I went through a brief slatebro contrarian phase. Not sure how bad I was but I can’t deny the possibility that “Will Saletan has a good point!” was something I said once.
What’s the dumbest Slate-syle/very serious sort of thing you ever believed or argued in favor of? Mine is a two-way tie between telling my dad that they should “teach the controversy” on evolution (which I took directly from a Gregg Easterbrook article) and saying (to whom I forget) that maybe Fareed Zakaria was right that by invading Iraq and improving relations with Iran we could establish a bloc of US allies in the Middle East. (Note: I was against the war by the time it was being seriously considered.)
zhena gogolia
I’m proud to say I have no contributions to make to this discussion.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
Fucking why?
Big R
I’m not sure about specific policy options, but I know in college I tended toward technocratic/Third Way approaches, but other than being a “deficit hawk” I don’t remember anything in particular.
rikyrah
A black man went undercover online as a white supremacist. This is what he learned
Peter Holley
10 hrs ago
As soon as Theo Wilson started making YouTube videos about culture and race, trolls using racial slurs started flocking to his page.
After engaging in endless sparring matches in the comments section, Wilson began to notice something curious: His trolls seemed to speak a language unto themselves, one replete with the same twisted facts and false history. It was as if they had all passed through some “dimensional doorway,” arriving from an alternative universe where history, politics and commonly accepted facts had been turned inside out.
There was the idea that slavery was a form of charity that benefited enslaved Africans; that freed blacks owned more slaves than whites before the Civil War; that people of color make up the majority of those receiving aid from America’s safety-net programs; and that investor and philanthropist George Soros is funding protest movements like Black Lives Matter.
Curious about where his trolls were getting their revisionist history lessons, Wilson, 36, — an award-winning poet and actor from Denver — decided to go undercover in their world. In 2015, he started by creating a ghost profile named “Lucious25,” a digital white supremacist who appeared to be an indigenous member of the alt-right’s online echo chamber, he said.
His avatar was John Carter, the Confederate hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction series about death-defying adventures on Mars.
Within a few weeks Wilson’s alternate identity was questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace, railing against Black Lives Matter and bemoaning people he called “race-baiters,” such as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. After several months, he was a disaffected fixture on alt-right websites that draw white supremacists — such as Info Wars and American Renaissance — and in the comments section of racist YouTube videos
Doug!
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I don’t know, I was 25 and stupid, I guess.
rikyrah
in moderation, pleas help
rikyrah
Blood on His Hands: How Bernie Sanders Made Donald Trump President
Spandan Chakrabarti
August 25, 2017
For a long, long while, those of us who actually vetted Bernie Sanders from the Left had suspected that Bernie Sanders helped Donald Trump get elected president.
Here at TPV, for example, we pointed out that both Sanders and Trump appealed to a narrow demographic of ‘white working class’ voters (who we now know were motivated by the ‘white’ part in the last election rather than the ‘working class’ part) on the basis of xenophobia – Trump with his anti-immigrant boast and Sanders with a tradephobic message that singled out Latin American and Asian countries as the ones to be afraid of. Both Sanders and Trump failed – or more aptly did not care to – appeal to the broad, vast, diverse swath of America that came from all races, colors, creeds.
Both Trump and Sanders delved into violent imagery, although Trump much more directly so. Sanders did his part with invocation of ‘revolution.’ That revolution is seen by many Americans whose families come from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa as bloody, violent, and harmful was unseen by Sanders and his loudest supporters. To ignore that rhetoric is hardly better than right wingers claiming that confederate statues and flags are merely historical artifacts.
But until now, those of us who observed this phenomenon lacked hard numerical evidence of Sanders’ culpability in Trump’s ascent to the White House. We now have that evidence.
The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, a massive undertaking involving 50,000 poll-respondents, finds that fully 12% of Sanders voters in the Democratic primary switched their votes to Donald Trump in the general election. The most important factor that moved Sanders voters into Trump’s court? Again unsurprisingly to critical and objective Sanders observers, that factor was a form of racism – the denial of white privilege.
joel hanes
Just before the invasion of Iraq, Josh Micah Marshall had me half-convinced that the US government would not be acting as it was unless they had nearly-irrefutable evidence of the presence of deployable chemical weapons in Iraq.
Fool me once …
eclare
@rikyrah: wow, thanks.
Doug!
@rikyrah:
I think it got through now
rikyrah
Why Republicans Must Pay for Trump
Donald Trump is already the legitimate leader of just one half of one-third of the country. It’s time for the rest of us to act in concert and do what we need to do.
JOY-ANN REID
08.25.17 12:00 AM ET
Being away from New York and the news cycle for a few days gives you tremendous perspective and a bit of a mental health break, but the facts of our present situation become no less clear with distance from the cable news set. Donald Trump is no less a disaster this week than he was last week. And he will be no less a disaster next week than he is today.
Indeed Trump, lashing out at the media and whipping his audiences into a frenzy of xenophobia and Confederacy nostalgia, is in a sense not the president of the United States. True, he remains installed in office until by the grace of Bob Mueller he is compelled to resign or 2020 brings forward the better angels of American voters’ nature. But he no more leads this nation than a garden gnome grows your hydrangeas. He is an empty figurehead, mentally unraveling on live television and swinging wildly at the ghosts of his accidental victory and certain condemnation by history. To the extent he leads anyone, it’s little more than the same ragged cult of dead enders who’ve always been among us—who’ve swung back and forth between the parties for more than a century and who can’t bring themselves to regard the naked emperor in their midst or face the true meaning of their vote for him.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Trump earns a lopsided disapproval rating of 59 percent, with just 35 percent of Americans applauding the job he is doing. At this stage it makes little sense to wonder what that 35 percent are thinking. Suffice it to say it may be down to pure tribal loyalty. Per Quinnipiac: “[e]very party, gender, education, age and racial group disapproves” of Trump’s performance, “except Republicans, who approve 77-14 percent; white voters with no college, approving 52-40 percent, and white men, who approve by a narrow 50-46 percent.”
In other words, Trump is the leader of approximately one half of one third of the adult population of the United States.
…………………
It therefore falls to the Democrats, the imperfect, often scattered opposition party, to right the ship. This is no time for intraparty perfectionism or partisan protectionism. All who wish to see the Trump circus brought to an end need to focus on doing whatever it takes to put the Democratic Party in charge of Congress on Jan. 1, 2019.
eclare
@rikyrah: Have not read morning thread, sister doing ok?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
The US and the Soviet Union were the same and were both equally bad. Also compared them to two children on a playground fighting over a candy bar when they could have shared it. Yeah..
zhena gogolia
@joel hanes:
Oh, okay, if that qualifies as Slate. I was like, “Tony Blair! It must be true!”
Doug!
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
That is also the same, and I think only, topic on which I had a stupid opinion to the “left” of what I believe now. I didn’t realize what a tragedy it was for Czechs, Poles, etc. to have to live under Soviet control for 45 years.
randy khan
I’ve always thought it would be fine to teach the actual evolution controversy, although it would take about 3 minutes:
[Long set of lessons on evolution, Darwin, etc.]
[Towards the end of the last session:]
“There are people who argue that all of this is wrong. Even though they have no good evidence to show that evolutionary theory is wrong, they keep trying to get their ideas into science classes. This causes a lot of controversy, but it’s not science, and none of it will be on the test.”
* * * *
I guess that would take about 30 seconds, not 3 minutes. Even better.
rikyrah
Powerball winner already broke one rule. What else not to do
The winning ticket, purchased in Massachusetts, snagged a $758.7 million jackpot.
Putting a team of pros in place is key to protecting her money.
An estate plan should be implemented as soon as possible.
Sarah O’Brien | @sarahtgobrien
For 53-year-old Mavis Wanczyk, the newly minted winner of Wednesday night’s $758.7 million Powerball jackpot drawing, life is about to get crazy. And that might be putting it mildly.
“She better get ready. She’s going to be hit up for investment opportunities, charity requests, even people she knows are going to come to her,” said Jason Kurland, an attorney at Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman, a law firm in East Meadow, New York.
………………………………………
Although Massachusetts law requires lottery winners to be made public, some recipients in the past have created a trust and had a trustee accept the winnings to protect their anonymity.
By choosing to come forward so quickly — the state allows lottery winners a full year to claim their winnings — Wanczyk, of Chicopee, Massachusetts, has already made what many experts would call a mistake by not protecting her identity.
Kurland said the best thing she can do at this point is immediately hire an attorney who can shield her as much as possible from the onslaught of attention she’s in for from money-seekers.
Schlemazel
@joel hanes:
He had to be willfully ignorant to believe that. I was reading a lot of European press and they were doing a wonderful job of reporting. Many US media sources had the information but drown it out with war cries.
The Aluminum tubes were not adequate for using in a centrifuge
The Inspectors verified most weapons destroyed or well past their use by dates
No way Nigeria could supply that much yellow cake as they don’t have the infrastructure to deliver it
UN inspectors were being given unprecedented access and didn’t leave until Boy Blunder order them out
Iraq was not a supporter of the Taliban and was in fact considered an enemy
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, that was a Saudi operation
People need to be reminded, people like Josh
MJS
I don’t know if this qualifies as Slatebro material, but I was very briefly convinced that George Will (yes, I know) had a point that because he had lied about Lewinsky, Clinton should resign, because how could we trust him on big issues going forward? Will went on to point out that the results of the election would be honored because Gore would become president, not Dole.
Yes, I hang my head in shame, but take some solace in the fact that I don’t have any more recent examples to point to.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Doug!: Seriously, though – my most #Slatepitch opinion, which I still defend, is wrt music criticism: “Oochie Wally” is not actually a bad song (though still incredibly stupid), that the instrumental is easily much better than “Big Pimpin'”s, and that the only people who really love the latter song are (mostly-white) music critics trying way too hard to be “with it” (e.g., Christgau, Pitchfork & Rolling Stone). The first position is heavily advocated by Complex, which is very fitting.
Suzanne
I voted for John McCain once, for senator. I think this was back in 2004, because I was still married to my ex-husband (SHIVER). Don’t worry, there was no way that the Democrat was going to win that race. He had come to my university in 2000 when he was in the presidential primary, and I had not hated him and I felt kinda bad for him after his family got the Karl Rove treatment.
The stupider thing was marrying the ex. HOLY SHIT THAT WAS STUPID.
rikyrah
@eclare:
My sister is home from the hospital. I’m very thankful.
MattF
The Slate crew (except for Lithwick) never leaves the impression that they actually know anything about anything– so I’m generally innocent of propagating any of their arguments. The rise of Trump has made that criterion somewhat irrelevant. I’m pleased that Trump is mocked regularly at Slate, and only a little irritated about the venue.
Schlemazel
@rikyrah:
That should be committed to bronze and replace every damn memorial to treason in defense of human bondage as well as sent to every Steiniac and Bern dead-ender
Thanks for sharing
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@MattF: Current crew or the Lords iteration?
Doug!
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I agree with this.
Wapiti
@Doug!:
Your comment made me think: Things really sucked for the Czechs and Poles under the Soviets. Things really sucked for African Americans under Jim Crow. I need to find a way to point this out when people throw out ideas of letting the South secede if they want.
rikyrah
Trump is Making a Shutdown and Default More Likely
by Martin Longman
August 24, 2017
Goldman Sachs is now telling their investors that the chances of a government shutdown are fifty-fifty, which is their way of warning that a sharp downturn in the markets could be right over the horizon. But a possible stock market collapse due to a temporarily shuttered government is a fairly small risk compared to the likely result of a default on our sovereign debt if the debt ceiling isn’t raised before the end of September. Another distinction between the two is that there are fallback options if Congress can’t come to a deal on spending. They can pass a continuing resolution that keeps the government operating at current levels and give themselves more time. But they have to raise the borrowing limit or else we won’t be able to pay our bills.
In some sense, we can consider everything optional except the debt ceiling. The Republicans would like to rewrite our tax laws and our health care laws. They have ideas for how to change how the FAA operates and how flood insurance is sold and regulated. They’d like to use the CHIP reauthorization bill to advance some of their agenda. They can, and most likely will, fail at all of these things without it doing much, if any, damage to the economy or the country. Likewise, they’d like to base government spending on their own priorities, not the priorities laid out in President Obama’s last year in office. But if they have to continue the old spending regime to keep the government operating, there’s no real harm in that. They need to reauthorize defense spending, too, and they have some important priorities to advance in that process, too. But they can punt on that if that have to. It’s only the debt ceiling that represents a heart attack-level of seriousness. They can’t fail on that effort.
