I appreciate what Beau is trying to say, but IIRC, over thirty states have proposed 81 anti-protest bills, so protesting could be construed as a “criminal act” and therefore be subject to the terrorism definition. Until we see how this works out in practice, I’m worried about who will actually be targeted with this.
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True. We do know that the federal government has tended to focus on groups like Civil Rights organizations, Black power organizations, and leftist groups in the past. Even when these groups do embrace violence of some kind, they tend to avoid violence against people, which is most certainly not the case with right wing groups, who tend to embrace violence against people.
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From that same meeting:
I wish I could say that I can’t believe we hadn’t heard this story here yet, but it’s a Black woman fiercely speaking truth to power - so I’m not surprised at all.
Rock the fuck on Rachel Scott, “wit’ yo bad self…”
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For all his lip service to progressive-sounding causes, Biden remains a promoter of neoliberal capitalism.
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This is a good thing, interesting to see how it plays out.
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I’m going to be a spoilsport and note that fixing American health care is a massive and complicated task, and it’s mostly the job of the congress instead of the president; whereas ordering the military to do airstrikes somewhere is directly within the executive branch’s job description and can be done quickly and easily.
Yeah you’re right, Obama said barely a word while “Obamacare” was being put together and instituted.
/s
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He also bombed the crap out of places, and authorized drone strikes against militants during that period.
So, I guess a why not both?
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Establishing a public option (as he promised during the campaign) is not a reach. It already exists in the form of Medicare and the VA. Expanding those avenues for people to get healthcare is part of his mandate. How many treatments can the government pay for with what was spent on missiles and jets?
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We know the solutions. Other countries have employed them. We just have a political class that would rather line their pockets with insurance kickbacks than solve the problem.
This whole “it’s too hard to fix the problem” when other developed nations have indeed “fixed the problem” is bullshit.
And we can fix the problem of invading other countries by stopping that.
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The ACA made it through the Senate because Obama’s VP twisted the arms of many of his former colleagues.
I know, I’m from one of those countries that have socialized health care, and it works wonders. And America really deserves something similar.
But that doesn’t change my point, which is that fixing the stuff that’s broken in America is going to take a lot of work and time, and undoubtedly involve ungainly compromises, because of other broken stuff. I’d be very pleased if Biden had pulled off something like public option for ACA in the half a year he’s been president, but I’m completely unsurprised and un-disappointed that he hasn’t done so.
I’m more than aware… but we don’t have to build a whole system from scratch, so the argument that we can’t make the changes because they are too difficult to implement and what would you replace it with anyway is just flat wrong.
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Not necessarily. There is now both the justification and support for forcing the issue, first regarding elections and voting rights, and subsequently for all the issues that are popular among citizens but have been blocked by the GOP.
What is lacking so far is the political will to be half as ruthless in executing the will of the people as they are to block it.
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For everyone’s sake, I hope that you are right, and I’m just being overly pessimistic. 
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