US Politics, February 2020. They want to kill your cows.

Good afternoon!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/bernie-sanders-briefed-by-us-officials-that-russia-is-trying-to-help-his-presidential-campaign/2020/02/21/5ad396a6-54bd-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html

good spring, summer, fall, and night, this is going to be a shitshow

i see the Clintonite Homo blog chorus is unanimously asking Sanders to drop out

it's going to bring out the most idiotic responses from all sides. bernie's supporters will be constantly accused of being russian plants, and his own supporters might being fighting internally as they try to identify them. meanwhile conservatives get to tell themselves a new story: sure, russia wants to help trump. both they want to help democrats too. both sides, not just trump

sorry, imagine those sentences with fewer typos and more insight

re the bernie brief, well yeah

Fuck this. It’s a ploy to kneecap him—leaking the brief to the press so they can report on it.

People support Bernie because they have seen family members crushed by medical debt and student loans. Or they got dicked over in the financial crisis when they mortgge tripled overnight. He is not a random outsider who serves only to disrupt the system like Trump—he’s offering solutions to problems that have been roundly ignored for decades

yes fuck this shit

Putin just wants everyone suspicious, frightened, confused and fighting with everyone else over what the truth even is.

expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed, particularly in America

Aimless otm. inasmuch as Bernie interest is in disrupting the system and Putin's interest is in fomenting dissent, Russia promoting both him and Trump makes perfect sense.

er not dissent, more like confusion

I dont care at all what putin wants. Its such a dumb obsession.

I dont care at all what putin wants

lol ok

I’ve been thinking about drafting a facebook post — because it‘s really only relevant to facebook — advising friends about how to spot questionable groups/sources because a few who are less online keep reposting liberal content mill crap.

Key signs: most of the content is sourced from other sites or memes, the profile links to a website with spurious content and “petitions” that seem to be the same form as their “sign up for our email newsletter” form, and a handful of other indicators that there’s nothing of substance there.

I expect most of these pages to flip to selling diet plans when the politics grift gets old

I think linking a totally normal presidential campaign to russian spies sows confusion

Putin wants some prime shoreline and oil priced in rubles and not euros or us dollars iirc

the eternal dream of warm-sea ports

sounds idyllic tbh

iirc it's long been an iowan strategic priority as well

we’re busy spitefully ruining the mississippi delta by dumping nitrogen in the river

Typically good piece by David Roth, here on how reactions to both Trump and Sanders highlight the institutional failures of both the GOP and the Democratic party establishment.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156639/bernie-sanders-no-donald-trump

A similar transparency is fundamental to Sanders’s pitch; he pushes for the ambitious policy goals that Democrats have long claimed to want but leaves out the signature Democratic caveat that those things are of course impossible and anyway must be negotiated with an opposition that is by now quite open about not just its unwillingness to do any such thing but its belief that the Democrats are inherently illegitimate. Again, this only looks like a parallel where the candidates are concerned—Sanders deals in the universal “us,” where Trump governs by pointing to increasingly large tranches of Americans and sneering “not you.”

From the perspective of the institutional parties and their aligned media organizations, though, the parallel is cleaner. People who have made their living by defining and describing the scope and scale of the possible naturally resent being challenged on that sort of thing; party insiders, just by dint of their vantage point, do not take kindly to the sudden presence of uninvited masses. In nominating and then electing Trump, Republicans made obvious the extent to which they were no longer playing what one side persists in thinking is a gentleman’s game. The president oversees prisons with children in them and often “jokes” about remaining in office for the rest of his natural life. Only one side of that once-polite binary is even alarmed by this. It’s somehow the same one that keeps playing as if the old rules were still in effect.

Acronym—the well-capitalized, well-connected, deliberately opaque “venture-style” outfit headlined by veteran Democratic campaign types that built the busted app that helped turn the Iowa caucuses into a tragicomic shitshow—is precisely the sort of failure that would result from a political establishment disappearing up its own metaphorical ass. Whether that organization is deliberately scammy or just a low-utility gambit executed with slapstick amateurism is, at some point, immaterial.

sorry, imagine those sentences with fewer typos and more insight

Nu borad description

Did we already cover this?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-prosecutors-lay-out-case-against-julian-assange-extradition-n1141366

Assange’s legal team insists the American case against him is politically motivated. His lawyers say they will present evidence that the Australian was offered a pardon by the Trump administration if he agreed to say Russia wasn't involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails that were published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Assange’s lawyers say the offer was made in August 2017 by then-Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who claimed to be acting on behalf of President Donald Trump.

The White House has called the claim “a complete fabrication and a total lie.” Rohrabacher acknowledges discussing the Democrat leak with Assange, but denies offering a pardon from the president.

Rohrabacher acknowledges discussing the Democrat leak with Assange, but denies offering a pardon from the president, saying "I was very careful to make no explicit offer of a pardon; all I did was drop a few broad hints and wink at him vigorously."

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CloudyNegligibleBergerpicard-small.gif

"That Pam Anderson, she's a real goer, isn't she?"

the Democrat leak

It drives me bonkers that mainstream news organizations have picked up this garbage verbal tic.

Ginni Thomas unleashed!

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/clarence-thomas-wife-among-conservative-activists-leading-trump-efforts-to-compile-deep-state-hit-list

Clarence and Ginni seem like a well-matched couple. I'd wonder what their dinner conversation sounds like, if I thought Clarence ever said anything.

"Is that a ..."

Nah, I won't.

Ginny dressed like this once:

https://cdn.talkingpointsmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ml28atfg8ybgtsi8me6l.jpg

Ginni Thomas unleashed!

unleashed, muzzled, brought to curb

let's neuter all this dog talk!

oh

#SCOTUS rules 5-4 in Hernandez v. Mesa that the family of a Mexican teenager who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a cross-border shooting cannot sue the agent for damages under the U.S. Constitution

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) February 25, 2020

Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch both additionally called to remove the right from individuals to sue federal officers for civil rights violations at all, let alone for murder.

cool stuff

Speaking publicly against the Patriot Act could have a significant impact at a time Democrats are still acquiescing to a George W. Bush-era policy that has been in place for nearly 20 years. Last November, Democrats voted overwhelmingly for a measure granting a three-month extension of the three Patriot Act provisions, included in a House resolution to prevent a government shutdown, infuriating civil rights activists. Only 10 Democrats in the House voted against the reauthorization, among them Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), known as “the squad.” But Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) co-chairs Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), and vice chairs, Reps. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.), all voted for it. (Neither Sanders, Warren nor Klobuchar were present for the Senate vote.)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/22326/bernie-sanders-patriot-act-safeguarding-americans-private-security-records

speaking of jurisprudence

The question was "do you think justice was served in the Harvey Weinstein case?" This was Trump's full answer. pic.twitter.com/vyF3f1a5Lw

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 25, 2020

The phrase that keeps bubbling up lately starts with 'once all legal means have been exhausted, then ___' but the blank at the end is escaping me atm. I'm sure it'll come to me.

Very interesting article from Rachel Bitecofer, the political scientist/analyst who says there are basically no independent voters:

Hate is on the Ballot

My forecasting model for the 2018 midterms predicted an enormous Democratic wave in the House, mostly by focusing on a dynamic known in political-science circles as negative partisanship. The idea behind negative partisanship is simple, harking back to Henry Adams’s definition of politics as the “organization of hatreds.” The determination to vote out the opposition—and the broader trend of acute polarization within the American political system—has altered virtually every facet of our political life. Negative partisanship is affecting the behavior of voters and reshaping the voting coalitions aligned behind each major party.

...

Against this backdrop of roiling cultural upheaval, our politics has remained rigidly binary—and indeed has grown far more brittle over time. Partisans in this culture struggle have sorted themselves ideologically into two parties that are now devolving into bitterly opposed enemy factions in the 1860 model. In 2014, pollsters with the Pew Research Center found that 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans believed their partisan counterparts were a “threat to the well-being of the country.”

Now, just three years into the Trump era, and a whole new brand of negative partisan division, my survey finds that these indexes have skyrocketed. Seventy-one percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats now regard the opposition party as a force that stokes baleful national decline. In a study of what they call “lethal mass partisanship,” political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason found that 15 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats agree that the country would be better off if a large number of opposing partisans in the public today “just died.”

...

Even though we commonly assume that independents make up roughly a third of the electorate, the pool of persuadable independents is actually quite small, just 7 percent of the total electorate, according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent analysis. This is because most independents admit to being “leaners”—bringing them into fairly reliable affiliation with the Republicans or the Democrats. Research shows these leaners think like, feel like—and, most important, vote like—“soft partisans.” In fact, many leaners are what political scientists Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov call “embarrassed” partisans—people too ashamed to admit their partisan dispositions even to themselves.

This dynamic leaves a quite small pool of “pure” independents truly open to persuasion, especially late in a campaign season. That’s especially the case after voters have been reminded why they vote for one party, and not the other, by a barrage of campaign appeals that key into their latent partisan dispositions.

...

To hear many Democratic leaders tell it, ignoring Trump was the secret to their success in 2018, but the voter file data suggests otherwise. Democratic gains, strong though they were, may actually have been handicapped by a strategy that failed to exploit the party’s best asset: the electorate’s angst about Trump. What’s more, the turnout of the Republican base was just as strong in these districts as in districts where candidates were more liberal and did talk about Trump. So the strategy of not rousing any partisan blowback in the general election doesn’t appear to have yielded the advantage of a suppressed opposition vote.

...

What do all these negative partisan trends portend for 2020? Even though most analysts continue to look at 2016 as a frame for 2020, that reflex bespeaks another failure to size up a dramatically shifting electorate. The complacent voting ranks of 2016 who believed (at the energetic prompting of polls and pundit forecasts) that Donald Trump could never be president have been replaced by the terrified electorate of 2020. These voters know all too well the hazards of granting great power to a figure like Trump and view the president as a Terminator-like political figure who simply can’t be stopped. After threading the 2016 Electoral College needle, Trump has acquired an almost mythic aura of invincibility for most people, election analysts included. And in some key ways, the unsettled character of this political moment—together with the structural inequities of the Electoral College and a battery of GOP-orchestrated voter suppression drives—has inoculated President Trump from political gravity. But as Andrew Yang would tell you, math matters, and Trump has a basic math problem. As the electorate is currently constituted, there are more potential Democratic voters out there than there are Republican, and not just in California. There are more in the Midwest and in the Sun Belt. There are so many more in Virginia and Colorado that both states have moved off the swing state map.

It's a long piece, but very much worth reading. As I keep saying around here, the Democratic candidate — any Democratic candidate — has a powerful weapon on their side going into November, and that's that 55-60% of the American public fucking hates Donald Trump.

Is it a variant on the piece you posted last month?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/06/rachel-bitecofer-profile-election-forecasting-new-theory-108944

Sort of, in the sense that the former was an interview with her, whereas this one is a long essay — with charts — analyzing the lessons of 2016 and 2018 (hint: the midterms did not happen for the reasons you think) and what they portend for 2020. (No predictions are forthcoming, no candidate endorsements are offered.)

Thanks. I'm reading.

Trump seems to be misfiring on all cylinders this morning... https://t.co/AYThOIwJuS

— Jeffrey St. Clair (@JSCCounterPunch) February 26, 2020

a chocker

choker presumably?

chocking on my covfefe over here

I mean yes just give him an opponent

quick reminder as we barrel toward a potential pandemic of the likes unseen in a generation that the president of the united states is more or less undeniably a raving moron who has severe difficulty spelling common english words.

I'd forgotten. Thanks!

wait a second, the president doesn't even know wtf he's talking about!