he looks like Andrew Bird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRk2iHkOcNE
The "sweat on my butt" joke was funny, because I am 12 years old.
He was 18! And joking! This is a low blow.
I am not down with hating on high schoolers
Somebody should find a video of him in law school.
Bunch of squishy liberals. Conservatives had no problem hating on 8-year old Obama, I can't recall if there are any stories about child Hillary that have been flogged but I'm sure they wouldn't feel bad about doing so.
squishy liberals
My son recently became aware that some people have "abs". I told him that my abdominal muscles are so big that they grew together and that's why I don't have a six pack.
Mines really more of 12 pack. Or maybe a party ball.
When I was 18, we moved a Party Ball into a dorm room without getting caught.
stories about child Hillary that have been flogged
She was a Goldwater volunteer in her teens, right?
But, yeah. Loathsome as he appears to be both in this video and in the present, I hate to take the video as meaning anything about him now. Lots of people might have been that awful as teenagers and have gotten better.
Right, but even though he was hardline, there's no evidence he beat his campaign volunteers.
This is interesting, given all the stories about him being a pompous, condescending humorless jerk as early as his second year in college. Here he appears to be merely a condescending jerk.
11:
And some of them grow up to become Ted Cruz.
13: I've never heard him described as "humorless." As much as I hate to admit it, he probably has the sharpest wit of any candidate on either side.
We can't go back and kill baby Hitler, but we can - and therefore we must! - go back and mock teen Cruz.
Lots of people might have been that awful as teenagers and have gotten better.
This surprised me, first mildly that someone else believes it and then strongly by how much I disagree. Terrible teenagers grow up to be terrible adults. Everyone is terrible, clearly, but I think the ways in which we are terrible are evident by the time we're in high school. People don't change who they fundamentally are, very often.
One of the ways in which I am terrible is by being very judgmental and dismissive of other people.
Wow could I not possibly disagree with 17 any more than I do. I was a terrible teenager. I'm still terrible, obviously, but the ways in which I'm terrible now are completely unrelated to the ways in which I was terrible then.
Yeah, and we aren't talking about some turd kid who grew up to be a relatively harmless family man and middle manager somewhere. We're talking about someone who is using his position of power to advance a dangerous, reactionary agenda. He used to just be a turd bag. Now he's a turd bag that is a literal danger to human survival.
I can see where you're standing from here, but not to agree with you overall.
"People don't change who they fundamentally are," I can agree with, but it really depends on what 'fundamentally' means. I don't think what kind of awful person you're likely to be if you let yourself is likely to change much from when you're a teenager: I bet if you filmed a teenager in their worst moments, and showed it to people who knew the person as an adult, a couple of decades later, the behavior would almost always be recognizable rather than being a big surprise: sniveling whiners would be people with that tendency; arrogant blowhards, similarly, and so on. But some people let themselves be terrible, and other people get themselves under control, and don't generally behave according to their worst impulses.
Right, but even though he was hardline, there's no evidence he beat his campaign volunteers.
None that's been made public, anyway.
I can agree with the general sentiment in 20, but it doesn't push back on 17 quite hard enough. It's not just that people "get themselves under control" and reign in their worst tendencies. It's that teenagers still have a lot to learn, and their teenaged worst tendencies may in many cases be completely turned around through subsequent life experience (including education).
But some people let themselves be terrible, and other people get themselves under control, and don't generally behave according to their worst impulses.
As near as I can tell, being able to hide your terrible impulses is like 95% of adulthood.
I mean, when I was 18 I was a goddamn no-joke street evangelist.
I know a guy who knows him! Chad who runs his campaign was one of the best men at my sisters wedding. Nice guy, not terribly conservative. But never talked to him about Cruz, so not much to report, sorry.
You can't have two "best men." Superlatives don't work like that.
20.last describes me (I hope). I really have no idea how many people thought I was an asshole in my late teens, but it was surely more than my self-image would have expected*, and (I'm almost certain) way more than think so now. Because in my late teens I could be an insensitive jerk in a way that I'm not now, even though I think my best qualities were always present and reasonably apparent.
It's also probably true that 18-y.o. white American males are perhaps THE #1 demographic for assholery, for obvious reasons. Many, if not most, of us get better.
*not just due to solipsism, but due to still-damaged self esteem from my earlier years of self-loathing. I didn't take myself very seriously, so I didn't think others did, but of course it's not like I was wearing t-shirts that said, "Don't take what I say too seriously, because deep down I have some serious self-doubt."
I think 17 is probably right deep down, but with people as late as high school or even (very) young adulthood there are only so many different ways to be awful. And which kind of awful exactly is causing the awful behavior isn't obvious until later on in life. (So, it's the same kind of problem as diagnosing any number of other things: fewer symptoms than diseases.)
I'm pretty sure I knew people in high school who would have said similar things if caught on camera at the right moment (and 'filmed for the yearbook' would certainly have had a higher probability of being that moment), but not out of the kind of intensely arrogant sociopathic dickishness that Cruz has spent the rest of his life displaying. General awkwardness, mildly solipsistic immaturity or even just a kind of general resentment combined with thinking (accurately) that this was an exercise in 'school spirit!' bullshit could get you close enough that you'd see something like that. From what I can see it's mostly a young person being kind of contemptuous of the video yearbook and telling the people involved to fuck off, which really could result from any number of different character flaws. In this case it just happened to result from a genuinely horrific and abnormal set of flaws which he is right now strutting around displaying for everyone to see.
You can have multiple maids or matrons of honor, because honor is non-rivalrous good.
There can't be multiple best men at the wedding? What are they called then? Groomsmen?
Groomsmen or, if they're virgins, "Men of Honor."
I lean towards the Messily side of this. There's certainly continuity of certain aspects of personality that show up quite early. People do make radical changes but it tends to require radical situations or experiences to make a person completely change who they are. For the majority I think you have a pretty good idea how they are going to turn out if you know them well in High School.
30: One best man, and the rest are ushers.
It's also probably true that 18-y.o. white American males are perhaps THE #1 demographic for assholery, for obvious reasons. Many, if not most, of us get better.
I think this is right. It takes a few years of living on your own to get enough self-awareness and life experience. At least that's my excuse.
You can have multiple maids or matrons of honor,
But you have one Honored Matre and suddenly you're imprinted.
24 has blown my mind. Was this fact generally known on the blog?
We just assumed that the same was true for basically everybody who grew up in the south.
In this particular dude's case there's tons of confirming evidence that he continued to be a world-class dick, and he appears even for a high-schooler to be a world-class dick here. So I don't get the squeamishness. It's fair to discount what people did as teenagers and to cut teenagers slack for being stupid, but it doesn't have to be disciunted to zero and in this case it definitely helps to explain a larger ongoing continuing world-class dick.
I disagree with 20 too because I was actually quite nice as a teenager and I'm pretty unpleasant a lot of the time now.
Ajay was so much older then. He's younger than that now.
Even if you were an asshole at that age and describe yourself as "pretty terrible sometimes, actually", I doubt you've taken your assholery to the level of bringing the US government (and global economy) to the brink of collapse just to get your name out there for a Presidential bid.
Was this fact generally known on the blog?
I didn't know specifically that, but I have learned to believe anything of urple. Anything.
"To put the exhaust into the intake is an abomination before the Lord!"
23 is correct.
Young Cruz looks like young Peter Facinelli. Or maybe Eric Bana or even Christian Bale. I got a mancrush.
My heart leaps up. Only Last good thing Kooper ever did.
It's also probably true that 18-y.o. white American males are perhaps THE #1 demographic for assholery,
Meh. Assholes come in a rainbow coalition of ethnicities, races, ages, and classes. 18-y.o white American males are just of the entitled punk variety.
As I'm surrounded by teenagers a lot at the moment I have ¡opinions! basically that it's pretty common for us to have a freshman join the tea and start off the biggest pain in the ass that the other kids really generously tolerate (they blow my mind) and who over the course of high school grows into a wonderful, mature and lovely person. Then I see kids on other teams who seem to only grow and become further entrenched in obnoxiousness from year to year and it makes me despair. Who could possibly coach a kid not only to behave so poorly but to go further that way?
One of my most vivid examples was a young man who proselytized his fellow students freshman, sophomore, junior years (we had to tell him to knock it off pretty regularly) but summer before senior year discovered girls and showed up for practice with a new hairdo and fashion sense (quite sharp) and *much* smoother ways.
||
This is basically what I would have liked to say in the FightFight thread, if I had had time:
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10853502/bernie-sanders-political-revolution
But I've covered Sanders for a while, and in my view he is selling something different. In contrast to Obama, who tended to position himself personally as the solution to Washington's problems, Sanders views his political revolution as issues-oriented and coalition-based. In my analysis, it would involve three key planks:
A Democratic Party-wide move to the left on economic issues, focused on challenging the power of the wealthy and corporations (and, by extension, the power of the Republicans those interests tend to back)
A new economics-focused electoral appeal aimed at nonvoters of all races -- and at white voters who've tended to support the GOP
A continued mobilization and organization of many of those core supporters, so they'll keep fighting for change once President Sanders is in office
Obama never tried to remake the Democratic Party ideologically, instead staying squarely in its mainstream on economic issues. And he's been criticized for failing to make use of his massive organizing operation once in office -- preferring instead to play an inside game focused on Washington, DC, to get his policies passed.
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he's been criticized for failing to make use of his massive organizing operation once in office
a criticism which neatly forgets that "his organization" was not an inert tool waiting to be wielded, but was actually a bunch of people who were supposed to get out there and work for the things they said they wanted.
This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.
they didn't.
instead of "pitching in", instead of "making that change", the people who elected him went and let a bunch of Republican crazies get elected in election after election.
and note that this is the same problem Sanders would face for any of his plans that require the public to rise up in a "political revolution": they won't.
That's partially my fault. I'm getting lazy.
My main point is that tif this video for was of Bernie sanders a for no one would sew different for voting.
50/51 isn't a law of nature. I don't think Sanders is going to do this either, but he gets a chance to demonstrate his movement building prowess.
53 could not have been better said.
the people who elected him went and let a bunch of Republican crazies get elected in election after election.
Should they all have moved to other congressional districts or something?
54:
Exactly. Really, people getting out and voting in off-years is exactly what needs to happen and hasn't. Even if you're not optimistic about the chances of this happening under anyone, you should still vote for the person that you think is most likely to bring about this kind of change.
This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
But this is an idealistic appeal to people's sentiments. That's different than explicitly organizing people on the basis of their interests and their class position in the U.S.
60:
I think Obama kind of caged himself in about how severely he could trash the republicans by running on a platform of finding common ground with them. If he had explicitly said in a SOTU "These Republicans are obstructionists, America. Register to vote by doing XYZ and then vote straight democratic tickets so that I can usher in the final era of liberal darkness once and for all" it really might have worked, but it also could have really backfired and made things even worse for him than they were anyway.
Bernie isn't promising anything like bipartisanship. He's promising to basically do everything in his power to enact substantial reform, so he won't be as limited in the courses of action he can safely pursue as Obama was.
Also 58 is right on.
As for people changing as they age, I don't think I've changed too much since I was a teen, but my sister definitely seems like a nicer human being. Then again, siblings not getting along is fairly common. And I'd be willing to grant that most people don't change too much after their teenage years, while still leaving open the possibility that some significant minority change based on epiphanies or traumas or general personal growth. Call it wishful thinking if you want but the alternative is scary.
57: -better
59
Exactly. Really, people getting out and voting in off-years is exactly what needs to happen and hasn't.
This is correct but unfortunately it's even worse than that. Off-years, primaries, local elections that might or might not line up with them, unelected stuff that tends to influence what goes on in local elections. The Lions Club, the PTA, stuff like that. And when I put it like that the problem looks insurmountable because I sure wouldn't join groups like that if you dragged me kicking and screaming, and I can't even blame that on being overworked or not speaking English well enough, I'm just too lazy and antisocial.
Somehow everyone has succumbed to the belief that the Republicans have a permanent structural advantage in the off-year elections. Not so: it's the party that is out of the White House tends to do better in midterms. The Republicans got killed in 2006, for example. The Republicans did pick up seats in 2002, not long after 9/11, but the Democrats picked up seats in 1998, so even that's not much evidence of anything.
Everyone wants to reinvent the mass membership party apart from the mass membership.
What people fail to understand is that Bernie is uniquely situated to make voters try harder to elect liberals and do so for years. With a Bernie win, popular and permanent revolution is going to be happening, because that's the nature of his support. He's building a movement, not just trying to elect a man, so it's completely realistic -- indeed more realistic than the putative "realistic" mainstream liberals! -- to assume that he'll be able to pass legislative projects like single-payer health insurance shortly or no later than two years after getting elected. What the nay-sayers fail to understand is that his very emergence onto the political stage is sufficient evidence, if he wins, that the world is being transformed and therefore Congress is being transformed. Oh, and also the people want major major change right now. That, and no other, reason explains why he does better against Trump than Hilary Clinton in a few polls. So Bernie is the better choice for short term victory. And he's also the better long-term choice because of the permanent movement and political transformation that he'll create.
Did I miss any of the arguments? That all seems like incredibly implausible wishful thinking.
If he had explicitly said in a SOTU "These Republicans are obstructionists, America. Register to vote by doing XYZ and then vote straight democratic tickets so that I can usher in the final era of liberal darkness once and for all" it really might have worked, but it also could have really backfired and made things even worse for him than they were anyway.
I still think it's unlikely that this would work (and not only because I don't think many people who don't vote watch the SOTU address).
It did make me curious, just as a point of comparison, if the MTV "Rock The Vote" effort ever made any difference in turnout and apparently it didn't (story from 2004).
Youth voting has actually declined since RtV has been in existence. Only in 1992 did youth voting tick upward from its continuing downward descent (but so did all other age groups that year). Voter turnout among 18-24 year-olds was around 45% in 1990, RtV's first year in business, but by 2000, this age group was voting in the range of 38%. There were about 27 million young people aged 18-24 in 1990 and around 29 million in 2000. That means around 11 million young people voted in 2000, and 12.1 million young people voted in 1990, for a net loss of one million young voters.
On the other hand, I've always heard that non-voters have similar political inclinations to voters, but perhaps that isn't true (article from 2012)
Far more nonvoters than voters favor activist government. About half of nonvoters (52%) say the government should do more to solve problems, while 40% say the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals. The balance of opinion is reversed among likely voters: 56% say the government is doing too much, while 39% say the government should do more to solve problems.
By 46% to 31%, more nonvoters favor keeping the 2010 health care law in place than repealing the law; 23% do not express an opinion. Voters are more evenly divided, with 49% favoring the law's repeal and 43% saying it should remain in place; just 8% do not express an opinion.
There are smaller differences in the opinions of voters and nonvoters on tax policy: 55% of nonvoters and 51% of likely voters say it would better for the economy to maintain current tax rates on income under $250,000 while raising taxes on income about that level. A third of nonvoters, and 42% of likely voters say it would better to lower tax rates for all Americans by 20%, while limiting some tax deductions.
I'm skeptical that it's possible to shift the American political landscape by bringing in non-voters, but that provides some support for the idea that non-voters lean to the left.
65:
If you're trying to convince me not to get my hopes up about a Sanders Presidency being terribly productive or transformative, then that that really it not necessary. I'm plenty cynical. But I've also got anywhere between 50-70 years of living on this planet left and I'm going to participate in the political process in the way that I see fit to ensure that those don't suck so bad as it looks like they're going to. If you've got constructive suggestions for how to change this (local political strategies, places to volunteer, societies to join, organizations to support), I'm all ears. If you think that grim support of HRC is more productive than grim support of Sanders then go ahead and state your case for her. But so far it sounds like you're just kind of pissed that people aren't displaying what you deem to be an appropriate amount of cynicism.
Whether or not Sanders gets any of this stuff done, I think you probably would like it if he could. The way I see it, a vote against him is a vote against a markedly more liberal state than the one we have now. Cynical as we both may be about anybody's ability to enact the kinds of policies he's talking about, doesn't actively voting against them make things worse?
Trivers, your local Democratic county central committee is a great place to spend some energy. Check it out.
67: I think RT is so cynical because we've heard it all before. Warren Buffett once said something like "When a bad company hires a good CEO, it's the company that emerges with its reputation intact." American politics is the way it is for deep structural reasons, and while many people have gone to Washington promising to change it, few of them have. The career of one Hillary Clinton is an instructive one. Nobody in 1992 would have doubted she was a liberal. Yet 24 years of Washington experience later, here we are.
67 - it's a fair assumption that my default mode is to be pissed that people aren't more cynical and despairing. With that said, if I didn't think that Bernie's candidacy had huge costs and risks, of course I'd support him, even if I think getting his agenda actually passed, even if he wins, is unlikely. But as we've talked about I do think that those risks are there. But even with that said I'm not actually mad at anyone who supports him, just a little mad about particular arguments I see get made on his behalf (almost exclusively on social media, not here).
In terms of progressive long-term movement building I agree with Carp that the local level is the place to start. Bernie himself got started by a left-liberal faction organizing in Burlington VT. I actually do think that the country as a whole is getting more progressive, at least on economics, and that this will continue, so the future doesn't look all bad, at least if we don't blow everything up first.
65- Nice straw man you've got there RT. I think there is a chance Bernie might prosecute a criminal banker. Hillary isn't likely to.
70.1: It's because you made the mistake of reading the Internet outside of Unfogged. Rookie mistake.
