US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

Boy oh boy am I a weirdo with no credibility. All I care about is making a good paycheck. So be it.

thought you were leaving there bud

hmmmm. this dan_theman guy is starting to sound familiar. like another guy who's been banned twice already. or is it three times now?

Yet, everything this banned guy was banned for has come true beyond expectations.

If you're as sharp as you all think you are, why dart and dodge what you know as truth? Just be honest with yourselves and join me.

https://i.imgur.com/CpWzkk5.jpg

it's not about being sharp for me, it's just fucking lame to call people morons. this is hopeless anyway, like a badminton match for one against a fucking wall

that is unfair to badminton against a wall, which is invigorating

Is the consensus now that GOP will retain congress? That they calculated that the Kavanaugh case was a vote winner for them not a vote loser? if so that makes the extra weeks investigation an extra weeks time to get their voters riled up. the 'blue wave' seems a bit uncertain?

i'm really not sure about the overall effect of the kavanaugh confirmation on the midterms. before it happened, it seemed like the democrats were sailing toward taking over the house, and possibly even the senate. in the midst of it, when a delayed vote until after the midterms seemed possible (kavanaugh dropping out and someone else being nominated but voted on until after elections), it seemed like that would really motivate republican voters to show up and alter the presumptions. but now, after kavanaugh has been confirmed, and what's left is a bunch of democratic voters that are fucking pissed? i think we'll need to wait a week or so and see how the momentum shifts.

Agreed, if its shifted a bunch recently it can shift a bunch again. I cant tell if this was part of plan or not, to keep this in news cycle seemed dumb at first, then smart, and now Ive no idea, maybe neither - but I could see the rationale behind it, especially if most of the seats up for re-election are D

the kavanaugh confirmation is more brutal than most democratic voters realize, though. the benefit of gaining a democratic majority is to change/update the laws of the land. the republicans just landed control of the supreme court for the next decade or two, at least. i guess it's rude to talk about when they'll die, but of the conservative jsutices, clarence thomas is the oldest, and he's 70. alito is 68. it's going to be bullshit 5-4's for a very long time. and that means that even if something like medicare for all becomes the law of the land, it could very well be temporary. it's important to vote this november, duh, and it would be helpful to help check the power of literally the dumbest person in the entire world, donald trump, but if left-leaning voters knew how fucked we are, many of them wouldn't bother voting.

Chief Justice John Roberts has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints against SCOTUS nom Brett Kavanaugh but not referred them for investigation. @CarolLeonnig @amarimow @thamburger https://t.co/eEVY30WkRa

— Beth Reinhard (@bethreinhard) October 6, 2018

Starting to look more and more like the SC was the main game and Trump a gaudy wrapper to distract outrage and legitimise brute power politics.

*normalise, rather

Good mourning!

you must be re-hearse-ing for an arsekicking from Alf!

I got yer tax returns right here.

Starting to look more and more like the SC was the main game and Trump a gaudy wrapper to distract outrage and legitimise brute power politics.

― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK),

This was the ball game in October 2016, though.

from this morning's NYT story about the House races:

t might seem strange for Republicans to improve their standing even as Mr. Kavanaugh’s falls. It is even stranger since the Times/Siena polls provide zero evidence — truly, zero — to support the view that Republicans are now likelier to say they intend to vote than they were before the Kavanaugh hearing.

yeah, there is no consensus on what the Kavanaugh confirmation will have on midterms. The immediate effect is that Senate polls have broken in favor of Republicans, however many House polls have actually broken in favor of Democrats since the initial Ford accusations broke.

There are competing theories, some that the Kavanaugh thing will galvanize the GOP base, others that now that he's confirmed, some of the excitement will die down as they won't feel like they have an open SCOTUS seat to worry about....whereas Democrats are furious now that he's officially confirmed.

https://www.cookpolitical.com/index.php/analysis/national/national-politics/how-kavanaugh-could-boost-turnout

In all likelihood we have at least 2 or 3 batshit scandals/controversies to go before midterms, and Kavanaugh will feel like it happened 3 years ago by the election

otm

just sent my vote-by-mail ballot back. fuck the GOP.

getting a wee bit tired of people sharing "DON'T VOTE ABSENTEE" memes though.

it's based on generalized information that isn't true, such as stamps being required (not so in Orange County). also in Florida, due to a judge's ruling in 2016, they have to let you cure a ballot that was not accepted due to mismatched signature, and you can check on the status of your ballot, and go early vote if for some reason it gets lost in the mail.

half my friends basically saying "YR VOTE WON'T COUNT"

I vote absentee and am registered in Oregon, where voting is done by mail anyway. The envelope very clearly says you don't need postage if mailed in the US

btw did anyone read last Sunday NYT Mag's voting-machine "irregularities" piece? Entirely up in the air as to when and where your vote will count.

it's going to be bullshit 5-4's for a very long time. and that means that even if something like medicare for all becomes the law of the land, it could very well be temporary. it's important to vote this november, duh, and it would be helpful to help check the power of literally the dumbest person in the entire world, donald trump, but if left-leaning voters knew how fucked we are, many of them wouldn't bother voting.

― Karl Malone, Sunday, October 7, 2018 2:12 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like if a major legislative achievement with majority support like this was passed and then shut down by the court, it would provoke some kind of insane crisis. not that this isn't an insane crisis right now.

i think some governors would ignore the ruling and roll out the program in their states anyway. stuff like that.

We're right back where we were in 1935-1937.

That's kinda optimistic, Alfred. Wouldn't that be a better place to be than the decades that came before?

Living through the Great Depression was a better place?

A bunch of us were talking last night, including a lawyer friend (whose law prof originally spoke/testified in favor of Bart, despite being diametrically opposed politically). The best case scenario we imagined was that Bart's ego was/is so fragile that he won't go full burn-it-down a la Thomas, at least not at first. The worst case scenario is a future 6-3 conservative SC, which is definitely more possible than it should be.

Still going back to something I asked rhetorically of my friends and probably you folks as well after Trump was elected: aside from prohibition, have Americans ever had a right taken away from them or reversed? We've been slow to progress often, and there have been roadblocks and restrictions put up, but have we ever had an actual right reversed or negated?

black men's franchise, post-reconstruction south

Josh, I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Inherently-Unequal-Betrayal-Supreme-1865-1903/dp/0802778852

xp...which is a frightening analog to the present. the whole neoliberal age starting with reagan (or carter, really) has been about erasing gains from the 60s/70s. dismantling new/great society programs, limiting the power of the federal government to redress inequality, making the legal space for abortion as narrow as possible, etc.

In essence, a Stephen Field dissent in the Slaughterhouse Cases gave former railroad lawyers on the Court a novel way to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting due process only in federal cases while enthusiastically protecting something called "liberty of contract" between labor and management

I guess I was thinking more of the modern/contemporary Civil Rights and beyond era, but fair enough.

And just requested that book from the library, thanks.

A quick read.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape dropping.

xxp prop 8 and marriage rights in california

I was thinking more on the federal level.

but on the state level, I wonder what the effects of increasingly draconian laws in various states will be, economically, politically, culturally. for example, if Mississippi outright banned abortion, and the Supreme Court backed the state up. would people boycott Mississippi? Would people leave Mississippi? Would it galvanize people to vote out the elected officials in Mississippi? Would abortion-rights flip back and forth based on who's in charge of the state at any given time?

none of the post-casey whittling-away of real abortion rights has provoked any of that, beyond contributing to a general sense among the culturati that these are backwards/backwoods states they don't travel to

The flip side of that is, what are statistics on abortions in those states? Have numbers gone significantly down? Have accidental deaths gone up?

Wasn't there a legal decision just a day or two ago that reduced the number of clinics that provide abortions in Missouri to one?

Josh you can use any search engine to find all of that

can I? I just assumed those numbers were as prone to obfuscation and manipulation as gun numbers.

okay, quick Google about Missouri and as far as I can tell numbers have been declining precipitously for decades, which I think reflects national trends. So the last few reported years, at least that I could find, said something like 4500 or 5,000 a year. Somewhere in that ballpark. But of course those numbers can't reflect how many people wanted or needed abortions but couldn't for whatever reason. they also I think include people who came from out of state. So I don't know how accurate or useful the numbers are. Except that the number seems to be going down.

anyway, in terms of changing minds or shoring up support, those numbers are super important, especially numbers reflecting how many people were prohibited from getting abortions that needed them. or hurt because they couldn't get them.