U.S. Politics: Are You Threadening Me Master Jedi?

[Jace, Extat]

Jay-Z is showing some pretty deep insight on the Van Jones show right now.

[Jace, Extat]

Umm, so I'm not a math wizard like all of you silly number people.

But when Corey Gardner is polling at 12% in Colorado, maybe it's time to start wondering if there's hope. The really interesting thing to me regarding all these numberz is that its not just that people are mad at Trump and Republicans. They're mad at Democrats too.

That could be good! If people actually start holding representatives accountable!

[Ormond]

On 1/25/2018 at 11:57 AM, Zorral said:

Virginia history books for high schoolers had no mention of slaver at all in the section on the Civil War, at least in the days people I know were in hs there back in the 1960's.

Tywin was not talking about 50 years ago, but about today. And I graduated from high school in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1969 and am pretty sure mention of slavery wasn't being suppressed then.

[Zorral]

Ivanka has sunk the family to an even lower low.  It's astounding how these people keep revealing themselves as even worse than their previous worst. This should be at the top of the news everywhere, but the msm seems to not notice, or maybe, since it has to do with a hero of Puerto Rican aid, not care?

https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/957635396766175233

Quote

In a new low for Washington, yesterday @chefjoseandres was asked to leave the Alfalfa dinner after-party at @CafeMilanoDC by its owner, Franco Nuschesse, apparently because his presence made Ivanka Trump uncomfortable (Cafe Milano is the watering hole of the Trump Admin).

Chef Jose Andres, with his own hands and his own money and his own efforts, has fed countless more people in Puerto Rico, people without food, than FEMA has.

He and the chef / owner(s) of Milano are really good friends.  He was invited to that party by them.  But Ivanka got him removed. That's not even LEGAL.

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/ryanjent/_uncomfortable_ivanka_trump_reportedly_had_activist_chef_and_trump_critic_jos_andr_s_removed_from_event

 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Ormond said:

Tywin was not talking about 50 years ago, but about today. And I graduated from high school in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1969 and am pretty sure mention of slavery wasn't being suppressed then.

Your point is that currenlty Virginia embraces its history of slavery, slave breeding, slave dealing, slave dealing and slave lynching, including participants such as Thomas Jefferson?

I spend a fair amount of time in VA, and with Virginians, and I can assure you that the above is not so.

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Your point is that currenlty Virginia embraces its history of slavery, slave breeding, slave dealing, slave dealing and slave lynching, including participants such as Thomas Jefferson?

I spend a fair amount of time in VA, and with Virginians, and I can assure you that the above is not so.

Wow, was that ever a big move of the goalposts! I made no such point and if you had read carefully you would know this.

[Inigima]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Ivanka has sunk the family to an even lower low.  It's astounding how these people keep revealing themselves as even worse than their previous worst. This should be at the top of the news everywhere, but the msm seems to not notice, or maybe, since it has to do with a hero of Puerto Rican aid, not care?

https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/957635396766175233

Chef Jose Andres, with his own hands and his own money and his own efforts, has fed countless more people in Puerto Rico, people without food, than FEMA has.

He and the chef / owner(s) of Milano are really good friends.  He was invited to that party by them.  But Ivanka got him removed. That's not even LEGAL.

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/ryanjent/_uncomfortable_ivanka_trump_reportedly_had_activist_chef_and_trump_critic_jos_andr_s_removed_from_event

 

WaPo says this isn't true: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2018/01/28/no-ivanka-trump-didnt-stop-jose-andres-from-getting-into-a-party-heres-what-really-happened/

[GAROVORKIN]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Your point is that currenlty Virginia embraces its history of slavery, slave breeding, slave dealing, slave dealing and slave lynching, including participants such as Thomas Jefferson?

I spend a fair amount of time in VA, and with Virginians, and I can assure you that the above is not so.

History is made by imperfect human beings. Some are really good , some really indifferent and some are really bad.

[OldGimletEye]

Unlike interest rates, I do not believe there is a Zero Lower Bound for The Republican Party.

Anyway, 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2018/01/28/the-republican-party-had-to-get-worse-before-it-could-get-better/

Quote

In the age of Trump, Bill Kristol has become a voice of reason in the Republican party. In a recent interview I think he proves something I've been saying for a while: the Republican Party had to get worse before it could get better.

 

Quote

I'm not a Democrat, and I'm really not a partisan by nature. 

Yes, yes, we know. Obligatory hippie punching. But anyway............

Quote

But I believe the fact that the problems with the GOP started years and years ago. Quite frankly I think the sharp denial of reality started with the Iraq war. Remember how mad Republicans were that reporters "weren't telling the good stories" out of Iraq? They wanted to blame the insurgency on biased reporting while journalists died over there.... sorry, I'm getting annoyed just remembering it, so I'll move on.

 

Quote

The next really bad sign in my telling of history is the Tea Party that wished for a completely unrealistic vision of small government that would actually do great harm the rural and struggling places that they claimed to be supporting. Then you had Sarah Palin, death panel hysteria, birthers, Obama as a secret socialist radical, Glenn Beck... It's been downhill for awhile from my point of view.

