https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-...te-progressives-11632431403?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 Biden’s Reconciliation Mess Democrats’ disarray in Congress is a sign nobody is in charge at the White House. By Kimberley A. Strassel Sept. 23, 2021 6:13 pm ET Papa Joe Biden was belatedly dragged from his recliner this week to settle escalating hostilities between warring Democratic siblings over a multitrillion-dollar agenda. No surprise that his two days of meetings accomplished nothing. Mr. Biden campaigned as the ultimate grown-up and leader, and his administration kept up that facade for months. But the Afghanistan debacle was a reminder that Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Mr. Biden as having botched nearly every foreign-policy issue for 40 years. Today’s party fight over its $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is likewise a reminder that a man who spent a Senate career drifting with the Democratic tides is ill-equipped to step up with a vision that will unite battling factions. Not that the squabblers couldn’t benefit from some time-outs. Speaker Nancy Pelosi in late August dragooned her centrists into voting to begin a reconciliation bill, in return for her promise they’d get a vote on their bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill no later than Sept. 27. Democratic leaders figured a month was long enough to bully members into submission on the reconciliation bill’s substance and $3.5 trillion price tag, and to tie the two votes together. But fights broke out over Medicare, drug pricing, climate provisions, and means testing. House committee chairmen rolled over objections and rushed out bills, only to confront a stalled Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have refused to be rolled or rushed on the package, and the Monday deadline looms. Centrists say: Give us the infrastructure vote or reconciliation is toast. Progressives say: Give us all $3.5 trillion of our reconciliation dollars, or infrastructure is history. Meanwhile, the accusations and name-calling have burst into the open, exposing deep divides. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is tweeting and retweeting accusations that her party’s centrists are owned by “Pharma” and the oil industry. Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, blasted House Democrats who pushed back on drug price controls for daring to “step out of line at this juncture” and called for primary challenges. Oregon progressive Rep. Pete De Fazio griped that the infrastructure bill was “crap” written by “12 rump senators” (to include Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema) who are “all pro-fossil-fuel” and “such jerks” to boot. Notice the “such.” It was left to John Podesta, who served as President Clinton’s White House chief of staff, to this week send an unsolicited memo to every Democratic office, warning that the party is at risk of implosion. He advised centrists to embrace the reconciliation process. More notable, he bluntly counseled progressives to climb down from their $3.5 trillion demand, pointing out the obvious—that they don’t have the majorities or the mandate to pass such an agenda. The question is why the man who matters—the president—wasn’t making that point from the start. Mr. Biden ran as a centrist, an alternative to the wild Sanders agenda. His campaign—to the extent he had one—centered on controlling Covid and restoring political norms. Even that agenda was a tough sell. He won a narrow victory; House Democrats lost seats; Chuck Schumer ended up majority leader in a 50-50 Senate. All this counseled a modest approach—assuming Mr. Biden had an approach. His career has consisted of latching on to whatever is the latest Democratic fad, with no real defining ideology of his own. Upon winning his primary battle, he promptly invited the vanquished Mr. Sanders to write his policies. He allowed his ego to be stroked by aides and historians who assured him his presidency could be “historic.” The result has been a mammoth Bernie agenda strapped to a limited White House mandate, and a president who is along for the ride. The Biden White House may yet clean up this mess, but the bigger point is that a Biden in charge wouldn’t be here in the first place. Rather than invite Mr. Manchin to the Oval Office last week to cajole him (unsuccessfully) to support $3.5 trillion, he’d have sat down with the West Virginian months ago to understand his bottom lines. Ditto Ms. Sinema and House centrists. Rather than letting progressives bid up expectations for an unprecedented and wildly uncertain reconciliation strategy, the president would have explained political reality to his party. He’d have insisted it give him a win by unifying around an enhanced infrastructure bill, one that strategically picked off GOP support. A Biden in charge would at this moment be crowing that he’d passed a Covid relief bill, and finally ushered a national infrastructure reboot over the congressional finish line. An argument can be made that the best thing that might happen to Mr. Biden now would be the collapse of reconciliation. The press would label it a defeat, and progressives would howl. But if a breakdown took the monstrosity off the table, it would provide the president an opportunity to reset—to refocus on a bipartisan bill and to recast himself as reasonable and in charge. He might even save his party from a thumping next fall. All it would take is for Mr. Biden to act, for once, like the man he sold himself as in the election. Write to kim@wsj.com.
