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

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/gov-paul-lepage-of-maine-a-christie-supporter-makes-racially-charged-remarks/?ref=politics

&c &c

lol @ "racially charged" instead of "racist", come on now

Planet Debbie to get primaried

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com.br/2016/01/controversial-dnc-chair-debbie_8.html

excellent

and again hooray for that fuck Steve Israel exiting

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-republicans-may-mourn-loss-but.html

yeah fuck that guy

When we rooted her out of the DCCC "Red to Blue" program in 2008-- after she sabotaged 3 south Florida Democratic candidates to help her right-wing Republican amigos, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart-- she wormed her way back into power, with a big assist from Emanuel, and wound up as head of the DNC, a catastrophe for the Democratic Party, Getting her out of that position would be an absolute mitzvah... but getting her out of Congress would mean a lot more.

wtf is wrong w u

not very pc huh

maybe you and lepage can commiserate together

Mordy, always with the substance

after she sabotaged 3 south Florida Democratic candidates to help her right-wing Republican amigos, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart

wonder what the story is here

paging sotosyn

Down with tyranny!

Mr. Cruz, responding to the question of a boy with an interest in politics, began discussing the example of healthcare policy. “Take Obamacare,” he said, pausing before the punch-line. “Please, take Obamacare.” Modest laughter followed.

“Sorry, a little Benny Youngman,” Mr. Cruz said. (He seemed to mean Henny Youngman of “take my wife…please!” fame.) The boy looked back at him.

“Ask your grandfather,” Mr. Cruz said.

benny youngman, the king of swing states

NO MOTHERFUCKER you ASK your GRANDFATHER

there's been chatter in South Florida for years about the collusion b/w Ros-Lehtinen, Diaz-Balart, and Wasserman-Schultz, in part cemented by their penchant for hyphenates.

lol

Benny Youngman was huge in Cuba iirc

we clearly live under the tyranny of corpo-hogs and whores, nuthin wrong with sayin so, iab.

apparently Hillary faked an answer the other night about that new true-crime Greatest TV Show Ever, dont you guys feel like roasting her over that?

There's this narrative around GOP ppl that things are "really bad" right now in this country (make America great again etc) which I find offensive as hell bcz things have been bad for the disenfranchised etc FOREVER, and middle class white dudes are doing pretty good right now, afaict. Even David brooks has the brains to call this shit out as untrue (with respect to middle-upper class white men, etc). It's strictly a xenophobic white male phenomena but no one in the media would ever even hint at that. This has been your quarterly trenchant political bowel movement by brimstead.

Probably true about white middle class dudes but the real story is that middle class is quickly shrinking, dudes and women who were middle class 20 years ago may well have been demoted to the working class by now, especially in big urban areas with out of control gentrification.

Not saying this to downplay issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

i wonder what it means to be working class in the usa

i have no problem with people wanting to make something great. it's the 'again' part that is always so dumb. things have probably always been pretty shitty that's why we're in this mess to begin with. the forefathers seemed like a bunch of jerks tbh

*founding fathers

trying to make anything great is a terrible idea imo. greatness just kind of happens and is coexistent with not-greatness.

idk if someone wants to make a great 'train' or something

although i'm perfectly comfortable with greatness just being around and existing

fewer people are middle class plus even people under the current definition of middle class are struggling compared to relatively recent memory -- maybe not compared to 2009, but probably compared to 2005, or 1995. Of course, people of color are feeling the decline even worse. But "the other guy has it even worse" is never much of a campaign pitch.

The Koch network also provided funding to fine-tune budget proposals from Representative Paul D. Ryan, such as cuts to Social Security, so they would be more palatable to voters, according to the book. The Kochs were so influential among conservative lawmakers, Ms. Mayer reports, that in 2011, Representative John A. Boehner, then the House speaker, visited David Koch to ask for his help in resolving a debt ceiling stalemate.

“Dark Money” also contains revelations from a private history of the Kochs commissioned by David’s twin brother, William, during a lengthy legal battle with Charles and David over control of Koch Industries.

Ms. Mayer describes a sealed 1982 deposition in which William Koch recalled participating in an attempt by Charles and David to blackmail their fourth and eldest brother, Frederick, into relinquishing any claim to the family business by threatening to tell their father that he was gay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/us/politics/father-of-koch-brothers-helped-build-nazi-oil-refinery-book-says.html?ribbon-ad-idx=13&rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article

Some empty-chair ideas that will go unused tonight:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/12/other-chairs-empty-obama-speech-deaths-domestic-foreign-column/78631644/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/01/12/mark-my-words-glenn-beck-predicts-tonight-will-not-be-obamas-final-state-of-the-union-address/

When I saw the headline, I assumed he was warning of a third-term coup. No--just arrogance. ("Arrogance.")

(Excuse the source. A Facebook friend argues with these folks in the comments section, so their posts show up on my wall.)

According to Beck "the last big, huge progressive president we had was Jimmy Carter." Uh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/12/white-privilege-just-made-an-appearance-in-the-presidential-race-its-about-time/?tid=sm_fb

why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments why did i read the comments

And there were questions about whether the country is making more rapid progress on sexism or racism poll

uh, did anyone else watch the SOTU on amazon or the white house website? i mean i guess it's their right to make it a powerpoint presentation but i found it creepy and weird and a bad precedent

Noticed that, too. Seemed kind of lame.

the fuck is kim davis doing there

i mean imagine this with president ted cruz or trump or rubio or bush with stats and issues you don't agree with

http://i.imgur.com/6qraIzU.png
http://i.imgur.com/fPPARey.png
http://i.imgur.com/hO7Fxp1.png
http://i.imgur.com/gFMF16H.png

http://i.imgur.com/6iiscVq.png
http://i.imgur.com/HiKqf03.png

They didn't have any of that stuff on PBS

damn this nikki haley speech is brutal

Kinda creepy, like a dispatch from our new alien overlords

blaming Obama for "unrest in our cities"? fuck's sake...

This is awful - ending her national career before it starts.

Her smiles read as grimly gritted teeth

the Sputnik line was good.

definitely

also major jindal vibes, he did one of these a while back, right

lol talking about Haley obv

Her takeaway from Charleston is that it caused too many noisy black people

David Brooks seems to think she was criticizing Trump but that wasn't what it sounded like to me

man the abc pundits are such a fucking joke ,"she told her story and it's an American story" thanks cokie roberts. Oh let's bring Hugh Hewitt on, "she gave a terrific speech"

I don't watch much tv news has abc always been this bad

David Brooks seems to think she was criticizing Trump but that wasn't what it sounded like to me

― Check Yr Scrobbles (Moodles), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 10:34 PM

I think she was criticizing the English language for failing to come up with words and phrases that match her complex thinking.

RE: Karl Malone's screencaps -

Does anyone remember Bill Clinton's entrance at the 2000 Democratic Convention?

Apparently, the DNC (and Barbra Streisend) had wanted a bunch of statistics like the Obama ones above to scroll down the screen as The President made his way to the podium, but the networks weren't cool with that. So instead, viewers watched six minutes of him strutting down a hallway.

energetic kid in my office really talking up nikki haley

You can see some of it here, starting at 2:05:

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

The stats are on the convention screens, but not the news feeds. Peter Jennings' commentary on HD sets is pretty valuable too.

Didn't Obama promise a different sort of SOTU? Was he talking about the power point, because otherwise it seemed pretty same ol'.

His rhythms were off for a lot of it; the jokes were better.

after the SOTU i expected that everyone else would have been freaked out by the accompanying visuals - the ones i posted above along with dozens of others. but (not just here but everywhere) i don't think anyone cared. which i sort of feel like a crazy person today! very twilight zoney.

i guess i'm not completely in the twilight zone yet because i understand no one would care. most people probably didn't even see it, to start, because they had something better to do on a tuesday night. or, if they did watch, most probably watched it on tv or some other stream other than the whitehouse/amazon/youtube version, and apparently the tv version was the "normal" one without the powerpoint visuals. it's possible that they've used the visual accompaniment in previous years so now it's just old news. and i guess the biggest thing is that for the charts and graphs and bullet points, at least, they were just supplementing the content of his speech. if a someone is trying to communicate an improvement in the economy and is citing stats via the spoken word, i can see why having a graph on the side supporting the point could be acceptable.

but man, it was not acceptable. it was fucking bizarre. it wasn't just charts and graphs, it was PR photos and inspirational messages and subtle attacks. it disturbed me even though i agreed with most of what he was talking about. it was just straight up propaganda, it just happened to be propaganda i mostly agreed with. i realize the argument is What do you expect when you tune in to whitehouse.gov to watch a speech? and the real purpose of the SOTU is to persuade, not to inform. but Amazon video and Youtube were also carrying the whitehouse.gov version of the speech (with all the splitscreen pictures of obama literally kissing babies), and neither one of them displayed a "WARNING: THIS IS A PROMOTIONAL VIDEO STRAIGHT FROM THE GOVERNMENT" disclaimer. i don't know. it's just creepy. and what a shitty precedent it sets. imagine cruz doing something like this in January 2016. it would be absolutely nauseating to watch. imagine him speaking while the splitscreen shows a group of elementary school children hugging him in a classroom and misleading overlaid text boasts about president cruz' education reform plan.

judging by the lack of any internet response to it, i'm alone in this, but if nothing else you'd think people would be creeped out by official whitehouse feed spilling out into other popular channels like youtube and amazon.

sorry for many typos and poor reasoning but i just wanted to try to freak out the internet before my 10 am meeting

It's never the wrong time to freak out on the internet.

Repetitive, as always, but I thought the last four minutes, theatrical or not, was fantastic. (I watched the CNN repeat--glad I dodged the charts.)

Were you watching it on the WhiteHouse account on YouTube?

I don't know anything about what Amazon does except that they sell books.

feel like ppl who are wont to freak out over obama WH propaganda have already freaked out enough over obama himself that doing so over the graphics would be a step down

Hoping the upcoming Obama roadshow features more zings and name-names. I expect good things from his transition to campaigner-in-chief.

I only read the transcript, but it seemed like pretty weak tea for a final SOTU. Although I did appreciate his implicit disavowal of Trump's worldview throughout.

I always scan SOTU as STFU.

The President should given an annual STFU address.

Were you watching it on the WhiteHouse account on YouTube?

started out watching it on amazon video, then checked to make sure whitehouse.gov and youtube were streaming the same version.

i mean, if you were watching it on TV on NBC or whatever and suddenly this happened

http://i.imgur.com/hO7Fxp1.png

would you raise an eyebrow? would you think, 'i'm surprised NBC is so directly serving as a subordinate to the state right now'? again, maybe not. probably not. from what i can tell most lefties are like "but the media is ALREADY a subordinate to the state, maaaaaaan", everyone on the right already thinks that obama is the antichrist, and there are only two people in the "center", and they live in a cabin without the internet way out in the woods and weren't available for immediate comment on this post. but hypothetically, if you're in the twilight zone with me and you would think it was weird if NBC carried a version of the speech that included the PR visuals, why is it any less weird when the white house partners with youtube and amazon to do the same thing?

"The rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There's no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I'll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office."

