Nope can’t blame this on Mitch. Sen. Booker goes in to more detail in his emotional speech. The crux is this bill needs to pass by “unanimous consent”. One guess who the single senator is that is objecting.
KevinC
5141
Anyone know if his neighbor is availble for contract work?
For judges there used to be a thing called a “blue slip” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_slip - where if a senator failed to submit a positive blue slip on a judge affecting their state (and especially both senators failed to do so) - the nomination would not likely proceed to committee - in 2017-18, McConnell basically stopped that - and said “he believed blue slips should not prevent committee action on a nominee”
Biden should just come out and say, : “YOU, Mercedes. I’m talking about you.”
Timex
5144
That’s the woman who retweeted the clip of the guy screaming racial slurs at protestors.
So she’s one of people who aren’t very good.
vyshka
5145
He should tweet back a picture of her
This is a spectacular article on the nature of collaboration and its application to the Trump regime and its enablers. It takes the position that Trump’s election is analogous to the hostile occupation of the Republican Party by a foreign value system — something I don’t think is entirely right, btw — contrasts how different actors have responded to the occupation, and makes comparisons to collaboration and resistance in other regimes of hostile occupation.
Thanks for linking, that really is an excellent article with great historical perspective!
IMO It’s difficult to take the notion of a “hostile” occupation of the modern republican party too literally though. The party has been headed down this long, dark, and dangerous road since Reagan & it has seemed a quite wiling participant for the various reasons highlighted in the article itself. Trump’s me-first-and-let-the-rest-burn-corrupt-cronyism is maybe the ultimate expression of fully unfettered late-stage capitalism. Perhaps anschlauss is a better analogy?
But ultimately it doesn’t actually matter what we call it. Trump & the republicans that keep him in power are all useful idiots for Putin, Xi Jinping, and other authoritarians that would prefer to see a weak & insular United States that largely leaves the world to them.
Diego
Yes, that’s my own quibble with the thesis. Trump is simply a ruder form of what many of them have wanted all along, not someone with an alien philosophy. And it credits some actors (e.g. Graham) with a far better pre-Trump reputation than they deserve. In some ways, though, that strengthens the thesis: if we grant that they are better than they are, then the need for an explanation is even greater. And it does go a long way to explaining why people who railed against him and called him out from the start now support and empower him. And why all the grown-ups in the room are basically collaborators, and are likely to be remembered that way.
I’m also intrigued by the idea that collaboration really requires no explanation; that collaboration is the norm, and that it is resistance that is the real mystery.
Since Nixon and the “southern strategy” (i.e. start appealing to racists) in 1968.
The will to power is the only explanation needed.
Trump is a moronic sociopathic narcissist who wants power & attention but is too stupid to wield the levers of government in a way that consistently and effectively accomplishes much of anything apart from keeping himself wealthy and at the top of the heap.That leaves the various collaborators and sycophants he has enabled (at least the ones who aren’t themselves idiots) free to fight for his ear & managing his whims and tantrums so that they can get their agendas executed. In a way it’s even better for them when Trump makes lots of mostly meaningless noise and show, because it distracts people from what’s really happening and keeps those people voting against their own self interests. See Stephen Miller & kids in cages / immigration, or the various corporate lobbies that are now directly in control of the regulatory agencies that oversee their own industries, or Pence & the religious right with abortion restrictions. etc. etc. etc.
Yeah, really interesting article. Thanks for the link. This part struck me:
For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.
Another quote from that article about Trump’s inauguration speech wins the Understatement of the Century award:
Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system.
Menzo
5154
More nominees for Biden’s “bad people” list:
Inevitable dog whistle. I shouldn’t, but I’m still surprised at how what I took as essential beliefs and ideals to a functional society are inconvenient to care about, leading to the kind of moral relativism that is incapable of questioning if bad things even happen, or to whether it’s all fake.
Maybe he means “if we release this country you will release your life.”
It kinda works.
Just found this doozy of a paragraph on his facebook page…
I’m not a conspiracy theoriest, I’m a career intelligence officer, to which part of responsibility was/is to assertion the facts to determine the truth and modus operandi as to the who, whate, where, when and why something occurred.
Never mind the spelling, but does anyone besides conspiracy theorists start sentences with, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist…”
