Tywin et al. Posted September 13, 2018 Share Posted September 13, 2018 6 minutes ago, Zorral said: Further in the news one hopes is fake, tell us that Bloomberg is not going to run for POTUS in 2020! He'll be frackin' 78! https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/bloomberg-set-to-run-against-trump-in-2020-qvbfcrswg Listening to Market Place just now. The tariffs are going to make rebuilding after Florence even more expensive and difficult. Not only will materials such as lumber that are foundational to rebuilding going to cost a lot more, but as well, there are likely to be shortages of the much more expensive materials and items such as, say, bathroom fixtures, etc. Nah. He will either lose in the primary or lose in the general while helping Trump. I really can't see him doing that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zorral Posted September 13, 2018 Share Posted September 13, 2018 11 minutes ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said: Nah. He will either lose in the primary or lose in the general while helping Trump. I really can't see him doing that. Maybe ... if the orange nazi has his Katrina moment, of which he's evidently terrified he might -- not that he helps with that by throwing paper towels and denying to the Puerto Rican people that their disaster and 3000 dead are made up by Dems: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-obsessed-with-avoiding-his-own-katrina-even-if-its-too-late?ref=home Not to mention his government is staffed only by grafters, grifters, thieves and liars, who have no talent for anything else. Such as privatizing weather information in favor of a donor ... that will keep away Katrina moments won't it? He's such a frackin' idiot!!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 13, 2018 Share Posted September 13, 2018 13 minutes ago, Zorral said: Maybe ... if the orange nazi has his Katrina moment, of which he's evidently terrified he might -- not that he helps with that by throwing paper towels and denying to the Puerto Rican people that their disaster and 3000 dead are made up by Dems: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-obsessed-with-avoiding-his-own-katrina-even-if-its-too-late?ref=home Not to mention his government is staffed only by grafters, grifters, thieves and liars, who have no talent for anything else. Such as privatizing weather information in favor of a donor ... that will keep away Katrina moments won't it? He's such a frackin' idiot!!!!!!! “Has his Katrina moment” That ship has sailed whether he and the Republicans acknowledge it or not. Surely, it will be one of the first investigations launched should the Dems take the House. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deadlines? What Deadlines? Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 2 hours ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said: We said this about Dubya too..... ........How'd that work out? The one positive thing I’ll say about Dubya; at least he’s not trump. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zorral Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Evidently a goodly amount of the mess in today's election was created by the IDC people. Even the mayor's son's name had mysteriously disappeared from his district's rolls. Also a lot of voters got lying calls about the time of the polls being open and closed, and polls changing location. The good news is that turn-out was not bad. Some locations even had massive turn-out -- their word. Others reported good turn-out. IOW, voters do seem energized. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lokisnow Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 12 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said: Primary day for New York's state races. One thing I hope any NY posters or reader do is vote out IDC members if you live in their districts. (The IDC is a breakaway group of Democrats who have been caucusing with Republicans in the state senate, and it's been obvious all along the motivation has been just for the prime seats, pay raises, and perks that Republicans will throw them in order to retain control of the state senate.) The group is supposedly going to come back to the fold now, but they've said that before and left Democrats high and dry afterwards. The fact that they're continuing to illegally fund through a PAC supposed to be set up for a 3rd party, (but which was chaired until recently by the head of the IDC and only ever seems to pay out to IDC members) shows that their corruption is certainly still in place, and that they're likely to remain a separate group. Here's who the IDC members are, what district they represent, and who is challenging them on the ballot: DISTRICT IDC INCUMBENT CHALLENGER Senate District 11 Tony Avella John Liu Senate District 13 José Peralta Jessica Ramos Senate District 17 Simcha Felder* Blake Morris Senate District 20 Jesse Hamilton Zellnor Myrie Senate District 23 Diane Savino Jasmine Robinson Senate District 31 Marisol Alcantara Robert Jackson Senate District 34 Jeff Klein Alessandra Biaggi Senate District 38 David Carlucci Julie Goldberg Senate District 53 David Valesky Rachel May *Note: Felder is not actually with the IDC, but he is a Democrat who has been caucusing with Republicans separately. Lets do our best to kick their asses right out office, change the direction of the state party, and clean up some of Albany's notoriously corrupt culture. so far results don't seem great for the IDC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paladin of Ice Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 8 minutes ago, lokisnow said: so far results don't seem great for the IDC So far on the state's results website, nearly every name on that list is either losing or in a very tight race. The big exceptions are Felder, (although it was expected to be almost impossible to get him out) Diane Savino, (who is crushing it) and Valesky. Everyone else is at least in the political fight of their lives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paladin of Ice Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Update on the tallies so far. Here's the breakdown of the IDC members and their challengers again: DISTRICT IDC INCUMBENT CHALLENGER Senate District 11 Tony Avella John Liu Senate District 13 José Peralta Jessica Ramos Senate District 17 Simcha Felder* Blake Morris Senate District 20 Jesse Hamilton Zellnor Myrie Senate District 23 Diane Savino Jasmine Robinson Senate District 31 Marisol Alcantara Robert Jackson Senate District 34 Jeff Klein Alessandra Biaggi Senate District 38 David Carlucci Julie Goldberg Senate District 53 David Valesky Rachel May and here are the tallies at the moment: Liu has a lead of about 1,000 votes, (50.35 to 45.54%) over Avella. 