U.S. Politics: Houston Avoids Second Disaster

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

7 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I think they are figuring out how to implement the ban and kick people out of the army without there being a bunch of law suits. I don't think they are specifically looking for a way to tell Trump they can't kick people out of the military on the basis of gender identity. 

That ship has already sailed. I think they had a least three separate suits filed against them on Monday on the back of this.

[DMC]

21 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I think they are figuring out how to implement the ban and kick people out of the army without there being a bunch of law suits. I don't think they are specifically looking for a way to tell Trump they can't kick people out of the military on the basis of gender identity. 

Yes, the clear subtext of Trump's memo is for Mattis to figure out a way to discharge the thousands of now-openly transgender serving members with the best possible justification (re-instituting the ban on recruits is comparatively straightforward).  And since Mattis has been a soldier all his life and has risen to where he is, I assume he understands the subtext and in all likelihood will do just that.  But I'm not an expert on Jim Mattis, and I suspect no one else here is either, so whether and how he goes about doing so - and Trump's reaction to such recommendations - still remains to be seen and matters a great deal.

[IamMe90]

3 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Your point?  Care to actually answer this question:

 

Come on man, you had to already know that his "broad, sweeping implications" would entail either incest, bestiality, pedophilia, or some combination of the three. To be honest, I'm almost a little relieved that it was only limited to the first two (I mean, aside from some of the more... "eccentric" ones). 

What's actually surprising is that he had the balls to say it after all the glib one-liners. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, IamMe90 said:

Come on man, you had to already know that his "broad, sweeping implications" would entail either incest, bestiality, pedophilia, or some combination of the three. I'm a little it was only limited to the first two (I mean, aside from some of the more... "eccentric" ones). 

What's actually surprising is that he had the balls to say it after all the glib one-liners. 

Yeah was pressing to get him to say it.  Some of his examples were quite amusing.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

4 minutes ago, IamMe90 said:

Come on man, you had to already know that his "broad, sweeping implications" would entail either incest, bestiality, pedophilia, or some combination of the three. To be honest, I'm almost a little relieved that it was only limited to the first two (I mean, aside from some of the more... "eccentric" ones). 

What's actually surprising is that he had the balls to say it after all the glib one-liners. 

To the argument of Equal Protection, I still want to know where my Gay Divorce Court show is. This is bullshit.

[IamMe90]

25 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

To the argument of Equal Protection, I still want to know where my Gay Divorce Court show is. This is bullshit.

We've had too many years to look at how shitty marriage has been to the rest of you  Though, admittedly, as far as trashy daytime TV goes, it would be damn glorious. 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Just now, IamMe90 said:

We've had too many years to look at how shitty marriage has been to the rest of you  Though, admittedly, as far as trashy daytime TV goes, it would be damn glorious. 

It would be fucking amazing. Television is so dropping the ball here. 

[DMC]

The case against antifa:

Quote

During the 1960s, there were hundreds of riots across America in protest of police brutality and in support of civil rights. Experts say the riots were a major contributor to the rise of “law and order” and “tough on crime” policies that followed in the coming decades. These policies made police more aggressive and filled America’s prisons to levels never seen before in US history. In short, the perception of lawlessness led both Americans and their politicians to demand more stringent law enforcement.

Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton University, noted as much in a recent study:

In presidential elections, proximity to black-led nonviolent protests increased white Democratic vote-share whereas proximity to black-led violent protests caused substantively important declines and likely tipped the 1968 election from [Democrat] Hubert Humphrey to [Republican] Richard Nixon.

Violent protests led to a conservative backlash, while nonviolent demonstrations helped liberals.

The paper concludes, “[W]hile violence in response to repression is often justifiable, this research suggest it may not be strategic.”

One chart from Wasow’s study demonstrates the trend. It shows that “civil rights” became the “most important problem,” according to public polling, during peaceful protests in the mid-1960s (including the 1963 March on Washington topped by the “I Have a Dream” speech), while concerns about “social control” spiked when riots spread in the later part of the decade.

