"Just another day in paradise, okay?" April 2017 President Trump and oppo dump thread

HELENA – While Montana’s U.S. House race is one of only two special congressional elections nationwide that could be competitive, national Democratic or left-leaning groups so far have shown little interest in putting money into it.

With just eight weeks left until the May 25 election, no national group has bought broadcast ads on behalf of Democrat Rob Quist, the musician-songwriter and first-time candidate running for the open seat against Republican Greg Gianforte and Libertarian Mark Wicks.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) – the main national party group dedicated to helping Democratic U.S. House candidates – doesn’t mention the race on its website and didn’t return several messages left by MTN News.

It has also has made no independent expenditures on the race.

http://www.ktvh.com/2017/03/quist-doesnt-have-much-support-from-national-dems

Samantha Bee was making a point about the lack of support or at least voting on the Democratic side a couple of weeks back. Was that over the L.A. Mayor?
Would be ridiculous if this current regime were to continue beyond the point it could be stopped because of apathy on the opposing side. But since taht was one contributing factor to begin with, one would hope that any of this regime would be enough of a warning.

one of the most disheartening things about the election to me was how many people I know who didn't vote. everybody's excuse was that, since we live in california, it really didn't matter

They were correct tbh

yeah I guess, but I was kind of disgusted by the apathy

what was also dismaying to me was how many people, even people who would never consider voting for trump, completely bought into all the bullshit smears of clinton as an excuse to stay away from the polls

it's been really hard for me to get over my anger about all of this

fake news! "Those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard."

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-ed-our-dishonest-president/

failing LA times! exterminate! benghazi! exterminate!!

They were correct tbh

People in DC line up to vote all the time. People vote in Guam.

We should fine people for not exercising the franchise imho

I agree

Given what the USA is like, fining people for not voting would probably raise a lot of revenue.

Given what the USA is like, instituting a fine for not voting would stir up a lot of support for repealing voting rights altogether.

ballz

we should have a lottery every midterm and federal election -- no taxes for the rest of your life for the lucky winners -- and they should be national holidays, nobody works, school off, too

and they should be national holidays, nobody works, school off, too

yep

if they actually wanted people to vote, they would make election day a federal holiday

Everything should be good and nothing should be bad, that's just my opinion

we should have a lottery every midterm and federal election

I've thought this for a long time. You don't even have to say "no taxes" -- I think one $50,000 purse and 10 $10,000 consolation prizes would be enough.

Voting is comically easy in Washington State, I get a ballot in the mail to fill out at my leisure and can put it in the mail or drop it at a box downtown to save a stamp.

I'm not looking forward to moving back to Michigan where I'll have to make an effort to go out and stand in line to vote on a Tuesday; then again my presidential vote will actually matter now.

yeah, I'm surprised how little absentee voting there is in so many states.

The LA election mentioned upthread was 4 weeks ago. Turnout was 12%.

I've thought this for a long time. You don't even have to say "no taxes" -- I think one $50,000 purse and 10 0,000 consolation prizes would be enough.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra),

I wonder how many religious voters would stop because they're agin' gambling.

We have compulsory voting in Australia. The fine if you don't vote is only $20, and even that's easy enough to get out of (just say you were travelling or something), but it's enough to get turnouts of over 90%.

how are you surviving under that tyranny? i mean, they're basically forcing you to vote! you are a free person floating through the world on a cloud of personal expression, and these altruism-worshipping government overlords force you to document your opinion on elected leaders or pay a small penalty? you should get a gun

Well I can't get a gun, because our freedom-hating government has made that pretty much impossible!

i am so sorry. i can't imagine what it must be like to not be able to kill someone

One thing I've never understood about US elections, and would be a serious disincentive to vote for me, are these gigantic queues where people wait hours and hours to vote. I've voted in plenty of different places in Australia, including densely populated inner city areas, and I've never waited more than 5 minutes to vote. Why is it so hard in the US? The other thing is why have your elections on Tuesday, when everyone's at work? We have ours on Saturday.

as far as I can tell it's predominantly a phenomenon in certain states, those under republican control, who are actively trying to suppress the vote, because more people voting is bad news for them!

