Non-restive = not gearing up to revolt.
Doesn't that group skew pretty heavily R?
Which is probably true at all ages. Still 50 to 54 year olds cause most of my problems.
Doesn't that group skew whiter than average?
7: are you gazing into a 50-54 year old navel right now?
It's from Canada, so from 2018. Anyway, I think it's amusing that they singled out a very small age group.
12 Some congressman's brother-in-law.
My brother-in-law too. And my brother.
They'll be affected by work requirements? Hope they can swing it.
I just mean they're in the age group.
Right. I think some congressman has a brother-in-law who he thinks needs to get a message. Maybe there's more than one of them.
I feel like they are specifically saying people my age are unwilling to work unless pressed.
More specifically, there's currently a sort of work requirement (for certain adults without dependents) that ends after 49, presumably on the theory that older people are more likely to have trouble maintaining basic (physical) jobs and less likely to be spongers, and they're raising it to 54.
Fuck 50 to 54 year olds anyway.
I turn 55 in November, so yeah!
The other interesting speculation (also featured in JMM's work) is that Biden gave up nothing that he wouldn't have given up in the regular budget negotiation, so the Republicans got literally nothing that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
I haven't looked into this, but it's my impression that the markets -- stock and bond -- were somewhat less agitated by this negotiation than the Obama/Boehner one. My thinking is: If you want to know what's going on, don't listen to the Congresspeople; listen to their owners.
21: That came up in the last thread, but the problem is it's a bit of a black swan - default has never happened, so it's hard to confidently assert the market knows how to price the risk.
22: Yeah - I think that's why JMM and other smart commentators remain unhappy about the whole thing. You keep stepping up to the brink, and accidents will happen.
Everybody knows that the Left and the Far Right won't be able to muster enough votes to stop this deal -- except whip counts aren't right every single time.
Me, I think it's a defensible position to believe that this can't be dealt with while the gun is loaded and aimed at the economy. Although a sensible Congressional majority is not in sight, that's who is ultimately going to succeed in dealing with this.
(Or the nuts take us over the brink and we have to mint the coin or whatever.)
On the bright long-term side, the last supermajority there might not have even been 25 votes in the Senate to eliminate the debt ceiling (it polls rather poorly, wasn't on anyone's agenda then from what I can recall) so being a few votes away is a lot closer.
I think generally I'm prepared to defend Biden's performance here down the line, now that I see how it played out. I used to defend Obama on the grounds that he was obviously the political expert, and in cases where his intentions were good it was wise to defer to his judgment on strategy. That seems more true with Biden. (It's also possible that Biden's actual intentions are superior.)
Wasn't Biden the one who pushed Obama toward a Grand Bargain back in the day? Bad instincts there. But at least he learned and is now better applying his skills perhaps.
I blame New York Democrats for fucking up so badly that we lost the House.
The day after he signs the deal, Biden should quietly mint some platinum coins.
I hope there's a coin or two right now sitting in a vault somewhere.
27, 28 -- The only thing I know about New York politics is that it's too complicated for collective aspersions of this type. Someone in Albany fucked it up, in service of some agenda I wouldn't understand even if they explained it to me. It took more than one person, and there were probably multiple agendas that just didn't really include holding seats in the NYC suburbs.
IME 'parties' per se aren't really responsible for this sort of thing, because parties respond to elected officials rather than vice versa.
I also blame the NYC press for overhyping the crime problem in NYC.
Some? How many does he need? Or is he planning to use one to make change next time he buys groceries?
31: If they had an agenda that wasn't holding seats in Congress, I'm willing to cast aspersions widely.
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Salmakhan sp*m in the Paxton thread.
