U.S. Politics: Phantom of the Emergency

[Gertrude]

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

You know everyone is getting worn down when no one has posted the embarrassing white house feast yet.

Yep. Pure exhaustion.

[Rippounet]

6 hours ago, Altherion said:

It's not necessarily about growth -- you can have growth as technology improves -- but your "reasonable centrist" (i.e. one who is concerned about the environment) is definitely incompatible with the current incarnation of capitalism because the latter is insanely wasteful by construction. Think about the production of practically any physical good: shoes, smartphones, water heaters... all of them have the same incentives for wastefulness. We are capable of making them so that they last a long time, but this is not done because the manufacturers prefer that you buy replacements and because making something last longer usually makes it more expensive to manufacture. And every product replaced entails energy lost at multiple stages: it has to be produced, packaged (with packaging that is ultimately discarded), transported to the store, stored and finally transferred to the customer.

Even without technological breakthroughs, we could significantly reduce our energy usage by significantly lowering consumption, but of course we will never do this because every one of those energy consuming steps results in profits and jobs. And even when things aren't broken or, less frequently, deliberately crippled by the manufacturers after a period of time (this mostly happens with electronics that are regularly updated with new firmware or drivers), there is a strong pressure to upgrade to the newest model applied via marketing. It's (mostly) not a matter of some evil individuals being wasteful, the whole system is wasteful by construction and there's currently no way to generate the kind of energy it requires without severe environmental impact (though if what you want is simply to avoid carbon emissions, we can do that...).

Dude, you'll never cease to amaze me. You spout arch-conservative bullshit for months on end, and suddenly you post this piece which is anti-capitalist enough to make my eurocommie heart swell.

 

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Rippounet said:

Dude, you'll never cease to amaze me. You spout arch-conservative bullshit for months on end, and suddenly you post this piece which is anti-capitalist enough to make my eurocommie heart swell.

 

Years

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Dude, you'll never cease to amaze me. You spout arch-conservative bullshit for months on end, and suddenly you post this piece which is anti-capitalist enough to make my eurocommie heart swell.

 

Its plagiarized from tucker Carlson. 

[Jace, Extat]

36 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Its plagiarized from tucker Carlson. 

Whether this is true or not, there wasn't really anything anti-capitalist in that post. It was at best a half hearted jab towards inefficiency that explicitly avoided assigning blame.

A lot more clever than I thought him capable, he set conditions of critique that seem thoughtful and almost progressive while avoiding lies which would give the game away. Seriously. That's 7th grade debate level shit at least. I say with no sarcasm that I am very impressed.

I expect this kind of latchkey brilliance from Steve Bannon and that's about it.

[Fragile Bird]

9 hours ago, S John said:

I wonder if that’s what Clemson requested.  Maybe they voted on it or something.  I wouldn’t rule that out.  But otherwise it is definitely tacky, if only becuase it’s kind of lame to get served a mundane thing like a Big Mac at a once in a lifetime event like visiting the White House.

When Trump announced the menu the outraged comments were endless in the NYT. Many people with knowledge of what universities actually feed their football players these days were just gagging with disgust. And everyone else gagged with disgust at a president who serve that crap at a WH dinner.

I think Trump is just showing us what he eats when he goes to a sports event and is having the boys over to share his meal. I remember reading a hilarious account of one of the first campaign organizing meetings, held at the dining room at one of Trump’s golf courses. A small group of wealthy back room types waited for Trump to come off the golf course to discuss things over lunch. He ordered hamburgers and fries for everyone at the table. Iirc, one purpose of the meeting was to introduce him to Steve Bannon. The article was describing how he got hooked up with the campaign.

Trump has to keep up that 239 pound physique somehow, ya know.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I thought that too, but as it turns out Dems are winning this shutdown fight. The ratings for who is to blame are increasingly going against Trump, his approval rating is dropping, and it is looking worse and worse in various small ways. As others get inconvenienced - flights, passports, licensing, food stamps, HUD, parks - you're going to see that get worse and worse.

Because so far, he hasn't won the overall messaging, and that will cost him one way or another. 

So far there isn't that much pressure on Democrats to reopen the government at all costs, because they're not refusing to do anything that they had promised or voted into law. 

So far, but what if this drags on another month? Eventually people will also blame Democrats, and everyone’s approval ratings will crater. And that doesn’t factor in something like a TSA strike. I still think the Dems will be the first to blink, but not until they’ve sufficiently damaged Trump.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 hours ago, karaddin said:

You know everyone is getting worn down when no one has posted the embarrassing white house feast yet. I don't know how a guy so obsessed with showing off how "classy" he is with solid gold thinks under delivering on food doesn't make him look bad. This isn't even the first time, it's just an escalation.

 

10 hours ago, S John said:

I wonder if that’s what Clemson requested.  Maybe they voted on it or something.  I wouldn’t rule that out.  But otherwise it is definitely tacky, if only becuase it’s kind of lame to get served a mundane thing like a Big Mac at a once in a lifetime event like visiting the White House.

If they requested fast food, it would have been Chick-fil-A. That’s what they ate after the championship. My two takeaways were (i) how symbolic was it that this fraud billionaire served of fast food to his WH guests and (ii) that food had to be cold, soggy or both. What a great memory for those kids….

[Maithanet]

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

So far, but what if this drags on another month? Eventually people will also blame Democrats, and everyone’s approval ratings will crater. And that doesn’t factor in something like a TSA strike. I still think the Dems will be the first to blink, but not until they’ve sufficiently damaged Trump.

This shutdown will end at some point.  Trump's statements that he'll stand firm for "years" are so preposterous they may actually weaken his position.  Even three months of shutdown is pretty obviously impossible.  A huge portion (60%? 80%? more?) of essential federal workers cannot continue to work for free for three months, and they will be forced to either quit and look for new jobs or just stop showing up and hope they can come back when they'll actually be paid.  Looking just at TSA that would mean a nearly total shutdown of US airports, which would have cascading effects on all businesses, since deliveries of food and goods would stop, business travel would end, nobody could visit sick relatives, etc.  And TSA is far from the only important federal employees working without pay.

All other shutdowns, once your side starts losing, you fold, because it's clear that holding out serves no purpose.  The other side will never "cave" when you are the party taking most of the blame.  So might as well fold sooner rather than later, so you only get blamed for a minor shutdown, rather than a full blown crisis.  But Trump is challenging that assumption.  He thinks that his supporters are sufficiently robust and indoctrinated that he can indeed let things get worse and worse and worse.  Even if Trump takes 3/4ths of the blame, if there's enough blame to go around, even 1/4th of the blame is going to make Democrats uncomfortable.  It's almost as if Trump is counting on Democrats actually caring about what happens to the American people, when he clearly does not.

I think that when this gets bad enough the Senate is going to act, giving Trump a small out that it was the Senate and not him that caved.  McConnell doesn't particularly care about dick measuring, and I think eventually he'll just want to get this shutdown nonsense behind him.  In contrast, I have trouble believing that Pelosi's first act as Speaker is going to be to cave to President Trump when she knows Trump has a losing hand.  I've no doubt that some freshmen Democrats are going to get really uncomfortable with this shutdown (even more than they are already), but I don't think there's anything they can really do about it to force Pelosi to deal. 

When that happens is anybody's guess.  Right after the next big missed paycheck is my guess, so probably sometime around Feb 1. 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

So far, but what if this drags on another month? Eventually people will also blame Democrats, and everyone’s approval ratings will crater. And that doesn’t factor in something like a TSA strike. I still think the Dems will be the first to blink, but not until they’ve sufficiently damaged Trump.

I don't think that the Democrats will blink. This is precisely the sort of spine that their base wants to seem them harden against Trumpism. And the new blood of Democrats will only strengthen that resolve. Right now a lot of the news coming out is from Trump's base being upset that his actions are hurting them, "the little guys." And one of the reasons why some of his base voted for him was the false impression that he's a winner. Well? Right now he is not winning. And he has not won a number of his past encounters. So he's looking like a flop making a final big gamble before he goes broke at the poker table. In contrast, the Democrats are providing proposals to open the government for the sake of the workers and "little guys." Even if they refuse to accept the wall as part of the terms, that will only improve their image.

[karaddin]

Yeah, I think him just being cheap as fuck and having no respect for anyone else is plenty of explanation for it. I saw someone say that McDonald's does "catering" and it wouldn't normally wind up in individual boxes for burgers so I'm wondering if he just sent an intern out to do massive orders with no notice... Which would have made the food even colder.

Hell, given his track record he probably made them put it on their own card and will refuse to reimburse.

Hilarious response though, the players that didn't go to the White House got a rather different meal

 

[Guest]

20 hours ago, felice said:

Anyone who doesn't know she's only suggesting that for income over $10 million is so far inside the right wing bubble that there's no point trying to reach them. And even if you ignore the "marginal" aspect, I can't see many Americans being too concerned about how anyone's going to get by on "only" three million a year after tax!

Reducing tax on the lowest brackets would be great, but they can't campaign on absolutely no detail, and if they provide any detail, Republicans will just cherry pick whatever can be misrepresented most effectively. It's not worth worrying about.

Someone earning $500,001 will only pay the same rate as someone earning $10m on one dollar of their income, with the current brackets; they shouldn't be siding with the multi-millionaires. And households with $500k incomes are in the top 1% anyway; it's not a huge demographic to be overly concerned about.

I know that the conversation has moved on, but I didn't have time to respond to this yesterday. 

I'm not nearly as confident as you are that "people that don't understand marginal tax rates" and "people firmly ensconced within the right wing bubble" overlap perfectly on a Venn diagram. 

I worked in public accounting for several years, and a hefty portion of our client base was made up of people wanting us to prepare their returns for them during tax season. Anecdotally, I would say that my experience with the general public regarding taxes would not allow me to say with confidence that most non-right wing bubble people understand marginal rates. 

When the Bush tax cuts were set to expire and before they were renewed by Obama, we had a rash of calls from people asking what their new bracket would be (oftentimes thinking they were in the 15% or 25%, etc., bracket and would be bumped up to the pre-Bush bracket because they would just look at the income thresholds for each bracket, extrapolate that to their income, and assume that was the bracket they would be taxed at. Now they understood deductions and tax credits would lower how much tax they had to pay, but many of them never realized that they had never been in the 25% or 28%, etc, bracket in the first place. 

I daresay that an even higher majority of people who file their taxes at H&R Block or Jackson-Hewitt or the rest of their ilk (and don't get me started about how these are predatory businesses taking advantage of the desperation and ignorance of poor tax filers to gouge the ever-living fuck out of them) have no clue about what marginal rates mean.

If we're fantasizing about burning the current tax code down to the ground, I think Democrats could steal a march on Republican messaging by having statutory and effective tax rates be the same, and even having negative tax rates for the poorest filers. When Republicans try to complain about Democrats raising taxes, Democrats can say, no we are lowering taxes and simplifying them, we are treating all income the same, and then, as an added non-messaging bonus, would actually be raising more revenue.

By making the message more simple, Democrats would put Republicans in the place Democrats are now; having to provide nuance and context to a discussion about taxes that most people will tune out anyway.

[Fez]

Interesting Supreme Court action. It's a 5-4 decision related to the Armed Career Criminal Act, but not the line-up you'd expect. Roberts joined the liberals, but Breyer joined the other four conservatives. 

Breyer has a history of sometimes being more conservative on certain criminal issues, and on the 4th amendment especially (not that its relevant here I don't think). However, in the past that resulted in 5-4 conservative decisions when Scalia was the one joining the liberals instead; Roberts never did. Not sure what's different about this case, or maybe different about Roberts.

[lokisnow]

I don’t think there will be any real pressure on trump or McConnell unless the tsa sick out becomes less pathetic, right now they’re only7.5% our sick, versus 3.2% last year. At best this creates a minor inconvenience for people of slightly longer delays like minor holiday travel . It probably needs to double again to create normal holiday delays and go above 20% to actually start to impact Americans lives and more importantly to Congress resolving it, impeding business profits and shareholder dividends 

[Maithanet]

6 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

I don’t think there will be any real pressure on trump or McConnell unless the tsa sick out becomes less pathetic, right now they’re only7.5% our sick, versus 3.2% last year. At best this creates a minor inconvenience for people of slightly longer delays like minor holiday travel . It probably needs to double again to create normal holiday delays and go above 20% to actually start to impact Americans lives and more importantly to Congress resolving it, impeding business profits and shareholder dividends 

Except that will happen if both sides stick to their guns.  Missing one paycheck is hard, and people have to tap resources that they would rather not, like short term loans, friends and relatives, and food banks.  Each missing paycheck is a bigger problem than the one before.  And this isn't just TSA we're talking about, the impacts of the shutdown only grow day by day. 

Trump and Republicans are acting like this is simply a matter of will, that they can outlast the shutdown.  But this isn't like tabling Merrick Garland's nomination - the pain of a government shutdown increases geometrically as more and more people are impacted. 

[Fez]

US Coast Guard not getting paid now. DHS found money in some account to get them their first paycheck during the shutdown, but I guess it ran out.

 

[Kalbear]

Pelosi continues to show her mettle. House dems turn down trump's offer for lunch to talk about shutdown. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/rank-and-file-democrats-reject-trumps-invitation-to-shutdown-talks-backing-leaders-in-united-opposition-to-border-wall/2019/01/15/2539482e-18d2-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?__twitter_impression=true

[DanteGabriel]

17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Pelosi continues to show her mettle. House dems turn down trump's offer for lunch to talk about shutdown. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/rank-and-file-democrats-reject-trumps-invitation-to-shutdown-talks-backing-leaders-in-united-opposition-to-border-wall/2019/01/15/2539482e-18d2-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?__twitter_impression=true

Maybe the Democrats just weren't tempted by the prospect of cold fast food?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Pelosi continues to show her mettle. House dems turn down trump's offer for lunch to talk about shutdown. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/rank-and-file-democrats-reject-trumps-invitation-to-shutdown-talks-backing-leaders-in-united-opposition-to-border-wall/2019/01/15/2539482e-18d2-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?__twitter_impression=true

I haven’t read the fine print, but I’m not sure if that was a smart move. It gives Trump an opening to paint the Democrats as the ones unwilling to negotiate.

[IheartIheartTesla]

If Trump were to read this book called The Art of the Deal (or something like that), making the first offer to meet just makes it seem like he has the weaker hand and needs an end to the shutdown more than the Democrats,