Oh yes, who could forget middle aged people running around shouting at each other about who is the most conservative while in Paul Revere costumes. It was almost like the golden age of conservative clownery.

Quote

The farther the republican party falls the better in some ways. It is important for reasonable people on the right to have the scales fall from their eyes about their ideological allies. The worse it gets, the more will finally accept the magnitude of the rot... A team mentality is poisonous to clear thinking, and I think a willingness to see how bad some ideological allies are will help broadly improve the quality of conservative thought.

Not too sure about this. It seems to me the depths that the Republican Party can sink is really, really, low, and they can drag a lot of people down with them.

Quote

I am personally surprised by the amount of rationalizing and enabling of Trump. I think I underestimated the power of rationalization as a human psychological fact. They start with a very hardheaded look, [saying] he’s not good and the tweeting is horror, he’s a jerk, and the tweeting is distasteful, but you know, we’ll get this and this. He’ll be better than Hillary and we can live with it, but we’ll have to control him.

I'm really not. That's what conservatives do. And so long as people like Sean Hannity and Limbaugh support him, Trump will have the loyalty of the base.

Quote

Hopefully in the age of Trump more smart conservatives will wake up not just to how bad things are, but how bad they were and why their focus on the problems with liberals were misplaced. The Republican party and conservatives broadly need broad and fierce internal debate, not kid gloves with ideological allies and vitriol and hysteria with liberals. There are allies across the aisles, and enemies on your side.

The problem the "smart conservatives" will have:

1. They will have to take on the professional conservatives. These people make a lot of money and have a lot of power by preaching the gospel of the true conservatism. I doubt they will give up that gravy train easily.

2. Beating back the white resentment crowd isn't going to be easy. Plus, if the Republican Party gives that up, then it is probably going to have tougher time selling it's policies. That is quite a pickle.

3. And then of course what in the hell will the new conservatism updated for the 21st Century going to look like? It's just going be to the same old, same old, conservative policies we've known and laughed at for years?

[LongRider]

9 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

3. And then of course what in the hell will the new conservatism updated for the 21st Century going to look like? It's just going be to the same old, same old, conservative policies we've known and laughed at for years?

It will be a Real True Conservatism^TM!  We lowered taxes, now to lower the standard of living even more, lower education standards even more, lower voter participation even more, and jack up more, more, more hate of the black, brown, LBGTQ, immigrants and liberals even higher!  What's not the like about Real True Conservatism^TM?   True conservatism at last.  

[OldGimletEye]

Teles and Lindsey believe libertarianism needs a fresh start. They believe that it needs to run away from conservatism and stop being an ideology mainly of the wealthy.

I’m not sure how successful they will be, and don’t agree with everything they say, but anyway interesting;
 

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/regulatory-subsidy-extreme-leverage-reply-mike-konczal/

Quote

Mike Konczal has written a thoughtful, highly critical review of The Captured Economy that focuses on our analysis of financial regulation. Although we are not sure how much Konczal would agree with us once all misunderstandings are resolved, his criticisms are based on a misreading of our position. No doubt all failures of communication are on us, so we welcome this chance to straighten things out and clarify and elaborate our argument.

 

Quote

 First, they could have allowed more liberal branching, as some states had begun experimenting with during the 1920s. Second, they could have mandated greater reliance on equity financing, as the “Chicago Plan” forwarded by Irving Fisher and others would have done in dramatic fashion by requiring that bankers hold reserves equal to 100 percent of deposits (thus ensuring that bank lending would be financed much more heavily with equity).

The Chicago Plan, endorsed by Fisher is interesting. As conservative sorts of people, know, Banks create most of the money in the economy by way of deposits. The Chicago Plan would have eliminated that and made the government the sole provider of money. It’s a reform that would be worth talking about today.

Quote

Note that this explanation departs from efficient-markets thinking and embraces a “behavioral finance” approach. We believe that bubbles are a regular feature of asset markets, and that it is possible for everyone to take on too much risk at the same time because they are blind to how risky what they are doing really is. By regularly intervening to stave off reality checks that would make people more risk-averse, the government has actively abetted the inflation of the biggest bubble of them all: the U.S. financial sector bubble.

Well its good to see some libertarians abandoning the EMH, and apparently, not doing it, when it's convenient to become an asset mispricing concern troll.
 

Quote

But moral hazard doesn’t just incentivize consciously aggressive risk-taking. Once you’ve taken the behavioral turn, you see that moral hazard also causes people to underestimate the risks they’re taking. This is what the formal and informal safety nets constructed for the financial sector combine to do: they make the high-wire act of extreme leverage seem a lot closer to the ground than it really is.

I don’t disagree about moral hazard problems but two things. One is no politician is going to let the bottom drop out of the economy. And Bankers know it. Secondly, it doesn’t seem quite right to impose high cost one generation, just to teach bankers a lesson. There has to be some mechanism of not letting the economy implode, while making bankers really, really, dislike what happens if the government has to get involved to clean up their messes.

