US Politics: Biden vs. Ron DeCardassian in the Delta quadrant

[Varysblackfyre321]

38 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

Ronald Reagan couldn’t do his job, except for the acting part. Sure, competence should be a job requirement. 

So Feinstein’s mental health should be overlooked because Regan?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

So Feinstein’s mental health should be overlooked because Regan?

Think you missed the point there.

[HoodedCrow]

Did I say that Feinstein’s complete health should be ignored? No, there just seems be different standards, and age is not sufficient. I thought Reagan was repulsive and I couldn’ t understand how he was elected and lionized.

[DMC]

20 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Yes it is, it’s extremely old liberal overestimating their own importance to something much bigger than themselves .

The difference is Stephen Breyer is totally in control right now of being replaced by a nominee chosen by a Democrat.  With Feinstein, this demand is predicated on Newsom being recalled AND Breyer actually retiring in the next 16 months, two things that are far from certain and completely out of her control.  Joe Manchin and Jeanne Shaheen are 74 and if they died they would be replaced by a Republican governor.  Why not demand they resign?  Or Sherrod Brown?  The Virginia gubernatorial election may swing to the GOP in November, why not demand Mark Warner and Tim Kaine resign before that happens?  Because all of that is ridiculous, just because of remote possibilities that include the Senator in question dying.

20 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

If you disagree and think that one poll showing a registered democrat defeating Elder triumphs over the multiple ones that show Elder crushing the competition over everyone else I don’t know what to say, because I know, you know silly that is.

No, I just said there is uncertainty that Elder would win.  This is rather obvious considering how little support he's getting overall and the fact we don't really know composition of the electorate in recall elections - plus how many Democrats will actually follow the direction and not vote for any candidate to replace Newsom.

[Varysblackfyre321]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Why not demand they resign?

Because they’d be replaced by a Republican governor.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

The Virginia gubernatorial election may swing to the GOP in November, why not demand Mark Warner and Tim Kaine resign before that happens?

The people you’ve mentioned are decades younger than Feinstein.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

The difference is Stephen Breyer is totally in control right now of being replaced by a nominee chosen by a Democrat.

Righ now he can. I’m just advocating we try to keep it that way at least until the midterms.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

With Feinstein, this demand is predicated on Newsom being recalled

Which there is a significant chance for.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Breyer actually retiring in the next 16 months, t

Retiring or dying as old people are like to do.

He probably won’t retire with a Republican majority in the senate. He could still die after Feinstein does under a Republican governor.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

November, why not demand Mark Warner and Tim Kaine resign before that happens? 

Because they’d be replaced by republicans.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

No, I just said there is uncertainty that Elder would win.  This is rather obvious considering how little support he's getting overall

He could get 5% of voters support and he’d still become governor if most vote to recall Newsom and he’s the recall candidate with the most votes

Its not a head to head election.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

fact we don't really know composition of the electorate in recall elections

It’s the same electorate.

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 8/28/2021 at 11:53 AM, DMC said:

Let's look at this empirically.  There have been plenty of really old MCs in recent years, even decades.  Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd, Daniel Inouye, John Dingell, John Conyers.  The only one to affect anything was Ted Kennedy.  And why?  Because he had brain cancer and he knew he was gonna die.  Dianne Feinstein does not have cancer, as far as I know.  She has no reason to believe she's gonna die soon, as far as I know. 

Let's leave Dianne Feinstein alone and maybe give her some dignity.  The people of California elected her to be Senator until January 3, 2025.  I don't see any reason not to respect that.

There have been numerous reports extending back to last year that she has having significant cognition issues. And because we've always let old people run the country well into the 80s and 90s isn't a good reason to continue this. I don't want people who look at the future so differently from the rest of us deciding future policies that will impact us and not them.

But first things first--she's shown some worrying signs.

Dianne Feinstein’s Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question Among Senate Democrats | The New Yorker

ETA: I shared this article because it's both considerate of her accomplishments, and deals with the problem in an honest way.

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Because they’d be replaced by republicans.

No, Warner and Kaine would not be replaced by Republicans right now.  That was the entire point.  The governor right now is Ralph Northam, a Democrat.

4 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

He could get 5% of voters support and he’d still become governor if most vote to recall Newsom and he’s the recall candidate with the most votes

Its not a head to head election.

It’s the same electorate.

....It's not the "same electorate."  Nobody knows the composition of the electorate because recall elections are very rare - in addition to being off-cycle and off-year.  I don't know if you're being deliberately obtuse or just that ignorant, but this discussion is not going anywhere.

12 minutes ago, Centrist Simon Steele said:

There have been numerous reports extending back to last year that she has having significant cognition issues.

Yes, if the urge to resign was predicated on her cognition issues, that'd be one thing.  That, however, does not seem to the argument at all - but rather that she's 88 and therefore "very likely" to die.

[Fez]

I'm not going to read back every post on this endless topic, but, if Newsom lost the recall, why do people think there wouldn't just be an emergency session of the state legislature to change the law so that the governor is required to appoint any senate replacement from the party of the departing senator? 

