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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2017 8:15 am 
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Also, Democrats have a lot of difficulty finding halfway competent candidates. In Montana they ran a folk musician with legal and financial troubles against Greg Gianforte, the guy who beat up a reporter the day before the election and still won. In Georgia, they ran a 30 year-old documentary filmmaker and political n00b. In 2016, their slate of losing congressional candidates included a random unemployed person and a beekeeper. Their talent pool in red states is ankle deep because they've given up in those places for so long.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2017 7:33 pm 
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Kea, these are R+9 to R+30 districts. It's physically impossible for the Democrats to win against almost any kind of creep if the Republicans spend enough money on getting their base out. In Georgia it cost 5,000 a vote, but they had it to spend.

Now let's watch them try to buy a couple of million votes in the general election. All they'll need is 10 or so billion dollars to make it work. No problem at all.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2017 9:26 pm 
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If only 3 senators have promised to vote against a bill with cuts to Planned Parenthood, then only one needs to cave. One will, because nobody wants to be That Guy Who Held Up The Bill. They'll just get some other minor concession in return. They might get Mitch McConnell to throw in a few hundred million for (religious) "pregnancy crisis centres" in their state and call it a day.

It'll be a band-aid trade floor. McConnnell will give out band-aids and the senators will most likely take them and go and tell their constituents how they made the bill better. They seem to be displaying a curious lack of self-preservation. They probably believe they can get away with a combination of "It Wasn't My Fault I Did My Best" and "Look, a liberal celebrity said something mean about Real Americans!"

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:39 am 
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Kea wrote:
Also, Democrats have a lot of difficulty finding halfway competent candidates. In Montana they ran a folk musician with legal and financial troubles against Greg Gianforte, the guy who beat up a reporter the day before the election and still won. In Georgia, they ran a 30 year-old documentary filmmaker and political n00b. In 2016, their slate of losing congressional candidates included a random unemployed person and a beekeeper. Their talent pool in red states is ankle deep because they've given up in those places for so long.


It's sort of hard to blame people for not wanting to put themselves up in an election they have a slim chance of winning when there is a 100% chance of muckraking, shenanigans and having to grind through a campaign with only a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel. Which is probably a train.

Successful business owner? Lets see how your business does after the opposition slanders you for months. Portrays you as a despicable human being and twists your words like a pretzel - on TV. Got kids? Lets see how much they like your candidacy after the death threats start. Running for high office in the US is one of the worst processes available in the entire western world. The partisanship, the sheer length of the nightmare, and the number of dollars thrown at it just make it a horrible, horrible process.

And don't even get started on the fundraising... So glad that Canada went to (mostly) public funded elections!

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2017 1:45 pm 
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Pretty much. Only weirdoes and cranks would subject themselves to that in a longshot district. But there are too many longshot districts now.

And now we are watching to see how long the Republicans can defy gravity with the power of sheer group-think. They're sounding like the kid who's been bragging all semester that he can fly like Superman and now he's on the edge of the roof, it would be too humiliating to not jump. I don't know what's going to happen. Are they going to come crashing down? Or is the US entering an era of Government by Bullcrap?

I feel like I'm watching the US degenerate into one of those third world countries, where politicians blatantly line their own pockets while governing by publicity stunt. They occasionally drive a truck out and give out some bags of grain to a few of their supporters on national television, playing the benevolent rainmaker for a day. The government is totally incompetent and functionally useless. Policy is a joke, they don't even pretend to base any of it on facts, it's all for show, merely to look like you are Doing Something. And all the voters resign themselves to the fact that life is crappy, it will always be crappy no matter who is in power, so you might as well vote for the guy who looks like you, or who is entertaining, or who comes to your village and gives you a bag of rice, or who says things that make you feel good about yourself for 15 minutes.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 10:45 am 
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To me, a lot of the blame goes to the American electorate. The levels of voter apathy have reached the proportions where a blowhard, wanna be dictator can come in and just lock up the party base by saying literally anything he thinks will get a vote, including mutually exclusive things all in the same speech. The people who should be determining the election, an informed non-partisan pool of voters, just doesn't freaking exist right now.

I mean, what's easier than coming in, throwing some quick one-line responses to complicated issues that don't really answer anything, and move on when the press asks what the hell you're talking about, call them fake news and deny them press credentials.

The actual candidates that take stuff seriously... can't beat the short attention span of the "average" American voter. You can't explain a nuanced, thoughtful actual solution to a problem like immigration in two sentences at a rally. Trump can simply unleash "Mexicans are rapists and murderers", "Build that wall", "Mexico will pay for it", or "I'll bring the coal jobs back!"

Bernie won't just say "My plan will be great, it will be the best ever, believe me" because he knows its a much more complicated problem than that. But as soon as the old Jewish guy starts explaining how things actually work and what he wants to do, the majority of Americans have changed the channel. As soon as Elizabeth Warren starts explaining just exactly how Wall St. is screwing everyone including their shareholders, eyes glaze over.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:42 pm 
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This, too, is the fault of the GOP. Sad to say, brain dead right-wingers who will always turn out to vote a straight party ticket outnumber their left wing counterparts in this country fairly significantly. Back around the time the Republicans became the party of institutional racism (1967-68) they acknowledged this; and also realized that the uglier they made the process the fewer folks who aren't ideologues would remain involved. Really, it's standard southern politics; but until then the south had been caucusing with the Democrats. And so it went.

So, yes, the naughty electorate that might be expected to care about reality who tuned out in disgust. But to be fair to them, they were deliberately set up to tune out by the Republicans and their fellow travelers who drove the process; and unlike the early 1900s there is no left wing counter-narrative mass media any more to warn said electorate that they're being played.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:02 pm 
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The US is hardly the only country where voters have gone for patently unrealistic rhetoric peddled by a crass buffoon. See: Berlusconi.

But the Republicans have sure stepped in it by encouraging the fact-free paranoid right wing media ecosystem to flourish to the point where any congresscritter contradicts Rush Limbaugh at their own peril. They ended up being the dog that got wagged by their own tail, a political party put in service of an entertainment empire. With an audience that's been trained to distrust any mainstream news sources in favour of speculation and conspiracy.

And yes, the left sometimes falls for similar crap (hi, anti-vaxxers) but they are comparatively bad at it.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 1:41 pm 
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Kea wrote:
And yes, the left sometimes falls for similar crap (hi, anti-vaxxers) but they are comparatively bad at it.


I don't know that being anti-vaxxer is necessarily left or right at this point. Trump himself blurred a bunch of those lines while on the campaign trail, talking about spacing the shots out etc. during a debate. It seems (unfortunately) to be something people on the fringe left (It's not holistic! Establishment medicine bad!) AND fringe right (You can't trust the FDA! Government bad!) have been getting into. Voila! Bipartisanship!

Anti-science, mind you, but neither of the fringes is really convinced on science most days. Requires too much rationality and critical thought, especially when it contradicts what they "know to be true" or "what happened to Jenny McCarthy's kid!!!11!!1!"

I remain unconvinced that the current lack of reality on the right is significantly the GOP's intentional fault. I really don't think they did the math on what they were doing or where it was going. I think they simply became enamored of the idea of a media outlet (Fox News) that was much less critical of them and still reached their core demographics with remarkable accuracy. I don't think that evolution to the Right Wing Echo Chamber (TM) was planned by anyone, but instead evolved over time. I doubt even Darth Ailes or Darth Cheney had any idea what they were unwittingly building on the right. It was a ball that started rolling awhile ago and has rolled over even those who started the process, whatever their intentions were.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 11:22 pm 
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I also doubt that anybody planned for the right wing conspiracy mines to become this big and influential, it's more that the politicians did nothing to stop it from getting out of hand. It says something that Glenn Beck of all people is now sorry for his role in promoting paranoia.

And the problem isn't just that a minority of people buy this crap, it's that the crap has pushed the right so far out into sheer insanity that there isn't really a middle anymore. People position themselves based in large part on what those around them are doing, and so when they see that "Obama is the literal anti-Christ" is the far-right position, then "Obamacare is horrifically socialist" becomes the moderate Republican position. Even though the plan that eventually became Obamacare was developed by the Heritage Foundation.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2017 9:20 pm 
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But it didn't start in the 80s, or the 60s. It started in the 40s, when the GOP (and to some extent the Democratic right) found themselves facing permanent marginalization on the tail end of the Depression and WW II. So they went ugly to distract folks from the fact that the Left had been very good for them, drumming up the red scare and the witch hunts to start the poisoning of the well. The West coast Republicans (most famously Dick Nixon) led the charge; but until Tail Gunner Joe made a mockery of the whole thing they were all perfectly happy to go along with it, and it became their modus operandi thereafter. Let's face it, the last positive campaign the Republicans ever ran for president was for Eisenhower; and even that was a campaign against rather than a campaign for (in that case, against the Korean War).

Now freely granted the GOP didn't become an evil caricature of a party until it was taken over by a merger of the Western Republicans and the Southern Democrats in the late 70s and early 80s; but they started down that road before we even accepted Japan's surrender. They may not have expected to do this well, but this is where Buckley, Nixon, Atwater et al were always trying to take us. This is the party Conscience of a Conservative was supposed to create, even if not quite this overt about it.

Btw, the odds of the Senate voting for some kind of ACA killer bill any time soon don't look that good. Who knows, they may have to actually admit a Democrat to the table (the poor dears).

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2017 1:28 am 
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At least Buckley was too embarrassed to promote overt racists. They've been going in that direction for a long time but I think they went completely off the deep end after Dubya. As incompetent and dishonest as Dubya was, being accountable for governing kept them semi-anchored in reality. The Senate appears to be in the uncomfortable and awkward process of becoming reacquainted with reality but they do seem determined to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "I can't heeaaaaar youuuu!"

I don't see how they're going to win any Democratic support unless they jettison the entire bill, ditch the Freedom Caucus, and write a whole new centrist Obamacare patch from scratch. McConnell would rather sell his right kidney. I think it's more likely that McConnell makes the bill even more vicious to win over the Freedom Caucus and then gives out some pork to the moderates to make them shut up. The moderates will squabble over who is most deserving of the two lifeboats and the rest will probably cave.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2017 7:28 am 
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Perhaps, but there are four 'moderates' who will almost certainly lose their seats if they vote for this; the two currently running statistically tied races and the two from Maine (who would lose all the single issue pro-abortion rights and Planned Parenthood voters forever). It's hard to come up with any sort of bribe that will make that an acceptable risk.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2017 8:56 pm 
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If there's only four moderate Republican senators, I think it would be far harder to come up with a bipartisan bill. Even if you cut out the hard right, there's very little that average Republicans and centrist Democrats would agree on. No Democrat is going to vote for a revised bill on the grounds that it is only half as ugly as the one Mitch McConnell is currently pushing, and no Republican will vote for a bill that didn't contain tax cuts for the rich. Ted Cruz (of all people??) is pushing a compromise in which the Republican hardliners would get more regulatory dismantling in return for giving up some of the tax cuts in order to patch up Medicaid for the moderates. If it doesn't work, I think the Republicans are more likely to give up on health care altogether and move on to more tax cuts.

Anyway, there's a new study out on Obama-to-Trump voters - people who voted for Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016. Most of them already agree with the Democrats on economic issues, but that was overridden by Trump's fearmongering on immigration, terrorism and crime. So Democrats probably aren't going to win them back by stronger appeals to economic populism unless they find a way to dismantle the xenophobia and cultural anxiety. Either they substantively move right on immigration, or try to jiu-jitsu around it by finding a candidate who doesn't culturally read as a "liberal coastal elite".

Speaking of immigration, Trump's Muslim-ish Travel Ban 3.0 is going into effect right about now. I guess the liberal Supreme Court justices found the lower courts' arguments a bit too much of a stretch to get Kennedy on board and opted for damage control instead of going down with a glorious dissent. Trump gets to have his travel ban as long as he doesn't kick out people who already have green cards and visas. The Trump administration will get to finesse around the rest of the restrictions by simply not giving out any visas for the next 3 months. And by the time the Supreme Court gets around to debating the actual merits of the ban October, the ban will have already run out its clock.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:36 am 
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I don't think the Dems need a "not-coastal-liberal-elite" so much as a candidate that reads as "not-establishment" to win next election. I still think this was the fundamental problem with Hillary - she reeked of "the system" from every pants suited pore. Which is why a lot of people (myself included) wanted Sanders to face Trump in the 2016 election, I continue to believe Bernie would have annihilated Trump in the general. Bernie was understood to be three things: Not establishment, having sincere and genuine beliefs, and willing to fight for what he believes. That was the winning ticket, not Hillary, and every single likely voter poll showed Trump v. Sanders was a cakewalk for Bernie.

As for health care, I don't see that bill moving forward anytime soon. The only chance they had was to ram it through before the public opposition got really going (and before the CBO scored the bill) and that's just not going to happen the far side of the July 4th long weekend. It's a poison pill for every (R) headed into a contested election for the next ten years. It's easy for Joe Blow (R) from Texas to vote for the bill because he knows he might only win his district by 15 points instead of 20. Josephina Blow (R) of Minnesota, on the other hand, knows this vote will cost her her seat. Guaranteed.

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