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US Politics: A Feast for Crows


DMC

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10 minutes ago, SweetPea said:

There are no strings attached to it, so you can stop with the bullshit excuses and admit that if passed, it will be a net positive for the country, and it will happen by the Democrats working together with the evil KKK nazi party. And you would deny it. You'd rather not have positive development than to be 'tainted with evil' or some such shit that you believe. You're the sort of person who would enjoy if the economy tanked and people suffered because it would hurt Trump's popularity.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww ... peas and froggies, etc., they are just bad people.  They don't really have any ideology at all other than wanting to kiss up to and join what they believe is the winning side. No point in even reading much less engaging, with their complete moral bankruptcy, other than, of course, to:fencing:  and :lol: at them.

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1 hour ago, SweetPea said:

Why are you intentionally being a fool? Or do you actually believe that oceans are magical barriers that no air currents can cross?

Did you actually read the article and what Trump said? He said the the US has the cleanest air in the world and the rest of the world has really dirty air and the oceans are really small when it comes to the atmosphere, and by implication they are to blame cuz all that filthy air is polluting the US.

First of all the US doesn’t have the cleanest air in the world, Canada, Australia, Finland and other countries have cleaner air. By his own words then the US’s filthy air is polluting Canada. Secondly, that air was cleaned up because the US has passed more and more regulations regarding air pollution and plant equipment, forcing dirty industries to clean up. Regulations he has declared are a burden to industry and wants repealled. So much for his declaration that he’s an award winning environmentalist, lol.

Third, his support for the coal industry and his promises that more coal mines will open and more coal burning plants will open totally undermines the ‘pollution is coming from elsewhere’ line of argument. If particulates are traveling across the ocean from India and China and dropping on the US, where the hell are particulates from US coal plants dropping? Did the Atlantic become magically bigger than the Pacific so nothing from the US land on Europe? Is the atmosphere different for the US than it is for other countries?

Fourthly, have you ever even looked at a map? The filthy air in India drops it’s particulates all over India, but mainly on the areas where the plants producing the particulates are and the regions within a few hundred miles of them. See, there’s this giant ocean called the Pacific between India and the US. 

There is a concept that has been advanced by environmentalists and others who are worried about the Earth that the world is small and we only have one planet, and everything we do as mankind impacts our planet. Trump is trying to paint himself with this ‘oceans are small and the atmosphere is big’ bullshit to show he cares about the air, while fucking promoting coal plants and cancelling tax write offs for electric vehicles and talking down the price of oil so Americans can drive giant gas guzzling trucks and SUVs spewing out green house gases by the ton. You can take that ‘are you a fool do you think the oceans are a magical barrier’ bullshit of yours and stuff it where the sun don’t shine.

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On 11/28/2018 at 9:37 AM, DMC said:

Oh yes, totally agree.  The fact this leadership doesn't already have well-groomed replacements (to be fair, there are a handful, e.g. Ben Ray Lujan, Hakeem Jeffries, Cheri Bustos) is both irresponsible and demonstrates their self-interest.

Jeffries and Luján got into leadership roles below the top 3, according to a WaPo article and an NPR story from yesterday, so it looks like they’re becoming official as presumed future leaders of the party.

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Lol my god is Pelosi fucking garbage. I completely missed how she was bringing up how W Bush treated her and called her # 3. She is such a worthless bag of shit and completely unaware of how terrible both her positions and republican positions that she agreed with are. 

Her fucking friendly bullshit with a white supremacist party shows how she is okay with bigotry, most likely a bigot herself, and only cares about power. 

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Nate silver made the comment that 60 million democrats voted in the midterms which is an unbelievable turnout number. And he compared it to the insanely gigantic wave in 2010 (63 house seats flipped) which took merely 45 million republican votes to achieve

 

lets break it down to the senate though. That’s 50 million democrat votes for democrat senators versus 34 million republican votes for republican senators. A sixteen million vote margin in senate elections and republicans gained three seats.

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and in the senate in 2010, democrats got only 29 million votes to republicans 32 million votes (and lost six seats as a result) (this was a drop from democrats in 2004 earning 44 million votes for the same seats and republicans also dropped 7 million votes from their 2004 senate totals). That is a democrat drop of 35% for the same senate seats in a republican wave year that’s horrible but it is also offset a little by a republican drop of 18%. That gives a delta of Democrats underperforming in the midterm by 16% relative to republicans.

so apples and oranges because of senate class seat variance, but yes it is incredible that democrats found 21 million new midterm senate voters (and no one is talking about it), but it is equally incredible that republican midterm senate vote turnout was 106% of their biggest wave election in the modern era!

 

to me, the unreported story of this election is the utterly phenomenal republican turnout to staunch the democrat wave.

so let us take a thought experiment. Republicans should not have been +6% from 2010, and they should have had turnout down -16% from 2010 in a democrat wave, add 6 to 16, and we should take away 22% of republican vote totals to see what the results should have been in a normal democrat wave year.

if republicans numbers fell off that much they would have won senate seats in Utah, Wyoming, MIssissippi, and Nebraska. 

Thats it, every other seat, including Mississippi special, would have gone to democrats for a seat total of 31 in one election!

so what was the one thing that woke up republicans to the midterm elections and motivated them to vote in outrageous numbers? The confirmation hearings over Kavanaugh. If The info on Ford has never come out and that media circus never had happened democrats would have had an utterly historic victory in the senate. 

So that means Feinstein was right to sit on the Ford info, if it generated republican enthusiasm to that degree, it was a massive loss for democrats to not have the quiet 55+ confirmation vote after an uneventful hearing Kavanaugh probably would have gotten.

and I was wrong and Feinstein is smarter than me, not a shocker, I know.

bit this is a pretty fascinating incredible election with unbelievably positive democrat numbers. Needs more analysis of the numbers.

if democrats can find 21 million extra voters just for senate in a midterm, what does that indicate they’re going to accomplish for the presidential election? Nothing ? Something? In any event targeting 30 senate seats every cycle should be the baseline, because we came damn close to achieving that outcome this year.

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2 hours ago, SweetPea said:

I'm not saying to compromise on issues that you find morally horrible. Obviously, that won't happen, just as Trump won't compromise on something like border security.

The obviousness is the part that a lot of people find not so obvious. 

2 hours ago, SweetPea said:

I'm saying it would be better to find common ground on issues both parties can agree on. It may not be much, but it's certainly better than nothing, and it's certainly better than giving up all dialogue and resorting to FUCK YOU.

Except that's not what was being discussed, so this comes as arguing in bad faith against strawmen. 

In any case, it doesn't matter right now, as the person who is holding this is up is, well, Mitch McConnell.

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Looking just at the class 1 senate elections it’s important to compare 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018

This is also a class that every one of its past three midterms has been a wave election, 1994, 2006 and 2018 were all waves

2000, 36.7M democrat votes to 36.7M republican votes

2006, 32.3M democrat votes to 25.4M republican votes (88% and 69% of prior pres turnout 19% dem advantage)

2012, 50.0M democrat votes to 39.1M republican votes 

2018, 49.5M democrat votes to 33.9M republican votes (99% to 87% of prior pres turnout 12% democrat advantage.)*

even if republicans only had 19% behind democrats as in the 2006 election, democrats still would have been at 30 seats, keeping IN, MO, FL, while also flipping Both TX and MS special with ND and TN too close to call. If both broke to democrats that would have been 32 seats in class one in this election.

*edit, adjust for the California problem, and estimate:

2018, 46M democrat votes, 37M republican votes, (92% to 92%) WOW!

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1 minute ago, lokisnow said:

Looking just at the class 1 senate elections it’s important to compare 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018

This is also a class that every one of its past three midterms has been a wave election, 1994, 2006 and 2018 were all waves

2000, 36.7 democrat votes to 36.7 republican votes

2006, 32.3M democrat votes to 25.4M republican votes (88% and 69% of prior pres turnout 19% dem advantage)

2012, 50.0 democrat votes to 39.1 republican votes 

2018, 49.5 democrat votes to 33.9 republican votes (99% to 87% of prior pres turnout 12% democrat advantage.)

even if republicans only had 19% behind democrats as in the 2006 election, democrats still would have been at 28 or 29 seats with ND and TN too close to call.

The problem is not that more Republicans came out to vote, it's that we got a lot of effectively worthless votes. While Republican voting was up compared to previous midterms, a lot of this came in very blue states anyway. That helped with California turning dark blue, but didn't help a lot in places like Tennessee.

