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The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:
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The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 9:11 PM

https://newrepublic.com/article/160213/brewing-democratic-fight-bidens-cabinet


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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 9:31 PM

McConnell had better try to work with Biden. Biden is probably the last Democrat McConnell is going to get who is willing to compromise and work across the aisle; if he bucks up and sabotages Biden and treats him with the same fight-for-every-inch-of-ground abandon he did with Obama - who was also pretty durn moderate - then that's it, it's all-out war. The next Dems in office are going to be hardcore libs from the Bernie and AOC camp, and they're not going to be interested in compromising.

Populism goes both ways. And "eff the rich" is the easiest line in populism to sell of all time.

Didn't like ObamaCare? Get ready, because we're about to have an NHS or at least a public option. Didn't like current environmental regulations? Get ready, because they're about to supersize the EPA and give it the policing heft of the FBI. Don't like Black Lives Matter? Just wait until they get around to reparations. Don't like labor unions? Get ready, because everybody from your Uber driver to your dishwasher to the guy stocking shelves at Sam's is going to be making union-negotiated pay.

The Dems have the votes, and there's going to be a point in the near future when they're in the ascendancy again...and I'd really rather it was somebody from the centrist camp in charge then. Because if you won't work to be the middle, what happens is you just cut the moderates' legs out from under them and empower the fringes...and that is dumb, dumb, dumb...especially if they've got you outnumbered.

There are a lot more poor people in this country than rich ones...and the middle class is being squeezed to extinction. Careful, Mitch.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 9:45 PM



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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 10:00 PM

Progressives have 100's of thousands of young activists taking to the streets, and without Trump at the wheel threatening to call in the national guard, you can see where it gets bit nerve racking for the men behind the curtain. Going back to the days of FDR, every time the progressive movement inched the ball forward, it was because they assembled in mass protest.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 10:54 PM



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oh no, the tough guy straw man argument.


Nov 16, 2020, 11:17 PM



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Hey, remember when...


Nov 18, 2020, 7:50 AM [ in reply to Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet: ]

You advocated Trump supporters rising up in violence just two weeks ago?

Need a link?

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[Catahoula] used to be almost solely a PnR rascal, but now has adopted shidpoasting with a passion. -bengaline

You are the meme master. - RPMcMurphy®

Trump is not a phony. - RememberTheDanny


Re: Hey, remember when...


Nov 18, 2020, 9:39 AM



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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 10:10 PM [ in reply to Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet: ]

I completely disagree.

The Bernie Bros are the fringe of the party, but the less the Dem mainstream establishment accomplishes the more frustrated they get...and the more their ranks swell.

Pelosi and Biden are holding onto their majorities by the skin of their teeth right now. If you don't like Pelosi or Biden, I would look at the people to the left of them. That picture you posted of AOC glaring daggers at Manchin did indeed say it all.


Do you really want someone like AOC running the Dem party? Because her and her ilk have a quality you don't seem to quite credit - they too are anti-establishment. Donald owned those votes the last two elections because whatever else he was, he was anti-establishment and disruptive...but those people don't belong to the GOP, they belong to the loudest and angriest voice in the room. And I promise you it's easier to sell the idea that the rich owning too much and leaving only scraps for the rest of us is a lot easier to sell than conspiracy theories about the Deep State and child pedophile rings...especially because the ever-rising wage gap means there's actually a fair bit of truth to it.

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If the threat is, "Move to the left or get AOC", I'll take


Nov 16, 2020, 10:24 PM

AOC and start from where that then takes us. And it wont be pretty and the left will have to account for it.

I am not saying you are proposing that threat, but if it is put on the table - give in to some direction I believe is wrong or take the ultimate end of that direction - I'll say "Take your best shot.". That type of negotiation is not negotiation, and I wouldn't play it.

Negotiation is 'if you give here, I will give there." That, I will do. If I instead hear, "You give here, or I will take it all", I will say "Take it." AOC is the left's deal. If they want to use her as a bargaining chip, I'll say make them play it. No threats.

