When a third party swoops into a negotiation and steals your leverage it has a significant impact on what that middle ends up being

Because placating the egos of the people in power make sense, same reason Zelensky congratulated Trump on winning

I got my numbers on sick days from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute?wprov=sfla1

Unfortunately, it isn’t just the media, look through this article and you can see a bunch of Democratic lawmakers and campaign consultants pushing this narrative. These are all people we need to get out of elected offices and off campaign staffs or they’re going to continue to sabotage the Democratic party’s ability to win offices and govern effectively.

Also, the bullet that was dodged hit the radiator of the car that could’ve taken us to the hospital

They still have it coming. Unless they’re personally on Trump’s hit list they’re going to be too wealthy and insulated to feel any real consequences from a Trump administration. The people who are going to suffer the most are minorities and poor people.

A talking head who gets paid a six figure salary to go on TV and spout inane bullshit about immigrants eating pets shouldn’t be replied to. Cletus in the comment section who has a two year degree and makes an hourly wage to do skilled manual labor and honestly thinks the government will let any migrants who want to do so walk into the country whenever they want and give them a welfare check for their trouble does need to be spoken with.

That’s all a lot easier said than done, but I think that’s the general outline of the problem here.

Workers were asking for 15 days of sick leave, Congress and Biden gave them 1 with the act that ended the strike. Later, the railroads continued negotiating with some of the unions and gave them four days of sick leave. People from the Biden administration were present for those conversations and take credit for that.

So, no, the Biden administration did not give the unions what they asked for, and yes they likely did do material harm to them by stopping that strike.

Related article that’s not as good and on a crappier website, but has at least one passage that makes an important observation in passing - holy crap were there a lot of highly educated and highly paid legal experts who went on TV and said obvious bullshit

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

…

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/aWmXf

There’s the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there’s everyone else.

Ftfy, there is no such thing as a good Republican, there was decades of bullshit from them that led us to this point and they’ll be fascist scum after Trump is gone. Anybody who can’t admit that simple truth is either too dumb or too cowardly to be given political power.

Me: oh boy i cant wait to unify against all the republican jerks that have been messing stuff up for literally my whole life

Harris: i promise to put a republican on my cabinet have you met my friend liz

Me: oh boy i can’t wait to die

That’s a really complicated question that’s going to depend on what he’s trying to do, but it’s never going to be any one thing, it’s going to be a combination of using legislative procedure and longshot lawsuits to slow things down where we can, having conversations with our families and neighbors about how Trump is fucking up and driving Trump’s popularity down, and some amount of finding workarounds for social problems that don’t require government involvement (e.g. private abortion funds, mutual aid networks, etc).

We didn’t let the USSR decide our troop deployments for us, and we didn’t tell everybody what a great guy Stalin was to sell war bonds. When it comes to potential voters, I agree with you we can’t be picky (like, if they’ve got a problematic stance on trans people or women or people receiving welfare or whatever I’ll try to politely and succinctly tell them why what they’re saying hurts to hear and then steer the conversation back to the many many things we do agree on), but when it comes to the people we put on stages, the people we elect, and the people who advise elected officials on policy and campaigns the Manchins and Kinzingers and Cheneys of the world are poison who will only lose us votes.

Beyond the brain drain, the school to prison pipeline is going to get opened wide, they’re going to jam as many cops into public schools as they can and have them going law and order on kids over stupid shit

I wonder if Biden is happy for his “friend”

It’s a big tent, the people in charge of the party right now suck but there are lots of good lawmakers and staffers in there

with the Tulsi Gabbards switching to red and the Adam Kinzingers switching to blue

Ugh, a future of having to choose between Russian agents and fucking tea partiers sounds bleak as hell, we’ve gotta be able to do better than that

I don’t see how you could possibly see his attacks on migrants, trans kids, etc. as anything other than punching down.

Also, why are you holding the Democratic party accountable for down voters here or other randos online who say stuff about Trump supporters? They’re pretty distinct groups, and the fact is elected Dems bent over backwards to talk as nicely about Trump supporters as they could.

And I actually think that was a big part of what I think their real voter engagement problem was, which is that everything Dems say comes off like inauthentic over polished political bullshit to a lot of voters. I think simultaneously trying to say “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” and “Trump supporters are not garbage” sounds insane (like, if you’re supporting an existential threat to democracy you just inarguably are a garbage human being, sorry not sorry).

I don’t think we should make it a centerpiece of our message or waste a bunch of time on it, but if we get a direct question about Republican party supporters we have to respect our potential voters enough to say “Yes, they are garbage, roughly 35-40% of this country are bad people who are willing to hurt others to get what they want and that’s why it’s so important for the rest of us to put aside our difference and work together to stop them.”

Wanna bet the places and sectors that are doing worse than median wage growth and inflation are rural and manual labor things? That second one especially I think could explain why some gen z men voted the way they did.

Why do you think 11 million people sat out?

Like, if you’re walking down the street and one person calls you a horse they’re a jerk, if two people call you a horse they’re both jerks, but if everyone keeps calling you a horse maybe it’s time to go get fitted for a saddle. The Dems got called a horse 11 million times here.

I mean, no offense but the fact that you haven’t heard this just might mean you’re deep inside an echo chamber. It’s hard to have an exact measure of these thing, but Republican threats and celebrations of violence and sexual assault are at least as central to their party’s platform as being opposed to bigotry is to the Democrats party’s from where I’m sitting.

And I’m not sure why you think being opposed to bigotry is an attack on working class men. Like, if we want to talk about the working class and poor people, let’s talk about the fact that transgender people are more likely than the average American to be living in poverty because of the discrimination they fave.

I will say that’s an easy to miss fact because society in general doesn’t like to platform working class people because they’re not as eloquent or pretty and the Dems tend to behave the same way, so we hear more about wealthy celebrity members of queer communities and other marginalized groups. At the end of the day, tho, if you do really care about the working class you need to care about transphobic discrimination (among all the other kinds of discrimination) too, because it is absolutely a tool the capitalist class wields to keep us divided and oppressed.