U.S. Elections: Trumpsterfire Unchained

[drawkcabi]

14 minutes ago, SerPaladin said:

Expect to see the Trumpsters and Evangelicals coalesce (though the "god uses flawed men" argument of the evangelicals makes my head hurt). I wonder if they will take on a new party name, or drive the Bushes and National Review out and claim the Republican moniker That means an eternity of Trump and Cruz battling each other for that throne.

If they drive them out whatever new party name they come up with they should take the Rhinoceros as a mascot kind of in spite and kind of a "don't forget where we came from and how this happened" thing.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Well, I just hope Trump keeps on firing at Paul Ryan, and his support sticks to their word and votes for his Democratic opponent in the election. 

Not, that it would make dealing with house Republicans any easier, but a.) I would immensely enjoy that spineless coward getting ousted b.) it might put an end to his political career/presidential ambitions for 2020. c.) watching that GOP going up in flames would be simply be awesome/entertaining and I (as a mere observer) would be totally curious who would be the next ringmaster for that circus.

Go Donald, kill 'em all (politically).

[Ice Queen]

18 minutes ago, SerPaladin said:

Expect to see the Trumpsters and Evangelicals coalesce (though the "god uses flawed men" argument of the evangelicals makes my head hurt). I wonder if they will take on a new party name, or drive the Bushes and National Review out and claim the Republican moniker That means an eternity of Trump and Cruz battling each other for that throne.

The only one crazier and more dangerous than Trump is Cruz. 

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

1 minute ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

There may have been outcry, but that doesn't make it 'more undemocratic' than having a minority of voters command a majority of delegates. He would not have had a majority of delegates under proportional rules, and an actual majority would have been free to coalesce around someone else.

The general election rules are also undemocratic, so it's true that Republican rules are more similar to the general- they're similarly undemocratic.

I'm fine with the general election rules as they are.  The electoral college doesn't really bother me. 

Although I would prefer something like the Westminster system.  

[OnionAhaiReborn]

16 minutes ago, SerPaladin said:

Some of the Dirty Dozen and a Half were never serious candidates, but the Republicans would be well served to set up rules that start with a smaller field to prevent a Trump style disaster in the future. Cruz had to deal with at least three other "Evangelical" style Republicans, Kasich had Christie, Perry, Walker, Gilmore, Pataki and Jindal in the "Governor" lane. Rubio and Bush fought over the establishment bloc before they realized there was a bigger dog in the kennel. And Ben Carson was there.

The leadership is too weak to have winnowed down the field ahead of time. And that lack of leadership contributes to keeping it weak. Right now there are four splinters of the party, and the divisions are deep enough to make me feel that they can't be healed. Trump's lower income/ no college bloc cannot co-exist with the laissez faire economics types, because of Free Trade, among other things. The evangelicals have long been at odds with the libertarians. And there are just not enough of the ivory tower purists to keep the tent alive.

Expect to see the Trumpsters and Evangelicals coalesce (though the "god uses flawed men" argument of the evangelicals makes my head hurt). I wonder if they will take on a new party name, or drive the Bushes and National Review out and claim the Republican moniker That means an eternity of Trump and Cruz battling each other for that throne.

I definitely agree that the crowded field caused similar-candidates to cannibalize support from shared blocs. That would have been less of an issue if, at the end of things, their delegates could have reformed as voting blocs at the convention. I think they would have patched together the standard "Evangelical"-"Establishment/free market" coalition which has dominated since the 90s.

[OldGimletEye]

14 minutes ago, Notone said:

watching that GOP going up in flames would be simply be awesome/entertaining and I (as a mere observer) would be totally curious who would be the next ringmaster for that circus.

And badly needed. It's become an intellectual trash heap, that needs to have gasoline poured on it and then lighted.

We need to have a reasonable center right party, I think. If for any reason, so the left can keep a sharp mental edge.

[Ariadne23]

54 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

While I'm sure you don't like Citizens United, I don't see how it can really be tied to the rise of Trump.  His opponents in the GOP primary were much better funded, but his "free media" tactic overwhelmed their spending.  Now maybe Trumps "politicians are bought and sold" message has a little more punch with Citizens United, but the message that the little guy is getting shut out of politics is pretty universal.

I think we agree on this. What I mean is that until the average voter feels less shut out of politics, this populist impulse isn't going anywhere. And while the Dems have a greater populist tradition to draw from in recent times and can channel that energy into a Bill Clinton in '92 who feels your pain, or an Obama in 2008 who is supposedly going to bring greater transparency to government, or a Bernie in 2016, the Republicans don't have much to offer populists at this moment in history beyond the bare message of anti-elitism, and so we see this darker stuff, this scapegoating, from that side. Trump's campaign for me feels like "come for the guy not beholden to special interests, stay for the misogyny, race-baiting, and xenophobia." 