Though I am experiencing one upside of FB: I have a friend who is super-establishment Republican (she may actually work for the Jeb campaign). She's losing her mind over Trump hijacking her party, and all of her attacks on him are from the left (he's racist, sexist, etc.). The schaudenfreude is delicious.
It's pretty easy to drag social media baggage into Unfogged. I'm guilty of it sometimes, too.
I did do a bit of phone-banking for Bernie the weekend before last and met some wonderful people and it did get me thinking I should try to get more involved in local politics. Even though it's a Republican stronghold, Dallas is a pretty well-run city. I've only recently gotten to a level of personal/financial security where it's possible for me to participate.
It sounds like you think we're actually on a more secure path to a substantially more liberal state than I do and that nominating Bernie would be an unproductive jumping-of-the-gun. I'm probably less worried about the relative risk of Bernie to Hillary as a candidate than you are[1]. The risk that stands out to me is that if Bernie's Presidency goes poorly (especially if he gets nothing done and is one-term), it will usher in an era of even greater cynicism than we already have[2] and we may end up with even more terrible, even more reactionary candidates than we're already faced with. Is this what you are also concerned about as well, or are you more worried about the election?
[1]I think he's more likely to win in November than she is but I do grant that there's value to be had in knowing more or less exactly what the right-wing kitchen sink looks like in her case. Bloomberg joining the race does make me worry, though.
[2]And I'll grant there is probably plenty of room for the people he plans to go after to tank his Presidency (and probably a lot of peoples' lives along with it) in ways that would not be easy for the public to understand.
Neither Sanders nor Hillary is likely accomplish much in terms of fixing health care or free college tuition any of those lofty goals. But Hillary is more likely to get us involved in dumb wars, and Bernie is more likely to Legalize It.
58: Yes! C'mon down, y'all! 70s this week!
Bernie is more likely to Legalize It.
Where's my fucking checkbook...
Are there ever any shallow structural reasons?
I and the other three liberals in eastern Oregon all vote Democrat in our congressional elections.
78: Mostly just in south Florida, where the fractured limestone underlayment obviates anything deeper.
the ways in which we are terrible are evident by the time we're in high school.
I don't remember who said this, but "High School never ends."
Anyone watching the Republicans-sans-Trump debate?
Marco Rubio is literally repeating things he's said before verbatim. I have my 22 oz. wine glass out.
81: I believe that was Bowling for Soup.
I rented a house with some roommates in the same neighborhood as all of them when I was in college. It was a surprisingly middle class neighborhood.
I have it on. Rubio is an interesting case. I don't believe he can think on his feet at all. He seems to be a preprogrammed robot.
In the debates I've watched it's pretty clear that Rubio basically just has a set of cue cards memorized and he recites whichever one is closest to the question whenever he's asked something. If you get the right question you can see him freeze with anxiety for a second until he starts into one of his bits. I think he really is an impressively empty suit, and would get eaten alive in any debate where he was challenged on something he didn't see coming or have a prewritten response to.
Aren't there consultants who charge big money to train a candidate to achieve just that type of performance in a debate?
The main goal being not to actually debate well but to produce sound bites and to avoid saying something stupid.
You can do that (by Republican standards) with maybe a third order Markov model. Hell, first order gets you a pretty good Ted Cruz:
markovchaintedcruz.tumblr.com
I feel like the moderation is a lot more aggressive than usual in this Republican debate. I'm enjoying it more than I expected to.
From what I'm reading (but not watching) Kelly is really going after Cruz and Rubio in the debate. If so that reveals an interesting choice on the part of Fox News - we already knew the establishment hated Cruz, but they might be trying to undercut Rubio to make space for Bush after all. I can see how that could be a strategy if they're all still basically committed to Bush as a candidate.
I think Megyn Kelly landed a harsh one on Rubio, and Chris Wallace was pretty hard on Ted Cruz.
You should watch Kelly. She's got that business-lady, power-leg thing going.
91:
I sort of wonder if maybe they've just decided that they're fine with Trump. I read something a while back about how they legislature has basically decided that they're fine with him as President because he's some completely uninformed that it will be easy to turn him into an empty vessel for their agenda.
Yeah Bush is looking a lot better in this debate, but I don't see how that could save him at this point.
Isn't that what Hindenberg thought about that one guy?
96 I made that comparison in an earlier thread.
Right, but I was subtle. Because Godwin.
Wow Chris Christie "I knew nothing."
Rubio gets slimier and slimier with every word that comes out of his mouth.
I don't think this is something I've seen a moderator do in a debate before. I'm genuinely surprised that it's within the debate rules, even.
Also wow, she really looks like she wants to hurt him. Trump may have been making a very good decision not to show up, even without the grandstanding he's doing about getting attention from people.
102 Yeah I was rooting for injuries so I'm having fun.
I've been thinking lately that Trump is doing brilliantly largely because American political races are very much like reality TV. This is for two reasons
1) When you interact with people on reality TV, you need to be on your toes. Other people are going to cut up the footage/recording of the interactions to make them either sell or fit a narrative. You need to do everything in your power to keep control of the narrative so that the audience comes away liking you.
2) You're going to be asked about all of your interactions later when you're alone. You need to be able to spin the interaction in a way that gives the audience the impression you want. Better yet, you can have interactions with people with the goal of bringing things around to a desirable monologue.
What do you guys think?
105:yes, he's consciously doing reality TV tactics.
That's very plausible as part of it. Trump has an aggressive simplicity when he talks that I actually wish I could manage. And it makes it very difficult to cut and paste what he's saying into different contexts. And he's very used to insisting strongly on whatever past he's just made up, while dodging specifics he could actually get called on.
I think the main thing though is that unlike a lot of more powerful Republicans he actually understands his audience and what they want, which is basically President Limbaugh.
105- I feel like you have a point. Maybe I'm living in fantasy land but I think it didn't used to be this way.
Oh good god Cruz, explicitly coming out against Ethanol subsidies is not helping you here. And adding in "I'm not against ethanol, just..." isn't going to impress anyone.
Are people more easily spun now than they used to be?
107:
I was thinking it actually helps to not have billionaire donors.
The problem with billionaire donors is that they're so obsessively insistent on pushing their own agendas that it handicaps their candidates in elections. I think something like 75% of Americans want serious government action on climate change.* So any President that says climate change is a myth is at a significant handicap in the general election, but they can't actually align with the majority because the donors won't let them.
It's like this on all kinds of issues. The candidates have to appeal to a handful of totally non-representative rich dudes first and the voters second. It puts them at a significant disadvantage when it comes to appealing to voters.
*Trump says climate change is a myth, but this is the first issue I could think of where the typical republican candidate is at a significant handicap because of the donor class
In Trump's case, this allows him to take much, much more brutally right-leaning stances on immigration than the other candidates do. Ditto for nationalistic, isolationist trade policies.
I don't think this is something I've seen a moderator do in a debate before. I'm genuinely surprised that it's within the debate rules, even.
Wow, that is remarkable? Is the whole debate like that? I watch more of Megan Kelly attacking the candidates.
Carson is not even trying anymore. "Putin is a one-horse country: oil and energy." Recites the Preamble to the Constitution as his closing statement.
I think she did it to Rubio as well at one point? I'm not sure - I've only watched a couple clips not the debate itself. I think everyone else got off pretty easy, though.
Whether or not the power players in the Republican party have a strategy is up for debate, honestly, but this debate made it look like they're hoping to cripple both Rubio and Cruz. Given the way Fox went after Trump in the previous debate I'm not surprised he stayed out of it, although that probably would have made for some real fireworks. My best guess is that it's clear that Jeb has a bunch of powerful allies, and is making an argument behind the scenes that he absolutely can and will take out Rubio all on his own whether or not he gets support. And so they're hoping to reset the race and put him back on top as the establishment candidate. I have no idea what they're thinking about Trump in all of that, though. I think a lot of them really did talk themselves into believing that Republican voters are really into conservative ideological slogans or whatever and are having trouble coming to terms with the fact that they were mostly just bigots looking for the dreamiest authoritarian leader (which is very clearly Trump), so they're assuming that somehow everyone will snap out of it and things will go back to normal. If they are thinking that and if Trump's GOTV operation gets votes that look like his polling support there's likely to be a really huge freakout after either Iowa or New Hampshire.
I told ya it would be Jeb. I thought it might be at the convention. MoTU don't lose.
I have always presumed that some level of financial cops can frog march Trump in handcuffs anytime they wanted to. Just as you can get away with a lot in the financial world, if they want to they can destroy you. They rarely want to.
Different kind of ugly on the Democratic side. Spent an hour looking for the Quinniepac poll of New Hampshire that showed Sanders with a twenty point lead on Clinton with voters making under 50k a year; and Clinton with a twenty point lead on Sanders with voters making over 100k a year. Archdruid had a post about how it isn't the 1% in both parties that rule, but the top 20%, and the top 20% have benefited from the last ten years.
Oh well. 2016:pigs win again, as I expected. Maybe get interesting in 2020.
Don't get all hopeful on us, bob. You know the pigs always win and always will.
Here's a wild-ass bob-style that I'd only make after downing enough alcohol to get me through the republican debate without chucking my laptop off my balcony.
If Bernie wins the Democratic nomination and Trump wins the Republican nomination, Bloomberg runs as an independent. Trump cooks up some reason (or has one cooked up for him) to drop out of the race so that it's Bernie v. Bloomberg.
Having now watched the OP video, I think Cruz wouldn't come across as unusually dickish for an 18-year-old guy based on it alone, but since we have lots and lots of additional evidence of his dickishness it looks a lot worse.
I've been thinking lately that Trump is doing brilliantly largely because American political races are very much like reality TV.
The only reality TV show that I watch is The Great British Bake Off (because I'm a Mary Berry fangirl, and I'm not kidding: I have nothing but affectionate admiration for the undisputed queen of the sponge cake). I'm pretty sure Trump would utterly fail at the Baked Alaska round, and I doubt he could produce an edible Victoria sandwich.
But yeah, I think you're right about the reality TV angle.
Trump is a brilliant self-promoter, and a canny manipulator of audience expectation. The Donald's self-fashioning almost reads like a grotesque caricature of grandiose egomaniacal delusion, except that it, o horror of horrors, actually seems sort of 'authentic.' He may well be, genuinely and authentically, as stupidly thoughtless as he comes across. Which is not to say that he's 'stupid': he is not stupid, he is very, very smart. But he appears to lack that inner space within which introspection and retrospection occur.
And for all his emphasis on his own excellent sorry self, he is listening very carefully to his audience, absorbing impressions and picking up cues, and then giving his customers exactly the product they want to purchase.
I was talking tonight to someone who'd done a bunch of work for Trump, and said that he's exactly like his public persona in private. No difference at all. "What you see is what you get." So he kind of does have his own sort of insane authenticity
123: I can't say 123 surprises me at all. He seems like a quintessential "no filter" person. Other than whatever filter makes him interpret everything that happens as reinforcing his own greatness, but that's on the input side rather than output.
Here's my nightmare scenario: it's Trump vs. Bernie. Bloomberg joins the race, eeks out a win in New York. No one gets 270, the election is thrown to the House, setting off a fratricidal brawl in the House GOP. The impasse is finally resolved by the election of compromise candidate Paul Ryan.
I kind of like Megyn Kelly despite her being a right winger. She asks hard questions and follows up when the interviewee dodges. Nobody who's watched her much prior to the debates would be surprised at how she went after Trump. The Cruz bit on immigration was hardcore even for her, though. All but calling him a liar to his face was a nice touch.
Admittedly, following up when someone dodges isn't a particularly high standard for a journalist, but given the sorry state of journalism generally and of Fox News journalism in particular, it's head and shoulders above the crowd.
I assume spelling her name with a 'gyn' is some kind of feminist statement, like with "womyn" or something.
102 really is great. (Although Cruz responded pretty effectively, I think--substantively non-responsive/nonsense, but it sounded good if you weren't thinking hard.) I wish the debates generally featured much more of that. It's disgraceful how often the moderators let candidates lie without even so much as a follow up. Having said that, it very much disturbs (but very much does not surprise) me that the pointed questions and sharp follow up seem targeted at particular candidates, and not evenly distributed. Whatever happened to the supposed objectivity of the press?
I don't know how far I'd go with calling her a real journalist: she definitely has a bit every couple weeks that hits the internet where she at least seems to be holding someone's feet to the fire rather than just acting like their press agent. And for Fox News that's saying something. But I've always suspected that there's more than a little Shep Smith style allowed exception going on there, where she's given a certain number of times to go a bit off the reservation in order to be able to look like a journalist rather than a hack so that her hackery other times is less obvious.
Having written that now I'm thinking that that might mean that she is a real journalist, though. I strongly doubt her willingness to go after Cruz the way she did in this debate was a matter of sincere journalistic integrity or anything - it was absolutely a hit job, and a very satisfying one. I absolutely love the "You said (x) yes you did and..." where she just sticks the 'yes you did' bit in there before Cruz even has a chance to say something, as if it was just a natural part of the sentence.
Which is not to say that he's 'stupid': he is not stupid, he is very, very smart. But he appears to lack that inner space within which introspection and retrospection occur.
This is exactly right. I've heard a lot of people talking about how Trump is really dumb and he's very clearly not dumb at all. I wouldn't rely on his judgment (or analysis) for most things, but his ability to turn back attacks or launch his own is really spectacular and he's hitting very small targets too squarely with it for it to be accidental or anything. Ted Cruz challenged him to a one-on-one debate when he withdrew and his response (yesterday, I think) was something like "I'd be happy to debate Ted once he's had a court confirm that he is actually eligible to be President". That's doing the bullying-dominance politics that Republicans live off of way, way too well not to be deliberate and intentional.
60 : But this is an idealistic appeal to people's sentiments.
it was precisely what "Yes We Can" was about.
But the reason our campaign has always been different, the reason we began this improbable journey almost a year ago is because it's not just about what I will do as president. It is also about what you, the people who love this country, the citizens of the United States of America, can do to change it.That's what this election is all about.
That's why tonight belongs to you. It belongs to the organizers, and the volunteers, and the staff who believed in this journey and rallied so many others to join the cause.
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
the bullying-dominance politics that Republicans live off of
This is exactly what Trump is all about. He's not playing some bullshit intellectual game. It's all about being the alpha wolf. For this reason I think a Trump/Clinton matchup would be very interesting, since I don't think he's capable of seeing a woman as a real threat, or taking her seriously in a debate. Played right she could make him look like a (even more of a) clown.
125: I don't remember learning this before, but it appears the 12th Amendment requires the House to pick from the top 3 candidates in the Electoral College.
I wouldn't rely on his judgment (or analysis) for most things, but his ability to turn back attacks or launch his own is really spectacular and he's hitting very small targets too squarely with it for it to be accidental or anything.
Some of this is the classic "dumb people are too stupid to know they've lost the argument" thing, though. Not that I think he's dumb per se, but his blustery self-aggrandising argumentation style is just impervious to most attacks. "You just insulted all Mexicans" - "Mexicans love me". "You're a misogynist" - "Only against fat sluts". "Your wall plan is insanely impractical" - "It's going to be the biggest, most beautiful wall ever, and we won't have to pay for it".
So did anyone make the obvious "one no trump" joke about the Fox debate?
What's the deal with everyone going on about Trump? He picks his nose and everyone says, "My god! What a genius! Did you see how effortlessly he found his nose!"
"That's right! It was gross and disgusting, and yet how can you help but be impressed!"
136. Some gag about opening with a weak hand?
One no trump bids are generally pretty difficult to make because they're usually the result of a busted bidding process.
134. Even more interesting is that if it goes to the House, each state has one vote; it's not like all 435 members get a direct vote.
It's really hard to win a no trump bid in Hearts.
You clearly use a different system from the one I grew up with, but I haven't played bridge for 40 years so that's unsurprising.
My sister and her friends used to play bridge in high school and college, but I never learned it. I did learn Euchre, but at the time I didn't realize it was a traditional card game. I thought it was something recent named for Bob Uecker.
135: Maybe, but shamelessly refusing to ever back down or admit that what you said was demented or (depending) that you said it at all even if there's video has been a hallmark of Republican politics for a very, very long time now. I think Trump only seems odd because of how good he is at it, even compared to the other candidates. (Also a bunch of the stuff isn't actually stuff that could reasonably be expected to hurt him in a Republican primary anyway - especially the McCain bit which the press seemed convinced would be the end of him even though (1) the base hates McCain and has for a long time and (2) people have been saying much nastier shit about McCain for decades.)
I also think that a large part of the reason (though not all) that Trump seems like he's upending politics or is wildly out of the norm for a successful Republican candidate is that the press spent the first two or even three months not taking him seriously as a candidate. If Bush or Cruz or Rubio had been wandering around saying similarly demented stuff (and, well, they sort of were in a lot of ways) they wouldn't have received coverage using words like 'demented' and 'buffoonish' and so on. The reason this election looks so bizarre is that the press gleefully treated him like a joke or a freak far enough into the primary that they don't know how to walk it back and talk about him as a serious figure with a history of success and a rousing and charismatic style, which is what they'd have done otherwise. And as a result their 'both sides are basically the same' narrative is getting really screwy because the guy they've (accurately) described as a flaming lunatic is also one a massive proportion of one of the parties loves.
