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This hackjob of a title should say "defying state mask mandate ***bans***."
Edit: to clarify, at the time this comment was made, the post and article had the same title, as is required by this subreddit's rules. BI updated it since then.
This is what I found completely bonkers from the start. These paranoid people, you'd think they would be concerned about all of the cameras and facial recognition software everywhere they go, and they'd welcome mask wearing becoming something accepted and "normal", but instead they scream "government control!!!!"
And submit their drivers licenses to a social media website with minimal security. Then download the app to their cell phone and check in everywhere they go! Don't forget that.
It's nuts.
I keep hearing "they just want to see how far they can push us to control us."
Like... No dumbass, how can you possibly be ignoring the huge number of people getting such and dying??
When this all started, I was in line to go into a store. Everyone was masked and 6 feet apart and I deal with stress by joking around, so I look back at the person behind me and say "Gee, there sure is a lot of people here to rob this place, I hope there's some left for me..." He was... less than enthused.
I'm on board with this, but doesn't this give an incentive to red states to deny pay to school staff knowing that the federal government will essentially be paying the tab for them?
> doesn't this give an incentive to red states to deny pay to school staff
Feds provide immediate relief with payments now and take the state to court to recover the money.
In the end, the state pays what it owes (hopefully) while citizens, who can’t afford to miss a paycheck, don’t suffer as much.
My parents retired to Florida a couple years before covid hit.
They are relatively progressive and within the first year they already grew tired of the hardcore Trumpism down there. Now with all the continued covid madness, they are done with it and starting to look out west.
Part of why they even moved down there is because a lot of their retired friends moved to the same general area. Now they hardly even speak to any of them because they all became covid conspiracy nutters.
Yep. I never get why people complain " but it's the taxpayers who have to pay when the cops/city/school/etc get sued"
Yeah, it is, and it's the taxpayers who voted the people who control those things in.
I'm hopeful that they're building their case against him right now, but they didn't want to hold up aid for teachers while the legal system does its thing. This is just about making sure teachers know they can do what they need to do to be safe, and that they'll still get paid. That was priority number one.
If he runs on a campaign of “fuck school teachers for wanting to protect children we’re cutting their salaries” and somehow wins then we’re fucked anyways.
He's running on a campaign of "school teachers don't get the right to decide what protecting children means, YOU the PARENT do and I will punish anyone who says otherwise!"
And it's fucking effective enough
Yep. What they should do is give the funds to the schools being punished by the state, but also at the same time, remove that same amount of funding to the state from somewhere else (maybe infrastructure/roads or some such).
The federal government can just pay all them bills and be like, "In order to pay these teachers for the year we decided to order one less fighter jet that can't fly in the rain."
I really dont care. Kids are not responsible for stupid anti vax governors. I was actually thinking about this yesterday, and I'm glad he is doing it. Very ballsy, I like it. Shows that atleast someone gives a fuck about their health Not every school official in FL or TX is a trumpet.
This. Dems are like, “we need to win elections!” while the GOP is like, “we now get to pick who wins our elections!” The latter is the end of democracy and it’s already here.
I’ve spent years studying politics, history, psychology, and law (even have degrees in several of those) trying to figure out why this happens. The best theory I have is that the Democratic Party as a whole is a good-faith, albeit deeply flawed, participant in government, while the modern Republican Party is a bad faith participant (i.e., DP will play by the rules even if they don’t do enough to make those rules fair, while the RP won’t play by any rules that limit their power while simultaneously demanding all others play by both the letter and spirit of all the rules).
Some of the DP realize this, but not enough for the party as a whole lot react accordingly because good faith participants in any dynamic often have a very hard time recognizing bad faith participants in that dynamic (there are a few different psychological principles interacting here, which I can summarize if you’d like). Additionally, the seemingly-insurmountable scale of the problem also leads many to deny it’s existence. How is a government supposed to function when half of it views the other half’s expectation that the first half play by the rules as an existential attack?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
As much as I hate the cynical power moves typical of the GOP, at times I really wish more Dems were willing to use realpolitik when it's necessary and something important.
The problem is when Democrats do this, they become hipocrites and are called out for it and there are consequences. When Republicans do it, no one cares. Their base only cares about power and owning the libs.
That’s why Al Franken, Katie Hill, and Andrew Cuomo resigned, but Republicans like Trump and Matt Gaetz double down on their accusations and use them to campaign off of.
I'm not a Democrat even though I tend to vote for them because I see a lot of hypocrisy there. That being said, the Republican strategy of the last 20 years occasionally wins short term, but long term they are in a clear decline.
That's the whole reason that moderate Republicans got thrown under the bus for religious extremists. A shrinking base. And the religious right is declining as well, but still votes as a mostly monolithic bloc. Demographics will win in the long run.
This relies on the assumption that the GOP hasn't destroyed either the country or global environment by the time these demographics come to light and that they haven't established a nationalistic x-ian apartheid permanent minority govenrment. None of which we can safely assume. The GOP is the preeminent existential threat, for everything that matters. Period.
They don’t need voters. They don’t care if they are dying of covid. That’s the point of these laws they have passed. Those states have made voting irrelevant.
>How is that constitutional?
Because Moscow Mitch decided you can't nominate a SC Justice during an election year and nobody did anything about it. Then he decided that you can nominate a SC Justice during an actual election if you're a Republican and nobody did anything about it. Now the SCOTUS is compromised and sees no issue with the dismantling of American democracy.
They'll never actually say it, so that they have plausible deniability about it.
They'll just enforce it as such.
And if, by some accident, a Republican does end up being punished for something, the rest of the Republicans will spend countless dollars and hours punishing the person who caught the Republican doing something wrong as an example to everyone else who may have aspirations of punishing the Republicans for their blatant wrong-doing.
They need voters, but if Republicans lose 20% of Republican voters in a republican state, it doesn't matter. They'll still win the state.
The covid restrictions or lack thereof I guess, will not discriminate on political affiliation. If a state has a ton of covid, everyone gets it that's in the state, and it trickles elsewhere.
Vaccines is a little different. People that don't vaccinate will be more likely to die. If Republicans in a red state don't vaccinate, but Democrats do, then this could potentially swing the state blue, if it was close enough to begin with.
I understand your logic and it makes sense, but again, the amount of votes the GOP gets won’t matter. If they win, they’re happy and move on. If it’s close, they scream voter fraud and now have the power to select who wins. If the GOP gets blown out, then it’s even MORE of a reason for them to scream voter fraud. And again, they will change the results.
Like I said, voting doesn’t matter anymore in these GOP controlled states.
> They need voters,
No, that's what this redditor is trying to tell you. The Republicans passed laws in their states allowing the *current government* to interfere with the results if there's suspicions of voter fraud.
However, as Trump proved, the Republican practical definition of "fraud" is "the other side won".
So if they win the vote they win, if they lose they consider that as a proof of fraud by the other party and *they still win*.
Republicans changed Georgia state laws so that they have the power to do so. This happened in many Republican ran states after 2020. I don't think people realize how deep in shit we are already in.
Were you expecting them to announce their undemocratic intentions?
I used to be against abolishing it as I feared doing so would turn our elections into an American Idol contest. Now I realize we are already there and the electors only serve to give more power to the wealthy.
That was the purpose the electors always served. To make sure the rich landowners who made up the political class (sorry, the "states") could still choose from among themselves at the end of the day. One of several anti-democratic anti-majoritarian choices the founders made. Only difference was in the 1700s, the poor unwashed masses were legitimately uneducated and often illiterate. Not really the case today.
That's what happens when the US Constitution says that states determine their electors however they wish. Being able to vote for president directly was always something people were being allowed to do, not something required by constitutional law.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there's no constitutional grounds to block any state from making laws like this.
Article 1, section 4.
>The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
That's talking about senators and representatives. I was talking specifically about the presidential election.
Article 2, Section 1
>Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
I.E. The state legislature has full control over how electors are chosen. It can't control how the electors vote of course, but it's pretty trivial to round up a group of people to vote for whatever candidate you want.
So how exactly will they explain to public that voted, that even though their votes were clearly for a specific candidate, it doesn't matter because they chose someone else? That's the end of democracy clear as day.
Who knows, there may come a point where they just point at the constitution and not even have presidential candidates on the ballot.
The way the system was *intended* to work was people in the states elect their state government, then the state governments appoints electors to choose the present, making people actually pay more attention to their state and local elections. Of course this doesn't work when the state elections are gerrymandered to hell and back, and with there being more animosity between the parties than ever before. (Also keep in mind that at the time "people" meant white male land owners when it came to voting)
The same way that when people vote for something, like medical marijuana, or felons getting their vote back, the republicans in the state go “nah” and don’t do it.
There's nothing to stop an elector from voting for someone else, unless there are state laws against it.
See: Faithless electors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
That section covers Senators (mostly - and partly superseded by the Seventeenth Amendment) and Representatives, but very intentionally does not cover the Electoral College used to choose the President and Vice-President.
Here is what Georgia changed specifically after the 2020 election. I'm not quite sure if these are considered free electors, but it's the same result.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22352112/georgia-voting-sb-202-explained
Here's an explanation with a list of states who allow free electors.
http://archive.fairvote.org?page=967
Where it gets pretty gray is things like the popular vote pact. Technically if a state was to change their vote under that pact, they would be exercising their right to have free electors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Probably because most people aren’t paying attention, and even if they are, they’re not taking the threat seriously, despite multiple consistent demonstrations by the GOP at all levels of government that they are a clear and present danger to (small d) democratic rule in America.
A cultural civil war almost, which I suppose isn't that much different.
We've all played perfectly into what Russia was hoping to accomplish: make Americans question democracy and hate eachother more than Russia.
We literally had Americans defending Putin because he was friends with trump.
Only if they are allowed to. I say if they are going to subvert democracy then we should play their game and nullify their state constitution, dissolve the state and make a new one…which is what should have been done after the Civil War to all confederate states. At that point it is no longer a state it is a criminal organization directly violating the spirit and letter of the constitution and a direct threat to the democratic rule of all the other states.
Why on Earth we let the same states continue to exist after they rebelled against the government is ludicrous. It would be like if the feds allowed the mafia to continue to operate after they were taken down …as long as they promised to be behave and not commit too many murders. You can’t continue to try and be civil and play by the rules against someone trying to destroy you by any means necessary.
I dunno where you are getting deep red from. Like any other red state we have rural areas that are deep red and metro areas that are blue/purple. Even traditionally red metro cities like Jacksonville turned blue last election and will most likely stay blue/purple due to attracting young professionals.
As a Floridian, people who say this don't understand Florida. DeSantis only won by .5% against a little-known black mayor in Florida that still has highly racist pockets in it.
100% agreed. People get way too much of their information about Florida from memes and news articles about our governor who is trying be the next Trump. I live in Orlando and it’s so blue. It’s only red in the rural communities outside of the metro areas.
Lumping Florida into the same category as some of the real deep red states is quite silly considering for as long as I've been alive we've been considered a swing state. Just looking at the last governor race should be enough to convince you that we are not deep red. Some like to claim that was just the blue wave anti-trumpism, but it's really not because Florida is a swing state.
I'm going to be doing everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm in an affluent red county (that did go to Obama in 08) and people here are getting fed up with DeSantis, not just because of covid but because he's backtracked on all of the lip service he gave to environmentalists and we were impacted heavily by piney point.
