Time to put up

The two hold outs against passing the "Build Back Better" bill are standing in the way of the Democrats holding Congress just over a year from now.  While Congress, and Democrats in particular appear incapable of getting any legislation passed, Biden's poll numbers are tanking. 

Oddly, that may give Biden some leverage. He has only to convince Manchin and Sinema will likely follow suit - she won't want to be the one person to have sunk the Democrats entire post-Trump agenda. 

So what will it take to get Manchin on board?  How about threatening to primary him from the left?  If he sticks to his guns the Senate is lost anyway, replacing him with a progressive won't make any different to the Dem's control of the Senate.  But if he likes his job, and I suspect he does, he'll reach a compromise pretty quickly.

Thumbs down

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instgram were all off-line this morning. According to the New York Times "it was unlikely that a cyber-attack caused the issues. That’s because the technology behind the apps was still different enough that one hack was not likely to affect all of them at once."  That suggests that all three platforms were taken down deliberately by someone inside Facebook, perhaps even by the company itself. Why might they do that? Perhaps its intent is to rile up its users to by showing how much people rely on these platforms in the hope that their dismay at begin deprived of Facebook's services can be channeled into preventing Congress (or the DoJ) from legislating or ruling to curtail the company's out-sized influence.