54% of us voted against Donald Trump. https://t.co/4fDbNV1DVG
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) December 4, 2016
Nixon 1960: 49.55%
Gore 2000: 48.38%
Kerry 2004: 48.26%
Ford 1976: 48.01%
Romney 2012: 47.15%
Trump 2016: 46.17%— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 2, 2016
Another way of visualizing the difference, by the Brookings Institution, as reported in the Washington Post:
… According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.
Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy.This appears to be unprecedented, in the era of modern economic statistics, for a losing presidential candidate. The last candidate to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, Democrat Al Gore in 2000, won counties that generated about 54 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, the Brookings researchers calculated. That’s true even though Gore won more than 100 more counties in 2000 than Clinton did in 2016.
In between those elections, U.S. economic activity has grown increasingly concentrated in large, “superstar” metro areas, such as Silicon Valley and New York.
But it’s not the case that the counties Clinton won have grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country — they represent about the same share of the economy today as they did in 2000. Instead, it appears that, compared to Gore, Clinton was much more successful in winning over the most successful counties in a geographically unbalanced economy.
The Brookings analysis found that counties with higher GDP per capita were more likely to vote for Clinton over Trump, as were counties with higher population density. Counties with a higher share of manufacturing employment were more likely to vote for Trump.
“This is a picture of a very polarized and increasingly concentrated economy,” said Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings metro program, “with the Democratic base aligning more to that more concentrated modern economy, but a lot of votes and anger to be had in the rest of the country.”…
Same issue as ever — if acreage could vote, Trump would’ve gotten his imaginary landslide. And if so many people in that acreage didn’t chose the impossible dream of re-enacting an imaginary 1950s over all the potential of an actual future…
***********
Apart from regretting the intransigence of our neighbors, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Central Planning
The local kennel liner had a letter to the editor yesterday that basically said he thought Trump won because “look at the map!”. It’s like he was for land owners being the only ones with the right to vote. Crazy.
Davis X Machina
Impeach James Madison!
Davis X Machina
Impeach James Madison!
Davis X Machina
Impeach James Madison!
Davis X Machina
Dupe
OzarkHillbilly
@Central Planning: A constitutional originalist.
Davis X. Machina
As for the dupes — anybody who calls those thingies on a touch screen a ‘keyboard’ should be shot.
J.
Did y’all see the news about Carrier yesterday? Turns out it’s not Mexicans taking good ole American jobs, it’s robots. In an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, the head of Carrier said many of the jobs that were “staying” in Indiana would be automated. So actually a lot of workers will still lose their jobs. Anyone recall Trump’s plan for defeating the robots?
Baud
The election and the emotional fallout convince me that the righties who insisted America is exceptional don’t really believe it and the lefties who deride American exceptionalism really did think we were better than this.
Baud
@J.: I’m rooting for the robots.
Baud
@J.: When the number of jobs saved was first reduced from 1100 to 800, I predicted it would go down further.
OzarkHillbilly
@Davis X Machina: Stutter.
daveNYC
@J.: I believe that it involves sending wave after wave after wave of men at them until the reach their kill-counter limit and shut down.
MomSense
@Baud:
Well said.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Central Planning:
Who votes the federal government’s acres?
OzarkHillbilly
@Davis X. Machina: I think the man who invented the touch screen should be shot and pissed on.
Baud
@MomSense: How you doing?
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: I love my 23″ touchscreen on my computer, hush you.
Mark B
@Baud: I’m pretty impatient for Skynet to become self-aware and clean up all of this mess. According to the Terminator movies, it should already be underway, right?
Temporarily Max McGee (Until Death!)
@Central Planning:
The irony being that the owner of the largest amount of acreage is the federal government.
Baud
@Mark B: Right. Who knew the robots were the good guys in all those movies? Propaganda.
MomSense
@J.:
I live in a small town surrounded by rural, low population towns. I honestly don’t know what the future jobs for these folks might be. We have more progressive farming programs than most states and a market for the products in our foodie meca Portland, but it’s not nearly enough. The paper mills are gone and even if the mills were to come back, they would be full of robots doing the jobs.
The smarter kids who stick around end up doing HVAC work. If you are an exceptional builder or tradesman you can do alright especially if you can get some jobs on the new ocean front estates the summer people are building. Otherwise it’s pretty grim. The smart kids finish their degrees in engineering and then leave.
rikyrah
Morning, Everyone.???
MomSense
@Baud:
Eh. I need to get in fighting form, Baud. I’ve decided to talk to my doctor about depression. My snap out of it is missing the snap.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: The damn things never do what I want them to do, preferring instead to do something that totally fucks up my morning. I wanted to take a 24 oz framing hammer to the last one I used and the only reason I didn’t is because I was confined to a bed in a hospital and all my hammers were in my truck at home.
Baud
@rikyrah: It was good in the other thread. What happened? :-(
Baud
@MomSense: Please take care of yourself. We need you. Take time off if necessary. I find the news blackout has helped me.
debbie
Talk about two Americas: Ohio just passed a heartbeat bill, making abortion illegal at 6 weeks; and Jackal Kasich, after years of touting and imposing large tax cuts to stimulate the state economy, now states that the state is on the edge of a recession because (gasp) revenues have plummeted.
I hate starting the day this angry.
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: Around here, most everyone commutes.
debbie
@Baud:
I agree. The whole thing was about a big F U to the country. “I am doing this because I can.”
Baud
@debbie: I consider abortion gone. Fight like hell to keep it, but we need to be ready to make it a legislative issue.
WereBear
@MomSense: I have some hopes for the new trend in tele-commuting helping people in rural areas; you don’t have to constantly be in the office.
The snag there is the apparent reluctance of those hard-working Amurricans in the heartland to get on board the digital revolution. From what has been reporting with our boots on the ground, here and elsewhere, they want a job that requires them to work hard, but not with their brains.
Era of the sand hog is over, people.
Shalimar
@J.: Since Trump is essentially a comic book villain, I’m guessing his plan is to create a Master Mold in his own image to lead the robot army.
rikyrah
@Baud:
I read Mayhew’s post, thought about the 20 million who will lose healthcare, and I am back at the same anger that I have been since November 9th
Kay
The similarities between Chris Christie and Donald Trump should be explored. The thing about Christie is he was a terrible governor- incompetent- but that gets overshadowed by the fact that he’s a horrible person, too.
Makes me think the way to go after Trump is to focus on competence. It has a side benefit- that approach would drive him absolutely bonkers. They don’t care about their failures as people- that’s what lacking character means, really, not caring about that- but they DO care about failing as CEO’s.
debbie
@rikyrah:
That is so fucking typical of conservatives: Get rid of what you don’t like and kick the solutions down the road to some undefinable point in time. Fuck the gap. We love doughnut holes! Like sending troops to war and then worrying about protecting them from injury. Bastards.
Baud
@rikyrah:
I wonder how many of those 20 million voted for Hillary. See Kentucky.
If they do pass a “replace,” some portion of that 20 million will still have insurance. They’ll just be paying more and/or receiving less coverage.
But a lot of people will still be hurt. Including good people.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: Ya know, they do make keyboards for phone/tablets. If you’re typing alot on these devices, get one. I have a bluetooth one.
SiubhanDuinne
Oh joy. Morning Edition is introducing a new weekly Wednesday feature: “Ask Cokie.”
rikyrah
@debbie:
I understand.
WereBear
@debbie: Conservatives live in an imaginary world. Always.
Even their longing to go “back to the past” isn’t based on a real past, but a nostalgic one.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Abortion will revert back to the state(aka, no longer a right), so it’ll be legal on the west coast and the north east; no so much anywhere else.
rikyrah
@Kay:
There is no competence
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: Not really. I can’t imagine the GOP Congress not seeking a nationwide ban.
BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne:
Can we “Ask Cokie” to go away?
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear:
The corporate bureaucracy my wife is embedded with resists. They have people working remotely from San Francisco and that’s OK, but for my wife to work from home 60 miles away….. Naahhh, can’t allow that.
Iowa Old Lady
The University of Louisville’s accreditation agency has put them on probation because of Governor Bevin’s actions. This is from a friend who teaches there:
Kay
@rikyrah:
Don’t feel sorry for them. Feel sorry for their children.
Health care investment takes a long time to pay off. Their parents are short-sighted fools who will make the country as a whole sicker and poorer.
SiubhanDuinne
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Yeah, that would be my first (and only) question.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah. Can’t fix stupid.
Iowa Old Lady
@Davis X. Machina: Touch screens should be banned in cars. You have to take your eyes off the road to use them, and then they resist.
Forked Tongue
@SiubhanDuinne: This will not stand.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yes, my wife has them on all her tablets. BUT…. the number of things you are unable to do from the keyboard is infinite. Fuck touch screens, I and my Neanderthal fingers will stay in the stone age with a mouse.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: Using the logic, so should radios with buttons.
James E Powell
@Kay: But if people – that is voters – cared at all about competence . . .
WereBear
@BillinGlendaleCA: I have all my basic controls on the steering wheel, and I don’t need to look.
sunny raines
new mantra:
“cutem’ loose”
as in jettison the moocher red states from the productive blue. This crap of the ignorant, the bigoted, and the violent dominating the country has got to stop!
Starfish
@WereBear: What is happening is that people who are priced out of Bay Area housing are going elsewhere and negotiating to keep the Bay Area salary. That may be of use to the struggling communities.
Kay
@rikyrah:
This is the mindset. He admires people who engineered a traffic jam and kept school children trapped on buses for hours. They don’t care about being bad people and their fans don’t care either. They care about being seen as effective badass manly men.
Portray Trump not as a bad human being but as a fuck up. “Bad ass” and “fuck up” are incompatible. Can’t be true at the same time.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m old enough to remember computers without a mouse.
Iowa Old Lady
@BillinGlendaleCA: I don’t have to cycle through screens to find and hit a radio button. I can do it by feel, even when wearing gloves. The touch screen hates gloves.
Central Planning
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m not sure he could spell “constitution”. Probably even screw up kkk.
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Real ‘murikans. Not some commie libtard urban tree huggers.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: Why would you need to wear gloves, I’m confused.
WereBear
There’s incredible power in PR; I am reading Cycle of Lies, about the rise and fall of cycling phenom Lance Armstrong. There was plenty of evidence to topple him, but the English speaking press were content to be his buddies… to get access.
They would rather craft a best-selling narrative than a true one.
And from their point of view, there’s no downside; someone else will topple the idol with the feet of clay, and then they will happily cover that.
kirbster
Today is the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I have no doubt that President Obama will commemorate the day with a dignified, heartfelt speech about the terrible sacrifices of war. PEOTUS will use the occasion to brag about his tremendous properties in Hawaii.
BillinGlendaleCA
@WereBear: Mind you my automobile just had it’s 31st birthday(on Sunday) so there’s just the horn on the steering wheel(and it doesn’t work well).
Temporarily Max McGee (Until Death!)
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Heehee…Spent 7th hour of my first semester of my fresman year of high school (1979) writing if>then hangman programs in basic on a TRASH-1. :D
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’m old enough to remember being taught how to use a slide rule.
Iowa Old Lady
@BillinGlendaleCA: Don’t make me hurt you.
Mark B
@BillinGlendaleCA: Buttons are tactile, and you can operate them without looking if you’re familiar enough with the layout. With a touch screen, you need to keep your eyes on the screen the whole time you’re operating it to know that you’re touching the right area on the screen.
Baud
@kirbster:
Veterans overwhelmingly went for Trump. Apologies to the good ones, but I’m not going to care about people who don’t care about themselves.
Anne Laurie
@Iowa Old Lady:
Lotsa the mail-order/online catalogs I do my clothes shopping from are offering gloves with ‘touchscreen sensitive’ pads on the fingertips, this holiday shopping season. Suspect they’re going to be a very popular gift option, giving how dependent people are on their phones!
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Some of us still have this thing called ‘winter’. You may have heard of it. ;-)
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: Heh, I might enjoy that?.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: My dad was an engineer, I learned to use a slide rule at an early age.
@OzarkHillbilly: We have winter here, it gets down into the 60’s, brrrrr.
WereBear
@BillinGlendaleCA: You can get away with that in California. Here in the frozen north, I have to have something that won’t break down. Metal fatigue and salt on the roads are real hazards here.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
If we can’t have a giant damn meteor robots will have to do I guess.
Silly question but it is relevant to my work life.
