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US Politics- Enemy at the Gaetz


Fury Resurrected

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I just read a story about how Gaetz (spell-check wants to talk about Garth Brooks I think) made it his personal mission to block the passage of laws against using intimate images of partners and former partners without their consent in Florida when he was a state representative. Apparently he took the position that if a partner “gave” you a picture of themselves you now own it and can do whatever you want with it, and that ownership extended to other intimate communications like texts. The law was basically trying to make “revenge porn” illegal, and when a version finally got passed he had it weakened by taking out texts and other electronic communications. 
 

A stronger version of the law was finally passed in 2019.

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13 hours ago, DMC said:

Other than Warren and Sanders all other major candidates held positions that are almost impossible to discern from Biden, other than MFA and I guess legalizing weed.  Anyway, if you're saying the small differences between Biden and Harris et al. on healthcare would have driven Anti-Trump voters to 3rd parties or back home, well, I think you're being very silly.  That's like saying Barack Obama won in 2008 because he had a superior healthcare plan to Hillary.

I'll just say I disagree, and leave it like that. I think "Medicare for All", as a slogan, regardless of what it means, had the potential to be an albatross around the neck of the nominee; just like "Defund the Police" did. Not quite as a potent, but still a big deal if the nominee supported it (whereas Defund was so powerful, it didn't matter that Biden opposed it).

 

In other news, the FY2022 discretionary budget request is finally out: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/FY2022-Discretionary-Request.pdf

It's a total ask of $1.52 trillion, a 15.9% increase in non-defense spending from FY2021 (overall its an 8.4% increase).

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/4/9/2025040/-Amazon-reached-out-to-USPS-to-get-private-mailbox-installed-ahead-of-union-vote-emails-show

But on the day counting began, we learned more about how far Amazon went to stack the deck in its favor. The National Labor Relations Board had refused Amazon’s request to have a ballot drop box in the facility, citing coronavirus social distancing precautions. But documents obtained by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union through Freedom of Information Act requests show that Amazon defied that by going to the U.S. Postal Service and asking for a mailbox to be installed on Amazon property—which it was, unmarked, the day before voting started

 

 

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1 hour ago, Fez said:

I think "Medicare for All", as a slogan, regardless of what it means, had the potential to be an albatross around the neck of the nominee; just like "Defund the Police" did. Not quite as a potent, but still a big deal if the nominee supported it (whereas Defund was so powerful, it didn't matter that Biden opposed it).

So when you said "most of the other major primary candidates had positions that were downright toxic to truly swing voters," you were really just talking about MFA?  And "Defund the Police" was so potent it didn't matter that Biden opposed it, but it still didn't repel these Anti-Trump voters to 3rd parties or not voting?

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

My impression from watching the primary debates was that everyone but the far left wing would pivot hard to the center to win a general election.

Yeah when Biden and Harris actually debated MFA/healthcare, the main takeaway was confusion.

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16 minutes ago, DMC said:

So when you said "most of the other major primary candidates had positions that were downright toxic to truly swing voters," you were really just talking about MFA?  And "Defund the Police" was so potent it didn't matter that Biden opposed it, but it still didn't repel these Anti-Trump voters to 3rd parties or not voting?

It wasn't just MFA, but you brought that one up. I don't want to re-litigate the primary again, but suffice to say I think there were myriad positions that everyone still in race by Iowa, except Biden, had adopted that would've been bad in a general election. Various nobodies who dropped out before then probably would've done just as good as Biden in a general election.

Also, I think Defund the Police absolutely did repel some Anti-Trump voters, there's been plenty of stories about that in the past 6 months. My point is that I think other slogans, like MFA, would've repelled additional anti-Trump voters; not to the extent that Defund did, but it all adds up. But those other slogans were things that Biden was able to defuse by being so blandly acceptable.

Anyway, I'm done with this topic. If you don't believe moderates do better in general elections than non-moderates, there's nothing else worth discussing.

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15 minutes ago, Fez said:

If you don't believe moderates do better in general elections than non-moderates, there's nothing else worth discussing.

Well, no, that's not the issue at all.  The issue is the notion that most of the primary field was significantly less moderate than Biden so as to scare off enough Anti-Trump voters to lose the election is incredibly dubious.  And the lack of coherence makes the confirmation bias in such an argument readily apparent.  And when this fallacious rationale is deployed - repeatedly - as reasoning to prop up stale white guys as opposed to female and/or minority candidates, yeah, I have a major problem with that.

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The left has never tried the experiment of running a 'non-moderate' in the general as opposed to a moderate in recent memory. The right did, and they had a 50/50 result (of course, speaking of Trump here). This is of course a debate as old as the trees, swing voters versus hidden voters.

Unfortunately, there appear to be more hidden white males without a college degree voters than any other demographic, so one can understand why the Democrats are so risk averse. Maybe when the alternate is someone relatively palatable (i.e., a bland moderate GoP candidate) they can go for it.

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I come out of the 2020 cycle thinking that it wasn't that Biden was a bland white guy but that he was a very known quantity of bland white guy.  He was Obama's chummy VP.  Thus when Republican attempted to define him as a radical leftist to low-information voters, they weren't buying it.  Republicans attempted an end-around that Biden was mentally out of it, and that the "real" power would be leftist women like Pelosi and Harris, but that sort of fearmongering-once-removed just isn't as effective. 

Thus, I think that even if Democrats had nominated a boring white moderate like Bullock or Hickenlooper, Republicans would have had more success in defining him as Fidel Castro Reborn than they could with Biden.  And given how stomach-lurchingly close the election ended up being, I do think that Trump would have won.  So count me in the group that to me it feels likely that any non-Biden candidate would be less than 50% to win. 

