U.S. Politics: A Request to Address the Cleft on the Left

[Red Tiger]

59 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Why would it have an impact on subsequent candidates but not on Obama "The Disappointer in Chief" himself?

You really thought he was that bad? Id give him around a 7.

[Shryke]

23 minutes ago, Inigima said:

Christ some of you have taken leave of your senses. It DOES NOT MATTER how much you think Roe v. Wade is "the law of the land" or whatever other meaningless dumbshit platitude you've used to convince youself that surely now it's safe and even perfectly advisable to hurl yourself headlong into a pack of hungry wolves. If you have learned NOTHING else in the past 20 years it should be that all bets are off and history and norms mean nothing. We have a Republican party that is both hard-right and aggressive to an incredible, record-setting extent. They are 100% willing to stab you in the face, they are 100% willing to tell you they are 100% willing to stab you in the face, and they are 100% willing to look you dead in the eye and tell you that actually, it's GOOD for you to have a buck knife plunged directly into your eye socket. Roe v. Wade is exactly one (1) contradictory SCOTUS opinion from not being the Law Of The Land Hurrrrrr anymore and these fucking monsters are actively and openly stacking the court system with pure ideologues without even trying to hide it, including stealing a Supreme Court seat to install Neil Gorsuch, who is not so much a Supreme Court justice as a Fox News article in a skinsuit. And you muppets are content to burble about how abortion rights are safe forever because surely the Republicans won't cross this red line the way they've crossed a thousand others. The mind reels at how a human being could possibly be this gullible.

As regards the Democrats' never-ending run to the right because they too are incredibly, indescribably stupid and somehow continue to believe that surely this is the time Lucy won't pull the football away: Barack Obama is a once-in-a-generation oratorical talent. If your best plan for winning the Presidency in 2020 is "let's get another one of those" then I am interested to know just what brand of paste it is that you ate when you were five because its ability to destroy cognitive function should be studied in a laboratory setting. The Democrats did not win "7 of the last 11" elections, they won 5: Carter, Clinton 1, Clinton 2, Obama 1, and Obama 2. The Republicans won the other 6: Reagan 1, Reagan 2, HW Bush, W 1, W 2, and Trump. If you want to go back further than that, Nixon won the two before that and he was a Republican too. Obama was a phenomenal speaker, but he also ran against W, the most incompetent president in modern history until Trump.

I'm not saying you want to run Lenin incarnate, but the Democratic base did not turn out for Clinton* and they will give even less of a fuck about a bland technocrat like Bloomberg. Learn a lesson for once in your incompetent lives, Democrats, and figure out that the mythical moderate Republican does not exist and that the Democratic base does not like Republicans and will not reward you for becoming Diet Republicans.

* I understand that there was extreme voter suppression from the right. As I expect that to continue in 2020 I do not consider whining about it to be a viable electoral strategy and suggest looking for ways to overcome it.

Huh?

The Democrats have been consistently moving to the left since at least Clinton.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

5 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Why would it have an impact on subsequent candidates but not on Obama "The Disappointer in Chief" himself?

Well he was elected coming off 8 years of a Republican administration, so he fits the same model Red Tiger was talking about. Bush Sr. was the only recent exception to the pendulum swing rule, right?

[Shryke]

Just now, Red Tiger said:

You really thought he was that bad? Id give him around a 7.

I don't. That was just the characterization Karaddin was using. The idea that it would hit subsequent candidates more then Obama himself just doesn't make sense under that framing though.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

The notion that abortion is a losing issue for Democrats is really overstated. Now there are regions where it obviously will be, but Democrats aren't likely to win much there anyways so I wouldn't sweat it, and that's why I was also arguing that it's smart politics to allow pro-life Democrats to take those nominations if they're otherwise qualified. But for the rest of the country the issue can actually be a winner for Democrats.

