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

The court actually has been mostly bad for anyone not wealthy, white and connected and many of the the decisions people mention to defend the court are decisions people like Roberts think are terrible. https://t.co/zitBEDrRmT

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 17, 2018

The yield to political pressure thing is important though, because it’s Roberts foreshadowing the court going farther to the right than the majority of Americans want it to, and he wants to preemptively frame those decisions as acts of integrity rather than partisan goals.

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 17, 2018

and he could just as easily have implied that the Court responded to Political Pressure in 1937 when the Court started going FDR's way.

The SCOTUS is magic and it only works if you believe in it. There’s a reason almost nobody knows what “justiciable” means.

somewhere lurking in the deep background of the SCOTUS's magic act is the government's monopoly on force which ultimately backs up its authority. but the whole apparatus works far more smoothly when the face of authority is acceptable to the great majority and the foundational threat of force is scarcely noticed or needed. that's what putatively has Chief Justice Roberts, um, 'worried', so they say.

previous presidents knew enough to let other people take the wheel when it comes to letting to murdering journalists .

secret of trump is he appeals to people who don’t mind journalists getting murdered

“secret”

JUst reading through some of the twitter links I got yesterday. & therefore being reminded that trump really needs to retire this guilty until proved innocent thing. If he's used it in places where the guilt was pretty obvious already then I think it takes on the colour of the cases he's used it in, so he might as well just state I know I'm covering this up.

Probably has already taken on the 'yes, this is an obvious lie' flag.
(just thinking of obvious semiotic substitutions)

guilty until proved innocent*

* birth certificates / emails excepted

Probably has already taken on the 'yes, this is an obvious lie' flag.

The old joke ("How can you tell when X is lying? His lips are moving.") has never been more appropriate than with this president. Literally every utterance is not just a blatant lie, but the direct mirror image of the truth.

the historical political independence of SCOTUS is a giant fucking horselaugh

well, good mourning!!

impeach the president!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/beto-orourke-ted-cruz-debate-texas-senate.html

Reading this bummed me out

if it makes you feel any better, when the GOP keeps control of congress (despite losing the aggregate popular vote by 10,000,000+), they can bury proof of the president's treason

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/411785-mueller-to-present-key-findings-related-to-russia-probe-after?

Good news! Turns out America's problem is that rich white people are fighting with each other, and everybody else is doing fine and wishes white people would just shut up!

America is an increasingly diverse nation but a loud, hyper-active group of well-to-do whites on the left and right are tearing it apart from the edges, according to an astonishing new study of our electorate.

The big picture: 14% of America, roughly half left and half right, consistently shouts, posts and votes, while 67% of us are exhausted.

You have about 8% of Americans in the hard-left camp — almost all white (80%), all well-educated, all voting, all giving money and time to campaigns, all active on social media. Their combined voices dominate Democratic politics.

You have about 6% in the hard-right camp — almost all white (88%), all well-educated, all voting, all giving money and time to campaigns, all active on social media. Their combined voices dominate Republican politics.

Oh, and these two groups basically hate everything about each other.

This eye-opening breakdown comes from "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape," by the international nonprofit group More in Common.

The report, one of the largest-ever studies of U.S. polarization, is based on an 8,000-person poll by YouGov, with about a 1% margin of error.

I learned about the study from a column by the N.Y. Times' David Brooks, ("The Rich White Civil War: A smarter look at America’s divide"), who said these two extreme wings of U.S. politics have become "cultish."

...

Be smart ... Good news for third-party dreamers: Tw0-thirds of Americans (the study's "Exhausted Majority") have had it with this white fight — and yearn for something new.

secret of trump is he appeals to people who don’t mind journalists getting murdered

the secret of trump is he appeals to people who don't mind anyone who's not already just like them getting murdered imo

i fuckin' wish hard-left voices dominated democratic politics xp

Trump appeals to those who ever considered demonic possession from an aspirational perspective.

