AM Quickie

The political stories and election updates you need to know to start your day- all in five minutes or less. Co Hosted by Sam Seder and Lucie Steiner. Powered by Majority.FM

https://fans.fm/amquickie

subscribe
share






Mar 8, 2021: Senate Passes Chopped-Up COVID Relief


Welcome to Majority.FM's AM QUICKIE! Brought to you by justcoffee.coop

TODAY'S HEADLINES:

The Senate passed Joe Biden’s flagship Coronavirus aid package on Saturday, against unanimous Republican opposition, despite all of the concessions hacked out of it by centrists like Joe Manchin.

Meanwhile, The U.S. proposed an interim power-sharing agreement with the Taliban, the fundamentalist government turned insurgency that we overthrew in 2001, showing just how deranged and pointless the past 20 years of war have been.

And lastly, Biden signs an executive order meant to make voting easier, as state GOP bosses aim to brutalize voting rights all over the country.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The Senate passed Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Saturday, narrowly scraping by without Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker vote because one Republican was absent.

The other 49 members of the GOP voted against the bill, even after conservative democrats like Joe Manchin had made sure its most progressive bits were sliced out.

Manchin personally lobbied against the $15 minimum wage amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders and had worked hard to shoot down a bump to the $300 a week enhanced unemployment benefits keeping many Americans afloat.

Biden supported both of those things, but because he currently doesn’t have a handle on his own party, the barely-Democratic brigade ran the show.

Reuters reported that the Senate set a record for its longest single vote in the modern era, at 11 hours and 50 minutes, most of which spent on shooting down dozens of Republican amendments and negotiating a compromise on the UI benefits for Manchin’s sake.

Since the Senate hacked up the bill originally passed by the House by removing the minimum wage increase, they have to send it back to the Representatives before it ends up on Biden’s desk for him to sign.

Still, it does mean that we’re one step closer to actually getting the $1400 checks that Biden has agreed to give us. He originally promised $2000, but hey, who’s counting. It’s not like we’re in the midst of a desperate global recession or anything!

U.S. Proposes Sharing Power With Taliban

We have been at war in Afghanistan for 19 years, five months, and one day. In October of 2001, we invaded the country to overthrow the Taliban, a fundamnetalist regime that was believed to be hiding Osama Bin Laden. We later found him in Pakistan, but nevermind.

Last week, the Biden administration proposed a plan for a sweeping power-sharing agreement between the Afghan government we installed after invading and the Taliban, showing just how little the U.S. has accomplished after almost 20 years of violence.

The power-sharing plan, which was obtained and published by Afghanistan’s Tolo News, is a sort of last-ditch plan for some semblance of peace in the country. The U.S. is pushing for, at the least, a restart to the peace talks between the two groups brokered by the United Nations.

Biden faces a May 1 deadline to decide whether or not to leave any troops in the country. In a letter also published by Tolo, Biden’s secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, warned Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, that the Taliban would take over massive swathes of territory if U.S. troops pull out.

That’s what someone who wanted to stay at war would say, of course, but unfortunately it’s also probably true. The U.S.’s decades of war in Afghanistan have left everyone involved, except perhaps the Taliban, in a no-win situation.

The Washington Post reports that Afghan experts think the Taliban is moving closer to a total military victory, but doesn’t want to then have to lead a country that would get cut off from U.S. aid. As we said. There’s no winning in this one.

Biden Orders Voting Access

Biden signed an executive order on Sunday aimed at expanding federal voting education, outreach, and access.

Sunday was the 56th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Birmingham Alabama, but the order he signed is somewhat less revolutionary than the actions civil rights leaders took there.

Biden’s order largely pushes federal organizations to modernize their voter outreach programs, including vote dot gov, and expand access to registration materials to people with disabilities, incarcerated people, and other underserved groups.

What it doesn’t do, of course, is directly combat some of the outright attacks on voting rights that have been launched in GOP-controlled state legislatures for years. The GOP under Trump, and after him, has been engaged in a nationwide push to restrict voting rights as much as possible, because they know they can’t win elections in a fair or representative democracy.

Biden does support HR1, the For the People Act, which passed the House last week. That bill does lay out several more concrete ways to fight back against the GOP’s anti-democracy forces, so it’ll be important to watch that one as it hits the Senate.

But the GOP’s onslaught on voting may be on firmer ground in the courts, as the conservative-majority supreme court is currently hearing arguments on an Arizona case that could limit activists' ways to fight voter suppression.

Biden’s order is at least a token acknowledgement of the problem, but if Democrats want to hold any power at all in the next few cycles, they’re going to have to get serious about protecting every American’s right to vote.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

A U.N. report revealed that the world’s population wastes more than two trillion pounds of food per year, which breaks down to roughly 163 pounds per person in private homes alone, to say nothing of restaurants and businesses. This isn’t to scold everyone for not finishing their dinner, but more of a reminder of the damaging inefficiencies that the global economic system wreaks.

Meghan Markle said in an explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey that forces inside the British Royal family prevented her from receiving mental health support and psychiatric help, as well as speculated about the skin color of her child with Britain’s Prince Harry. Monarchies -- not great, it turns out!

The CDC is expected to release its official guidelines for what vaccinated Americans should or should not do at some point this week. We’ll expect those to be pretty cautious, but still might have some encouraging notes for people who’ve gotten the jab already.

And finally, it’s all falling down for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, including, perhaps, his bridge, as a new report shows that structural problems with the bridge named after Cuomo’s father were covered up. Adding to this, more top state democratic officials are calling for his resignation. Not looking good for the guy.

MAR 8 , 2022 - AM QUICKIE

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn


fyyd: Podcast Search Engine
share








 March 8, 2021  7m