Octopus Overlords

El Guapo wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:36 pm

Holman wrote: ↑Wed Dec 23, 2020 10:07 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 10:48 pm On a tangent, I was reading about the curse of Tippecanoe (apocryphal) that causes presidents elected in years ending in 0 to die in office. The pattern held from 1840 to 1960, only to be broken in 1980 and 2000. I hope Biden doesn't reestablish it.

It also includes all the presidents who have been assassinated.

So it consistently happened except for the years where it didn't happen?

Also I don't think that 1940 should count. FDR died in 1945, after being reelected in 1944.

GungHo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:17 am Ok...assuming congress and the WH are both democratic, which is seemingly hopeful at this hour, what's the 'Biden Plan'? <orchestral crescendo>

I mean I know what we heard in the campaign but that's campaign talk and not reality in DC. Are we looking at a national mask mandate? A quick strike tax increase on the rich? Immediate $2k stimulus checks?
I realize things can still change and Bob knows we're going to have challenges/recounts in these races so they aren't officially over for awhile yet. Just trying to get a sense of what to expect if the dream has indeed come true

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 7:40 am

GungHo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:17 am Ok...assuming congress and the WH are both democratic, which is seemingly hopeful at this hour, what's the 'Biden Plan'? <orchestral crescendo>

I mean I know what we heard in the campaign but that's campaign talk and not reality in DC. Are we looking at a national mask mandate? A quick strike tax increase on the rich? Immediate $2k stimulus checks?
I realize things can still change and Bob knows we're going to have challenges/recounts in these races so they aren't officially over for awhile yet. Just trying to get a sense of what to expect if the dream has indeed come true

Quick list: Mask mandate as law? Nah, though I would expect Biden to urge it from the bully pulpit. A tax increase is unlikely considering the recession. Biden has said he'd back a $2000 check. However, don't get too euphoric here. Unless we have filibuster reform we'll soon see that having the majority is important but might not be enough. Unfortunately Biden and the new most powerful Senator in America Joe Manchin don't support filibuster reform so we may still find America ungovernable with Democratic control of both Chambers and the White House.

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 9:10 am Maybe but 2 years might be all we have to make reforms and they might need to be sweeping. The next few months will give us hints.

Kraken wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:55 am

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 9:10 am Maybe but 2 years might be all we have to make reforms and they might need to be sweeping. The next few months will give us hints.

Very likely true. Biden doesn't really do "bold," and quietly restoring competence will be satisfying in itself. But one hopes he'll push at least one signature achievement while he has the chance -- probably something cautious like strengthening Obamacare, and possibly a modest tax hike. Maybe a meaningful climate initiative.

I hope Joe surprises me with something more ambitious.

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 7:40 am

GungHo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:17 am Ok...assuming congress and the WH are both democratic, which is seemingly hopeful at this hour, what's the 'Biden Plan'? <orchestral crescendo>

I mean I know what we heard in the campaign but that's campaign talk and not reality in DC. Are we looking at a national mask mandate? A quick strike tax increase on the rich? Immediate $2k stimulus checks?
I realize things can still change and Bob knows we're going to have challenges/recounts in these races so they aren't officially over for awhile yet. Just trying to get a sense of what to expect if the dream has indeed come true

Quick list: Mask mandate as law? Nah, though I would expect Biden to urge it from the bully pulpit. A tax increase is unlikely considering the recession. Biden has said he'd back a $2000 check. However, don't get too euphoric here. Unless we have filibuster reform we'll soon see that having the majority is important but might not be enough. Unfortunately Biden and the new most powerful Senator in America Joe Manchin don't support filibuster reform so we may still find America ungovernable with Democratic control of both Chambers and the White House.