Furthermore, comparing total senate votes with outcome is idiotic on its face anyway, as the values aren't uniformly distributed. You can do that with the House and POTUS, but not with only 33 seats of the Senate. And the places where Democrats lost? The vote was not particularly close, one way or another, at a state level. 

This goes back to the problem of the POTUS election in general - while Democrats have a lot of demographic trends going their way, they're going in all the wrong places. It doesn't matter if Dems win California by 1 vote or 10 million votes. Meanwhile, Tennessee is losing population, and what population is staying is becoming more conservative - more old, more white, more rural, less educated. 

Someone else pointed out that the trend of 2016 was that northern rural areas were voting like southern rural areas, where the trend in 2018 is that southern urban areas are voting like northern urban areas, and I think that's more reasonable. 

That all said, it's absolutely the case that Kavanaugh helped places like Florida and Texas and Mississippi, though I don't see how it would have mattered in North Dakota (Heitcamp was always a longshot). 

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29 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

so what was the one thing that woke up republicans to the midterm elections and motivated them to vote in outrageous numbers? The confirmation hearings over Kavanaugh. If The info on Ford has never come out and that media circus never had happened democrats would have had an utterly historic victory in the senate. 

So that means Feinstein was right to sit on the Ford info, if it generated republican enthusiasm to that degree, it was a massive loss for democrats to not have the quiet 55+ confirmation vote after an uneventful hearing Kavanaugh probably would have gotten.

and I was wrong and Feinstein is smarter than me, not a shocker, I know.

bit this is a pretty fascinating incredible election with unbelievably positive democrat numbers. Needs more analysis of the numbers.

if democrats can find 21 million extra voters just for senate in a midterm, what does that indicate they’re going to accomplish for the presidential election? Nothing ? Something? In any event targeting 30 senate seats every cycle should be the baseline, because we came damn close to achieving that outcome this year.

I'm not at all sure the Kavanaugh hearings had the impact that you think they did.  Trump has gone with an "all base, all the time" strategy, and thus, his base is very loyal to him.  So when he ramped up the fearmongering about immigrants and impeachment, they showed up to vote.  Yes, Kavanaugh was a useful tool to motivate voters on the importance of the Senate, but I think it was a minor factor overall.  Even if Kavanaugh was confirmed relatively smoothly a la Gorsuch, I'm sure that Republican voters could still see that holding onto judge nominations is pretty damn important, seeing how Trump is useless when it comes to policy. 

Trump motivates voters, to vote for him and to vote against him.  It's possibly the one good thing I can say about him.  More Americans voting is a good thing, and I'm glad that 2018 had turnout that was closer to a presidential election than a midterm.  If we can see turnout in 2020 that is 10-15% higher than 2016 (which is definitely doable), then I would be really happy.  I would also really like Democrats chances, because Democrats have a lot more "low frequency" voters out there than Republicans do. 

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44 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The problem is not that more Republicans came out to vote, it's that we got a lot of effectively worthless votes. While Republican voting was up compared to previous midterms, a lot of this came in very blue states anyway. That helped with California turning dark blue, but didn't help a lot in places like Tennessee.

Furthermore, comparing total senate votes with outcome is idiotic on its face anyway, as the values aren't uniformly distributed. You can do that with the House and POTUS, but not with only 33 seats of the Senate. And the places where Democrats lost? The vote was not particularly close, one way or another, at a state level. 

This goes back to the problem of the POTUS election in general - while Democrats have a lot of demographic trends going their way, they're going in all the wrong places. It doesn't matter if Dems win California by 1 vote or 10 million votes. Meanwhile, Tennessee is losing population, and what population is staying is becoming more conservative - more old, more white, more rural, less educated. 

Someone else pointed out that the trend of 2016 was that northern rural areas were voting like southern rural areas, where the trend in 2018 is that southern urban areas are voting like northern urban areas, and I think that's more reasonable. 

That all said, it's absolutely the case that Kavanaugh helped places like Florida and Texas and Mississippi, though I don't see how it would have mattered in North Dakota (Heitcamp was always a longshot). 