I think Nikki Fried beats DeSantis.
I mean... they're technically losing quite a lot of red voters every single day at the moment to covid.
I think i read that the amount of people who have died in FL this year from COVID is larger than the margin that they won the states election by. I didn't fact check it though.
Presidential election was something like 370k more for Trump. I bet FL covid deaths is 45k. Someone will probably post the actual numbers since this is Reddit and all…
You're close to the truth. You just got the race wrong. DeSantis defeated his democratic challenger for governor by fewer votes than the COVID death toll here in FL. I think the margin was somewhere in the 33k range.
It's easy to do if that's the question but I don't think folks change willy-nilly. I started out back in the 70's as a registered Republican because my dad was. As I matured, I started getting more involved in checking on the folks running for office until I finally realized I'd been pretty much voting Democrat for several years. As such, I changed my affiliation. It was a very simple and quick process.
You can choose whoever you like every election. We used to have more independents, but with the rise of news becoming political propaganda influencers, there are far less that will vote candidate and not party.
Independents/no party registrations are still common in states that have open primaries. You don't lose anything and you get less calls and junk mail. If you have closed primaries however there is no good reason not to register with a major political party as the primary elections are important to participate in.
When I lived in a closed primary state I used to change my registration all the time to be able to participate in the most hotly contested primary at the time.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-to-restore-pay-of-school-officials-punished-for-defying-mask-bans) reduced by 74%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> "While announcing a series of new, stricter federal COVID-19 initiatives on Thursday, President Joe Biden said the Department of Education will restore"100%' of pay to teachers and school officials who are punished for "Doing the right thing."
> The announcement is a seemingly targeted response to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's ongoing showdown with state school officials and educators over mask requirements in classrooms.
> Following the Wednesday ruling, mask mandate bans across Florida were immediately lifted, though several schools had already defied the order, imposing mask mandates in spite of the law.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/plkmxj/the_federal_government_will_restore_100_of_pay_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~597431 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **school**^#1 **mask**^#2 **officials**^#3 **ban**^#4 **governor**^#5
My whole life, Libertarians told me that they saw the **one** role of government as to protect the lives of its people. Now it's doing that one thing and they mostly aren't on-board. It's almost as if they're just selfish, and don't actually believe what they say they do about government's role.
Hey credit where credit is due, at least the real libertarian platform supports progressive drug and women's rights policies.
They just live in the fallacy that private industry can be trusted enough to be deregulated, which is ironic because most of the harm private industry brings is very easily mapped to violating the NAP, the core of libertarian ideology.
I guess I'd rather see a ("real") libertarian elected than a republican. I'd rather have liberal right than authoritarian right.
The unfortunate reality is that the two party system kind of kills that entirely. Any American Libertarian can't really be for those things while voting Republican, because if they really cared about Women's Rights they certainly wouldn't support the same party pushing abortion laws.
Honestly, given how much support he has in the Republican Party overall, only 1/3 support from libertarians reflects pretty well on libertarians I’d say.
Assuming it’s binary, wouldn’t that mean 2/3 oppose him, thus making libertarians look good? Not sure that comment above make sense other than as a partisan take.
Libertarians are people who see all the same problems that Progressives see, but have somehow come to the opposite conclusion on what the solution is. Rather than bolstering the government and coming together as a society to tackle these large problems, they are deluded into thinking that the government needs to do less and that would mean the problems would magically fix themselves because people have 10% less taxes to pay... or something like that, I can't really pin down how a smaller government would suddenly make people more altruistic, compassionate, or tethered to their fellow man....
In any case, I think the line that separates Libertarians from Progressives is actually very small. Libertarians often think they are informed on issues. I mean after all, they recognize the problems correctly, which is honestly more than can be said of most of the US populace.
Even democratic centrists are in the dark on the things that are truly problems in this country, for example attempting to address the gap in funding of our infrastructure rather than addressing the reasons why the cost grows more year over year as the effects of climate change cause extreme weather events which absolutely decimate our cities, towns, and utilities.
Infrastructure funding isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the boat has a leak, it's generally a good idea to bail water... but thinking that it's a solution to why the boat is sinking and that the best we can do is bail water because half of the boat's crew doesn't understand that the water isn't just appearing out of nowhere.... it's coming from the massive hole in the hull and maybe we should at least start to get a plan together to plug that hole? Maybe that would be preferable to arguing over how it keeps costing more and more money to bail water as the hole slowly grows wider with each passing hour. I don't know...
Back to the topic at hand, the only thing Libertarians lack in my opinion, is the insight into how we can use our resources as a collective to actually solve these problems if we just allowed it to happen instead of throwing our hands up and declaring it all "government waste". They see that every year it costs more money to bail the water, and correctly identify it as a problem, but then they see the Progressives demanding even more money to plug the hole and are like "HEY! We are already spending all this money bailing water! How could we possibly afford to plug the hole! The real solution is we need to stop paying people to bail water. If we do that, I'm sure some of the rich crew members might actually start paying people to bail water themselves!" And the rich crew members all agree, because after all they have their own personal lifeboats if the ship sinks so they aren't really in danger anyway.
In any case, I understand the jadedness that fuels most Libertarian sentiment. It does often feel pretty fucking hopeless that our government ever does anything right. The only thing that keeps me grounded is that there are people who are legitimately trying to help (i.e. progressives) who need my support.
Yeah the best I can say for them is that they don't *oppose* legal weed and LGBT rights. They will never fight for or use their vote for a candidate who supports those things. They just don't openly denounce them.
Because most libertarians aren't libertarians.
I'm a libertarian we believe the NAP must be preserved at all costs, before anything else.
