US Politics: Competence Crisis?

[Spring Bass]

Saw an interview on PBS with a congress Representative from South Carolina (R.) on immigration reform, and I found myself agreeing with the GOP position on the issue of path to citizenship. They're still wrong on border security, but I agree with their point on the negative points of granting the same path to citizenship to all the current illegal residents. I wonder if the Democrat will be able to back down on that issue?

What's wrong with it?

[karaddin]

Occasionally shitty developers rely on particular versions of Java, such that updating Java can cause applications to break. It's rare since most syntax doesn't change much, but it happens. I wish I did not have firsthand experience with this phenomenon.

Back when I was on the helpdesk at my work, our student self admin portal required 1 of 2 specific java builds. Not even just a particular minor version. Think it was 4.2.6 and 4.2.12 that worked. Was years ago, but it was like that for years and was awful.

[Commodore]

Saw an interview on PBS with a congress Representative from South Carolina (R.) on immigration reform, and I found myself agreeing with the GOP position on the issue of path to citizenship.

Rowdy Gowdy, my favorite Congressman

[Durckad]

Saw an interview on PBS with a congress Representative from South Carolina (R.) on immigration reform, and I found myself agreeing with the GOP position on the issue of path to citizenship. They're still wrong on border security, but I agree with their point on the negative points of granting the same path to citizenship to all the current illegal residents. I wonder if the Democrat will be able to back down on that issue?

Is that you agreeing with the GOP's position or that particular congressman's position?

[TerraPrime]

Bah. Stupid mobile interface just ate a long post. Will try later.

*grumbles*

[Mad Monkey]

Doesn't the board actually save your posts periodically? I always see that at the bottom of a page if I take too long to post.

[Merentha]

http://www.huffingto...n_3561701.html?

So, Florida just banned computers. And cellphones. And "any system or network of devices that may be used in a game of chance." (Bingo is explicitly excluded). Ostensibly, they were trying to ban internet cafes being used as online gambling centers, but appear to have rather missed the mark.

edit: Can we ban guns since they may be used in russian roulette?

[sologdin]

awesome. it's like the Simplification in canticle for leibowitz.

[DanteGabriel]

Almost started a new thread for this, but US Politics is inactive enough to maybe accommodate it...

I've been thinking for a while that political parties are cyclical in their influence and relevance -- they have ideas that are popular, win a few Presidential elections, ideas become ideology, ideology becomes dated and out of step with public opinion, party die-hards double down on ideology, drift into irrelevance and/or self-parody, other party ascends to dominance, and eventually some faction within the fading party refreshes the ideas.

I came across an article on the Atlantic that pretty well captures this, by comparing the Republicans' current plight to the Democrats of the late 70s and 80s. Essentially the Democrats were wandering the same out-of-touch desert until the DLC got influential enough, and got one of their own nominated in 1992, to start remaking the party brand.

The party is in desperate straits. It has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. It consoles itself with a majority in Congress, but even there its ranks are dwindling. On nearly every issue of national significance—from social affairs to fiscal matters to foreign policy—its positions are increasingly out of step with those of the majority of Americans. Riven by factions, it sometimes seems more like a collection of squabbling interest groups than a coherent political entity. People have started muttering that it might become merely a regional concern, or even go the way of the Whigs and die out.

This is the plight of the Republican Party today. “If we’re being honest,” the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, moped earlier this year, “we have not really won a decisive presidential election since 1988.” Polls show that the party’s stance on practically every issue is a loser: same-sex marriage, international affairs, immigration, even taxes and the deficit. But this dismal situation was, a quarter century ago, the plight of the Democrats.

In the late 1980s, Democrats were the party of racial quotas, handgun bans, and welfare rights, viewed as soft on crime, weak on communism, and antagonistic to family values. The party’s lone president since 1964, Jimmy Carter, won post-Watergate with just 50 percent of the vote. “You’d look at polls and see that the American public agreed with the Republican Party on every meaningful voting issue,” Bill Andresen, a House Democratic aide at the time, recently recalled. The Democratic brand was so toxic that many of the party’s politicians shunned its liberal national candidates, particularly the 1984 presidential nominee, Walter Mondale. As William Galston, who was Mondale’s issues director, told me, “It was not possible to build a platform long enough that southern Democrats would appear on it while Mondale was at the podium.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/how-to-save-the-gop/309306/

I read the article with some mixed emotions, because the rise of the Clintons and the influence of the DLC led to a whole lot of other problems in the party which I currently decry.

