Because someone in the media whispers to them “hey yeah but wouldn’t in be fun if instead you spent the next 6 weeks trying unseat your own nominee” and they go “TAHTS’ SUCH A GOOD IDEA” and get busy on it
No one intervenes if the system goes after a Democrat, so it can all just happen as normal
People have been so amped up with undirected random anger against the system that it’s just spilling out in random directions against anything that looks like organized activity.
As soon as it can get harnessed and channeled against Democrats, it’ll turn into a hell of a big problem.
Crazy impractical idea: Reach out to Stumpy Nubs, pitch it to him as an episode idea where you bring the tools to him and he plays with them and teaches you how to work with them and how to approach safety with them.
I do not recommend trying to “figure out” how to work safely with them if you’re that unfamiliar with them. It only takes once. I think that fear is there for a reason.
I bet I will not need to look further than one week back in your postings to find some histronics about how Biden is behind by however many single-digit points in a national poll and that's a big deal
Edit: Found it! It was an inference from a single percentage point of difference between him and Trump in a national poll.
Poll finds Biden damaged by debate; with Harris and Clinton best positioned to win
The national poll, conducted and commissioned by the firm Bendixen & Amandi after Biden’s politically disastrous debate and shared exclusively with POLITICO, found Biden trailing Trump, 42 percent to 43 percent.
Vice President Kamala Harris is now running ahead of Trump, 42 percent to 41 percent, the survey found.
Pretty cool that we found out now that he's no longer damaged by the debate, since his national poll numbers are the metric -- right?
Biden's administration had no official role in it
Hm... I think you might be right. The White House sort of took credit for it, and I thought I remembered that they were in on some of the negotiations and I've been saying they were, but everything I can find now seems to indicate that it was just the unions pressuring the railroads. I can't find anything to indicate that Biden's people were involved.
Moreover, saying unions can't strike when it's economically or politically inconvenient is tantamount to saying that can't strike at all. There's a reason hundreds of labor historians wrote Biden and his labor secretary an open letter condemning them for what they did with this strike.
100%. I agree. Like I say, my personal feeling is that, if the workers want to strike, then fuck the economy. If the economy tanks and we get some level of "oh god I'm really struggling with the price of hot dogs / with how my stocks are doing," then maybe all of those people who are unhappy about that happening should live for a year in the railroad workers' shoes.
I'm just saying, it's extremely relevant what all other actions Biden did for unions when it wasn't the whole economy at stake, and that I kind of get why he did it. I'm not saying I think that's the right way for the US government to react to a big rail strike or that the Biden administration is a good ending point for progress.
acting like he didn't or it's no big deal is extremely unhelpful to Biden's reelection efforts.
Fair enough. Acting like the other 95% of his union actions didn't happen is also unhelpful to Biden's reelection efforts, though.
I stick up for Biden on a lot of things because I think he did a great job domestically, and because his opponent is clearly so horrifying that he’ll make it impossible even to maintain Biden’s improvements, let alone go beyond him to the places that the country actually needs to go. But I’m actually fine with replacing him - just, according to some kind of coherent plan for what the Democrats should do instead, and a convincing case that it’ll be an improvement. In that case, then sure, let’s rock and roll.
I do react negatively to just a shrieking tide of misleadingly negative news about him - like, say, reacting to the news that he’s now up by 3 points in a national poll by pivoting to some other thing to talk about, using a framing that creates a narrative that he’s steadily losing support week by week and it’s insane that he’s even considering staying in the race, because it’s a lost cause. That I would fight against, yeah - not because I necessarily think it’s proven that him staying in is the right answer, but because that narrative is a bunch of transparent horseshit unsupported by the facts.
Hope this helps clear up the confusion.
So I thought to myself, why is ozma / NYT / the Hill all of a sudden super interested in swing states, when before it was almost all talking about what the national polls show
And so I looked up what the NYT poll said about national numbers. The answer will shock you!
(Polls are crap, in general; I’m more just pointing out the hypocrisy of freaking the fuck out about Biden’s numbers tanking because of the debate, then when they don’t, pivoting seamlessly to freaking the fuck out because he’s 3 percentage points behind and he’ll never catch up and he’s being a moron to stay in, to now seamlessly freaking the fuck out about a new, however perfectly valid, way of looking at the polling, when he pulls ahead by 2-3 points nationally.)
“We”, he says
Yes yes, very good. Let it all out.
Here, now do this one; tell me why it's all irrelevant. Don't hold back, it's not good for you.
i don't believe anyone makes any decision that causally increases or decreases the buying power of a dollar, except perhaps the buyer and seller in any transaction, but only within the confines of that transaction, anyway.
I think we're done here
What a polite request! As a matter of fact, I'd be happy to cut and paste so it's a little more clear for people who don't like clicking links.
“Put us in the group of doubling down unequivocally,” said Brent Booker, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which represents some 400,000 U.S. workers in construction and other sectors. “He’s done more for our members than any president in my lifetime.”
“Most of my members are already pretty well-attuned to how Joe Biden feels about labor unions. I don’t doubt [Harris] would support labor unions, but I don’t think she would stand a chance” at winning the election, said Dave Fashbaugh, 59, the business manager of a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Michigan.
Despite the panic set off in much of the party over Biden’s debate performance, union support has not wavered for the president even at the moments of maximum uncertainty. Union endorsements have taken care to stress support for both Biden and Harris, often endorsing the two jointly, and many union officials say publicly they would be as confident in Harris as in Biden.
As Democrats on Capitol Hill convened to discuss their way forward, the AFL-CIO last week put out a statement saying it “Stands in Strong Solidarity With Biden-Harris Ticket.” The nation’s preeminent labor organization endorsed Biden in June 2022, the earliest it has ever weighed in on a presidential race.
The Biden administration has gone to enormous lengths to make good on his promise to be the “most pro-union president in history.”
He pushed for key legislation that poured billions of dollars into the creation of union jobs in clean energy, semiconductors and other industries. He has appointed labor allies to key leadership positions and offered unions pension bailouts, apprenticeship funds and policies that have made it easier for workers to organize.
“President Biden’s record of delivering for working people stands for itself,” David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers, said Tuesday in a written statement. His “transformative infrastructure investments … are creating good, union jobs” and “his worker-centered trade policy … is rebuilding supply chains.”
IDK, I stopped with that much; that seems like plenty. Want me to copy and paste some from the NLRB article, though? There's a little bit of history and explanation of how he made it happen that might be interesting.
Got it. Yeah. I thought I had seen something like that. I just couldn’t find it on the spot just now when looking for it.