US Politics: March Madness

[GAROVORKIN]

A secret meeting between Xi of China and Kim of North Korea ?  Perhaps Xi is telling Kim to dial down his Nuclear program ? or maybe XI is assuring  Kim of China's support in case thing get hot between North Korea and the US ? Interesting and curious that this meeting is happening at the same time  that the US and China are having secret Trade Negotiations .

 

This is just a though but,  perhaps the Bolton appointment might be a factor?

[Mudguard]

4 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

It seems likely that Dowd quit because he wanted to keep Trump from sitting down to questions with Mueller, and Trump wants to testify. After all, when you've made it 70 years as a shockingly ignorant dumbass who's been protected by corrupt culture, family money, and ratfuckers like Roy Cohn and Roger Stone all your life, you must be smarter than the rest of the world, and consequences are just a thing that happens to other people.

I'm skeptical that Trump actually wants to sit down voluntarily with Mueller.  If he really did, it wouldn't take months to set the interview up.  Trump publicly says that he wants to sit down with Mueller because he thinks it makes him seem less guilty.  He claims there's no collusion, so of course he's willing to sit down to talk to Mueller.  He has nothing to hide!  An innocent person like Trump wouldn't have anything to fear from talking with Mueller.

His attacks that Mueller's team is biased also suggest that he's not going to be voluntarily sitting down to talk with Mueller.  Ultimately, I think Mueller is going to have to compel Trump to testify, with Trump continuing to claim that he would love to talk because he has nothing to hide, but his lawyers won't let him, and besides, Mueller's team is filled with a bunch of Democrats out to get him. 

[GAROVORKIN]

22 minutes ago, Mudguard said:

I'm skeptical that Trump actually wants to sit down voluntarily with Mueller.  If he really did, it wouldn't take months to set the interview up.  Trump publicly says that he wants to sit down with Mueller because he thinks it makes him seem less guilty.  He claims there's no collusion, so of course he's willing to sit down to talk to Mueller.  He has nothing to hide!  An innocent person like Trump wouldn't have anything to fear from talking with Mueller.

His attacks that Mueller's team is biased also suggest that he's not going to be voluntarily sitting down to talk with Mueller.  Ultimately, I think Mueller is going to have to compel Trump to testify, with Trump continuing to claim that he would love to talk because he has nothing to hide, but his lawyers won't let him, and besides, Mueller's team is filled with a bunch of Democrats out to get him. 

Or Trump might decide enough is enough and fire Mueller.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

According to “Page Six,” Trump Jr. was reportedly issued a concealed-carry permit in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, just days before his now-ex filed for divorce earlier this month. Why PA, especially since his new permit won’t carry over to his home state? One source suggests, “But there is speculation that he didn’t do it in New York because you have to supply financials.” And you know how the Trumps feel about that.

Donald Trump Jr. Reportedly Fills Void in Heart With Concealed-Carry Permit

https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/donald-trump-jr-reportedly-got-a-new-concealed-carry-permit.html

[TrueMetis]

Well that's a red flag.

[Martell Spy]

 

Quote

A collection of states started preparing legal actions against the Trump administration on Tuesday just hours after the Commerce Department announced that it would include a controversial question about citizenship status in the 2020 U.S. Census — a move that could have far-reaching effects on immigrants and the political landscape

.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/26/census-citizenship-questions-487399

States to sue Trump administration for adding citizenship question to U.S. Census

The California AG quickly filed a legal complaint, while New York's Schneiderman said he would lead a multi-state lawsuit.

 

[Yukle]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

Yes, if Republicans drew every map Democrats would never win; but that's a meaningless statement. They didn't draw every map, and likewise if Democrats drew every map, Republicans would never win (the Maryland gerrymander is as devious as any Republican map).

It's not a meaningless statement, because it highlights that gerrymandering shouldn't be allowed. Ever. For any reason at all.

[OldGimletEye]

9 hours ago, Kalbear said:

 replaced them with war hawks.