I also am not sure I see a path to daylight for the Republicans, short of fundamentally re-aligning the interest groups they serve. They're too practiced at ostracizing and driving out their centrists, too used to tuning out negative feedback, and too much prey to the market-driven manipulations of Fox and the right wing commentariat that depends on attention and ratings rather than political viability.

[Guest Raidne]

I've been thinking for a while that political parties are cyclical in their influence and relevance...

I've been thinking the same thing. Had a conversation about it last week. I think part of it is just tied to the nature of the history of ideas. The Republicans picked up steam when they adopted the rising "rational actor" model as the basis for their policy and used it to argue against Keynsian economics. It was a more vibrant idea with all the advantages of the ideological challenger and displaced the Democrats. Now, very recently, the behavioral model has been adopted by the Democrats. It's empirically based and more accurate than the rational actor model, and the Republicans will, IMO, likely become even more ideologically irrelevant than they are right now.

I think this would happen faster if liberals were more comfortable taking this sort of data-driven, outcome-based approach over raw social justice arguments about our duty to "help the poor" without reference to a more quantifiable desired outcome. In other words, there are a lot of moderates who still think that Republicans are "smarter" and more in tune with reality than the "bleeding heart liberal" of the pre-Clintonian period. That effect, on the other hand, is probably significantly offset by the shadow of ignorance cast over the Republican party by their alliance with the religious right, which has vocal members that are perceived by many to be ignorant to an almost unbelievable degree that falls well outside of the scope of trends in the history of ideas.

[DanteGabriel]

I think this would happen faster if liberals were more comfortable taking this sort of data-driven, outcome-based approach over raw social justice arguments about our duty to "help the poor" without reference to a more quantifiable desired outcome. In other words, there are a lot of moderates who still think that Republicans are "smarter" and more in tune with reality than the "bleeding heart liberal" of the pre-Clintonian period. That effect, on the other hand, is probably significantly offset by the shadow of ignorance cast over the Republican party by their alliance with the religious right, which has vocal members that are perceived by many to be ignorant to an almost unbelievable degree that falls well outside of the scope of trends in the history of ideas.

This may just be the view from inside my own bubble, but I was pretty sure the Democrats had already moved on to data-driven outcome-based approaches to alleviating poverty. All the arguments I've seen advancing certain economic policies are rooted in studies about how much better off the economy is when the lower classes get money, rather than letting it accrete (wow, board spellcheck doesn't accept "accrete") at the top in hopes that some of it trickles down. It's the Republicans, especially in the last couple of cycles, who've been pounding unsupported ideology about "job creators" and the mythical 47% and clinging to the Laffer Curve.

If there are still moderates out there who think the Republicans are the smart, in-touch party, I'd like to know where they are, and what the fuck they've been paying attention to for the last 20 years, because it hasn't been politics.

[Fez]

Seems probably a bit earlier for this, but who knows, maybe its cool enough that it'll pass and become the 16th* bill Obama signs into law this year:

A bill (HR 2617) introduced by Reps. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) on Monday, if passed, would establish the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historic park.

Apparently the concern is that as commercial spaceflight gets more and more prevalent, eventually they will get to the moon. By declaring the moon landing sites a national park, it'll better protect them from being potentially damaged or removed. Fun times, although I don't think we need to really start worrying about this issue for at least another a decade or so.

On the other hand, if we declare that its a national park, I think that means that we're declaring part of the moon to be US territory. I'm not saying I have a problem with that, there's no better way to start a campaign of supervillainy than seizing the moon, but other countries might (although telling Republicans that we'd be sticking it to an international treaty would be a great way to get them behind the bill).

*Yup, there've only been 15 signed bills so far this year, a new record low.

[Guest Raidne]

This may just be the view from inside my own bubble, but I was pretty sure the Democrats had already moved on to data-driven outcome-based approaches to alleviating poverty.

The party, I think, has. Other people still make plenty of appeals to emotion. Which is fine - and valid. It IS a moral issue. But it slows down the adoption of the idea that the Democrats are the rational thinkers on economic issues.

If there are still moderates out there who think the Republicans are the smart, in-touch party, I'd like to know where they are, and what the fuck they've been paying attention to for the last 20 years, because it hasn't been politics.

Their time frame is longer than the last 20 years. This is hard for me to really get too, because I'm not this old either, but a lot of people still have a view of the Democratic party that is informed by the Carter era. I suppose its tempting to just wait them out or whatever, but a lot of those people did vote for Clinton (the second time around) and we probably don't have that long until the tide swings back the other way and they get the theoretical jump on us again.

