US Politics: Reaching the Tipping Point

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Saying what shit?  

Sorry quoted the wrong post, meant to quote your first one about a faux Hardline on immigration 

 

*And it's hard to say "what shit" because you mentioned it would be vague.  But anything considered hawkish or Hardline would be a hard "no" for me, dog.

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Ah, thanks for the clarification.  

Does that more or less mean that it is not possible to move right on immigration without it being code for white supremacy?  

Yes, for me it does, and I would actively campaign against any of these people in a primary.  In the general, they would not have my vote, and the level of how much I'd speak out against them would be proportionate to their statements on the issue 

[Raja]

10 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Does that more or less mean that it is not possible to move right on immigration without it being code for white supremacy?  

It is tough to make any sort of conclusion given that you've spoken in fairly general terms so far such as - 'hawkish on immigration', 'moving to the right', 'compromise on the immigration front', if you were more specific, as Ormond stated, it might be easier to figure out what kind of stuff you're talking about. 

In addition - I am naturally skeptical of people when they want to 'move to the right' on immigration, as these arguments 90% of the time have a foundation based on xenophobia, a sense of 'taking our jobs', and 'preserving the native culture' - whilst also flying in the face of the mountain of social science evidence on immigrants in the US. 

[DMC]

24 minutes ago, Triskele said:

But the forces that Z points out are part of the reason that there can be no complacency even if there's some hope that 2016 was a fluke. 

Sure, no complacency.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Also, you want to get more Dem votes?  Maybe the Dems should move left in some shit, like healthcare, reproductive rights, the environment.  I'd guess with my generation few things are as responsible for low turnout than the corporate, centrist, and appeasing old timey-norms attitudes advocated by shitty candidates like Biden.

[Raja]

11 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

California goes even bigger on Obamacare
The state is advancing a sweeping health care package that could shape Democrats' debate over universal coverage.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/16/california-obamacare-health-care-1530461

 

Expanding coverage to undocumented immigrants is a good move - insurance coverage for undocumented immigrants is pretty mediocre across the US, with almost *zero* protection by the federal government. I think NYC & SF have some pretty significant plans in terms of coverage for undocumented immigrants ( I think the NYC model is based in part on the SF one), but it's good to see the states take *some* action. CA have been debating expanding the federal program to undocumented immigrants for a while, so I'm glad to see this potentially become a reality. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 minutes ago, Triskele said:

OK, went looking for a bit on the center left Denmark party that was a part of Sullivan's example.  

 

from Vice.

 

Not good.  Worse than I'd thought.  And certainly not what I was thinking of with my vague first example.  I was thinking of something more like just talking more about border security and the path to citizenship.  

I think the problem is when you speak in platitudes to appeal to the basest bigotry out there about issues that are genuine crises with a real human cost, you're already compromised.  

This is the same cowardly flinching that half of the Dems were advocating during the shutdown.  "Just give him some of the money for the wall" they said.  "We'll look bad if we don't compromise".  There's no negotiating with terrorists.  The shit happening at the border is a humanitarian crisis and any attempts to gain a few cornfed whiteboy votes by minimizing it, or cashing on how hot xenophobia is with Trump's base are fucking wrong on so many levels.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

LOL.  I dream on empirics, unlike your ludicrous method that ultimately is just whining.  Get off my ass.

Peeps gonna stay on it, or at least laff at it, since you and your ilks keep advocating for the ludicrous status quo, proven so often to be Fail. 

Particularly as Bushwa2 stole the elections twice, etc.  Fluke = denial, denial, denial. Time to grow up.

[DMC]

36 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Peeps gonna stay on it, or at least laff at it, since you and your ilks keep advocating for the ludicrous status quo, proven so often to be Fail. 

Particularly as Bushwa2 stole the elections twice, etc.  Fluke = denial, denial, denial. Time to grow up.

Um, what?

[ThinkerX]

Much as I dislike Trump, I have to agree with him on this:

 there is a massive refugee crisis at the border. 

Trump's 'solutions' are brutal, immoral, and doomed to fail.

The refugee crisis, soon to be driven in no small part by climate change, is going to get worse, not better.  Comments and polls I have been seeing point to a growing dislike for such refugees.

 

[ThinkerX]

50 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Indeed, what is the Dems platform going to be?  This will be a huge campaign issue both because Trump will make it one as part of his MAGA and because it's a legit issue in its own right.  I cannot imagine that open borders is the position (though Trump will probably paint whichever Dem's position as such no matter what).  

Predictions:

saying family separation is inhumane and that we have a system of laws for handling immigrants seeking assylum

But as you say, this actually has blown up.  Way more people are trying to come than ever, and it seems like the Dem is going to have to have some clearer message on this.  Even if Trump doesn't have a solution he at least has a message that works for his base.

Assuming the Democratic party takes the white house and holds onto the one branch of congress, way I see it...

 

best that can be hoped for is a path to citizenship for the Dreamers combined with an increase in work permits with the trade off being a fully funded wall and far stricter immigration requirements.  Even that much will be hells own fight.

 

Trump is right about another thing: an (illegal) immigration solution will have to include Mexico.