Instead, it might work the other way. The left shifted left until it got Trump. Trump was of course his own worst enemy, but a Nikki Haley wont make those mistakes in four years. If one threatens with an AOC, I counter with Haley and take my chances.

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Re: If the threat is, "Move to the left or get AOC", I'll take


Nov 17, 2020, 4:47 AM

I am saying "engage with". One of the most frustrating things to me - a guy who voted Republican in every election but the last one and my first one (where I voted Perot, not Clinton) - is that the Republicans were bad at listening and tended to ignore social issues until absolutely forced to do so. But that's gotten way worse. McConnell utterly changed the wheel-and-deal tenor of the Senate (which was created to do exactly that, while the House was imagined as a sort of freewheeling House of Commons where the rank-and-file reps shouted and shook their fist across the aisle at each other). And then along came Trump, treating the left not just as political adversaries but as actual enemies and certainly not fellow Americans.

If the GOP doesn't back off of that, and in a hurry, it's going to be broken. What won't bend invariably breaks, and the demo maps all say the GOP is headed for a disaster by 2024 that gets progressively worse every cycle thereafter for at least the next 30+ years. The Millennials don't like the GOP...but Gen Z absolutely loathe them. Gen X is the last generation where the Republicans are even close to even.

Look at California. The Republicans are an outright minority party there, and more than one GOP pollster has taken a look and said: "that's the canary in the coal mine" - the
Dems took 63.7% of the vote in California, and won by almost 5 million votes. The Dems flipped Arizona and are in the process of taking Georgia, and Texas is not far behind. Florida held off the blue wave by playing the "Socialism" card with the Cuban community but that's not going to hold up, especially in face of literal red waves - the state's tourism industry is getting choked off by red tides fueled mostly by agricultural and industrial runoff and every hurricane that hits the state is a reminder climate change is getting increasingly savage and no state will pay a bigger price for that than Florida. Good luck there, over the long term.

The day is not far off when the Democrats literally will not have to care what the Republicans think. And God help us all if a bunch of enraged far-leftists have control of the party then because the middle got squeezed to nonexistence, and the GOP has just entrenched themselves as the party of denial and reactionary obstructionism like the stupid mean bully in every movie who everybody hates.

The GOP's best attribute has been its common sense and ability to balance a checkbook and it's showing absolutely none of either of late.

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I was not disagreeing with what you just said, or with


Nov 17, 2020, 10:31 AM

much of your post to which I replied. I did say, as perhaps some may have missed, that you were not making the AOC threat.

I also do understand and affirm the reasons for bipartisanship, some of what you describe. If you are getting up a group to vote for that, count me in.

You are not the one with the 'now we will do things our way' attitude. However your reference to 'be careful or you will get AOC' is something I have heard elsewhere, and is often used as a reason to concede, not negotiate.

Recognizing hypocrisy is not a reason to repeat it, but I will note that the left spent four years in nevertrump mode, but now wants bipartisanship. Right. Okay, one should always do what is best, regardless of the duplicity of one's opponent, but that does not mean anyone should ever concede in order to promote peace or avoid a bad outcome. Negotiate, yes. Concede, no. A threat, of AOC or of anything else, is no reason to concede a principle.

An example is nationalization of heath care. I think it is wrong for several fundamental reasons. However, if I were negotiating with the left I would be willing to trade that for some other things (what those are is another subject, but they will be as significant as that). However, if a Biden team member reponded with anything akin to "No, you need to give us this, or we may have to put AOC on the cabinet), my response would be, "Then do it. See you in 2024."

If the left wants to negotiate, fine. But I am not going to concede principles just because they threaten political anarchy. If that is the threat, we already have it. Lets go there and start over. "The tree of liberty must from time to time...".

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Re: I was not disagreeing with what you just said, or with


Nov 17, 2020, 5:24 PM

The problem is actually really simple - the share of the pie. Wealth inequality is getting worse every year.

