The Biden Presidency Thread

[Zarathud]

State needed to provide it to protect our relationship with Saudi Arabia. They’re not going to take kindly to our diplomats not intervening.

[malchior]

She's right - this is really dumb. Multiple reporters griping that the WH held a wedding at the WH and only invited Vogue for a layout was precious. That this is part of some pattern of "cute lying" or just lying in general?

I mean Trump lied about the pandemic and the election but think about what they said about the *Vogue shoot*?!

https://twitter.com/onesarahjones/statu ... 3925863428

[El Guapo]

Obviously what's really going to enrage the White House press corps is not human rights abuses, but threats to the livelihood of the White House press corps.

[Holman]

Obviously what's really going to enrage the White House press corps is not human rights abuses, but threats to the livelihood of the White House press corps.

Obviously you're blind to the agony of missing a byline in VOGUE.

[Alefroth]

Congress acting to avert rail strike by forcing acceptance of previous agreement.

https://apnews.com/article/business-eco ... fccddff22b

Seems like a bad move on the administration's part to me.

[El Guapo]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

[malchior]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

It was a big enough population of workers (~60K) to severely cripple national operations. And you'd expect the other 8 to refuse to cross picket lines.

[Alefroth]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

The other unions said they'd honor picket lines.

[Alefroth]

The difference between the forced agreement and the one the 4 unions want is 3 paid sick days.

[Kraken]

Biden has solid enough labor bona fides to get away with this. The needs of the many.... That said, Warren Buffet can afford to give these workers paid sick time. Robert Reich wrote that it would cost 2% of the railroads' profits -- not gross income, profit. But the crux is that the workforce is so tightly scheduled that any sick time disrupts operations.

[malchior]

Biden has solid enough labor bona fides to get away with this. The needs of the many.... That said, Warren Buffet can afford to give these workers paid sick time. Robert Reich wrote that it would cost 2% of the railroads' profits -- not gross income, profit. But the crux is that the workforce is so tightly scheduled that any sick time disrupts operations.

Heaven forbid the railroad company build some padding in. Still who do these railroad workers think they are demanding some sick time? The police? Luckily the railroad masters don't have to because the servants of the oligarchs will step in to protect their profits. And the pols wonder why people don't trust them.

Edit: As an aside, the Democrats have been losing blue collar workers in large numbers. It isn't about Biden's bona fides. This may reinforce the notion that regular workers don't get a fair shake from this cruel system. And they may have a point.

[El Guapo]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

It was a big enough population of workers (~60K) to severely cripple national operations. And you'd expect the other 8 to refuse to cross picket lines.

Was there no other way to structure these negotiations? This structure (while somewhat fluid) feels very close to requiring unanimous consent among the twelve unions, which seems like a recipe for failure, given how hard it is to get people to agree on anything.

If there isn't...almost feels like it would be better to just have the federal government nationalize the freight lines or something like that.

[malchior]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

It was a big enough population of workers (~60K) to severely cripple national operations. And you'd expect the other 8 to refuse to cross picket lines.

Was there no other way to structure these negotiations? This structure (while somewhat fluid) feels very close to requiring unanimous consent among the twelve unions, which seems like a recipe for failure, given how hard it is to get people to agree on anything.

If there isn't...almost feels like it would be better to just have the federal government nationalize the freight lines or something like that.

That seems awfully drastic when the spitting distance between them is 4 sick leave days.

[El Guapo]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

It was a big enough population of workers (~60K) to severely cripple national operations. And you'd expect the other 8 to refuse to cross picket lines.

Was there no other way to structure these negotiations? This structure (while somewhat fluid) feels very close to requiring unanimous consent among the twelve unions, which seems like a recipe for failure, given how hard it is to get people to agree on anything.

If there isn't...almost feels like it would be better to just have the federal government nationalize the freight lines or something like that.

That seems awfully drastic when the spitting distance between them is 4 sick leave days.

Yeah, I don't exactly mean to say that that should be done now. It's just that this negotiation structure seems pretty likely to lead to this type of outcome.

[LordMortis]

Biden has solid enough labor bona fides to get away with this.

Not sure about that

The needs of the many.... That said, Warren Buffet can afford to give these workers paid sick time. Robert Reich wrote that it would cost 2% of the railroads' profits -- not gross income, profit. But the crux is that the workforce is so tightly scheduled that any sick time disrupts operations.

Without knowing the particulars this time, I tend to agree. They (We?) have stuck it to the rail workers pretty hard over the last few decades. At first read, from over the summer, their desires seemed pretty damned reasonable to me. The rails, like most, need to attract more talent and you can't attract talent when you treat them unnecessary.