President Trump is already pre-spinning failure, however.
These would not be Trump tweets without lies attached, and it’s absurd to blame the Democrats for “holding up” debt ceiling approval. The Republicans are to blame for needing Democratic votes, but they have majorities and the vote on the debt ceiling cannot be filibustered. Since they do need Democratic votes, they can’t make demands. Even the Trump administration doesn’t think they should make demands. Trump’s problem is that too many Republican officeholders won’t listen to him.
Yet, the meat of Trump’s complaint here is that the Republican leaders didn’t follow his advice and have now created a mess. If this is an attempt to herd the congressional Republicans into passing a “clean” debt ceiling bill, it might make some sense. But it looks more like preemptive blame-shifting than savvy leadership. It might look better if Trump were offering an updated plan, but he isn’t. And the ironic thing is that Trump is giving a pass to the people who are responsible for creating the mess. He blames the Democrats for obstructing and the GOP leadership for ignoring his strategy, which gives comfort to the rank-and-file Republican lawmakers who are the real problem.
Kelly
I was convinced that GW Bush and the Republicans would cautiously govern toward the center to attract voters to their party after just squeaking in.
Schlemazel
@rikyrah:
That sounds like good news!
Tim C.
If I’m contrarian about a Slate post does that make it a meta-Slate response?
Actually, I think Slate has gotten a lot better for the most part, and it varies on who is writing the piece. Will Saletan seems to be a the “Fuck it, I can’t play that game anymore.” When it comes to Trump and Dahlia Lithwick is solid. Yes, they do a small number of “on the other hand” items, but it’s not the 2005-2014 version of Slate anymore. So anyone is free to point out the duds that still remain, but IMO, it’s better and worth reading.
rikyrah
They Haven’t Been Able to Destroy Obamacare…Yet
by Nancy LeTourneau
August 25, 2017
If you believe what Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are saying, you’d think that Obamacare is a disaster that is imploding as we speak. For example, at his town hall forum this week, Ryan said, “Obamacare is not working. We’ve got dozens of counties around America that have zero insurers left. So doing nothing really isn’t an option.”
First of all, it is important to remember that Ryan was referring to the Obamacare exchanges—where about 10 percent of Americans get their insurance. What he’s talking about doesn’t affect the other 90 percent who get their insurance via their employers or a government program. Even with that, Ryan was off by dozens because, of the more than 3,000 counties in this country, there was only one that didn’t have any insurers left in the exchanges. Now there are none.
Hannah Recht provides us with an important update. The last county with no insurers was Paulding County in Ohio. Yesterday, CareSource announced that they will sell marketplace plans there next year. Here is what the coverage map looks like right now for 2018.
eclare
@Schlemazel: Hell, I read the US press, and I read about how the tubes were unsuitable. It was on page 23 of the FYFNYT, not page one, but it was there. I still remember Howard Dean on tv saying there were no weapons.
MattF
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): I guess I’m not watching the shifts.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Doug!: I feel like I’ve actually moved further right, while still being on the left, since the election oddly enough. For example, I’m still broadly against the death penalty, but support it in response to vicious RW politically motivated attacks, like the Portland stabbings, Cville, and Dylann Roof. I think Trump has made me a worse person. During the healthcare debacle I can’t tell you how often I wished death on all of the Congressional Rs.
Brachiator
I think that for a brief time, I thought that “don’t ask, don’t tell” might be a reasonable compromise.
Doug!
@Wapiti:
Yes, that’s a good point. I hate the “let the south secede” stuff.
Major Major Major Major
IMO Slate has improved considerably over the years, and especially since Trump. I also like their advice column. And their occasional contributors like the astronomer guy. And they get interesting people for their interviews. Except they had Greenwald one time recently. Although they’ve made me dislike Jim Newell, which I didn’t think was possible, but it’s more likely that Jim Newell has made me dislike Jim Newell.
Anyway, uh, I dunno, I think at one point I thought I was “socially liberal but fiscally conservative”, and that the surplus should be given back to taxpayers, but I was like 17.
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I’ve certainly distanced myself from the left, but I don’t really see that as the same thing as moving right. It’s more a self-clarification that I never actually was a leftist.
ETA: Fun topic, thanks, Doug!.
Suzanne
@MattF: I really like Jamelle Bouie. Dahlia Lithwick has always been good. I miss the hell out of Simon Doonan. And their former architecture writer, Witold Rybczynski, is greatly missed by me. He did a great job explaining urban and design issues in an accessible way.
Really, the worst ones are/were Saletan, Hitchens, and Marcotte.
patrick II
The invasion of Iraq. Arrrggghhhh. I wasn’t particularly for it, but I wasn’t against it either. But before Iraq the government had never told as direct, important, and totally removed from reality lies as the the Bush administration did about the WMD in Iraq — well except for Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam in general. Except for supply side economics. And Law and Order. And big bucks getting free steaks, And… oh hell, I am naive.
In my defense, I had seen Clinton do a pretty good job in Bosnia. But Bill was competent, and actually had a plan for what happens after a war ends, unlike Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney who had the libertarian fantasy that with the absence of government and being without a plan that might limit capitalism was a good idea, a libertarian utopia would bloom in the desert. The birth pangs of democracy as Condoleezza put it. Just as insane in its own way as the donald.
Percysowner
Wow, I can’t remember when/if I agreed with a Slate commentator. I left Slate like 3-4 years ago when I finally had enough of Lord Saletan wanting abortion to be banned because he, personally, thought it was icky. I do still read Dear Prudence, because I’m an advice column junkie, and I never found Dalia Lithwick to be a problem, but I pretty much never look at any other writer over there.
hugely
Yay i love me some ronnie lane / faces. First doug j title i immediately started to sing.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
People dissing on hipsters all the time turns me off too. I’ve always thought they’ve had good taste in music (then again I’ll listen to anything besides country). And really they try to foster a greater social responsibility, or I’ve read. What’s wrong with that?
Doug!
Slate is much better now. Jim Newell writes there!
oatler.
What I see on ‘conservative’ sites is the religious argument that Nazis are really leftists and therefore evil. The KKK and skinhead followers of Trump are really leftists. Have I really been conservative my whole life?? If so, my bad…
MattF
@Suzanne: Generally agree. Hitchens was ever and always a cocktail party chatterer.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17
Pattern of hacking preceded attendee of Trump camp Russia meeting
Rachel Maddow describes some of the past work by Rinat Akhmetshin for his clients and notes that what seems to be a hallmark of his services happened to the DNC shortly after his participation in a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump campaign leaders.
Doug!
@hugely:
Great song, it was on my mind because I watched a Wes Anderson movie recently.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Doug!: Yes, it most emphatically is not the 467th best song in general, the 16th best rap song, or even in the top 40 Jay-Z songs. (And for what it’s worth, the instrumental never sounded particularly Egyptian, though I’d watched — and immediately HATED — the video at the wee age of 4, and it took place in the Caribbean, so my impressions may be a bit colored).*
While we’re at it, Pimp C doesn’t have the best verse by a long shot, Complex.
WRT Nas: “Big Girl” and “Angels (The Flyest)” are also the worst Nas songs ever recorded — though “Braveheart Party” & “You Owe Me” come reasonably close — and the rapper with the worst ear for instrumentals is not Nas, but Eminem. Easily. (Nas’ taste in beats generally punches below his weight, but that’s mostly due to procrastination. On a musical level, Hell: The Sequel, Infinite and the otherwise generally poor Relapse are really the only projects that consistently hold up over the years — the rest of the good albums have at most just over half the beats being decent).
*Largely because of the obnoxious I’M ON A BOAT aesthetic.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
I get so mad when I see this. Define ‘country’.
@Doug!: And Yglesias doesn’t, although he’s improved both in content and spelling since he left.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17
Broad Mueller mandate could mean crisis for Jared Kushner
Rachel Maddow reviews the litany of sketchy deals that have come to light around Jared Kushner, and talks with former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade about how Special Counsel Robert Mueller would likely build a file on Trump campaign associates in the Russia investigation.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17
Former Trump adviser Icahn on NY AG Schneiderman’s radar
Rachel Maddow reports on the response from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office when asked about questionable actions by very-recently-former Donald Trump adviser Carl Icahn.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
I still consider myself a social democrat, but Sanders has really fucked that brand up in the US that’s for certain. I don’t know. My politics don’t stem so much from a doctrine or ideology but from a sense of my own right and wrong.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: There’s great music in ‘country’, IMO. But also lots of garbage. So, it’s complicated.
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: I’m gonna call bullshit on this one graf from the above-linked piece:
I don’t disagree that the word “revolution” has a bloody, negative connotation for many folks. But to accuse an American politician who uses it — in a country that was founded upon and ostentatiously proud of its own revolution — as being as willfully offensive as Confederate apologists is absurd.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Unfortunately, this might also include family members.
I recall reading about a guy whose family and friends essentially became his entourage. This lottery winner wanted to travel, live the good life, but felt guilty that his friends and extended family could not afford to do all this stuff with him. So he would pay their way. This soon expanded into giving them money so that they could start businesses, etc. Eventually, the lottery winnings started to run out.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17
Trump looks to loot Afghanistan mineral wealth for US profit
Rachel Maddow shows that what was previously guessed at or darkly assumed about Donald Trump’s intentions toward Afghanistan’s mineral resources has been borne out according to a report that says Trump has assigned the task to Wilbur Ross.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17
Trump helps Taliban with talk of looting Afghanistan minerals
Laurel Miller, former State Department special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s interest in looting Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is harmful to the U.S. mission there.
Cacti
In my salad days, I believed poverty was mostly the result of poor life choices and if people just “pulled themselves up by the bootstraps” there was no reason they couldn’t escape it.
Then I spent some time in poverty myself.
It left me with a rather different view of things.
Miss Bianca
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I think I espoused this sort of opinion in high school. Or, at least, that Soviet-style Communism had some advantages over US-style capitalism. (which, for women, sadly, it actually did, tho’ that wasn’t the basis of my argument). I remember my father rolling his eyes so hard I could practically hear them.
rikyrah
CIA fears Trump’s chief ‘can’t resist the impulse to be political’
08/25/17 08:00 AM—UPDATED 08/25/17 08:50 AM
By Steve Benen
The Central Intelligence Agency is supposed to be an apolitical agency. Its director is supposed to serve the public’s interest, not those of any party or president. It’s critical to the CIA’s mission that the agency steer clear of partisan disputes, and be recognized – by policymakers and the public alike – as an independent intelligence agency.
But with Donald Trump in the White House, even the most basic functions of the American government have a tendency to be … different.
The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that the president’s CIA chief, former Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, is “perhaps the most openly political spy chief in a generation – and one of President Trump’s favorite cabinet members.” Trump has turned to the CIA director as an adviser on all kinds of issues unrelated to Pompeo’s duties, including the health care debate.
Overnight, the Washington Post took this quite a bit further, reporting that some CIA officials aren’t sure they can fully trust their own CIA director because of his apparent loyalties to his ally in the Oval Office.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Doug!: Also: What the fuck happened to Jack Shafer? I remember him being reasonably good at Reuters, and at least an on-balance-worthwhile writer at Slate (albeit a horrible editor), but since his move to Politico he’s been significantly worse than Cillizza and even Halperin — I still hold he was the fucking worst columnist during the election cycle). Is Cleek’s Law really that helluva drug?
rikyrah
@Cacti:
It’s expensive to be poor.
Wish a whole lotta folks could learn that.
MattF
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): I haven’t read Shafer recently, but ‘worse than Ciliizza’ is… low.
Doug!
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
He’s struggled with dealing with Trump. I think his weakness is that he’s too much of a troll and right now trolling often means tortured defenses of Trump.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker:
As little as I like Sanders, and as much as I’m willing to blame him and his claque of most hard-core followers for helping to enable Trump, I’m going to agree with you on this one.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@rikyrah: She had no choice about coming forward. One of her co-workers was with her when she checked the number. Said co-worker blabbed the news to everyone; the winner had no chance to get anything in place before she quit her job.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
As much as I think Sanders was and still is damaging the Democratic Party by driving the young to third parties and non-voting, I read that article and it doesn’t actually say what that lede sounds like. Those numbers are not particularly high compared to most elections or to Republicans, and analysis of that 12% showed that they were Republican ratfuckers.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
I guess I’m ok with Johnny Cash, Denver, and Buffet. Willie Nelson’s okay too. I don’t like “twangy” voices and songs about “hickish” things like Kenny Chesney’s She Think’s My Tractor’s Sexy, brocountry, or Taylor Swift’s country phase.
Matt McIrvin
Iraq, no contest. To some degree I blame the Clintons, who were both on board.
It made me resolve to pay closer attention to radical-left voices when they disagreed with liberals, which in turn led to some real disappointments in the 2016 election cycle.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: 90% of everything is crap, that doesn’t mean you say “oh I don’t listen to anything.”
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I gave up on trying to cram myself into a specific ideology or label a couple years back. I just say ‘liberal’ since the vast preponderance of good ideas are liberal, and most of the remaining ones are leftist.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Miss Bianca:
I remember being really shocked to learn that gay people didn’t really have rights in the supposed Worker’s Paradise of the USSR. I always, for some reason, thought it hypocritical of them.
jacy
@Suzanne:
I hear you. Most of the stupid ideas I ever entertained where only entertained because I was trying to give my stupid ex-husband the benefit of the doubt in is stupid beliefs. Which leads me to believe that being around crazy people makes you at least temporarily crazy. Now, I was a registered Republican for a bit in my youth, but only because there were closed primaries in my state, and it was easier to vote against the crazy before they got a foothold. But pretty soon anybody running as a Republican was equally as bad as the next, so it became a moot point. I like to think I never held any Slatebro type stances, but I may be rewriting my own history……
No Drought No More
I was schooled by Steve Gilliard after contending that the decision to disband the Iraq Army could be justified. In my defense, I understood he responded We occasionally exchanged e-mails, too.
What’s funny is despite acknowledging he had a good point, I nonetheless felt a tad resentful of being straightened out online. I think it’s called human nature.
Matt McIrvin
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Well, not literally, since for reasons I still find inscrutable he calls himself a “socialist” rather than the social democrat he actually is.
Doug!
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I agree with you about this too.
And I can’t believe anyone would put in the top 20 rap songs of all time.
Ruckus
@Schlemazel:
Yes.
This information was out, at the time. You had to want to be fooled for some reason not to see it. You didn’t even have to look all that hard. But if you had a hard on for war, none of that mattered. It’s like being a racist, all the evidence one needs to not be one is out there, you have to want it to be one.
Frankensteinbeck
@jacy:
Being around crazy people makes you at least temporarily crazy. I vividly and with a certain amount of guilt remember my going a little off the deep end under the pressure of my abusive Crazy Ex.
EDIT – @Suzanne:
From that same relationship, I learned how easy it is to ignore the red flags that someone is totally fucking psycho when you’re in love with their good traits.
eclare
I voted for HW over Dukakis in my first presidential election where I could vote. Last time I voted Republican.
Mike in DC
I used to think Clintonian compromise /3rd way politics was a viable way forward for Democrats. By 1996 I was so disgusted that i didn’t bother voting.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@MattF: Among other things: He pimped Bloomberg 2020; fucked the EMAILZ chicken so hard he got genital salmonella; openly caped for Ailes, Sinclair, Breitbart’s accreditation & Bill O’Reilly; and claimed that Clinton would’ve been just the same as Trump. (Some of his dumbest defenses of the EMAILZ thing: Fucking said chicken was defensible because “they laughed at Alfred Wegener!1!!, and this fuckery). Chinchilla is fucking stupid and fairly horseracist, but he isn’t usually openly evil and can be forced to admit the truth in the face of overwhelming evidence — put bad Shafer and bad Chinchilla
together and you can see just how much worse hackish conservatism is than hackish centrism.
TriassicSands
@rikyrah:
I’m no fan of Sanders, but that article is nonsense. Lots of Obama voters voted for Trump, does that mean Obama is responsuble for Trump’s election?
No candidate is responsible for the actions of his or her voters, unless the candidate encourages or incites those voters to perform certain actions — like Trump encouraging his supporters to be violent.
Bernie sucks in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t responsible for Trump winning. This kind of thinking is just going to contribute to Democratic division. IMO.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: I think I used to as well, it’s sort of what you pick up in college (if you don’t go full-blown Marxist). Now that I’ve married into a South Vietnamese family I’m actually offended when I see people toting Soviet and Maoist propaganda around, since I have in-laws who can’t walk straight because of the treatment they received at actual honest-to-god Communist reeducation camps and had to flee their own country with an infant, in unsafe ships that got attacked by pirates.
Matt McIrvin
@oatler.: I hear that kind of thing from Internet Libertarians sometimes: Republicans are left-wing, fascists are left-wing, everyone else is left-wing and that’s what’s wrong with them.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Doug!: What about the other music takes?
WaterGirl
Mine is easy. In 1972, my freshman year in college, I had a friend who was a junior. She was great, we had lots of fun, she had the best dope. Anyway, before the election that fall, she was trying to tell me about this break-in at a hotel in Washington DC, and I told her that was ridiculous. If all that was true, it would be all over the news! I voted for Nixon.
sigh.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike in DC: I still think that in the 1990s, it was the only viable way forward. That was over 20 years ago, though.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: I predict that Sander’s arrogance and his Sanders-centric view of the world will never allow him to take this in and believe that he bears any responsibility. I hope this article follows his every move until the end of time.
MattF
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Now I’m pleased that I never read his stuff. Suffering is not good for you.
Doug!
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I don’t know that Nas that well though I think “I used to watch CHIPs, now I load glock clips” is one of the great lines of all time. Based on my limited listening though, I also think the beats aren’t that great, even when the lyrics are.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: And there were people willing to tell you that all that evidence was itself bullshit, at great length. By that point in history the Internet made it particularly easy to find your own echo chamber.
Mike E
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): I hear sparrow roasted on a curtain rod is quite delicious
Frankensteinbeck
@TriassicSands:
Sanders takes a heavy load of blame for Trump winning, but it ain’t because of cross-over votes to Trump. Cross-over votes to Stein, maybe.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I think I voted for John Anderson for Prez in 1980 (after Barry Commoner faded). Does that count? At least I didn’t vote for Reagan.
Major Major Major Major
@TriassicSands: It’s not a good article. It’s not well-reasoned. Lots of special pleading. Feh.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Major Major Major Major: Not directly related to the “college communist” trope, but I flirted with Counterpunch-style
anti-imperialism
from sixth- to eighth-grade, though by the beginning of freshman year at high school I’d grown out of that school of thought.PaulWartenberg
I think there was an article on how Proportional seating for Congressional offices would be better than Gerrymandering.
Schlemazel
@eclare:
That is what I meant by drowning it out
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: NPR had a piece on the stats that article uses. One thing that struck me is that the number of Sanders > Trump voters were actually less than half of the number of Clinton > McCain voters in 2008. During the 2016 campaign, I thought the Sanders dead-enders would be a fart in a whirlwind like PUMA. I was wrong because the election was so close, but they really were a much smaller group.
Mike E
@Mike in DC: heh, after ’96 I registered “unaffiliated” due to the triangulation away from Dem party platform planks…just marked my 20th year not reg’d a Dem, but I might switch back (new year’s resolution!)
Mom Says I*m Handsome
@Cacti:
I’m a pleasant middle-aged white guy, and I spent two years in the welfare system (food stamps, heating assistance, TANF, Medicaid, etc.). After returning to the workforce I would sit at the lunch table and hear the ignorant shit my co-workers would say about how the system is rife with corruption, that recipients are lazy and indolent, and that “we” should cut benefits even further so that “they” are forced to get jobs, I would quietly share my story — that despite an engineering degree from MIT, I couldn’t find a decent job after the recession; that the paperwork requirements are so strict (at least in Colorado) that cheating the system is nearly impossible; that the people with whom I shared all those miserable waiting rooms down at the social services building were struggling mightily, many of them with mental illness or physical disability that made a regular full-time job (of which there are precious few) an impossibility; and that thanks to the safety net, my four kids, my loco ex-wife, and I were able to stay afloat.
“Uh, erm, yeah, well, you paid into the system, and that’s what it’s there for, and, uh, how ’bout those Broncos?”
Fuckers. They lack even the most basic imagination to put themselves in another’s shoes. “There but for the grace of Dog go I…”
The Moar You Know
@rikyrah: Those numbers say one thing: there will be no impeachment.
Hell, that’s UP two points from the last poll. Well, I guess the GOP sure likes all that economic anxiety that’s murdering people lately.
James Powell
Back in the day I was an enthusiastic advocate of the kind of public-private partnerships that all turn out to be corrupt bargains that both rip off the taxpayers and screw the people who were supposed to be served. Stadiums, charter schools, toll roads, whatever. I don’t recall talking about corporate prisons but if anybody brought it up I’m sure I’d have thought it was a good idea. I put it down to my youthful ignorance as to how politics really works – totally forgot everything I should have learned from George Washington Plunkitt – and to the malign influence of economics professors.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
It wasn’t. It was political art, on a third grade level. Now if the question was, “Is it a necessary step due to our fucked up politics?” then and only then is it a any kind of reasonable, and at that the lowest level of reasonable that’s possible. I say that because it didn’t change the military crime of being gay. And as an order it got broken, a lot. IOW it was bullshit that didn’t bullshit the people who needed bullshitting.
BTW I did notice that you said you once believed.
Schlemazel
@Mike in DC:
It probably is the only option currently able to win elections. We need someone that can at least run in the middle and then deliver real progress. I thought that Hilary might be the one to do it but now we will never know
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: Yet another thing that the article would try to special-plead away, if it addressed it. It even says at one point that you don’t get to compare this election to any other election. Feh!
@Ruckus: I was under the impression that many LGBT groups at the time thought it was progress.
Ohio Mom
Based on my memory of the Grenada incursion and the brevity of the first Gulf War, I told a young woman who worked for me and had a sister who had recently joined the Marines, “Don’t worry, we don’t do long wars any more.”
ETA This was at the start of this Iraq war, what is it, something like 14 years ago?
WaterGirl
@Mom Says I*m Handsome: When I read that I thought about the line I saw at least twice in two separate stories last week. Here’s what they were thinking: “You were one of the good ones.”
Ugh.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
I was struck mostly by the stats of the crossover voters themselves. Racist as Hell and with no history of voting Democrat in the general. They really were just ratfuckers, not actual disappointed crossovers. That doesn’t surprise me, since I figured the Sanders/Trump crossover vote was invisibly tiny. Again, it’s the Sanders/Stein that concerns me, and maybe Sanders/Johnson. The article doesn’t go into those.
Trollhattan
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Presently in the waiting room of a new-to me doctor being serenaded with “new country”, which is advising “the highway ain’ yer friend.”
Shoot me, please.
I’ll bring them a Lucinda Williams CD if I like them
Gelfling 545
@Suzanne: I had said that if McCain won the 2000 nomination that I would probably vote for him. He didn’t so I was spared that. By the time he did get the nomination the scales had fallen from my eyes.
“The stupider thing was marrying the ex. HOLY SHIT THAT WAS STUPID.”
I can relate to that, too.
guachi
My opinions are always correct. They can never fail; they can only be failed.
Chrome agnomen
I’m old so I have an advantage in that my screw ups are mostly in the distant past as pertains to this discussion. I have never once voted republican for any office, but I once tried very hard to believe in a god. 45 years ago or more, mind you. And I am also guilty of thinking that though I could never espouse a rightist viewpoint, they still had the best interests of the country at large in mind.
Starfish
1) Bush and Gore are the same.
2) Maybe these libertarians are onto something.
3) Maybe we should take evolutionary psychologists seriously.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Doug!: The classic albums: Illmatic >> It Was Written > Life Is Good
Really good albums: Stillmatic (almost as good as Life Is Good) ≈ The Lost Tapes >≈ Distant Relatives > God’s Son
OK albums: God’s Son > Untitled > Street’s Disciple, Hip-Hop Is Dead
Not very good: I Am…
Then Nastradamus, aka “the album rehaul even the label execs thought was a bad idea).
