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US Politics: Show Trials & Tribulations


DMC

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4 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Trump (or one of his servants) just posted this on twitter/facebook:

 

What's funny about this is that I think Trump is making the same mistake Clinton just made - in politics, it's important to have all the right enemies.  Just a few pages ago someone (correctly) pointed out that Hillary coming out against Sanders will only bolster his support with the left.  Now Trump et al are trying to show common cause with Sanders supporters, while forgetting that NOTHING makes the left less sympathetic to an argument like saying "Trump supports it".  I know there are a fair number of progressives who are still unsure about Sanders vs Warren, and this kind of bullshit will definitely not help. 

This is doubly funny, because having all the right enemies was essentially Trump's main qualification in the 2016 primaries.  If he wasn't so good at pissing off the liberals and the media, he never would have gotten the nomination in the first place. 

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10 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Now Trump et al are trying to show common cause with Sanders supporters, while forgetting that NOTHING makes the left less sympathetic to an argument like saying "Trump supports it".

I very much doubt his motivation here is to help Sanders. It's far more likely that he is laying the grounds for delegitimizing the primary as a whole and using this in the general election similarly to what he did in 2016. Of course, if Sanders somehow wins, he'll need a different strategy.

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3 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I very much doubt his motivation here is to help Sanders. It's far more likely that he is laying the grounds for delegitimizing the primary as a whole and using this in the general election similarly to what he did in 2016. Of course, if Sanders somehow wins, he'll need a different strategy.

He will use the same strategy as always. Lies, lies and more lies. Trump is nothing if not predictable. He is no strategic genius, just a fucking liar.

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Just now, Altherion said:

I very much doubt his motivation here is to help Sanders. It's far more likely that he is laying the grounds for delegitimizing the primary as a whole and using this in the general election similarly to what he did in 2016. Of course, if Sanders somehow wins, he'll need a different strategy.

I think he is trying to foster the grievances of whoever loses the primary.  He did it in 2016, and it was essential in his ability to win the election with only 46% of the vote.  I just think that doing it in such an obvious way in 2020 is not likely to be effective - only the most foolish of Sanders supporters would think that Trump cares about whether left wing voters are getting screwed.

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3 hours ago, Darzin said:

But what does this mean? What is the mechanism they would use to stop him?

I don't know what to tell you--I made it clear to someone that you can't possibly know what that'd be (potentially even if it happened). I expressed disbelief that the DNC will let Sanders win. We've litigated again and again the multiple ways the DNC tried to sabotage Sanders in 2016, and the usual suspects ignore all that and laugh it off a conspiracy. This time, I decided to more broadly show how Democrats do things to hurt progressive candidates and poor voters who are typically of people of color, but again, the usual responses that don't really consider the evidence, they decide to attack and try to discredit the person making the argument. At this point, it's really not worth litigating this when you have people here who believe in the purity of their party in the face of all evidence showing their party is as corrupt as any other. 

As to the original question, what mechanism will the DNC itself use to stop Sanders? Let's wait and see what is leaked this time. Maybe without DWS in charge, the DNC is just a force of benevolent justice. I have my doubts. If Bernie runs away with it, I believe we then will see whatever mechanisms they would use to stop him. Until then, as I said from the get go, the point about Sanders is moot. He will not run away with the election. The broader point was that even if he did somehow, none of it matters, he won't be the nominee. None of Clinton's typical bag of dirty tricks to place blame on everyone but herself. The point is, Clinton's intervention does nothing. Sanders isn't winning under any circumstances.

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14 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

If Bernie runs away with it, I believe we then will see whatever mechanisms they would use to stop him. Until then, as I said from the get go, the point about Sanders is moot. He will not run away with the election. The broader point was that even if he did somehow, none of it matters, he won't be the nominee. None of Clinton's typical bag of dirty tricks to place blame on everyone but herself. The point is, Clinton's intervention does nothing. Sanders isn't winning under any circumstances.

This post just gives me flashbacks to 2016.

On how President Trump continuously stated that it was impossible for him to win. That the whole system was against him. That everything was rigged. How "The Swamp" would never allow him to be president.

But then you know, he won, cause everything he was spouting was bullshit. There was no conspiracy to keep him from the presidency. If there was, then he wouldn't be president. He just said these things because he expected to lose, and was putting up a built-in excuse.

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Just now, A True Kaniggit said:

This statement just gives me flashbacks to 2016.

On how President Trump continuously stated that it was impossible for him to win. That the whole system was against him. That everything was rigged.

But then you know, he won, cause everything he was spouting was bullshit. There was no conspiracy to keep him form the presidency. If there was, then he wouldn't be president. He just said these things because he expected to lose, and was putting up a builtoin excuse.

