Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

The revolution will be supervised.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Bark louder, little dog.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Let there be snark.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

I was promised a recession.

We still have time to mess this up!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Monday Morning Thread: What Is This ‘Empathy’ of Which Democrats Speak?

Monday Morning Thread: What Is This ‘Empathy’ of Which Democrats Speak?

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Last week, certain HRC-hating elements gave Politico what they considered an enormous SHOCKING REVELATION:

… Speaking at a Virginia fundraiser hosted by former U.S. ambassador Beatrice Welters, Clinton says in a clip released by the Free Beacon that many of her former primary opponent’s supporters sought things like “free college, free health care,” saying that she preferred to occupy the space “from the center-left to the center-right” on the political spectrum.

During the conversation, also reported in the Intercept, Clinton confesses to feeling “bewildered” by those to her far-left and far-right in the election.

“There is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates,” she said. “And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”…

While stressing the need to not serve as a “wet blanket on idealism,” Clinton paints fans of the then-surging Vermont senator as political newbies attempting to deal with an economy that has fallen short of their expectations.

“Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement,” she said. “They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future.”

Clinton added: “If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing.”

“I think we all should be really understanding of that,” Clinton said.

The audio, which according to the Free Beacon was “revealed by hackers who breached the email account of a campaign staffer,” surfaces the same week that Sanders hit the campaign trail to try to win those same young voters that Clinton has struggled to attract since clinching the Democratic nomination.

Apart from the, shall we call it, irony of the Intercept making common cause with the house organ of Bill Kristol’s son-in-law, it’s hard to understand why this statement is somehow supposed to be embarrassing to Clinton. Until I realized that for the far-Left dudebros, just getting mentioned as something less than a winner is supposed to be deeply shameful; they can’t imagine Clinton having any empathy for young people deeply in debt because they don’t understand the concept of empathy. Hey, she said those kids were not-winners! Beyotch must despise them, or she’d insist that being trapped in your parents’ basement was a principled dedication to the LIBERTY of not having to pay rent!
***********

Apart from GOTV, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?

Reader Interactions

352Comments

  1. 1.

    Chet

    I believe this is the same group of people that Donald Trump said “don’t know how to win”—whatever that means. So which characterization is more respectful?

  3. 3.

    Cermet

    First knee jerk reaction is to blame Hillary; then as facts are revealed, say that she wasn’t the mean, nasty person they always first consider her being. Wow, and people wonder why the media has made a Rump the star thug.

  4. 4.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    I watched some MSNBC anchor try to press Bernie Sanders to accept his premise that this was terribly insulting mockery and Sanders refused to go along and said actually, I agree with her. The guy just couldn’t stand it and kept trying.

    You can see the little journamalist wheels going, basically they heard “living in parents’ basement” and vaguely remember when someone insulted bloggers by calling them nothing but out-of-work losers living in a basement in efforts to discredit their non-Villager political observations, and the journamalist thinks aha! That’s an insult!

    Except that Clinton wasn’t demeaning opinion-givers by claiming that they’re just amateur losers in a basement, she was saying that for young people just out of college moving back home with parents is too often the only option.

    This is your brain on sensationalism.

  7. 7.

    Kay

    I liked the excerpt. I think they ARE “children of the recession”. I feel like there was this concerted effort after the recession to “put it behind” us, that not enough attention was paid to how it profoundly affected (some) people.

    I personally will never look at the finance sector the same again. What blew me away was how arbitrary values are- how they were just making shit up. This is a small town and I have a broad idea of how much just about anyone makes. I KNEW they couldn’t afford the houses and cars they were “buying”.

    After 30 years of being told they’re all geniuses it was shocking. There was a period in this county where there were questions on who owned foreclosed property. They had so fucked it up in their haste to extend credit and collect bonuses no one could untangle it. That’s like “markets 101” – who OWNS this? They managed to screw that all up after 150 years of operating fairly reliably.

  8. 8.

    Immanentize

    Hello, All. Mondays are rough. Cloudy and damp near Boston…. I hope everyone has a nice day!

  9. 9.

    LAO

    Good morning all, slight progress on the puppy front. This morning she peed in my apartment building hallway (after a 30 minute walk) rather than in my apartment. (Which I cleaned up). Still no poop. This is going to be a long and potentially aggravating day.

  10. 10.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    “He has now successfully entered into the zone of being a laughingstock and a punchline.”

    – Rick Tyler, Republican strategist and former Ted Cruz aide

    Edging closer to the dream (see last panel) becoming a reality.

    Donald Trump reportedly ended up running for President at least partly due to being so thoroughly and humiliatingly mocked by President Obama at the WH Correspondents dinner. For him to end up achieving nothing but permanent laughingstock status in the annals of US history would be the only silver lining to have emerged from the rest of having to endure his bigoted, racist, sexist, shitshow for the last year.

  13. 13.

    Kay

    It’s important to Trump’s campaign that he maintain the fiction he is “bringing people in” to the GOP. That’s why he insists Bernie supporters are flocking to him.

    I love how he says “no one has seen crowds like this”. Sure they have. 2008, Obama. Obama’s were much bigger.

  14. 14.

    Luthe

    In another example of empathy, the Clinton campaign’s “Contact Us” page allows for a choice of prefixes that include “Mx.” the gender-neutral honorific just added to the dictionary this year.

    It’s a tiny, tiny thing, but it’s also another example of how the Clinton campaign embraces everyone, including the genderqueer.

  16. 16.

    msdc

    they can’t imagine Clinton having any empathy for young people deeply in debt because they don’t understand the concept of empathy.

    Quoted for truth. The dudebros, the 27 percenters, the journalists – all of them.

  20. 20.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @LAO: Going in the right direction though. Once you remove all the places where it’s not allowed, the only place left will be the sidewalk, as God intended. Simple process of elimination.

  21. 21.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: I’m no genius, I had no idea how really bad it was going to get, but when I saw the shit they were pulling, the people they were loaning to, I told anyone who would listen to get their money out of the market. Nobody listened of course, but at least I got to say, “I told you so.”

  22. 22.

    BruceFromOhio

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    “His staff has no control over him whatsoever. It’s their responsibility to keep him focused on what it takes to win, and they have lost it,”

    Yeah, it’s not HIS fault he’s a gaping sphincter, it’s that pesky staff that ‘have lost it.’

    Sorry, Luntz, your remora aren’t magical creatures. You go to election day with the parasites you have, not the parasites you want, particularly that big nasty one at the middle of it all.

  26. 26.

    NotMax

    @BruceFromOhio:

    If had any religious convictions, would be looking forward to witnessing people like Kellyanne Conway being drop kicked from the throne of god.

  27. 27.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    There’s no where to put money outside of the market….unless it’s real estate! Ooops.

    The whole concept of “the market” is interesting as far as the people I see (who are primarily working class- people w/out a 4 year degree). They don’t believe the value of their 401k’s. This “money”isn’t real to them. They’re not really clear on why it goes up and down. I think it probably hinders saving and investment. They don’t consider this “reliable”, partly BECAUSE it goes up and down so they’re less likely to defer spending and save.

    When my daughter was little, younger grades, I would compliment her on a good grade and she seemed slightly baffled. I realized she didn’t know how it worked- she didn’t know that grades were tied to anything real. She’d say “she must like me!” and I’d think “oh,God,she thinks they just make this up!” She was a drifty, dreamy little kid but that’s what it reminds me of.

  29. 29.

    waspuppet

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    You can see the little journamalist wheels going, basically they heard “living in parents’ basement” and vaguely remember when someone insulted bloggers by calling them nothing but out-of-work losers living in a basement in efforts to discredit their non-Villager political observations, and the journamalist thinks aha! That’s an insult!

    More than likely their boss.

  30. 30.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    This is HRCs version of Obamas “clinging to their guns and religion” comment. The Bernie Bros are trying to do to HRC what the pre-official teabagger teabaggers tried to do to Obama. Whatevs because,you know, Trumpy is going to give them a free college education and a free Sparkle Pony.

  31. 31.

    TK

    Lmao. This leak was supposed to be harmful. It actually makes her look more human. More or less, don’t promise the kids something we can’t give them for Christmas. Every parent understands that sentiment.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    @Aleta:

    This is one of those articles that could have been written many months ago. And it still holds back, politely skims the surface.

    I agree. They promoted Donald Trump. To deny that at this point is ludicrous. I would really like to know what kind of internal deliberations on “good tv” went on.

    If they deliberately held off on vetting- the Trump coverage was neutral or positive from January to June- then they’re officially skewing elections because no one “held off” on Benghazi or emails.

  33. 33.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: Sure one can take it out of the market and put it someplace else. They still have Federally insured saving accounts at banks. Which is what I wanted my wife to do with her 401k, which of course for whatever reason she was unable to, mainly in my opinion because 401ks are not primarily a retirement savings plan, but a way to force everyone to put their savings into ‘the market’ so that hedge fund managers and their cronies can make billions of dollars risking other people’s money.

    I’m not one to micro manage investments, my basic philosophy being to put it somewhere and forget about it(mostly because I know I’m not that smart). The exception being when everything is screaming at you, “It’s all about to go to shit!”, then move it someplace safer.

  35. 35.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mai.naem.mobile: Except that the mainstream media jumped wholeheartedly on “bitter/cling” (and “basket of deplorables”, which was the real analogue in my opinion), whereas with this one, some actually seem to be explaining that the attack is dishonest instead of just tut-tutting about bad optics.

  36. 36.

    Kay

    @Aleta:

    I don’t even buy that it’s “markets”. Revealing bad things about Trump would drive much more views than presenting hours of his speeches did. The person who had his tax return pages gave them to the Times reporter who had done an in-depth piece on Trump’s business interests.

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @waspuppet:

    remember when someone insulted bloggers by calling them nothing but out-of-work losers living in a basement

    Trump, at the debate. Also said they were 400 lbs.

  41. 41.

    JPL

    @Kay: The person who sent the three pages, knew exactly what they were doing.
    They did not send federal returns, which are against the law to print, but rather state returns. I find it interesting, but the real slush fund is at the foundation. That story appears to be lost.

  42. 42.

    maurinsky

    Congrats on your continued sobriety!

    I work in Hartford, CT, and the city smells like sewage this morning. Not the best start to a Monday morning.

  45. 45.

    Kay

    This is already having an effect on his supporters. According to an AP-NORC poll:
    Only about one-third of Republicans say they have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that votes on Election Day will be counted fairly, according to a poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
    Half the people who have a favorable opinion of the Republican nominee say they have little to no confidence in the integrity of the vote count, the poll finds.
    This is what happens when a candidate irresponsibly sows doubts.
    Trump’s gambit may be planned or, more likely, he’s just making it up as he goes along. It is no joke. Our democracy is a fragile thing which depends upon accepting the rules of the game.

    If this happens Republicans will blame Trump, but shouting about voter fraud was official policy in the Bush Administration. They engineered a plan to persuade their base that black people were stealing elections to push those state laws, and “prestige” publications went along with it- the WSJ was central to the effort. I’d see some bullshit in the WSJ and it’d be in USA Today 2 days later.

    It wasn’t the slightest bit subtle- they started with a focus on Milwaukee and Philadelphia. It was a bare accusation that hundreds of thousands of African Americans were committing felony voter fraud. It was outrageous when the WSJ did it and they shouldn’t be surprised Trump (who is not very bright) believes it.

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @JPL:

    The person sent them to a reporter that had done an in-depth, labor intensive piece on Donald Trump’s business interests.

    This isn’t markets, this 18 months “hands off Trump” shit they pulled. She was rewarded for good work with those tax returns.

  50. 50.

    Matt McIrvin

    @OzarkHillbilly: The attack on Clinton discussed in the OP, that Hillary Clinton insulted and dismissed millennials by calling them pathetic basement dwellers (when she was actually explaining, and urging empathy for, their economic plight).

    The Intercept seems to be pushing it hard, and Hugh Hewitt chortled about it being Hillary’s 47% moment, but the big papers and such seem to have mostly regarded it as a bullshit story.

  51. 51.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @maurinsky: I was watching Joe of the Morning and he says CT is a hellhole and he’s paying 55% taxes.

    (Joe, if you’re paying 55% in taxes, you’re doing it wrong.)

    Other than Joe’s repeated complaint about his taxes(No Joe you can’t just add the top rate for income taxes and add on sales tax), they were saying that the ‘liberal media’ is missing the real story about Trump’s taxes. The tax system is screwed up(they pointed to Buffet paying less in taxes than his secretary), but that Trump lost $1 billion dollars in a year.

    ETA: Joe was also complaining about the lack of polls since the debate like a junkie in need of a fix.

  52. 52.

    Bruce K

    I’m afraid to even think it, but could it be that the self-destruction of Donald Trump has finally begun? This past week has been like one of those cold-medicine fueled fever dreams…

  53. 53.

    Gindy51

    @Kay: They are right in that it isn’t real until they cash it out. It can disappear at any time given the market volatility. It’s not like a pile of gold or a stack of cash. You can’t point to “it’ and say “there it is!”. You can look at numbers on a scree or a statement but you cannot hold “it” in your hand.
    That baffles people big time. My daughter, not the most money savvy person on the planet, still has no idea of her true monetary worth. It is well in excess of what she sees in her checking account because she doesn’t see any other money as real unless she can spend it, NOW.

  60. 60.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Throwing a 100 yr old woman out of her home of 50 years, but they’re the victim:

    “All I’m asking is for Iris Canada to show us the same respect we showed her,” Owens said. “We had every right to evict her back then, and 99% of people would have. We protected her … Think about what kind of economic sacrifices we’ve made.”

    Awwwwwwwwww…. Poor babies, all they want is a little respect.

  61. 61.

    Argiope

    @LAO: I had a puppy I adopted at 6 months and she also had issues with going off the property. In my case, though, it was a back yard vs anywhere else in the known universe, so less annoying situation than yours. I finally decided I was going to walk her until she couldn’t hold it anymore, then crazy-praise-and-treat-her. Took an hour and 45 minutes, but she finally broke down and did it. After that, she was less reluctant, but still preferred what she felt was clearly her own territory. No way to know, of course, but I think her shelter months made her wary and she was withholding because she didn’t want to leave any scents of herself out in the big scary world. Once she grew up and developed some confidence, she’d go anywhere outside. Puppies require more patience than you have, no matter who you are.

  62. 62.

    Hal

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I think Phil Mickelson did that a few years ago while trashing Obama. Somehow claiming he was paying some huge tax rate by throwing in sales tax. His 300 million dollar and counting fortune just isn’t enough for him to live off.

  64. 64.

    TS

    @raven:

    And both sides – and despite Trump’s rants – no-one likes Hillary either – and everyone’s Mom will never vote for Clinton – and the GOP will retain the Senate. Why on earth do I turn it on & expect anything different.

  65. 65.

    amk

    Will donnie dick’s one billion hole make waves this week or will the corrupt msm try its best to bury this story too?

  68. 68.

    PPCLI

    @Matt McIrvin: That’s the difference that people like Hewitt can’t get. They think that the problem with Romney’s 47% speech was that he used poorly-chosen phrases. In their apologies and special pleadings for Romney they spoke about “poorly chosen words”, “should have phrased things better”, etc. And they went away thinking — “Damn, we got caught on a technicality.”.

    But the problem wasn’t the phrase, it is that he gave an extended speech talking about people who are struggling, spoke of them with open contempt, and said it wasn’t his business to care about them.

    It doesn’t occur to them that speaking of people who are struggling, stating that they are struggling, and then stating that these are people we need to reach an arm out to, to help and lift up, isn’t the same.

    It’s revealing — to them, the world is divided into winners and losers, and even to describe the plight of the people they regard as losers is to mock said “losers”.

  69. 69.

    maurinsky

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    CT is most definitely not a hellhole, although there are certainly things that could be improved.

    We do have a massive problem right now in Northeastern CT, though – for some houses built between 1983 and 2004, there was pyrrhotite in the aggregate used for the concrete foundations, and pyrrhotite oxidizes when exposed to water, so those basements are starting to crumble. I went to a meeting about it on Saturday, they brought in a coalition from Quebec, where they had the same problem in the Mauricie region. The economic repercussions of this could be staggering, both for individuals affected as well as regionally. Half of the housing stock in a couple of towns was built during that time period.

  71. 71.

    gene108

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    @Gindy51: That’s also why folk under 45 generally don’t trust Social Security.

    We’ve been told, for at least 25 years*, which is as far back as I can recall, that Social Security and Medicare are going broke and won’t be there when you retire in the 2030’s and 2040’s or later.

    I was very, very interested in Bush, Jr’s plan to privatize Social Security because I kept hearing about how Social Security is going broke.

    When the push started to turn it into law, Air America Radio came on the air, and despite the poor reception and weak signal where I live, I got to hear Al Franken dismantle the pro-privatization argument.

    Without Al’s commentary, I do not think my views on Social Security would have changed.

    The need for liberal pushback, no matter how small the audience, is very important. I think social media helps get the message out, a bit, but it also puts out many conspiracy theories.

    * Edit: I am 42. The arguments that Social Security is doomed goes back to my high school years, when I started to really pay attention to politics.

  72. 72.

    maurinsky

    When people I know complain about taxes, I suggest they try making less money and owning less stuff, but they never seem to want to go down that path.

  73. 73.

    Kay

    I don’t know who you-all read for predictions, but this is Rothenberg. He’s older and not a data fetisher but he said this election was over in August ( “this cake is baked”) and he’s sticking to his guns. Says all this is noise and Clinton will win.

    He’s nice to read because he’s so polite, although I think he’s a Righty.

  74. 74.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @OzarkHillbilly: No, it’s part of being young. The money goes out and when you’re under 45 you don’t think that much about retirement. The Republicans(and Pete Peterson, but I repeat myself) have accentuated this, but people have short time horizons.

  76. 76.

    WereBear

    As Anne Laurie’s title points out, there hasn’t been a proton of empathy from Republicans for destroying so many lives, especially the ones that are first trying to get off the ground.

    And 401ks don’t deserve the respect of pensions or Social Security. Wall Street plays games and they vanish.

  78. 78.

    MomSense

    @Kay:

    What pisses me off about it is that Cheney and the Republicans kept saying deficits don’t matter, and spending money hand over fist on the Iraq mess, tax cuts, handouts to pharma and student loan companies who never passed the savings on to their customers as they were supposed to. Meanwhile their deregulation and privatization schemes broke the entire world economy. When it is time to help the people who were harmed they all of a sudden embraced balanced budgets like it was a direct message from 8 lb 3 ounce baby Jesus. C’mon.

    And for decades while the Republicans were cutting taxes and racking up debt they were deferring even basic maintenance on our nation’s infrastructure.

    But the thing that infuriates me is when they pretend to care one bit about the recession generation, their kids and grand kids, and say with such fake concern that the worst thing we could do is saddle these poor kids with debt. Guess what, if we put the recession kids to work rebuilding and repairing all the things that are falling down and crumbling and innovating new things – these kids would not inherit a world of debt. They would be paying income taxes, buying and building homes, having babies, and doing all the things that make our economy boom.

    That the Republican fake concern is used to advocate policies that do real harm to our kids and grandkids is one of the most cynical things I have ever seen. It’s an outrage.

  80. 80.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    Ugh. What I love about it is people know this. Or they should know it. That’s what the US Attorney scandal was about!

    It was a litmus test for lawyers who would pursue voter fraud.

    There is CURRENTLY a consent agreement in place to stop the GOP from suppressing AA votes! This stuff is recorded. It happened. I love the wide-eyed innocence- “who, US?”. Shit yeah. Going back to Bush I. Court records.

  83. 83.

    Ceci n'est pas mon nym

    Feeling very sad this morning about some very VERY local politics. It’s kind of Brexit in microcosm. Somewhere in here are larger lessons about voters screwing themselves, like Brexit and the recent “why did you let us vote for that” bill on suing the Saudi government. Something about voting without thought of consequences.

    Very abbreviated version: two struggling churches spend years working toward a merger, months of effort by an army of volunteers, plan put in place, every step approved by both congregations. Day of final vote, one church is packed with people who are technically on the rolls but haven’t been seen in years. The merger is voted down in the name of “saving” their church. Now the “saved” one will likely be gone in 3-4 months (no money, mass resignations) and the other, without the combined assets, perhaps a year later.

    I’m also thinking about scorpions and frogs.

  84. 84.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @amk:
    At this point, the trend of increasing Republican incompetence is so clear that I don’t think we can describe it as luck. This is a sociological process playing out. Trump is not a coincidence, he’s a result of where the conservative movement is going. Personally, I think racism is driving that process, but the progression is clear.

  86. 86.

    Barbara

    @Kay: If people can understand the concept of debt they can understand the concept of wealth. The guy you owe money to has a stream of income from you that doesn’t depend on him waking up in the morning and doing anything involving additional earnest labor to receive it. That’s what wealth is. It’s not a salary, it’s not earnings. In ancient Rome anyone who had to work for a living was considered to be poor. We don’t like to use the term poor, but the concept was meant to cover any person who can lose everything they have if they lose their job or become incapable of holding a job, for whatever reason. Obviously, before modern medicine and social safety nets, that was an ever present reality. But even today, that’s still most people.

  88. 88.

    Face

    Real question: are Presidents drug-tested? If yes, is it before or after they’re sworn in? If not…..well….wow.

  90. 90.

    Matt McIrvin

    @OzarkHillbilly: These stories that become very meta can become hard to parse. One of the things that is infuriating about them, actually, is that the story about the story becomes the story, so it no longer matters whether the original story was substantially true; people spin whole column feet out of growing concerns about the optics generated by the media chatter, so that the political media are mostly reporting on themselves.

  91. 91.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I was young once, admittedly dirt was new back then, but I remember working and getting my paycheck, looking at the FICA deduction and thinking, “Yeah, it won’t be enough and I’ll have to do something more, but it is a start and I don’t have to worry about it, it will be there.” That was before Reagan tho.

    You don’t give the GOP near enough credit. They have destroyed the credibility of good governance. They have destroyed the credibility of paying one’s fair share of taxes. They have destroyed the credibility of the voting process.

    And they’ve destroyed the credibility of SS and Medicare.

  92. 92.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    Ugh. This week on NPR Morning Edition we get get Cokie and, to balance out her liberal lefty views, Fucker tucking Carlson. Not sure this is any kind of improvement over Jonah Goldberg. Ugh.

  95. 95.

    Jibeaux

    I’m still shaking my head at how Trump had 9 prepared sentences to try to exploit this nothingburger, and he literally couldn’t make it through that without insulting and belittling the same supporters and Sanders himself. Pander fail + pander set self alight.

  96. 96.

    hovercraft

    Nicole Wallace and even Joe of the Morning are saying the tax issue is not that big of an issue since it’s already baked in, the problem is his mocking Hillary over her pneumonia, and making shit up about her having an affair. Halpern says it’s as if Robby Mook calls him up every morning and says here’s what we need you to do today to prove our point that you’re temperamentally unsuited to be president, and he does it. The discussion is only among the 4 republicans, Joe, Nicole, Michael Steele, and Halpern, and they all agree that the focus on the taxes is letting the bigger story about the speech go under reported, that is what’s going to turn off those suburban republican women. Oh and Joe and Nicole seem to feel that Jake Tapper gutted Rudy yesterday.

  98. 98.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Matt McIrvin: Yep, a comma or the lack there of can lead to any # of interpretations, and reading someone talking about what someone else said….

  99. 99.

    Keith G

    Clinton’s analysis is of course correct. I still wish she would have communicated that without the “living in their parent’s basement” phrase and speaking of those consigned to being baristas.

    Statements very similar to those are used quite often in popular culture to put down the people that Hillary was talking about. It is difficult to be seen as being empathetic to them when one is using the vernacular of criticism. It is a small point, but this is an election where every Hillary email I get (several every day) tell me that every vote counts.

  100. 100.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I suspect the people who are really outraged at Hillary’s statement is alt-rights ones – of all the millennials they are the ones who are truely unemployable. With all that hate sooner or later they will slip up at a job and get fired.

  101. 101.

    Eric S.

    NPR Host: Tucker Carlson, you used an interesting phrase there, “the new populism.” What is the new populism?

    T. Carlson: “The new populism is the idea that the people that shop at Wal-Mart should be able to participate in the political process as well.”

  102. 102.

    bjacques

    Commercial fusion power and the collapse of Social Security are 20 years away and have been for as long as I can remember (thanks to reading Jerry Pournelle in the late 1970s).

    It’s funny that every revelation about Hillary, ranging from kinda shocking (Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s hackdom) to :shrug: (the “parents’ basement” comment) comes out only thanks to aggressive hacking by enemies, yet her campaign’s doing really well, while the jaw-dropping stuff about Trump comes out either from Trump himself or somebody on the inside who’s disgusted enough to just throw it out on the street, and his campaign runs like a washing machine on spin with a brick inside.

  103. 103.

    MomSense

    @amk:

    How can I forget them if they won’t go away?

    Speaking of the gun nutz, the little six year old boy who was shot at his school in S.C. died. I read a statement from his mom about planning his super hero themed funeral and sobbed. This is a moral outrage.

  104. 104.

    RobertDSC-Quad Intel Mac

    I have less than zero interest in what Bernie has to say. That motherfucker has no room to talk about anything. Get off the stage, you bitter old man.

  105. 105.

    Barbara

    @SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch: Tucker Carlson should be persona non grata on any credible media outlet by now. I stopped listening to Cokie Roberts (nee Boggs) 20 years ago. She is the daughter of a Congressman whose brother was (may still be for all I know) one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington. She, like a lot of people, has nearly her whole identity vested in being the insider who lives off of Washington’s two party ecosystem and gets paid big money to deconstruct it for the rest of us with her inside knowledge. She is a totally self-interested hack who hasn’t expressed an honest thought in a long, long time.

  108. 108.

    gvg

    @gene108: It’s much older than that. I think it started before SS was actually implemented. My dad is a retired engineer, which is a professional group that trends conservative and he has always been a liberal. He is mid 70’s and told me as a child about having frustrating arguments with fellow engineers back in the 70’s who were sure SS was going to go bust in just a few years. He laid out cost versus benefits, comparisons about cost to do it private and showed it wasn’t going bust. they just didn’t believe him. he was right though. his predictions were always closer to what ended up really happening than their doom scenario’s. I have known a few of the type myself. they always seem to be the ones who do more personal investments and want that money for their stock choices because they are convinced they could do better (fools IMO)

    Dad was a defense contractor engineer. I am not sure about other kinds of engineers but his field has a kind of boom bust cycle depending on always getting new contracts. when your contract is up (missile or plane built) everyone gets laid off so you have to build your own retirement. there is also the owner if getting ready to retire so he loots the pension fund or sells it to a corporation who loads the company up with debt (to buy the company often) and then has to renegotiate the pensions. So these guys are naturally obsessed with their stock portfolios.

    There seems to be a personality type that just can’t accept social security works pretty well and is a good thing. they also don’t accept that most people work hard but will never understand enough to invest and frankly don’t want to. what they really want is a secure pension that can’t be stolen which is really a lot of what SS is. The propaganda has always been undermining it. Historically when people have no confidence, they hoard not invest. without SS, I think investments would come to a crashing halt and then the we don’t need it’s would find out how interrelated all finance is and how important public confidence is.

  110. 110.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Barbara: Actually Cokie is the daughter of two Congress critters, her mom took over her dad’s seat after he was killed in a airplane crash.

  111. 111.

    Barbara

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Apparently it doesn’t take much to destroy Rudy, since he does 90% of the damage himself first and just hands you the knife to finish him off. I am still stunned that he told Chuck Todd that adultery is no big deal because everybody does it. In addition to providing a window into his soul and his particular brand of Catholic Christianity (ya just have to go to confession people, no biggy), if it’s no big deal why is it a big deal for the Clintons? What makes the issue so deserving of scorn when it relates to the Clintons, and especially Hillary Clinton? WTF is wrong with someone whose self-awareness is so low that he does not see that he might not be the best person in the room for making the case that Bill Clinton’s infidelities are relevant to anything?

  112. 112.

    marduk

    There’s one part that’s both condescending and largely wrong:

    we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”…

    This is nonsense on stilts. The Nordic model is the system Bernie ran on and the model pretty much everyone left of center points to as a successful expression of progressive values. And Hillary should know that. I’m sure there are some people on the left confused about the details because there aren’t that many folk that get into the policy weeds but progressive support for the Nordics is not some fad.

    That being said this is not exactly a harsh criticism and most of her remarks are, as Bernie noted, quite empathetic and supportive of the situation young folk screwed by the great recession are in.

  115. 115.

    amk

    Former contestants and staff of The Apprentice described how Mr Trump frequently discussed the size of women’s breasts and who he would like to have sex with on set.

    Former producer Katherine Walker said Mr Trump often talked about women’s bodies and commented on which female contestants he thought would be good in bed.

    Eight former crew members said Mr Trump paid particular attention to a female camerawoman on set who he thought was attractive. Ms Walker said Mr Trump’s comments frequently made the camerawoman uncomfortable.

    “He said something like she was cute and she had a nice ass, and it was brought to my attention by someone else that he had a crush on her,” Ms Walker said.

    These people should have sued nbc for workplace sexual harassment a la pox news.

  116. 116.

    gvg

    @RobertDSC-Quad Intel Mac: well he does have relevance in saying Trump is misinterpeting what I said for his own purposes…….that has credibility. For the rest of the time I generally agree and I am tired of him but on that specific issue it would be journalistic malpractice not to ask him. Of course given how the media has been acting the last 16 years, I am more surprised than not that they did ask him when it was relevant. now if they could just stop asking when it’s not AKA McCain everytime Obama does something…

  117. 117.

    different-church-lady

    @maurinsky: but from what we learned over the weekend, the key to avoiding taxes is to buy more stuff. A hell of a lot more stuff.

  118. 118.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @Barbara:

    Cokie’s brother died two years ago, so he’s out of the picture. I remember Hale and Lindy Boggs very well. Cokie was hired by NPR originally as their Congressional correspondent, because she had grown up in the halls of power and could explain the arcane rules and traditions to a radio audience. And to her credit, for a long time (in the early years) she did.

    I hear her now only because I have “Music Through the Night” on overnight and usually come awake during “Morning Edition.” Of all the possibilities of background noise, NPR remains the most viable for me. So . . . Cokie + Some RWNJ, every Monday.

  119. 119.

    hovercraft

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    Yes. I love Wallace calling Rudy unhinged, saying that he;s not helping Trump, She said Trump values loyalty over honesty, and that he’ll continue to send Rudy out there, even though he’s not helping.

  120. 120.

    Suzanne

    @Mustang Bobby: Congratulations and go you. That’s an amazing accomplishment.

    Feeling despondent today. Reading things like HRC’s words about Millenials—all of which are true—makes me feel like I will never not be struggling. Seriously, it just feels overwhelming at times. And relative to my peers, I am doing very well. So I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if there are any policy solutions at this point that can make things cost less and make government work more.

  122. 122.

    Barbara

    @marduk: It’s not nonsense on stilts. There is no “nordic” model. Scandinavian countries, including Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, do not all have the same way of doing things. Yes, they are broadly similar and much more generous than the U.S. is with safety net programs, but they are hardly identical. There was also no thought as to how those models might be adapted for a society that is much more heterogenous than they are. Even there, increasing diversity is causing a lot of anxiety and re-examination of safety nets. I think they are worth emulating if it makes sense, I certainly admire their generosity and commitment to the common good, but there does not seem to have been a lot of effort to understand the details.

  123. 123.

    different-church-lady

    @MomSense:

    Guess what, if we put the recession kids to work rebuilding and repairing all the things that are falling down and crumbling…

    There ain’t a smartphone app in the world that can mix a tub of concrete or swing a hammer, so how you gonna get the kids to think of that as a viable plan escapes me.

  127. 127.

    hovercraft

    @Barbara:
    She beat him. The polling in the 1999 senate race was showing his weakness against her, so he took his diagnosis as a graceful way to bow out and avoid a defeat at the hands of a political novice who was a carpetbagger to boot. So on top of being a hated Clinton, she derailed his carefully laid political plans. Remember back then he wasn’t yet Mr. Noun Verb 9/11. His hatred for her is personal, she stole his job, and now she’s gonna get the presidency that should have been his. It’s not fair that first this black man, and now this woman are going to in one case, and already have in the other, taken what should have been his.

  131. 131.

    MomSense

    @different-church-lady:

    I don’t know about the app thing. I see a ton of kids who would love a good construction job. They bust their asses as sternmen, clam diggers, whatever jobs they can get. And then there are all the engineering grads who leave our state because we don’t build anything here and there are plenty of things to build. We have so many bridges and many of them are rusted.

  135. 135.

    Monala

    @Keith G: I get what you’re saying. She could have said, “have to move back home with their parents,” and that would have been better.

    I was recently texting a friend about planning an activity for our daughters, who had both been sick. I wrote, “I think they’re both a little stir-crazy.” And then I wished I hadn’t written that, because I’ve been trying to be conscious of ableist language. A piece of advice I’ve gotten is don’t try to use shorthand, just say what you mean. And what I meant was, both girls were eager to get out of the house.

    In other words, live in their parents’ basements has become shorthand for can’t afford a place of their own. And if that’s what you mean, then say that.

  136. 136.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @different-church-lady:

    There ain’t a smartphone app in the world that can mix a tub of concrete or swing a hammer, so how you gonna get the kids to think of that as a viable plan escapes me.

    I was a kid once. It worked for me. It is also working for my son.

  137. 137.

    MomSense

    @marduk:

    Ok, we all know about the Scandinavian economic models but they are very different countries than ours in terms of population size, demographics, etc. Norway also has all that oil money going for it. Also too you may want to ignore the growth of anti immigration sentiment and right wing parties.

  138. 138.

    Peale

    @Barbara: his infidelity and trump’s infidelity is caused by the fact that they are perfect men who women want. They are cheating because they have opportunity to. Wealthy, powerful and big dicked, they are cheating for all the right reasons…it shows their alpha dog perfection to the world.

    Bill cheats because he’s a dumb fuck who married an ugly, uncaring, feminist bitch. It’s really hillary’s fault, you see. When bill cheats it just shows what a bitch she is.

    See the difference?

  139. 139.

    bemused

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I remember how msm basically ignored respected economists’ warnings. Heck, they were even ridiculed and laughed at by business panel “experts” on cable shows and cnbc.

    Even before GW got in office, I had found reality based liberal internet sites, writers and a few liberal radio show hosts that reported what msm avoided and it was amazing how prescient and accurate the reporting on ramifications of Bush administration actions and ballooning real estate bubble were. Trusting these folks including Krugman and other reliable economists that a big bust was looming was large factor for us when we decided around 2006 or so to sell our small business and as soon as possible. It sold just before the meltdown.

    It was interesting to me at the time how many other business owners in our sphere didn’t see it coming or didn’t think the housing boom becoming a bust would affect the economy or their businesses much. I suspect many of them got their only news from Kudlow, Fox, etc.

  142. 142.

    rikyrah

    Trump Doesn’t Propose Closing the Loopholes He Exploited
    It’s a major flaw in his ‘only someone who games the system can fix it’ argument.
    by Steven Waldman
    October 2, 2016

    Donald Trump often says that because he’s gamed the system he knows how to fix it. We make fun of that argument but it’s actually a pretty good line. If you want to shore up the security problems in your computer system, you might well hire a former hacker.

    There’s one small problem: Trump never actually says how he would deploy this insider knowledge to fix the problems.

    Let’s start with taxes. Trump’s response to the New York Times revelations that he may not have paid taxes for 18 years was to tweet:

    I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them. #[email protected]

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2016

    Chris Chritie agreed: “What it shows is what an absolute mess the federal tax code is and that’s why Donald Trump is the best person to fix it.”

    But taxes are one area where Trump has actually put out a detailed plan. Get this: He does not touch the carried losses provision that allowed him to use massive business losses to eliminate his personal tax liability. According to the Times piece, Trump took advantage of a part of the code that allows investment losses to wipe out personal tax liabilities, not just for that year but for future years.

    Hillary Clinton’s plan would appear to eliminate the practice, indirectly, by establishing a larger minimum tax on people with substantial income (a.k.a. the Buffett Rule).

  143. 143.

    NorthLeft12

    AAHA!! Finally the smoking gun that all Hillary haters have been tirelessly and vainly searching for!

    Without a doubt, this passage shows that she is completely unfit to be President in a Republican based reality. Empathy and compassion and understanding have no place in the US of A leadership; government or in business.
    Look how awful things have been under Pres. Obama! FFS.

  144. 144.

    Feathers

    @Ceci n’est pas mon nym: The mystery voters probably belong to some fundie denomination and are basically stealing the building. It’s called steeplejacking. Find a low membership church, have enough people join, pretending to share the the victim’s faith, then when you have a critical mass, vote yourselves the ownership of the valuable land and buildings.

    Someone should do background checks on these people ASAP to figure out where they came from to see if the vote can be voided.

  147. 147.

    Brachiator

    @Barbara:

    .WTF is wrong with someone whose self-awareness is so low that he does not see that he might not be the best person in the room for making the case that Bill Clinton’s infidelities are relevant to anything?

    If Trump insists that his surrogates go deep into the sewer, they will push the idea that Bill Clinton was a sexual predator who abused women, and that Hillary was complicit in this.

  150. 150.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @rikyrah: Let’s ask Republicans if they like the idea of taking one of the fraudulent voters that they invented and are so paranoid about, and make that person president. Because only someone who got away with voter fraud knows how to fix voter fraud.

  151. 151.

    WereBear

    @MomSense: In my area, the younger people are creating farms with a lot of foodie emphasis, organic angle, contracting with restaurants and our farmers market runs into December by moving into the town hall.

    It’s certainly not that they cannot work hard. Of course they can!

  153. 153.

    burnspbesq

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The Intercept seems to be pushing it hard

    Of course. Greenie is a narcissistic sociopath. His sympathies naturally lie with the kindred spirit, Trump.

  154. 154.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @bemused: My wife and I started talking about buying a place just as it started. Neither of us knew how bad it would get but it was easy to see it would be a whole lot worse than it was at that moment.

  155. 155.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Matt McIrvin: @burnspbesq: Unfortunately, a lot of Bernie-supporting millennials follow The Intercept. I had brunch with two of them yesterday, who were just outraged(!) that she would describe Bernie supporters as basement-dwellers wanting free stuff and not knowing what it means. Even though she didn’t really say either of those, and even if she had it wouldn’t have been an unfair characterization of many of them.

  156. 156.

    Feathers

    @Kay: I can only dream, but I hope the Trump ExperienceTM begins the conversation we need to have about the problem being business, not government.

    I did an X-Files rewatch recently and it amazed me how much contortion was done to make everything about the evil government, even when the story was about an evil pharma co or defense contractor. It always turned out that the government had tricked or forced them into doing these bad deeds. I think that because the show is so beloved, including by me, the fact that it is a Murdoch product, and how, in hindsight you can feel so much right wing fever swamp in its attitude.

  160. 160.

    scav

    This thing about Trump’s organization renting space to an Iranian later linked to terrorism is interesting. Isolated, probably no big deal but taktn in context with the Cuba business and, far more importantly, his bigly stated words both now and then? “He’s a genius businessman!” his acolytes shout, as the untimate get out of consistency morals Trump card. But it might give the security base flickers of angst at least. A pattern is developing. (not an unexpected one to many.)

    Personal favorite detail

    A representative for Glodow Nead Communications, a public relations firm representing the Trump Organization, told an ICIJ reporter that the Trump Organization would only comment if the story was positive. She declined as a matter of policy to provide contact information for any of its employees.

    this is the article TPM links to, so hats must be involved, no?

  162. 162.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: shomi just comes here to assert his/her innate superiority over everyone else because out in the real world everyone is so blind to his/her far superior intellect that they just ignore him/her as just another bumbling idiot.

    My suggestion is to do the same.

  165. 165.

    Brachiator

    @Monala:

    . I wrote, “I think they’re both a little stir-crazy.” And then I wished I hadn’t written that, because I’ve been trying to be conscious of ableist language.

    But the phrase is not necessarily demeaning a person because of who they are. We seem to be insisting that language cannot be vivid and metaphorical, that everything must be spelled out.

    Stir crazy referred to someone who became unbalanced because they had been confined in the stir (prison) for too long.

    But I understand the need to try to avoid unnecessary confusion and controversy. But when it comes to Hillary, it seems that she can’t win. Her enemies are intent on painting her as an uncaring hawkish unreliable centrist, and they will run everything she says through a negative filter to prove themselves right.

  167. 167.

    SFAW

    @hovercraft:

    Oh and Joe and Nicole seem to feel that Jake Tapper gutted Rudy yesterday.

    I don’t believe it. I need to see Tapper do it again, just to prove that he did it the first time. And then, because I’ll still be rubbing my (lying) eyes in disbelief, I need to see Tapper (or Chuckles Todd!) do it again, just to be sure.

    And at least 10 more times after that, for good measure.

    Fucking Rudy, what a lying, sociopathic, racist scumbag. I look forward to the day that he’s sent Up The River. (Not that I know of any particular crime. I just think the son should emulate the father, in this case.)

  168. 168.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Feathers: I don’t know if it’s that much of a reach. Mulder is probably an Alex Jones fan; he’s repeatedly mocked for watching FOX lowest-common-denominator stuff like World’s Deadliest Swarms. They’re routinely hamstrung by FBI bureaucracy, which isn’t really left or right so much as standard storytelling. IIRC the black oil conspiracy leans heavily on the government because they have the means, not necessarily because they’re the only bad actor.

    Do you remember the one with the evil HOA?

  169. 169.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Major Major Major Major: Iceland is also a big exporter of tropical hardwood.

    They import raw hardwood and dry it in geothermally-heated kilns before it gets re-exported. It’s treated as an export because it remains in Iceland for more than the qualifying period for it to be regarded as a national product rather than processed goods in transit.

    Norway also exports a lot of aluminium thanks to their massive overcapacity in hydro-electric power per capita (something like 6kW capacity per person).

  171. 171.

    Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck

    @Brachiator:
    I’m not sure this is an option, because they don’t understand sexual predation as a bad thing. The conservative attitude has generally been variations of ‘boys will be boys’, ‘women exaggerate’, and ‘the slut had it coming to her.’ They’re pretty deeply invested in those attitudes. Attacking Hillary for not being able to keep her husband in line works just fine to them, and as you may have noticed, they don’t seem to grasp that anyone might find that attitude misogynistic.

    @burnspbesq:
    GG always has time to remind us that Democrats are the real enemies.

  172. 172.

    Brachiator

    @SFAW:

    . I don’t believe it. I need to see Tapper do it again, just to prove that he did it the first time.

    I’m pretty sure the clip is still up on YouTube (can’t provide a good link from my smartphone).

    Not sure if it was a complete gutting, but not a bad job.

  173. 173.

    SFAW

    @shomi:

    So I can’t figure out if (A) the “real” you is the asshole who gets his jollies by screaming “You all fucking SUCK!”, and your quasi-rational persona is due to large ingestion of psychotropic pharmaceuticals, or (B) you’re normally quasi-rational, and you do drugs to become an asshole.

    Based on your long-term performance, I’m guessing that “asshole” is your baseline.

  176. 176.

    different-church-lady

    @OzarkHillbilly: now why you gotta go ’round takin a crap on my gross generalizations?

    Of couse there are still youngsters in the world willing to do physical labor. But I doubt they’re the ones who will complain the loudest that there are no jobs or opportunites because all the elders are corrupt.

  178. 178.

    NorthLeft12

    @WereBear: Empathy. Avid conservatives do not believe in the concept.
    I use to wok with an Engineer who strongly believed in the value of destructive capitalism. He was a young guy, originally from India, and was reasonably intelligent. What I found he lacked in his character, was any empathy for the actual individuals who were being put through these changes and the impact on the communities they lived in.
    We had some excellent discussions about this issue, but in the end he focused on the hoped for long term benefit to overcome the short term suffering and would never concede that the state owed some kind of accommodation to those negatively impacted.
    He ended up leaving the company to be involved in a start up business. Have not heard from him for a few years now. I admire him for aggressively chasing his dream [to be rich and independent] and I hope he develops some level of compassion along the way.

  180. 180.

    Chris

    @Cermet:

    First knee jerk reaction is to blame Hillary; then as facts are revealed, say that she wasn’t the mean, nasty person they always first consider her being.

    Yep. I heard about this a couple days ago from a right wing friend. I didn’t comment at the time, but I was pretty sure it was bullshit: every time a story like this breaks, it’s invariably revealed that it’s not what it sounds like, or at least not the way the right wing’s spun it.

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    You can see the little journamalist wheels going, basically they heard “living in parents’ basement” and vaguely remember when someone insulted bloggers by calling them nothing but out-of-work losers living in a basement in efforts to discredit their non-Villager political observations, and the journamalist thinks aha! That’s an insult!
    …
    Except that Clinton wasn’t demeaning opinion-givers by claiming that they’re just amateur losers in a basement, she was saying that for young people just out of college moving back home with parents is too often the only option.
    …
    This is your brain on sensationalism.

    Your brain on Village-elite classism, more like. As you say, they’ve only ever heard “living in your parents’ basement” as an insult, proof that the person we’re talking about is a loser and a deadbeat who hasn’t done anything with his life. For someone to be speaking about it as nothing to be ashamed of and in fact something that deserves compassion and help isn’t their vocabulary.

  181. 181.

    StringOnAStick

    @OzarkHillbilly: I saw it, and we got out of the market then. I also saw the 2000 crash coming and shorted the hell out of it but that was when I did the market as my full-time job. Eventually the stress chased me out of that field so I wasn’t tuned in enough to safely short it this time, but enough to protect us by bailing. Like you, no one wants to hear it, so I quit saying anything to anyone. If you are right, people never stop asking you what specific things to invest in;for free of course and you can’t charge a fee gir your work unless you are licensed.

    4 months ago a fund manager who is a patient in our office was chatting up my boss that he has his investors at 60% cash; said the market has too much risk in it right now for the amount of potential gains left and for such a slow growth economy.

    The real secret of being super rich us that nearly all their money is in bonds and such that throw off an income stream; they don’t take the risk of actually being in stocks. That’s why they push so hard for the Fed to increase rates – they could care less if it puts the brakes on the economy since their investments are relatively walled off from the impact of that. Suffering from an economic slow down is for little people.

  182. 182.

    Brachiator

    @Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck:

    . rachiator:
    I’m not sure this is an option, because they don’t understand sexual predation as a bad thing.

    Rudy G specifically referred to his background as someone who prosecuted sexual predators in hinting at the coming attacks on the Clintons.

    Attacking Hillary for not being able to keep her husband in line works just fine to them, and as you may have noticed, they don’t seem to grasp that anyone might find that attitude misogynistic.

    I agree with you here, but oddly enough, the Trump people are pitching this stuff to conservative women, especially to married women. This is pointless and distasteful, and I also think it’s ineffective at this point in the campaign. But I think it is also a reflection of Trump’s psyche, how he views women and relationships, and his need to hit back at the Clintons at a personal level.

  184. 184.

    Mike E

    @Rob in CT: the nut quote from the Trump & Atlantic City piece:

    We had not yet been trained to recognize Trump’s hyperbole as constant, indiscriminate, and meaningless.

    The Memory Hole is stronger than Peak Wingnut, apparently.

    Also: al gore!

  188. 188.

    Ruckus

    @Ceci n’est pas mon nym:
    Had a similar situation 25 yrs ago. Not a church situation but people screwing themselves. In the canyon next to our housing development there was scheduled to be built a very nice, upscale planned business community. You couldn’t see or hear any of it from our houses. The company had a community meeting to discuss what was going to happen, and a timeline. About 3/4 of the people where complaining that they had known nothing about it, although we’d been told and about a 1/4 wanted to stop it. The gentleman explained that all the permits had been granted and work would start in x months, they wanted us to understand what they were doing to mitigate problems not ask permission. It was NIMBY, which I see as parallel to the church situation. People couldn’t see the forest for the pine needles.

  189. 189.

    bemused

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Two local brothers in a very tiny town got into the lending business during the boom and built a brand new building to run their company in. They didn’t survive the bust, sold the building and were kind of scrambling to find other ways to make a living. I know everyone in town was aware they were riding the wave and were not surprised when they closed down. I’m still puzzled at the other local business owners who didn’t seem to be too worried about how the housing boom and eventual downturn would affect their businesses. I can only think they were more focused on the now business climate and would worry about that later if and when it changed.

    The business owner, much larger, who bought our business also bought another small business at the same time. (The businesses all sell the same products and services). We did wonder at the time why he would want to take on two more businesses when there was so much uncertainty about the real estate boom and the economy. He either didn’t know or take it seriously. He did have more resources to weather average business storms but when the financial meltdown happened, we know he and others in the same line of business were really sweating it out and it has taken years for them to recover. I just don’t think he had a clue it was coming.

    A large number of business people are just not that smart judging from the many we know.

  190. 190.

    Pogonip

    @Kay: It sounds like they understand quite well. The money isn’t real to them because it isn’t real, period. It can be, and probably will be, yanked away from them by financial chicanery. My own 401K material is in a folder labeled “Fantasy Money.”. It’s a fantasy substituted for a real pension, and if I ever do get any of it I will treat it as found money. It’s not something I will depend on.

  192. 192.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay:

    I love how he says “no one has seen crowds like this”. Sure they have. 2008, Obama. Obama’s were much bigger.

    I wonder if Trump even views President Obama as a legitimate human being given his racist tendencies. Even now he argues that he had the right to challenge Obama’s legitimacy to be President. But you’re correct that in the real world, President Obama drew bigger crowds during his 2008 campaign, including a massive crowd in Germany, than those drawn by Trump. But truth doesn’t matter to Trump or his alt-right supporters.

  193. 193.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @different-church-lady:

    now why you gotta go ’round takin a crap on my gross generalizations?

    ‘Cause that’s just how I roll. ;-) Truth is, I am a little sensitive to the “Americans won’t do that kind of work…” (and other such iterations) because I have heard it applied all too often to things I made a living doing. The correct phrasing is “Americans won’t do that kind of work for slave wages.”

    I feel the same way about “Da yoots are too lazy and only want to play der gameboys…” It may be true of some, but it is not true of either of my sons who work 2-3 jobs if they have to to make it add up.

  197. 197.

    glory b

    @BruceFromOhio:

    “His staff has no control over him whatsoever. It’s their responsibility to keep him focused on what it takes to win, and they have lost it,”

    Excuse me, but why isn’t anyone noting that winning isn’t the end of this? Forget what it takes to win, how About what it takes to GOVERN?

    During the Obama/Clinton primary, someone said/wrote that how you campaign shows how you will govern. They act like dragging his bloated carcass across the finish line (thanks for that one, whoever said it in another thread) is the end game. IT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!

  198. 198.

    Brachiator

    @Major Major Major Major:

    . how long until we hear the phrase “sexual superpredator” from the Trumpists?

    It would be gross, but not unexpected, for them to use a variation of Clinton’s own language against him.

  199. 199.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @StringOnAStick:

    If you are right, people never stop asking you what specific things to invest in

    Fortunately for me, as a dumb ass carpenter they just figured I got lucky. :-)

  200. 200.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: Trump deliberately gives out tickets to his events in greater numbers than the fire code allows, so he can say the stupid fire marshal is making him turn them away at the door.

  201. 201.

    Chris

    @Kay:

    If this happens Republicans will blame Trump, but shouting about voter fraud was official policy in the Bush Administration. They engineered a plan to persuade their base that black people were stealing elections to push those state laws, and “prestige” publications went along with it- the WSJ was central to the effort. I’d see some bullshit in the WSJ and it’d be in USA Today 2 days later.
    …
    It wasn’t the slightest bit subtle- they started with a focus on Milwaukee and Philadelphia. It was a bare accusation that hundreds of thousands of African Americans were committing felony voter fraud. It was outrageous when the WSJ did it and they shouldn’t be surprised Trump (who is not very bright) believes it.

    That’s the story of the Trump candidacy in a nutshell. He’s being portrayed as this exceptional and totally out-of-left-field candidate that no one saw coming, when the truth is that virtually everything about him has been baked into the Republican Party for a long time.

    (The surreal spectacle of Romney trying to bring down Trump by saying “you guys, did you know Trump supports torture? That’s bad!” was their entire primary season in a nutshell).

  202. 202.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Matt McIrvin: Thankfully, any sane person reading this story can see that she never derided young people for living in their parents’ basements. That’s simply a Rightwing spin on her comments.

  203. 203.

    Cermet

    @Chris: If this wingnut logic by the corporate media gets the Rump elected, it will prove that democracies are most vulnerable to capitalist elites buy up the news media.

  204. 204.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Matt McIrvin: they’re not busters, just soft leftists who don’t really know anybody who supported Hillary that doesn’t have lady parts. So all the Bernie supporters THEY know were smart people doing it for noble reasons with a deep knowledge of the issues, not this charicature hillary painted that accurately describes a fifth of his voters. Also, of course, SHE DIDNT ACTUALLY DO SO, but they still haven’t learned that most of what you hear about her is a lie.

  205. 205.

    Original Lee

    @Ceci n’est pas mon nym: Had a similar thing happen with a church we used to attend, except that the vote went through and the congregations were supposed to merge. The problem was, one congregation was basically all related to each other and lived near each other and saw each other all the time, so they didn’t see any need to do very much beyond Sunday activities, while the other congregation was very committed to the projects they had been working with for decades and desperately needed more hands to make them work. A meeting of minds was impossible. The family-oriented congregation just waited out the mission-oriented congregation, and they now own everything and have shut down all except for one of the missions, which they like because it’s a Sunday one.

  206. 206.

    Brachiator

    @Matt McIrvin:

    .At this point the Busters are actively rejecting the word of Bernie Sanders himself, which to me is a sign that he was always more of a symbol than a person to them.

    Interesting point. I think this may be why many of these people, depending on their age, can move from Nader to Sanders to Jill Stein.

    And yes, there are a few who flirted with Trump. They see themselves as revolutionary outsiders.

  207. 207.

    Chris

    @PPCLI:

    That’s the difference that people like Hewitt can’t get. They think that the problem with Romney’s 47% speech was that he used poorly-chosen phrases. In their apologies and special pleadings for Romney they spoke about “poorly chosen words”, “should have phrased things better”, etc. And they went away thinking — “Damn, we got caught on a technicality.”.

    It’s doubly bullshit because “47%” was most definitely a deliberately chosen word. It had been a meme on right wing blogs for three or four years at that point. It was a very blatant shout-out to tell these people “I understand you and share your concerns.”

  208. 208.

    Kay

    Oh, gross:

    In his years as a reality TV boss on “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump repeatedly demeaned women with sexist language, according to show insiders who said he rated female contestants by the size of their breasts and talked about which ones he’d like to have sex with.
    The Associated Press interviewed more than 20 people — former crew members, editors and contestants — who described crass behavior by Trump behind the scenes of the long-running hit show, in which aspiring capitalists were given tasks to perform as they competed for jobs working for him.

    I swear to God. Just force these horrible old men to retire. They’re hopeless.

  210. 210.

    RaflW

    Overall, of course this is much ado about nothing. The media is having a field day with Donald, as they surely should be. In a weak nod to fairness, they’re running this about Clinton. Its stupid, but there ya go, our failed media experiment in action.

    That said, I’m sort of disappointed that Hillary is so dismissive of Scandinavia. She seems to be holding a view of the region from some time in the past. And I get that the US isn’t going to turn into a Social Democrat wonderland.

    But we could learn a thing or 3,000 from them on issues like work-life balance, having a socially responsible business and industrial base, how to rein in banksters, etc. We aren’t going to become Denmark, but pretending that you don’t know what northern european social democracies are like (“whatever that means”) is bullshit coming from a former SOS.

  211. 211.

    schrodinger's cat

    NYT has its priorities right. Now they have launched a character assassination of Alicia Machado in the op-ed pages and an investigation into Bill Clinton’s bimbo eruptions in the news section.

  212. 212.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    . That’s the story of the Trump candidacy in a nutshell. He’s being portrayed as this exceptional and totally out-of-left-field candidate that no one saw coming, when the truth is that virtually everything about him has been baked into the Republican Party for a long time.

    Then why are Republicans afraid of Trump?

  214. 214.

    Kay

    How many paid staff people did the rest of the GOP field have? None of them could have interviewed the people who worked on The Apprentice and found out Trump rates people on their breast size?

  215. 215.

    Zach

    Me and my BernieBros friends have been saying Clinton should do this for a while. Check out Larry Website, he quoted a Bernie delegate from PA making the case that Clinton should own who she is – a centrist – and explain that she needs to keep her from going too far right. This is exactly what this sounds like. Yelling at people to vote for HRC because if they don’t they’re stupid and telling them she’s the most progressivist ever is silly. This, this empathy you think the BernieBros are missing, is what is driving the far left. I see people 20 years younger than me getting hung out to dry because of the timing of their entering the workforce. I see a state that has pushed all risk on to the individual for the benefit of Baby Boomers, to the detriment of the entire country. Hillary was part of that! I don’t think it was malicious. I think it was well intentioned, based on what the best counsel available was saying at the time. It’s just that counsel was wrong, and that counsel has only just begun to realize it.

    HRC should leak more stuff like this. It’s better than what her surrogates are doing for her.

  218. 218.

    dogwood

    @Patricia Kayden:
    Nixon said it’s not illegal if the President does it. He didn’t believe that he was immune because he was Nixon. Trump believes a lie becomes true by virtue of HIM saying it.

  219. 219.

    glory b

    @NotMax: It irks me when Rachel Maddow refers to her as such a “nice lady.” No, she’s a monster for trying to make a worse monster more palatable.

  220. 220.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RaflW: One thing I always disliked about Sanders’ use of Denmark as an example is that they’ve got a serious ethnic-nationalist/xenophobic streak. (Other Nordic countries are not as bad.)

  222. 222.

    Brachiator

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    .Because they are afraid that they won’t be able to control him.

    I agree. But this contradicts the facile notion that Trump is just your standard Republican, only huge.

  226. 226.

    Kropadope

    @Major Major Major Major:

    they’re not busters, just soft leftists who don’t really know anybody who supported Hillary that doesn’t have lady parts. So all the Bernie supporters THEY know were smart people doing it for noble reasons with a deep knowledge of the issues, not this charicature hillary painted that accurately describes a fifth of his voters.

    I don’t think this even qualifies as a caricature. The purpose of a caricature, as I understand it, is to highlight and exaggerate obvious flaws in someone. It’s good for a cheap laugh, not for fostering understanding. There’s no better word for what Hillary expressed here than empathy. She wasn’t trying to draw attention to character flaws she saw in these people, she was trying to highlight the fact that people are suffering.

    Oh, and for the record, the most committed Busters I know are all women.

  229. 229.

    Feathers

    @Major Major Major Major: One of the interesting things to observe was how X-Files had the novelty of having an ongoing storyline but about the “crime” part of the story, not the “drama” portion. But that became a huge problem when they ran out of plot. Buffy, which began while X-files was still running, solved the problem by wrapping up each major storyline at the end of the season. This is still the standard solution.

    I am convinced that many of the problems of male nerddom can be traced back to thinking that Scully was actually wrong all the time, not that she was a great character on an often lazily plotted show.

  235. 235.

    catclub

    @Kay:

    I swear to God. Just force these horrible old men to retire. They’re hopeless.

    If Trump drops out, Roger Ailes is available. He seems to be the one with plenty of influence.

  240. 240.

    Applejinx

    @Suzanne:

    Feeling despondent today. Reading things like HRC’s words about Millenials—all of which are true—makes me feel like I will never not be struggling. Seriously, it just feels overwhelming at times. And relative to my peers, I am doing very well. So I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if there are any policy solutions at this point that can make things cost less and make government work more.

    But if anybody can make it happen, Hillary can. I think this is why the Republicans are so freaking out, and why Hillary is so giddy at times. You have to remember it has taken decades of pretty much treason, some of which Hillary even unthinkingly or pragmatically supported (the whole neoliberal thing, which is so obviously out of fashion today), to get to where we are.

    It’s tumbrel time, and that can be done violently or through policy. The money is there and it’s basically tenets of religious faith stopping us from rebalancing the state to be more functional. Right wingers (especially economic right wingers) broke our country on purpose.

    Look at tax rates under Eisenhower and the kinds of stuff we did as public works, directly employing citizens and paying them. It’s called the Eisenhower highway system for a reason. Now look at what needs to be done (repair) and what can be done.

    Now look at who, right now, are weaving tight bonds with government and would benefit from major public works in key areas. What if we want the best data networks in the world, mega-super-fiber everywhere like the post office and electricity is everywhere? Google is closer to the government than anybody. What if we want everyone with solar panels and batteries, a gigantic network of green power so nobody ever has to pay an electric bill OR GAS FOR THEIR CAR again, plus fighting climate change? Elon Musk is all over that. We are positioned to (through sketchy and hilarious public/private nepotism) do AMAZING things in terms of huge-scale public works, things that truly matter.

    Be of good cheer and be ready to have your mind blown. This stuff can and will happen, not because it’s a progressive dream but because it’s not: it’s a setup for even weirder problems, but the problems you face (I have loads of millenial friends, and agree with you) are the product of intense obsessive work to get things that out of balance. When it gets swinging back, we will all thrive a lot more, and life will get weird. (your house battery will spy on your blood pressure and feed it to the government, the better to manage the mood of your neighborhood. Shit like that)

  242. 242.

    bluefish

    Anecdotally, my 21-year old son, living with us and attending his senior year of college not too far from here, would have no real problem with HRC’s basement dwelling comment. Would probably tend to agree along with most of his pals. That’s not the reason this handful of young men and women, some in school, some working low wage but steady jobs, don’t plan on voting for her. The reasons in this tiny group are definitely other. To my chagrin. If youth knew, if age could and all that jazz.

    This is one she ought to be able to xplain pretty easily–read in context, she’s got nothing to apologize for. Ain’t nothing wrong with using shorthand either and we know young folk use it all the time themselves. What these young adults, kids, don’t get is that number one, I’m not up for being harangued about my vote for her — it’s don’t ask, don’t tell round here for the most part unless folks want to volunteer. Number two, I am crystal clear about the fact that I feel like I have NO choice this election cycle but to cast my HRC ballot–and why. It’s gotta be succinct but the attention span and time just aren’t there. Reasons — Because I’d like to live along with the rest of the planet. And I’d like to see my kid live. DT scares me just that much. At this moment, he’s doing a sit down with retired generals who support him. Televised. This is what frightens me half to death. I see him as deeply, deeply self-destructive. That ain’t good in the WH. Take that act back to Park Avenue, stat, and let the country at least try to recover from the tsunami of poison unleashed.

    It’s going to take us a very, very long time to even begin to clean up this mess. Excuse the semi emo rant. Off for a walk with the dog. Cannot wait for this nightmare to be over, Walter!

  244. 244.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kropadope: The most committed Busters I know are men, but they’re not particularly leftists or millennials either; they’re middle-aged Ron Paul fans and some old “politicians are all scum” hippie types who almost never vote.

  246. 246.

    StringOnAStick

    @RaflW: I have friends who lived and worked in Norway recently. The secret to the Norwegian and other Scandinavian countries successful social safety nets are tax rates that would doom any US political campaign. There is a reason this isn’t being discussed more right now. The repubs were wringing their hands with glee when Bernie was competitive since as soon as he had the nomination they were going to destroy him on how much taxes would have to increase here to do what he was proposing.

  248. 248.

    Chris

    @marduk:

    I don’t think it was condescending, but yeah, that was the only part of the speech I rolled my eyes at. Scandinavian examples are pointed to for the simple reason that the conservative/centrist line in this country has always been that the kind of policies they have are impossible to implement because they lead to economic destruction, and, well, manifestly they don’t.

    @Barbara:

    There was also no thought as to how those models might be adapted for a society that is much more heterogenous than they are. Even there, increasing diversity is causing a lot of anxiety and re-examination of safety nets.

    But that’s not a material problem, it’s a political one.

    I’ve heard the argument that Scandinavian models couldn’t be applied to the U.S. because our population is much bigger, our country is much more spread-out, or whatever, and that I could see.

    But the argument about politics isn’t saying “it’s impossible to adapt Scandinavian models to America,” it’s just saying “too many Americans wouldn’t want to adapt this.” Which, 1) well, yes, but it’s pretty normal for parties to support things that, at least for the moment, are unpopular, and 2) it’s true no matter what “model” you adopt – the ACA was probably the most non-intrusive and corporate-friendly way to reform the health insurance system while still improving things for the client, and the same people who are anxious at diversity flipped out at it just the same as if it had been the second coming of Lenin.

  249. 249.

    Applejinx

    @different-church-lady:

    There ain’t a smartphone app in the world that can mix a tub of concrete or swing a hammer, so how you gonna get the kids to think of that as a viable plan escapes me.

    Pay them fifty dollars an hour. Hell, I’d be standing in that line myself.

    There is NO REASON public infrastructure work has to be shittier than the private sector. If you don’t want a brain-drain, a skilled-labor drain, off to stupid capitalist tricks and pointless construction for the rich, then outbid the rich whilst taxing the shit out of them. And that says nothing of truly unskilled labor. There is NO reason the government has to pay shit wages. Think of it as helicopter money: want to rebuild our country? Sign up and get paid to do it. Go to work. We are so far away from ‘paying people to dig a hole and then fill it in’ that it’s not even funny.

  251. 251.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Applejinx: I believe there are big logistical issues (mostly local) to doing infrastructure work in a shovel-ready fashion (as opposed to longer term), and the buy-American stuff and probably union contracts would hinder this further. Now, there’s plenty of federal land where we can do dig-a-hole-fill-it-in, but at that point we should just give away the money. Which is a great idea, though.

  252. 252.

    Botsplainer

    @Kay:

    GOP staffers are just not that good. I think they arrive as poorly trained ideologues come straight through the “homeschool to Patrick Henry University/Liberty University/Regent’s College Young Republicans to RWNJ think tank to Congressional office pipeline”, with predictable results, as empathy is not a part of their maturation process.

    Think about how they all got snookered by the alleged “grassroots” campaign on Terri Schiavo. Each office was getting a ton of calls and messages from a dogged and dogmatic small number, but they weren’t bothering with checking on the provenance of the contacts. What those blundering idiots thought was an overwhelming show of support for Congressional action turned out to be a complete opposite of what the public felt. It was a classic preventable blunder, and even their own base voters were stunned.

    This veto override is yet another example of lousy staff work. On the D side, I can see the political calculation (I disagree with it, but there is some logic to the capitulation to the right). On the R side, I see nothing but stupidity.

  253. 253.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: Well, to some extent it’s saying “people are ineradicably racist, so out of ethnic diversity, democracy and a strong social safety net, you can only pick two”.

  254. 254.

    Applejinx

    @Robert Sneddon: We could have that in solar, very easily. You want arid locations and square mileage. Energy storage is also a big deal, but American business is working on that in the form of Elon Musk.

    I think I read that we also have substantially more foreclosed houses than homeless people…

  255. 255.

    hovercraft

    Did anyone watch the Trump military townhall in Virginia? Think his cyber answer during the debate, but given to a roomfull of supporters. These supposed military experts applauded word salad, and nonsense. He’s talking about General Macarthur, keeping the oil, smallest military ever, stop them cold. Basically buzz words, and these people applaud him. And he’s sniffing again. His strategy to defeat ISIS is, are you ready? The element of surprise.

  258. 258.

    Amir Khalid

    @Feathers:
    There were (or should I say there are) two different kinds of X-Files episode: “Conspiracy” episodes are related to the long-running, evil-government plot, while “Monster of The Week” episodes are standalone stories. Mocking the pseudoscience shows on its own network was something of a running joke on The X-Files.

    Show creator Chris Carter wound down the original long-running plot halfway through season six, when he killed off the Syndicate behind it. Carter’s plan once the show took off was to do five seasons on TV and then make The X-Files a movie series. But as I recall, Fox wanted the show to continue, because it was bad at picking new hits. (It endured a 1999/2000 season where all its new shows tanked.) Plus, Duchovny left the show for most of season eight and all but the finale of season nine, which left Anderson literally holding the baby. The MOTW episodes were still fine, but Carter had to make up a new long-term plot on the fly, and it was awful. I doubt there was any political agenda involved.

  259. 259.

    catclub

    great explainer for what is really like to have happened with Trump’s $916M ‘loss’.

    Debt parking means that the bankruptcy debt is held in limbo, but not technically forgiven, which would result in an income that has to be reported.

    The last item at that link is: “If you can find WHERE that debt is parked, that is worth a Pulitzer Prize”

  260. 260.

    Applejinx

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I believe there are big logistical issues (mostly local) to doing infrastructure work in a shovel-ready fashion (as opposed to longer term), and the buy-American stuff and probably union contracts would hinder this further.

    At this time I don’t believe unions can do shit to oppose anything or anybody. As far as buying American, if we completely ignore the calculus of capitalist gain and just make it ‘rebuild America, using citizens, paying them well and sourcing the resources from only American sources whatever the relative cost’, that solves that.

    Let’s remember this notion does not have to compete in a capitalist marketplace. Who gives a fuck if it could be done more cheaply in Malaysia, or whether it brings the highest return on investment for stockholders? We’re talking about public works. Again, it’s a kind of religious tenet that these things must be done a certain way, and the time’s right for open revolt against these assumptions.

  261. 261.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Amir Khalid: I’m with Amir here. Though a couple season 7 episodes are classics IIRC. But I find it best to just skip the conspiracy episodes at any rate.

    It’s also cool to see the seeds of things to come in some of the episodes, like the one where Vince Gilligan met Brian Cranston.

  264. 264.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The Intercept seems to be pushing it hard, and Hugh Hewitt chortled about it being Hillary’s 47% moment, but the big papers and such seem to have mostly regarded it as a bullshit story.

    Dare we hope the MSM have finally realized that Huge Halfwit is a fraud & grifter?

  265. 265.

    Barbara

    @Chris: I think it’s a mistake to use Scandinavia as a shorthand way of defining what you want. I think we should be willing to look at European models in order to expand our safety net and make it more efficient for health care, in particular. But people in the U.S. sometimes seize on a particular feature of European ways of doing things without getting the trade-offs or the context. Nearly every European country provides universal access to healthcare, but there are many different models and most incorporate elements of private insurance. Another example is the notion of free university. Well, tuition may be free, but living expenses are not. Swedish students borrow money to pay living expenses. In addition, many fewer people are “selected” for admission to four year universities, and they have to navigate a path that is filled with social and class expectations. Try to think about how that might play out in the U.S., with its history of entrenched racism and unequal public schools. I still maintain that some of the biggest and undeserved beneficiaries of “free tuition” will be affluent people, whose children will be much more likely to get into a much more competitive admissions process for low cost public universities. I think the details matter.

  266. 266.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    @Iowa Old Lady: Rumor has it Kellyanne was sent to the hospital with alcohol poisoning a few hours after the Saturday Penn rally. They found four empty gallons of Jack Daniels bottles next to her. Only the best booze for Kellyanne.

  268. 268.

    Applejinx

    @Major Major Major Major: One of the reasons ‘Elon Musk is evil’ is because he takes very large government subsidies to do his thing. He’s extremely good at the sort of public/private synergy/vampire-squid I’m talking about, which is why he comes immediately to mind.

    A lot of people think he is the most evilest guy ever because he is cheating, by taking government money rather than operating completely and entirely according to the terms of Wall Street and private investment. I just have a different opinion of the intrinsic value of private capital. I would not lose a wink of sleep if black helicopters came and nationalized the whole fucking Dow Jones index. Some things would probably work better that way, some worse. If Elon Musk wants to cozy up real close to the government, well, that’s how we got jet airliners and the Internet. Government pork.

  269. 269.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Major Major Major Major: I think Musk is kind of a megalomaniac and not necessarily a good guy. But the energy technologies he’s trying to develop are more or less pushing in the right direction. Unfortunately any industrial process whatsoever is probably going to have some kind of dark side, so the only way to maintain clean hands is blanket opposition to everything.

  270. 270.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    @StringOnAStick:

    Seriously – Bernie has no other message other than huge tax increases to vastly expand the government’s role in everyone’s life – in a moment in time when the country’s white population is literally having a nervous breakdown as a result of the ACA. The Trump campaign would be showing footage of Venezuela 24/7, along with Bernie’s friendly comments about Castro and that Sandinista guy and his honeymoon in Moscow. Additionally, Trump’s misogyny would never have been more than a footnote, since Bernie has some pretty sketchy stuff in his past too, about women and sex. His style would not have contrasted that well to Trump, either. Hillary has turned out to be the perfect foil for Donald – she’s turned him into a walking grenade with the pin pulled.

    Also, Charles Blow’s column today has caused terroristic man-toddler to trend on twitter. That’s thanks to Hillary getting to him.

  272. 272.

    ? Martin

    @Applejinx:

    We could have that in solar, very easily. You want arid locations and square mileage.

    The cost of adding commercial solar is already lower than coal in all 50 states. Residential should be there within 3 years if the current trends hold. Residential is already competitive with grid in at least half the country. Energy storage prices are dropping pretty dramatically as well. IOW, you should be able to build a fully off the electric grid solar home under a 30 year mortgage and come out ahead in terms of cost in about half the country now. In 3-5 years you should be able to do that almost anywhere in the US without serious consideration.

  273. 273.

    Brachiator

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    . NYT has its priorities right. Now they have launched a character assassination of Alicia Machado in the op-ed pages

    I just read this, and thought it good pushback against those who have tried to vilify her.

    Ms. Machado’s scrappy attitude is refreshing — and enlightening: Her feud with Mr. Trump is proof yet again of his misogyny. But it’s also a reminder that he has no monopoly on that. There’s plenty to go around in Latin America.

  274. 274.

    NorthLeft12

    @Chris: I have reacted strongly to some people of my generation and older who think it is an adult child’s failure if they are living at home while just starting out. I have explained to them how difficult it is to find decent housing on a low wage. I have asked if they would rather see these kids living in their cars [if they have them] or on the streets. I have also pointed out that this is not what most of these adult kids want either, and that they are working hard to get in a position where they can live on their own.
    I’m getting a little tired of the smugness of the older generations and their negative attitude towards the younger generations. In a word; assholes.

  276. 276.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Applejinx: these are lefties complaining. He’s not evil because of the government, he’s evil because he’s making a profit.

    Defense spending and weird public-private stuff are what drives information technology, I know that for sure. DARPA, Bell…

  277. 277.

    dmsilev

    Sigh. Gonna be a long day today. Colleague sent me a draft of a paper to edit. Sample bit of text: “Now blowing our data inside out…”. Kinky!

    (They mean taking the measured resistance and plotting the conductance, which is 1/R).

  278. 278.

    Brachiator

    @Applejinx:

    .If Elon Musk wants to cozy up real close to the government, well, that’s how we got jet airliners and the Internet. Government pork.

    So, you hate the Internets?

  279. 279.

    catclub

    @? Martin:

    Energy storage prices are dropping pretty dramatically

    Energy storage is soon to be crucial. And the solutions at this point are fascinating: Pumping water up a hill. Running a train up a hill.
    Inflating a balloon ( kevlar, underwater, Duty cycle in the 100K(?) range). I always liked the flywheels, but they are apparently too high tech to also be cheap enough.