There's an article over on The Atlantic that says America may be in terminal slide because of the overproduction of elites. We have too many rich people now who own too much of the pie and they take more every year and because of the way they've gamed the system it only gets progressively worse.

What insulates nations from silliness is a robust, productive, and very large middle class...but we're squeezing ours to nonexistence. That creates a situation where you've got a resentful and very large underclass and a privileged group of rich people who will do almost anything to preserve their power...and history tells us that's a dangerous, dangerous situation.

Historically what happens is the underclasses turn on the elites, almost always. The notion that the rich are the problem is the easiest trope in populism to sell.

Mitch is accelerating that process by digging in and refusing to take concrete steps to preserve the middle class. The warning sign should have been, there were a ton of Bernie Bros who also voted Trump...and the reason is simple: they're not Republicans or Democrats, they're anti-establishment and they're going to vote the most disruptive candidate. The system as it is, is crushing them.

How bad is wealth inequality? Well, there's this very simple viral video CBS did demonstrates. It's incredibly depressing.

https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/1223224310413905921?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1223224310413905921%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fslate.com%2Fnews-and-politics%2F2020%2F02%2Fwatch-cbs-journalist-use-pie-illustrate-inequality.html

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Is the problem the share of the pie or the size of the pie?


Nov 17, 2020, 10:27 PM

If Bill gates owned everything and was 100 times richer, and because of that situation everyone's standard of living was 50% higher, is that not a good thing?

Maybe. There are some things more important than money. All those things have to be assessed. But the moat dangerous thing in the world is to look at wealth inequity as a stand alone issue, declare it bad for some reason, and attack it. That is the strategy of the left.

Once one agrees that a doctor should make more than a mechanic, one is agreeing with wealth inequity. To say X level of it is good and Y is bad requires a lot more than a graph and a rant. And the proposal to address it by fiddling with taxes (its not the poor we love, its the rich we hate) is to propose a solution that didnt even factor into the problem.

If wealth inequity was created by fundamental inequities that should be addressed, one of the main ones has to be the abdication by congress of its oversight of antitrust laws. Through the 70's, getting a merger approved was a major hurdle. Since then, congress hasnt seen a merger it didnt like, and now we have a handful of banks and a handful of media companies that control most of what is decided in the US. One byproduct is that fewer and fewer people are making more and more money.

You cant fix that by taxing it away from Mark Z. Instead, its time to break up the social media oligarchies/monopolies (and others).. The effect would be the same as breaking up ATT, which spawned a communication revolution and created many, many millionaires, a very good outcome.

I mention this every so often on this board. Know who never agrees with me? The left posters. I have some ideas regarding why that is, but if bipartisanship means working together, there has to be some agreement on the ideals we will pursue. If the left responds to growing oligarchies by, say, hypothetically, wanting to assume control of entire industries, or taking control of more money, and that I should agree to that or get AOC, bring on AOC.

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Re: Is the problem the share of the pie or the size of the pie?


Nov 18, 2020, 6:48 PM

Well, I differ from a leftist in that I'm an actual free-market capitalist. And I agree what we've got now is captive-market capitalism and we've gotten away from anti-trust regulation, which steadily wound down in the '80's.

Not surprisingly, it was a start-up that just came up with our COVID vaccine. That's where the energy has always been.

I also totally, completely agree - it's a heckuva lot healthier to create 1,000 millionaires than one billionaire.

Nothing wrong with being rich. I aspire to be rich myself...and got wiped out by a shady investor in a software medical start-up I myself was involved in a few years back. I'll try another scheme soon...hopefully with my eyes more wide-open than they were previously. Bad beats teach hard lessons and that one hurt.

One thing I would quibble with, though - we're entering a different era than we used to be in, and the job requirements are very different, especially on the blue-collar end. Agricultural jobs are going away and aren't coming back; we're headed to automated V-farms in the next 10 years. Manufacturing jobs are going away and aren't coming back - we're headed to automation and then 3-D printing within twenty years.

What happens to those people then? Not everybody can be a code developer or lawyer.

