Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Sen. Chuck Schumer speaks on COVID-19 relief breakthrough with Sen. Toomey" video.

@fungalmasterpiece4114 Yup. To Joe’s credit, he said forcefully, not forcibly. We can use our votes and our speech forcefully. Those who advocate violence to forcibly impose change are a threat to both society, democracy, and individual liberties.
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I’m an ex-Republican. I’m registered independent. While I foresee myself voting for Democratic candidates for as long as the GOP is in the hands of criminals, I don’t think I can bear to register as a Dem. I do think there is a room for a moderate (or moderately conservative) faction in the Democratic Party—there has been in the past. So we’ll see.
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Is that relevant? Whatever his other failings or your opinion of him as a person, does he support Covid relief or not? Is he helping get a package passed or not? Don’t put petty politics over the health and welfare of the entire country.
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Ask Pat Toomey, the guy who created this last minute obstacle. I can’t tell if he was just trying to make a political point or to actually sabotage the compromise.
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Fingers crossed 🤞 that you’re a Georgia Republican 🐘.
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Perhaps he is. Can you point out which specific lies you think he told this time?
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The reason for $600 rather than $1200 is the leadership of the Senate refused—they wanted NO direct stimulus checks. If there was no compromise at $600, it’s likely there would either be no relief package at all or no direct payments at all.
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@RedGuajiro Proof?
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@LivingLove-lw6kf What you want is a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy as set forth in our constitution. It’s not impossible to achieve. California and other states have modified their state constitutions to allow voters to directly vote on initiatives. There is growing support for dispensing with the electoral college. What you seem to want will be difficult to achieve, but as I said, it’s not impossible.
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It’s both. Agreed, it’s not enough for the hardest hit, but it’s the best they could come up with since the Senate leadership’s position was to give NOTHING. Even though there was bipartisan support for $1200! And despite the compromise, the package was almost torpedoed by Senator Toomey at the last minute! It’s still a stimulus because not all who receive it desperately need it. These people will spend it on goods and services, keeping the economy on life support until the majority of the population is vaccinated and back at work. Perhaps they will be charitable and give the money to those that face eviction or are already evicted.
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There was bipartisan support for $1,200 payments. It’s important to know who blocked that, whether they are Republicans or Democrats (and I’ll give you a guess). Those who compromised and accepted $600 checks shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. They knew how important it was to get something out the door. Now let’s get more philosophical for a moment. I want to touch on the orthodox GOP response to lockdowns, which is “the cure can’t be worse than the disease”, meaning jobs are more important than lives, that the economy is more important than hundreds of thousands of lives, that my job is more important than your life or even the lives of my family members. Or even my own life. Sacrificing a half million or a million is worth it if it means we “get back to normal” sooner. Before addressing the humanitarian aspects, I want to question the premise that the economy can return to normalcy when millions are getting sick, and hundreds of thousands are dying, and sane people concerned for their own health and the health and safety of their families are staying at home as much as possible. It defies logic. Pretending that the deaths aren’t real doesn’t remove them nor does it minimize their cause. But I hear a straw man conservative saying, “but if people are voluntarily locking themselves down, following mask protocols, limiting their gatherings, why do we need government imposed lockdowns, mandatory masks, and government limitations on gatherings? The reason is this: a significant portion of the populace, for various reasons (usually boiling down to ignorance, delusion, politics, or hatred of expertise), defy common sense measures and are instrumental in the spread of the virus. These self-described “free thinkers” emulate the actions and words of their political leaders, and their selfish, antisocial mindset is reinforced by those words and examples. That is why we need lockdowns. It’s not for the people already doing their best to stay safe. It’s for the jerks that don’t care what happens to anyone else, the ones that defend their “right” to not wear a mask* even when it will deprive others their right to live. As a conservative, I understand the tendency towards wanting less government control, more liberty, less government spending. I have a basic belief that, for all its problems, capitalism is the best economic engine for the development of society. However, I do not ignore the fact that we are in a national emergency of unprecedentedly proportions, and that the damage to our country is going to get worse before it gets better. Whether I measure that damage in precious human life or our precious economy, I recognize the reality, and I recognize that ordinary conservative policies are not responsive and in some cases make our national tragedy worse. And I also recognize that in a time of national emergency, the federal government must lead a national response. At the start of WWII, we did not delegate the response to Japan, Germany, and Italy to the states. There was an all of government response that harnessed the entire country to defend ourselves. Imagine how the war might have ended if each state was left to its own devices as aggressors swept across the globe, while the president insisted it wasn’t a world war. Austerity isn’t an excuse to ignore a national emergency. Individual liberty isn’t permission to thumb your nose at the society that helps protect your liberties. We face a common threat in Covid-19. Unite or die. “So, what about the stimulus checks?” asks my conservative straw man. Why everyone? Shouldn’t they be targeted only to the most needy? If their sole purpose was to help the most needy, those facing or in the midst of financial collapse, evictions, hunger, etc., yes. And the Senate could have spent the past 6 months determining who should get this assistance and how to deliver it. But that is not the sole purpose of the stimulus checks. The other purpose is right there in the name, STIMULUS. The purpose is to stimulate the economy, to encourage people to spend on goods and services, thereby preserving jobs, which maintains demand for goods and services. It’s a stop gap measure to keep the economy alive, to provide fuel to the engine so it doesn’t die. In the long run, keeping it alive now is cheaper than trying to revive it later. Letting it die increases the risk that capitalism will be replaced by a social system less amicable to human liberties and human rights. There. That’s the conservative argument FOR economic stimulus. What’s more, it harnesses the marketplace and consumer choice, rather than allowing government to pick the winners. What can be more conservative than that?
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@joeblack007 It has nothing to do with addressing the emergency, if that helps you understand. At best it was political grandstanding to demonstrate GOP power to scuttle aid, at worst it is a GOP attempt to damage a Democrat President’s ability to respond to the Covid crisis, so Biden would look bad.
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Who are you threatening with violence?
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How so?
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Romney didn’t try to sabotage the relief bill. (Neither did Spector, for obvious reasons.)
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@wvpatriot3077 LOL, no. Unless you mean that keyboard warriors are patriots, and that their staging areas are living room couches and the seats in front of their computers. LOL, your revolution is online, and more of a revolting masturbatory fantasy than an actual revolution.
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Let it go. There is no evidence that the election was corrupted. Any such evidence only exists in the fevered imaginations of cultists.
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@geekedmaxx You either believe the COVID pandemic is real or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re delusional and not worth arguing with. If you do believe it’s real, and are taking the position that “the cure shouldn’t be worse than the disease”, what you are saying is that your job is more important than the lives of your neighbors, your family, even yourself. Get it? You think your job is more important than your own life! Don’t you think that is crazy?
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@tombragalone7250 I posted this on someone else’s comment, but maybe it’s a better suited response to your comment. You either believe the COVID pandemic is real or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re delusional and not worth arguing with. If you do believe it’s real, and are taking the position that “the cure shouldn’t be worse than the disease”, what you are saying is that your job is more important than the lives of your neighbors, your family, even yourself. Get it? You think your job is more important than your own life! That’s just crazy. Measures like this package are what will keep the economy alive, and will make a recovery possible in the next year. Government measures limiting the economy, mandating masks, social distancing and gatherings limit long term economic damage as well as deaths to hundreds of thousands of Americans. Denying that the pandemic exists is delusional. Believing the pandemic is a government conspiracy is delusional. Agreed? I hope so, because debating the contents and structure of the relief package is futile if we don’t agree on basic reality.
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No. It’s not time. Maybe that time is coming, but it’s not right now. Maybe wait until we have a new President in office, and hope like hell that there he has a senate majority, or you can forget it. If you want to advance your cause in the meanwhile, I suggest you work your ass off to get those two Georgia Democrats elected to the Senate. If that doesn’t work, there’s the 2022 midterm elections. No doubt those campaigns will be starting over the course of the coming year.
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