Willem's Planet

Another week gone, and here is October 2021 on us, already.
Every night all the calamities of the moment are covered by NBC Nightly News. In a way, the news is always the same.
We’re in a climate crisis.
Hospitals are still filled with Covid-19 patients.
We’re told America could be just weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time ever.

And as far as enacting President Biden’s policy agenda, we don’t have 6 major political parties in government, the way the Germans do. We have only two.
I would argue we actually have only the Democratic Party.
(The Republicans are AWOL. They very, very rarely work with the Democrats. They will kill American democracy— and kill us all— if they come back into power).
The moderates and the progressives in the Democratic Party are tussling over two big policy bills.
There’s the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and a $3.5 trillion social policy bill that includes measures related to climate change, family aid, and expansions to Medicare.

Here’s what Amber Philips writes in today’s Washington Post about the key players in the Democrats’ congressional battles.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.): Leader of centrist Democrats in the House
What he wants: A vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday, which he didn’t get.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.): Leader of the progressive caucus in the House
What she wants: Centrist Democrats, particularly in the Senate, to get behind the $3.5 trillion spending bill that would be the capstone of Democrats’ control of Washington right now.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.): A centrist holdout in the Senate
What he wants: Democrats’ social safety net legislation to cost much less, around $1.5 trillion.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.): Another holdout in the Senate
What she wants: First off, for the House to pass the infrastructure bill. She helped negotiate that in the Senate, where 19 Republicans voted for it.
And like Manchin, she wants Democrats’ social safety net/climate change legislation to cost much less. But unlike Manchin, she’s been more quiet about what she could support, frustrating liberals who feel like they can’t negotiate with a moving target, or no target at all.

Here is a set of slides from Deutsche Welle’s website that shows the outcome of Sunday’s federal elections in Germany.
Angela Merkel’s party (the Christian Democrats) lost ground everywhere.
For the first time since the 1950s, at least three parties will be needed to form a coalition in Germany’s government. (The two largest parties are unlikely to form a coalition on their own).
The Social Democrats and the Green Party made the biggest gains.

‘I want to focus on what we said yes to as a State.
We said yes to science; we said yes to vaccines;
we said yes to ending this pandemic;
we said yes to peoples’ right to vote without fear of fake fraud or voter suppression;
we said yes to a woman’s fundamental constitutional right to decide what she does with her body, her faith and her future;
we said yes to diversity;
yes to inclusion;
we said yes to pluralism;
we said yes to all those things we hold dear as Californians – and I would argue as Americans: economic justice, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, our values, where as Californians had made so much progress.
All those were on the ballot this evening.
And so I’m humbled and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians that exercised their right to vote, and expressed themselves so overwhelmingly to rejecting the division, by rejecting the cynicism, by rejecting so much of the negativity that’s defined our politics in this country over the course of so many years’.
– California Governor Gavin Newsom at a press conference tonight

Good news from California: the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom has failed.
This was a sour-grapes, politicizing-of-COVID effort from the Republican Party of Suffering and Death to unseat Newsom; a waste of $276 million. Per California law they had needed only 50% of the vote to recall Newsom, and install the challenger with the most votes. In this recall it would have been Larry Elder, a conservative radio talk show host and Trumpist.  That would have been downright awful.