Be smart ... Good news for third-party dreamers: Tw0-thirds of Americans (the study's "Exhausted Majority") have had it with this white fight — and yearn for something new.

of course! The bylines are the give away.

let me guess, "something new" will be a business-friendly status-quo centrist party that rejects such "hard-left" ideas as a social safety net, and such "hard-right" ideas as, hrm, well, we can't really think of any that are SO bad they'd be worth making a fuss over

NEW:

Ivanka and her dad have been lying around the world to pump up their real estate deal sales.

A former fed prosecutor told us: "We have seen those sorts of claims form the basis for criminal cases in a number of different settings." https://t.co/EmIfq54lYy

w/ @WNYC https://t.co/Xud3Wl6SrA

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) October 17, 2018

another well-researched investigation into the president's finances that not a single member of congress will be asked to comment upon

let alone act upon

I wonder if a string of mysteriously-disappearing GOP senators followed by Trump appearing in public wearing a series of human-skin suits while munching on femurs would prompt more than a congressional harrumph.

Third party dreamers are also entitled white people.

"something new" will be a business-friendly status-quo centrist party

The Love Song of Michael R. Bloomberg

lol forget what talking head i saw on TV the other day gushing about what a great pres he would be. ugh!

Well anything would probably look better than the current one.
Just like a dream.

Do hope people are going to recognise what a low this point in history is and not repeat it.
& not trigger a deeper drop.
Hope the US bottoms out and recovers, takes the 12 steps about who gets to be a higher power and so on.

i came here to post about this study and am delighted to find everyone already hating it

the hard left dominates Democratic politics, har de har har

Andrew Cuomo would differ

"It's disappointing, but it's not a Republican problem."

Mitch McConnell on deficit... "It's a bipartisan problem: the Unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those demographics to the demographics of America in the future."

Ha! I wish I could do this at work.

Those programs...

Can someone please just build a simulation for Mitch McConnell where everyone is poor and on fire so he can experience that full body pleasure he seeks.

I've been suggesting forever that people need to get GOP-ers hooked on some videogames where they can sate their sociopathic urges in a vacuum.

The US and our allies have long murdered people without any money or power. The freakout about Jamal Khashoggi is partly a realization on the part of the upper middle class that the coming trajectory of the US empire is going to require murdering people like them too.

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) October 17, 2018

I always wonder exactly how good it feels to type something like that. Is it as good as an orgasm? Or is it only as good as, say, eating a single Halloween-size chocolate bar?

You tell me.

i think he’s the one projecting now, but u do u jon.

“man, once the we spread THIS message fyre festival is gonna be HUGE!”

the freakout about khashoggi is partly because journalists perk up when something happens to one of them but mostly because it's a really vivid and ghastly story

I just don't get people who spend years and years mad at what the US and the Saudis are doing, and then when other people get mad as well go 'fuck you, you're mad for the wrong reason!'. Ride the wave, push for sanctions. No kid in Yemen are going to complain that the war ended because of Khashoggi rather than because his own brother died.

I guess you didn't get it when Richard Pryor said in his white voice about drugs reaching the suburbs, "My God, it's an epidemic!"

_You're Mad for teh WRONG Reason!: A Guide to Navigating USA in the Age of Social Media_

This morning I appeared on @HillTVLive and the Republican pundit I was paired with touted the virtues of toxic masculinity, attacking @BetoORourke as a beta male. @KrystalBall and I called him out because silence in the face of such complete B.S. is not an option. #TXsen pic.twitter.com/ebemLX0fQR

— Jennifer Holdsworth (@HoldsworthJen) October 17, 2018

love how she calls this dude out

that is ace

Notice how he wiggles on the hook. They can't say "He's a fag" or "a San Francisco liberal" anymore.

Waiting impatiently for science to figure out a way to spontaneously render infertile every dude who refers to himself as an alpha male. Dream big, scientists, you can do this.

love dude trying to backpedal to calling Beto "millenial." Beto's 46, a whopping one year younger than Cruz.

That republican pundit/Trump data dude is an author of short stories:

http://www.shorterstoriesbymatt.com/

yeah but see he's appealing to millennials, whereas cruz is not appealing in any capacity