 

[lokisnow]

Democrats shouldn't crow about trump failing on over turning obamacare because of this chart.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/29/16223042/voxcare-record-insured-americans

Now this chart is stupid, because it does everything by percent, not raw numbers.

So you look at that chart and think, oh wow, white people didn't get much benefit of new obamacare signups.

Wrong, white people got over 75% of the new obamacare signups.

if white people are 61% of the population of 323 million there are 197 million white people

16% of white people were uninsured before obamacare, or 31.5 million white uninsured people

That white people have experience a "flat" decline from 16% to 8% seems paltry compared to 42% to 24% right?

Today only  8% of white people are uninsured, that is 15.75 million white people that now have health insurance (most of them on medicaid).

Trump failed because WHITE people got a handout from the government, millions of them, and everyone knows someone who benefitted.

The democrat method of "minimal possible social safety net" means that before Obamacare, most of the handouts democrats give out go to non-whites, since our national system of institutional racism is designed to keep non-whites in the lowest income categories.  

In a novel twist, with Obamacare, democrats doled out 75% of the benefits to whites, big change, the program endures because of it.

Before Obamacare, few white people knew anyone on medicaid, why? because medicaid cut off at some ridiculous number like $11,000 per year in income. very few white people can imagine that one can even live on such a number, because the institutional racism of our national system means that they are almost guaranteed to never be subjugated to wages that low by virtue of their race, but millions of white people get by on 18,000 - 24,000 a year. And some of them get scooped up in the medicaid expansion. 

Although democrats never intended it, in expanding medicaid to include the lowest white income brackets, they probably saved obamacare.

republicans have always hated medicaid because medicaid benefits had been mostly confined to a black income bracket, so in their eyes it's a tax on whites to give free health care to blacks. 

it seems as though medicaid is no longer believed by the republican electorate to be a program for blacks, but a program that also includes whites--which the failure of trumpcare seems to demonstrate.

the lesson is, as always, that all politics is always racial, and if you want to save the world, you need buy in from whites,  and you only get buy in from whites if your policies also help out whites in large, tangible ways--and you're not going to get buy in from whites if all your solutions are pouring billions into bottomless abyss of the aiding the worst off, simply because the rigged system means that extremely few whites suffer from all the bullshit that the worst off have to deal with. But you can help the worst off more, and more consistently if you're also helping out those who feel like they're bad off but may not empirically have as much need as many others.  Unfortunately for democrats, their edumacated policy morons all bleat about how we must only triage for the worst patients and not bother treating other patients, "don't you dare help out those who are probably borderline fine" is the general attitude of the educated elites towards the walking wounded  (who are super stressed about it and certainly have never once felt "fine" in their adult lives, despite 'very smart people' saying they are fine)

get the lower middle class on board though? well then you might start enjoying New Deal Coalition levels of success, democrats.

Also points to the fact that if you want to further reduce the uninsured, you'll have much more success and a much broader coalition to do so by expanding medicaid further and creating medicaid transition options that allow people to continue their medicaid insurance if they are lucky enough to find themselves climbing out of the medicaid income brackets.

single payer? very nice in principle, but very near impossible to build a coherent coalition given the voting demographic realities . Medicaid expansion? I think you can do it, because it tangibly benefits white people. and the higher up the income ladder you go, the more likely people are to vote, so the more you push medicaid up, the larger your coalition becomes.

[James Arryn]

So...apparently his Trumpness is balking at the idea of accepting help from Mexico re:Harvey. Stand up guy.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, James Arryn said:

So...apparently his Trumpness is balking at the idea of accepting help from Mexico re:Harvey. Stand up guy.

Well, clearly, what is important here are the optics of the US accepting help from Mexico... not actually helping the millions of people in SE Texas who desperately need help.  Donald Trump ladies and gentleman.  What a sack of shit.

[Dr. Pepper]

2 hours ago, James Arryn said:

So...apparently his Trumpness is balking at the idea of accepting help from Mexico re:Harvey. Stand up guy.

