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

They also tried to run up the popular vote by sending resources to places like Chicago.

Still not clear on how the mandate magic is supposed to work, did it help in the last six years?

above logic makes sense in theory, just has very little relation to reality, where republican congresspeople are way more concerned w/ being primaried than they are w/ demonstrating that they're a moderate

mandate magic is a bit like consumer confidence, or the bandwagon effect. it's about creating a widespread feeling that the balance of power has shifted to the winner.

you don't get bonus points for winning georgia and arizona. you either win or you lose.

iirc, you do get bonus points, in the form of more EC votes, and running up your EC vote and your popular vote totals strengthens your argument for that mysterious 'mandate' thing when dealing with a hostile Congress. A senator from Georgia or Arizona is going to be easier to persuade your way if you won their state, and a Representative, too, if you won their district, or even came damn close.

also some downballot effects, in theory

mandate magic is a bit like consumer confidence, or the bandwagon effect. it's about creating a widespread feeling that the balance of power has shifted to the winner.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 3:05 PM (forty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and it can evaporate the second an opposition party decides to obstruct everything

I mean they clearly did all this stuff because they thought they were going to win those states and didn't need to do anymore, and that was clearly overconfident of them. I don't think "avoid hubris" is fighting the last war.

From TPM:

The following is from a former federal prosecutor with deep experience in public corruption investigations and prosecutions.

"I've reviewed the redacted search warrant that the Court unsealed today.

It confirms what we assumed all along: (1) prior to seeking the warrant and to Comey issuing his letter, the FBI had no idea whether these were new emails, or duplicates of emails they previously reviewed--all they could see was non-content header information (to and from); (2) the FBI had no information to suggest that the emails were improperly withheld from them previously; and (3) the FBI had no facts to justify the urgency in seeking a review of the emails prior to the election. This latter point is key. Generally, DOJ policy commands that prosecutors and agents refrain from taking investigative steps (even non-public steps like seeking search warrants) within 60 days of an election in a politically sensitive matter.
Bottom line: nothing new, no urgency, no obstruction, no reason to defy longstanding DOJ policy and risk affecting the election. And there was simply no basis for Comey's decision to make matters worse by issuing a public letter to Congress.

If the prospect of a Trump-appointed FBI chief weren't so scary, there is no question that Comey should be unemployed right now.

I'm as prone to panic as anyone, but ... until Trump won people were writing obituaries for the GOP (as they are wont to do). And then suddenly ... people were writing obituaries for the Democrats. Which is to say, as bad as things seem it's not inconceivable that things can flip again in the next fews years, depending.

yes for all the "most polarized parties" ever stuff (except on surveillance, perpetual war etc), national elections turn on "Let's give Row A a chance..."

there was a good article about that after the election - both parties went through some dire times in the last 15 years, both bounced back rather quickly

that said the GOP does seem pretty sinister this go-round with respect to rigging things, dropping their standards, and abusing their power, so we'll see

yes expect the worst, especially given two generations of Dem 'centrism'

I read the fbi warrant and got pissed. Confirmed my suspicions that they didn't do a de-dupe across document collections. All they did was eyeball the metadata then sent their letter to our boy Chaffetz, who then leaked the fucking shit out of it to the media.

I dont know the details for what docs they have collected and what resources they have but I'm a paralegal who deals with this kind of shit every day. I know how easy it is to reduce emails, etc to an MD5 hash value and cross reference them against each other to de-dupe. the warrant says they have fornesic images of all this shit. if they had access to litigation support software you could run a hash dedupe in about a day.

Vanity Fair sez "impeach"

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/donald-trump-conflicts-of-interest-impeach

article is a joke, makes no mention of how impeachment actually works or the political maneuvering that would be necessary

fair enough but I thought you were in favor of impeachment proceedings?

(also I think anything hammering on Kuwaitigate is good at this point)

I am but that article's mostly just "gosh, sure looks like Trump is already doing things that are grounds for impeachment" which is sort of well duh

I mean unlike the GOP with Obama, I don't think we're going to be at a loss for grounds for impeachment. There's gonna be shit from day 1.

the real problem is leveraging the necessary political capital/driving wedges in the GOP to turn on Trump

or alternatively just loudly clamoring for impeachment/highlighting all the illegal shit so that Dems take back the House in 2018 mid-terms

agreed, for sure, I see it as a rallying point rather than the one path to victory

Xpost Amazingly, we might get shit well before that!

I probably said this already but it's unpresidented to have someone entering office with a) this low an approval rating and b) already beset with scandals. this is political capital and we need to pressure Dems to use it.

i know we cant/shouldnt jump on every inane thing he says on twitter but this is really something, almost self-parody

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 8m8 minutes ago
I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote - but would campaign differently

good mourning!

they thought they were going to win those states and didn't need to do anymore, and that was clearly overconfident of them

Well, perhaps they merely did precisely what almost everyone else who follows politics was doing, which was to look at polls and aggregators and 538 and RCP and the Upshot and PEC. I know I was. And while 538 saw more uncertainty than other aggregators (and were roundly mocked as an outlier), they still were confidently predicting comfortable Clinton wins in exactly "those" states.

"I tend to believe in the indicators everybody else appears to believe in" looks like overconfidence in retrospect, because the indicators were wrong.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/crystal_ball.jpg

they raised a record amount of money, over a billion dollars, why not spend it? especially if it is to defeat a "existential threat"? hard to believe that line when the one campaign that could've prevented it stops at "good enough".