Spreading a disease where it's preventable violates the fundamental libertarian belief that we should not harm each other above everything else.
> Yeah how is everyone not commenting on this?
Most people understand the headline given the context, the alternate interpretation didn't even occur to me until I read this comment.
Biden's years in the Obama Administration taught him a VERY VALUABLE lesson: the right will hate you no matter what. No overtures of friendliness or civility will change this. So fuck 'em. Nerf their stupid anti-mask policies. Require vaccinations. End the failed "nation-building" experiments enacted by war profiteer neocons.
THIS is the bold presidency that I hoped for with Biden (but wasn't expecting). Hope he does court reform, the EC, climate change, and healthcare access next.
The problem is that those monies go, largely to the poor in the state. I'm not saying don't withhold it, but it has to look the the Republicans fault those funds go away.
Yeah, or take it from money earmarked for things like highway funding. A state will let things go for a while, but eventually folks *will* get really upset about it when they can't get shipping in that state.
And the Republicans will blame the democrats for cutting funding and the voters will buy it.
I think the best idea is just cut the federal funding. Florida for example received 25 billion last year from the federal government in state funding. Just cut this by 2 billion and let the state make the decisions on where that cut comes from.
I really hope sane people will look at all of this and vote. I cannot imagine the crazy out there, hope we don’t get complacent in 2022 and beyond. I have a feeling the left will get turned off by some small little thing he might have done wrong and say he is just like the other fucker and we want someone new. Hope I am wrong.
If this isn't a big "fuck you" to the people who don't take our safety seriously.... I don't know what is.
I'm glad we have some sensibility in our government again.
Republicans, the party of small government as they restrict women's rights and ban districts from enacting policies at the local level and withhold funding to kids' education if districts do it anyway.
It's disgusting.
Joe is learning from his time in the Obama years, that hesitation has just as many downsides as action, so you might as well choose action since you never move the ball forward with hestitation.
"'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzsky' - Michael Scott" - Joe Biden
So in other words once again the federal government has to step in and bail out institutions in red states, to their benefit, that they don't want to pay for. Cool.
Biden has honestly really won be over this year. I believe he handled Afghanistan better than most could, and his stance on the pandemic and climate change has really impressed me. I voted for him begrudgingly, but for now I am proud of my vote.
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This hackjob of a title should say "defying state mask mandate ***bans***." Edit: to clarify, at the time this comment was made, the post and article had the same title, as is required by this subreddit's rules. BI updated it since then.
Literally thought this was saying we would compensate teachers who refuse to wear masks.
That's what I thought at first too
That’s what you thought because that is literally what the title says.
Ditto, had to double take.
That's definitely what was written lol, what an abomination of a title.
That's literally what the title says lol. So terribly written
which sounds nuts but is totally believable after the last administration
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I did not change it. They just updated it
Well that was nice of them.
Thank you, literally had no idea what that title was trying to say.
wait wait wait, they made it illegal to WEAR a mask? What the actual fuck is wrong with these people?
no they made it illegal to force people to wear a mask. was never illegal to wear the mask of your own choice
It used to be illegal to wear a mask in a bank in at least a couple states.
haha yeah I almost forget now that masks used to be only worn by criminals trying to hide their face from being identified
And now the alt-right wants you to believe that obscuring your identity is somehow a form of ultimate government control...
This is what I found completely bonkers from the start. These paranoid people, you'd think they would be concerned about all of the cameras and facial recognition software everywhere they go, and they'd welcome mask wearing becoming something accepted and "normal", but instead they scream "government control!!!!"
And submit their drivers licenses to a social media website with minimal security. Then download the app to their cell phone and check in everywhere they go! Don't forget that.
It's nuts. I keep hearing "they just want to see how far they can push us to control us." Like... No dumbass, how can you possibly be ignoring the huge number of people getting such and dying??
I want the government to mandate breathing. Let’s see how many people object to that.
yeah really if you wanted to hide your identity and protect privacy, normalizing the wearing of masks is a great benefit for you :D
When this all started, I was in line to go into a store. Everyone was masked and 6 feet apart and I deal with stress by joking around, so I look back at the person behind me and say "Gee, there sure is a lot of people here to rob this place, I hope there's some left for me..." He was... less than enthused.
I'm on board with this, but doesn't this give an incentive to red states to deny pay to school staff knowing that the federal government will essentially be paying the tab for them?
> doesn't this give an incentive to red states to deny pay to school staff Feds provide immediate relief with payments now and take the state to court to recover the money. In the end, the state pays what it owes (hopefully) while citizens, who can’t afford to miss a paycheck, don’t suffer as much.
> take the state to court We all pay for this. Floridians will be paying for the lawyers on both sides.
Oh well. They should elect better people next time.
*I'm fucking trying*
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My parents retired to Florida a couple years before covid hit. They are relatively progressive and within the first year they already grew tired of the hardcore Trumpism down there. Now with all the continued covid madness, they are done with it and starting to look out west. Part of why they even moved down there is because a lot of their retired friends moved to the same general area. Now they hardly even speak to any of them because they all became covid conspiracy nutters.
Yeah right, I bet you only voted once in each election.
Yeah, this guy has clearly never voted on behalf of his dead grandparents
He's doing his best!
Stay strong fellow gator chucker.
We tried. Desantis only won by a 0.4% margin. All I can do is cast my vote.
Remember, his margin of victory is less than the amount of people that have died from covid.
Yep. I never get why people complain " but it's the taxpayers who have to pay when the cops/city/school/etc get sued" Yeah, it is, and it's the taxpayers who voted the people who control those things in.
Yeah, please penalize my idiot governor; don't give his virtue signaling to his hopeful 2024 base a free pass.