I get what you are saying, and this is even more so why I believe Sanders won't win. The Democratic party is fearful of their own "Trump" (of course, equating Sanders to Trump is problematic enough, but many liberals do this), and they will not let it happen.

But in 2016, it's very possible I said the same thing about Trump (that even if he did run away with the nom, the right wouldn't let it happen). I can't remember. 

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3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

In my opinion, if Executive Privilege applies in cases of impeachment and trial for removal from office impeachment is an empty threat.  The Congress will be prevented from actually investigating actions of the Executive by claims of Executive Privilege if it applies in this context.  That means it is next to impossible to remove a President from office.  That cannot be the intended result of the inclusion of the possibility of a President being removed from office.  

Honestly, we are damaged by the fact that it has never happened since the Constitution was ratified.  It creates the impression that it is never supposed to happen.  

[An aside]

Something occurred to me back in November.  As the Constitution was originally enacted the Vice-President was supposed to be the person with the second highest vote total in the Electoral College.  That was changed after the tumultuous election of 1800 by the 12th amendment ratified in 1804 which allowed a separate election for the Vice-Presidency. 

Before that change we had a built in "Shadow Government" in a manner similar to the Parliamentary systems of Europe where the opposition party was ready to jump into the Executive's role.  Could impeachment have been intended to operate like a vote of No Confidence with a replacement government ready to step into place?  Given the original structure it seems likely to me.  The concretion of formalized broad umbrella political parties rather than the varying "interest groups" anticipated by the Federalist Papers seems to have rapidly undone the possibility of that sort of a structure.   People vote based upon party membership rather than based upon individual assessment of the allegations against the current executive.  

Just a thought.

Two things. First, I believe it was President John Adams that was cited last night, after leaving his presidency, as saying generally that the power of Congress to acquire information should supersede the President’s ability to suppress information, otherwise impeachment would be a meaningless exercise. Second, my understanding is that a vote of no confidence was discussed and rejected by the founders. OTOH, the vagueness of the Constitution really does make impeachment whatever Congress wants it to be.

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Hey can I just rant a bit about how every presidential election for the past 20 year is decided by 5 states: 

  • Michigan
  • Pennsylvania
  • North Carolina
  • Ohio
  • Florida
  • (Maybe Wisconsin...)

Whatever candidate the Dems choose, their challenge is to expand their reach to about 1500 lazy jackoffs in Florida who sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democrat, with the qualifications being, 1) anyone but Hillary and 2) who has a more nostalgic campaign slogan. Fuck the electoral college man. 

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3 minutes ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

Person 2: Fuck the electoral college man. 

Person 1: But we need that to represent the less populated states of the country!

Person 2: So you are OK switching over state governor elections to a similar system, so areas with less people living in them have more of a say in who becomes governor?

Person 1: ????? What, no..... mumble.... mumble.... what?

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13 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Person 1: But we need that to represent the less populated states of the country!

Person 2: So you are OK switching over state governor elections to a similar system, so areas with less people living in them have more of a say in who becomes governor?

Person 1: ????? What, no..... mumble.... mumble.... what?

Basically this. You end up with off-the-grid weirdos who live in a panhandle, having enormous electoral power, which they don't even take responsibly.

What the Dems should be asking themselves is, which candidate can appeal to a highly specific non-ideological voting block that decides these things because they've already got the Dem voters covered, anything else is redundant. The block that believes chemtrails are out to get us and who want to keep their guns but who don't care which party they vote for as long as they're righteously angry about it all (can you tell I live in Florida?)

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2 hours ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

Basically this. You end up with off-the-grid weirdos who live in a panhandle, having enormous electoral power, which they don't even take responsibly.

What the Dems should be asking themselves is, which candidate can appeal to a highly specific non-ideological voting block that decides these things because they've already got the Dem voters covered, anything else is redundant. The block that believes chemtrails are out to get us and who want to keep their guns but who don't care which party they vote for as long as they're righteously angry about it all (can you tell I live in Florida?)

Probabaly just easier to run a candidate who can bring out some college students, the youth, and poc to vote than to try to persuade these unicorns.

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2 hours ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

which candidate can appeal to a highly specific non-ideological voting block

Give me an example of any such thing as a non-ideological voting BLOCK -- particularly right now on January 22, 2020.

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For the poll watchers among us:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/bernie-sanders-leads-democratic-primary-poll-cnn-biden-warren.html

Quote

Of course, all of these findings should be taken with several grains of salt. If it is true that Sanders has erased Biden’s advantage with nonwhite voters, then the shape of the race has fundamentally changed. Until now, there’s been a presumption that any Biden challenger would need to compensate for sizable losses in overwhelmingly nonwhite southern primaries by running up the score in the vice-president’s weaker regions. If that logic no longer holds, victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could provide Sanders with a durable claim to front-runner status. On the other hand, the fact that both CNN’s headline numbers — and its results among nonwhite voters — are significantly out of step with other polls suggest that we may simply be looking at a flawed survey. For the moment, RealClearPolitics’ average of national polls gives Biden a six-point lead over Sanders.

