The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

Yahoo did a split poll about the Covid relief package that was passed last month. Half the time, they told respondents how much spending the law authorizes ($1.9 trillion); and half the time, that wasn't mentioned.

The law was more popular in the group who knew how much it cost than in the group who didn't. Even among Republicans.

[Inanna]

It's not hidden information about the amount of spending in the law. I wouldn't bet anything on the results you reported.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's not hidden, but lots of people don't follow the news.

[N.E. Brigand]

There have been a lot of claims in the media, not only from the right, that the election law getting so much attention in Georgia (with similar laws in the works in multiple other states) aren't really voter suppression, so I appreciated this clear-headed response in New York magazine:

Georgia’s Jim Crow Lite Vote Suppression Continues Trump’s War on Democracy

To take the most egregious example, in the last election cycle, voters who went to the wrong precinct — a common problem, compounded by recent moves by the state’s GOP leadership to close more than 200 precincts — could still cast a provisional ballot. The new law forbids this, requiring voters to travel to the correct precinct before 5 p.m.

The law’s notorious ban on volunteers handing out snacks and water to people waiting in long lines adds to the dilemma. (Conservatives insist poll workers are still allowed to give out water, but the whole reason volunteers have to handle these tasks themselves is that poll workers typically don’t.) And the bill shuts down remedies by imposing limits on courts extending voting times in response to long lines or delays and giving the Republican legislature final say in the almost certain event of a dispute.

[...]

"Voter suppression doesn’t involve long lines, any more than long lines at Disneyland are ride suppression," argues [conservative commentator Ben] Shapiro. This is a bizarre comparison. If you’ve ever visited a theme park, you know that long lines actually are ride suppressors. When my kids were young, I took them to Disney World; if the lines were too long when they asked to go on certain rides, sometimes we wouldn’t go.

[...]

National Review editor Rich Lowry, parroting the official line from Georgia Republicans, insists, "It’s hard to believe that one real voter is going to be kept from voting by the new rules." Really? Not one? In the 2020 election, nearly half of the 11,000 provisional ballots in Georgia were cast in the wrong precincts. (And that was with unusually high levels of mail voting, which the new law also curtails.) Presumably, at least some of those voters will be deterred by the requirement that, after waiting in line to vote and being told they have visited the wrong precinct, they go to find another precinct and stand in line again.

(And as the column goes on to point out, National Review has a history of supporting voter suppression, having opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and having argued as recently as 2016 that it was too easy for people to vote.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't know why everyone refers to the ban on "food and water" from the New York Times on down. The language of the law says "food and drink" not "food and water".

[N.E. Brigand]

Former congressman and former radio talk show host Joe Walsh, a Repblican from Illinois (turned Independent because of Donald Trump), points out that New York's voting laws, in a number of ways, are more restrictive even that what Georgia's new law requires. In light of that observation, it may be worth noting that progressives have complained repeatedly about New York's voting laws.

[Sunsilver]

I don't know why everyone refers to the ban on "food and water" from the New York Times on down. The language of the law says "food and drink" not "food and water".

Voronwë, back in the day in Ontario, bars and liquor stores were closed on voting day, so voters couldn't be unduly influenced by drinking alcohol. I don't know if it's the same in the U.S., but that could be why people are assuming 'food and water' and not 'food and drink'!

[Beorhtnoth]

Am I alone in viewing the 46th President as "President Not-Trump", meaning much of his championing is predicated simply on the fact he isn't Trump?

I see very little from Biden that is either inspiring or radical. My gut feeling is that Biden is being accorded kid gloves not because of his policies, gadfly bites on the establishment behemoth, but because he, well, isn't Trump.

It appears, as Chomsky might state, the Business Party triumphed over the Business Party, and the peons are left to cheer the least worst result.

[River]

No, you're not alone, but that was where most of Biden's appeal was and is. I'm not sure what someone has to be smoking to believe Biden's a radical of any kind.

[Beorhtnoth]

My pipeweed brand is between me and my supplier, thank you very much!

[River]

. Where I live, any relatively unrefined plant matter you put in your pipe is legal and open for discussion.

[Frelga]

. Where I live, any relatively unrefined plant matter you put in your pipe is legal and open for discussion.

Reminds me of that dad who caught his kid smoking weed and then realized it was oregano.

[River]

I honestly don't know how I'd react to that.

[Beorhtnoth]

A waste of good oregano...

[River]

Well, yes, that would be part of my reaction. Along with "What are you doing? What do you think you're doing? Why are you doing what you think you're doing? Why are you acting like what you thought you were doing actually succeeded?" and so on.

[N.E. Brigand]

Am I alone in viewing the 46th President as "President Not-Trump", meaning much of his championing is predicated simply on the fact he isn't Trump?

I see very little from Biden that is either inspiring or radical. My gut feeling is that Biden is being accorded kid gloves not because of his policies, gadfly bites on the establishment behemoth, but because he, well, isn't Trump.

It appears, as Chomsky might state, the Business Party triumphed over the Business Party, and the peons are left to cheer the least worst result.

1. Biden isn't being accorded kid gloves. As I have repeatedly pointed out in this thread, the mainstream media is biased against him.

