About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leave attracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.
[snip]
In our era, it is primarily Congress that prevents popular laws from being passed or getting serious consideration. (Holding an occasional hearing does not count as “doing something.”) Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs — and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances.
Everyone’s mad at David Brooks but this is the dumbest thing in the Times today.
“Congress” isn’t refusing to enact sensible gun regulations. “Congress” isn’t gutting the only weakass healthcare protections we’ve ever managed to pass. “Congress” isn’t denying pregnant women health care or parental leave. “Congress” isn’t murdering net neutrality in its cradle. “Congress” is doing none of these things.
Mitch McConnell and his merry band of blithering buttlicks are.
Pretending nobody in Washington wants to get anything done sounds really savvy and appealingly cynical because it allows you to let everybody off the hook including yourself. The facts remain that the very SECOND Democrats had control of Congress they passed universal background checks, created a committee to study climate change, and oh yeah REOPENED THE GOVERNMENT THAT HAD BEEN SHUT DOWN.
I mean sweet mercy, you don’t have to go past the first Google result to figure that out.
We can’t solve any problems right now because we keep telling ourselves lies about what those problems are. Those problems are Republican problems, full stop, and the more we keep on with this copypasta equivalence the stupider it sounds. “Both sides” is a joke by now, here on the internets, but it keeps getting spat out like it still means something.
I get it. It lets you sound like you know something everyone else, all those dumbasses with party allegiances and beliefs in stuff and principles worth fighting for, is too blinkered to know, and that special knowledge gets your op-eds published and your name on the cable shows. It lets you off the hook for figuring out what a candidate stands for and then backing that candidate, fully and unashamedly, because their views align with yours. You can just declare that the whole system is, like, bullshit, man, and go home.
Instead of having to stand up and say “Congress” isn’t doing anything to stifle the views of the majority. The views of the majority are the views of the Democratic Party and but for corruption, gerrymandering, and a 24-hour propaganda network blaring all day long that liberals are socialist traitors’ whores, those majority views would be law by now.
Schmuck.
A.
2 propaganda networks- Sinclair and Fox…
Sarah Kendzior on twitter today points out that we don’t currently have a Secretary of Defense. Trump’s national emergency declaration specifically authorized the mobilization of armed forces. When we don’t have a SecDef. The political media are going to have to “both sides” the shit out of this if they want to avoid looking all partisan and stuff.
i just started another patrick henry oration in my 1906 oration + he is complaining about the minority forcing their shit on the majority. we need another patrick henry to say the same thing now + rouse the majority to take back their ideas. screw the mainstream media.
And bigotry. You left out bigotry. Too many members of my tribe (I am a non-elite white male native-born Amurkan) are complete shit-heads who put their vacuum-skulled prejudices above their plain self-interest, and have spent the past 50 years or so shredding OUR OWN SAFETY NET in a fit of spite because the government started allowing black Amurkans to use the net as well. I wanna line ’em all up, all my wingnut fellow crackers, and wear out a thousand pairs of boots kicking their dumb asses for them.
It is important to politicians to misdiagnose problems in order that the innocent can be blamed, and the guilty rewarded. And the guilty must always be rewarded because they are also the powerful.