Keep bars open and put voting machines inside. Nobody gets served until they vote imo.

as for tuesday voting, yeah idgi

it's not a mystery, imo - they want fewer people to vote

I thought we had established that this had something to do with rural folk not traveling on Sundays

fine ppl all u want if we can all vote by mail like in Oregon

I've voted in plenty of different places in Australia, including densely populated inner city areas, and I've never waited more than 5 minutes to vote. Why is it so hard in the US?

I’ve had to queue ten minutes or more in a densely populated area in the first hour of voting. And I was an election officer last year, and we ended up with 20+ minutes wait by the end of the day, and had to stop handing out out-of-region ballots to clear the queue. But I also voted early at a school, and that took zero queuing at all.

The other thing is why have your elections on Tuesday, when everyone's at work? We have ours on Saturday.

Despite the above, this is legit insane for a country that prides itself on democracy.

The important incentive that Australia does offer to people to get out of bed and go queue is the opportunity to get a hot snag and a squirt of sauce in your face, obv.

There was a more-than-ten-minute queue behind me when I voted in 2013, in the Australian Consulate in San Francisco. But that’s because only two people could have ballot papers at once, and I vote below the line. I imagine US polling places would be burnt to the ground if people had to number that many boxes.

insane for a country that prides itself on democracy.

Also 2013: I nearly got beaten up in a gay bar in Philadelphia on July 3rd for suggesting that democracy was founded in Greece, not Philly

It's all down to the democracy sausage. 95% turnout in-out-sausage.

Also 2013: I nearly got beaten up in a gay bar in Philadelphia on July 3rd for suggesting that democracy was founded in Greece, anything not Philly

Well I might have exaggerated slightly on the 5-minute wait, but I doubt I've ever waited more than 15 mins to vote. I've also voted in the UK in British elections as I'm a dual citizen, and I don't remember any crazy waits there either.

I do wonder why more countries don't have compulsory voting. Ticking a few boxes once every few years is hardly onerous. It makes the vote more representative and it also means huge resources don't need to be wasted on getting out the vote.

Manditory voting sounds like hell. Why would anyone want a forced march of the most ignorant/disinterested/low-information people into the voting booths?

And knowing that you have to vote makes people more likely to actually be engaged with politics, aware of policies, cast votes according to principles, etc. (And if you really don't care, just go into the booth and donkey.)

Admittedly this also works better in a system where you have more than two functional choices in a federal election.

x-post but relevant!

Our idiot voters are more likely to just draw a C&B on the ballot than vote for a Trump.

I'll grant you Clive Palmer, but wouldn't you prefer an elected millionaire tweeting sad poems about how he misses cheeseburgers?

i vote no to forced voting

was always relieved late in life when Mom told me she wasn't voting

So the argument is optional voting weeds out the people you wouldn't want voting anyway? Worked so well in the last presidential election

Actually I think it works the other way round. Compulsory voting shifts things to the centre and away from the extremes. We have Donald Trump type politicians in Australia but they poll 10-15% of the vote, not 48% or whatever Trump got.

white house photographer, it's still kind of a job?

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/2/15140892/trump-white-house-photographer-shealah-craighead-vs-pete-souza-obama

there's a subtext to this that just seems to infest the entire administration - just winging it, whatever seems like it mostly works, resulsts!!! - so basically everything about how our government runs is now the macrocosm of shit like this amazing moment, whatever's supposed to be going on here

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8261591/17157745_1278383738897730_4999235804013350519_o.jpg

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/848702920128438272

Jared Kushner is in Iraq right now, a senior administration official confirms.

Can he stay there?

ppl who don't vote wd vote the way people who do vote vote, studies have shown

thought we all caught that one

tee hee Gerson's bit in the Post is merciless

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-failing-presidency-has-the-gop-in-a-free-fall/2017/03/30/e0882d62-1581-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html

Heading into last year’s election, Republicans knew that this problem — the tea party predicament, the Freedom Caucus conundrum, the Boehner bog — had to be dealt with. The GOP needed a large and capable leader who could either unite the whole party (at least temporarily) with a bold, conservative vision, or peel off some centrist Democratic support with innovative policy. They needed an above-average president.

