Manchin now seems to be saying that he won’t support even his own version of the BBB reconciliation package.
Quelle surprise!
Edit: So, I wonder if they will start to seriously consider student loan forgiveness now, or if they’re just not going to do anything for the rest of the year.
Alstein
6349
They should do that about 2 months before the election- so the kids don’t forget who did it.
Coal miner’s union all in for BBB. They acknowledged that coal has little future and want the investment in future jobs in the bill.
KevinC
6352
Will be interested in seeing what impact this might have on Manchin’s position.
Menzo
6353
Pretty sure it will be none. Manchin never actually cared about coal miners.
KevinC
6354
Oh I don’t doubt that. But does he care about coal miner votes? Not a rhetorical question, I have no idea of how WV politics work or how a Democrat is still elected to the senate there.
Timex
6355
Honestly, I’m not sure how powerful that union really is.
While coal is big in WV, it’s because of the money the corporations have, not really the number of miners.
There are only around 11k people working for mining companies in the entire state. By contrast, there were around 800k votes cast in the 2020 election in WV.
I think there are a lot of folks in WV whose attachment to the coal industry is kind of psychological, rather than actually working for it.
Yeah, as long as there’s a billionaire mine owner who can spin up a “coal is the lifeblood of our state and the Democrats want to take that from us so you can program computers and drink soy lattes” narrative, it won’t matter what the actual coal miners have to say about anything.
CraigM
6357
Pretty much. This was true in 2016, and is true today.
Coal is irrelevant from an employment perspective, and those jobs are never coming back even if you eliminated every environmental regulation.
ShivaX
6358
He’s very much in favor of the owners and always has been.
You forgot to throw in something about “San Francisco values” (AKA LGBTQ people/Nancy Pelosi), Jews and SOCIALISM.
Alstein
6360
Biden just raised SNAP benefits by 30% and made school lunches free for rest of this year.
I think this is a big deal, but the liberal news media really doesn’t want to spread the word on this, and FOX will call it socialism.
Houngan
6362
+1. If the needle is at the 90 degree/12 o’clock mark, then CNN sits on the needle, I guess MSNBC is at 11:30. Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera are the cherubim floating above. Fox is around 2:30, and the rest of the crap is the scrapings left on the compass-maker’s floor.
RichVR
6363
And tells you about it. Over and over and over and over…
Alstein
6364
Yes, they want Biden to win, but not be able to do much. They generally are run by corporate Dems who prefer the status quo, even when just about everyone knows it’s unsustainable.
CNN and MSNBC largely represent the status quo viewpoint. They’re better than FOX, as they at least believe in fact-based reality , but they have their slant, and it isn’t a good one, so I only trust them so far. I avoid MSNBC heavily, but CNN I use more- but even there I know what their target audience, and just look at their ad-sponsored articles, that tells you plenty.
One of my first experiences with the news media was when I was in Governor’s school back in the early 90s. They had a CNN reporter trying to teach us about media misinformation, and I got to ask a question about what they thought about their own slants on the news, and they tried to claim they didn’t have any. That was something I remembered.
No news media source is free of bias, knowing what the biases are is necessary to figure out how they are slanting stories. I would trust the BBC or Al-jazeera a lot more on reporting about America than I would any American network, but I wouldn’t trust them on much within their home countries.
The key is to be able to balance between reading the slant of news, while avoiding falling into the trap of “news you can agree with”. That can be difficult sometimes, and why getting into it here is often worthwhile, I can see other perspectives and avoid falling into a bubble of only seeing things from the slant of my own side. (though I can also see why I believe what I believe as well)
Canuck
6365
The LP can turn Biden into a great speaker!
In all serious though, a great distillation of his speech into 60 seconds.