All the classic albums, as well as Distant Relatives and Lost Tapes, have consistently good-to-great instrumentals with only one to two stinkers. God’s Son > Stillmatic, musically, but the instrumental quality is fairly decent — the problem isn’t so much that his beats consistently suck, but that it’s fairly uneven among albums.
Ruckus
@patrick II:
I actually think worse. They went into office wanting to do what they did, start a war in the middle east. They needed an excuse, which 9/11 was for them, but they cost over 100,000 people to die, and spent our money like it was a Niagara Falls sized money fountain doing it. And they convinced a lot of people that it was a good idea. 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor, except that it really wasn’t the same at all. And it’s never been made clear to me how the Bushes could be such close friends with Saudi Arabia and the royal family both before and after 9/11 and there be no connection between why 9/11 happened and said excuse to get their war on. Not saying there is or isn’t a connection, just asking the question.
drumpf is just an ignorant, blowhard, senile, racist. That could certainly be said about some of shrub’s friends but I don’t think it actually applied to him, at least not to any where near the degree as it does to drumpf.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@guachi:
Also: I’m always right; the world just changes to fit my opinions
Brachiator
@Wapiti:
The thing speaks for itself. Most people who talk “the South should secede” are white people who think that the South is only other white people, and don’t think about African Americans living in the South at all, or presume that they would all magically transport to the North.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
I recall being vaguely supportive of the war in Afghanistan when it was announced at the time. In my defense, I was six.
Major Major Major Major
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Which war in Afghanistan?
I think I was too (2002 edition).
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Suzanne: I have a lukewarm-to-mildly-positive opinion of Marcotte, but she absolutely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Lord Will & Hitchens.
rikyrah
Tell the Democratic Unity Commission how you’d like them to conduct our nominating process here:https://t.co/i79ui2UEX2
— Grannie Wolf (@nitehowl55) August 25, 2017
rikyrah
Dem amendment to must-pass bill would ban spending taxpayer dollars on Trump businesses: https://t.co/ykOpicZkEt pic.twitter.com/phPgJ7snzt
— The Hill (@thehill) August 25, 2017
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Major Major Major Major: I thought you were in your thirties (and yes, it’s the 2002 one).
The Moar You Know
@Mom Says I*m Handsome: I spent just shy of a year in SF homeless. I don’t recommend it.
I figured it out and got employed and homed. But I think about that time in my life. Shit can go bad and you can be fucked beyond belief…and I didn’t know how you could go for help. Of any kind. So I didn’t. I should have. I was stupid for not doing so.
In SF, there were two kinds of homeless: down and out, hard luck stories, and the mentally ill (who are the majority of homeless there). Dealing with down and out is easy: support them until they can make things happen again. They do make it happen again, and quickly. Being homeless is so awful that nobody who’s capable of taking care of themselves stays that way long.
However, we desperately need as a society to completely rethink how we deal with mentally ill/substance abusing homeless people, and the first thing is to not allow them to stay out on the streets even if that’s what they want. They’re a danger to themselves and sometimes, thankfully very rarely, a danger to others.
No matter which group a homeless person falls into, we are failing the poor and most vulnerable in our society in an absolutely horrific way and that needs to change, and not ten years from now. It needs to change today.
Major Major Major Major
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): I am. Hey, I was in shock, and the guys who did it were living there. I imagine I wasn’t thinking about it as a mass invasion and long-term occupation. This is why decisions are supposed to be made by adults, not seventeen-year-olds.
You’re twenty-one? Weirdo. :P
ETA: p.s. Can you help me figure out what twenty-one-year-olds are like, for my comic?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I’m conflicted. I like the positive progress that has been made for women’s rights there and the Taliban was evil but it’s also a moneypit that has cost thousands of troop’s lives.
FlipYrWhig
@Schlemazel: One of the people who was considered virtually synonymous with that strategy and, when he entered electoral politics himself, was greeted with jeers and pinched noses was… Terry McAuliffe. Who’s been a fine governor. And most of the same people who hated DLC Third Way something something and hence hated McAuliffe hated Hillary Clinton for all of the same reasons, in 2008, and in 2016, and probably in 1998. Which is now a big part of the reason why when those people carp and moan about neoliberal corporatists and so forth I just roll my eyes and pantomime the universal jerk-off motion.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t have the greatest social life, so probably not.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
I knew it long before I relearned it the hard way.
I worked in the seedy side of not far from downtown LA. Started there when I was 12-13 yrs old. The area that had less going for it than skid row. I saw working class poverty and all the steps below that first hand.
And it’s different when the person you see, if you had a mirror, is you. When having very, very little, to nothing, is not only personal, it’s all there is.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I remember watching a news segment, maybe 60 Minutes on a gay woman military officer, Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was “honorably” discharged after it became known that she was a lesbian. She very simply, very logically talked about how straight people had photos of their loved ones on their desks, and could talk about their dates, trivial details about their social lives. But she and other gay people had to hide their lives.
It struck me then that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was bullshit. It didn’t take strident advocacy. It just hit me as obvious that it was absurd to force gay people to live in shadows, and that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was designed to make straight people feel comfortable in their bigotry.
Ella in New Mexico
@TriassicSands: I’m with you. It was 100% click bait headline for the Sanders-bitters to work their grievances up yet another time…
With this kind of logic ANYONE who ran against Hillary is responsible for her loss. It’s not-healthy competition and having more than one anointed candidate in an election is called DEMOCRACY.
Looking at the numbers and their rationales, they wouldn’t have voted for her anyway whether he had run or not. I’m sorry but it’s time to quit blaming Sanders or his supporters or anyone else besides the cheating sons-of-bitches on the right who collaborated with a foreign enemy to work their will and steal a election. THEY pulled a coup.
Jesus fuck can we just pull ourselves together and get to the real business at hand? She has.
catclub
By contrast here is my Slate pitch: Trump does not want to win the elections in 2018.
this will be easy if the Democrats hold one or both houses of the legislature.
he can refuse to answer subpoenas and court orders ( as is his habit over the years).
he can rail at obstruction. he can palm off the blame for nothing being done to somebody else.
Major Major Major Major
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Well, yes, you comment regularly on an obscure blog.
I don’t need help with the human condition writ large. Ehh, I’ll tweet at you if I have any actual questions.
FlipYrWhig
Oh, as for the OP question, I remember feeling like same-sex marriage should be called something other than “marriage” to be savvy politically and placate the religious. Circa, maybe, 2000.
Mike in DC
@Schlemazel:
I think the problems with centrism are well documented. If the other side never compromises, they never pay a price for it. Meanwhile, the emergent policy winds up matching the preferences of the most conservative part of the coalition, demoralizing base voters badly needed for the midterms. I won’t get into the corporatist stuff, but basically any move to the center should be largely rhetorical and the substantive policies should reflect base consensus preferences.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: What amounts to, really, is wishing that they could undo the support for the Civil Rights Act that cost the Democrats the country for a generation plus. Just write it off as a loss and to hell with the black people who still live there. But, hey, Democrats would win more elections.
Major Major Major Major
@Ella in New Mexico:
Well, no, it’s still also the fault of anybody who wasn’t obstructed from voting for Hillary and still didn’t.
karensky
@zhena gogolia: Ditto
Major Major Major Major
Speaking of Very Serious Person bullshit, Axios (feh!) says that Kasich and Hickenlooper are thinking of mounting a joint 2020 bid, which, ew. And I say this as a Hickenlooper fan.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
For me, I went in full support for gay MARRIAGE, because of 2 things:
1. End of life/hospital decisions
2. The financial benefits of marriage.
Why should 4 women, each married to a man for 10 years a piece, be entitled to his social security.
But, a man who has been with his male partner for 40 years, be not entitled to anything?
PHUCK THAT.
And, the thought..the mere thought…that you would be with that person for 10, 20, 30 years…
and, their homophobic relatives can just sweep in at the end – BAR YOU from the hospital – AND try and take the financial stuff after death?
HELL MUTHAPHUCKIN’ NO.
Mike J
@rikyrah: Steve Cohen is a good guy.
rikyrah
@Wapiti:
The majority of African Americans, in 2017, live in the Red State South.
FlipYrWhig
@Ella in New Mexico: I feel like that story shows the opposite of what people are taking it to show. It doesn’t show that it was disaffected lefties (a/k/a “Bernie Bros”) who sank the Clinton campaign. It shows that a chunk of people who voted for Sanders were something other than disaffected lefties all along. Some of them might have just been non-ideologically-inclined angry douchebags. Which needs to be fed back into the question of whether a campaign on Sanders’s policy themes run by someone who isn’t Sanders and against someone who isn’t Hillary Clinton would rack up the same numbers Sanders did against Clinton. I strongly suspect not.
smintheus
@rikyrah: That’s a ridiculously simplistic argument. More Clinton primary voters in 2008 went over to McCain than Sanders voters in 2016 went to Trump. You can’t blame a candidate because some of their primary voters didn’t vote in the general election the way the candidate urged them to do.
rikyrah
@Mike J:
A very good guy that represents his majority Black district very well.
smintheus
@joel hanes: He’s an idiot.
Brachiator
@ Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) :
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
BS wanted to be president, but he had a problem, he’s an independent. He’d never get off the ground in the fist place. So he ran as a dem. OK, so far fine. Then he lost the primary. At that point he should have done either one of two things. Shut the fuck up or fully supported the candidate who beat him fair and square. He did neither. That’s on him, no one else. And for his opposition that may not have destroyed her but it sure didn’t help. It played right into the hand of the opposition.
How is that not helping them?
pacem appellant
Confession time: In college I helped the LaRouchians get recognized as a campus club. I was pretty enamored with glibertarianism too, registered as a Libertarian, though my love of literature prevented me from ever finishing any Ayn Rand book–good god that woman can’t write!.
Lastly, I came to the same-sex marriage bandwagon way too late. I am blessed to have an old friend who patiently and painstakingly walked me back from the “just don’t call it marriage” ledge.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: Libertarians are, by their very nature, morons. They can’t help it. They don’t comprehend that we are social animals, and need each other to survive.
Major Major Major Major
@Villago Delenda Est: I would like to amend this to be about people who are libertarians after being out of college for at least one year.
ETA: Not because this excludes me; I never was.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m going to continue to blame people who put out propaganda about how evil the Democratic party is and how they cheated and were violating the law and suppressing the votes of people who wanted to vote for somebody who wasn’t even a Democrat,
There were a lot of stupid voters who believed that bullshit, but a lot of the blame should go to the liars who made up those stories and spread them among the gullible.
smintheus
@Doug!: I was much more dismissive of American cold warriors in my youth, until I visited East Germany and decided the Soviet Union really did qualify as an evil empire.
Kay
I like state laws as an experiment for federal laws. Republicans don’t really, though. Not in the ordinary meaning of “experiment” which means you don’t ramp it up national if it fails. They do fake experiments that are really just done deals.
This is an example:
They don’t know that they’ve seen the depth of the damage
Trump will adopt this whole thing because it was never an experiment. That’s key. If they say “experiment” they mean “everywhere, no matter the results”. I support real experiments.
Ohio Mom
@Major Major Major Major: Kasich is stupid and ill-informed. What is Hickenlooper’s excuse? Which party’s ticket would they run on?
Really though, I can hardly worry about next presidential election at the moment.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Those echo chambers had no depth, no substance. They were bullshit chambers. Sure you had to weigh the evidence, but those scales had a lot of fucking obvious thumbs on them. And one didn’t have to look hard at all to see them.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike in DC: What if the Democratic base is, on many issues, moderates, at least on economic policy? That’s kind of important to figure out. IMHO too often the mistake is made to assume that the base is liberals and they’re being taken for granted.
At one point Nate Silver, I think it was, tried to figure out which politicians were providing more liberal voting records than their constituents’ demographics would seem to indicate they should. It was like the baseball stat-head “Value Over Replacement Player” concept. It was an interesting lens to apply. A replacement-level politician would match perfectly to the stated preferences of the voters who put them in office. In the blogosphere we tend to think that Democratic politicians are performing _worse_ than replacement value because they’re moving right to get campaign contributions instead of staying left to please their base. I don’t think that argument holds up very well, except maybe in the case of Joe Lieberman.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: Sure, I wasn’t making an exhaustive list.
@Ohio Mom: Loop is probably listening to the wrong people. He’s not a natural politician.