What they got is unimaginably distant from any of these goals. They got a leader who is empty — devoid of even moderately detailed preferences and incapable of using policy details in the course of political persuasion.

ppl who don't vote wd vote the way people who do vote vote, studies have shown

again a) if you make more people vote, you get more people thinking about their votes, and especially b) I don't think you can show studies that indicate this wrt preferential voting and proportional representation? bcz if we're fantasising about electoral reform improving the US anyway

if you make more people vote, you get more people thinking about their votes

[citation needed]

^^^ apparently a First Red Scare innovation that's been on the books for a century, and regularly observed since McCarthy times, but never much discussed or highlighted by sitting officials? just doing some quick googling here since it was news to me too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjVe35M8C0U

Yeah, every President from 1921 on has declared Loyalty Day, Obama included

Yeah, every President from 1921 on has declared Loyalty Day, Obama included

maybe we should choose our leaders by lottery

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/trump-voters-explain-why-hes-doing-great-actually

White House officials had hoped to further vex the journalists by having Mr. Trump announce news in Harrisburg, which would spoil their evening, forcing them to set down their forks and knives and go to work.

But a plan for the president to announce in Harrisburg that the United States was pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement fell through when Mr. Trump decided, after urgent phone calls on Wednesday from the leaders of Canada and Mexico, not to do it — at least for now.

The White House then toyed with the idea of having Mr. Trump announce that he was ripping up the Korea Free Trade Agreement. But he stole his own thunder, telling The Washington Post on Thursday that the United States might terminate the five-year-old agreement.

“It’s a horrible deal. It was a Hillary Clinton disaster, a deal that should’ve never been made,” Mr. Trump said. In fact, President George W. Bush negotiated the agreement with South Korea in 2007, and President Barack Obama renegotiated it in 2010, which is effectively what Mr. Trump is now proposing to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/us/politics/trump-rally-pennsylvania.html

Chris, a 23-year-old bank teller in Vermont

VICE: Why did you vote for Trump?
Chris: I voted for Trump to weaken the moderate left. After the primary, the mood was that Hillary was going to easily win office. A Clinton victory would have set back the left wing of the Democratic Party for years, at the very least until 2020. Having won both the primary and the general election by wide margins, the party establishment would have had an excuse to sweep Bernie (Sanders)'s "revolution" under the rug, never to be seen again.

How do you feel about the mass protests against Trump?
They're a little too focused on social justice for my taste. Don't get me wrong, those issues are important, but the whole point of making sure Hillary lost was to promote socialism. The Democratic Party already has a solid set of positions on things like minority rights, women's rights, and abortion. Where's the march for healthcare, or Occupy Wall Street part two?

Which of Trump's campaign platforms are most important to you?
Infrastructure. That's one of the few issues where he and the left overlap, and I'm hoping his own party won't derail his planned infrastructure bill when it comes up for a vote.

Also, healthcare. The ACA made Democrats complacent. If Trump destroys healthcare then single-payer will grow in popularity. You can already see polls where support for it is over 50 percent just from the THREAT of the GOP messing with the ACA.

Chris, a 23rd-dimension chess player in Vermont

one thing's for sure, we have the best election system in the world and there is no reason to change anything about it

Yes, everyone knows that the left's biggest enemy is the moderate left. Very urgent to make sure the moderate left is defeated, for as everyone knows, socialist utopia is what comes _just_ on the other side of racial holy war.

guys we already have boring things like "equality", why haven't we overthrown the government yet?! #cheguevara2017

fucking enrages me when people who have privilege downplay the necessity of focusing on those initiatives in real time

Socialists against social justice. Cool platform, dude

hey, don't get him wrong, those issues are important. just not as important as voting for donald trump to accelerate our demise so that we will bounce back so much higher after hitting rock bottom

wild to read perlstein on romney's lies in 2016

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

“Nixon knew that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: ‘good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.’”

...

And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romney’s apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

fucking enrages me when people who have privilege downplay the necessity of focusing on those initiatives in real time

it's what we learn in our lord of the flies grade schools -- better to pick on the other kids who get teased worse than we do than confront the bullies head on. play that game long enough, get good enough at teasing, and someday we'll be ready to bully the bullies -- then we'll abolish all bullying!

i really haven't met any ppl like Chris irl, i hope they number in the dozens

And they all live in Vermont

just annooooother day

Working hard to promote socialism by working in that most socialist of endeavors, commercial banking.

i really haven't met any ppl like Chris irl, i hope they number in the dozens

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Sunday, April 30, 2017 11:46 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And they all live in Vermont

― El Tomboto, Sunday, April 30, 2017 11:55 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i haven't met any here, either!

also, not to let him off the hook, but of all the places in america where voting for trump was a meaningless self-indulgence, vermont has got to be up there

And now for some huge news:

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the dean of the Florida legislative delegation and the first Cuban American elected to Congress, is retiring at the end of her term next year, saying it’s time to move on after 38 years in elected office.

“It's been such a delight and a high honor to serve our community for so many years and help constituents every day of the week,” the Miami Republican told the Miami Herald in an exclusive telephone interview Sunday. “We just said, ‘It's time to take a new step.’”

Her unexpected retirement marks the end of a storied career in which Ros-Lehtinen repeatedly broke political ground as a Cuban-American woman -- and gives Democrats an opportunity to pick up a South Florida congressional seat in 2018.

Ros-Lehtinen, 64, was elected last November to Florida’s redrawn 27th district, a stretch of Southeast Miami-Dade County that leans so Democratic that Hillary Clinton won it over Donald Trump by 20 percentage points. It was Clinton's biggest margin of any Republican-held seat in the country.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article147718764.html#storylink=cpy

I suspect Chris is really Ra's al Ghul

It's no big surprise that a 23 year old can fool himself into thinking he's a deep political strategist. There are worse fools. At least he has political goals other than white supremacy.

or at least in addition to white surpremacy

Democrats give up hope on striking a deal with Trump

Though many are still nervous — there remains deep anxiety about being pulled into a government shutdown fight over border security — party leaders are in a much different place than they were in December and their success in defeating the Obamacare repeal made them feel that political order had been restored after a year of feeling like they no longer understod anything.

In the Democratic debate about how to deal with Trump, total obstruction — similar to the Republican approach during Obama’s presidency, with hopes it’ll produce the same results in elections — is winning, and selective, principled compromise is starting to seem like a fever dream, despite anxiety in some quarters that Democrats will be blamed for more gridlock in Washington that voters clearly don’t want.

What a vindictive moral midget:

The Mauricio Macri administration reverted a decision to award former US president Jimmy Carter the Order of the Liberator General San Martín — the maximum distinction that the country can give to a foreign personality —, under the pressure from US President Donald Trump’s administration, CNN web site reported this week.

The official tribute, which had already been approved by the foreign ministry and was published in the Official Gazette, was cancelled after receiving a specific request by the US government, which would have suggested it would be better to delay it. Carter was to be given the award for his work in promoting human rights during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.

despite anxiety in some quarters that Democrats will be blamed for more gridlock in Washington that voters clearly don’t want.

Learn to say: "The Republicans have all the tools they need in order to govern. Let them govern."

how funny will it be when the "conservative" senate removes the legislative filibuster?

Not gonna happen

A day after Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward issued a stirring call for the press to hold Donald Trump to account, the president’s chief of staff said the White House is actively considering a change to libel laws affecting news reporting.

“I think it’s something that we’ve looked at,” said Reince Priebus, appearing on ABC’s This Week. “How that gets executed and whether that goes anywhere is a different story.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/30/reince-priebus-libel-law-change-media-white-house

can May's thread be titled: "People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?"

Dear, dear lord.

There really is no ceiling on the amount I would shell out to watch the Pay-Per-View special of him being slowly fed into a wood chipper.

I mentioned this yesterday, but this good news isn't getting enough play: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ileana-ros-lehtinen-announces-no-reelection-bid-2018

Can't help but wonder if as a member of the House Intelligence Committee (and the only one to ask a question that didn't pertain to leaking to the press) she saw more Russia shit and thought, "Shit, my seat, redrawn a couple years ago, looks more unsafe in 2018..."

New thread - Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

May I never read the phrase 'oppo dump' again.