US Politics returns: the post-Election thread

[Maithanet]

Ben Carson takes himself out of consideration for head of HHS.

Quote

Carson's business manager, Armstrong Williams, said Carson has made clear he has no experience in running a federal bureaucracy....He said Carson would remain a close adviser of Trump and a friend. "His life has not prepared him to be a Cabinet secretary," Williams said.

It seems very strange that he felt his experience as a doctor prepared him to be President, but not to be a Cabinet secretary. 

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

4 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

That's an apologist myth Americans believe to ignore their exceptionalism. 

Well, the usual one is the New York World, but the series was never named after the newspaper, which had nothing more to do with MLB than any other paper. I believed the myth too until I took the history of sports as a seminar course and the prof debunked it. It was called the World Series because, well, ______, Fuck Yeah! 

http://www.snopes.com/business/names/worldseries.asp

 

I think that the counter-ego myth that developed is actually more illustrative than the title itself, personally. The first is just arrogance, the second is denial of fact to avoid owning the arrogance, and that's a lot more danerous.

This is the wrong place for it but perhaps there needs to be a postseason tournament for professional baseball teams from leagues around the world. 

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I have a question about the Kushner/Christie feud. When Chris Christie put Kushner's dad in jail, was there any sort of prosecutorial misconduct, over-zealousness, or trumped-up (hah) charges? Because it seems to me that Charles Kushner's dad broke a few laws, and went to prison for it.

Sure, there are plenty of other reasons to dislike Christie, and almost anyone would be pissed at the guy who sent one of their parents to prison, even for legitimate reasons. But it seems to me that freezing out Christie for these personal reasons is yet another bad sign of the general competence of the Trump administration.

[butterbumps!]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/15/is-planned-parenthood-affiliate-fueling-anti-trump-protests.html

I should clarify that Fox News did mention a possible soros connection but even they didn't treat it as forgone fact, and it's pretty buried in the article.   But absolutely nothing like what the killer snark asserted.

 

[Ice Queen]

2 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

A bit, lol.  

I don't condone the violence you suggest but I definitely understand the reasons for having that desire.  I was speaking to someone who works with underprivileged families and children, usually families of color, immigrants or even refugees.  She went full steam Trump love psycho in a conversation with me because she assumed I was a scumbag like her.  I just stood there envisioning beating her with a chair. If I hadn't been trying to get assistance for the child in my care, I would have told her exactly what I thought of her.  I filed a complaint with her manager, but he's an old white guy so they've probably teamed up to belittle and harass the people who come to them for help.  

There, now I've lost my progressive membership because I've completely stereotyped a random old white dude who did nothing but listen to and take notes about my complaint.

LOL A lot of old white guys are in your predicament. As a woman, though, I'm enraged at the number of women who blithely ignored the warning signs in Trump and voted for him anyway. To paraphrase Jane Austen, they're seriously lacking in either sense or feeling. 

I don't condone violence, by the way. Try everything else first but keep it on the table as a very last resort. I recognize that sometimes it's the only way, unfortunately. If someone picks a fight, sometimes the best course is to make sure they never pick another one. 

Here's an example. After the election, my daughter asked me if it was okay to fight back if a man grabbed her or assaulted her, because we've taught our children that violence is wrong. She (sarcastically) said that if Trump does it that must mean it's okay. I had to explain Nixon's "it's not illegal if the president does it" thing. 

Not only has sexual assault become normalized with Trump's election, but we've left our girls with no sense of how to protect themselves. If that doesn't change in a hurry, they're going to be at the mercy of every man who's become emboldened by this election. 

[aceluby]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

ace,

There were voter ID measures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that suppressed voter turnout for Democrats?

Not sure, never claimed that.  I am claiming that this is why voter ID is pushed so hard by Republicans in general.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Not sure, never claimed that.  I am claiming that this is why voter ID is pushed so hard by Republicans in general.

I'm not going to dispute that point.

[Ice Queen]

19 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Butterbumps,

I don't know.  But I can't believe that those three states going Republican for the first time in 32 years for Wisconsin and Michigan, and the first time in 28 years for Pennsylvania was accomplished with only partisan Republicans supporting Trump.