[El Guapo]

Biden has solid enough labor bona fides to get away with this.

Not sure about that

The needs of the many.... That said, Warren Buffet can afford to give these workers paid sick time. Robert Reich wrote that it would cost 2% of the railroads' profits -- not gross income, profit. But the crux is that the workforce is so tightly scheduled that any sick time disrupts operations.

Without knowing the particulars this time, I tend to agree. They (We?) have stuck it to the rail workers pretty hard over the last few decades. At first read, from over the summer, their desires seemed pretty damned reasonable to me. The rails, like most, need to attract more talent and you can't attract talent when you treat them unnecessary.

Was there any practical way for the administration to force the corporations to concede the additional 3 paid sick days? Mainly I'm trying to figure out what the practical alternatives were (if any) other than this or a rail strike.

[LordMortis]

Was there any practical way for the administration to force the corporations to concede the additional 3 paid sick days? Mainly I'm trying to figure out what the practical alternatives were (if any) other than this or a rail strike.

Dunno. But it seems like if you can attempt to force the workers to work then you could attempt to force the corporations to give time off/rework their scheduling system. Otherwise you can't force the workers from quitting, can you? Then it falls back on the corporation anyway.

[Alefroth]

Was there any practical way for the administration to force the corporations to concede the additional 3 paid sick days? Mainly I'm trying to figure out what the practical alternatives were (if any) other than this or a rail strike.

Pass a law requiring paid sick leave like our peer countries?

[Alefroth]

Looks like they passed a second measure allowing seven paid sick days-

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -sick-days

The second House measure, which passed 221-207, would provide seven paid sick days, in an attempt to address workers’ concerns. Three Republicans joined Democrats to approve the measure that included sick days.

Democrats’ decision to add a vote on paid sick days comes after major blowback from lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rail unions, who were disappointed by Biden’s push to approve a deal that did not adequately tackle this issue.

[malchior]

Why was rejection by four of the 12 unions sufficient to derail (pun not intended) the deal? Did approval need to be unanimous?

It was a big enough population of workers (~60K) to severely cripple national operations. And you'd expect the other 8 to refuse to cross picket lines.

Was there no other way to structure these negotiations? This structure (while somewhat fluid) feels very close to requiring unanimous consent among the twelve unions, which seems like a recipe for failure, given how hard it is to get people to agree on anything.

If there isn't...almost feels like it would be better to just have the federal government nationalize the freight lines or something like that.

That seems awfully drastic when the spitting distance between them is 4 sick leave days.

Yeah, I don't exactly mean to say that that should be done now. It's just that this negotiation structure seems pretty likely to lead to this type of outcome.

I'm not so sure. Especially when the ask is so fair. Maybe people won't remember this but this is the type of avoidable own goal that just chips away at this administration with the people they can't afford to lose from their coalition.

[malchior]

Looks like they passed a second measure allowing seven paid sick days-

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -sick-days

The second House measure, which passed 221-207, would provide seven paid sick days, in an attempt to address workers’ concerns. Three Republicans joined Democrats to approve the measure that included sick days.

Democrats’ decision to add a vote on paid sick days comes after major blowback from lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rail unions, who were disappointed by Biden’s push to approve a deal that did not adequately tackle this issue.

Let's see how it goes but this seems like pure theater.

[Alefroth]

Rubio has already indicated he'd block even the first measure.

[Alefroth]

Looks like they passed a second measure allowing seven paid sick days-

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -sick-days

The second House measure, which passed 221-207, would provide seven paid sick days, in an attempt to address workers’ concerns. Three Republicans joined Democrats to approve the measure that included sick days.

Democrats’ decision to add a vote on paid sick days comes after major blowback from lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rail unions, who were disappointed by Biden’s push to approve a deal that did not adequately tackle this issue.

Let's see how it goes but this seems like pure theater.

Not surprisingly, it failed.

A second measure adding seven paid sick days for rail workers passed on a mostly party-line vote in the House, but it fell eight votes short of a 60-vote threshold needed for passage in the Senate.

[malchior]

Nothing says freedom of association like the government stepping in and forcing you to accept a contract.

[Isgrimnur]

Even Canadians do it

The province intends to use the notwithstanding clause to protect its proposed back-to-work legislation from legal challenges. The clause allows the legislature to override portions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for a five-year term.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apparently expressed his disapproval of the use of the clause to Ford in a call on Wednesday.

[Defiant]

Gingrich to Republicans: Don't underestimate Biden

We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats.

