Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

The mine disaster.

has anyone made the 'the invisible hand of the market has tiny fingers' joke yet bc I did

YES

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/12/01/thursday-morning-open-thread-peotus-trump-fraud-in-chief/

Our system isn't one.

Update: Since someone on Twitter asked, the other four people to get under 50 percent in each contest were John McCain (2008), Michael Dukakis (1988), Walter Mondale (1984) and George McGovern (1972).

"Looks like the Washington Post may have decided the nation needs a Paper of Opposition, since the NYTimes is determined to control the Kneepads Brigade."

oh ffs

balloon juice is a great name for anything though

some peoples shoulders are v prone to chipping huh

The Shoulderchips Brigade

josh marshall has been writing a lot about the possibility of medicare phaseout, this post was interesting and highlights some of the difficulties the GOP will encounter in trying to phase out both medicare and ACA: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-are-gops-now-asking-dems-for-helping-killing-obamacare-and-medicare

i have trouble understanding their motivations for wanting to kill medicare and social security, even at great political cost. clearly a subset of republicans want to do it. but why? is it just pure ideology - they oppose the idea of a federal govt, SS/medicare are successful and popular federal programs and contribute to a perception that the federal government can provide basic essential services, therefore they have to go?

they want to kill poor people

no point in sugar coating things imo

Esp. black ones (xp)

Alan Grayson tom

otm

eh it's just that they want more business for the private sector. making peoples lives worse is incidental but not a dealbreaker

That's the economic motivation; the rest is psychological. I've heard it said too many times from conservative relatives that it's your fault if you don't find a job w/insurance.

The underlying assumption seems to be that a private-sector thing is always and everywhere better than a public-sector thing.

Government employees never do anything right, you see! And they have no incentive to do anything right because they're impossible to fire. People who work for _real_ businesses have to be competent, because if they aren't, they get fired.

Never mind that none of the above is correct - I've seen plenty of mind-boggling inefficiency, redundancy, and petty tyranny in private-sector companies of all sizes. Government employees abolished slavery, defeated Hitler, built the Interstates, and landed on the motherfucking moon. Then there's everything they've done to safeguard your health, beat diseases, ensure you have safer food, cleaner air and water...

Government employees abolished slavery, defeated Hitler, built the Interstates, and landed on the motherfucking moon. Then there's everything they've done to safeguard your health, beat diseases, ensure you have safer food, cleaner air and water...

yeah, but imagine if the employees of GloboCorp could have taken those things on instead. the civil war would have been finished in 2 years, at a quarter of the cost, Stalin and Mao would have perished along with Hitler after issuing public apologies, the interstates would have extra lanes, and the moon would be a gas station on the way to alpha centauri.

Government employees never do anything right, you see! And they have no incentive to do anything right because they're impossible to fire. People who work for _real_ businesses have to be competent, because if they aren't, they get fired. omg heard a guy on the train this morning say the same exact thing becasue the train was running about 10 mins late. must have been all those government workers just taking their breaks on the tracks .

tbf i heard many government employees make the same argument themselves.

if only amtrak was run like model corporation megabus, where the buses are always on time and there's always someone on hand to let you know which line to stand in.

The only thing that makes the private sector good at ANYTHING is competition. Government services that are monopolies anyway are not going to be run better just because they're suddenly in the hands of someone taking a profit.

The biggest problem with that standpoint isn't 'private corps will do it more efficiently' it's whether efficiency is the proper metric, especially when it's code for 'profitability.' I don't want prisons or transit or Medicare to be judged by efficiency; they should be evaluated by their contribution to the public good.

I know it's a trenchant argument, but I'm surprised how often it's overlooked.

Like I don't think there's a single profitable public transit system in the world. Hence the name.

The only thing that makes the private sector good at ANYTHING is competition. Government services that are monopolies anyway are not going to be run better just because they're suddenly in the hands of someone taking a profit.

Did Thatcher and Reagan fight and die in vain?

we can only hope

https://twitter.com/dick_nixon/status/678455833957670912

oops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXWVpcypf0w

Like I think you see some of the worst imaginable abuses in situations where the govt just takes some monopoly service (e.g. prisons) and hands it over to one or two corporations. You still have the monopoly and the lack of incentive to do anything well, but with less oversight or concern.

The private sector often does *efficiency* better than the government, because that's one of the ways it earns profit. But the benefit of every service can't be boiled down to *efficiency.* Sometimes efficiency is even antithetical to the benefit.

Donald J. Trump
‏@realdonaldtrump
McCartney is responsible for something like 5,000 suicides every Christmas due to "Wonderful Christmastime." Ask him about it.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/804407177368715265

just posting this to get it out of the way

it feels exhausting to blame jill stein or other third party candidates at this point

the blamefest in general is exhausting

mhm

people who still vote 3rd party in swing states are probably beyond reasoning w/ anyway

Yeah, as I've been saying on that point -- she had a pretty bad showing as a third-party candidate, you're not going to get a much weaker one than that. So, assuming this is all her fault, your options are:
1) Ban third party candidates
2) browbeat the candidates and or their supporters even harder, hoping you will finally make it so that no one runs and/or no one votes for them
3) Come up with a better campaign strategy so that someone with like 20k votes in a swing state doesn't cause you to lose

yeah and what iatee said. If you want to bang your head against a wall, spend it on the registered dem trump supporter -- they're worth twice as much as the stein supporter!

(a vote lost for Trump plus a vote gained for Clinton)

sry for weird metaphor, spending banging your head makes no sense

banning 3rd party candidates wouldn't be a terrible idea. the problem is that we have what is in practice a runoff voting system, but a few people just don't understand that and given room to pretend otherwise. bernie and trump were the real '3rd party candidates', sanders and johnson were just ways to express that you decided not to vote.

and *are given room

and ugh 'sanders and johnson' should be 'stein and johnson'

fwiw, the one thing I liked in the Stein interview I listened to was that she advocated ranked or instant runoff voting.

jill stein advocates changes to help save us from jill stein, basically

lol true

obvs you still have the problem of how many of those people would have gone Clinton. PA in particular seems pretty unlikely - you'd need nearly all of her voters to go Clinton rather than another candidate or stay home.

the weird thing about this election is that similar to brexit I think, if you had a repeat election 3 days later, I think the outcome would have been reversed. not all of those stein voters would go clinton, but many would and more importantly I imagine a lot of lethargic voters would have shown up. plus I bet there were some trump voters who were just trying to make a statement.

people love to have someone or something concrete and simple to blame, particularly when it can be tied into a moral failure on the part of voters (an extension of the "personal responsibility" ethos they've internalized from conservative talking points) xp