Forum    Search    FAQ

Board index » Chat Forums » Political Opinions and Opinionated Posts




Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 1466 posts ] 
 
Author Message
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:21 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Short answer: tell the national party to direct resources to all the state parties. The president is pretty much the leader of the party (current situation notwithstanding); if he tells them to help everybody instead of just incumbents, they will. Obama (and Clinton) didn't much care, and aside from the brief period under Dean the DNC was the handmaiden of the incumbents. No help to everyone else from one side (but not the other) means they generally lost, and then got out of politics out of frustration. The inevitable erosion of the incumbents then had no one coming up to make it good.

Consider the 2000 elections. The Republicans invested heavily in low level elections, the Democrats ignored them, the Republicans swept those state level elections, and then gerrymandered treason into Congress bypassing any Democratic protection for incumbents. Would it have been that neat if the Democrats opposed them instead of letting themselves get rolled? It seems unlikely.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2017 5:56 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
The Democrats do seem pretty useless. They don't seem to be showing any signs of getting their act together since they've kept the same party leadership on.

Anyhow, it looks like Trump's executive order is already making the insurance industry nervous. They'll probably soon be fleeing the exchanges en masse, and then the Republicans will claim that Obamacare was failing anyway and all they did was put it out of its misery. So any half-assed plan they come up with will look better than the smoking crater they've left behind. They will play hero and use the smoking wreckage of Obamacare to threaten the Democrats into going along with it, because look, those hypocritical liberals want people to suffer for political gain! Hubris. They gots it.

They'll even find a way to spin people losing insurance as a positive. There are those who only begrudgingly signed up for the ACA due to the threat of fines. The coverage available is kind of crappy and it costs too much even with subsidies. These people see it as a pointless tax and would sooner go without insurance than fork over for the ACA.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 8:00 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Some folks have to eat whatever garbage the Republicans and their owners feed them to keep reality at bay. The question remains if enough other folks will. Since the large majority covered under those exchanges aren't rich enough to have another option, they won't fall into that crowd you're mentioning (though I'm acquainted with folks who do).

In other news (and possibly soon to spawn another thread), the 'discussion' over the Chinese land grab in the South China Seas looks a bit like it's heating up. It would be pretty much suicidal for the Chinese to back down, and the Americans don't seem to know or care. This seems vaguely similar to a previous 'discussion' the US was having with Japan back in 1941. It was a good thing for everyone involved that it was resolved peacefully, right?

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 12:36 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
The wholesale undermining of reality is what Trump is all about. If his press secretary is already fighting with the media over whether it rained on inauguration day, you can bet he'll be loudly disputing whatever numbers come out of his own government that don't suit his immediate purposes. Granted, he can't conceal a whole recession like the Chinese can, but he's taking a leaf straight out of Putin's playbook by flooding the information environment with so much bollocks that nobody will ever have the time or energy to sort it out. That turns facts into a matter of tribal identity. When people's personal circumstances fail to match up with the version of reality their tribe is selling, they are pushed to either reject the tribe (which is psychologically uncomfortable) or conclude that their problems are theirs alone.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2017 7:21 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
An illegal and completely bungled anti-Muslim executive order, a Holocaust Memorial post notable for being completely judenrein, and the removal of the intelligence and military professionals from the NSC. Quite the day. His Supreme Court nominee is probably supposed to help change the subject, but there's a brewing constitutional crisis here that could easily get out of hand.

Yeah, interesting times.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:58 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
You know it's bad when you can't tell whether it's breathtaking malice or breathtaking incompetence.

OK, so sooner or later Trump's going to get a Supreme Court Justice to replace Scalia. I don't know how long the Democrats can filibuster for, but it'll happen.

What are the chances that when a refugee case reaches the Supreme Court, it'll vote 5-4 to uphold his piece of blatantly discriminatory garbage? Will Roberts flinch?

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:51 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
They can filibuster for 4 years, if it comes to that; unless the rules are changed (and Senator M has declined to do so) there's no time limit or stamina needed.

But as far as the Supremes, it probably depends on how it's presented to them (and what Kennedy thinks, of course); they'd be happier striking it down on a narrow technical basis. But it's also a matter of whether they're defending the Law or themselves. If they see it as defending the right of Federal courts to tell the President no, then we may see a unanimous ruling. If it's about upholding the law? Narrower, but since this case involves directly flouting Federal law (as opposed to merely being unconstitutional) I think we'd see 6-7 votes against Trump. Oligarchs see little profit in standing up for dictators (it undercuts their power), which very much limits how far any career Republican will go to help Trump.