I didn't watch it cuz I have shit to do in the evenings and this is really minor but what a weird thing to say - Lincoln presided over a civil war and was murdered, he was hardly a conciliatory figure. And the right-wing has always completely and utterly loathed (and continue to loathe) FDR, who was just better at outmaneuvering his opponents.

i'm with you on this ZS, fighting this sort of mindcontrol marketing is a worthy cause

xpost
lincoln presided over a civil war, but he may have been the only thing that kept the country together in the end. source: Lincoln by george lucas
i imagine by "Roosevelt" he was allowing some of the people in the room to think that he might have been referring to Teddy.

i was watching as he said that bit. it's hard to guess at his intentions but at the time he said it, the subliminal message to the audience (congress) seemed to be "even IF lincoln or roosevelt [insert presidential hero here] were president right now, they'd have difficulties bridging the divide too because all of you are insane"

the white house partners with youtube and amazon to do the same thing?

I totally hear you, but I'm asking if you were watching the address on the White House channel on YouTube. If you were, then I think that's just as acceptable as it would be for Youtube/user/satansatansatan to show the video with goat horns superimposed on everyone.

i feel you karl. that shit makes my skin crawl. complete lack of media literacy education here in the 21st fucking century doesn't help re: other people's lack of response.

powerpoint in general is a plague but that's for another thread.

oh, i got you! sorry, i misunderstood. i'm not totally sure, i just clicked over to youtube and clicked the first thing that said State of the Union. i imagine it was probably on their white house channel, you're right. ok. so that's a little less creepy to me. i remain creeped out by the amazon video version of it, though.

I dislike the incorporation of memes into the state of the union mainly in terms of aesthetics: I think they look ugly

charts look like they're playing to the vox media crowd

i have to admit i laughed when they put they made the chart fullscreen and hid obama behind it

http://i.imgur.com/gFMF16H.png

sorry I wasn't around last night but if you didn't think Nikki Haley was blasting Trump with both barrels during that speech, you need to listen to it again; you also need to read this:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/01/13/nikki-haley-donald-trump-republicans-2016/78729616/

i have to admit i laughed when they put they made the chart fullscreen and hid obama behind it

"We've created so many jobs they're poking me in the nose!"

karl i didn't see that but it certainly does look distasteful

basically because government still appears to exist in a no-frills-communication zone, rhetorically, so any steps outside that to what otherwise looks like a standard corpo voxpost infographic technique appear to be highly manipulative.

especially the photos.

damn just look at all those jobs

basically because government still appears to exist in a no-frills-communication zone

see, that's the thing, because i think in other areas they've already made the leap. they have a social media presence and their communications team has clearly been trying to develop new ways to put the administration and their policies in the best light. and all of that seems...predictable and not too revolting. i mean, if you go to the white house website or their instagram or whatever you'll already find a bunch of that. and if you go to the websites of the more comm-savvy congresspeople you'll find the same thing.

so i'm not sure why it seems so creepy when they apply the same PR gloss to the STFU SOTU, which is an annually scheduled slice of PR from the govt. i guess, again, it's just that it spread out beyond the official white house channels and out into what i presumed would be a relatively nonpartisan source, Amazon. i guess the creepiest thing is the intuition that amazon would do the same exact thing to support a republican president. it's the cooperation of corporations and the state to deliver PR super weird, so obvious that they don't even bother to conceal or distract from it. yes yes, that's always existed but the audacity of it seems to herald a new era of sleaziness

DJP otm. The idea that either speech was "all about Trump" is ludicrous. That whole line of thinking is just a way to deflect attention from Obama's points about political disfunction or to obscure the obvious racism in Haley's speech

I grant you that IF it were on NBC, that would be troublesome. But I watched NBC all evening and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

As pplains noted, lots of people put self-praising videos on YouTube. And lots of people use Amazon as a means of disseminating their stuff - Trump and Carson sell their books through Amazon, for example.

Everybody wants to present their policies and accomplishments in the best light; that's part of being a public official: tell us what you've been up to and what you're doing with our money.

Is the main objection that it's slickly produced? (So it wouldn't be creepy if it looked like shit?) Is the main objection that it looks like PowerPoint (so it would be okay if it looked like it was done in Illustrator?) Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff.

Government agencies' websites and newsletters typically talk about the good they're doing and minimize problems. Some of them look crappy, some don't. My congressperson sends me a mailer every once in a while that says "this is what I've been doing." It looks okay. Of course it's cherry-picked and of course it's biased in their favor. That the mailman delivered it to me does not imply government endorsement of every message therein (any more than the mailman delivering National Review, or whatever, would imply endorsement).

Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? That it shows Obama hugging kids? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff. Of course it's PR. Lots of things are PR; we shouldn't be mad at them for being done well as opposed to being done poorly.

erg, sorry for the repeating ramble

yeah but PR looks like a shortened form of propoganda

Is the main objection that it's slickly produced? (So it wouldn't be creepy if it looked like shit?) Is the main objection that it looks like PowerPoint (so it would be okay if it looked like it was done in Illustrator?) Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff.

...Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? That it shows Obama hugging kids? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff. Of course it's PR. Lots of things are PR; we shouldn't be mad at them for being done well as opposed to being done poorly.

no on all of those. it's this:

I grant you that IF it were on NBC, that would be troublesome. But I watched NBC all evening and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

As pplains noted, lots of people put self-praising videos on YouTube. And lots of people use Amazon as a means of disseminating their stuff - Trump and Carson sell their books through Amazon, for example.

so you're implying that there's a difference between Amazon and NBC when it comes to whether or not they should be required to be nonpartisan. NBC has a journalistic responsibility to not be a loudhorn for the administration. but with amazon, it's ok, because they also sell stuff? see, that's where i get creeped out, because the lines between "journalism" and corporations selling shit have become so blurry. on one hand, streaming services like Amazon video (and other services like Netflix, youtube) is becoming the main way that a lot of people access media. imagine the parallel experiences of two people - one watching shows on NBC all day, the other watching shows on netflix/amazon all day. They have largely the same experience, they watch their shows and there are ads here and there. Then at 8pm, the president comes on. NBC shows the relatively nonpartisan version, while Amazon shows the propaganda version, without even stating that it's propaganda. see the problem? Amazon sells shit, but so does NBC, and they both have many, many other interests besides. streaming services are becoming more like standard news outlets for many people, while media conglomerates are starting to become more like the streaming services in some ways. everything is blurring together. and in the midst of it, you have some of the media outlets amplifying the administration's message. i dunno. this is weird to me.

i don't think NBC has a responsibility to do anything really.

"then we've already lost..."

/FakeObiWanQuotes

call me old fashioned, but i think major media outlets DO have the responsibility to uphold at least the barest threads of journalistic integrity. and if amazon is going to serve up video to millions of people and get more and more powerful every year, they should be held to the same standards.

call me old fashioned, but i think major media outlets DO have the responsibility to uphold at least the barest threads of journalistic integrity.

Wake me up when they stop being an official propaganda arm of the Catholic Church every spring and winter.

The churlish part of me is thinking that anyone watching the State of the Union address on Amazon deserves all the propaganda in the world but I don't think you're raising any invalid points here.

TV networks sell Washington as democracy. Period.

sure, but i'd replace the 'period' with a 'period period period' because there's still a spectrum of wrongdoing, and it irks me to watch everything slide toward the awful direction. also, things can always get worse. until we're all sitting around watching our 1984 telescreens, they can get worse. (and even after that, things can get worse because what if those telescreens could spray bug spray in your eyes)

the amount of room on the down side is only bounded by human extinction

things can always get worse, and do.

passed up the infomercial last night in favor of a western about amputations and cannibalism, which rather produced the same themes with more entertainment.

I assume you mean Bone Tomahawk?

They are both showing the propaganda version - it's the SOTU speech!

xp yes, just a few walkouts at MoMA when the cannibals, well...

I got enough of a rundown from jjj to realize that this movie isn't one I should seek out but it sounds great in the abstract

it's fine if you hide your eyes for 20 seconds, just like with reaction shots of Mitch McConeell.

that movie was directed by a guy who used to write for Metal Maniacs

yes, he went into his metal history in Q&A and seems to be a John Ford hater, but i liked the film nonetheless

also from a political angle, given that the antagonists are a Native "lost race" that might be politically queasy, he had two of the white principals condemn "manifest destiny" and "bigotry," which seems like a high proportion in a white-guy search party of four in the 1890s, but i understand it.

anyway back to propaganda:

What made Obama’s soliloquy especially maddening was his suggestion that big money has overwhelmed politics because because Americans just aren’t trying hard enough:

"Changes in our political process — in not just who gets elected, but how they get elected — that will only happen when the American people demand it. It depends on you. That’s what’s meant by a government of, by, and for the people."

In fact, U.S. citizens have demanded “changes in our political process.” Activists delivered over one million signatures to the White House telling Obama to sign an executive order on dark money. A similar petition set up via the White House website’s system has passed the 100,000 signatory threshold requiring a response (which the Obama administration has yet to produce). Twenty-seven senators, including Minority Leader Harry Reid, and over 100 members of the House of Representatives have asked Obama for such an executive order. Even Gene Sperling, former director of Obama’s National Economic Council, has said it’s “important and needed.”

But Obama has steadfastly refused to act.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/obama-delivers-more-pretty-words-ugly-inaction-on-money-in-politics/

yeah i hear you Karl Malone. i didn't watch it in any version but i get what you're saying. there is something about the deadpan blahness of C-SPAN aesthetics that has always given me hope that we could someday become a country that approaches politics and policy more or less like that all the time. like my fantasy of publicly-funded elections looking kinda like that: flat, shot-on-video footage of people talking in rooms with ugly lighting and no makeup, with audible coughs and sips of water. not saying that would miraculously make us a real democracy or w/e but it would definitely be a positive change.

shifting over into really slick aesthetics is jarring, yeah, although i guess you could imagine that (if the audience were more media-literate or critical) it would make visible the pageantry that's always been there with these things. not as much pageantry as say, the nominating conventions - but still. the meme-ready graphics and charts and shit, especially in a "they fly at u face" sort of way where it's not like you can sit and read the scale of the chart or the explanation of what it's measuring, just CHART HERE IS CHART, BELIEVE!!!... yeah, that does feel more propagandistic. blah.

a transmission from 2018 just appeared in my inbox

http://i.imgur.com/q1G06IM.jpg

(there really was a splitscreen last night of obama with the statue of liberty)

but in my paranoid future, NBC is now some sort of subsidiary of NetflixVerizon, who made a deal with the Cruz administration to stream national addresses

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kim-davis-sotu-jim-jordan_56957017e4b05b3245dadc0d?ref=yfp

kinda funny - gives every impression that she's interested in milking her "celebrity"

@tinyrevolution
This guy Obama feels so strongly about money in politics, he should really run for president

also, Tony Kushner's husband (good film writer) is kind of a lib idiot

@MarkHarrisNYC
Add up Obama's progressive accomplishments 2008-16 versus the accomplishments of everyone for whom he isn't progressive enough. He wins.

or you could go to someone whom you cite often who's not a lib idiot and whose conclusions line up with mine almost as well as drone rockets did on al-Awlaki:

Despite all of that, here in 2016, the Affordable Care Act is still law, as is marriage equality, and so is the right to be gay and a soldier. Wall Street is still regulated better than it was in 2008. The president has moved the country further toward a policy to combat the climate crisis than anyone thought he could. He has moved boldly—and alone—on the issue of this country's insane attachment to its firearms. And he has redefined for all time the concept of a lame-duck president as a president with no more fcks to give. As Michael Grunwald shrewdly points out, if you listen to the Republicans on the campaign trail, they mostly complain about all the stuff that the president has managed to accomplish.