Any of you olds here remember a common office joke about business communications that started with works saying “this is shit” and seeing how that was changed at each management level until the CEO hears “this is powerful stuff that make the flowers grow”? I really need it because upper management just discovered this is happening but google is not helping me
Starfish
@BillinGlendaleCA: When it is 13 degrees outside but feels like -1, my face cannot get unfrozen enough to laugh at your joke.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Schlemazel: Sounds like the corporate version of the telephone game.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Starfish: Sounds like what happens out here when folk get Botox treatments.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Mine was a chemical engineer, I still have his old circular slide rule. Fits in a pocket.
Botsplainer
Wow. I’m in an ugly little set of exchanges with some Christer wingnut rural Kentucky broadcaster on the FB feed of a sometimes Fournier-curious Kentucky pundit who was a working colleague and friend of my late uncle (who was a sportswriter of some note). As an aside, I think I’ve effectively wrecked Fournier for him (yay me), it took a while.
Anyhow, this lardass wingnut that goes to bleat on Al’s feed has been affiliated with about a dozen broadcast outlets in Kentucky over the years as an anchor or manager. Last night, he was whining about a piece on the Washington Post excoriating the Flynns over the acceptance and propagation of fake news. Terry Anderson (google him, your memories about the name are correct) sailed in to tell him he was being ridiculous. Fatass wingnut chose that moment to double down, and ignored the “breadth of real world experiences” hint that the thread host gave.
It is not going well for fatass wingnut. Right now, there is radio silence. We shall see if that changes.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: My dad was an electrical engineer, he may have had one of those. I’ve still got his long slide rule in a drawer.
OzarkHillbilly
Well, that’s a start. Now can we get rid of his idiot father?
Patricia Kayden
@J.: So Trump gave Carrier a $700,000 tax break so they could fire humans and replace those humans with robots. Sounds like a sci-fi plot.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m still faster on my slide rules – 28 of them at last count – than my students are on their scientific calculators. Whippersnappers.
Schlemazel
@BillinGlendaleCA:
It was. It is so old that the first time I saw it it was a mimeograph sheet! Then it was xeroxed but I have not seen it in 25 years now I bet. My big boss was astounded to learn he had experienced the phenomena in real life. I’d like to present her with a copy but can’t find it
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: Have you watched “I, Robot” or “Ex Machina“? Never root for the robots. They’re awful.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden: More awful than Trump?
Leto
@Baud: Apology accepted, Admiral Needa.
Patricia Kayden
@debbie:
Still trying to figure out how large tax cuts to the 1% helps to stimulate the state when the savings stay in the pockets of the 1%. Where is the evidence that businesses hire more people or otherwise spend to help the economy when they are given large tax cuts? This is voodoo, trickle down economics which has no basis in reality.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: Good point. They’ll be much smarter than Trump. That’s for sure.
Schlemazel
@BillinGlendaleCA:
HA! The company I worked for bought a microprocessor production company & decided to seed my department with these newfangled things. It was a board with the processor and a couple other chips on it, 8 little switches so you could set the registers to make it boot, 8 little lights for output and a jack to connect to a cassette tape player for storage. We were expected to bloom a million ideas for using them. At the time I was working on a Xerox computer that had a 50KB drum memory. The drum, a precursor to disks was bigger than a 5 gallon bucket & rotated on a shaft while the head moved back and forth to read-write.
PCs came along a few years later
BillinGlendaleCA
@Schlemazel: So it didn’t have a touchscreen?
Kay
Cable news anchors were apparently forbidden to use that phrase under Obama.
Baud
@Leto: Damn you, Darth.
@Kay: Nothing but Happy Holidays from me.
satby
@MomSense: That was true of the part of MI that I lived in too; Clark Equipment used to employ hundreds and the town I lived in used to have triple the census. Now the choices are mostly construction and minimum wage service jobs, kids who go to college seldom come back. I didn’t look, but it’s a red voting area anyway, so it probably went for the PGiC.
OzarkHillbilly
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I hate to admit it but I’ve lost my touch.
Another Scott
@Schlemazel: In the beginning was the plan…
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Schlemazel
@Kay:
ALL HOLIDAYS MATTER!
Schlemazel
@Another Scott:
THANKS! You have done a great service to your nation!
artgeminiacle
Dubya’s “Ownership Society” is alive & taking it’s first steroids, with the usual resulting effects : thick neck, thin skin, delusional expressions of inflated superiority, and apoplectic denials . . .
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Happy Pagan Solstice Celebration.
satby
@Baud: Well, I’m one of the 20 million, so at least one Clinton vote was from an Obama care user.
I said in the last thread that have’m on the fence about even bothering to pay the premium for next January, in my head Obama care is already gone. I probably will just in case I get hit by a bus or something.
MomSense
@Anne Laurie:
You can buy conductive thread and sew it onto your mittens and gloves.
Another Scott
@sunny raines: Nope.
We have a Union. I’m not ready to let a minority break it up.
Progress has always been non-linear. Progress has always been hard. I’m going to work to make it very difficult for them to drag us backwards – they’re going to have to work very hard to trash everything my parents and grandparents worked for…
Defeatism doesn’t help – it rewards those who are working against us.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
Ugh. Another fawning Matt Lauer interview:
Trump lies thru the whole thing but it doesn’t matter. It’ll all be “truth” in 24 hours.
At what point do we call what they do “propaganda”? It doesn’t HAVE to be state-funded, right? One would think they wouldn’t have to pay them so much. How hard can it be to smile and nod your head?
DCF
How the Democrats could win again, if they wanted
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/29/how-the-democrats-could-win-again-if-they-wanted
Labor and economic equality used to be at the heart of liberal politics. Rich professionals expunged these concerns – and have reaped the consequences.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Schlemazel:
Here’s a biblical version: “In the beginning was the plan.“
schrodinger's cat
@Kay:Word! That’s what the Indian freedom fighters did too. Focused on specific British policies and boycott of British made goods to get the point across. Moral high ground is not enough on its own to win difficult political battles.
Democrats should be pro-Unions and vocally. Say that labor should have a seat at the table. They are as important as investors to the functioning of a business enterprise.
Iowa Old Lady
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I was pretty horrified to see a slide rule on the cover of one of the books I wrote about engineering communication. Even my engineer husband laughed. Last time I saw it on Amazon, it had been recovered.
MuckJagger
@OzarkHillbilly: But like Manafort, Flynn the Lesser is sure to pop up in another role somewhere down the line
Baud
@DCF:
With this fix, I say good for us liberals.
Damn straight, troll.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: To repeat myself, “Pay it. Last I heard was a 3 year time line to shut it down.”
JMG
@DCF: Same old lefty nonsense. By “people who aren’t part of the existing non-profit/journalistic in-group” the author means “me!”
Mark B
@DCF: I don’t understand the narrative that liberals are clueless elites. That runs completely contrary to my own experience with liberals. I mean maybe there are a few people who fit that description, like some out of touch actors, but the average rank and file liberal is a working person who achieved success by working hard, getting educated and doing the normal things that people do to get ahead in a capitalist society. The ‘whole liberals are elites’ narrative seems to be a straw man created by people who don’t know any liberals.
schrodinger's cat
@Iowa Old Lady: Slide rules, rule. In fact many of my students don’t even have the ability to make good guesstimates, they are so lost without their calculator, the poor dears.
Baud
@Mark B:
I don’t even own a Volvo.
schrodinger's cat
@Mark B: All the past 4 Republican nominees were sons of famous fathers, and Democrats are the elites. Whatever.
Ksmiami
@sunny raines: yes no money for moochers. Feel bad for the kids but really they should blame their parents
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Neither do I and I hate latte’.
Glidwrith
Where is this 54% figure coming from? My google-fu fails me.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Steeplejack (tablet):
And late again.
Schlemazel
@DCF:
please let me be the first to say – go fuck yourself & this bullshit
Mark B
@Glidwrith: I’m guessing it’s this: Trump got 46% of the vote, therefore 54% voted for someone else. Roughly 48% for Hillary, the rest for others.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: yeah, thanks. I’m sure I will. It’s just demoralizing to know that at the ripe old age of 64 I’ll be left high and dry by our troglodyte masters. Leaving me a gap year before Medicare, though Medicare will be bastardized by then too.
Elizabelle
@Schlemazel: You are the first, cuz I deleted my comment.
fuck that troll.
But good morning to the rest of you good people. Grrrrr.
ETA: Funny. Spellcheck changed Brrrr to grrrr. But it still works.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@J.: That’s what I was thinking – at 30 an hour to turn screws robots become worth it. Everyone is bemoaning automation but muli ttasking and thinking is something a robot can’t do so as a worker you better be able to do those.
That’s for example why I don’t agree truck drivers will be replaced by robots – Truck drivers have to also unload and load the truck and deal with the customer. Robots can’t do that short of one those very pricey Mitt Romney models.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Glidwrith:
The Twitter link shows that Trump received 46.2% of the vote, so 54% voted for someone else, which is equivalent to voting against Trump.
Elizabelle
@Baud:
Good morning. That’s a really perceptive comment.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: I have hope. Many in the GOP are running a little scared now that the chickens are coming home to roost. It is up to DEMs to turn the heat up on them. Maybe we really will. They can’t help but see what is really happening here.
hedgehog mobile
@SiubhanDuinne: Shoot me now.
satby
@Baud: that’s a very true statement. I know I believed we were a better country than the election showed.
J.
@Baud: Me too. Hasta la vista, bebe.
Davis X. Machina
@OzarkHillbilly: Got one on my desk. I hand it to kids who ask “Do you have a calculator?”
Elizabelle
And Trump is Time magazine’s Man of the Year. According to the LA Times.
Silver lining: so was someone else. A few someone elses. Hint hint hint ….
FWIW, Obama was Man of the Year. In 2012. Hmmmmm…..
MomSense
@Mark B:
Yes, liberals are such clueless elites that the poor working people voted for a billionaire developer who lives in a gilded penthouse. Yeah that makes a ton of sense.
Davis X. Machina
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Standardize loading docks, like they did with cargo containers, and it’ll happen.
Seen a longshoreman lately?
J.
@MomSense: I feel for towns that had a strong manufacturing base and have seen their economies decimated and their young people leave. I write about technology for a living — and have grown to hate technology. Call me a Luddite (and a curmudgeon), but I often think we humans have totally screwed ourselves. Though I am forever grateful for the invention of the washing machine and dryer, and would we really want to go back to the bad old days where people worked seven days a week in dangerous jobs, kids too? That said, I would be quite happy if the Internet and everything that has resulted from it never existed. But as my husband, a tech entrepreneur, constantly tells me, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. :-(
gogol's wife
@MomSense:
Of all the things that enrage me, this is probably the biggest. Those stupid rubes, I guess they never saw a front-office suit before, and all he had to do was put on a trucker hat and they thought he was one of them.
OzarkHillbilly
@Davis X. Machina: You should add an abacus for the ones who say, “I can’t use this!”
J.
@Patricia Kayden: Maybe Carrier or UTX should change its name to Skynet.
DCF
@Mark B:
I’ll leave the reactive, puerile replies to my topic post here alone…it’s clear that any attempt to engage with these individuals is an exercise in futility….
‘Liberal elites’ refers to the ‘professional class’ (read: meritocracy) – the top ten percent (10%) of the socioeconomic ladder. As one who is a member of this cohort, I am aghast at the compartmentalized, myopic and vitriolic tone (and perspectives) so often found within the confines of this commentariat….
Have at it, if you will…but be prepared to lose (repeatedly) if you continue to focus exclusively on ‘identity politics’ and forsake the overarching theme of socioeconomic equality….
We Launch PropOrNot.Org To Identify Inept Propagandists and School Amplifiers Like The Washington Post on How to Spot Them
Posted on December 5, 2016 by Yves Smith
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/we-launch-propornot-org-to-identify-inept-propagandists-and-school-the-washington-post.html
https://www.propornot.org/
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@WereBear:
and that brings up the other things our idiot MSM won’t talk about because it doesn’t fit the narrative – in sourcing. Companies over outsourced in the 2000 and found out they were paying people lots of money in remote locations to do nothing (their project manager quit, everyone else was to busy and so on) so the big push has been to get people as near the company headquarters as much as possible so management simply doesn’t forget about them.
MomSense
@gogol’s wife:
Doesn’t it also point out the bullshit nature of the argument that liberals are just too neo and elitist?
hedgehog mobile
@Kay: Io Saturnalia!
rikyrah
@OzarkHillbilly:
But but but…how can he lose a job that THEY SAID he never had in the first place.
OzarkHillbilly
Poor poor Milo Yiannopoulos, he’s had 2 speaking events canceled due to the cost of security. But as usual with these assholes he blames anybody but himself for not putting up the extra money and calls it ‘censorship’.
As always, tuff talk but too much of a coward to come out and say his bullshit without a big brother security detail to back him up.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I’ve missed it this past 8 years…..
sigh…
rikyrah
@DCF:
I’m going to say this again..
PHUCK ALL THESE MUTHAPHUCKAS.
There is no economic policy that the Democrats have that would specifically HURT the working class.
The problem is, is that it would help ALL the working class.
And, the WHITE working class has no interest in policies that help ALL the working class.
Davis X. Machina
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh, I’ve got that covered too — Chinese/Japanese (two bead) and Roman/Medieval (one bead) versions.
Kids want to know “How do you do arithmetic with Roman numerals? There ‘s no place value.’ Well, you just don’t use paper…
Starfish
@Kay: I think that anything that involves softball questions from Matt Lauer can be classified as propaganda.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Davis X. Machina: That only works at the warehouses, not at the customers site. If you own a small business doing light industrial are you going to buy an expensive robot, rebuild your loading docks and warehouse all just so UPS can save some money? Are you going to discontinue products lines just because the UPS bot doesn’t like the packaging size or weight? How’s that going to work at home deliveries or at apartment complexes, high rises in urban areas and disabled customers?
Chris
@DCF:
As a person who spent the last year getting completely fucked in a non-Medicaid-expansion state who’s had one of his biggest economic problems lifted since moving back to a post-Medicaid-expansion state thanks to Obama and the Democrats, I heartily say fuck you. Never mind the number of jobs saved the auto industry and saved or restored by bringing the country back from the recession, and never mind that Hillary was running on a platform of raising the minimum wage and expanding the ACA.
Democrats have done more for working people in the last eight years than anyone has in four decades, and plenty of those of us who are in that category have no trouble realizing that because we’ve felt the differences instantly. If some white working people were upset that there wasn’t a special delivery for them, or if the utopians are upset that eight years weren’t enough to turn us into the United Federation of Planets, well, fuck them too.
liberal
@DCF: Not to engage in argumentum ad hominem, but I myself would never link to NakedCapitalism anymore. I used to follow the site avidly, then my visiting fell off slowly. Fine. But in the summer, the site was clearly becoming Trump-curious, and Yves penned some horseshit op-ed about perhaps leftists should vote for Trump.
Fuck that. I despise Hillary, have for a long time, but I was happy to vote for her, given any Republican opponent, and in particular Cthulhu.
Not that I disagree with what you’re saying in this one comment, though. It depends what you mean by “identity politics.” If identity politics means “we support a just order, which means equal rights for all, including the right not to get executed by police officers because of our skin color, in addition to other elements of a just order—including economic justice” then I’m all for it. If it means “a coalition between neoliberal fat cats, the professional classes, and a pro-civil rights agenda which is great in itself but isn’t going to help anyone, including working and middle class POC, find meaningful work,” then I’m against it.
Weaselone
@DCF:
Great. Is this where we once again pretend the Democrats do not have plans, policies and proposals meant to address socioeconomic equality?
gene108
@DCF:
Democrats brought working people:
1. Social Security
2. 40 hour work week
3. Overtime pay
4. End to child labor
5. Right to unionize
6. Family Medical Leave
7. Medicare/Medicaid
8. Unemployment insurance
9. sChip
10. Expanded access to healthcare via PPAC
11. The minimum wage and every minimum wage increase since
and yet Republicans, who oppose all of these are the working class heroes, who they turn to because Democrats are out of touch.
Every gain made by the working class, for the last 85 years, is because of Democrats. Period.
There ain’t a lot more we can do to address their “economic anxiety”, at this point, if they fail to recognize that fact and keep voting Republican.
Look the “economically anxious ” working class is not running to a more Left-y party than the Dems. They are supporting a far right, anti-labor party.
So something other than economics seems to be at work.
I wonder what that is?
Starfish
@liberal: They do that every election season.
liberal
@Chris: yes and no. There are elements of truth in what DCF says.
Despite all the rosy bullshit about how it grows the economy, immigration as currently constituted hurts working class people. AFAICT, a lot of people DCF is criticizing are fine with outsourcing, essentially open borders, etc. The arguments go “but those jobs are going to be automated anyway!” and “it’s selfish to favor an American worker over a Chinese worker!” The latter argument is ridiculous, but at least two well-established commenters here espoused exactly that view.
Keep that shit up, and you’ll be doomed to political extinction.
Major Major Major Major
It bothers but does not surprise me that this Van Jones thing is being covered the way it is. It looks like he basically said, every political group has some issues, maybe everybody could stop being dicks, and so of course it’s being reported as DEMOCRAT SAYS DEMOCRATS SUCK. Sigh.
ETA: @liberal: Naked Capitalism is on that PropOrNot group’s list of useful idiots, too.
hovercraft
@Kay:
The morons who voted for him have finally caught onto the fact that they were sold a bill of goods, by Fatboy and the media who fell in love with his tough guy shtick. Too bad the northeast is still being choked off because he cancelled the new Hudson tunnel so he could raid the funds for other shit like bribing elected to support his re-elect. Bridgegate hasn’t helped, but like most gop schemes that are designed to last just long enough for a re-elect, people were waking up to his con back in 2013, but the Sandy and the funds that came afterwards gave him a second chance, which he squandered. He has earned his 19% approval rating. The shitgibbon may still give him a job as his ball shiner, that is if Jared and Lucretia allow it. Otherwise him and Mary Kate will have to go back to just scraping by on her 700K a year Wall Street gig, those poor people how will they cope?
Chris
@Mark B:
Skynet has competition. First Ultron rose and was put down, then Samaritan ruled the world in secret for two years until the Machine finally put it down. Now that that’s done, I assume the Machine is battling Skynet and that’s why the holdup.
hovercraft
@SiubhanDuinne:
Why are you so terrible at your job, you have no original thoughts or opinions that I couldn’t get from any gop operative on TV, so why should I waste my time watching or listening to you? Give me one good reason.
Davis X. Machina
@gene108: “He hates the same people I hate. Hand me the goddam ballot.”
That’s the election, right there. The rest is commentary at best, onanism at worst.
Chris
@Shalimar:
Best thing I’ve read since election day: “The problem with Trump is he thinks he’s Lex Luthor, but he’s not even Syndrome.”
Davis X. Machina
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Long-haul trucking is where the savings can be found. Logistics center to supermarket. Factory to logistics center.
No one puts cars in cargo containers to go from the Maine State Pier out to Vinalhaven.
gene108
@liberal:
But where’s the line between deport them all and manage immigration policy.
Places that see influx of immigrants are not the dying towns people bemoan. Places with higher immigrant populations seem to be doing better economically.
What would honestly help rural America is increasing their population via immigration, because you’d then have the population to support more local businesses and attract investment.
You may end up with some pockets, where people speak Spanish than English, but there are trade-offs to everything.
hovercraft
@Iowa Old Lady:
Pah ! Who needs stinking accreditation, if it’s rescinded they can always follow the example of their junior senator and just create their own accreditation board. Rand Paul claims he is a doctor, why deny the rest of the state this free market solution?
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: There was a god-awful piece on Daily Kos yesterday about how robots are going to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, and are the reason Trump won and will eliminate 110% of jobs and destroy the world. I’m barely exaggerating. Front-page, not diary. It was dreadful.
Anyway, I always think of this when I think about the machines taking over.
Chris
@WereBear:
Obligatory reference that the fifties is the go-to decade for “the past,” but all the evidence says that conservatives fucking hated the fifties when they were living them. I don’t even mean the post-New Deal economy. They were terrified of communists, of civil rights marchers, of non-WASP demographics transforming the country, of rising youth culture. They thought they were living through the collapse of America just as much as the ones today do.
gene108
@Chris:
Don’t forget the rise of that evil Rock ‘n’ Roll music and that tempter of sin “pelvis” Elvis Presley and his shameful gyrating hips.
Chris
@gene108:
Ding ding.
Immigrants matter vastly more as a scapegoat than as an actual source of economic woes for the natives.
@gene108:
And fancy-pants intellectuals from Harvard and Yale. It’s always fancy-pants intellectuals.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: What exactly is the nativist problem with hearing Spanish? Why is it so virtuous to be monolingual?
Major Major Major Major
@gene108: A lot of these rural (mostly exurban) Americans don’t want that either. They want nothing to change. They want things to be exactly like they were in a largely-imagined past and they don’t want to have to do anything differently than their parents did. Even if it would be easy, even if it would help them, even if it would in the case of immigration not actually require any effort.
ETA: I know these people. They bemoan their town’s loss of interesting people and local charm, they bemoan their town’s loss of jobs and spending power, and then they blame it on immigrants from south of the border.
hovercraft
@DCF:
Bullshit.
Minimum wage, overtime pay, paid time off, equal pay, safe working conditions, social security, medicare and Medicaid, I could go on, but these are all things democrats support, card check the right to organize, democrats support all of these, a fairer tax system. Can they do more, of course they can, but enough with this bullshit, it is propagated by the purity ponies who chose to not sully themselves by voting for the Goldman Sachs candidate. I wonder who got the last laugh.
Last I checked, Move On, the unions, Change.org and the like were pretty representative of the working class, the Fight for 15 is being waged by workers, not some coastal elites, so please stop this nonsense.
Glidwrith
@Mark B: Ah, thanks!
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s especially eyeroll-worthy because being monolingual is the opposite of American tradition. In the early days, with the Germans, with the Dutch, with the Scandinavians, with the lingering pockets of French and Spanish in the south, there were entire subcultures (all white people) throughout the nation where English was at best a second language, and IIRC, these people outnumbered the WASPs from the start, to the point that it’s questionable if you can even call them subcultures. “Assimilation” into the WASP-defined culture was a very slow process, and you can still see traces of the old heritage today in a lot of places. The idea that it’s normal for an immigrant to get off the boat, have a gun put to his head, and be told “learn English by the end of the year, or else!” is very twentieth century.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: Forget it, that article is literally by Thomas Frank.
Betty Cracker
@Davis X. Machina:
QFT.
'Niques (frequent visitor; occasional commenter)
@Chris: As was pointed out on this very blog some years ago . . . those who most fervently want to go back to the 1950’s WERE CHILDREN THEN . . . Life is almost always pretty good when you are five!
Mark B
@Davis X. Machina: I think a lot of the onanism is targeted at whitewashing the racism and white nationalism which was at the core of the Trump boom.
ruemara
@DCF: Hillary won the actual working class, so this writer can fuck off.
@DCF: and doubly fuck off. While eating salt drenched toasted dicks.
Major Major Major Major
@ruemara: I agree, especially since it’s literally Thomas Frank.
Betty Cracker
@hovercraft: He will never stop that nonsense because he is a missionary for a religious belief that neither requires nor offers compelling data, common sense or historical facts to support its tenets. The faith has its religious icons, like St. Bernie the Martyr, the Apostle Frank and the Young Turk Disciples. It’s just as pointless to argue with him here as it is to debate a proselytizing zealot who rings your doorbell on a Saturday to attempt to convert you.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Aha, another one of the stop using ‘identity politics’ and focus on the WWC (not an identity, just the most important people ever created), chorus.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@gene108:
And beatniks!
Chris
@DCF:
Well, there’s a shocker.
rikyrah
Quick Takes: Chaos Over Obamacare “Repeal and Delay”
by Nancy LeTourneau
December 6, 2016 5:07 PM
POLITICAL ANIMAL BLOG
* I am going to summarize the chaos that is erupting among Republicans as they try to hammer out a “repeal and delay” strategy on Obamacare. First up is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Republican Senate leaders said Tuesday that they plan to charge through with their plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act as soon as the new Congress convenes in January.
“Obamacare repeal resolution will be the first item up in the new year,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said at his weekly press conference after the GOP caucus lunch.
Republican leaders reiterated their previously floated plan of repealing the Affordable Care Act first and replacing it in a piecemeal fashion.
* Last week there was an attempt to rally the troops around a plan in which the repeal of Obamacare would happen immediately, but implementation of the repeal would be delayed for three years while Republicans came up with a replacement plan. Members of the House Freedom Caucus don’t like that idea.
The proposal “will meet with major resistance from Freedom Caucus members,” the North Carolina Republican vowed in an interview, calling it “the first big fight I see coming for the Freedom Caucus.”
“It should be repealed and replaced, and all of that should be done in the 115th Congress” — the two-year period starting in January through 2018 — and “not left to a future Congress to deal with,” Meadows added.
Most members of the Freedom Caucus represent the reddest of red districts. They don’t want to face their constituencies in the 2018 election without demonstrable proof that they got rid of Obamacare.