Actually, that latter may get the party to push their puppets on the Supremes to vote no; when and if Trump openly flouts the ruling, they've got a great excuse to elevate president Pence...

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:28 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Didn't he already instruct the Department of Homeland Security to ignore the court order? I hear the Koch brothers are starting to get nervous about Trump. There is something very wrong when you find the Koch brothers agreeing with you.

But I have seen this movie before. Oligarchs ultimately will kowtow to the dictator because the dictator has the power to grant commercial favours and inside information to friends and unleash regulatory nightmares upon enemies. Oligarchs are the first people to kiss arse if they think it's going to help their bottom line. If you're going to unseat the aspiring authoritarian, you'd better do it fast, before he sinks his claws into the economic machinery of the state.

There's another leaked executive order floating around, this one saying that Trump wants to deport LEGAL immigrants for using social assistance programs that they are currently LEGALLY entitled to use. I can almost understand a hardline approach where they want to kick non-citizens off benefits, but deporting people? Is this politics or a WWE villain?

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:20 am 
Member of the Fraternal Order of the Emergency Pants
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 3411
AOL: Dodger724
Location: Relative Obscurity
Kea wrote:
Is this politics or a WWE villain?

Close e-damn-nough

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 7:08 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
So he alienated Australia, threatened a war with Mexico and Iran (separately), and sees nothing happening in Ukraine.

On the other hand the Republican Congresscritters have saved us from the horrors of not being able to dump mining waste in our own waterways or having to report payments to foreign governments. At least if we're energy companies. Oh, and whittled down an obstructionist rule in the Senate which nobody but a Democrat would even think of using (this week) in order to make sure we've got an absolutely incompetent Secretary of State (in Putin's pocket) to represent us in such interesting times as we're creating above the gap.

It must be fun to be so thick as to see voting for this as a good idea when you're not, say, an energy company.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 9:37 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
They should put Rex Tillerson's picture under "regulatory capture" on Wikipedia.

According to the latest opinion polls, the public is somewhere between equally divided and narrowly supportive of the "Muslim Ban". Fear works. It's tapping into the same mentality that drives anti-vaxxers. Fear of being tainted. You can't argue facts with it. It's "those people are polluted, they have to be kept out".

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 1:29 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:02 am
Posts: 1210
Website: http://circular-illogic.deviantart.com/
Location: Somewhere, Texas
Weremensh wrote:
So he alienated Australia

The ultimate irony of this episode to me was John McCain being the one to make the call to smooth things over. To the best of my memory, a few years ago he himself had a blowup while meeting with a German(?) diplomat, walking out after saying something along the lines of "I didn't come here to listen to this crap". His buddy Joe Lieberman was the one who had to help patch things up.

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 2:50 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Wed May 15, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 11381
Kea wrote:
According to the latest opinion polls, the public is somewhere between equally divided and narrowly supportive of the "Muslim Ban". Fear works. It's tapping into the same mentality that drives anti-vaxxers. Fear of being tainted. You can't argue facts with it. It's "those people are polluted, they have to be kept out".


Now I have to wonder how the poll questions were phrased...

I mean, are these the same people as were running the polls that said Trump wouldn't win?

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 2:59 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
It's still early, so there's only been a couple of surveys. The one that found narrow support had pretty Trump-friendly wording (it was done by Rasmussen, which typically leans Republican). The one that found an even split had more balanced wording. But both were asking about support for the ban in the abstract. We'll have to see what happens when you ask people whether they support the ban that was actually implemented. If support stays anywhere near 50% even after the news has been flooded with images of deported grandmothers and small children being separated from their parents, I'll know the US has been politically polarized beyond repair.

s.i.l. wrote:
The ultimate irony of this episode to me was John McCain being the one to make the call to smooth things over. To the best of my memory, a few years ago he himself had a blowup while meeting with a German(?) diplomat, walking out after saying something along the lines of "I didn't come here to listen to this crap". His buddy Joe Lieberman was the one who had to help patch things up.

You know things have gone crazy when John McCain is the calm one. Isn't the man famously bad-tempered?

Top 
   
 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 4:47 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Mon Sep 13, 2004 12:00 am
Posts: 785
Location: snuggling Kittens
Weremensh wrote:
So he alienated Australia


Which I am still gobsmacked about. Like.... why on earth would you alienate the one country in Asia that is completely reliable as an ally for you????

2 weeks and he's managed all of this trainwreck. Wow.

Top 
   
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
 
Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 1466 posts ] 

Board index » Chat Forums » Political Opinions and Opinionated Posts


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

 
 

 
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to: