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US Politics: Red Whine Hangover


Fragile Bird

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Once again the robot troll presents his style that leaves readers scratching their heads, wondering, what does he think he's saying because whatever it was he didn't write it that way.

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5 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Once again the robot troll presents his style that leaves readers scratching their heads, wondering, what does he think he's saying because whatever it was he didn't write it that way.

I'm still proud of that neat trick I did where I wrote something about stepping back and looking at something from a perspective being ignored so inanely that anybody willing to figure out what I was saying wasn't going to immediately explode in incoherent rage. I thought it was a risk that I would be running if I was more forthright. As later events, threads, and posters showed, it was worth doing.

 

But either you can't understand the concern that a low-population state with a commodities-orientated economy can be crushed without much notice by the legislative preferences of states with different economies and much larger populations. Or know some ways that concern has shaped American politics post WWII. Or you don't get a "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" reference.

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8 hours ago, Rippounet said:


To borrow Madison's terminology, most of us live in republics. Very few of us experience anything even remotely close to actual democracy however. It might seem pedantic to point that out, but it's not. It really explains a great deal of the mess we're in right now.

Madison largely referred to "pure democracy" when speaking of democracy. 

The Framers largely understood the republic to be a representative democracy. Eugene Volokh lays out a good line of reasoning. End result: the U.S. is a democracy and a republic.

As to the mess, it's because of a congressional act from 1929. It's not a constitutional issue. No such act, Gore wins in 2000. No such act, Clinton wins in 2016 with a Democratic majority in the House. No such act, I suspect the arc of increasing partisanship would be very different as the GOP would have no hope at the presidency if it stuck to its approach.

 

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How should representative democracy look? Would a system that lets a small block of voters select a rep or reps, strictly controlled by the number of voters in each block, who then sit in a regional council in a province of a larger state and those reps then vote members of said councils to represent their membership and to sit in the large national council to make the big decisions that can affect all voters, be adequate for a democratic system? This is the system my union uses and at our national gathering 2000+ people do manage to get stuff done., while representing over 650,000 members.

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On 10/8/2018 at 5:41 PM, Cas Stark said:

I don't really know, me, I am made pretty jittery by the ideas of abolishing the electoral college, changing the senate, because 2 from every state now isn't fair to high population states, moving to a straight popular vote for president, and packing the supreme court II.  This from my perspective sounds like a desire to destroy a whole lot of American institutions in order to get power. I am sure you know, a lot of these 'checks and balances' and levels, etc. exist for exactly the reason of not having a society run by 51%.  Gerrymandering is done by both parties, so that's a draw.  I find this all very troubling, and it's weird to me coming from people who spend 24/7 in semi hysterical rants about Trump suspending elections and turning into Hitler/Stalin/Pinchochet that these ideas don't strike anyone as problematic, or that would create a negative impression for conservatives.

Unless I'm having a brain fart I don't think I ever got back to this.

Keep in mind that what you listed have only been argued for by some, they are not all majority opinions among liberals and the people making them have exactly zero power. The Electoral College is a relic of three centuries ago, and it was necessary to bind the Union. I don't know if the Founding Fathers would still think it's a positive thing today. Keep in mind, Democrats have won, Keep in mind, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections and won a plurality in the one that preceded them. And yet, they lost three of those elections. That's not healthy.

As to the Senate, please just answer one simple question: his it healthy for 39 million people to be represented by 44 Senators and another 39.5 people to be represented by 2? Especially when the latter are probably overall more important to the country as a whole? I think every state should get one and the remaining 50 are proportionally allocated. Changing that one thing would fix so many of our country's problems. 

Packing the Supreme Court is just flat out stupid, and I pray that Trump never finds out that he could actually try to do it.

Yes both sides to Gerrymander. But is it at the same rate? Furthermore, do you not take into account that one side largely wants to do away with it while the other is clinging to it and openly saying they are using it combined with voter suppression to hold on to power?

As far as Trump goes, yes he is dangerous. People like that should never have power. I don't think he's going to turn into those kind of people, but I don't think he respects democratic norms, and once you go down that road all bets are off. And to be fair, did Republicans speak any differently about Obama or Clinton? The key difference here is that they would actually never do what we should all fear most. Trump, OTOH, has that possibility. I would not be here somewhat freaking out if we were discussing the actions of President Rubio, or President JEB! or any of the other normal candidates. I can't honestly say where my mind would be with a President Cruz, but I wouldn't fear him trying to become a dictator. 