Starfish
@liberal: Please be specific about what you mean by immigration policy. H1B visas when companies cannot find workers should probably be more stringent. For example, “have you tried paying more for this work? have you tried training some people?” should be a thing that companies have to prove that they tried before they are allowed to go overseas to import workers, especially if the work is not cyclical and is in a profitable field. Companies should not be using H1B visas to get tech workers because they don’t want to train any or don’t want to pay the going rate.
One of the arguments about the machines is that in actual reality, more jobs are being lost to robots than to people. Everyone whose job is efficiencied away is not a lazy good for nothing despite generations of a country built on protestant work ethic.
Gator90
@DCF:
1. Fuck over people of color.
2. ??????
3. Socio-economic equality!
Major Major Major Major
@Starfish: H1B requesters are already supposed to do that, the problem is in enforcement.
We absolutely need to have a conversation about automation because the future isn’t going to look much like 20th-century capitalism, but we seem to be incapable of having it. Not you and I, but the grown-ups. The conversations people do have are the wrong ones.
gogol's wife
The WaPo is full of people saying the electors should be faithless. Latest is Kathleen Parker. In the comments there was this gem (paraphrase): “Big deal that Clinton got 2.5 million more votes than Trump. That isn’t so many. My candidate, Gary Johnson, got 4 million votes, and he lost!”
gogol's wife
I submitted a very polite comment on a Liz Spayd column, saying that the next thing I wanted to hear from the NYT Public Editor was the date of her resignation. It never got posted.
James E Powell
@Mark B:
Not quite. It’s a straw man created by people who cannot counter liberal arguments on the merits. The RWers created the image of the liberal straw man. They keep it updated with the latest targets of RW rage. I recall back in 2003-2004, some PAC ran a TV ad against Howard Dean that listed most of them. More recently, having to press 1 for English is considered the equivalent of being forced to wear a yellow star.
There is so much I really love about this country, but there is also quite a bit I hate.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Dean Baker is my go-to guy on things like this. E.g. The Job-Killing-Robot Myth.
Cheers,
Scott.
DCF
@Betty Cracker:
No, I’m not a ‘true believer’…read Eric Hoffer for an explanation of that approach….
Even after the shellacking we received on November 8, the vast majority of commenters here refuse to accept facts. Not opinions – facts. One can turn every which way but loose in attempting to explain the loss(es) – remember how we were favored to retake the Senate? – but the bottom line is unavoidable. The Democratic Party – and a significant number of its national candidates – were/are perceived as distant and/or ineffectual.
The same people who castigated Thomas Frank, Thom Hartmann, Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, and a host of other observers – who predicted this debacle – were dismissive and derisive when it came to discussing HRC’s vulnerabilities and ‘inevitability’. How’s that working out for you, sheeple?
How To Rebuild The Democratic Party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbgIBqycge0
Another Scott
@Chris: Fancy pants Harvard intellectuals like O’Reilly and Cruz…
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
@hovercraft:
Seriously, I’d give anything to be able to ask Cokie Roberts in front of a large group of people “have you ever heard of Cokie’s Law and if so how do you feel about your name at being synonymous with journalistic incompetence ?”
Mark B
Narrowly losing a handful of swing states while winning the popular vote by a large margin is a ‘shellacking?’ Now I know you’re pushing a false narrative.
Major Major Major Major
@DCF: oh my god, shut up.
I thought ‘sheeple’ put you in moderation.
germy
@Starfish:
Before every interview, Matt goes into a huddle with his RW Repug boss. His boss goes over the questions, gives suggestions, and Lauer understands what his job is. They had a similar meeting before he interviewed HRC, and spent 15 minutes out of their half hour asking “but what about teh emailz????”
Chris
@James E Powell:
It’s also the usual trick of the elites that really do have the power trying to deflect any public anger at them for the way they run the country by setting up a mostly fictional “liberal elite” that can take the blame instead. Even though it’s fairly obvious that college professors and entertainment stars have very little power to change the course of the country, which one can’t say about Wall Street bankers and lawyers, lots of people fall for it.
(Why yes, that does resemble the practice of European elites promoting belief in “the Jews who rule the world” to take attention away from themselves. And yes, the resentment for East Coast cosmopolitan elites especially as they relate to New York City has always had a whiff of antisemitism about it too).
germy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Drones!! The techno-utopianists would reply.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Most immigrants can speak English and at least one more language. Another example of Republicans demonizing knowledge.
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
I love that word. Always puts me in mind of this.
Major Major Major Major
@germy: no we wouldn’t. You’re thinking of the dumb ones.
@Chris: a whiff?? And more than a little queercoding too.
Another Scott
The lack of a federal budget was mentioned in an earlier thread. GovExec has the latest:
More at the link.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who expects something to pass, but if the Democrats are smart, they won’t vote for a pig-in-a-poke. Make them own it.)
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
To be fair, the whole beef with the big cities on the East Coast is the amount of diversity, which means there’s an infinite number of categories to hate.
The reason they keep the whining to nice and generic words like “uppity East Coast elites” isn’t entirely dog-whistling. It’s also because as long as you keep it nice and generic, it’s basically a Rorschach test onto whom all their followers can project their own specific pet hate. Jews, gays, immigrants, black people…
hovercraft
Leading GOP obstructionist decries ‘senseless obstruction’
Watching irony die can be an exasperating experience.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 4 Republican, said that on issues like health care, he hopes [Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer] “works closely with us, listens to the voices of the voters around the country and ends this really senseless obstruction.”
Let’s take a minute to unwrap this, because it’s one of the more jarring quotes of the year.
First, listening to voters’ voices isn’t a bad idea, but in the most recent election cycle, voters (a) preferred Hillary Clinton by a considerable margin; (b) shrunk the Republican majorities in both chambers; and (c) keep telling pollsters that they’re not on board with the GOP’s repeal plans.
Second, for John Barrasso to decry “senseless obstruction” without appreciating the irony is completely bonkers. The far-right Wyoming senator has been almost hysterically obstructionist when it comes to health care policy in recent years, at one point going so far as to demand that officials “stop celebrating” good news related to the ACA reform effort.
——————————————————————————————————–
Hospitals: GOP may create ‘an unprecedented public health crisis’
Hospitals are not known for being especially political or ideological. Everyone gets sick; everyone occasionally has a medical emergency; and so everyone has a vested interest in making sure hospitals are stable and secure facilities.
And with that in mind, when American hospitals start to panic in response to Republican threats, the public ought to take note. The Washington Post reported yesterday:
The nation’s hospital industry warned President-elect Trump and congressional leaders on Tuesday that repealing the Affordable Care Act could cost hospitals $165 billion by the middle of the next decade and trigger “an unprecedented public health crisis.”
The two main trade groups for U.S. hospitals dispatched a letter to the incoming president and Capitol Hill’s top four leaders, saying that the government should help hospitals avoid massive financial losses if the law is rescinded in a way that causes a surge of uninsured patients.
The dire warning was issued alongside this study (pdf) from the AHA and the Federation of American Hospitals, detailing the severe financial consequences for the industry if the nation’s current system unravels as a result of the Republican agenda.
rikyrah
What Does it Take to be White?
by Martin Longman
December 6, 2016 3:15 PM
In a new piece in the Atlantic, Emma Green explores whether or not American Jews can be considered “white.” Apparently, the election of Donald Trump has given this question new urgency since white supremacists supported his campaign and one, Stephen Bannon, has become Trump’s chief adviser. Bannon’s ex-wife alleged in court that Bannon would not let their children attend one school because it had too many Jewish students (who he referred to as “whiny brats”), wondered why another had so many Hanukkah books in the library, and opposed a third because it used to be housed in a Jewish Temple. Bannon did not contest the allegations at the time (“it would serve no useful purpose to refute each of the critical comments Petitioner has directed at me.”) and some of them have been independently corroborated by reporters who tracked down the school administrators who interacted with Bannon at the time.
It’s pretty hard to define whiteness, but it’s probably good to put things in perspective by asking why the Irish were not originally considered fully white and how they became so. In some ways, both Jews and the Irish have always been white, as least as far as immigration and citizenship laws are concerned. But they both experienced discrimination in housing and employment, as well as social estrangement and politicized racism.
The controversial Noel Ignatiev explored the Irish’s journey in a 1995 book called “How the Irish Became White.” Maybe you won’t fully embrace his thesis, but however it came about no one, including Irish-Americans, questions their “whiteness” today.
American Jews overwhelmingly self-identify as white when forced to choose, and secular Jews seem to blend in and certainly don’t experience police harassment or suffer from other disabilities suffered from darker-skinned minorities like being treated as presumptive shoplifters. I haven’t forgotten that former Chief Justice William Rehnquist had restrictive covenants in the deeds of two of his homes that barred their sale to Hebrews or nonwhites, but I think housing discrimination against Jews is mostly a thing of the past (correct me if I’m wrong).
In a lot of ways, then, Irish-Americans and Jewish-Americans have become white over time. I was doing some research recently on the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Indiana during the 1920’s, and it was quite clear that the organization at that time in that state was much more anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish in its outlook and priorities than anti-black. I don’t think that legacy has simply disappeared on the far right (or Alt Right), but it does seem like anti-black racism has more power at the moment.
I don’t think you bother to ask if Jews are white, though, unless you think they’re under some kind of renewed threat. Stephen Bannon sits at the left-hand of the president, and he’s known for making anti-Semitic remarks, not for bashing Catholics.
Of course, most Latinos and certainly most Mexicans are Catholic, but their religion seems like less of an animating factor for Trump’s anti-immigration supporters than their race, their language, and the perception that they compete for low wage jobs. I guess for the Klan, their Catholicism is one more mark against them, but not the first and most important one.
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: the evil elites thing has been ‘gay’ about as long as it’s been ‘jewish’ though. I would argue that the other ones are secondary–most people actually knew/know a woman, or an immigrant, etc.
Botsplainer
@ruemara:
To be fair, the ox penis soup I had in China a couple of months ago was pretty decent.
So I guess you could say I ate a bowl of salty dicks. And enjoyed it.
DCF
@Mark B:
Who’s To Blame For Hillary Clinton’s Loss?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNZmXhxuThU
BTW…if the abusive, expletive-laden, emotionally reactive responses so common here (in response to differing opinion/perspectives) don’t land the given offender(s) ‘in moderation’, then the term ‘sheeple’ sure as hell shouldn’t do so….
Botsplainer
@ruemara:
To be fair, the ox pen!s soup I had in China a couple of months ago was pretty decent.
So I guess you could say I ate a bowl of salty dicks. And enjoyed it.
hovercraft
Leading GOP obstructionist decries ‘senseless obstruction’
Watching irony die can be an exasperating experience.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 4 Republican, said that on issues like health care, he hopes [Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer] “works closely with us, listens to the voices of the voters around the country and ends this really senseless obstruction.”
Let’s take a minute to unwrap this, because it’s one of the more jarring quotes of the year.
First, listening to voters’ voices isn’t a bad idea, but in the most recent election cycle, voters (a) preferred Hillary Clinton by a considerable margin; (b) shrunk the Republican majorities in both chambers; and (c) keep telling pollsters that they’re not on board with the GOP’s repeal plans.
Second, for John Barrasso to decry “senseless obstruction” without appreciating the irony is completely bonkers. The far-right Wyoming senator has been almost hysterically obstructionist when it comes to health care policy in recent years, at one point going so far as to demand that officials “stop celebrating” good news related to the ACA reform effort.
Gator90
@rikyrah: “Jewish-Americans have become white over time”
Is it possible to decline this dubious honor?
hovercraft
Hospitals: GOP may create ‘an unprecedented public health crisis’
Hospitals are not known for being especially political or ideological. Everyone gets sick; everyone occasionally has a medical emergency; and so everyone has a vested interest in making sure hospitals are stable and secure facilities.
And with that in mind, when American hospitals start to panic in response to Republican threats, the public ought to take note. The Washington Post reported yesterday:
The nation’s hospital industry warned President-elect Trump and congressional leaders on Tuesday that repealing the Affordable Care Act could cost hospitals $165 billion by the middle of the next decade and trigger “an unprecedented public health crisis.”
The two main trade groups for U.S. hospitals dispatched a letter to the incoming president and Capitol Hill’s top four leaders, saying that the government should help hospitals avoid massive financial losses if the law is rescinded in a way that causes a surge of uninsured patients.
The dire warning was issued alongside this study (pdf) from the AHA and the Federation of American Hospitals, detailing the severe financial consequences for the industry if the nation’s current system unravels as a result of the Republican agenda.