He has had to be more of a wartime president than he wanted to be. The drone war—and its consequences in both the short and the long term—are his alone. Sooner or later, some of the kids he's sending back to Central America are going to end up dead, and that will be on him, too. The surveillance state is still alive and well in the United States and Edward Snowden is still alive and well in Moscow. He can't close the prison at Guantanamo because Congress won't give him the money to do it.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows, and that's been enough. Has he disappointed me? Yes, which gives him something in common with every president of my lifetime.

yeah i don't like him in that mode. expect more.

DEMAND more.

except, as you know, it's all fucking over.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows

self-fulfilling horseshit

we're kind of perpetually fucked until we somehow manage to reconcile mid-term elections with the presidential elections in order to get movement on the actual process of legislation

it's kind of bullshit we even refer to them as "mid-term" when the makeup of the legislative body is more important than the president, who has executive power but functionally can't introduce policy beyond handing it to the party representatives in congress and making bold speeches

DEMAND more.

except, as you know, it's all fucking over.

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius),

It's not a binary. It's being an adult. It's possible like many friends who finally have access to health care to campaign for Sanders because HRC is a horror.

Screw that "adult" shit in particular, it's the mantra of the O-bots on JoeMyGod and the like.

any "progressives" who are disappointed in Obama after his 2008 spring/summer antics had their heads in the sand.

I voted for O in the NY '08 primary, and it's the last shameful time i'm going to be pressured into shoveling 'adult' shit.

Man, Karl, going back through some of these old SOTUs really bring back the memories.

http://i.imgur.com/vh9OnZf.jpg

loool

maybe this is the start of a grand new tradition

I didn't vote for him at all in '08: his FISA vote, so soon after the decade's horrors, was too puerile for me to accept. He had done nothing for me to feel disappointed about; he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern. I voted for him in 2012 because he'd done enough for me to recoil at the idea of Romney taking Miami-Dade.

he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern

something to be admired about this, imo. his lack of duplicity is pretty unusual for a prez.

Screw that "adult" shit in particular, it's the mantra of the O-bots on JoeMyGod and the like.

Sorry you can't imagine nuances to the word, like David Brooks attaching "reform" to "conservatism."

His foreign policy's been more confused than expected: super exec powers bequeathed by Bush + "smart" "tactical" Clinton-era recoiling from ground combat + chickens coming home to roost in the Middle East = shit's fucked up. But I can't imagine any president of either party creating coherence out of Middle East policy, in part because the idea that we can impose coherence on independent actors is fucking mindless. I do admire the Iran deal -- in broad strokes.

In contrast to 2008 (most of it anyway), I'm thinking about domestic matters only.

I mean: Saudi Arabia's our most trusted ally.

he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern

also crap, let's start w/ promise to walk a picket line with a union, close Guantanamo, warrantless surveillance is "not who we are"...

even Cheney strongly hinted he'd come around to inheriting a good chunk of the required worldview.

I....don't think he inherited it? After the FISA vote I knew he believed it.

also he "hates stupid wars," several of which he's prosecuted

as usual you are fudging a lot of facts

idk what else he could have done to try and close Gitmo, for example. No way does he want that open.

Writers are so often the worst judges of their own material.

xxpost

I am sure glad his grand bargain with Boehner fell apart. Not sure his pledge of civility and bipartisanship meant that proposed agreement

plz see my recent link on how he could've closed Gitmo by himself, Shakes, cuz i dont gaf anymore

Really?

Also I did not expect him to allow his Justice department to go after whistleblowers more than any prior administration in history. But yeah, some good accomplishments

Morbz I don't see any discussion of Gitmo in that intercept link, or are you referring to something else

yes something a few weeks ago

well it's not on this thread so idk what yr talking about

and you replied to it!

so Dubya wants to shut down Gitmo

oh that

yeah idk how compelling that legal reasoning is, certainly it would be immediately challenged/drag on for years/go to the supreme court

morbs, which presidents do you think have accomplished more than obama (or have a more morally admirable record) in the last 50 years?

kinda like asking me to choose among mafia chieftains, no lie

LBJ was our last liberal prez, so despite that little genocidal oopsie in Vietnam, him. And everyone else except maybe Reagan, Nixon and Clinton.

and that means nothing

you think Dubya was better than Obama = you are insane

i knew GOTCHA was coming

i dont care about ranking these shits; you are all fucking hobbyist fantasists

that's a GOTCHA? It was a bizarre omission on your part!

T/S: ILE film threads vs. ILE politics threads - which one makes you not want to live more

tbh i don't even think LBJ was better than obama, i oppose the drone campaign but i'm not sure how anyone could make the case that anything obama's done is worse than escalating a needless war for no reason and carpet bombing another country for three years straight.

you are all fucking hobbyist fantasists

sez the baseball fan

I thought you liked Poppy Bush.

austan goolsbee on sanders' single payer plan

2) Sanders is right that we shouldn't just think of his single-payer health plan as a $15 trillion tax increase. We should ask whether people would be better or worse off in total. But even by that measure, lots of low and middle income workers would, in fact, be worse off and paying higher taxes.

Sanders' basic argument against the newspaper articles characterizing his health plan as needing a $15 trillion tax increase has been that we shouldn't think about tax rates alone but should ask the broader question of whether people are better or worse as a whole after the program goes into effect. If a single-payer health plan lowers health costs overall then his reasoning says that the taxes we raise for the health plan will be less than what people currently spend on health care and if we concentrate those taxes on the rich, then a typical person could actually be better off after the tax than they were before.

As a theoretical matter, that's not wrong. We should try to make that kind of calculation when we think about government programs. The thing is, though, that argument does rely quite heavily on the economic notion of "pass-though". Oversimplifying here: the Sanders health essentially plan puts all current health costs onto the government but will pay for it with cost savings and with taxes including a payroll and income taxes around 9%. Doing that frees companies from their currently massive health care costs. The Sanders plan counts on the employers then passing all of that savings though to their employees in the form of higher wages (and not keeping part of it as higher profits). If the companies don't pass it on, then, for sure, workers will end up worse off because they will pay the 9% payroll and income taxes but not have higher incomes to compensate (remember that employers pay about 75% of the normal health insurance premium for their workers so their savings on the employee contribution for health care will not normally add up to anything close to the 9% tax hike they're paying. They need the employer to pass on the other 75% to them).

So you need to decide whether companies would pass through the savings to employees. Would they? Many economists trust that markets would pass it through. Ironically, many of the Democrats that, like Sanders himself, have called for a repeal of the "Cadillac Tax" on expensive health insurance plans have implicitly presumed the opposite. They fear that the Cadillac tax will lead companies to reduce or eliminate generous health care plans without raising employee's wages in return.

But even with complete pass through, there are some significant low and middle income groups that would face net tax increases under a Sanders health plan. Generally, people that currently pay less than 9% of their income on health insurance will be worse off under a plan with free health care but a 9% tax to pay for it. That makes me think the plan hasn't been well thought through.

Almost anyone with low or moderate income getting insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, for example, will have health premia capped at rates below the Sanders 9 percent tax. A typical non-smoking family of 4 making with an income of $50,000 per year would have to pay in excess of $1000 a year more in taxes under the Sanders plan than they pay now for health insurance in the exchange You can plug in different characteristics in the Kaiser Family Foundation premium calculator to see for yourself here or you could look at the JAMA stylized examples here http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1738900 (in real life, some of those people would have out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles when they get care, some of them would get help with those costs and we would need to weigh those against whatever co-pays they might have with a single payer plan but you get the idea).

People on Medicaid have caps on their health insurance cost at around 5% of income. So the working poor would face a net tax increase of 4% of their income. Kids with jobs but that can stay on their parents' health care plans up to age 26 under Obamacare would have to pay 9% of their income in taxes with Sanders' plan but without getting any upside from the government paid health care (though their parents would get some part of it back, depending on what they pay for the incremental coverage for the child).
I'm sure there would be other groups, too, if we worked through the numbers. His plan seems likely to hit a lot of people with tax hikes that it probably didn't intend to hit. If the employers don't pass on their savings to raise wages, it will hit all workers.

Isn't that 9% thing a red herring? Workers pay 2.2% in the Sanders plan, the other 6.6% is a payroll tax paid by employers who would no longer have to provide insurance for workers.

Isn't only using the "premiums" number also grossly misleading? Those are high deductible plans, and they have copays and coinsurance too. I don't think you have deductibles and coinsurance under single-payer. But yeah I guess a non-smoking family of four earning $50,000 a year who NEVER EVER ACTUALLY USE ANY HEALTH CARE SERVICES and buy the cheapest plan on the market would be a little worse off.

Just being able to live in a country where everyone was able to get health care based on their need for health care and not have to worry about whether they could afford it should be cause for joyous nationwide celebration. Because everyone needs health care and no one can predict or control how much health care they will need or when they will need it. That, and the fact that a single payer system done properly would not cost society a cent more than the train wreck we have now.

that goolsbee post was written before the sanders plan actually came out

ezra klein on bernie single payer plan

krugman:

My column and Bernie Sanders’ plan crossed in the mail. But the Sanders plan in a way reinforces my point that calls for single-payer in America at this point are basically a distraction. Again, I say this as someone who favors single-payer — but it’s just not going to happen anytime soon.

Put it this way: for all the talk about being honest and upfront, even Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors — or as Ezra Klein says, puppies and rainbows. Despite imposing large middle-class taxes, his “gesture toward a future plan”, as Ezra puts it, relies on the assumption of huge cost savings. If you like, it involves a huge magic asterisk.

Now, it’s true that single-payer systems in other advanced countries are much cheaper than our health care system. And some of that could be replicated via lower administrative costs and the generally lower prices Medicare pays. But to get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.

Saying no has two cost-saving effects: it saves money directly, and it also greatly enhances the government’s bargaining power, because it can say, for example, to drug producers that if they charge too much they won’t be in the formulary.

But it’s not something most Americans want to hear about; foreign single-payer systems are actually more like Medicaid than they are like Medicare.

And Sanders isn’t coming clean on that — he’s promising Medicaid-like costs while also promising no rationing. The reason, of course, is that being realistic either about the costs or about what the system would really be like would make it a political loser. But that’s the point: single-payer just isn’t a political possibility starting from here. It’s just a distraction from the real issues.

But to get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.

It should be noted that foreign single-payer systems are just as good or better than the US 'system' at delivering the outcomes people want.

neither of those are anti-single payer

Can certainly see how some of those details need to be explained, but I'm a little surprised by Klein's level of alarm - insisting the plan is "unrealistic" in the subtitle, the thing about hospitals closing, and the raising of income taxes on the wealthy (which is like 3.4-4% increase if you're making less than ten million dollars a year).

The thing I would say I'm most alarmed about in HRC's plan is nothing specific I can see about how the uninsured in states with right wing governors will ever get to go the doctor. At all.

In terms of the economics, I don't see anything in Clinton's plan to reduce insurance premium costs. Is that where people who are somewhat well off are primarily feeling it? I only see mention of reducing deductible and co-pay costs.

3.4-4% increase if you're making less than ten million dollars a year

And over $250K, of course.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-struggling-with-immigration-rules-and-cruelties-of-deportation/2016/01/18/5c2d4258-bba7-11e5-b682-4bb4dd403c7d_story.html

White House defense of DHS Ice sending women & kids back to Central America, is not that convincing

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/01/06/ice_raids_on_central_american_families_are_not_what_obama_promised.html

You want smoke and mirrors, how about all these scare pieces about single payer that don't remind that single payer does not preclude you from going to a private doctor or dentist or whatever as need arrises, which is what my family in Australia and England do. Meanwhile, here in the states, I had to (ultimately successfully) waste hours and hours telling five different people that the $300 balance my good insurance stuck me with for taking my daughter in to a clinic for a mere strep swap was bullshit and possibly dishonest.

How much weight do studies like these put on the anticipated savings from single-payer that derive, not from reducing overhead and marketing and the administrative apparatus that's in place to try and deny coverage for strep swabs, but rather from the health benefits of the public having easier access to care at earlier junctures? My understanding has always been that this was one of the biggest fiscal (not to mention humanitarian) arguments for single-payer: if it doesn't cost you to go check out this cough or a weird feeling in your side, you're more likely to go check it out when it's comparably cheap and easy to address, rather than once it's developed into a major life-threatening condition requiring long-term high-tech treatment.

Thing is, I can't fathom how anyone would calculate that savings... so is it factored in at all?

White House defense of DHS Ice sending women & kids back to Central America, is not that convincing

not really sure why the feds are doing such a politically counter-productive action that doesnt really benefit anyone. except like 'rule of law' stuff that's casually brushed aside in other matters.

My column and Bernie Sanders’ plan crossed in the mail. But the Sanders plan in a way reinforces my point that calls for single-payer in America at this point are basically a distraction. Again, I say this as someone who favors single-payer — but it’s just not going to happen anytime soon.

I like Krugman but he is SO SO SO SO wrong about this being a "distraction." We should never, ever shut up about single payer, no matter the immediate odds, and suggesting otherwise is craven.

I get it, Sanders is promoting policies that may not be politically feasible right now, but saying "everyone just be quiet about it" is a good way to make sure the left stays asleep and NEVER gets these things done.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/01/20/palin-blames-son-s-violence-on-obama.html?source=TDB&via=FB_Page

someone make this deeply stupid person go away

offered w/out comment

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/20/sarah-palin-is-making-sense-really/

yeah i think krug is being too harsh. it's funny cause he and stiglitz would really be the perfect endorsement for bernie; they're the furthest left you can go in credible mainstream economics, would give him a much needed sheen of electability. but they're both tight with Clintons so it's just not gonna happen

I like Krugman but he is SO SO SO SO wrong about this being a "distraction." We should never, ever shut up about single payer, no matter the immediate odds, and suggesting otherwise is craven.

the majority of bernie sanders' platform is stuff that has zero chance of happening even were he elected, so if you just consider him a symbol of 'the left' it's good that a lot of this stuff is getting tv time.

otoh if you consider him an actual-political-candidate his whole campaign is super disingenuous. if only people who were disappointed w/ the obama presidency could have the chance to experience president sanders dealing w/ a republican congress.

the chance to experience president sanders dealing w/ a republican congress.

the main reason we have Sanders as our only alternative to Clinton is in part due to Sanders' poor grasp (or disregard) of 'political reality'. the realists saw the minefield they would be entering and stayed on the sideline. the Don Quixote aspects of Sanders are pretty prominent. so, he is our only alternative to Clinton and he will not succeed in his quest. I'm still glad someone is talking about the issues from a left-progressive perspective, so that perspective is at least given some airing out. he fills the need for a rallying point the left can attach themselves to.

sarah-palin-is-making-sense

We, you, a diverse dynamic, needed support base that they would attack.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/right-wingers-turn-on-criminal-justice-reform.html

Tom Cotton and others trying to kill bipartisan criminal justice reform bill

Cotton isn’t alone. Other Senate Republicans, including Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and David Perdue of Georgia, also registered their strong opposition during the lunch, even as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) vigorously defended the bill, which he helped negotiate. Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?

how much of today's Obama-Sanders WH meeting is going to be about Bern opposing the FDA pick?

Sen Warren reports on toothless enforcement vs corporate crime:

In virtually all the cases she cites — from Standard & Poor’s delivering inflated credit ratings to defraud investors during the financial crisis, to Novartis giving kickbacks to pharmacists to steer customers to their products, to an explosion at a Bayer CropScience pesticide plant that killed two employees — the Department of Justice declined to prosecute individual executives or the corporations themselves, resorting to settlements with minuscule fines that barely disrupt the corporations’ business models.

The report also gives new meaning to the term “1 percent.”

JPMorgan’s settlement for giving conflicted advice to its clients over wealth management products was less than 1 percent of annual operating profits.

GM paid under 1 percent of company revenue to settle claims on the faulty ignition switch that killed multiple vehicle passengers.

For-profit college EDMC ripped off students with false promises of well-paying jobs, and paid below 1 percent of its student loan revenue over the period of violations....

Despite multiple promises by President Obama’s Department of Justice to stiffen enforcement of corporate misconduct, including a 2015 memo creating new guidelines for prosecutions of individuals, almost all major instances lead to toothless settlements, Warren writes. “Accountability has been shockingly weak.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/29/elizabeth-warren-challenges-clinton-sanders-to-prosecute-corporate-crime-better-than-obama/

State rep and Cruz campaign functionary lies pointlessly about military service, resigns

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rep-graham-hunt-resigns-over-military-service-exaggerations/

they always get caught. i don't understand it.

I would've totally court martialed guys like that back when I was a general.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CaUwofjWEAA_J8N.png

so Obama visited a mosque.

Union picket line and Bernie phone bank are next. #FullBulworth

caucus trivia: first building in the usa built specifically to be a mosque is in iowa

Federal court strikes down NC congressional district maps

Three federal judges on Friday threw out the congressional voting maps the Republican-led General Assembly drew five years ago, ruling that two districts were gerrymandered along racial lines.

The ruling throws the March 15 primary into chaos, as the judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw the maps within two weeks and not to hold any elections for U.S. House until the maps are in place. A special session of the legislature would have to be called to approve new maps, and they might have to pass federal muster again.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LU8vk8EH0yg/VTM4WZUS1QI/AAAAAAAAAio/pyx7ONxGpkc/s1600/casablanca34.gif

You would think, that with the possibility that a court would throw the districts out, someone would have a spare map drawn up just in case.

voting rights act is so last-century

It's like watching a lava lamp.

http://i.imgur.com/NP32c5o.gif

apalachia, never change

looks like a big tobaccky field fire to me

No seriously, the Appalachia district hardly changes.

harvey gantt otm

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/krugman-on-bernie-sanders-electability

The super-delegates are just under 15 percent of the total number of delegates. If Clinton wins this group by a margin of 80% to 20% (she has more than 95% of the super-delegates who have already made a commitment), then Sanders would have to capture more than 55 percent of the elected delegates to get the nomination.

This means that Sanders could not get the nomination just by scraping by in the primaries; he would need a decisive victory. The question then is, if Clinton were to lose decisively in the primaries to a candidate who has all the weaknesses touted by the experts to whom Krugman referred us, how likely is it that she would have been able to win the general election if Sanders had not gotten in her way?

Despair, Sanders fans. Krugman has the business.

all I want out of November is chaos.

however it'd be great if Clinton won the nomination antidemocratically and there was a lil "revolution" to redress that.

http://rlv.zcache.com/jefferson_tree_of_liberty_poster-ra2241f73a53e489fb51ba68c72a6732f_wad_8byvr_324.jpg

In a harsh partisan snub, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees — Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming and Representative Tom Price of Georgia — have chosen not to invite Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to testify about the administration’s plan, set to be released on Tuesday as part of the traditional budget week festivities.

“Rather than spend time on a proposal that, if anything like this administration’s previous budgets, will double down on the same failed policies that have led to the worst economic recovery in modern times, Congress should continue our work on building a budget that balances and that will foster a healthy economy,” Mr. Price said in a statement.

Mr. Obama’s budget proposal is of course not likely to please congressional Republicans, and it was never going to be adopted by the Republicans in the House and Senate. They have already expressed outrage at its proposed $10 a barrel tax on oil. But to refuse to hear from Mr. Donovan seems an extreme break with the usual conventions of Capitol Hill and it denies the Republicans a chance to try to pummel him and the budget at a televised hearing. They typically enjoy that.

Republicans often complain that they can’t get administration witnesses they want to testify. They might hear about the budget snub the next time they are pressing for an administration official to turn up.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/08/congress-declines-to-hear-obamas-budget-proposal-in-person/

rude

continued schaudenfreude re: the completely decimated/bordering on non-existent California GOP:

Low on funds and lagging in the polls, GOP Assemblyman Rocky Chavez has dropped out of California’s U.S. Senate race and will run for re-election to the Legislature.

Chavez, R-Oceanside (San Diego County), announced his withdrawal at the beginning of a radio debate for Senate candidates Monday night in San Diego.

Although he was the leading Republican in the race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, Chavez was only pulling 7 percent support in a January Field Poll and had just $369 in campaign cash on hand, according to the latest federal financial disclosure forums. He had $42,889 of campaign debt, according to the filing.

Chavez’s departure leaves two major Republicans in the field, former state party Chairmen Duf Sundheim and Tom Del Beccaro. Both are polling at 3 percent, according to the latest Field Poll.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/us/politics/alan-graysons-double-life-congressman-and-hedge-fund-manager.html?referer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FjFp15qqKE6&_r=1

so this is...interesting. alan grayson has been running a hedge fund while sitting in congress

lol Grayson

Hadn't thought much about Senate-race politicking over the corpse in the robe. I assume there's gonna be a non-prez-election thread cuz sports fans can't get enough.

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466735802/scalia-s-death-and-the-2016-senate-races

Chuckie a lil bit hypocritical re playing politics with the SC. Lil bit.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/14/flashback-in-2007-schumer-called-for-blocking-all-bush-supreme-court-nominations/

Senator Schmuckie vs White House over counterterorism funding, ie Infighting Is Fun. (I have no idea who's right.)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/schumer-and-white-house-exchanging-words.html

savage mules, endless war

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/10/obama_on_verge_of_launching_another_bombing_campaign_in_libya_after_dropping_23144_bombs_on_six_countries_in_2015/

Chuckie a lil bit hypocritical re playing politics with the SC. Lil bit.

idk why anyone tries to make hay out of this (or McConnell's hypocrisy) - when the rules are on your side, you use them, when they're not, you fight against them. that's political operations 101.

savage mules, endless war

p sure America's been bombing someone somewhere non-stop since bombs were invented tbf

technically Schumer said that after Roberts and Alito the burden of proof was on the nominees to show that they were in the mainstream. Obv Kagan and Sotomayor have been in the minority and haven't sought out cases in the manner of Roberts/Alito but I think they've been who they said they were in their hearings.

Yeah with context what Schumer said not really comparable: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lol-has-anyone-looked-at-what-schumer-actually-said

"LOL."

In the news: Scalia-less Supreme Court lets stand the ruling demanding immediate redistricting in NC to counter gerrymanding.

change we can believe in

Apparently the maps won't do much difference in party affiliation, but at least they don't look like somebody spilled something on the Tar Heel State.

http://i.imgur.com/apKa9ME.jpg

apropos of nothing, i remembered that Joe Wilson (YOU LIE!) existed, and since i haven't heard about him since he said YOU LIE, i thought i'd see what kind of punishment was rained down upon him by his district in SC.

In September 2009, Wilson received international attention when he interrupted a speech by U.S. President Barack Obama to the joint session of Congress by shouting "You lie!"[4][5] The incident resulted in a formal rebuke by the House of Representatives largely along party lines.[6]

Wilson was re-elected in 2010 by a comfortable 9 percent over his nearest challenger and when he ran unopposed in the 2012 general election he was re-elected with 96% of the vote. Wilson won reelection in 2014 with over 62% of the vote in a three-way race.

oh, cool

This is fantastic: Teenager claims to be a state senator, gives lecture to high school students

what state senator has a driver? kind of went overboard there

The White House released their economic report. Only seventeen 'Piketty's in this one!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/ERP_2016_Book_Complete%20JA.pdf

https://twitter.com/clairecmc/status/701873255506956288

Claire McCaskill has breast cancer.

http://www.abc15.com/news/national/jeff-flakes-convoy-charged-by-elephants-during-trip-about-poaching

this is just the news the editorial cartoon industry needed.

http://www.wpr.org/marquette-poll-feingold-maintains-lead-over-johnson-us-senate-race

nice :)

we've missed you, Russ

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/rsc-budget-deal-219800

welp, no budget for 2017, Ryan back in Boehner's spot lol

makes me yearn for the budget slashing gentility of the bush administration. OH WAIT THAT NEVER HAPPENED.

Fuck off and die: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/debbie-wasserman-schultz-paylenders-cfpb_us_56d4ce38e4b03260bf77e8fc

Seven N.J. newspapers call on Christie to resign

I got some sort of DNC poll in the mail that I haven't opened. If it has any questions about party problems, I'm going to write in "fire Debbie Wasserman Schultz asap"

time to zap the Odious Planet Debbie; as Pierce sez, it makes Clinton's reform bleating an extra sick joke

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42611/debbie-wasserman-schultz-resign/

The White House is vetting Jane L. Kelly, a career public defender turned federal appellate judge, as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court, as President Obama closes in on a decision that could reshape the court for decades and create an election-year showdown with Republicans....

Judge Kelly won quick and unanimous confirmation by the Senate three years ago to her current post on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Her nomination could intensify pressure on Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to break with his party and hold hearings on Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court candidate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/us/politics/white-house-vetting-jane-kelly-judge-supreme-court.html?_r=0

In a Senate floor speech in 2013, Mr. Grassley effusively praised Judge Kelly, a longtime public defender, just before she won unanimous confirmation to her current position on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

The senator read from a handwritten recommendation letter he had received from a retired judge, David R. Hansen, a Republican appointee he counted as an old friend. Mr. Hansen called Judge Kelly a “forthright woman of high integrity and honest character” and a person of “exceptionally keen intellect.”

“I congratulate Ms. Kelly on her accomplishments and wish her well in her duties,” Mr. Grassley said at the time. “I am pleased to support her confirmation and urge my colleagues to join me.”

Democrats have privately said that selecting Judge Kelly might force Mr. Grassley to change his stance and hold hearings, out of a sense of obligation to a respected jurist from his home state and concern about tarnishing his reputation in Iowa months before he faces re-election. The six-term senator is facing pressure from voters to consider any nominee on the merits, but he said in an interview Wednesday that he would not change his position even for a fellow Iowan....

“In this particular instance,” Mr. Grassley said about the election-year vacancy, “it has got to be the process, and the person doesn’t matter, see.”

I enjoy hearing that last sentence in the voice of Edward G Robinson.

"Obama's got words, the voters have spears! Lots of terms for suicide, Mitch, but not mine, see."

c'mon Iowa, you can do it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/us/politics/charles-grassley-patty-judge-iowa-senate-race.html?_r=0

looking forward to watching Grassley squirm

we'll try, man. still stinging from losing tom harkin's seat to a really lame republican

they didn't cite any polling or, well, anything so i'm not sure what makes this challenger "formidable" but yeah i'd love to see grassley get the boot

also wtf dude is 82, retire already

RIP Grassley Twitter account

i'm not sure what makes this challenger "formidable"

"Patty Judge, a former Iowa lieutenant governor and state agriculture secretary..." in a state where agriculture means almost the entire economy.

current US secretary of ag is the last reasonable Iowa governor

kind of wish he'd go back to being a governor, tbh

This is insane: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/the-debilitating-economic-disaster-louisianas-governor-left-behind/?tid=sm_tw

Bobby Jindal destroyed his state to better his chances in the election. And then he got Drumpfed. This Drumpfing of the Gop is the climax to a story that really kicked into gear in 2010. Once Clinton wins and the dems retake the senate, it'll almost be kinda fun. Almost.

Is it really Jindal's fault, though? Hasn't Louisiana been a tragedy since the 1920s, if not earlier?

The influx of cash from Katrina relief funds had the state beginning an upswing right before Jindal came into office; his policies smashed that surplus and dumped the state into its current hole.

An upswing compared to what, though? Seems like Louisiana's always been one of the bottom 5 poorest states, is my point. They didn't really have that far to fall.

It seems to pretty obviously have been made a lot worse by unfunded tax cuts, and then Jindal refusing to take hard choices due to him not wanting to look bad.

Did you read the article? They've always been poor but not cut-everything-60% poor.

“This was years of mismanagement by a governor who was more concerned about satisfying a national audience in a presidential race,” said Jay Dardenne (R), the lieutenant governor under Jindal who is now the state’s commissioner of administration. Dardenne said Jindal had helped the state put off its day of reckoning in a way that mirrored a “Ponzi scheme.”

An upswing compared to what, though? Seems like Louisiana's always been one of the bottom 5 poorest states, is my point. They didn't really have that far to fall.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Friday, March 4, 2016 2:38 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what the fuck man

the lesson is: you can always be poorer

that was Reagan's campaign slogan

On Jindal’s watch, nearly every agency in Louisiana shed employees, and state lawmakers say some teetered because of the losses. The Department of Children & Family Services shrank to 3,400 employees, from 5,000 in 2008, and social workers began carrying caseloads above national standards. The state also cut funding for youth services and mental health treatment.

“When you cut those programs, it doesn’t change the need for people to get those services,” said Walt Leger (D), a state representative. “It just means you’re no longer providing them. Those folks end up in jail or wandering the street, not being treated for mental health issues, and all of those things have a huge societal cost.”

Jindal out doing the rounds blaming the rise of Trump on OBAMA.

what in the actual fuck

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr05%2F2013%2F7%2F23%2F17%2Fanigif_enhanced-buzz-25022-1374615059-0.gif&f=1

Wasserman Schultz will be DNC chair on election day, Y or N?

Chief of Staff!

j/k god I hope not

i really can't see HRC giving two shits about her 'scandals'

esp when she's done such a nice job of running interference

She's so loathed by libs that the party's gonna keep her.

if Cory Booker wasn't considered such a comer he'd be tailor made for the part.

Murtaza Hussain
‏@MazMHussain
Military killed 150 people in one of the many countries it was bombing yesterday, we don't know who they are but luckily they were all bad.

"...the Obama administration on Monday announced that it will for the first time acknowledge the number of people it has killed in drone strikes outside of conventional war zones, including civilians. The report, administration officials said, will be released “in the coming weeks,” and will continue to be released annually. The news came as the Pentagon confirmed that it had carried out one of the largest airstrikes in the history of the war on terror.

Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, described the plan in comments made during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We know that not only is greater transparency the right thing to do, it is the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counterterrorism actions and the broad support of our allies,” Monaco said, adding that the operations described in the report would not cover areas of “active hostilities,” such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria."

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/07/drone-casualty-report-promised-as-u-s-airstrike-kills-150-al-shabaab-members/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdDVOO7W8AE4l7R.jpg

Oof.

was live for about 10 minutes

that can't be real

I mean come on

seriously, that's not real is it

ohmygod

that is simultaneously uforgivably horrible and the funniest fucking thing I've seen so far this yeat

ok it took me a minute, and then.... damn

giggling little assholes, what else do you even say

I think "giggling little assholes" about covers it

to be clear, I am laughing at the galling stupidity that leads someone to think that posting this is a good idea

either they're incredibly uninformed about who they're attacking, or they're gleefully cruel

both pretty damning

and they say the party won't fall in line behind trump?

New documents obtained through Freedom of the Press Foundation’s lawsuit against the Justice Department reveal that the Obama administration - the self described “most transparent administration ever” - aggressively lobbied behind the scenes in 2014 to kill modest Freedom of Information Act reform that had virtually unanimous support in Congress....

Today, we are publishing a detailed memo authored by the Justice Department that strongly objected to almost every aspect of FOIA reform put forth by the House of Representatives at the time....

(From the proposed bill:)

An agency may not withhold information under this subsection unless such agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would cause specific identifiable harm to an interest protected by an exemption [in the FOIA], or if disclosure is prohibited by law.

Doesn’t sound controversial at all, right? While the DOJ noted it was “seemingly analogous to the Attorney General’s ‘foreseeable harm’ standard contained in his 2009 FOIA Guidelines,” it referred to this language as “particularly pernicious.” They claimed a slight word change from the DOJ’s own policy would dramatically expand current policy; yet critically, they stated that they would be against it even if the language was exactly the same as their own stated policy. From the memo:

To be clear, we do not believe that this is fixable by amending the language, because any codification of a foreseeable-harm standard would undermine proper FOIA administration by requiring judges to determine on a document-by-document, subjective basis whether withholding is proper.

Imagine that: giving judges the power to be able to determine whether the government was lying!

https://freedom.press/blog/2016/03/new-documents-show-obama-admin-aggressively-lobbied-kill-transparency-reform-congress

Lawmakers Chug Raw Milk to Celebrate Legalizing Raw Milk, Are Mysteriously Overcome With Stomach Illness

#freedom

i know it's shocking that debbie wasserman schultz would be involved in this, but

In a bizarre display of bipartisan cooperation, a handful of Democratic lawmakers have joined Republicans in trying to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The question is: Why?

Most notably, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also serves as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, is co-sponsoring the deceptively titled Consumer Protection and Choice Act, which would undermine the watchdog agency's pending efforts to rein in predatory lending.

The bill would delay federal regulations for payday lenders by two years. It also would allow states to adopt more lenient rules for the industry.

Wasserman Schultz is joined by eight other Democrats in co-sponsoring the legislation alongside twice as many Republicans.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160308-column.html

Rep. Patrick Murphy is our party's choice to fill Marquito's Florida seat.

Ned brought my attention to this cover story.

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

whatta Nobel guy

"I love that guy"

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

i can't stop watching this

it's always been uncanny how much she looks like my beloved first-grade teacher but maybe it's that way for everyone

beloved and feared

explaining how 'kleptocracy' starts with a short e

treeship otm btw i can't stop thinking about this and idk it feels much less And Hello To Liberal Facebook! than yr average 21c harangue to an empty senate chamber because she is just so so so otm in it and the people she is haranguing are literally in the apparently helpless act of destroying the sixth party system

Holy shit, that speech is pure fire. In tears over here. When does she get to be president?

