US Politics November 2017

House Speaker Paul Ryan told donors assembled at a Koch brothers conference in Wichita, Kansas, late last month that Republican lawmakers would tackle welfare after tax reform passes the Congress, according to two people familiar with the remarks — an idea the president mentioned last week, telling reporters that “people are taking advantage of the system."

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/27/trump-agenda-tax-reform-260405

The fun just never stops with this bunch...

what's even left to cut? are they going to go after disability? there's a fuckton of broke ass white people on disability who are trump voters, not sure if this is a good idea for them politically but they dgaf anymore

Eh, everything'll be rigged from here on out, they don't need those gross poor people anymore.

There's a *lot* of fraud in SSDI/SSI, if some on it in my extended family are any indication. In my case, morbidly obese alcoholics eeking out their last decade on mental health disability. However, the sensible reform would establish more stringent guidelines for the judges that look at SSDI/SSI appeals, and perhaps subsidizing employment of some currently helped in less physically demanding jobs, not blanket cuts.

In a number of respects, most of those who left the welfare rolls after the 1996 reforms wound up on SSDI/SSI.

Between 1996 and 2015, the number of Americans on the SSDI rolls jumped from 7.7 million to 13 million

Society has to do something with its morbidly obese alcoholics in their last decade of life. I'm not sure that sloughing them off into the disability insurance program is precisely the definition of "fraud", since the alternative is to push them into homeless shelters, drifting in and out of hospital emergency rooms and drunk tanks. We can't just stare past them and pretend they are already dead. If SSI and Medicaid can keep them minimally viable until their liver fails, its about as good as any other program in our piss-poor social welfare apparatus.

maybe i am simple but i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist 'you're on your own' / 'you have no one but yourself to blame' BS

Because Calvinism? It has nothing to do with improving the species or w/e, that's for sure.

It's the old "He who does not work, does not eat" Captain John Smith Mayflower bullshit.

maybe i am simple but i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist 'you're on your own' / 'you have no one but yourself to blame' BS

― reggie (qualmsley),

Funny you should say so! I'm at this moment reading One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and a gospel of individualism was the tenet of James W. Fifeld Jr. This fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fifield_Jr.

Because Calvinism?

Marilynn Robinson has been good in recent years explaining how many of the awful things we've been taught about Calvinism are wrong.

Daines and Johnson both "no" on current bill. Not sure if this is a new development, saw some grumbling from Daines earlier

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/361992-montana-republican-opposes-current-version-of-tax-bill

i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist

Maybe it is because Social Darwinism is entirely distinct from Darwin's theory of the evolution of species. It was independently developed by social philosophers like Herbert Spencer and depends entirely on misunderstanding and misapplying the mechanisms of evolution that Darwin described.

Whenever this "lol stupid right-wingers don't realize they're hurting themselves" stuff comes up I go back to contenderizer's post from a few months ago:

progressives often cluck about the manipulation of poor conservatives, implying that they're mooncalf rubes too dumb to know when they're voting against their own interests. this seems wrongheaded on a number of levels. for one thing, it presumes that such interests can be measured objectively. they can't. the conservatives in question likely stack their towers of relative value quite differently than most progressives. it's also condescending and plays into a well-established conservative narrative, one which holds that the american left is a coalition built cynically on graft, on stealing from the common pot in order to buy the votes of the destitute & lazy. viewed through that lens, the refusal to be so bought, even when one is genuinely needy, becomes a point of pride.

― The sandwiches looked quite dank. (contenderizer), Saturday, March 18, 2017 11:00 PM (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

For at least some conservatives, the knee-jerk rejection of ideas like universal income, single-payer health care, and a robust safety net may be part of a proud "refusal to be so bought," not just "fuck those lazy brown people."

(Though there's plenty of that too.)

not exactly watergate

"When McCrummen put her purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers." https://t.co/1P3Nxirxe8

— Amy Argetsinger (@AmyArgetsinger) November 27, 2017

(watergate-quality ratfucking i mean)

It's interesting that both current "no" votes come from Senators no one predicted would be no votes. Johnson and this dude Daines. Plus the nebulous possible no votes of Collins, McCain, Flake, Corker ...

Basically, who knows, but the debt ceiling vote could take the steam out of this debate anyway, couldn't it? That's ... next week?

this is supposed to move to the floor this week, ahead of the debt ceiling votes

the plan is to vote it out of committee tomorrow, and Corker and Flake are both on the committee. If they want to kill it early here's their chance (I don't think they will)

If this does actually make it to the floor and is opened for amendments it will be interesting to see what Schumer does, I expect some theatrics

god james o’keefe is such a fucking moron

xpost Wow, that Post story. Can someone be prosecuted for that?

nah

not a crime to lie/entrap journalists

I do like how O'Keefe can't even ratfuck properly on behalf of a pedophile though

lankford is making waves too about saying "no", holding out for revenue backdrops (ie, automatic cuts to medicare / social security when the deficit inevitably balloons)

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/27/politics/james-lankford-republican-tax-plan/index.html

the post story is a real treat

indeed it is. some real geniuses we're looking at here

on a similar note

https://i.redd.it/7kmqhrud8l001.png

When asked who at the Daily Caller interviewed her, Phillips said, “Kathy,” pausing before adding the last name, “Johnson.”

https://simpsonswiki.com/w/images/0/0b/Joey_Jo-Jo_Junior_Shabadoo.png

ahahhahah my mind went to the same place

they should have just planted the fake news directly into social media, where hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people would have taken the bait, and then blamed unnamed "leftists" for spreading their deliberate lies. they could even have rumored the WaPo was "deep in talks with woman X in preparation for running her story."

do it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/retired-marine-colonel-to-launch-alabama-senate-write-in-campaign/2017/11/27/08816f4c-d394-11e7-9461-ba77d604373d_story.html

didn't they already sorta do that? I've heard that "Someone in Alabama offered me $1000 to make up a fake Roy Moore story!" thing several times. xp

that is referenced in the WaPo article

people keep claiming WaPo and others are bribing people, presumably at the behest of a vast left-wing conspiracy

c'mon, as if we could stop squabbling long enough to come up with anything that dumb

the fact that they were able to watch this PV employee just walk right into the office is pretty lol

just have someone sit across from the entrance and if you suspect an interviewee, see if they show up to work for O'Keefe, I guess

xp we should try some more vast conspiracies

imo it'd be really funny to replay the situation where the reporter blocked the purse with her own purse, only instead of just seeing if the first purse got moved, just keep moving them around to block each other and see how long it goes

Curb Your Enthusiasm scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nISggw9WM54

AL GOP Sen Shelby didnt vote for GOP candidate Roy Moore, instead voted for unnamed "distinguished Republican write-in” - according to @KilloughCNN

— Deirdre Walsh (@deirdrewalshcnn) November 27, 2017

I thought he already said he wrote in Sessions

"the distinguished racist Keebler Elf from Alabama" just didn't have the same ring to it

lol

shelby's in the club

http://img1.etsystatic.com/000/0/5900221/il_340x270.309466889.jpg

A handy rundown of James OKeefe’s bullshit and when he got back on it:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/935272597520076803

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPrBngaVwAALNHS.jpg
this guy is likely headed for jail afore he turns fifty

Well, yeah.

would also accept an early grave

He’s arrested and convicted multiple times, hasn’t he, but never actually gone to jail?

that always seemed curious to me too, but i'd guess he probably has a long list of republican assholes willing to anonymously provide him bail and good representation in court