What, no Joe Manchin thread?

[Js1 85,560]

8 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

I mean, who wouldn't want to be the 51st lockstep GOP shill instead of being The Most Important Man in the Senate America?

fify.

[Bullneck 19,206]

When this bill finally passes in whatever form someone somewhere needs to "lose" the paperwork for all the funding earmarked for WV.  

[Bullneck 19,206]

On 10/1/2021 at 6:09 AM, workswithseed said:

Sucks that people aren't the Borg and think like they should. 

 

On 10/1/2021 at 6:13 AM, Judge Roybeanbag said:

Exactly.  Thanks for proving my point.

Owned

[Bullneck 19,206]

On 10/1/2021 at 7:04 AM, Incredulity said:

Well, lets see…. there are 100 Senators and I am pretty sure 100% divided by 100 Senators would equal 1% percent, so… in leftists super fair fantasy government Sinema is representing more people than she should.

 

So once again quit spamming the board with stupid shit you find on Facebook.

You didn't see that "census" thingy at the bottom, did you?

[Satchel 6,949]

Manchin’s career would effectively be over with a switch to the GOP. Mitch can’t guarantee he’d win a primary (he wouldn’t) and his leverage would be gone. He’s trying to get the Dems to back up off him.

[Underdog 28,770]

 This mofo needs to have some close family members disappeared/held for ransom until he comes to terms with the Dems, Sinema could have her Hell,Kitty collection confiscated until she does the same. 

[Longhorn_Fan68 33,896]

dear NSA, we don't know that guy ^

[deac_tracy 516]

24 minutes ago, Underdog said:

 This mofo needs to have some close family members disappeared/held for ransom until he comes to terms with the Dems, Sinema could have her Hell,Kitty collection confiscated until she does the same. 

Isn't this what the teamsters are for?

[babysdaddy 2,728]

https://www.axios.com/manchin-sanders-reconciliation-fight-789c8441-fa49-404f-9d36-4adaa8e1d908.html

[workswithseed 2,110]

8 hours ago, Underdog said:

 This mofo needs to have some close family members disappeared/held for ransom until he comes to terms with the Dems, Sinema could have her Hell,Kitty collection confiscated until she does the same. 

Are you fed?

[Underdog 28,770]

3x a day, sometimes more. 

[Satoshi 129]

Thank God for Joe Manchin

 

[TwiceHorn 31,534]

8 minutes ago, Satoshi said:

Thank God for Joe Manchin

 

I'm ok with that.  

While I don't love the financial surveillance stuff, to some extent it is necessary, but I think the threshholds are far too low, especially for the stated purpose of identifying tax dodges.

[Incredulity 11,683]

On 10/21/2021 at 3:03 PM, Underdog said:

 This mofo needs to have some close family members disappeared/held for ransom until he comes to terms with the Dems, Sinema could have her Hell,Kitty collection confiscated until she does the same. 

[brakeman 28,419]

[Fudge Nuggets 19,219]

18 hours ago, Satoshi said:

Thank God for Joe Manchin

 

I can see how this is big news for you since it focuses on bank accounts less than $10K.  Congrats, poor.

[WBT 20,662]

Gotta make sure those poors aren't dodging their negative tax bills

[formermav43 4,606]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I can see how this is big news for you since it focuses on bank accounts less than $10K.  Congrats, poor.

Most of your fellow Americans don’t have bank accounts with more than $10k. 

[Bruh Man 3,160]

10 hours ago, brakeman said:

Manhattan’s senator

[Judge Roybeanbag 11,820]

11 hours ago, brakeman said:

Taxing wealthy people is divisive.  Having the largest wealth disparity in the nation's history, not divisive.  Got it.   Fuck you Joe Manchin.  

[Fudge Nuggets 19,219]

17 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

Most of your fellow Americans don’t have bank accounts with more than $10k. 

And?

[Js1 85,560]

17 minutes ago, Bruh Man said:

Manhattan’s senator

He’s his daughter’s senator 

[formermav43 4,606]

And nothing. It was just a statement of fact.

[Mdhorn 5,987]

Quick New Yorker Read

Last month, as Democrats were struggling to craft a passable version of the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5-trillion bill that contains much of the Biden Administration’s domestic agenda, Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, told a group of reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or, basically, our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.” The Democrats are attempting to pass the measure through the budget-reconciliation process, an effort that will take every Democratic vote in the Senate. In return for his support, Manchin is reportedly demanding that the bill be cut by more than half, eliminating or radically scaling back key provisions such as the expansion of Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision; paid family and medical leave; the child tax credit; and the clean-electricity program, which would penalize gas- and coal-fired power plants in an effort to mitigate climate change.