I think Trump is succeeding because the Republican party has spent so long pretending that stupid stuff is real that the party can't stop a candidate by pointing out that what he says is impossible and stupid to an even greater degree/
142 - I played mainly by my parents' "system" which is probably hideously out of date - a one no trump bid usually happened when one partner opened one no trump because of a strong-ish/balanced hand, the partner had absolutely nothing and passed, and the two opponents had sort of medium-strength hands that weren't good enough to open bidding. With the result that you have to take a majority of the tricks with one fairly powerful but not overwhelming hand without much idea of what was going to be coming at you from the left and right.
The application to the present nominating process would be obvious if it weren't banned.
Maybe I'm living in fantasy land but I think it didn't used to be this way.
I think the way politics has been covered has been like this for a long time (at least 20 years), but 2 things changed: the rise of reality TV made the audience* especially receptive to a reality approach, and there's been a breakdown in norms in our politics generally. In the '90s, politics were covered like entertainment, but the politicians still treated policy as meaningful. Rove spotted the Achilles heel of US political coverage--that reporters cared more about optics and gaffes than about substantive lies--but it was under Obama that Republicans, at least, understood that there would be no sanction whatsoever for flatly denying reality.
Trump is the genius who synthesized these changes. Cruz lies with the best of them, but he plays the game like a serious pol; Donald knows that nobody gives a shit about seeming serious, not when you have something else to offer. Note here that you need both halves of the equation: an earlier generation would have been repulsed by Trump's act, because that sort of vulgarity was limited to pro wrestling, and Trump can only get away with his indifference to reality because no Republican in 7-15 years has felt bound by it.
Note here that I think the last part is why he can't possibly win the general. Faced with somebody playing by different rules, he starts to look like a clown. Republicans can't call out Trump's BS because they mostly subscribe to it (and because they fear the base that absolutely believes in it), but HRC or Bernie will have no such problems, and Trump's visceral appeal is to a minority of the general electorate. The Dem doesn't need to convince Donald's fans to vote for them, they just need to point out to everyone else that he's a clown that's full of crap. Maybe I'm overestimating the American public, but nothing I've seen suggests to me that Trump can impersonate a remotely serious person, and I think a majority of Americans still want a serious President.
*useful to remember here that not only did reality rule the airwaves in the '00s, but there were also a variety of shows, such that something like 2/3 the TV audience watched one flavor or another. It's as comfortable and familiar a form as multi-camera sitcoms
I see that parts of 148 echo the much more succinct 146. But neither comment is very funny.
147. Ah, you're talking about getting stuck in a declaration of 1NT- I thought you meant an opening bid. Shouldn't happen. Your partner ought to take you out into their best suit. Analogy: the people who believed they ran the party have forgotten how to play the game.
150 yeah I basically play (played - not in a long time) kitchen table bridge - I gather more (at all) sophisticated systems will have some sort of out if you happen to be holding an even-distribution zero-face-cards kind of hand and your partner says 1NT (like you say "two clubs" and that doesn't mean "my best suit is clubs", it means "I have nothing, do what you can with that") but I never learned those systems.
This isn't directly related but it's close enough that the ||/|> markers aren't necessary.
Some of it isn't particularly surprising (though it is heartening). But look at the Comfort/Anxiety scale for the candidates - and especially look at the cross-tabs for Sanders and Clinton. That is not remotely what I would have suspected, and makes me think that Sanders may be a stronger contender than I'd thought before.
152 - I would guess any dem nominee would end up at Clinton-level comfort/anxiety numbers with "Republican leaners" by the end of the campaign- which looks like it's the big difference between Sanders and Clinton in that measure.
There are various standard conventions (http://www.math.cornell.edu/~belk/notrump.htm), but if you have weak hand with no long suits there's not much you can do anyway. Some hands you're just going to lose.
Without any weird conventions basically you would bid a long suit if you have it, and pass otherwise.
Some hands you're just going to lose.
My name is Jeb Bush and I approve this message.
137 is so true. Apparently "America" really loves one-trick ponies. (At least the trainers are honest enough to play to the pony's strengths!)
153:Reminds me of how some Obama supporters were certain that he would be subject to less vitriol than Clinton.
Liberals: you cannot convince your husband to stop beating you by changing your appearance or behavior. The problem is them, not you, and you have to win by winning, not by placating the opposition. There is literally no nominee remotely acceptable to the liberal part of the party that would be treated any better by Republicans than Obama or Clinton.
But you do worry about how independents treat the candidates and whether or not Republican vitriol will resonate with them.
158:
Yeah, the people with whom Republican vitriol resonates are lost causes, so I don't worry too much about the dreaded right-wing media storm.
Hey, Trivers -- how old are you? You posted something the other day about plausibly having 70 years to live, and I've been wondering if you're optimistic, or if you're fifteen. (Not that there's anything wrong with being either, but we rarely see high school students posting here.)
I honestly have no idea whatsoever how the attack ads with pictures of stalin/lenin/red square et cetera will resonate with people. Will they look hokey and old-fashioned and make people laugh? Will they actually buy it? No clue.
159: You can't ignore them and win. It's probably less of an issue that it was fifteen years ago, but there are still a very large number of voters (and even more who don't bother to vote) who are very poorly informed, incapable of tying issues to any kind of broader ideology, and without any affective attachment to either party.
160 Maybe everyone in his family lives to 95+ years?
Not that there's anything wrong with being either
I thought one of the major themes of the thread was that there is usually something wrong with being 15. Although it's ok as long as you eventually grow out of it.
Though it would be cool if Trivers were still in high school. The blog needs new blood.
Not to sound predatory or anything.
160:
I'm in my mid-20s, which is why I said 50-70 years with seventy as the upper limit.
People in my family do tend to live a long time.
Huh. "I was a Donald Trump ghostwriter" is funnier, more touching, and less about Trump than I would have expected.
I can't recall the exact moment or what specifically triggered it, but after an unbroken string of 12-hour days, I found myself possessed by the voice of Trump: that in your face, balls-to-the-wall style, overflowing with turbo confidence and showmanship. My boss said I had found the voice, and my co-workers agreed. I became known around the office as the Voice of Trump.
I was tasked with developing the Trump Blog ("Ideas and opinions from Donald Trump and TrumpU faculty") and making it a key platform for the company, as Trump had only a slight online presence then. Though I'd been on the job for less than a month, my boss left me to my own devices. I selected the topics and turned them into blog posts, with little or no supervision.
Each post was an opportunity to stretch out the voice, to further become the voice. In one of the early posts I wrote: "The glamour and grandeur of my buildings and my life are no mere trappings. ... It's a product of style, and it comes from deep inside -- you cannot buy style." That went over big around the office.
169 That person needs a twitter account like that Dick Nixon dude.
Optimistic is also fine. We've had optimists commenting here before. They don't tend to stay that way, mind you.
Optimistic is also fine.
As long it isn't techno-optimism.
169 That person needs a twitter account like that Dick Nixon dude.
I should add that, in addition to the humor, there are two story-lines to the article both of which work nicely. The first is the story introduced in that excerpt -- him as a young man who discovers he has a bit of flair, gets put in charge of a blog which nobody in authority takes seriously, and which amuses him and the people in the office -- that ends as you would expect. Eventually he writes something which, completely inadvertently, gets picked up by the broader press and, as it turns out, sounds like Trump but happens to contradict Trumps real opinions. That gets the blog shut down.
The other is a minor thread about his relationship to his father who was a moderately successful salesman and how writing the blog allows him to channel his father's "salesmanship through performance" energy in a way which he could never have done in his own voice.
169 The bit about the "criminally tacky" post that got him in trouble is hilarious.
174 before seeing 173. 173.2 is the criminally tacky post.
157 - What I thought was interesting was purely within the Democratic party - of course any Democratic politician is going to fill the Republican base with existential terror and hatred. But what's interesting was how, even when it was close, Sanders beat out Clinton on almost every demographic (hence the crosstabs reference). The only one where Clinton was higher, I think, was black voters: every other minority group was a bit more excited by Sanders or less anxious about him. Also that was true of women which is the bit that I think should be making strong Clinton supporters a bit nervous (though I'm willing to bet that's an artifact of the big difference between younger and older people that shows up when it comes to Sanders and Clinton).
(The separate 'expectations' bit is hilarious if you look at what Trump supporters expect him to do versus either of the possible Democratic candidates. Guys I know people of the left sometimes have unrealistic expectations, but...)
140: I knew that part, although I still don't know what happens to a state's one vote if its House delegation is evenly tied.
The only one where Clinton was higher, I think, was black voters
The problem for Sanders is that difference is huge compared to nearly every other Sanders/Clinton difference on that table.
It looks like historically a split state was not counted.
"Nobody in 1992 would have doubted she was a liberal. Yet 24 years of Washington experience later, here we are."
this is her from 1993:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/23/magazine/saint-hillary.html?pagewanted=all
A critical aspect of Mrs. Clinton's analysis suggests the rejection of rights-based liberalism as it now exists. She favors, as does the President, welfare reform, and she argues that society has extended too freely rights without responsibilities, which has led to a great decline in the standard of behavior.
She cites a recent article by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on what the New York Senator called "defining deviancy down."
"Senator Moynihan argues very convincingly that what we have in effect done is get used to more and more deviant behavior around us, because we haven't wanted to deal with it," she says. "But -- by gosh! -- it is deviant! It is deviant if you have any standards by which you expect to be judged."
This line of argument, central to Mrs. Clinton's view, is, of course, precisely what social conservatives have been saying for years. Social liberals, who dominate the national Democratic Party, have held that it is not the place of either government or society to lay down a set of behavorial standards based on moral absolutes, and that individual freedom necessitates moral relativism.
"I think that is a theoretical and to a great extent an elitist argument," says Mrs. Clinton, with some heat. "I think a person would have a hard time making that argument to the kind of people who I know who are working hard and living in fear and are really taking the brunt of a lot of the social and political decisions that we've either made or failed to make in the last 20 years. There are standards. We live by them. We reward them. And it is a real fallacy to jump from what we do in our individual and work lives to expect us not to have standards in our social community lives."
I almost always agree with Jeet Heer's tweets, so this one shocked me.
You can't understand Trump's appeal unless you have a little nihilism in you, a small desire to bring everything down. Most pundits don't
Really?
First, the article in 180 was by Michael Kelly; we're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but fuck that guy.
Second:
Since she discovered, at the age of 14, that for people less fortunate than herself the world could be very cruel, Hillary Rodham Clinton has harbored an ambition so large that it can scarcely be grasped.She would like to make things right.
She is 45 now and she knows that the earnest idealisms of a child of the 1960's may strike some people as naive or trite or grandiose. But she holds to them without any apparent sense of irony or inadequacy. She would like people to live in a way that more closely follows the Golden Rule. She would like to do good, on a grand scale, and she would like others to do good as well. She would like to make the world a better place -- as she defines better.
While an encompassing compassion is the routine mode of public existence for every First Lady, there are two great differences in the case of Mrs. Clinton: She is serious and she has power.
182.1: No, we're allowed to speak ill of the dead. We're just not allowed to masturbate to them.
I don't particularly think much of Michael Kelly either, but I can remember enough of the '90s to remember what I really disliked about Bill Clinton and his administration overall (which Hillary has been kinda-sorta walking away from, but only on the issues which are getting her serious flack right now). And the Welfare Reform/NAFTA stuff fits into that category, as well as the general social mostly-conservative stuff you got from the DLC at the time matches some of what he mentions in the quoted bit. His analysis and writing are godawful, but Lemmy is right about the extent to which she is/was a liberal - or at least whether or not she was depends a lot on what you think it means to call someone a liberal. It's hard to compare different eras given where they were starting from and what the big public issues were at the time, but she almost certainly wouldn't have seemed very liberal thirty years before, and 1992-version-Clinton doesn't seem very liberal now either (although current Clinton does, in a lot of ways).
The fact that Sanders seems to have been almost entirely ideologically consistent his entire career only to, right at the end of it, find himself occupying a place in the spectrum of reasonable political views (as opposed to outright-crazy-person) is kind of hilarious, and must be very strange for him. It's probably really gratifying though.
180:
Don't forget that when Bill ran in 1992, he went after GHW Bush for breaking his promise not to raise taxes, bragged about bringing the death penalty back to Arkansas, and promised to kick people of welfare.
Hitting Bush over raising taxes is particularly nasty, and I think that Bill Clinton and the New Democrats probably deserve some of the blame for how kooky the Republican party has become. As much as liberals speak wistfully of the days when Republicans were conservative but ultimately pragmatic statesmen who did what had to be done to keep the budget balanced, we tend not to acknowledge that the last time they raised taxes to do this, Bill Clinton knifed them for it.
At least on Facebook, most of the Clinton supporters I know are really pretty conservative. They're worried about all this "free stuff" Bernie wants to give out because "people need to know the value of hard work". What bothers me deeply is that I really do feel that these are the sorts of people who really should be voting Republican and fighting the difficult but necessary fight in that party, but instead they've been over here on the left doing hippie-punching while Overton window has drifted so far right that Marco Rubio is considered a moderate. When I think of the more sane tenets of conservatism and ask myself what a sane conservative party would look like, I really think of the Clintons and the New Democrats more broadly.
must be very strange for him. It's probably really gratifying though.
I dunno. It is also heartbreaking that wealth inequality got so bad that it can be the dominant issue. Like, I am glad that people are scared of climate change now, but heartbroken that it had to be this fucking scary for them to get there.
...we tend not to acknowledge that the last time they raised taxes to do this, Bill Clinton knifed them for it.
I really don't think the way Clinton campaigned can be even remotely characterized that way. Especially considering the way Bush's 1988 campaign was run. Clinton just made sure he couldn't be Atwater-ed.
What are the reality TV programs that showcase an environment hospitable to the Trump-like personality?
I was in high school and college from '01 to '10, so I didn't always have time to keep up with popular culture at large (especially from '04 to '09), but it's not like I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the genre. I'm in touch with the general idea. I've enjoyed Survivorman, Myth Busters, Locked Up Abroad, and even Fear Factor, all of which were pretty popular reality TV shows, but none of which had Trump-like characters that I can recall.
Trump's fans make me think of trash talk shows like Jerry Springer's, and Trump himself seems to act like a professional wrestler or a very exaggerated Judge Judy, but I don't think those are usually considered reality TV. At 122, Jane has it that Trump wouldn't do well on the Baking show. Are we talking The Real World or Survivor? Where, I ask sordidly, is Trump's natural habitat?
What are the reality TV programs that showcase an environment hospitable to the Trump-like personality?
"The Apprentice" comes to mind.
Well, there is his own show, The Apprentice.
I thought that Obama/McCain was the first big step towards election as reality show. Charisma was such an issue (Obama, Palin) and the celebrities really mattered and we all knew the supporting casts.
This election is more like a trashy competition reality show, not least because of the number of Republican candidates.
185.3: I think if some sort of sane conservative party is going to happen, it's going to break off from the Democratic Party after the Republican Party dies.
Being pwned by Moby is like breathing air. That's just what happens. It only counts if I'm also pwned by other people.
188.last Trump as the apotheosis of Morton Downey Jr seems nearer the mark than reality TV. It's just that Trump's appearances on reality TV have really given him the opportunity to hone those bully instincts to a fine degree.
It's been said before, but Mark Cuban has to be a little regretful that he's not the blowhard reality show billionaire that's a leading candidate for president. I'd certainly rather have president Cuban than president Trump.
Is "president Cuban" support for Rubio or Cruz?
Much like with sports performance, you can't reasonably compare a politician's "liberalism performance' except relative to era. Otherwise too many variables come into play and you end up saying things like "Nixon was a liberal."
The middle of the Democratic party right now is way to the left of where it was in 1992. Which is great! IMO the Clintons have always been more or less at the dead center of their party, neither particularly liberal nor particularly conservative Democrats. Remember in 1992 Clinton's big serious challenger were deficit-hawk Paul Tsongas and conservative-ish Nebraskan Bob Kerrey. Gore was considered to the right of Clinton then. The more liberal challengers, Tom Harkin and Jerry Brown (! given his current record in California) weren't taken seriously as candidates for the nomination. There were still tons of actually for real conservative Southern Democrats in the House and Sam Nunn was considered to be a totally reasonable Democratic candidate.
I really don't think the way Clinton campaigned can be even remotely characterized that way. Especially considering the way Bush's 1988 campaign was run. Clinton just made sure he couldn't be Atwater-ed.
I realized that my memory of the campaign isn't good enough to judge that, so I searched to see if there were any quick histories of the campaign. I found this. I don't know anything about the author, but it seems like a reasonable summary and this seems to support Moby's argument:
In the fall, the Bush campaign - now led by the astute James Baker, on leave from his post as secretary of state - assailed Clinton on the issues of trust and taxes. The organization and ethos of the Clinton campaign team meant that the Democrats, in contrast to the 1988 presidential campaign, would fight fire with fire. Based in Little Rock, and headed up by the brilliant James Carville, the 'War Room' ensured a rapid response to any Bush attack and provided Clinton's campaign with thematic focus: change, economic revival and health care would be its salient issues.
But the most remarkable thing in the article was watching the short clip from the presidential debate in which Clinton directly addressed the audience about the economic situation.
Gosh that makes it seem like the theater of American politics has changed a lot since 1992 and not for the better*. Both Bush and Clinton look like they regard the debate as a chance to actually talk about issues, and look relatively comfortable doing so (even though Bush is completely stiff, he does seem like the words he's saying mean something, and that he is trying to communicate) whereas debates these days so often feel like an exercise in trying to dodge the question.**
It is a remarkable moment as Clinton gradually warms up to what he's saying and arrives at this as his climax, "it is because we are in the grip of a failed economic theory. This decision you're about to make better be about what economic theory you want."
