Hillary Clinton's national popular vote lead just surpassed 2.5 million (1.9%): https://t.co/j58GaxfPmH
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 1, 2016
Clinton 48.2%, Trump 46.3% https://t.co/RdiOa817hd
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) December 1, 2016
National polls were close to spot on. https://t.co/QGyuqsag04
— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) December 1, 2016
Looks like the Washington Post may have decided the nation needs a Paper of Opposition, since the NYTimes is determined to control the Kneepads Brigade. Phillip Bump, “Trump will be the first modern president to get less than half of the vote in both the primary and general”:
… Trump always likes to say that he received more votes than any previous Republican nominee, which is accurate, but it’s also accurate that a record was set for most votes cast for candidates other than the eventual nominee.
Using data from U.S. Election Atlas and the Congressional Quarterly Guide to Elections, we can plot contests since 1972 (after the reforms that followed the 1968 process) and demonstrate that only five times have major-party nominees earned less than 50 percent of the vote in both the primary and the general — and only once, this year, has that person ended up winning the presidency…
Update: Since someone on Twitter asked, the other four people to get under 50 percent in each contest were John McCain (2008), Michael Dukakis (1988), Walter Mondale (1984) and George McGovern (1972).
Interestingly, both of the last two losing candidates got more of the vote in the general election than did Trump. Trump earned about 46.3 percent of the vote (though ballots are still being counted) to Mitt Romney’s 47.2. (Romney also did better than Trump in nearly half the states.) Hillary Clinton, of course, beat Trump in the popular vote this year, which is where this whole thing started…
More Republicans voted for someone besides Trump than voted for him in the primary, but he won. More Americans voted for Trump’s opponent in the general, but he won.
Had we been saying this about Clinton, I think it’s safe to guess the word Trump would have used to describe her victory: Rigged.
Trump, as is his wont, found the right loopholes to stake his claim to a chunk of an aging, damaged institution (the GOP, in this case) — which he will now, predictably, loot and discard.
But let’s keep reminding him that his “landslide” is really just a Mondale/McGovern/Dukakis/McCain – level #FAIL, artificially inflated into the semblance of a victory by years of Republican vote-suppression, gerrymandering, foreign interference, and warring factions within the national security state. He has no mandate, and neither do the professional GOP asset-strippers like Paul Ryan, who are planning to use Trump as their catspaw.
***********
Apart from congratulating the pollsters for their accuracy (FWIW), what’s on the agenda for the day?
rikyrah
Morning, Everyone ????
rikyrah
I look at those tweets and get angry again g
JJ
@rikyrah: Hey now.
Raven
So Mnunchin just said the high income people will get “less deductions” about 5 times. I always remember a sign at the grocery checkout lane that said”12″ items or less. Someone crossed it out and wrote “fewer”!
Schlemazel
Obama received 65,915,000 in 2012, 65,498,000 in 2008
Can we lay to rest the notion that her victory was some sort of national disaster on the part of Democrats in general and Hillary in particular or are we going to spend 4 years chasing voters who are never going to vote D anyway?
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Mnunchin’s English to go along with Ryan’s math.
Kay
So when Trump’s supporters continue to cheer him after he screws them and puts in policy that is a plutocrats dream we can all stop insisting he’s a “populist” and it was “economic anxiety”, right?
He’s the same fraud he’s been every day of his adult life and they voted for him because he’s a mean-spirited bully, which they admire.
Maybe we can pick an official expiration date for that theory?
Kay
@Raven:
“It’s not a tax cut for rich people because they get fewer deductions” is the new “we’re not cutting programs, because we’re getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse so it’s a net GAIN”
weaselone
@Kay:
The theory officially expired the first time it was used. Our media (with a few exceptions) is just dumb, fat and lazy.
raven
@Kay: “less” deductions!
Kay
@raven:
Well, give him a break. He didn’t have to work that hard in school:
Trump’s son in law in purchased admission to an elite college. Maybe this guy did too.
OzarkHillbilly
….
Yes, because you are soooooooooo concerned about the health and well being of the protesters.
Gov? You want a peaceful relationship? Seppuku is the only option guaranteed to give you peace.
Jus’ sayin’.
Kay
@weaselone:
In a way it doesn’t matter. All the theories on why Republicans lost in 2008 and were doomed and over as a Party turned out to be complete bullshit. It’s equally likely the same is true on the theories about Democrats.
Kay
@raven:
He didn’t have to work at all for this job, actually. His one and only qualification is he supported Trump and is a banker of some kind. “Merit” is really not operative. Not a factor.
Matt McIrvin
The Republican Party is probably going to do just fine going forward, though, by becoming Trumpatized (to the extent it wasn’t already). The same structural imbalances that make it possible for Trump to win the Electoral College are the ones that lead to Republican dominance in state and local politics: non-college whites are more spread out geographically than anyone else, so their votes count more. That will be an advantage for them even if national demographics keep changing sufficiently that Dems regain a solid presidential lead. Probably even if gerrymandering gets dealt with nationwide.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
Same here. I keep having bouts of anxiety, too.
Darkrose
@weaselone: I don’t expect better from the media. I’m sick to death of hearing it from people on the left who want to keep chasing those precious white voters.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: Ooooopps, forgot the link: U.S. veterans to form human shield at Dakota pipeline protest sorry ’bout that.
Yoda Dog
Morning, all.
This made me smile this morning. The Beastie Boys were the jam back in my youth…
I get to stay home with the young’uns so its going to be a good, fun day today.
Darkrose
@rikyrah: I’ve been going back and forth between rage, despair and exhaustion for weeks now.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Schlemazel: Obama got 69,498,516 votes in 2008.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: This is America Kay. The only “merit” that matters is “who do you know.” Always been that way.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The theories were basically correct, they just identified a trend and incorrectly labeled the effect as unbeatable. We have a country where the population (#1) is getting less and less non-Hispanic white, but (#2) the non-Hispanic whites (especially ones with less education) can get radicalized by anxiety about that, and also the geographic Big Sort gives them a constitutional thumb on the scale. The two effects are racing one another.
The biggest danger is that trend #2 leads to outright ethnic cleansing to negate trend #1, either genocide or mass expulsion of non-whites. The election of Trump just pushed the danger of that way up. The neo-Nazis crow about this explicitly; others do it with more layers of coding.
But there probably would have been an event like this sooner or later. And the mitigating factor is that the rich assholes at the top of the R party mostly know that anything like that would be killing the golden goose that keeps them rich.
In the meantime, they can get some of the same effect by messing with voting rights.
Immanentize
@MomSense: me as well. I’m still waking every night about 3 am and my first thought is “Trump?!” And then can’t sleep for an hour. Then I am tired all day. But I am starting to hatch two projects to fight this new reality, so that makes me feel somewhat better….
Mai.naem.mobile
@Raven: he also said a limit to the mortgage deduction interest. Not sure that Orange Douche will do along with that with his personally being a real estate investor but this was on the table last tax reform package. You could really fuck some middle class people with this one especially coastal blue states elites with expensive housing.
Helen
Morning all. Almost noon here in Dublin.
One of the things I’ve observed here is that customer service is exemplary. Really everyone, from McDonalds workers to bankers are thrilled to help you. Ask a question and you not only get the answer, but a whole history as to why the answer is what it is. Extremely helpful to a newbie.
Well, I am perversely happy to report that the one exception is……wait for it….. THE FUCKING CABLE COMPANY. I was supposed to get hooked up today, but no. Not tomorrow either. Maybe Saturday, but they will send an email confirming. Like the email they swear they sent Tuesday to confirm today, which I never got. But for sure Saturday. They see me right there in their computer. Saturday at 11. For sure. After they confirm. In the email. Which was supposed to arrive right after I spoke to them 3 hours ago.
It’s kinda nice to know that some things NEVER EVER change.
Schlemazel
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: OH NOES! Wikipedia is wrong!
Thats what I get for relying on the internet
Woodrowfan
@OzarkHillbilly: heh. I’m listening to Sarah Vowell’s book on Lafayette in my car and just this morning heard her say something like “the four more comforting words in America are “I know a guy/”
Mai.naem.mobile
@Matt McIrvin: the only silver lining I see with Trumpy is that he fucks it up so bad that the Dems get generally unwinnable red state off year governorships, generally unwinnable red state Senate and Governorships in ’18 that they manage to hang onto till the census and redistricting is over. And possibly the House with blue dogs who manage to hang on till 2020/2022. I am talking screwing the pooch like Dubbya did but I don’t know if I can survive another epic Dubbya style screwing the pooch.
Woodrowfan
@Immanentize: I thought it was just me… I do the same….
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …Also, Hispanics identifying as white are probably going to become more and more numerous and politically aligned with other whites as time goes on (as with other ethnic groups before them), so some of trend #1 is illusory. But not all of it by any means.
Taylor
@Helen: I have a true story about my mother, who lives in South Dublin, trying to get internet service from A Large Irish ISP.
After several frustrating months of not being able to get A Large Irish ISP to provide the service, she wrote a letter to the new CEO (who was not Irish).
Then one night, she got a call from the CEO wanting to discuss it with her.
She of course assumed it was one of her nephews joking with her…..until she realized it was for real.
I can also report, from personal experience, that rumors that IP packets between Port Laoise and Dublin are carried by carrier pigeon, are absolutely true.
OzarkHillbilly
Good news for all baseball fans, MLB players and the owners have reached a tentative deal.
CJ
I’m still developing strategies to cope. One thing that helps is the phrase “Minority President.” It soothes and encourages me plus if it catches on, it will bug the hell out of Trump.
OzarkHillbilly
‘Bogus charges’: Standing Rock activists say they face campaign of legal bullying
OzarkHillbilly
@Woodrowfan: It’s the American way.