It’s also Axios, so it’s dumb speculative gossip, this seemed like the right place to dump it.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
Weren’t you 21 once? :p
Early 20 somethings like to go places, do things with friends. Like teenagers with a lot more freedom (and responsibilities). We’re considered adults, but nowadays take a little longer to mature. We also typically don’t have a lot of cash to throw around.
Like any group we’re not a monolith. Whatever you do don’t portray us as “lazy” good for nothing’s always in our phones. Some fit that stereotype. Just like some boomers/silents fit the greaser/dirty hippy stereotype.
Villago Delenda Est
Ever since Will Saletan proposed a “compromise” on abortion that the forced birthers would never accept (we’ll just push free contraception as an alternative to abortion) I’ve written him off as a total idiot. He doesn’t understand that “babies” are not what the entire abortion thing is all about. It’s about fucking, and it’s about women having agency. The forced-birthers hate both, and will do everything to stop this, even though it’s none of their motherfucking business.
Eric U.
I think my slatebro phase was cured sometime during Bill Clinton’s administration. I was definitely a fan of the DLC/third way types for a while. The utter depravity of the response of the right to anything mildly progressive has turned me into a rabid, “eat the rich” sort of person though. How can you compromise with people like the Republicans have chosen to be? Compromise is required to get past the Democrats.
@FlipYrWhig: I remember being in favor of DADT. As an interim step, which is what I think it was intended to be.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: That’s also what the “dirtbag left” thinks about electoral strategy. No time to test it, just do it immediately everywhere always! Sigh.
Ruckus
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
I read Ann Rand. Once. I was 12. Didn’t make it all the way through. It was shit. To this day, every sentence still is.
smintheus
@Schlemazel: Even more to the point, the Bushies claimed that they knew for a fact that there were active weapons programs, and that they knew where they were. But when it came time to tell UN inspectors where to look, they either couldn’t or wouldn’t identify a single site. Not even one.
That was all a sentient human being needed to know to determine that the Bushies were lying. Marshall is a prat in many ways, as I can attest from direct experience.
Villago Delenda Est
@Major Major Major Major: That’s a worthy amendment. The Pauls epitomize this stupidity, they have no excuse of youthful experimentation to fall back on.
I looked at libertarianism once, but some actual life experience convinced me that, like communism, it breaks down at the point where you don’t know everyone in the community around you. Which means 100 people, more or less.
zhena gogolia
@Mom Says I*m Handsome:
Good for you for speaking up.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Not really surprising if you delve into Sanders voting record on immigration. He has frequently aligned himself with anti-immigration wing of the R party. Your Chuck Grassleys and Jeff Sessionses, he especially unfriendly towards skilled immigrants.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Ruckus: Took out Atlas Shrugged in ninth-grade. Never got past the first three pages before returning.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
I’ve heard gay people talk about how a lover’s family disapproved of them, tried to pretend they did not exist or barely tolerated them, and then deliberately shut them out and cruelly, specifically ignored their wishes when the person’s partner became seriously ill and died.
The deliberate, vicious, unnecessary cruelty of situations like this makes my blood boil.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I mean, you guys are still Millennials, you just had social media and smartphones at a more tender age. I don’t have any trouble writing women or older people, but I dunno, worried about the twenty-one-year-old for some reason. Probably be fine. I think the youngest person I regularly interact with in meatspace is twenty-four.
@Villago Delenda Est: Hell, anarchy works when you’re under Dunbar’s number.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
What like some Lincolnesque “National Union Party” ticket? Kasich sucks.
Mike in DC
@FlipYrWhig:
I would think that in many cases, the distances between the progressive and moderate policy positions are less than that between moderate and conservative policy positions.
TriassicSands
@Ella in New Mexico:
I wish we could, but that would be un-Democratic, I guess.
Villago Delenda Est
@Major Major Major Major: Everyone but Boomers should be forced onto a boat in the path of a torpedo and left to drown.
There, I said it. It makes no sense at all if you think about it for 15 seconds, but hell, we’ve got to get a fast meme out there for clickbait.
FlipYrWhig
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Especially because one thing that would immediately make a person approved by just over one-third of the public into a strong contender for the presidency is… a three-way presidential race.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: They were probably not Democrats to begin with.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in DC: The best explanation of what “conservatives” are all about:
John Kenneth Galbraith
smintheus
@MJS: I thought then and still think that Clinton should have resigned. The rest of his second term was going to be useless after that, he did perjure himself, he was going to embarrass a lot of Dems by forcing them to defend him, and his resignation would make Gore a stronger candidate in 2000 than otherwise.
That said, Republicans didn’t have a leg to stand on after their ridiculous defense of Reagan and Bush about Iran Contra.
CaseyL
Apologies for being OT, but I’m watching hurricane coverage on the Weather Channel. They keep talking about what an exceptional storm Harvey is, because of the possibility of the storm bouncing on and off the coastline, picking up more strength every time it goes out to the water, and how it will be hanging out over Texas to dump 25″ of rain on the state from the coast into the interior.
Everyone’s saying “unprecedented.”
They’re saying “First time ever, in recorded weather history.”
They’re staying “Multi-day multi-state disaster.”
But they are not saying “climate change.” Not even referring to it.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
You should be fine then. 24 isn’t that far removed from 21 honestly. Personally, I don’t use social media much. I don’t have the patience or the self-absorption for it to interest me.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
If you are the building foreman, looking at plans for the pyramids, don’t have any stone properly shaped and no way to get them into position, anything that moves you forward is progress. Like owning a lot of slaves.
I didn’t say it wasn’t better, but it wasn’t a fix, it was a band aid. Sometimes a band aid is all you need, sometimes it’s all you’ve got. This sure wasn’t all that was needed, but it may have been all B. Clinton had. I’m not so sure.
Kay
More and more I think McConnell TOLD Trump he would be protected in the Russia probes. I look at how upset he was with Sessions and now McConnell and it’s like he was assured this “protection” would happen. We know McConnell protected Trump before he was elected.
Because Mueller wasn’t supposed to happen. Comey basically brought Mueller about with his memo-writing and such. They thought they could get rid of Comey and it would end there, but Trump and Co botched the whole thing up helped along by Comey being 3 steps ahead of them.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about health care. He’s mad at McConnell for something else. Trump says he wouldn’t have hired Sessions if Sessions had told him he planned to recuse but what if Sessions told him he wouldn’t then had to?
Major Major Major Major
@Mike in DC: @Villago Delenda Est: Yeah, this is because the difference between a progressive version of a policy and moderate version of a policy is that they want to do the same thing in different ways, or maybe to a different degree, whereas the difference between a moderate policy and a conservative policy is that the conservatives want to pretend they’re doing the thing but actually they’re robbing you blind, in a way that probably hurts black people a lot.
@Ruckus: OK, so maybe not reasonable in and of itself as a compromise, but still a positive policy outcome since the alternative looked to be nothing. Wasn’t Clinton trying to lift the ban entirely at first?
Emma
@Ruckus: The pyramids were not built by slaves. That comes from Hollywood movies.
Roger Moore
@MJS:
How’s this for a Slate Pitch: it would have been better in the long run if Clinton had resigned. It would have meant Gore was running as an actual incumbent in 2000, so he wouldn’t have felt the need to run away from Clinton. Given the state of the economy, he probably would have won rather than lost, which would have meant no W presidency, possibly no 9/11, certainly no invasion of Iraq, no Roberts and Alito, more aggressive action on greenhouse gas emissions, etc.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah:
I did not know that.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike in DC: Probably true, but mostly I’m quibbling with the idea of equating the base and liberals. A lot of what’s vexing to lefties about the Democratic Party gets explained pretty readily if you think again about who’s the base. The problem circa 2002-04 or so used to be that pundits would assume that the blogosphere was the base (largely white, largely highly educated, largely male), and then last time around the problem became that pundits assumed that Twitter users and Sanders rally attendees (pretty much the same profile) were the base. That has had a serious distorting effect.
James Powell
@FlipYrWhig:
Thank you. For some reason this never occurred to any reporters who were covering the Sanders campaign.
WaterGirl
@smintheus:
I’m not so sure that helps your argument. More Clinton primary votes in 2008 crossed over to vote for the side that thought the economy was fine and thought that it was okay for Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat away from the president – rather than vote for the incredibly capable and talented black man. Hmmm.
edited
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
“Independent” is really attractive to some people and a lot of people would be completely unfamiliar with Sanders as a Senator – because they don’t know about any Senators. I bet you’re right.
James Powell
@Ohio Mom:
I don’t know about that. I think it’s more that Kasich is without any future in the Republican Party.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I think I was engaged to your ex’s female doppelganger.
You can’t control love, you can’t reason with it, sometimes you can’t even live with it. It consumes you. It makes you do insanely stupid fucking things. That sometimes take forever to pay for. And that payment isn’t always money. Money is the easy part.
smintheus
@WaterGirl: So was Clinton to blame because a lot of her primary voters were jerks? Because the argument rikyrah cited said that Sanders was responsible for Trump’s victory simply because some of his primary voters ended up voting for Trump.
Major Major Major Major
@James Powell: He’s also terrible.
James Powell
@smintheus:
The press/media consensus is that Clinton is to blame for everything. BernieBros agree.
TriassicSands
@smintheus:
The article begins with the belief that Sanders was, and had to be, responsible for Clinton’s defeat.
It is rarely realistic to expect a defeated primary candidate to do everything possible to ensure the victory of the winner. Sometimes, merely not working against the winner is the best that can be hoped for.
Did Hillary Clinton really want Obama to win the general election in 2008? An Obama victory wouldn’t cast real doubt on the likelihood of Clinton getting another shot at the presidency. She was fortunate that things worked out in her favor. But an Obama defeat would have meant Clinton would have been a sure bet to be the 2012 nominee. She had to be ambivalent.
What was different in 2016 was the prospect of a Trump presidency and Sanders’ age. Those together should have made an all-out effort on Sanders’ part easier for him. But it is difficult to overstate the power of ego for those who have convinced themselves they should be president.
zhena gogolia
@CaseyL:
It makes me crazy. I’m sure they’re under orders from management.
Kay
I can’t get too mad at Sanders supporters because I have to be so disappointed in white women. 53% for Trump. Dear God. It isn’t that Clinton is a woman, it’s that Clinton is a normal human being. To me it was like “this horrible creep or Hillary Clinton?”
I thought better of them.
Mnemosyne
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I know. I was a moron who thought it wouldn’t matter.
For all of the disastrousness of Trump, at least I feel like I did everything I could to help Hillary win, because there fucking is more than a “dime’s worth of difference” between the parties.
Tenar Arha
@rikyrah:
Good to hear sister home.
That interview was really good; that bit about how being more compassionate doesn’t make him more hopeful…just hits so hard. Thanks for linking to it.
WaterGirl
@Kay:
McConnell certainly did protect Trump before the election. It’s clearly party-befire-country for the Turtle.
Did the Turtle promise Trump that he would continue to protect him, or did Trump make that assumption? It could have been either one and Trump’s response would be the same, I think. I don’t think Trump has figured out yet that the Republicans were using him. The only good thing about that is that Trump was using the Republicans to get into power, and now they have all turned on each other. Best thing that has happened since November.
Doug R
@joel hanes: Well, at least I’m in good company with you and Josh Marshall about the Iraq invasion.
Mnemosyne
@TriassicSands:
I think the real problem is that, like it or not, Sanders opened up the Pandora’s Box of white resentment that most other Democrats had been wise enough to leave closed. Hillary toyed with the lid of that box in 2008, but she shoved it back down well before the convention and enthusiastically endorsed Obama at the convention itself.
Sanders opened the lid and walked away. Wittingly or not, he allowed white voters to express their racial and misogynist resentments through him.
It turns out that his advisors were correct that there was a whole segment of white working-class potential voters who weren’t showing up. Unfortunately, they were white supremacists who were willing to overlook Sanders’ Judaism because he fed into the rest of their white resentment. And when Sanders didn’t win the nomination, they turned to the other white resentment candidate: Trump.
Look at the article. The Sanders to Trump voters voted on race and misogyny. That’s what Sanders activated, whether he and his supporters want to admit it or not.
ruemara
@Ella in New Mexico: You’re kinda ignoring there were some cheating sons of bitches on the left too. And they’re still on Bernie’s jock.
@CaseyL: They won’t say it until the water is up to their necks.