* Not completely true. As RT has pointed out, contemporary politics are significantly more liberal, which is an improvement.
** To be fair, Clinton does completely move away from the question (which was about the deficit) and it's fascinating to watch the looks on GWB's face as he realizes that Clinton isn't even making an effort to answer the question as asked.
Interestingly, the first footnote in 197 was written without seeing 196, but I'm glad to see RT making the point that I was thinking of.
..headed up by the brilliant James Carville..
I think this undercuts the credibility of whoever it was that wrote that article (not that, I guess, that was an opinion that a lot of people didn't have at the time, but still).
he does seem like the words he's saying mean something, and that he is trying to communicate
Nostalgia has come to this? 'Remember when political campaigns weren't garbled word salad?'
191: I didn't have too much hope for that until I read this this morning. I can see Fox News collapsing as a pillar of right wing propaganda under the right conditions, and if that happened there's no immediate successor waiting in the wings. Worse there are like twenty different ones all of which would almost certainly start to hate each other. If the conservatives can't hold their epistemic bubble closed off and coherent, or have a path for the insane rumor mill to feed directly into the mainstream, which is what Fox News has been doing we're likely to see it have an actual internal war (as opposed to the fake one that has supposedly been happening the last few years but has been pretty mild/not actually that factional).
In that case I can definitely see a "we're basically sane" conservative faction make a plea to pull the blue dog/'moderate democrats' off to form a new coalition, in the hopes of the deep crazies just sort of fading out after a couple years of petulant fights. (I suspect we'd see the more conservative group immediately move to the right a bit, but if their carefully constructed media apparatus takes a big enough hit they wouldn't be able to go nearly as far as they have the last twenty years or so, or not for a while at least.)
189, 190: Well, now I feel silly. I'd totally forgot that Trump had his own show. Ha. Time to check out The Apprentice.
The metaphor in 157.2 really isn't one you ought to be using.
191, 201: Here in California we're starting to get a couple Republican mayors who aren't batshit. I'm hearing that Swearingen in Fresno and ??? in San Diego are running on (I think) "good urban planning and climate change response is the fiscally responsible strategy". I'm not paying close attention to them, so I can't vouch for them. But it seems like some Californian Republicans are finding their way back from the wilderness.
I'm hearing that Swearingen in Fresno
I hear that cocksucker's good with a knife.
201: I'm certainly not saying it is going to happen. Just that it is more likely than Republican Party reform. A third party could form and become the more conservative of the two main parties and eclipse the Republican Party. To me that seems much more likely than the Republican Party going sane but less likely than the Republican Party becoming so small that there is space for the Democratic Party splitting into a left and right.
Of course, most likely of all is the horrible status quo continuing for way, way long.
I think this undercuts the credibility of whoever it was that wrote that article
I agree. I don't think it's particularly sharp political analysis, but I thought it served reasonably well as an outline of general contours of the campaign.
Nostalgia has come to this? 'Remember when political campaigns weren't garbled word salad?'
Well, it was Bush, so there was a fair amount of garbled word salad.
I don't know, perhaps nostalgia isn't the right reaction, but I was just struck that it remained an effective moment of political theater.
The horrible status quo is guaranteed Democratic presidents with room to challenge from the left. People who elect Republican state offices suffering the consequences but the rest of us getting on with things nicely. This shit can last for another generation, far as I'm concerned.
I have absolutely no fear that the Republican candidate will get 65% of the white vote, and they've royally pissed off anyone ethnic or young. The demographics only get better and better. In retrospect, I think we'll regret not moving more aggressively left in this election, when the pre-election freakout ends and we are all "of course Cruz/Trump/Bush was never going to win".
I fucking love this primary season and it gets better almost every day.
Sorry, here is GHWB garbled word salad
For example:
"If you want to have a philosophical discussion, I take your point, because I think it is important that if we--if you presented me with a hypothesis, 'You've got to do this or you've got to do that,' and I would accept it and understand
the political risks that'd be involved if I showed any flexibility at all in even discussing it--I would have to say that--that a--that you make a very valid point in your question, because, as I tried to indicate in my remarks, it's job creation, and that is attraction of capital that is really the best antidote to poverty."
I'm not saying that everyone regarded Bill Clinton as a liberal, but that Hillary was considered a liberal. As of 1992 what we knew about Hillary was a) feminist, b) law career that involved child advocacy. Then she was appointed to head a task force to bring about the long-term liberal goal of universal health care. The public perception of her was "big government liberal". After 1994, Bill Clinton ran to the right, and Hillary adopted a much lower public profile.
208: Well, as long as you're calm.
your partner says 1NT (like you say "two clubs" and that doesn't mean "my best suit is clubs", it means "I have nothing, do what you can with that")
You are thinking of Garbage Stayman.
Semi-related, can anyone smarter than me comment on this article alleging that Sanders' campaign is dramatically understating the costs of its Healthcare proposal? I want to believe it's just another Vox hatchet-job, but paragraphs like this seem pretty damning:
Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Emphasis mine.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.
At least on Facebook, most of the Clinton supporters I know are really pretty conservative. ... What bothers me deeply is that I really do feel that these are the sorts of people who really should be voting Republican and fighting the difficult but necessary fight in that party,
On my FB feed, the most aggressively pro-HRC guy is a hedgefunder who openly supports David Cameron.
I dunno. All this talk about the Republicans collapsing (this is more towards Megan) seems total magical thinking to me. Maximum likelihood scenario, Trump gets the nomination and loses in a 53-46 "blowout" to HRC that leaves the Republicans controlling the House and the fever swamp festering. Throw in a recession, or a terrorist attack, and Trump could totally win it. You're delusional if you don't think it's a real possibility.
Things are not going to get better. Certainly not for those in red states.
It seems, frankly, too damning to be true. If the plan had errors that egregious and that obvious, you'd think every major media outlet would already have pointed them out. But I don't really know.
I don't in any specific way at all know what I'm talking about. But doesn't any single-payer plan assume that drug costs will go down due to the government's monopsony bargaining power? The difference between calculating costs assuming that sort of thing will be a factor and assuming it won't would probably be pretty big.
Pharma would still have money for consultants, right?
Should be asleep, but I'll take a nap tomorrow anyway to dance all night at the Science Ball.
215:
The media is not known for its shrewd economic analyses.
213:
I have to confess I'm not terribly worried about it even if it is true. I think (like Matt Yglesias did in 2008) that there's too much emphasis being placed on putting forward detailed policy proposals. Everybody knows that everything any candidate proposes is going to be put through the wringer of congress even if we do end up with an entirely democratic congress. Furthermore, it's not the President's job to propose legislation; it's congress's. What matters is that we get someone into office who is on board with making health care reform up to and including single payer into office. It is confusing and suspicious to me that Hillary Clinton is going so far as to sound skeptical of single-payer rather than taking the line of "if congress sends me a good single-payer bill, I'll sign it" or something similar.
It's not hard to see why the media (and the Clinton campaign) is pushing the meme that candidates should have detailed policy proposals in hand more than a year before they could take office: it's a meme that explicitly favors Clinton with her connections to people at think tanks, government agencies, and in industry who can quickly draft up something that looks serious and professional -- and that's not even getting into all the people who would love to do this stuff in exchange for a shot at a job in her administration.
I've heard people hammer away at Bernie because his proposals are basically ten-page word documents while Hillary has monolithic 5,000 page documents. Anyone who thinks she had more to do with these than ordering them up out of the depths of her connections* is delusional. It's an attempt to snow the Sanders campaign, nothing more.
*Wonder how long it is before some doofus proposes a website where politicians can go anonymously to pay $20 an hour to get broke grad students to draft up long policy papers that are too daunting for anyone to read for them so their campaigns look serious. It's like Uber, but for fooling the masses!
Political stuff here is kind of depressing: 40% of Germans want to depose Merkel on account of her basically-humane refugee policy, Austria's socialists are fighting about whether they've agreed to a hard limit of refugees or merely a target, etc.
Aside from that, life is good. We're definitely the lucky ones. Finally got an amp and nice speakers last weekend, a turntable arrived today.
When somebody talks about making at 80% cut to a key sector in the industry which I'm employed, I'd like at least at little emphasis on detailed policy proposals.
Anyway, the estimate of drug savings is comically high.
222:
But a 5,000 page proposal that no one is going to read in time for the election is arguably as bad as nothing. It's practically obscurantism.
When somebody talks about making at 80% cut to a key sector in the industry which I'm employed, I'd like at least at little emphasis on detailed policy proposals.
I haven't followed any of the back-and-forth about Sanders plan, but in terms of the general conversation I feel like this comment continues to represent my general thinking (and Moby is demonstrating my final point).
If the cost of Health Care in the US is driven primarily by the cost of treatments, rather than the frequency and distribution of treatment it could mean that there's no way to make significant cost reductions without directly challenging current providers and asking somebody to take less money for a service they currently perform -- a different argument than getting people to be more efficient about what services they do, and likely to face much more push-back.
213- Stolen from the naked capitalism comment section: "
I was naturally suspicious about the Vox article (disclosure: I never willingly read Vox, primarily because of its association with Markos Moulitsas), so I looked up information on Dr. Thorpe. Turns out he was Bill Clinton's Assistant Director of Health Policy at the Dept of Health and Human Services-working with Hillary, it would seem, to draft an earlier version of Romneycare/Obamacare. Also, in spite of being asked to work with the State of Vermont looking into a single payer plan, his bio at Emory describes him as working for quite a few insurance companies. The Emory bio states that he worked with a number of U.S. senators "to develop and evaluate alternative approaches for providing health insurance to the uninsured." Notice that his specialty was making sure everyone in the country was insured, not that every citizen received affordable health care. Draw your own conclusions here."
I work in the weeds of policy implementation, haven't really looked at Thorpe's analysis yet, but I am not too bothered by potential cost issues. Regardless of how you do the math, it's quite true that a tremendous amount of savings is possible via cost control, maybe more likely over time than on day one because of the political power of the various providers and suppliers, but you need to aim high. Besides, obviously, it being the right thing to do.
Including dental and vision does feel almost like pandering. Not even Canada covers those, I thought.
Via cost control *under single-payer*, that should be.
226: Be that as it may, he's basically right (maybe a bit low depending on how you define it) on his estimate of drug spending in the U.S.
I guess not an estimate of his. He probably just googled the number like I did.
214- I am indulging in wishful thinking here but the thing I like about Trump is that the mask has really slipped. The Republican party is fundamentally a way for white supremacy to control American politics. If 5% of Republicans can't support that once it becomes a naked fact, we could be in for a real realignment.
If that feels too optimistic, you could always figure that the party realignment will start because the white supremacy wing thinks they could do better in a third party of their own.
Moby, are you trying to give us nightmares?
Actually, I'm consulting as we speak.
Really interesting from front page linkee Mark Schmitt. The view from which Trump is a technocrat. Not mentioned but what immediately leaps out to me is that if so, he also shows the racist underbelly of high technocracy.
"Bad Technocrat" sounds like a Will Ferrel movie that I would probably see once it was one Redbox.
Moby are you in pharma? Somehow I thought you were one of a biomedical data dude at an academic medical center, which is what I used to do. Which now that I think about it often is really kind of pharma.
...he also shows the racist underbelly of high technocracy.
I absolutely agree. Over at CT, cam a chance to discuss the circa 1900 Prgogressives. Post-structuralism has shown us definitively that reason and science are racist to the core.
Likely Persistance of a White Majority American Prospect, Winter 2016. Or maybe not.
"The United States has historically followed a "one-drop" rule in classifying people with any black ancestry as black. The census projections, in effect, extend the one-drop rule to the descendants of other mixed families. A great deal of evidence shows, however, that many children growing up today in mixed families are integrating into a still largely white mainstream society and likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it."
Lots of interesting stuff here, including a detailed breakdown by income of mixed couples, e.g. Asian father-White mother etc etc.
Just when I was arguing that people couldn't deny the white supremacy any more Vox comes along to prove me wrong. I still don't think arguments like that pass any kind of smell test.
Following the "one-drop rule" for whites, I think the article says America will be at least 70% white in 2050.
Article talks at length about assimilation and self-identification, of course.
"...the odds of intermarriage were five times higher for the children of intermarriages than for those from Mexican-only backgrounds. These intermarriages were overwhelmingly with non-Hispanic whites. Scholars of intermarriage have also found higher rates of marriage with whites among individuals who are mixed white and Asian compared with those who are Asian only. In sum, many partly white adults appear to have been integrated into largely white social worlds."
Yes, African Americans are an exception. But hoping that the grandchildren of Ted Cruz will automatically become Democrats may be too hopeful.
The inevitable demographic triumph may be evitable. Better off working with class.
I don't see the arguments in the article I linked as inconsistent with Trump deliberately appealing to racists, more adding another aspect, but I suppose it does downplay the racist angle.
They can't help it, Roger. Those Voxxers are just such omniscient gentlemen. It's pointless to resist their explainin'.
|| NMM to Jacques Rivette, but I understand that with him it can take up to 760 minutes to get off. |>
It made me awfully bitter when I figured out I was effectively a pharma worker and that they had rigged the system in such a way that they could pay me poverty-level wages to work as an engineer for them. Getting to do actual science now and then was fun, though. And I was lucky to work with some fabulously sharp people. I'd kind of like to enroll in grad school there for comp bio stuff but I really don't know that I want to go back to that world. I'd actually earn more as a grad student and at least have low interest loans available to me. Also a second income due to the SO.
One of my favorite pieces of schadenfreude was going to the Obesity, Diabetes, and Metabolic Disorders symposia with a bunch of overweight doctors where they served a spread of pizza, donuts, and soda.
If that's a director/film critic/French guy, I think Barry already mentioned it.
245: Mostly I do some cutting edge stuff and make enough to support a middle class family but not a middle class family and a secret working class family across the tracks.
246: Yeah, he's French and fairly radical. Only seen one movie, some three hour thing about a staging of Racine's Phaedra I think. I liked it and looked at Racine for a little while. Gotta do the Celine Goes Boating fore I die I suppose.
You know you're not a real player when your secret family is only working class.
One of my favorite pieces of schadenfreude was going to the Obesity, Diabetes, and Metabolic Disorders symposia with a bunch of overweight doctors where they served a spread of pizza, donuts, and soda.
A little on the nose, but them's the breaks.
Also, by far the fattest one among the people I work with.
I ended up in sort of a weird position where they created a position to let me continue work I'd done in an internship so I wouldn't have to go back to my awful home university for grad school.
So that position ended up being research-tech grade for non-research-tech-grade work. They were pretty understanding when I left and I think their hands were pretty tied when it came to getting me more money on a reasonable time scale. Still get to do lots of stats at my new job and it's lower stress, too.
Wow, that article linked to in 253 is really astounding.
As far as I can tell the TL;DR version is "Well, everyone is either a wonky policy focused technocrat or an ideologue. And since Trump is wildly inconsistent on anything matter other than authoritarian white supremacy*, then he must not have an ideology about policy stuff and hence he's a wise technocrat!
The level at which he's failing to encounter anything resembling the United States or its politics is genuinely staggering. The fact that (1) 'technocrat' is just something people use to describe themselves when they don't think they can sell you on their ideology (and not some kind of interesting approach or position in itself) and that (2) Trump's appeal is that he is an authoritarian white supremacist is so stunningly obvious that I'm really not certain how someone could even make the argument he makes in good faith. I mean, either it's bad faith or that guy is living in a bizarre alternate reality and maybe someone should look in on him to make sure he isn't scribbling nonsense all over the walls of his apartment or something.
I guess it's interesting in some sense but it's kind of like watching a trainwreck.
*obviously not described this way
This is a hell of a Friday news dump: NMM to Hillary's email server not containing top secret materials.
255: Meh. Just skimmed the article but
1) This is Mark Schmitt, not some schmuck
2) Georges Sorel was an engineer with the Dept of Public Works for 20+ years. Heinlein. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Machiavelli.
Of course there can be an (anti-) ideology of the act, the deed, efficiency, the will. It is intrinsic to the discussions of fascism.
Anti-racism has rotted brains.
I think it's basically more news in the same grey area where it can be described in a way that makes it sound spoooooky but described in a more accurate way to sound like it isn't anything one way or the other or even described in a way that makes it sound like absolutely nothing at all. Which makes it perfect news-bait given that it's about a Clinton, but if it was about a Republican wouldn't make it into any articles. The most likely explanation for it is that it's stuff that wasn't classified at the time but ended up that way for a combination of practical reasons (due to new events), and absurd government policies regarding classified information.
Still: not great for Clinton but great for the ongoing rumor mill so look forward to hearing about the issue constantly for at least the next nine months or so.
Yeah, its new. Vox says its probably a result of the general over classification of things. Which sounds plausible to me, but I'm guessing Trump won't see it that way.
Although, I also think that if overclassification was really a systemic problem, maybe the Secretary of State should have done something to fix it.
I mean, "oh, never mind that classification thing, its just an artifact of the inefficient way we Democrats run the government" isn't exactly a winning argument.
Although, I also think that if overclassification was really a systemic problem, maybe the Secretary of State should have done something to fix it.
Don't know anything at all about State. but rumor has it some folks at Defense overclassify, too. And few folks would successfully argue that's a nest of solid Ds.
Also don't know about almost any of the intel community at all. But, again, point is, different OCAs will come down in different places, and then derivative classifiers can be as fussy as they like--who'd tell them to be otherwise?
