US Politics: Portlandia

[Martell Spy]

13 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Ephebophile is not an official diagnostic term. But the official diagnosis for pedophilia is sexual attraction to those 13 years of age or younger, so yes he did miss the official designation of the term by one year. Obviously everyday use of the term pedophilia is now broader than the official diagnostic definition.

i think mall cruiser was the technical term we were using on this board for Roy Moore around the election time.

[The Anti-Targ]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/us-coronavirus-death-toll-public-opinion-poll-accuracy

Quote

Thirty-one percent of respondents in the survey said they believe the number of Americans dying from Covid-19 is in reality smaller than public data portrays. Skepticism was up from 23% in May.

Skepticism about coronavirus statistics was heavily correlated with media consumption habits, the poll found. A 62% majority of Fox News watchers said the statistics are overblown, while 48% who reported no main news source thought so. Only 7% of CNN and MSNBC watchers thought so.

Right. OK. So that possibly explains some of why the administration continues to see people approving of its handling of the pandemic.

Of course for some there will be an innocent / ignorance defense. If the CFR for COVID-19 is meant to be 1% or less but the official numbers say the US CFR is 3.5% (reported deaths/confirmed cases) then some people may be forgiven for believing the death numbers are too high, by 300%. Of course that's a misread of the data. I do wonder how many people suffer from this ignorance defense. I suspect the vast majority of people who don't believe the death number fall more into the conspiracy camp / default distrust of "official" statistics.

The article doesn't give a left/right ideological split among responders, but given the correlations to news sources it's not an unreasonable assumption about what end of the spectrum the great majority of deniers sit. Hard lefties are as distrustful of official government information as hard righties, but in this instance they are not strongly politically motivated to be distrustful, except maybe to believe its worse than the official stats say. In terms of case numbers it's certainly far worse than the official stats. But death numbers are likely to be of an acceptable accuracy.

 

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/us-coronavirus-death-toll-public-opinion-poll-accuracy

Right. OK. So that possibly explains some of why the administration continues to see people approving of its handling of the pandemic.

Of course for some there will be an innocent / ignorance defense. If the CFR for COVID-19 is meant to be 1% or less but the official numbers say the US CFR is 3.5% (reported deaths/confirmed cases) then some people may be forgiven for believing the death numbers are too high, by 300%. Of course that's a misread of the data. I do wonder how many people suffer from this ignorance defense. I suspect the vast majority of people who don't believe the death number fall more into the conspiracy camp / default distrust of "official" statistics.

The article doesn't give a left/right ideological split among responders, but given the correlations to news sources it's not an unreasonable assumption about what end of the spectrum the great majority of deniers sit. Hard lefties are as distrustful of official government information as hard righties, but in this instance they are not strongly politically motivated to be distrustful, except maybe to believe its worse than the official stats say. In terms of case numbers it's certainly far worse than the official stats. But death numbers are likely to be of an acceptable accuracy.

 

I see repeated, vehement commentary elsewhere that COVID 19 is getting weaker and will vanish altogether right before the November elections with the strong implication it is a democratic plot. Almost literally an article of faith, with evidence to the contrary dismissed as 'fake news.'

[The Anti-Targ]

Right after the November election, if Biden wins, of course. Can't have it disappear just before the November elections because then Trump might win. Please pass the message on to our deep state colleagues: AFTER the election not before. It'll be a total disaster if they screw up that timing. And make sure the message is properly encrypted so that QAnon doesn't find it.

[ants]

On 7/19/2020 at 3:43 PM, GrimTuesday said:

Whenever one of the left leaning board members gets a bug up their asses about how weak the Democrats have been as of late, we are told that it is just something you have to accept in a situation when you only hold one chamber and the president is of the other party. This mentality absolves the failure of the Democrats when they do have power, telling us not to look back at how Democrats have failed to push their advantages in the past because all that matters is now or how we have to look at the climate they were operating in. People like Bernie Sanders (and John Lewis) have always existed, and but the party did not elevate them because they thought that it would lose them donors and elections. Progress take political will to pull off, and the Democratic party has had the political will to do anything truly, unequivically good exactly once since LBJ. Too many times they have simply been content to hold a seat down and pay empty lip service to the suffering that plagues this country. John Lewis got his skull fractured to make a difference, what have the rest of us done?

Think of the progress we could have made if we had just been willing to fight, and then look at the people who now hold the reigns of power within the party, and you will see the same people who stood against that progress at the helm. I see Nancy Pelosi saying that she longs for a pre-Trump Republican as if the Bush administration did much in the early days of the financial collapse towards the latter part of his time in office.

I know it is harder to build than destroy, but it feels like the Democrats have simply made sure that the Republicans had a slightly smaller hammer.

Bernie Sanders ran as an independent.  He only joined the Democrats because you're whacked out presidential primary system doesn't allow parties to control who can run as nominees.  

I thought the article posted in the last article by David Shor (below) went a long way to show how the politics work, and why politicians often need to take moderate stances.  

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html

[Alarich II]

1 hour ago, ants said:

Bernie Sanders ran as an independent.  He only joined the Democrats because you're whacked out presidential primary system doesn't allow parties to control who can run as nominees.  

I thought the article posted in the last article by David Shor (below) went a long way to show how the politics work, and why politicians often need to take moderate stances.  

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html

A very insightful interview, thanks for sharing. I found some of his answers a bit depressing, especially the part about the likely regression towards the mean and what that could mean for the election 2020 and also his comments about the structural disadvantage of democrats in the EC.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Alarich II said:

also his comments about the structural disadvantage of democrats in the EC.

Yeah, this sort of outlook was the saddest thing. If the Democrats manage to sweep into control of the Senate thanks to the Trumpian implosion, they may just have two years to figure out how to continue the momentum to retain control for another cycle, at least, or otherwise they're going to get hamstrung and it'll be Obama all over again.

ETA: There was a discussion on The Weeds about Biden, the unity document, the filibuster, and so on between Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias that I found interesting. Their conclusion strategically seemed to be that Biden and the Democrats have to decide to not get themselves rolled by the GOP making noises of bipartisanship and trying to run out the clock to 2022 where they'll label them do-nothings; an effort to bipartisanship needs to give way to hardball and jamming through legislation as soon as the GOP reveals themselves to be dishonest actors.

 

[DMC]

13 minutes ago, Ran said:

If the Democrats manage to sweep into control of the Senate thanks to the Trumpian implosion, they may just have two years to figure out how to continue the momentum to retain control for another cycle, at least, or otherwise they're going to get hamstrung and it'll be Obama all over again.

This is a durable rule of thumb that I think has actually become even stronger with polarization.  With the electorate split basically 50/50, there's almost certainly going to be a backlash to a newly elected (and reelected) president upon the midterms.  Sustainable success in consecutive cycles seems a pipe dream at this point for either party as long as the composition of "swing" voters remains similar to what we've seen the past 16 years.  2002 and 1998 were consecutive outliers in the incumbent protecting against losses during midterms, but those were both special circumstances I don't see happening again anytime soon.

So, yeah, if the gods be good and we get a Biden victory and Senate takeover, that means the Dems have two years to do something with it.  Expecting anything more is folly.  I mean, in a lot of ways that was clear with Obama as well even upon his inauguration, and he did do about as much as you should expect a president in this climate to do.  The institutional structure of the US government does not lend itself to massive shifts in policy unless you have a perfect storm of crises and realignment like FDR.  Or I guess Lincoln, and maybe LBJ capitalizing on JFK's assassination.  I'm not hoping for anything similar to those situations, albeit I suppose we might already be there considering the current environment.  So....yay?

[Tywin Manderly]

Patient, Can You Spare a Dime?

The shameless racket which the system of health care in the United States is never ceases to amaze as well as appall me! 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

So, yeah, if the gods be good and we get a Biden victory and Senate takeover, that means the Dems have two years to do something with it.  

Which begs the question, should this occur, do Democrats use their political capital to pack the courts, kill the filibuster, or both in this limited time window?

[DMC]

13 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Which begs the question, should this occur, do Democrats use their political capital to pack the courts, kill the filibuster, or both in this limited time window?

Increase SCOTUS composition.  Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.  Revise cloture.  That'd be my institutional wish list.

[Fez]

19 minutes ago, DMC said:

Increase SCOTUS composition.  Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.  Revise cloture.  That'd be my institutional wish list.

If you're going to do a thing, do it all the way. Let's bring in Guam/American Samoa/Northern Mariana Islands as a combined 53rd state: Pacifica or Oceania, something like that. Totaled up, that's another 250,000 US citizens without representation.

Also, it won't happen, but I want to see some real constraints on Presidential power in preparation for the next time there's a Republican in the White House. Codify into law all the norms that Trump has been able to break with impunity; and put much stronger guardrails on presidential emergency powers. 

[BigFatCoward]

6 minutes ago, Fez said:

If you're going to do a thing, do it all the way. Let's bring in Guam/American Samoa/Northern Mariana Islands as a combined 53rd state: Pacifica or Oceania, something like that. Totaled up, that's another 250,000 US citizens without representation.