I spent the bulk of my adult life being hand to mouth if not hand to rent & utilities, we’ll see if there’s enough for your mouth. I needed food stamps for getting through college, then it was getting established in CA after the parents threw me out. Then it was the economic crash in in the 2000’s, the housing crash, the layoff of my partner, surviving that, etc. etc. I’ve experienced our social safety net up close on two coasts. The process is hard, and if you think $120 a month buys enough food, you are an idiot. It’s also funny that if I hadn’t been destitute, I wouldn’t have been able to have my hysterectomy and who knows how bad things could have gotten for me physically. But the hours of it took, that ate into my attempt to get work… I’d much rather pay my taxes and make this whole system work for everyone than put people through the deprivation and stress. This can happen to anyone.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Yeah, I figured that’s about what you meant. It was bullshit. And don’t ask, don’t tell was around decades before the 90s. We had at least one gay guy on our ship. And I know this because I saw him in town, with a very close personal friend of his. Out of 300 men, I’d bet there were others. Men can keep their dicks in their pants and their hands to themselves, if they are taught to. Many are not taught reasonably, if at all.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
Trump rats people out, so if they did promise him (Sessions and McConnell) he’ll probably blurt it out in a fit of rage. I delight in imagining how scared Republicans must be of this fucking loose cannon they sent spinning across the deck, because you know Trump has all kinds of dirt on them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
that’s a high item on my “shocked but not surprised” list, that nobody in the good village of Broderton ever mentions that, when told the Russians were actively interfering in the American election, McConnell, said “yeah, well, that works for me” I think it was mourned this tie min 2013 that they all wagged a collective finger at Obama for not being willing to work with such a swell guy, who had already said, out lout and to anyone listening, that the only thing eh cared about was making Obama a less successful president.
Brachiator
@Emma:
And from misinterpretations of the Bible. The notion that slaves built the pyramids has been around for a long time.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@rikyrah:
Explains why Trump is preblaming the shut down on the Dems then. As always, Trump is the self absorbed useless twat.
Doug R
@Schlemazel: I believed that aluminum tubes centrifuge bs. When someone else pointed out they were probably for rockets, that started my turning point.
WaterGirl
@smintheus:
I didn’t say they were jerks; I am fairly convinced that race played a part in their decision. So yeah, let’s say there was a racist component. Hillary was to blame to the extent that she was aware of that, played to that, and that she and Bill were willing to use race against Barack Obama, and there was plenty of evidence that they did that. So yes, I do blame Clinton for that, and I had to get over that in order to vote for her in 2016, which I did.
I don’t think that was the argument at all – I think the argument wasn’t that Sanders was to blame because Sanders voters just happened to end up going over to Trump’s side. The argument, as I understand it, is that Sanders was aware of hit and played to it. He had to be aware of it, either that or he was too stupid to deserve to be president. And I say that as someone who voted for Sanders in the primary.
Sanders sewed division, long after he had a chance to win. And yes, I absolutely hold Sanders responsible for that.
--bd
I was a regular at Slate’s News Quiz for much of 2000.
Xantar
@Tim C.:
I think Slate got a lot better when David Plotz departed. I still listen to their Political Gabfest for entertainment value, and Plotz is consistently the one with the most bizarre, tortured reasoning motivated by an apparent desire to be Devil’s Advocate. They recently had talked about the GoogleBro manifesto and it was actually a very reasonable, nuanced, and thoughtful discussion of all the angles of the issue, why he was wrong, and why Google is still kind of awful towards women. And I’m pretty sure they managed that because Plotz was on vacation at the time.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: And the GOP would have protected Trump if he’d have just kept his big fat mouth shut! McConnell didn’t try to extract a loyalty oath out of Comey and intimate this his (Comey’s) job was on the line if he didn’t lay off Flynn. McConnell didn’t make Trump fire Comey. McConnell didn’t confess on camera to Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation. McConnell didn’t blurt out state secrets to the Russians in the Oval Office after barring U.S. but not Russian media. Etc.
That’s the funniest part of this whole thing! The GOP was perfectly willing to sweep all of this shit under the rug and were in a position to do so — they’re still trying! If Trump was minimally competent, if he had the tiniest modicum of self awareness, if he had the remotest inkling of discretion, he’d be home free. But because he’s a giant, resentful, self-pitying man-baby, there’s at least an outside chance he or at least some key associates will go down.
MJS
@smintheus: But then he would have been lost as a very effective surrogate in 2008 and 2012.
smintheus
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I voted for Barry Commoner in 1980. Had lunch with him because my college roommate was organizing his campaign in state, was very impressed with him. Decided that he’d make a much better president than anyone else running that year.
Jack the Second
I used to be really worried about the national debt, GMO crops, and Monsanto.
smintheus
@MJS: If Bill Clinton was such an effective surrogate in 2008 and 2016, why did Hillary lose both times?
Ruckus
@smintheus:
Are you British, or educated in the UK?
We don’t see prat used in the US all that much. A good word, very descriptive for 4 letters, but not common usage at all.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl:
Yep, and she was roundly criticized for it at the time. I took shit from various corners of the Internet when I called out Sanders for the exact same things I’d called out Hillary for in 2008 because some folks just couldn’t imagine that a person could be capable of consistency, I guess.
But that is the argument the article was making. It is a bad article.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@smintheus: Bubba’s speech at the ’12 convention* seemed to be something of a last hurrah, I don’t know if it’s his declining health (some say… he just seems older and thinner to me) or he just lost his fast ball. One thing I kept waiting for over the course of the campaign was for his speech defending the Clinton foundation. In a season of campaign surprises, where from one to ten trump was 100 and Wilmer was a 50, Bubba’s fade out was at least a five or six. To me.
* where, contrary to what a lot of people said (“Why can’t Obama make this speech defending his first term?”), he didn’t say much that Obama, and Biden, and bunch of other people hadn’t said before, but it was the (white) president from before everything went to hell saying it.
Recall
@rikyrah: I see he’s changed his tune from a year ago:
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2016/7/25/bernie-holdouts-will-not-decide-election
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think the problem was more the Sanders supporters who stayed home or voted third party than the ones who actively switched to Trump, but I do think that white resentment played a huge role in those decisions, too.
O. Felix Culpa
Gov. Abbott has asked Trump to declare a major federal disaster in Texas. Trump is “considering it.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2017/live-updates/weather/hurricane-harvey-updates-preparation-evacuations-forecast-storm-latest/?utm_term=.afdb9dddb90a&wpisrc=al_alert-national&wpmk=1
Ella in New Mexico
@Major Major Major Major:
OFFS I think it’s obvious that anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton contributed to her loss. The issue is the pretense floated by the article that if someone in the primaries supported Sanders, they, and thus HE made her lose. The majority of those actively choosing not to vote for her afterwards were never going to vote for her anyway–it was NOT related to their expressed support of him.
O. Felix Culpa
@Ruckus:
I acquired that word and other pithy Britishisms when I lived in Hong Kong. Pre-1997.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Major Major Major Major:
You got a coffee house where the college set hang out? Go, lurk, listen, note styles, fashion, body language. Don’t be a creepster. You got this, MMMM.
MJS
@smintheus: I said 2008 and 2012, and I was referring to his advocacy on behalf of Obama.
smintheus
@Ruckus: I studied in England. I thought prat had become a common word in the US, but maybe not.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
I believe so. I know it sounds like it but I’m really not slagging Bill Clinton. There are political realities and one of them is the opposition is/can be very vindictive and selfish in their politics. Sometimes a band aid is all you have and not what you need at all.
Major Major Major Major
@Ella in New Mexico:
Look, I didn’t like the article either, but I was responding to you saying we shouldn’t blame anyone other than the cheating sons of bitches on the right. That’s all.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@smintheus:
I think I encountered a copy of GQ that featured a Barry Commoner interview and dug his views.
rikyrah
Tell the Democratic Unity Commission how you’d like them to conduct our nominating process here:https://t.co/i79ui2UEX2
— Grannie Wolf (@nitehowl55) August 25, 2017
Ella in New Mexico
@Mnemosyne: I have not seen a breakdown of the actual voters who did this in states that surprised us all and flipped to Trump after pre-election polls showed Clinton would win. That would definitely be interesting.
I’d be curious to know how many of these voters chose to “vote their conscience” because they lived in a state (NY, CA, etc.) that was going to go for her no matter what. I know some here in New Mexico did because they felt confident it wasn’t going to end up being a vote for Trump, just a way to state dissatisfaction with their choices. Not that I didn’t try to talk them out of it…
rikyrah
NOAA satellite shows combined visible and infrared imagery of Hurricane #Harvey on Friday. pic.twitter.com/mXnsosS1p2
— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) August 25, 2017
Budding Southeast ridge and western ridge will force #Harvey to sit and spin next week. Inevitable #flooding situation. pic.twitter.com/gosalil4LP
— Ed Vallee ? (@EdValleeWx) August 24, 2017
I’ve never seen so many consistent runs suggesting 40”+ falling in one storm…many prayers to these folks, this is the real deal #Harvey pic.twitter.com/ojfShe7HVm
— Kirk ? Hinz (@Met_khinz) August 25, 2017
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@O. Felix Culpa:
Isn’t that interesting?
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Right. Trump didn’t understand that he wasn’t supposed to announce the obstruction efforts.
All he had to do was play along. But he can’t! Because he’s The Boss, dammit.
“Underlings! Where’s this obstruction I was promised?”
rikyrah
Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks
and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented
at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago
By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HAEYOUN PARK and ADAM PEARCE
AUG. 24, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html?ref=oembed
Ruckus
@Emma:
So all those people who pulled huge rocks over logs in desert heat with their backs and all the masons who carved them into shape were paid at least minimum wage, paid vacations and had health care? Sorry they may not have been “slaves” but they didn’t do that level of work because they were artists who thought huge stone monoliths in the middle of the desert were cool.
smintheus
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Commoner was very smart and accomplished. Nice guy too, good sense of humor.
Chyron HR
@Ella in New Mexico:
Well, jeepers, we were told over and over again last year that Sanders’ supporters are THE TRUE PROGRESSIVES and that the Democratic party must throw out the primary results that were tainted by African-Americans and other undesirables and declare Bernie the nominee by fiat. And yet now it comes out that a not insignificant portion of his support apparently came from right-wing white nationalists. Isn’t that strange?
Mnemosyne
@Ella in New Mexico:
I somewhat disagree with you here, because I remember the contingent of Sanders supporters who chanted and tried to drown out EVERY speaker at the DNC. On national television.
I have no problem at all with people who voted for Sanders in the primary and then put on their big-girl panties and voted for Hillary in the general — which is a MAJORITY of Sanders supporters.
But there are still a bunch of dead-ender fucktards running around on Facebook and IRL who are smugly proud of themselves for voting third party or not voting at all because Hillary was just that terrible of a person. Those people are the ones I want to punch in the throat, and there is a fuckton of them making nuisances of themselves in public.
WaterGirl
@Kay:
What a lovely image that is! I can’ hear it now… “But you promised!” Just like a little child. I can’t wait.
rikyrah
Tax-cut advocates stop pretending to care about the deficit
08/25/17 11:20 AM—UPDATED 08/25/17 11:26 AM
By Steve Benen
It was a political dynamic so absurd, it’s still hard to believe Republicans pulled it off. During George W. Bush’s presidency, GOP policymakers decided, as Dick Cheney once declared, that “deficits don’t matter.” Republicans put two wars, two tax cuts, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card – and made no effort to pay for any of it.
Reflecting on the era, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who’s been in Congress since the start of the Carter administration, told the Associated Press in 2009 that “it was standard practice not to pay for things” during Bush’s presidency. A year later, the Utah Republican told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell “a lot of things weren’t paid for” before Barack Obama became president.
And then GOP officials decided everything they’d said and done no longer mattered, and that any attempt to add so much as a penny to the debt was a crime against the American way of life. It was a transparent and ridiculous sham, which much of the political world accepted at face value. After all, voters were told, Republicans were the party of “deficit hawks.”
Now GOP policymakers control the levers of power again, and right on cue, many of the folks who pretended to be concerned about the deficit in the Obama era have decided to drop the facade. Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday:
Ella in New Mexico
@Major Major Major Major: Ok, gotcha. Sorry. it’s just getting really tiresome reliving the primaries here at BJ. And seriously, when we consider that millions more people DID vote for her than Trump, it’s obvious that lots of Sanders supporters DID vote for her. All’s I’m sayin’ is we need to stop beating them up and move on.
