[ Posted Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 – 15:50 UTC ]
President Joe Biden is hoping for a few legislative wins before the midterms. Three bills in particular seem to have a better-than-average chance of success. They're a far cry from the agenda Biden attempted to achieve last year, but having to deal with two corporatist Democratic senators derailed almost all of these lofty ambitions. So Americans will not be getting tuition-free community college, subsidized child care, free preschool, student loan forgiveness, action on climate change, and a whole host of other ideas that would have dramatically improved the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens. Thanks, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for nothing.
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[ Posted Friday, July 22nd, 2022 – 16:10 UTC ]
Initially, tonight's hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th was supposed to be the final hearing. That was before all the rest of the hearings caused so many other witnesses and tangential stories to come out of the woodwork. Nevertheless, it was indeed (as I wrote yesterday) the "season finale" of the summer miniseries of televised hearings. The committee is now promising to reconvene and hold more public hearings in September, to cover all the new information. The committee will stay busy during the August congressional break, digging into all the new evidence and witnesses who have come forward, and then they'll report back afterwards to the public. So there's all that to look forward to....
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[ Posted Thursday, July 21st, 2022 – 16:16 UTC ]
I write this just before the start of the season finale of "House Select Committee Investigates January 6th" -- which I should mention is not actually the title of a television miniseries, as these hearings are not being presented for entertainment purposes. They are being presented for informational purposes, because every American deserves to know what happened before, during, and after that dark day in American history. They are hours-long extended public service announcements, in other words. Very sober proceedings exposing very serious crimes and misdemeanors -- including, tonight, dereliction of duty by the country's commander-in-chief.
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[ Posted Friday, July 15th, 2022 – 17:51 UTC ]
And so, once again, we find ourselves in a very familiar place. Senator Joe Manchin has just yanked the rug out from under the lion's share of what he was supposedly negotiating in good faith with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (and the entire rest of the Democratic Party). Manchin let it be known that two of the biggest things he himself had said he was going to strongly support (in the pared-down version of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan) were suddenly verboten and off the table. In other words, Joe Manchin successfully wasted everyone's time -- once again -- for months on end.
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[ Posted Friday, July 8th, 2022 – 16:59 UTC ]
President Joe Biden capped off a pretty good week with a pretty good speech today, given right before he signed an executive order to do what he could to protect women's rights. Biden did so, of course, in response to the "extreme" Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade.
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[ Posted Wednesday, July 6th, 2022 – 16:40 UTC ]
Control of the United States Senate will be one of the biggest political prizes fought over in the 2022 midterm elections this November. So far, out of all the 2022 Senate races, Democrats look fairly well positioned to either hold onto their thin majority or perhaps even expand it by one or two. In what is supposed to be a very Republican-friendly year, the GOP's chances of taking the Senate seem dimmer than ever. This is due to one very big reason: personality matters. The quality of the candidates matter.
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[ Posted Friday, July 1st, 2022 – 16:56 UTC ]
The two biggest political topics of the past week were the continuing outrages piling up from both the Supreme Court and the House Select Committee on January 6th.
On Tuesday, a young aide who worked for Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, appeared in a surprise House committee hearing. The previous week, the committee had let it be known that there would be no hearings over the two-week Independence Day break. But a day beforehand, a new hearing was announced without fanfare and without any details.
The witness who appeared, Cassidy Hutchinson, had apparently been getting threatening messages from those still surrounding Donald Trump. They read like mob bosses leaning on a witness who might spill the beans:
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[ Posted Thursday, June 30th, 2022 – 15:47 UTC ]
This month has been a monumental one in politics, containing several far-reaching Supreme Court decisions and the January 6th committee hearings. While it is too soon to tell, all of this may have shifted things in Democrats' favor heading into the midterm congressional elections. Democratic voters are a lot more engaged and motivated to vote, while Republicans are losing ground. Whether this proves to be enough to counteract the expected "red wave" in November is still a very open question, but it is clear that the shift has so far favored the Democrats.
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[ Posted Monday, June 20th, 2022 – 14:56 UTC ]
In the past, whenever I have used that title phrase, it has always been tongue-in-cheek -- as a hyperbolic metaphor, in other words. Other close cousins to it would be: "A GOP circular firing squad," or "Republicans eating their own." Neither of those was ever meant literally either, obviously. They were all merely used to dramatize intraparty GOP power struggles, or one Republican getting ostracized or worse by his or her own fellow party members. Such as Madison Cawthorn getting successfully primaried, or what the party has done and is doing (both in the House of Representatives and back home in Wyoming) to Liz Cheney.
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 15th, 2022 – 16:08 UTC ]
How low can the bar go for what is acceptable in a Republican candidate to the rest of their party? That is a question that many have been asking ever since the rise of Donald Trump. Because while he was busily tearing up all the political rules of decorum, one of the first ones he shredded and flushed down his golden toilet was the expectation that political candidates aren't suppose to tell blatant lies -- especially about themselves. Before Trump, getting caught in one big fat lie might not have been a death blow to a Republican politician's career (at least, with the right artfully-worded explanation), but getting caught in two of them was sure to be disqualifying. In our post-Trump world, however, it is apparently fine with the Republican Party if you just go out and have a ball lying your face off and just making things up out of thin air. Because, these days, why not?
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