US Politics: Paradise Lost

[lokisnow]

I expect Pelosi to win the speaker because she’s an incredibly phenomenal strategist and as a process tactician she has incredible accuracy, remember how perfectly she threaded the ACA needle? the mostly feeshmen in the group opposing her are going to be out maneuvered due to their lack of experience, and some of the returning reps in the group will be peeled away with the concessions and favors they wanted all along. 

 

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

remember how perfectly she threaded the ACA needle?

Not sure that should be heralded too much as a legislative accomplishment.  How is letting 39 then 34 Democrats vote against it threading the needle?  That being said, I do agree she is a very adept tactician and that's part of why I too expect her to remain as Speaker.  Bit lofty on the praise though.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

31 minutes ago, DMC said:

That's probably true, but retirements would still be independent of my expectations in regards to comparing the losing incumbents against the entire caucus.  I think the most interesting interpretation of these results is that incumbents in vulnerable districts tended to vote more conservative than they probably should have - which suggests they were more worried about staying in line with Trump than signaling to their constituency that they were more moderate/independent/bi-partisan/what have you.  The fear Trump propagates is truly top-down!

I'm sure that's true. One of the more surprising aspects of Trump's first two years is the Republican party's complete and utter capitulation to him. 

[DMC]

Michael Avenatti arrested on domestic violence charges

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

One of the more surprising aspects of Trump's first two years is the Republican party's complete and utter capitulation to him. 

Definitely too much to hope for, but it'd be nice if stuff like this made them realize how much of a mistake that is.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

In 2018, we again find ourselves charting new territory. The argument that Comey’s firing might not be a catastrophe for democracy was that we now had Robert Mueller in the role of special counsel. The argument that Sessions’ firing might not be a catastrophe for democracy is that Mueller’s investigation may yet overcome any obstacles and reach its natural conclusion.

In 2018, we again find ourselves charting new territory.
Maybe, maybe not. But whatever the outcome of Mueller’s investigation, America is establishing new precedents. One precedent is that President Trump fired the FBI director—and Congress did nothing. Another is that Trump admitted the FBI’s investigation of his campaign motivated the firing—and Congress did nothing. A third precedent is that Trump fired the attorney general after having railed against him publicly for refusing to intervene in the investigation—and Congress has done nothing. A fourth precedent is that Trump circumvented the Justice Department’s order of succession so he could replace the attorney general with an individual who has directed partisan attacks at the special counsel, has described publicly how a new attorney general could undermine the investigation, has had a personal and political relationship with an individual involved in the investigation, and has been associated with a company that is the focus of a separate FBI investigation.

 

This Is the Saturday Night Massacre
It’s just happening in slow motion.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/jeff-sessions-firing-saturday-night-massacre-matthew-whitaker.html

[Fez]

25 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

I expect Pelosi to win the speaker because she’s an incredibly phenomenal strategist and as a process tactician she has incredible accuracy, remember how perfectly she threaded the ACA needle? the mostly feeshmen in the group opposing her are going to be out maneuvered due to their lack of experience, and some of the returning reps in the group will be peeled away with the concessions and favors they wanted all along. 

I wouldn't be so sure. Its certainly possible she hangs on, maybe even likely, but its not a given. The fact that Tim Ryan got almost a 1/3rd of the caucus to vote for him as minority leader after 2016 shows that a decent chunk of Pelosi's support is pretty soft. If this opposition group holds together past Thanksgiving, I wouldn't be surprised if things fall apart quickly for Pelosi as everyone scrambles to move up a rank.

Its only going to take somewhere between 17 and 19 votes to block her, and she's never had to deal with a margin that small for a meaningful vote (except in 2007/08, but she was much more popular then).

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

Amid all of this, House Democrats introduced a major bill that would protect access to the court system to millions of US workers. On October 30, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and a group of House Democrats introduced the Restoring Justice for Workers Act, which would ban businesses from requiring workers to sign arbitration clauses. News of the bill ended up buried in the avalanche of midterm coverage, but the proposal is worth highlighting because it would impact millions of US workers.

Forcing employees to sign arbitration agreements is common practice now, and usually happens during the hiring process. Workers essentially waive their right to sue the company for potentially violating the law, whether it’s related to sexual harassment, racial discrimination, stealing their wages, or anything else.

Instead, employees must take their claims to private arbitration, a quasi-legal forum with no judge, no jury, and nearly zero government oversight. Under this secretive process, workers are less likely to win their cases. And when they do win, they tend to get much less money than they would in court.

 

House Democrats have a sweeping plan to protect millions of workers’ legal rights
It’s actually quite simple.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/14/18087490/mandatory-arbitration-house-democrats

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Not sure that should be heralded too much as a legislative accomplishment.  How is letting 39 then 34 Democrats vote against it threading the needle?  That being said, I do agree she is a very adept tactician and that's part of why I too expect her to remain as Speaker.  Bit lofty on the praise though.

Gushing with praise for the competency of a Dem now as well. Are we sure Loki hasn't been replaced by a body snatchy because this is seriously creepy

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Michael Avenatti arrested on domestic violence charges

Ah, that old classic: people who dig pits for others often fall into a pit themselves. And of course, he claims to be completely innocent:

Quote

In a statement, Avenatti called the allegations "completely bogus."

"I wish to thank the hard working men and woman of the LAPD for their professionalism they were only doing their jobs in light of the completely bogus allegations against me," he said. "I have never been physically abusive in my life nor was I last night. Any accusations to the contrary are fabricated and meant to do harm to my reputation. I look forward to being fully exonerated."

 

[Fragile Bird]

36 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Ah, that old classic: people who dig pits for others often fall into a pit themselves. And of course, he claims to be completely innocent:

 

Wait...aren’t you the person who said more proof was needed against Kavanaugh? And are you suggesting his clients, who were paid off by Trump and have provided all kinds of personal details about Trump, were bogus?

[Darth Richard II]

Just now, Fragile Bird said:

Wait...aren’t you the person who said more proof was needed against Kavanaugh? And are you suggesting his clients, who were paid off by Trump and have provided all kinds of personal details about Trump, were bogus?

It's almost like he's some sort of hypocrite...

[SpaceChampion]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Michael Avenatti arrested on domestic violence charges

Seems it was a set-up, Jacob Wohl Appears To Take Credit For Michael Avenatti Arrest, Trump Fan Earlier Tried To Frame Robert Mueller

[Altherion]

32 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Wait...aren’t you the person who said more proof was needed against Kavanaugh? And are you suggesting his clients, who were paid off by Trump and have provided all kinds of personal details about Trump, were bogus?

Yes, I said more proof was needed. That's why this is hilarious: somebody finally gave him a taste of his own medicine. And I make no claims about his clients and Trump, but his accusations against Kavanaugh were so implausible that even Democrats say his involvement was counterproductive:

Quote

"Democrats and the country would have been better off if Mr. Avenatti spent his time on his Iowa vanity project rather than meddling in Supreme Court fights," a senior Senate Democratic aide fumed, referring to Avenatti toying with the idea of seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. "His involvement set us back, absolutely."

 

[drawkcabi]

1 minute ago, Triskele said:

Randomly playing around with the 2020 electoral map and have a question:

Has anyone seen any good analysis of how much the needle was tilted in Florida by the move to allow felons to vote again?  Does this not greatly help the Dem chances in Florida albeit far from guarantee a victory?

If one takes the 2016 map and flips Florida back to the Dems then the Dem candidate would only need to flip any one of the three proverbial blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  If all three of those were flipped back but all else is the same then we're back to very close to the Obama / Romney map.  Point being I guess that even with Ohio looking tougher for the Dems lately if they can just get Florida back in the fold they're in great shape in the EC.  

 

Never, never count on Florida.

The DNC should campaign there, sure.

Devote money and resources there, sure.

But when it comes to making an electoral map, just leave Florida out of it.

 

Trying to think of a clever turn on W's flub up of the "fool me once" saying but nothing's working but it all comes down to when it comes to elections Florida will always be counting on fools.

[lokisnow]

51 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Randomly playing around with the 2020 electoral map and have a question:

Has anyone seen any good analysis of how much the needle was tilted in Florida by the move to allow felons to vote again?  Does this not greatly help the Dem chances in Florida albeit far from guarantee a victory?

If one takes the 2016 map and flips Florida back to the Dems then the Dem candidate would only need to flip any one of the three proverbial blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  If all three of those were flipped back but all else is the same then we're back to very close to the Obama / Romney map.  Point being I guess that even with Ohio looking tougher for the Dems lately if they can just get Florida back in the fold they're in great shape in the EC.  

 

400,000 right? So this is a logistics problem. Only about 40% would probably bother with registration even if contacted, so 160,000 people to register.

 So let us say a paid staffer focused on voter registration can get about ten people per day registered. They work 250 ish days in 2019 @ a salary of  $50,000, so that’s 2,500 ppl  registered. But there’s probably about 150 work  days ($30,000 salary) in 2020 before registration closes, so let’s say 400 work days per staffer or 4000 people registered in the period remaining before the presidential election.

so to get 160,000 people registered you need 400 staffers working from now til then at a salary cost of 32 million (not including any overhead investments.

of those 160,000 newly registered, probably only about 100,000 vote, of which it’s likely democrats will be lucky to split more than 65/35, so democrats will Net plus 30,000 votes for an investment of 32 million .

probably worth it if that’s the margin in these FL elections, but you can see why democrats would rather not spend the money, it’s much preferred to give the money to expensive consultants and on ineffective tv commercials you feel much more accomplished as a politician with the ego injection of commercials than with the thanksless task of investing in democracy. :-/

[karaddin]

I thought the number being bandied about was ~1million? But the estimated voters coming from that was even smaller than the number you go, so it really confused me.

[SpaceChampion]

 

[OldGimletEye]

Now conservative sorts of people. Remember way back when, when ya all were running around saying "How 'bout that Cetic Tiger!". Sure you do. It was right around the time ya all were saying "Best Healthcare system in the world!".

Except Irish GDP data has to be read with a big effin grain of salt because of some dubious sort of accounting transactions.

Ireland though comes closer to the small open economy model where the world rate of return, r*, can likely be assumed to be given exogenously. It doesn't really apply to the US, which is not a small open economy.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/opinion/the-tax-cut-and-the-balance-of-payments-wonkish.html

Quote

Now, the TCJA played almost no role in the midterms: Republicans dropped it as a selling point, focusing on fear of brown people instead, while Democrats hammered health care. But now that the election is past, it seems like a good idea to revisit the bill and its effects. What I want to focus on in this piece is the effects on the balance of payments.

 

Quote

Why the balance of payments? Because the theory of the case - the not-necessarily-stupid rationale for the corporate tax cuts at the heart of the bill - depended crucially on claims about what tax cuts would do to international movements of capital. So one important piece of any attempt to assess the results so far involves looking at the balance of payments changes since the lower tax rate went into effect.

 

Quote

The claim by tax cut advocates was, however, that the tax cut would be passed through to workers, because we live in an integrated global capital market. There were multiple reasons not to believe this argument in practice, but it’s still worth working through its implications.

 

Quote

What tax-cut advocates argued was that the rate of return in the U.S., net of taxes, is set by global forces. Suppose that there is a global rate of return r*; then the U.S. will have to offer r*/(1-t), where t is the corporate tax rate.

 

Quote

But the logic of the pro-tax cut case depends on the cut facilitating a period of large trade deficits. (I don’t think anyone told Trump about this.)

Of course the orange knucklehead didn't understand this.

 

Quote

These shifted profits then show up in the data as investments abroad, even though they may not correspond to anything real, as is clearly the case for much foreign investment in Ireland.

International tax avoidance is, by the way, a big deal. Gabriel Zucman and his colleagues have shown that we’re talking about trillions of dollars of assets and many billions in lost tax revenue.

 

[Maithanet]

9 hours ago, lokisnow said:

400,000 right? So this is a logistics problem. Only about 40% would probably bother with registration even if contacted, so 160,000 people to register.

 So let us say a paid staffer focused on voter registration can get about ten people per day registered. They work 250 ish days in 2019 @ a salary of  $50,000, so that’s 2,500 ppl  registered. But there’s probably about 150 work  days ($30,000 salary) in 2020 before registration closes, so let’s say 400 work days per staffer or 4000 people registered in the period remaining before the presidential election.

so to get 160,000 people registered you need 400 staffers working from now til then at a salary cost of 32 million (not including any overhead investments.

of those 160,000 newly registered, probably only about 100,000 vote, of which it’s likely democrats will be lucky to split more than 65/35, so democrats will Net plus 30,000 votes for an investment of 32 million .

probably worth it if that’s the margin in these FL elections, but you can see why democrats would rather not spend the money, it’s much preferred to give the money to expensive consultants and on ineffective tv commercials you feel much more accomplished as a politician with the ego injection of commercials than with the thanksless task of investing in democracy. :-/

The 400k number is the number of black ex-cons.  The number of total ex-cons who were reinfranchised is something like 1.4 million.  This WaPo Article takes a stab at it, although I don't like some of the assumptions they make.  They added a caviat the article at the end that ex-cons vote very infrequently (16% for black voters, 12% for all others).  This would mean approximately 64k new black voters and 120k new white/latino/other voters.  So of those ~180k new voters, who many votes might the Democrats pick up?  It's hard to really say, but something on the order of 20-30k sounds right.  Which would make this incredibly close election even closer, and the 2018 result might see a split decision with Nelson and Desantis both winning very narrowly. 

[Fez]

Maine has completed the ranked choice vote tabulation for ME-2 and... we have another Democratic House pick-up. Golden won by just under 3,000 votes.

Susan Collins is now the only Republican left in Congress from anywhere in New England (Three of the six governors are Republican though).