200 of 224 districts reporting. Ramos has a 2,500 vote lead (52% to 40%) over Peralta. 143 of 159 districts reporting. Felder is up by about 4,700 votes (60% to 36%) on challenger Morris. Almost all districts in. Myrie has a 3,300 lead (52% to 43%) over Hamilton. 181 of 213 districts reporting. Savino has 60% of the vote against two challengers. That election is over and she's going back to Albany. Jackson has a 7,500 vote advantage over Alcantara. (53% to 36.5%) Almost all districts in. Biaggi has a lead on Klein himself, who seemed too entrenched to lose. Biaggi is up 1,700 votes, about 52 to 46.6%. Still a decent amount of districts to be made official however. I overlooked Carlucci before, he seems well on his way as he's up 58% to 37%, although almost 40% of the districts there are not officially in. Valesky has fallen slightly behind May despite his strong start in early districts. She has an edge of 600 votes, 50.5 to 47%. All districts are in, so unless anything happens at the margins, May pulled a big come from behind victory. So two members of eight members of the IDC look likely to remain, and Felder (who, lets remember, was not in the IDC and doing his own separate running with Republicans and pissing on Democrats thing) remains in charge of his personal fiefdom, but the IDC just effectively ceased to exist barring some big turnarounds or some major recruiting, and given what just happened, I doubt anyone is going to be eager to follow their example. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldGimletEye Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Trump, the orange swamp thing bull shit artist. https://www.vox.com/2018/9/13/17855268/trump-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-tweets Quote The falsehoods President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning about the Hurricane Maria death toll are disturbing. They’re also a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s political strategy: a complete disdain for the truth, the attribution of all dissent to partisan animus, and just-beneath-the-surface racial appeals. In two tweets, Trump cast doubts on the rigorous statistical research finding that roughly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, accusing the work by researchers at one of America’s leading universities as “being done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.” Krugman takes a stroll down memory lane and reminisces about years of Republican Party dipshittery. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/opinion/lehman-economic-crisis.html Quote But the broader economic crisis went on much longer. Unemployment rose to almost 10 percent, then came down with painful slowness; it didn’t get back to 5 percent until seven years after Lehman’s fall. Why didn’t rapid financial recovery lead to rapid economic recovery? Quote When Christina Romer, the administration’s top economist, argued for more stimulus, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, dismissed it as “sugar.” Christina Romer, prolific student of the Great Depression getting told by Geithner how things are. What a joke. Quote But the most important reason the great slump went on so long was scorched-earth Republican opposition to anything and everything that might have helped offset the fallout from the housing bust. When I say “scorched earth,” I’m not being hyperbolic. Let’s not forget that in the summer of 2011 Republicans in Congress threatened to provoke a new financial crisis by refusing to raise the debt limit. Their goal was to blackmail President Barack Obama into cutting spending at a time when unemployment was still 9 percent and U.S. real borrowing costs were close to zero. Yeah that 2011 shennigans was a complete distraction. And then you had Republican idiots running around claiming that debt default by the US would be no big deal, right about the time their was shortage of safe assets of which the US government was the main supplier. Quote You had to be extremely credulous to take fake G.O.P. deficit hawkery seriously; unfortunately, there were a lot of credulous pundits out there. The urge to both sides and look all reasonable and centristy and stuff is apparently very strong. Quote Anyway, the events of the past two years have made the reality of what happened crystal clear. The very same politicians who piously declared that America couldn’t afford to spend money supporting jobs in the face of a deep, prolonged slump just rammed through a huge, deficit-exploding tax cut for corporations and the wealthy even though the economy is currently near full employment. No, they haven’t abandoned their commitment to fiscal responsibility; they never cared about deficits in the first place. My advice is that next time your Republican friend or family member starts going on about "the deficit" laugh in their face. Related: Quote One of the particularly frustrating, fact-free aspects of the conservative push to add (or ramp up) work requirements in anti-poverty programs like Medicaid or SNAP is that low-income people who can do so are already working hard. Moreover, as the job market tightens, they respond to tightening conditions. On the methodology of macro. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/13/financial-crisis-foundations-macroeconomics/ Quote A, if not the, preoccupation of macroeconomists for the last generation has been providing macroeconomics with a microeconomic foundation. At one level this totally makes sense. How can one be against establishing foundations? The microfoundations only thing got started basically because Robert Lucas convinced the profession that was the only legitimate way to build macro models, to the point that any other method couldn't get published. I'm not opposed to the micro foundations approach necessarily, but it shouldn't be the only way to think and build macro models. Quote Yet it has to be acknowledged that the principle of building macroeconomics on microeconomic foundations, as applied by economists, contributed next to nothing to predicting, explaining or resolving the Great Recession. The insights into the financial meltdown that policymakers found most valuable came from scholars, such as Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, who thought in terms of broad aggregates and made no effort to establish micro foundations. My problem is basically that micro economics still hasn't come up with a very good theory about markets reach a general equilbrium. The good old Walrasian auctioneer story simply is a nonstarter. How actors change prices and expectations through time and whether that eventually leads to a stable equilibrium condition, still isn't, in my view, satisfactorily