258:
I think you're spot-on. I think that few people are making enough of the way that Trump is willing to say literally anything to drum up support. One of the reasons that people are able to get away with arguing that Hitler was a socialist is that he'd say just about anything to get more power, so you can paint him as anything if you mine enough text.* But this sort of thing is dangerous. Of course if you're a power-mad fascist you don't want to have an ideology; ideologies can only constrain you. I just hope that our constitution really is well enough designed to keep him from doing truly irreparable harm.
*Yes, I'm aware that he promised to crush Marxism and was definitely not a socialist in any meaningful sense.
I've lost the emails of various posters, but development is worth comment.
"National SOCIALIST"... says so right there on the box.
Why the fuck does Tony the Tiger need a Twitter account?
My lawn! Get off of it!
Bad Technocrat
Not just a spa town in the Bay Area.
Neo-reaction is one of those ideologies that is so bankrupt in every way that they deserve all of the snark and condescension that RationalWiki dishes out.
I just found this HuffPo article that says the Vox one that said Sanders' plan way underestimated cost explosion was bunk, so I figured I'd post here:
MHPH Your 255 makes the point I was trying to make in 239 better. Thanks
all of the snark and condescension that RationalWiki dishes out
I was kind of hoping for 269 to inspire the unfoggedariat to once and for all take out these punks.
We're not really the "doing stuff" type.
Who are we supposed to take out? RationalWiki, or the neo-reactionaries? I feel like we're not being well-led, here.
On balance I think we're more opposed to the neo-reactionaries than to RationalWiki, but I don't see us effectively taking out either (see 274).
Now that it turns out that the ninjas and ekeanoplans were all just talk, I feel deflated, but why can't it be both?
To be clear, I was originally envisaging more of a sound but purely rhetorical tolchocking, of the Tigre or Derauqsd type.
Tigre may still be up for that sort of thing, but I think we've thoroughly alienated derauqsd by now. Still, though, I'm not sure anyone here is up to anything more than snark at this point.
So now you want us involved in a two-front war? Jesus Christ, man, we're not superheroes. Larger-than-life heroes, yes, but not superheroes.
I'm still up for the ekranoplan thing if anyone's game.
First we were told that it was irresponsible to support progressive third party candidates, because that just throws elections to Republicans. No matter how terrible the Democratic candidate is, you have to vote for them, because the Republicans are much worse, they said. If you want to see politics move in a more progressive direction, the place to do that is in the Democratic primaries, they said. Challenge centrist dems in the primaries, and vote for more progressive options, they said.
Except now that ALL of that advice is being followed, it turns out that, oops, it's also highly irresponsible to vote for progressive Democrats in the primaries. They're at greater risk of losing in the general election, we're told. It's not worth the risk of possibly throwing the election to Republicans, we're told.
Well fuck you.
282 -- Maybe you can find a comment like that from me, although I'm more likely to have said' build a movement in states and significant localities that's more than just a candidacy.'
I think there's a whole lot of Dems who'd be happy with a Sanders presidency -- and I'd even venture to guess that such folks amount to a majority of Dems. You can still divide that majority into people (a) willing to vote Sanders in the primary and (b) worried that a Sanders candidacy is a risk not worth taking. You can insult people who are worried about that into agreeing with you, though. I'm sure of it.
You can insult people who are worried about that into agreeing with you, though.
Is that missing an "n't" or can I start calling people shitheads on the advice of counsel?
He's being sarcastic, which is always awkward in the courtroom. Lawyer: "My client is 'innocent'." Judge: "If you use air quotes one more time, I'm going to hold you in contempt."
"Since I'm dealing with a bunch of people too stupid to get out of jury duty, I'll use small words."
1.) Canada does not cover dental except for low-income people (unemployed/welfare) and there is in Ontario some very limited dental availability in community health centers. Interestingly anyone can get healthcare in those centers but you can't get dentistry there if you aren't poor/high risk, i.e. a drug user.
2.) Canada - or at least Ontario - did cover eye exams every 24 months.
3.) Providing dental care to kids seems totally reasonable to me. Oral health - especially preventative care is a big deal. I think Florida had a whole bunch of tooth extractions of kids under general anesthesia, because that's the only dental care that Medicaid will pay for.
The UK is basically the same. Free dental care and free eye exams for under 18s, the elderly, and people on low incomes. Everyone else pays, but the NHS has a fee schedule that sets a maximum that NHS dentists can charge for work. So if you are registered for an NHS dentist the charges are:
http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/AboutNHSservices/dentists/Pages/nhs-dental-charges.aspx
So, most routine visits are under £20, and the most you can ever pay, even with extensive work, is a little over £200.
In some areas it is quite hard to find an NHS dentist, as lots of dentists only take private patients, but if you can register, it does help keep dental costs within a predictable range.
The Sanders/Clinton debates are really starting to remind me of the ones back in 2004, a lot of which were genuinely infuriating. At this point I think it's relatively clear that the American people overall wouldn't be that freaked out by Sanders as a candidate in the general, so it really is about which one would be a better president, not which would be a better candidate (and it's far from obvious which that would be at this point, anyway).
I'm thinking only Martin O'Malley can save us from this division.
291: At this point I think it's relatively clear that the American people overall wouldn't be that freaked out by Sanders as a candidate in the general
I don't know how to parse this: what's "the American people overall"? Is it the majority of likely voters, both Democratic & Republican parties?
I ask partly because the phrase "the American people" (what they want, what they believe) is thrown around quite a bit by the press and pundits, in both print and tv, and it always feels glib; and partly because whatever is meant by the phrase in this case, I don't see it at all.
I'm on Obamacare, and I have basic but comprehensive dental and vision. I'm not sure how not feasible it would be to scale it up, but medicaid in my state does provide what Sanders would like to offer.
I agree with 282, but not aimed at commenters here, rather at the MSM/DNC establishment. I think it's fine for individual people to be nervous, as people were about Obama in 2008, or to prefer Hillary on the merits. I don't think it's ok for the DNC to try to kneecap their a popular primary candidate because "center-left" is just a lie they tell the base to keep the left part from non defecting.
Further, at the community health center I'm familiar with, those who have the money to pay can't go to their dentists, because they can go to a private one.
The NYTimes has formally endorsed Clinton and Kasich.
297: Yep, there's that liberal media at it again!
Trivers, I take you'd have preferred to see an endorsement for Sanders on the Democratic side ... but who would you have preferred they endorse on the Republican side?
I'm not really comfortable with the NYT endorsing anyone at this point in the race: it's sort of a moot point, other than declaring clearly who they think will be least threatening to wealthy interests.
Kasich is especially ridiculous, though. I mean, I get that there's a sort of low-information voter thing where he comes off as the moderate because he isn't visibly drooling at the thought of committing genocide against muslims or something, but aside from the medicaid thing he's really just a taller, more charismatic* Scott Walker. He's not even close to anything you could consider a moderate, no matter how much the press wants to talk about him as the Return of The Huntsman or something.
*I know, but the comparison is to Scott Walker.
297: the Washington Post did an anti-Sanders dis endorsement called "Bernie Sanders fiction-filled campaign".
299:
I really would prefer they not make endorsements at this point.
I think I've linked here before, but it's still fun to watch the odds they're offering change over time. (You can find the political bets under "Futures and Propositions" on the sidebar.) Right now they're offering 40:1 odds that JEB will win the (general) election, and 33:1 odds that Biden will. Ouch.
(I don't know how far anyone should take their analysis of the race, though. As late as late November/early December you could get 2:1 odds on Carson dropping out before Jeb or Trump did, and even when Carson was peaking I think it was pretty clear that he wasn't going the distance.)
The NYTimes has formally endorsed Clinton and Kasich
And ran a headline the same day reading, "Sanders and Trump Voters Share Anger". Up yours, NYT.
I too prefer that papers make no endorsements at this time. Is there any time at which it is appropriate for them to offer endorsements? Should they never make them? How unusual would that be? Serious question.
At any rate, and by the way, MHPH, the NYT endorsement explicitly states that Kasich is no moderate, so blathering on about how he's no moderate is, uh, yeah.
So, yeah it says he's not moderate but then it goes on to praise how he's down for compromise and talks about how he's for Republicans who are tired of extremism and describes his views on the biggest issues going on right now in ways that make him sound moderate and follows a pretty lengthy bit about how extreme/untrustworthy the other ones are in comparison. Sorry, but a bit of handwaving about his lack of moderation sandwiched between two bits, one much larger, written to make him look relatively reassuring/moderate doesn't undercut the blather very much there.
Buy you can't imagine how much fun it is for papers to make endorsements and how important î makes them feel. Would you rib us of our last sheds of dignity?
Dignity? No. Your 'o' key? Absolutely.
MHPH, you win. Kasich is not the least bad Republican candidate, and the American people overall wouldn't be that freaked out by Sanders as a candidate in the general.
Jim Gilmore still exists, right?
It's a valid question, I guess. But if the NYT wanted to go all political-hipster and endorse someone who voters don't like they could gone a lot more obscure than Kasich.
Kasich was governor of a nicer state.
Jim Gilmore still exists, right?
Yes, after serving as Governor of Virginia, he went on to create the wildly popular television show Gilmore Girls, which chronicles the struggles of a mother-daughter political duo, hell bent on eliminating the car tax.
That's a damn lie! People have heard about that show, so he couldn't possibly have been responsible for it!
Maybe Ohio became less nice than Virginia during his tenure.
"Sanders and Trump Voters Share Anger".
With Trump voters its more hate than anger, really.
Some Trump voters are dumb and angry. They can be saved. Some are hateful and angry. They can't.
I guess the ones who are dumb and hateful, but not particularly angry, went for Carson.
I wonder how much people will be able to coordinate Wednesday. If you plan to vote for Jeb or Kasich (or any other candidate that isn't offensive to the MSM) but know that a vote for Jeb is a vote wasted, you might vote for Rubio. I think that could push him over the top. And Trump might react so poorly to an Iowa loss that he starts to sink.
(Could push him over the top, but seems unlikely to)
I think as long as Trump doesn't come in significantly below his polling numbers he'll probably be ok at least for now. He's almost certainly got at least one "I'm the victim you saw the debate they're trying to take it away from us" in the tank, though probably not two or three. If he comes in a close-ish second the press will still try to spin it as an inability to GOTV, but he could take the hit to his momentum and go into New Hampshire strong anyway. If it's a sudden surge for one specific person (Rubio) and a fall off for the not-Trumps that's easier to spin, because he can just blame the "Rubio wins all the debates" press and probably scrape through. If he takes a really big hit, though, and especially if the other candidates all perform basically the way they look right now (only with the additional percentage distributed among them) then he's got a serious up hill battle and probably won't make it to the nomination.
Jeb really would have just dropped out months ago if he cared about the party. Ditto for Chris Christie and probably John Kasich. Rubio needed those numbers.
If Trump looses Iowa, he should try a goofy little scream while making a speech to fire up his campaign workers. That will get loads of press.
I think Jeb still thinks he can win it, and that the Rubio/etc. support will flow back to him if he can kick Rubio out of the race. I don't know if he's wrong about the second bit of that, but I think he's probably wrong about the first. He's been spending massive amounts of money running attack ads on Rubio, though, and I'm guessing he's a big part of why the establishment hasn't gotten behind Rubio as well. I'm guessing his theory is that Trump will get an early lead, probably, but if he can knock down Rubio and the rest of the hangers-on he can at least score enough delegates on super Tuesday to at least be in the race and Florida is (I think) the first really big winner-takes-all state. So if he can make it to Florida and he thinks he has a strong shot at taking Florida then he's got a chance. (I don't think he has a strong shot at taking Florida. But I do think he does.)
I just realized that consolidation of the votes that go to non-viable candidates is literally how a caucus works, so a scenario like all of the Christie/Kasich/Bush/Rubio people consolidating behind a single candidate is actually pretty likely. I feel dumb.
I'm not sure that's how it works in Iowa though. After 2012's Ron Paul trickery I think they just set it so that the straw poll at the caucus is binding, and that the delegates are assigned to candidates later on based on the proportions of votes. So at the last minute people could decide not to vote for, say, Christie and switch to Bush. But that would mostly just mean they were sitting there with their ballot while the representatives of the campaigns gave brief "here's why you should vote for me not those other losers" speeches and changed their minds. I don't think Iowa has cutoffs for support, either, except the most basic one where if you have a small enough percent of the vote that you'd only get a fraction of a delegate then you don't get a delegate. (In New Hampshire it's 10%, which would mean that a result identical to the current polling would be hilarious.)
To clarify: it would be hilarious because they split up the delegates according to a straight percentage (roughly), but the delegates assigned to candidates below 10% support just get taken away and given to the frontrunner. They aren't reapportioned based on the various percentages.
So it's been fun watching the various not-Trump candidates wobbling back and forth across that line. The way things are going it's totally possible that we could see Trump leaving NH with like 3/4 of the delegates, despite getting about a third of the votes.
This Bernie video purports to explain the Iowa caucus.
If it's correct, what happens is there's an initial poll, and then everyone supporting a candidate with less than 15% (I think) has to move over to another candidate that does have over 15% support.
That's how the democratic Iowa caucus works. The republican one is very different: you hear a little speech from a local supporter of each candidate and then you just vote. No standing in groups, no 15%, no reassigning. Just a normal vote but that takes a lot longer.
Thanks for the correction. I did not realize it was different across parties.
My sister was a practicing Iowan during the 2008 election. She went to the caucus but I can't remember what she said about it.
I can sympathize. I have a few friends who were raised Iowan and it does some strange things to a person.
Reading Sanders versus Clinton arguments elsewhere on the Internet makes me want to stab people. "Let's speculate what psychological flaw makes you not see that I'm right about everything." I may firewall out all non-Unfogged sites until July or so.
This is a good article on the "Bernie bro":
The one caveat on the article is that I think Greenwald is downplaying the phenomenon of 4chan troll/Right winger who posts misogynistic anti Clinton stuff as a faux Bernie supporter, which is something I've seen on comment threads. I would say this has less to do with politics or candidates' supporters than with trolling on the internet, and might be better thought of in apolitical terms.
Feel very much the same as Walt's 335. Added bonus is being saved from the temptation to read and participate in stupid and infuriating 500+ comment threads.
335 is right. There are totally reasonable reasons to vote for either one, which to my mind basically come down to "is the risk that Bernie would lose the election to a Republican outweighed by the potential benefits of electing him to office." To my mind the answer is quite clearly "no" but that's the basic metric and depending on what your inputs are for risk and reward you can come up with a reasonable view on either side.
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Oh for fuck's sake!!! NMM2 Joe Cocker.
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Oh, OK, he was dead already. As you were.
343 This seems to have been an unusually sucky month (and just last night I heard rumors of Fairuz having died but it turned out to be the Egyptian child-star actress) but didn't Joe Cocker die like a year ago?
339:
It has just been jaw-dropping to watch the media waste so many words on what's going on on Twitter. It should be painfully obvious that when you report on any sort of social media behavior, you're leaving yourself wide open to all sorts of trolling, false-flagging, and everything that comes with that.
There are now 4chan trolls on Twitter claiming to be Hillary supporters who are spreading white nationalist anti-semitic memes about Bernie. Trolling is among the internet's oldest pastimes and the media is just totally getting hoodwinked by it.
Greenwald isn't helping the alternative media's profile much by referring to Krugman as a consummate, actual bro. To be honest. That just looks petty (and ridiculous), but it is very much Greenwald's style.
A journalist I follow on Twitter locked her account because of the pileons after she said something mildly critical of the Sanders online following. Like, graphic violent fantasies, people copy-and-pasting every one of her locked tweets, a person making a YouTube account directed at her consisting entirely of him saying "Hello" creepily over and over.
Its broader significance and what hay Clinton and co. are making of it can be debated, but it is indeed a Thing.
347: a lot of the time the media knows exactly what it's doing. The Guardian likes to poke its readership with OMGSEXISM stories that generally boil down to "someone is wrong on the internet" but it gets them page views.
343: I did that, too, until I realized that the BBC article being passed around was from a year ago. On the other hand, I had assumed Terry Wogan was already dead. NMM to him, by the way. Oh, also the singer from Jefferson Airplane.
338: There certainly is pro-Bernie misogyny all over Twitter, and the left should be called out for it and accept it. On the other hand, noting the existence and the threat of such misogyny doesn't by any means imply that's the entirety of the base, or that that is the only source of misogyny. Yes, it's completely legit to be more critical of the left for this sort of thing, as we expect better. Seconding 348 that it's ridiculous to call Krugman a bro. What a petty and pathetic argument this all is. (For the record, my priors are probably Bernie for primary, Hillary for general).
Has anyone ever encountered or heard one of these allegedly pro-Sanders assholes in person? I'm just pondering the possibility that they're all -- in internet personae -- trolls. If they're not, I'm wondering what one looks like in the flesh. That is, what kind of Sanders supporter is that?
It doesn't make a lot of sense. Sanders is a balding, slightly paunchy 74-year-old. What kind of person who supports, say, his call for breaking up the big banks, engages in graphic violent fantasies against women? Are these working class folks who might otherwise vote for Trump? Or what? I may be suffering from a failure of imagination.
I agree there's sexism (and racism, and all sorts of other isms) on the left. I agree that we need to fight them.* I also think there is a small group of people who are willing to support Bernie over Hillary because they are sexist (a much smaller group than is visible online as a "Bernie bro," because the vast majority of those people aren't really going to vote for Bernie.) My issue is flipping this issue around: that a small group of sexist men support Bernie =/= supporting Bernie is sexist, particularly since his campaign supports gender equality and has spoken out against overtly sexist trolls.
Part of the issue is there are two sorts of power imbalances on the internet and they're working at cross purposes. First, there's the gender imbalance where there are a large number of extremely angry men with too much time on their hands who enjoy harassing women on the internet. That Hillary is a woman who has been demonized by the Right absolutely feeds into this, since MRAs are completely reactionary. I would argue that about 80% of the worst Bernie Bro stuff is from MRA types who enjoy harassing women and Hillary Clinton in particular. They don't take Bernie seriously, and they can mobilize the fact he's currently her only direct opponent (sorry, Martin O'Malley) to adopt a position from which to attack her supporters.**
On the other direction, anyone who even mildly challenges the interests of entrenched capital is such an anathema to the powers who control the media, and the chattering beltway class, that such a person is going to get demonized in every way possible. Red scaremongering techniques are one such way, but for the Vox/Jezebel crowd, not that effective. Tarring support for Bernie as demonstrating sexism/racism is much more effective with UMC people who identify as "progressive" but are economically not far off from left-wing Republicans of a few generations ago. There's also wish fulfillment: if you shout loud enough that Bernie (civil rights activist and SNCC organizer, 100% record from NAACP, actively willing to learn from his mistakes and change after getting called out by BLM) only appeals to douchey white guys, you might make that true.
*Intersectionality is important and tricky and there are so many ways to fail at it. I think that Hillary and Bernie both have their weaknesses here, which is fine because they are both flawed human beings, as are we all.
**If Bernie were to win the nomination or even be a real threat, they're the types who would move over to Trump and harass Bernie for being a Jewish Communist (like Trivers I've seen some of this from "Hillary supporters." Whom are probably trolls who got bored of being "Bernie bros")
I posted 353 before reading 352, but it's kind of an answer. If 353 is TL:DR, My guess is the vast majority of "Bernie bros" are MRA-type trolls who couldn't give two fucks about Bernie but enjoy harassing women on the internet. Hillary Clinton is the she-devil incarnate to the MRA-sphere, so it makes it doubly enjoyable. If Bernie actually becomes a serious candidate, they'll flip to the "Jew world order" stuff that is also part of the MRA world. As Trivers notes, and as I've seen, some of them have already done this, posting anti-Semitic anti Bernie stuff as "Hillary supporters."
And this is why the media should, in general, avoid reporting on Twitter. It's a waste of time to even deal with these trolls. Every Berniebro piece that gets published only encourages them.
Come to think of it, every time I've been critical of Hillary on, say, Twitter or anywhere else public, I get follows and accolades from right-wing trolls. I find this very frustrating and so often have to spend some time beating them back with a stick.
The right-wing witch hunt against Hillary is upsetting to me because it crowds out genuine liberal criticism. Watching Doug Henwood get tarred by Clinton supporters as a "hate-mongerer" has been instructive.
It sounds a bit loony, but I can't help but wonder if fanning the flames of the right-wing hate machine was ever a deliberate strategy on the part of the Clintons. I often hear Democrats cite the right's desperate attempts to sink the Clintons as evidence that she's a bona fide liberal.* It also makes it easy to dismiss anyone who dares bring up things that are truly worrisome (the apparent preferential treatment given by the State Department to Clinton Foundation donors while Hillary was SoS, for example**) as a member of the vast, right-wing conspiracy. It really is quite an effective tool for silencing dissent among their supporters.
*I'm willing to grant that there are arguments to be made here, but this one is just stupid. Come to think of it, it could get used as evidence that Ted Cruz.
**At the bare minimum, being so close to the operations of a nearly half a billion dollar global charity that takes donations from the same people that the State Department deals with constitutes a very plausible conflict of interest
God yes, it would be ridiculous to use these people to characterize Sanders's campaign or following.
I disagree somewhat. It's not at all unusual for me to see young, white, mostly-male people hopping into the Twitter mentions of women of color (and less often, men of color) that I follow.
I'm not talking about plain old hateful racist, sexist trolls, of whom there are plenty regardless of Presidential election season. I'm talking about people who will take a perfectly ordinary conversation happening between Twitter acquaintances, in which no candidates is @'ed and no hashtags are used, to pop up and berate people for not crediting Sanders for having been a civil rights activist back in the day.
I block these guys preemptively as soon as I see them popping up in a thread, so I don't have any examples handy to point to. Bu it's definitely something I've seen at least 30-40 times over the past few months.
It goes something like this:
Person 1: Sanders isn't learning as fast as he should. It's been months since the Netroots Nation thing and he's still tone-deaf.
Person 2: Yeah...I get that he thinks economics trumps everything but just name-checking black unemployment isn't cutting it.
Bernie supporter: Bernie is the only candidate who's actually marched for civil rights! You think Hillary cares about black people? #feelthebern
It's a level of youthful pile-on (especially by including the hashtag, which is going to pull others into the conversation) that comes across as really paternalistic.
Anyway, I can see how, if you're a journalist on Twitter, getting the something like the following series of responses, all from different people, to something positive about Clinton might give one the impression that Sanders supporters were sexist:
Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal war hawk and a consistent enemy of the poor!
Of course you would say that. You work for $establishment_media_company you shill! #feelthebern
Hillary sucks! Oh, wait, no she doesn't that's why Bill cheated on her!
Typically, a famous journalist with have tens of thousands of followers, so the responses will fly in quickly and they won't have time to check who really stands for what, much less suss out who's likely to just be a troll. So it would be easy to get comments one and two (which aren't exactly great responses but aren't actively sexist) muddled up in one's head with comment three (which very much is).
This raises the larger question of "why the fuck do these journalists think it's acceptable to hang out on Twitter -- a platform that is practically designed to encourage trolls and make reasoned arguments impossible -- all day and then write about how horrible it is?" Shouldn't they be off in Flint digging up dirt on Rick Snyder or something?
The right-wing witch hunt against Hillary is upsetting to me because it crowds out genuine liberal criticism.
This, for sure.
things that are truly worrisome (the apparent preferential treatment given by the State Department to Clinton Foundation donors while Hillary was SoS, for example**)
I am honestly shocked that this hasn't become a bigger deal in the campaign. I find it appalling. It was 100% foreseeable and 100% sketchy from the beginning -- unlike, frankly, her e-mail scandal. Any 12-year-old could have identified the ethical problems in a top government official being connected a global foundation given a three-sentence overview of the situation.
I am genuinely surprised that Limbaugh, Fox, et al haven't been hammering away at it nonstop.
At the bare minimum, being so close to the operations of a nearly half a billion dollar global charity that takes donations from the same people that the State Department deals with constitutes a very plausible conflict of interest
Forget plausible, I think it's egregious.
This raises the larger question of "why the fuck do these journalists think it's acceptable to hang out on Twitter -- a platform that is practically designed to encourage trolls and make reasoned arguments impossible -- all day and then write about how horrible it is?" Shouldn't they be off in Flint digging up dirt on Rick Snyder or something?
Well, the dirt in Flint is probably poisonous too.
Speaking of Clinton, I realize I am emphatically not the target audience, but I'm totally mystified by who would be persuaded by this campaign ad, which a former co-worker of mine linked to on Facebook.
I watch that ad, and I see a bunch of feel-good, contentless platitudes. All it does is irritate me and make me think she's taken the easy way out by supporting a bland, safe political topic.
I mean, Laura Bush -- possibly the least political First Lady of the last 50 years -- supported children. More to the point, I'd bet serious money that you could compile a set of clips exactly like that featuring Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee.
There's nothing in this Clinton ad that actually spells out anything she DID for children, or any policy she supported. Absent that, I just watch it and snarkily think about the "superpredator" clip that's been recirculating lately.
This raises the larger question of "why the fuck do these journalists think it's acceptable to hang out on Twitter -- a platform that is practically designed to encourage trolls and make reasoned arguments impossible
This applies to pretty much any public Internet platform that's not well policed, and there aren't many of those. There is in fact hope of better systems over time. Of course people choose to use or not use Twitter for an array of reasons that are their own, but I do not like the idea that people (and remember this is disproportionately women) should preemptively withdraw from what is in many circles a key part of public life.
361 is why I disagree with Tigre about the relative risk of running her rather than Sanders. The argument seems to (not from Tigre, but from others) rest on the assumption that the risks and the dirt that will get dragged up on Hillary are fully known while the risks of Sanders aren't.
But Hillary is under an FBI investigation over the emails. The FBI is not an arm of the right-wing conspiracy, it's an arm of the executive branch of the government that is investigating actions on Hillary's behalf that very plausibly could have put national security at risk. At the very least, if you're Hillary Clinton and you know that the vast right wing conspiracy is watching your every move, you should be taking extra special care to do everything above water in accordance with the rules. The very last thing you do is use a private email server as a matter of bureaucratic convenience. In the very best case, this makes Hillary Clinton look really quite incompetent from a PR standpoint -- casting her oh-so-heralded political acumen into doubt.
It's worth noting that she is the only member of the cabinet to have actually come under any sort of investigation like this. That's because, no matter how detested you are on the right, there are actual standards of probable cause you have to give Republicans before you get an honest-to-god FBI investigation into your actions. But liberals seem to just be content to accept the old "oh-you-know-they-are-out-to-get-Hillary" line, which just doesn't square with the fact that there are people they hate just as much (if not more) who aren't being pursued as criminals.
358
White men mansplaining racism to people of color is irritating. Hopefully those sorts of people are the ones who will listen to Bernie saying knock it off, but they might not think it applies to them.
My feeling is: both Clinton and Sanders have weak spots when it comes to race. Both are white people of a certain age, and neither one seems to be the "natural" candidate of black voters, given their past and current histories with race. TBH, this doesn't seem like a wedge issue between them, and they would both be far better than any Republican. That the Clinton campaign picked race, and managed to smear Bernie as the candidate of Left wing white supremacy is dismaying, is distressing to me for two reasons: first, it's dishonest: Bernie can and should do better on race, but that's true of any white Democratic candidate.* The second and perhaps more important reason is it feels like a way to drive a stake between labor and racial issues, in a way which is beneficial for capital and not for the poor and people of color. Racism is absolutely not collapsible to economic issues, but the two are intimately intertwined in ways that are pointedly ignored.
*I also think Coates has a legitimate point, that as the most leftist person in the race, and the one most amenable to listening, it's ok to try to push Bernie specifically to be more aware on racial issues, though one has to acknowledge the dynamic of why that is the case: Coates is pushing Bernie on reparations because he's the only candidate that he thinks such pushing would have any influence over.
364
Even fucking Facebook comments would be better than Twitter; at least there it's understood that you should suspicious of anyone not using their real name.
351: Signe Anderson? And Paul Kantner died? Fuck, dropping like proverbial flies. I load up from my archives and the playlist is getting pretty fucking full.
Starship in the sky, be ready by 1990...oops
366:
Speaking of driving a stake between labor and racial issues, there's a great interview with Adolph Reed in which he discusses briefly the long history of doing this in the United States when socialistic sentiments start to gain momentum. He really, really does not like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think because he sees him as an unwitting participant in this game.
But I do agree with you about Coates, espeically given that blacks were explicitly written out of the New Deal and given the way that racism has been used in the past to dismantle the welfare state. I think Coates is right to want a better answer from the Sanders camp than "Oh, well, we're going to get the white working class in support of this and it will still be good for blacks since you all are disproportionately afflicted by poverty and we promise that this time we won't let white supremacy be used to take it from you once the working class whites are doing well enough to betray you!"
Also, I'm curious, but only the last comment in 359 strikes me as sexist. The first comment seems like boilerplate political trash talking. The second is more deranged, but I'm not sure what makes it sexist. "Shill" isn't a gendered insult. I find it all distasteful, but that sort of crap gets flung in all directions as a standard part of elections.
Trivers- You seem like you an example in mind with that last. I'm curious because usually I think black people were excluded from the start by design, rather than later on.
370:
Right, I meant to write two kind of shitty but not sexist comments followed by a sexist one. I'm saying that someone on Twitter might see all of these responses coming in so fast that they can't help but sort of aggregate all of them into a hypothetical Berniebro, despite the fact that they come from different people with different motivations.
371:
I'm thinking specifically of welfare reform in the 90s. The right-wing rhetoric (to which the Clintons yielded in the 90s) was pretty nudge-nudge-wink-wink racist, with whites on the right convinced that they were paying into a system that was subsidizing black degeneracy. So this is an instance in which a part of the welfare state was easy to dismantle once it was pointed out to whites that blacks were disproportionately benefiting from it -- even if it hurt poor whites, too.
So I think Coates is right to suggest that the left really ought to pre-empt this sort of thing by speaking more explicitly about racial injustice, even if that means running the risk of alienating some working-class racists.
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Bill Thompson, very competent manager of the Airplane family (+Starship, solos) since 1969, also died in January. He made them comfortable and secure, still doing work up to last year.
Good one, as an example of what a bad one looks like, Martin Katz, Airplane's first manager had them in court for 22 years. "I get all income from everything you did or will ever do! Maybe you get an allowance"
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Marco Rubio has an ad out that is basically a carbon copy of the George W Bush-era video shown at citizenship ceremonies. I'm assuming the similarity is due to lazy ad creators rather than any attempt to actually dog-whistle to naturalized immigrants.
the ethical problems in a top government official being connected a global foundation
Is "global" the problem? Because I'm not convinced our home grown donor class has our interests at heart.
Meanwhile, you'll never guess which campaign is facing an actual sex-discrimination lawsuit from a former staffer.
Is "global" the problem?
It sure is in this case, given that Clinton was Secretary of State. I don't even think this WashPost article fully gets at the problems:
The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.
Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation's 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.
The agreement, reached before Clinton's nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.
I can't believe they came up with that "agreement." It doesn't remotely pass the sniff test for me.
Now, even if we're as generous as possible with Mrs. Clinton, and we assume that the deals would have happened under any Secretary of State and that they were 100% in America's best interests, the fact remains that we should not even be in a position to have this conversation. I want to have as few reasons as possible to assume that America's role in the global weapons trade has anything to do with who has lined the pockets of my Secretary of State.
Really, being involved with heads of state to the tune of receiving tens of millions of dollars in donations to from them to pursue one's personal vision for the world should probably preclude one from serving in the executive branch. Remember how great it was when the CEO of Halliburton was Vice President?
So sick of this primary season because it leads to near-complete bullshit issues like this one being taken seriously by decent people. Honestly just think about what a nothingburger you're whining about.
379 How is that a nothingburger? It's the very definition of a conflict of interest. It smells to high heaven.
A nothingburger is the stupid email scandal.
The email scandal was something she just should have known better than to let happen. This undermines, in my mind, the argument for her political acumen and general competence. If she knows the vast right wing conspiracy is after every shred of scandal they can find and she is as plainly competent as claimed, she would not have let this happen.
I don't think the suspicious relationship between the Clinton Foundation's donor list and increases in arms sales to the country's they run can be called a nothingburger, either. It's downright scary. And even if you believe it's a coincidence, it's going to get used against her in the general to claim that she is a national security liability. And honestly, I'm going to have a hard time explaining to people why they shouldn't be concerned.
Can you give me a reason that the fact that the Clinton Foundation looks like a global influence peddling scheme with implications for the international arms market should not be genuinely concerning?
Don't be jackasses. The Clintons operated a global charity foundation which leveraged Bill's name and reputation to do various worthy charitable things around the world. Some countries, before Clinton was appointed, made multi-year commitments to donate at certain levels for things like relief for AIDS patients. When Clinton was appointed, this was disclosed and after laws and various ethical guidelines were reviewed, those donations that had already been agreed to (again, for charitable purposes) were allowed to continue. After she left office some other governments, that hadn't given during her tenure, gave. It wasn't a for-profit enterprise in the first place. Even putting that aside the only use of it when she was in office was to allow various contributions to more or less worthy causes to continue. Even ignoring all of that the notion that the Secretary of State in fact negotiates or can even particularly influence arms sales to benefit a personal charitable foundation is preposterous. Literally every single campaign donation made to any candidate, including every donation Bernie Sanders has received in his entire career, is a more corrupt transaction. Not to mention every single non-direct donation in which any outside group supports a candidate, ever. There are plenty of reasons not to ote for Hillary but get off of the faux-scandal precipice.
365, which I'm just reading now, is also fucking nuts. Enough. I'm going to switch off thr internet for a while. Hopefully Bernie will lose Iowa and people can have a few minutes of being disappointed and then regain their fucking minds.
Literally.
I'm actually bothered by the email scandal for reasons that fa has articulated on the blog before. But I will say in the realm of political scandals it's definitely a nothingburger and falls within the "what's scandalous is what's legal" zone
I'm completely with Barry on this.
To 383, I am particularly bothered by the fact that Hillary added her name to the Clinton Foundation and formally joined it in 2013, after she left the State Department. She had to have known she was going to be running for President. Why on earth would she create a situation that would blur the lines between philanthropy and political activity even more?
Also, we have pretty strict rules in the US about non-US-citizens donating to political campaigns. As far as I know there is definitely no mechanism for foreign citizens, never mind foreign GOVERNMENTS, to contribute $ to a candidate. So in that context, foreign governments giving money to the foundation look even more like an end-run around pesky campaign finance restrictions.
And I say all of this as someone who has circa 20 years of experience dealing with major US foundations, though none in the international realm.