It’s not a secret that Manchin, whose personal worth is in the millions, has deep ties to the fossil-fuel industry. Last year, he received half a million dollars in dividends from Enersystems, a coal company he started in the late eighties, which is now run by his son. He is also the U.S. senator who’s received the most money in political donations from the oil, gas, and coal industries. But an underexamined aspect of Manchin’s history is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, or alec, which brings together lobbyists, state legislators, and representatives of conservative think tanks to draft and disseminate model bills. Since its founding in 1973, the organization’s work has laid the foundation for thousands of laws passed by state legislatures that have weakened labor unions, redirected public-school funding to private schools, hobbled the welfare state, restricted voting rights, and blocked or reshaped environmental regulations in favor of business interests. “ALEC is unique in the sense that it puts legislators and companies together and they create policy collectively,” Scott Pruitt, a former alec leader and President Trump’s head of the E.P.A., explained to Governing magazine, in 2003.

Documents disclosed as part of a series of legal settlements with the tobacco industry show that Manchin, as a West Virginia state senator in the nineties, was deeply involved with alec. At the group’s annual conference, in 1993, which was held at a resort in Traverse City, Michigan, attendees took part in sponsored events such as R. J. Reynolds’s mixed golf tournament and skeet and trap shooting, paid for by the National Rifle Association. Manchin, then a national director for the organization, moderated a workshop devoted to health-care costs, which promised to reveal how “the true demon in America’s health care spending has become our own government programs, Medicare and Medicaid.” The panelists included a representative from the Seniors Coalition—later accused by the A.A.R.P. of being a front group for the pharmaceutical lobby—and a representative from the drugmaker Mylan. Years later, Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch became the president and C.E.O. of Mylan. The company is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit alleging that it colluded with Pfizer to eliminate competition for its EpiPen, the price of which rose by several hundred per cent under Bresch’s leadership. (Manchin declined a request to comment for this article.)

alec’s next annual conference, in 1994, was in Tampa Bay. Prominent guests included Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House the following year, and Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate. The conference opened with a speech from alec’s executive director, Samuel A. Brunelli. “Since D-Day, the federal government has extended its power into every sector of the economy and every sector of our lives,” Brunelli said. “And what is our reward? Well, large parts of our cities have become terrorist enclaves. Welfare is Methuselized poverty, and it replaces family with dependence on government.” To Brunelli, “the resources of the productive are plundered, while the failures of the inept are cultivated.” Manchin moderated another health-care panel with representatives from the pharmaceutical industry. Afterward, there was a lunchtime presentation of alec’s annual Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award, which was given to two of the organization’s funders: David and Charles Koch.

By the summer of 1995, Manchin was second vice-chairman of alec’s board of directors. (The group’s co-equal “Private Enterprise Board” was led by executives from Coors and Philip Morris.) In an annual report, Brunelli celebrated alec’s “remarkable year.” Of two hundred and sixty-eight model bills, he wrote, more than half were considered in one or more state legislatures. Nearly a thousand pieces of legislation based on alecmodel bills had been introduced, and roughly a quarter of them had been enacted. One of the most successful, the Truth in Sentencing Act, which required people convicted of a violent crime to serve at least eighty-five per cent of their sentence, became law in twenty-five states. Other widely adopted alec bills involved reducing benefits for welfare recipients and allowing companies to self-audit their compliance with environmental laws and then seal those records from the public. “With our success rate at more than twenty percent,” Brunelli said, “I would say that ALEC is a good investment. Nowhere else can you get a return that high.” (A representative for alec did not respond to a request for comment.)

Manchin was elected governor of West Virginia in 2004. By then, he had been out of alec for nearly a decade, but he remained a staunch defender of corporate interests. As governor, Manchin cut business taxes and sided with coal and power companies in opposing an E.P.A. effort to declare ash from coal-powered plants to be hazardous waste. (Coal ash contains contaminants, such as mercury, selenium, and lead, that can pollute groundwater and decimate fish populations.) Manchin also sued the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers over new rules that limited mountaintop-removal mining, accusing the Obama Administration of attempting “to destroy our coal industry.”

