Month: May 2021

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Not So Fast, Honey

About six weeks ago we were presented with my employer's plan to slowly start transitioning folks back into the office. Myself—and the other members of my team—let out a collective "UGH" because none of us are in any hurry to go back.

The plan started out with a month or so of strictly voluntarily returns not to exceed 25% (that TBH, I don't think any department took advantage of), followed up by a month at 50% capacity, and then finally back to "normal" at 100%.

Well, thankfully my enterprise isn't run by the type of Republican assholes running the State of Arizona who are hell-bent on getting everything opened back up, because we got notice yesterday that moving to Phase 2 (50%) is on hold "indefinitely" because of the rising number of cases in the state.

That does not mean that my team is not in the office at all. For the next several weeks we're in house, masked up and social-distanced every Monday for a half day to do some much overdue inventory salvage and tidying up the back-to-back episodes of Hoarders that are our two equipment storage rooms. A daunting task because as we discovered yesterday, there is shit in there from the late 1980s…

But at least we can walk in the rooms now.

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Eight Seconds of Pure, Unadulterated Truth

Much has been said about Fox News' propensity for fallacies over the years, but nobody has nailed it quite so simply and perfectly as CNN's Jim Acosta.

During a broadcast on Saturday, Acosta dispensed with all niceties and just called Fox News "the bullsh*t factory."

You can see the moment here:

The internet is lauding him as a hero for finally saying what so many have been thinking.

Acosta made the comments while reporting on Republicans' most recent obsession, a now retracted New York Post story which claimed, erroneously, migrant children detained at the southern border were all given copies of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' children's book, Superheroes Are Everywhere.

In discussing the way the right has turned the story into its controversy du jour, Acosta pulled no punches.

"This [story] was USDA Grade A bullsh*t and the reporter who wrote the story resigned claiming she was forced to make it up. But the damage was done, pumped out over the airwaves at the bullsh*t factory also known as Fox News."

Acosta's blunt appraisal of the controversy is pretty hard to argue with.

The New York Post story claimed Harris' 2019 book was included in all migrant children's welcome packets upon arrival at the border—the truly damning implication being that taxpayer dollars were spent to purchase the copies of the Vice President's book.

The claim was false and easily disproven.

In reality, one single copy of the book, donated by a private individual, was distributed. After a furor erupted online about the fallacies in the piece, the journalist who wrote it, Laura Italiano, resigned in protest, calling the piece her "breaking point" and admitting she did not "push back hard enough against" it when she was "forced" to write it.

But as with so many other fake controversies, conspiracy theories and false accusations against Democrats and those on the left, Fox News made little effort to set the record straight, leading to Acosta's rebuke.

On Twitter a new nickname for Fox News was born.

In a subsequent broadcast, Fox News did admit the story was "not accurate."

But they continued raising questions about the book itself and speculating private individuals were donating Harris' book instead of more worthy items or supplies.

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Biden's First 100 Days and the GOP's First 100 Days Without Trump

robertreich:

By almost any measure, Joe Biden's first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against COVID-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.

Two thirds of Americans support Biden's $1.9 stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined last Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6 trillion price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn't feel radical.

Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Clinton's failed to accomplish and which Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as pre-school, public community c0llege, paid family and medical leave, home care, and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.

Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared to workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it's time we caught up.

Besides, it's hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn't feel scary. He's old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He's humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it's clear he knows them.

Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it's unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.

In his address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first hundred days. They had been accomplished "because of you," he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.

Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden's proposals. Trump left it with little more than a list of baseless grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans – that Trump would have been reelected but for fraudulent votes and a "deep state" conspiracy, that Democrats are "socialists" and that the "left" is intent on taking away American freedoms.

Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he's to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.

Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump's yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden's. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.

Trump's giant $1.9 trillion tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which "trickled down," make Biden's proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.

Trump's fierce economic nationalism has made Biden's "buy American" initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump's angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.

At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers' refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes has alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.

Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden's hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump's overt racism and his overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden's initiatives to end police brutality and "root out systemic racism," as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.

The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.

With any luck, Biden's plans might be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the right-wing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury.