US Politics - I'm not orange I'mpeach

[Fragile Bird]

Just throwing a scenario out there for comments.

Let’s say the Democrats won the next election and boot Trump out.

Expecting better treatment from the Dems, would-be immigrants hiding out in Mexico (and in Canada) surge over the border for the next 6 or 12 months. Records are set for the number of people crossing the border.

What are the Democrats going to do?

[Jace, Extat]

9 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Just throwing a scenario out there for comments.

Let’s say the Democrats won the next election and boot Trump out.

Expecting better treatment from the Dems, would-be immigrants hiding out in Mexico (and in Canada) surge over the border for the next 6 or 12 months. Records are set for the number of people crossing the border.

What are the Democrats going to do?

Let god sort 'em out.

[sologdin]

give em jrrbs in the firearm seizure agency.

[ThinkerX]

20 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Just throwing a scenario out there for comments.

Let’s say the Democrats won the next election and boot Trump out.

Expecting better treatment from the Dems, would-be immigrants hiding out in Mexico (and in Canada) surge over the border for the next 6 or 12 months. Records are set for the number of people crossing the border.

What are the Democrats going to do?

this trips off  the scenario where in 10 or 20 years time, Trump is seen as visionary - even by centrists.  

[Rippounet]

13 minutes ago, sologdin said:

that won't work--advisory opinions are unlawful; there'd have to be a live case.

Of course this assumes there is actually a case (I said so a few pages ago). Which is of course extremely unlikely. In other words, it's closer to a thought experiment than speculation at this point in time.

But you never know. As unhinged as Trump is already it's not unreasonable to think his old age may make him a certifiable madman.

[karaddin]

4 hours ago, DMC said:

I think this is the rub.  Let's take a hypothetical, but lift up the veil of ignorance a bit - let's say you're a politically ambitious 30 something lawyer at the turn of the millennium trying to figure out your next career move.  AND, you also know you're a black woman.  So you know once you get into a contentious race with the right, they're gonna brand you soft on crime just based on spec.  So what do you do?  You run for DA - of the most liberal city in the country - but hey at least it's still "law and order." 

And then you cultivate that until you're able to become US Senator of the biggest state in the union and are, ya know, actually able to have a say in legislation.  Sounds like a pretty damn sound strategy to me. 

...

But a white leftist telling Kamala Harris her past policies/actions are too racist for her to run for the Democratic nomination?  We've reached the apex of liberal irony.

For the last part - I haven't seen anyone saying she should be disqualified from running, just that she shouldn't win. And completely agreed on white liberals needing to take a back seat and listen to black people's opinions on this - the challenge there can be deciding on who to listen to though, and my feed has a fair bit from sex workers who are (understandably I think) not a fan and that's obviously going to influence the opinions I see.

Any white liberals saying she should be disqualified from running are whack.

The bolded in the first half of your post is both a reasonable reaction and something that makes me concerned she's not the right choice. People under pressure due to bullshit reasons who try to disarm those bullshit reasons are a bigger risk for doing this in the future as well, perhaps being more hawkish to avoid looking soft. And for the record I had exactly the same concern with Clinton. The difficulty with this is that it can run awfully close to saying "well we just need to stick with the white man then" which is really not what I want to be saying either, so it's not like I have the answer - just concerns.

At the end of the day I'm just a citizen of the world with no ability to vote in the primary or the election and am just hoping for the best candidate to win the primary - I can't actually make any choices or do anything.

[The Anti-Targ]

6 hours ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Apropos of nothing much at all, but can I say I find hilarity in the fact that the right is losing it's mind over the NBA/China thing over free-speech being infringed upon, while they were perfectly happy with people getting kicked out of the NFL over almost exactly the same thing.

I'd argue it's pretty much apropos of everything. Just another example of politically expedient hypocrisy.

I do wonder what Colin Kaepernick is thinking about now.