Betty Cracker
@DCF: You’re spouting scriptural references and invoking your prophets again, brother, and even referring to us as a flock, which confirms my suspicions that you’re driven by religious zeal. I admire very little about your fact-free approach to explaining the mysteries, but I’ll give you this: You’re as persistent as a megachurch pastor pursuing a terminally ill widow with a fat trust fund.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DCF: the fact that you use bold face type to pimp your ridiculous links to silly, screeching, self-righteous cranks is highly clever, and bigly persuasive
rikyrah
For Republicans, Being Anti-Science is a Feature, Not a Bug
They ultimately want to prove that government is a problem, not a solution.
by Nancy LeTourneau
December 7, 2016 10:36 AM
It is hard to imagine two people more polar opposite than Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Perhaps someone will eventually write a book comparing these two men because that is what it would take to adequately explain the myriad ways that they are mirror images of one another. But I’d like to take just a moment today to zero in on one big difference that could have a dramatic effect – not only on how our federal government works – but how it will affect the American public.
One of the things that is not often mentioned about our current president is that he is a genuine science nerd. We’ve seen that in myriad ways over the course of the last eight years – most notably in how he has done so many things to inspire young people to study science. A couple of months ago, Obama was the guest-editor of WIRED magazine. In his editor’s note, he explained his love of science.
When it comes to governing and policymaking, that is why you’ll find this statement on the web site of the Office of Budget and Management:
This is an example of how President Obama is less driven by ideology than he is by pragmatism. His statements to Republicans over the years about his willingness to consider their proposals if they could demonstrate their effectiveness was not so much a kumbaya call to bipartisanship as it was an attempt to call them out. He knew their only plan was obstruction and that they didn’t really have any pragmatic solutions (see: Obamacare).
SenyorDave
@hovercraft: Second, for John Barrasso to decry “senseless obstruction” without appreciating the irony is completely bonkers. The far-right Wyoming senator has been almost hysterically obstructionist when it comes to health care policy in recent years, at one point going so far as to demand that officials “stop celebrating” good news related to the ACA reform effort.
Until my New Year’s resolution kicks in, I’ll just lump Barrasso into the I hope he DIAF group, like pretty much all nationally elected Republicans. Because the country would be so much better off he and his buddies simply didn’t exist anymore.
Botsplainer
@Iowa Old Lady:
I love U of L – I hold two degrees from there, and hold both football and basketball season tix. I also despise Matt Bevin with the heat of a million suns.
That said, the situation is murky – prior governors made appointments without reading the fine print of state law, which does appear to mandate political and ethnic diversity. They were appointing passionate University supporters without delving into those aspects of the lives of appointees. Ultimately, you had boards which were overwhelmingly white and democratic.
There really did need to be a fix, but Bevin, being a stone moron, didn’t follow procedural rules PLUS overly catered to the Christer fuckheads of Southeast Christian Church, a local megatemple of pharisaic hypocrisy that claims 23,000 members (Louisville isn’t religious as a whole and has a huge liberal Catholic population, so Southeast grew itself by hollowing out smaller Baptist, Methodist and unaffiliated congregations, and there are closed churches all over).
Anyway, he had advance warning, but did it anyway.
hovercraft
I guess now we know how such an “honorable man” such as Bob Dole was the only GOP Statesman to endorsed the shitgibbon.
Trump–Taiwan Call Was Culmination Of Months-Long Lobbying Effort By Bob Dole
schrodinger's cat
@hovercraft: Honorable Republican is an oxymoron
randy khan
I’ve seen some variation on the Brookings story several times in the last few weeks, and my takeaway seems to be different from what other people see. I see that the people who are doing well voted for Clinton and the people who aren’t doing well voted for Trump. The Democrats might want to ponder what might get the people who aren’t doing well to vote for them – I mean, those people should vote for the Democrats in the first place, but obviously they think otherwise. It’s something that ought to be addressed.
(And, just to be a little contrarian about the story – the big correlation may well be between population density and voting, not between economic output and voting. I’d be interested about what would happen if you changed the metric for the analysis to per capita income; maybe nothing, but maybe a lot less of a correlation than you see in this version.)
hovercraft
Slaves to California and the Lib/Brown Person Raj
But I wanted to flag a short opinion column which I believe captures a critical element of what is happening in the country right now: our constitutional architecture can allow popular minorities to dominate or at least disproportionately influence the nation’s politics. But not permanently. This was the case for most of the 19th and 20th century. But it can’t do so forever. Even in this period of nationwide Republican dominance I think most Republicans realize it is a fragile grip.
Here’s the rather breathtaking column by Michael Barone, in which he argues that the electoral college is important because it is preventing California from exercising ‘colonial’ rule over the rest of the country.
It is a very unlovely argument. It has a number of statistical ins and outs. But these two passages capture it.
White middle class families have been pretty well priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic.
…
California’s 21st century veer to the left makes [the electoral college] a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London’s disdain for the “lesser breeds” it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.
One might argue, and with some truth, that we shouldn’t make too much of this argument since this is just a particularly ugly pushback against those arguing Trump lacks a measure of democratic legitimacy for losing the popular vote.
But there’s a bit more than that to it, I think.
This is the mindset of a person and, I think, a political movement that fears that their power cannot be maintained in the context of majoritarian democracy. It’s of a piece with voter suppression, voter ID checks, expulsion of undocumented immigrants — the nationalist surge that drove the outcome of this election.
The big takeaway both parties took from the 2012 election was that Republicans had maxed out the white vote and that it still was not enough to prevent Barack Obama’s reelection. That was the predicate for the Republican post-election ‘autopsy’ and a lot of Democratic confidence going into 2016. That assumption was wrong. In part it was wrong because the 2012 exit polls slightly but significantly distorted the electorate, making it look younger and less white than it was. (That’s a story for another post.)
But it wasn’t that wrong. Whites continue to make up a shrinking portion of the national electorate. It’s no accident that of the three Republican presidencies since George Bush left office in 1993, two lost the popular vote and one won it only barely. This isn’t a fluke but an escalating trend.
This does not mean that 2016 was a hiatus on the way to the Democratic millennium and that Democrats just need to hold on until the Trump coalition shuffles off the stage. That is definitely not what I mean. What I think it does mean is that the kind of ‘last election’ apocalyptic speechifying we saw this fall from Trump and others did not and will not end with Trump’s unexpected victory. We are still in that moment. It continues to permeate everything in our politics.
schrodinger's cat
@randy khan: It was a giant fuck you to the people doing well. Spite vote.
Elizabelle
@DCF: Would you just go away?
You’re so clearly superior to the rest of us, why waste your time here? Many of the ideas you link to would get a more respectful hearing if you did not lob them as weapons. As you do.
Fuck off, dcf.
Botsplainer
@hovercraft:
Dole’s support of Twitler was driven by the purest of motives rooted in economic anxiety.
schrodinger's cat
@hovercraft: I have said this before, they want an Apartheid America.
DCF
@Betty Cracker:
Your responses are emblematic of the dismissive hubris that cost the Democratic Party – and the nation as a whole – this election cycle.
It’s clear that you are content to stay within an echo chamber such as this one, and to exclude any/all perspectives that may threaten that approach.
I regret that this is your choice. As an earlier commenter noted, ‘extinction’ is the fate of those who do not choose to evolve.
Democrats regroup; Name Bernie Sanders to leadership role
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDz1uL_ueko
tobie
@Betty Cracker:
This one’s for the ages. Bravo!
bemused
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’ve often thought these folks would not fare well at all if they had to live in another country and learn another language from scratch. Adapt? Forget about it.
And immigrants here get absolutely no credit for adapting and thriving here.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Patricia Kayden: Yeah, but are they as awful as Trump supporters? You gotta choose the lesser of two weevils.
Botsplainer
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yup.
Let me sum it up:
The Dudeist
@Baud: Then I want to ask them what happened to their rallying cry of states rights? Oh yes, that only works when they don’t have the white house or senate.
Wow.
SiubhanDuinne
Just saw a headline that Trump has picked retired Gen. John Kelly to head DHS.
Kelly, Mattis, Flynn. Am I the only one concerned about the concentration of career military men in the incoming defence/security leadership?
ETA: My concern is totally apart from their qualifications, ideology, or lack thereof. It’s just … So Many Generals.
schrodinger's cat
@bemused: Another country? Many of these folks don’t want to move to the next county or state. Another country is a bridge too far.
T did well among those who have never moved more than 25 miles from their place of birth.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@J.:
The plan involved some guy named Deckard….
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: California is geographically distant? From what? We have like 15% of the population.
Chris
@hovercraft:
Like I keep saying: hang out on a right wing blog for any length of time and you’ll eventually get to the conversation about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to vote, with a staggering number of demographics tossed in the “shouldn’t be allowed to” column – all demographics that, they don’t really mind admitting, should basically be banned because they vote liberal and that’s bad.
All the talk about voter fraud, the electoral college, the importance of making sure people in low-population areas have a saying in things too, it’s just bullshit for polite company. The conservative voter base does not believe that we all have a right to vote. It does not believe that a government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Period.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SiubhanDuinne: Nope, and as one who’s been thinking that Mattis would at least be a sane person, I was very unhappy to see him appear the hair furor’s rally, grinning and speechifying. The argument for the “Warrior Monk” is supposed to be his massive library of history.
The R head of the committee where Mattis’s waiver would need to originate was protesting the idea that it should just be rolled into whatever the latest budget stop gap is, he wants it formally presented and debated as a bill, but I expect him to be rolled. It’s the kind of thing the Mattis of media imagination and propaganda (see also, John McCain and Lindsey Graham) should be insisting on.
bemused
@schrodinger’s cat:
Exactly. They have panic attacks.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes. Yes, they do. Remember Pat Robertson in the eighties literally saying that “one man one vote” democracy in South Africa would not be “wise.” Any system in which they’re not guaranteed a lock on power is illegitimate to them.
hovercraft
@DCF:
The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class
To many white Trump voters, the problem wasn’t her economic stance, but the larger vision—a multi-ethnic social democracy—that it was a part of.
Click over to the Atlantic and follow the links, and when you’ve read the data disputing your bullshit, Frank’s too, come back and we can discuss the fats, not your impressions and anecdotal “evidence”.
Either that or shut up asshole.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: that is… not good.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just read this morning in the 9 billionth story about WWC’s voting for Trump: Some mayor in WV who thinks Trump’s gonna reopen the coal mines and our kids who have gone down to North Carolina will come home.
Patricia Kayden
@OzarkHillbilly: Bub but but VP Pence told Morning Joe that Flynn’s son was never a member of the transition team. Pence is a Christian and would never lie so what’s going on here? I’m aghast!!
The Dudeist
@DCF: Sorry, we won the popular vote by a solid margin. I stand by my belief America wanted to progress. You can lecture and cajole all you want but the reality is you guys won on what is known in the fight game as a technicality.
We want to help people. You guys want to hamstring people in order to control them. We want diversity. You want the status quo where big business gets over on the rest of us. We push business to be accountable and pay fair wages. YOU guys whine and defend said big business to pay shit wages.
In the end, history will be with us. One concern is that this incoming President will do damage that no other has ever done (and I am counting Hoover and Fillmore and even Bush II) let’s hope fringe voters who went with Trump solely because they always believed a bidnessman could run the country better than a politician (especially one they viewed as dishonest, even if we all know that’s a crock too) will come back when they realize said master of commerce can’t even tie his shoes without somebody showing him how.
The folks who vote for Presidents because they like swagger and attitude? Proof is in the pudding – Obama won twice. It can be replicated. Be careful you do not overplay your hand in the next year. HE HAS NO MANDATE and neither does a congress that has a national approval rating in the teens. CASE IN POINT? Ryan talking down his need to destroy Obamacare and Medicare.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: it’s not a waiver. We should stop calling it that. The president-elect wants us to rewrite the law so he can put a military person in a civilian position.
gvg
@DCF: sheeple was a favorite derogatory expression of an abusive personality that used to attack here, so I am not surprised it causes moderation here but not elsewhere. I can’t call her a troll as I don’t think the fights she provoked were meant to be entertaining. She tried coming back under various names but was pretty recognizable. kind of crazy too. I recommend you pick some other phrase that means the same if you want to avoid moderation. It was a few years ago.
Patricia Kayden
@satby: From reading Richard Mayhew’s posts, it appears that the Republicans are kicking the can on actually implementing the repeal of the ACA for up to three years. In other words, they’ll make a big show in January on repealing it but won’t actually do anything to implement that repeal until they can come up with a replacement (which most likely will be never). At least that’s how I’ve read Republican plans vis-a-vis the ACA.