 

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I would say it probably all started to go seriously downhill with Watergate, then you saw  overall belief/trust in U.S. institutions. Bork was a big turning point.  The liberals went nutty when Reagan won, and then the conservatives went just as nutty when Clinton won.  There are lot of other smaller issues, like the various tinkerings that have been done w/how Congress works starting in the 70s, that yeah, they took power away from the chairs and now nothing gets done, so was that really, in hindsight, good? or not so good.  We're in a very bad place right now on almost any form of measurement and I don't expect that to change.  Sometimes societies go crazy and ruin themselves.  It's always totally obvious who was the real 'villain' in hindsight and what were the missed chances for a correction, but that's only in hindsight.  Like I said yesterday, liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think the same, and no one is interested in finding a common ground.  But, I appreciate the polite exchange.

There are several points along the way that got us to where we are today, but there is one that stands out above all else: Gingrich. Newt Gingrich is the individual who changed American politics. Prior to him, politicians wanted to win on the value of their ideas. Gingrich introduced the politics of winning by humiliating your opponents. And once Republicans saw that it worked, after not holding the House for four decades, they never looked back, and that's why today the mantra of the conservative movement is "own the libs." It's not morals, nor values, nor ideals, nor good governance. it's about inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the opposition, and it explains exactly why Trump behaves they way he does, magnified by the fact that it's his intrinsic nature anyways. 

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Don't think this has been posted here, if so sorry..

Dina Powell Eyed to Replace Haley at UN

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Dina Powell, a Goldman Sachs executive and former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump, has had discussions with senior members of the administration about possibly succeeding Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. [...]

President Trump confirmed late Tuesday that Dina Powell is on his short-list for U.N. ambassador, along with four other candidates that he did not name. Trump was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to Omaha, Nebraska.

Yet it is unclear how much interest Powell has in leaving Goldman again to rejoin the Trump team. A person familiar with her thinking said she is happy at the investment bank and has yet to make a decision about another career-defining move.

Yeah, if I was at Goldman Sachs I wouldn't want to go to the UN either.

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19 minutes ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

Unless I'm having a brain fart I don't think I ever got back to this.

Keep in mind that what you listed have only been argued for by some, they are not all majority opinions among liberals and the people making them have exactly zero power. The Electoral College is a relic of three centuries ago, and it was necessary to bind the Union. I don't know if the Founding Fathers would still think it's a positive thing today. Keep in mind, Democrats have won, Keep in mind, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections and won a plurality in the one that preceded them. And yet, they lost three of those elections. That's not healthy.

As to the Senate, please just answer one simple question: his it healthy for 39 million people to be represented by 44 Senators and another 39.5 people to be represented by 2? Especially when the latter are probably overall more important to the country as a whole? I think every state should get one and the remaining 50 are proportionally allocated. Changing that one thing would fix so many of our country's problems. 

Packing the Supreme Court is just flat out stupid, and I pray that Trump never finds out that he could actually try to do it.

Yes both sides to Gerrymander. But is it at the same rate? Furthermore, do you not take into account that one side largely wants to do away with it while the other is clinging to it and openly saying they are using it combined with voter suppression to hold on to power?

As far as Trump goes, yes he is dangerous. People like that should never have power. I don't think he's going to turn into those kind of people, but I don't think he respects democratic norms, and once you go down that road all bets are off. And to be fair, did Republicans speak any differently about Obama or Clinton? The key difference here is that they would actually never do what we should all fear most. Trump, OTOH, has that possibility. I would not be here somewhat freaking out if we were discussing the actions of President Rubio, or President JEB! or any of the other normal candidates. I can't honestly say where my mind would be with a President Cruz, but I wouldn't fear him trying to become a dictator. 

 

There are several points along the way that got us to where we are today, but there is one that stands out above all else: Gingrich. Newt Gingrich is the individual who changed American politics. Prior to him, politicians wanted to win on the value of their ideas. Gingrich introduced the politics of winning by humiliating your opponents. And once Republicans saw that it worked, after not holding the House for four decades, they never looked back, and that's why today the mantra of the conservative movement is "own the libs." It's not morals, nor values, nor ideals, nor good governance. it's about inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the opposition, and it explains exactly why Trump behaves they way he does, magnified by the fact that it's his intrinsic nature anyways. 

