[ Posted Friday, February 5th, 2021 – 18:59 UTC ]
This week we were treated to the spectacle of the Republican Party largely voting in support of an advocate of using deadly violence towards her political opponents. How the mighty have fallen -- since this used to be the party that dearly loved to sanctimoniously lecture everyone on how high morals were an absolute necessity in politics, and that even the concept of "moral relativism" was evil. That all went out the window when they nominated the most amoral man imaginable for president, of course, but it's still rather shocking to see this once-publicly-righteous party wallow in the filth of QAnon and flirt with ideas like advocacy for assassinating political opponents.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 4th, 2021 – 17:51 UTC ]
As we head towards next week's impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the Senate, I think there are three important things to remember and to stress. In fact, I wish more in the media would point these things out on a regular basis, but if they fall down on the job then Democrats should immediately pick up the slack and remind everyone of a few hard, cold facts.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021 – 17:19 UTC ]
One of the concerns many Democratic voters (especially progressives) have had about President Joe Biden was that he has had a propensity to compromise too much when dealing with congressional Republicans (as he did as vice president on several Obama initiatives) and that he just wasn't bold enough (too incremental), and would therefore prove to be a rather wishy-washy president. Well, the jury's still largely out (after all, it hasn't even been a full two weeks yet), but I have to say that the earliest indications are surprisingly good. Biden is holding firm in his first big legislative push, and he's refusing to get sidetracked into some miasmic swamp of some promised bipartisan compromise that never actually materializes.
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[ Posted Monday, February 1st, 2021 – 16:42 UTC ]
The next few weeks are going to be rather critical for the Republican Party. They have a clear choice to make, and at this point it's pretty obvious that most Republican members of Congress are about to choose the most self-destructive path now available to them. Call it the final capitulation to Trumpism.
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[ Posted Friday, January 29th, 2021 – 18:29 UTC ]
President Joe Biden has now spent his first 10 days in office. All told, it's been fairly boring. Which is exactly what millions of Americans voted him into office to achieve. Journalists everywhere are writing absolute paeans to boredom. Throughout the land, a joyous cry is raised: "Let boredom ring!" Well, OK, that may be overstating it a tiny bit. But not by much.
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[ Posted Thursday, January 28th, 2021 – 16:14 UTC ]
President Joe Biden has been in office a little over a week, and so far he has exceeded expectations. Now, to be fair, these are still the earliest of days. Biden is still enjoying his "honeymoon" period with the public, with the press, and (largely) with Congress. That will fade, undoubtedly. Also, Donald Trump left so many egregious messes lying around that cleaning up the worst of them was pretty low-hanging fruit indeed. But, so far, Biden has not disappointed in a big way once.
None of his cabinet choices raised any huge alarm with even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they've been getting steadily confirmed with huge bipartisan votes. There will be a few later on that will be more contentious, no doubt, but so far Biden's track record on putting together his administration is a pretty admirable one.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 27th, 2021 – 17:32 UTC ]
This really shouldn't be all that extraordinary, but sadly it is. The Department of Homeland Security just issued a warning about the possibility of right-wing violence and/or terrorism. Here are the pertinent facts:
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 – 16:45 UTC ]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer won his first big political battle against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last night. McConnell, in a fit of petulance, had dug in his heels and was refusing to agree to the new Senate rules proposed by Schumer which will dictate the chamber's power structure for the next two years. This is normally a routine vote, even with an evenly-balanced 50-50 Senate -- there wasn't much drama the last time this happened, when Tom Daschle and Trent Lott worked out an agreement. Essentially, Senate committees will be evenly divided between Democratic seats and Republican seats, but Democrats will still control what gets out of committee and (more importantly) what makes it to the Senate floor for a vote. After all, even though the Senate is evenly-divided, Vice President Kamala Harris is the deciding vote for the Democrats. But that's been true since last Wednesday, and yet McConnell blocked the new rules until today, which had left Republicans still chairing all the committees -- even though they're now in the minority.
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[ Posted Monday, January 25th, 2021 – 16:35 UTC ]
The Washington political press corps have returned to some semblance of normalcy. One of the things this means is that President Joe Biden is getting scrutiny and criticism for the actual reality on the ground versus what he had promised. This follows a four-year period of being so cowed by Trump's firehose of lies and bluster that the press corps mostly didn't even bother, other than a few half-hearted attempts here and there.
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[ Posted Friday, January 22nd, 2021 – 18:18 UTC ]
Three momentous things happened last week which so overshadowed everything else in the political world that we're just going to ignore everything else up front, here.
First, Donald Trump slouched off to his golf resort in Florida a few hours early, for purely petty reasons -- he wanted the flight to still officially be "Air Force One" (a designation that only exists when the current president of the United States is on the plane), and he also didn't want to have to ask President Joe Biden for the routine favor of one last flight home on the big plane. So he flew while he was still president, after staging a pathetic goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews (home base of the two planes that serve as Air Force One and Two). He forced the military into giving him one last 21-howitzer salute, and then flew south for the winter. And, hopefully, forever.
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