3 1/2 million seconds = 34 and 1/2 days. 3 1/2 trillion seconds = 111 THOUSAND YEARS. Just so we're all clear on the difference between these 2 numbers.
Kimberley Strassel In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Strassel suggested teachers could be equipped with stun grenades to protect their students.[9] By October 2019, President Donald Trump had tweeted about Strassel or retweeted her commentary more than 20 times, including calling for a Pulitzer Prize for her.[10] Shortly before the November 2020 election, Strassel promoted claims about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal.[11][12] Strassel's claims were contradicted by the newspaper's own reporting arm hours later.[12][13][14][15] After Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Strassel claimed that the election contained voting irregularities.[16] On November 2020, Strassel made false claims about the election, incorrectly claiming that Wisconsin’s turnout numbers for the election was "not feasible".[17][18]
She is mostly right, but I am sick of people who aren't from border states, or haven't been to the border, telling us how to handle it. They live away from the major effects and all have an opinion down to "you can't ride horses".
i want a democrat that actually wipe student debt like he/she claim. still holding out on the potential 50k wipe, but biden doesn't seem the one to do it.
Biden Can't Fix High Beef Prices With $500 Million But spending more would be a bigger mistake. Sometimes, there simply isn't a government solution to a problem. https://reason.com/2021/09/24/biden-cant-fix-high-beef-prices-with-500-million/ excerpt The Biden administration, perhaps worried about the political toll that rising food prices could extract in next year's midterms, announced plans earlier this month to offer up to $500 million in loan guarantees to beef producers. That's on top of $500 million approved as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was supposed to "expand processing capacity and increase competition in meat and poultry" industries, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. *** Taken together, the White House's approach to high meat prices can be summarized as an argument for greater government subsidies based on the idea that stimulating more competition in the meat-packing industry will expand supply and reduce bottlenecks. But, as David Frum details in The Atlantic today, there are some good reasons to be skeptical of this argument. For starters, it takes about $200 million (and several months, if not longer) to build a single new meat-processing plant. That means the Biden administration's new loan programs will not purchase much additional capacity, and whatever gains are made will not happen immediately. Even if the plan is successful, smaller producers will likely need ongoing support beyond the initial loans—if there was a market for more, smaller meat processors, the private sector would be investing in them already. "There's a real risk," writes Frum, "that the initial commitment of $500 million in aid and loan guarantees to small packers will expand into continuing intervention in the marketplace to keep smaller competitors in business in the face of the higher efficiency and lower prices of the big packers." Of course, because this is Frum, he handles the shortcomings of President Joe Biden's plan with kid gloves, even while admitting that White House officials had no answers for his pretty basic questions about how all this will actually, you know, work. Still, he writes, "the architects of the Biden plan are uneasily aware that it rests on a lot of hopes, guesses, and optimistic assumptions." Let's just call this what it is: a good way to waste $500 million without making any impact on the price of beef. *** It's not impossible to imagine a more expensive government response to rising beef prices, of course. The Biden administration could ask Congress to approve $20 billion to subsidize farmers who raise cows, build more meat-processing plants, and send every American family a weekly coupon to reduce the cost of steaks and burgers at the local supermarket. (At the very least, this would allow those of us in the news business to write fun headlines about how the beef czar was grilled during a congressional hearing.) That would be a response that might move the needle, though it would be awful on so, so many levels. The never-ending interventions that Frum describes would be only a part of it. It probably wouldn't take long for the beef industry to become a sacred cow for Congress in the same way that corn-growers already are. And even if the government did all that, it still wouldn't do anything to address the actual root causes of the current beef price problem: a massive drought in the Western U.S. that has caused beef herds to shrink and the average cow to be 15 pounds less meaty when it is slaughtered. It would not fix the ongoing pandemic-related staffing issues at meat-packing plants, which are operating less efficiently even when fully staffed because they have to take necessary precautions to limit outbreaks that could cause even bigger disruptions. The lesson here is one about the inability of the government to direct the economy on a large scale. Using the Defense Production Act isn't the best way to get more rapid COVID tests into American homes, sweeping aside FDA red tape is. The test makers will do the rest. Offering $500 million in loan guarantees to anyone who wants to build a new meat-processing plant isn't going to address the supply chain problems at the existing plants or end the Western drought. more at the link
My favorite part of the Biden presidency is how much he gets under the "independent" sports fan skin. I'll vote for Joe Biden because he doesn't kowtow to the deplorables. If you don't believe in liberal democracy, you can get out!