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That's what Quoz said.


Nov 17, 2020, 8:02 AM [ in reply to If the threat is, "Move to the left or get AOC", I'll take ]

Nowhere did he say "Move to the left or get AOC".

He said McConnell needs to learn to meet in the middle with an administration willing to meet in the middle, or otherwise, people like AOC will rise out of it.

His post was pretty clear.

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[Catahoula] used to be almost solely a PnR rascal, but now has adopted shidpoasting with a passion. -bengaline

You are the meme master. - RPMcMurphy®

Trump is not a phony. - RememberTheDanny


Re: That's what Quoz said.


Nov 18, 2020, 4:24 AM

Yup.

All-or-nothing tactics aren't wise, if you're the minority. What happens then is, you get the nothing.

The rich have far too many slices of the pie right now, wealth disparity gets worse every year, and the middle class - and political middle - is getting squeezed.

That creates a poor-versus-wealthy conflict...which the rich inevitably lose. They become targets and eventually you get either a crime state (see Mexico and most of Central America right now) or a socialist revolution.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 10:52 PM [ in reply to Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet: ]



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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 10:54 PM

Me too.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 11:27 PM [ in reply to Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet: ]

I am not talking about the Bernie Bros. I am talking about everything from labor reform, to the new deal, to marches for civil rights and women's rights. Those movements all started in the streets, not on the floor of congress. When the traditional mechanisms fail, threatening anarchy tends to wake up the powers that be.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 11:36 PM

Democracy, bowing down to the loudest 10%.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 16, 2020, 11:41 PM

no, we bow down to an invisible .01%, and most people are too blind to see it.

And if you are going to conflate labor laws and civil and women's rights to democracy being subverted by the loudest ten percent, you are going to have a tough time defending that.

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Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet:


Nov 17, 2020, 6:32 AM

I don’t think we bow down to the .01%. We are being manipulated by them.

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Whatever choice(s) you make makes you. Choose wisely.


He's talking about the future.***


Nov 17, 2020, 8:00 AM [ in reply to Re: The Brewing Fight Over Biden’s Cabinet: ]



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[Catahoula] used to be almost solely a PnR rascal, but now has adopted shidpoasting with a passion. -bengaline

You are the meme master. - RPMcMurphy®

Trump is not a phony. - RememberTheDanny


The worst mistake this administration could make...


Nov 17, 2020, 8:04 AM

Is to dig into the same Republican stubbornness that the Trump and McConnell crowd did for the past few years. Those two men helped to increase the divisiveness in our nation. Biden has the opportunity to fix some of that, particularly with Cabinet appointees by staying moderate and bipartisan.

We know McConnell is a child who puts party and power before country, but playing into that game with him is a mistake.

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[Catahoula] used to be almost solely a PnR rascal, but now has adopted shidpoasting with a passion. -bengaline

You are the meme master. - RPMcMurphy®

Trump is not a phony. - RememberTheDanny


Re: The worst mistake this administration could make...


Nov 17, 2020, 9:23 AM

I think McConnell should fully support Bernie as Secretary of Labor and Liz Warren at Treasury, if running the Bureau of Indian Affairs is taken. I think he will be fine with that. The GOP holds both the governor's seats in Massachusetts and Vermont, so that move would guarantee two more appointed GOP senators. I actually think McConnell and Biden will work better together than we might think as they were colleagues for many years and had a congenial relationship. Obama was a first term senator who McConnell felt had not paid his dues to be President. He made it tough on Obama no doubt.

The Democratic Party candidates for governor in Vermont and Massachusetts must have really sucked! How does a Republican win in those two states? Having said that, I guess MA has elected multiple GOP governors in the last few years. That seems odd to me.

Biden is not going to get a major progressive agenda off the ground, but he will get some things done such as infrastructure and even some medical reforms. I think the country is ready for a bit of compromise and that's how things should work.

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Source check?


Nov 19, 2020, 11:18 AM

spooneye®

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Please forgive me, @IneligibleUser


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