So ... is this yet one more entry into the nothin' story that a journalist is pretending is a sumpin' . . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This hasn't gotten much play here in the news, though a lot of mainstream media like the NY Times had stories about the Japanese woman who got screened for pregnancy by the airline flying to an US Pacific island birth tourism destination, Saipan. This woman screamed bloody discriminatory murder about it, sued the airline, etc. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/us/hk-saipan-pregnancy-test.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ticket-passport-pregnancy-test-flying-to-saipan-can-be-complicated-11578664961

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/pregnancy-test-hong-kong-airport-saipan-birth-tourism/

But maybe that spurred these guys to go after this wide-spread practice -- it is much more common here within the US, despite the people ABC news talked to saying it was rare.  Many of them who come here are very wealthy, thus they are noticeable for sure. Periodically we see a story in a NYC publication or LA one about it, but nobody's particularly cared until now.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-targets-birth-tourism-vetting-plans-visas/story?id=68406386

 

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23 hours ago, DMC said:

Who dat?  I don't recall any left-leaning poster asserting a Trump presidency would be better than a Sanders presidency.  There was a brief discussion in the last thread where @Mlle. Zabzie expressed consternation with potentially having to vote for Sanders, but that was in the context that she votes in NY and therefore her vote is meaningless - and even then she didn't even entertain the prospect of actually voting for Trump.

 

Oh lord no.  Also, am I considered a left-leaning voter here?  Inquiring minds and all that?

 

 

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22 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Oh lord no.  Also, am I considered a left-leaning voter here?  Inquiring minds and all that?

 

 

I wouldn't so consider you a left leaner.

OTOH PG considers me a snob.  Some days he might possibly be right -- and then it' probably intentional, meaning, attempts employing rhetorical tools such as inversion, irony, etc., hopefully, to illustrate how stupid a question is.  Most days though, he's just wrong. :D

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6 hours ago, Maithanet said:

What's funny about this is that I think Trump is making the same mistake Clinton just made - in politics, it's important to have all the right enemies.  Just a few pages ago someone (correctly) pointed out that Hillary coming out against Sanders will only bolster his support with the left.

I really don't get why a bunch of y'all (didn't mean to pick on you Maith, just the most recent post about it) are acting like Hillary's attack on Bernie means it's a mistake, or that she's a bad politician, or that it hurts the Democratic party, or that it demonstrates she's a bad strategist.  Hillary isn't a politician anymore, she's a retired politician.  As such, she is naturally going to feel less constrained about "what's good for the party" than when she was trying to lead it - further, I strongly suspect in her mind she feels like the party abandoned/betrayed her (and Bill) over the past 4 or even 12 years.  So strategically, all she wanted to do was hit Bernie and figure out the best time to do it.  I'm honestly not sure if she had control over when these comments were leaked, but right before voting starts seems like pretty damn good timing to me, if your goal is to get revenge on Sanders.

Anyway, point is Hillary is a wild card and has nothing to lose.  I don't think her criticisms will have much of an impact at all, and I'm sure that's why she feels free to insert own invective during the primaries.  Like I said, I don't think it's a problem until/unless she's still doing this once someone wraps up the nomination.

11 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

The most anti-Sanders establishment force seems to be the major media outlets, but mostly through subtle stuff like misleading headlines.  I think any unfairness in the primaries is more likely to come from other power structures than the Dem party itself; corporate donors and super PACs buying up misleading ads, or the media spinning shit, just typical post Citizen's United, protect the one percent, save the status quo capitalism in action.  Does the DNC probabaly like this?  Of course they do.  Do they have their thumb on the scale of the actual primaries?  Probabaly not in a significant way, they don't need to, there are other ways to hammer the left and especially Sanders without resorting to overt 'rigging'.

How dare you actually make a well-reasoned argument on how the DNC/Democratic party may play an informal role in counteracting the rising left - or Sanders and Warren - that certainly the establishment seeks to quell.  Traitor!

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Before that change we had a built in "Shadow Government" in a manner similar to the Parliamentary systems of Europe where the opposition party was ready to jump into the Executive's role.  Could impeachment have been intended to operate like a vote of No Confidence with a replacement government ready to step into place?  Given the original structure it seems likely to me.  The concretion of formalized broad umbrella political parties rather than the varying "interest groups" anticipated by the Federalist Papers seems to have rapidly undone the possibility of that sort of a structure.   People vote based upon party membership rather than based upon individual assessment of the allegations against the current executive.  

Just a thought.

