U.S. Politics. Next?

[DMC]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Hah. No.

Romney will be all mouth and no trousers, tutting about Trump's personal conduct before faithfully voting for his bills.

Well, according to 538, Hatch currently votes with Trump 96.4% of the time.  The "mean" (predicted score) for both Utah Senators is 83.6%.  I'd expect Romney will be much closer to the latter than the former.  Is that much?  Obviously no.  But huzzah for marginal victories and Max Weber quotes about the slow boring of hard boards.

[Sivin]

19 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

If you're running for office, I'll be happy to work on your staff if the price is right.

Thanks. I've been in a good mood lately. 

[mormont]

14 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Well, according to 538, Hatch currently votes with Trump 96.4% of the time.  The "mean" (predicted score) for both Utah Senators is 83.6%.  I'd expect Romney will be much closer to the latter than the former.  Is that much?  Obviously no.  But huzzah for marginal victories and Max Weber quotes about the slow boring of hard boards.

No, it's not much, and I'll be surprised if you get even that out of Romney.

Remember, Romney still believes he can be President one day and that the way to do that is to be loyal to the party. So he will toe the party line. Which is, you can say what you like about how uncouth Trump is, but you may only vote against Trump when given permission to do so.

Romney might 'rebel' on issues like disaster relief that are issues of conscience for him, but to be 'much closer' to 83.6% than 96.4% he'd need to be rebelling as often as Bob Corker: he'd need to be in the top half-dozen Republican dissenters. Not going to happen.

[GAROVORKIN]

4 minutes ago, mormont said:

No, it's not much, and I'll be surprised if you get even that out of Romney.

Remember, Romney still believes he can be President one day and that the way to do that is to be loyal to the party. So he will toe the party line. Which is, you can say what you like about how uncouth Trump is, but you may only vote against Trump when given permission to do so.

Romney might 'rebel' on issues like disaster relief that are issues of conscience for him, but to be 'much closer' to 83.6% than 96.4% he'd need to be rebelling as often as Bob Corker: he'd need to be in the top half-dozen Republican dissenters. Not going to happen.

He might win the Senate seat  in Utah but , Mitt Romney will likely never be President. He's old hat .

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, mormont said:

Remember, Romney still believes he can be President one day and that the way to do that is to be loyal to the party. So he will toe the party line. Which is, you can say what you like about how uncouth Trump is, but you may only vote against Trump when given permission to do so.

Hm.  I'm not sure if Romney is still aiming for the big chair.  If he was angling for 2020, obviously he'd want to distance himself from Trump as much as possible, but I don't think that.  As for 2024, he'll be 77.  Potential Biden 2020 aside, I still think that's pretty old, although I suppose Romney does have those magic underpants.

12 minutes ago, mormont said:

Romney might 'rebel' on issues like disaster relief that are issues of conscience for him, but to be 'much closer' to 83.6% than 96.4% he'd need to be rebelling as often as Bob Corker: he'd need to be in the top half-dozen Republican dissenters. Not going to happen.

Right, I do anticipate he'll be close to a Corker or McCain (similar score) than, say, a Jeff Flake - who is probably the most rhetorically critical of Trump but still votes with him about 90%.  Some of this is due to ideology and how voting "with" Trump is measured.  There's a distinct "who leads whom" question with Trump and the GOP Congress.  Trump is probably the most deferential president to Congress since Ike (with the caveat that Ike was deferential to Congress as a whole while Trump is deferential to the GOP Congress). 

So, that's why Flake's score is higher than Corker's and McCain's - he's more conservative than the latter two, as well as Romney.  There's also the Rand Paul factor.  He only votes with the president 83% of the time in part because he's batshit but also because he's not concerned about toeing the line with Trump nor the GOP leadership.  As a party elder, Romney will have some of that going on too (although he obviously is much more naturally inclined to align with GOP leadership than Paul). 

I expect Romney will make policy distinctions with Trump on certain policy areas, immigration and trade immediately spring to mind.  Of course, how much those issues actually reach the floor is conditional on the party composition of Congress come 2019.

[LongRider]

5 hours ago, WinterFox said:

There's been an awakening in the force. America is passing into the possession of those worthy of her power. For the first time in the better part of a century there is engagement from millions of young people who bear something resembling pride and vision, something that this country has desperately wanted for most of living memory.

Yawn.   My living memory includes the anti-war efforts of the '60's, the Civil Rights efforts, I remember when Dr. King was shot.  The Women's Liberation movement.  Important?  Yes all of them were.  Anti-war protesters were the bane of LBJ's presidency  "Hey! Hey! LBJ how many kids did you kill today?"  Engagement of young people, I'm all for it. 

The back lash against all of these movements have proved longer lived and is still active today.  Now they are better financed and have much more control over who votes in this country.  Certainly good things happen, Doug Jones would not have won his senate seat w/o the suppressed voters coming out and doing what needed to be done to vote.  Your force better get to fucking work because right now it seems to be mostly in your head.

4 hours ago, mormont said:

In addition to what Kal notes about the damage to the world economy from Japan and S Korea, don't forget that even if China doesn't retaliate, it will have to deal with the collapse of N and S Korea plus Japan right on its doorstep. And then we have to hope that Russia doesn't decide to take advantage of China being weakened. Luckily Putin is a reasonable chap.

This is so important to say.  Retaliation and escalation can happen in any war, retaliation/escalation with nukes would be very difficult to recover from.  And as Kalbear mentioned, disrupt a few supply chains, and it makes a difference.  See WWII; the Ploesti raids for example.  Attack on the oil fields (fuel) and railroads (supply) it made a difference.  Attack a few refineries is the USA, blow up a few freeways and you don't need nukes, sabotage would do nicely, and the USA is crippled.  

7 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

8 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

The song I'm hearing these days sounds a little different. To wit:

 

LOL. 

Just in case somebody doesn't know where I got that verse:

 

Edited 7 hours ago by OldGimletEye

I love both of these references and Tom Lehrer is always so timely, even though his act was from the sixties.  Here's another good one.   

 

[Dr. Pepper]

Reading the list of some of the things the US has done just since 9/11 and just thinking about our general history, I really don't understand how the US doesn't live under an intense burden of shame.  We're complete shitbags.  We've been genocidal maniacs, slavers, we've destroyed massive ecosystems, we bring harm to millions every year, we have dropped nukes on citizens, we don't even feed or provide adequate healthcare to our citizens.  I'm constantly amazed and disgusted at people with ten american flags in their yard singing 'proud to be an america' with a straight face.  We're horrible.

[James Arryn]

3 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Reading the list of some of the things the US has done just since 9/11 and just thinking about our general history, I really don't understand how the US doesn't live under an intense burden of shame.  We're complete shitbags.  We've been genocidal maniacs, slavers, we've destroyed massive ecosystems, we bring harm to millions every year, we have dropped nukes on citizens, we don't even feed or provide adequate healthcare to our citizens.  I'm constantly amazed and disgusted at people with ten american flags in their yard singing 'proud to be an america' with a straight face.  We're horrible.

 

[Gertrude]

24 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I'm constantly amazed and disgusted at people with ten american flags in their yard singing 'proud to be an america' with a straight face.  We're horrible.

Yeah. We do some things very well and there are things to be proud of, but there are so many ways we could do much better, and yes, some ways we are outright horrible. I want us to do better, but first that means admitting mistakes and bad practices. I hate the term ‘ American Exceptionalism’. In my experience it is used to excuse our faults and indicates an unwillingness to look toward other countries to see if they might have better ways of doing things because ‘Murika, fuck yeah!’ Your mileage may vary on that.

[TheKitttenGuard]

1 hour ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Yawn.   My living memory includes the anti-war efforts of the '60's, the Civil Rights efforts, I remember when Dr. King was shot.  The Women's Liberation movement.  Important?  Yes all of them were.  Anti-war protesters were the bane of LBJ's presidency  "Hey! Hey! LBJ how many kids did you kill today?"  Engagement of young people, I'm all for it. 

The back lash against all of these movements have proved longer lived and is still active today.  Now they are better financed and have much more control over who votes in this country.  Certainly good things happen, Doug Jones would not have won his senate seat w/o the suppressed voters coming out and doing what needed to be done to vote.  Your force better get to fucking work because right now it seems to be mostly in your head.

This is so important to say.  Retaliation and escalation can happen in any war, retaliation/escalation with nukes would be very difficult to recover from.  And as Kalbear mentioned, disrupt a few supply chains, and it makes a difference.  See WWII; the Ploesti raids for example.  Attack on the oil fields (fuel) and railroads (supply) it made a difference.  Attack a few refineries is the USA, blow up a few freeways and you don't need nukes, sabotage would do nicely, and the USA is crippled.  

I love both of these references and Tom Lehrer is always so timely, even though his act was from the sixties.  Here's another good one.   

 

Just using this an an excuse.

 

[LongRider]

20 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

Just using this an an excuse.

 

That's a good one!   Thanks for posting it.   

[Maithanet]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

Hah. No.

Romney will be all mouth and no trousers, tutting about Trump's personal conduct before faithfully voting for his bills.

Weird that you say this, when that is exactly what I said in my original post (you deleted that part). 

Quote

Not that it makes too big a difference, since, like Flake, Romney will probably support the party line most of the time.  But it's still an improvement over Hatch. 

I expect Romney to vote with Trump only slightly less often than Hatch.  That's nonetheless a marginal improvement. 

I'm also not as sure that Romney is going to avoid criticism of Trump for party unity.  I don't think he's going to run for president again, if he were, the time was 2016.  The party is moving away from him, and by 2024 he'll be too old.  In Utah, he actually has a strong incentive to criticize Trump at times, since the Mormons are far less fond of Trumpism than most Republicans.  Even if all he does is make occasional noises of reproach about Trump's failings, that's still better than we were ever going to get from Hatch.

[Fragile Bird]

So Steve Bannon has called those meetings with Russians at Trump Tower 'treasonous'?

Does Trump actually still listen to him?

[Fragile Bird]

Oooooh, also from Bannon, 'they are going to crack Trump Jr like an egg on national tv!'

[aceluby]

So it looks like Trump wants to break a long standing treaty with Russia to build a new nuclear weapon.  This fucking guy.  He is completely unstable and should be nowhere near these decisions.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I never thought I’d say this, but I really miss Dubya.

I feel like I’ve said that 20 times in the last year.

We’re so f****d…

[mormont]

35 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Weird that you say this, when that is exactly what I said in my original post (you deleted that part). 

My apologies, but to be fair, it's not exactly what you said, and if you meant what you did say to parallel what I said, then why would you ever have described Romney as 'a step in the right direction for the country' and 'a reliable anti-Trump Republican'? What I'm saying is that we can rely on Romney to be pro-Trump. If that's what you were saying too, then your post makes little sense. He can't be both reliably pro- and anti-Trump. And he won't. Noises of reproach don't mean a thing if Romney is going to do as Trump tells him.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I never thought I’d say this, but I really miss Dubya.

Meh, it's kind of like saying, I miss Mussolini because compared to that Hitler guy, he wasn't so bad after all. And that maybe true. But they are both bad. It's kind of like trying to distinguish between The People's Front of Judea and The Judean People's Front.

The problem here is the Republican Party managed to put in Dubya into office and then follow it up with Trump. I think in the future posterity will be amazed how we could put those two losers into office in such a relatively short span of time.

[Maithanet]

1 minute ago, mormont said:

My apologies, but to be fair, it's not exactly what you said, and if you meant what you did say to parallel what I said, then why would you ever have described Romney as 'a step in the right direction for the country' and 'a reliable anti-Trump Republican'? What I'm saying is that we can rely on Romney to be pro-Trump. If that's what you were saying too, then your post makes little sense. He can't be both reliably pro- and anti-Trump. And he won't. Noises of reproach don't mean a thing if Romney is going to do as Trump tells him.

I said Romney is "a step in the right direction for the country" because he is an improvement over Hatch.  The Senate would be better if there were more Mitt Romney's and fewer Orrin Hatches.  Yes, this is grading on a curve, all Republican Senators support loathsome policies and Romney will be no exception. 

As for whether Romney will be "a reliable anti-Trump Republican", I guess we'll wait and see, but to me, Romney is the most prominent anti-Trump Republican.  Most Americans have never heard of Jeff Flake or BIll Kristol, and the Bush family criticisms have always been rather understated.  In contrast, here's some anti-Trump statements that Romney has made:

- "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud"

- "His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat"

- “But you say, ‘Wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?’  No, he isn’t. And no, he doesn’t.”

Romney hasn't backed away from his Trump criticism, and given how Trump skeptical the Utah GOP is, he'll have little incentive to do an about face as a Senator.  Being anti-Trump doesn't mean he's not still a Republican, so Trump and Romney will agree on a lot of things. If you're only counting votes for/against, I expect he'll be similar to Corker or Murkowski (~86% agreement), but that's still 10% less than Hatch's 96%. 

I won't forget that Anti-Trump Republicans are still Republicans.  But they're better than Trumpists. 

[Maithanet]

19 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I never thought I’d say this, but I really miss Dubya.

I feel like I’ve said that 20 times in the last year.

We’re so f****d…

I think this is giving Dubya far too much credit.  The political climate was such that Bush was about as conservative as you could possibly be in 2000-2008.   He passed a regressive tax cut, invaded Iraq for no reason and let an American city drown.  And in order to bash down Democratic opposition to those things, the GOP laid the groundwork for Trump 8 years later.  Bush isn't the only father of Trumpism, but he's on the list.