Of course it's another irony of corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism has nothing to do with freedom of speech or democracy, in fact those things are often a detriment. The corporation must only make decisioons that maximise profits and /or minimise / externalise losses and costs. So long as the decisions are lawful they can be as authoritarian as China and North Korea.

Arguably, despite the backlash Acti-Bliz still may have made the right capitalist decision, because they would probably suffer more long term loss from raising the ire of China than raising the ire of gamers, who will soon forget the whole thing and go back to feeding their habit by spending thousands of dollars they can't afford on gambling minigames and other predatory in-game microtransactions.

[ants]

5 hours ago, DMC said:

I think this is the rub.  Let's take a hypothetical, but lift up the veil of ignorance a bit - let's say you're a politically ambitious 30 something lawyer at the turn of the millennium trying to figure out your next career move.  AND, you also know you're a black woman.  So you know once you get into a contentious race with the right, they're gonna brand you soft on crime just based on spec.  So what do you do?  You run for DA - of the most liberal city in the country - but hey at least it's still "law and order." 

And then you cultivate that until you're able to become US Senator of the biggest state in the union and are, ya know, actually able to have a say in legislation.  Sounds like a pretty damn sound strategy to me.  But then when you get around to running for president, you're told that you are partly responsible for systemic racism?  GTFO.  I've talked to probably around a dozen black colleagues/fellow alcoholics at the bar about this issue with Harris the past few months, and while opinions on Harris are decidedly mixed, not a one thinks her past "disqualifies" her as a candidate, which I've seen and discussed here and elsewhere.  If a minority voter told me that, I'm not going to argue.  But a white leftist telling Kamala Harris her past policies/actions are too racist for her to run for the Democratic nomination?  We've reached the apex of liberal irony.

Um, this seems pretty ridiculous.  On these boards, and from what I've read elsewhere, nobody has said Kamala should be disqualified.  She has been attacked from the left, by people who would be saying there are stronger progressive candidates.  Which wouldn't be a problem for Kamala if she'd run on law & order and a centrist position.  But she keeps trying to semi-position herself as progressive, so funnily enough that doesn't seem to wash.

The idea that a different AG doesn't influence the outcomes for constituents, no matter the law, is frankly ridiculous.  Especially when she ran against an incumbent progressive, and then was far less progressive in the role.  Her election worsened results for her constituents.  Saying now to a progressive that because some minority voters don't care, so they shouldn't, is pretty strange.  Its like saying if a bunch of minority voters endorsed Herman Cain that progressives should be therefore ok with him.  

Again, nobody is saying she can't run.  But trying to run as a progressive candidate, when you have strong progressive opponents, when you have the baggage she does, is making life difficult, and you can hardly be surprised when progressive voters decide to select other candidates.  

[Martell Spy]

The Grim Lottery of Surprise Medical Bill Stories
Journalists can occasionally help the victims of the health care industry's predations, but without major reform these abuses will continue.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155334/grim-lottery-surprise-medical-bill-stories

Quote

 

In April 2017, a man named Drew Calver thought he was dying. A heart attack had pinned him to the floor of his bedroom. His neighbor took him to St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, where he was successfully treated. Weeks later, he received a bill from the hospital: That’ll be $108,951.31, please. St. David’s was out of network on his insurance, and Aetna had only paid $55,840 of the total $164,941 bill for his treatment. 

How? As NPR reported in conjunction with Kaiser Health News, although “insurers will pay for needed emergency care at the closest hospital—even if it is out of network...the hospital and the insurer may not agree on a reasonable price.” If the insurer thinks the hospital is charging too much, and the hospital won’t budge, the bill goes to the patient. In this case, NPR discovered that the hospital was definitely charging too much: Calver was billed $19,708 each for two stents placed in his arteries, but the median price paid by hospitals for stents of that type is just $1,153. According to billing experts that NPR spoke to, even the amount that Aetna did pay was vastly inflated—as much as twice what it should have paid. The price of the stents was roughly four times what it should have been, the cost experts at Healthcare Bluebook told NPR. 