Helen
@Taylor: This is Virgin Media. Their packages are great, but I just can’t get to seem to get them out to the apartment. I have ZERO faith that they will show up on Saturday. But I will be there waiting.
Perhaps I should write a letter. And perhaps Richard Branson will call me. Yeah. That may happen!!!
Darkrose
@OzarkHillbilly: Some interesting stuff in there, especially the All Star Game no longer determining home field advantage for the World Series.
Matt McIrvin
@Mai.naem.mobile: You know what they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I think there might be a short-term Trump boom from the usual phenomenon of Republicans suddenly forgetting everything they said about deficit spending when a Republican president is in. If he really goes hardcore trade-protectionist, that might hurt, but Congress may not actually want to play along with it and he might just forget that too. It’ll all fall in eventually, but it might be in President Trump’s second term, like with Bush.
MomSense
@Immanentize: @Woodrowfan:
Yup. Same here.
@OzarkHillbilly:
How are you feeling?
rikyrah
@Kay:
Tell it, Kay.
debbie
@Kay:
That date will be today, when we hear the terms of the “deal” with Carrier, especially the concessions by Indiana.
Baud
@Raven: It’s a long standing GOP dream to transfer money from upper middle class to the rich by eliminating deductions and lowering capital gains taxes.
rikyrah
@OzarkHillbilly:
This is such an underreported story.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
Then we must fight it.
RedDirtGirl
@Raven: Yeah, we call my mom the Word Queen, and she drummed that one into my head from an early age.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I seriously doubt they’re going to eliminate the mortgage-interest deduction–which is a stupid and socially counterproductive idea in the abstract, but in practice is the main bone the tax code throws to the upper middle class as opposed to the super-rich, and would be really hard to get rid of without pissing off a huge number of voters.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
This is just sickening. Thank you, Vets!
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
I think Trump benefits from the Obama recovery, like Bush, Jr. was able to coast on the historically strong employment numbers of the 1990’s.
But as the wealth transfer to the top 0.1% kicks in and everyday folks have less money to spend, we will see the economy start to struggle and people finally starting to notice how bad things are getting.
debbie
@Raven:
Probably just some rarely used deductions, like the one where Trump could deduct his personal losses from his income, or the one where Trump could claim his contractors’ losses as his own, or …
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
I woke up last night from a bizarre and scary dream. For two weeks, I would wake up around 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, but the last week, I had been sleeping all the way through the night.
Baud
@gene108:
People were predicting a recession even if Hillary had won.
Jeffro
@Baud:
I’m sure you meant, “…from the poor and working class and middle class and upper middle class to the rich…”, right?
PS a little help here, how do y’all do the strikethrough thingy?
Baud
@Jeffro: I think they’ve bled those other classes dry. Less money there.
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: I’m doing better but now the Woofmeister has diarrhea (probably from chewing on a butchered deer** kill near my property), which means I have to get up and let him out 3 or 4 times a night and go outside with him to make sure he doesn’t go get a midnight snack from the aforementioned carcass. Kinda hard to fall back asleep after standing around in 20 degree weather in my underwear.
** our local deer herd is infected with Chronic Wasting Disease and MDC has told all deer hunters to butcher their kills in place and bury the bones etc. to reduce the spread of the disease. Burying the bones is all but impossible out here without use of a trackhoe so hunters just leave the bones for my dog to find. He came back with a leg a couple days ago so now I have to take him out every time. Still got the shits tho. Gonna take a stool sample to the vet today.
Darkrose
@OzarkHillbilly: Yikes! That sounds awful all the way around.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Yes.
One thing I wonder is what happens now in the Southeast. Black voters have been migrating into the South for years; it’s a reverse of the Great Migration of the mid-20th century, and Florida is collecting Democratic-voting, non-Cuban Hispanics. Hillary didn’t make it in NC, and she lost Florida this time, but places like Texas and Mississippi are getting closer than they were.
But the right-wing backlash to all that is hellish. Now Trump just made overt Klan-style racism way more socially acceptable than it was before. Do the trends reverse, making the Southeast deep red again? Do they continue? Something else?
I also think it’s interesting that we didn’t really see any reversal of the gradual bluing of the Western states. That’s the dog that didn’t bark.
Ohio Mom
@Matt McIrvin: “President’s Trump’s second term”?!?! Bite your toungue!
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: ugh.. That’s a nasty job. Glad that you are feeling better though.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: We’re due one. It’s the natural cycle.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
Yes, but that was partly predicated on Republicans staying obstructionist about any kind of public-sector spending, which they do when Democrats are in the White House. We might have another round of military Keynesianism at the very least, though social services will obviously get slashed to the bone.
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom: It’s a possibility we have to consider. I lived through 1984 and 2004; I’ve seen how this works.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: That’s a fair argument, but the arguments I saw were based on the business cycle not on what Washington would do.
OzarkHillbilly
@Darkrose: @JPL: It’s a shitty job but somebody’s gotta do it.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Also, I’m partly thinking of Bush’s first term as a model, with a jingo President demagoguing terrorism and war, and the post-9/11 environment of course wasn’t an economic boom but a modest recession with only an anemic recovery by ’04. People were concerned about other things.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Bush I was also a popular war president and lost reelection based on a relatively mild recession.
OzarkHillbilly
Cupboards everywhere are being feverishly checked for old unusable firearms.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Matt McIrvin: Spending doesn’t seem like it’s on the Republican Congress’s agenda. I suppose maybe if Trump actually has the motivation to fight for it he could get them to move on it but otherwise it doesn’t seem like it will happen.
The tax cuts, if targeted to the wealthy and/or upper middle class will be minimally stimulative because their marginal propensity to consume is low. With the talk of voucherizing Medicare I’m planning on saving every penny I can for that future operation or expensive treatment that now I won’t have coverage for in my old age.
Frankly since I don’t know what the Trump admin will bring for the economy I’m pocketing all the money I can on the general principle that its good to have as large a nest egg as possible if another Republican induced economic shit storm occurs – and I’ll continue with that strategy even if a tax cut comes my way. If a lot of people pull back out of uncertainty with what a Trump admin will bring that will put a drag on the economy. I don’t know how many people view his Presidency as a financial risk but I’m guessing it’s a non-trivial portion of the nation’s population.
Baud
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I’m taking it as a huge risk.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: And even coasting off the gigantic popularity spike of 9/11, Bush II only won in a squeaker. But he did get a paper-thin popular-vote majority, unlike in ’00.
Patricia Kayden
@OzarkHillbilly: Peaceful = you shut up and stop complaining while we destroy your water source.
Why didn’t the Governor reach out to the water protectors from the get go before everything got so ugly? This could have been resolved if the Government had respect for Native Americans.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: …To win on the Bush/Bush model, Trump needs to hold off the huge terrorist attack, the massive terrifying war and the domestic racism/ethnic-cleansing/jingo campaign until about 2019 or early 2020. He may not be able to wait that long.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Hold off on what got him elected?
Matt McIrvin
@Patricia Kayden: Racism against Native Americans in the Dakotas is pretty fierce.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the Washington Post’s opposition. They probably just dislike Trump because he’s vulgar and from out of town.
Baud
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: Motives no longer matter.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
I didn’t realize you could eat the meat of a deer with Chronic Wasting Disease. I hope the woofmeister feels much better. Man I hear you about the standing outside in the cold with the dog. Have done that far too many times.
Hellbastard
One bit of advice that David Frum offered up on Bill Maher’s show was to support the institutions that have the power to push back on Trump. The WaPo did some good work with Fahrenthold’s investigations into the Trump Foundation so I went ahead and ordered a digital subscription to the Washington Post. For Amazon Prime members you can get 6 months free and then 5 bucks (or so) a month after that.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize:
When you’re ready…or the projects are hatched…can you share your plans? I’ve been working on developing projects too, focusing particularly on local and state activism. Doing something, anything, helps fend off despair. Vive la résistance!
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Jeffro:
<strike>text to be struck through</strike>
Chris
I go from apathetic some days to full bore Sarah Connor other days. Today is a Sarah Connor day what with the Shitgibbon making a damn mess in Pakistan. On the horizon is a major fuckup…some combination of $5-$6/gal gas(by poking Iran with a stick)….massive wall street deregulation and the shredding of the safety net is likely to walk us all down. SHE found some way to deal with the shitstorm on the horizon and I guess so can I.
sunny raines
none of how trump got to being POTUS is going to matter one whit to trump, the republicans, or the corporate media. Once he is installed, he will use all available power to destroy every semblance of democracy he can. trump is about trump and NOTHING ELSE.
OldDave
@Taylor:
There’s an RFC for that!
O. Felix Culpa
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yay! I was planning to go to spring training in AZ with my dad. My first time ever. I grew up watching baseball with him on our black-and-white rabbit-eared television and can’t wait to share the experience with him.
(Sigh. Those were the days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley newscasts. Ou sont les neiges d’antan?)
MomSense
@Chris:
Lift weights. That’s what I’m doing.
OzarkHillbilly
@O. Felix Culpa: Jealous over here. Always wanted to go to spring training but never had the opportunity.
O. Felix Culpa
@OzarkHillbilly: Same here. Very excited about going. It helps to live only about an 8-hours’ drive away now.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Hellbastard: I did the same. Maybe they hate Trump because he’s vulgar and from out of town (basically the same reason they always had it in for Bill Clinton) or maybe because they think he’s a fraud and unqualified to be POTUS. Doesn’t matter to me what their motivations are so long as they keep investigating the crap out of him.
Waldo
@Chris: Sarah Connor was looking at a more promising future.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: Er that leads to serious problems if the future is a bunch of idiot hickies holding everyone else back. A minority control of a democracy is a serious problem.
