This "victory" had to be rescued by Republicans because he didn't expend any energy or political capital making it happen. The Titanic has hit the iceberg, and the progressives in his party are goosing the throttle. Meanwhile Joe is off in Glasgow making climate castles in the air.
"...and there is hope on the horizon for the pandemic."
Hope has been "on the horizon" for months now, and I'm frankly wondering whether that's where it always will be.
When will we get pollsters who ask information-seeking questions about the answers they get, and discount the "opinion" of non-answerers?
"Vice President Kamala Harris' approval rating is 28% – even worse than Biden's. The poll shows that 51% disapprove of the job she's doing. One in 5, 21%, are undecided."
It would be nice to know what action or absence of specific action forms the basis for the disapproval vote and why the undecided are undecided. Might it be because they know nothing about what VP Harris has done or not done but don't want to admit their ignorance?
The primary purpose of these polls is not to provide useful information... at least not in their presentation to the public. Their purpose is to act as fodder for particular narratives. I have serious doubts about the usefulness of many of these polls that are so often touted for various political purposes or for political horserace commentary.
A long time ago (around 25-30 years ago) when I was a grad student I did a lot of work with polling and data analysis in social science (a lot of political polling, actually). HOW you ask and word the question is just as important as the content of the question (actually more). I used to like to joke saying that I could construct a poll that would make Hitler or Stalin look like fantastic people and leaders--except it isn't really a joke.
A carefully constructed and validated poll can tell you lot of interesting things. Political polls are not those types of polls, in most cases--at least not as they are presented to the public... and used by the media. As an aside, we used to get data from exit polling--this was basically the raw data (on which we did our own analysis)--we are talking about computer printouts (yes that was how long ago it was) that was several inches thick and very detailed.
Progressives like to throw out that X% (forget the actual number) support progressive environmental policy--well, that is both true and not true. Here is an example (using example questions to make the point):
1) The environment is important and we need to act to preserve it (this will be very popular);
2) The environment is important and we need to tax rich people so that we can preserve it (not as popular but still popular);
3) The environment is important and we need to increase everyone's taxes so that we can preserve it (probably not very popular); and
4) The environment is important and we need to increase gasoline tax to $6 a gallon so that we can preserve it (not going to be popular at all).
Do you see what I did there? General ideas and aspirational goals are popular (they are also generally open to interpretation). Specific policies are usually unpopular--the more specific 9and higher obvious cost) the less popular.
Everybody wants to save the planet until they find out how much it will cost THEM.
I can kill your idea or policy or popularity in a poll by how I ask the question, when I ask the question (something as simple as time of day) and who I ask. It becomes a question of rigor in construction and performance.
Even as some right-wing media figures and politicians try to outdo each other over Big Bird's PSA, freelance writer Meg St-Esprit sent this tweet about her 10-year-old son, which received a lot of likes and retweets.
Children have more empathy, kindness, and community outlook than adults do.
@MegStEsprit
As my 10yo got his @pfizer vaccine tonight he was nervous but kept whispering his (high risk) best friend’s name over and over. And I have zero regrets that my kid was scared and yet did something out of love for another person anyways.
Seriously, these polls are just ridiculous. Disapproval for Kamala...what is she actually doing and what is a VP's actual duties? Do these voters want her sucking up to Joe like Mikey P did?
While I find the whole discussion about Big Bird amusing, I think it's an overstatement to say that "we" find ourselves embroiled in a conversation about it. "We" seems to include those who regularly participate in the Twittersphere (which, from research out of Pew nearly 3 years ago includes about 22% of adults in the U.S. - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/) and in the Crazysphere (OAN, et. al.).
I appreciate Kinzinger's point that opponents of Trumpist authoritarianism can ill afford to let standard issue policy differences torpedo a pro democracy coalition.
What he doesn't explain is how voting against a bill (BIF) whose passage was arguably critical to (large D) Democratic survival at a time when the Democratic Party is, for better or worse, the only alternative to authoritarianism, serves his overriding goal.
