American politics 2016: Lawyers, Guns, and D-Money

Repub concedes NC gov race

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy7eZrxUsAAmXe4.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/05/north-carolina-gov-pat-mccrory-r-concedes-closely-contested-governors-race/

Even in conceding the fucker has to play the voting fraud card.

every losing R is gonna do that from now on

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html

These stories have been legendary for eons, but getting a definitive account of over $100 billion a year in waste is pretty damning.

I'm an unapologetically pro-government liberal. I believe that the wheezy old Federal machinery, imperfect as it is, is often the only machine that is at least trying to work on behalf of those who are most vulnerable. I also frequently work for businesses that can be just as blindingly stupid.

That said, conservatives regularly exempt military spending from their litany of tsk-tsky "bad government, bad, naughty government!" The military is all that is noble and good and self-sacrificing. We need a strong military so that we can waggle our national erection before weaker nations. Military spending dwarfs every other category of non-entitlement spending. But when it turns out it's even more wasteful and bloated than anything mere civilians can come up with? Crickets.

Bad naughty government spending consists of PBS, the EPA, Common Core, Obamacare, grants for cowboy poetry.

So tell me if I'm simplifying this but if Scalia hadn't died, McCrory would likely have been re-elected.

xpost Reading that article, it seems less that it's guns 'n' planes 'n' bombs military spending, which offers the bang for the buck GOP loves best, and more just secretarial bureaucracy stuff. I honestly don't know how they determine what is "waste" and what is not, but I was impressed to see that the Pentagon at large employs over a million people, and, as it notes specifically, employs almost as many people working desk jobs in "business operations" as it does active troops.

What's sad is that lots of people will see that fact as a priori evidence of waste.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Those are all just abstract numbers, nowhere (that I saw) does it say what those people do, whether it's important, or what would happen if they were cut. Someone's got to be at a desk, paying bills, cleaning bathrooms, working at the cafeteria, signing checks, etc. It's not just people running around with guns or flying bombing raids, I imagine sending the aforementioned across the globe takes some extensive work.

Yeah and the more you decide to cut non-combatant costs by entrusting that work to junior junior purchasing clerks or bargain-priced contractors, the more likely it is to go wrong.

You'll just end up with the same $500 dollar hammers and thousand-dollar toilet seats*, but it will be due to incompetence in data entry as opposed to naked corruption.

* = note that many of these stories are overblown and/or misleading; e.g., the very expensive toilet seats actually turned out to be an entire toilet ASSEMBLY for a space shuttle, which one might expect to be solving slightly different problems than your shitter at home, thxbye

Yeah take "an army travels on its stomach" and expand to all the 1,000,000,000 things that need to be done to make every little thing happen around the world.

Tru facts from the front linez: at one time, my work involved analyzing and reporting procurement data for the U.S. Coast Guard. USCG technically predates the Navy, and has wandered among the War Department, Transportation, Defense, and Homeland Security; it therefore has interestingly overlapping procedural overlays and operates under several different regulatory frameworks all at once. Its acquisitions are complicated.

1. A junior procurement officer in Yorktown, Va. had purchased some photocopier parts. He looked at the box and it said "Made in Korea," and he dutifully entered a code he thought was right but that indicates North Korea. There was some consternation among people wondering why the American people were buying North Korean copier parts. I don't know if this rose to the level of Congressional attention, but it might have.

2. In a similar vein, these systems required a two-letter code for place of manufacture. "AL" is the code for Albania. Woebetide the clerk who is purchasing something from Alabama.

3. While junior clerks were being hassled over minor data-entry problems like these, an entire billion-dollar shipbuilding program decided the system was too cumbersome to even bother interacting with, so they just kept their own records on a locally-maintained Excel spreadsheet.

Did I read that right that at one point the report was made top secret?

uh, Clinton thinks CONGRESS should "act" against 'fake news'? What a smashing civil libertarian. See what you've done, max?

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/309532-clinton-blasts-epidemic-of-fake-news

What a stupid thing to do with a repressive regime coming into power, what the fuck is wrong with her?

@dick_nixon
Finger on the pulse, just like the campaign.

In his Daily Beast article, published on November 21, Chacon describes how he manufactured the forged Goldman Sachs speech transcript. He says he did it prior to learning that the WikiLeaks releases of Podesta emails contained actual Clinton speech excerpts to Wall Street banks. But once he realized WikiLeaks had published actual Clinton transcripts, Chacon began trying to lure people he disliked – Clinton critics – into believing that his forged speeches were real, so that he could prove they were gullible and dumb.

Sadly for Chacon, however, the people who ended up getting fooled by his Fake News items were the nation’s most prominent Clinton supporters, including supposed experts and journalists from MSNBC who used his obvious fakes to try to convince the world that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and thus should be ignored. That it was pro-Clinton journalists who spread his Fake News as real now horrifies even Chacon....

Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/

You worry about her & her campaign, and I will worry about this instead:

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/09/womens-march-on-washington-barred-from-protesting-donald-trump-inauguration/

National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst told The Guardian that agency rules in place since 2008 give an inaugural committee preferential access to some public areas along Pennsylvania Avenue, the National Mall and surrounding land. Litterst said it will likely take crews until March 1 to dismantle the barricades and seating assembled for Trump’s inauguration.

they've secured an alternate location

still bullshit, obviously

They still have not announced the "alternate location" as far as I can tell

next time you want to buy the media just remember to buy the fake media too

https://twitter.com/haircut_hippie/status/806727683195355136

TX's refusal of medicaid expansion doing a lot of work vis a vis the point of that story

Right, the fact that states are turning down free money in a bid to undermine their poorest citizens' right to health care is the real scandal

"Well, the Republicans..." is generally the response to anything of that sort - which is simultaneously true and irrelevant. Did anyone think the Republicans were going to work with Obama to make the ACA a success once passed? If they did, would they like to buy some beachfront property in Montana?

The masses aren't going to suddenly understand the complicated ways in which the American right undermines them - all they see is a party that's just as integrated with wealth and power and not doing anything they can see to help them, because the measures that would are automatically off the table.

Yes, but what about the Republicans?

@gatorgoat
You know what a good message is to non-voters? "Vote for me, and I'm going to give you a raise and make sure you can go to the doctor."

Not "if you make between $24,678 and $29,284 you will receive a subsidy of 9.3% of your adjusted income toward a tiered-access health plan"

"Consult subsection VI, graph 4 to determine your indexed income (adjusted for current interest rates) to see if you qualify for a 1% raise"

"If your locality participates in an exchange market and you qualify for the earned income tax credit you may get a 0.931% incentive"

"Just go fill out this 336-page form and we will contact you for your initial interview to determine eligibility in 4-6 weeks"

THIS SHIT IS WHAT DEMOCRATS CALL "HELPING" AND THEY'RE CONFUSED WHY THEY LOSE ALL THE FUCKING TIME

https://twitter.com/gatorgoat/status/809064589715456000

can we talk about what a piece of shit the israeli ambassador to the US is?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ron-dermer-praises-frank-gaffney

Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official, also has promoted the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim, as well as the conspiracy theory that public figures including Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist have covert ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Ambassador Dermer is not aware of any anti-Muslim views held by the Center for Security Policy and certainly would not endorse any such view,” a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. told the Southern Poverty Law Center in November when asked about Dermer’s acceptance of the award.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/north-carolina-mystery-special-session

https://www.facebook.com/JeffJacksonNC/posts/596258303910095

it is insane

Summary of what they're trying to do in NC:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/15/north_carolina_legislative_coup_an_attack_on_democracy.html

"Legislative coup" is not an overstatement.

north carolina, kansas. this is our shitty future!

yeah, been following the NC situation. Are there any NC ilxors who post in politics threads?

Following the Putin model, I'm reminded of how one of his first moves was getting rid of any regional governors who opposed him and installing Kremlin-friendly bureaucrats. The majority of U.S. governors and legislatures are already Republican anyway, obv. Though there won't be any takeovers of Northeast or West Coast state governments, I'm sure they'll look for ways to curb and limit their powers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/opinion/how-do-you-get-to-be-a-governor-in-vladimir-putins-russia.html?_r=0

Following the Putin model, I'm reminded of how one of his first moves was getting rid of any regional governors who opposed him and installing Kremlin-friendly bureaucrats.

http://i.imgur.com/L6qfuWU.jpg

Following the Putin model, I'm reminded of how one of his first moves was getting rid of any regional governors who opposed him and installing Kremlin-friendly bureaucrats. The majority of U.S. governors and legislatures are already Republican anyway, obv. Though there won't be any takeovers of Northeast or West Coast state governments, I'm sure they'll look for ways to curb and limit their powers.

― birthday party, cheesecake, jelly beans, boom (tipsy mothra), Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:03 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, the two big setbacks I see for that approach are: (1) it goes completely against the way our government is set up by the constitution and (2) Republicans tend to be very attached to that aspect of our system, in fact their whole agenda is to make states MORE powerful and the federal government less powerful. If Trump wishes to do the opposite, it's going to be an interesting struggle.

That said, two ways that come to mind if they do want to do this would be (1) using the power of the purse, i.e. revoking or limiting federal funding based on allegiance to certain policy goals (as is already being floated wrt sanctuary cities (2) creating broader federal police powers and increasing the scope/size of those bodies under the guise of anti-terrorism or immigration or something.

#1 is difficult for them, because it's been almost entirely the conservatives on the Supreme Court who have shot down that approach, including in very recent decisions on the Affordable Care Act.

I'm not saying they won't try anyway, but there are some pretty key differences between the U.S. and immediate post-Soviet Russia.

I mean I'm not saying *it can't happen here*, but we are pretty far away from having a system that looks like this:

Governors in Russia are formally elected by the residents of each region, but the complex nominating process and the election commissions, which are controlled by the Kremlin, allow the president to make anyone he wants a governor,

I'll come right out and say that can't happen here

Or whatever's going to happen here will look a lot dumber.

since it involves our electorate, probably

I mean it can happen here if they, like, figure out how to dissolve and remake our system of government. But otherwise no.

so Red Dawn scenario basically

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bf/ItCantHappenHere.jpg/220px-ItCantHappenHere.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/68/It_Happened_Here.png/440px-It_Happened_Here.png

our republic will last 3000 years

Yeah, I didn't mean there could be any kind of direct federal takeover of noncompliant state governments. But with all the federal levers and so many state levers in the same hands, I'm sure there will be various kinds of pressure brought to bear on unfriendly states and cities.