They could even follow the lead of Utah and Hawaii and go so far as to require the governor to pick from a list of 3 names provided by the state party of the senator.

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

I'm not going to read back every post on this endless topic, but, if Newsom lost the recall, why do people think there wouldn't just be an emergency session of the state legislature to change the law so that the governor is required to appoint any senate replacement from the party of the departing senator? 

They could even follow the lead of Utah and Hawaii and go so far as to require the governor to pick from a list of 3 names provided by the state party of the senator.

The above has me wondering -- is it always a simple matter of a regular law being changed to determine the procedures by which a replacement Senator is chosen? Or are there states where this procedure is written into the state constitution and so it wouldn't be so simple?

[DMC]

40 minutes ago, Ormond said:

is it always a simple matter of a regular law being changed to determine the procedures by which a replacement Senator is chosen? Or are there states where this procedure is written into the state constitution and so it wouldn't be so simple?

I'm not aware of any procedure being in the state constitution, but I suppose it's possible.  Judging by the NCSL page, most every states' procedure appears to be just a regular statute.

[Zorral]

Supply chain crunch and inflation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-25/the-world-economy-s-supply-chain-problem-keeps-getting-worse

~~~~~~~~

In better news, early this afternoon our NO friends found means to check in, and they are all OK and safe, though one lost his car totally from street flooding, "but a lot better than losing my roof, so that's a win, man."  Parts of NO toward Tulane didn't even have downed power posts and lines.  And Tulane still has internet capacity, so if one can get over there, internet it is.  People are still charging their phones via their cars - those who have cars or whose cars weren't trashed, anyway.

However, there has been no contact - news from any of our people out in Cajun country.

 

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Supply chain crunch and inflation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-25/the-world-economy-s-supply-chain-problem-keeps-getting-worse

~~~~~~~~

In better news, early this afternoon our NO friends found means to check in, and they are all OK and safe, though one lost his car totally from street flooding, "but a lot better than losing my roof, so that's a win, man."  Parts of NO toward Tulane didn't even have downed power posts and lines.  And Tulane still has internet capacity, so if one can get over there, internet it is.  People are still charging their phones via their cars - those who have cars or whose cars weren't trashed, anyway.

However, there has been no contact - news from any of our people out in Cajun country.

 

From a friend (and board member): “looks like Golden Meadow and Galliano are trashed. Cousins have lost their houses”.

[Wilbur]

21 hours ago, Zorral said:

Supply chain crunch and inflation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-25/the-world-economy-s-supply-chain-problem-keeps-getting-worse

In general, the Chinese learned nothing from America's embrace of the JIT supply chain, and in fact they almost immediately replicated the problem in the same search for marginal dollars of profit.  Now their own back end supply chains into SEA are disrupted by Covid, and the costs for transporting component parts from SEA to China are consuming all those marginal profits.

The stack of stranded intermodal transport container units sitting in Long Beach was downright mountainous last May when we were over there.  I am unsurprised to read that carrying trade shippers are unwilling to enter into long-term contracts currently.  Spot prices for shipping have taken over almost every supply chain, causing the cost of transportation to rise for every product.

One silver lining is that perhaps, just maybe, this will result in a slightly narrower river of cheap plastic crap merchandise being imported from China.

[Zorral]

NUFF SAID -- From a long time New Orleans friend:

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

Quote

 

You’ve probably heard, but the shit is hitting the fan around here

Tulane’s campus is closed for six weeks – we’ll do class via zoom starting in mid September, and then after fall break resume meeting face to face (in masks) on campus.

No electricity here for a month cos some massive “transmitter” (whatever the fuck that is) fell in the goddamned river.

Why the most crucial node in the power grid here would have been built on the banks of the river is a question that lingers in the minds of many .  . .

Fucking slapstick

I just drove up to Tulane to sit in charge up my phone and laptop in the airconditioned splendor of the student center.

Driving through Central City at 9:00 this morning was interesting.  Heavy katrina vibes all around. A line to get into the gas station was easily six blocks long.

In another day or so, there will be civil unrest.

I have not seen a cop or a soldier yet – not one.

The heat isn’t as bad as it can be this time of year, but its still pretty miserable – very hard to sleep.

I’ve got a line on getting into a car and driving out of here, perhaps as soon as tomorrow or Thursday – if that falls through, Joel is driving to Nashville this weekend and I’ll plan to bum ri

Not much else to report. It’s a mess. I keep reminding myself that we’re early in the storm season – there could be two or even three more storms between now and November. That will be a problem.

Really looking forward to settling back into normal pandemic miseries.

 

 

[Zorral]

The Southernification Thesis:

"The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America
The Old North/South Split Lives on in the Urban/Rural Divide"

https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/the-density-divide-and-the-southernification

Quote

 

. . . .  However, I suspect that battle between North and South lives on both culturally and geographically. The North has drifted out of the countryside and concentrated itself into our cities. At the same time, America’s rural and exurban counties have slowly become more and more homogenously Southern. The South has risen again … in rural Maine? . . . .