Schlemazle
Politiho is reporting that Bob Dole & his consulting company has been paid $140k over the last 5 months by Taiwan. For that money he arranged meetings a couple months ago for the government with some guy called “Jeff Sessions” and arranged a phone call with the Pissant-Elect.
The Dudeist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wow, NC has an economy at least. WTF would any kid who leaves WV come back to work in cole mines? Idiocy.
Schlemazel
Politiho is reporting that Bob Dole & his consulting company has been paid $140k over the last 5 months by Taiwan. For that money he arranged meetings a couple months ago for the government with some guy called “Jeff Sessions” and arranged a phone call with the Pissant-Elect
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I do think it’s a problem that economic activity is increasingly concentrated in mega-metropolises. It sucks not just for the people stuck out there in the hinterlands who can’t find decent jobs, but in some ways for those of us in the mega-metropolises. Housing costs are high, we have to move away from where we grew up to find a decent paying job, and the traffic is horrible and there are many other associated inconveniences (long commutes being chief among them).
I’m sure it has something to do with technological change and the types of jobs available but it is a problem. I live in the DC area, and I’m reasonably happy here, but I’d be just as happy, maybe moreso, if you plunked my job down in my home town of Grand Rapids, MI. My commute would be shorter/quicker and more predictable. Housing costs would be much lower, making it easier to get by on one salary and to save for retirement.
The Dudeist
@Patricia Kayden: Further proof they are reading the tea leaves when it comes to what they can get away with in terms of the base that votes for them. Even many of them are on twitter asking Trump not to dump Obamacare without a replacement.
hovercraft
The Shitgibbon will deny this till the day it dies, Putin did not meddle dammit, the shitgibbon won all by it’s self.
Steve Benen
Before the election, Trump said he simply did not believe American intelligence agencies when it came to Russia. After the election, he evidently hasn’t changed his mind. Time, which today named Trump “Person of the Year,” reports:
For reasons that remain unclear, Trump still refuses to acknowledge the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s agencies were responsible for stealing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails released on WikiLeaks. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump says.
Asked if he thought the conclusion of America’s spies was politically driven, Trump says, “I think so.”
It’s not at all clear why, exactly, Trump believes this, and he’s never explained what’s led him to question the veracity of the American intelligence — other than his own personal preferences.
It does help explain, however, why the president-elect has blown off most of the available national-security intelligence briefings that have been made available to him during the transition process: Trump doesn’t seem to believe what U.S. agencies have to tell him.
Once he’s in office, making life-or-death decisions about international affairs, Trump’s skepticism about his own intelligence agencies might make things … how do I put this … problematic.
Major Major Major Major
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: maybe if the people in the hinterlands weren’t so convinced that any government assistance to people other than auto workers and farmers was communism, we could have some decent transportation infrastructure and national broadband that would make these problems significantly less bad.
Mnemosyne
@The Dudeist:
FWIW, conservatives in America have only ever believed in “states rights” that benefited them directly. The Fugitive Slave Act was an enormous violation of the non-slave states’ rights, but that didn’t matter since it benefited the slave states.
Same rules are going to apply here, because conservatives only believe in “states rights” that benefit them.
Chris
@hovercraft:
Jesus fucking Christ. He’s not even trying. Once again, white people are the only ones that matter.
For all the talk comparing this to 1930s Germany, it’s been far more instructive for me to see the parallels between now and the era after the Civil War. When a consensus rapidly formed that what the nation really needed was for white Yankees and white Rebels to hug it out, and also, no more of this irresponsible nonsense about the failed experiment “Reconstruction.”
Helen
Just saw on RTE (Irish) news that Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year. The reporter then said “Trump said he was honored by the news”. They then showed the melting Trump Time covers from the election and the reporter started to laugh!!
The Dudeist
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Yes, agreed but here’s the thing…I have relatives in these areas and education is not so great, infrastructure is lacking. Why should any plant or business invest in areas that do not do all they can to be attractive to a potential megabucks employer?
Shoot, these small towns are so deluded they don’t get that their leaders give Wal Mart subsidies to move in and then that results in small businesses closing down because they can’t compete. These red state small towns do not value the things that would make them competitive. Not trying to be a jerk, just trying to understand why we should throw them a bone? Bootstraps and self reliance is what these people preach ad nauseum so if say California was smart and built up infrastructure and opportunity why should they lose out because small town Mississippi or Alabama or even Kansas keep electing people who do nothing for them or their towns?
The Dudeist
@Mnemosyne: Agree, when they aren’t in control…states rights. When they gain control…let’s do an outright ban.
It’s so stupid.
Patricia Kayden
@hovercraft: To me, anyone who prefaces discussions about the working class with the term “White” is a straight up racist. The working class as a whole was not ignored by Democrats or Secretary Clinton during the election cycle. White racists shouldn’t be catered to and it appears that this hew and cry about Democrats ignoring the working class = Democrats didn’t pay enough attention to White people’s preferences/desires/wants. If Democrats start catering to White racists, they can say goodbye to me.
If DCF is another Trump-voting troll, he won’t read your well linked comment since facts aren’t important to Rightwingers.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: states rights was always supposed to be a dog whistle, not actually believed. Now we’ve got people that actually believe the dog whistles.
Sessions and the paleocons never did.
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: Trump is (to hear him talk) convinced that politicians and bureaucrats have ruined everything. “Any good manager can manage anything”, according to B-School folklore, and being rich obviously means they’re good, therefore business-types are a natural pick for him. Generals have that aura of “America First!!1” that he’s trying to ride for even more power, and they supported him early on (“I have
20088 Admirals and Generals that have endorsed me!!1″), or at least some of them did. Others, not so much.It’s going to be a disaster, but we don’t know the scale yet. We have to make them own their incompetence…
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris
@hovercraft:
This is an old problem between conservative presidents and the intelligence community. Trump’ll just kick it up to eleven.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
also hilarious that the old fool thinks he “comes from” and speaks to the guns-n-bibles culture of western WI, northern MI, IA, central PA and the Ohio river valley. I’m sure all those folks would’ve been lining up to vote for the guy who was unemployed till he was thirty-seven, lived on a commune, marched with the Sandinistas and wanted to raise their taxes to send other people’s kids to college.
Chris Hayes was all excited that he’s going to be doing a town hall with St Bernard in Wisconsin. I was gratified to see that most of his twitter feed reacted with “Oh, FFS…”
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I heard that Mattis was there, although I didn’t watch or listen to any of the rally so I don’t know what he said. I, too, was slightly reassured by the fact that at least he’s well-read.
If I’m not mistaken, Flynn doesn’t require Senate confirmation, but the other two do. I wonder whether anyone in Congress will question the abundance of generals among Trump’s nominees.
(And, shallowly, I’m also thinking that in addition to being attracted to medals and gold braid, Trump is very drawn to the whole hierarchical structure of the military, and really really likes the idea of a bunch of three- and four-stars calling him “Sir.”)
Patricia Kayden
@The Dudeist: I hold out hope that Trump will stop the ravenous Congressional Republicans from kicking millions of people off the ACA unless they can “replace” it with something as good or better. This may end up as a win for the American people, if all that ends up happening is tinkering with the ACA to fix its flaws.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Appart from those sparsely populated counties in the north, hell even OC and San Diego are coming around, you are far removed from the rwnj mindset. It’s not that you are geographically distant from Real America, it’s philosophically and politically. To overcome the newly acquired democratic super majority is daunting, California is a state with a huge population, so to move it back towards their side is a huge challenge. Yes you have 15% of the population, but they are the wrong type of people.
@Chris:
@schrodinger’s cat:
Perhaps they want us to ditch all the amendments to the constitution, no women, property owners, 3/5 ths, then you could have a white male dominated political system, just as god meant it to be.
The Dudeist
@SiubhanDuinne: The right won’t question because for them it’s this illusion of strength they love so much. Lots of generals = smart and strong. Wrong, yes. Problem is it’s like they never grew out of playing army men or something.
Chris
@Patricia Kayden:
And so is anyone who discusses the working class when he clearly only means the white one.
You and a ton of other voters. What we’d lose by making us attractive to the so-called WWCs would be more than what we’d gain.
Honestly. Imagine the Democrats a hundred years ago saying “we need to focus on the WASPs because all those Jews and Catholics make us look bad.” We wouldn’t have lost, we’d straight-up have ceased to exist as a party outside the South. That’s functionally what the “stooooooooop talking about identity poooooolitics!” crowd is doing now.
Patricia Kayden
@Chris: Can Senator Sanders explain why he didn’t appeal to the White working class when he was running for the Democratic nomination? It’s not as if he didn’t have the opportunity to reach out to these poor, helpless folks during the Democratic primaries. Why did he fail to communicate to them when he had the chance to do so?
Ridiculous. I’m still glad he lost to Secretary Clinton.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: oh, I know what the author meant, I just think he should have said it.
hovercraft
@SiubhanDuinne:
The military is still the most respected institution out there. It is hoping that sticking a bunch of them into it’s cabinet will give it’s administration a veneer of legitimacy. The hordes will love it, and the media will lap it up, “look at all the serious people” it has appointed.
The Dudeist
@Chris: Yes, but he is not a democrat. He’s an independent who caucuses with the Dems so he needs to definitely be reminded of this.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No doubt in my mind you’re right on both points. Remember, Trump is smarter than all the generals. I’m only surprised more of them weren’t offended, but I’m sure they all think he meant those other generals, they agree. I don’t know if Mattis and Flynn have a history of disliking each other, but people are predicting they’re not going to, and I believe the story that 2 star Mattis didn’t want anyone who outranked him in Turmp’s circle. I think Petraeus was also 4 star.
The Dudeist
@Patricia Kayden: I think his biggest flaw is that he goes on and on about the same things and for most GOP leaning working class types (read: white working class) they just tune it out as political talk. He really is doing himself harm by talking like this. If I was Bernie, I’d just keep working to push for fairness for all (like I thought he did back in the day).
Mnemosyne
@hovercraft:
The top issues that marked a Trump voter: immigration and terrorism. People who said their top issue was the economy voted for Clinton.
And if my fellow white people are too stupid to make the connection, I’ll spell it out for them: “immigration” and “terrorism” in this context are polite euphemisms for racism and xenophobia.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Don’t be silly, he has to be maintain plausible deniability. You others are just too sensitive and always looking to be offended, all he said was that the west coast I s just so far, and liberal Hollywood and the tech sector are pricing hard working American families out of the state, which is why they are fleeing to Texas.
See nothing about Mexicans, the blacks or the queers.
Major Major Major Major
@The Dudeist: he’s basically dead to me. I think that is far from his greatest flaw.
Botsplainer
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’m actually a little relieved on that one. His bio is noncontroversial in that he isn’t a raging asshole, and he’s got a department with some muscle in it. I had fears that it would be an incompetent loon.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m going to say it out loud: Sanders is more than a little deluded if he thinks the Bible-thumpers don’t care that he’s Jewish. They only love Israel because its destruction and the death of all the Jews will herald the End Times.
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
Hillary Clinton actually WON White voters making UNDER $50K.
She didn’t win their supervisors, who are only too happy to throw the WWC under the bus and push them out in front as the face of the Ferret Head voter.
SO STOP SPREADING THE LIE THAT THE WHITE WORKING CLASS DIDN’T VOTE FOR HILLARY!!!!!
Chris
@Patricia Kayden:
@The Dudeist:
The first time I blew up at something Sanders said was on this blog a year and a half ago, when he was giving an interview about the Democrats’ inattentiveness to the working class. The interviewer actually did bring up the fact that other than whites, the working class is very much in lockstep behind Democrats… which he immediately dismissed with the usual canards that, well, of course, blacks are going to vote Democrat because we just elected a black president, and Hispanics are going to vote Democrat because of immigration… But, look, if you’ll just pay attention to the white working class…
No one involved in this line of bullshit seems to have realized that when the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and basically everyone but the white working class that’s on board with the Democrats, maybe it’s the whites who are the odd ones out and letting other things overrule their economic/class interests. This will never occur to the Sanderses of the world, because they still see white people as the rational default voter who surely is motivated solely by intelligent self-interest, and surely, if only someone would give him the right message…
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
THANK YOU
THANK YOU
THANK YOU!!!!