2. Chomsky publicly supported Biden in last year's election.

[Beorhtnoth]

1. Compared to Trump, and especially on the eastern shores of the Herring Pond, Biden is accorded kid gloves. I can only relate what I see.

2. Chomsky indicated a preference for Biden over Trump. His support is qualified.

[N.E. Brigand]

1. Compared to Trump, and especially on the eastern shores of the Herring Pond, Biden is accorded kid gloves. I can only relate what I see.

2. Chomsky indicated a preference for Biden over Trump. His support is qualified.

2. Yes, it's absolutely qualified. As one report said last fall, Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt Biden's dreams. Cool by me.

1. Let me clarify: it's not specifically a bias against Joe Biden. In the United States, the media in general holds a bias in favor of conservatism. A frequently noted example of this is the panels selected for the Sunday morning news programs, which typically consist of a moderator and three invited guests, and those guests tend to be two conservatives and one liberal. This was the case when Bush was president, when Obama was president, when Trump was president, and now that Biden is president. When a liberal is president, the explanation is that the panels need to be thus skewed to balance against the people in power. When a conservative is president, the explanation is that the panels need to be skewed thusly to help the audience understand the people in power.

Here's another example: a number of journalists are largely taking at face value Republican claims that Biden's proposed $2 billion infrastructure plan (whatever its faults or merits) isn't really infrastructure because money that could be spent on roads is designated for trains. You see, things that help people in urban areas more than those in rural areas aren't "core infrastructure." Just yesterday, ABC's Sunday morning host George Stephanopoulos (who was top adviser to Bill Clinton!) repeated this claim uncritically.

Similarly there was a regular genre of American reporting for the past four years in which the mainstream media went to enormous lengths to better understand Trump voters. It was so frequent that there were running jokes among media observers about "diners in Trump country." Never mind that more people had voted for Clinton: there were almost no equivalent attempts to understand her voters. And now that Biden is the president, there are hardly any stories attempting to understand his voters either. Why not? Here's how Dave Weigel of the Washington Post explains it:

"Different levels of demand ... If you're a Michigan liberal in 2017 you want to know how all those downriver white guys swung to Trump after backing Obama twice. If you're a Michigan conservative in 2021 you're just assured that Detroit stole it for Biden."

And here's how Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo just this afternoon described the problem:

"A common long-standing pattern: the fact the news organization staffs really *are* more cosmopolitan/urban in outlook (not precisely liberal) has the effect of producing journalism which is often aggressively coddling of right-wing constituencies and often critical of liberal values."

There were lots of Clinton voters in 2017, and lots of Biden voters now, whose views are every bit as legitimate as those of Trump's supporters. Interviewing the latter and not the former encourages the general public to think that the former don't exist in serious numbers.

This is a big part of how we got Bush and Trump in the first place: the media normalized their far right positions.

- - - - - - - - - -
One more thing: Donald Trump was quite possibly the worst president in American history. Even a media predisposed to give a Republican the benefit of the doubt could not ignore all of the insane things he did,* so of course Joe Biden will superficially be seen as getting a pass by comparison. Joe Biden isn't committing lots of crimes. Joe Biden isn't telling dozens of lies every week.

*Even so, the media repeatedly and I would say willfully let him get away with a lot. Another running joke among media observers concerned all the times journalists who should have known better said something like, "With this speech, Donald Trump has finally become a real president" (basically because he managed to read from a teleprompter without interjecting to smear anyone) -- only for Trump to complete undermine that judgment within a few days by dong something ghastly, which didn't prevent the media from going through the same routine all over again a couple months later.

Or look at how they reacted to the release of Robert Mueller's report. They let themselves be completely bamboozled by William Barr's initial statement when he received the report in which he exonerated Trump and also by Barr's statement exonerating Trump again weeks later when the report was released, which totally colored how they discussed the report (which most journalists never bothered to read). Those who have read the report find that Robert Mueller, cagey as he was in deference to misbegotten Dept. of Justice guidelines, nonetheless made it perfectly clear that the whole Trump team had engaged in very shady behavior with regard to Russia, and also that Donald Trump himself had repeatedly obstructed justice to prevent Mueller from getting a full picture of those shady Russian dealings. But if you surveyed American journalists even now, I'm confident that you'd find their consensus was that the Russia investigation was a nothing burger. Because that's what they expected and enabled.

[yovargas]

I would argue that the major effort to "understand the Trump voter" is definitely not a signal of conservative bias. It is, fairly blatantly, an admission they were shocked and confused by the existence of these Trump supporters and they needed to be analyzed and studied, like if they were a strange new tribe found in a remote jungle. We didn't need to go through all the effort to understand the Clinton voters because, well, Clinton voters were normal and everyone normal understands them, right?

[Túrin Turambar]

I would argue that the major effort to "understand the Trump voter" is definitely not a signal of conservative bias. It is, fairly blatantly, an admission they were shocked and confused by the existence of these Trump supporters and they needed to be analyzed and studied, like if they were a strange new tribe found in a remote jungle. We didn't need to go through all the effort to understand the Clinton voters because, well, Clinton voters were normal and everyone normal understands them, right?

This, exactly.