I hope she's in the Senate for years, inspiring good men and women to run for president.

serving well on committees, too

this cycle of exaggerating the ability of a president to affect change followed by electing complete blockading idiots on off-years to actual legislative power needs to change, but I have no idea how that starts

It starts with a voting population that's massively more engaged than what we currently have, which Obama attempted to do and failed miserably at, partially through his own efforts and partially because people in his own party ran away from him and his policies during midterm elections.

^^^

Yup exactly

She belongs in the senate, as has been argued repeatedly

i think she'll be potus eventually

when she's 80

maybe in 2024 - she'll be 75

there's always the special election in 2018 when Trump abdicates.

there's always the special election in 2018 when Trump abdicates. is assasinated by Putin

nah, they're besties!

Putin offered high praise for the billionaire businessman-turned-Republican presidential front-runner on Thursday during an annual news conference with reporters.

"He is a bright and talented person without any doubt," Putin said, adding that Trump is "an outstanding and talented personality."

And in remarks closely mirroring Trump's assessment of the campaign, the Russian leader called Trump "the absolute leader of the presidential race," according to the Russian TASS news agency.

gangster sees a mark

...and knows how to influence (and upset) the GOP commentariat

i think putin prefers working with authoritarians bc it's much easier to figure out what their interests are

gangster sees a mark

^^^

I was just making a joke about Putin murdering former associates guys

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/freedom-caucus-budget_us_56e76241e4b0860f99da2cb3?

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus said Monday night they would not support the federal budget deal proposed by House Republican leadership, putting the spending plan — and the entire appropriations process for the year — in serious jeopardy.

From the basement of a Capitol Hill restaurant, Tortilla Coast, Freedom Caucus members took an official position against the $1.07 trillion budget that’s scheduled for a committee vote on Wednesday. The conservatives took issue with the top-line spending number, arguing that Republicans should go back to the $1.04 trillion level under automatic spending cuts known as sequestration that were set in 2011.

At least 30 members of the roughly 40-member Freedom Caucus voted to formally oppose the budget. Those 30-some members are vital for the Republican budget. Without their support, the document would lack a majority of House votes, since the spending blueprint typically gets no Democratic backers.

But the votes are not there for what they want:

The fiscal blueprint, released Tuesday by Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., relies on eliminating health care subsidies and other coverage provided by Obama's health care law, sharp cuts to Medicaid, and reprises a plan devised by Ryan years ago that would transform Medicare into a voucher-like program for future retirees. A deteriorating fiscal picture required Price to propose deeper cuts than ever before...

Many conservatives oppose the additional $46 billion or so in higher spending that the deal with Obama permits for the upcoming round of appropriations bills for the 2017 fiscal year starting Oct. 1; it comes on top of about $66 billion in higher spending for the ongoing budget year.

In sum, conservatives are tired that sweeping budget cuts are never implemented while Obama prevails on more money for agency operating budgets. A plan to advance real spending cuts along with the nonbinding budget targets didn't win over many tea party converts, in part because it's plain the cuts wouldn't make it through the Senate

http://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-block-budget-ryan-cites-anxiety-among-voters-150836916--politics.html

nobody could have predicted

http://fourcolors.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/files/2012/01/Peanuts-Football.jpg

lol

i'm trying to figure out who charlie brown and lucy are at this point. maybe we are all charlie brown

I assumed Charlie = Ryan and Lucy = Freedom Caucus

instead of holding a football lucy just punches charlie in the dick

neither playing football nor dick punching are allowed at Tortilla Coast. these freedom caucusers just won't play by the rules!

"There are two things that are unquestionably true about American politics:

1. Wielding power in a capitalistic, imperialistic, racist, sexist society means making necessary compromises and trade-offs that are difficult if not impossible to justify on progressive grounds.

2. Democratic and progressive politicians regularly make unforced errors that damage progressive goals and frequently cite non-existent or questionable political constraints to justify bad policies.

The trouble is distinguishing whether a policy decision is a necessary evil or an unforced error. About 90 percent of how you feel about the Democratic party will depend on which of these scenarios you think happens more frequently. About 90 percent of debates on Twitter ignore one of these two truths, which is why they are awful."

https://medium.com/@SeanMcElwee/two-truths-and-a-whole-lot-of-lies-2609b328bf03#.8w264npg7

Daughter of Illinois State Rep Accused of Attacking Mother's Opponent With Staple Gun

Meanwhile the EPA can't win for losing.

Ryan needs to shitcan the so-called Hastert Rule and just make bargains with the dems that can get at least 180 to 200 Republican votes, leaving the Freedom Caucus to stew in its own juice. It's that damn Hastert Rule that has handed them all their power, and the rule is entirely imaginary.

so not gonna happen

he'll lose the speakership if he does that

The Georgia General Assembly recently passed a bill, called the "Free Exercise Protection Act," that would allow faith-based organizations to deny services to people based on their religious beliefs.

But making the bill into law could create some backlash from the NFL, which Atlanta is hoping to host for the 2019 or 2020 Super Bowl.

"NFL policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness, and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or any other improper standard," Brian McCarthy, NFL spokesman, said in a statement. "Whether the laws and regulations of a state and local community are consistent with these policies would be one of many factors NFL owners may use to evaluate potential Super Bowl host sites."

http://news.wabe.org/post/religious-exemption-bill-could-bump-ga-super-bowl-list

priorities

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/21/why-we-cant-ignore-the-house-republicans-really-bad-budget/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard

More on the House Republicans budget bill (that proposes lots of cuts, but not enough for the 40 member Tea Party Freedom caucus)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/03/21/these-photos-of-obama-in-cuba-are-going-viral/?tid=sm_fb

uh not what the White House wanted, I'm sure

unless they're just straight-up trolling right wing media

i would donate my 2004 Cuba photos to the White House for digital manipulation, but then again the only one i'm in is at Che's gravesite / memorial.

tomorrow is the meeting with dissidents and the ballgame, so nuthin can go wrong there.

how does this compare to photos of Nixon with the actual Mao? tell the wingnuts to sit on a chainsaw.

http://i.imgur.com/lvP1E8D.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CeFtox0WEAQJQwT.jpg

unless they're just straight-up trolling right wing media

^^^^

how would he be trolling right wing media?

In that Reagan speech under the Lenin bust, he condemned the Soviet system's stifling of intellectual curiosity, according to what I remember reading in the Cannon bio.

it'd be pretty funny if, back at the white house, the obamas are sitting around reading people rage about this and giggling

"mister president, maybe we should have the cameras face the other way? there's a huge che guevara mural behind you"

"nah, maybe o'reilly or limbaugh will finally have a brain aneurysm while yelling about this"

"Do you have any cigars about? I thought you'd have cigars. Never mind, doesn't matter"

"nah, maybe o'reilly or limbaugh will finally have a brain aneurysm while yelling about this"

― μpright mammal (mh

Change we can believe in!

nobody except the right wing media and maybe some cubans in FL give a fuck about these photos

speaker ryan growing a conscience? wtf is this

http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/full-text-speaker-ryan-state-american-politics

still reading thru it

"I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you I have always met this standard. There was a time when I would talk about a difference between “makers” and “takers” in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. “Takers” wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don't want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point.

"So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way. But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct. I was just wrong. And of course, there are still going to be times when I say things I wish I hadn’t. There are still going to be times when I follow the wrong impulse.

"Governing ourselves was never meant to be easy. This has always been a tough business. And when passions flair, ugliness is sometimes inevitable. But we shouldn’t accept ugliness as the norm. We should demand better from ourselves and from one another. We should think about the great leaders that have bestowed upon us the opportunity to live the American Idea. We should honor their legacy. We should build that more confident America.

doesn't know the diff between flare and flair but oh well, wisconsin

golden opportunity for a Dem House? lookin' like idiots so far...

"...Most of those seats are hopelessly Republican, but not all of them. Six of the districts have a Cook Partisan Voting Index score (a measure of how much more partisan a district is than the median) of “Republican+10” or less. Democrats held two of them, the 3rd and 10th districts in Pennsylvania, as recently as 2010. Illinois’s 16th district, held by Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, is only R+4, but no Democrat emerged to challenge him. Given their thin margin for error, Democrats need surprises in seats like Kinzinger’s to win the majority. But they cannot get his.

If this pattern continues, dozens more Republicans (in the states where candidates can still file) will see no general-election opposition from Democrats. To give one glaring example, Virginia’s 2nd district, which Mitt Romney won only narrowly in 2012, has an open seat; incumbent Scott Rigell is retiring. But while two Republicans have announced they’re running, no Democrat has declared yet, and filing closes March 31. There’s also no Democrat currently running in Colorado’s 3rd district, an R+5 seat where incumbent Scott Tipton only won 53 percent of the vote in 2012."

https://newrepublic.com/article/131919/retaking-house-democratic-pipe-dream

yeah one thing I know for sure is that the Dems will actively screw up every opportunity handed to them this season

wow at Ryan's makers/takers recant. it's not often you see someone in his position admit that they were completely wrong

would be cool if all Bernie's $$$ was going to challengers for those House seats instead

xp

Kizinger's kinda hot tbh

that Ryan statement is really odd, trying to think of what could have motivated it

Growth? It's been known to happen. Rarely.

He's probably dying.

don't underestimate electoral panic

i suppose there is the possibility that he genuinely realized he made a mistake (over and over) and wants to atone. but wasn't he handing out copies of the fountainhead to everyone like 2 years ago? and now suddenly he realizes it was all a giant mistake? someone needs to ask him if ayn rand is still his favorite author

of course he can pretend he doesn't thumb through The Fountainhead before his P90X routine.

yeah there's gotta be some political triangulation/calculation to saying this at this particular juncture, I just don't get what it is. Maybe that's undergirded by some personal revelations, and in that case I can't help but wonder what those were as well.

"cut your losses"

lol @ those paragraphs leading into praise for the Kemp-Roth '81 tax cut ie more Laffer cruve "trickle-down" horseshit

but wasn't he handing out copies of the fountainhead to everyone like 2 years ago? and now suddenly he realizes it was all a giant mistake? someone needs to ask him if ayn rand is still his favorite author

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, March 23, 2016 12:40 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If we can forgive 19-year-olds, perhaps we can also forgive Paul Ryan.

Maybe, and I'm talking just an outside chance here, but maybe Ryan suddenly realized that makers/takers is widely used by white supremacists as coded language for whites/minorities and he became deeply ashamed of himself.

David Stockman: "Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate."

Every Republican running for President is proposing more massive tax cuts for the rich.

Ryan may be changing his phrasing, but not his core values or any substantive House bills.

Back In January Ryan began talking about this--

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-paul-ryan-stopped-referring-to-makers-and-takers/

At a Wisconsin 4-H fair in 2012, Ryan encountered a Democrat who objected to what then was one of Ryan’s signature rhetorical tropes — his distinction between “makers” and “takers,” the latter being persons who receive more in government spending than they pay in taxes. He had been struck by a report that 60 percent of Americans were already — this was before Obamacare — “net receivers.” But his encounter at the fair reminded him that, for a while, he and many people he cared about had been takers, too.

The morning after a night “working the Quarter Pounder grill at McDonald’s,” Ryan, 16, found his father, who had been troubled by alcohol, dead in bed. Janesville’s strong sinews of community sustained Ryan and his mother; so did Social Security survivor benefits. When GM’s Janesville assembly plant closed, draining about $220 million of annual payroll from a town of 60,000, many relatives, friends and constituents needed the social safety net — unemployment compensation, job training, etc.