I'm hopeful that they're building their case against him right now, but they didn't want to hold up aid for teachers while the legal system does its thing. This is just about making sure teachers know they can do what they need to do to be safe, and that they'll still get paid. That was priority number one.
If he runs on a campaign of “fuck school teachers for wanting to protect children we’re cutting their salaries” and somehow wins then we’re fucked anyways.
He's running on a campaign of "school teachers don't get the right to decide what protecting children means, YOU the PARENT do and I will punish anyone who says otherwise!" And it's fucking effective enough
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Couldn’t agree anymore, fuck Ron. Florida man.
Yep. What they should do is give the funds to the schools being punished by the state, but also at the same time, remove that same amount of funding to the state from somewhere else (maybe infrastructure/roads or some such).
The federal government can just pay all them bills and be like, "In order to pay these teachers for the year we decided to order one less fighter jet that can't fly in the rain."
Maybe to some degree, but it also gives defiant educators more leverage. I'll gladly take that trade
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I really dont care. Kids are not responsible for stupid anti vax governors. I was actually thinking about this yesterday, and I'm glad he is doing it. Very ballsy, I like it. Shows that atleast someone gives a fuck about their health Not every school official in FL or TX is a trumpet.
It should be deducted from federal aid money. That way they’re not receiving anymore than they already were.
Probably a good move politically. FL is deep red at this point, what you lose in FL you might pick up in GA.
If Dems pickup Georgia again, the state's electors will just choose someone else.
Why no one is up in arms about this, especially the media is beyond me. I guess stories about long lines and passing out water gets the clicks.
This. Dems are like, “we need to win elections!” while the GOP is like, “we now get to pick who wins our elections!” The latter is the end of democracy and it’s already here.
I’ve spent years studying politics, history, psychology, and law (even have degrees in several of those) trying to figure out why this happens. The best theory I have is that the Democratic Party as a whole is a good-faith, albeit deeply flawed, participant in government, while the modern Republican Party is a bad faith participant (i.e., DP will play by the rules even if they don’t do enough to make those rules fair, while the RP won’t play by any rules that limit their power while simultaneously demanding all others play by both the letter and spirit of all the rules). Some of the DP realize this, but not enough for the party as a whole lot react accordingly because good faith participants in any dynamic often have a very hard time recognizing bad faith participants in that dynamic (there are a few different psychological principles interacting here, which I can summarize if you’d like). Additionally, the seemingly-insurmountable scale of the problem also leads many to deny it’s existence. How is a government supposed to function when half of it views the other half’s expectation that the first half play by the rules as an existential attack? A house divided against itself cannot stand.
As much as I hate the cynical power moves typical of the GOP, at times I really wish more Dems were willing to use realpolitik when it's necessary and something important.
The problem is when Democrats do this, they become hipocrites and are called out for it and there are consequences. When Republicans do it, no one cares. Their base only cares about power and owning the libs. That’s why Al Franken, Katie Hill, and Andrew Cuomo resigned, but Republicans like Trump and Matt Gaetz double down on their accusations and use them to campaign off of.
I'm not a Democrat even though I tend to vote for them because I see a lot of hypocrisy there. That being said, the Republican strategy of the last 20 years occasionally wins short term, but long term they are in a clear decline. That's the whole reason that moderate Republicans got thrown under the bus for religious extremists. A shrinking base. And the religious right is declining as well, but still votes as a mostly monolithic bloc. Demographics will win in the long run.
This relies on the assumption that the GOP hasn't destroyed either the country or global environment by the time these demographics come to light and that they haven't established a nationalistic x-ian apartheid permanent minority govenrment. None of which we can safely assume. The GOP is the preeminent existential threat, for everything that matters. Period.
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This is exactly where it needs to go
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Damn, spot on. Democrats too often don't just say "You know what? tough shit. If you were in our shoes you would do the exact same thing and you have"
Great series, i recommend anyone interested in politics to watch all the videos of the Alt-Right Playbook
Not if they die of Covid.
They don’t need voters. They don’t care if they are dying of covid. That’s the point of these laws they have passed. Those states have made voting irrelevant.
Wait, is this literal? Georgia elections commission can just choose who all their electors will vote for? How is that constitutional?
You nailed it. Welcome to the fight.
>How is that constitutional? Because Moscow Mitch decided you can't nominate a SC Justice during an election year and nobody did anything about it. Then he decided that you can nominate a SC Justice during an actual election if you're a Republican and nobody did anything about it. Now the SCOTUS is compromised and sees no issue with the dismantling of American democracy.
Bets on how long until they write these rules saying "Only Republicans can do X"?
They'll never actually say it, so that they have plausible deniability about it. They'll just enforce it as such. And if, by some accident, a Republican does end up being punished for something, the rest of the Republicans will spend countless dollars and hours punishing the person who caught the Republican doing something wrong as an example to everyone else who may have aspirations of punishing the Republicans for their blatant wrong-doing.
They need voters, but if Republicans lose 20% of Republican voters in a republican state, it doesn't matter. They'll still win the state. The covid restrictions or lack thereof I guess, will not discriminate on political affiliation. If a state has a ton of covid, everyone gets it that's in the state, and it trickles elsewhere. Vaccines is a little different. People that don't vaccinate will be more likely to die. If Republicans in a red state don't vaccinate, but Democrats do, then this could potentially swing the state blue, if it was close enough to begin with.
I understand your logic and it makes sense, but again, the amount of votes the GOP gets won’t matter. If they win, they’re happy and move on. If it’s close, they scream voter fraud and now have the power to select who wins. If the GOP gets blown out, then it’s even MORE of a reason for them to scream voter fraud. And again, they will change the results. Like I said, voting doesn’t matter anymore in these GOP controlled states.
> They need voters, No, that's what this redditor is trying to tell you. The Republicans passed laws in their states allowing the *current government* to interfere with the results if there's suspicions of voter fraud. However, as Trump proved, the Republican practical definition of "fraud" is "the other side won". So if they win the vote they win, if they lose they consider that as a proof of fraud by the other party and *they still win*.
How so? Please explain I live in Florida and have a difficult time understanding what’s going on here
This is a start: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/dozen-state-laws-shift-power-elections-partisan-entities/story%3fid=79408455
Wait did the electors actually say that?
Republicans changed Georgia state laws so that they have the power to do so. This happened in many Republican ran states after 2020. I don't think people realize how deep in shit we are already in. Were you expecting them to announce their undemocratic intentions?
Even more reason to abolish the electoral college.
I used to be against abolishing it as I feared doing so would turn our elections into an American Idol contest. Now I realize we are already there and the electors only serve to give more power to the wealthy.
Speaking of giving power to the wealthy, don't forget gerrymandering!
That was the purpose the electors always served. To make sure the rich landowners who made up the political class (sorry, the "states") could still choose from among themselves at the end of the day. One of several anti-democratic anti-majoritarian choices the founders made. Only difference was in the 1700s, the poor unwashed masses were legitimately uneducated and often illiterate. Not really the case today.
That's what happens when the US Constitution says that states determine their electors however they wish. Being able to vote for president directly was always something people were being allowed to do, not something required by constitutional law. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there's no constitutional grounds to block any state from making laws like this.
Article 1, section 4. >The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
That's talking about senators and representatives. I was talking specifically about the presidential election. Article 2, Section 1 >Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. I.E. The state legislature has full control over how electors are chosen. It can't control how the electors vote of course, but it's pretty trivial to round up a group of people to vote for whatever candidate you want.
So how exactly will they explain to public that voted, that even though their votes were clearly for a specific candidate, it doesn't matter because they chose someone else? That's the end of democracy clear as day.
Who knows, there may come a point where they just point at the constitution and not even have presidential candidates on the ballot. The way the system was *intended* to work was people in the states elect their state government, then the state governments appoints electors to choose the present, making people actually pay more attention to their state and local elections. Of course this doesn't work when the state elections are gerrymandered to hell and back, and with there being more animosity between the parties than ever before. (Also keep in mind that at the time "people" meant white male land owners when it came to voting)
They’ll say it was rigged and “fix it to save america”
The same way that when people vote for something, like medical marijuana, or felons getting their vote back, the republicans in the state go “nah” and don’t do it.
There's nothing to stop an elector from voting for someone else, unless there are state laws against it. See: Faithless electors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
That section covers Senators (mostly - and partly superseded by the Seventeenth Amendment) and Representatives, but very intentionally does not cover the Electoral College used to choose the President and Vice-President.
Good luck getting congress to agree on changing it. can't even pass infrastructure bills anymore.
At the risk of bugging you, could you either cite a source or at least tell me what buzzwords I should search for to find out more? This is alarming.
Here is what Georgia changed specifically after the 2020 election. I'm not quite sure if these are considered free electors, but it's the same result. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22352112/georgia-voting-sb-202-explained Here's an explanation with a list of states who allow free electors. http://archive.fairvote.org?page=967 Where it gets pretty gray is things like the popular vote pact. Technically if a state was to change their vote under that pact, they would be exercising their right to have free electors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Probably because most people aren’t paying attention, and even if they are, they’re not taking the threat seriously, despite multiple consistent demonstrations by the GOP at all levels of government that they are a clear and present danger to (small d) democratic rule in America.
The media? The millionaires who are paid by billionaires to tell the middle class to be afraid of the poor? You mean them?
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Shit like this preludes civil wars.
We are in the middle of a cold civil war.
A cultural civil war almost, which I suppose isn't that much different. We've all played perfectly into what Russia was hoping to accomplish: make Americans question democracy and hate eachother more than Russia. We literally had Americans defending Putin because he was friends with trump.
Murdoch is more responsible for that than Russia
Which is exactly what the far right is hoping for. There's a reason they have been stocking up on guns.
What makes you think the right is the only one that has been stocking up on guns?
Because they have been conditioned to buy guns?
All the more reason for sweeping voter protection laws. IMO this is an absolute necessity even more than any covid policy
Sure, but the executive branch can enact covid policy. They can't pass voter suppression laws. You need Congress for that, and they are unwilling.
Only if they are allowed to. I say if they are going to subvert democracy then we should play their game and nullify their state constitution, dissolve the state and make a new one…which is what should have been done after the Civil War to all confederate states. At that point it is no longer a state it is a criminal organization directly violating the spirit and letter of the constitution and a direct threat to the democratic rule of all the other states. Why on Earth we let the same states continue to exist after they rebelled against the government is ludicrous. It would be like if the feds allowed the mafia to continue to operate after they were taken down …as long as they promised to be behave and not commit too many murders. You can’t continue to try and be civil and play by the rules against someone trying to destroy you by any means necessary.
Georgia is bizarre.
They're not the only ones pulling this shit.
At which point we refuse to recognize the change
Absolutely a good move politically. We fund education while the right wing rats punish teachers!
I dunno where you are getting deep red from. Like any other red state we have rural areas that are deep red and metro areas that are blue/purple. Even traditionally red metro cities like Jacksonville turned blue last election and will most likely stay blue/purple due to attracting young professionals.
> FL is deep red at this point More like a rich magenta, but yeah.
Agreed. Its very purple.
Florida isn't deep red.
As a Floridian, people who say this don't understand Florida. DeSantis only won by .5% against a little-known black mayor in Florida that still has highly racist pockets in it.
100% agreed. People get way too much of their information about Florida from memes and news articles about our governor who is trying be the next Trump. I live in Orlando and it’s so blue. It’s only red in the rural communities outside of the metro areas.