SiubhanDuinne
@Botsplainer:
Right, I added a postscript to my comment that my concern at this point is not about the qualifications (or lack thereof) of Kelly or the other picks — merely the fact of there being so many high-ranking (yes, retired, but still) career militarists. “Not a raging asshole” is certainly reassuring, and worth a longer conversation. But at the moment, it’s just all that brass in the Cabinet and closest WH staff that is giving me pause.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: I was actually surprised when he didn’t pick a general as a running mate.
hovercraft
McCain thinks it’s ‘outrageous’ to ask him about Trump
But as it happens, McCain’s discomfort is ongoing. Last week, the Republican senator grew quite agitated with reporters who dared to ask him about his party’s new leader. “I’m not talking about President-elect Trump,” McCain declared. “I will not talk about Donald Trump…. Do not ask me again about Donald Trump.”
Since reporters don’t take orders from the Arizonan, McCain blew up again yesterday. The Huffington Post reported:
He got mad at a Bloomberg reporter who asked him about Trump’s tax plan, and repeatedly told him he’s not going to talk about the president-elect of the United States. When a PRI reporter asked when he would talk about Trump again, the Arizona senator responded, now somewhat playfully, “On the first of January, I promise to start answering these stupid, idiotic questions.”
This party is so pathetic, McCain is between a rock and a hard place, he obviously despises the shitgibbon, but it will be the next president of the United States, something McCain failed to do. He may hate him personally, but he is in large part to blame for where the GOP has ended up, he chose Sarah Palin, he normalized nominating a patently unqualified running mate, the media largely gave him a pass, and the party never looked back. It is now a party where Palin, Carson, are acceptable “qualified” candidates for the presidency. McCain , Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, they did this to the GOP, they showed the whackos that you could put an idiot one heartbeat away from the presidency, and the media would focus on her winks and clothes and her workout routine, so why not reach for the real deal and take it all? McCain cannot be the statesman because he is as much of a sellout as the rest of the party, and his constituents love the new guy. Couldn’t happen to a ‘nicer’ guy.
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: Gods bless XKCD.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
Something that keeps occurring to me is that, in one way, Sanders was right — there was an untapped group of white voters in rural and exurban areas. However, it turns out that the reason that group was untapped was that they were white supremacists who didn’t have a leader. Now they have one in Trump.
Thanks a lot, Bernie, you stupid schmuck.
Chris
@rikyrah:
This is, of course, the other big thing. While the white working class does remain much less politically liberal than its counterparts, the fact is that voting is still fairly class-based and that WWCs are still more likely to vote Democrat than their wealthier counterparts. Especially outside the South. Frequently (and apparently nationwide in this election as well), by majorities.
As a person who makes well under $50,000 a year, hearing my demographic invoked to cover the sins of the assholes who voted for Trump regardless of whether they are in fact working class enrages me to no end.
? Martin
Put another way, the US election reflects a vote against the high GDP per capita economy and is demanding a low GDP per capita result. Labor based manufacturing is low GDP per capita with the exception of just a handful of industries. Manufacturing was the higher economic driver to farming a century ago, and we minimized our farming labor force (not output – agricultural output is at record highs) to concentrate on the higher output (meaning better wages and quality of life, not to mention taxes to fund militaries, universities and the like) manufacturing jobs. We’ve since moved to minimizing our manufacturing labor force (not output – manufacturing output in the US is at record highs) to concentrate on the higher output service and information jobs.
Making fairly commoditized air conditioners is not going to expand GDP. Even making higher tech iPhones won’t. Building new global service industries is going to throw off a lot more economic output, and that’s exactly what Trump is threatening to tear down. We are not going to get an economic lift here. We’re going to get stagnation – companies afraid to launch in the US out of fear that they’ll be punished later by a president or a congress that doesn’t understand what an international expansion looks like, or companies that are dependent on foreign sales afraid they’ll be sucked into a trade war. Trump isn’t threatening to tax you if you start your business in China, only if you start it in the US and then move it to China. Why on earth would you start it in the US then? Start it outside the US and then extort some state into tax breaks or loan guarantees to move it in. There’s literally no upside to starting a business (or expanding production) in the US given Trump’s policies.
Miss Bianca
@hovercraft: You know, I used to love the Guardian back in its “Manchester Guardian” days (yeah, I’m that old). But this self-righteous strident “you know what YOUR problem is, liberals!!” tack they take with American politics is really starting to wear on me. It’s coincident, I think. with the fact that the Labour Party has become less about pragmatism, winning a broad mandate, and winning elections than it is about purity. THe one thing your old-school socialist-leftist cannot stand to realize is that hard-left stances are not, by and large, generally popular. A Tony Blair or a Bill Clinton may be anathema to them for any number of goodly reasons, but the fact that their purity ponies cannot achieve broader electoral success – in fact, can’t seem to find their asses in a dark closet using *both* hands – is something that they just can’t, or won’t, accept.
@Major Major Major Major: It *is*? Jesus, is that why I was thinking, “this sounds just like something that douchenozzle Thomas Frank would write”?
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
You haven’t mentioned the Office Kittehs recently. How are they doing?
Jodabbler
@Schlemazel:
Gator90
@Mnemosyne: They also admire Israel’s unapologetic oppression of brown people. Something to do with “Judeo-Christian values,” I think.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin:
Yyyyyep. If I leave the nonprofit sphere I imagine my employers will no longer be American, since I’m in a position that requires only a laptop and internet connection.
SiubhanDuinne
@Major Major Major Major:
I didn’t realize (or don’t remember) that he was considering any generals for VP. I was more worried that it would be Christie or Gingrich.
schrodinger's cat
@Miss Bianca: Guardian has always been leftier-than-thou since I became aware of it. Even in the context of Indian politics they promote people like Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy who write well and are ideologically pure but couldn’t get themselves elected to a council seat.
NR
Lots of people here really need to read this interview with Van Jones over at Salon.
And this part:
Really, read the whole thing. You guys need it.
Aleta
Besides being a lie, the idea that the Dems don’t speak for the WWC is a major piece of propaganda that is intended for use (along with “states rights” and “local control”) in the maneuvering to privatize public services, bridges and land for corporate profit.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: Yep, that one’s my favoritist XKCD of all. Except for this one, perhaps…
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
I knew it was going to be that one before I even clicked :D
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@rikyrah: I don’t think of WWC as white working class anymore, more like “White Whining Class”. You know, the white people who go get government out of medicare, and “they took our jobs!” while not actually looking at why their communities are falling apart.
(edited for more explanation)
LesGS
@randy khan: What do you mean by “doing well”? The exit poll results I’ve seen have under $50K folks going for Clinton and the over $50K going Trump.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: He also lost his son in Afghanistan for what that is worth,
tobie
@Chris:
My Yiddish is a bit rusty, but I believe one would say in a response to a statement like this, Geh in drerd arein.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: They are Ranch Kitties now! I told Schrodinger’s Cat the story the other day…
I miss them *terribly* at the store, but the Big Boss Man decided he didn’t want cats here, so I commandeered them and brought them up to my friend’s ranch before he could give them away to someone else. They’re living large – they have 40 acres to run around on, and everyone loves them. And they still like to snuggle, even tho’ they’re growing up
Botsplainer
Here is an interesting query, given Flynn’s predisposition is toward recklessness and Mattis is certainly more aggressive than I’d like.
In a scenario where Twitler decides to project force and something awful occurs resulting in a huge loss of life (say a sunken aircraft carrier or airstrike gone awry), how much resistance can we expect from the military about something crazy?
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: Wasn’t his SIL the one who ended up picking Pence? Fortune has a fawning piece about the process. It doesn’t look like any generals were in the running.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: Isn’t that the rallying cry that drives us all to argue here? ; )
Eric U.
@Baud: funny thing is, the coal mines are going to be increasingly automated too. Turns out those heartless bastards that run them would actually rather not kill anyone, and you can run more risks to get more coal, probably
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
I saw that when I looked up his Wiki bio. It is very sad, and I suppose it might bear on some of the policies, decisions and advice he gives Trump. Hope so, anyhow.
Chris
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
I mean, the term “white working class” is increasingly being blurred by the way it’s used culturally and not economically. Country’s full of people who’re doing better than fine for themselves, but imagine that because they own a badass pickup truck and some guns and don’t live on either coast, that makes them “working class.” Trump being dubbed a “working class billionaire” (which might have some meaning if he were actually self-made, but of course, he inherited, like every other big Republican) is the icing on the cake.
“White working class” may be joining “moderate Republicans” on the list of media buzzwords that’ve lost all meaning.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
Might be. I do remember that Trump supposedly wanted to change his mind about Pence late the night before the announcement, and the kids had to talk him down.
Thanks for confirming that there were no generals on the VP shortlist. I couldn’t think of any whose names had been mentioned.
liberal
@? Martin:
And you know this, how?
Service jobs, by and large, don’t pay as well.
And the service industry that really makes money is the FIRE sector, which is mostly about parasitic rent collection, not actually building real wealth.
liberal
@Botsplainer: A loon…like nominating a guy who thinks Iran and ISIS are in cahoots?
Brachiator
@NR:
So, if I read the whole thing, what magical understanding will I come away with?
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
Oh, I know you miss them! But they’ll have fun. Glad you introduced them to the joys of snuggling when they were still little. I assume you can go visit them whenever you want.
Jeffro
Sorry if I missed this upthread, but Kathleen Parker is calling for the EC to not elect Trump
I know, I know…but it’s better than her saying we should all sigh and get behind Orangemandias, right? The one thing she gets wrong is that the EC will never be able to settle on some sort of “consensus” candidate like Kasich,
Therefore, it’s imperative that Hillary speak up, note Trump’s disqualifying behavior (even just since the election), note that she won the popular vote by a vast margin, offer to form a unity government (specifics TBD, but certainly a large number of Republican cabinet members), possibly even pledge to only serve one term, and leave it to the GOP electors to vote their conscience.
Worth a shot – nothing left to lose here.
If you are of a like mind, please feel free to write to Ms. Parker…promote her column on Twitter and FB…send it on to Hillz…go for it!
NR
@Brachiator: That the attitudes expressed around here are destructive.
hovercraft
James Hohmann/WaPo
All this debating about “policy” is and was moot for a large portion of the electorate, the world economy is in flux, major changes are needed. For many voters, their livelihood is not as secure as it used to be. Just like all those people in poor neighborhoods who play the lottery religiously knowing they probably won’t win, these people chose to vote for the shitgibbon knowing it was full of shit, but on the off chance that he might actually be able to turn back the clock. That is why policy didn’t matter, it wasn’t one more policy proposal that would have made the difference to them, they system isn’t working for them like it used to, their kids won’t be better off than they are, so they rolled the dice. They know that shit rolls downhill, so they are hoping when the shitgibbon blows everything up the people who get screwed are those further down the ladder. The real WWC, those making below 50K are already hanging on by a thread, and that’s why they voted for sanity.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
QFT. She lost the white flighters.
hovercraft
@tobie:
Don’t know what that means, but my response is simply, GFYS Bernie, and then DIAFF. That is all.
gene108
@Chris:
There was a disruption to people working in the trades. Illegal immigration and really did hit a lot of blue collar people for jobs like house painting or hanging sheet rock.
The simple solution is to give those people work visas, so they can demand proper wages.
But a lot of folks seem to think the only acceptable solution is mass deportation. So you still have an underground workforce driving down wages and no real solution.
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: “Global service industries” != restaurant jobs or other ‘service’ jobs.
Kay
@NR:
My problem with it was this election really was unprecedented. It was weird. We had a reality tv show candidate, for one thing, he just refused to release anything and Clinton was essentially stripped naked. She had this long record and REAMS of info- they were all eagerly reading campaign emails and campaign emails will ALWAYS sound bad. There was a huge transparency GULF between the two candidates- and that’s all elections are- comparisons between two. Everyone knew everything about Clinton, good and bad, and 90% of people didn’t know Fact One on her opponent. It was unequal, wildly skewed.
Add to that what was real, measurable voter suppression in WI and NC, Wikileaks, the FBI, and the NYTimes leading the anti-Clinton pack and you have a lot of weird, one-off shit. You just do. Analyzing such a weird election as “not enough outreach to working people” just seems to deliberately ignore all the other factors.
I’m broadly sympathetic to the ‘working class outreach” argument but you can’t just ignore everything else. It wasn’t 2012 just because Clinton is not Obama. It was also NOT 2012 because Trump is not Romney. Trump is unique and these factors Ilisted are unique it’s not credible to me to just ignore how bizarre this election was
Chris
@gene108:
They tried to replace immigrant jobs with prison labor in Georgia eight years ago or so. They discovered that even prisoners weren’t willing to do work that hard for that kind of price. In other words, the jobs wouldn’t be getting picked up even if all the immigrants were deported. No gringo wants to do them.
The problem isn’t immigrants, it’s the unwillingness to pay living wages for these jobs.
hovercraft
@SiubhanDuinne:
Manafort conspired with the kids, he created some sort of problem with the plane that meant he had to spend an extra night in Indiana with Pence and is wife. But the re-think was to go with Christie, who they were all against.