“At the fair that day, I realized I’d been careless with my language,” he writes. “The phrase gave insult where none was intended.” He has changed his language and his mind somewhat but thinks the fundamental things still apply.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-paul-ryan-rethinks-the-makers-and-takers-idea/2014/08/29/62d02090-2ee4-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html

pffftt

what an asshole

man George Will has always wanted to sit on Ryan's lap.

imo there's a difference between trumpeting your ideals, no matter how misguided they are, and being dumb enough to think your job in congress is do just stand around yelling about those ideals instead of doing your job

paul ryan is pretty bad, but he seems to actually have an interest in working and maybe finally realized some of his peers who ran on the same rhetoric aren't very bright

he's so bright it took him several decades to realize he was a "taker"

it's a net product over your lifetime, I am sure all his hard work now makes up for that

lol

Fun with Chait:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/reminder-liberalism-is-working-marxism-failed.html

How much hippie punching would you like in one screed? What if he worked in slams against college students _and_ political correctness in his clueless ahistory?

he still thinks the DLC won

I want to thank Cruz for an amazing turn of phrase here

"If a Republican cannot carry the state of Utah, which Donald Trump cannot, you are looking at a Mondale-level bloodbath."

ol' "Hurricane" Mondale, they used to call him

We should not forget that for four years, Walter Mondale was Vice President of the United States of America.

and each day during that term, he bathed in the blood of the innocent, in an enormous stone tub built for this very purpose

It's weird how some things only seem aberrant with forty years of hindsight.

Mondale was such a no-hoper, i voted for him

in defense of lost causes by slavoj morbius

some shit going down in north carolina tonight

McCrory to sign bill barring LGBT protections against discrimination

I still have a killer Mondale '84 t-shirt fyi

wtf is wrong with these people

that bill sounds like it's trolling for a rematch on the Romer v. Evans law. what a weird moment to try and do that.

Conservatives only wage culture war fights they've already lost; trans issues and "bathroom panic" is generating a lot of heat this year. No consolation to those being harmed or feeling threatened by any of this but the gay marriage cases of last year were inevitable when "traditional marriage" amendments swept ballots in many states in 2004.

This is in the NC bill too

In addition to voiding the bathroom provision of Charlotte's ordinance and spelling out state policy on discrimination in employment and public accommodations, the bill also would prohibit cities and counties from adopting so-called living wage ordinances because that would require businesses to pay workers more than the state-established minimum wage
Read more at http://www.wral.com/nc-lawmakers-bar-lgbt-protections-against-discrimination/15594951/#qPCRsZIZpmbY7Mbd.99

Sadly there's probably no way to mount a federal constitutional challenge against anti-home-rule statutes enacted by states, I think they can do whatever they want there.

move the fuck out, gay ppl

'radical breach of trust and security under the false argument of equal access'

https://governor.nc.gov/press-release/governor-mccrory-takes-action-ensure-privacy-bathrooms-and-locker-rooms

move the fuck out, gay ppl

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, March 23, 2016 9:19 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, that should solve all the problems. can they all move in with you?

soonz i die

youd leave more room, tho

i have no idea what that means

if all the NC fags move to NY they'll drive your rent up though

^this guy goes or i do. enough already.

huh?? i'm scarcely needling you any more than you or i would anyone else; i'd call it teasing more than anything else. i think you're projecting something much nastier onto what i've posted than what was intended.

speaker ryan growing a conscience? wtf is this

press release: i am so presidential

Conservatives only wage culture war fights they've already lost;

Yup.

Stephen Prothero just came out with an entire book on that very subject

For a very long time the conservatives were actively fighting against extending basic civil rights to african-americans and to the lgbt community and the results looked like they were winning for decade after decade.

This "already lost" thesis appears to presume that conservatives "lost" the war against jim crow or lgbt rights as soon as the rights movements coalesced. Otherwise you'd have to argue that the conservatives weren't battling from the very beginning. It would be much more accurate to say that if the oppressed are willing to continue in the face of violent oppression for as many decades as it takes to overthrow the old regime, they can eventually win their point - at enormous cost in pain and effort.

It might be better put that you only notice it when it's distinguishable from the prevailing culture.

I don't even know what to say about the NC bill. There was a huge battle here in Charlotte to pass the non-discrimination ordinance (and in particular to add the transgender protections), with a ton of contentious public hearings and a very divisive council vote. And it all gets undone in a single night by a cabal of conservative legislators who convened a special session for the express purpose of denying their fellow citizens a right to equal protection under the law. Duly signed into law by our beloved governor, who at least pretended to be a moderate as mayor of Charlotte for 14 years, but now seems so eager to bow and scrape to the idiotic rednecks of this worthless fucking state.

it's so fucking depressing

indiana governor signs bill banning abortions in cases of fetal deformity

waiting for the bill that bans abortions in cases of brunette hair

Weird when I see people I know share this kinda thing:

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/political-choice-why-the-two-party-system-is-broken-beyond-repair/

http://tofias.net/files/png/blog/2016/02/footprint.png

lol comcast tho. a whole company based on the collection of rent from government-granted monopolies, that it lobbies heavily to maintain.

lol at apple ngaf

It's from http://tofias.net/blog/2016/02/has-apple-been-neglecting-politics

today John McCain wrote a NY Times op tribute to the last Lincoln Brigade fighter from Spain who died a few weeks ago. You know, a Communist!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/can-merrick-garland-kill-the-filibuster

The conflict between the new guard and old will likely come to a head over a Supreme Court nomination. If a moderate like Garland can get majority support but not sixty votes, what will the Democrats do? It is a good bet that they will go nuclear again—and abolish filibusters for Supreme Court nominees as well. That would be a healthy step for both Democrats and democrats. The filibuster has become a cancer on the legislative process, creating the need for supermajorities on even the most routine business. The less it exists, the better.

Supporters of the filibuster will warn that if it is abolished for Supreme Court nominees, it will soon be abolished for legislation too—and then the Senate will become more like the House. And that will be fine. The Senate is, by design, a less than democratic body; there is no real justification for the fact that small-population states like Vermont and Wyoming have the same number of senators as California and Texas. The existence of the filibuster only exacerbates the anti-democratic nature of the chamber. Merrick Garland’s nomination will prove consequential indeed if it helps usher the filibuster to its long-overdue demise.

it's a nice dream

So I'm still pretty sickened by HB 2 in North Carolina, but these are a few articles I found useful for context:

http://www.autostraddle.com/after-north-carolina-9-states-14-anti-trans-bills-332746/

http://www.autostraddle.com/kourtney-yochum-becomes-the-7th-trans-person-murdered-this-year-we-find-ourselves-asking-the-same-old-questions-332736/

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-conservatives-increasingly-care-where-you-pee-20160308

http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/who-birthed-anti-trans-bathroom-panic

auto straddle eh

Eh, Mey Rude's coverage of trans issues has been solid, and I found the breakdown of legislation in the other article to be useful.

anybody should be able to use any public restroom imo

I agree, but playing on people's transmisogynistic fears (as most of their rhetoric presents trans women as predatory deviants) gives the Republicans an easy wedge issue, as noted upthread and in that Rolling Stone article. I don't think it's mentioned in the articles I posted, but Lambda Legal and the NC branch of the ACLU will probably be spearheading challenges to the law, as far as I know; it remains to be seen who will join them.

anybody should be able to use any public restroom imo

I'd like to hear what women ilxors would say about this idea.

I don't see any good reason to gender single-user restrooms; it's not clear to me that gender-segregated shared restrooms are necessarily safer for it, but I'm more agnostic on that question. The bathroom bills, however, aren't about ensuring women's public safety, they're about restricting visibly trans people's access to public space.

Merritt Kopas wrote her MA thesis and some related talks on restrooms and gender regulation, incidentally, but I've only skimmed her thesis:

http://mkopas.net/files/KOPAS_UW-thesis-2012.pdf

http://mkopas.net/files/Kopas_AGREAA-Trans-Studies_2012_text.pdf

last time the gop was filibustering, people said the dems in power didn't abolish it because senators like to keep power in the senate. is that still the conventional wisdom?

I don't see any good reason to gender single-user restrooms

I agree with this completely.

As for multi-user restrooms, I would imagine that rape victims might have some qualms about abolishing gender distinctions entirely, but I am not a rape victim and cannot speak for them.

Only reason I can see to gender single-user restrooms is that men are disgusting and make huge messes and women should not be subjected to that.

Only reason I can see to gender single-user restrooms is that men are disgusting and make huge messes and women should not be subjected to that.

Ha ha, you have never had to clean women's restrooms for a living.

That ... is true. Are there typically puddles of urine in women's restrooms?

fetuses everywhere iirc

I do want to reiterate that this is a side question (there is currently no movement to abolish gendered bathrooms); the real issue is that conservatives are invoking an imaginary problem to further stigmatize an already marginalized group of people. It really isn't much different from nineteenth century laws against crossdressing.

I don't see any good reason to gender single-user restrooms

I agree with this completely.

I'd agree with this if women didn't fear sexual assault from men.

don't think segregating single-user restrooms really has anything to do with that

Single-user bathrooms almost always have locks on their doors to ensure privacy.

So it looks like Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and Equality NC are filing suit against the North Carolina law: http://www.advocate.com/politics/2016/3/27/equality-groups-filing-suit-against-north-carolinas-anti-lgbt-law

excellent RS article, relating this non-issue to the cynical calculus of an election year is a good lens to use imo

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/03/28/breaking-nathan-deal-will-veto-georgias-religious-liberty-bill/

someone noticed the sound of a bunch of organizations tentatively scratching georgia off their list of places to hold events

i mean, yeah.

There are a thousand levers that can influence human behavior; it's interesting to see which move whom and when.

hollywood does alot of business in georgia due to sweet sweet tax incentives and they threatened to bail on the state if this went through so I'm not surprised

http://gov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2016-03-28/transcript-deal-hb-757-remarks-0

In light of our history, I find it ironic that today some in the religious community feel it necessary to ask the government to confer upon them certain rights and protections. If indeed our religious liberty is conferred by God and not by man-made government, we should heed the “hands-off” admonition of the First Amendment to our Constitution. When legislative bodies attempt to do otherwise, the inclusions and omissions in their statutes can lead to discrimination, even though it may be unintentional. That is too great a risk to take.

Some of those in the religious community who support this bill have resorted to insults that question my moral convictions and my character. Some within the business community who oppose this bill have resorted to threats of withdrawing jobs from our state. I do not respond well to insults or threats. The people of Georgia deserve a leader who will make sound judgments based on solid reasons that are not inflamed by emotion. That is what I intend to do.

As I've said before, I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community in Georgia of which my family and I are a part of for all of our lives. Our actions on HB 757 are not just about protecting the faith-based community or providing a business-friendly climate for job growth in Georgia. This is about the character of our State and the character of its people. Georgia is a welcoming state filled with warm, friendly and loving people. Our cities and countryside are populated with people who worship God in a myriad of ways and in very diverse settings. Our people work side-by-side without regard to the color of our skin, or the religion we adhere to. We are working to make life better for our families and our communities. That is the character of Georgia. I intend to do my part to keep it that way.

aside from Hollywood, GA wants the Super Bowl - that paragon of moral fibre - in a few years as well.

good speech, Deal.

headline should be A New Deal

shit they need to reboot New Coke as well

these religious exemption bills are insane. it seems like the very reason the first amendment was written was to prevent these. when a court case is decided down the road, they will literally be defining what is Christian religion. the first amendment seems written to forbid that?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

i guess they lean on the "prohibiting the free exercise" bit. which is dumb. cos it says FREE exercise. as in nobody is being oppressed, nobody is wielding power over another. that is FREEDOM.

it seems like the very reason the first amendment was written was to prevent these.