(Of course, The Squad doesn't address that issue either, presumably because they aren't interested in pro-democracy coalitions in the first place.)
How do Kinzinger (and Cheney, who also voted against the BIF) expect to thwart a future Trumpublican electoral blowout if they won't lift a finger in Congress to help Biden's legislative agenda? From the lecture circuit?
Maybe they're pinning everything on blockbuster January 6 committee revelations. Let's hope they know something the rest of us don't.
If Cheney voted for this bill, her chances for reelection would be zero. She alone is trying to lead the Republican Party away from the Trump personality cult. If she can beat a MAGA candidate in her primary, with her strong stance relative to January 6th, in beet red Wyoming, the Trump fever may well break.
Point taken. But she's been averaging around 20% in Congressional primary polls. That doesn't mean she couldn't win in a crowded open primary with Democrats and Independents pulling for her. Or even parlay that into retaining her seat.
The problem with "Trump fever" is that it's not just a personality cult. It's a revolt against the whole system of winners and losers that produced today's America, including both economic and cultural elites.
I was reading a Korean news site yesterday (Squid Game sigh…) and I laughed out loud reading their “top articles” and #9 was “Presidential race starts in earnest soon.”
Polls suck. Polls said Trump was going to lose in 2016, right? I understand their usefulness, but also maybe the President should do his job for like, I dunno, more than a YEAR before we go and ask the stupid public about it. So much can change by the next election, yet it’s always going to be #1 news in America because here. Politics is entertainment.
Stay on the Claremont story, Bulwark. This is some dangerous shit, attempting to mainstream extremism.
I live in Nebraska where 91 of 93 county governments passed some version of "gun sanctuary" resolutions. Some of these resolutions tiptoe up to the sort of nonsense about the authority of Sheriffs that Claremont is selling. This choice of the word "sanctuary" is telling. This is meant to assert that state and federal regulation of gun rights can be ignored by counties.
So Ted Cruz, a Fox News stalwart, is accusing Big Bird of being a vehicle for government propaganda, as though he has been asleep the last five years.
How do these folks think this works? A five year old checks her Twitter, sees what Big Bird has to say about his experience with the vaccine, then goes to mom and dad and says she's going out and getting the vaccine, whether they want her to or not? Is that how this works?
You're assuming Cruz is a reasonable human being. Assume instead that he's a cynical a-hole whose only concern is getting and keeping power and everything he does makes sense.
One of the most "sensible" folks out there, considering that he and his goals are exactly as you described. I mean this guy is dedicated to sensible. Why else would he have himself on video wrapping a strip of bacon around the business end of an AR-15 and then gleefully "cooking it" with firepower. ( Always wondered why his trigger finger didn't cramp up...could have used a bump stock I suppose. )
The fact that Cruz is originally from Canada is the best argument I can make for serious immigration reform in this country. ( Sorry, Canada. No offense. We have plenty of home-grown versions of such sensible and dedicated people to account for ourselves. )
I guess I should apologize for him too as the Latin American immigrant father of U.S. citizen children. I sincerely hope none of them turn out like him.
Not quite sure how to take this...not nearly as online as most, and the words on the screen don't always unfailingly convey the true meaning behind them, as I suspect some folks would say of some of the things I post. Seriousness sometimes comes off as sarcasm and vice versa, as happens occasionally in real life face to face conservations as well.
For example, when my boss at the part time job I started about 3 months ago ( a guy about 20+ years younger than me, with a sense of humor similar to my own ) recently asked at the end of my last day of the week if I'd be able to finish up the parts I was currently working on when I returned the following Tuesday ( so they could be shipped before the end of that day ), I felt comfortable enough to crack a little wise and reply "Sure. If I'm here on Tuesday", then proceeded to head for the exit.
A moment later he was at my shoulder as I walked down the aisle, asking rather seriously if there was a chance I wouldn't be in as scheduled.
It was a joke, I replied. Well, you're kinda' hard to read sometimes, he responded. Well, so are you, I told him. Which was true from my perspective.
We both got a good laugh out of it, since it wasn't the first time it had happened.
So for clarity's sake, you can put me on record that, having read some of your other posts, I can confidently say that we need a whole lot more folks like you around here, where ever they may come from.
Along with a whole lot less of the likes of Lyin', AR-Fryin' Ted.
Heh, yeah. I meant it in the spirit of you're not really blaming Canada for Flyin' Ted. I don't really think we should blame the fact his father was from Cuba for his ardent loserishness either.
Don't you know, Charlie, that it's okay for the Squad to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill because they were making a statement, and if it came down to their votes making a difference, they surely would have voted for it, so we're told to assume....
I'll try to keep this short. It's fairly clear now that voters do not care about politicians doing anything. As you note, the stock market has never been higher, jobs are plentiful, wages are up, they just passed an infrastructure bill, and yet the American people are not happy. The reality is that people clearly don't know what they want, but they do know that they are never happy. Perhaps we should have figured this out by the fact that presidencies tend to change hands politically each time, because as Mayer said rather accurately, 'the american people have no political desire other than throw the bums out.' When things are good in America, the american people don't reward the party in power. When things are bad in America, they don't so much blame the people in power as tell themselves that they were right to begin with.
Second, on the 'normalizing Syria' bit. Look, there is no shortage of awful things to be said about Syria. you could apply nearly any evil adjective to describe their leader, and it would probably fit. But here's the thing: it doesn't matter if the US recognizes them or not. They're going to exist. Assad is going to be in power. And refusing to accept this is a bit like how the US didn't accept the CCP as the 'real' china and stubbornly acted like Taiwan was China, and not the billion people on the mainland. It revealed how impotent the US was, for not accepting reality.
Syria will be led by Assad, and the US won't do anything about it. It does the US no favors by pretending like this isn't the case. China is putting people in extermination camps, there's religious war going on in India, there's genocide in Myanmar; all of these places are in countries that the US recognizes. The same is true for the wars in the Balkans in the 90's. Terrible stuff happens all of the world by terrible people. But that doesn't mean that their governments and nations don't exist. We can say that's 'legitimizing' or 'normalizing' them, but the fact is, it doesn't matter if we accept them or not, they exist, and they'll do whatever they please. Not recognizing them just means they act with more impunity.
To use a somewhat messy metaphor, it's a bit like how after 2016 a whole host of liberals were like 'we can't normalize trumpism' and tried to pretend like he didn't exist or that the forces of illiberalism were rising. The same happened with a lot of center-right publications. The fact is, pretending like it doesn't exist isn't really an option. The problem is that by the time you're asking 'should we normalize this' it's already normalized. Once they're in power, congrats, they're already normalized. Refusing to grapple or engage with it only makes you look weaker, not them. They don't need your acceptance to do what they want, after all.
So is Syria awful? Yes. It's one of the worst regimes in a world of them. But pretending like they don't exist is a bit like trying to pretend that Franco wasn't in charge of Spain for all those years. It was pointless.
I'll try to keep this short too. Democrats are perennially bad at messaging. Do you think the vast majority of Americans follow the stock market? Do you think the vast majority of Americans have stock portfolios? Do you think the vast majority of Americans pay to subscribe to the NYT, Wapo, or the Bulwark +?
Democrats should stop over-explaining everything, come up with simple to-the-point messaging. That would go a long way towards getting people to understand what's going on and how it impacts their own lives.
"Yes, he won a huge legislative victory..."
This "victory" had to be rescued by Republicans because he didn't expend any energy or political capital making it happen. The Titanic has hit the iceberg, and the progressives in his party are goosing the throttle. Meanwhile Joe is off in Glasgow making climate castles in the air.
"...and there is hope on the horizon for the pandemic."
Hope has been "on the horizon" for months now, and I'm frankly wondering whether that's where it always will be.
