biden sells/sold oil to china

This post was edited by TiStuff on Jul 8 2022 11:08pm

would you rather china buy from RU or from the US?
And prices have been coming down.

Obama basically begged RBG to step down while he still had the votes to nominate a replacement, but she - an 81 year old, two-time cancer survivor at the time - stubbornly refused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/rbg-retirement-obama.html


The Dobbs decision is not automatically against the country's majority - it didn't ban abortion, it delegated the issue back to the states. Yes, there are some fundamentalists in the GOP who want to enact a federal abortions ban, but that's not gonna happen. Not feasible politically, and it would directly go against Dobbs. So at the end of the day, abortion will not be outlawed in all the blue states and most purple states. As long as the GOP doesn't overreach, this will be a non-issue. And even if they do, the repercussions will only be felt in 2024 and beyond, not so much in 2022.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 9 2022 01:28am

that criticism of the Supreme Court, while folly, is narrow in scope to one. he didn’t say they “were out of control” like biden did in some vague verbal assault on our republic. did Trump then pass an EO giving the federal government power over rights reserved to the states? no

biden calling anyone or anything else out of control (other than his own family and oval office staff) is ridiculous.

your recent point on RGB not retiring is interesting but it was her call. if she’s completely capable and still wanted to work that was her call. of course she ceded control of the succesor in some way. that’s just part of being an adult.

on a side note i never bought the whole “RBG wanted Hillary to be the one to nominate her successor”. RGB went to great lengths to correctly push for expansion of women’s rights and advocacy. Hillary is about as anti-women of a person as there has ever been

overall wouldn’t call hubris ‘bad timing’. old people retire (Kennedy) and pass away (Scalia, RBG) all the time. if the “smart party” cannot understand time-sensitive decision-making that’s their own doing

This post was edited by excellence on Jul 9 2022 06:42am

Any time Trump lost, he attacked the Supreme Court. Having said that, I don't think Biden himself is attacking the Court's legitimacy (though other surrogates certainly have). Biden is an institutionalist and is clearly attacking their judgment regarding this decision. I guess people will see what they want to see though and Biden should be more careful with his words. The problem is that Democrat's want a "fighter" and Biden just isn't that kind of person. I'd argue that Democrats need a "winner" and not a "fighter" and that's exactly who Joe Biden is. The issue is that you need several "winners" to get the policy that you want and Democrat voters are notoriously short-sighted when it comes to elections.

As for the filibuster, yes, some people did read shit from the phone book. However, the important thing is that they kept standing and never yielded the floor. You KNEW who was doing the talking. I believe that a filibuster should be tied to names and that's what a talking filibuster does. Right now, it's tied to the party and that's not really helpful.

I don't think any party would invoke "big, sweeping change" with a weak trifecta because it's electorally dangerous. There are a lot of large changes that come out of the House because they know that it has zero chance of passing the Senate. If it DID have a chance of passing due to a reformed filibuster, the bills would be a lot more serious. Legislative policy whiplash is a theoretical construct that has no basis in reality.



Biden's EO is tremendously weak and while I don't agree with all of it, it's not really an overreach. I don't remember every controversial EO that Trump signed that interfered with State's rights but it wouldn't surprise me if he did it. Pretty much every President from Reagan on has abused EOs.

kekw

Was it already a done deal in 2014 that Hillary would be the nominee? And yes, it was insane hubris for a 81-year old, two-time cancer survivor to either bet on "her" party winning a third presidential election in a row in spite of the current incumbent not being particularly popular anymore, or to bet on being able to ride out 4, potentially 8 years of Republican control of the WH. Her cancer coming back and killing her 4 months before Trump's term ends was bad timing though.

