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

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, Ormond said:

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/

Yes, it is above 41% - but it's also fallen .8% in the aggregate since the report came out, and the most recent polls have it worse. I'm not saying that it's conclusive, but it does appear to be at least for now going down. No real good data about impeachment from independents is out yet. 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

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

See, I agree with this, plus actually focusing on issues that voters continue to care about.  Also, need a good nominee to oppose.

1 hour 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?

Mike is WAY to the left of me (and smarter than all of us).  If he has such a remote control, he would press the button basically because he's sick of all our whinging.

1 hour ago, The Great Unwashed said:

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.

That's bank side.  Law firm side is tame.

[Maithanet]

I remember in these threads we discussed "do voters get more conservative as they age?" and I came across this (2014) article from pew research that answered the question in a way I'd never seen before.   

Quote

Pew Research Center surveys over the past two decades also have found compelling evidence that generations carry with them the imprint of early political experiences.

As Fact Tank noted last year, Americans who came of age during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and are now in their 70s and 80s, have fairly consistently favored Republican candidates, while those who turned 18 under Bill Clinton and his two successors have almost always voted more Democratic than the nation as a whole.

That is more cogent than I've ever seen before, and it shows how voting groups by age is actually pretty static.  For 2020, it's safe to say that the Silent generation is increasingly a nonfactor (voting rates go down once you reach 75+ years old, and the very youngest of the Silent Generation will be 78 in 2020.

The Boomers and early Gen X are still a huge group of voters and they are generally leaning Republican, with the exception of those coming of age under Nixon.  But it is the bottom of the chart that shows the huge problem for Republicans, where seven presidential terms (1992-2020) show consistently Democratic leanings.  All voters under 45 now fit into that group, and in 2016, voters under 45 made up 44% of total voters. 

EDIT: the graphic didn't show up.  You can see it if you click the link. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours 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.

Especially when you throw a touch of sadism in the mix, and Trump does clearly get off by hurting other people.

Also, I read the article you linked @DMC and I largely agree with it.

[Ormond]

32 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I remember in these threads we discussed "do voters get more conservative as they age?" and I came across this (2014) article from pew research that answered the question in a way I'd never seen before.   

That is more cogent than I've ever seen before, and it shows how voting groups by age is actually pretty static.  For 2020, it's safe to say that the Silent generation is increasingly a nonfactor (voting rates go down once you reach 75+ years old, and the very youngest of the Silent Generation will be 78 in 2020.

The Boomers and early Gen X are still a huge group of voters and they are generally leaning Republican, with the exception of those coming of age under Nixon.  But it is the bottom of the chart that shows the huge problem for Republicans, where seven presidential terms (1992-2020) show consistently Democratic leanings.  All voters under 45 now fit into that group, and in 2016, voters under 45 made up 44% of total voters. 

EDIT: the graphic didn't show up.  You can see it if you click the link. 

Obviously hard and fast generation lines are really a bit silly, but the Baby Boom didn't start until 1946 which means that the youngest Silent Generation yearly cohort will be turning 75 in 2020, not 78. Though of course their % of the voters will be down, if perhaps not by quite as much as a 78 age would assume. 

P.S. I see that particular Pew article forces the generations into the Presidential terms, which changes their "Boomer" birth years to be from 1943 to 1962 instead of the 1946 to 1964 birth cohorts that are the actual demographic Baby Boom. It's perfectly fine to divide people up by the Presidential term instead of the traditional generations, but I curmudgeonly think they shouldn't have forced the generational designations to line up with the way they were splitting things. 

 

[ThinkerX]

just took another of these msnbc polls:

 

'Have President Trump's immigration policies made the border situation better or worse?'

78,400+ responded.

64% think Trump made the border situation worse.  Tells me that a lot of republicans are upset with Trump's immigration policies.

This sort of thing keeps piling up - say a successful attack on health care or SS or some such...it could start costing Trump his core supporters.

 

 

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

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

I was at a bar, misread your post sorry.

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Yes, it is above 41% - but it's also fallen .8% in the aggregate since the report came out, and the most recent polls have it worse.

That is a significant drop considering the timeframe, yes.

46 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Also, I read the article you linked @DMC and I largely agree with it.

Yeah it was a good and succinct article.