First, you can't talk about it as a stand alone issue. You have to put the Republican on the defensive with issues like abstinence only sexual education and attempts to make birth control harder get or outright banned. Once you can do that you can show that they're being a raging hypocrite because they're advocating for policies that will actually increase the abortion rate. Then you pivot to stories of back ally abortions and educate people on the risks of going back to an era where that's a real possibility. You have to make it unmistakably clear that outlawing abortions will in no way shape or form prevent them from happening, and that by going that route people are actively endangering the younger women in this country. And finally, tie them to Trump's comments about how women have to be punished for having abortions and do not let them dodge or escape the issue. They'll either have to agree with Trump or distance themselves from Trump and if they do the latter you can trap them by showing your target audience just how nonsensical the outlawing abortion is.

It's important to also remember that 80% of the country is open to abortions is some form or another. 30-35% of the country supports abortion rights no matter what, so you've got them in your pocket already. The candidates goal has to be to play to the better sense of the remaining 45-50% of the people, and if you do what I listed above, I firmly believe you can win over a majority of them on the issue, especially if you can personalize it for them in an effective way. And most importantly, go on the offensive. Meekly defending the issue is the real loser. Being strong on it can energize your base and show leadership that appeals to the average voter.

To argue that 'libs, progs, Dems' whatever you call them should desert women's rights to choose and reproductive health also ignores the stated objective of crazyconfederatenaziwhitenationalistssupremacists that women are to be pregnant as early and as often as possible to breed the white race into dominance, and that any woman who declines to do so is not a real woman, and then even more less than a man than she was in first place.

It's also impossible not to notice that the same people who worry more about what might happen to the same  crazyconfederatenaziwhitenationalistssupremacists if we protest them in all the ways possible to protest them are the same people who are not -- or believe they are not -- going to be affected by anything these same  crazyconfederatenaziwhitenationalistssupremacists want to do to everyone who isn't  crazyconfederatenaziwhitenationalistssupremacists, whether women who decline to have multiple children, who are LGBT, Afridan American, Mexican, Jewish, Muslim, the impoverished, you name it because they are none of the above.  It's like the white people who kept telling African Americans to just wait a while longer for freedom, for rights, like everyone else, and who told and tell women the same thing.  None of this affects these white guys so they just don't think it matters.

So for the sake of electing some damn Dem who won't help the rights of women who decline to have multiple children, who are LGBT, African American, Mexican, Jewish, Muslim, the impoverished, you name it, the same women who decline to have multiple children, who are LGBT, Afridan American, Mexican, Jewish, Muslim, impoverished, you name it, are obligated to not care about their own conditions and situations for the greater good.  Which turns out, who knew???? not the greater good at all, but just for some pearl clutching white guys who are terrified that their stable little lives will be disrupted and their comfy days sitting all day at computers, watching tv and blowing will be more difficult to maintain (while probably some woman makes their dinner and washes their clothes too).

[Bonnot OG]

Obama at times was handcuffed pretty badly. Other times he tried appeasement when he shouldn't have. I don't think he was a disappointment. I didn't expect great things because of how racist this country is and how he would be fought tooth and nail over everything, which is what happened for the most part. 

[Shryke]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Well he was elected coming 8 years of a Republican administration, so he fits the same model Red Tiger was talking about. Bush Sr. was the only recent exception to the pendulum swing rule, right?

https://xkcd.com/1122/

It's not all that useful to look into patterns this way because the sample size is stupidly small and the circumstances change so much over time and there's a ton of factors at work here.

I mean, both recent times the Democrats have had "the pendulum swing against them", they've won the popular vote and only lost because of the distribution of electoral college votes.

