OK, so we chain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to the bottom of an empty Olympic-size pool. We charge average Americans $5 a go to pee in the pool, and sell the “streaming” rights to the highest bidder.
All proceeds go toward eliminating the debt and deficit, minus a small cash prize to whoever finally puts the two of them under water.
There will be some who say this won’t eliminate the debt or the deficit, or even shove Sleepy Joe’s Incredible Shrinking Build Back Better bill through the legislative sausage grinder. And they’re absolutely right.
But let’s do it anyway.
Mad Blog Media 
Everybody wants to shit on Joe and Kyrsten but frankly, if the Dems can’t get enough senators to pass the bill, its just the way of politics. Recall that WVa went massively for Orange Turd and Az traditionally elected Republicans.
I’d put all 50 (D) senators in that pool and see how long it would take for them to find consensus once the Golden Showers start.
Yep. The only solution, as Charlie Pierce points out, is to elect enough Donks to do the beez-a-neez. But piss on ’em anyway.
The local D’s primaried all the conservative/moderate D’s out of the Roundhouse here in the Land of Entrapment. Not sure that is a good thing but its what people wanted and the Elefinks are a laughingstock, so there is no real choice here. You get whatever flavor D the primary produces and likely, that person will run against a raving lunatic. Not that my party is immune from raving lunacy.
We will see what happens in the mid-terms. Thing is, I doubt WVa would elect a progressive. Not sure what will happen in Arizona when Sinema comes up but that’s four years out. I’d say strike a deal and get what they can. If the Donks shoot blanks (not a good metaphor these days, eh?) they may pay for it come 2022.
Thing is, the system is broken. Along with fairness in the economy.
Yeh, W.Va. seems unlikely to go Full Blue anytime soon, no matter what kind of ROI they get for their tax dollars (they do pretty well). We’ll have to find those Donks elsewhere.
But the conventional wisdom has it that we won’t find them in the midterms, which is when the party holding the White House traditionally takes a thumping. These two speedbumps are not exactly smoothing the path to electoral triumph.
I wonder. The Elefinks have shit their nest so badly that I think they may actually lose seats.
Sen Sinema voted against the dumpster’s tax cut. The dumpster got a big cut even though it was the turtle’s baby; the turtle had this tax cut in his vest pocket until a pres dumb enough to sign it came along. Then, she voted in favor of extending the cut permanently for individuals. Now she doesn’t want to vote to partially reduce the cut for corporations. There was a $1.7 infrastructure bill that the senate passed months ago sitting in the speaker’s in box. She kept it from a floor vote. The postal service is floundering, immigration policy is a hot mess, they ain’t managing the budget or the debt, and the world is on fire. Yet, they fiddle. And, why is this being done in a budget reconciliation bill? Because they haven’t passed a budget for FY-22 nor permanently increased or eliminated the debt ceiling. Disappointed am I? No. Expected this was. I am tempted to go all upper case, but I respect your ears. Congress don’t do shit, except raise money and campaign, and it hasn’t for years.
“Congress don’t do shit, except raise money and campaign, and it hasn’t for years.”
Well, I dunno about that … just the other day they yelled at execs from TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube for making young people act weird. I remember when all that took was a couple pimples on prom night.
Maybe we should eliminate the middleman and just start electing corporations to Congress. Sen. Facebook, Rep. TikTok, etc. Corporations are people too, my friend. …
I didn’t get a harrumph from that CEO!
“… The postal service is floundering, immigration policy is a hot mess, they ain’t managing the budget or the debt, and the world is on fire. ”
That line reminds me of one of my favorite songs from Gil Scott-Heron. And we thought it was bad then.
Sheeyit, we can’t even put Whitey back on the moon. If we’re lucky we’ll get an unmanned NASA fly-by in 2022. Everything old is new again. We’ll probably find Manchin up there waiting for us, watching his people strip-mine the place for coal while Big Pharma’s Sinema sees to it that any working stiff with a booboo pays $15,692,305 for an Advil.
Now we get “Whitey flying a dick shaped toy into suborbital flight from the New Mexico Desert”. What a let down.
Saw this not so subtle shade from those left wing hippy yippies at Carhartt.
FIT FOR THE NEXT FRONTIER
Right now, there’s over 3 million jobs that need to be filled in our country and 140 million square miles of Earth to explore. That’s why the people we make gear for aren’t rocketing to outer space in search of the next frontier. They’re simply waking up each morning ready to work.