Much more this; Trump behaves the way he does because 1) he's always done it, never had any constraints on him, and 2) the alpha male thing of never backing down and BS through things does work, it may be vulgar and very unpopular in our current era of the feelings as paramount, but it works.  I was thinking the other day Trump is a bit like Henry VIII....never studied for his current role, responds to flattery, superficial intellect,  holds grudges, bored by details, easily distracted, but his instincts serve him well.  You should be glad he's not got a Cromwell, then he might be dangerous, but he doesn't and he isn't.  IMO

Gingrich had and has ideas, you may not agree with them, but he's got them. And he and Clinton eventually did compromise and a lot of things were passed and signed, some good, some not so good.

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8 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Nikki Haley has resigned as UN ambassador. I just heard the news, fon’t Know the reason. Did she quit or get fired?

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Haley's is also the first major Administration exit since that anonymous New York Timesop-ed in which a still-unknown "senior Administration official" talked about how officials were working to check Trump's impulses and even undermine him in certain ways.

Haley's name quickly rose to the top when it came to potential authors of the op-ed - given her well-established independence within the Administration - but she issued perhaps the strongest rebuke of the author in an op-ed of her own.

Methinks she doth protest too much?

I'm not familiar with her op-ed. My question is did she criticise the op-ed for existing and thus showing the underbelly of the Administration, or did she credibly rebutt the central claim of the op-ed?

Personally I never thought much of her. Her arguments (that I saw) in the UN were typically nationalistic, belligerent and simplistic. Though I can see why that means she enjoyed some degree of bipartisan support among the US population. Most people mistake nationalism for patriotism. They like belligerence against external criticism. And simplistic arguments have wide appeal because they are easy for a majority of the people to understand.

But I've only seen here in the international news headline grabbing stuff. She might be a much more credible operator n the areas that don't grab the headlines. Though I assume most of the headline grabbing stuff coming from the UN, involving the USA, is the same whether it's US news or International news. 

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3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Starting from there, it's hardly surprising that federalism was designed to give the people of some states slightly more political influence than the people of others. The "Great compromise," was not meant to preserve or respect the power of the people any more than the rest of the constitution.

Madison actually drafted the Virginia Plan which would have created a bicameral legislature with representation in both houses proportional to the population of each state (i.e. basically what the people in this thread who want to abolish equal representation in the Senate want). The Great Compromise was about many things, but above all it was meant to get all states (large and small) to sign up.

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50 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

2) the alpha male thing of never backing down and BS through things does work, it may be vulgar and very unpopular in our current era of the feelings as paramount, but it works. 

An "alpha male" is not a thing. That would be what is referred to as an asshole and it does not "work" unless words are used in a manner other than their correct meaning.

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Since I have posted on Apportionment many many many times in this thread series, let's take that 1300 representatives number @Ran is throwing out and see what it implies:

For reference, the 65 members of the HOR in 1789 represented about 60,000 people each (population of approx 3.9M) and we had a nadir in the HOR in 1803 when 141 members represented a population of 5.3M for about 37,645 people per representative. 

Then in 1933, after the 1929 reapportionment act (that said we'd never not ever have more than 435 HOR members because first principles state that furniture is more important than people) and after the reapportionment in the 1932 elections, we had 123.2M people represented by 435 representatives, for about 243,000 people per representative

Currently, we have 435 members, apportioned on a population of 308.7M for about 710,000 people per representative. (Wyoming has a population of about 500,000, btw)

You can't quite graph the decrease in representation from 1789 to 1933 because the Civil War fucks up the graph really badly, but throwing out those numbers, it's a fairly steady decrease in representation of about 20,000 ppl/rep every census. If that level had continued from 1933 to 2013, we'd have decreased our representation down to about 422,000 ppl/representative.

Circling back after all those numbers, if we had 1300 representatives today, that'd be about 237,000 people per representative. pretty close to the 1933 number of 244,000 people per representative, or the nice round number of 250,000 people per representative (which would give us 1267 members of the HOR). I am completely on board with any of these metrics going forward, all are superior to 435.

 


Let's break down 710,000 people per representative mean? Well if we subtract 25% for those who can't vote (the under 18 and immigrants) that is 532,500 (potential) voters per district, but if only 60% of (potential voters) will vote, that is 319,500 voters per district, so a majority could be won by about 160,000 voters, more or less.

How does that compare to 1803? well we have 37,000 people per representative, divide by two to eliminate all the women, or 18,500 penises per representative, but eliminate 80% of those 18,500 to eliminate the children, the non property owner, the slaves, and immigrants etc, which means an eligible voter pool of 3,700 voters, or a majority won by a mere 1,851 votes. Now that is representation! but obviously not very helpful for today, because even crazy people like me do not think we should have a HOR of 8,343 members, which is what 1803 implies (and to have districts small enough that 1,851 votes could win it, we'd have 37,400 representatives!)

so what about 1933? 244,000 people per representative, subtract 25% for those who can't vote is 183,000 (potential) voters per representative, 60% of potential voters will vote, so that's 110,000 voters per district, or 55,001 votes to win a seat.  

That actually seems pretty reasonable to me. it would certainly make getting elected much more plausible for anyone who is not an elderly-wealthy-white-retired-penis-possessing attorney (which is the only demographic cohort with the plausible means and free time to run for election for a district comprising three quarters of a million people).

It also makes it much more plausible to actually know your representative and it more or less ensures that your representative is going to be invested in your community.  A Rural district in Missouri, for example, that needs to encompass three quarters of a million people is going to be tremendously vast, or will divide up a city (like springfield, MO) into portions in order to bolster their population numbers without allowing the city portion to influence the vote outcome. in theory, a smaller district size would allow for truly rural districts that are still reasonably compact. On the other hand, You could certainly do the same thing for smaller rural districts, if the district were only 250,000 people, it would be incredibly easy to divide up a city like springfield, MO into nine portions in order to bolster the rural population numbers without allowing the city portion to influence the vote. But even this would probably be better because the representative would still be able to better represent the unique needs of his rural district far better than they can for the vast tracts of land they now represent.

So even if reapportioning simply makes for more egregious and more extreme gerrymandering it still would make for better representation of the needs of the people than is currently provided by our system which values furniture more than people.

If you want reapportionment to make gerrymandering far less effective, you'd need to scale down at least to 125,000 per district, which would still be very easily gerrymandered, but probably even down to the 50,000-60,000 per district, because that's the level where you can start making it much more difficult to systematically target urban voters for disenfranchisement via gerrymandering.

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Apparently Taylor Swift coming out, politically speaking, has lead to a spike in voter registration. Making an egregious assumption I'm guessing that will mostly be young white women registering. Which is great. Unfortunately the right-wing machine trying to disenfranchise large numbers of people doesn't have its sights set on young white women. As they are not the target of systematic disenfranchisement, T Swizzle's influence is not getting to those most in need of being brought into the electoral fold. It could be apathy and disillusionment which prevents young women from registering, so if she's helped to overcome some of that then she's done a good thing.

I can imagine that any time voter registration numbers are increased in association with "young" and "female" that probably raises right wing eyebrows a bit regardless of race.

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28 minutes ago, Week said:

An "alpha male" is not a thing. That would be what is referred to as an asshole and it does not "work" unless words are used in a manner other than their correct meaning.

Being a sociopath totally works! I carved up my boss with an Elven long-sword and looted all his treasure.  Now, I just drink honey-mead all day.

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Ah well...

 

Not that anybody here cares, and I'm to preoccupied to come up with a link at the moment, but Murkowski is in major hot water with the Alaskan branch of the republican party over the Kavenaugh mess.  As in, they might toss her out of the party (possible, but not real likely)

 

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33 minutes ago, Week said:

An "alpha male" is not a thing. That would be what is referred to as an asshole and it does not "work" unless words are used in a manner other than their correct meaning.

He got elected, didn't he?  Having survived a series of scandals that would have destroyed a normal candidate who reacted in a normal, predicable way.  Call it whatever you want.

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5 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Not that anybody here cares, and I'm to preoccupied to come up with a link at the moment, but Murkowski is in major hot water with the Alaskan branch of the republican party over the Kavenaugh mess.  As in, they might toss her out of the party (possible, but not real likely)

Isn't she basically independent of them? She lost the primary and still managed to win as a write-in.

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