OK then. Biden 2020.

hanimmal said:

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/1299ae16f3f21db12e4a41ce2392a0f7
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrat Joe Biden leaves little doubt that if elected he would try to scale back President Donald Trump’s buildup in nuclear weapons spending. And although the former vice president has not fully detailed his nuclear priorities, he says he would make the U.S. less reliant on the world’s deadliest weapons.

The two candidates’ views on nuclear weapons policy and strategy carry unusual significance in this election because the United States is at a turning point in deciding the future of its weapons arsenal and because of growing debate about the threat posed by Chinese and Russian nuclear advances.

China, whose relatively small nuclear force is growing in sophistication, is cited by the Pentagon’s top nuclear commander as a leading reason why the United States should go all out on nuclear modernization.

“We are going into a very different world,” Adm. Charles Richard, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said Sept. 14. “We are on a trajectory, for the first time in our nation’s history, to face two peer nuclear-capable competitors.” He was referring to Russia, which has long been a nuclear peer, and China, whose leaders Richard says have put a strategic nuclear buildup “next on their to-do list.”

Days later, Richard said China could become a peer “by the end of the decade, if not sooner.” But other estimates suggest a slower pace. The Pentagon recently said Beijing may double its nuclear stockpile over the next 10 years, which would still leave it far behind the U.S.

Trump entered the White House in 2017 with little to say on the subject of nuclear weapons, but his administration produced a policy document a year later that the Pentagon portrayed as largely tracking the path of the Obama administration. Trump did, however, add two weapon types and beef up the budget for a years-long overhaul of the nuclear arsenal — an overhaul that Biden sees as excessive.

“Our nuclear now is in the best shape it’s been in decades,” the president said this month, although the military says the arsenal’s main components are so old they are long past due for replacement. He has boasted in broad, sometimes cryptic, terms of U.S. nuclear advances, telling journalist Bob Woodward in 2019 that he had built a secret nuclear weapon that neither Russian nor China knew about.

If reelected, Trump would be expected to stay on his path of modernizing the nuclear arsenal, which has bipartisan support in Congress despite growing budget pressures. Less clear is how Trump would approach nuclear arms control, including the problem of North Korea’s unconstrained arsenal. His administration has walked away from one arms control deal with Russia and balked at extending an Obama-era strategic nuclear treaty with Russia that Biden says he would keep in place.

Just days before Trump entered the White House, then-Vice President Biden cautioned against abandoning Obama’s approach.

“If future budgets reverse the choices we’ve made, and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup, it hearkens back to the Cold War and will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States or our allies,” Biden said in a Jan. 11, 2017, speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

James Acton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, says Biden’s instincts on nuclear weapons are more liberal than those of much of the Democratic Party’s defense establishment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he would fundamentally change U.S. nuclear policy.

“In practice, there are often pressures to continue the status quo,” Acton said in an interview.

Biden embraces the notion that nuclear weapons should play a smaller role in defense strategy and that the ultimate goal should be a nuclear-free world. He has not spelled out how he would pursue this, but he has dropped clues.

He has said, for example, that he opposes the Trump administration’s decision to develop and deploy two types of missiles armed with less-powerful “low-yield” nuclear warheads. One is a sea-launched cruise missile that is some years from being fielded; the other is a long-range ballistic missile that the Navy began deploying aboard submarines nearly a year ago.

“Bad idea,” Biden said in July 2019. Having these makes the U.S. “more inclined to use them,” he added.

During the campaign, Biden also has embraced what nuclear strategists call a “no first use” policy. In simplest terms, that means not initiating a nuclear war — not being the first to pull the trigger, so that in a nuclear crisis, the U.S. president might opt to unleash a retaliatory strike but not a preemptive one. Longstanding U.S. policy has been to reserve the option of striking first, arguing that this makes war less likely.

Obama considered but rejected a shift to “no first use.”

The Biden campaign has made few pronouncements on U.S. nuclear weapons policy or strategy and it declined to make an adviser available for an interview. The campaign website says Biden believes “the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack. As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”

In a questionnaire last year by the Council for a Livable World in which Biden and other candidates were asked whether the U.S. should review its policy reserving the option of using nuclear weapons first, Biden said yes but did not elaborate. He also agreed that modernizing the U.S. arsenal could be done for less than the currently projected $1.2 trillion.

Some have speculated that Biden would consider dropping the plan to build a new nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile force, replacing the Minuteman 3 fleet fielded in 1970. That project is expected to cost at least $85 billion.

Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, believes Biden would stick to the missile program.