Shorter me: Joe deserves his poll numbers.
When will we get pollsters who ask information-seeking questions about the answers they get, and discount the "opinion" of non-answerers?
"Vice President Kamala Harris' approval rating is 28% – even worse than Biden's. The poll shows that 51% disapprove of the job she's doing. One in 5, 21%, are undecided."
It would be nice to know what action or absence of specific action forms the basis for the disapproval vote and why the undecided are undecided. Might it be because they know nothing about what VP Harris has done or not done but don't want to admit their ignorance?
The primary purpose of these polls is not to provide useful information... at least not in their presentation to the public. Their purpose is to act as fodder for particular narratives. I have serious doubts about the usefulness of many of these polls that are so often touted for various political purposes or for political horserace commentary.
A long time ago (around 25-30 years ago) when I was a grad student I did a lot of work with polling and data analysis in social science (a lot of political polling, actually). HOW you ask and word the question is just as important as the content of the question (actually more). I used to like to joke saying that I could construct a poll that would make Hitler or Stalin look like fantastic people and leaders--except it isn't really a joke.
A carefully constructed and validated poll can tell you lot of interesting things. Political polls are not those types of polls, in most cases--at least not as they are presented to the public... and used by the media. As an aside, we used to get data from exit polling--this was basically the raw data (on which we did our own analysis)--we are talking about computer printouts (yes that was how long ago it was) that was several inches thick and very detailed.
Progressives like to throw out that X% (forget the actual number) support progressive environmental policy--well, that is both true and not true. Here is an example (using example questions to make the point):
1) The environment is important and we need to act to preserve it (this will be very popular);
2) The environment is important and we need to tax rich people so that we can preserve it (not as popular but still popular);
3) The environment is important and we need to increase everyone's taxes so that we can preserve it (probably not very popular); and
4) The environment is important and we need to increase gasoline tax to $6 a gallon so that we can preserve it (not going to be popular at all).
Do you see what I did there? General ideas and aspirational goals are popular (they are also generally open to interpretation). Specific policies are usually unpopular--the more specific 9and higher obvious cost) the less popular.
Everybody wants to save the planet until they find out how much it will cost THEM.
I can kill your idea or policy or popularity in a poll by how I ask the question, when I ask the question (something as simple as time of day) and who I ask. It becomes a question of rigor in construction and performance.
Even as some right-wing media figures and politicians try to outdo each other over Big Bird's PSA, freelance writer Meg St-Esprit sent this tweet about her 10-year-old son, which received a lot of likes and retweets.
Children have more empathy, kindness, and community outlook than adults do.
@MegStEsprit
As my 10yo got his @pfizer vaccine tonight he was nervous but kept whispering his (high risk) best friend’s name over and over. And I have zero regrets that my kid was scared and yet did something out of love for another person anyways.
"Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:4, KJV.
Religious or not, I think all can take that point and look at this child and perhaps benefit from it, as I hope I will have the wisdom to do myself.
Seriously, these polls are just ridiculous. Disapproval for Kamala...what is she actually doing and what is a VP's actual duties? Do these voters want her sucking up to Joe like Mikey P did?
While I find the whole discussion about Big Bird amusing, I think it's an overstatement to say that "we" find ourselves embroiled in a conversation about it. "We" seems to include those who regularly participate in the Twittersphere (which, from research out of Pew nearly 3 years ago includes about 22% of adults in the U.S. - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/) and in the Crazysphere (OAN, et. al.).
I appreciate Kinzinger's point that opponents of Trumpist authoritarianism can ill afford to let standard issue policy differences torpedo a pro democracy coalition.
What he doesn't explain is how voting against a bill (BIF) whose passage was arguably critical to (large D) Democratic survival at a time when the Democratic Party is, for better or worse, the only alternative to authoritarianism, serves his overriding goal.
(Of course, The Squad doesn't address that issue either, presumably because they aren't interested in pro-democracy coalitions in the first place.)
