Make it a little bit more painful

Yesterday Leah McElrath tweeted “A truly beautiful statistic.” Then she quoted a tweet from David Gelles:

More people in US are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 than people who have had the disease since the pandemic began, according to CDC data. 30,686,881 people have received 2 doses of the vaccine. That's more than the 28,999,705 Covid-19 reported total cases in the US.

There have been 29 million cases. Today McElrath quoted Gelles again:

US Coronavirus Death Toll: March 9, 2020: 22 March 9, 2021: 527,341

McElrath added:

Domestic mass death has become normalized. That’s a dangerous development.

From Greg Dworkin’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos... Now that the big virus relief bill is through the Senate, Sen. John Cornyn tweeted:

Record broken: unfortunately Democrats insisted on breaking our perfect record of overwhelmingly passing bipartisan COVID relief. More and faster vaccinations, children safely returning to school, and more support for struggling job creators should have been the priority.

Will Jordan responded:

Core message out of Senate Republicans seems to be they had *nothing* to do with the very popular legislation that just passed.

Paul Waldman wrote:

The advantage Republicans have is that even when they’re in charge, they don’t really have to care about whether government appears competent. Their own failures and inefficiencies can be taken as yet more proof that the fundamental argument that government can’t do anything right is correct.

Lawrence Glickman added:

We might generously say that the GOP has moved from a principled critique of unnecessarily large government to a generalized contempt for governing itself; to make “Washington is a broken” less a diagnosis than an active policy and action plan.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the relief bill did get bipartisan support, not from senators, but from voters. About 70% of people are for it including broad support from GOP voters and even nasty guy voters. The public wanted passage of the bill even if no GOP senators supported it. Biden wouldn't have gotten it passed without that broad public support. That makes Sen. Cornyn’s statement above all the more strange. He and his colleagues are going against GOP voters. Eleveld wrote:

But the bigger takeaway from the plan's uniquely unifying qualities may be that the vast majority of Americans are simply hurting so badly after four years of total GOP incompetence, they actually crave a government that works again.

There has been a seismic shift, as former Rep. Barney Frank put it,

People have gone from being anti-government, to beyond being even neutral on it, to thinking: ‘We need the government; it has to help us. You have a new consensus in America—that the government has an important role, and that Ronald Reagan was wrong. For the first time in my lifetime, people are saying that the government has done too little rather than doing too much.

Eleveld added:

One of the reasons Republicans have remained so loyal to Reagan-era ideas over the course of decades is because they helped the party reframe a conversation about the role of federal government that had mostly won the day since the advent of New Deal progressivism in the 1930s.

Charlotte Alter tweeted:

I truly don't think the American people care if a bill is bipartisan...AT ALL. In years of interviewing voters I have never heard anybody criticize a piece of legislation by saying "but it wasn't bipartisan!" People care about how the sausage tastes, not how the sausage is made. "On the one hand, I get money. On the other hand, I wish that they had given me this money on a bipartisan basis." - no voters, ever People care about bipartisanship in the abstract, like "people working together and being nice to each other" way. Do they count votes on individual bills? No. Do they keep track of which bills got bipartisan support? No. Do they care? Also no. They are busy living life.

Sen. Joe Manchin has been the most adamant that the filibuster must be maintained. I’ve written about this before, and about eliminating or gutting the filibuster is critical to getting the progressive agenda enacted. Hunter of Kos reported that Manchin’s position is easing. Maybe. On Meet the Press with Chuck Todd Manchin said:

If you want to, make them stand there and talk, I'm willing to look at any way we can.

Manchin is talking about the Talking Filibuster in which senators actually have to stand on the floor of the Senate and talk – and keep talking, The current filibuster is a requirement to get 60 votes to advance a bill, with very little actual work. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Rep. Jim Clyburn, a black man and part of the House leadership, spoke out after the House passed the bill to reform voting rights.

There's no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain't gonna happen. That would be catastrophic. If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.

Jordan Weissmann, tweeted a link to a POLITICO article and adding:

Manchin is actually being more specific about what filibuster reforms he'd support—and it's bad for the GOP. He previously said he'd consider reinstating the talking filibuster. Now he says he's open to requiring the minority to keep 41 votes on the floor.

Another reason for these kinds of reforms is that talking filibusters make news. It will be obvious who is obstructing which bills, such as the GOP obstructing voter rights. Anosognosiogenesis tweeted:

The average cost of eating at a restaurant in the US is $13. How many minutes does it take you to earn that? (note: jeff bezos makes $2,489 per second, or 191 average meals per second)

At federal minimum wage of $7.25 it takes 1:45 to earn enough for that meal. Median wage of $15.35 – 50 minutes. Average hourly pay of $20.90 – 37 minutes. Congressional pay of $174K a year or $83.60/hour – 9 minutes. A person on SSI getting the equivalent of $4.96/hour – 2:36. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that back in 2016 Michael Tubbs was elected as they youngest and first black mayor of Stockton, California. Starting in 2019 he tried an experiment in basic income. He gave 125 poor residents in a low income section of the city $500 a month, no strings attached. A study has now looked at how those people have done. These people are more likely to find full time jobs, pay off debt, be happy, and stay healthy. Einenkel wrote:

But what about bootstraps and giving tax breaks to the richest people? You know, the stuff that has never worked in the history of ever? Those opposed to Universal Basic Income (UBI) plans frequently argue that the no-strings-attached part disincentivizes people from finding gainful employment. It’s the same argument they make for welfare or food assistance, and in all cases they have been proven wrong. At the time, Tubbs explained some of his thoughts on the matter to POLITICO: “There’s this interesting conversation we’ve been having about the value of work. Work does have some value and some dignity, but I don’t think working 14 hours and not being able to pay your bills, or working two jobs and not being able—there’s nothing inherently dignified about that.”

Even though Tubbs was not reelected last November his example has inspired other mayors to sign on to the idea, forming Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Robert Anderson tweeted:

I don’t get why people think Bert and Ernie are the gay Muppets when Statler and Waldorf are right there, throwing shade from a BOX SEAT AT THE THEATRE.

Briandaniel Oglesby ran with that idea, giving both Statler and Waldorf a gay back story, which is, alas, too long for me to quote in full. He wrote that Statler and Waldorf are both old queens, but not a couple. According to Oglesby’s version they were a couple for a while, but had a falling out.

They probably would have stayed apart, but then they happened to both be in the audience for an absolute fiasco – a remount of A Streetcar Named Desire with Miss Piggy playing Blanche. They couldn’t stand it, and during the intermission the two of them ripped it to shreds. They’ve gotten older, bonding over shared, performative hatred of the shows they see, never acknowledging what they had.