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Hellblazer187 posted:Bringing up progressive punch reminds me to ask, is there any generally accepted sort of ranking system where we can say who is most or least progressive/leftist/whatever? That's about as good as it gets, along with the lobbyist ratings on VoteSmart, but there's really no great way to differentiate people on the left from people in the middle on their votes alone, because they usually all end up in the same place.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:11
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Hellblazer187 posted:I agree with this entirely, but I think it's incomplete without pointing out that the 2006-2010 Democratic party made a lot of mistakes about how far left to go (or really, not go). So while it is 100% true that she was the left of the party at that time I don't know how much that means for the 2018-2020 and forward party Yeah, but the party had a substantial amount of its majority composed of legacy conservative/blue dog democrats, both in the House and the Senate. How far Pelosi could go depended on what she could round up 218 votes for. If she couldn't round up 218 votes for what she wanted, she had to go with whatever was closest to what she wanted that would get 218 votes. Who is responsible for those mistakes depends on who was responsible for the end product. You can judge her to a certain degree by the end result, but the most important thing you have to look at where she was trying to drag people to get to those results. Pelosi could have thrown abortion rights overboard to get Obamacare passed easily. Instead, she spent weeks dragging the anti-abortion democrats in the House (at the time, there were enough to block Obamacare) over to where she wanted them to be. The key issue is where she decided to try to drag people to the left, and where she didn't, and that requires actually digging into the history of the 2008 Congress much more than people actually do in these discussions. She dragged 218 votes to implement a carbon tax in the hopes the Senate would then be forced to take it up (they didn't), knowing that would place some of her members at risk, because that was important to her. A more conservative speaker would not have tried. There are certainly probably areas she did not try, or tried to drag the people on the left to the more centrist position she preferred - but you've got to go find what those are and look at them to confirm that's what happened, and not that the default was a more conservative position that she dragged as far left as she could while preserving 218 votes and a chance of passing the Senate. That dragging generally happens internally, and then it's her job to defend the end product, so a lot of people look at an end product that is farther to the right that they want, note Pelosi defending it, and assume she was the cause. Frequently that was not true: the problem is that we have now forgotten (thanks to all of them losing in 2010) how big the blue dog caucus at the time was. Pelosi's job was to pass what she could with the caucus she had (and given Obama's preferences and what the Senate would do). Where those results were inadequate, you need to determine if it was because those were the results she wanted, and she worked to get them, or if they're the results closest to what she wanted that she could get.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:15
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evilweasel posted:A lot of reporters were saying this is not true, and if it was reporters would have noted it in their stories because most of them know Lindsay Walters. Someone called it out as fake in the replies and he responded with "oh well, the can do it, so can I" it's not true.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:15
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The Congressional Dems should agree to a Nerva deal with Pelosi where she gets to lead until while helping along some Trajan to succeed her in 2021.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:21
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I think calling that a "damning" "confession" is kind of overblown. If only by virtue of incoherence.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:21
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evilweasel posted:Yeah, but the party had a substantial amount of its majority composed of legacy conservative/blue dog democrats, both in the House and the Senate. How far Pelosi could go depended on what she could round up 218 votes for. If she couldn't round up 218 votes for what she wanted, she had to go with whatever was closest to what she wanted that would get 218 votes. Who is responsible for those mistakes depends on who was responsible for the end product. For me, I was pretty onboard with finding another Speaker once Pelosi held that press conference during primary season and said that if they retook the House, they would reinstate PayGo. That plus her other pleas for "bipartisanship" and overall  to me demonstrates that whatever she's done before now, in the here and now she's trying to be bipartisan with Nazi death cultists and thus is not equipped to lead anymore. IMO we need someone new, someone more in tune with today's politics.https://www.thenation.com/article/the-perils-of-pelosis-pay-go-promise/
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Nov 15, 2018 17:27
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:I think calling that a "damning" "confession" is kind of overblown. If only by virtue of incoherence. Yeah, even though he's clearly obstructing justice, you can read it to mean anything because it's so loving stupidly said
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Nov 15, 2018 17:29
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VH4Ever posted:For me, I was pretty onboard with finding another Speaker once Pelosi held that press conference during primary season that if they retook the House, they would reinstate PayGo. That plus her other pleas for "bipartisanship" and overall I'm not really sure what the problem with PayGo is. To me, it's just responsible government. If you want service from the government, you need a way to pay for it. No empty promises of getting something for nothing.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:30
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Deteriorata posted:I'm not really sure what the problem with PayGo is. To me, it's just responsible government. If you want service from the government, you need a way to pay for it. No empty promises of getting something for nothing. The big problem is when you just take tax increases on the rich entirely off the table. You can fund basically any spending any new Democratic administration wants to do by reversing the Trump tax cuts on the rich and corporations anyway though, so it's not even necessary to get into a big fight over if PayGo is the right thing to do when we have this giant pool of untapped revenue that needs tapping. This also has the helpful side effect of, if you do it right, making key programs "self-funding" so they're exempt from the appropriations process and require new legislation to defund or abolish (like, say, Obamacare).