OzarkHillbilly
@O. Felix Culpa: Enjoy the time with your father. By the time it was possible for me to do such things with mine he was in early stages of Alzheimers and insecure going anywhere without my mother.
JPL
@Steeplejack (tablet): Thanks this is a test..
TrumpTrumpTrumpEnhanced Voting Techniques
Oh the other thing that someone pointed out – Trump won the evangelical vote by historical margins. Likely the source of his winning in the right places.
I suspect it’s a mixture that Pence will be the shadow president and Trump is a con man, like your typical mega church preacher so Evangelicals are preconditioned to trust Trump.
O. Felix Culpa
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks. That’s a big motivator for me. He’s still in relatively good health, but I’ve noticed (and try not to notice) increasing frailty. I want to share this experience with him while we still can.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The extreme case is apartheid South Africa, or, roughly equivalently, Jim Crow South Carolina.
I think at this point the Democrats need to be thinking about local politics, and the right strategies to use are going to be different in different parts of the county. Out West, they can probably keep doing what they’re doing. In the South, all-in on civil rights, voting rights, districting reform. Rust Belt, economic populism is about all they’ve got left but it might be more a matter of cutting losses than winning anything back. The Northeast is a mixture of all three–and try to convince upscale totebagger liberals to stop voting for any Republican who seems nice. Nail them to The Donald.
bystander
If you need distraction, filmdom’s finest achievement in capturing antiquity is currently on TCM, the classic Hercules, Samson & Ulysses. The perfect melding of Greek mythology with Judaic lore. Eat your heart out, Tom Holland.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
We need a new tag and T-Shirts
“Hail to the Cheat”
Chris
@Baud:
And it’s a longstanding theory of mine that the 1%, or at least the super-ideological Koch types among them, view the New Deal as basically the most gigantic hold-up in history, where FDR and his mob and his union thugs stole the wealth of those who really deserved it. So, when they look at our modern society with the middle class suburbs and reasonable standards of living and all, they don’t see a healthy functioning society, they see thieves living high off of money that doesn’t rightfully belong to them. And they’ve been angrily trying to take it all back ever since.
Hence, that longstanding dream you mentioned.
You know all those rich Cubans who bailed for Miami in the late fifties and have spent the half-century since then just waiting for the day that they can go back to Cuba and take back the exact same giant sugar plantation they used to run so things can go back to The Way They Were? That’s the Kochs and Scaifes for you.
satby
@rikyrah: @MomSense: @Darkrose: Me too:all of the above.
rikyrah
We Can Relate: Why the Democratic Party’s Message Hit Home in Urban Areas
Trevor LaFauci November 30, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was historic.
Not only did she run against Donald Trump, Wikileaks, the Russians, the FBI, and the Unicorn Left but she also had to run against an American media openly willing to tear her down while simultaneously raising up and granting her opponent unprecedented amounts of free air time while conveniently overlooking countless scandals that would in any way damage his reputation. Despite all this, Hillary Clinton earned more votes than any White male in our nation’s history, and ended up trouncing her mentally inferior opponent by at least 2.3 million votes much to his chagrin. She was able to rally the Democratic base, maintain the Obama coalition, bring in moderate Republicans, and even expand Latino voter participation in record numbers. Although the media perceived her as an “uninteresting” and “uninspiring” candidate, Clinton overwhelmingly won millennials by 18 points overall and won the millennial vote in 42 out of 50 states.
Nowhere was Clinton’s campaign more dominant than in our nation’s cities and urban areas where she won 88 of our country’s 100 most populous counties, surpassing President Barack Obama’s 2012 performance and matching his 2008 performance. She won these areas by a resounding 13 million votes and counting, including dominant wins in Manhattan, Denver, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC where she captured at least 75% of the vote. What makes Clinton’s performance even more remarkable is that since 2012 we’ve seen blatant Republican voter suppression in such states as Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida making it nearly impossible for certain people of color to either gain or maintain entry in the democratic process. Had these states had a Democratic rather than Republican governor, then we would have seen an even more lopsided win for Clinton in those states’ urban areas.
Yet despite the success of Hillary Clinton in our nation’s most populous areas, the consensus in certain Democratic circles is that Democrats simply didn’t do enough to reach out to middle America. However, like our friend Spandan articulated, this strategy ultimately will do more harm than good for the progressive movement going forward. Not only does the strategy fail to account for the changing technologies associated with globalization but it also fails to address prevalent civil rights issues that the Democratic Party has and needs to continue to fight for. Just because Hillary Clinton won 93% of the vote in Washington, DC doesn’t mean we turn our backs on the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement has raised in that city or other urban areas. It simply means that the Democratic Party needs to keep raising that issue while simultaneously raising other issues that affect other populations nationwide.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes but this is disenfranchises the middle and upper classes for some reactionary and poor minority. It’s sort of inverted Jim Crow. That doesn’t sound sustainable to me.
Just consider North Carolina – all those laws are to punish the people who moved to the state because it adapted to the Global Economy.
rikyrah
In defense of identity politics: The soul of the Democratic Party will not sit down and shut up
Spandan Chakrabarti
November 30, 2016
In the aftermath of the election when the big loser of the popular vote is going to the White House, leaving the rest of the world to whom America has been yapping about democracy stunned, some have seen great opportunity in this great crisis for our country.
Interestingly, another white dude who also lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton – and also the nomination of the Democratic party because we are actually democratic – saw it as his opportunity to hijack the modern Democratic party and make it into a Trump-lite ego-stroker for rural racism. Not so long ago Bernie Sanders went on quite a rant about how Democrats must ditch what he pejoratively called “identity politics.” Said the other yelling old white man from 2016:
Before I get to how offensive, stupid and beyond psychobabblish that is, let me state the obvious: this line of rhetoric is not that different from Bernie Sanders and his supporters’ constant assault on and belittling of people of color, civil rights and women’s rights during the campaign. Nor is this line much different from Sanders’ unrelenting assailing and demonization of Hillary Clinton’s character, which fed into the narrative Trump pushed against Hillary Clinton and the so-called white working class bought.
This is not so different from Bernie Sanders and his campaign consistently dismissing Hillary Clinton’s primary wins in states with large populations blacks and Hispanics on the basis that those states aren’t swing states (and therefore, who cares if a bunch of n*ggers in South Carolina want Hillary Clinton, right, Bernie?). All of this is very much in line with what seems to be Bernie Sanders’ sad and debunk political philosophy that if only economic equality reined, a black Harvard professor wouldn’t be getting arrested while attempting to enter his own house, or a young, successful black woman wouldn’t be pulled out of her car on her way to an interview to a lucrative job and later die in police custody.
Nonetheless, for a moment, let’s address this huge, giant, pain-in-the-ass strawman Sanders wants to beat to a pulp: us running candidates based on their high heels and afros.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Well, to make it sustainable, the richer whites would have to be convinced to join the racist bloc against the Obama-esque coalition. Some are already in; some of the rest might be gotten with stern warnings about the electoral perils of identity politics.
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: Yes, yes, and yes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, I mean how are they just going staff their companies when the ignorant and lazy hillbillies just drive the workers away out of sheer spite. It’s not impossible, it’s clear they got it California that the Dems are the future and Wall Street was certainly pretty comfortable with Hillary.
Glidwrith
@rikyrah: Preach it!
rikyrah
More Death to Our Hometowns
by Martin Longman
November 30, 2016 4:06 PM
…………………..
A real populist uprising might have gone after the greedy thieves whose crimes went unpunished instead of elevating a reality-show fraudster with narcissistic personality disorder and dozens of petty scores to settle.
But Trump at least gave the middle finger to an establishment that enabled the housing crisis and looked the other way as families and factories were destroyed over the last several decades.
Even this isn’t good enough to prevent the the return of the robber barons, though. Not when former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin is going to be Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn is in line to be his director of the Office of Management and Budget.
………………………
And what about Mnuchin?
Critics have raised many questions about Mnuchin’s financial dealings, from a lawsuit over pocketing profits in the Bernie Madoff case to his suspiciously quiet exit from the Hollywood production company Relativity Media just before it took huge losses and filed for bankruptcy. Just his association with “vampire squid” Goldman Sachs has motivated some anger. But another part of Mnuchin’s history is more relevant: his chairmanship of OneWest Bank, a major cog in America’s relentless foreclosure machine.
Even among the many bad actors in the national foreclosure crisis, OneWest stood out. It routinely jumped to foreclosure rather than pursue options to keep borrowers in their homes; used fabricated and “robo-signed” documents to secure the evictions; and had a particular talent for dispossessing the homes of senior citizens and people of color.
gene108
@Baud:
I think, like the 2001 recession, it will be relatively mild because the economy is in a better place.
Unlike the 2001 recession there’s not a lot to do to reverse it other than direct government spending in the economy, which Republicans are reluctant to do, so it may drag on needlessly long.
rikyrah
Steve Bannon’s White Nationalist Agenda
by Nancy LeTourneau
November 30, 2016 3:17 PM
Last week I noted something Steve Bannon told Kimberly Strassel.
That was part of my argument for how Bannon thinks he is out-smarting liberals by inciting them to chase after inflammatory statements while he maneuvers strategically behind the scenes. It raised my curiosity about who this man really is, what he is trying to accomplish and how he plans to do that. Based on what we’ve seen from Bannon so far, I’d propose that he sees himself as the mastermind puppeteer who plans to chart the course for Trump’s presidency in much the same way that Karl Rove did for George W. Bush. Only Bannon isn’t simply interested in political power, he envisions leading a global nationalist movement.
My curiosity about Bannon was further aroused when, in response to the charge that he is a white supremacist, he told Strassel, “we are going to bring capitalism to the inner cities.” What does that mean?