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BIG disagree. Biden is not a 'winner', he's mediocrity personified and failed upwards throughout his career. There's a reason his previous two presidential runs failed miserably, just like his presidency. Even in 2020, I would argue that it was rather Trump self-destructing than Biden winning. Biden was the right person to capitalize on Trump's presidency unraveling during unprecedented, unique circumstances. And yes, the Dem base can thank its party establishment and elites for ramming Biden through in February 2020. If the choice had been "Trump's chaos versus Bernie's big bold progressive revolution" instead of "Trump's chaos versus Biden's return to normalcy", I would assume that Trump wins.



Hmmm, I see your point. For example, Strom Thurmond is more famous for his 24-hours filibuster of the Civil Rights Act than even his presidential run.

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I gotta disagree again. The GOP, with its weak trifecta, genuinely tried to repeal Obamacare without having any proper replacement. They came within one vote, and god knows if McCain gives his dramatics thumbs down if he doesn't hold such a huge grudge against Trump, or if he isn't terminally ill with a brain tumor at the time.

Likewise, Democratic "moderates" in the House have voted in near-total lockstep on every piece of legislation Pelosi put before them, even stuff that's surely not gonna play well with voters at home in their tossup or even light-red seats. If they are willing to put themselves on the record in favor of bills which are significantly to the left of the median voter in their district while these bills have no chance of passing, how much more willing would they be to take this electoral risk if actual policy "wins" could be achieved?



Iirc, the (ab)use of EOs as the main way of governing picked up pace during the Obama years. To be fair, so did fundamentalist blockade attitudes in Congress.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 9 2022 12:50pm

The proof is in the pudding. Biden is President and "fighters" like Bernie, Warren, and Trump are not. Biden was the right man for the time just like Obama was the right man for the time. "Fighting" doesn't mean jack shit when you've already lost and the Democrats are JUST beginning to feel the ramifications of their 2016 loss. I know you love Bernie, but there isn't some grand conspiracy against Bernie. He just isn't as popular as you think he is. Votes are the ONLY thing that matters and Bernie is really bad at getting votes. Honestly, the worst thing about the Holocaust is that you didn't kill his fucking ancestors. The world would be a much better place without him.

As for your example with the Obamacare repeal....that had nothing to do with the filibuster and the attempt was through budget reconciliation which only requires 50 votes. Do you have another example in mind?

House Democrats, whether moderate or radical, vote in lockstep because Pelosi is the greatest House Speaker since Henry Clay. There is no one more effective than Pelosi at getting people in line. Anyway, they vote on these bills that are bad because it allows them to "stand for something" without having to see the consequences of the legislation. Every political junkie knows that the "For the People Act" is a poorly designed, symbolic bill that has no chance of passing. However, having your name on it looks good to low information voters. It would be a very different bill if the filibuster didn't exist. I agree with you that Democrats would be more willing to sacrifice themselves to get true wins but those true wins stem from policy that works, not symbolism.

Biden isn't president because he did anything that was particularly strong or smart or savvy, he's president because Trump had the bad fortune of seeing his presidency shredded by a once-in-a-century pandemic and failing to live up to the task.


I'm not a huge fan of Bernie and don't think, nor ever claimed, that he's super popular. After he won the Nevada caucuses, he had all the momentum and a chance to reach out to the rest of the party and unite it behind him. Instead, he chose to shit all over them, basically announcing "yes, this is a hostile takeover of your party, and there's nothing you can do about it". One week later, all the establishment forces in the party worked together behind the scenes to rally behind Biden, so that they could stop Bernie, which they easily did because Bernie, like you said, isn't all that popular, not even among Democrats.





You said that

The attempt at repealing Obamacare is an example of a party trying to invoke big, sweeping change based on a weak trifecta, in spite of the obvious electoral risks.


Fine, I can agree with that. But it's contradicting what you said earlier, namely that the party would shy away from passing sweeping legislation on slim majorities because of the electoral risk.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 9 2022 02:24pm

i havent looked into the details of my claim but i bet it goes something like. biden gives china a good deal on oil after china gave his kid a "good deal"? then biden gave you a shit deal to make up the difference.