Only four republican seats were uncompetitive (MS, UT, NB, WY), Democrats lost several senate races by percent margins that look bad but are not that bad by vote totals for example, TN democrats increased their vote total by 300,000 votes from a presidential turnout year in 2012 and republicans LOST 280,000 votes from their presidential turnout year in 2012.  The margin of victory was only 220,000 votes in TN, and democrats just demonstrated that number of votes gained in one six year cycle is doable in that state. So while the percent outcome of 54-44 may seem insurmountable or uncompetitive in retrospect, looking at the actual vote numbers and the change in vote numbers indicates these races are actually very doable and the votes are there to make them competitive. 

And the overall numbers reflect this as well, so they act as a shortcut for most of the states although the problems with this shortcut are obvious as you state. 

The biggest one is that California—with two democrat candidates—screws up both democrat and republican overall 2018 vote totals relative to the R vs D 2012 election. So you’re actually wrong that republicans racked up a lot of vote gains in Cali, democrats candidates got 11M votes instead of 7.8M and republicans got 0 votes instead of 4.7. Adjusting for California, That’s enough to swing it so that turnout was 92% for each party of their pres senate election turnout total

 

***

Unrelated but population growth in the United dates from 2006 to 2018 was 27.3M, for an increase of about 8%, the annual increase is about 0.75%. So the math to rectify for that is fairly easy. 

 

 

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8 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Only four republican seats were uncompetitive (MS, UT, NB, WY), Democrats lost several senate races by percent margins that look bad but are not that bad by vote totals for example, TN democrats increased their vote total by 300,000 votes from a presidential turnout year in 2012 and republicans LOST 280,000 votes from their presidential turnout year in 2012.  The margin of victory was only 220,000 votes in TN, and democrats just demonstrated that number of votes gained in one six year cycle is doable in that state. So while the percent outcome of 54-44 may seem insurmountable or uncompetitive in retrospect, looking at the actual vote numbers and the change in vote numbers indicates these races are actually very doable and the votes are there to make them competitive. 

 

The assumption that the 2012 electorate is similar to the 2018 one is the flawed one. As I said above, Tennessee is moving to be more white, more rural, and more old than 2012 was, and the end result is a demographic negative for Democrats. 

8 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

The biggest one is that California—with two democrat candidates—screws up both democrat and republican overall 2018 vote totals relative to the R vs D 2012 election. So you’re actually wrong that republicans racked up a lot of vote gains in Cali, democrats candidates got 11M votes instead of 7.8M and republicans got 0 votes instead of 4.7. Adjusting for California, That’s enough to swing it so that turnout was 92% for each party of their pres senate election turnout total

I didn't say what you think I said, so yay! 

8 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Unrelated but population growth in the United dates from 2006 to 2018 was 27.3M, for an increase of about 8%, the annual increase is about 0.75%. So the math to rectify for that is fairly easy. 

 

Another issue is that while growth is that value, growth in voters is not symmetrical. White people aren't growing as much, but they vote more consistently than LatinX people do, and they're voting more regularly for Republicans than they have in the past. 

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1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

so what was the one thing that woke up republicans to the midterm elections and motivated them to vote in outrageous numbers? The confirmation hearings over Kavanaugh. If The info on Ford has never come out and that media circus never had happened democrats would have had an utterly historic victory in the senate. 

So that means Feinstein was right to sit on the Ford info, if it generated republican enthusiasm to that degree, it was a massive loss for democrats to not have the quiet 55+ confirmation vote after an uneventful hearing Kavanaugh probably would have gotten.

So what you're saying is that the allegation of Kavanagh's sexual assault of Ford (and Ramirez, and Swetnik) should have been kept hushed up for the sake of political expediency? Um, yeah, I could say some very ugly things in response to that, but let's just say (to put it veeeeery mildly) I strongly disagree with that! 

I honestly hadn't pictured you as being one of the people who would prefer to bury a sexual assault allegation (even if truthful) if it might negatively affect a political calculus. Colour me disgusted!

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1 hour ago, Ser Reptitious said:

So what you're saying is that the allegation of Kavanagh's sexual assault of Ford (and Ramirez, and Swetnik) should have been kept hushed up for the sake of political expediency? Um, yeah, I could say some very ugly things in response to that, but let's just say (to put it veeeeery mildly) I strongly disagree with that! 

I honestly hadn't pictured you as being one of the people who would prefer to bury a sexual assault allegation (even if truthful) if it might negatively affect a political calculus. Colour me disgusted!