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More from JMM this morning:
One point is staring us in the face. This Republican Party cares a lot less about fiscal policy than even the old GOP. The post-1970s GOP was always opportunistic and hypocritical about spending and debt. These days, though, they barely care about it enough to manage the hypocrisy. Consider DeSantis: that whole terrain of politics is totally absent from his presidential pitch. To the extent the current GOP wants to re-form the federal government the energy is entirely on purging it of non-conservatives, Deep Staters and the like. Authoritarian politics, anti-BLM and gender culture war politics, the border. Those are the Republican issues. A necessary though not sufficient explanation of how McCarthy seems able to sell this agreement is that basically no one in the GOP actually cares about the thing they were demanding.
We're a long way from when Paul Ryan pretended to be an irredeemable wonk!
33 Governor, a handful of legislative leaders, sure. Maybe some honchos in Queens? I don't know. Cast aspersions too widely, though, and you end up with a downdraft.
We have the aspersion plague in a different form here. Despite the fact that Nancy Pelosi has done more for rural Montana than Matt Rosendale is ever going to do, by a very large margin, it's become an article of faith that The Democrats have abandoned rural Montana. OK, yes, in a world where money is scarce, the state party picks 7 or 8 races where the kind of modest contributions it can afford to make are likely to make a difference. If you're running in a district that votes 65-75% Republican, how much money do you think you're going to get? Especially since in a state legislative race, candidates themselves are expected to knock on every door in the district at least once. What do they think a visit from the state party chair -- someone no one has heard of -- is going to accomplish? And yet Democratic candidates in rural Montana seem absolutely addicted to saying 'The Democrats have abandoned rural Montana' and are then apparently surprised that voter don't find this a reason to vote for them.
38 Apparently the deal has some defunding of police.
37: The JMM piece is about Trump's silence, and I don't think it quite does justice to the central issue for Trump: What's in it for Trump?
His involvement would be all downside for him. He'd either fail, in which case he'd have another high-profile failure that he'd have a difficult time explaining; or he'd succeed and a significant chunk of the negative fallout would splash onto him. And any extreme measures that Biden decided to take would become more credible in the aftermath of a failure in the House. Trump is smart to keep his yap shut here.
JMM makes a plausible case that maybe DeSantis could gain political points by coming out against a deal. But DeSantis, even more than Trump, has to pay attention to the money people.
In general it played out well but I'm pretty miffed that Joe Manchin's pipeline made it in there. a) what the fuck does a pipeline have to do with a debt ceiling? b) why the fuck are Dem's adding sweeteners to bring another Dem on board?
Based on this and on other recent news concerning Ram Emanual's big planes for LNG exports, I remain deeply suspicious of the Biden Administration's commitment to the environment.
Obama also played the game of trying to be a little too cute in accommodating the fossil fuel industry, and as a result we got the fracking bubble and a whole bunch of new methane released into the atmosphere.
24 is a good point.
Although a sensible Congressional majority is not in sight
I'm not sure that's a given. Can't recall if I've said this here already, but, despite the Autofill that makes every commentator describe the 2024 Senate map as "terrible for Democrats", I simply don't see it as that bad. You've got 3 D Senators who've each already won 2-3 elections in red states up for reëlection, which isn't awesome, but if it's a good year for Dems, I think all 3 can win*, and if it's a bad year for Dems, you're not going to hold a 51-49 Senate majority regardless of the map.
Meanwhile, Sinema is very likely to be replaced by Gallego, which, as far as voting is concerned (as opposed to committee seats and who's Leader), is effectively a D pickup.
On the House side, those infamous NY seats are decently likely to revert and, again, if we're talking about a Biden win, then the R House majority isn't big enough to survive that anyway.
None of this is to say I'm assuming another trifecta come 2025, just that I think it's about as likely as not, and will probably be decided by whether the Fed's attempt to induce a recession works and/or persists.
*there's legit concern about all 3, but I don't think any is a dead man walking, or especially close.
