#biden does good things

[rabbiteclair]

i think light novels are really going somewhere

[tittyinfinity]

my food stamps got cut by $14 more??? After it was already cut by $60 a few months ago???

I'm now receiving $185 less a month in food stamps than I got a few years ago. And food prices have nearly doubled. This is bullshit.

[gammija]

...

[definitelyforsurenotbees]

name 10 good things Biden did that actually had a tangible effect on everyday people particularly marginalized people.

Listen. I’m not a political science major by any means (STEM kid) but I do know this: you want tangible effects? Look at your local government. That’s where policies are being made that you’ll feel like have tangible, daily effects. Things that affect your commute, your neighborhood, hell even your trash pickup schedule.

But I get it, you want to know what this old fart in office is even doing. What’s the point in voting for him when he doesn’t do anything for you? The thing is, presidential acts are a lot more big picture. There’s plenty of info online but Biden’s actions absolutely have far reaching impacts, just not the immediate, acute kinds you might be thinking of. Here are some examples JUST FROM ONE SINGLE PRESIDENTIAL ACT (America Rescue Plan)

provides relief directly to low and middle income families via child tax credit act

Reduced child care costs for black families

Cut black child poverty in HALF.

Greatly increased SNAP benefits.

Emergency rental assistance

Homeowner assistance fund

Foreclosure protection

Provides funding for folks recovering from or at risk of homelessness

State small business credit initiative

Grants to expand, diversify, and improve access to registered apprenticeships for underserved communities.

Remember, when it comes to $$, Biden can pass these acts. It’s up to state and local governments to actually work out the nitty gritty of funding distribution. Pay attention to your local politics, and for the love of god please vote blue.

[powerfulkicks]

idk i'm really tired of people being angry and bitter all the time. like it gets exhausting to constantly be yelled at and guilt-tripped and to see passive aggressive posts passed around, even when the posts aren't directly addressed to me.

at a certain point it's like is this behavior actually helping anything or do you just like the feeling of righteous anger?

[dashiellqvverty]

one thing people online are going to do is attribute things to taika waititi that he has literally nothing to do with (from that post abt wwdits where they are interviewing the SHOWRUNNER who is NAMED in the article and is very much not taika)

[spacedouterri]

.

[lildoodlenoodle]

Don’t want to vote for Biden, but who the fuck is else am I supposed to vote for

[the-physicality]

this election discourse reminds me so much of finals discourse…. (Obviously much higher stakes but)

[lesbianpetecampbell]

I relate so strongly to that "Is chat a fourth person pronoun" post right now watching everyone fail to understand the definition of the word fascist. No, the Democratic party is not fascist. No, the founding fathers were not fascist. Yes, Donald Trump is fascist. Fascist is not a word for "political ideology I don't like" or "when the government does bad stuff" its a defined term based off of the ideology and policies of Mussolini's fascist movement in Italy. This is like how liberals will call Putin a communist because they don't like him and Russia was in the Soviet Union 35 years ago.

[thoughtportal]

Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it

When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.

Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.

I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.

Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.

All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.

But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)

Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.

Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.

The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.

Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.

Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.

This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.

Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.

Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.

{source}

[merl-out]

unless ur a palestinian queer

I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

[doux-amer]

I'm sorry, I usually ignore inflammatory posts like the one I just saw, but the amount of condescending lecturing by op and everyone in the tags was unreal and made me see red. How dare you say that to care about people suffering and dying is a privileged stance? To be in a position where you can dismiss people's feelings like that is actual privilege. Marginalized people aren't being heard so abstaining from voting is one of their only tools left to them. That is what it means to live in a democracy (I'm saying this as someone who encourages people to vote now and previously worked as an organizer in getting people registered and getting people to vote). You can't dismiss that.

And you can't "this guy's not that bad except he wants to exterminate people/doesn't care about exterminating people" your way into a better society. If you don't understand either of these things, you are unbelievably privileged af and you've been fortunate enough not to be in a position where you can't exercise the right to vote and/or live in an authoritarian regime, no offense (full offense intended).

I'm going to be real with you. If you're announcing to the world that you're going to vote for Biden this year, don't lie to yourself. Saying that publicly has little impact on influencing anyone reading your tweet/Tumblr post, particularly if you run in liberal and/or progressive circles. Like I said in the tags in the previous post, you're just doing it to guiltsplain to your leftist friends and followers to make yourself feel better about your choice. If you weren't driven by that guilt, you'd just shut up and vote for him quietly, fully aware of what you're doing and how you feel about it. There's no reason to be so loud about it because if you were that worried about democracy dying or whatever, then do something that has a real impact like directly working in the community.