Mnemosyne
@Ella in New Mexico:
I know that in MI and (I think) WI, Jill Stein got more votes than Trump’s margin of victory. Remember, we’re talking about 80,000 votes spread over 4 states.
Those are the people who piss me off.
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The whole thing is maddening. If our system of government worked like it should have, we would not have this piece of shit as president. The founding fathers never predicted the moral bankruptcy in so many of
our leadersour elected officials.smintheus
@Mnemosyne: Reasonably enough. I still want to punch in the throat the Democrats who decided to teach the Democratic Party a lesson by not voting in 1968. A lot of the awful things that have happened in the intervening decades might not have happened if they’d just shown up to keep Nixon out of the White House.
Fair Economist
@FlipYrWhig:
Probably not. The Sanders-Trump voters were supporting Clinton in ’08. They were just trying to mess things up. Most of Sanders’ voters were genuine, but even with ratf*ckers they were distinctly short of a majority, so I don’t think a Sanders message is a winner in 2020. Down the line, maybe, as the young were much more supportive, but we shall see.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chyron HR: @Chyron HR: Nokimi Konst, “Young Turk” and professional WIlmerite, went off this morning about how it’s hypocritical for Dems to complain about voter suppression when the primary process was so unfairly rigged against The One True Progressive
Mel
@Major Major Major Major: Don’t know if this is true for anybody else, but I always had the most difficult time with characters who were closer to me in some way (age within a few years or so, or with something very similar in some integral part of their makeup: a defining experience, background, motivation, a similar career, etc.). For example, I used to teach creative writing, but ask me to write a teacher as a primary character during those years? <>
Even if others didn’t see any issue with the character, I was always uncomfortable and questioning whether the dialogue, the decisions, the actions rang true or not. Writing such a character was harder for me, because I had to contend with writing around the questions in my head, as well as with the writing itself.
Ella in New Mexico
@Chyron HR: “not insigniticant”–uh, no. It was a VERY insignificant number. As in barely statistically significant.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mnemosyne: also PA, I think
Brachiator
@smintheus:
American vernacular has “pratfall,” but even this is specialized and archaic.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yep. There’s still a BIG contingent on the left that believes this with all of their hearts. And Vlad’s propaganda machine makes sure that they keep thinking it, too.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I don’t disagree with you at all, Kay. You are on point.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
My husband , who has 30 years experience with criminal types, thinks Trump’s Tweets are meant to convey information to more than the person he targets. So if he hints he’s gonna pardon Sheriff Joe that’s a message he’ll help the others or if he rats on Mika and Joe for being gross hacks that’s an implied threat to the rest of the punditry – this could happen to you.
So his turning on Corker would be an implied threat to the GOP Senators- I’ll repeat what you tell me if I don’t get what I want.
Trump knows a lot about all of them and he doesn’t give a shit about anything besides his own skin. It must be terrifying.
Fair Economist
@Ella in New Mexico:
It does seem, based on that research, that actual *voters* who supported Sanders in the primary and didn’t support Clinton in the general were relatively few. The Sarandon/West/Stein types are a problem in the media, but not so much on the ground.
Ella in New Mexico
@Mnemosyne: Yes–forgot about MI. I wonder if there is a way to estimate an expected/average “Stein” vote we’d have seen, as compared to the 12K there. Just took a few votes in a few counties to flip that whole state, WI too.
It’s why I’m sure that we will one day find that someone fucked with vote totals, either at the machine or elsewhere.
burnspbesq
I think I once said that Scalia’s concurrence in Raich compelled him to conclude that the ACA didn’t raise any Commerce Clause issues. Feel free to throw broccoli at me.
Major Major Major Major
@smintheus: @Brachiator: You’ll not see pratfall much and I rarely (never?) see ‘prat’ in American english.
smintheus
@WaterGirl: The founding fathers never predicted political parties, or an electoral college that works in the way our modern system does (they expected state delegations to get together and debate who’d be the best person for their state to elect). They also didn’t predict or want standing armies and a whole bunch of other stuff we take for granted.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
Now, remember, Dolt45 met with Nunez and Burr. While Nunez – who has Russian connections himself – has done what he’s supposed to do – obstructing the investigation…Burr, has tried it, but there seems to be some sort of make up in the Senate, where, he’s been drug along with the Russian investigation.
Fair Economist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Republican-funded media attacks the Democratic party. Shocking! In other news, the sun came up in the east this morning and water is still wet.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@rikyrah:
Did it. Left this comment for them:
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah:
You are so right. People have no idea how hard and expensive it is to manage living in poverty. Makes me want to spit when people spout pablum about bootstraps and such.
rikyrah
@O. Felix Culpa:
they’re about to get hit with 4 FEET OF WATER AND THIS MUTHAPHUCKA IS ‘ CONSIDERING IT’?!?!?
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
In my early years at Enormous Brokerage & Mutual Funds LLC, we had a client somewhere in Appalachia who’d won a multi-million dollar (not anything like this week, probably <5-10 million) lottery prize. We could see his account, including the checks he wrote, and watched for a few years as he wrote check after check for cash at the local liquor store. It was all gone in a few years.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: It’s true that the article didn’t come out and say that Bernie deliberately played to white privilege, but to me he clearly did.
I did think the “but this wasn’t a normal election so we’re just gonna discount all that” part was pretty laughable.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Brachiator:
Don’t know how much that guy won, but it seems like it would be difficult to go through 3/4 of a billion dollars quickly. I know it would be nice to not have to worry about money anymore if I had 700 million dollars or so.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: Essentially all of the white liberals I know in real life were Sanders primary voters. They all voted for Clinton without great reluctance in the general election, though a couple complained about the nefarious DNC after she lost.
Mnemosyne
@smintheus:
The Electoral College was supposed to protect our country by preventing a dangerous populist elected by the unwashed masses from becoming president. Instead, it actually enabled that very result.
Ella in New Mexico
@Mnemosyne: @Mnemosyne:
Lots of us were very unhappy with the caucuses and the bizarre rules some states set up to be able to participate in the 2016 primaries. We need to get our shit together and make them all equally open, fair and transparent. Then losers have nothing to bitch about later, right?
And as for Vlad, I think he LOVES it we still have at least two daily postings here at BJ about how evil Bernie Sanders is…
Ruckus
@ruemara:
And does far more often that people admit. Glad you came out on the other side. I had a heart attack and didn’t know it, while living without work, in my early 60s, towards the end of the recession. I found the job I have through my cousin, otherwise I may not have found one at all. Every interview I went on, my age was a factor. Life always shits on you at the least convenient times and the more inconvenient the time is, it seems the more shit it throws on top. That it happens to so many of us seems never to enter into the minds of some. Until it happens to them, then it’s woe is me, why won’t anyone help.
I tell people I like paying taxes, it’s a sign that we can be a healthy society. That so many, like the Mercers and Koch brothers, who couldn’t spend all their money in 20 lifetimes, think that they should get to keep all the money they can steal just proves that our society is not healthy.
NoraLenderbee
@smintheus: Now it’s Hillary’s and Bill’s fault?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Ella in New Mexico:
Open primaries bad. Leaves us open to lots of easy ratfucking.
smintheus
@Mnemosyne: The EC as we have now. The Founders’ EC was supposed to function differently: assemble, debate, compromise on an acceptable candidate.
smintheus
@NoraLenderbee: I’m trying to find where I said that.
HeleninEire
Voted for Anderson in my first ever Presidential election.
Yeah I’m old.
hueyplong
I’m kind of giddy at the idea of Trump publicly sharing things said to him by GOPers in confidence before they realized that doing so was a really, really bad idea.
It could be literally anything.
So we’re at a point where the GOP senators have to determine how much they have to have Trump’s back.
Caspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon:
“That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. ‘Cause as you know, sir, in the heat of action, men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and that their emotions carry them away.”
Apply that to GOPers and Trump and try not to laugh yourselves into asphyxia.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I think it was all he had, but part of the reason for that is because he did a bad job of managing it. He thought as CinC he would be able to go in, give an order, and have the military do what he told them. Instead, he talked about it a bunch, and the military leaders responded by putting together a political coalition to block him. DADT was a fallback compromise position. He might have done better if he had given an explicit order on day one and not given them a chance to build up opposition, or if he had taken the time to convince them and actually build support for open service. In the end, he wasn’t willing to spend the effort or political capital to make it happen.
You can see it as either a success or a failure depending on your attitude toward these things; I actually think it’s a good test case. If you’re an incrementalist, you can see it as a success in that it let more gays and lesbians serve, which helped to pave the way for the Obama-era end to the whole thing. If you’re an all-or-nothing type, you will probably see it as a failed compromise that didn’t let gays serve openly and left them vulnerable to the kind of purges that happened during the W years. There’s some obvious truth to both views.
Ella in New Mexico
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Did not really mean “Open Primaries”–I agree, they’re evil. Meant “open process” as in transparency, ease in registration, voter access, etc. Mostly NO CAUCUSES EVER AGAIN lol
NoraLenderbee
@smintheus: You wrote:
Ella in New Mexico
@smintheus:
Seriously, don’t get me started of how pissed off I am at Bill Clinton in terms of his fucking with his wife’s campaigns. I think he literally put a knife in her back with that tarmac meeting. All things aside, who here does NOT know in their gut she’d be POTUS today if she’d kicked his sorry ass to the curb long ago?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Ruckus: Actually, many of them were well-paid artisans. There’s been an ongoing excavation of the worker’s city for the last decade or so that’s been overturning a lot of assumptions about the pyramid builders.
The heavy labor was not slaves, but poor laborers who worked approximately three month shifts.
Also contrary to Herodotus, the labor force was about 10,000 workers, not 100,000. The great innovation that allowed the building was labor organization; there’s a clear org chart to be found in the records that have been uncovered in the worker’s city.
catclub
@Ella in New Mexico:
I think you may not understand the relation between losing and bitching about it.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Thanks, just voted and wrote a long comment at the end. I was not too thrilled with the survey and the direction they seem to be going in.
efgoldman
@Ella in New Mexico:
Implement a rule that any candidate in the primary has to have been a registered, self-identified Democrat for a period of 2 years? 5 years? Some minimum of years. No more helicopter Dems.
WaterGirl
@Ella in New Mexico: What if people who “voted their conscience because it didn’t matter to the outcome” had voted AGAINST Donald J. Trump, and he had lots the popular vote by, say, 10 million votes. That would have made a statement. That would have made a difference.
James Powell
@Mnemosyne:
They were white supremacists who were willing to overlook Sanders’ Judaism as long as he was running against Hillary Clinton. They’d have never voted for him over Trump in the general election.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
You know it might only be 3 feet of water………..
Isn’t that a third less? Let’s see, divide by 14, take the result and multiply by 15, move the decimal 4 places to the left…………… The mother fucking moron
ETA I have no idea what the hell just happened on my computer. In the middle of this it just posted and added a tab on my browser. Either the worst has happened and all my fingers have turned to thumbs, or my neurologist is seriously missing some really obvious clues. It is possible to be a FYWP moment as well.
Betty Cracker
@Ella in New Mexico:
Wait, what?
Kay
@Ella in New Mexico:
He really doesn’t have it anymore though, Bill Clinton. He was the speaker at the Ohio Dems in ’10 (I think) and he was awful.
He sounded like Tom Friedman. I think he’s been a big deal international statesman for too long. I liked him much better when he was rough around the edges. I miss that sense of excess you got with him, that he was fallible, flawed. I think that was human and appealing to people. He’s so skinny and serious now.
O. Felix Culpa
@Ella in New Mexico:
Yes, she has, and in my experience in NM party politics, so have most HRC supporters. Not so much some of the Bernie folks. They are still going on at meetings about the evil DNC and how Bernie wuz cheated. They don’t seem to be able to let go of their deeply-felt grievances. The Hillary folk (myself among them) remain silent, but wish that we could just move on and focus on the issues we have in common and resisting our deranged president. Frankly I worry about splintering if the grievance-nursing doesn’t finally get put to bed. Eyes on the prize.
catclub
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
actually:
so no worries about how to spend $700M.