53 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I remember in these threads we discussed "do voters get more conservative as they age?" and I came across this (2014) article from pew research that answered the question in a way I'd never seen before.   

I mentioned this and cited fairly recently, although I think it was in the UK thread.  Anyway, it's definitely an accepted consensus among (political) behaviorists at this point.

 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

By all indications, the Supreme Court is poised to let the Trump administration add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The consequences of its probable ruling will last longer than Donald Trump’s presidency, well into the term of the next president, and possibly the one after that. Hispanics and immigrants will be undercounted, leading to overrepresentation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures of disproportionately white and rural regions. The result will entrench Republican power into the 2030s, depriving Democrats of representation in Congress and state legislatures, as well as electoral votes. States with large immigrant communities will lose billions in federal funding. Ultimately, the citizenship question is not some wonky dispute about proper census protocol. It is a dispute over who counts in America.

Here is the worst part: The Trump administration should have no legal authority to wreak this havoc. In his opinion blocking the citizenship question, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman listed six separate ways that the administration violated the law in its effort to rig the census. Yet on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s conservatives seemed prepared to reverse Furman and let the government include the question. To do so, these justices deployed credulity and hypocrisy in equal measure, abandoning their principles to reach the outcome desired by the Trump administration and the Republican Party. It was a very bad day for truth at the Supreme Court.

 

The Supreme Court Is Poised to Shred Its Credibility to Let Trump Rig the Census

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/supreme-court-census-case-citizenship-question.html

 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

The summit with Twitter’s CEO is unlikely to assuage the president’s concerns about tech giants and social media, of which he has many. Two people close to Trump previously told The Daily Beast that Trump has repeatedly griped to associates about how his predecessor, President Obama, has had more Twitter followers than he has, even though—by Trump’s own assessment—he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is.

Twitter CEO Gently Tells Trump: Your ‘Lost’ Followers Are Bots and Spam Accounts
Jack Dorsey may have wanted to use Tuesday’s meeting to talk up Twitter’s efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, but the president had more important things on his mind.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-gets-gentle-reassurance-from-twitter-chief-jack-dorsey-over-follower-count-in-white-house-meeting?ref=home

[Altherion]

11 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I generally agree with this.  It's a pretty arbitrary proposal for a governmental expenditure (and does her plan address the tax bill side of this?  Because it will amount to people getting free money, and I kinda think that should be subject to tax somehow).    

She explicitly states that unlike most income, it will not be subject to tax. The proposed way it's paid for is also fairly unique: it's a tax on wealth rather than on income or real estate. More specifically, 2% per year on everything over $50M.

7 hours ago, lokisnow said:

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.

Fine, let's spend half the money on half a dozen climate change moonshots and divide the other half between everyone except the rich -- or maybe even everyone with no exceptions (a-la a universal basic income). Again, there is a whole lot of ways to spend a trillion dollars. This doesn't answer the question of why it should be given to people with college loans rather than any other set of people.

[Martell Spy]

3 minutes ago, Altherion said:

She explicitly states that unlike most income, it will not be subject to tax. The proposed way it's paid for is also fairly unique: it's a tax on wealth rather than on income or real estate. More specifically, 2% per year on everything over $50M.

Fine, let's spend half the money on half a dozen climate change moonshots and divide the other half between everyone except the rich -- or maybe even everyone with no exceptions (a-la a universal basic income). Again, there is a whole lot of ways to spend a trillion dollars. This doesn't answer the question of why it should be given to people with college loans rather than any other set of people.

Well we could just take the trillion dollars and disburse it to the 1 %. And then offer ourselves up as their indentured servants for the rest of our lifetimes in exchange for food and water. Which is the current state of our country.

[Rippounet]

2 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Again, there is a whole lot of ways to spend a trillion dollars. This doesn't answer the question of why it should be given to people with college loans rather than any other set of people.

Because you want people to be educated? Because democracy works best with an educated citizenry? Because in the long-term the US needs scientists to sustain its economy?
Because in any civilized society education should be a right and not a privilege?
Because the US can afford it? Because investing in the future (students) is a valid idea in itself?

[Altherion]

23 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Because you want people to be educated? Because democracy works best with an educated citizenry? Because in the long-term the US needs scientists to sustain its economy?
Because in any civilized society education should be a right and not a privilege?
Because the US can afford it? Because investing in the future (students) is a valid idea in itself?

