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US Politics: The Ides of Mueller


Paladin of Ice

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5 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Nunes

ETA: It's getting hard to make comparisons because most Authors make characters that are interesting and multi-faceted so they do bad things but think they're the good guy.

Every day makes the remaining Trumpers more and more poorly developed characters.

DeVos seems to be the most direct analog to Umbridge. There are already memes.

Nunes is some unremarkable dipshit in the Ministry who got elevated to a ranking position due to his willingness to do whatever he's told.

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2 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I'm not really sure what this is a sign of.  The PA case just had to do with PA law, and it was pretty obvious that the Supreme Court shouldn't get involved here.  It's good that they didn't, but this wasn't unexpected.

Right, it's not much of a sign at all.  It was already clear SCOTUS wasn't going to block PA's ruling when they refused to do so in early February.  Perhaps that's why their order today was one sentence.  They did order a stay on the North Carolina case because it will effectively be decided by Gill v. Whitford (the Wisconsin case) and whether SCOTUS accepts a national standard for partisan gerrymandering in the efficiency gap.  That still pretty much boils down to Kennedy and whether the efficiency gap makes sense to him as a standard, as he expressed such a standard for partisan gerrymandering could be developed in Vieth v. Jubelirer.

2 hours ago, Yukle said:

Why is any partisan bias allowed? Why do governments get to draw their own maps? America needs to follow the lead of civilised nations, who give this power to independent bodies.

Partisan bias is allowed because different people (on both sides) prioritize different aspects in drawing districts other than proportionality - such as competitiveness, majority-minority districts, and keeping counties or local boundaries together.  Plus, it's virtually impossible to have no partisan bias, even 538's attempt to do so resulted in an R+1.  Regardless, even if you could successfully draw the districts with no efficiency gap, the partisan bias can and will change because the census is only done once a decade.  The efficiency gap is calculated based on past elections - 538 uses Cook PVI which relies on the past two elections.  That calculus is obviously going to change when you're basing it on the 2016 and 2012 presidential elections rather than the 2008 and 2004 presidential elections, and these change will be reflected in shifting partisan bias.

As for independent commissions, there are a number of states out west that have them.  The literature on whether they significantly limit partisan gerrymandering is still emerging, and the question is very much an open one.

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27 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Oh well, they're all dumb. If we start looking for smart people the analogy falls apart.

Yeah it's like when people were arguing if Don Jr. or Eric was the Fredo of the Trump family.  The entire family is Fredo.

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6 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Yeah it's like when people were arguing if Don Jr. or Eric was the Fredo of the Trump family.  The entire family is Fredo.

Eeeeehhhh... Maybe Ivanka would make a pretty good Fredo?

She tried something apparently, and it's gonna get her locked (shot) up.

But yeah, it's like I said a few pages back. They're all too one-dimensional to compare to any relevant fiction equivalent.

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2 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

That's high school reading dude.

If you're gonna try and be edgy and smart in your falsely edgy and smart sea lioning, at least put in some effort.

Seveneves or Steel Beach.

At least have some pride, man.

On The Beach.

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24 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Partisan bias is allowed because different people (on both sides) prioritize different aspects in drawing districts other than proportionality - such as competitiveness, majority-minority districts, and keeping counties or local boundaries together.  Plus, it's virtually impossible to have no partisan bias, even 538's attempt to do so resulted in an R+1.  Regardless, even if you could successfully draw the districts with no efficiency gap, the partisan bias can and will change because the census is only done once a decade.  The efficiency gap is calculated based on past elections - 538 uses Cook PVI which relies on the past two elections.  That calculus is obviously going to change when you're basing it on the 2016 and 2012 presidential elections rather than the 2008 and 2004 presidential elections, and these change will be reflected in shifting partisan bias.

As for independent commissions, there are a number of states out west that have them.  The literature on whether they significantly limit partisan gerrymandering is still emerging, and the question is very much an open one.

Having a partisan lean is not the same as having an in-built bias intended to favour a party. The idea that particular demographics will vote a certain way is normal, that's the entire purpose of representative systems. The idea that the boundaries can be drawn in such a way that boundaries are designed around partisan lean, instead of geographic ones, is utterly stupid.

There is always an inefficiency gap, as that's just a consequence of these being best-fit models. Accuracy is not increased by changing how boundaries are drawn, but by adding more electorates. If there were 10,000 seats in the House instead of 435, then obviously the efficiency gap would drop.

It isn't an open question as to whether partisan gerrymandering is limited by independent commissions. It's easily proven. I once wrote a thread on this, comparing the USA's heavily gerrymandered maps to Australia's independent ones. I can't be bothered updating the stats right now, but to use 2016 figures as an example:

318 of 435 seats in the US Congress were held by margins of 20% or greater. 4 out of Australia's 150 were. That's 73% in the USA and 3% in Australia. Furthermore, 45 of 150 seats in Australia are held by 5% margins or less, or 45%, compared to 26 in the USA, or 6%. That shows a significantly more competitive electorate in Australia.

And this is done with preferential voting; bear in mind that Australia's voting system allows for minor parties in a significant way.

The 8-10% uniform vote margin that the Democrats need to flip the house in the USA is outrageous. No Australian government has ever achieved that. An 8% lead in our voting system would effectively create a super-majority.

To give you an idea of how well this works in Australia: our system, where the executive must be sitting members of the legislative, is like the Westminster one. 2 sitting Prime Ministers have lost office because they lost their seats. That's how competitive Australia is, and how fairly the electorate is represented by comparison. The state of Victoria, where I live, is headed by a Premier who is in a marginal seat. That's not unusual in our governments, because boundaries represent the demographics of their electorate fairly accurately. And most fairly drawn electorates have large numbers of swing voters.

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The five thirty eight thing is an interesting tool but it is sort of garbage in garbage out algorithm as it heavily weights the 2010 boundaries I would guess, reflecting variants on those approaches in almost every variant. Look at Missouri, actual boundaries are pretty nicely gerrymandered, the black areas of KC and STL are segregated into tiny districts, while the rest of the same are diluted. For the other major population centers, they tri-secting Springfield, isolate Columbia, Cape girardeau and st Joseph and bisect Jefferson City. You could absolutely gerrymander Missouri in a democrat friendly direction much more effectively than fivethirty eight does.

finally, the 538 idea that the slight tweaking of the 2010 district lines would be a neutral approach is fucking hideous because their “neutral” effectively perpetuates the disenfranchisement that gerrymandering encourages and perpetuates. 

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10 minutes ago, Yukle said:

There is always an inefficiency gap, as that's just a consequence of these being best-fit models.

That was my point.  Your response I quoted suggested there shouldn't be any partisan lean, which is virtually impossible.

11 minutes ago, Yukle said:

Accuracy is not increased by changing how boundaries are drawn, but by adding more electorates. If there were 10,000 seats in the House instead of 435, then obviously the efficiency gap would drop.

Yeah the notion of a 1,000+ seat national legislature raises many more problems than it fixes.  You thought gridlock was bad now...

13 minutes ago, Yukle said:

It isn't an open question as to whether partisan gerrymandering is limited by independent commissions.

I'm not going to speak for other countries, but it certainly is an open question in the US.  The goals of such commissions have been hotly debated within such states, and if anything, such commissions have been found to favor compactness and respecting county lines, not proportionality. 

It's great it works so well in Australia.  But there's often an assumption on this board that gerrymandering can be easily fixed in the US and is a simple problem with a simple solution.  That is decidedly not the case.

21 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

The five thirty eight thing is an interesting tool but it is sort of garbage in garbage out algorithm as it heavily weights the 2010 boundaries I would guess

Other than obviously relying in part on current (2010) district data to get an idea of the partisan breakdown within each state (which really there's no other way to do it), this is decidedly wrong, even though it's nice you "guess" it:

Quote

We drew six of these sets by hand — Nos. 2-6 and No. 8 — using a tool called Dave’s Redistricting App (more on that later). The districts for No. 7 were designed by a software engineer named Brian Olson.

All of the hand-drawn maps follow two simple rules: Each district must be contiguous, meaning that all parts of the district touch each other, by water or by land. And each district must be within 1,000 residents of the state’s “ideal” district population — the total population in 2010 divided by the number of districts — to satisfy the legal requirement that districts be equally populous.

Before we get into the specifics of each type of map, here are some more overarching guidelines we followed, for both the map-making and the analysis. When considering partisanship — some maps were drawn with specific partisan aims, and we calculated the partisanship of every district in every map — we used the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index. PVI measures how much more Democratic or Republican a district voted relative to the national result in an average of the last two presidential elections. [...]

