In Case You Missed It (v76)

Grab your cuppa and settle down to a review of last week's posts, in case you missed anything.

Sunday School brought conversations with a handful of Senators, including Ohio Republican Rob Portman, who talked about the American Rescue Plan (ARP) - the Biden COVID package - and about bipartisanship.

 Sen. Portman, who voted to pass the Trump tax cuts and repeal Obamacare via reconciliation, but says trying to do COVID relief that way "would poison the well of bipartisanship." 

He thinks what Biden should do is "...to start off with more bipartisan measures, so that we don’t poison the well, so that we can continue to work together. And in this case, it would be very easy to get Republican support for a COVID relief package."

He poo-pooed the idea that Republican voters are in favor of the bill -"if, you know, checks are coming out to people's homes, that's going to be popular, but that doesn't mean that this is the right bill." He gave a list of things in the bill he says are not related to COVID.

The bill passed yesterday, without a single Republican vote. 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was featured in the Extra Credit post; he talked with Chuck Todd on MTP. Among other things, 

he sees there being an active engagement between our two countries - and he's happy to see us re-engaging.

I think certainly there were things that were more challenging under the previous administration in terms of moving the dial in the right direction on the international stage. But, at the same time, you know, we all have democracies that go in different directions from time to time. And the, the sweep of the work that we need to do together as, as allied nations in the G7 and elsewhere, continues to be really important.

I added a Sidebar to the previous week's Poll Watch and TGIF entries, which talked about our collective dissatisfaction with the two political parties and about the potential for a major Trump announcement at CPAC a week ago. And, there was the CPAC straw poll. Trump did well, naturally - it's his cult after all - and so did Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor. So, good news for them, right? Well, maybe not so fast.

One thing to keep in mind? The CPAC straw poll isn't very reliable. This Vox article includes a tweet from Jake Sherman at Punchbowl News. Take a look.

I was Wondering on Wednesday about a few things, including the fact that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped an inadvertent truth bomb on her argument for a federal $15 minimum wage. Complaining about the ARP giving only $1400 direct payments to everyone, where Trump gave $2000, here's what she said (emphasis added today)

I don't understand the political or economic wisdom in allowing Trump to give more people relief checks than a Democratic administration. People went far too long without relief last year - if anything, we should be more generous, not more stingy. It's also an insensitive compromise for the roughly 80% of Americans that live in urban areas, which are known for higher costs of living.

Here's the thing I do wonder about, now that AOC is on record with concerns about being sensitive to people in high cost of living areas. How can she be such a proponent of a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour? If you want to talk about being "insensitive," imagine convincing yourself and countless millions of others that it's acceptable to have the same minimum wage in Mississippi, where the 2021 cost of living is 86.1; Arizona, where it's 97; and in New York, where it's 139.1?

She proved the point I've been making about that for a few years now. And, as you probably know, the minimum wage hike was removed from the bill before it was voted on, and an amendment to put it back in was defeated, with eight Dems voting with all of the Rs to keep it out. 

I dropped a Quick Take on the fine art of negotiation that's practiced by some. And by some, I mean by macaques, when the tourists they steal from want to get their stuff back. 

I would never compare our elected officials to monkeys - someone got in trouble for doing that recently, I think. And I certainly wouldn't compare macaques to people - I'm sure someone would yell at me for that.

I'm just saying, if monkeys can learn to negotiate with people, can't we get our elected representatives to negotiate with each other? Is that too much to ask?

Funny, on the ARP, the hardest negotiation was the Dems talking to one of their own, WV Sen. Joe Manchin, who wanted to drop extended unemployment in the middle of the summer, when the House and Senate would be adjourned, and, for all we know, some of them (QanonRon Johnson, for example) might be in Moscow or something, and unavailable to fix it.

Lots of the progressives have been calling for the Senate Dems to ditch the filibuster. That's not new, I noted, by sharing a 2019 Knock Knock post on that very subject. I was surprising to me that I was on the same side of an issue as my other senator, Kirsten Gillibrand.

I don't always agree with my senator, but on this issue, I surely do. And if they don't want to listen to her any more than I normally do, maybe they'll listen to Delaware's Senator Chris Coons.

It's a terrible idea. Democrats would reap the whirlwind almost immediately. It is the last bulwark of the rights of the minority in the Senate. If a simple majority could carry the day, we'd have a right-to-work law signed into law by president Trump  - I could give you a list of 20 things that president Trump would have signed into law in his first few weeks that would either repeal anything positive thing that President Obama did or anything that a progressive Democrat would hope to do in the future.

The progressives may need to be reminded that they are not the majority of Dems,  that they've got to work extra hard to get things accomplished - and that they'll have to give a little. It will be interesting to see what they do with the ARP this week, when they have to vote on the Senate version before the bill can make it to Biden's desk. 

For your TGIF, I put my foot down and assigned the good week/bad week lists. The good were fun, the bad were to be expected - and I added a mixed week list just for all of us who vote. 

Voters had a decidedly mixed week, depending on what you read and, heaven forbid, on your own opinions, should you have them - please say you have opinions on this! Take a look:

Former lynching target Mike Pence had an op-ed about election integrity, which attacks HR1, the House voting rights act. Mostly, he says, it's full of changes making it harder for all kinds of people - the living, breathing kind I'm fond of, and the other kind, too - to engage in political speech. Not only that, but

Every single proposed change in HR 1 serves one goal, and one goal only: to give leftists a permanent, unfair, and unconstitutional advantage in our political system.

And that's only part of it - it actually gets both better, and worse. 

Finally, I ended the week with an Irony Board entry, after I stopped laughing.  It seems that some old guy named Trump has ordered his most fervent fundraisers to stand by and stand back, or something like that. According to an unnamed advisor to the former president, cease-and-desist orders have been sent to the RNC, NRCC, and NRSC.

...Trump remains committed to the Republican Party and electing America First conservatives, but that doesn't give anyone - friend or foe - permission to use his likeness without explicit approval.

That's so rich, coming from Trump - complaining about someone using him without permission. After all, Trump and his campaign have not been at all shy in using other people's intellectual property without permission, suggesting that they are folks who support him and his message. 

There's a list for you, if you want to know all of the people he's co-opted without permission. 

There you have it -- last week, in a nutshell. See you later for Sunday School.