There's some double negative paradoxical circular logic to them. We did not have freedom of religion, so it was added as part of the bill of rights, thus protecting our right to practice our religions, which is being infringed upon by those exercising their right *not* to practice our religion. Therefore we need our religion further protected from those whose protections infringe upon our rights to practice our religion, which infringes on their protected rights. So the solution is the lessen their rights to better secure ours. Etc.

also pretty sure 'it is a sin to do anything for and/or be nice to gay people' is not in the bible

have you read the bible backwards? *metal salute*

But they are taking away my right not to be nice to people, which is an implicit precept of the Bible.

North Carolina's attorney general has announced that his office will not be defending HB 2. His remarks focus on the law's likely damage to the state's economy and reputation: https://mobile.twitter.com/dominicholden/status/714839764180938752

But also touch on what was really the standout point of Kennedy, J's opinion last year in the marriage equality case, which is that enshrining discrimination in the law is both unconstitutional and repugnant to the national character

Andi McClure on twitter: "Reminder that North Carolina SB2 exists more or less entirely as part of McRory's gov reelection campaign & his opponent is the atty general"

Now another bill protecting homophobic and transphobic discrimination is past the Mississippi House, and likely to make it through the Senate tomorrow:

https://mobile.twitter.com/chasestrangio/status/714966131723919361/photo/1
https://mobile.twitter.com/chasestrangio/status/714966131723919361

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CewR6GyW4AA9QaE.jpg

"Male (man) and female (woman) THE LORD created them, referring to their immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at birth"

So do we know who's written these laws? ALEC? The Family Council? Someone Koch-related?

I think it's the Family Research Council:
http://www.frc.org/transgender

That brief concludes by presenting trans people's identities as delusions, and transphobia as a matter of conscience:

A person's sex (male or female) is an immutable biological reality. In the vast majority of people (including those who later identify as "transgender"), it is unambiguously identifiable at birth. There is no rational or compassionate reason to affirm a distorted psychological self-concept that one's "gender identity" is different from one's biological sex.

Neither lawmakers nor counselors, pastors, teachers, nor medical professionals should participate in or reinforce the transgender movement's lies about sexuality--nor should they be required by the government to support such distortion.

Along similar lines, the Republican Party resolved a few months ago to challenge the Obama administration on Title IX: http://www.advocate.com/transgender/2016/2/25/republican-national-committee-endorses-anti-trans-bathroom-bills

Enshrining those three particular religious beliefs into law is so clearly a First Amendment violation under Lemon, but I wouldn't trust the conservative wing of this Supreme Court to give even a passing nod to it at this point.

when some people are so fervently supporting legislation affecting a relatively tiny subset of the population, who they likely do not even know, it's some suspicious shit

Wider stakes: rolling back the whole concept of gender as a social construct, feminism, unwifely behavior, and other products of the cultural Bolshevik infiltrators. If sex roles are god-given then government has no business giving any legs up to women in the workplace, controlling their own bodies, etc. etc.

(And,obviously, any recognition of trans, intersex, and genderqueer people as people, going far beyond bathrooms.)

NC Attorney General Roy Cooper is not a particularly inspiring candidate, but he's raised a shitload of money and also has refused to defend both this law and Amendment One (NC's anti-gay marriage law which was ultimately struck down in court), so here's hoping he gets into the governor's mansion to act as a check on our insane legislature.

what are roy's negatives, asking as an out-of-stater

He's a long-time member of the Democratic political establishment in rural eastern NC who served almost 20 years in the legislature. Not necessarily the most dynamic, out-of-the-box-candidate. Plus the Democratic-controlled state government was often accused throughout the 90's of shortchanging urban areas in road and education funding and instead funneling their tax money to rural and over-represented districts. There's not a lot there-- he's just an old face.

feel like people in NC can't complain much when a non-blue dog dem has a serious shot to win governor

well this is different: tying your attacks on minimum-wage increases to food truck popularity:

A higher minimum wage is no way to solve the problem of poverty

Contains the bit:

Big Brother can mandate a $15 hourly minimum wage, but Big Brother cannot mandate that firms hire workers. As minimum wages have risen, cashiers have vanished from drug stores and food trucks have replaced restaurants. Few would have thought 10 years ago (when the national minimum wage was $5.15) that food trucks would line the streets in the D.C. downtown area and people would line up for their lunch...

Food trucks have existed since forever and most of the current crop charge as much as a restaurant, if not more.

also assume that food truck quality was pretty piss poor 10 years ago and the only ones lining up to them for lunch were construction workers

the DC food truck trick is to offer you $7 entrees that are only 2/3 of a full meal. in the heat of the moment you just add on a $4 side to avoid afternoon stomach grumbles.

Update on the anti-LGBT bill HB1523 in Mississippi: the state Senate voted 31/17 to pass it with amendments, so it'll be going back to the House. @EWagsterPettus and @arielle_amara have been livetweeting the proceedings, if you want more details, and @aclu_ms and @chase_strangio are also useful for context.

*@chasestrangio, rather

Summary here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/dominicholden/mississippi-scheduled-for-final-vote-on-anti-lgbt-religious

is there even one incident ever, anywhere, of anyone being assaulted by a transgender person in a public bathroom?

Not as far as I know, but that doesn't mean we can't be convenient scapegoats!

The idea that letting trans women use women's restrooms would lead to sexual assaults is, and I do not use this term loosely, blood libel.

Blood libel doesn't merit opposition with evidence, it merits condemnation.

is there even one incident ever, anywhere, of anyone being assaulted by a transgender person in a public bathroom?

See, if I was a smart piece of shit GOPer, I'd say it was to protect the transgendered person.

trans women get assaulted and murdered outside of restrooms in awful numbers, telling them they should be using the men's room is basically violent.

i don't think anyone could possibly buy that forcing a trans woman into a male bathroom would be for her protection

Yeah, that's right.

I was trying to turn it around backwards and wound up going 360°.

@ggreenwald
Arab-American family of 5 going on vacation - 3 young kids in tow - removed from @United plane for "safety reasons"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctIMBz-42qk

not sure where else to put it, but andrew sullivan is joining new york magazine as a contributing editor

try Damage ContrLOLz

‏@chrislhayes
How Habitat for Humanity used federal dollars to push poor people out of Bed Stuy

https://www.propublica.org/article/habitat-for-humanity-brooklyn-bedford-stuyvesant-poor-lose-homes

Check out this shit in Kansas re voting:

http://cjonline.com/news/2016-04-01/kansas-county-elections-head-used-political-ties-kris-kobach-then-curbed-voting

crazy, and if he gets into legal trouble, maybe the Kansas legislature will bail him out with some changes to the judiciary

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/us/outraged-by-kansas-justices-rulings-gop-seeks-to-reshape-court.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The federal body is supposed to have two Republican and two Democratic commissioners but has only one Democrat now because of a vacancy.

i'm sure the vacany is totally organic and not part of a concerted campaign by the gop to keep it that way.

Andrew Bacevich on the transformation of POTUS into unchecked warlord

"Collaborating with a president they roundly despise — implicitly concurring in Obama’s questionable claim that “existing statutes [already] provide me with the authority I need” to make war on ISIS — the GOP-controlled Congress thereby transformed the post-9/11 AUMF into what has now become, in effect, a writ of permanent and limitless armed conflict. In Iraq and Syria, for instance, what began as a limited but open-ended campaign of air strikes authorized by President Obama in August 2014 has expanded to include an ever-larger contingent of U.S. trainers and advisers for the Iraqi military, special operations forces conducting raids in both Iraq and Syria, the first new all-U.S. forward fire base in Iraq, and at least 5,000 U.S. military personnel now on the ground, a number that continues to grow incrementally.

"Remember Barack Obama campaigning back in 2008 and solemnly pledging to end the Iraq War? What he neglected to mention at the time was that he was retaining the prerogative to plunge the country into another Iraq War on his own ticket. So has he now done, with members of Congress passively assenting and the country essentially a prisoner of war."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/writing-a-blank-check-on-war_b_9616466.html

funny how elastic the definition of war can be

Mississippi's bill protecting citizens' sacred freedom to discriminate against LGBT people passes into law: http://www.advocate.com/religion/2016/4/05/mississippi-governor-signs-sweeping-anti-lgbt-religious-liberty-law

PayPal abandons plans to open facility in Charlotte because of LGBT law

(an office opening that the governor was crowing about days before signing the NC anti-trans bill)

that's right: http://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/San-Francisco-poised-to-vote-on-full-paid-leave-7228281.php

\o/ Seattle next let's go

ased on Tuesday by the Office of Congressional Ethics listed a half-dozen possible violations of House rules by Representative Alan Grayson of Florida. Credit Loren Elliott for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, may have improperly used his House office and staff to handle personal financial matters involving a family-run hedge fund as well as political activities related to his bid for the United States Senate, the Office of Congressional Ethics concluded in a 986-page investigation released Tuesday.

The report, which found as many as a half dozen violations of House rules, provoked an angry response from Mr. Grayson, who accused the quasi-independent agency of conspiring with his Democratic opponent for the Senate seat.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Grayson said repeatedly in a telephone news conference after the report was released.

The exchange came on the same day that the House Ethics Committee — the only entity that has formal powers to sanction a House lawmaker — announced that it was still studying the case and that, at least for now, it would not create a formal investigative panel to examine possible misconduct charges against Mr. Grayson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/alan-grayson-florida.html?ref=politics

Did video of Rick Scott getting berated at Starbucks get posted?

Thank you (really) big government Treasury Department for new rules that have led Pfizer to give up for now on corporate inversion plan that would shift their headquarters to Ireland to avoid taxes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/04/06/pfizer-and-allergan-call-off-their-merger-after-u-s-move-to-block-inversions/

xpost Didn't see it here, out do love the idea of people yelling at politicians, forcing them to face the targets of their shit policies in an up close and personal way. I've always wondered what I'd say if I bumped into one of these jackasses but don't think I'd be as brave as that woman.

for everyone's benefit:

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

agree that she is remarkably well composed and articulate, I would probably be stumbling over my words out of nervousness

also love the "I'm not talking to you"

hero

xp it is awesome.

my governor, ladies and gents. He probably bought a tea no sugar.

lol

Glorious, although one has to assume Rick Scott's sense of shame is deeply buried if it exists at all, given all he's done to gut public services.

as suspected:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Report-4-credible-sex-abuse-allegations-7234198.php

Bruce Springsteen cancels Greensboro, NC show over anti-LGBT bathroom law: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bruce-springsteen/a-statement-from-bruce-springsteen-on-north-carolina/10153539447566824

awesome

Taibbi: Bernie or no Bernie, Paul Krugman is wrong about the banks

Krugman would likely argue that all those little things like laundering money for narco-terrorists, monkeying with world interest rates, and systematic cheating in the currency markets had nothing to do with the crash.