explained. Franklin Fisher's Disequlibrum Foundations of Equilbrium Economics ought to be required reading in any upper level econ program. Unfortunately it isn't. Quote But some kind of foundation is still required for macroeconomics. That is why I’m very excited by my friend Andrei Shleifer’s new book with Nicola Gennaioli, “A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility.” The book puts expectations at the center of thinking about economic fluctuations and financial crises — but these expectations are not rational. In fact, as all the evidence suggests, they are subject to systematic errors of extrapolation. The book suggests that these errors in expectations are best understood as arising out of cognitive biases to which humans are prone. People aren't completely stupid, nor are they clearly rational, at least in the sense of always getting price expectations correct in future periods. Any model, that doesn't have a learning dynamic it, isn't really credible. I think rational expectations is fine when you your starting to think about a model in the beginning as it is usually easier to work with, but eventually it needs some kind of learning dynamic put in, contra U of Chicago's John Cochrane. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 WaPo reports that Paul Manafort is taking a deal to plead guilty. Quote President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has agreed to plead guilty to federal crimes at a hearing Friday morning, officials said. The planned plea, if accepted by a judge, would short-circuit his second trial scheduled to begin later this month in the District on charges of money laundering and lobbying violations. The details of Manafort’s plea were not immediately clear, including whether he would be providing any information to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of any deal. People familiar with the plea discussions have previously said that Manafort has no intention of cooperating with Mueller, so it’s possible any prospective agreement could allow him to admit guilt without providing information to investigators. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 What is the incentive for prosecutors to offer a deal without cooperation? It looked like they had a strong case so why not just nuke him, add more to what he gets from the last trial? He has treated the whole process with contempt likely expecting a pardon anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 18 minutes ago, Morpheus said: What is the incentive for prosecutors to offer a deal without cooperation? It looked like they had a strong case so why not just nuke him, add more to what he gets from the last trial? He has treated the whole process with contempt likely expecting a pardon anyway. A defendant always has the option to plead guilty, whether he agrees to cooperate with prosecutors on separate cases is a totally separate issue. Since he's only pleading guilty now, at this late stage, he won't get as good a deal as he probably would have earlier, but it's still generally a lower sentence than being found guilty by a jury. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 20 minutes ago, Maithanet said: A defendant always has the option to plead guilty, whether he agrees to cooperate with prosecutors on separate cases is a totally separate issue. Since he's only pleading guilty now, at this late stage, he won't get as good a deal as he probably would have earlier, but it's still generally a lower sentence than being found guilty by a jury. I am aware there is the option to enter a guilty plea but I thought he was only pleading guilty to some of the counts as part of a deal. Why not push for more? Are the other crimes harder to prove? At any rate this looks mostly like keeping some bad headlines out of the press until Trump pulls the trigger on a pardon as that article suggests. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 9 minutes ago, Morpheus said: I am aware there is the option to enter a guilty plea but I thought he was only pleading guilty to some of the counts as part of a deal. Why not push for more? Are the other crimes harder to prove? At any rate this looks mostly like keeping some bad headlines out of the press until Trump pulls the trigger on a pardon as that article suggests. I don't think we know enough to say right now. The facts are coming out soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Ok, I just saw a lawyer on TV explaining that those other counts will essentially be folded into the two to which he plead guilty, he is really taking responsibility for all of it, but it is down to technical sentencing details, if I understand correctly. This guy also thinks this is bad for Trump even if Manafort is not cooperating. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 12 minutes ago, Morpheus said: Ok, I just saw a lawyer on TV explaining that those other counts will essentially be folded into the two to which he plead guilty, he is really taking responsibility for all of it, but it is down to technical sentencing details, if I understand correctly. This guy also thinks this is bad for Trump even if Manafort is not cooperating. It's not good for Trump, but it might be the least bad possible option. It's coming on a Friday during a major hurricane, this definitely won't get the press that it normally would. And if Manafort had gone to trial, then Manafort and corruption are in the news for the next month, along with his (almost) inevitable guilty verdict a right before the midterms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 7 minutes ago, Maithanet said: It's not good for Trump, but it might be the least bad possible option. It's coming on a Friday during a major hurricane, this definitely won't get the press that it normally would. And if Manafort had gone to trial, then Manafort and corruption are in the news for the next month, along with his (almost) inevitable guilty verdict a right before the midterms. That was my thinking. Breaking news now says the deal is being called a “cooperation agreement” so maybe forget all my questions anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Update: Prosecutor has announced Manafort is now cooperating with Robert Mueller. I didn't expect that. Perhaps the pardon wasn't going to solve all his problems after all? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morpheus Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 A hunt in which the witches voluntarily drown themselves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aceluby Posted September 14, 2018 Share Posted September 14, 2018 Just now, Morpheus said: A hunt in which the witches voluntarily drown themselves. FAKE NEWS! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.