Some of these questions were answered when I watched a documentary Bannon made with David Bossie (from Citizens United) in 2010 titled “Generation Zero.”
………………..
But to understand what Bannon was referring to when he talked about bringing capitalism back to the inner cities, it is helpful to note how the film portrays one of the contributors to the housing crisis. For Bannon and Bosie it all goes back to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. Here is how it is discussed in the film:
Notice first of all that they say that the civil rights movement “claimed” that blacks were being red-lined. With all of the focus on the 1960’s it is interesting to note that this is the first time (and only time) that the civil rights movement was mentioned. Doing so would have stepped on the whole idea that the era was simply about spoiled narcissistic Woodstock kids. But redlining went far beyond a claim made by that movement. It was a documented fact that kept African Americans from being able to participate in one of the foundational parts of the American dream – home ownership.
Emma
@rikyrah: Ole! Bravo! YES!
rikyrah
“Islam Is Not a Religion”: The Real Reason Michael Flynn’s Appointment is Ominous
by Steven Waldman
November 25, 2016 9:36 AM
American history is full of moments when it was broadly acceptable to malign particular religions. For years, people in public life attacked Catholics, Mormons, and Jews in particular.
But we’re now witnessing something new. No successful presidential candidate has ever been as overtly hostile to a major religion as Donald Trump was to Islam.
As with so many other things Trump said, we all had a slender hope that maybe it was just hot air and he wouldn’t follow through. The selection of Michael Flynn as national security advisor is an ominous sign.
The media has been focusing on Flynn’s tough stance on radical Islam. (“Flynn a Frequent Critic of Muslim Militancy, Culture,” ABCNews reported). That wildly misses the point. What’s astonishing is Flynn’s claim that Islam is not a religion, but rather an ideology.
Why is that such a big deal?
Some background. Conservative Christians have been attacking Islam since 9/11 – not only because of its connection to terrorism but because they believe Muhammed was a false prophet and pedophile. But they’ve also spent the last eight years arguing that religious freedom is under attack (because bakers are not allowed to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding).
This created a dilemma. How could they square their love of religious freedom with their desire to clamp down on one particular religion? So about a decade ago, a new idea arose in conservative Christian circles: Islam it is not a religion.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Pat Robertson explained, “we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law.” Ben Carson said Islam was “a life organization system,” not a religion.
Republican Congressman Jody Hice explained the implications. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.”[my emphasis]
This notion had been on the fringes of the Christian right – until this month, with the appointment of Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor. “Islam is a political ideology,” Flynn said earlier in the year. “It definitely hides behind being a religion.” He repeated that idea in his book.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Hiring Marty Barron as editor in chief at the WaPo was a very good sign that Bezos was serious about the company town’s newspaper not competing to be the other Tiger Beat on the Potomac. Remember, he was the Spotlight guy from the Globe. I just wish they’d clean house of the useless past their sell by date punditry and hire younger more diverse voices, and they’d have more money for the Farenthold’s of the world and some young go getters. It’s the only national newspaper I subscribe to – fuck the NYT.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes, it’s coming.
This is where my phrase-, they want to party like it’s 1948, but NOBODY is playing with them, comes into play.
We are not our ancestors. We are not going to party like it’s 1948. Certain White folks think it’s gonna be like that, but the times have changed. People are not playing with them.
Major Major Major Major
It took W 235 days to fuck up so spectacularly that we still haven’t recovered. Why did it take another five years for people to notice?
Ksmiami
@Chris: by moving to Mexico?
Iowa Old Lady
@OzarkHillbilly: I heard that yesterday, and thought again that things like that are a sign of the maldistribution of wealth.
rikyrah
When Voter ID Laws Lead to Disenfranchisement
by Martin Longman
November 30, 2016 12:50 PM
Having worked as a county coordinator for ACORN perhaps gives me some unique perspective on how Voter ID laws are likely to play out in real life. But if I know firsthand, the designers of these laws have known from strategic, psychological, statistical and practical points of view that the laws would cause lower turnout in poor urban neighborhoods. In other words, the laws are designed to do the exact opposite of what I was trying to do with ACORN.
Corner Stone
@Chris:
SHE found the sweet release of death.
liberal
@Mai.naem.mobile:
Yes and no. Current landowners (myself included) will take a massive hit. In the long run, though, in proportion to real estate value being site value (ie, apart from the value of the improvements), it just decreases the (after-tax) rental value (rent as in annual yield) of the land, so it decreases land values. The decrease roughly offsets the increase in taxes paid. (That’s not taking into account the impact on improvements, but in high-density areas, improvements are often less than half the total value, AFAICT.)
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: thanks for these. Almost worse than the triumph of trumpism for me has been the “kick her while she’s down” bs from so-called “leftists”. To me, their efforts to ignore the twin elephants in the room of racism and sexism, and pretend that this “white working class economic anxiety” shit is the *real* issue that we have to deal with – and threaten or dismiss every actual Democratic constituency to try to woo and appease – has been absolutely sickening.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Miss Bianca:
cc: NR, goblue72, les and all the other Berniebros who comment here. They’re actually the worst.
hovercraft
@rikyrah:
This shit needs to stop, the modern democratic party is the party of the coming majority, we all celebrate our different “identities”, we are proud of our parties actual diversity, it’s not just lip service. Those who celebrated Tim Ryan, another white man eager to return us to the democratic party of old, you know the one, back when the good old boys were in charge, need to get over it, we are not going back there. Millions of white men have embraced the current democratic party warts and all. Last night Ryan was on with Tweety, and showed us why he was so roundly rejected by his colleagues.
When Tweety, the champion of the WWC voters who the democrats have ‘abandoned’ is urging caution, you have truly lost your mind. To go on national TV to make ethnic slurs, and push back the criticism you receive is reprehensible.
The party has changed, we used to the party of the old South, we are not anymore, hopefully soon we will become the party of the new South. Those trying to turn the clock back are doomed to fail, and if they keep this nonsense up about regaining the WWC, they will alienate us, you know the um, base.
Corner Stone
I just saw a blurb on TV about “Rescue efforts for ailing Buzz Aldrin”. I read it as, “Rescue efforts for alien Buzz Aldrin”, and was like “I KNEW IT! I KNEW THOSE FUCKERS GOT TO HIM!”
Major Major Major Major
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: i tend to agree with them about the relative merits of pie, though.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: I remember that notion LeTourneau mentions, that the 2008 crisis was caused by affirmative action for minority lenders. I argued with Republican friends about it at the time, but it hasn’t gotten much traction outside of their idea-bubble in the years since then. Interesting to see Steve Bannon leaning on it now.
Corner Stone
@Miss Bianca:
I have no time and no can’t evens left for anyone who tries to dismiss how much a part of this nation is about racism.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@Baud: Motives matter because they drive action. If you think a man vulgar and boorish, you will investigate things that make him look more so. If you think his policies are destructive, you will investigate that. So, unless I’m wrong, the Post will investigate fluff that makes the man look bad (like denying vote counts) while ignoring the fact that this is of a piece with undermining public confidence in elections, a decades-long GOP effort.
Immanentize
@O. Felix Culpa: Will do — One I will report on soon. The other is a longer term, cooler project that I hope will involve interested Juicefolk….
Matt McIrvin
@hovercraft: Jesus, that’s not just an ethnic slur, it’s an ethnic slur that I thought reached its expiration date about 25 years ago, insulting a group that barely even sees itself as an embattled minority group any more. It’s not going to endear him to national swing constituencies.
Peale
@hovercraft: I doubt that more than six people in Youngstown call it “dago red wine”. Do they call tacos “wetback sliders”? That’s real people talk…
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: whoa, holy shit. I hadn’t seen that. Thank you.
This is the perfect symbol of how the people saying we need to move away from identity politics treat white as not only an identity but the default identity. Which is not a novel observation of course but it’s exactly the people who make that assumption who examine it the least.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: And they’re even willing to slice and dice who is “white”–I’d guess most Italian-Americans see themselves as white at this point, and I know some of them respond positively to white identity politics. But I guess their position isn’t secure.
MomSense
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
They are intolerable.
ETA Poor Shaun King is upset because senior staffers for Warren and Sanders told him their staffs are overwhelmingly white. I couldn’t resist telling him that’s why so many of us voted for Clinton. What a moran.
Major Major Major Major
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: I’ve been assuming it’s because Jeff Bezos hates Trump.
Corner Stone
@hovercraft: Tim Ryan learned his schtick from Sanders it seems to me. A relative nobody in the House and a questionably ineffective legislator. Feeling his white maleness under assault decides to try and punch way above his weight class and take down a female colleague, and deny her power. Now we will be treated to many awful being of whiteness harangues from this clown for the next several weeks/months.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: Looking forward to it! Thanks. Happy – and productive – ruminations.
ETA: Vive la résistance!
Immanentize
@Matt McIrvin: I agree — “Dago?” I grew up in a mixed working class city of Irish, Slovak and Italians. Dago was a mean-spirited thing to say even 25 years ago.
Corner Stone
@Peale:
Man I could go for a few of those today.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
Did he miss the part of the primary where we who are of different “identities”, pointed out that Sanders and his team were a bunch of white dudes. Doesn’t he remember them bringing in Symone Sanders as spokesperson to shut up the critics? Jeebus these people are as bad as the shitgibbon supporters who are baying about it’s cabinet appointments.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Corner Stone:
I defy them to name one single public policy that isn’t or hasn’t been determined by white “identity politics” – whether it’s housing, education, transportation, environmental, health, infrastructure, tax, etc etc etc etc. Just *one* policy. I won’t wait.