[The Anti-Targ]

Interesting Last Week Tonight episode about Impeachment and pros and cons of impeaching Trump. Knowing that there's a 99% chance the Senate would not convict, are there still benefits to the Democrats if they do impeach? John Oliver thinks yes. I think he makes some valid points. The Trump situation is not like the Clinton situation. A Trump impeachment is about obstruction of justice concerning investigations into a whole bunch of serious stuff that in itself would be impeachable. The Clinton situation ended up being about lying about sex stuff. If during impeachment hearings a whole lot of stuff from the Mueller report gets aired in public and played across the media things could swing more like how the Nixon situation ended up (Though Trump would never resign). Nixon's approval rating went from 67% to "must resign" in a short space of time. Trump already has low approval, and if the details of the Mueller report are as bad as people (and Mueller) suggest there's going to be damage to Trump's standing with the public, and damage to any Republican who stands too close to Trump. Bringing Trump's misdeeds out into the light, in a manner perhaps only impeachment proceedings could do, may be an important public good.

It appears that the principled approach would be to impeach, and there's a decent chance the politically beneficial approach for Democrats would also be to impeach. Even if it's a 50/50 call that should be good enough odds to go for it.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

“There’s no boom in Youngstown, but blue-collar workers are sticking with Trump,” the New York Times announced last month, in the latest of a series of Trump Country dispatches on the nation’s white working class. These heartland safaris exhibit a common media oversight: the compulsion to paint white, small-town manufacturing workers as the face of the working class, which is in reality mostly urban, racially diverse, and more likely to make burgers than automobiles.

In Youngstown, these stories exhibit another oversight: Youngstown is not white. In contrast to the largely white Mahoning Valley, for which it often serves as an unthinking stand-in, the city itself is 43 percent black and majority-minority. The mayor is black. In more than a dozen interviews in Youngstown’s black community, I could not find anyone who knew a black Trump supporter, let alone was one. But not all of the people I talked to voted for Hillary Clinton, either.

These heartland safaris exhibit a common media oversight: the compulsion to paint white, small-town manufacturing workers as the face of the working class.
The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”

And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.

 

The Nonwhite Working Class
Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/black-voters-youngstown-ohio-trump-democrats.html

[Zorral]

“Nevertheless, She Persisted . . . . " a quote from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, defending the move to silence her ... when she protested the appointment of Sessions, he, who she showed, instrumental, in suppressing the black vote in his state of Alabama.

Elizabeth Warren makes it, in depth, 'above the fold' on the NY Times -- which means the Dems as well as *rum* are afraid of her. However, their praise is rather faint and the damning attempts are bold. Lagniappe is a photo of the very young EW in a dress she made herself, in which for better or for worse, for does it matter? of course it does since she's female, duh! reveals a very pretty EW. 

Perhaps the most important sections of this piece with which voters can educate themselves as to who EW is, explain the differences between Warren and Biden -- Biden in favor of punishing financial hardships by making bankruptcy harder to get and covering less, and less regulation of his bosses, the credit card companies, while Warren's data studies persuaded her to stop the exploitation and punishment of the financially strapped by banks and credit card companies. (Biden, of course, is trying to re-write the history of this, which the article, to be fair, includes.) The article covers her history and background (poor, insecure, hardworking), her education into how the corporations buy politic and politicians and pillage the poor, immigration, African American racism and feminism. Her approach to all these is economic, because the corporations exploitation target all these groups for their own enrichment, while also buying the political system.  Still, unlike some others, EW still seems to believe the political system itself can be redeemed by revamping economic and financial focus, laws and regulations to make things more fair, starting with breaking up the giant corps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/magazine/elizabeth-warren-president.html?

Quote

 

For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent. 

....Her grand overarching ambition is to end America’s second Gilded Age.... 

“Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” appreciated Roosevelt’s argument that trustbusting was helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. “If you go back and read his stuff, it’s not only about the economic dominance; it’s the political influence,” she said. . . .

In the years since it became law, the bankruptcy bill has allowed credit-card companies to recover more money from families than they did before. That shift had two effects, Matthew Yglesias argued recently in Vox. As Biden hoped, borrowers over all benefited when the credit-card companies offered slightly lowered interest rates. But as Warren feared, the new law hit people reeling from medical emergencies and other unexpected setbacks. Blocked from filing for bankruptcy, they have remained worse off for years. And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis. . . .

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/17/politics/supreme-court-double-jeopardy-clause-case/index.html

So, the SCOTUS has held that it is not double jeopardy for a State to charge someone with a crime after an acquittal on federal charges arising out of the same facts.

This means, by extension, a pardon for federal crimes will not preclude State charges against the person pardoned.  Interestingly Ginsburg and Gorsuch dissented from the 7 member majority.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Here’s a link with more meat on its bones re the double jeopardy case:

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gamble-v-united-states/

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

The Republican Challenge to Virginia district Maps is kicked saying the Republican members of the Virginia Legislature lack standing to challenge district maps:

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/virginia-house-of-delegates-v-bethune-hill/

[Maithanet]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The Republican Challenge to Virginia district Maps is kicked saying the Republican members of the Virginia Legislature lack standing to challenge district maps:

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/virginia-house-of-delegates-v-bethune-hill/

Ahh yes, the classic supreme court team of Ginsburg/Thomas/Gorsuch/Kagan/Sotomayor putting together a 5-4 decision. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Ahh yes, the classic supreme court team of Ginsburg/Thomas/Gorsuch/Kagan/Sotomayor putting together a 5-4 decision. 

It’s a pretty weird majority.  

[Guy Kilmore]

I am kind of curious to see how more of these cases play out