In June, an undercover reporter for Greenpeace U.K., posing as a headhunter for an unnamed oil-and-gas entity, coaxed Keith McCoy, a senior lobbyist for ExxonMobil, into a number of embarrassing revelations. “Joe Manchin—I talk to his office every week,” McCoy said. McCoy added that their conversations were aimed at ridding legislation of “negative stuff”—emissions reductions, taxes on fossil-fuel companies. “He is the kingmaker on this, because he’s a Democrat from West Virginia,” McCoy said of Manchin. “He’s not shy about sort of staking his claim early and completely changing the debate.” (Exxon has said that McCoy is no longer working for the company and denied that his comments represented the company’s position.)

alec still lists Manchin on its alumni page, where he’s the only Democrat among thirteen senators. Some Democratic organizations, such as the Democratic Leadership Council, have mimicked alec by relying on large corporations—including Koch Industries—as funders. Though the D.L.C. folded a decade ago, it drove a significant portion of the Democratic policy agenda in the nineties, enabling Republicans to realize long-cherished goals like cutting welfare benefits and passing nafta. But the Democrats have never had a progressive policy-making infrastructure that could match alec. “One of the most deleterious aspects of alec is how it normalizes this idea that corporations should have an equal voice and vote with state legislators on policy measures before they’re introduced in statehouses,” Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, a nonpartisan corporate-watchdog group, told me. “When you looked at who had a leadership role in alec, it was almost entirely Republican.”

Since Biden took office, Manchin has continued to take positions that align with alec’s ideology. He opposed both an effort to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour and the Senate’s For the People Act, which, among other provisions, would have eliminated partisan gerrymandering, a primary reason Republicans have an ironclad hold on many state legislatures. As the Build Back Better bill gets whittled down, Manchin has reiterated his philosophical opposition to it. “I don't believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society,” he said. “I think we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.”

Last January, when Manchin opposed sending a new round of stimulus checks, he told a reporter at the Washington Post, “I don’t ever remember F.D.R. recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. He gave ’em a job.” In fact, Roosevelt created the American welfare state, including Social Security and the first national program of cash benefits for families. But Manchin’s invocation was ironic for another reason: no Democrat has ever understood better than F.D.R. the ability of corporate interests to seize political power. Just before the 1936 election, Roosevelt gave a speech outlining how these interests threatened the social and economic gains made by the New Deal. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” Roosevelt said. “They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

Three days later, in what should be a lesson to Manchin and his party, Roosevelt won the largest electoral landslide in modern American history.

Dan Kaufman is the author of “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics,” which was published in 2018.

 

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,142]

This woman would be an excellent Senator from West Virginia.  This is the kind of representation West Virginians should have.  Not Joe MAnchin.  

 

 

[Bullneck 19,206]

On 10/27/2021 at 1:07 PM, Satoshi said:

Thank God for Joe Manchin

 

Is this your version of a humblebrag?  You don't have 10,000 of anything.

[mchookem 16,376]

..

Edited October 29, 2021 by mchookem

[mchookem 16,376]

6 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

This woman would be an excellent Senator from West Virginia.  This is the kind of representation West Virginians should have.  Not Joe MAnchin.  

 

 

yes but is your average West Virginian smart enough to realize that?

[Bullneck 19,206]

22 hours ago, brakeman said:

I did a quick Google search to verify this and one of the Google suggestions was "billionaires in India."  I clicked and apparently there are quite a few in Calcutta (Kolkatta).

Take that, Wheeling, Charleston, and Morgantown.

[elfenix 34,332]

he may be one of the conservative posters that pops in here from time to time:

 

[Js1 85,560]

15 minutes ago, elfenix said:

he may be one of the conservative posters that pops in here from time to time:

 

Just the vast majority of these people making policy don’t know how the real world works. Most of them haven’t had a private sector job in 3 decades.

But then people denigrate those like AOC who had an actual job dealing with these issues before congress. 

Edited October 31, 2021 by Js1

[Satoshi 129]

 

[hayden_horn 11,365]

52 minutes ago, Satoshi said:

 

he really should just declare himself a republican. i'm so sick of his shit. and i'm a very reluctant democrat these days.

[pyrohornIII 4,818]

[Homercles 10,206]

I posted this in reply to someone saying ineffectual Dems in the VA Gov race…but someone explain to me how an entire party’s agenda can get tanked by two people?  
 

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

[sidis 9,832]

11 minutes ago, Homercles said:

I posted this in reply to someone saying ineffectual Dems in the VA Gov race…but someone explain to me how an entire party’s agenda can get tanked by two people?  
 

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

 

from 0:08 to 0:20 of that video, mitch mcconnell looks like he is contemplating eating mccain's intestines.

[washparkhorn 9,939]

7 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

The same people who pay Republicans to get in line - also pay Manchin and Sinema to get in line. 

I am not sure there is much authentic representative democracy left in the good old U.S. of A.

What a power structure - the dimwit cultists on the far right, the crooks - plus - a corrupted Congress - plus - a Supreme Court getting demands to overrule Warren Court decisions, I suppose annihilation must sound dope to the nihilists.

We live in interesting times to say the least. There is a lack of commonsense afoot. 

[Underdog 28,770]

1 hour ago, sidis said:

 

from 0:08 to 0:20 of that video, mitch mcconnell looks like he is contemplating eating mccain's intestines.

With fava beans and a nice Chianti. 