I wonder if the $758M is based on the before taxes are withheld each year, amount? so if $758 = 29*$26.1M is that $26.1M before or after taxes.
WaterGirl
@Kay: That’s a really interesting thought from your husband. I look forward to the day when the Republicans in office stop speaking to Trump because it’s not safe to talk to them.
Even as I type that, my experience with narcissists tells me that they will just make stuff up if it suits them, so even not talking to Trump is no protection at all. Nice bind they’ve gotten themselves into. I have never felt less empathy for anyone in my entire life.
smintheus
@NoraLenderbee: And that sentence was a response to an earlier comment, which also had nothing to do with blaming Bill Clinton for the 2016 loss.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I will reiterate my opinion that Trump is suffering from cognitive decline. He can’t keep his lies straight for long enough to sell them effectively. Eventually, he loses track of what he was trying to convince people and winds up telling the truth instead.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Thankfully, Maryland allows lottery winners to hide their identity. Maryland is one of only six states where you can stay anonymous when you win lotteries.
WaterGirl
@smintheus: I’m not ragging on the founding fathers, I just think it’s time that we acknowledge the realities of the world we live in and put some protections in place that don’t rely on the assumption that candidates will not be bad actors. Release tax returns, full physical and mental health reviews, etc. Stop relying on norms – which went to hell with Republicans under Obama and now Trump has burned those to the ground – and codify some of this stuff.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.No one expected that you would have to say that it’s not okay to collude with a foreign power to get elected, or expected that such a requirement would have no teeth.No one expected our citizens to have sunk so low as to elect a piece of shit like this.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ruckus: Archology says otherwise. Basically the Pryamids were a public works project and the workers though they had it pretty good. Keep in mind most of the workers were farmers to hard work in the desert was just part of the deal.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: I forgot about those guys!
NoraLenderbee
@catclub:
Shit, how can anyone be expected to live on that.
WaterGirl
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: The last question was “Select all that apply”. I checked multiple answers.
Shana
Because so many people are talking about positions and opinions they had in college that they’ve grown out of, let me share a somewhat related story my father used to tell me.
He was an architecture major in the 50’s. At that time students had to fill in a form at the beginning of every year and one of the lines said “Church”. Not “Religion”, “Church”. As a student of architecture he knew his styles of church architecture, and for the first three years filled in “Gothic”. Then, in his senior year, he decided that wasn’t his favorite style any longer and wrote in “Romanesque”. About a week later the priest from the campus-affiliated church showed up at his door with a stack of tithing envelopes and said “Where you been for the last three years?”
I love that story.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: The longer Trump is “considering it”, the longer eyes are on him, the more powerful he feels. It’s always about ego.
Citizen Alan
@Kelly:
I still think Bush would have governed as a Centrist had 911 not given him cover to let his freak flag fly.
O. Felix Culpa
@Ella in New Mexico:
Wholeheartedly agree.
The Pale Scot
@Doug!:
Well, you got better, that’s the important thing.
Juju
@MJS: The Clinton/Lewinsky affair didn’t become public until early ’98, I believe. It wasn’t a voter issue in ’96. Gore had been sworn in as Vice President and would have become president if Clinton had resigned when it all came to light. I never read George Will, so I don’t know what you’re talking about, but sounds like you are saying that Lewinsky was a ’96 presidential election issue. She wasn’t.
efgoldman
@Mnemosyne:
“Very noisy and annoying on the intartoobz” is not the same as “big” meaning many voters.
Let them pound sand. They aren’t going to vote Dem anyway. especially if it’s a woman and/or minority.
WaterGirl
@Ella in New Mexico: Me.
Mnemosyne
@Ella in New Mexico:
C’mon, you know better than that. The aggrieved are going to bitch no matter what. Trump is the (alleged) billionaire son of a millionaire and he’s still aggrieved.
There was nothing magically different about the primaries or caucuses in 2016 vs 2008. The only difference is that Obama’s campaign knew how all of them worked, inside and out, and was able to exploit those differences. Sanders’ team didn’t bother to figure those things out and then whined that rules that had been in place for a decade or more were unfair to them.
ETA: Or, to put it another way, the Sanders team made the same mistake that Obama’s opponents have been making for 20 years — assuming that if Obama made it look easy, it must BE easy, because a Black guy did it. Whoops!
Redshift
@Ella in New Mexico:
I would have no problem with letting it go at that if not for the constant calls that the Democrats need to figure out how to appeal to those people.
Ruckus
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I’ve done a bit of hard labor in my life. When I owned my own machine shop the maximum chunk of steel I would work by myself was 1200 lbs. And yes I had mechanical help doing that but not a fork lift. I was in the military and have humped 75 lb high explosive shells and helped unload semi trucks worth of food, all one shell/box at a time. But that’s nothing like it would have taken to build the pyramids. Especially with 10,000 instead of 100,000 workers. Yes life was harder then, yes people were used to only manual labor. And I may be totally wrong here, but telling me that people wanted to drag huge stones to build a stone monolith in the desert is beyond belief. That they might have done it as the only work they could get? I might buy that. That there may have been a few people that organized a lot of people to do it may be possible, look at our politics, we have people that organize people very much against their own interests, time and time again.
I just don’t see that many people doing this willingly.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: And now that Trump has become president, even people like Kid Rock thing they can be president. The bar is so low that it’s buried underground.
catclub
@Citizen Alan: The George Bush who immediately wanted to abrogate the ABM treaty and find a way to go to war with China? That George Bush? The one who immediately started governing as if he was elected by a huge majority? The boss of the Mayberry machiavelli’s
Hope springs infernal.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
Did you see his speech at the 2016 DNC about Hillary? It was amazing. Despite his peccadilloes, it was very, very clear that he’s loved her for 40 years and has no intention of ever stopping.
I think he was kind of looking forward to being First Gentleman and essentially getting to retire from party politics.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Redshift: That Grauniad article TenguPhule posts yesterday isn’t an argument for listening to Trump voters, it’s an argument for turning at least the greater Phoenix area into a glass parking lot.
James Powell
@catclub:
That’s enough to get me almost all the guitars I want.
--bd
@catclub: The part I hate about this is that they usually take the same percentage withholding as for regular gambling winnings. That net after tax number is way too high. The 39.6 bracket kicks in at between $400,000 & $500,000, depending on filing status. So lets just assume 39.6% on the full amount, along with Massachusetts’ 5.1% flat rate. To make the calculation easy, let’s apply that total 44.7% rate to the $480,000,000 lump sum. The remaining after-tax amount, 55.3% of that, is a net check of $265,440,000, leaver her about $70,000,000 underpaid. There’s going to be some serious check cutting next April.
Ella in New Mexico
@efgoldman: No. You’re forgetting new registrations with young people, POC, new citizens, etc.
hueyplong
@–bd: I might be willing to assume her problems if the burden becomes too great for her to bear.
Redshift
@Ella in New Mexico:
He’s talking about a time requirement for candidates, not for voters. The chance that a newly registered voter would be a candidate is pretty tiny, but even in that case, it could be handled by instead requiring that you be a registered Democrat and not have been registered with an opposing affiliation for x years. Them newly minted Democrats would automatically qualify.
Robert Sneddon
@–bd:
Heh. In the UK gambling winnings don’t count as income for tax purposes so a lottery winner winning £150 million gets the lot in a single lump (no “annuity” crap) the week after the draw. The government does take a small cut of any bets laid though and that includes lottery ticket purchases.
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
Also, too, they should have to show their fucking taxes. I want the committee on presidential debates to have the same rule.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Ruckus: There’s only so much that the archaeological record can tell us, but our best information at the moment is that the heavy labor came from poor laborers and from idle farmers during flood season. I don’t know how much of it might have been the only work available. In some respects, it seems to have been the best work available. And yes, there’s evidence that the job included health benefits. They’ve found at least two skeletons in the worker’s graveyard that survived a limb amputation for several years. Best guess is the result of an on-the-job accident.
Remember that this was a religious project as well as a royal project. There were undoubtedly additional culture-specific benefits. Qualifying for a decent burial may have been one of them; we don’t know what that would have meant to the laboring class.
MJS
@Juju: No, Will’s article came out in that 1998 period. I wasn’t saying it was an election issue. My reference to Dole was something Will also said in the article, to the effect of, “All the people claiming this is about attempting to undo the results of the last election are wrong. If Clinton resigns or is removed from office, Dole won’t become president. Gore will.” Reading it again you’re right, I wasn’t very clear on that point.
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
Come sit with me, I like the way you think. We can chat…
Jay S
@–bd: I believe that the federal tax is due on receipt of the income. Waiting until April is probably a costly mistake, although I expect the IRS to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Aaron
When America invaded Iraq I had my doubts. I was reading Atrios (before he came out) and other blogs and their doubts were my doubts. And I literally said, repeatedly, I don’t see how if we invade, and there are no WMD’s, congress would have any choice but to impeach gwb. boy was I wrong.
catclub
@Robert Sneddon:
ah, that is pretty sensible, then.
Juju
@MJS: I read through it twice and what you said didn’t seem right. As I said, I never read Will, so I didn’t know, but your explanation/clarification makes perfect sense. Thanks.
ruemara
@Ella in New Mexico: It’s not insignificant if the amount of voters was greater than the amount Hillary lost by. And, sadly, they were. Some allies.
ruemara
@Ella in New Mexico: I will cut from this country of true progressives get their wish of open primaries and caucuses. Join the fucking party or shut up. We are constantly being ratfucked by the libertarian pretenders to true progressivism. Open primaries disenfranchise minorities and working folks as well as would be the fucking nail in the Dem party coffin. And since the true progressives are running around on my fucking donations to a party they hate, while bitching moaning and taking Wall Street bankster cash, they can shut the fuck up.
NR
I sure am glad that we can all feel good about ourselves, secure in the knowledge that everyone who doesn’t vote for our candidates (along with everyone who does vote for our candidates, but also happens to hold political positions we don’t like) is racist, sexist, or some other variant of horrible person. Really makes political analysis incredibly easy.
WaterGirl
@ruemara: Did you fill out the DNC survey rikyrah linked to? One of the first questions was a rating from 1 to 10 about whether open primaries make the party weaker or stronger. I went with a “1” – I think open primaries are a total disaster. If you want to have a say in who the nominee is, then join the fucking party.
Bill Arnold
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
This (re DT), I agree with. He once briefly (like 20 seconds) irritated/scared me enough to actively wish him harm. (There were other prods too, but it was mainly DT). The Rs in congress are an aggregate of individuals, so have not been tempted to collectively hate them.
Re the original question, my main failing recently in this regard has been an excessive faith in the power/probability of/for capitalism to solve important problems. Eyes a bit more open now about the degeneracies in capitalist systems that can be caused by (increasingly personalized and AI driven) marketing, and regulatory capture, and active political influencing. and etc. Basically, greed needs a tight and strong leash, and carefully monitoring, and it would be nice to find a workable replacement.
Oh, and as a younger man, voted for John Anderson. Don’t recall the thought processes but they were almost certainly quite shallow.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: You’re a fucking idiot, and a troll.
J R in WV
@smintheus:
I thought a prat was a small fish…
--bd
@Jay S: No. As long as you have paid 110% (in her case) of the prior year’s tax liability in a quarterly pro-rata fashion, either through withholding or estimates, you are exempt from underpayment penalties and interest as long as all remaining liabilities are paid with the return / extension filed on April 15th. If the feds didn’t have that 25% or so minimum withholding, she could tell them to withhold $20,000 or whatever and pay the remaining $190,000,000 or so on April 15th. Why the feds don’t withhold the full 39.6%, I have no idea. (CPA MST credential card played).
burnspbesq
@–bd:
I’m sure you meant 43.4 percent.
--bd
@burnspbesq: If you’re thinking about Obamacare taxes, they don’t apply to lottery winnings, just investment income over a certain amount. Also, since it’s not wages, there’s no additional .9% Medicare tax on the winnings either. Then again, it’s Friday and I’m tired. What were you thinking? I could have missed something.
Chris T.
I’m happy enough with “teach the controversy” as long as it includes a wide sampling of creation myths. Including, for instance, the old Egyptian one about Atum jerking off to make the world.
Ransom
COIN just might work this time!
Jack the Second
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Shit, man, you win 700 million dollars in a lottery, take the goddamn annuity. Is there some reason you need more than $23 million / year for the next 30 years?