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US Politics: Speak Into the Microwave


Fragile Bird

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51 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Not per the WSJ.  They are the leaders of the Republican Study Committee in the House.  Trump got their support by backing block grants and support for states adding a work requirement for the ability to receive medicaid.

Hmm. I was going off of the numbers I heard on NPR yesterday, but a quick Google search makes it clear that the numbers are all over the place. That said, the 12 number that Week threw out there is definitely referring to Senators.

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17 minutes ago, denstorebog said:

So, I guess this is a pebble on top of everything else, but one of these days, some R lawmakers are really gonna get tired of the amount of shit-gibbonry that keeps hitting the news.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/324539-preet-bharara-said-to-have-been-investigating-tom-price

In other news, both Bret Baier and the increasingly awesome Shep Smith have now stated on air that they're not gonna help Trump get out of this mess by lending any credence to Napolitano's statements. I did kinda wonder how it would go over with Fox that Trump tried to pass the blame to them during the press conference with Merkel.

I saw that about Bharara. No real surprise given it looks like a clear case of insider trading but it'll probably be swept under the rug now.

The Fox news guys seem to be pretty good about all of this while the opinion hosts are all bending over backwards to be the most pro-Trump.

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39 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Hmm. I was going off of the numbers I heard on NPR yesterday, but a quick Google search makes it clear that the numbers are all over the place. That said, the 12 number that Week threw out there is definitely referring to Senators.

The bill has to be passed by Congress first, before it goes to the Senate. Trump is not wasting his time on Senators at the moment, because if Congress doesn't pass it, there will be no Senate vote.

According to CNN, there are currently 22 Republicans who will either vote against the bill or who are on the fence. They can risk losing 21 votes. One of the 22 was in the group who met with Trump today, and Trump proclaimed he had convinced all of them to vote yes. That sonds like the bill will pass Congress and go to the Senate.

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47 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

The bill has to be passed by Congress first, before it goes to the Senate. Trump is not wasting his time on Senators at the moment, because if Congress doesn't pass it, there will be no Senate vote.

According to CNN, there are currently 22 Republicans who will either vote against the bill or who are on the fence. They can risk losing 21 votes. One of the 22 was in the group who met with Trump today, and Trump proclaimed he had convinced all of them to vote yes. That sonds like the bill will pass Congress and go to the Senate.

I get that, I was just clarifying something for Week. That said, I'm still not completely sold that it will pass the House. It's more likely than not, but still not a done deal. And if it does pass, it will be incredibly interesting to see what happens once it gets to the Senate. Several Republicans are in a situation where they're damned if they do vote for it and damned if they don't. They've really boxed themselves in on this one.

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Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Racist, incompetent, and reactionary. Pretty much what Radical Islam ordered, methinks.

 

 

How so?  to the extent that they care, I'd assume they want a passive disinterested admin over anything else.  unless this is the old 'recruitment' argument?

I just don't see the connection.  you could maybe make an arguemnt that they'd favor american isolationism, but i don't think the kind of isolationism Trump represents fits the particular mold they would be looking for.

 

Granted, I'm not an expert on bin Laden.......

 

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2 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

 

 

How so?  to the extent that they care, I'd assume they want a passive disinterested admin over anything else.  unless this is the old 'recruitment' argument?

I just don't see the connection.  you could maybe make an arguemnt that they'd favor american isolationism, but i don't think the kind of isolationism Trump represents fits the particular mold they would be looking for.

 

Granted, I'm not an expert on bin Laden.......

 

I don't think they want Isolationism. They want a Holy War. I don't see Trump being  truly Isolationist outside of his Russian/Nato stance.

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1 hour ago, Swordfish said:

 

 

How so?  to the extent that they care, I'd assume they want a passive disinterested admin over anything else.  unless this is the old 'recruitment' argument?

I just don't see the connection.  you could maybe make an arguemnt that they'd favor american isolationism, but i don't think the kind of isolationism Trump represents fits the particular mold they would be looking for.

 

Granted, I'm not an expert on bin Laden.......

 

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Wtf, quote malfunction.

 

Anyways, SF; OBL's 'plan' was to bleed the US economy dry by getting them engaged in a quagmire a la Soviets vs mujahideen. He articulated this many times, though the specifics would get tweaked. So a 'passive disinterested' administration is exactly the opposite of what he'd want. Similarly Isil supposedly wants the US in a ME ground war, though with slightly different objectives. Neither wants a hands off US policy; multiple hard targets in your own region << soft targets 'over there'. 

Also, what's wrong with the 'old recruitment' argument? Several terrorist organizations have openly advocated it.

Lastly, I'll again argue against the term 'isolationist' as the alternative to US policy of repeatedly invading other states. Most nations in the world don't do the latter, nor are they isolationist. No nation continually at war around the world is remotely approaching anything like isolationism. It's a fantastically outdated and inappropriate term. 

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You know, our dear and beloved “Party O’ Bidness!!” just has a way of sending me high and to the right.

There is just something about it. Now what could it be? Oh, I wonder, what that could be?

Oh, yeah, it’s because of people like Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s latest Randian fantasy.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/17/14960358/paul-ryan-medicaid-keg

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“We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around,” Ryan says, before interrupting himself to clarify exactly how big of an opportunity this is, “since you and I were drinking out of kegs.”

 

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Undoing that sounds bad to me, but Ryan is passionate about the idea that the government helping low-income people can actually hurt them. 

Once again, Paul Ryan plays fast and loose with other people’s research about the effects of various welfare programs on people’s labor supply.

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“The left,” he said, “thinks this is a good thing. They say, ‘hey, this is a new freedom — the freedom not to work.’” But they’re “making a big mistake here. What they're offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.” Under Ryan’s health bill, if you want your kids to get medical care then you’re going to have go out there and hustle and make sure you find yourself a better, more soul-filling job. And he’s been dreaming about that kind of soul-filling for a long time.

You know, for a party, oh so worried, about people not wanting to work because they are getting free stuff from the Democratic Party, the little ol’ Republican Party itself ain’t all that great at boosting employment.

From Blinder and Watson:

https://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf

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Panel C considers employment and unemployment. The D-R gap in the annual growth rate of payroll employment is 1.42 percentage points, and the gap in employee hours in nonfarm businesses is somewhat larger (1.65 points). Both are highly significant. Somewhat puzzling, given these results, the partisan gap is much smaller in the household survey—just 0.56 percentage point—and not significant at conventional levels. The average unemployment rate is lower under Democrats (5.6% vs. 6.0%), but that difference is also small and not statistically significant. There is, however, a sizable and statistically significant difference in the change in the unemployment rate, computed as the difference between the average unemployment rate in the final year of the term minus the average value in the final year of the previous term. During Democratic presidential terms, the unemployment rate fell by 0.8 percentage points, on average, 5 while it rose by 1.1 percentage points, on average, during Republican terms--yielding a large and statistically significant D-R gap of -1.9 percentage points.

On top of this, the fact of the matter, the Republican Party, for the most part, fought the reality based community every fuckin step of the way, from the onset of the financial crises in 2008,in using both aggressive monetary and fiscal policy to restore full employment. Of course, the Republican leadership’s real agenda was to get tax cuts for the wealthy, arguing we should have done it the way Ronnie did it!!! Except you know, Ronnie was a big tax cut guy and welfare state hater, but when it came right down to it, the GDP growth over his term wasn’t much better than Jimmy Carter’s. You know, it would seem to me, Ronnie’s numbers would have been a lot bigger if it really expanded the supply of labor.

But aside, from what the leadership of the Republican Party leadership was trying to pull, the fact of the matter is that too many of your average Republicans would seem to have believed that the source of our problems has been too many lazy people on welfare rather than a lack of demand. While everyone else was trying to figure out how to get out of a liquidity trap, according to your average Republican the problem was just too many lazy people getting free stuff.

Paul Ryan is just ridiculous. And so is the party he belongs to.

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29 minutes ago, Triskan said:

Was this a historic record for most allies offended in one day?  

I've never been more embarrassed to be an American.  

As a non-American, I'm honestly looking forward to how this will be spun into some kind of symbolic win. He's...a bad joke.

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13 hours ago, denstorebog said:

In other news, both Bret Baier and the increasingly awesome Shep Smith have now stated on air that they're not gonna help Trump get out of this mess by lending any credence to Napolitano's statements. I did kinda wonder how it would go over with Fox that Trump tried to pass the blame to them during the press conference with Merkel.

It's a trap! Don't fall for that. They are cool with Napolitano appearing on their news channel and spreading his nonsense (and thus give some sort of credence to him). But they are not cool, when it comes back to bite them. In for the penny in for pound Shep. 

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3 hours ago, Notone said:

It's a trap! Don't fall for that. They are cool with Napolitano appearing on their news channel and spreading his nonsense (and thus give some sort of credence to him). But they are not cool, when it comes back to bite them. In for the penny in for pound Shep. 

The upper management maybe but Shep Smith has been consistently good. He doesn't have control of booking on other shows and what those crackpots say.

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I find this imaginary distinction between News Guys and Opinion Guys still ridiculous. It's a steaming pile of you know what, they are trying to sell there at Faux News. How often have the News Guys denounced the Opinion Guys? Have they ever spoken up about Napolitano and other right wing trolls spreading their nonsense on their so called News Channel they have constantly blurred that line between News and Opinion there. They don't get to complain that orange dipshit quoting an Opinion Guy from their channel is harming their reputation as journalists. 

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