I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible

lol

How many people are there in the US? 300 million or so? I could've gotten at least 350 million votes if I really wanted to.

i heard miNewt on NPR this morning, again advocating his novel advanced-planning recommendation on pardons.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51696/newt-gingrich-trump-pardons/

That's going to go over well

I dont know the details for what docs they have collected and what resources they have but I'm a paralegal who deals with this kind of shit every day. I know how easy it is to reduce emails, etc to an MD5 hash value and cross reference them against each other to de-dupe. the warrant says they have fornesic images of all this shit. if they had access to litigation support software you could run a hash dedupe in about a day.

I write litigation support software and this is 100% OTM.

i was asked to solve the same problem with the enron email dataset for a prescreen with a tech company and did it on my creaky laptop in about an hour and a half.

there was also an interesting subquestion: who replies to emails the quickest? turns out there was a crazy guy at enron who replied in like 90 seconds to emails he sent to himself.

My :15 of fame was working on the Enron trial

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/04/13/a-dash-of-goth-in-a-sea-of-rep-ties/

Focusing on a hard to achieve long term goal is one thing. Doing that with no mechanism in mind for achieving it is another. The only remotely feasible way to change the electoral college is to win back enough state legislatures to pass NPV in states totaling 270 electoral votes (or the even harder road of winning back enough state legislatures to amend the constitution).

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive)

Ah! Now that looks like a strategy. Moreover, it's a strategy that, if successful, would have significant and tangible benefits well beyond simply repealing the electoral college, a strategy we honestly NEED to pursue because if we don't take the state legislatures the system is going to become more and more rigged.

My thinking on this is that populism is a major, major force in America today, and it's a politically non-aligned force. To achieve anything, anything at all, an anti-Trump coalition is going to need to appeal to populists. Saying that the electoral college is rigged and we need to get rid of it is going to have a lot of appeal to people with little to no knowledge or understanding of politics, people who have been conditioned to value direct democracy and the power of the individual vote above all else.

Am I saying that people should focus on it, even as a primary motive? No, absolutely not. The first priority should be opposing Trump. But man, I don't really see a lot of downside to saying "We need to fix our corrupt system by getting rid of the electoral college".

i know we cant/shouldnt jump on every inane thing he says on twitter but this is really something, almost self-parody

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 8m8 minutes ago
I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote - but would campaign differently

― jason waterfalls (gbx), Wednesday, December 21, 2016 8:34 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark

he's biting his own tweet here

i really believe the dude is suffering from a mental disorder.

He is addicted to validation that he is a winner and keeps perpetually chasing the dragon. Nothing is good enough anymore.

Even many of his supporters seem to have voted for him because or in spite of his issues. I can't imagine there are many people who don't think he's mentally ill.

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.

During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I'd written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

it was clear he didn't believe it in, but kind of surprised to see him get rid of the catchphrase a month before inauguration. better now than later, i guess.

newts love swamps iirc

Lefty Blue America fundraiser and blogger Howie Klein is not optimistic for Dems re 2018

The Senate is a lost cause. Ignore the DSCC, Chuck Schumer and the Senate elections in general. We'd be better off if they choke on their own vomit after shoveling their crap, loser candidates like Patrick Murphy, Katie McGinty, Ann Kirkpatrick, Patty Judge and Ted Strickland down everyone's throats. They'll lose more seats in 2018. Don't worry about it and don't put a nickel into anything but helping defend (directly, never through the DSCC) Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Sherrod Brown (OH). The action for 2018 is all in the House. The Democrats have to come out with a net gain 24 seats to put a brake on Trumpism. (In reality they need more than 24 seats because of so many Democratic collaborators among the New Dems and Blue Dogs, but let's call it 24 seats for the sake of argument.)

How to win back the House? Offer a more attractive alternative to the destruction Trump and Ryan are promising. Sounds simple, right? Yet when people on Twitter started buzzing Monday how the Republicans had stabbed American workers in the back by excising Buy American provisions out of a water infrastructure bill, I felt the obligation of explaining to them that so many Democrats voted for it that it was completely negated as a campaign issue. https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-much-pain-do-republicans-have-to.html

I dug this:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-the-debate-over-journalism-post-trump-gets-wrong/

My thinking on this is that populism is a major, major force in America today, and it's a politically non-aligned force. To achieve anything, anything at all, an anti-Trump coalition is going to need to appeal to populists. Saying that the electoral college is rigged and we need to get rid of it is going to have a lot of appeal to people with little to no knowledge or understanding of politics, people who have been conditioned to value direct democracy and the power of the individual vote above all else.

Am I saying that people should focus on it, even as a primary motive? No, absolutely not. The first priority should be opposing Trump. But man, I don't really see a lot of downside to saying "We need to fix our corrupt system by getting rid of the electoral college"

the electoral college is neither rigged nor corrupt. it's just dumb.

middle american populist rage is probably not going to be channeled towards tearing down an voting system that gives disproportionate voting power to middle american populist rage.

'an voting system' = 'a voting system'

Klein quotes are great

i'd be willing to supply my own vomit to Schumer

More on the issues Howie Klein writes about---

Can the 2/3 progressive Dems in the House win over this 1/3, plus voters

http://floridapolitics.com/archives/229291-stephanie-murphy-joining-blue-dogs-new-democrats

The combined membership of the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition represents more than one-third of the Democratic caucus.

Both coalitions have strong bipartisan reputations and a history of working with Republicans. Murphy said she will work with her New Dem colleagues to advocate legislation that strengthens our nation’s middle class and will work with her Blue Dog colleagues to help introduce No Budget, No Pay, which says Members of Congress must pass a budget and appropriations bills on time or they don’t get paid.