I don't disagree with you regarding the value of education, but what does that have to do with my question? The vast majority of the people with college loans have already gotten the education that the loans paid for. If you wanted to help students, the only reasonable way forward in the US at this point is to force colleges to lower costs. There's a variety of ways to do this, but handing out more money is most certainly not one of them -- that's a large part of how we got into this high tuition mess in the first place.

[lokisnow]

Yeah but forcing colleges to lower costs only solves the future problem it doesn’t do anything to mitigate the devastating losses inflicted by the current tragedy.

maybe take it out of the ass of every big college donor and admin official, donated more than a hundred grand in the past thirty years? Earned more than 500 grand a year as an admin at a college now you owe an equal amount to the student loan forgiveness program :-p punitive and illegal but it would be oh so satisfying to force donors and admins to fix this catastrophe they created.

[Guest]

As much as I'd like to see my remaining student loan debt forgiven, and as much as I'd like to see the parasitic banks and debt collection agencies get shafted, I'd much rather see that money go towards single-payer healthcare and initiatives to combat global warming.

I think simply making student loans dischargable under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy would go a long way towards alleviating the student loan debt problem. That's an easy remedy that's already in place which accounts for individual situations without needing to reinvent the wheel. Capping interest and penalties would probably also be easy and popular solutions.

Long-term, getting the banks completely out of funding higher education is probably the best solution. Education is a public good and should be treated and funded like one.

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

There's a variety of ways to do this, but handing out more money is most certainly not one of them -- that's a large part of how we got into this high tuition mess in the first place.

More money?  When was the first round of money, because please I'd like my share of it.  You are so full of shit it's not worthwhile, but this one, really?  They're throwing money at the problem?  No, they're not -- in fact they've been systematically throwing effectively less money at the problem since sequestration.  I know this for a fact because it's part of my data collection.  Learn your government dude.

[karaddin]

11 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Keeping on the right side of history again 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/22/us-un-resolution-rape-weapon-of-war-veto

Yeah this got to me as well. Its the double punch of the US not even pretending to be the good guys compared to Russia and China, and also if the US ceases to be an advocate for certain basic liberties around the world we're pretty cooked on long term trends because the other two major powers sure as fuck aren't going to pick up the slack.

[DMC]

14 minutes ago, karaddin said:

and also if the US ceases to be an advocate for certain basic liberties around the world we're pretty cooked on long term trends because the other two major powers sure as fuck aren't going to pick up the slack.

Yep.  The US has already been the huge bitch on international orgs.  Pretty into that stuff in terms of research.  This administration just fucks us over, fucks the world twice over, etcetera.

[Altherion]

28 minutes ago, DMC said:

More money?  When was the first round of money, because please I'd like my share of it.  You are so full of shit it's not worthwhile, but this one, really?  They're throwing money at the problem?  No, they're not -- in fact they've been systematically throwing effectively less money at the problem since sequestration.  I know this for a fact because it's part of my data collection.  Learn your government dude.

Yes, more money. This argument about education being critical is at least a few decades old. The first solution to it was to increase the amount of credit available in subsidized loans. The predictable result of this was that the universities raised their prices even higher. Warren's proposal (by the way, here's the full Medium post) is to go from these subsidized loans to simply dumping large piles of cash into the university system -- first by paying off the loans and second via massive federal subsidies that make college free for students. Note that nowhere in that proposal does she mention forcing the colleges to reduce price or even restricting them from further increases.

[DMC]

Just now, Altherion said:

Yes, more money. This argument about education being critical is at least a few decades old.

The argument is way more than a few decades old, c'mon.

2 minutes ago, Altherion said:

The predictable result of this was that the universities raised their prices even higher. Warren's proposal (by the way, here's the full Medium post) is to go from these subsidized loans to simply dumping large piles of cash into the university system -- first by paying off the loans and second via massive federal subsidies that make college free for students. Note that nowhere in that proposal does she mention forcing the colleges to reduce price or even restricting them from further increases.

I'm not a policy guy, and actively try to avoid getting into these type of conversations, but come the fuck on.  You're so full of shit here.  None of your brim and doom has any chance of happening anywhere based on Warren's proposal.  I mean, I guess to look at the positives you've proved yourself as a good WWE heel.  Through hell, fire, and brimstone, by god it's Altherion: