The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Kaelik]

The evil terrorist we drone bombed and then claimed the "secondary explosion" from their bomb was what killed all the collateral was CAUGHT ON CAMERA loading the car on a security camera earlier that day and investigation found the tape!

It was loaded with water and the "secondary explosion" was in fact just the regular explosion from a drone and the US was just lying.

Fun times!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/worl ... -isis.html

[Kaelik]

Putting more oil company lobbyists in place to regulate energy. The Biden* way.

Neil Chatterjee, a Republican commissioner who left FERC when his term expired earlier this summer, welcomed Biden's move in a tweet, calling Phillips a "friend," saying that "it would be an honor to have him succeed me," and wishing him luck with the Senate confirmation process.

LOLOLOLOL Kill me.


*Literally every fucking democrat has done this since Clinton and also all the republicans, but good thing that there is literally no difference between Biden and Sanders because a shit org like the Sierra Club gave Biden a good rating.

[Kaelik]

Id say kill me, but it seems like Biden is very much planning to.

https://www.boem.gov/sites/default/file ... LS-257.pdf

[Kaelik]

Hey also, the US said "actually we drone striked the wrong car" which is probably another lie. While this lie would obviously mean no US official should ever drone strike anyone ever again and that anyone who ever ordered a drone strike should be tried for murder, this is actually them trying to save face.

Because they said they tracked the car for eight hours before drone striking it. So either they spent 8 hours watching someone and then just guessed that they were a terrorist despite actually being an aid worker, or there was totally a REAL actual terrorist they were tracking for eight hours who had a car filled with explosives, and it just happened to drive near this one for a minute, and they switched up, but there was an actual terrorist that really needed to be murdered from the sky eight hours after they started tracking them or else a big bomb would go off!

And then uh... despite blowing up the wrong person, and therefore not blowing up the right person, no bomb went off..... so I guess they actually didn't need to launch a missile.

But they want to lie and say there was a real terrorist, so that no one asks if maybe every time they launched a missile it was at someone who they just guessed was a terrorist based on nothing. I mean, you might consider if two cars drove near each other at any point in 8 hours and they are just now blowing up the wrong person. But that's the competent version where there was actually any terrorist at all instead of just victims of the US murder machine.

MOD EDIT: Removed call for execution; too close to wishing death on someone.

[Kaelik]

Worth remarking that in addition to putting literally every lobbyist he can find in charge of regulating the field they lobbied on behalf of, Biden has nominated for the US attorney slot a state judge who ran an illegal debtor prison, used the money from the debtor prison to pay for the court system, and even embezzled from the proceeds to pay for personal expenses. It was so bad that the District Attorney (no friend to poor debtors) asked the State's AG to prosecute the judges for this absolutely horrible shit.

But that's who Joe Biden thinks should be the US attorney. From enjoined by the federal district court to stop running a for profit debtors prison out of your state judge's chambers to representing the state in front of the court that enjoined you.

There's even a SC case where Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan all sign a separate concurrence on a shadow docket remand condemning this person for allowing race based striking of black jurors, but we have to get her out there so she can..... do her own race based striking of jurors in federal court apparently.

https://www.civilrightscorps.org/work/c ... ors-prison

https://theappeal.org/landrum-new-orleans-da/

[Kaelik]

Fun Fact: The Biden admin is trying to get PR by raising the refugee cap from 65k to 125k next year.....

But this year when the cap was 65k they only admitted 7k (fiscal year ends like... in a couple weeks?)

So yeah, fun times. Democratic admins hate refugees so fucking much just like GOP ones.

[Kaelik]

Biden admin going to detain all the Haitians fleeing the conditions imposed on them by a successive string of US "presidents" imposed on them in fake elections in Guantanamo, because apparently the imperialism wasn't on the nose enough.

[Kaelik]

Still mass deporting without a hearing all non white refugees because "they might introduce COVID to the currently COVID free United States" every day.

[Harshax]

Biden admin going to detain all the Haitians fleeing the conditions imposed on them by a successive string of US "presidents" imposed on them in fake elections in Guantanamo, because apparently the imperialism wasn't on the nose enough.

I'm kind of lost on the whole, "Haitians being captured by cowboys after crossing an actual body of water news item." I've seen some cowboy-wrangling porn images in mainstream news, but haven't been able to track down the scenario due to personal/family biz. What's the fucking deal here? The Washington Post and New York Times are guilty of publishing what looks like UberEats* drivers being lassoed by mounted white-people and the saner part of my subconscious recently let one of those two subscriptions expire.

Is this a new isolationism or just the government hydra not knowing what the ninth head is doing while the third head is trying to get something internally relevant done?