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Nov 15, 2018 17:32
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evilweasel posted:The big problem is when you just take tax increases on the rich entirely off the table. You can fund basically any spending any new Democratic administration wants to do by reversing the Trump tax cuts on the rich and corporations anyway. Right. My problem with it? It's conceding to a bullshit right wing talking point. They act like we can't fund social programs then tax cut the rich all the hell, it's flat out bullshit and Dems should not concede to it on any level.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:33
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VH4Ever posted:Right. My problem with it? It's conceding to a bullshit right wing talking point. They act like we can't fund social programs then tax cut the rich all the hell, it's flat out bullshit and Dems should not concede to it on any level. It's worth keeping in mind that bullshit right wing talking point isn't actually working; people hate the tax cuts. Where I'm sort of wavering is if PayGo is helpful in some respects in raising taxes on the rich. By expressly linking those raised taxes on the rich to social programs, do you make it easier to raise taxes on the rich and squash opposition to those tax hikes, or is it better to just have tax hikes on the rich for the purpose of paying down the deficit/everyone pays their fair share/etc? I'm leaning towards the former because people need to realize (and they're starting to) that tax cuts are not free - they take away the social programs you like and the important government spending you approve of. Why should the rich and corporations pay more in taxes? Well, either because we need to decrease the deficit, or because we need to spend money on important things. Or both. But I think that "spending money on important things" is better messaging for Democrats, because just focusing on the deficit isn't gonna get people nearly as enthused about tax hikes.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:36
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evilweasel posted:It's worth keeping in mind that bullshit right wing talking point isn't actually working; people hate the tax cuts. Where I'm sort of wavering is if PayGo is helpful in some respects in raising taxes on the rich. By expressly linking those raised taxes on the rich to social programs, do you make it easier to raise taxes on the rich and squash opposition to those tax hikes, or is it better to just have tax hikes on the rich for the purpose of paying down the deficit/everyone pays their fair share/etc? I'm leaning towards the former because people need to realize (and they're starting to) that tax cuts are not free - they take away the social programs you like and the important government spending you approve of. Why should the rich and corporations pay more in taxes? Well, either because we need to decrease the deficit, or because we need to spend money on important things. Or both. But I think that "spending money on important things" is better messaging for Democrats, because just focusing on the deficit isn't gonna get people nearly as enthused about tax hikes. i'm always wary of trying to co-opt a right wing talking point because the right has a way more unified and bigger propaganda network, and are also better at just pushing talking points to begin with (remember that "fake news" was originally a dem creation). even if it was possible to do, the current democratic party is just not capable of it and will only undermine themselves by trying.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:44
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Stexils posted:i'm always wary of trying to co-opt a right wing talking point because the right has a way more unified and bigger propaganda network, and are also better at just pushing talking points to begin with (remember that "fake news" was originally a dem creation). even if it was possible to do, the current democratic party is just not capable of it and will only undermine themselves by trying. This is where I come down too. Democrats are NEVER as good at sloganeering as Republicans and trying to take their talking point away will backfire, it's a guarantee.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:47
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https://twitter.com/stevemistler/status/1063092569427578880 https://twitter.com/stevemistler/status/1063104826047975424 This is about TRO for now, I think.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:49
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Stexils posted:i'm always wary of trying to co-opt a right wing talking point because the right has a way more unified and bigger propaganda network, and are also better at just pushing talking points to begin with (remember that "fake news" was originally a dem creation). even if it was possible to do, the current democratic party is just not capable of it and will only undermine themselves by trying. I think you need a justification to raise taxes, and the best two I see are that that they are needed to "pay for" something, or that they're needed to reduce the deficit/pay down the debt. I think it's necessary to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, I think the better political message is the former, so I generally agree with it. I also think it's important to link taxes to what you pay for with those taxes, precisely to fight back against Republican efforts to claim tax cuts are free money - people need to understand that when Republicans say "cut taxes" they also mean "and cut spending later" even though they try to hide that fact. I do not have a political problem with separating the tax hikes from the spending if that's the more effective way to do it. But I think those tax hikes are necessary and fighting against Republican efforts to portray tax cuts as free money with no costs at all is necessary; both for the long-term financial health of the country and for the long-term protection of spending programs from the "starve the beast" strategy. This has been effective even in red states, where there's been a revolt against republicans slashing spending to finance tax cuts and led to revolts that forced republicans to vote for tax hikes. So I'm open to arguments about how it's more effective to separate the two. But I think people underestimate the value of linking popular spending and tax hikes, and are somewhat buying into republican framing when they say it's a bad idea.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:51
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evilweasel posted:It's worth keeping in mind that bullshit right wing talking point isn't actually working; people hate the tax cuts. And apparently, up to 21% of taxpayers are going to wind up owing more at tax time because Republicans wanted tax cuts to give more people in paycheck now (in order to make people vote for them) which wound up with the IRS putting out a faulty formula to employers and so the number of employers underwithholding increased significantly. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634474267/more-taxpayers-will-owe-the-irs-in-april-due-to-under-withholding-report-says Hopefully the new group of Democrats in the House can successfully tie, "this is their tax bill" to the Republicans rather than people being dumb and going, "Dems in the House, now my taxes!!!!" In fact it might be smart for the incoming Dem House to do absolutely nothing with taxes until after April so people can't even low info blame them.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:53
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VH4Ever posted:This is where I come down too. Democrats are NEVER as good at sloganeering as Republicans and trying to take their talking point away will backfire, it's a guarantee. uh we just had an election that the initial republican plan was precisely to run on their tax cut sloganeering, and it failed so badly in the face of democratic responses that they abandoned it entirely by the time of the election. they failed so badly people have almost entirely forgotten it. people are starting to get how tax cuts are linked to social spending being cut, and it resulted in a tax cut being more of an electoral liability than tax hikes in the past have been. that's big, and that's the ground shifting under republicans. we do not need to cower before their economic sloganeering on this issue: we know we can win this, because we did win this.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:54
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jesus christ "why don't we try to give turkey a dissident to murder, so they'll stop being upset about the saudis murdering a dissident?????" https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1063111419158245376
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Nov 15, 2018 17:57
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evilweasel posted:I think you need a justification to raise taxes, and the best two I see are that that they are needed to "pay for" something, or that they're needed to reduce the deficit/pay down the debt. I think it's necessary to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, I think the better political message is the former, so I generally agree with it. I also think it's important to link taxes to what you pay for with those taxes, precisely to fight back against Republican efforts to claim tax cuts are free money - people need to understand that when Republicans say "cut taxes" they also mean "and cut spending later" even though they try to hide that fact. i don't have any problem with rhetorically linking tax raises to increases in social spending, that's all well and good. what i do oppose is implementing something like PAYGO because that needlessly ties your hands as a legislator. there's no benefit to doing that and it's just the party letting themselves be spooked by republican talking points.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:57
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I feel weird saying this but after fixing healthcare raising taxes is practically my number 1 issue. The US needs to tax more, a lot more.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:59
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evilweasel posted:jesus christ Yeah this is mega hosed up.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:00
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evilweasel posted:jesus christ This was the poo poo that Flynn got taken down for, and they decide to give it another go These morons
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Nov 15, 2018 18:01
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Stexils posted:i don't have any problem with rhetorically linking tax raises to increases in social spending, that's all well and good. what i do oppose is implementing something like PAYGO because that needlessly ties your hands as a legislator. there's no benefit to doing that and it's just the party letting themselves be spooked by republican talking points. iirc it's trivial to waive paygo, though you then have to ask yourself if you're handing republicans new talking points. but again, this is a moot point because there's so much revenue we need to raise, so there's not going to be any real sacrifice by tying the two together. more importantly, what I'm saying is that this isn't about being "spooked" by republican talking points: this is about fighting back on this issue and trying to solidify the "taxes pay for social spending" as hard as possible into the minds of the public so that it is harder for republicans to run on cutting taxes without having to answer what social programs they're planning on strangling afterwards. and again - this was just successful! democrats successfully tied the trump tax cuts to the planned phase 2 ("oh dear, look at that deficit that arose completely spontaneously, guess we need to cut spending") and made the tax cuts unpopular and a millstone around republicans' necks instead of something they could run on in the midterms.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:01
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https://twitter.com/pdmcleod/status/1063101319282679808
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Nov 15, 2018 18:02
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Considering how Republicans who get Trump’s support keep losing maybe they should be less concerned with getting on his bad side. I guess they’ll be hosed in a primary though so hmm
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Nov 15, 2018 18:08
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Considering how Republicans who get Trump’s support keep losing maybe they should be less concerned with getting on his bad side. I guess they’ll be hosed in a primary though so hmm Both Corker and Flake basically got forced out of the Senate because they figured they would need to get right with Trump or lose a primary, and chose to resign instead.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:09
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Gee, Encyclopedia Brown, what a brilliant loving deduction.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:10
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evilweasel posted:jesus christ Dont extraditions have to be approved by a federal judge? no way any judge signs off on sending this dude back to Turkey to die.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:11
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EwokEntourage posted:Dont extraditions have to be approved by a federal judge? no way any judge signs off on sending this dude back to Turkey to die. yeah. it clearly looks like it was a desperate attempt a few weeks ago to take the heat off KSA - it's amazing people stayed quiet about it this long, since they sound pissed
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Nov 15, 2018 18:15
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eke out posted:yeah. it clearly looks like it was a desperate attempt a few weeks ago to take the heat off KSA - it's amazing people stayed quiet about it this long, since they sound pissed The DOJ attorneys assigned to try to do this may not have been high up enough to already have some reporters in their rolodexes for when they need to leak something. If I was told to do something like this, it'd take me a little bit to figure out how to leak it to the press (especially without getting caught).
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Nov 15, 2018 18:17
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evilweasel posted:uh we just had an election that the initial republican plan was precisely to run on their tax cut sloganeering, and it failed so badly in the face of democratic responses that they abandoned it entirely by the time of the election. they failed so badly people have almost entirely forgotten it. I hear what you're saying but I thought the story was they were expressly trying to ignore unpopular (for them) issues like taxes and Obamacare and ran on THE CARAVAN!!! instead?
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Nov 15, 2018 18:18
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HelloSailorSign posted:And apparently, up to 21% of taxpayers are going to wind up owing more at tax time because Republicans wanted tax cuts to give more people in paycheck now (in order to make people vote for them) which wound up with the IRS putting out a faulty formula to employers and so the number of employers underwithholding increased significantly. When I looked at the withholdings change, it was pretty obvious I wasn't having enough removed from my paycheck. And I have fairly simple taxes now (standard deduction, no tricky stuff) so I expect it to be even worse for people who have anything resembling complex taxes. And this is with me being one of the "winners" from this bill. I make enough to get decent improvements from rate changes, and don't need any of the itemizations anymore. I don't need the money and would rather have better governmental services for everyone. I can't imagine a removal of these tax changes isn't going to be incredibly popular, and will only get worse once people realize they've been had in April. rkajdi fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 18:19
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VH4Ever posted:I hear what you're saying but I thought the story was they were expressly trying to ignore unpopular (for them) issues like taxes and Obamacare and ran on THE CARAVAN!!! instead? That's what they did in the last two months or so, once the tax cut attempts had obviously backfired. If you go back to when the tax cut was passed, up until about June of this year, Republicans kept boasting about how great the tax cut bill would be on the campaign trail. They started getting worried when Lamb won that special election (where they had to pull the tax cut ads because they weren't working), but it took a while to really sink in that they'd managed to pass the only unpopular tax cuts in history, and that Democrats were on the winning side of that issue. That wasn't their original plan; their original plan was about how great it was they cut your taxes and democrats would raise them instead. It failed, and so they had to fall back on the caravan nonsense. Basically, your question assumes that the taxes were unpopular for them. That's what was such a rude shock to them; they had every expectation that running on tax cuts would be a winning message, just like it had been since the Reagan administration. It wasn't, and we need to recognize that's because we won that battle.
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Nov 15, 2018 18:21
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evilweasel posted:A lot of reporters were saying this is not true, and if it was reporters would have noted it in their stories because most of them know Lindsay Walters. Which part? She lists her title as "White House Deputy Press Secretary" and she's listed in the Annual Report to Congress on White House Personnel as having a salary of $115,000. That's not $130,000, but it's not far enough off that I'd call it "not true" - heck, maybe there's some unlisted bonus to put it at $130K? She also received her BA in 2012, which means she's probably somewhere in the 28-30 range - young, but old enough to make the "young intern" moniker misleading. E: Oh, the "she's Lindsey Walters", part. That's embarrassing  And almost certainly not true: Acosta video, Lindsey Walters.
Stickman fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 18:55
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evilweasel posted:
I think this warrants some analysis, though. How did the Dems win the tax issue? Did they get their message out better? Were voters overall more skeptical about the intentions of the tax bill? Were people carefully comparing their before and after taxes and seeing how little impact it had? Were people less concerned with higher taxes if it meant better government services? Basically, lower taxes always seemed like an issue that was difficult to counter since you'd be seen as taking away people's hard-earned money if you wanted higher taxes. So was this time a fluke, or is there a lesson that Dems should take away for the future?
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Nov 15, 2018 19:01
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+1 more D in the House Golden wins Maine’s 2nd District race following historic ranked-choice count quote:Democrat Jared Golden was declared the winner of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race on Thursday following a historic tabulation of ballots using ranked-choice voting.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:03
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Nemo Somen posted:I think this warrants some analysis, though. How did the Dems win the tax issue? Did they get their message out better? Were voters overall more skeptical about the intentions of the tax bill? Were people carefully comparing their before and after taxes and seeing how little impact it had? Were people less concerned with higher taxes if it meant better government services? It's probably one or more of the following: (a) Republicans included corporate tax cuts with their individual tax cuts and people hate corporate tax cuts; (b) the corporate tax cuts were permanent, the individual ones were not, making clear where the priority was; (c) republicans have been trying to cut social security and medicare ever since the Bush II Tax Cuts, so people have gotten wiser to the scam; (d) the effort to pay for the tax cuts by raising taxes on middle/upper middle class people in blue states backfired by making everyone uncertain if perhaps their taxes would go up to pay for their boss's tax cut; (e) the shift from "the deficit is an existential threat, cut social security" to "pass these trillions of unpaid-for tax cuts" was just much to abrupt and a little too obvious allowing people to make the connection between "deficits" and "republicans gonna cut the stuff you like"; and (f) the economic disasters in Kansas and other states Republicans got control of; and (g) there just wasn't any real obvious benefit to most people, even if their taxes went slightly down. Democrats ran hard on that these tax cuts weakened social security and medicare, and that they were a precursor to cutting those programs as well. People don't like taxes; people do like social spending. Democrats did a much better job of making the link between the two clear, and Republicans did a much worse job of hiding what they were doing than the last time. Raising taxes on the rich is so popular Donald Trump ran on it during the Republican primary. He abandoned that position only after he won, as part of consolidating control (and, because he wants that tax cut himself). It's also why he brazenly lies that it actually increased his taxes. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 19:06
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evilweasel posted:(c) republicans have been trying to cut social security and medicare ever since they existed and also even before that
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Nov 15, 2018 19:10
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https://twitter.com/AlexHortonTX/status/1063060683129008128
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Nov 15, 2018 19:13
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The Republicans in Congress repeatedly saying in September and October that we need to look into cutting Medicare and Social Security due to the massive budget deficit was also a pretty huge help in exposing the con. Them saying those things made just as little sense as Bredesen releasing that he would have voted for Kavanaugh. It was like they just couldn't help themselves.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:15
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