The Biden team took an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the U.S. House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turned it into trillions of dollars in spending – and a series of radical bills. The latest bill on sexual rights overriding all other rights was bitterly opposed by virtually every conservative even as it passed with Republican support.

Biden has carefully and cautiously waged war in Ukraine with no American troops. Although poorly timed and slowly delivered, U.S. weapons and financial aid have helped cripple what most thought would be an easy victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Biden team had one of the best first term off-year elections in history. They were not repudiated. They did not have to pay for their terrible mismanagement of the economy.

If Republicans are going to successfully work through the next two years in the Congress – and win the presidency in 2024 – we need to look much more deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022.

Today there is not nearly enough understanding (or acknowledgement) among leading Republicans that our system and approach failed. We need to rethink from the ground up how we are going to Defeat Big Government Socialism – including almost inevitable second-time Democrat Presidential Nominee Biden.

This is a much bigger challenge than I would have guessed before the election.

[malchior]

Fuck Gingrich. (To parapphrase) We allowed them to pass legislation with bare majorities...

He started this descent into madness.

[gbasden]

Fuck Gingrich. (To parapphrase) We allowed them to pass legislation with bare majorities...

He started this descent into madness.

Gingrich is very high on my list of politicians I would like to kick square in the nuts. He's been horrible on so many levels for decades.

[Kurth]

Fuck Gingrich. (To parapphrase) We allowed them to pass legislation with bare majorities...

He started this descent into madness.

Gingrich is very high on my list of politicians I would like to kick square in the nuts. He's been horrible on so many levels for decades.

But, man, that’s such a long list!

[gbasden]

Fuck Gingrich. (To parapphrase) We allowed them to pass legislation with bare majorities...

He started this descent into madness.

Gingrich is very high on my list of politicians I would like to kick square in the nuts. He's been horrible on so many levels for decades.

But, man, that’s such a long list!

Oh, it's a very long list and I've checked it more than twice.

[Defiant]

I'm not a fan of Gingrich, but I just found it interest that he had some positive things to say about how effective this administration has been (albeit through the eyes of someone who thinks Democrats are evil), hence why I posted it.

[gilraen]

I'm not a fan of Gingrich, but I just found it interest that he had some positive things to say about how effective this administration has been (albeit through the eyes of someone who thinks Democrats are evil), hence why I posted it.

I was just thinking that Gingrich did a better job giving credit to the Democrats for their accomplishments than what Democrats are capable of doing for themselves.

[Smoove_B]

Jeff Zients is going to be the next Chief of Staff?! The same Jeff Zients that bungled COVID-19 response? FFS.

From 2021:

The logistical hurdles of ending the pandemic will undoubtedly be the largest challenge of his career, which Zients faces with no direct experience in public health. As a product of elite private schools with wealthy friends, his actions will be closely watched by advocacy groups who say the pandemic response must address decades long health disparities seen in Hispanic and Black communities.

I guess if you disappear for a year, anything is possible (from March 2022):

“Jeff Zients failed and the world paid the price.

“Despite promises that the U.S. would be a ‘vaccine arsenal’ for the world, the United States and rich countries refused to share vaccine technology with developing countries and failed to deliver sufficient vaccines.

“The vaccination rate among low-income countries is 14 percent – about one-sixth the rate in rich nations. And even those data disguise the extent to which people in poorer countries are receiving less efficacious vaccines.

“The true toll of this failure will never be known, but at this point almost surely includes tens of millions of avoidable cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid. It also includes extreme disruption of poorer countries’ economies and societies.

I actually thought Biden saying the other day that he forgot about the pandemic was bad, but this...this is confirmation nothing will change.

[LawBeefaroni]

Jeff Zients failed and the world paid the price.

He took the heat dutifully and is being rewarded.

[malchior]

There is no reward motive to aim for competence anymore.

[malchior]

NY Times

Somehow this story gets more preposterous. There are elements of this story that call into question the previous stories the White House told. Another White House with a President (or staff) that whether it is a fair characterization or not looks like it can't shoot straight and then lies about it.

President Biden’s lawyers told the Justice Department in November that they had no reason to believe that copies of official records from his vice presidency had ended up anywhere beyond a think tank in Washington, where several classified documents had been found that month, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

That assertion, the people said, was based on interviews with former officials who had been involved in the process of packing and shipping such material. The Biden legal team had surveyed them after the discovery on Nov. 2 of a small number of classified files in a closet of his former office at the Penn Biden Center, seeking to understand how the files got there.