I would have picked you as too smart to be worried in particular about the foreign donation rule (the foundation thing wouldn't be a big deal except that it involved foreign govenrments, since LITERALLY ANY AMERICAN ORGANIZATION NO MATTER HOW EVIL can donate directly to a candidate or do a ton of things to support them actually personally and actually directly, but obviously I was wrong and you are a deluded jackass.
372- Thanks that makes sense.
I guess I'm sort of in the middle on the email and foundation stuff. I don't quite agree that they are nothingburgers but I'm not sure it makes sense to join the critics on this stuff. I don't know if it is realistic to think we can get a leader who doesn't participate in influence peddling, broadly defined. That might just be dewy eyed naivety. I think the reason Republicans don't usually criticize the Clintons speaking fees and foundation fund raising is that they don't see anything wrong with that stuff. They see influence peddling as pretty much the point of getting elected or appointive positions. Of course the fact that the Clintons behavior lends Republican corruption like Vice President Dick "Halliburton" Cheney legitimacy. Since no penalty ever attends this sort of behavior when Republicans do it I don't know if it makes sense for us to complain when someone on "our" side benefits.
As far as the email stuff goes I know if I had handled top secret stuff that way when I had a clearance I'd have spent years in jail. The rules really are different at her level though. George W. Bush and his administration did much worse with way fewer consequences. His brother and Rick Perry did roughly the same thing as did Chris Christy, along with others I'm forgetting. Truthfully I wish Hillary had erased all those emails, then physically smashed the hard drive then melted it. I'd be happy if she just gave everyone who complained about the email stuff the finger.
I should be asleep so I apologize if that wasn't coherent.
Respect for principled Bernie voting, nothing but contempt for stupid scandal-mongering jackasses like, apparently, Witt.
Witt-Tigre throwdown! This should be good.
I guess the hos will just have to watch.
It's real "go after your opponents' strengths" stuff. Clinton spent a few years as a Secretary of State, then she helped run an immense charitable foundation doing good work in the poorer bits of the world - let's find some way we can attack her for doing that!
(Has anyone ever actually bribed someone by contributing to a charity that they run? Is that a thing? Normally you bribe people by giving them money, in my experience.)
But liberals seem to just be content to accept the old "oh-you-know-they-are-out-to-get-Hillary" line, which just doesn't square with the fact that there are people they hate just as much (if not more) who aren't being pursued as criminals.
Serious question: who? Who would you say is hated "just as much if not more" by the US right wing than Hillary Clinton? Can you suggest, say, five names?
393: It's the standard way of bribing in the religious world, I'd have thought. But the Clintons don't live off their charity's incomes, so won't work for them.
"The standard way of bribing in the religious world" is a wonderful commentary all by itself. But I'm sure it's true.
395: hmm. I'm not sure about Bill - remember he's been the one they've been comparing Obama to (not to Obama's advantage). And his profile is pretty low. You think Bill is more hated by the US right wing, right now, than Hillary?
396: I can certainly see it as a way of gaining indirect influence. It's only human nature that, if you give a lot of money to the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons, then Lady Ramkin will provisionally conclude that you are probably a nice person. It's a time-honoured way of getting knighthoods - you look for charities with a royal patron, or one close to the PM, and shove money at them. But the point is that you aren't actually getting much of value here. The idea that, if you shove money at the Clinton Foundation, Hillary will actually subvert US foreign policy in your favour is quite different. (As is the idea that she is so naive that she won't work out that's why you're doing it.)
Is there suggestion of any quid pro quo other than increased arms sales? Because if these were people we were selling to anyway (or would have), I'm not really seeing how the bribery is supposed to work. Generally speaking, you bribe someone to buy things from you, not the other way round. Especially if you're an arms dealer.
Gee, I can't imagine why everyone hates Ted Cruz.
400: I think the argument is that you need State Department permission to export arms to foreign countries, and some of the countries were not very nice, so if they hadn't bribed Hillary via the Clinton Foundation then the arms sales would have been blocked.
Given that the biggest customer was Saudi Arabia, my considered response is along the lines of HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The full list of countries that gave heavily to the Foundation and saw significant increases in arms imports from the US also includes Australia, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK.
I have a 2nd Amendment right to run a mail-order gun store that ships to anywhere DHS goes. Because I'm opposed to any waiting period, my every weapons ships loaded, with a round in the chamber, and the safety off.
I was under the impression that the reason for the private email server was to make FOIA requests harder rather than mere convenience. I don't know if this is true, but it's a more plausible reason for doing it than merely not wanting to change email addresses.
The Clinton Global Initiative is broadly aligned with US foreign policy interests, so I'm not seeing a huge conflict of interest there. It's not clear to me how pouring money into the CGI helps Hillary Clinton other than to advance her preferences in how aid is spent, which is part of what she's doing at State anyway. If that money was directly going into her or Bill's pockets things would be different, but as is she's just advancing the same agenda through two different channels, and it's an agenda the Obama administration supports.
401
It's funny that in an election with Donald Trump, Ted Cruz manages to be the bigger bully.
394
I would say there are times of temporary vitriol where other people are claimed to be hated more, but Hillary is the gold standard of disliked. She's the Hitler of Right wing political arguments. (You can call it Buttercup's law: any fight between conservatives will end with one of them comparing someone to Hillary.)
Exactly - the only way I can see there being an inference of actual impropriety is if the sales wouldn't have happened at all absent the donations. And I've not seen anything material to that effect. Every single one of the countries involved had arms exports approved under Bush. There's a question over whether the State Department should have blocked them over human rights issues, but, come on. It's never stopped us before, and Obama started selling arms to Egypt again after Clinton left office, so it's clearly not a serious constraint.
On the other hand, a lot of defence contractors do seem to have donated to the foundation, which is a lot dodgier, but in tiny sums by arms bribery standards. I mean, BAE's Saudi slush fund alone was £60m, which is more than the entire list of dodgy donations here.
Bill?? Hillary was much more hated than Bill, even in the 90s. My gut says Hillary is probably more hated than Obama, though I haven't seen polling on that.
Yes. Even if more people hated Bill in the 90s, the people who hated Hillary were really much more involved with their hatred than those who hated Bill.
407: yes. Remember the whole seven-year inquisition was originally about investigating Whitewater, which was at least as much about Hillary as Bill, and also the cattle futures trading business, which was Hillary. And then you got the Vince Foster madness which was also all about Hillary.
Bill was just sleazy and kind of indolent, after all. Hillary was the insane scheming murderous adulterous lesbian communist [some insults omitted here for brevity] insider-trading Lady Macbeth.
Also, fried pickles were a new thing for most of the country.
From NRO & its comments and the like, people hate Obama, but they still hate Hillary more. Recently there's been a lot of hate for the RNC and anyone perceived as being Republican establishment, but it's usually framed in terms of Hillary, e.g. "There's no difference between Jeb and Hillary, so who cares who wins." or "Boehner has smaller balls than Hillary. She gets her corrupt agenda through while he weeps." and stuff like that.
Here's a succinct representative comment on the merits of Obama vs. Hillary:
Hopefully, brain-damaged Bernie beats the Gorgon here, there, and everywhere. Republicans should do all possible to help him win the nomination, since any R candidate will destroy him in the general. As a Conservative, here is my Democrat pecking (screwing the country) order: Bernie, worse. Obama, worser. The Gorgon, worstest.
We all feel very defensive about our balls, but back in my day, we sublimated our castration anxiety better.
People hate Obama, but not to the deranged levels of Hillary. Here are comments on an NRO article comparing Trump to Mussolini:
Trump is Obama. No temperament for the democratic process; no real experience at governing; mocks everyone he disagrees with; no real social class; divisive on issues such as immigration, terrorism, and so on. He has fascist tendencies in the same way Obama does. Obama has just had more years for them to become apparent.
Many of us see Obama with his pompous poses and thrust out jaw to be Mussolini like, not to mention, the fake Greek columns and the cult of personality. Trump may not be a fascist yet, but Obama is there.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430555/trump-mussolini-women
(This is really tangential to the conversation, I just wanted to post this article.)
415: strasmangelo is writing for NRO now?
TRIGGER WARNING: extreme, offensive, and possibly contagious stupidity
For comparison, here are the sorts of things written about Boehner (comments aren't searchable so I have to actually read comment threads on old articles, these all came from reading part of a comment thread on one article. I actually left off the most vitriolic comments calling for Boehner's assassination and the really homophobic and transphobic ones, with the exception of comment 1, which was tamer than lots of the others.), and the more general point that RINOs are worse than Democrats:
John bonejead is not a man he is a mam. Jenner needed a surgeon.Bonehead did not..
Who are the morons who vote for them? All those freshman Tea Party people who got elected caved. Bonehead got the House to cave. What's wrong with those weak willed traitors?
Tell this Chaber of Commerce bought turd running the GOP I'm voting DEMOCRAT. You POS GOP prostitutes need to be thrown out.
Quit playing with Nazi Pelosi's Yabbos (the NSA has pics) pull your head out your ars and do something right for a change!
We must remember that the career politicians such as Boehner are not actually there to represent their constituents, once they get in to office it becomes about lining their pockets at taxpayer expense. They will do whatever it takes in the way of deceit,double dealing,changeing position in order to retain their exalted positions of power and in their eyes prestige. There is no difference between a Democrat or a Republician once they get to our seat of government and realize how rich they can become by feeding those who elected them a constant supply of pablum thru nonsensical rhetoric designed to soothe the masses. And they have at this time a perfect example of how easy it is to accomplish their desires for these things by merely looking at how the sorry excuse for a president we have now has accomplished it.
Boehner is a CANCER, a "RINO" in every sense of the word, and a horrible representative of the American people. Any nominal "Republican" who votes with Boehner on ANYTHING is not worthy of the support of any good American.
Both Boehner and Obamao = petty, small men... both traitors.
Boehner is the GOP equivalent of Baraq Hussein the Horrible. That isn't news. We've known it for years. He should not have been re-elected to the Speaker's seat. I blame the GOP!
Just renewed my drivers license, changed affiliation to Independent. Reason: Republicans like crybaby Boehner. I am sick to death of these people who no longer represent me and people like me. Until the Republicans field an actual conservative candidate, who is not a corporate whore, I will remain an independent and give my vote to a third party.
Boehner and Reid have a lot of similarities. One of the ugliest qualities a leader can have is vindictiveness. The Clintons have it in spades. Reid is master. Boehner is a quick study. It uglifies and repels and is a kind of acceptable terrorism. Its not going to go away. The moral of the story is, as many have found out before, that if you set out to kill the king then you must succeed or die. There are no third choices.
Voting for a stealth GOP RINO is worse than voting for a Democrat because it gives the liars and cowards electoral cover and camouflage. Just because they call themselves Republicans, it means nothing if they legislate like Democrats. Trojan horses elected by the people are worse than voting Democrat.
Boehner is a drunken RINO scumbag who is doing Barrack Obama's bidding against the will of the American people who are responsible for the huge Congressional Republican majority. Boehner, Paul Ryan and the rest of the RINO Establishment must be challenged by Conservatives in the 2016 GOP primaries. They must be defeated. In the alternative, let all the Conservatives that Boehner is persecuting become Democrats and deprive Boehner of a Republican majority and his Speakership. Since he's advancing the causes of Democrats, what's the difference if Nancy Pelosi is restored to the Speakership?
Boehner is an even bigger traitor than Obama.
I hope I live long enough to urinate on Boehner's grave. SELL OUT POS Fukface!
Why? It really doesn't matter. We have a "single" minded government controlled by foreign elements. Bonehead and Mcgruber are all the proof you need, They lied to win power back and then they continue on like Marxists. We didn't need to replace Dirty Harry and pigly nancy at all. I challenge anybody to show me the difference now. The repubs lied through their teeth to win a landslide election and now they are proving what fools we, the American people are.
John Boehner is a small man with a small intellect. He is Barack Obama in orange.
He sure never gets upset at Pelosi or any of the Dems. Of course, Boehner is a little sissy boy compared to Pelosi. She's give him a look that would make him break down and cry - something which he has a tendency to do anyway.
What a bunch of thoughtful, pragmatic conservatives.
I think it is contagious. I definitely feel stupider.
418 is pretty fucking awe inspiring. I can't think of an English equivalent. Certainly not attached to a supposedly respectable journal of opinion. Before the Iraq war I used to joke about Weimar America, and look what lived under that rock all along
It's times like this we need to remind ourselves that internet commenters are the worst of all humanity and are not a representative sample of anything, not even republican primary voters.
424
The sad thing is these comments really *are* a level of civility up from what you'd find on the more crazy Right wing sites. No obvious racial slurs or hardcore misogynist epithets, which are pretty run of the mill elsewhere.
Also, articles on Boehner (and Hillary, of course) bring out the crazies more than other NRO articles. On about 50% of the articles, I still stand by my claim that the commenters are more intelligent than the authors (I know, not hard). But if you want a contrast, read the Trump = Mussolini article. Last I checked, most people were pointing out that a Berlusconi comparison was more apt.
I read NROs comments a couple of days ago on Buttercup's advice (for which I still haven't forgiven her) but they really are a step up from newspaper comment sections.
425: We are internet commenters.
429: I'm comfortable with urple's characterization of us.
429: And you guys totally suck.
428
Mea culpa!
The commenters are still stupid and evil, but they aren't necessarily more so than the writers. If you get the right thread, you can also see arguments on the merits of the candidates between various factions of the Republican party. If you're really lucky, you'll come across the lone Jeb! supporter.
429
The jury's still out on where we fit on the "worst of humanity scale."
And also plus, whether or not we're the worst of all humanity, we're definitely not a representative sample of anything, I don't think.
we're definitely not a representative sample of anything
434
Eh, a martian anthropologist reading these recent threads would get some sense of American left-of-center politics among the educated classes. They could probably figure out what are general shared values, what are the things we debate over, what we value in a political leader, etc. There hasn't been a poll done, but my guess is the political views of people commenting here provide a reasonably accurate representation of the anti-libertarian moderate/left to far left wing of the Democrats (with some outliers). I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary/Bernie support among blog readers also reflected the national average, about 50/37%, with a decent number of undecideds.
I think we're a representative sample of people who are massively overeducated and bored at work.
418 is pretty fucking awe inspiring. I can't think of an English equivalent. Certainly not attached to a supposedly respectable journal of opinion.
It probably wouldn't be so vehemently directed at particular same-side politicians, but have you seen the comments on the Mail and Torygraph sites? And, now that I think about it, they probably are a bit like that re: Cameron with the EU negotiations going on.
426
The sad thing is these comments really *are* a level of civility up from what you'd find on the more crazy Right wing sites.
I was genuinely confused when I (reluctantly) started reading some of those comments after the lead-in. They seemed passionate (and deluded), but in a comparatively normal way and definitely didn't have the level of pure malevolence and filth I've come to expect from right wing internet comments or, to be honest, powerful and very influential right wing media commentators.
438: . Respectable journal of opinionwas meant to exclude the mail, but, no, I don't look at telegraph comments and perhaps when it comes to referendum stories I should.
This is interesting:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/
Nothing to see there, move along.
438, 440
The NRO is not remotely analogous to the Mail or Telegraph. It's the intellectual standard-bearer of the conservative movement. Since the movement is intellectually and morally bankrupt, the magazine is too, but it is most definitely not a tabloid.
443: I wouldn't rush into that. When I have glanced its way NRO has been full of right-winged tabloidesque rubbish like (if memory serves) "Let's Have More Teenaged Marriage," "A Conservative Firefighter Fights the Flames of Political Correctness," "Fat Asshole Recommends Military Service to Others" and "Guy with Unnamed Sources in the Intelligence Community Thinks the Same Things about Iran as Your Local Dumbass."
Isn't the Telegraph (not the Mail) respectable and an intellectual standard-bearer? I could be wrong.
It's the intellectual standard-bearer of the conservative movement.
That's like being the tallest midget in the circus. Especially when intellectuals like Jonah Goldberg are sitting in your dugout.
"Guy with Unnamed Sources in the Intelligence Community Thinks the Same Things about Iran as Your Local Dumbass."
Charles Krauthammer?
I might be wrong on the Telegraph, but I would say the NRO considers itself on par with The Atlantic or the New Yorker (key words: considers itself). They also let you know how Very Smart they are by throwing in a reference to de Tocqueville or Edmund Burke or even Weber every once in awhile, which I doubt the Telegraph does. They're basically unabashed pretentious elitists.
447: I was thinking of the guy with a beard and a Gabriele D'Annunzio complex. Name escapes me.
||
You cannot unsee this Trump father-and-daughter photograph. Even *I* give it a hearty chorus of WTFs.
|>
It was a thing during the 80s. Concrete parrots having sex, that is.
447: have you ever read the Telegraph? It's not a tabloid, for a start.
Later on, statue birds moved on from concrete and started tapping that asphalt.
449: never click on an apo link. never click on an apo link. never click on an apo link. (full-body clonic spasm) never click on an apo link...
Caption: This picture is for the fucking birds.
I assume everyone knows that Trump has repeatedly "joked" about wanting to date his daughter, right?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-ivanka-rolling-stone
457: Melania Trump is 45 and they've been married for a decade, so he's due for a trade-in.
Oh hey, and Ivanka is now the same age Melania was when they married. You can't argue with science, people.
In the case, I guess it won't happen.
Trump is not constrained by your bourgeois notions of "matrimony" or "parentage". He's a winner.
The Ptolemies engaged in incest and their dynasty lasted longer than the United States has, to date.
