The August 2019 US Politics Thread is dumb (stupid}

i just want everyone to follow the law

did you all hear about some sort of mass extinction event that we're all living through? word on the street is that it's the 6th one in earth's history. thing is, just thinking about it kind of hampers industry and hinders economic growth. i can't be bothered to consider earth's natural resources when i'm busy making sure that economic growth continues to grow exponentially for the rest of recorded human history.

i think the plan is to stop recording human history in about 3 weeks

still seeing the FB "let's settle for Biden, deal with climate change in '24" threads; very sensible

one thing that annoys me about the climate change conversation is that global warming is only a small fraction of the damage our species has been doing to this planet over the past couple of centuries

casinos will save us

Owners of one of Illinois’ largest video gambling companies are behind efforts to influence city politics, expand gambling and build a casino near land they control. https://t.co/RfKgAIEIBh

— ProPublica (@propublica) August 8, 2019

This is a slightly interesting post from Talking Points Memo:

For all the arguing and analyzing and prognosticating about the 2020 presidential race I am surprised how little attention has been given to what may or I think likely will play the biggest role in the outcome: third party candidates.

One of the truths about the 2016 election is that Donald Trump didn’t do any better in 2016 than Mitt Romney did in 2012 if you’re looking at the percentage of total votes cast. Indeed, he did significantly worse. Romney won 47.2% of the national vote while Trump won 46.1%. Electoral votes count, not popular votes. And that was Trump’s critical advantage. But it’s really the unusually high 5.7% of the vote going to three third party candidates — Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and Evan McMullin — that made it possible for Trump to win as a minority candidate.

As we’ve seen both before his election and since, Trump is a minority candidate, essentially a factional leader, who has incredibly durable support of between 35% and 45% of the population. He really, really needs the presence of spoiler candidates to pull the contest down into the mid-40s where it was in 2016. I’d never say never. But I think there’s a good argument that a significant third party/spoiler candidacy — or ideally more than one — are the necessary predicate of Trump’s reelection.

People probably think mostly of a third party left candidate like Jill Stein. But just as plausible and just as dangerous is a “center” candidate like Starbucks baron Howard Schultz wanted to be. Stein-type candidates could flourish with a Biden ticket and a Bloomberg or Schultz type could with a Sanders or Warren one.

Ideally for Trump you’d have both — a billionaire centrist to peel off preenish Never Trumpers who don’t want higher taxes and a Jill Stein wrecker-type candidate to peel off purism voters on the left. Yes, the Electoral College is a big deal. But third party candidates are what make an Electoral College victory at roughly 45% of the vote plausible.

How to combat this isn’t that obvious. Party unity is the answer of course. But saying it isn’t a strategy. Where we should focus attention is on the idea that the Trump team undoubtedly knows all this too. So Trump and his reelection team will do everything legitimate and probably illegitimate to get strong third party contenders into the race. I would assume Russian efforts in 2020 will focus on this too.

I don’t have a great answer to what Democrats do about this. But it needs a lot more focus than it is currently getting. Because there’s every reason to believe it will be of decisive importance for the outcome.

The reason I say slightly interesting is because while the theory is sound, the reality is that I don't see any third party candidates on the horizon at the moment. Has Stein made any noises about running again? Schultz has already fucked off, right? Ballotpedia claims there are 816 people who have registered to run for president in 2020, but none of them other than the Ds seem to merit serious consideration. Or am I wrong? Is there someone out there that should be taken seriously as a spoiler next year?

Stein sure strikes me as the type to make the same mistake multiple, multiple times.

Steyer has explicitly said he won't run 3rd party fwiw.

bill weld is currently running for the republican nomination, but i guess he could continue as an independent or 'conservative'

i doubt he should be taken seriously, but he at least has some name recognition

One of the billionaires said he'd only run if Bernie got the nomination IIRC

Fucking Howard Schultz. Was it just Bernie, or was anyone but Biden?

who was the Libertarian candidate in 2016?

Many people are making the "mistake" of running for president. If you don't like them, don't vote for them. You don't get to police other peoples' franchise on behalf of the goddamn Democratic Party.

who was the Libertarian candidate in 2016?

the first one named in that quote

i don't get to police, but i sure get to judge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nOy4WtAc4c

oh yeah, that guy.

i know a Democrat who yells JILL STEIN JILL STEIN for four (or 12) years. Not very good at math or logic.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/trump-baby-photo-el-paso-shooting.html
worth the read

https://nypost.com/2019/08/09/trump-cracks-jokes-about-rent-control-kamikaze-pilots-at-hamptons-fundraiser/

And of his tough stance on trade tariffs and US military aid, Trump told a story of going as a boy to collect rent checks with his father, adding, “It was easier to get a billion dollars from South Korea than to get $114.13 from a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and believe me, those 13 cents were very important.”

yeah wrt "no corpse photos" I would delight in this one exception

Here's acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read, "give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge." pic.twitter.com/q8OoNn3k6r

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2019

This is a fucking nightmare

by 'this' you surely mean, all, this whole, reality here now yes

Don Jr. actually made...a good tweet !??

Hey @ChrisCuomo, take it from me, “Fredo” isn’t the N word for Italians, it just means you’re the dumb brother. 😉 https://t.co/sgg6yF7UDO

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 13, 2019

he'd know

Was gonna say, “take it from me” feels like a self-own

I thought Eric was the dumb brother.

how can you tell the difference

Eric definitely *looks* like the dumb one but Don Jr. is a lot more online and therefore has had many more chances to expose his idiocy to the world

if only his father were online more often to expose his own idiocy

tbh, I got that from SNL.

that's where we got the dad too

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/08/13/politics/central-casting-trump-is-talking-more-than-ever-about-mens-looks/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F

Nice work, CNN. All along I knew gay panic was the key to bringing down Trump

xxp I love The Onion's series about Don Jr and Eric - https://politics.theonion.com/tag/trump-boys

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said on Tuesday that the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to the United States was referring to “people coming from Europe.”

“Well of course that poem referred back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies,” Cuccinelli said of the inscription on the statue during an appearance on CNN on Tuesday. “Where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/457344-cuccinelli-statue-of-liberty-poem-refers-to-people-from-europe

I guess this chooch missed the line about welcoming "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore"

good morning!

And forgot "From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome."

well Ken Cuccinelli is a piece of shit birther and homophobe so not surprised by any of the crap that he spews

I just can’t believe the good people of...wait, who elected him again?

this guy

Trump's business model was predatory: get rich by deceiving customers, cheating suppliers. His model of the world economy is also predatory: trade is bad, there must be a loser for every winner. You might say Trump was our first Marxist president. And Marxism is now failing again

— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 14, 2019

Here's acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read...

this is not what he said

david frum is a thoughtful conservative that deserves to be taken very seriously

that is a take of absolutely phenomenal stupidity even by the usual frum standards

Is he talking about like Harpo Marxism or

Richard Marxism

that's true, Cuccinelli said it says the opposite of what it says

U.S. Rep. Steve King: If not for rape and incest, 'would there be any population left?' https://t.co/TVBZQjYsOb via @DMRegister

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 14, 2019

The Kiron Republican was discussing his defense of not allowing exceptions for rape and incest in the anti-abortion legislation he tried to pass in Congress. Republican leadership had prevented bills he sponsored on banning abortions from advancing through the House, despite GOP support for the measures, King said.

Just because a conception happened in bad circumstances doesn't mean the result isn't a person, King, who is Catholic, argued.

"It's not the baby's fault for the sin of the father, or of the mother," he said.

"especially the sins of the mother", King added

the King family gatherings must be a hoot