Eh, certainly an interesting thought, but I don't think so.  My reading of the constitutional convention is they kind of rushed how the president will be elected/chosen right at the end.  Kind of like when I'm trying to finish a point in a lecture and all the students are packing up.  I don't think they put that much thought into it.  Moreover, I don't think there's any mention of a motion of no confidence in the Federalist.  Madison and Hamilton go over A LOT of political theory in those things, so one would assume if that was what they intended but wasn't actually in the Constitution - e.g. Hamilton expressing the intent of judicial review in Federalist 78 - they would have emphasized it.

I think a shadow government would be a great idea, especially in the current age of polarization, but I don't think that's what they had in mind with how the VP was elected or how impeachment was supposed to work.  Just nothing I can think of that would even vaguely imply that.  Definitely could be wrong though.  Not like I've read all the Federalist papers any time recently.

3 hours ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

Whatever candidate the Dems choose, their challenge is to expand their reach to about 1500 lazy jackoffs in Florida who sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democrat, with the qualifications being, 1) anyone but Hillary and 2) who has a more nostalgic campaign slogan. Fuck the electoral college man. 

In 2016, Trump won Florida by about 112 thousand votes.  While 2000 was obviously insanely close to a point we may never see again, and so was 2016 in terms of percentage, the difference is much larger now than changing the minds of "1500 lazy jackoffs" in Florida.

3 hours ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

What the Dems should be asking themselves is, which candidate can appeal to a highly specific non-ideological voting block that decides these things because they've already got the Dem voters covered, anything else is redundant. The block that believes chemtrails are out to get us and who want to keep their guns but who don't care which party they vote for as long as they're righteously angry about it all (can you tell I live in Florida?)

I lived in Orlando for about 7/8 years.  I definitely know the types you're talking about.  I really don't think those should be the constituents any party would want to target for mobilization.

22 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Oh lord no.  Also, am I considered a left-leaning voter here?  Inquiring minds and all that?

I was trying to be inclusive!  So, by "left-leaning" posters, I essentially meant everyone but Altherion.  Maybe Cas or HOI or FNR, but I think they've all been sufficiently scared off from these threads.  Ideologically, my impression is you're pretty solid middle, in the Scot to Mudguard interval.  Maybe Ormond too.  Alright, that's probably TMI and me way overthinking things for a minute there, but you did say inquiring minds!

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15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

federal elections need to be as broad and nonrestrictive as possible, and there really isn't a way to make 'head to go hang out and vote for a few hours' nonrestrictive. 

That it can take hours is appalling. There should be a voting place within a few minutes' walk of everyone in a reasonably densely populated area, and a few minutes' drive for everyone not actually living on a farm or otherwise a significant distance from any kind of population centre. The queue to vote shouldn't be more than a few minutes if you arrive at a particularly busy time. Other countries manage this, so there's no reason the US can't (costs are per capita, so the size of the country is irrelevant).

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22 minutes ago, DMC said:

Eh, certainly an interesting thought, but I don't think so.  My reading of the constitutional convention is they kind of rushed how the president will be elected/chosen right at the end.  Kind of like when I'm trying to finish a point in a lecture and all the students are packing up.  I don't think they put that much thought into it.  Moreover, I don't think there's any mention of a motion of no confidence in the Federalist.  Madison and Hamilton go over A LOT of political theory in those things, so one would assume if that was what they intended but wasn't actually in the Constitution - e.g. Hamilton expressing the intent of judicial review in Federalist 78 - they would have emphasized it.

 

I was trying to be inclusive!  So, by "left-leaning" posters, I essentially meant everyone but Altherion.  Maybe Cas or HOI or FNR, but I think they've all been sufficiently scared off from these threads.  Ideologically, my impression is you're pretty solid middle, in the Scot to Mudguard interval.  Maybe Ormond too.  Alright, that's probably TMI and me way overthinking things for a minute there, but you did say inquiring minds!

Two snips:

1.  I actually think that the founders GREATLY underestimated the eventual power of the executive branch under the system that they set up.  I would FURTHER argue, that they were in fact correct in (most) Civil War periods (maybe Andrew Jackson and the fact that political parties quickly became a thing, aside) in how they thought it would all work out.  I think for these inquiries it is almost better to look at the post-civil war post 14th Amendment world, and maybe even further the post-New Deal world.  But I'm probably overthinking this :P

2.  I feel very included.  I will claim the Scot, Mudgard, Ormond interval of rational, but doomed, thought.

29 minutes ago, Zorral said:

I wouldn't so consider you a left leaner.

OTOH PG considers me a snob.  Some days he might possibly be right -- and then it' probably intentional, meaning, attempts employing rhetorical tools such as inversion, irony, etc., hopefully, to illustrate how stupid a question is.  Most days though, he's just wrong. :D

Phew.  Thought I was losing my edge.  I try not to lean.  It's not ladylike.  I stand upright with a platinum rod through my spine (or up my a$$, take your pick), thank you very much.  

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