Alefroth wrote: ↑Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:09 am

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 7:40 am

GungHo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:17 am Ok...assuming congress and the WH are both democratic, which is seemingly hopeful at this hour, what's the 'Biden Plan'? <orchestral crescendo>

I mean I know what we heard in the campaign but that's campaign talk and not reality in DC. Are we looking at a national mask mandate? A quick strike tax increase on the rich? Immediate $2k stimulus checks?
I realize things can still change and Bob knows we're going to have challenges/recounts in these races so they aren't officially over for awhile yet. Just trying to get a sense of what to expect if the dream has indeed come true

Quick list: Mask mandate as law? Nah, though I would expect Biden to urge it from the bully pulpit. A tax increase is unlikely considering the recession. Biden has said he'd back a $2000 check. However, don't get too euphoric here. Unless we have filibuster reform we'll soon see that having the majority is important but might not be enough. Unfortunately Biden and the new most powerful Senator in America Joe Manchin don't support filibuster reform so we may still find America ungovernable with Democratic control of both Chambers and the White House.

Couldn't they pass a stimulus check through reconciliation?

Sending $2,000 stimulus checks to most U.S. taxpayers is at the top of the list for New York Sen. Chuck Schumer now that Democrats are set to regain control of the Senate.

Schumer, who’s in line to take over as Senate majority leader, revealed his stimulus check priority while talking to reporters on Capitol Hill after both Democratic challengers in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections were declared victorious over the Republican incumbents.

Defiant wrote: ↑Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:18 am Schumer was saying that there would be a new stimulus check (for $2000) coming soon.

Also, IIUC, it's one reconciliation per fiscal year, and this years hasn't been used yet, so that would give them two for this calendar year.

Collectors will be able to buy official Joe Biden presidential inaugural medals in bronze and .999 fine silver versions before Biden takes the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States Jan. 20.

The President Obama 2013 medal was priced at $1,250.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:31 pm

The President Obama 2013 medal was priced at $1,250.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:39 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:31 pm

The President Obama 2013 medal was priced at $1,250.

So you're saying this is a deal!

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 6:00 pm You could buy two rolls of American Eagles for the same price. These presidential coins have zero collectible value, you're just overpaying $1,970 for an ounce of silver.

Defiant wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:28 pm If you're wondering what to spend your theoretical future stimulus check on, you now have the opportunity to buy the Joe Biden inaugural medal for the low, low price of $1200?

Collectors will be able to buy official Joe Biden presidential inaugural medals in bronze and .999 fine silver versions before Biden takes the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States Jan. 20.

https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins ... ng-offered

Taylor is a staunch Trump supporter and recently travelled to Washington DC for a post-election pro-Trump rally. A photographer by trade, she was upset by the rioting but believes unsubstantiated claims that left-wing radicals were behind the violence.

It was just heart-breaking to watch what was going on and the behaviour of protesters is just not like the Trump people I've been around. If it did come from any conservatives, then I condemn it. There's no excuse for violence.

It doesn't change my support for Trump. The people that love Trump, that's not going to change no matter if he gets a second term or not. It just means we're going to hold out for 2024 and hope either he runs again or his kids do.

Our country is going to go downhill over the next four years if Biden does take office. I'm actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.

We're going to catapult towards socialism and communism. I'm worried for the country's future, but regardless of who takes office, we have a lot of healing to do. I hope we can all find our common humanity and embrace each other when this is all over, which is hopefully soon.

malchior wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 9:03 am So I'm beginning to lose hope that Biden is going to be effective beyond tactical level things. Just this morning reports are that he doesn't support impeachment and was partially behind the slow roll -- I'll assume they are hoping for a resignation that isn't coming. He is focused on pandemic. Obviously very important in the fact that it is the overwhelming death vector.

Unagi wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 10:17 am

malchior wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 9:03 am So I'm beginning to lose hope that Biden is going to be effective beyond tactical level things. Just this morning reports are that he doesn't support impeachment and was partially behind the slow roll -- I'll assume they are hoping for a resignation that isn't coming. He is focused on pandemic. Obviously very important in the fact that it is the overwhelming death vector.

Honestly. This is pretty much how I think he should handle it.

As long as others are leading the charge, and it sounds like there will be, he can stay one layer above it.