On a related note, I just today learned that Gephardt in 1979 told the parliamentarian to consider the debt limit raised by the passage of the budget, and that held until Gingrich. That might be an easier lift for Blue Dog types than abolishing the limit. Of course the next R House could undo it just as Newt did, but I think it would still be an improvement, and possibly lay the groundwork for killing it in the near future.
31, 38: The guy who's coming in for most of the blame, along with Governor Hochul, is Jay Jacobs, the state party chair. I don't have a good sense of how much difference a good party chair would have made, but Jacobs seems to be both ideologically way to the right of the median NYS Democrat, and also not particularly effective in doing anything at all.
Obama also played the game of trying to be a little too cute in accommodating the fossil fuel industry, and as a result we got the fracking bubble and a whole bunch of new methane released into the atmosphere.
I'm still not convinced that allowing natgas to all but destroy coal power plants in the US was a bad call. Coal was still about 50% of US electricity in 2008; 7 years later, it was just over 1/3. Over the same period, overall fossil fuel generation dropped, so it's not just substitution from coal to gas.
Around here they're shuttering coal plants so fast it's hard to keep track. Mind you, fracking essentially was a bubble, and there are all sorts of non-GHG issues. But the fracking era coincided with a significant (~10%) and seemingly permanent decline in US GHG emissions (per World Bank), and the renewables market is now so strong that fracking isn't profitable enough to keep the wells running.
Based on this and on other recent news concerning Ram Emanual's big planes for LNG exports, I remain deeply suspicious of the Biden Administration's commitment to the environment.
That pipeline is still very unlikely to happen. Smarter people than Rahm Emmanuel have been trying to get it going for years without success. It's just a very expensive piece of infrastructure relative to competing projects.
45: Yes, it seems like natural gas ended up working as a "bridge fuel" exactly the way people said it would. Whether that was the right approach environmentally is a separate question, but on its own terms it did work.
Except the way it was done, the natural gas hasn't really been cleaner than the coal it replaced. Take a look at what happened to atmospheric methane during the fracking bubble. It went from "a problem that's being resolved" to a parabolic increase, basically in concert with the era of cheap natural gas.
Meanwhile, in addition to killing the coal industry, cheap gas also killed the nascent relaunch of the nuclear power industry, while also strongly influencing the decision to shutter legacy nuclear facilities, rather than make the investment to keep them running.
The city busses switched to gas and standing on the street became like six times nicer.
48: Yeah, I'm not saying it was an unalloyed good. I wouldn't necessarily agree that it wasn't an improvement over coal, though. Methane has a higher warming potential than carbon dioxide but it also persists for a much shorter period so the net effect isn't immediately obvious and depends on the specifics. Coal also has way more non-carbon pollutant emissions so the switch to gas cut down a lot on those. But the nuclear point is an important one too. I did a series of blog posts on natural gas a while back called "The Ambiguous Fuel" and I think that characterization remains accurate.
I guess the thing about a "bridge fuel" is that you have to actually be willing to cross the bridge. You can't just drive halfway out on the bridge and park there, which seems like whats happened. Yeah, we're past coal, but we've locked ourselves into a whole next generation of fossil fuel dependency.
All those new natural gas plants are going to continue spewing carbon into the atmosphere for decades, and they won't have any incentive to go away as long as the price of gas is kept low by doing things like building out more pipelines.
Eh, I mean, the marginal cost of renewables is always going to be less than gas once they're built, and a lot of them are getting built right now. I agree that you actually have to cross the bridge but to me it looks like we are.
All this bridge talk reminded me of "the bridge to the 21st century". We crossed that bridge, didn't we?
It's probably like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I hate crossing that. Too high.
44 By this account, the NY Dems' failure wasn't in being too accommodating the Republicans, but not accommodating enough. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/what-went-wrong-new-yorks-redistricting
I agree that you actually have to cross the bridge but to me it looks like we are.
See, I don't think we are. I think we are just planning to use a lot more energy overall. So, while a larger share of energy will be coming from renewables, I don't see natural gas use actually declining, absent the kind of price hikes that Biden Administration policy is actively working against.