  280. 280.

    Anoniminous

    @Applejinx:

    Elon Musk is evil’ is because he takes very large government subsidies

    Silicon Valley was built on very large government subsidies, grants, and investments. That Silicon Valley techbros don’t know this just goes to show they are highly trained and poorly educated.

  281. 281.

    bemused

    @StringOnAStick:

    I’m reading The Nordic Theory of Everything, In Search of a Better Life by Anu Partanen. Partanen is a Finnish woman who fell for an American and eventually moved to the US and married him. She talks about the stress of finding health insurance and other issues that Americans deal with that those in Scandinavian countries don’t give a second thought to. She thought she had so much anxiety because the US culture was so different but then realized that Americans are just as stressed about affording health care, child care, elderly parent care, education, etc, etc.

    Partanen compares life in US vs the Nordic countries focusing on four key relationships-parents and children, men and women, employees and employers and government and citizens. She pushes against the criticism that Nordic countries are socialist nanny states and instead that is Americans that are more entrenched in unhealthy dependencies that we realize, arguing that Nordic citizens enjoy not just more equality but much more freedom than we do.

    The book begins with a May 2012 conference on social mobility in which the discussion among world experts was where people worldwide were attaining a better life than their parents. Ed Miliband, leader of the British Labour Party said, “If you want the American dream, go to Finland” and that the US has been known for opportunity but no longer.

  282. 282.

    Elizabelle

    @StringOnAStick:

    The secret to the Norwegian and other Scandinavian countries successful social safety nets are tax rates that would doom any US political campaign.

    However, the Scandinavian countries are relatively thinly populated. A friend — a Swedish executive — wondered why the US is not taxing itself more, because there is a larger population to spread the cost around. Need not be anything as close to Sweden’s tax burden.

    At some point, you would get an economy of scale IF you don’t have the middlemen sucking the system dry. Which is what American business exists to do.

    Also: infrastructure improvements, and jobs. Make some jobs now, before we’re all Ubered out of existence.

    We should at least start having this conversation.

  283. 283.

    Brachiator

    @hovercraft:

    His strategy to defeat ISIS is, are you ready? The element of surprise.

    So, Trump gets his military strategy from Monty Python skits?

    Cardinal Ximinez: *Nobody* expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear, fear and surprise. Our *two* weapons are fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency. Our *three* weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical dedication to the pope.

  284. 284.

    WereBear

    @StringOnAStick: The secret to the Norwegian and other Scandinavian countries successful social safety nets are tax rates that would doom any US political campaign.

    Very true. Whenever Mr WereBear and I discuss this, we emphasize that what you get to take home is your own, to blow on mostly non-essentials. But most people cannot get this: they want all the money, the same way a Nigerian scam target starts thinking about millions of dollars!

    My parents were raised with the idea that you could save your way out of poverty. But you can’t. That’s why it’s poverty.

  287. 287.

    Elizabelle

    Watched a tad of CNN this morning.

    I cannot get over how much advice the pundits are giving Donald Trump on what to say, like he’s going to take any of it. (Although he might ….) Pundit’s point seems to be to free DJTrump to focus on the substantial message of his campaign. Problem being …

    Can’t remember them doing this with Democratic candidates. Aren’t Dems just criminals?

  288. 288.

    sherparick

    @Applejinx: You know what else was very good Government/Private enterprises:

    1. Building the American Railroad System in the 19th Century (lots of corruption and graft, but railroads got built and industrial America (for good and ill) was created.

    2. The automobile and the road building industry (Auto companies and Oil companies (believe it or not) lobbied state legislatures and Congress in the 1900-1960 to enact and increase gas taxes to build paved roads. Ford, GM, and Exxon (e.g. Standard Oil) all got rich , but (for good and ill) we got cars and the roads to drive on them.

    3. The Airline and Aircraft industry are almost totally the result of Government subsidies and contracts the last 100 years, from military and civilian R&D, building airports and air traffic control system, a long period of regulated prices that guaranteed profits, and regulation of safety.

    4. Perhaps Musk dreams will work out.

  289. 289.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @hovercraft:

    Did anyone watch the Trump military townhall in Virginia?

    No, but the top-of-the-hour headlines on NPR just played a few sentences. He is clearly on the TelePrompTer, sounds very subdued and drugged, low-energy, lacking all passion or even interest, and basically — if he weren’t Donald Trump — a speaker to whom no one would ever pay the slightest attention.

  291. 291.

    Chris

    @Feathers:

    I did an X-Files rewatch recently and it amazed me how much contortion was done to make everything about the evil government, even when the story was about an evil pharma co or defense contractor. It always turned out that the government had tricked or forced them into doing these bad deeds. I think that because the show is so beloved, including by me, the fact that it is a Murdoch product, and how, in hindsight you can feel so much right wing fever swamp in its attitude.

    I don’t even know if it’s right wing swamp fever. To me, it’s just one of the things that makes the show feel dated in some ways even by nineties standards. X-Files very much comes off as a show written by someone whose political opinions were formed in the days of Watergate, the Church Committee, the Pentagon papers, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, and all that good stuff. Hence, the obsession with the Faceless Inhuman Government Machine. Sci-fi had already started moving past that to fear of the Faceless Inhuman Corporations as early as the late seventies.

  292. 292.

    Matt McIrvin

    @catclub: The gravitational approaches have the advantage of simplicity (and great maturity, in the case of pumped storage–people have been doing this for a long time), but the disadvantage of low energy density–gravity is just not a very strong force, when you get right down to it.

  294. 294.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: I always think of the Nineties revival of The Outer Limits: the paradigmatic New Outer Limits episode always revolved around a corporation with a sinister name that was creating something horrific in a laboratory with a glass-walled cell.

  295. 295.

    Matt McIrvin

    (I loved it when Pepsico spun off their fast-food franchises into a new corporation called “Tricon Global”, because it was such a New Outer Limits name. Company called Tricon Global, they’ve got to be making genetically engineered blood-sucking supersoldiers or something. Unfortunately they later changed their name to “Yum!” which doesn’t have the same ring.)

  296. 296.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Mike J: Yeah, the techbros are by and large not the engineers, they’re finance types who decided that there was more money in tech.

    @Matt McIrvin: “Massive Dynamic” from Fringe is my favorite eebul sci-fi corporation name. It is of course named after General Dynamics, the defense contractor.

  297. 297.

    Amir Khalid

    @Chris:
    There were the occasional Faceless Inhuman Corp episodes. I remember one or two involving Morley Tobacco Co., the maker of the Cigarette-Smoking Man’s preferred cancer sticks.

  298. 298.

    brettvk

    @OzarkHillbilly: I worked at a public library reference desk in the early oughts and picked up on the housing bubble from my exposure to the business press there — so the information was out there. I was able to get into a cheap house with a FHA first-timer loan by 2006, despite a previous bankruptcy, and to hold onto it when I was laid off the following year. I’m overeducated but not in business/economics, and I was a little surprised that there was so much surprise when the bubble burst.

  299. 299.

    nonynony

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Company called Tricon Global, they’ve got to be making genetically engineered blood-sucking supersoldiers or something. Unfortunately they later changed their name to “Yum!” which doesn’t have the same ring.

    I dunno – a corporation named “Yum!” sounds far more sinister to me than one named “Tricon Global”. “Yum!” has a very distinct “Soylent Green is People/To Serve Man is a cookbook!” vibe around it – what exactly are they trying to hide behind that name?

  300. 300.

    catclub

    What a great paragraph from a CNN article:

    In just the past week, Trump delivered an underwhelming debate performance, struggled to recover from it, engaged in a counterproductive feud with a Latina beauty queen, posted early morning Twitter tirades and spewed insinuations without any evidence about Clinton’s marriage. The tax story — which could undermine Trump’s image as a successful businessman — will dominate the next few days.

  301. 301.

    Cacti

    @PPCLI:

    But the problem wasn’t the phrase, it is that he gave an extended speech talking about people who are struggling, spoke of them with open contempt, and said it wasn’t his business to care about them.

    This x infinity.

    What sealed Romney’s fate was that behind closed doors with his fellow rich, he sneered and jeered about anyone less fortunate than himself.

  302. 302.

    Brachiator

    @sherparick:

    You know what else was very good Government/Private enterprises

    Louisiana Purchase. Purchase of Alaska. And subsequent development of the land.

  303. 303.

    Brachiator

    @Cacti:

    . But the problem wasn’t the phrase, it is that he gave an extended speech talking about people who are struggling, spoke of them with open contempt, and said it wasn’t his business to care about them.

    Yep. And a lot of middle class and working class white people tried to tell themselves, “oh, he’s not talking about us.” But in the end, a lot of them had to confront the truth.

    The Romney campaign was the first that I noticed in which the GOP candidate so openly, comfortably, and blatantly courted the uberrich as donors and advisors. Previous candidates would try to mix it up with a few rallies featuring a diverse crowd. But whenever I would hear a story about Romney out fundraising, it was always among the mega rich, often with the press conspicuously not invited.

  304. 304.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    SCOTUS just rejected a hearing on the Obama immigration policies 4-4. Thanks Millennials and Latinos for sitting at home in ’14 because Obama didn’t give you guys your Sparkly Pony with the apricot colored Swaroski(sp)crystals. Also too,watching Kim Kardashian having a fight with her half/step sister/niece was more important than voting. Yeah,i have lots of empathy for these people.

  305. 305.

    ? Martin

    @sherparick: Public/private enterprises typically work out much better than public only ones. Nations that have gone with public only infrastructure tend to get trapped behind the role of taxpayer money – that early infrastructure initiatives have essential function for some people, but are seen as non-essential for most people. Most people didn’t have cars when the nation needed to start road building – and there was no real vision for everyone needing a car. The suburb hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the strip mall. So when these things happen, you are very dependent on the attitude at the time for how generously government money should be spent. India famously didn’t build out telephone service across the nation for this reason. They didn’t believe that phones were essential, even when there was an 8 year waiting list for a phone. Countries that had privatized systems could get up and running faster, or more efficiently because they didn’t rely on a centralized group of individuals to measure the merit of the infrastructure. Instead, people could choose to pay for it directly and in how much they were willing to pay provide a measure. That doesn’t mean government doesn’t have a role – it does, an important one, to ensure that the market is open, fair, interoperable, safe, and so on and to provide assistance to the private enterprises as needed (backbone, interfaces with other nations, etc.)

    This is the conservative argument against health care systems like the NHS in the UK. At some point you have to put an actuarial value on a health decision. How much should the system pay to save your life or to prevent it from getting worse? In the UK, that’s question falls on a central group of people. In the US, it’s distributed among a bunch of other groups of people in companies, with a gate to allow anyone to make that decision for themselves if they are wealthy enough. It’s an inherently difficult problem to grapple with, but the public always prefers to have a direct voice in that question. It’s why we want decision-making with our doctor or with ourselves.

    But the same holds true for all infrastructure. Consider that the cost of car crashes in the US is about $900B per year. That exceeds the staggeringly high cost of our military. Successfully rolling out self-driving cars that were good enough to eliminate those crashes would put enough money each year in consumers pockets to pay for almost all federal discretionary spending. However, can government see the opportunity cost? Probably. Can consumers see the opportunity cost? Almost certainly not. At least not to the extent that they would be willing to invest on the order of $9T to solve that (a 10 year ROI is pretty darn good for infrastructure). And I would point out that $9T is about what it would cost to buy everyone in the US a new car. If self-driving cars do arrive, it’s a complete no-brainer to push strongly toward them, yet I think it’s effectively impossible for government to make that investment. They can encourage it with policy decisions but not cash on the table, and this is where the private sector can function best.

    Consider also the free trade issue. Obama took action (40% tariff) against Chinese tire manufacturers who we accused of dumping in order to protect US jobs. There are 1200 people in the US employed to make tires, and the trade action raised the price of tires enough to cost US consumers an estimated $1.1B. Now, the 1200 jobs saved were probably very grateful for that as would a lot of pro-labor folks like Kay, but we’re paying $900,000 per year for each of those jobs. The workers aren’t getting $900,000 per year, and their jobs are hardly safe as the market will respond to the tariff in some other way. Trade, like most infrastructure, has costs that are very direct and visceral and benefits very diffuse and difficult to value. When trade is working for the US, we tend to not notice because we don’t recognize the incremental hiring in the US entertainment sector which is a large export service economy, but we do recognize a plant shutdown. Government is very susceptible to these problems when it is spending taxpayer money.

  306. 306.

    hovercraft

    @SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch:

    He is clearly on the TelePrompTer, sounds very subdued and drugged, low-energy, lacking all passion or even interest

    He was only on the prompter at the beginning, which is why that part was anodyne GOP, stronger, tougher bullshit. As soon as he started taking questions he was still subdued, but just stringing buzz words together, and going off on tangents.

  307. 307.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Brachiator: If fat shaming and slut shaming is not a hit job, then what is?

    Ms. Machado is something of an exception. Not political per se, she is a provocateur. Early in her training, she refused plastic surgery, flouting the submissive stereotype. And as the entire planet now knows, she gained weight. When Mr. Trump, who ran the contest in 1996, ridiculed her, she put on more — by some estimates, as much as 42 pounds.

    Much like her adversary Mr. Trump, she appears unable to resist being on camera. Or getting into messy situations. In 1997, she was charged as an accomplice to her boyfriend in a shooting in Venezuela, though her charges were dropped. She apparently engaged in some risqué behavior with a fellow contestant in a Spanish reality show. In 2010, Univision reported that the father of her daughter was a Mexican drug lord, José Gerardo Álvarez, known as “El Indio” and now incarcerated. (She has denied the story.)

  308. 308.

    Amir Khalid

    I don’t understand. Why is it evil of Elon Musk to take government money for R&D? He wants to do it for the future profits, the US Government wants to encourage it so that American companies (and, touch wood, American workers) will benefit.

  309. 309.

    Kropadope

    @Matt McIrvin: Oh, most of my Ron Paul lovin friends never considered Bernie and now mainly just bring up the DNC non-scandal to try to piss off my formerly Bernie supporting friends.

  310. 310.

    StringOnAStick

    @NorthLeft12: I’m someone who managed to get out of my BS and MS degree into a crap economy; the single advantage I had compared to new graduates today is housing was still relatively cheap then. One thing that happened with to mortgage bubble/bust is a lot of foreclosed housing ended up being bought as rentals by corporations, so housing is much more expensive on an adjusted dollar basis now.

    On top of that, I got out without any student loans. I didn’t qualify for them because my folks made too much money though they didn’t support me through school; at the time it pissed me off but it kept me from graduating with debt.

    Kids getting out now have huge debt, poor salary opportunities and high housing costs. This has been and still is a huge drag on the economy because of reduced household formation, meaning buying homes, cars, starting a family, etc. It is a structural contraction now built into the system and has the economy growing slower than it would have. Middle class parents depleting their limited funds to get their kids through college is another drag, and the cherry on top is reverse mortgages that ensure no wealth will be inherited. All the money goes upstairs to the 1%.

  314. 314.

    Humdog

    @Mai.naem.mobile: As I understand it, all demographics that support Democrats have a lower turnout in midterms. By snidely insulting the youth and Latinos, you are scapegoating and coming perilously close to bigotry.

  316. 316.

    maurinsky

    @Amir Khalid: I was always a fan of the MOTW episodes. I was bored shitless by the government conspiracy/alien abduction stories (except for Jose Chung’s From Outer Space).

    I

  318. 318.

    Kropadope

    @Mai.naem.mobile:

    Thanks Millennials and Latinos for sitting at home in ’14 because Obama didn’t give you guys your Sparkly Pony with the apricot colored Swaroski(sp)crystals.

    Yeah, they’re so much worse than the boomers who vote every election overwhelmingly for the Republicans.

  320. 320.

    StringOnAStick

    @bemused: Thanks for the book rec, I will definitely read that. Economics and social economics are hobbies I enjoy.*

    * Weirdo? Yeah, I know..

  325. 325.

    Barbara

    @Kropadope: There are reasons why some demographics vote less consistently — they move more often and have to change their registration, and might not be as engaged because they know they will not be staying in the same place for the whole cycle. Which also explains why the presidential elections may seem more meaningful to them. I am all in favor of trying to goose turn out but the reason for not voting might not always be due to outright apathy or lack of diligence.

  327. 327.

    Mnemosyne

    Haven’t read the rest of the thread, but there were 4 college kids who went on the voter registration drive this weekend and they were freakin’ adorable with how excited they were about Clinton and how much they want to convince their fellow Millennials that cynicism and apathy only plays into what conservatives want you to do.

    In fact, they were so adorable that I had to put in my earbuds and read a book rather than rain on their parade in my curmudgeonly fashion.

  328. 328.

    The Golux

    @hovercraft:

    His strategy to defeat ISIS is, are you ready? The element of surprise.

    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!1!Eleventy1!

  329. 329.

    StringOnAStick

    @WereBear: I’m at my BIL’s currently, and his wife is the classic struggling retail worker, shit on constantly by management. She was popping off on how a $15 minimum wage for McDonald’s workers, she didn’t like it because her coffee went up in price. I did mild shaming on how she could afford it (she’s inheriting a ton from my BIL when he passes soon), and then proceeded to explain that poor people spend every penny they earn, just like she did before she married my BIL. She finally got it when I explained that those people’s sending is what grows the economy, not some small number of millionaires that just shove their huge tax break into their savings account. It was like watching her mental light bulb come on.

  330. 330.

    Steve in the ATL

    @LAO:

    Still no poop.

    Perhaps she’s waiting for today’s Bundy update, then she will let a giant pile of it out as a statement on the sov cit idiocy.

  332. 332.

    Botsplainer

    @catclub:

    I know – he hounded her ass mercilesslessly for years, and she shanked him every time she had the opportunity. They HATE each other.

    And even then, he’s endorsing her.

  333. 333.

    Mnemosyne

    Also, too, I have a story from my trip about how a mean white lady inspired me to randomly give $20 to a couple who needed it, but I want to wait until I have a proper keyboard to type it on and not my phone.

  334. 334.

    Gindy51

    @brettvk: I figured it out when I saw people getting into homes with less of a down payment than I needed for a car! My neighbor, former VP of our local big business, was canned in 2001 and got into real estate as a mortgage broker when the build up began. He made plenty of cash, blew it on all sorts of shit he and his family did not need, and when the bottom dropped out he mailed his own house keys back to the bank. He rented a shit hole in Indianapolis still trying to be a mortgage broker (he got fined for not telling their organization he had declared bankruptcy himself) and got canned from 4 or 5 different positions. Lets say he and Trump share MANY aspects of personality and could be twins except Trump had money to fall back on where as this dope did not. To say he got what he deserved is accurate due to the harm he caused those he lent money to and got hooked on mortgages they could not afford.

  335. 335.

    different-church-lady

    @srv: And to think when I said they couldn’t pour concrete with a smartphone app I was sorta kidding…

  337. 337.

    Gelfling 545

    @LAO: Do you have a neighbor with a dog whom you could walk with a few times? When my pug was abput a year old & still pretty unreliable ( pugs are notoriously stubborn abput house training) she stayed with my sister for a few days while I was out of town. Going out with my sister’s dogs seemed to do the trick. She’s been completely reliable since.

  338. 338.

    Gelfling 545

    @Kay: around my second year of teaching (What can I say, I was slow.) I realized that most of the kids had no real conception of the connection between their grades and their work. I then started periodically reviewing how I calculated grades which helped some, but not completely.

  340. 340.

    Larkspur

    @different-church-lady:

    There ain’t a smartphone app in the world that can mix a tub of concrete or swing a hammer, so how you gonna get the kids to think of that as a viable plan escapes me.

    You know, it isn’t all about swinging hammers and hauling heavy shit. To get infrastructure work done, you need project managers and other support personnel. A new college graduate may not love the idea of doing lower level organizational and planning work, but it’s employment, and it could be linked to a reduction in student loans, too.

    And imagine if we put a large team to work on getting all the VA backlog information computerized. Again, we’d need people to plan the project and analyze HIIPA protections, as well as the mountains of data entry workers. And it would be “temporary”, in that I hope we could catch up on modernizing record keeping within a few years, but it would be real work with real positive results,even if a college graduate had hoped to begin a little higher up on some illusory ladder.

    One of the things we’re facing now that I didn’t face so much as a new high school graduate in the early 1970s is that there were still some jobs you could get (though they were rapidly disappearing) from which you could earn a modest living. They may have been low-status and dead-end-ish, but you got paid and you began to establish a work history. I’m talking about gas station attendants, brick-and-mortar store clerks, stenographers, typists, file clerks, administrative assistants, and the whole other class of non-career type jobs, or entry-level jobs, that people could get and earn enough to rent a decent house or apartment. So many of those jobs have just vanished because we simply don’t need as many people to do them, as we’ve computerized and mechanized.

    Gas stations are self-service. I remember when lawyers used to scrawl out stuff on big yellow pads of paper, then send it over to the secretarial pool for formatting and typing. Most lawyers work on their own computers now, and although many of them don’t know jack-shit about formatting, they can employ one secretary to take care of three lawyers’ work. And lots of would-have-been sales clerks instead find themselves at Amazon fulfillment centers being worked to exhaustion.

    So yeah, I have a lot of empathy for millennials, especially the ones whose parents didn’t score big-time and don’t have the basement or the empty bedroom to offer their kids any more.

  341. 341.

    ? Martin

    @StringOnAStick:

    Kids getting out now have huge debt, poor salary opportunities and high housing costs.

    That’s not accurate. Average debt load for students leaving public universities is on the order of $28K – a bit less than the average car loan. That’s not huge debt considering that your education appreciates in value while your car depreciates. $30K of debt in order to earn an average of $20K per year more is the very definition of a good deal, and a responsible debt level.

    Average wages for someone with a BS degree is $60K, with new grads expected to earn about $50K. Even at the low end, new grads should earn in the high $30s which is still a good return on the loan. The unemployment rate for new grads is 2.1% – well below what is considered full employment. So your first two items are complete bullshit.

    There’s truth in the 3rd, though. The wage gap from HS to BS degree is massive – over 50%. So the relative value of the degree is unquestionable. But the cost of housing in many parts of the country has simply outpaced wages – for BS holders and especially for HS grads. College grads are slightly falling behind relative to the cost of housing, but they are massively, massively better off than people that never earned the degree. Those people are simply fucked. And within the college grad numbers there is another level of inequality. Engineering and some other STEM degrees are vastly better than many arts, humanities, and social science degrees. The engineers are way ahead of the game, and some of the others, while still being ahead of the HS grads by a wide margin – and by enough to easily pay off a public education – they are losing to the cost of housing by a wider amount. The engineers and some others can easily afford to carry the $100K+ debt that a private education would cost, if they so desired. That’s not necessarily a good investment because that degree will rarely earn you more than from a public (MIT to Ole Miss, being an obvious exception) but it’s hardly going to toss you into poverty.

  344. 344.

    Gelfling 545

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Well, that and they’re always being told they’ll never get to collect theirs. Of course, they were sayimg the same when I was on my 20’s-30’s ans still, my check arrives every month like clockwork.

  345. 345.

    ? Martin

    @srv: Actually, given that many modern online services are extremely secure and vote by mail is by far the biggest source of voter fraud, moving to electronic registration and voting could be much more secure than otherwise.

  346. 346.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Barbara:

    There was also no thought as to how those models might be adapted for a society that is much more heterogenous than they are. Even there, increasing diversity is causing a lot of anxiety and re-examination of safety nets.

    In 1992, waiting for the airport bus in Luxembourg City, I was chastised by a young Dane over the USA’s terrible record in race relations in comparison to Denmark. His smug superiority finally provoked me to say, I wonder how Danes would handle things if 12-15% of your society was suddenly a different color from you? I don’t think you’d do any better than we have.

    Not long after that, IIRC, there was something of a scandal in Denmark involving a significant number of Somalis who they’d granted political asylum. Investigation turned up evidence that some of the politicals had been at no more risk at home than the rest of the population; and, more to the point, many Somalis who were subsequently admitted claiming to be family members of those already there were not in fact related. There was general outrage among the Danes that the “refugees” were taking advantage of the asylum policy to sneak in & sponge off the generous social welfare system. Again IIRC, this was a major (perhaps the major) factor in Denmark electing a right-of-center government for the first time in forever. FWIW.

  347. 347.

    Brachiator

    @MattF:

    . Via WaPo, Trump Foundation has been ordered by NY AG to cease fundraising immediately.

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

  350. 350.

    Brachiator

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    . If fat shaming and slut shaming is not a hit job, then what is?

    Context. The author clearly points out that there is a beauty contest industry in Venezuela, in which women are expected to quietly go along with the fantasy. Machado not only defied Trump, she defied an entire macho culture. And the op Ed piece could have gone further, but people who know about the Venezuela beauty contest industry, also understand how much it is also Euro centric, putting a premium on a slender white woman body type, while disparaging Venezuelan women with indigenous or African bodies.

  351. 351.

    leeleeFL

    @amk: And like the great and generous man that he is, he shares. I simply spend so much time looking dumbfounded by Trump and his minions that I wear a permanent expression of “Huh?”

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