How do Kinzinger (and Cheney, who also voted against the BIF) expect to thwart a future Trumpublican electoral blowout if they won't lift a finger in Congress to help Biden's legislative agenda? From the lecture circuit?
Maybe they're pinning everything on blockbuster January 6 committee revelations. Let's hope they know something the rest of us don't.
If Cheney voted for this bill, her chances for reelection would be zero. She alone is trying to lead the Republican Party away from the Trump personality cult. If she can beat a MAGA candidate in her primary, with her strong stance relative to January 6th, in beet red Wyoming, the Trump fever may well break.
Point taken. But she's been averaging around 20% in Congressional primary polls. That doesn't mean she couldn't win in a crowded open primary with Democrats and Independents pulling for her. Or even parlay that into retaining her seat.
The problem with "Trump fever" is that it's not just a personality cult. It's a revolt against the whole system of winners and losers that produced today's America, including both economic and cultural elites.
Can't anyone not take the bait of an imbecile thought from an imbecile politician; just ignore that caca.
I was reading a Korean news site yesterday (Squid Game sigh…) and I laughed out loud reading their “top articles” and #9 was “Presidential race starts in earnest soon.”
Polls suck. Polls said Trump was going to lose in 2016, right? I understand their usefulness, but also maybe the President should do his job for like, I dunno, more than a YEAR before we go and ask the stupid public about it. So much can change by the next election, yet it’s always going to be #1 news in America because here. Politics is entertainment.
“because here politics is entertainment.” Note to self: finish whole cup of coffee before pressing fingers to tiny buttons on screen.
If our politics is entertainment, it jumped the shark in 2016.
Stay on the Claremont story, Bulwark. This is some dangerous shit, attempting to mainstream extremism.
I live in Nebraska where 91 of 93 county governments passed some version of "gun sanctuary" resolutions. Some of these resolutions tiptoe up to the sort of nonsense about the authority of Sheriffs that Claremont is selling. This choice of the word "sanctuary" is telling. This is meant to assert that state and federal regulation of gun rights can be ignored by counties.
So Ted Cruz, a Fox News stalwart, is accusing Big Bird of being a vehicle for government propaganda, as though he has been asleep the last five years.
How do these folks think this works? A five year old checks her Twitter, sees what Big Bird has to say about his experience with the vaccine, then goes to mom and dad and says she's going out and getting the vaccine, whether they want her to or not? Is that how this works?
You're assuming Cruz is a reasonable human being. Assume instead that he's a cynical a-hole whose only concern is getting and keeping power and everything he does makes sense.
One of the most "sensible" folks out there, considering that he and his goals are exactly as you described. I mean this guy is dedicated to sensible. Why else would he have himself on video wrapping a strip of bacon around the business end of an AR-15 and then gleefully "cooking it" with firepower. ( Always wondered why his trigger finger didn't cramp up...could have used a bump stock I suppose. )
The fact that Cruz is originally from Canada is the best argument I can make for serious immigration reform in this country. ( Sorry, Canada. No offense. We have plenty of home-grown versions of such sensible and dedicated people to account for ourselves. )
I guess I should apologize for him too as the Latin American immigrant father of U.S. citizen children. I sincerely hope none of them turn out like him.
Not quite sure how to take this...not nearly as online as most, and the words on the screen don't always unfailingly convey the true meaning behind them, as I suspect some folks would say of some of the things I post. Seriousness sometimes comes off as sarcasm and vice versa, as happens occasionally in real life face to face conservations as well.
For example, when my boss at the part time job I started about 3 months ago ( a guy about 20+ years younger than me, with a sense of humor similar to my own ) recently asked at the end of my last day of the week if I'd be able to finish up the parts I was currently working on when I returned the following Tuesday ( so they could be shipped before the end of that day ), I felt comfortable enough to crack a little wise and reply "Sure. If I'm here on Tuesday", then proceeded to head for the exit.
A moment later he was at my shoulder as I walked down the aisle, asking rather seriously if there was a chance I wouldn't be in as scheduled.