Overall, U.S. energy consumption looks pretty flat over the past 30 years, so presumably dropping on a per capita basis.
The climate doesn't give per capita reductionprizes though.
The EIA currently projects that energy use will grow but emissions will shrink because of the shift to renewables. Wide range of projections for gas specifically because it's sensitive to small changes in assumptions.
(Those are total numbers, not per capita.)
OT: Minnesota has just legalized recreational marijuana. Does that mean if you don't enjoy it, you can be arrested?
Wide range of projections for gas specifically because it's sensitive to small changes in assumptions.
For sure. And if we engineer the situation so the realized assumption is "gas costs a lot more" we end up getting to where we need to go a lot quicker. But I see policy going in the other direction.
I mean, if you want gas to cost a lot more building a pipeline through Alaska is a great way to accomplish that.
And "gas costs a lot more" is a really good way to be sure the coal-friendly party controls everything. At least until there's a lot of electric cars.
And... CBO estimates that SNAP beneficiaries will increase by 0.2% as net outcome of the various provisions in the deal, after 2025 when the new work requirements are fully rolled in.
I mean, if you want gas to cost a lot more building a pipeline through Alaska is a great way to accomplish that.
What about the option of waiting for the polar ice caps to melt and exporting crude by tanker directly from the North Slope? That's got to be a lot cheaper, I would expect.
What about the option of waiting for the polar ice caps to melt and exporting crude by tanker directly from the North Slope? That's got to be a lot cheaper, I would expect.
This idea has in fact been considered, both for offshore oil and onshore LNG. (For onshore oil there's already a pipeline, of course.) It's not necessarily much cheaper, but then the ice isn't totally melted yet.
And "gas costs a lot more" is a really good way to be sure the coal-friendly party controls everything.
It seems to me that, as recently as our last election, our enemies were happy to use their influence on the global prices of fossil fuels to soften the ground for the electoral success of the coal-friendly party. As long as we are dependent on this stuff we are enabling some very bad actors, both nationally and globally, and giving up power to them.
I get that higher fossil fuel prices are unpopular, but they are the most effective tool we have as far as preventing the planet from overheating. Its an idea worth spending some political capital on to protect. Except not worth it to Joe Biden, apparently, which, again, is why I don't really have a lot of faith in him on the environment.
And just like that, oh look, here is the Administration siding with Saudi Arabia to weaken the proposed plastics treaty. WTF?
but then the ice isn't totally melted yet.
What's the icebreaker situation up there? Do the Russians still kick our asses when it comes to icebreakers?
The Russians kick everyone's ass on icebreakers and have for decades. The Coast Guard did finally start building a second one but I don't know how far they've gotten.
Apparently they're building three more with the first one expected in summer 2024. They apparently actually have two old ones, but the Healy is the only one we see regularly up here.
70.last: Maybe Iran will invade them?
The problem with an icebreaker-ekranoplan hybrid is that it would have to be both heavy and light.
However, given a sizeable-enough research grant, I am confident that I could figure it out.
We've got the long game. They have ice breakers, and we'll melt everything.
If the ekky icebreaker doesn't work out, you could perhaps repurpose some of the work for use on Rahm Emanuel's big planes for LNG exports
61: Just hobbyists. No professionals.
A few years ago, our local U.S. attorney put Tommy Chong away for that.
Are they really going to lift it? Will I finally get to stand up straight again?
Manufactured Drama:139: So, odds that the "deal" (or some slight modification of it) gets more Dem votes than Republican? I'm thinking it will if it passes.
But I guess the "real" test was on the rules vote where only 53 Ds were "yes" compared to 165 on the limit itself. More R nos on the actual vote.
Probably provides a useful categorization around perceived seat safety and ideology/whackadoodleness:
YYD
NYD
NND
YYR
YNR
NNR
maybe a few NYx?