Just saying that our grandkids will enjoy the rule of Trump VI Philopator.
On the other hand, no US leader has had to blow an Italian to stay in power.
Trump is not constrained by your bourgeois notions of..."parentage"
Hey baby, do you have any Trump in you?
But America will eventually rise against Trump XII, the Alto Sax Man, and drive him out. He will only be restored by slipping a few $billion to a renegade Chinese general, and his daughter, Ivanka VII, after torrid affairs with a short lived Party Chairman, and a boss of Shanghai, will finally shoot herself, having abandoned the Incident Room at the height of the crisis. America will formally become a Chinese province.
I know we've moved on, but this article gets at some of my discomfort with the way Hillary has framed the conversation of reproductive rights = abortions & birth control, and why it's very tone deaf of her and UMC white feminist writers supporting her to claim the upper hand over Bernie:
The only thing we can know for certain about the coming Trump dynasty is his pyramids will be gold plated.
Trump will not lower himself to live in a dinky dump like the White House. Luckily, there is a Trump Hotel under development right on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House.
I saw that this summer. The sign said "Trump 2016." It alarmed me.
442. My first reaction on reading the NY article is how cheap it is to buy the Clintons.
449 is pretty bizarre (TBH I don't think those parrots are doing more than petting) but 457 is really squick-inducing.
Parrots are always trying to obfuscate the definition of "sex."
Yes, Moby, it's those trampy parrots' fault.
"Come, human, sculpt us while we kiss. Only touch each other outside the feathers. Promise."
CMU students: hardened criminals who tagged the back door of my old office building.
(On topic because of the internet comments.)
A bald man with a bloatee is also a right-wing talk radio commentator? Thanks, MSNBC! Now I've seen everything.
Ted Cruz seems to have an early lead:
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/primaries/2016-02-01#IA-Dem
If this trend holds, Bush is going to get 227 more delegates than Gilmore.
Ted Cruz's lead just keeps expanding, not unlike a bubble of gas in my stomach after eating chili. Giving me the same feeling, too.
Clinton and Sanders are both going to get more delegates than Gilmore has votes.
The republican counts are actual voters, right? As opposed to delegates on the dem side? So Gilmore really has exactly two people who have voted for him out of 35k? I guess the big suspense of the night is whether he'll get to double digits.
holy shit ted cruz is actually going to win this
Aww...MSNBC is saying Martin O'Malley is going to drop out.
If you're masturbating to O'Malley's campaign, you should hurry.
No word on Gilmore. Maybe he just needed to meet the double digit threshold.
If you're masturbating to Gilmore's campaign, you can take your sweet time.
You know, I can totally understand someone thinking "No, it's time to get serious; I'm not going to vote for Trump after all." But I can't imagine anyone thinking "No, it's time to get serious; I'm not going to vote for Trump after all; I'm going to vote for Ted Cruz."
I can't imagine being 1% as popular as Rick Santorum.
It looks less like people not voting for Trump after all to me, and a lot more like every candidate except Cruz, Trump, Rubio, and Carson just going "screw it I'll vote for Rubio or Cruz", at least compared to what the polls looked like earlier.
There are a great number of things I can't imagine.
Reported on Twitter from one caucus (may be apocryphal of course). "Slow and Steady wins the race and no one has started slower than Jim Gilmore."
I had a feeling people would have a hard time pulling the trigger for Trump. Cruz has the benefit of being an actual conservative, which, if you were inclined that way, I could see voting for. Trump doesn't actually give a shit about the ideology, and I've been wondering why people don't see through his act. But apparently they do.
495: Let's assume that such a caucuser is a low- to no-information voter. Is it difficult to imagine now?
We all know Dunning-Kruger--dummies don't know how dumb they are--and its corollary--smarties don't know how smart they are--but what about what the dummies make of what the smarties know (and value, and how they'll behave, etc.), and vice versa?
Wonder how Trump is going to react to losing Iowa.
Em dashes are converted to en dashes? Are en dashes even distinguished from hyphens? Let's find out.
hyphen -
en dash -
em dash --
I believe the standard play is "WE WUZ ROBBED!!"
With Cruz as the apparent winner it won't even be that hard to sell to people. Rubio looks like he got enough that I'm worried that Jeb might drop out sooner than he otherwise would have.
Interesting disparity between urban counties. Of the top 5:
Polk (Des Moines): 53.8% Clinton
Linn (Cedar Rapids): 51.9% Sanders
Scott (Davenport): 52.3% Sanders
Johnson (Iowa City): 58.7% Sanders
Black Hawk (Waterloo): 52.7% Sanders
Is Des Moines less white, then? Or less of a college town just by virtue of being bigger? Or what?
0.9%. This feels more like a tie on the Dem side.
509:
I think Sanders has a pretty easy appeal to rural whites that Hillary really doesn't. That was a big part of his constituency in Vermont.
I wonder how much he nipped from the Trump vote.
Those aren't rural counties though. Just smaller urbs.
513: If there had ever been any M to his campaign, it was done in secret, while wearing two wetsuits and a ballgag.
Speaking of which, I heard the phrase "rural floor" on a speakerphone today and it was much like the "rural juror" sequence on 30 Rock - I heard it twice and had to ask for it to be repeated before it auded.
507: Polk county even at this point has 44 more precincts to go so if it's that close it could still probably go any which way. The fact that the SDEs keep staying so hilariously close is really kind of amazing though. Without Clinton starting with a six delegate lead they'd just be trading delegates back and forth.
It looks like Council Bluffs went for Sander. It's not exactly a huge city but it's mostly just a suburb.
The Ted Cruz has come out in Iowa to let us know we can expect at least six more weeks of primary season.
I could see Trump reacting to this by aggressively race-baiting Cruz and Rubio personally.
I sort of wonder if at this point we won't see a general strategy in the primaries where all the non-Trump backers back the second-most popular guy in their state (as of voting time) just so they don't have to nominate Trump. What would that look like?
Late returns, that was my other guess, unprovably of course. And now they seem to be coming in - gap down to 0.2%.
And the Dem side just keeps getting tighter.
I think what we're seeing now is all the Non-Trump/Non-Cruz backers following that strategy with the 3rd most popular guy.
Wonder how the media will react if Bernie wins.
Unless I'm missing some rule, Rubio will get just as many delegates out of this as Trump.
528: The delegate count is pretty sure to go to Clinton no matter how things go from here (barring a really surprising finish), so I'm guessing there will be a fairly aggressive "Clinton leads in delegates..." line being pushed.
Is it wrong that I'm actually pretty upset Trump didn't win Iowa in a blowout? I was hoping for Trump to crush Cruz and Rubio, with Carson surging last minute to a high second place for maximum chaos.
If the difference falls within The O'Malley Margin, its technically a tie.
I hadn't quite internalized how few people vote in this thing. Fewer than 200K on the republican side.
I have to admit my Iowa predictions were off. I thought Trump would win Iowa fairly safely, about 28% to Cruz's 24%, and if anything Rubio would slightly underperform. I thought Dem side would be close-ish, but Hillary would win by 2-4%.
533: Have you ever driven across Iowa?
Gilmore's vote now goes to 11.
531: Nope. We're now doomed to spend the next, what, two or three months at an absolute minimum getting an endless stream of media commenters talking about Rubio's gravitas and political genius, and how he's a truly amazing politician - the next Obama, really! - and how the Republican party is finally coming to its senses, and so on.
I was really hoping that of all the people that would get knocked down hard it would be Rubio, and not even for electoral reasons as much as his scared/nervous-memorized-speech thing is just pathetic and hearing him praised as a man of incredible raw oratorical talent is super annoying.
536: Halfway between Gilmore and Paul.
Iowans can't count very fast. I'll learn who won in the morning.
I thought I paid attention to this kind of politics but who the fuck is Jim Gilmore?
Iowans can't count very fast.
That's because under the Iowa state constitution, after every five votes are counted, everyone has to stop and de-tassle corn for ten minutes.
Is that what kids are calling it nowadays?
I hope not. It's the functional equivalent of castration.
Growing up in Illinois, I learned how to make fun of Iowa (corn stuff*) but not, apparently, how to spell "tassel" correctly.
*Because, you know, it's not like there's any corn in like all of non-Chicago Illinois or anything.
At least Carson's got himself a fresh set of clothes.
To be fair, you were in yes-Chicago Illinois.
Apparently there are shenanigans from the Clinton campaign in vote counting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXOPuFQkve4&feature=youtu.be
(It's confusing, because the Iowa Dem caucus was probably designed by the person who invented the butterfly ballot. What happened is: everyone counted, then people left/reconfigured themselves, then the Sanders team recounted, but the Clinton team didn't, they just added the new people to their previous number, but apparently you're not supposed to do that(?). Anyways, apparently no one knew the total number of caucusees, and Sanders people might have came and left and not been included in the final count, whereas since the Clinton people didn't do the recount, their final number reflected cumulative instead of the # of voters present at that time, which apparently it is supposed to. Anyways, Iowa is stupid, why can't they just have normal voting like normal states. But also, not following the stupid rules is also sketchy, if those are the rules you're supposed to follow.)
Meh, I'm not worried about it. They're just about splitting the delegates either way.
Fuck, someone's going to dox that poor woman and it's just going to be awful.
If only three people left the room and the margin was eight, I don't see the big deal.
551
I hope there is no personal harassment of that woman. As an outsider, I'm not sure why both campaigns couldn't have counted votes the easy way. But also, rules is rules, and if your state has stupid ones, you still have to follow them. Apparently it may have swung a delegate the opposite, and given the delegate differential currently, that might make a difference.*
*I mean, not really because it's a tie, but it could change the media spin.
552
That's what I thought, but apparently an unknown number of people left the room, and Sanders was up by 5 before the recount. 3 was the number of known people who left. My guess is it was late and people more didn't want to do a recount rather than active maliciousness, but if those are the rules, you still have to follow them.
On one level, this is extremely trivial. On the other hand, it's important to do the small things correctly and with integrity, especially when it comes to voting. These sorts of shenanigans that doesn't rise to the level of real wrongdoing still gives off a negative impression to voters on the fence, especially when you come into a campaign with a narrative that you're sleazy and you've rigged the system against your opponent.
I liked this quick reaction from John Judis TPM
"And the results showed again that she is failing to inspire young voters, who have to come out in large number for a Democrat to win the presidency. In polls, she lost 18 to 29 year old voters to Sanders by 84 to 13 percent.
Clinton also displayed continuing weakness in connecting with voters. The quarter of Democratic voters who want a candidate who "cares about people like you" preferred Sanders by three to one. Those who wanted a candidate who was "honest and trustworthy" preferred Sanders by 82 to 11 percent. These kind of concerns could plague Clinton in the general election."
Clinton cheats, and is corrupt.
Plague? I think she loses, if she gets as far as November. But they won't let Bernie get the nom. Maybe Biden, or maybe the bankers think it is time for Repubs.
Jebmentum! He is playing this exactly right. Don't even believe him if he withdraws. By acclamation at the convention, you heard it here.
(Heard tell Rubio has a complete second adulterous family that will get revealed. Politicians are insane.)
I kind of want Bob to be right about Bush at the convention, although I'm not quite sure why.
556.last if that came out about Trump it would only help him.
I kind of want Bob to be right just for the entertainment value, but also because if it happens the GOP might just schism for real.
I didn't realize Carson was also from Florida. That makes 3/17.
Seems that he just retired there three years ago.
And the results showed again that she is failing to inspire young voters, who have to come out in large number for a Democrat to win the presidency. In polls, she lost 18 to 29 year old voters to Sanders by 84 to 13 percent.
This just shows that young voters prefer Sanders to Clinton. It does not show that young voters would prefer Cruz (or sitting at home) to Clinton.
But they won't let Bernie get the nom. Maybe Biden, or maybe the bankers think it is time for Repubs.
Nominating a Republican for the Democratic candidate would be a bold move but I think the bankers could pull it off.
Jebmentum! He is playing this exactly right. Don't even believe him if he withdraws. By acclamation at the convention, you heard it here.
BOOKMARK IT!
Jeb! vs Joe! would be a terrific debate.
And the results showed again that she is failing to inspire young voters, who have to come out in large number for a Democrat to win the presidency. In polls, she lost 18 to 29 year old voters to Sanders by 84 to 13 percent.
Also relevant: in fact, they feel pretty much as enthused by a Clinton presidency as by a Sanders one.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum
523 Trivers! I tried to construct a model of this process in this blog post: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2015/12/20/why-so-many-republicans-are-still-running-for-president/
The Guardian has gone into total fanboy/fangirl mode over Sanders. But Bouie is wrong. This is not the first time in a century that a socialist has built a movement with mass appeal, because if Sanders is a socialist, then the word has no meaning any more. The guy's a New Dealer, LBJ redivivus. How he would deal with his own inherited war if elected, remains to be seen.
The whole family is adulterous or just the parents.
565 - LBJ did great work, Vietnam notwithstanding. We all could use another like him
That one thing notwithstanding, how was the play?
It was damn good, as a matter of fact. I was sooo pissed at Mr Booth for disrupting it at such a critical point in the action. I tried to make them carry on, but the leading lady told me it was no use because they couldn't move backstage for Pinkerton agents.
Do you happen to know how it ends?
Do you happen to know how it ends?
With Trump winning the nomination and then a split into a regional party for the south, a libertarian party, a white supremacist party, and several bunkers full of people waiting for the apocalypse.
Serious question: is it possible that Trump's support is artificially depressed in a caucus because at least some percentage of the people who support him don't want to stand up in support of him in front of their friends and neighbors? There are a lot of condescending attitudes toward Trump supporters, even among other very conservative republican voters. I think he might do better in a secret ballot.
Alternative theory to 572: Trump is very popular, with non-voters. Flipping non-voters to voters is the dream of every outsider candidate, but look how often it fails.
So these fucking australopithecines don't even have a secret ballot?
It's not a primary. It's a caucus.
Iowans still vote with a secret ballot during elections. And they don't de-tassel corn until summer.
Iowa Republicans did have a secret ballot this year. Iowa Democrats didn't; the vote consisted of telling the supporters of various candidates to stand on different sides of the room, and counting heads. Or in some caucuses, counting boots and dividing by two.
I think it's very likely the weird complex rules of the caucuses depressed Trump's vote. The more I try to figure out how they work, the more stupid and less comprehensible they seem. The Democratic one is extremely stupid (people gather in a gym and get head counts? Really?), but the Republican one isn't much better.
565
Sanders is absolutely not a socialist, but that's not what matters. What matters is he calls himself a socialist, and/or is called that by others, but it's not materially harming his chances. He's a New Deal democrat, but he's also the first "socialist" who's run seriously for president in a long time. (I should know, as part of my leadership role in YPSL, I campaigned for the socialist presidential candidate in 2000. He got about 5,000 total votes nationally).
So if I understand correctly, the delegate results are Cruz 8, Trump 7, Rubio 7 (needed: 1237), and Clinton 22, Sanders 21 (needed: 2283). I would call that a 3-way tie and a 2-way tie rather than a win for anybody.
Hey all, starting a post to move the conversation to the front page. Sorry I was AWOL last night.
Who is suppose to approve your leave?
Meekins approves/denies all leave requests.
Wait, the New Deal wasn't socialist?
I mean, I know we have this parochial definition where nothing quintessentially American can be socialist like those filthy Europeans, but it was, surely.
John Maynard Keynes was a paid up member of the Liberal Party in Britain, as far as I know until the day he died. The New Deal was (broadly) Keynsian, at least in concept. Socialism has historically been about public ownership of critical sectors, to which you can say, "What about the TVA?", and I will say, "Yeah, and what else?"
That one thing notwithstanding, how was the play?
It sounds terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_American_Cousin
Sample gag:
-- He writes from Brattleboro' Vt. [Reading written letter.] "Quite well, just come in from a shooting excursion, with a party of Crows, splendid fellows, six feet high."
-- Birds six feet high, what tremendous animals they must be.
-- Oh, I see what my brother means; a tribe of indians called Crows, not birds.
-- Oh, I thought you meant those creatures with wigs on them.
-- Wigs!
-- I mean those things that move, breathe and walk, they look like animals with those things. [Moving his arms like wings.]
-- Wings.
-- Birds with wings, that's the idea.
It would be rather interesting if Sanders actually were a socialist and went around arguing for the compulsory nationalisation of Boeing and Microsoft.
588
That might get me fired up enough to actively campaign for him. Maybe he could also nationalize the banks.
It would probably be less interesting than it appears at first sight, because nobody would pay the slightest attention to him (see 579.2).
589: And it would be the one thing that would drive me to vote Republican.
Say it aint so Walt! Whats the big deal about proposing nationalizations that would never happen?
For all the trouble that nationalizing the banking system could cause the level of deregulation that the Republicans are talking (more seriously) about looks like the sort of thing that could straight up destroy a lot of the banks (through misconduct related financial meltdowns). Maybe Walt just really, really hates banks?
Because they're bad policy? "Vote for a candidate with terrible policy ideas because Congress will stop them" doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
I'm against nationalizing Boeing and Microsoft. I would be okay with a partial privatization of the banks, though the government probably shouldn't take over Goldman-Sachs prop-trading desk.
594 is true, but I'm not sure how it could get anyone to "so instead I voted for the one who proposed eliminating the entire social safety net and turning the middle east into a single sheet of radioactive glass" or something.
What else can I do? I can't throw my vote away.
Rand Paul can too win if we just believe in him hard enough!