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US Politics: It’s Not A Crime If Your Feelings Got Hurt


Mr. Chatywin et al.

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20 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

So it’s like band camp?  

Not really.  Booze is WAAAAAY better, and there is a general lack of tubas.

44 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Honestly, I don’t think anything matters that much at this point outside of a tanking economy. Trump’s support and hatred is baked in. The aftermath of the Mueller reported showed us this. An impeachment attempt will bring Trump supporters home in the short run, and excite the liberal base, but that’s it. If they’re going to do it, best do it sooner than later and get it over with.

 

Yeah - in a just and righteous world, we would no long have the chief cheeto in charge.  But the world is neither just nor righteous, and impeachment is dumb.

14 minutes ago, DMC said:

No, that's not it.  Independent voters, at least the ~10% that are actually swing voters, still matter.  And polling strongly suggests they think impeachment is stupid.

Yes.  Because it is at this point.  It's the economy stupid.

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25 minutes ago, DMC said:

No, that's not it.  Independent voters, at least the ~10% that are actually swing voters, still matter.  And polling strongly suggests they think impeachment is stupid.

That sounds about right, hence why I said if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it now. The closer you do it to the election, the more it will backfire among independent voters.   

That said, it’s a damn shame Democrats and the media over-hyped the report. It’s findings alone, absent a smoking gun on Russia, should be enough to get anyone impeached.

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15 hours ago, Altherion said:

I don't see how this would make it work -- if anything, it would increase the resistance to the plan. A substantial number of the people who are worst off today never went to college and will not see a dime of this money. Neither will the people who worked hard to pay off their loans and delayed important things like having children until the debts are paid. Other than the fact that the people who will be receiving money under this scheme have a high chance of voting for Warren to begin with, there is no reason why money should be handed out to this set of people rather than some other set. We could, for example, simply give money to the poorest without consideration for college. Alternatively, with the same $1.2T, we could fund literally a dozen moonshot programs to solve global warming to the tune of $10B per year per program. There's a whole bunch of other ways to spend the same money; I'm sure everyone can think of one that they like.

First, spending money on social welfare in no way excludes spending money on climate change mitigation and drawdown, that's a dumb fallacy. We will spend money on both.

It is very easy how it makes it work. It creates tens of millions of stakeholders instead of a million stakeholders. It's an order of magnitude in difference.

It makes people who the government always excludes from post-LBJ social welfare programs (the middle class) the majority recipient of the program.

When the government used to create social welfare programs large enough to include the middle class (farm relief, social security, medicare) those programs were and are extremely popular and enduring. When the programs were narrowly targeted towards the neediest (welfare, medicaid), those programs were significantly less popular and subject to continual bipartisan immiseration and revision and recision of the program (until Obama, with Medicaid).

If we allocate social welfare money to student debt relief, the program should be modeled on the successful, popular and enduring social welfare programs, which means it absolutely HAS to include the middle class in a substantial and meaningful way.

Targeting the program at the worst off, would mean modeling it on the the programs that have been the least politically successful in America. This means you are gifting republicans with a powerful political weapon to attack democrats with. That would be fucking stupid. Open it up to everyone, and their attacks have much less potency. They'll still attack it, as with Obamacare, but people having a stake in the outcome creates a natural constituency in favor of the social welfare and that sort of internalized stakeholder defense is needed to maintain the success of the program.

This debt forgiveness (which is capped at a mere 50,000 anyway) should also be statutorily exempt from being  considered taxable income by the IRS. 

Additionally, targeting the program at the worst off means several orders of magnitude of administrative costs and overhead relative to a universal program. Targeting the program at the worst off means tens of thousands of pages of minutia of regulations and guidelines and caveats and exclusions instead of mere dozens of pages. Targeting the worst off means an implementation delay of at least four years to write the tens of thousands of pages of regulations, and another minimum of two years to litigate those regulations, instead of implementation within eighteen months. Targeting the worst off means creating a system so complex, that the sheer complexity and effort required to navigate that complexity deters at least 25% of the people meant to be helped--which makes the ratio of aid-to-administrative costs even worse. Targeting the worst off means a huge portion of the aid money will be extracted as rent to administer the hyper-complex system, relative to very low administrative costs for a simple universal system.

