Senate Approves Infrastructure Bill

At long last, infrastructure week is here! The gang contemplates what the bipartisan plan and ...

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At long last, infrastructure week is here! The gang contemplates what the bipartisan plan and Democratic reconciliation package mean for the country and the economy. Also, how would Sen. Goldberg vote on the bipartisan bill? Then the discussion turns to what should be done about the latest damning climate report. Plus, everyone’s worst fears about Afghanistan from a few weeks ago seem to be coming true. And finally, for dessert, Andrew Cuomo.

Show Notes:

–Uphill’s latest update on infrastructure

–IPCC report 

–Pentagon press secretary John Kirby

–State Department spokesman Ned Price

–Cuomo resigns

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Comments (51)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Appreciated the very interesting discussion of climate change and Afghanistan. I certainly hope infrastructure week doesn’t become infrastructure month. It’s got to be one of the most boring topics, haha, no fault of the hosts, of course.

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  2. GregS

    Sarah made an interesting argument regarding Cuomo's excuse of "I'm just a poor dinosaur who got caught up in changing standards." She said, that society might have said that men would be allowed to get away with it, but this behavior was never okay to women, and so it is OK to judge him even if the "standard" was different at the time he did some of the things he did.

    I'm willing to bet good money that black slaves in the US did not consider it acceptable to enslave, rape, and murder them. I also don't think this was an unknowable secret to someone who owned slaves.
    So should we judge Thomas Jefferson (for example) by that standard, or does he get a pass?

    Would be interested to know if thinks there is a difference between the two scenarios and why.

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    1. Avatar photocircle-angle-nib
      Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

      Great question! TJ certainly knew slavery was morally bad. Most if not all of the founders did. They struggled with what to do with it in everything they wrote. So yes I think very much we can judge them by their own standards at the time. That doesn’t mean that their contributions to self government aren’t impressive or praiseworthy. But you don’t just ignore their acquiescence to an obvious evil either. People are complicated, rarely all one thing or another and we—the heirs to their political legacy—would be smart to treat them as such. Cuomo’s sins and victories on the other hand are far more mundane on both counts. We won’t struggle to think about his legacy. We won’t think of it at all.

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      1. GregS

        Oh yeah Cuomo won't even be an afterthought of history, no question about that.
        Thanks for the response, and I agree with your position on this entirely. When we say "we shouldn't judge someone by today's standards" we conveniently elide the fact that the person being judged almost certainly knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway because they knew they could get away with it. And also it doesn't negate all the good they did, but it does have to enter jnto the calculation.

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  3. Paula Weber

    I doubt this is the most appropriate place for this comment but here goes anyway:
    I believe it was near the end of the Trump administration that David wrote a piece on the "crisis of competence" in the administration to deal with the ridiculous lies that Trump was listening to and circulating about the election. I would love to see a piece of the same caliber regarding the crisis of competence regarding the CDC and FDA. It seems there was and continues to be a desire to keep up noble lies instead of simply rescinding, apologizing for said lies and stating actual goals, methods, and data. There were huge error bars at the beginning of the pandemic... some of those have shrunk drastically and some remain due to delta. It would be nice to know what those actually are. The experts have not covered themselves in glory or at least they have proven themselves to be very poor teachers of their own expertise.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Deb4711

    I take the podcasters' point that the public has moved on from Afghanistan and it won't have much political salience. But, I can imagine a very good political ad that juxtaposes the Taliban's rapid progress toward taking over with the administration's refusal to recognize that reality.

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    1. GregS

      Meh as the TD crew said, you can have an ad with Pompeo and Trump saying the same things. This is a bipartisan, decade long problem. I'm guessing the withdrawal was moved up because they had intelligence showing the Taliban was planning something like this and they did not want to find themselves in a situation of having to escalate some offensive activities (and potentially even having a few US casualties here and there) during a withdrawal. That would have looked worse - like an actual retreat.

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  5. Gabriel Salas

    Sarah overlooks something about the burden of de-carbonization of the economy. The US and Europe built their economy over decades of mostly heavily polluting technology - coal power, diesel trains, etc.
    China and India have access to the cleanest technology ever, plus the speed of clean technological advance continues to be extraordinary. When batteries become widely economical (for now they are good to plug smaller gaps in grids), hydrocarbon based power generation is a goner. Does anybody think that there will be any new internal combustion engine vehicles being built by 2035? Thus, China and India will be able to develop their economy (China is pretty up there already) in a much more carbon-efficient technology environment.

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  6. Ellen

    Sarah says, re the Cuomo debacle, that this behavior was never okay to women. Having lived through the 80's and 90's as a woman, watching the Thomas hearings and the Clinton/Lewinsky/Broaddrick extravaganza, I have to vehemently disagree. In fact Jonah's recent G-File is a perfect walk down memory lane of how the leading (very powerful, mind you) feminists of the day were all over Thomas but then not only defended Clinton but practically fell over themselves to get in line. I still get angry thinking about how when the Lewinsky thing happened I naively looked to the feminists of the day to continue their Thomas offensive and call Clinton out as well. Nope, nothing. And worse, as Jonah's essay reminds us, they went the opposite direction. That is when the feminist movement lost me. They proved they never cared for all women. They just cared for a certain political demographic of women.