“This outcome will result partly from the fact that Joe Biden is a common-sense centrist who respects the views of experts,” Thompson wrote recently. “He will find few if any experts in the nation’s nuclear establishment who think phasing out ICBMs would make us safer.”

This story corrects group name to Council for a Livable World, not Council for a Living World.

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In a column published over the Fourth of July weekend I compared Joe Biden to America's founding fathers — in particular to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — because they all supported ambitious economic policies that were not realized in their lifetimes. (Or that potentially, in Biden's case, will never be realized at all.) One reader responded by tweeting an image of actual feces at me, but other critics took a more measured approach: Writers at Fox News and the Daily Wire arguing that it was more appropriate to compare Biden to Jimmy Carter.

This article first appeared in Salon.

According to Fox News, Biden is like Carter "because of the economic similarities of high gas prices and inflation," while the Daily Wire quoted a tweet that claimed Biden was "the worst American president since Jimmy Carter, and possibly of all time."

There's something to these arguments, but not for the reason the Biden-haters think. The most important similarity between Carter and Biden is that each was a bland, moderate Democratic hope who was elected after a period of unprecedented Republican corruption — and who failed to stem the rising Republican tide.

As I've written before, nostalgia for Barack Obama played a big role in Biden's nomination, and then Donald Trump's spectacular failure to respond to the COVID pandemic pretty much decided the election for Biden: He presented himself to a public that was largely fed up with the incumbent, and promised a return to the pre-Trump status quo of "normal" politics. Basically Biden was in the right place at the right time, and mainstream Democrats saw him as the only option to fend off first Bernie Sanders and then Trump.

Jimmy Carter's story was quite different. He ran a grassroots primary campaign in 1976 that pioneered many modern campaign tactics, and beat back more than a dozen other candidates, including mainstream Democrats like Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Sen. Frank Church and progressive favorites like Rep. Mo Udall of Arizona and Gov. Jerry Brown of California. Carter pioneered a new style of retail politics, one in which candidates campaigned hard on the ground, while studying the primary and caucus calendars carefully. Through this method, Carter managed to pull off an upset over both the mainstream and progressive preferences.

That approach became normal for both Democratic and Republican candidates in the following decades, but it was brand new in 1976, and Carter stunned the political universe. Hardly anyone outside the Deep South had ever heard of Carter, a one-term Georgia governor with a mixed record, at the time Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974. Two and a half years later, he was the president.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Carter accomplished some impressive things. U.S. energy security today is the direct result of legislation he passed, according to Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's former domestic affairs adviser. In a 2018 interview with Salon, Eizenstat also ticked off Carter's achievements in passing landmark ethics legislation and doubling the size of the national park system. Carter had appointed more women and more Black people to senior positions and to the federal bench, Eizenstat said, "than all 38 presidents before him put together." In a distant pre-echo of the Biden presidency, Carter also endorsed the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates to "choke the economy and squeeze out inflation," at great risk to his chances of re-election.

In foreign policy, Carter helped forge a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt, one that has endured to this day and produced the immortal photograph of Carter beaming while Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shook hands with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Concluding that America's colonial era belonged in the past, he negotiated a treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government. More broadly, he worked to reorient American foreign policy toward human rights, cutting back or ending support to Latin American despots, opposing white minority governments in South Africa and Rhodesia and speaking out against Soviet human rights violations and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Stuart Eizenstat: "This Southern president appointed more women and more African-Americans to judgeships and to senior positions than all 38 presidents before him put together."

Then there was the downside, which in Carter's case was abundant. His leadership skills were lackluster, he was not a charismatic or inspiring speaker, he tended to vacillate in decision-making and he struggled to retain the best staffers. It wasn't his fault that the military mission attempting to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran was a disastrous failure, but that failure stuck to him. Overall he appeared unequal to a series of major problems amounting to what he correctly identified as a "crisis of confidence." He was decisively defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, an election that proved to be a massive turning point in American history and politics.

That's why Carter is widely regarded as a failure. He was elected by a nation thirsty for real leadership, and he left it in a more advanced state of dehydration. His good intentions don't seem to count for much against that legacy. But that doesn't mean Carter didn't accomplish important things as president — or that it wouldn't have been preferable if Americans had given him a second chance. Joe Biden is now risking a Carter repeat: Replacing a problem president in one election, and then creating an opening for another one.

Biden won the Democratic nomination mostly because of nostalgia for Barack Obama. After that, Trump's failure to respond to the pandemic effectively decided the election.

