donuts

donuts, 1 month ago

a president elected on hope and change

Here's a little middle school social studies lesson for you: there is a lot more to the government than the President.

Bernie Sanders could be sitting in the Oval Office right now and he'd still be struggling with the political realities that Biden is dealing with today. There would still be multiple wars raging, there would still be Republican obstructionism, there would still be a Republican controlled House and a tied Senate, etc. And I'm willing to bet you would be sitting here commenting on how "disappointing" he ended up being as a progressive....

If you want big, sweeping FDR-style changes, then elect a big sweeping congressional supermajority like FDR had. It's not rocket science, people like you would rather just shy away from the political reality of getting bills passed in favor of complaining online, and it's getting boring.

donuts, 3 months ago

Isn't this you, just yesterday, complaining that Biden was enabling the Israeli/Netanyahu government to stop aid from coming into Gaza "at all":

Just so everyone is clear, the Israeli governments reaction to this massacre is that they now need tostop aid from coming into Gaza at all because this incident proves starving people receiving aide is a danger to the Israeli military.

These are the people Biden is sending millions of dollars in weapons to. These are the people Biden directs the US ambassador to veto a widely supported cease fire resolution to give international cover to. Fuck, these are the people Biden chooses to lock arms with even as he loses 100k votes in Michigan in protest.

Today Biden has directed the US military to personally deliver aid to Gaza, in the most effective way that they can. (The US certainly isn't going to put boots on the ground to deliver aid in extremely hostile and dangerous territory where hostages are being kept potentially anywhere.) They are getting aid to the people of Gaza, while the UN is failing to.

It's possible that the UN could deliver aid more effectively by driving it into Gaza, but (a) it's very likely that they can't, because we've seen aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and aid stolen from innocent civilians and (b) the connections between UNRWA and Hamas have almost completely ruined the trust relationship with Israel. The UN has become severely compromised by their lack of ability to vet the people that work for them, because as the old saying goes "a bad apple can spoil the bunch", and innocent people are suffering because of it. That one isn't on Biden.

To say that Biden could "end this all with a phone call" is pure fiction, whether it's in an op-ed or not--the only two parties who can agree to a ceasefire are Netanyahu's government and Hamas. No US president, real or imaginary, is going to disarm Israel when they are our biggest ally in the region and under constant threat from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and others. No US president, real or imaginary, will call for Israel to unilaterally ceasefire against Hamas as Hamas continues to hold their people hostage and wage their own counterattacks. If a ceasefire should happen, and it should, it'll only happen because both sides of this conflict agree to the terms.

Anyway, I really hope you don't realize that you're moving the goal posts here, because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt... Anything else makes the complaints seem political and not genuinely pragmatic or even idealistic. Set the goalposts somewhere reasonable, and just keep them there.

Nobody is saying that Biden deserves a fuckin' peace prize for this, but he's doing a good thing here (something that just yesterday you seemingly wanted to see too) and he should be given at least due credit for that.

donuts, 21 days ago

Well, kudos to the libertarians for actually showing that some of them actually believe in the things that their party stands for.

Even they are smart enough to understand that Trump is a fucking wannabe fascist dictator.

donuts, 2 months ago

Even this dumb fat fuck knows how bad this Arizona abortion ruling is for his chances in November, and yet it was 100% his doing.

He ran in 2016 saying that he was going to appoint SCOTUS justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade, he packed the court full of hyper-conservative judges who unsurprisingly did exactly that, and now the states are implementing some of the most extreme anti-woman abortion laws imaginable. He can back-peddle all the fuck he wants know that he sees how unpopular his actions have been, but it doesn't change the fact that he and the rest of the GOP are responsible. You made your bed, now lie in it.

donuts, 1 month ago

I don't blame him. Low quality, poor safety standards, made in sweatshops by who-the-fuck-knows, not good for American jobs. China can keep their junky clunkers.

donuts, 1 month ago

Counterpoint: If Biden can pass the biggest infrastructure bill since the New Deal, the biggest climate bill ever, erase tens of billions of dollars of student debt, pull us out of the pandemic economy without a major crash, put together a global coalition to help Ukraine fight against Russian imperialism, reschedule cannabis, etc., then I'm going to blame the stupid voters for not (a) recognizing his achievements and (b) not recognizing the threat that Trump and the Republicans pose to our democracy and the global climate.

Biden has a razor-thin majority in the Senate and has no control of the House. Trump has already personally appointed 33% of the SCOTUS, and has another 66% eating out of the palm of his hand. And people are going to hand our country to the Republicans again (even though they are openly speaking out against democracy every fucking day) because... why...? Because there isn't peace in the middle east and somehow that's Biden's fault?

donuts, 1 month ago

Thomas won't even have to die. If Trump wins you can be sure we'll see at least 1 resignation and replacement. They aren't going to make the same mistake that RBG made, especially since they've had their eye on the ball when it comes to packing the courts with conservative judges at every level for decades.

Everything is in place for Trump to perform an autocratic authoritarian takeover of America. People need to be mentally prepared to fight or flight.

donuts, 12 days ago

Today's executive order doesn't conflict with any of those things.

In fact, all it does it put a temporary limit on extralegal border-crossing asylum claims to 2,500 people per day. So it does not, in fact, "shut down" asylum claims, nor does it increase deportations of people who have been living here.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry

Is the United States supposed to take in an unlimited number of unauthorized border-crossers every day?

Is that the way it's going to go down? The right falsely accuses the left of being for "open borders", and the left's response is to actually just take the bait and make that their stance?

Because if that's the new progressive litmus test (it's hard to keep up since there seems to be a new one every day) then we have well and truly jumped the shark. Even progressive hero FDR turned away tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees:

In 1933, and again in 1937, the Roosevelt administration modified the “likely to become a public charge” restriction, but kept it in place. German Jews attempting to immigrate to the United States in the 1930s were still often rejected for economic reasons.

As a result of these legal and administrative obstacles to immigration, less than 20% of the German quota was filled during FDR’s first term. The Roosevelt administration focused on domestic problems, chiefly combatting the Great Depression. Though Americans certainly had information about the threat Nazism posed to German Jews, few could have imagined the persecution would escalate to mass murder. FDR did not take significant action to aid German Jews, either by ordering a diplomatic protest or by publicly supporting increased immigration.

Some people on this website who claim to be "on the left" are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don't give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.