One of the puzzles of the 2016 election, and the catastrophe of the Trump presidency, is how populist white nationalism finally prevailed at a time when Americans, taken altogether, were less racist than ever. This is one of the questions I take up in the “Density Divide.” But I left out one of my favorite answers to this question largely because it’s too speculative and I didn’t have the data to prove it. My hunch is that rural white culture, which was once regionally varied and distinctive, became more uniform by becoming increasingly Southern. I call this the Southernification thesis.

In the Density Divide, I argued that the key to answering “Why did white ethnonationalism finally work to win the GOP nomination and then the White House when it didn’t even get close to working for Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul?” was that residential self-selection on ethnicity, personality, and education had made lower density parts of the country progressively more homogenously ethnocentric and socially conservative, which finally made it possible to unify and organize rural and exurban whites as a single constituency.

I’m confident that this is correct, as far as it goes. However, I think it’s an incomplete explanation without something like the Southernification thesis. Before it could be successfully organized politically, America’s increasingly ethnocentric non-urban white population needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.

What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened. Now, I have few doubts that it did happen and is still happening. Indeed, it’s hard to think of better impressionistic evidence than the spread of Confederate flags far from the South into all parts of white rural America. But that doesn’t seem like quite enough.

But let’s suppose that it is enough. How did Southernification happen? I’m going to take this up in length in another, even more speculative, post. But here’s I would start: When I was a kid, the Atlanta Braves somehow became “America’s Team.” Could it be that the media mogul who married Hanoi Jane took the critical first step in bringing non-urban white America together by beaming sanitized Southern culture into living rooms everywhere? . . . .

 

 

[Fragile Bird]

Well, hell, I just read the Wikipedia entry on Tucker Carlson. Quite the read! His mom was a free spirit who walked out when the kids were little, and his dad married the heir to the Swanson frozen foods fortune, although at the time they had already sold out to Campbell’s. His dad had been the director of the Voice of America.

Tucker was a keener from way back, going to boarding school he went out with the dean’s daughter, eventually marrying her. He only has a BA. He tried to join the CIA but his application was rejected. Then he decided to become a journalist, encouraged by his dad who said “they’ll take anyone”. I had heard about the yearbook entry about being a member of the Dan White fan club (the murderer of Harvey Milk).

Isn’t it funny how so many of these Republicans who are leaders of the the masses, of the real Americans, are all boarding school, private fortune, guys? Yes, Swanson wasn’t his mom but he grew up in that crowd.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

Well, hell, I just read the Wikipedia entry on Tucker Carlson. Quite the read! His mom was a free spirit who walked out when the kids were little, and his dad married the heir to the Swanson frozen foods fortune, although at the time they had already sold out to Campbell’s. His dad had been the director of the Voice of America.

Tucker was a keener from way back, going to boarding school he went out with the dean’s daughter, eventually marrying her. He only has a BA. He tried to join the CIA but his application was rejected. Then he decided to become a journalist, encouraged by his dad who said “they’ll take anyone”. I had heard about the yearbook entry about being a member of the Dan White fan club (the murderer of Harvey Milk).

Isn’t it funny how so many of these Republicans who are leaders of the the masses, of the real Americans, are all boarding school, private fortune, guys? Yes, Swanson wasn’t his mom but he grew up in that crowd.

I'll wait for the John Oliver summary. Less text.

[Mindwalker]

IIRC, the Daily Show one isn't bad, either:

 

[Mindwalker]

A company owned by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s in-laws won more than $7 million in no-bid and other federal contracts at U.S. military installations and other government properties in California based on a dubious claim of Native American identity by McCarthy’s brother-in-law, a Times investigation has found. (...)

Vortex faced no competitive bids for most of the contracts because the Small Business Administration accepted Wages’ claim in 1998 that he is a Cherokee Indian. Under the SBA program, his company became eligible for federal contracts set aside for economically and socially disadvantaged members of minority groups, a boon to its business.

Wages says he is one-eighth Cherokee. An examination of government and tribal records by The Times and a leading Cherokee genealogist casts doubt on that claim, however. He is a member of a group called the Northern Cherokee Nation, which has no federal or state recognition as a legitimate tribe. It is considered a fraud by leaders of tribes that have federal recognition. (...)

When presented with The Times’ findings, experts in government ethics said the sheer volume of federal work the company received in and near McCarthy’s district, in addition to Wages’ disputed claim to be Native American that allowed him to avoid competitive bidding, warranted more scrutiny. (...)

A Times examination of census, birth, death, marriage and other available public records show Wages’ ancestors were identified as white. He is listed as white on his birth certificate.

“It’s disheartening to see this,” Cornsilk said. Native Americans are “the poorest people in the United States,” and “the poverty gets worse” if there are abuses in the SBA program, he added.

Cherokee leaders said the Northern Cherokee group is one of many masquerading as bona fide tribes.

In the interview, Wages said anyone who claims Vortex prospered because of his ties to McCarthy “is a liar.”

(...)

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-pol-mccarthy-contracts-20181014-story.html

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Majority Leader?