Before we started work on the atlas, Dave’s Redistricting App already had data on population and race, which we used to draw the maps that did not take partisanship into account (the majority-minority map and the compactness map that follows borders). To draw the other four maps, we needed up-to-date vote data in the app.1 So we acquired precinct-level voting results for the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections from Decision Desk HQ, along with the boundaries of the precincts in those elections.

 

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It has been reported that people from the Mueller investigation sat down with Trump's lawyers last week to discuss some of the questions Mueller wants answered, and they include a question about what Trump knew about Flynn's phone calls to the Russian ambassador.

This question apparently is the one that sent Trump into a rage, that may have led to McCabe's firing.

So...has Flynn told Mueller he briefed Trump about the calls? And is that why panic levels been jacked up?

And is that why Trump has hired this new, very aggressive, lawyer?

eta: And the fact that the Trump companies received a subpoena, and the fact his lawyers keep telling him the investigation is going to wrap up any day. And questions about Session's role in the firing of Comey.

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3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I've heard one person (who is in favour of partisan setting of boundaries) argue that making it openly partisan is transparent, because you know the people in control of the map are partisan so you know what will be motivating them when they draw the lines on the map. But if you make it an "independent" body all you are doing is hiding the partisan bias of those who are on this independent body, and therefore you will still get biased maps only it's covert partisanship rather than transparent partisanship.

Their assumption/assertion of course is that no one can be trusted to be more loyal to the system than to their own partisan political interest. And the way the USA is so divided at the moment, I'm not sure they are wrong. If you can't go for a non-partisan independant body, then why not go for a bi-partisan body? Where each side gets to appoint an equal number of people to the body, and re-districting has to be agreed by consensus rather than simple majority vote.

The US in general is weird with confusing non-partisan with 50/50 pure partisans. Y'all go with the second one basically all the time and it just doesn't work.

Other countries manage to draw ridings/districts/etc without the insane level of political meddling y'all have. Even some states are doing it right now and afaik it works pretty well.

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3 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

In 20 years kids are only going to know the phrase 'showered in gold' or 'covered in gold' as a piss thing after a sitting U.S. President's fetish is brought public in his impeachment.

 

that’s because water games are for oldass boomer freaks, the youth of today is all eat ass or gtfooooohhhh

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12 minutes ago, unpaid comintern said:

that’s because water games are for oldass boomer freaks, the youth of today is all eat ass or gtfooooohhhh

It's true there's a big push amongst millennials to rebrand the generation as either 'GenAnalphagic' or 'GenCoprophagic'.  The internal factions are still dooking that one out.

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15 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Sorry, I meant to answer! Yes, that's him. And Don Lemon is interviewing him tonight. He has a funny voice.

Don looks fucking menacing as this kid is explaining the scheme

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1 hour ago, Shryke said:

The US in general is weird with confusing non-partisan with 50/50 pure partisans.

That's because "non-partisan" is a myth akin to believing an appellate judge's decisions isn't primarily based on partisanship/ideology.  

1 hour ago, Shryke said:

Other countries manage to draw ridings/districts/etc without the insane level of political meddling y'all have. Even some states are doing it right now and afaik it works pretty well.

There are only two states - Arizona and California - that include nonpartisan/unaffiliated members in their "independent" commissions for redistricting US congressional seats.  Arizona actually right now has great proportionality, 5 GOP and 4 Dems in their 9 seats.  However, only 3 of these 9 seats are remotely competitive, which does not reflect a increasingly purple state (Trump won by 3 and a half points).  Moreover, as mentioned in the above link ("hotly debated"), these commissions tend to have competing goals beyond simple proportionality, and favoring such goals tends to reflect the partisanship of each member.

As for California, 39 of their 53 seats (73.6%) are held by Democrats.  A whopping 30 of these seats have Cook PVI's of D+12 or more, and 8 more are at D+5 or more.  While Democrats have received between 60-62% of the vote in the last three presidential cycles, this demonstrates partisan gerrymandering is not solely a GOP problem (rather, it's a problem that tends to increase as one party increasingly dominates a state), nor does the inclusion of nonpartisan commission members lead to more proportionality or competitiveness.

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