Major Major Major Major
@Immanentize: I mean, when we say that the “identity politics” thing just means “‘working class’ white people vote for the party that lets them say n****r,” people think we’re exaggerating, now along comes their new darling and LITERALLY AFFIRMATIVELY MAKES THAT ARGUMENT.
Seriously‽
hovercraft
@Matt McIrvin: @Peale: @Major Major Major Major:
All of you guys need to stop being so sensitive, this is how real America talks. And if you want to start winning there again, you have to get with the program and stop being so politically correct. This is how you start to win back the WWC, real talk.
Iowa Old Lady
@Corner Stone: I also read his account of how he moved away from his anti-abortion stance. He and his pregnant wife were waiting for their ultrasound results, and it occurred to him that the government should not be part of whatever decision they made. So until it happened to him, he had no insight. Thank goodness his child was fine, but it annoyed me.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: I guess being sensitive about this sort of stuff is pretty faggy, isn’t it?
@Iowa Old Lady: yep. Ryan evinces Republican levels of empathy.
hovercraft
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Well the problem is your premise, “white identity politics” is not real, unless you are referring to white people being discriminated against, you know reverse racism. “White” people are not a race, they are Real America.”
MomSense
@hovercraft:
They are almost worse than the shitgibbon supporters. I expect more from them.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@MomSense:
Shaun King is a fraud through and through – no wonder he attached himself like a remora to that other fraud, Sanders. He really is hated – I follow the Kinfolk Kollective on FB and boy howdy, they REALLY don’t like him.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Totally dude, this is the problem with America now, you people are denying people of their first amendment rights. Excuse me while I step out to grab me some watermelon and fried chicken with a chaser of grape soda.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major:
It was the kind of fuckup you get rewarded for. The question is whether it happens that way again.
I think if/when we get some major terrorist attack and Trump goes full metal fascist in response, it’ll be uglier and grosser than last time and he might not get as much liberal/centrist cover. But people have short memories and pusillanimity runs deep. And there will be more brutal and possibly more effective crackdowns on dissent. So it’s hard to say.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
They are also having a whine fest:
After the Drudge Report announced that Trump was meeting with Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn…
This last one cracks me up, when you are losing deadbeats like this, you are SAD!
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@hovercraft:
Too bad there wasn’t any evidence out there that Trump was a con man/
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: …Part of it, though, may have been that, at that particular time, international terrorism really wasn’t on the radar for most people, and the sheer magnitude and nature of the 9/11 attacks was genuinely so surprising that “nobody could have foreseen” politically worked as an excuse. Remember, Bill Clinton’s attempt to kill Osama bin Laden got mocked as “Wag the Dog” distraction.
fuckwit
@Matt McIrvin: I think there will not be any one term presidents again. It’s impossible to unseat even an incompetent boob like Shrub. Troll will have 8 years to fuck up the country.
Corner Stone
@hovercraft:
Good God! I always thought that was just a myth…
henqiguai
@Steeplejack (tablet)(#80):
Hmm; never tried that one. I always use <del>strike through</del>. Let’s try that
<strike>strike through</strike>.ETA: What’d’ya know; something new learned!
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: IMHO Ryan (and Seth Moulton, who was on Rachel Maddow last night) are using this “
whiteworking class” shtick as a pretext for what they really want, which is younger leadership. It’s not ideological. For Sanders, it’s genuinely ideological, because he’s been reliant on SDS-like interpretive frames for 50 years running. Tim Ryan just wants to jump the line.Matt McIrvin
@fuckwit: You never know. I grew up thinking that a two-term president was a really rare thing: until 1984, presidents had gotten reelected, but nobody had gone the full eight years since Eisenhower, partly because of people dying or getting driven out of office. The situation could change again. If nothing else, all those KFC buckets could catch up with Trump and we could have Pence trying unsuccessfully to carry the torch. And Dubya almost lost.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: this seems like the likeliest explanation for it. It was “new” here in the US. This time (and there will be a this time) it won’t be.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: Though Trump certainly will play anything as “see, we’ve been too lax on letting Muslims live in our country,” etc., etc., go full bigot and insist it’s not his fault. It’ll work with some.
And, again, memories are short. I’ve always thought it was interesting how people don’t remember how many major airliner bombings there were back in the 1980s.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
The funny thing is that I actually do love all of those things, in moderation of course, I guess I’m a stereotypical blah.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: I saw a thing once that was a rant about why is this a racist stereotype? Of course black people love fried chicken–fried chicken is fucking delicious!
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I would agree. That’s why I called it a schtick for Ryan. Sanders may or may not have a true ideology that his “populism” is based from. I am not sure either way.
But Ryan is just another aggrieved white guy who sees an opening at a time of anger and turmoil and wants to take that nasty woman at the top down so can catapult into power. Without putting in the work or bothering to build a coalition.
J R in WV
@Woodrowfan:
Me too. Anywhere from 3 am to 5 am, for an hour or so, then I can usually go back to sleep.
I was up and online for an hour or so in the predawn time today. Not even the cats were up. One wrapped tight in a towel by the heat duct in the bathroom, the other in the feather comforter we just put on the bed for the winter. Cats like feathers! Plouffy to surround the cat with warm!
Jeffro
@Steeplejack (tablet): @henqiguai:
Thank you both.
Wait, I mean…
thank you bothLOLJ R in WV
@Matt McIrvin:
We have a really low rate right now, so I hope the R-dolts do end that deduction and piss off every homeowner in the nation. Really, I would hope that even if we were going to take a hit. After living here for nearly 25 years, the balance due is small, too. So Fuq it, I don’t care.
Maybe that will be the start of their learning process?
Corner Stone
It strikes fear in me to encounter what fresh hell Steeplejack hath unleashed here.
Major Major Major Major
@Corner Stone: I think a big part of it is not that they aim for the woman because she’s nasty, they do it because they think taking her down will be easy, which is why they don’t do any actual prep work.
Calouste
@Mai.naem.mobile: I consider the shitgibbon merely being “another epic Dubbya style screwing the pooch” the best case scenario.
Matt McIrvin
@J R in WV: It’d crater the real-estate market again. Whee!!
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: cheaper rents for me.
I saw a joke the other day that said they should make a millennial version of Monopoly where you just wander around the board borrowing money to pay rent and never buy anything.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Kay:
I anticipate, Kay, that when Trump is routinely screwing the mouth breathers who voted for him, what we’ll hear is that he was not a true conservative anyway… He was a liberal who had supported Democrats in previous elections.
After all, people who vote Republican can be tricked, but they’re never, ever wrong.
Calouste
@Chris: The oil price is going to be a point of contention between the shitgibbon and his puppet master in the Kremlin. Russia needs high oil process, but $6 gas would be fatal for the shitgibbon’s popularity.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
I think that’s what pisses people off, the watermelon and fried chicken thing is bullshit because as you say they are delicious and most people love them regardless of race, so why single us out? The grape soda thing is kinda weird though, I have no answer for why black people seem to drink it more than other people. I’ve noticed that you find the more ‘exotic’ (pineapple, guava, mango) flavored drinks in black and brown neighborhoods, whereas in other areas you find more traditional beverages. Maybe since we are all immigrants, our people came from places where tropical fruits and beverages were the norm, and our families raised us drinking that kind of stuff. Who knows.
Corner Stone
@Calouste: IMO, if we started seeing $3.01 for gas it might start the erosion even among the dummeratti.
BellyCat
Has this Guardian article been linked by anyone? (have not read this thread yet).
Opaque Corporate Misinformation Network, indeed!
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: “Killing the goose” is indeed the fear. The Washington Post showed how the areas that voted for Clinton are responsible for generating nearly two-thirds of the country’s economic output. The saddest part of the so-called economic divide between areas is the failure of the 1/3 to acknowledge how intertwined their own prosperity, current or future, is with the continuing prosperity of other areas. And the UW professor who interviewed all these rural people in Wisconsin, who were so resentful of elitists in Madison and kept telling her things like how they needed to do a “real job,” like processing lumber. They want the future to be a reprise of the past, only with better technology. At some point this simply becomes refusal to accept trade-offs associated with having a certain kind of life or using certain kinds of skills, or living in certain areas (not densely populated). It’s not all a matter of choice, but it’s hard to believe that someone could think that society should put lumber processing at the top of the economic ladder no matter how low the price of lumber is. I think back to the miner’s strike in Great Britain at the dawn of the Thatcher era in British politics. How hard it is to fully realize how little you are worth to the larger world relative to other people.
Calouste
@rikyrah: The phrase “Islam is a political ideology, not a religion” is used word-for-word by Geert Wilders and other European neo-fascists.
Calouste
@Corner Stone: I don’t know where you live, but you can definitely $3+ gas in my elite coastal enclave.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: To some extent the “Big Sort” is a soft form of ethnic cleansing: if nobody but white people wants to live in enough red and swing states, white people end up with outsize power. But I see that applying more to the upper Midwest than to the South.
The miner’s strike is such a complicated thing to think about: the British left is still furious at Thatcher for closing the coal mines, and she really was trying to break organized labor and any sense of social commonwealth, but on the other hand, the coal industry really was filthy and obsolete. (I’ve seen British lefties who fell for global-warming denialism because they associated opposition to coal with Thatcher.)
And how we deal with our post-industrial Midwest is probably the same kind of problem to some extent. It’s even the same problem, in the coal-producing areas.
Barbara
@hovercraft: Re: grape soda. Well, I think it’s a southern thing. In fact, I think all of those things — fried chicken and watermelon — are southern things. The best recipe on the planet for pan fried chicken is from Edna Lewis, who moved from the South to New York and basically introduced southern inspired cuisine to deprived northerners. So let’s say its 1950 and you are a white northerner who meets African Americans latterly living in Mississippi — fried chicken and watermelon might become associated with them as opposed to the region they come from, where everyone enjoys those things. So in the 40s and 50s, this might have been what happened. Well, that’s my theory anyway. Because, as you say, a lot of people in the South like okra, oysters, cornbread, collard greens, fried chicken, watermelon, and just about every part of a pig you can imagine and some you can’t, all things I really didn’t eat growing up in the North, but that my father in law absolutely swooned over.