—> Whoodathunk the billionaires would lose the support of Wyoming bison ranchers?
“Goldern it, hon’, is my Carhartt spacesuit in the wash again? I gotta go out to feed the Tauntauns.”
I like the way you think.
NPR thinks coal Joe pretty much sunk it single handed. Sinema had a hand in that too. They need to be banished to Phoenix where the vaccination rate is low and the temperature is climbing, and will continue to climb into the next century. And, they should be forced to eat every meal will Fann and Gosar.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1047583610/once-again-the-u-s-has-failed-to-take-sweeping-climate-action-heres-why
What pisses me off is what is left out of that article. Nothing the US does by itself matters as much as a warm piss in the woods as long as the big industrial polluters (China, India, third world) continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels and manufacture all the shit we buy from them. Right now China at least doubles our emissions and they are increasing theirs while we decrease ours; we gleefully buy their products that are manufactured using coal, shipped on container ships powered by fuel oil, and then trucked all over the goddamn place via diesel and gasoline engine. Only a global cap and trade or carbon tax on product, cradle to grave, will fix that. Otherwise, all we do is make ourselves feel good.
Meanwhile, the left opposes nuclear power (fifty year old plants might melt down), domestic mining of rare earths (its ecky and dirty), God help us if we start mass lithium mining for batteries, carbon sequestration is seen as evil, and hence we can’t get shit going in this country. I’d love to see us mine, refine, and make product out of our own resources such as rare earth elements in Mountain Pass and in Canada, replace fossil energy with wind, solar, and nuke plants, and return manufacturing to the USA.
As long as we import Cheap Shit from Asia, we will also be importing their carbon budget. And outsourcing good jobs. I’m not very happy with the Dynamic Duo of Sinema and Manchin, but I see a glut of hypocrisy on the left as well as dishonesty on the right.
Americans love cheap shit! Guy shows us at our guitar jam session and shows us his new guitar that’s made in china and bought on amazon at 40% off! Never occurred to him to go to Tucson, walk in a guitar shop, and buy a quality guitar made in the US, Mexico, or Canada. You know, or neighbors.
Kevin Drum went off on a climate-change tear the other day that was straight out of “Pogo” — “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I owe Kevin Drum a beer. Every time I see another Super Duty used as daily transportation, I want to slap on a bumper sticker saying “Doing my part to promote climate change”
You gonna love this shit guys. Ain’t Bill Gates a good guy?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-make-the-rich-pay-for-their-carbon-emissions
Oh, yes, the rich fly a lot. Americans love McMansions. China will mine coal and make a lot of money. And the American Dream is our export. I’m shocked, shocked, to see that there is gluttony going on in here!
Shrug. Here is how I look at it. We are no different than any other species, in spite of our arrogance about that big brain in our heads. Lacking predators that keep our numbers down and having the ability to modify our environment to our liking, we will consume ourselves into oblivion. The world will go on quite nicely once we are gone.
I think we are going to shoot well past 1.5 deg C increase unless (and I doubt) the climate sensitivity factors are way off. And as the article Pat posted says, those who can want to live unsustainably, in a world of cognitive dissonance, and that ain’t gonna change until, as Herb says, we get that third degree burn.
Maybe Peter Sellers had it right all along. The solution:
Reason, logic, science and common sense will just not seep into the American psyche to create lifestyle changes that can halt global warming. I’m sorry to say that we will only respond once we’ve held our collective hand over the stove burner and received a third degree burn. So expect 3 more years of hand wringing before real work gets done at scale to start the long and painful battle against our own reckless way of life. POB and others are so right that sending politicians campaign monies will only assure they do little or less once elected so they can stay elected. But expecting our legislators to pass meaningful campaign finance reform is like asking a running back headed for the end zone to stop, and whip out a penalty flag on themselves for being offsides.
As our wise friend says “there are no jobs on a dead planet”.
Here’s a fun story. Want to go all-electric, right down to the car? Use rooftop solar, sell power back to the grid? Maybe you can’t, because yesterday’s grid won’t support tomorrow’s tech.
Looks like the power pole behind our house. Right down to the trees overgrowing it and the giant beer can transformer.
Up in Bombtown the grid was in better shape and we were selling power back to the municipal utility company. That was nice. When we moved to Santa Fe we lost that capability and I’m not convinced at this point to put that 10-15k investment on the roof again. Our electrical use is pretty low. That is, until Martin Heinrich descends on us with the SWAT team to confiscate our furnace and stove.