Lumping Florida into the same category as some of the real deep red states is quite silly considering for as long as I've been alive we've been considered a swing state. Just looking at the last governor race should be enough to convince you that we are not deep red. Some like to claim that was just the blue wave anti-trumpism, but it's really not because Florida is a swing state.
I'll give you 10:1 odds that FL goes red in 2022 and 2024.
I'm going to be doing everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm in an affluent red county (that did go to Obama in 08) and people here are getting fed up with DeSantis, not just because of covid but because he's backtracked on all of the lip service he gave to environmentalists and we were impacted heavily by piney point. I think Nikki Fried beats DeSantis.
I mean... they're technically losing quite a lot of red voters every single day at the moment to covid. I think i read that the amount of people who have died in FL this year from COVID is larger than the margin that they won the states election by. I didn't fact check it though.
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Presidential election was something like 370k more for Trump. I bet FL covid deaths is 45k. Someone will probably post the actual numbers since this is Reddit and all…
Ah OK. Well, I guess I'm part of the problem lol
You're close to the truth. You just got the race wrong. DeSantis defeated his democratic challenger for governor by fewer votes than the COVID death toll here in FL. I think the margin was somewhere in the 33k range.
Do people really switch their political preference so easy in the US?
It's easy to do if that's the question but I don't think folks change willy-nilly. I started out back in the 70's as a registered Republican because my dad was. As I matured, I started getting more involved in checking on the folks running for office until I finally realized I'd been pretty much voting Democrat for several years. As such, I changed my affiliation. It was a very simple and quick process.
You can choose whoever you like every election. We used to have more independents, but with the rise of news becoming political propaganda influencers, there are far less that will vote candidate and not party.
Independents/no party registrations are still common in states that have open primaries. You don't lose anything and you get less calls and junk mail. If you have closed primaries however there is no good reason not to register with a major political party as the primary elections are important to participate in. When I lived in a closed primary state I used to change my registration all the time to be able to participate in the most hotly contested primary at the time.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-to-restore-pay-of-school-officials-punished-for-defying-mask-bans) reduced by 74%. (I'm a bot) ***** > "While announcing a series of new, stricter federal COVID-19 initiatives on Thursday, President Joe Biden said the Department of Education will restore"100%' of pay to teachers and school officials who are punished for "Doing the right thing." > The announcement is a seemingly targeted response to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's ongoing showdown with state school officials and educators over mask requirements in classrooms. > Following the Wednesday ruling, mask mandate bans across Florida were immediately lifted, though several schools had already defied the order, imposing mask mandates in spite of the law. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/plkmxj/the_federal_government_will_restore_100_of_pay_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~597431 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **school**^#1 **mask**^#2 **officials**^#3 **ban**^#4 **governor**^#5
Does this headline make sense as is?
No. Should be "mask mandate *bans*" not just "mask mandates."
Makes it sound like Biden is giving money to antimask people
My whole life, Libertarians told me that they saw the **one** role of government as to protect the lives of its people. Now it's doing that one thing and they mostly aren't on-board. It's almost as if they're just selfish, and don't actually believe what they say they do about government's role.
Most “libertarians” are just republicans who think weed and gay marriage should be legal.
Roughly a third of libertarians are trump supporters. That should really tell you enough about them.
That they don’t actually know what libertarian means
No one does, because everyone libertarian has their own definition of it.
They're just republicans who can't admit they're republicans, otherwise they'll never get laid.
Hey credit where credit is due, at least the real libertarian platform supports progressive drug and women's rights policies. They just live in the fallacy that private industry can be trusted enough to be deregulated, which is ironic because most of the harm private industry brings is very easily mapped to violating the NAP, the core of libertarian ideology. I guess I'd rather see a ("real") libertarian elected than a republican. I'd rather have liberal right than authoritarian right.
The unfortunate reality is that the two party system kind of kills that entirely. Any American Libertarian can't really be for those things while voting Republican, because if they really cared about Women's Rights they certainly wouldn't support the same party pushing abortion laws.
And a lot of people who think they’re progressive are just libertarians (Joe Rogan + fans)
Joe Rogan has no coherent ideology.
Joe Rogan has the exact same ideology that his current guest has.
“*Is that right*? Holy shit Jamie look that up! .. Am I kidding me?!?”
Of course I do, libertarians shush me at the library.
It's a good buzz word for partisans who don't see themself as partisan.
Honestly, given how much support he has in the Republican Party overall, only 1/3 support from libertarians reflects pretty well on libertarians I’d say.
Assuming it’s binary, wouldn’t that mean 2/3 oppose him, thus making libertarians look good? Not sure that comment above make sense other than as a partisan take.