I think describing Bolton as a war hawk is being too generous to him.

A war hawk sounds like somebody that is callous and reckless with the lives of others, but at least is willing to risk his own hide and is willing to hump a rifle and pack, unlike the Chicken Hawk. even though the war hawk is a bad ethical actor.

The Chicken Hawk is like the War Hawk, except the Chicken Hawk is a flamin’ coward. That’s Bolton along with some other clowns. The Chicken Hawk can often be found talking about shooting people a lot, but then when he gets his big chance too shoot people, craps his pants, because he heard the people he might shoot at, will shoot back.

[Yukle]

2 hours ago, dmc515 said:

There's not much evidence that the 2010 gerrymandering has resulted in a "difference in kind" order of magnitude.  Record levels of GOP advantage compared to recent elections?  Sure, this can be seen in median-bias and median-seat of post-2010 elections.  But those numbers are hardly that much different than previous cycles.  Hell, returning to Abramowitz's generic ballot forecast - a model that treats all of the past 18 midterms equally - the only post-2010 midterm actually overestimated the GOP-gerrymandered House:

Quibbling about the scale doesn't really change the outcome so much. There is no viable reason why gerrymandering should be legal. The fact that the Democrats need anything beyond a slight majority of votes to win a majority of the house proves an extremely broken system.

Before 2010 it couldn't be done so efficiently. It'll only get easier and easier for politicians to shore up their majorities in legislatures. Consider the logical extension of what happens now: when all parties who happen to be in office now get to remain in office within those states forevermore because the boundaries are so well drawn the majorities can never be overcome.

[Fragile Bird]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Damn that happened quick. It was doing fine all day and then cratered out in the last hour or so of trading. 

Also, the post you're looking for is at the bottom of the page:

 

Ah, thank you for that link! I see that 23,500 is considered weak support with a stronger support level at 22,500. In which case I’d say there’s a good chance that’s a level we will see for the Dow.

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

A secret meeting between Xi of China and Kim of North Korea ?  Perhaps Xi is telling Kim to dial down his Nuclear program ? or maybe XI is assuring  Kim of China's support in case thing get hot between North Korea and the US ? Interesting and curious that this meeting is happening at the same time  that the US and China are having secret Trade Negotiations .

 

This is just a though but,  perhaps the Bolton appointment might be a factor?

I don’t think so. Korea observers were shocked that Kim might meet Trump before meeting Xi, it would be considered a huge mistake and insult. He’s probably gone there to make sure the Chinese were first.

[DMC]

31 minutes ago, Yukle said:

Quibbling about the scale doesn't really change the outcome so much.

Quibbling about minutia is a fairly essential aspect of internet message boards, especially when the topic is politics and 90% of the board is left-leaning.

34 minutes ago, Yukle said:

Before 2010 it couldn't be done so efficiently. It'll only get easier and easier for politicians to shore up their majorities in legislatures. Consider the logical extension of what happens now: when all parties who happen to be in office now get to remain in office within those states forevermore because the boundaries are so well drawn the majorities can never be overcome.

I suspect the incumbency advantage will look as it has for the past half century - insanely high.  The main causal factor there isn't gerrymandering, which can either benefit or hamper specific incumbents dependent upon the aims of any state party's leadership.  Rather, the primary mechanism there is money in campaigns, which is actually a much tougher systemic problem to remedy.

Broadly, like most things, the only constant in US politics is that there are no constants.  This is particularly the case in respect to the inherently and perpetually shifting coalitions of cartel parties in a two-party system.  Gerrymandering is a potent weapon for such parties to employ to exploit systemic weaknesses for their own ends, but it is a very old weapon that is not fundamentally altered by new statistical analytics or algorithms, and it's a weapon that is sharp on both ends.

[chuck norris 42]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

I think describing Bolton as a war hawk is being too generous to him.

A war hawk sounds like somebody that is callous and reckless with the lives of others, but at least is willing to risk his own hide and is willing to hump a rifle and pack, unlike the Chicken Hawk. even though the war hawk is a bad ethical actor.

 

He gives the impression that he thinks  the Iraq war was magnificent because any aggression by the US must be magnificent. and anyone disagrees is silly, 

However 

Why do you say that he is a Chicken?
Is his  personal bravery ever going to be an issue?

 

 

[Yukle]

4 hours ago, Mudguard said:

I'm skeptical that Trump actually wants to sit down voluntarily with Mueller.  If he really did, it wouldn't take months to set the interview up.  Trump publicly says that he wants to sit down with Mueller because he thinks it makes him seem less guilty.  He claims there's no collusion, so of course he's willing to sit down to talk to Mueller.  He has nothing to hide!  An innocent person like Trump wouldn't have anything to fear from talking with Mueller.

His attacks that Mueller's team is biased also suggest that he's not going to be voluntarily sitting down to talk with Mueller.  Ultimately, I think Mueller is going to have to compel Trump to testify, with Trump continuing to claim that he would love to talk because he has nothing to hide, but his lawyers won't let him, and besides, Mueller's team is filled with a bunch of Democrats out to get him. 

This is almost certainly why his cronies have been saying that Mueller is setting a "perjury trap." It's not that they think Trump will lie (which he will) but rather that Mueller will set some sort of impossible trap to get Trump in trouble on an unfair technicality.

Perhaps Trump will plead the fifth. Non-stop. The idea of whether he can do it with Mueller is unknown. He can use it as a defence against the judiciary, but Mueller is part of the executive.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I think describing Bolton as a chickenhawk is a fair criticism. Bolton has proposed and advocated sending troops into harms way over and over again during his career, yet when he personally had an opportunity to serve in Vietnam he avoided sending himself into harms way.

During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers corresponded to birth dates.)^[32] As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War.^[33] Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard in 1970 rather than wait to find out if his draft number would be called.^[34] (The highest number called to military service was 195.)^[35] After serving in the National Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later.^[1] He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."^[36] In an interview, Bolton discussed his comment in the reunion book, explaining that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people[/b]

^^^

That is a classic example of being a chickenhawk, being in favor of military action for others while avoiding it for yourself. Hes for the fight as long as he doesnt have to risk his own neck.

[Fragile Bird]

Just woke up and decided to look at Facebook for a few minutes, and I was surprised to see the city of Atlanta has had it’s computer systems hijacked by a ransomware attack for the last 5 days. I’m surprised no one mentioned it. Too common?

[OldGimletEye]

8 hours ago, chuck norris 42 said:

However 

Why do you say that he is a Chicken?
Is his  personal bravery ever going to be an issue?

For me yes, if you're always advocating going to war for the silliest and stupidest of reasons. Had Bolton gone to Vietnam, and he had the chance, today he might be a lot more cautious about entering armed conflicts. As Bismarck is alleged to have put it, a man not exactly known for his pacifist leanings, once you have seen the glazed eyes of a dying musketeer, you'll think twice before going to war.

I'm not saying that every civilian leader that is entrusted with making decisions about national security, including entering military conflicts, has to have prior military experience. Not at all. For me good judgement, appropriate due diligence and caution, are far more important attributes. But, there is something about the bunch that is reckless and callous towards entering military conflicts, with the resulting carnage, combined with cowardlyness that rubs me the wrong way, particularly when certain sorts of people in this country are inclined to see people with a very big mouth and a very childish attitude and who do a whole lot of saber rattling as being “tough guys”, while those who show both restraint and caution get labelled as wimps.

Now I know conservative sorts of people might be inclined to say now, conveniently enough: Well, why is personal bravery and issue when picking civilian leadership that will make national security decisions? And I say, well conservative sorts of people, you helped to make it an issue when you decided to label people that are bit cautious about going to war as wimps.

When the conservative tough guy, struts around on the deck of a ship, like he’s Nelson that has just won some great naval victory, I’m callin’ bullshit, particularly when certain sorts of people eat that shit up like it's the best thing ever.

This sounds whole lot like Jonah Shitbird back in the day whining about being called a chicken hawk.

[Seli]

10 hours ago, dmc515 said:

...

Well, it's also because many Democratic-leaning states gerrymander themselves - the Brennan report highlights Maryland in particular, but if you look at Appendix 1, even Minnesota (which was "court-imposed") or Washington ("political appointee commission") have levels of unresponsiveness easily rivaling most GOP-gerrymandered states.

It would be interesting to know not only the unresponsiveness, but also the sensitivity of the districts to small changes. What was impressive about the Pennsylvania gerrymander was the extreme finetuning that went into constructing that map. A nice read here on Wired, where they talk about the mathematical teams that helped make the case against the old map.

Quote

from one team:

After conducting his trillion simulations, Pegden found that the 2011 Pennsylvania map exhibited more partisan bias than 99.999999 percent of maps he tested. In other words, making even the tiniest changes in almost any direction to the existing map chiseled away at the Republican advantage.

and from another:

Chen conducted another simulation with an additional 500 maps, this time, requiring that none of them pit two incumbents against each other. The goal was to see if the General Assembly drew the original map this way not based on partisanship, but based on protecting incumbents. But the results were largely the same. On every metric, the disputed map was an outlier.

“These charts are what really resonated with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices,” says Jacobson. “You see 500 black dots. Then you see the actual plan. It’s way out in nowhere land.”

 

[OldGimletEye]

Krugman on the corporate tax cuts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/opinion/tax-cuts-and-wages-redux-slightly-wonkish.html

Quote

Oops, they did it again. After Republicans rammed through their big tax cut, there were a rash of stories about corporations using the tax break to give their workers bonuses. Have the media learned nothing from the Carrier debacle?

High libertarian overlord bullshitting.

Quote

What was the theory of the case for those who believed, or at least claimed to believe, that a cut in corporate taxes would be passed through into wages? The story, as told by people like Kevin Hassett or the Tax Foundation, was that (a) markets for goods and labor are close to perfectly competitive, and (b) America is part of a global capital market that more or less equalizes after-tax rates of return. The idea, then, was that by reducing the rate of taxes on corporate profits, America would attract inflows of capital from the rest of the world. A rising capital stock would drive pre-tax returns on capital down and, by increasing competition for labor, drive wages up. In the long run, they claimed, all the benefits would go to workers.

I’ll just add once again, the old savings automatically turns into investment story makes sense in the Robinson Caruso parable because the intended plans of the saver are automatically matched with the intended plans of the investor.

If I stop buying cases of Natural Light and baloney sandwiches from my local grocery store, they are not going to think I’m committing to buying cases of Natural Light and baloney sandwiches in the future. Maybe if I committed to buying a forward contract for delivery cases of Natural Light and baloney sandwiches in the future my current savings would automatically become an investment.

But most commodities are not bough on forward contracts and that leaves firms guessing what my future behavior will be like. And for this reason, it would seem that expected sales growth is a bigger driver of capital investment than capital cost.

[Martell Spy]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-prosecutors-link-trump-aide-rick-gates-to-russian-intelligence

Mueller Prosecutors Link Trump Aide Rick Gates to Russian Intel Network

Quote

Prosecutors working on the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have linked Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, to a person with ties to a Russian intelligence service. In a court filing released Tuesday night, prosecutors said Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort’s companies, were in touch in September and October 2016—during the presidential campaign—and described the alleged link as “pertinent to the investigationProsecutors working on the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have linked Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, to a person with ties to a Russian intelligence service. In a court filing released Tuesday night, prosecutors said Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort’s companies, were in touch in September and October 2016—during the presidential campaign—and described the alleged link as “pertinent to the investigation.” It’s .” Prosecutors working on the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have linked Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, to a person with ties to a Russian intelligence service. In a court filing released Tuesday night, prosecutors said Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort’s companies, were in touch in September and October 2016—during the presidential campaign—and described the alleged link as “pertinent to the investigation