Covering the up the assaults was entirely wrong.  The allegations and how the rethugs and nazis played it brought women out to vote in droves, as was the very election of the nazi in the first place -- including that truly maligned group designated 'white women' without any notice that all white women are not the same any more than all black women are the same.  Women of all kinds across the board have been mobilizing for the midterms since the election of 2016 and the multi multi million womens' march right after the inauguration (which dwarfed the measly numbers turned for the nazi's chest poofer event and about which numbers for both he's lied about ever since.

How riled up are women to vote against him and his kind and for Others?  Here's a single example, from among my personal friendships and acquaintances, professional and social.  She was so infuriated by the behavior of the rethugs during the so called testimony of Dr. Blasey, she jumped up from her television editing board and kicked the stand and broke her right big toe.  Yah, she voted.  She also marched in the Women's March.  She's also white.

Other women I know of course voted like crazy and have been active like crazy, and they cover the spectrum of diversity.  But I ... think ... she's the only one who's broken a toe in the process.

Also, I am pointing out Field of Blood, an historical study that shows how utterly useless it is to be polite and understanding of these ilks.  They only take it as you are afraid of them and gives them even more glee in bullying you.  And 'bully them' is exactly one of the phrases the southerner used commonly back in the run up to the War of Rebellion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/books/review/field-of-blood-joanne-freeman.html

https://www.archives.gov/about/speeches/2018/field-of-blood

 

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4 hours ago, Bonnot OG said:

Lol my god is Pelosi fucking garbage. I completely missed how she was bringing up how W Bush treated her and called her # 3. She is such a worthless bag of shit and completely unaware of how terrible both her positions and republican positions that she agreed with are. 

Her fucking friendly bullshit with a white supremacist party shows how she is okay with bigotry, most likely a bigot herself, and only cares about power. 

Dude, give it a break. This isn't anything serious, it's just the song and dance she has to do in front of the cameras. She's trying to win the media narrative. You have no idea what her private tactics are, and frankly, if Democrats/liberals followed your lead, there would be >300 Republicans in the House and >55 in the Senate. Learn to be strategic for a change...

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2 hours ago, Ser Reptitious said:

So what you're saying is that the allegation of Kavanagh's sexual assault of Ford (and Ramirez, and Swetnik) should have been kept hushed up for the sake of political expediency? Um, yeah, I could say some very ugly things in response to that, but let's just say (to put it veeeeery mildly) I strongly disagree with that! 

I honestly hadn't pictured you as being one of the people who would prefer to bury a sexual assault allegation (even if truthful) if it might negatively affect a political calculus. Colour me disgusted!

No, I’m not supportive at all of a cover up or hushing  it up. I’m merely saying it hurt democrats in the end to have the circus come to town. Ideally, her allegations would have been seriously heard and considered when Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by Bush. Then, even if he was confirmed the allegations being out there probably would have taken him off trumps list (pretty likely he would be confirmed then in spite of the allegations as there would have been no outcry over such hearings for a court 99.999% of the country has never thought about). The process failed enormously at the first level when he wa confirmed the first time, and I think we should be angry about that rather than angry at Feinstein respecting Ford’s request for anonymity.

I’m glad we had the hearings and understand and accept the cost, but we also need to understand that the hearings massively helped republicans gin up high levels of base interest in the midterm senate elections specifically.

 

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It does increasingly appear that we are unlikely to achieve a <3 Deg C(or F?) rise by the end of the century, wiithout some drastic action being taken.

Elections should now be a single issue political debate for at least the next quarter century: how committed are you to combating climate change? If the answer is anything other than "no stone left unturned" in looking for and developing solutions, that person should not be receiving any votes from anyone who sees the truth of climate change.

Forget supreme court appointments, size of govt, size of debt / deficit, defence spending, social welfare entitlements, health care reform. Climate is the existential threat that can't be ignored, regardless of all other policy differences.

Oh, and plastic in the ocean.

Though if there is a silver lining, potentially, one way to deal with white supremacy  / enthno-nationalism with climate change is (given they also skew towards climate change denial) to give them the low-lying coastal land as their ethnically pure areas, and just wait a few decades. I guess at least that way they will eventually acknowledge one truth they previously denied, but probably too late.

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