Kay
@NR:
Think of the difference if just two factors had been even: wikileaks releases Clinton AND Trump emails and the FBI interferes on BOTH candidates.
Imagine Trump campaign emails. All campaign emails sound cynical and horrible but imagine his!
There was this insistence that we were comparing two candidates but that isn’t true. We were comparing a shitload of Clinton information – a daily barrage -to a smidge of Trump facts. He hugely benefitted from that. Anyone would.
NR
@Kay: Sure, this election was weird, no doubt about that.
But over the last eight years, the Democratic party has lost a ton of House and Senate seats across the country, along with governorships and state legislatures. With just a very few exceptions, the Democratic party has basically ceased to exist as a relevant political force outside of the northeast and the west coast. This presidential election was just the cherry on top of that particular shit sundae.
What the Democratic party had been doing for these past years has demonstrably failed. We need a new approach and a way to talk to the voters we’ve lost. Telling them that the pain they’re feeling is just a misguided yearning for white privilege isn’t going to get it done.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
This. There is absolutely NO LOGICAL REASON why service jobs have to be poorly paid. There is NO LOGICAL REASON service workers can’t be paid a living wage. It’s strictly because of the way people think about those jobs.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Exactly right — thank you for putting into words just how bizarre and unprecedented this election was. There are no easy answers. I wish there were, but there just aren’t.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
How is this Bernie’s fault?
Mnemosyne
@NR:
I realize that, no matter how many articles I link for you about the massive voter suppression operations that have been going on for over a decade, you will never, ever succeed in making the connection between suppression of Democratic voters and Republicans winning statehouses and governorships, but I guess I just can’t let your stupid, clueless bullshit go past without a challenge.
The only person who thinks it’s a mystery why Democrats suddenly started losing in states where Democratic voters were suppressed is you.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@NR: The Republicans talk to voters via hundreds of radio stations, multiple cable outlets, and a free broadcast network. How would the Democrats talk to voters? They have no messaging infrastructure.
Timurid
@Gator90:
You won’t have to decline it. It’s being rescinded.
Botsplainer
@liberal:
Oh, shit – that’ll teach me to just look at wiki.
He’s crazy.
Miss Bianca
@DCF: Bernie Sanders – Mr. “I’m not a Democrat until I want to be President, and the fact that I didn’t win the primary proves that the Democrats are corrupt”? Now there’s a guy with more nerve than sense, as my mother used to say. He can take his white lefty privileged self and fuck straight off back to the back benches where he was sooo much use before.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Rick Perlstein on the press.
Read it here.
Van Buren
@Major Major Major Major: instead of blaming the Walton family, where fault really lies.
DCF
@hovercraft:
I’ve read the article, as I subscribe to the magazine…The Nation as well, btw….
I see here that you conform to the archetypical Balloon Juice commentariat profile – deprecating, dismissive, and myopic.
Congratulations (smh)….
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Major Major Major Major: Agreed. Except that people think helping auto workers is communism (Obama got blowback from helping the auto industry and it was in fact that bailout that launched Rick Santinelli’s “Tea Party” rant that launched the movement). Only farmers get the exception. Oh, and Wall Street bankers…Santinelli didn’t complain when they were bailed out.
@The Dudeist: I see your point as well. But…leaving those places behind isn’t going to improve their voting pattern. I’ve had my moments when I think we just might as well let them wallow in what they’ve voted for and forget it but…there are Dems, even if they’re a minority, in those areas who vote for progress. Also if things keep going the way they are you’ll have totally crazified population in those areas and the disutilities of the megatropolises will continue to get worse. I don’t really have a solution to this issue on hand, I was just noting that the pattern of economic progress seems to have changed from one of broad geographic economic activity to economic activity heavily concentrated in large metro areas and that has some negative consequences for both the large metro areas and exurb/rural areas.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Miss Bianca: Bernie is part of the reason we’re here. You know the whole they are corrupt, she’s corrupt campaign. Then, followed by letting his supporters think everything was rigged against him. When you’re on the firing squad, just because your gun had a blank doesn’t mean you didn’t participate in the execution. Goddamn him.
SiubhanDuinne
@Van Buren:
What did John-Boy, Jim-Bob and Mary Ellen ever do to you?
DCF
@The Dudeist:
If, by ‘we’, you mean a (progressive) democratic socialist who voted for HRC because the carnival barkng, snake oil salesman and charlatan TRUMPF was a non-starter as a candidate (or a human being), you would be wrong.
You – and your cohort here at the Balloon Juice echo chamber – are complicit in advocating for a historically poor Presidential candidate whose every weakness played to her opponent’s strengths.
Tell me – how bad does a presidential candidate (on our side) have to be to lose to a rolling dumpster fire of a candidate like Donald J. Trump?
Clintonism is dying. If you wish to stand by and watch the steep decline (and inevitable death), be my guest…I’ll be working for non-incremental change(s) that will allow this country to realize its original promise….
Economist Who Predicted Brexit & Trump Brilliantly Explains Capitalism’s Collapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8bf6dbYt4&feature=youtu.be
Major Major Major Major
Trolls only ate up 10.37% of this thread, well done folks.
DCF
@Major Major Major Major:
Did you count yourself? Just sayin’….
randy khan
@LesGS:
Fair enough. I probably should have said “places that are doing well,” not “folks.”
Betty Cracker
@DCF: And yet you’ve neglected to rebut the points that article makes that contradict the garbage you’re linking throughout this thread like a Jack T. Chick pamphlet explosion. How unsurprising that your rigid dogma makes you impervious to data or ideas that didn’t originate from your own canon of the righteous — and that you accuse others of being in an echo chamber while you run around screaming about the One True Path.
DCF
@Betty Cracker:
Given that the bulk of the ‘points’ you refer to originate from a toxic waste dump of ossified dogma and self-serving policy, it may behoove you to cease projecting all over those who recognize that your own reflection is the source of your animus….
Stop referring to ‘purity’ and ‘righteousness’ in your responses. Perfection is unattainable, and those terms are simply code words for the same.
Memories here are short. I refer specifically to the howling, wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurred every time the efficacy of the HRC candidacy was questioned. For someone who was so utterly wrong for so long, perhaps it is high time to review the paradigm through (and upon) which you view the world.
Bernie Sanders’ Speech And QnA On Trump’s Victory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOLZAdZ9ig0
Betty Cracker
@DCF: You offer nothing but cut-and-paste crap and links from a couple of sources. You don’t engage the points others make — ever. So why in the hell would anyone listen to anything you have to say? In short, you are an evangelist, but you suck at that job, as evidenced by your repeat failures to convince others. I’m done with you — preach on in peace without fear of rebuttal in a dead thread. The sound of your own voice will echo loudly, and that’s all you’re interested in hearing anyway, so have at it.
NR
@Mnemosyne: Do you even read your own sources? Your own link says that only 20 states have new voting restrictions in place since the 2010 midterms. Guess what? That leaves 30 states that don’t have voter suppression.
I realize that you are too immature to even acknowledge that anything bad that ever happens might be your fault or the fault of someone you support, but you should at least take the time to read the sources you link and realize that they don’t even support your claim that voter suppression is to blame for all of the Democratic party’s problems.
To use just one example, take a look at Minnesota, which is controlled by Democrats. No voter suppression there. And yet Hillary only won the state by 1.4%. One of the most reliably Democratic states in the country, and Hillary won by a mere 1.4%, and the Republicans took control of the state legislature. If that’s not a sign that the Democratic party has problems in vast swaths of the country, I don’t know what is.
Now I realize that you think that you and the people you support are infallible and nothing bad that happens is ever your fault. But for any actual mature adults here, I encourage you to take a look at the political trend in America and think about whether what the Democratic party has been doing had worked.
(And before anyone accuses me of not caring about voter suppression, I agree it’s a bad thing and should be vigorously fought at every turn. But the facts simply don’t support blaming it for all of the Democratic party’s problems.)
NR
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Lack of infrastructure is part of the problem. But it starts by going to the communitites that the party has been ignoring. Read the Van Jones interview I linked earlier in the comments. That’s what he’s doing.
BintheD
@Schlemazel: I spent a part of the 70s flying in a Navy command and control aircraft that had the same damn thing – a 3 kilohootchie gold-plated bucket on a stick for memory. Truly 20th century stuff
randy khan
@NR:
States with new voting restrictions passed since 2010, based on a bit of research (so there could be more):
Alabama – voter ID, voter registration restrictions
Arkansas – voter ID
Florida – voter registration restrictions, voting rights restoral limitations, early voting restrictions
Georgia – early voting restrictions
Indiana – additional challenge rights (on top of existing voter ID)
Iowa – voting rights restoral limitations
Illinois – voter registration restrictions
Kansas – voter ID, voter registration restrictions
Mississippi – voter ID
Nebraska – voter registration restrictions, early voting restrictions
New Hampshire – voter ID
North Carolina – voter ID, voter registration restrictions, early voting restrictions
North Dakota – voter ID
Ohio – early voting restrictions
Rhode Island – voter ID (although less restrictive than other states)
South Carolina – voter ID (although less restrictive than other states)
South Dakota – voting rights restoral limitations
Tennessee – voter ID, voter registration restrictions, early voting restrictions
Texas – voter ID, voter registration restrictions
Virginia – voter ID, voter registration restrictions
West Virginia – early voting restrictions
Wisconsin – voter ID, voter registration restrictions, early voting restrictions
Note the states on the list that ended up being closer wins for Clinton than polls suggested or that went to Trump at least somewhat unexpectedly – Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin. Also, it includes Ohio, although in the end it wasn’t that close. Clinton won most of the states not on this list, often quite handily, and most of the rest are deep, deep red. So, while voter suppression may not be the whole story, it’s clearly a piece of the puzzle.
NR
@randy khan: Pennsylvania and Michigan (which Hillary lost) are not on that list, nor is Minnesota (which she almost lost and where the Democrats did lose control of the state legislature).
That voter suppression happened is not in doubt, but what has not been proven is that it altered the election result in any state. My position is that we should fight for the right of every eligible American to vote, not because it will help the electoral fortunes of the Democratic party, but because it’s the right thing to do.
So yes, fighting voter suppression is important. But to handwave away the Democratic party’s failures in a large majority of the country as only being due to voter suppression is just willful ignorance. The party needs to change, and that will be resisted by both the leadership that wants above all else to keep the corporate $$$ flowing into party coffers, and their loyal stooges, some of whom hang around here. But if the party doesn’t change, we can look forward to even more defeats in the future.
Steeplejack (phone)
@gvg:
“Sheeple” and “Watson” as moderation triggers were both rehabilitated a few months ago.
J R in WV
@BillinGlendaleCA:
No, Bill, I can touch a physical button, feel it, know which button it is, and push it, all without taking my eyes off the road. Same for turning up the volume with a knob you turn – easy peasy presto twisto done, without looking.
And those buttons on the steering wheel – half the time I try to change the volume using the buttons on the steering wheel, I hit some button that wants to hook a Bluetooth Phone up to the radio, which then tells me, nope, no Bluetooth phone detected over and over. Yeah, I know that, I keep the sucker turned off unless I’m calling someone with it.
Applejinx
@gene108:
I am an old man of 48 with a grey beard and how many of those things took place before I was born?
Not buying all of this ‘Dems automatically support the working class, except for they should stop being the working class and also move to a better state with more jobs that are already being well and truly fought over by better-trained people’.
I simply do not get all this alternately denying any problem, and lamenting unavoidable technology that will force us to send all the laborers to special camps where they can leave as chimney smoke because they are no part of a techno society. So much of this is crazy talk, bonkers.
Your problem is with the assumption that capitalism will provide for a multi-class/caste society in a time of automation and the decline of the human. That’s the problem. It’s almost as if the early Clinton distaste for the welfare state permeates the discussion and renders some things unthinkable.
We already have no meritocracy at all, and it’s only going to get worse, and if you have to manufacture morality to align with observed reality we’re fucked. The capitalist system fails to work when there’s this total disconnect between human labor and value. Time to rethink.
Applejinx
@Starfish:
THANK you. When the company Kodak, or Polaroid or whatever, goes bust and is replaced (in market capitalization and userbase) by a company like Instagram, that’s a net job loss the size of a small city, and there’s no comparable place for those people to go. It’s not like they can go across the street to another secretary job, or photographic film chemical coating job, or janitor for a building full of people like that, or mechanic to a fleet of trucks not needed at all by the Instagram-type company.
Understanding this is pretty important.