It was a joke, I replied. Well, you're kinda' hard to read sometimes, he responded. Well, so are you, I told him. Which was true from my perspective.
We both got a good laugh out of it, since it wasn't the first time it had happened.
So for clarity's sake, you can put me on record that, having read some of your other posts, I can confidently say that we need a whole lot more folks like you around here, where ever they may come from.
Along with a whole lot less of the likes of Lyin', AR-Fryin' Ted.
Heh, yeah. I meant it in the spirit of you're not really blaming Canada for Flyin' Ted. I don't really think we should blame the fact his father was from Cuba for his ardent loserishness either.
Also, thank you for your kind words.
Cool. I forgot about the Cuba connection. And you're right.
Ardent loserishness. I like it.
I love language and the ways people use it so inventively sometimes. Losericious, loserism, loserific, loseritis....loserishness.
Not in Webster or Oxford, but all there in the Urban. Never would have thought to attach "ardent" to it. Props.
And you're welcome.
Don't you know, Charlie, that it's okay for the Squad to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill because they were making a statement, and if it came down to their votes making a difference, they surely would have voted for it, so we're told to assume....
I'll try to keep this short. It's fairly clear now that voters do not care about politicians doing anything. As you note, the stock market has never been higher, jobs are plentiful, wages are up, they just passed an infrastructure bill, and yet the American people are not happy. The reality is that people clearly don't know what they want, but they do know that they are never happy. Perhaps we should have figured this out by the fact that presidencies tend to change hands politically each time, because as Mayer said rather accurately, 'the american people have no political desire other than throw the bums out.' When things are good in America, the american people don't reward the party in power. When things are bad in America, they don't so much blame the people in power as tell themselves that they were right to begin with.
Second, on the 'normalizing Syria' bit. Look, there is no shortage of awful things to be said about Syria. you could apply nearly any evil adjective to describe their leader, and it would probably fit. But here's the thing: it doesn't matter if the US recognizes them or not. They're going to exist. Assad is going to be in power. And refusing to accept this is a bit like how the US didn't accept the CCP as the 'real' china and stubbornly acted like Taiwan was China, and not the billion people on the mainland. It revealed how impotent the US was, for not accepting reality.
Syria will be led by Assad, and the US won't do anything about it. It does the US no favors by pretending like this isn't the case. China is putting people in extermination camps, there's religious war going on in India, there's genocide in Myanmar; all of these places are in countries that the US recognizes. The same is true for the wars in the Balkans in the 90's. Terrible stuff happens all of the world by terrible people. But that doesn't mean that their governments and nations don't exist. We can say that's 'legitimizing' or 'normalizing' them, but the fact is, it doesn't matter if we accept them or not, they exist, and they'll do whatever they please. Not recognizing them just means they act with more impunity.
To use a somewhat messy metaphor, it's a bit like how after 2016 a whole host of liberals were like 'we can't normalize trumpism' and tried to pretend like he didn't exist or that the forces of illiberalism were rising. The same happened with a lot of center-right publications. The fact is, pretending like it doesn't exist isn't really an option. The problem is that by the time you're asking 'should we normalize this' it's already normalized. Once they're in power, congrats, they're already normalized. Refusing to grapple or engage with it only makes you look weaker, not them. They don't need your acceptance to do what they want, after all.
So is Syria awful? Yes. It's one of the worst regimes in a world of them. But pretending like they don't exist is a bit like trying to pretend that Franco wasn't in charge of Spain for all those years. It was pointless.
I'll try to keep this short too. Democrats are perennially bad at messaging. Do you think the vast majority of Americans follow the stock market? Do you think the vast majority of Americans have stock portfolios? Do you think the vast majority of Americans pay to subscribe to the NYT, Wapo, or the Bulwark +?
Democrats should stop over-explaining everything, come up with simple to-the-point messaging. That would go a long way towards getting people to understand what's going on and how it impacts their own lives.
Tried. And succeeded!