[Mad Monkey]

I just want to state for the record that if the U.S. seizes the moon as its territory, I would happily renouce all my bleeding heart liberalism provided that the seizure was the first step toward turning the moon into a fully operational Death Star designed to be the center of the new Intergalactic Empire.

ETA: Your spell(ing) fizzles!

.

Hmm, that would require a lot of well-paying jobs, as well as even more slightly lower-paying jobs. It's not a bad idea even if we never do get any weapons systems up there.

As far as the park goes, as I understand it the bill doesn't actually cover the actual surface of the moon, just the NASA equipment left behind and things like footprints left behind. (Don't ask me how you can protect a footprint on the moon's surface without controlling the moon's surface).

[jarl the climber]

The party, I think, has. Other people still make plenty of appeals to emotion. Which is fine - and valid. It IS a moral issue. But it slows down the adoption of the idea that the Democrats are the rational thinkers on economic issues.

Their time frame is longer than the last 20 years. This is hard for me to really get too, because I'm not this old either, but a lot of people still have a view of the Democratic party that is informed by the Carter era. I suppose its tempting to just wait them out or whatever, but a lot of those people did vote for Clinton (the second time around) and we probably don't have that long until the tide swings back the other way and they get the theoretical jump on us again.

What your saying about the Carter era is kind of intersting. I attended college between 89-92. Most of my professers were liberals and spent time trying to prove that Carter was a good but misunderstood president. Only one of my PS teachers would even acknowledge Lyndon Johnson, who was certianly a better president than Carter in some ways ecspecially in his dealings with Congress. So liberals have kind of brought this on themselves by shilling for a mediocre president for 12 years before Clinton got elected.

I do not know if Clinton would have ever been elected if it was not for Perot. Still the sun rose and the world did not end and the democrats recovered most of the so called Reagan Democrats in 96. Its really sucsess or the perception of it that swings elections. If Obama can keep thew Middle East from exploding, improve the economy, and sucsessfuly implement his health care program the prospects of a democrat being elected in 2016 is almost certian. Still I think whoever gets elected in 2016 is going to regret it and it will hurt their party.

[Guest Raidne]

So liberals have kind of brought this on themselves by shilling for a mediocre president for 12 years before Clinton got elected.\

Possibly so, yeah. I did not understand this until I met my husband either. There is just enough of an age difference between us to make the difference. Not that he had deep thoughts about Carter as a child, but I have concrete impressions about Reagan that inform my opinions and I was barely born when he was first elected. But Carter is not even a part of my political universe, however. It's like talking about the current Republican party by reference to Eisenhower for me.

[The Iceman of the North]

Apparently the concern is that as commercial spaceflight gets more and more prevalent, eventually they will get to the moon. By declaring the moon landing sites a national park, it'll better protect them from being potentially damaged or removed. Fun times, although I don't think we need to really start worrying about this issue for at least another a decade or so.

On the other hand, if we declare that its a national park, I think that means that we're declaring part of the moon to be US territory. I'm not saying I have a problem with that, there's no better way to start a campaign of supervillainy than seizing the moon, but other countries might (although telling Republicans that we'd be sticking it to an international treaty would be a great way to get them behind the bill).

Declaring the landing-sites national parks are certainly within the "Common heritage of mankind" principle within the Outer Space Treaty, and is not likely to be seen as a precedence to declare the surface as US territory. If it is a concern, it could be set up as 'international parks' under the auspices of the OST, or some other international entity.

[Fez]

I always thought Republicans should like Carter more than they do, after all, he's the one who really got the ball rolling on the whole deregulation thing. I'm sure Reagan would've gotten things started if Carter hadn't, but Reagan was only able to do as much as he did because of Carter.

[DanteGabriel]

What your saying about the Carter era is kind of intersting. I attended college between 89-92. Most of my professers were liberals and spent time trying to prove that Carter was a good but misunderstood president. Only one of my PS teachers would even acknowledge Lyndon Johnson, who was certianly a better president than Carter in some ways ecspecially in his dealings with Congress. So liberals have kind of brought this on themselves by shilling for a mediocre president for 12 years before Clinton got elected.

And I'll still maintain that Jimmy Carter was the last President who tried to be honest with America, and paid the price for it.

[The Progressive]

texas teabaggers passed the restrictive abortion bill as predicted.