The Song Remains The Same

Cable news anchors should take this week off.  They can just run repeats of their Monday broadcasts for the rest of the week. Because the news hasn't changed: Democrats still haven't passed a reconciliation bull to expand social amenities, the Senate is trying to come up with a climate policy President Biden can advocate for at the upcoming climate summit in Scotland, Joe Manchin has issues, and the remaining sticky wickets are the scope of parental leave benefits, Medicare and Medicaid expansions, a "billionaires tax" in place of a tax rate hike, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. And this is really putting pressure on the gubernatorial race in Virginia.

Right now, I'm cautiously optimistic that something will get passed soon, though I think top Democrats in Congress are more optimistic than I am.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer says that “a final deal is within reach" in the face of disputes on two particular issues, Medicare expansion and prescription drug prices.  That's sort of like saying that a new car is almost ready to come off the assembly line but the factory workers still have trouble installing the engine and the axles.  

The story will likely remain unchanged tomorrow, and the day after that.  And on Friday, when MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell has his day off.  He won't miss much.  But perhaps the reconciliation bill and the basic infrastructure bull can both pass sooner rather than later.  But probably not soon enough of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, who, I'm afraid, is already toast. Why did he even want to come back?

Green Stalemate

An environmental expert recently wrote an editorial in a local community paper in my area about the "victories" environmentalists can be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend. Specifically, he mentioned the delays on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas and on the plan to hydraulically fracture land in the Delaware River basin for natural gas.

Since when are delays of environmentally destructive projects that might end up going through anyway considered victories?

He also wrote that these so-called victories come at a time when the national environmental movement continues to have to be on the defensive because of attempts to deny that climate change is real and attempts to abolish (or at least emaciate) the Environmental Protection Agency. So, when you get right down to it, the anti-environmentalist movement within the American right is on the side that's winning.

What Walter Cronkite said of the American war effort in Vietnam in 1968 sounds like what the environmental movement faces today; environmentalists in this country are mired in stalemate, and to say so seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. Anyone who thinks that American environmentalists are winning the battle need only look and see how many of their countrymen now think that maybe climate change is a hoax after all.