President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Trump Team Suppressed COVID Tests, Weakened CDC Guidance to Protect President: Report

 

That puts a rather charitable spin on Republican ratfucking.

It was originally going to be Montana, New Mexico, Dakota and Washington admitted at the same time with Montana/Dakota being republican and the other two being Democratic.

Republicans shifted the order by creating North and South Dakota and pushing New Mexico off the list to give three Republican states to alter the balance of Congress and Electoral College.

As for D.C., make the Capitol the seat of government, then turn the district a state by adding two senators and make the delegate an official congress critter.

They already have EC votes, and given the population there it is past time. They should have been made a state decades ago, but it wasn't a priority. As for Puerto Rico, there's no guarantee it would be solidly Democratic given that previous leadership there have been Republicans.

 

There's simply no easy response to this. What I can say is:

A. Among the many awful things about Trump, he imagined and manufactured enemies and villains at every turn, to the point where he hurt his own party's chances in the Georgia Senate elections. He dragged half the nation with him into that ditch. Trump himself may not be a nihilist - more of the worst narcissist - but QAnon clearly was and is nihilistic, leveraging the purposelessness and general moral bankruptcy of young, white men (although, increasingly, it became women, too) into a cause somewhere between racist mayhem/hooliganism and bloody revolution, and putting Trump - the ultimate contrarian - at the center of it. The key is the flatness of the ideology, the totalizing certitude that everyone and everything is shit, that you can't even trust your eyes and your horse sense that the person in front of you isn't the front of a vast conspiracy of sexual weirdos and elitist cruds but just a normal, somewhat flawed person getting along in the world and eating cereal in the morning. It's sick, and fucked up, and it depends on vast groups of unhappy people tricking themselves into doom.

B. And while I don't doubt, for a second, how hard 1,000 things have been since the 1960s in lots of places, this moment seems designed for the left to combine a reasonable desire to guard against what did happen - and what could have happened - on Jan. 6 with its own totalizing approach that also leverages media to convince its adherents that the world they're living in is something closer to 1998 Kosovo than what it is. If democracy teeters on the brink over the filibuster and DC statehood...what happens if/when it doesn't happen? Ratcheting up the rhetoric is dangerous.

 

475,000 dead. Some as a result of stuff like this.

 

And aren't great about wearing masks!!

 

The worst people imaginable at the worst possible time doing the worst things imaginable.

 

Very pro-life of them.

 

I agree with this, insofar as it relates to the nonsense Trump brought up, although one of Trump's main claims - which was nuts - had nothing to do with voter fraud, but election fraud on the part of the workers and/or machines.

Broadly speaking, there is a benchmark of election security that everyone agrees is necessary. The discussion is what an appropriate benchmark is. Generally, I'd be on the more liberal end of interpreting this. That's not the same as "well, if you don't agree with Democrats, you're automatically suppressing the vote."

 

I was going to give my buddy who just retired from FCA shit but he posted it too, saying wtf

 

I think the Oklahoma Panhandle exists because the Kansas boundary could not extend south of the Mason-Dixon line and the boundaries of Texas had already been set.

And I would like to recommend "How the States got their Shapes." I watched it while on my cross trainer. It is both fun and entertaining. The host is really, really good.

 

You are right. I am so damned obtuse.

 

Today's GOP: Where voting against your self-interest may cause your own death.