Also, it won't happen, but I want to see some real constraints on Presidential power in preparation for the next time there's a Republican in the White House. Codify into law all the norms that Trump has been able to break with impunity; and put much stronger guardrails on presidential emergency powers. 

Surely the rules need changed for next time there is a lunatic, not a republican, in the White House. 

[Fez]

3 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Surely the rules need changed for next time there is a lunatic, not a republican, in the White House. 

These are synonyms until I'm presented proof that they aren't. And any random Republican that is not a lunatic (Murkowski for instance), has no chance at winning a Republican presidential primary.

[DMC]

16 minutes ago, Fez said:

Codify into law all the norms that Trump has been able to break with impunity; and put much stronger guardrails on presidential emergency powers. 

Amending emergency power I get, sure, but I'm really not sure how you codify most of the norms Trump broke.  I mean, he's broken many laws that are already on the books.  So I guess maybe give Congress more power to check that?  Other than that, not sure what you can do about breaking norms from a legislative approach.

[Ormond]

51 minutes ago, Fez said:

If you're going to do a thing, do it all the way. Let's bring in Guam/American Samoa/Northern Mariana Islands as a combined 53rd state: Pacifica or Oceania, something like that. Totaled up, that's another 250,000 US citizens without representation.

 

I don't know anything about the politics in those Pacific Islands so I don't know if they would necessarily send Democrats to the Senate. And the Polynesian Samoans might not want to be in the same state with the Micronesians of Guam and the Marianas. I did see someone argue the other day that making the U.S. Virgin Islands a state would be good for the Democrats, though.

[Fez]

41 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I don't know anything about the politics in those Pacific Islands so I don't know if they would necessarily send Democrats to the Senate. And the Polynesian Samoans might not want to be in the same state with the Micronesians of Guam and the Marianas. I did see someone argue the other day that making the U.S. Virgin Islands a state would be good for the Democrats, though.

My issue is that there aren't enough people otherwise. Even combined they only add up to half the population of Wyoming. Guam has 162,000 people; American Samoa 57,000 people; and the Northern Mariana Islands 53,000 people.

At least with DC Democrats can argue that the city has more people than some states, to counter arguments of hypocrisy when Democrats also talk about how unrepresentative the senate is. Can't do that if we're letting 53,000 people get 2 senators. As far as politics, Democrats and Republicans compete in all three territories.

Right now Democrats have 10-5 majority in the Guam legislature, the Guam Governor is Democratic, and the non-voting delegate to the US House is a Democrat (and has been held by Democrats since 1993). Also, in the straw poll they hold each election, Obama won twice and Clinton won; though in the past they sometimes voted Republican.

In American Samoa, the legislature is officially non-partisan, but the Governor is a Democrat (and except for one independent, Democrats have held the office since 1993); the non-voting delegate to the US House is currently a Republican though.

But Northern Mariana Island politics are dominated by Republicans. So there's a partisan reason to bring them all in combined, to make sure Guam (and to a lesser extent American Samoa) ensures Democratic victories.

As for the US Virgin Islands, that's another one where population is an issue; only 107,000 people. But yeah, Democrats dominate politics there. They have a 13-2 majority (and the 2 are independents, not Republicans), and all islands-wide elected offices are held by Democrats.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Increase SCOTUS composition.  Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.  Revise cloture.  That'd be my institutional wish list.

The first one has consequences, but the latter two are easy slam dunks.

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

My issue is that there aren't enough people otherwise.

Yeah this is why I didn't respond to that part of your post.  Even if you combined all four - including the Virgin Islands - the populations are just so small.  And combining the four is just convoluted anyway.  Further, not just the lack of population, look at the votes of each's most recent gubernatorial elections - which I would assume would be the highest turnout contest (I may be wrong about that, don't really know):

• Guam:  ~36,000 (2018)
• Virgin Islands:  ~26,000 (2018)
• Mariana Islands:  ~15,000 (2018)
• American Samoa:  ~13,000 (2016)

So that's 90,000 voters, total.  And I was rounding up, often quite generously.  For comparison's sake, the 2018 Wyoming gubernatorial election had about 200,000 voters total.  Nah, that ain't gonna fly, even in a hypothetical wish list.

I do agree if you did combine them the delegation would almost certainly be entirely Democratic.  The interesting thing would be the primaries - I'd wager each would adopt their own candidate, so it'd be quite the dogfight.

[DMC]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The first one has consequences, but the latter two are easy slam dunks.

Weren't you arguing with me fairly recently that DC statehood didn't have a chance?