This story has a happy ending. After NPR reported on Calver’s case, the hospital agreed to lower his bill—to just $331. But the feel-good resolution only leaves distressing questions. Did the hospital, in the end, eat the more than $100,000 cost purely because of the bad look caused by media coverage? Or is it possible that the charge was absurd in the first place, and they happened to get caught this time? 

This is a well-trodden genre of media story, the only bright spot being that this sort of coverage can occasionally save someone from financial ruin. This week, the Los Angeles Times reported on the case of Ethan Hassanzai, severely disabled by cerebral palsy and other conditions. One day, he began vomiting and having seizures and was rushed to his local ER in Torrance, which quickly determined he needed to be sent, by air ambulance, to the medical center at UCLA. Days after his release, his insurer Anthem declined to cover these transportation costs. Even after months of appeals, Anthem insisted the air ambulance wasn’t “medically necessary,” and that he should have been sent, via ground transportation, to a closer hospital. 

The question of why Hassanzai’s family should have to bear this cost and not the medical practitioners who made these arrangements receives a blank stare from our health care system. As Ethan’s mother told the Times, “The doctors made the decision to transport him by helicopter. Were we supposed to challenge them?” Patients are not doctors, and should not refuse doctors’ orders because they think an insurance company might deny a claim; it is actually vital for the practice of medicine that patients are able to trust that doctors are making the best medical decisions for them. 

But again, a happy ending: After the story ran, complete with statements from an Anthem spokeswoman who told the paper that the air ambulance company “can charge whatever they choose,” Anthem reversed their decision and covered the cost. What changed the calculus? Once again, it was journalists creating a modicum of pain and shame. 

 

 

[DMC]

27 minutes ago, karaddin said:

The bolded in the first half of your post is both a reasonable reaction and something that makes me concerned she's not the right choice. People under pressure due to bullshit reasons who try to disarm those bullshit reasons are a bigger risk for doing this in the future as well, perhaps being more hawkish to avoid looking soft. And for the record I had exactly the same concern with Clinton.

Well, there's a lot to unpack here.  First, in terms of the Clinton comparison, I would have agreed with you that Clinton's hawkishness was simply her trying to look "tough" as female candidates are often forced to do, but I kind of changed my mind on that midway through the 2016 campaign.  When she was literally letting Trump run to the left of her on foreign policy, it made me wonder if her hawkishness doesn't just reflect her true preferences.  And considering her (admittedly seldom) comments on foreign policy since losing - when she knows her political career is over - I have to say I'm pretty convinced she just really is that hawkish.

But I digress.  I don't have nearly as negative a view of ambitious politicians bending "under pressure due to bullshit reasons" as you do.  We want to encourage ambitious, diverse, and capable candidates to run, not discourage them.  We are talking about only the second black female US Senator in history.  The primary research interest of one of my advisors is election aversion - both among minority groups in general, and specifically women (perhaps tellingly, each work is co-authored by one of my male advisors). 

So, no - certainly not everybody is saying she should be disqualified, although there definitely is a strain of that both in leftist groups at-large and in prior discussions on this topic we've had in these threads.  It is more of a continuum, but it frustrates me that the criticism often boils down to "she's more politically opportunist than [Candidate B or B-D]" -- and what especially grinds my gears is the undertone/insinuation that she's betrayed her race through her tenures as DA and AG.  This is exactly the type of criticism that reinforces the election aversion women and minorities (and in her case both) have that actually manifests internally as well as externally (see the conclusion of the second link above).  Putting myself in her shoes, I would have said go fuck you all months ago (well, years ago really, but that's just one of the billions of reasons why I'll never run for office). 

Getting back to the "political opportunist" frame of attack, this is just a non-starter for me.  The idea that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders - or any presidential candidate for that matter (except Andrew Yang, maybe) - are one one-hundredth of a percent less of political animals, or even politically craven, than Harris is just patently naive.  If you support Warren or Sanders or anyone else because their policy preferences align closer to yours, great!  That's how elections are supposed to work.  But don't tell me it's because they have more sincere beliefs or are somehow less politically calculating.  That just demonstrates a distinctly sophomoric perspective of American politics.