[rederiswrites]

I am not unaware of the negatives of Biden's presidency, and I am not trying to elide or forgive them. I'm reblogging posts about the Biden administration because I think it's really important that potential voters in the US realize that there is, in fact, a very big difference between the two parties, and voting for Biden is not just damage control--it actually does good. It's okay, you can actually feel a little excited about making meaningful progress, and not just hold your nose.

He's been very unflashy. He's not a great leader, he's not charismatic and he knows it, but he's an adroit politician and administrator, and he's been getting things done. Letting Trump win at this point would be tantamount to throwing the entire country on the bonfire. It's not a choice between bad and bad, it's a choice between meaningful, if imperfect, progress and fucking doom.

[lamplightjuniper]

hmm not really sure how calling out 84 tumblrinas who are specifically Not Voting is more useful than idk contacting 85 apathetic real-world people and trying to get them to vote instead.

it’s SIGNIFICANTLY easier to convince people to move from the middle or neutrality towards your opinion compared to people who already have strong opinions.

it looks like this:

neutral -> mild conviction -> your opinion

versus

strongly held conviction -> weakly held conviction -> neutral -> mild conviction -> your opinion

and it requires a LOT of energy to get from every single step to the next. Swaying someone once they’ve made up their mind is difficult under ideal circumstances.

there are so many apathetic and non-voters who can be reached with much less effort than people who are adamantly not voting.

If you are in the US and really care about the presidential or any elections, take a quick pause from posting on tumblr and google:

<county name> phone bank democratic party

(or <state name> if you are in a rural or very red area)

and link up with people who are actually trying to mobilize potential voters. posting can be useful but it isn’t boots on the ground.

And phone banking can be done from home in a lot of cases, you don’t physically need to knock on doors (although if you can that also has an impact) but you need to put your energy where it actually matters if you want people to vote.

[qqueenofhades]

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/743255237060689920/the-thing-that-confuses-me-about-the-dont-vote

The “don’t vote” left’s point is basically that, if Biden gets a second term, it’ll basically signal that “They’ll vote for us as long as we’re not Republicans, why don’t we do some REAL fucked up shit, if we can get away with it?” It takes the power out of the people’s hands and places it firmly in the party’s.

I can’t completely disagree with that, my caveat is that there’s no real alternative system or party in place, because top-down change is ineffective; a third party president has to contend with a two party congress.

Except no. This whole "Biden just wants to do as much fucked up shit as possible while not being a Republican, and if you give him a second term he'll do more fucked up shit deliberately to spite you" mindset is only possible as an interpretation if you a) deliberately and comprehensively ignore everything he has done to date, and b) you approach the situation with the maximum bad faith possible. Not to mention, the ultimate outcome of this Big Important Teaching Biden A Lesson is that Trump gets back into power and makes everything orders of magnitude worse, because he does in fact want to deliberately do evil shit to everyone and says so at every opportunity. There is not some magical happy alternative that springs into existence by not voting. If you choose this as a year to Teach Biden A Lesson, you are enabling Trump. Trump will be much, much worse. If you don't care about that, I still do not care what your Great Ideology is. You are not helping anyone and you are directly and irreversibly hurting everyone.

I made a post a few days ago wherein I mentioned that I want to assess Biden fairly, taking into account both strengths and weaknesses, but the rampant bad-faith, lying, misreading, misrepresentation, and open sabotage of him (especially by the online left; the GOP sometimes only wishes they were as good at turning Biden's voter pool against him) makes it really difficult to do that. My frustration with those people makes me just want to go "BIDEN IS GREAT THE END." I know he is a flawed old man (though by literally every account of a career spent in public service, he really does care about making the world a better place and any remotely good faith reading of his accomplishments thus far can see that). It is also very likely that he goes MORE left in a second term because he won't have to face the electorate again, he has always gone more left when pushed before, and he's not actually the scheming genocidal mastermind that leftist social media paints him as. Shocking, I know.

I know there are things in the world we don't like and don't want and want to stop, and therefore we blame our own president for not making it stop. But I have zero, no, none, absolutely none whatsoever sympathy for this pseudo-populist "WE NEED TO TEACH BIDEN A LESSON BY ELECTING TRUMP AGAIN, I AM VERY MORAL MUCH ACTIVIST" mindset. There's this funny thing about America wherein it is still (for now) a democracy. If Biden wins a second term, he can't run again. I would take literally anything these people said more seriously if they focused on developing their dream progressive successor for 2028 (and also figured out how to get that person elected and in a place to make real change) rather than cynically sabotaging Biden in the most consequential election year, again, of our lifetimes. If you don't like him now, find a way to make his successor a better option. Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY. I still don't know how many times I'm going to have to say that, but yeah.