But it would turn out that a handful of classified records were at Mr. Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Del., too. The mistaken premise, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, helps explain why roughly seven weeks elapsed before Mr. Biden’s lawyers searched boxes in the garage at his Wilmington home on Dec. 20 and found several more classified papers.

...

Even as Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois stressed that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had responded very differently to the discovery of classified material after they left office, he was also critical, calling the situation “outrageous” on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

It has diminished Mr. Biden’s stature even if it turns out to have been the fault of an aide because “the elected official bears ultimate responsibility,” Mr. Durbin said.

[Kraken]

(Drip...drip...drip....)

TFG did say that all the ex-presidents do it. I wonder if Bronco Bama's or W's people are poking into obscure corners.

[Smoove_B]

Sorry, wrong thread!

I know everyone is still focused on the documents, but more on Zients:

Economic historian Kyle Edward Williams, author of the forthcoming book Taming the Octopus: The Century-Long Battle Over the Soul of the Corporation, says that the bulk of Zients’s record points to “someone who seems to be failing up. The role that he played in the fiscal cliff episode, there [Obama officials] had a clear win over the Republicans and just handed it over to them, with severe consequences that we’re still seeing. And in his role as Covid czar, we went from getting free Covid tests from the government to there being less and less reliable access.”

The same goes for Covid vaccines and therapeutic treatments such as Paxlovid. Zients has diminished the government’s role in ensuring access and affordability to such critical resources in the face of a devastating public health crisis—with predictably devastating fallout. Within the hothouse political theater of the Beltway, Zients has been widely credited with “turning the pandemic around”—but the real-world import of that transformation courts renewed disaster. “What turning it around seems to mean is a very loud and very performative transition to the private market for the vaccine and therapeutics,” says Beatrice Adler-Bolton, cohost of the podcast Death Panel, which has closely tracked Zients’s tenure as Covid czar. “It’s very clear that Zients is going to have the model of Covid privatization be a priority for him as he moves into this new role.”

More to the point:

“If you look at every indicator, from the rate of vaccines to mask wearing, they’ve been in decline” since Zients began managing the Biden White House’s Covid response. And the Zients privatization effort has cleared the path for Big Pharma vaccine makers like Moderna and Pfizer to announce pending plans to market vaccines for $120—a ruinous market intervention at a time when preventive measures such as masking and remote working are waning and new strains of Covid continue to emerge. “Once the federally declared emergency response is over, and the prep act goes away, we’ll see the full commercialization start for the vaccine and therapeutics,” the health administrator says. “This is something Zients was pushing for…. People are worried about the prospect for new strictures on pharmacies [and their] not being able to deliver vaccines and Paxlovid like they have been. It will be the wrong time to take away those accessibilities. We’re really going to be hurting public health.”

Adler-Bolton’s Death Panel cohost Artie Vierkant is blunter: “It’s important to note that this management approach spearheaded the playbook that led to 700,000 Covid deaths on the Biden administration’s watch…. This appointment demonstrates to me that the Biden administration truly does think that the absolute tragedy that Zients oversaw was a major success story. And that should be terrifying.”

But sure, Chief of Staff. Sounds great.

[malchior]

Zients is a great choice! [/sarcasm] He is the epitome of the elite corps of management consultants who have championed policies that have enriched the few, destroyed communities, impoverished millions, and ultimately rotted away our country to the point where parasites like him can finally pick apart what's left for themselves.

[malchior]

Zients is a great choice! [/sarcasm] He is the epitome of the elite corps of management consultants who have championed policies that have enriched the few, destroyed communities, impoverished millions, and ultimately rotted away our country to the point where parasites like him can finally pick apart what's left for themselves.

Surprise - Zients and the rich corporate bastards he brought along have caused Biden to suddenly espouse policy that seems to enrich ... rich corporate bastards. And it is making Biden even more unpopular as a President.

In mid-March, the Biden administration formally approved the Willow oil drilling project on federally owned landed in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The ConocoPhillips-led effort is a massive operation, with the potential to produce 600 million barrels of crude over 30 years and release an additional 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually. It is also a major campaign promise betrayal, one that came as a surprise: “No more drilling on federal lands,” Joe Biden said in 2020. “Period. Period. Period. Period.”

In fact, the Biden administration has recently been doing quite a few things seemingly out of character with the first two years of his presidency. That change is especially confounding given that his embrace of a series of progressive policies in his first half-term preceded a historic overperformance in November’s midterm elections. Despite his reputation as a centrist, Biden has pursued an agenda—from climate to labor to judicial appointments—well to the left of his reputedly progressive Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. But now Biden seems to be tacking to the right, embracing policies that look much more like those championed by the 44th president.*