34 minutes ago, ants said:

The idea that a different AG doesn't influence the outcomes for constituents, no matter the law, is frankly ridiculous.  Especially when she ran against an incumbent progressive, and then was far less progressive in the role.  Her election worsened results for her constituents.  Saying now to a progressive that because some minority voters don't care, so they shouldn't, is pretty strange.  Its like saying if a bunch of minority voters endorsed Herman Cain that progressives should be therefore ok with him.

I honestly don't know what this is responding to.  It certainly doesn't pertain to anything I argued in the quoted post.

36 minutes ago, ants said:

On these boards, and from what I've read elsewhere, nobody has said Kamala should be disqualified.

Yes, people have said this previously on these boards.  As for elsewhere, take a look at The Intercept's coverage of Harris.  Like this article:

Quote

But in some ways, the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well, encouraging education and re-entry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.

But, you're right, my larger beef isn't really with the people who think she should be "disqualified" necessarily.  See above.

[karaddin]

@DMC I wasn't in any way condemning any political opportunism on her part and I'd agree with you on that being something they all do, so there was some misunderstanding there. Probably not one worth trying to figure out though.

 

[Kalbear]

My personal take on Harris from watching her and reading her messaging is that she doesn't stand for anything particularly passionately, and in this she reminds me of Clinton's genuineness not going through. Clinton, IMO, did care about certain things quite passionately, but she didn't care about a whole lot of specific issues other than feminism - and she had to constantly suppress that one (or at least was told to). 

But it meant when she was talking about specific issues that didn't specifically matter to her, she didn't give it a lot of passion and it showed. She was knowledgeable, she was articulate, she didn't fall into traps - but she also didn't care. And I get the same vibe from Harris - there just aren't that many things she cares about ,or is allowed to express that care.

I don't get that impression from Sanders, Biden or Warren. I also don't get that impression from Buttigieg. Until O'Rourke went on this anti-gun thing, I didn't think he cared a whole lot about anything other than getting stoned. 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, karaddin said:

@DMC I wasn't in any way condemning any political opportunism on her part and I'd agree with you on that being something they all do, so there was some misunderstanding there. Probably not one worth trying to figure out though.

 

Well I was going off your Clinton example, which at least seemed to me to suggest you were referring to concerns that she has a political calculus that you found concerning (i.e. "People under pressure due to bullshit reasons who try to disarm those bullshit reasons are a bigger risk for doing this in the future as well").  After that, yes, I dovetailed into a more thorough articulation of my general issues on the subject, not at you specifically.  Sorry.

[karaddin]

The Clinton thing wasn't opportunism, at least as I see it, and its not a consummation of the person. Just an awareness that this can result in worse outcomes. I don't even see it as on the same spectrum as opportunism, just potentially acting in more extreme ways to be taken seriously by dicks that would dismiss you.

I'll admit I'm far more conscious of this risk from a "women trying to show men they can be tough too" perspective, I'm not sure what this might manifest as when applied to racial dynamics. I guess the "tough on crime" thing is one of them, it just also can fall under the gender one.

[Jace, Extat]

I will second that people in these threads have indeed used the word "disqualifying" regarding Kamala Harris. As in "her record as AG is disqualifying".

Which to me indicates a feeling that said efforts "disqualify" her. Because she ran for public office and had the un-fucking-mitigated gall to discharge her duties competently.

 

[DMC]

28 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

But it meant when she was talking about specific issues that didn't specifically matter to her, she didn't give it a lot of passion and it showed. She was knowledgeable, she was articulate, she didn't fall into traps - but she also didn't care. And I get the same vibe from Harris - there just aren't that many things she cares about ,or is allowed to express that care.

I don't get that impression from Sanders, Biden or Warren.