Speaking for Pennsylvania, it really is Philadephia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle. Our state government, with voter ID laws and outrageous gerrymandering, have ensured that PA went red. There aren't enough Republicans in the cities to pull it off, and the number of Democrats in the rural areas (which is most of the state) aren't enough to turn those counties blue. The map looks the same as it did in 2012 and 2008...and they gave it to Trump. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

38 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No, Shryke and a number of other boarders, in the lead up to the election, explicitly said that the independent vote is not relevant.  It is my opinion that the results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin suggest that independents matter greatly in those three states that for the first time in decades went for a Republican Presidential candidate.

And yet here I was, the only person who has been a paid staffer on a political campaign, telling them how wrong they were. And no one listened......

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

27 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Butterbumps,

I don't know.  But I can't believe that those three states going Republican for the first time in 32 years for Wisconsin and Michigan, and the first time in 28 years for Pennsylvania was accomplished with only partisan Republicans supporting Trump.

Throw out WI. Trump basically matched Romney's numbers. But it's hard to explain PA and MI without including Independents. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

And yet here I was, the only person who has been a paid staffer on a political campaign, telling them how wrong they were. And no one listened......

I listened.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Throw out WI. Trump basically matched Romney's numbers. But it's hard to explain PA and MI without including Independents. 

Fair enough.  Why didn't Democrats turn out for Sec. Clinton then?

[aceluby]

47 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No, Shryke and a number of other boarders, in the lead up to the election, explicitly said that the independent vote is not relevant.  It is my opinion that the results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin suggest that independents matter greatly in those three states that for the first time in decades went for a Republican Presidential candidate.

Trump won in WI with only 2k more votes than Romney, so that state was not really decided by independents, but democrats who didn't vote or voted third party.  

ETA: as already stated by Tywin....

[Ice Queen]

9 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Throw out WI. Trump basically matched Romney's numbers. But it's hard to explain PA and MI without including Independents. 

Philadelphia and its suburbs have roughly HALF of PA's population and they vote blue. Granted, some of those suburbs are in NJ and MD, but it is still by far the largest metro area in PA. The map looks the same. More people voted for Hillary than voted for Romney in 2012 and Trump didn't come close to matching Obama's numbers. 

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

@Altherion

Since you're struggling to understand why people think Bannon is antisemitic, I'll explain it to you the way I would to a 10 year old.

Bannon ran Breitbart......

While doing so, he stated that he wanted the site to be a platform for the alt-white......

Alt-right is code for white nationalism, among other things.......

A key component of white nationalism is antisemitism.......

Capisce?

I did not really want to go into this as it requires a bit of history, but alright. American Jews are not monolithic. There are many divisions among them, but the one that is relevant here is that there are pro-Israel Jews and anti-Israel Jews (I don't mean that they want to destroy the country, just that oppose the actions of the Israeli government, especially the subset of the latter that pertains to Palestinians). In the past decade or two, academia and the media have leaned increasingly towards the latter set. Andrew Breitbart (the founder of Breitbart news) was Jewish as is Larry Solov (the current CEO). They came up with the idea of Breitbart News in Jerusalem and the organization opened a branch there a year ago.

Of course, this brings up the question: why in the world do they tolerate (and in fact encourage) the presence of alt-right readers as well as occasionally attack American Jews? The answer is that there are simply too few of either type of Jew to make a difference without allies and, on both sides, some of the alliances they make are with people who don't like them, but are willing to at least temporarily be on their side. On the pro-Israel side, this traditionally included Evangelical Christians and, more recently, parts of the alt-right. On the anti-Israel side, there is BDS which contains elements that are just as antisemitic as the worst of the alt-right.

In summary, Breitbart is one of the actors in an internecine conflict between American Jews. The coalition of allies on each side includes elements which are certainly antisemitic. However, this does not mean that high-ranking employees like Bannon who interface with these elements are themselves antisemitic -- they are merely propaganda operatives and, if they're any good (which Bannon appears to be), they almost certainly do not believe in their own propaganda.