Major Major Major Major
@Barbara: this is what’s been so galling to me. They don’t want jobs. They want their dad’s job, delivered to their doorstep.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Well if that old woman can do it, then surely a smart white guy can do it ten times better. After all I’m sure affirmative action had something to do with her getting the job. It’s that whole “PC” culture thing run amok. Put me in charge and I’ll put things back to rights.
The GOP ran and won in 2010 by portraying the democrats as the party of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, it’s not a coincidence that they ran against the first woman speaker and black president, they used misogyny and racism to seize power right before redistricting cementing their power for the next ten years. The media and most of us missed how big a role misogyny played in that defeat, when you think of all that she accomplished, she was turned into evil incarnate, providing a template for how they ran against Hillary. Obama is charismatic, articulate, and is very likeable, so was able to overcome the demonization. The common denominator between Hillary and Pelosi is their gender, Pelosi did it the way republicans claim women should do it, she had five kids, stayed home to raise them and then began her career, Hillary’s story we all know, but Pelosi is just as demonized for her scheming, calculating evil as Hillary is, so it all comes down to gender. They are both women who don’t know their place, behind the men.
Corner Stone
@Calouste: Huh. It hovers around $2 here in The Greater Houston Metro Area. Thought I saw national averages of $2.25 or so not too long ago. Has it gone up recently due to cooler temps or is that just about normal?
Applejinx
@gene108:
‘Start’ to struggle? ‘starting’ to notice?
Whatever, long as you’re finally on board. o_O
Holy CRAP. ‘start’ to struggle. Wow.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: Well, it’s a natural thing to want, isn’t it? I think it’s possible to empathize with that desire while realizing it can’t be fulfilled. What to do about it is another question.
hovercraft
@Calouste:
I know he lives in Texas, I think in or around Houston.
ETA: I see he already responded. I was right though.
Chris
@Calouste:
That’ll be an interesting confrontation. Putin may think he has a buddy in the White House, but of course Trump’ll throw him under the bus the minute he sees an interest in it, like he does to everybody. High oil prices are the sort of thing the public will notice immediately, and Trump will probably not want to be blamed for them.
(I’m a different Chris, btw. Dang, there’s just too many of us).
Corner Stone
@hovercraft: Yer dern tootin’!
YEEEHHAAAWWWW!!
hovercraft
@Calouste:
Also too where the hell do you live, according to the table at the link, the average gas price is not at $3 anywhere yet. I know it’s just averages but still. The west coast is the closest.
Show Average Prices By Metro Area
The prices below are for regular gasoline as of 12/1/2016 12:04:47 PM local time.
Mike in dc
3.01 million. Keep that number in mind when we get the final vote tally in a couple weeks. That’s Dubya’s margin in 2004, the only time in the past 24 years the Rs won the popular vote, and the year they claimed a “mandate” and Rove was talking about a permanent Republican majority.
If she gets close to or passes that, we have a talking point we can weaponize.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: right, but they’re acting like they’re entitled to a good job and they look down their noses at people who move away and get educated/learn modern skills–mocking the very tools one needs to succeed while demanding success for themselves.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
Then you pick the card Go directly back home. Do not pass go. Borrow another $200
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Click the link at number 189, San Francisco is at 2.80, a few CA cities are just below that, and Honolulu is also in the 2.70 s.
MomSense
@Mike in dc:
We could weaponize it if we had a delivery system.
Lizzy L
@hovercraft: Gasoline in the SF Bay Area at the moment varies: I filled up yesterday for $2.51 a gal. Depends on where you get it. (Chevron is higher. Chevron is always higher.) But CA has high gas taxes. Whenever you look at the gas prices you gotta factor in the state gas taxes. For example, in WA the state gas tax adds 63 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas. NY & Hawaii, 61 cents. CA, 59 cents.
Major Major Major Major
@MomSense: “free parking” replaced with everybody makes fun of you for being entitled, media wonders why you aren’t buying diamonds
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
Let’s actually make that game.
Applejinx
@Major Major Major Major:
The trouble here is that you’re insisting they get with the program and compete with urban, coastal jobs.
AS urban, coastal, economic-engine people.
You do realize they are simply not as good at doing those things as the expert techie urbanites who are already doing them? There’s no room. The economic engine here is doing things like replacing Polaroid with Instagram: capitalization, equal (or skewed in the favor of the newcomer), employee count, WAY beyond decimated. We do not need as many techies to do this stuff. They are so good that one of them does the job of a thousand grunts from the flyover states. The thousand grunts can’t come and do likewise: it’s a competitive market.
I’m with you on ‘dad’s job delivered to their doorstep ain’t gonna happen’, but try to remember that (A) they can’t have the techie jobs, people are already doing them far better than grunts from Iowa could volunteer to do, and (B) if you sentence people to death for not being incredibly ambitious, driven and lucky, people will get mad and feel hard done by. Doubling down on the realities of that situation does not help.
Hell, you can get immigration visas to come to the country and live here BEING one of the one people who can outperform a thousand grunts from Iowa. We try to get those top performers to live here, we seek them out.
I guess you could slaughter all the smart techies and let the grunts move in, but all that will happen is collapse. When you argue that one educated urbanite is worth a thousand dumb hicks because they can perform equivalently, part of that is that the dumb hicks can’t possibly compete against the urbanite. Read up on the mindset in upper-ranking Amazon employees sometime. Techies will not make room for ‘regular folks’. The expectation is that regular folks, to survive, will out-compete the techies for the good of the economy. This is bonkers.
Steeplejack (phone)
@henqiguai:
Technically, <strike> has been deprecated, but through tedious repetition I learned that my HTML-commando-wannabe clients found it easier to remember. “I don’t want to delete the text, I just want to strike it out.” Okay, fine, <strike> it is.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
YES! What about the playing pieces?
Thick reading glasses
Steeplejack (phone)
@Corner Stone:
I admit to having occasional nightmares about Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice and the brooms bringing up endless pails of water.
Chris
@Barbara:
It’s amazing just how much these people are socialists, or more precisely, what they think a socialist is: bitter and envious assholes who resent their more successful cousins, who think they’re entitled to a certain level of living forever and to have said cousins subsidize it, and whose attempts to bring the cousins down to their “proper” level are ultimately going to tank the economy for everyone, including themselves.
No, yeah. “Killing the goose” thing is absolutely a huge concern especially if we’re headed into an era of Republican dominance. Right now, the functioning economies that produce the wealth in this country are overwhelmingly blue. They’re that way in no small part because they’re blue, designed in ways that are more “inclusive” as opposed to “extractive,” to quote “Why Nations Fail.” So far they’ve been able to carry most of Redland on their backs for decades, but if New York and California are increasingly forced to live under Kansas rules, those places are going to spiral downwards pretty quickly until there’s no more money to go around for anyone, and the subsidies Redland has been living on for so long it doesn’t even realize they’re there anymore are going to die out.
Peale
@Chris: I don’t know if they will. They honestly have forgotten $4.00 gasoline under Bush. They think that inflation is out of control and we’re living in Weimar and we haven’t had significant bouts of inflation for 30 years now.
Calouste
@hovercraft: I live in Seattle. And yes, the average is not over $3 here, but there are definitely gas stations where you pay over $3.
hovercraft
Reports: Manafort Is Back And Heavily Involved In Trump’s Transition
Major Major Major Major
@MomSense: Thick reading glasses, Converse sneaker, mom’s used car, iPhone, hoodie
@hovercraft: The official said that Manafort was specifically concerned about staffing decisions that might affect the lobbying industry.
The Moar You Know
@Applejinx: It’s either that, or throw up our hands, pay them so they don’t riot, sterilize them and wait for them to die off. Because the only alternative – putting the work in to get their children up to speed for the 21st century is something they’ve simply refused to do, over and over and over again.
Is it fair? Hell no. OK? Nope. But you can’t hold back progress no matter how much you leap on its back and scream “stop”, as Buckley thought you could back in the 1950s. For many of the same reasons.
Origuy
@Taylor:
You mean somebody actually implemented IETF Request For Comment 1149?
SenyorDave
People don’t realize how much an increase in the price of gasoline effects lower income people. Let’s say your HH income is $50k, your net is $40k. Your HH consumes 1,200 gallons a year. If gas goes up 25 cents, that’s an extra $300 a year. That is a lot of money for some at that income level. The person making $250k won’t even notice. I will say it again, but never underestimate the gullibility/stupidity of the American people. Other than GDP growth, things over the last 6 years are pretty good in this country. Trump convinced half the American people that the US is in a meltdown.
Sandia Blanca
Interesting/useful list found at fivethirtyeight: Which Republican Senators Are Most Likely To Fight Trump?
Major Major Major Major
@SenyorDave:
And ever since the election a good chunk of those people are now convinced everything is fine.
Tazj
I got this from Chris Hayes’ twitter feed
Charles Gaba @ charles -gaba
With this update
WI Hillary down 22,177
MI Hillary down 10,704
PA Hillary down 46,435
So frustrating
Pogonip
@Applejinx: I think what would help more than anything else would be if a college degree were declared a Bona Fide Occupational Quality. A BFOQ is what a company has to prove is absolutely needed before they can discriminate: an example would be advertising for a MAN with a heavy beard to appear in a commercial for a shave cream marketed to men. This is legal, whereas the “Help Wanted: Male” ads of my childhood, for jobs anyone could do, are not. And many, many jobs “requiring” a degree don’t.
chopper
@gene108:
when that recession started the fed rate was about 5%. good amount of room to lower. today we got bupkes.
any recession we have in the next year is, as you say, going to stretch on for a lot longer than it should. it’ll also be deeper than it should be if only because the fed has no arrows left in its quiver outside of QE. and yeah, on the fiscal side there isn’t a chance in hell the gop is going to pass any real stimulus, and it’s not like trump has the political chops to make that happen.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
Thinking about my millenials –check, check, check, check, and check. HA!