He's going to claim Mexico's aid for Harvey was actually payment for the wall.  

He's now going off on twitter about how talking with North Korea did nothing to keep war at bay for the last 50 years so he's done talking.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

He's going to claim Mexico's aid for Harvey was actually payment for the wall.  

He's now going off on twitter about how talking with North Korea did nothing to keep war at bay for the last 50 years so he's done talking.  

Someone needs to pull the trigger on the 25th amendment before the man makes Northeast Asia glow.

[LongRider]

22 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Someone needs to pull the trigger on the 25th amendment before the man makes Northeast Asia glow.

If Northeast Asia glows the chances are good we will too. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, James Arryn said:

I don't think it's as impossible to make a military distinction are you're suggesting here. There are for example medical conditions which make someone ineligible for military service but wouldn't preclude other government posts. No idea how you'd waggle transgender into a medical category, but then none of this makes any sense to me, and yet it's still happening.

I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m suggesting that if you cannot ban people from the most demanding job then you can’t ban them from any other job either.

 

[Fez]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m suggesting that if you cannot ban people from the most demanding job then you can’t ban them from any other job either.

I think the court would agree unanimously that trying to stretch this case into turning transgender status into a national protected class would be an overreach (and there's almost certainly at least 4 votes against doing that under any circumstances; even though arguably transgender individuals already are because gender itself is a protected class). 

As for the more narrow question of whether the ruling might apply to all Federal employment, that's possible. It really depends on what the ruling is, and what compromises might be needed to get to 5 votes. It's possible they just don't address the question of Federal employment and if there's future discrimination at another agency a lawsuit will then get brought citing this case.

[mormont]

40 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

Ah, I see.  You were in inquisitorial though-police mode.  Trying to ferret out thought patterns that you might point to as vaguely symptomatic of unorthodoxy.  For a moment there I thought you were actually trying to engage me in conversation, and exchange ideas, like a normal person. 

Gotta say: you're not setting a great example. You're not 'engaging in conversation and exchange ideas'. In this thread at least, you've been insinuating, you've been hedging, you've been baiting and evading and imputing motives to others. Sure, some of that has been done to you too. But you have not behaved in a way where people really feel like they're being invited to engage in an honest conversation. So, reap as you sow, I suppose.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Someone needs to pull the trigger on the 25th amendment before the man makes Northeast Asia glow.

Not going to happen. Hasn’t the modern iteration of the Republican Party made it clear to you yet that all they care about is maintaining power in the moment rather than having any principles or long term perspective?

1 hour ago, Nasty LongRider said:

If Northeast Asia glows the chances are good we will too. 

Also not happening.

58 minutes ago, Fez said:

I think the court would agree unanimously that trying to stretch this case into turning transgender status into a national protected class would be an overreach (and there's almost certainly at least 4 votes against doing that under any circumstances; even though arguably transgender individuals already are because gender itself is a protected class). 

As for the more narrow question of whether the ruling might apply to all Federal employment, that's possible. It really depends on what the ruling is, and what compromises might be needed to get to 5 votes. It's possible they just don't address the question of Federal employment and if there's future discrimination at another agency a lawsuit will then get brought citing this case.

In general I agree that that’s the most likely scenario, but I do think it’s possible they reach further than the minimum. After all, they’d just be delaying the inevitable.

[all swedes are racist]

nyt op ed pages is just killing it lately 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/erik-prince-contractors-afghanistan.html?ref=opinion&referer=https://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html?nytmobile=0&nytmobile=0

[Shryke]

Re: The Trangender Ban in the Military

Mattis is dragging his feet on the issue because the military doesn't wanna actually do this. They already did basically the most they could publicly to say so in the wake of the initial tweet and now Mattis is stalling.

They've spent like a year now studying the issue, they were prepped and ready for the transition, etc, etc. If there's one thing the military doesn't like to do, it's change. And so when they do change, they really hate being shoved around and told to change back.