Quote

As to ad hoc bailouts, we have already explained how they propped up reliance on extreme leverage in the face of repeated brushes with disaster. In our understanding, they accomplished this, not by reducing known risks for large and systemically important institutions, but by suppressing risk aversion generally. In the years leading up to the financial crisis, market participants generally had no idea of the risks they were running—in significant part because policymakers kept stepping in and absorbing the downside. 

I don't disagree we shouldn't have ad hoc bailouts. We should have a very clear process of what is going to happen during a financial crises. And it should be very clear that bank CEOs and shareholders are really, really, not going to like it.

Quote

As this analysis and other studies have found, higher capital standards offer the prospect of significantly higher output over the long term, as the costs in terms of higher lending spreads (caused by higher financing costs for banks) are more than offset by avoiding the enormous losses that financial crises inflict.

This is something that all reasonable people can agree on, I think. Though the case against deposit insurance is a bit overblown.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Nasty LongRider said:

It will be a Real True Conservatism^TM!  We lowered taxes, now to lower the standard of living even more, lower education standards even more, lower voter participation even more, and jack up more, more, more hate of the black, brown, LBGTQ, immigrants and liberals even higher!  What's not the like about Real True Conservatism^TM?   True conservatism at last.  

It will be the best conservatism evah!!!

[Jace, Extat]

Wasn't the American education system hammered out by a bunch of big business guys to produce as many minimum-standard models as possible for as cheap as possible?

I'm sensing a puzzle here...

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Inigima said:

WaPo says this isn't true: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2018/01/28/no-ivanka-trump-didnt-stop-jose-andres-from-getting-into-a-party-heres-what-really-happened/

Andres apologized and was sorry for the misunderstanding due to Reasons that he ramped up.

Find us a guy in that house family and administration who would do that, OK?

As for the Reasons he might jump conclusions when he's been feeding Puerto Ricans and this family has done nothing but speak degrading and humiliating things about Puerto Rico and the people who live there, and uses that as an excuse to pretend they aren't even US ciitizens, much less suffering, well.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

History is made by imperfect human beings. Some are really good , some really indifferent and some are really bad.

But somehow, isn't it interesting, that the worst consequences of the indifferent and really bad are always most visited upon African Americans from 1607 until now . . .  including writing them and their experiences out of the mainstream of US History -- in popular history, academic history, politics, legal systems etc.

[Inigima]

7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Andres apologized and was sorry for the misunderstanding due to Reasons that he ramped up.

Find us a guy in that house family and administration who would do that, OK?

As for the Reasons he might jump conclusions when he's been feeding Puerto Ricans and this family has done nothing but speak degrading and humiliating things about Puerto Rico and the people who live there, and uses that as an excuse to pretend they aren't even US ciitizens, much less suffering, well.

Easy, killer. I'm no Trump fan. I'm just pointing out that the story is bogus, which it is. 

[Martell Spy]

A great long read on Manafort.

The Plot Against America
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/

Quote

 One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

 

[ThinkerX]

This sounds like something the 'Left' would dream up.  But, its the Trump crew, and given his love of authoritarian strongmen, I have to wonder if there isn't a great big internal security component as well:

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/axios-trump-administration-is-considering-nationalizing-5g-mobile-network/ar-BBImDs1?ocid=ob-fb-enus-580

 

The US government is considering a federal takeover of portions of the country's mobile broadband networks, according to

documents obtained by Axios.

A National Security Council official presented senior members of the Trump administration and other agencies with information suggesting that the United States needs to centralize its 5G network by the end of President Donald Trump's first term as a safeguard against Chinese cybersecurity and economic threats, according to the documents.

[Yukle]

Reading through the past few posts, I can see an assumption underlying the arguments that I disagree with when I observe politics.

People aren't identifying as conservative, and therefore Republican, or progressive, and therefore Democratic. They're identifying as the party itself, with the objective of winning power and having it being held. Idealists within each exist, and the people who are ideologically bound to a party exist, but I don't think people are voting to see particular policies enacted (or poor working class people wouldn't keep voting for the elephants who are not working to their interests) but they're voting to see their party win, like a sports club.

[Jace, Extat]

5 minutes ago, Yukle said:

Reading through the past few posts, I can see an assumption underlying the arguments that I disagree with when I observe politics.

People aren't identifying as conservative, and therefore Republican, or progressive, and therefore Democratic. They're identifying as the party itself, with the objective of winning power and having it being held. Idealists within each exist, and the people who are ideologically bound to a party exist, but I don't think people are voting to see particular policies enacted (or poor working class people wouldn't keep voting for the elephants who are not working to their interests) but they're voting to see their party win, like a sports club.

Weak parties, strong partisanship.

It's why I am excited that Democrat approval isn't as high as you would think in such times. Maybe it indicates a return to accountability.