Every time you land on a railroad, someone else moves into your apartment.
Miss Bianca
@hovercraft: you are so right about this, and it pisses me off just as much that the bros dismiss, downplay or actively embrace misogyny as that they make excuses for racism.
Sandia Blanca
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Read this absolutely scathing blog post on how evangelicals sold their souls by voting for the Minority President.
hovercraft
@Applejinx:
@The Moar You Know:
Booman has some thoughts on the urban/rural divide.
Democrats Need to Fight for (Some) Rural Votes
He makes some valid points, but I still think he’s ignoring the relentless propaganda Hillary and the democrats faced this election, the media in addition to providing endless live coverage, replays and amplification for free, also absorbed every attack and regurgitated it relentlessly. The message was not the problem, it was never about policy, one candidate was the entertaining , successful buffoon, who was new blood and an outsider, the other candidate was the corrupt, dishonest, secretive, lying, insider. This was the frame of the entire election, it was never about actual policies. So the problem to me seems to be that we are fighting two entities, the media and the GOP.
The world has changed, and everyone has to adapt, period. People voted to get things back to the way they used to be, they will be disappointed.
Vor
@Chris: one of my nieces is pregnant, due in January. Her Trump-voting mother is posting all this stuff on Facebook about how Scandinavian countries do a better job of supporting new mothers post delivery. Pre-delivery too. Then she asked “why don’t we do that?” I have to bite my tongue to avoid saying “but that’s the evil socialism!” She is also a big advocate for mental health services and drug treatment services. You just know she never considered that the likes of Trump and Paul Ryan would cancel that stuff. I’m betting by 2020 she will deny ever voting for Trump.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: you know, all of this is really starting to remind me of that Aesop fable, “The Belly and Its Members”:
“ONE fine day it occurred to the Members of the Body that they were doing all the work and the Belly was having all the food. So they held a meeting, and after a long discussion, decided to strike work till the Belly consented to take its proper share of the work. So for a day or two, the Hands refused to take the food, the Mouth refused to receive it, and the Teeth had no work to do. But after a day or two the Members began to find that they themselves were not in a very active condition: the Hands could hardly move, and the Mouth was all parched and dry, while the Legs were unable to support the rest. So thus they found that even the Belly in its dull quiet way was doing necessary work for the Body, and that all must work together or the Body will go to pieces.”
For “Members” read, “red state government sux where’s my subsidy?!” types, and for the Belly read…”actually functioning government”.
Major Major Major Major
@MomSense: Boardwalk or Park Place, get evicted for condo redevelopment.
ETA: This would actually be super easy to make as a website.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft:
But this is not actually that many people. Remember, for every one person who did this, five people who didn’t show up at all in 2012 came and voted for Trump.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
And there’s always not getting tipped so you skip a payday.
The Moar You Know
@Sandia Blanca: Hailarious. I laughed my ass off. That clueless gomer. He thinks that happened because of Trump? Fuck, talk about no sense of history.
The evangelicals signed off their rights to anything – including heaven – the day back in the late 70s when they declared “all in for Reagan”. This didn’t happen in 2016:
Happened in 1980. I was there. I watched it, and turned from those people in utter disgust. They’re not Christians, never were.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@hovercraft:
Old game – when the whole immigrant bashing thing started back in the earth 19th Century the WASPs would dump on the Germans because Germans drank beer and the WASPs whiskey. So it was a sign of weakness that the Germans were less a pack of drunkards…
Anyway, isn’t the correct reply to idiocy like that is “what’s with all the out of sync line dancing you folks do? Gee I’d feel embarrassed being that publically awkward.”
Applejinx
@The Moar You Know:
There is no speed for the 21st century. We’ve long since left behind the time when capital formed into large organizations employing battalions of workers. The idea that any people, from or in any place, with ANY motivation, can compete so hard and virtuously that they all outrace each other and everybody wins, is… not clever.
‘sterilize and wait’ is creepy, just saying. It’s a hairsbreath from ‘set up camps with an entrance gate and an exit chimney’. I don’t care how lame you think they are, or how damaged by 20th century media and mass brainwashing: they’re fucking Americans, which used to mean something.
There IS no speed for the 21st century. It’s mathematically impossible for all people to be competitive enough to be employed in 21st century ways. There is no such ‘putting the work in’, it’s literally impossible to maintain a populace on capitalism based on tech ‘long tail’ functionality. Structurally, it’s impossible.
Increasingly we see celebrities, super-performers, working wonders and having unusual problems where they’re too celebrity to work menial minimum-wage jobs, but aren’t earning money from their hyper-performance. For instance, a lot of YouTube stars. I’m kind of like that as an audio DSP nerd: having tough going, but sitting on cutting-edge IP. I can’t actually monetize that without some very abusive practices that are destroying my industry: practices that are assuredly techie.
These are competing to force OTHER competing workers down. I’m doing that on purpose in my industry: I’m driving the price of some goods to zero because I think the terms people use to provide those goods are extortionate and abusive. As such I’m an economic actor sabotaging the system because it’s become corrupt. You’ll find in many fields there are people willing to lose money driving the market down for some sort of benefit or advantage. In the 21st century economy, we all benefit from that productivity, but it makes employment impossible.
Maybe you ought to give up the idea of spaying and neutering the majority of Americans, even if that’s the only solution you see. This proposal is not likely to play well in Peoria.
Major Major Major Major
@Applejinx: A lot of these rural and exurban areas are dead. Not dying, dead. People need to leave. While we should also be focusing on minimum income programs, what needs to happen now is a consolidation in cities, or an investment in transit to get them there, or both. There are service-sector jobs serving the wealthy if nothing else.
ETA: Same situation in Germany, but they’re further along. Rural/exurban areas are where *their* incipient fascism is coming from, too.
ETAA: Anti-density measures by nominally liberal rentiers and NIMBYs isn’t helping either.
Timurid
@The Moar You Know:
Even if you get their next generation ‘up to speed,’ most of them won’t get jobs.
The new economy just doesn’t need very much manpower to function. Training an entire nation of rocket scientists will just end up with the vast majority of merely adequate rocket scientists waiting tables for the elite rocket scientists (if they’re lucky).
Quinerly
@Tazj:
@212…do we have any figures on Stein voters in PA and WI? It’s pretty obvious from the #s I saw last week that Stein cost us MI in a big way
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@hovercraft:
It would be nice if these people who say what Dems need to do, would also explain to us like we’re 5 years old, how to do it. Because as we see, people demand to be lied to.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Sandia Blanca: Well I know they are a soulless lot, but that they would go to someone so publically debauched as Trump is just stunning. I’ve seen recordings of Trump at prayer circles and it was clear Trump was just tolerating them and couldn’t wait for to be over. At lest Bush made the pretense of being a believer.
Apparently a guy can now go consort with the Jezebels and painted women 24/7 in NYC and roll right over Levicutius with some animals friends on Broadway now, just as long as he’s not seen doing it in Jesus Land.
The Moar You Know
@Timurid: I know this. We as a society are about to be facing unemployment rates that will make the Great Depression look like full employment. The jobs will simply not exist and that’s not repairable.
@Applejinx: Describe in detail and don’t hide behind tech terms. I’ve worked as a musician for over 30 years. I know that industry and that tech backwards and forwards. “Audio DSP nerd”, unless you failed to explain something about what you do, is the equivalent in the music industry of someone who knows how to use Photoshop but doesn’t know how to use a camera. Which would be the technical definition of “unemployable”.
Applejinx
@Major Major Major Major:
Man, I live in Vermont. Not even Burlington VT. The post-industrial infrastructure around my town looks a bit like Detroit (actually kinda charming: I like it, but it sure isn’t alive factories I walk past).
A lot of what I do for a living is globalized. I’ve personally brought a hundred thousand dollars of so into the country through selling software internationally. I can do that in Vermont, and it’s much cheaper to live. This is what I’m saying. Bullshit, rural areas are ‘dead’. Lots of acreage to grow food, put solar panels: there’s a lot of solar up here in Vermont. This is the future. Let Elon Musk invent a bunch of ‘hyperloops’ and everywhere’s commuter distance. We have railroad tracks running right through our town: I’m on the ‘Vermonter’ route that goes right down the Eastern corridor. Those could be high speed rail (which you do support: yay! Investment in transit is good)
Don’t tell me the world will be better if I move to a far more expensive, crowded city and pour coffee for the wealthy. They just don’t drink that much coffee. I’m about to drink a bunch of (awesome, bought over the internet, shipped by transit) coffee and write more software, up here in Vermont. The idea that you need to be centralized is flat out stupid: it’s capital driving that, NOT ’21st century business’.
‘Dying’ rural and exurban territory is a huge asset, a resource, not some dire doomed thing to flee from. Techno came out of Detroit and took over the world, in its day. The shittiness of geographically removed areas should be seen as a giant opportunity. You can’t be really competitive in places like London because capital itself crowds real productivity out. You can’t run a business if the cost of your lease is governed by the need for wealthy Chinese people to invest in real estate of high value, the cost of keeping doors open in this ‘ideal location for productivity’ will be prohibitive.
Tazj
@hovercraft: Yes, I would have to agree more with you.
I think he may be correct that Democrats may have to construct a more detailed and targeted message to rural voters and you’re never going to persuade people by ridiculing them. However, he’s going to have to elaborate on what behaviors and decisions the Democratic base made that resulted in white rural voters believing that Democrats were hostile to them. What policy decisions, this year or in the past 8 years? Is he talking about NAFTA again? This year the Democrats talked about strengthening SS, Obamacare and Medicare, raising the minimum wage, infrastructure spending, and making child care and college more affordable. Maybe Hillary shouldn’t have used the term Deplorables but we were we all supposed to ignore the neo-Nazis, xenophobia, racism and sexism? I don’t know which people were so mean to conservatives. Some comedians or Hollywood stars maybe? I don’t talk about politics at all outside my immediate family and I don’t argue with people IRL over their political views. Meanwhile in WNY, it is not unusual to see a Confederate flag on a house or a truck and/or a Hillary for prison or Trump that bitch sign.
We can’t change the fact that cameras recorded police brutality, and tragically all terrorist attacks were’nt thwarted.
Sorry for the rant.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Applejinx: Speaking as someone in electronics hardware biz, you do realize Frankfort, Kentucky is the world capital of Laptop computer repair? They don’t ship them back to China, costs to much. Same with North Carolina – that’s the big low cost manufacturing center in the US, creates lots of jobs. Also the same state with all these Tea Tards in the Legislator doing these nutty law, that not a coincidence.
Chris
@Timurid:
Which wouldn’t be as big a deal if wages and benefits for these waiters were something you could make a good living on. Of course, they’re not, and we have thousands of union-breakers and minimum-wage-opponents to ensure that they never will be.
Chris
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Not to me. How many scandals did various televangelists get embroiled in in the eighties?
Major Major Major Major
@Applejinx: @Enhanced Voting Techniques: There are plenty of worthwhile non-urban areas. There are also plenty of mostly-abandoned postindustrial shitholes full of people complaining that there are no industrial jobs in their mostly-abandoned postindustrial shitholes. I’m talking about the latter. Should something come along later and revitalize them, that’s awesome. But the “dad’s job” stuff isn’t coming back, and I’m sick of the people whining about it and feeling entitled to them and voting for Republicans out of spite.
Hell, the fact that fiber lines are run along railroad tracks means there’s all sorts of interesting tech hubs and potential tech hubs out in the middle of nowhere, even. That’s awesome!
But we also have a huge amount of wasted potential in our incredibly non-dense cities right now, and plenty of service sector jobs at the moment to make do while we fix these larger issues of what to do, redistributively, for the relatively poor in the rich countries.
Applejinx
@The Moar You Know:
My big concern here is PACE anti-piracy, and an associated middleman company Gobbler, and a trend towards charging people subscription fees and driving them away from ownership of digital tools. I see this as a big enough problem that I’m dumping software onto the market for ‘free’ and using Patreon (this alone could identify me: probably also my saving grace, I’ll tell you right now that those without ten years of established presence in the industry and a solid fanbase will not even get the beginnings of a foothold on Patreon)
I’m currently cooperating with developer Kazrog, and ex-Motown mastering engineer Bob Ohlsson, to teach people about dithering and wordlength reduction. I’m one of the few people who can get into a forum debate with JJ and not just annoy him with nonsense: I’m more or less on par with that guy, except he’s got better math skills and I’m exploring some wilder ideas. I’m friends with Paul Frindle, love the guy, keep an eye on him to make sure he’s okay. I’ve written wordlength reduction stuff that has got praise from Bruno Putzeys, I’ve had a mix guy with platinum-selling albums try to team up with me and make ‘celebrity’ versions of my stuff for marketing purposes and split the take. That same guy moved AWAY from LA to North Carolina so he could set up somewhere with waaaaay less overhead and milk his existing work reputation without having to pay LA-scale operating costs…
Last I checked I’d reached the top 7.5% of all Patreon earnings in just a few months. What that DOESN’T say is that this rank is worth very little money-wise and the huge majority of people are doing far, far worse. But that supports my point, not yours. We increasingly have to do business with people who are absolutely, utterly broke. I have my ways of positioning myself for this ’21st century business market’, and I’m satisfied with them, and you’re not gonna impress my customers and peers by calling me unemployable. Write a cutting edge wordlength reducer, even just one, and we can get into an internet slapfight over my technical skills. I’m about to completely jump the industry forward technically in that area for probably a ‘raise’ of fifty bucks a month if I’m lucky. Most of my peers are poor as crap too, including the superstars.
A lot of us agree the economic system is broken. We ought to: we saw the 21st century model obliterate our customers, the musicians, first.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Chris: Oh yes, I have friend is an atheist and does a fake pardoy preacher on the internet and defended Haggard when he was outed for doing drugs with a TV hooker. Haggard e-mailed the guy and it was clear Haggard was in on the joke. It’s that Trump has publically been seen doing this stuff like divorced three times and they give him a pass that drops my jaw.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Major Major Major Major: My point is Raleigh, North Carolinian is an example of a revitalized rural region and the hicks are doing to best to destroy it because it’s not dad’s job handed to them on a platter. High tech brings in educated people and foreigners, in other words teh gays and terrorists.
Major Major Major Major
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: So, basically, there’s nothing can be done and I’m free to say, screw those hicks, right?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Applejinx: Ever talked to a local about your lack of working at lumbermill lifestyle?
Applejinx
@Major Major Major Major:
It is, it really is. Never confuse opportunity with capital. Right now, capital is so highly concentrated that it doesn’t even make sense, it dumps superfluous money in stupid ways, but opportunity would be easy to accentuate.
If somebody set up an electric supercar company in Detroit, they MIGHT just be able to find people who knew about such things. If it was heavily subsidized just for being there, you might even see results. I’m reminded of Walt Disney, building what’s now a global business empire because he began in dire economic times and was a Bezos-like, hard driving personality with a vision and willingness to push for that vision.
Didn’t like unions though, that guy. His early growth depended on the economy being dire enough to pull skilled people out of the woodwork and have them working for peanuts. However, he did think big, it wasn’t about striving to make Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for cheaper and cheaper.
Our obsession with coastal elite enclaves is tied intimately with concentration of capital. There’s no reason we can’t disperse (and a number of reasons it’d be a good idea: what if the next 9/11 is a nuke? We could end up JUST with flyover country, after a war or California’s Big One. Wait, I know, let’s start fracking near the San Andreas Fault. There might be money in it! ;P
Applejinx
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Got paid $40 an hour to mix the album of a local. Damn good album too :) brilliant musician, and a super lefty in spite of looking like a small lumberjack in flannel :)
kc
I hate the fucking GOP, but it controls the White House, the Congress, and a majority of states. As aging, damaged institutions go, it’s in better shape than the Democratic Party.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Major Major Major Major: Yep, it may sound un-America, but they are Americans and they have the right to chose to fail. What they don’t have is the right to drag the rest of us down.
Major Major Major Major
@Applejinx: It’s not so much that I’m confusing opportunity with capital as I’m saying that with the way things are right now it makes sense to temporarily conflate the two while we work on a systemic fix. Might this just entrench the problem? Maybe. If I had a solution I’d be pushing it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Applejinx: You build you eletric car in Deroit, were are the Electronic Enginers and Techs to do the job? They all know their jobs is only going last five years so only an idiot would move to Deroit. There is a valid reason Tesla is in Fremont, California.
Hardware isn’t softwere, you have to live within communiting distance of work and be there every day.
Major Major Major Major
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I could see millennials doing it. We have all those student loans and stuff. Put in your five years, pay your bills, move on.
Matt McIrvin
@Helen:
I recall people from continental Europe saying that they find the smiling service they get at businesses in the United States uncomfortably weird and phony. Do they say the same thing about Dublin?
Tazj
@Quinerly:They may be out there somewhere, I haven’t seen them. Daily Kos has an article up about this as well as Charles Gaba’s Twitter feed. They get their numbers from The Cook Report, I think. This report shows the votes for Clinton and Trump but the other column just says “others”, so it doesn’t show how Johnson and Stein did by themselves. Sorry I can’t give you a link to it. There’s no smarty pants attached to my phone, it’s just me.
Tazj
@Tazj: Actually, I think Decision Desk HQ Twitter might have the most up to date numbers.
jenn
@OzarkHillbilly: Thank you!
Tazj
@Tazj: @Tazj: The Cook Political Report
jenn
@Hellbastard: Yep, I signed up for the WaPo, too. Of all of the mainstream media during the election, they were the best. Plus signed up for some magazines and liberalish media.
Tazj
Well if anyone cares about the Stein vote/ Trump margin. I got this from Jon Favreau’s Twitter feed he was retweeting David Wasserman@reddistrict
Stein votes/Trump margin
MI 51,4631/10,704
PA 49,678/46,765
WI 31,006/22,177
Jon Favreau is skeptical and says
So there’s that, whatever it means.
Procopius
@OzarkHillbilly: He may not write good, but he sure knows how to get money. Bigly.
Procopius
@Matt McIrvin: Sure, demographics are on the Democrats’ side, if they last long enough. What is it, 32 states controlled by the GOP now? With the Dems losing more every cycle? Thanks, DWS. And Chuck Schumer. Let’s see how we’re doing in 2036.
Procopius
@debbie: I think that particular loophole was already closed in the late ’90s. I think (I took Tax over 50 years ago, so am not up to date) most little used loopholes are specifically useful for multi-billionaires, so unlikely to be taken away. In any case they are surely not going to make up the difference in current revenue and what he cuts.
Procopius
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Subscribing to The National Enquirer would probably get you higher quality news. The Washington Post has been a neoconservative mouthpiece since the early days of Bill Clinton’s administration. No better than the New York Times, now. Or maybe the Wall Street Journal.