DL Open Thread: Thursday, March 13, 2024
Senate Democrats (Kinda Sorta) Grow A Spine. In their pathetically-wimpy way. Will they, for once, remain resolute?:
Senate Democrats haven’t even surrendered yet on a government shutdown — but already White House officials are gloating about making them eat crow, almost taunting them to vote “no.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw down the gauntlet Wednesday, proclaiming that Republicans don’t have the 60 votes needed to keep the government open past Friday. But President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are increasingly confident Schumer will release enough centrists to put up the votes for passage, according to multiple White House officials I spoke to over the past 24 hours.
Trump has come right out and said it: They’re gonna cave. Will they? Tell me again why any wimps who unilaterally surrender should remain in the Senate. Starting with Schumer. Which reminds me–where the fuck is the messaging about how disastrous the Rethug ‘continuing resolution’ is? You know, to let the American people hear why the Senate needs to fight back.
With less than three days to go before government funding runs out, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is calling for a vote on the 30-day continuing resolution that top Democratic appropriators unveiled Monday night.
The guidance from the Democratic leader comes as Senate Democrats struggle with how to move forward after House Republicans shoved through the Trump-backed seven month continuing resolution on Tuesday.
“I hope, I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday,” Schumer added.
Locked out of power, the short-term CR and the push for a bipartisan spending bill is believed to be part of a messaging effort by Democrats who want to be able to say they did not roll over and accept the MAGA funding bill that House Republicans and President Donald Trump are shoving down their throats.
Schumer’s Wednesday remarks point to a possible off the floor negotiation. The public ask to vote on the 30-day stopgap would likely come in exchange for Democrats giving Senate Republicans the votes they need to invoke cloture on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) CR on the Senate floor. That would mean that Senate Republicans would ultimately be able to pass the House-passed bill with a simple majority, eliminating the need for Democratic votes.
I can’t even…
Just Another Day In Dystopia. Everybody On The Firing Line. FBI Goes After–Habitat For Humanity!!?? Say Goodbye To Environmental Protections. And Those Pesky Rules Of Engagement (all the better to attack Canada and Greenland?). Read that Canada/Greenland story. It’s implausibly plausible. Especially with a Putin wannabe as President.
A Fascinating Portrait Of The Man Who Created The Barnes Museum. AKA Albert Barnes:
From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Models ; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.
Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes’s home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school.
…Barnes’s stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson.
Hope I’ve intrigued you into reading this. If not, I’ll try to find something more to your liking tomorrow.
What do you want to talk about?
Because Dems have not successfully framed the issues, a Dem filibuster will look like an effort to preserve international aid and DEI offices, which have been successfully demonized by the complicit MSM.
Dems haven’t explained what cuts they would be voting against. Pick a sympathetic issue and stick with it as the reason for a filibuster. At this point all the public understands is Team Red vs. Team Blue.