I’m pretty sure I heard that he was ok with how ever the congress decided to deal with Trump.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 6:09 pm Wait, 1,200 - 30 = 1,970?

malchior wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 9:03 am So I'm beginning to lose hope that Biden is going to be effective beyond tactical level things. Just this morning reports are that he doesn't support impeachment and was partially behind the slow roll -- I'll assume they are hoping for a resignation that isn't coming. He is focused on pandemic. Obviously very important in the fact that it is the overwhelming death vector.

He seems to want to address the insurrection but prematurely move past the major crisis of legitimacy brewing here. We saw ex-military, cops, business executives, small business owners, and regular folks invade the Capitol. Despite an *ACTUAL INSURRECTION* the reports that he thinks we just need to move on are baffling. He is going to quickly find out *THEY* have a different plan for our country. Heck Trump's attempts to get back on Twitter were to inspire his base and make a connection there. I don't think these people are just going to magically disappear.

What the base are saying to the press despite the Capitol attack indicates as such. The person in the quote below was *THERE*. Maybe not inside the Capitol but at the rally. She saw what happened with her own eyes and still thinks Trump is the solution and that Biden will bring communism to the United States. Biden can't coddle this away.

Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.

In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.

This absence haunted him. On his return to Washington, Biden “kept seeing the little … house, undermined by the powerful indifference of nature and the inevitability of time, no longer able to hold its ground; I could almost hear the sharp crack as its moorings failed, could envisage the tide as it washed in and out, pulling at it relentlessly and remorselessly until it was adrift on the water, then swallowed up by the sea.”

If Biden were to write this now, it would read as a heavy-handed political metaphor. He is about to fulfil an ambition that has driven him for half a century by assuming the presidency of the United States.

But he arrives to find that great office a ruin, with police tape all around it. Donald Trump’s demented last days have washed away the illusion of the US as a stable, settled democracy. On 6 January, a date that will live long in American infamy, all the entitled rage of the white nativism that Trump has channelled finally burst through the seawalls that protected the illusion of a healthy, functioning republic. The polity escaped complete inundation, but the breach is gaping.

The opening salvo would herald a 10-day blitz of executive actions as Biden seeks to act swiftly to redirect the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency without waiting for Congress.

On Wednesday, following his inauguration, Biden will end Trump’s restriction on immigration to the U.S. from some Muslim-majority countries, move to rejoin the Paris climate accord and mandate mask-wearing on federal property and during interstate travel. Those are among roughly a dozen actions Biden will take on his first day in the White House, his incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, said in a memo to senior staff.

Other actions include extending the pause on student loan payments and actions meant to prevent evictions and foreclosures for those struggling during the pandemic.

On Thursday, the new president’s second day in office, Biden would sign orders related to the COVID-19 outbreak aimed at reopening schools and businesses and expanding virus testing, Klain said. The following day, Friday, will see action on providing economic relief to those suffering the economic costs of the pandemic.

In the following week, Klain said, Biden would take additional actions relating to criminal justice reform, climate change and immigration — including a directive to speed the reuniting of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under Trump’s policies.

Make America California Again? That's Biden's plan.

Senate Democrats announce the first bill of the new Congress will be the For the People Act.

The legislation includes steps to make it easier to vote, campaign finance provisions to increase disclosure of donations, and ethics requirements for Congress and the executive branch.

malchior wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 2:56 pm I expect this will be nearly the same bill of the same name that was passed in 2019 and died without a vote in McConnell's Senate. IIRC it is a pretty big lift for the States. We should expect resistance from some of them and the GOP. Too early to predict how this will go but this could easily see a filibuster.

El Guapo wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 3:11 pm

malchior wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 2:56 pm I expect this will be nearly the same bill of the same name that was passed in 2019 and died without a vote in McConnell's Senate. IIRC it is a pretty big lift for the States. We should expect resistance from some of them and the GOP. Too early to predict how this will go but this could easily see a filibuster.

Democrats need to fight hard for these kinds of political reforms, though, and should be willing to abolish the filibuster to get stuff like this done. If the Democrats just accept a system tilted towards Republicans, sooner or later the GOP will succeed at consolidating a one party authoritarian state.