I would normally agree with the general sentiment that the POTUS gets both too much value and too much credit for the economy, and that particularly early in a term we are usually still seeing the results of older policy.

Except that in Trump’s case he has spent the first 100 days in office implementing policies with nearly universal agreement that there will be an immediate negative impact. Drastic, nonsensical EO’s like mandating commerical truck drivers speak English. The tarrif nonsense. Threatening global war with the talk of annexing Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Etc.

You should looked up how Congress works. They need a Supermajority to pass most legislation, and the Dems only had that for about 4 months from 2009-2010. The last time they had that control was under Kennedy/Johnson in the 60’s.

Even without those DINOs they still didn’t have a Supermajority. Honestly I think most people just don’t understand the difference between a majority and Supermajority and mistakenly believe 50 is enough in the Senate.

Then why didn’t Republicans vote for it?

And not just votes. Republican Attorneys General across the country tried to get it overturned in the courts. The House and Senate Minority Leaders have quotes strongly against it. Romney himself did not hold any office at the time the ACA was passed, but was preparing for his next presidential campaign. He described it as “an unconscionable abuse of power…the act should be repealed”.

If you look more closely at the Massachusetts state government in 2006 when Romney was governor and passed “Romneycare”, you’ll find that the state Senate was dominated by Democrats 34-6, while the state House was dominated by Democrats 139-20-1. There’s a much, much stronger case that Romneycare in Massachusetts was a Democratic piece of legislation than there is that the ACA was Republican.

The Republicans had plenty of control of the federal government before Obama, and their plan of "leaving Americans with nothing* was already in place. That’s what the Republicans voted for in 2010 by voting against the ACA.

Who said anything about dual majorities?

What times are these?

As I said, they have only had control for 4 months in my lifetime. Before that you need to go back to 1961-1969 with Kennedy and Johnson. I would actually need to do more research to find out whether they had a Supermajority or not, but it’s not even worth looking up because going that far back in time shifts the politics of the parties significantly and is not very relevant to today. The Democratic Party still has plenty of Southern Conservatives all the way into the Carter years.

So I would love to know what pattern you are seeing.

Romney was indeed a Republican, but a moderate one. The Church of Latter Day Saints has always been a weird outlier in American politics, and as a Mormon Romney largely follows that tradition. Utah itself is a great reminder that the trends Americans see with the two-party system, where every issue is a binary choice with the GOP or DNC each picking an option, the reality on the ground is more complicated.

It’s also worth looking to how Romney was the first senator in US history to vote to impeach his own party’s president. He did it again the 2nd time Trump was impeached too, along with a handful of others.

That’s not to say that I like Romney at all, or even that I like the ACA or even that I like the Democrats.But Romney is perhaps the furthest left Republican and created that initial bill with the intention of being a bipartisan compromise. He’s far closer to Neoliberal than Nazi. And while it was the foundation, his bill was NOT the final bill that passed into law. The bill that did pass saw 100% of Republican senators vote against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with 1 meaningless Republican vote. To say it was a Republican bill is simply historically inaccurate.

My apologies if a crosses a line with the comment, but calling the ACA Republican is demonstrably and factually false and, in my opinion, actively spreading disinformation.

The bill passed the Senate 60-39, with 1 abstaining. All 39 Republicans Senators voted against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with only 1 Republican vote.

If you want to say it wasn’t enough, that’s completely fair and I would agree. If you want to say the Democratic Party, both back then and today, is dominated by Neoliberal interests and suppresses Progressives or Socialists or whoever else then I would also agree. But none of that was the conversation- the bill that passed was demonstrably not Republican.

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They had control of the Presidency and the House of Representatives. I never said they didn’t have that- I said they didn’t have control of the Federal Government.

The Senate was tenuous. Just having 50 Dem Senators (well, that’s not true either because you need to include Independents to get to 50) isn’t good enough- you need 60 votes to have a filibuster-ptoof majority. The Dems just barely scraped that together in 2009, complicated in part by Ted Kennedy’s seizure and eventual death and Al Franken delayed in getting seated due to recounts. They only had 60 votes (still including Independents) from September 24th 2009 - February 4th, 2010. 4 months of controlling the federal government.

That is why when the 2008 financial crisis happened and the Dems wanted to pas a stimulus package in 2009, they had to get Snowe, Collins, and Spectre (who would leater switch parties to get them to 60) from the Republican side in order to get that passed.

They absolutely did not have control of the Supreme Court at any point in the Biden administration and the Republican SCOTUS shut down a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do. I remember checking every day for months to see how they would rule on Student Loan forgiveness, for example.

This is why they have the perception of being powerless- because they’ve pretty much never had the power. The Republicans love people who say the Democrats are useless. They love saying Biden didn’t do what he promised when he DID and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court reversed it. They love being able to stall Democrat legislation and blaming a Democrat president. Everything the Dems have done outside of those 4 months have required careful compromises and negotiation with the GOP to pass.

I agree about “fuck em”, let’s get out with the old and in with the new.

But what majorities are you talking about? I keep seeing this repeated all over the internet- the sentiment that Democrats get nothing done when they have control. The problem is that I’m 33 years old and the Dems have only had control of the federal government for a few months of my life, and that’s when they passed the ACA. I can’t really make a judgement on what the Dems do when they’re in power because they largely have not been.

I always thought it was weird how much attention people were paying to span messages. Giving them that much attention only serves whatever purpose they have.

This feels like it would be an actual Deadpool joke

That is the maximum size, but it’s also the most expensive size.

Street Fighter 6 is 60GB on Steam, so they probably could put it on the 64GB card if they wanted to. But it’s going to be a download.

Bravely Default is only 11GB, but it’s going to be a download too. Probably because it’s a much more niche game that SE doesn’t expect to sell a lot of units of. It’s probably more comparable to an indie game where the physical release is more of a collector’s item for hardcore fans than the main way they expect people to play the game.

It’s a combination of Nintendo following their tradition of using expensive and obscure formats, publishers being cheap, and some combination of publishers/devs for not optimizing for storage.

And it seems to have worked out for him pretty well. He lives an incredibly lavish lifestyle, won the presidency twice, has a huge collection of devoted followers, and generally seems to have avoided any negative consequences.

Between Trump and the people around him, SOMEONE know what they are doing.

Imagine believing that Democrats are homogenous

Maybe if you live under a rock?

Exactly. The whole world suffers from that. And I’ve seen a LOT of Democrats get absolutely destroyed by their bases for supporting it. Fetterman went from being a folk hero of work class Pennsylvanians to a genocide-mongerer. Cory Booker just pulled off a pretty amazing feat of giving a 25 hour filibuster and yet the news cycle very quickly shifted to how he voted with Republicans to continue bombing Palestine.

This meme doesn’t make sense to me because I’ve never seen Republicans send that accusation towards Democrats. If anything, Republican criticisms tend to go the other way: that Democrats should mind their own business and that there is a moral obligation to limit the scope of government (not that they actually care about that, but they say they do).

Imagine believing that a party can have a policy that doesn’t affect you.

That’s where the “analysis” part of “cost-benefit analysis” comes in and it doesn’t make sense to generalize like you seem to want to.

Is it really that much more responsible to run Windows 11? You seem to have a LOT of faith in Microsoft to keep you safe. There’s plenty of reasons to not switch to Windows 11.

I also use Linux on some machines. But I can also see why there are reasons why one distro or another, or even Linux in general, may not be the right call for some people.