[Red Tiger]

1 hour ago, Inigima said:

Christ some of you have taken leave of your senses. It DOES NOT MATTER how much you think Roe v. Wade is "the law of the land" or whatever other meaningless dumbshit platitude you've used to convince youself that surely now it's safe and even perfectly advisable to hurl yourself headlong into a pack of hungry wolves. If you have learned NOTHING else in the past 20 years it should be that all bets are off and history and norms mean nothing. We have a Republican party that is both hard-right and aggressive to an incredible, record-setting extent. They are 100% willing to stab you in the face, they are 100% willing to tell you they are 100% willing to stab you in the face, and they are 100% willing to look you dead in the eye and tell you that actually, it's GOOD for you to have a buck knife plunged directly into your eye socket. Roe v. Wade is exactly one (1) contradictory SCOTUS opinion from not being the Law Of The Land Hurrrrrr anymore and these fucking monsters are actively and openly stacking the court system with pure ideologues without even trying to hide it, including stealing a Supreme Court seat to install Neil Gorsuch, who is not so much a Supreme Court justice as a Fox News article in a skinsuit. And you muppets are content to burble about how abortion rights are safe forever because surely the Republicans won't cross this red line the way they've crossed a thousand others. The mind reels at how a human being could possibly be this gullible.

As regards the Democrats' never-ending run to the right because they too are incredibly, indescribably stupid and somehow continue to believe that surely this is the time Lucy won't pull the football away: Barack Obama is a once-in-a-generation oratorical talent. If your best plan for winning the Presidency in 2020 is "let's get another one of those" then I am interested to know just what brand of paste it is that you ate when you were five because its ability to destroy cognitive function should be studied in a laboratory setting. The Democrats did not win "7 of the last 11" elections, they won 5: Carter, Clinton 1, Clinton 2, Obama 1, and Obama 2. The Republicans won the other 6: Reagan 1, Reagan 2, HW Bush, W 1, W 2, and Trump. If you want to go back further than that, Nixon won the two before that and he was a Republican too. Obama was a phenomenal speaker, but he also ran against W, the most incompetent president in modern history until Trump.

I'm not saying you want to run Lenin incarnate, but the Democratic base did not turn out for Clinton* and they will give even less of a fuck about a bland technocrat like Bloomberg. Learn a lesson for once in your incompetent lives, Democrats, and figure out that the mythical moderate Republican does not exist and that the Democratic base does not like Republicans and will not reward you for becoming Diet Republicans.

* I understand that there was extreme voter suppression from the right. As I expect that to continue in 2020 I do not consider whining about it to be a viable electoral strategy and suggest looking for ways to overcome it.

 

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

15 minutes ago, Shryke said:

https://xkcd.com/1122/

It's not all that useful to look into patterns this way because the sample size is stupidly small and the circumstances change so much over time and there's a ton of factors at work here.

I mean, both recent times the Democrats have had "the pendulum swing against them", they've won the popular vote and only lost because of the distribution of electoral college votes.

Cool chart.

Yeah, I agree that it's an extreme oversimplification, but it is a pattern. 

[Zorral]

48 minutes ago, Inigima said:

Christ some of you have taken leave of your senses. It DOES NOT MATTER how much you think Roe v. Wade is "the law of the land" or whatever other meaningless dumbshit platitude you've used to convince youself that surely now it's safe and even perfectly advisable to hurl yourself headlong into a pack of hungry wolves. If you have learned NOTHING else in the past 20 years it should be that all bets are off and history and norms mean nothing. We have a Republican party that is both hard-right and aggressive to an incredible, record-setting extent. They are 100% willing to stab you in the face, they are 100% willing to tell you they are 100% willing to stab you in the face, and they are 100% willing to look you dead in the eye and tell you that actually, it's GOOD for you to have a buck knife plunged directly into your eye socket. Roe v. Wade is exactly one (1) contradictory SCOTUS opinion from not being the Law Of The Land Hurrrrrr anymore and these fucking monsters are actively and openly stacking the court system with pure ideologues without even trying to hide it, including stealing a Supreme Court seat to install Neil Gorsuch, who is not so much a Supreme Court justice as a Fox News article in a skinsuit. And you muppets are content to burble about how abortion rights are safe forever because surely the Republicans won't cross this red line the way they've crossed a thousand others. The mind reels at how a human being could possibly be this gullible.

As regards the Democrats' never-ending run to the right because they too are incredibly, indescribably stupid and somehow continue to believe that surely this is the time Lucy won't pull the football away: Barack Obama is a once-in-a-generation oratorical talent. If your best plan for winning the Presidency in 2020 is "let's get another one of those" then I am interested to know just what brand of paste it is that you ate when you were five because its ability to destroy cognitive function should be studied in a laboratory setting. The Democrats did not win "7 of the last 11" elections, they won 5: Carter, Clinton 1, Clinton 2, Obama 1, and Obama 2. The Republicans won the other 6: Reagan 1, Reagan 2, HW Bush, W 1, W 2, and Trump. If you want to go back further than that, Nixon won the two before that and he was a Republican too. Obama was a phenomenal speaker, but he also ran against W, the most incompetent president in modern history until Trump.

I'm not saying you want to run Lenin incarnate, but the Democratic base did not turn out for Clinton* and they will give even less of a fuck about a bland technocrat like Bloomberg. Learn a lesson for once in your incompetent lives, Democrats, and figure out that the mythical moderate Republican does not exist and that the Democratic base does not like Republicans and will not reward you for becoming Diet Republicans.

* I understand that there was extreme voter suppression from the right. As I expect that to continue in 2020 I do not consider whining about it to be a viable electoral strategy and suggest looking for ways to overcome it.

Absolutely!!!!!!!!

Ya! let the Dems do more and more of what they lose on every damned time.!

In the meantime, as of 2014 over 60% of childbearing age women had no resource for an abortion, which also means reproductive health care.  

Just drop your pearl clutching convictions that laws of the land mean shyte out there in the land.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

3 minutes ago, Zorral said:

In the meantime, as of 2014 over 60% of childbearing age women had no resource for an abortion, which also means reproductive health care.  

That sounds insanely high to me. You have citation for that?

[Zorral]

Suddenly you who never cites anything wants a cite.

The Guttmacher institute.  But you could research yourself, couldn't you. But -- you don't.  

What's really weird is that this same research shows that fewer women are having abortions but insist that the lack of available services has nothing to do with that.

Here's how it works. Roe v Wade is the law of the land.  You, a woman, in the middle landia of the land, such as the northern midwest -- there is not a single planned parenthood clinic anywhere in the state, except, maybe, ONE, hundreds of miles away.  There are no hospitals anywhere around -- except maybe a hundred miles away. There aren't even any doctors around, except a hundred or more miles away.

I have many female relatives who live like this.

[Shryke]

14 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Cool chart.

Yeah, I agree that it's an extreme oversimplification, but it is a pattern. 

No, it's not. That's the entire point of the chart. The sample size is so small it's indistinguishable from random noise.

[Kelli Fury]

It is also worth noting that Republicans don't need to overturn Roe at all in order to make abortions essentially illegal. There are now multiple states that have ONLY ONE abortion provider. So if you can cut funding so drastically to women's health that an entire state has only one clinic that can perform an abortion, that creates a huge swath of people who can't get to that clinic at all- so those people will not be getting abortions at all because they don't have the means to get to the only place available. Having only one clinic to serve an entire state of tens of millions of people also means very long wait times. That means a whole swath of women who didn't know they were pregnant soon enough wouldn't be able to get in in time. Then let's say you double down and add laws that say you're adding an extra required appointment and wait time to it, that's another large chunk of abortions you've eliminated by running out the clock and making the service even more expensive. Let's say you make the cutoff time in a pregnancy for legal abortions sooner, too, that combined with the astronomical wait times you created means that EVEN LESS people are eligible for this allegedly legal medical service. And let's say you also demand that insurance carriers don't cover it, making it too expensive for many people to make happen in time. So essentially, almost nobody can get an abortion. And you never touched Roe v Wade. The little bit of legislation it might have taken probably had some democratic support, even from pro choice democrats. 

[Kelli Fury]

Roe is a wall and pro lifers have ladders and planes to get over it.

[Shryke]

1 minute ago, Kelli Fury said:

It is also worth noting that Republicans don't need to overturn Roe at all in order to make abortions essentially illegal. There are now multiple states that have ONLY ONE abortion provider. So if you can cut funding so drastically to women's health that an entire state has only one clinic that can perform an abortion, that creates a huge swath of people who can't get to that clinic at all- so those people will not be getting abortions at all because they don't have the means to get to the only place available. Having only one clinic to serve an entire state of tens of millions of people also means very long wait times. That means a whole swath of women who didn't know they were pregnant soon enough wouldn't be able to get in in time. Then let's say you double down and add laws that say you're adding an extra required appointment and wait time to it, that's another large chunk of abortions you've eliminated by running out the clock and making the service even more expensive. Let's say you make the cutoff time in a pregnancy for legal abortions sooner, too, that combined with the astronomical wait times you created means that EVEN LESS people are eligible for this allegedly legal medical service. And let's say you also demand that insurance carriers don't cover it, making it too expensive for many people to make happen in time. So essentially, almost nobody can get an abortion. And you never touched Roe v Wade. The little bit of legislation it might have taken probably had some democratic support, even from pro choice democrats. 

More simply, Roe v Wade is not the law of the land, Planned Parenthood v Casey is. And that case and the subsequent laws and policy changes allowed under it were deliberate and successful attempts by the right-wing to severely restrict abortion access in the US.

I mean, it would be nice to fight stuff like that. But then no one showed up to do so in 2016 and let the GOP steal a SCOTUS seat and so now y'all are still pretty fucked on that front.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Suddenly you who never cites anything wants a cite.

The Guttmacher institute.  But you could research yourself, couldn't you. But -- you don't.  

What's really weird is that this same research shows that fewer women are having abortions but insist that the lack of available services has nothing to do with that.

Here's how it works. Roe v Wade is the law of the land.  You, a woman, in the middle landia of the land, such as the northern midwest -- there is not a single planned parenthood clinic anywhere in the state, except, maybe, ONE, hundreds of miles away.  There are no hospitals anywhere around -- except maybe a hundred miles away. There aren't even any doctors around, except a hundred or more miles away.

I have many female relatives who live like this.

You brought it up, Zorro. Jesus.

[Martell Spy]

Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Reportedly Tells Email Prankster He Can Have Ivanka ‘Out by End of Year’

https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/breitbart-editor-says-hell-have-ivanka-out-by-end-of-year.html

Democrats’ New Health-Care Plan: Medicaid for All (Who Want It)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/dems-new-health-care-plan-medicaid-for-all-who-want-it.html

[The Anti-Targ]

The fastest way to lower insurance premiums is to provide a decent basic level of healthcare at govt expense.

[Mudguard]

34 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Suddenly you who never cites anything wants a cite.

The Guttmacher institute.  But you could research yourself, couldn't you. But -- you don't.  

What's really weird is that this same research shows that fewer women are having abortions but insist that the lack of available services has nothing to do with that.

Here's how it works. Roe v Wade is the law of the land.  You, a woman, in the middle landia of the land, such as the northern midwest -- there is not a single planned parenthood clinic anywhere in the state, except, maybe, ONE, hundreds of miles away.  There are no hospitals anywhere around -- except maybe a hundred miles away. There aren't even any doctors around, except a hundred or more miles away.

I have many female relatives who live like this.

I looked at the 2014 paper from the Guttmacher Institute, but I don't see anything that supports your claim that "as of 2014 over 60% of childbearing age women had no resource for an abortion."  The closest statistic presented in the paper says the 39% of women in the US live in a county that does not have any abortion clinics.  See Table 4.  Note that this paper distinguished between hospital providers, physician offices, and clinics, so it's likely that some of that 39% live in a county with either a hospital or physician office that provides abortion services.

Where are you getting your 60% figure?