* - I've seen photos of Haitian men with plastic-bag-wrapped belongings in both hands that are equivalently sized to food delivery orders. I'm being overly sensitive: to my own joke to the poverty of these refugees and to the framing of these stories.

[Harshax]

I know there was a coup that implicates a Haitian living in Florida, American "translators" and some South American Military "pros," but I've missed the diaspora of post-coup news.

[Kaelik]

Biden admin going to detain all the Haitians fleeing the conditions imposed on them by a successive string of US "presidents" imposed on them in fake elections in Guantanamo, because apparently the imperialism wasn't on the nose enough.

I'm kind of lost on the whole, "Haitians being captured by cowboys after crossing an actual body of water news item." I've seen some cowboy-wrangling porn images in mainstream news, but haven't been able to track down the scenario due to personal/family biz. What's the fucking deal here? The Washington Post and New York Times are guilty of publishing what looks like UberEats* drivers being lassoed by mounted white-people and the saner part of my subconscious recently let one of those two subscriptions expire.

Is this a new isolationism or just the government hydra not knowing what the ninth head is doing while the third head is trying to get something internally relevant done?

* - I've seen photos of Haitian men with plastic-bag-wrapped belongings in both hands that are equivalently sized to food delivery orders. I'm being overly sensitive: to my own joke to the poverty of these refugees and to the framing of these stories.

1) About 15,000 mostly Haitian immigrants came north and crossed into the US recently to claim asylum, these are probably mostly not actually refugees from the recent coup, although the recent earthquake and coup probably added some to the number. Most of them are probably from the 2010 Earthquake that we did basically nothing to help the country recover from. (Almost like building more aircraft carriers is not a useful way to do relief work!)

2) They came from crossing the US/Mexico border and set up camp under a bridge that exists to facilitate transit along the border. They did this because under US law, the way you request asylum in the US is that you first cross into the US, and then request asylum. They are clearly not trying to sneak across the border and blend in, they are literally camped within sight of the border fence, looking to make asylum applications.

3) The US Customs and Border Patrol responded by gathering together a posse and riding in to whip them until the camp was broken up and rounding up as many as they could for deportation. Some of this is certainly just that you don't join CBP unless you are evil, but also Biden appointed a horrible evil murderous piece of shit who loves deportations to head DHS and has decided to keep most of Trump's political appointees, because it turns out Democrats love being evil to immigrants.

4) The CBP has deported without a hearing thousands and will continue to deport more. This is a violation of international law and US law. International law requires accepting refugees, the way the US usually pretends to be in compliance is that they have a hearing, and at the hearing they say "you are not a refugee, you are lying about the danger where you came from and/or we don't care about you starving to death that doesn't count as a refugee, it's only a refugee if the communists are going to kill you." This is bullshit, but acts as cover. However, even under US law, people who cross into the US to make an asylum claim must be given an actual hearing to present their claim and be judged a refugee or not. So the US is violating both it's own law and international law by deporting people without a hearing.

5) On a purely practical level, Haiti has a lot of violence and so fucking much poverty, and it's a country constantly beset by earthquakes. The US has caused most if not all of the poverty, as we were responsible for extorting the country to extract "reparations" for France for the crime of freeing slaves. We invaded Haiti and occupied it for decades to finish this extraction. The "reparations" were finished being paid in 1947. So the US stopped literally taking money from Haiti and giving it to France in 1947 to pay France for the loss of their slaves. There is not moral grounds for the US to turn away a single Haitian refugee.

We also have chosen most of their presidents. In addition to the president who suspended the legislature to rule by decree who we also supported before his assassination, in 2010 we sent Hillary Clinton there to tell them in no uncertain terms that the Left candidate who got the second most votes was not allowed to be in the runoff and it was going to be right wing vs less right wing, and they were going to find the ballots to do it or we were going to make sure that they never got a cent of foreign aid for their, you may recall, supremely fucked up Earthquake. Before that we kidnapped a president and forced him to resign while keeping him detained under armed guard to bring in the new president who withdrew the obviously absurd demand that France should pay Haiti back because of course France did nothing wrong!

6) The reason the US government is deporting Haitians as fast as they can get flights is because the US government is extremely racist and hates black people and poor blacks especially. This is being done with Joe Biden's orders, not because the CBP is just full of nazis (although, again it is). But the pretend cover reason is "Title 42" This is a reference to the 1944 Public Health Services Law that allows the state to "prevent the introduction of individuals during certain public health emergencies" IE, to prevent the spread of disease. Invoking this law to justify deporting asylum seekers without a hearing to prevent the introduction of COVID is obviously bad faith bullshit. We have COVID! It's already here and they aren't going to spread it in any significant extent. Also, we haven't even been testing them as we load them tightly onto plains to fly them to Haiti, because we don't even care if we cause mass infections in our victims.

The original invocation of Title 42 for this purpose was done by Trump which he did... well obviously because he's a racist piece of shit and he jumped on it as soon as Stephen Miller (yes specifically him, we know this from reporting) told him about it. Kamala Harris called this unconstitutional at the time, but in traditional Harris fashion, she changed her mind as soon as it was her turn to tell migrants not to come.

Obviously nothing about Title 42 permits the US to break international law and deport asylum seekers without the extremely limited process we normally allow. But the Biden admin is nothing if not committed to maintaining literally identical policies to the Trump admin when it comes to everything outside our borders or involving them*.

*Realistically I don't think Trump would have actually pulled out of Afghanistan, but he did negotiate a withdrawal, and we can't truly be sure that he wouldn't have carried it out if reelected, though I'm pretty sure some generals would have told him he will look week, and then he would have ordered a surge.

EDIT: Fair warning, I have mostly used the term refugee, because that's the term for them under international law and it's the not stupid one and accurately conveys their status as a person who needs assistance. Under US law we create an arbitrary distinction between refugee's who request assistance from outside the US and are accepted, and aslyees which are people who enter the US and then request asylum. Under international law both these groups are refugees.

[Kaelik]

I think it's fair to describe 2020 as the Least Important Presidential Election of our lives.

[PseudoStupidity]

I do love seeing our little social spending bill being cut a ton for seemingly no reason, I already saw the 2 free years of community college portion was on the chopping block. What a disappointing country.

[Kaelik]

The final straw breaking for me is that apparently the reason why the Iran Deal is not going to actually be implemented is because Iran demanded the ABSURD condition that Joe Biden should, as part of the agreement, guarantee that the america wouldn't break the deal again while HE WAS PRESIDENT. But the Biden admin refused to agree to that.

Not even binding on the next president! Just literally, that Joe Biden would not drop out of the agreement as soon as it was entered and resanction Iran as soon as they cut back their nuclear power enrichment. So now Iran won't be reentering the deal that would apparently be non binding on JOE BIDEN, can't imagine why they would think he would break the deal that he refuses to agree to not break.

So far the only for sure difference between a Trump and a Biden presidency is uh........ Well nothing actually! But PROBABLY Trump would not have actually carried through with getting out of Afghanistan, but maybe he would have! He's the one who agreed to it initially and we still left before Biden wanted to because the Taliban won, so maybe Trump would also just declare that the Taliban winning was just like he planned when he decided to withdraw.

[MGuy]

I feel like this is exactly what was voted for. Next to nothing happening under Biden. This is pretty close to the same thing that I was bewildered by when Obama came in with control of the House and Senate. The confirmation point for me was still back when they negotiated themselves out of ever raising minimum wage by honoring a limitation they could've ignored. Between that and the 2k checks thing it was pretty clear the tone they were setting. I feel like with how things are now though that there are more differences between voting in a republican vs democrat than back when Clinton was voted in.

[Kaelik]

I feel like this is exactly what was voted for. Next to nothing happening under Biden. This is pretty close to the same thing that I was bewildered by when Obama came in with control of the House and Senate. The confirmation point for me was still back when they negotiated themselves out of ever raising minimum wage by honoring a limitation they could've ignored. Between that and the 2k checks thing it was pretty clear the tone they were setting. I feel like with how things are now though that there are more differences between voting in a republican vs democrat than back when Clinton was voted in.

I specifically am talking about the presidential election. In so far as that hasn't seemed to change anything. While it will be funny when Biden passes a tax cut for the rich after they finish this shit, if republicans had the house and senate they would be passing another trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich, instead of only the few billion Biden is going to pass.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I do love seeing our little social spending bill being cut a ton for seemingly no reason, I already saw the 2 free years of community college portion was on the chopping block. What a disappointing country.

The reason "seems" to me like it's because they hate you. Either actively or passively. You are not part of what they're interested in. People who go to community college are not who Joe Biden's handlers serve. Preserving worldwide peace and stability is not really on the agenda.

[MGuy]

Joe Biden can't take all the credit. He was gonna only be X amount of shitty. Who knew that during that last election we were also placing Manchin in a leadership position from which he can act with impunity to undercut even the shitty deal Biden was going to make.

I seperate Manchin and Sinema because I don't think they're antics are part of Biden's game plan. The parliamentary allowing him to excuse himself from increasing min wage? Yes that's fine but he's got his popularity riding on this agreement and these fights with those two just don't seem to be helping him.