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58 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I come out of the 2020 cycle thinking that it wasn't that Biden was a bland white guy but that he was a very known quantity of bland white guy.  He was Obama's chummy VP.  Thus when Republican attempted to define him as a radical leftist to low-information voters, they weren't buying it.  Republicans attempted an end-around that Biden was mentally out of it, and that the "real" power would be leftist women like Pelosi and Harris, but that sort of fearmongering-once-removed just isn't as effective. 

Thus, I think that even if Democrats had nominated a boring white moderate like Bullock or Hickenlooper, Republicans would have had more success in defining him as Fidel Castro Reborn than they could with Biden.  And given how stomach-lurchingly close the election ended up being, I do think that Trump would have won.  So count me in the group that to me it feels likely that any non-Biden candidate would be less than 50% to win. 

The election was really not all that close. It wasn’t a landslide win and some states were close, but it was a decisive win and not a Bush v Gore or even a Trump v Clinton. The counting process for absentee ballots made it seem a lot closer than it ended up being.

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1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I come out of the 2020 cycle thinking that it wasn't that Biden was a bland white guy but that he was a very known quantity of bland white guy.  He was Obama's chummy VP.  Thus when Republican attempted to define him as a radical leftist to low-information voters, they weren't buying it.

Yeah I'm more receptive to this reasoning.  First because it's more measured, second because it applies uniquely to Biden and the specific 2020 presidential election - and not the highly suspect assertion that anti-Trump voters would have been dissuaded by candidates with slightly "less moderate" policy positions and/or ideology.  I'm far from convinced it's accurate, but I don't have a problem with it and don't really care - precisely because it can't be reemployed in the future to stifle non-white guys.

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15 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

The election was really not all that close. It wasn’t a landslide win and some states were close, but it was a decisive win and not a Bush v Gore or even a Trump v Clinton. The counting process for absentee ballots made it seem a lot closer than it ended up being.

It wasn't Bush v Gore close, no question.  I would consider it closer than Clinton v Trump though.  If Trump wins Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, he wins 269 EVs.  At which point it goes to the house and Trump wins because he won more states and each state gets one vote.  Biden won those three states by about 43,000 votes, which is pretty damn close, definitely less than the ~70,000 votes that Trump won MI, WI and PA by in 2016.  But picking and choosing the swing states like that is kinda bullshit, you have to take the overall margin.  Biden won those three states by 0.63%, so if the election shifted by 0.64% nationally then Trump wins.  That is less than the margin in 2016 (0.77%) or any other presidential election in the past 50 years, save 2000. 

Now, whether 0.64% is close or not is kinda a matter of opinion.  But to me, it's definitely in the range where candidate quality really matters, unlike say 2008 where Obama or Clinton or any half decent democrat would have won. 

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Not that this thread needs any more armchair post-facto horse-racing analysis, but I would tend to agree that Biden being a known quantity must have helped. Unusually for an incumbent President, the challenger was able to present himself as the safe, stable choice in contrast to the unpredictability of the incumbent.

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1 hour ago, Fury Resurrected said:

The election was really not all that close. It wasn’t a landslide win and some states were close, but it was a decisive win and not a Bush v Gore or even a Trump v Clinton. The counting process for absentee ballots made it seem a lot closer than it ended up being.

40k votes in 3 states, two of which were undecided until 6 days in. The election was insanely close. 

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12 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Is anyone else going to read the new John Boehner tell-all book?

My son says that “each hard copy comes pre-imbued with the scent of cigarette smoke” :rofl:

 

Full disclosure - I’m buying it. 

Then it's your sacred duty to count the number of times he tells Ted Cruz to go fuck himself.

(I personally have no interest in reading it because a) I'm not giving him a pass and therefore will not give him a cent, 2) I doubt there's actually much to learn from it and c) these books are typically a snore, and I doubt even the best ghost writer could make J-Bone interesting).

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Yeah, I don't wanna support Boehner. Did I hear he's investing in legal weed operations now? So a powerful white man profits from a crop that led to the imprisonment of nonviolent people, who were disproportionately black and brown? Under laws that he and his party made more stringent at every opportunity?

I can understand why you'd buy it. I'm the son of a politician, I do love inside political gossip. But I'll wait for excerpts to come out in various news outlets.

And please do tell us about anything juicy. :)

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22 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

(I personally have no interest in reading it because a) I'm not giving him a pass and therefore will not give him a cent, 2) I doubt there's actually much to learn from it and c) these books are typically a snore, and I doubt even the best ghost writer could make J-Bone interesting).

I've just started Nick Bryant's When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.  Boehner's not even in the index.

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Boehner is the only nationally elected politician I’ve ever met in person, though very briefly. It was at a Dfac (chow hall) in Afghanistan. Was eating with two of my friends and one of them nudged me and said ‘Dude the speaker of the house just walked in!’ And then he stood up. To which I replied, ‘what?’

Nobody else in the place knew who he was. JB recognized my friend recognizing him so he came straight for us. Next thing I know I’m shaking his hand and his aides are flying around taking pictures. Then he left in search of better photo ops. He is as leathery as he appears on television.

I did also follow Al Franken for a few blocks in DC once just because we were headed the same direction. And George W Bush gave my friend and I the ol double thumbs up at the dedication to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. He was there to give a speech and we got out of school for it. He had to pass really close to us to get to the podium and my buddy went for the thumbs up, W saw it and bam! double thumbs up. That was 3 months before 9/11.

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