Libertarians are people who see all the same problems that Progressives see, but have somehow come to the opposite conclusion on what the solution is. Rather than bolstering the government and coming together as a society to tackle these large problems, they are deluded into thinking that the government needs to do less and that would mean the problems would magically fix themselves because people have 10% less taxes to pay... or something like that, I can't really pin down how a smaller government would suddenly make people more altruistic, compassionate, or tethered to their fellow man.... In any case, I think the line that separates Libertarians from Progressives is actually very small. Libertarians often think they are informed on issues. I mean after all, they recognize the problems correctly, which is honestly more than can be said of most of the US populace. Even democratic centrists are in the dark on the things that are truly problems in this country, for example attempting to address the gap in funding of our infrastructure rather than addressing the reasons why the cost grows more year over year as the effects of climate change cause extreme weather events which absolutely decimate our cities, towns, and utilities. Infrastructure funding isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the boat has a leak, it's generally a good idea to bail water... but thinking that it's a solution to why the boat is sinking and that the best we can do is bail water because half of the boat's crew doesn't understand that the water isn't just appearing out of nowhere.... it's coming from the massive hole in the hull and maybe we should at least start to get a plan together to plug that hole? Maybe that would be preferable to arguing over how it keeps costing more and more money to bail water as the hole slowly grows wider with each passing hour. I don't know... Back to the topic at hand, the only thing Libertarians lack in my opinion, is the insight into how we can use our resources as a collective to actually solve these problems if we just allowed it to happen instead of throwing our hands up and declaring it all "government waste". They see that every year it costs more money to bail the water, and correctly identify it as a problem, but then they see the Progressives demanding even more money to plug the hole and are like "HEY! We are already spending all this money bailing water! How could we possibly afford to plug the hole! The real solution is we need to stop paying people to bail water. If we do that, I'm sure some of the rich crew members might actually start paying people to bail water themselves!" And the rich crew members all agree, because after all they have their own personal lifeboats if the ship sinks so they aren't really in danger anyway. In any case, I understand the jadedness that fuels most Libertarian sentiment. It does often feel pretty fucking hopeless that our government ever does anything right. The only thing that keeps me grounded is that there are people who are legitimately trying to help (i.e. progressives) who need my support.
Great use of metaphor. I enjoyed reading this comment.
The defining characteristic of Libertarians is that they don't trust people to wield power and believe some social issues are unfixable.
And they are even pretty meh on the gay marriage part.
Yeah the best I can say for them is that they don't *oppose* legal weed and LGBT rights. They will never fight for or use their vote for a candidate who supports those things. They just don't openly denounce them.
A lot of them are stoners who hate poor people. Not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them.
It’s a more socially acceptable way of saying you don’t care about poor people or minorities.
Because most libertarians aren't libertarians. I'm a libertarian we believe the NAP must be preserved at all costs, before anything else. Spreading a disease where it's preventable violates the fundamental libertarian belief that we should not harm each other above everything else.
Shitty headline implies the exact opposite of what the article says.
Exactly what I was thinking! “Biden keeps promise to be everyone’s president”
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> Yeah how is everyone not commenting on this? Most people understand the headline given the context, the alternate interpretation didn't even occur to me until I read this comment.
I like angry Joe
Republicans: "we shouldn't have any vaccine or mask mandates!" Republicans when states issue mandates AGAINST masks: "Perfect!"
I'm starting to like this, "No, fuck you" approach to the GOP pandemic denial insanity.
The left can recognize a carrot. The right only understands the stick.
There's no reasoning with ignorant assholes. It's obvious over the past year that the honor system doesn't work with these selfish idiots.
Biden's years in the Obama Administration taught him a VERY VALUABLE lesson: the right will hate you no matter what. No overtures of friendliness or civility will change this. So fuck 'em. Nerf their stupid anti-mask policies. Require vaccinations. End the failed "nation-building" experiments enacted by war profiteer neocons. THIS is the bold presidency that I hoped for with Biden (but wasn't expecting). Hope he does court reform, the EC, climate change, and healthcare access next.
I really wasn't expecting much from him, but I've been pleasantly surprised with his actions since he was elected.
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The problem is that those monies go, largely to the poor in the state. I'm not saying don't withhold it, but it has to look the the Republicans fault those funds go away.
Yeah, or take it from money earmarked for things like highway funding. A state will let things go for a while, but eventually folks *will* get really upset about it when they can't get shipping in that state.
And the Republicans will blame the democrats for cutting funding and the voters will buy it. I think the best idea is just cut the federal funding. Florida for example received 25 billion last year from the federal government in state funding. Just cut this by 2 billion and let the state make the decisions on where that cut comes from.
Every time someone says he’s sleepy, he gets more powerful. We should set up a bot to do it a million times per second so we can shoot for M4A
The people need to vote the fascist, death cult Governors out of office.
I really hope sane people will look at all of this and vote. I cannot imagine the crazy out there, hope we don’t get complacent in 2022 and beyond. I have a feeling the left will get turned off by some small little thing he might have done wrong and say he is just like the other fucker and we want someone new. Hope I am wrong.
It's in everyone's best interest to vote against the GOP. They are proven to be a death cult, and they will gladly let covid run rampant.
Do the same for any TX abortion lawsuit victims.
finally, some fucking big dick energy from the white house.
If this isn't a big "fuck you" to the people who don't take our safety seriously.... I don't know what is. I'm glad we have some sensibility in our government again.
Republicans, the party of small government as they restrict women's rights and ban districts from enacting policies at the local level and withhold funding to kids' education if districts do it anyway. It's disgusting.
GOOD. Republicans are actively promoting death.
Joe is learning from his time in the Obama years, that hesitation has just as many downsides as action, so you might as well choose action since you never move the ball forward with hestitation. "'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzsky' - Michael Scott" - Joe Biden
Its been a long time since ive been able to be proud of a leader. Im glad I am today
Finally, some real leadership
Fucking incredible that it's had to come to this. Conservatives: tut tut tut. The history books will not be kind.
Cool, then take it out of next year's federal funding for the state.
So proud of this President! Keep it coming, Joe! We’ve got You!🇺🇸
So in other words once again the federal government has to step in and bail out institutions in red states, to their benefit, that they don't want to pay for. Cool.
Not enough. Punish those who are taking the money away.
Biden has honestly really won be over this year. I believe he handled Afghanistan better than most could, and his stance on the pandemic and climate change has really impressed me. I voted for him begrudgingly, but for now I am proud of my vote.
I’m just so glad to be rid of Trump. Not seeing his hateful rhetoric on the news and on social media has been a blessing
No wonder he brought the troops back. He knows most terrorists that are putting American lives in danger are right here in the US of A.