[The Killer Snark]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I did not really want to go into this as it requires a bit of history, but alright. American Jews are not monolithic. There are many divisions among them, but the one that is relevant here is that there are pro-Israel Jews and anti-Israel Jews (I don't mean that they want to destroy the country, just that oppose the actions of the Israeli government, especially the subset of the latter that pertains to Palestinians). In the past decade or two, academia and the media have leaned increasingly towards the latter set. Andrew Breitbart (the founder of Breitbart news) was Jewish as is Larry Solov (the current CEO). They came up with the idea of Breitbart News in Jerusalem and the organization opened a branch there a year ago.

Of course, this brings up the question: why in the world do they tolerate (and in fact encourage) the presence of alt-right readers as well as occasionally attack American Jews? The answer is that there are simply too few of either type of Jew to make a difference without allies and, on both sides, some of the alliances they make are with people who don't like them, but are willing to at least temporarily be on their side. On the pro-Israel side, this traditionally included Evangelical Christians and, more recently, parts of the alt-right. On the anti-Israel side, there is BDS which contains elements that are just as antisemitic as the worst of the alt-right.

In summary, Breitbart is one of the actors in an internecine conflict between American Jews. The coalition of allies on each side includes elements which are certainly antisemitic. However, this does not mean that high-ranking employees like Bannon who interface with these elements are themselves antisemitic -- they are merely propaganda operatives and, if they're any good (which Bannon appears to be), they almost certainly do not believe in their own propaganda.

It's important to realise also that one does not have to be Jewish to lament the Nazis, any more than one has to be black to lament the KKK. People are too scared to recognise the fact, in spite of many European politicians admitting to implementing it and desiring its fulfilment, that the EU is currently mainly motivated in pushing through the culturally and demographically genocidal Coudenhove-Kalergi plan: a plan which has been guided by decades of educative and instititutional conditioning by the ideologues of the Frankfurt School. And both these things are great evils, the same as related Communism or Fascism are. And one doesn't have to be a non Jew to deplore them. Many libertarian Jews regard these things as extreme Zionist supremacism and deplore globalism while supporting Israel. I myself am a supporter of Israel. I belong to the online movement Bluehand. About maybe a third of us are Jewish. All of us hate Soros and the Rothschilds independently of our religion or lack of religion. The majority of us are pro Israel. The anti semitism argument the Far Left comes up with regularly whenever globalism is mentioned, while at the same time openly hating the Israelis, is just  a cheap and hypocritical means of shutting down debate.

 

[Weeping Sore]

14 minutes ago, The Killer Snark said:

...that the EU is currently mainly motivated in pushing through the culturally and demographically genocidal Coudenhove-Kalergi plan: a plan which has been guided by decades of educative and instititutional conditioning by the ideologues of the Frankfurt School. And both these things are great evils, the same as related Communism or Fascism are.

Um, may I ask when you were hit by the crazy stick?

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kalbear,

Trump won in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  All states that have gone for the Democratic candidates for a very long time.  The last time Wisconsin went for a Republican in a Presidential election was 1984, same with Michigan.  1988 was the last time Pennsylvania went to a Republican presidential candidate.  Are you saying Trump's victories there were accomplished without bringing independents into his camp?

Trump's win in those three States is why I think independents mattered, particularly this year.

http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

Yeah, you're wrong. Trump did not get particularly more voters there than Romney or McCain did. The reason Clinton lost was that she didn't  get the same turnout that Obama did before.

 

[Happy Ent]

43 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Of course, this brings up the question: why in the world do they tolerate (and in fact encourage) the presence of alt-right readers as well as occasionally attack American Jews? 

Is this question far different than the question why we on the Left accept rampant antisemitism in our own ranks as well? Can you be a Corbyn-supporter without also eating Jewish babies, for instance?

Antisemitism is one of the few constants of life, as is the charge of antisemitism. I have seen few debates that improve from pointing it out in the Outgroup. Much is to be gained by finding it in the Ingroup.

(For the record, I’m a philosemite and zionist.)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Tywin, who is a paid staffer, agrees with me on PA and MI, and you on WI.