[Shryke]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

While I'm sure you don't like Citizens United, I don't see how it can really be tied to the rise of Trump.  His opponents in the GOP primary were much better funded, but his "free media" tactic overwhelmed their spending.  Now maybe Trumps "politicians are bought and sold" message has a little more punch with Citizens United, but the message that the little guy is getting shut out of politics is pretty universal.

The biggest issue for the GOP primary was the overly large field, which existed because every fringe candidate has his own pocket millionaire/billionaire to fund the campaign and because the GOP, due to this outside funding source, has zero control over the candidates.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

For some slightly contrarian views in this thread, hopefully which will engender some thoughtful discussion outside of horserace stuff, rather than a bunch of people yelling the same talking points at the latest Trump/Putin troll. Yes I know I participated in that stuff too.

Cracked: How Half of America Lost it's Mind

Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds

And for more racehorse stuff: has there been a Wikileaks release? At this point they're all starting to blend together. It's almost like asking if there's been a new Trump racism/sexism incident.

[Shryke]

4 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

And badly needed. It's become an intellectual trash heap, that needs to have gasoline poured on it and then lighted.

We need to have a reasonable center right party, I think. If for any reason, so the left can keep a sharp mental edge.

Can't happen. The numbers aren't there for it. You can't have a right-wing party in america that isn't tied up with white supremacy because there aren't enough conservatives that aren't part of that. That's why the GOP recruited these voters in the first place after all.

[OldGimletEye]

1 minute ago, Shryke said:

Can't happen. The numbers aren't there for it. You can't have a right-wing party in america that isn't tied up with white supremacy because there aren't enough conservatives that aren't part of that. That's why the GOP recruited these voters in the first place after all.

Yep. Unfortunately, much of this election has been about tribalism. That's extremely unfortunate.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

17 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Some back of envelope math on the logistics of resurrecting one season of apprentice:

if they shoot a conservative 2500 tapes per season and it takes about fifteen minutes to ingest a 95 minute tape that's a max of 37500 minutes of ingest time, or 650 hours, given two assistant editor shifts results in at best about 20 hours of ingesting time per day, it would take 31 days to bring it into a computer, but a typical ingest station scales easily and rents in batches of three, so realistically ten days to get a season of tape and into a computer, scale it up three or four times with accompanying scale up in employees and computers managing the ingest, and you could have a season ingested in probably two days, remember it would take a day to just set up all the equipment, and there are supply constraints in the number of pieces of available hardware that exist for rental so you can't scale up unlimited.

now, given the conservative 2500 95 minutetapes, that's a max of 237,500 minutes of footage, let's say 1/3 of that is redundant because it's covered in another camera, so 156,750 minutes of footage aka 2612 hours. Assuming you have the same 20 hours of productive time on two shifts per computer, you need 130 computers  and 260 people to get through the footage of one season in one day

and there are a lot of seasons.

this isn't getting into that the server has to be expanded to more platters to handle that many clients and the switch has to be expanded for that many clients and you have to make Ethernet runs for that many clients. This would be a custom build up because no post facility in Los Angeles has 130 open seats available on its network. most don't even have that many seats, much less available seats.

throw enough money at it and it's possible to construct, but the tech build up takes time as well.

Yes. But Pruitt claimed there's far worse out there, he knows that from his time at the Apprentice. Which was Season 1-2 (?).

So that reduces the initial search significantly, if you only look at the first two seasons. If you say it's impossible due to time constraints, then I have to take your word for it. Pruitt may or may not be able to narrow down the "search area" a bit further. But that's rather hypothetical atm. And it kinda spoils the fun to guess, which skeleton is next to jump out of his closet.

[Swordfish]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

The point was to be overly simplistic. 

Why?

[Ariadne23]

8 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

For some slightly contrarian views in this thread, hopefully which will engender some thoughtful discussion outside of horserace stuff, rather than a bunch of people yelling the same talking points at the latest Trump/Putin troll. Yes I know I participated in that stuff too.

Cracked: How Half of America Lost it's Mind

Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds

To Sunstein's list, I'd add Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, though, frankly the first link there from Cracked essentially makes the same points. Still, as a person living in a very rural yet very pro-Bernie liberal part of the country, why express this populism in the Republican party? That part doesn't feel inevitable to me.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

The Republicans have always had uneasy and unholy alliances.  That's how they began.  It was an anti-slavery party with the remains of the Know-Nothings and Blue Blood remains of the Whigs.  The Democratic Party does not have all the answers.  Some of their ideas are downright stupid.  I agree that there is room for a right/center right party in this country, but the Republican party may be too fractured right now to be that party.  This feels like the era of the Dixiecrats on some level.  Parties fracture, break and realign.  Moderates fleeing the Republican Party are not necessarily going to feel at home with the left wing of the Democratic party today.  So what happens?  There are actually stresses on both parties.  It's just the Republican stress that is so apparent given their cheeto colored leader.

[OldGimletEye]

7 hours ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds

Quote

“Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed,” by James Scott. In this wildly imaginative book, dealing with agriculture, urban planning, and Esperanto, Scott argues that modern governments, relying on top-down knowledge, tend to be clueless, because they depend on “thin simplifications” of complex systems -- and hence lack an understanding of how human beings actually organize themselves.

Evidently influenced by Friedrich Hayek’s powerful arguments about the inability of planners to capture the dispersed knowledge of individuals, Scott goes even further, arguing that both faceless bureaucrats and free markets can do violence to sensible local practices. After you read him, you’ll never see the Clean Air Act or the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or any proposal for large-scale reform, in the same way again.
 

Standard conservative stuff. Hayek's arguments are not new. Nobody is denying that the government can make bad policy. They can.  Nor is the liberal argument, I think, to entirely eliminate market economies.

But, markets are not perfect, as conservatives like to claim. 

Fact is that the state can solve certain coordination problems that occur.

Quote

“Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform,” by Casey Mulligan. Economists love to draw attention to the unintended consequences of apparently public-spirited reforms. For example, big increases in the minimum wage can increase unemployment, and expensive environmental controls imposed on new cars might actually increase environmental harm, by increasing the prices of cleaner vehicles and thus decreasing fleet turnover.

Mulligan’s central claim is that the Affordable Care Act is imposing large implicit taxes on full-time employment, producing real reductions in wages. The result, he argues, is that many employees would do far better if they worked fewer hours per week -- and in some cases, if they didn't work at all. He projects that by creating a disincentive for full-time employment, health care reform will produce “about 3 percent less employment, 3 percent fewer aggregate work hours, 2 percent less GDP, and 2 percent less labor income.”

As he acknowledges, Mulligan’s particular numbers are highly speculative (and in my view, they are unsupported by current evidence). But he is certainly right to emphasize the importance of asking about the potential adverse side-effects of any significant social reform -- and at the very least, he offers cautionary notes about the need to monitor the actual consequences of the Affordable Care Act.

Casey Mulligan is generally an idiot. I wouldn't trust much what Mulligan has written. He's right up there with Jon Cochrane, his buddy at the U of Chicago economics department, who has made some blindly dumb statements since the Great Recession began. Both are free market fundamentalist. Cochrane is now running around promoting neo-fisherianism, since his predictions about inflation were an epic failure.

Mulligan has promoted the idea that unemployment insurance prolonged the recession. There are not many economist who would agree with Mulligan on that. Mulligan might have had a point if we had seen a large amount of wage inflation over the last few years. But, we haven't. I have a pretty strong prior that Mulligan is just talking out of his ass.

Here is a simple fact. The United States spends about 17% of GDP on Health Care compared to about a 11% or 12% average in Europe. And there is hardly any evidence that the United States does any better on outcomes. The United States healthcare system seems hugely inefficient. Obamacare while not perfect, I would argue, is a step in a better direction.
 

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

4 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

The Republicans have always had uneasy and unholy alliances.  That's how they began.  It was an anti-slavery party with the remains of the Know-Nothings and Blue Blood remains of the Whigs.  The Democratic Party does not have all the answers.  Some of their ideas are downright stupid.  I agree that there is room for a right/center right party in this country, but the Republican party may be too fractured right now to be that party.  This feels like the era of the Dixiecrats on some level.  Parties fracture, break and realign.  Moderates fleeing the Republican Party are not necessarily going to feel at home with the left wing of the Democratic party today.  So what happens?  There are actually stresses on both parties.  It's just the Republican stress that is so apparent given their cheeto colored leader.

It wouldn't shock me to see the more moderate Democrats and Republicans to start a new party while the progressive wing of the Democrats go their way and the nationalists on the extreme right go theirs. 

[Shryke]

3 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

It wouldn't shock me to see the more moderate Democrats and Republicans to start a new party while the progressive wing of the Democrats go their way and the nationalists on the extreme right go theirs. 

Where are the numbers for them though?

Starting a new party is a huge step and starting one doomed to fail is likely to never get off the ground.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

3 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Where are the numbers for them though?

Starting a new party is a huge step and starting one doomed to fail is likely to never get off the ground.

I wouldn't know where to find the numbers but especially on the Republican side what other option is there? The moderates who exist can't remain in a party full of white nationalists. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Where are the numbers for them though?

Starting a new party is a huge step and starting one doomed to fail is likely to never get off the ground.

If the Republican Party collapses are you postulating the US as a One party state with internal factions in the Democratic party being the only real opposition to the existing actions of Government?