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  7. Avatar photo
    MarqueG68

    I do find it humorous when everyone on the podcast has to make a profession of faith before discussing climate. "First let me say that I *believe* climate change is real, and I *believe* it is man made." It's a moment of testifying to the modern secular religion, the one that's dispensed with deity.

    One or some or all of you should invite Antonio García Martínez to a podcast to talk about it!
    https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-holy-church-of-christ-without

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    1. Fudrock

      I don't understand what one thing has to do with the other. I'm sorry, but "belief" isn't strictly synonymous with higher orders of faith; it pretty reasonably describes the state of mind for any person who in evaluating the the world, or merely a part of it, makes a determination based on limited evidence, a limited capacity to evaluate or absorb not just what is unknown, but often times what is known, and predetermined biases that color how the information is heard and understood. On an empirical level, there's more evidence that climate change is occurring, and this time it's man made, than there is of the existence of God, but the former doesn't negate the value of the latter.

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      1. Avatar photo
        MarqueG68

        I can readily agree with all but the last sentence. In that one, I believe that we believe, uh, that our limited understanding of the earth's climate is sufficient to draw hysterical end-of-world fantasies, to which our brains are predisposed anyway. I believe our empirical understanding of the climate and the earth's climatological history is far too limited, based as it is on highly extrapolated proxy data, in which the merest mismeasurement can result in wildly different geohistorical reconstructions. And I believe we are obsessing over the essential-for-life trace gas CO2 because we're afraid our rich-world lifestyles must be shielding us from seeing the true invisible hobgoblins.

        Also, I believe we see CO2 as a bogeyman because we've poured billions into the political objective--clearly spelled out by political grant-making agencies--to find evidence that CO2 is really really bad and is going to be cataclysmic. That isn't empirical study. That's monomania.

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    2. GregS

      Suppose you're arguing with Magellan about whether the voyage across the pacific will take 3 days or 3 months. You might start by saying, "first let me say that I *believe* the earth is round..."
      The reason you say this is to distinguish your arguments from those made by flat earthers. You can call this a "moment of testifying to religion" if you wish...

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      1. Avatar photo
        MarqueG68

        I believe in climate change. I believe humans have effects on climate that are in some ways against our preferences, and in some ways work to our advantage. I do not believe carbon dioxide is the temperature control knob. I believe our understanding of the complex climate system is far too limited to make the broad assumptions we seem to have made in the modern world, based on a monomaniacal observation of only one factor.

        That would be my statement of secular belief.

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        1. GregS

          Do you have reasons for these beliefs or do you just take it on faith?

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          1. Avatar photo
            MarqueG68

            Touché!

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  8. Richard Fulmer

    Why does Jonah doubt Ned Price's statement that, "It is self-evident that the Taliban seek a durable solution"? Clearly, the Taliban wants a durable solution, it's just that their preferred "durable solution" is very different from our preferred "durable solution." Their solution is a permanent Islamist Afghanistan.

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  9. Pedro Goulart

    David has a point on Afghanistan, but that is undermined by hawks' own refusal to be honest about exactly what they want to the general public, which gives the impression that they keep moving the goalpoasts. So the public gets fed up and just stops caring or say "enough with everything". The issue is mixing up at least 3 different goals of American military presence in Afghanistan: the original war against the Taliban regime; the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism campaign against the Taliban; nationbuilding to improve living standards of regular afghans.

    The first was successful, no doubt. The second goes to David's point, but it depends on whether public opinion shares his parameters. But the third is where the issue lies. First, hawks shoot themselves in the foot if they keep expanding the goals to prevent a pullout. It might sound smart to claim goal X to go in and then goal X *and* Y (the human rights, women's rights angle) to get out, but the public will learn from this, which makes selling new interventions harder even if their goals were more modest.

    Second, you can't credibly claim that there was actual progress in the human rights front if that was totally contingent on the military presence of a foreign power. It's like claiming you fixed the hole in the dam by having someone keeping their hand on it for years. That is, unless the US accepted the fact the it would like to be some sort of neoneocolonial power and be responsible for Afghanistan like a custodian. But hawks never bothered to ask the public whether they accept that role, let alone to actually persuade them.

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  10. Avatar photo
    Adicesa14

    Very enjoyable. Lots of timely and interesting opinion on important topics. Thank you

    Everything you said about the $3,500,000,000,000 “soft infrastructure” package makes sense, including your skepticism that the $1,200,000,000,000 “hard infrastructure” package should make the “soft infrastructure” package less likely. Hopefully, your skepticism is just fear that the “soft infrastructure” package will pass anyway.

    The UN climate change dictation is an unscientific compilation of scientific studies. The topic is too complex for realistic prediction by modelling as we know it. Further, we probably don’t possess accurate measurement or assumed values for all the relevant parameters of which we are aware. To paraphrase computer users, “poor data in – poor result.” Certainly, given what we know, our fate should not be in the hands of politicians, or totalitarian governments.

    It is perfectly reasonable to blame both Trump and Biden for the short-sighted, and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan.

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    1. Jon N

      The reconciliation bill is going to pass if the bipartisan infrastructure bill is going to pass. The only way to get the votes from the majority of the 74 member progressive caucus votes is for both to be brought through together. It will likely get paired down a little bit which is good, but it’s going to be both. Manchin and Sinema know this. Pelosi will have the votes she needs one way or another. Like her or not, she doesn’t bring anything to the floor without having the votes.

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