[tussock]

I was reading someone wrote about the first 100 days of FDR.

He had a house and senate didn't want to vote for his New Deal. So he told them to vote for it, without compromise. Then he declared a banking holiday for two weeks, so money stopped, in the entire country, when they were in session. President can do that, still can. Thing is, he'd just won the election, so he was popular. So, after two weeks of arguing about it, they promised to pass it after he ended the banking holiday.

And so he extended the banking holiday indefinitely until they passed his bill, and then six hours later it was passed and the bank holiday ended.

It was like 25% of GDP. Raised taxes from about what they are not up to around 90% at the high end. Created most of the modern government departments, got into housing the poor, started basic stuff with the health system. You know, like a baby modern country.

President is the executive, can literally do any fucking thing once it's funded, and he made them fund the biggest thing ever by a very long way because he cut the money off their paymasters. Hell, he controls treasury and can fix their debt worries with the stroke of a pen, by just making it not exist any more.

--

And instead of that, Biden proposed a bunch of compromises that he thought republicans would vote for like they did when he was young (which he is not any more, and they have not done that essentially forever), and is now compromising on the comprises he's made on that original compromise, in order to get two asshole democrats to vote for it. Rather than just, say, using any of the near-unlimited powers of the executive branch to make their donor's lives hell until they sign on to the thing the country needs to do so people stop dying quite as horrifically fast.

Like, Trump just wrote bullshit executive orders all the time, and they'd go to court and be overturned and he'd just write another one that did the same fucking thing an hour later, and eventually hit a judge so that allowed it. He took money from housing to build his wall. Took money from disaster relief to build his wall, and then entire of everyone just agreed the President can do any of that shit at any time, because lots of funding is actually super flexible.

Biden could literally just stop funding fossil fuels and instead fund solar. He could house people. He could just forgive student debts, could send everyone a fucking cheque just like Trump did, regularly even, with his gods damned name on it. And instead, no. There are people making bank off those things being awful, and they can hand $50k to a senator and yeah, why not. That seems fine, right.

[Kaelik]

In particular if you cared about actually passing anything, you'd just have the DOJ arrest Manchin's daughter, who has committed multiple crimes that the DOJ is investigating, but they are investigating the corporate structure, not of course, the actual people who did it (it was Manchin's daughter amongst others).

Manchin would pass everything you ever want.

It's just so funny that our system is so fucking corrupt that prosecuting just one single rich person for all the crimes we have documented evidence of them committing would solve like 1/4th of all our problems, but we still don't do it, because prosecuting the rich is the one thing that must never be done.

[Kaelik]

In the continuing story of how the Joe Biden admin is literally identical to the trump admin, Joe Biden is selling KSA more missiles ton bomb Yemenis to help end the war in Yemen, because several months after we decided that we would only support them with defensive and not offensive actions, someone finally just went ahead with a weapons sale because "when no Yemenis are still alive, KSA will be maximally defended."

[tussock]

So they passed $1 trillion (over ten years) of their $5 trillion dollar (over five years) "lets not have the economy completely collapse, yeah?" bills. It's 1.2 over 10 years, or ... 0.6% of GDP (or less, because it's not inflation adjusted in future, of course).

Which, basic lookup, the US has been running about 1.5% of GDP on infrastructure, but needs to spend 2.5% just to maintain trade parity, so this is still going backwards in real terms, just slower. By way of comparison, rich countries that are still improving people's lives spend 3%, and China spends like 8% and has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in quite a short time frame, historically speaking.

Biden wanted to spend like $2 trillion over 5 years on infrastructure, but insisted on republicans voting on it, so instead of having like 4% of GDP on infrastructure and really strong go forward, progress, improve wealth and growth and so on, lift people out of poverty, not that.

For all that effort, it's a whole lotta nothin. Like, stuff will stop breaking, some broken things will be replaced, but it's like assuming the US has a big lead on everyone and that just isn't true any more, not for a while now.

[Kaelik]

The most perfect summary of everything is that it costs 60 billion to replace all the lead pipes currently poisoning people, Biden's original proposal was 45 billion, and in the end, the new Biden Agenda is to pass 15 billion and then never pass anything else.

Also the bill with 15 billion subsidizes fossil fuel companies, has no climate change funding at all, and directs the government to sell off a bunch of government assets to private companies. (And allocates funds for the US government to pay consultants to help Exxon Mobil draft plans to buy power plants.)

[Kaelik]

Biden during the campaign criticized trump for offshore drilling and said he opposed it. Now the biden admin will be doing the largest offshore drilling auction in US history.

The democratic way.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Joe Biden is the most progressive president in my lifetime.