[sidis 9,832]

Just now, Underdog said:

With fava beans and a nice Chianti. 

everyone knows that is better with liver than intestines.

at least mitch mcconnell certainly knows.

[Mdhorn 5,987]

1 hour ago, washparkhorn said:

The same people who pay Republicans to get in line - also pay Manchin and Sinema to get in line. 

I am not sure there is much authentic representative democracy left in the good old U.S. of A.

What a power structure - the dimwit cultists on the far right, the crooks - plus - a corrupted Congress - plus - a Supreme Court getting demands to overrule Warren Court decisions, I suppose annihilation must sound dope to the nihilists.

We live in interesting times to say the least. There is a lack of commonsense afoot. 

 It will be fun when yet again, a few think they control the monster.  

[Mdhorn 5,987]

1 hour ago, Homercles said:

I posted this in reply to someone saying ineffectual Dems in the VA Gov race…but someone explain to me how an entire party’s agenda can get tanked by two people?  
 

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

Republicans are pretty basic--it's why they can trot out the hits repeatedly.  Democrats have a house of many different views, cultures, concerns and they double down on stupid shit without thinking about how defund the police plays to the rest of the nation.  The rubes still don't understand everything involved with planned parenthood.  Rather than google it, they go to Fox and are repeatedly sucker punched all day long until they're punch drunk and vomiting slogans like critical race theory without knowing what it is or where the terminology came from.  

[workswithseed 2,110]

8 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

The same people who pay Republicans to get in line - also pay Manchin and Sinema to get in line. 

I am not sure there is much authentic representative democracy left in the good old U.S. of A.

What a power structure - the dimwit cultists on the far right, the crooks - plus - a corrupted Congress - plus - a Supreme Court getting demands to overrule Warren Court decisions, I suppose annihilation must sound dope to the nihilists.

We live in interesting times to say the least. There is a lack of commonsense afoot. 

Wouldn't it be easier to run as a full on R in West Virginia than being a namby pamby D?

[WhatTheBuck 28,797]

9 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

they double down on stupid shit without thinking about how defund the police plays to the rest of the nation.

How many Democratic politicians have ever promoted a policy of “defund the police?” Maybe a few, if that? I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen activists say it but they’re not Democratic politicians. Mostly I’ve seen Republican politicians accuse the Democrats over and over again that they want to defund the police and the message sticks. It’s in all of the Republican campaign ads I’ve seen this cycle. Biden even said specifically that he didn’t support it but Trump just went on creating his own alternate reality by repeatedly claiming he did. 

[956 Worldwide 34,751]

11 hours ago, Homercles said:

I posted this in reply to someone saying ineffectual Dems in the VA Gov race…but someone explain to me how an entire party’s agenda can get tanked by two people?  
 

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

Democrats don’t have a Joe Manchin problem, they have a voters of West Virginia problem disguised as a Manchin problem. 
 

WV was the second most Trumpy state in the Union and Biden got 27 percent of the vote yet they have a Democrat senator who votes more than sixty percent of the time with his party. And the reason they have that is because at key times, Manchin gets his name in the news and proves to his Trumpy voters that he is a Special Democrat who charts his own path. And it is a side benefit that certain lobbyists also want him to draw this line, but make no mistake: his constituents want to see him stand up to his party leadership in some public way, so he has to pick some fight. 

So the Dems can primary Manchin (maybe, it probably isn’t a real threat given the demographics of the D voting block in WV) and then promptly lose a seat in the Senate to the GOP. They can also work to convince WV residents to vote for the type of person a Manhattan attorney believes best represents them, which I believe is a certain path to victory in Appalachia. 
 

It’s a lot easier to get upset at Manchin as a person than grapple with the unpleasant reality that representative democracy is working as intended— the Senator is doing what his constituents want. 

[workswithseed 2,110]

Are you my wordierand better looking alter ego Mr. Worldwide?

Edited November 3, 2021 by workswithseed

[Jive Turkey 12,642]

 

[Longhorn_Fan68 33,896]

[pacman 7,370]

22 hours ago, Homercles said:

I posted this in reply to someone saying ineffectual Dems in the VA Gov race…but someone explain to me how an entire party’s agenda can get tanked by two people?  
 

Repubs never seem to have this problem…it’s get in line or get primaried. 

You missed Trump's first two years? He couldn't get shit done except things he could do on his own.

It took a Republican big money donor mutiny to get those bogus tax cuts done.

[Bullneck 19,206]

23 hours ago, Jive Turkey said:

 

Birds of a feather

[Bullneck 19,206]

On 11/3/2021 at 6:07 AM, workswithseed said:

Are you my wordierand better looking alter ego Mr. Worldwide?

You're just talking to yourself at this point, dude.