Nothing Richard Nixon ever did can hold a candle to Trump's carnival of political horrors, and it was quite a different time: Some Republicans were willing to turn against Nixon in the end, revealing an era when they hadn't yet decided to place the quest for power above all else. They too had not yet forfeited their soul.

Joe Biden has, at least arguably reestablished the legitimacy of government simply by not being Donald Trump — and no matter what Republicans may claim about his son's laptop, Biden has avoided major scandals as well.

Biden's achievements on the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis, although modest in scale and hamstrung by implacable Republican opposition, go beyond simply a return to "normal." His mass vaccination program has saved thousands of lives, he brought the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Agreement and he has worked to reform both environmental regulation and immigration policy. His infrastructure bill, which will create new jobs and strengthen communities across the country, may well be his most lasting achievement.

Carter forged a lasting peace deal between Israel and Egypt, and presided over one of the most famous handshakes in recent history.

Like Carter, Biden is hardly a dynamic public speaker. Like Carter, he has presided over a major foreign policy disaster. (In Biden's case, it was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, so it's at least mildly ironic that Jimmy Carter so vigorously protested the Soviet invasion more than 40 years earlier.) Like Carter, Biden has seen many of his domestic policy initiatives go nowhere.

Joe Biden's last, best hope for political redemption may be the potential prosecution of Donald Trump for his actions before and during the Jan. 6 insurrection. If Attorney General Merrick Garland is reluctant, for whatever reason, to pursue the prosecution of a former president, the Democrats not only face likely defeat in the 2022 midterms, but still worse to follow.

America took a hard right turn after Carter's defeat, and may do so again if Biden (or another hypothetical Democrat) loses to Donald Trump (or another hypothetical Republican) in 2024, especially in the wake of an evident coup attempt going effectively unpunished and the planet continuing to warm to catastrophic levels without Republican policies to address it. In that scenario, there could be reasons to feel concerned not just about the future of democracy, but the future of the planet.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.rawstory.com/joe-biden-2657718705/View attachment 5169786

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Lucky Luke said:

"Like Carter, Biden is hardly a dynamic public speaker. Like Carter, he has presided over a major foreign policy disaster. (In Biden's case, it was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, so it's at least mildly ironic that Jimmy Carter so vigorously protested the Soviet invasion more than 40 years earlier.) Like Carter, Biden has seen many of his domestic policy initiatives go nowhere."

"Joe Biden's last, best hope for political redemption may be the potential prosecution of Donald Trump for his actions before and during the Jan. 6 insurrection. If Attorney General Merrick Garland is reluctant, for whatever reason, to pursue the prosecution of a former president, the Democrats not only face likely defeat in the 2022 midterms, but still worse to follow. "

Great...a bland vanilla prez.

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ActionianJacksonian said:

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hanimmal said:

Looks like some fascist dick head is all upset that Biden correctly stated 'you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-cop' enough to make this stupid meme.

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ActionianJacksonian said:

Hey, speaking of fascism, when are we going to use Defense Production on Big Oil?

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hanimmal said:

If it hasn't happened yet, what makes you think it is going to? Or are you trying to be all edgy?

It is a shame though that Trump 'negotiated' with MBS and Putin to cut oil production during the pandemic though. It would have been really nice to not have had this manufactured spike in prices to benefit these dictators and the mega-rich oil barons.

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ActionianJacksonian said:

It's funny we think of these things that way imo. Inflation is more of a "worldwide" phenomenon when we print the world reserve currency.

Dictators and oil barons set the gas prices yet its our policys the drive world fuel prices.

Trump did this that and the third, Biden is the savior. But none of that matters. Domestic production went down from 13.5 per day to 11ish. Exactly the amount to profit those dictators.
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hanimmal said:

If it hasn't happened yet, what makes you think it is going to? Or are you trying to be all edgy?

It is a shame though that Trump 'negotiated' with MBS and Putin to cut oil production during the pandemic though. It would have been really nice to not have had this manufactured spike in prices to benefit these dictators and the mega-rich oil barons.

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cannabineer said:

when I see a post that is all glittering suggestive dog whistles, and contains zero links to non-woo documentation,

I recognize the tingle of the fighting reflex. This means the mode of attack is sentiment and unlikely to be more than an online food fight.

shrug, “find something new”

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rollitup said:

So 11 years, huh?

you're coming along, although not exactly quickly.

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cannabineer said:

Let’s just say that while I am ambivalent about modding here, not doing so is probably better for my vascular health.
Tell me- why did the Happy thread get locked?

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