I'd even go so far as to say that Warren's income test phase out/cap is a mistake. There are not that many people with high incomes still carrying substantial student debt, and caps and phase outs have been continually advocated for social security solely as a Trojan Horse device for republicans to enable a future total destruction of social security.

So implementing the student loan jubilee system with the republican caps-and-phaseouts Trojan Horse in place absolutely weakens the entire structure. I'd much rather include a 100,000 rich people excluded by the cap if their inclusion means better protecting 20 million other recipients. It's worth it to me.

And shit. It's a GOOD thing to put the rich people and the poor and the middle class on the same fucking side as co-equal recipients, not dividing them up as opposing factions to begin with!

 

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7 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Not really.  Booze is WAAAAAY better, and there is a general lack of tubas.

Hey now, I recently spent some time with high end lawyers, and my uncle was very critical of me for chugging the expensive wine!!! Where’s the fun in that?!?!?

Quote

Yeah - in a just and righteous world, we would no long have the chief cheeto in charge.  But the world is neither just nor righteous, and impeachment is dumb.

In a just and righteous world, he would never have been nominated, but his support spiked when he called Mexicans rapists and murderers. But on the flip side, he’s someone who constantly thinks about sex, yet he can’t have any, so at least he has to suffer on that front, right?

 

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15 hours ago, Triskele said:

Another topic within US politics entirely:

It drives me crazy when people say that you can't impeach Trump because the GOP effort to impeach Clinton seemed to help Clinton.  This seems like unbelievably lazy reasoning as the situations are vastly different.

I don't mean to say that impeachment is a no-brainer for the Dem House right now.  I just mean to say that if anyone's like "but the GOP experience in the 90's!" then that is terrible reasoning.  I have heard some media person or other throw there out there too many times, and it's irritating.  

If we impeach Trump, it has to be because it is the right thing to do, but the republicans in the senate will never do that.

But look also at the world we live in. in spite of not being in office, Hillary Clinton was impeached by the media and press over Benghazi(!) and butheremails(!), and the constant drip drip drip of those informal impeachment proceedings was far more successful, far more popular and far more potent than the three ring sex scandal circus impeachment of her husband. The sex impeachment made Bill more popular, the benghazi impeachment made Hillary less popular. 

So, given that the media managed to sustain both impeachements against Hillary Clinton for three years with absolutely zero actual data, the model agains Trump must therefore be to use the treasure trove of data to initiate media impeachments of Trump along the Benghazi(!) and butheremails(!) standards.

we're far better off to drip drip drip this for the next eighteen months than to punt in an ineffectual congressional action that has no positive endgame outcome.

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6 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

we're far better off to drip drip drip this for the next eighteen months than to punt in an ineffectual congressional action that has no positive endgame outcome.

Death by a thousand cuts.  It's the surest political maneuver in terms of success.

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1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Even funnier is that the guy who presides is this guy who has an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Burns, except for the fact that he is pretty left wing and a genuinely lovely human being.  Now the summer meetings get a little crazy, but what happens at tax nerd camp stays at tax nerd camp.......  

Holy shit! 

Despite you vouching for his liberal bona fides are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that he doesn't have a mysterious remote control laying around that looks like this?

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

So it’s like band camp?  

Don't let @Mlle. Zabzie fool you. My dad was a CPA, so he gave me the skinny on what goes on...basically, you can be guaran-fucking-teed that every day at her office looks like The Wolf of Wall Street.

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26 minutes ago, DMC said:

I liked this article a few days ago:

What If Everything Mueller Told Us Had Been New?

Will check out a little later.

7 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Holy shit! 

Despite you vouching for his liberal bona fides are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that he doesn't have a mysterious remote control laying around that looks like this?

I’d be more worried about his vest made from an authentic gorilla’s chest.

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13 hours ago, DMC said:

Maybe that's just a facade, but I think the abject depression is there.  There's the famous scene in Oliver Stone's Nixon where Nixon makes Kissinger pray with him.  I wouldn't be surprised if Trump is at that point.  I don't know where I'm going with all of this, except just to say Nixon's impeachment was a process - and that process wasn't coming up against a reelection.  The Dems can raise holy hell but still not initiate impeachment proceedings.  Thus far that seems the way to go.

Again, NPD comes to the rescue here. Trump is not going to suffer depression because of losses or slights against him - he's going to blame others and be angry and attack others. It will make him even more unhinged, but it won't manifest as any kind of inward looking value, because Trump is incapable of self-reflection in that way. 

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17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It will make him even more unhinged, but it won't manifest as any kind of inward looking value, because Trump is incapable of self-reflection in that way. 

Case in point:

Quote

Trump bashed The New York Times on Twitter today, calling on them to “get down on their knees & beg for forgiveness.”

 

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18 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Again, NPD comes to the rescue here. Trump is not going to suffer depression because of losses or slights against him - he's going to blame others and be angry and attack others. It will make him even more unhinged, but it won't manifest as any kind of inward looking value, because Trump is incapable of self-reflection in that way. 

I largely agree, but just inserting that someone with NPD could be diagnosed with depression, they just end up expressing it as blaming others, being angery, and getting outright hostile with others.  It is actually very dangerous when depression and NPD start to commingle because the reactions can be quite violent.

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2 minutes ago, Guy Kilmore said:

I largely agree, but just inserting that someone with NPD could be diagnosed with depression, they just end up expressing it as blaming others, being angery, and getting outright hostile with others.  It is actually very dangerous when depression and NPD start to commingle because the reactions can be quite violent.

Oh sure - though depression in NPD characterizes itself as less about self-loathing and more about desperate clinging to the broken facade that allows them not to self-loathe. It'll show up as being more paranoid, more rage, more striking out. 

If Trump has another rally soon, it'll be interesting to see - because that's the sort of validation that he loves, and he'll use it to jump on his opponents even more. 

As to impeachment - the value of it being a political tool is as Warren says - get the people who vote against it on the record. That's an interesting bet, in that it's betting that Trump is basically not going to go away for a while, and that  the outcome of Trump's presidency will be massively negative, similar to supporting the Iraq war. I think that's a reasonable long-term play, but I don't know how well it works in the short term. 

That said, there's another argument to be made that independents, once they get the fire hose of media broadcasting the impeachment proceedings and the findings, will be in favor of it. Again, don't know if that's true, but it's not an unreasonable hypothesis. 

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2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Oh sure - though depression in NPD characterizes itself as less about self-loathing and more about desperate clinging to the broken facade that allows them not to self-loathe. It'll show up as being more paranoid, more rage, more striking out. 

If Trump has another rally soon, it'll be interesting to see - because that's the sort of validation that he loves, and he'll use it to jump on his opponents even more. 

Comments on the Twitter post you linked predicted a rally would be scheduled soon as part of his handlers' best way to soothe his ego. And, like clockwork, they announced an upcoming rally in Green Bay. So many old round white people to scream his name and give him the validation his parents wouldn't.

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36 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It will make him even more unhinged, but it won't manifest as any kind of inward looking value, because Trump is incapable of self-reflection in that way. 

Nope, this was what a lot of people thought was going to happen with the Mueller investigation including myself.  What the Mueller report told us is his advisers actually do refuse to execute his worst impulses.  So you're gonna need something else to convince me to go against obvious polling.

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5 minutes ago, DMC said:

Nope, this was what a lot of people thought was going to happen with the Mueller investigation including myself.  What the Mueller report told us is his advisers actually do refuse to execute his worst impulses.  So you're gonna need something else to convince me to go against obvious polling.

Uh...did you quote something incorrectly? I don't see how what you said is a response to the above quote. 

Also, oddly (to me at least) Trump's polling has actually begun to fall, including the first below-40% poll I've seen in a while. Even Rasmussen has him below 50%. 

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8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Uh...did you quote something incorrectly? I don't see how what you said is a response to the above quote. 

Also, oddly (to me at least) Trump's polling has actually begun to fall, including the first below-40% poll I've seen in a while. Even Rasmussen has him below 50%. 

considering republican support has strongly solidified under der official gestapopress Mueller narrative, it would seem there's been either a commensurate and opposite swing in democrat support for the real Mueller narrative, or there's been two swings in democrat and independent support for the real narrative that have more than offset the republican swing to embrace fakenews.

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23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Uh...did you quote something incorrectly? I don't see how what you said is a response to the above quote. 

Also, oddly (to me at least) Trump's polling has actually begun to fall, including the first below-40% poll I've seen in a while. Even Rasmussen has him below 50%. 

Still seems to be above 41% on the 538 aggregate. I don't think I'll be impressed unless his approval falls to 35% and/or his disapproval goes up to 60% on an aggregate site. 

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

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