Yeah, this essentially echoes my original thoughts on her weaknesses in this specific thread:

On 10/8/2019 at 11:27 PM, DMC said:

 @James Arryn asked, I believe (I'm pretty drunk), if this would be a lesson in campaign failure.  I don't see it.  Not sure what Harris did wrong, necessarily.  It's just she didn't do anything that made her stand out.  Warren did a much better job of that in outlining herself as the policy wonk.  Do people know or even care about all her plans?  Of course not.  But she's the plan lady.  It was well done.

The other three had distinct lanes that were easy to pursue (although I would still say that Biden hasn't really articulated a cogent message for what he cares about either, but I suppose he does get the benefit of the doubt on the "genuineness" aspect).  Harris has always been stuck in the middle, and she botched it.  So, once again, Kal has taken us full circle.  Kalbear:  Circle Closer!  ....I'll work on the nickname.

[fionwe1987]

5 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

You want to make up problems, go ahead. 

I must bow down to the singular wit and erudition that is represented in this argument. The grasp of facts and complex concepts here is outstanding. Bravo.

[karaddin]

36 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah, this essentially echoes my original thoughts on her weaknesses in this specific thread:

The other three had distinct lanes that were easy to pursue (although I would still say that Biden hasn't really articulated a cogent message for what he cares about either, but I suppose he does get the benefit of the doubt on the "genuineness" aspect).  Harris has always been stuck in the middle, and she botched it.  So, once again, Kal has taken us full circle.  Kalbear:  Circle Closer!  ....I'll work on the nickname.

I'd missed that post from Kal and yeah, I think that's a much bigger problem for her electability than those critical of her time as DA - those hurt her with a demographic that I think would still vote for her if she wins the primary, people put off by this aspect may be turned off voting in the general by it.

And I absolutely agree with it hurting Clinton too and I think Clinton (and Julia Gillard for an Aus example) followed bad advice which involved involved trying to be more polished and resulted in losing their authenticity. Definitely a risk for Harris too, but one Warren certainly isn't falling into based on her performance today - need to watch to the end of this for the full thing.

The one thing I'd say with respect to Kals commentary on the various candidates is that I agree Buttigieg doesn't come across as lacking passion but he's the one I'm most concerned its an effective act rather than genuine. Also agreed on Beto - he really seemed like he was ditching the coaching when he's gone after guns and it's the first time I've liked him.

[Kalbear]

I think Biden has been incredibly specific. He is the person who will beat trump and take us back to a Obama like time, or maybe even further back to the mythical land of bipartisanship. He is the nostalgia candidate combined with a deep revulsion for Trump. This isn't a lane per se, and it's not particularly policy driven, but beating trump like a drum and having the polling to back it up is a VERY strong stance, and I have never doubted that he genuinely wants to do that. 

What sold me most on Warren is her calls to her donors and supporters and her willingness to stand in line for hours to do pics. This humanized her and made her significantly more about those people than I've seen. She didnt use those stories to launch into policy like Clinton did either - it doesnt come off as calculated to me. 

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think Biden has been incredibly specific. He is the person who will beat trump and take us back to a Obama like time, or maybe even further back to the mythical land of bipartisanship. He is the nostalgia candidate combined with a deep revulsion for Trump. This isn't a lane per se

To the bolded, sure it is.  It's the electability lane.  Which is where he's been driving - probably slowly and holding up traffic - the entire time (sorry couldn't help myself).  That still has nothing to do with communicating a message of what he genuinely cares about, which is what your previous post was describing.

19 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I'd missed that post from Kal and yeah, I think that's a much bigger problem for her electability than those critical of her time as DA - those hurt her with a demographic that I think would still vote for her if she wins the primary, people put off by this aspect may be turned off voting in the general by it.

Yeah I think her and her campaign viewed being pigeonholed in the middle-ground between Biden and Warren/Sanders as inherently a defensive posture, which led her to equivocate on lots of things.  The way you wanna approach that is as an opportunity.