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eke out posted:I was doing some quick searching and I see basically no discussion of this being an issue on twitter, nor are there any notable news pieces on it. The key issue I see here is, how easy is it to put roadblocks in front of people trying to pay their court fees to keep people disenfranchised?
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Nov 11, 2018 21:52
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Z. Autobahn posted:I feel like 3 states unexpectedly tipped the election to Trump. (PA, MI, WI) and those are the three states most likely to tip the next one away from him. Florida just feels too old, too red, and too unpredictable to really bet any hopes on. Problem is you need all three of those to tip back. PA seems back to blue because neither the governor race nor the senate race were close (though Dems underperformed in the House races); MI went fairly solidly blue this election but there were some arguments that's due to the local weakness of the state Republicans and the national Democrats haven't necessarily made enough inroads to solidify the state; Wisconsin's governor election was still very close. I think that any route to victory involves winning PA back. Dems don't win PA, they don't win period. That gives Dems 252 votes, needing 18 (I assume the tie will go to Trump) to win. From there you have: States won in 2018: Wisconsin - 10 EV Michigan - 16 EV Arizona - 11 EV Other: ME-02: 1 EV (appears to have been won by Democrats, but through ranked-choice - I don't know how that will work in 2020). Iowa - 6 EV (Dems lost the governor race; won the House races - I would lean towards this not being winnable). States not won in 2018 but were close enough to mention: Florida - 25 EV North Carolina - 15 EV Georgia - 16 EV Texas - 38 EV Practically speaking, I think you can write off Texas and Iowa right off the bat. Texas will not change enough in 2 years and I don't think any national Democratic candidate will not be able to replicate what Beto did, and if they do manage that I think they've knocked the doors off anyway and speculating which state was the key state is academic. Iowa I don't know much about but given how strongly it's trended red recently, and how white and rural it is, I think that Dems don't win it unless they win everywhere. Even if they don't, I have a hard time seeing how its six votes are the key because no state or two, plus Iowa, makes sense as the only states that flipped. So I think you've got from there the following "categories" where the states will tend to move similarly Rust Belt - MI/WI (26 EV, you win these you win); Winnable South - GA/NC (31 EV, you win these you win); Florida (25 EV - you win Florida, game over); Misc: Arizona, ME-02 - Wildcards (12 EV). You can't win with just these, but it's plausible to pair these with one Rust Belt state or one Winnable South state and win. I think that's not too many avenues to victory for a candidate to be trying at the same time. It's basically six key states, and Pennsylvania, and your goal is to win three.
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Nov 11, 2018 22:34
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Chilichimp posted:I do not understand the concept of being "first to call" and why that should matter to news organizations. It definitely seems to run counter to basic journalistic practices to just guess who's going to win based on publicly available information, instead of just waiting. Most people just want to know who won and if they hear ABC is calling races while CBS isn't yet, they'll switch over to ABC to find out who won faster, giving ABC higher ratings and therefore more money.
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Nov 12, 2018 14:57
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Chilichimp posted:That literally did help the Republicans in 2016 with their base, so who knows? Maybe it gets people motivated for 2020. Having bills written, passed by the House, and blocked by Republicans gives you something tangible to point to about "yes, we will actually do this if you give us power, and Republicans are indeed opposed to this."
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Nov 12, 2018 16:05
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Lightning Knight posted:It’s extremely cool and good that most of the Democratic Senate leadership and prospective presidential candidates oppose BDS and support criminalizing it in the face of poo poo like this! I suspect that's going to start going away. Israel for a long time has benefited by being an area of bipartisan agreement (or more accurately, that support for Israel wasn't a partisan issue where Republicans were on one side and Democrats were on the other; there was substantially more dispute within the Democratic party/coalition regarding support for Israel). I think that was always going to start getting more polarized, but Netenyahu basically took a sledgehammer to that by explicitly and openly becoming a Republican partisan. That killed off a lot of the support for Israel within the Democratic party, but the full consequences of that haven't yet rippled all the way through the Democratic party system. It's going to though, and I think in a decade or so Israel's going to look back on it as one of their biggest geopolitical mistakes once that fully takes effect.
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Nov 12, 2018 16:26
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Squalid posted:This seems optimistic. Pro-Israel organizations remain important Democratic fundraisers. Netanyahu will be gone some day, they will not. Netenyahu's open interference in favor of the Republican party is only about six years old. But I think you underestimate the absolute rage in a lot of parts of the Democratic party about what Netenyahu has been doing - parts of the Democratic party that used to support the pro-Israel consensus. Now it's sort of an issue of national sovereignty. Realignments take time, but I think people are (understandably) just looking at the past 40 years and assuming all will continue as normal, when I think that's no longer the case. And many of those fundraisers will indeed be gone as well; heavy-handed intervention into American politics in favor of the Republican party is one of the things splitting off a number of American Jews from supporting Israel.
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Nov 12, 2018 17:03
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Your Boy Fancy posted:Schumer's trouble with this is that New York Jewish coalitions have been a major part of his power base for a long, long time. I don't think he's going to change regarding BDS, and it's gonna take retirement for him to be unseated. I don't see him changing either, he'd either need to lose a primary or retire. But I expect the next Democratic presidential nominee to be considerably cooler on the Israel support and ultimately the President has far greater power over foreign affairs than the Senate Majority Leader. And in 2020, Chuck Schumer isn't going to be any sort of national leader, it'll be the 2020 dem nominee who will matter for inspiring voters.
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Nov 12, 2018 17:34
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Hellblazer187 posted:Why IS he leader? I assume some combination of seniority and fundraising prowess? Those, plus willingness to do the work (he'd been putting in the work needed for a long time); lack of Presidential ambitions (which really matters for all the circumstances where you have to be the bad guy); broad support in the caucus because he's sort of acceptable to everyone and is generally willing to work with people. Very little of what goes into someone being majority/minority leader is about having the right policy positions or being popular with the public.
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Nov 12, 2018 17:37
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Full thread on what the judge in that lawsuit is doing: https://twitter.com/dominicholden/status/1062038426806030336 Basically democrats pointed out to him that Republicans are only looking for remedies they can lie to the public and claim were required because of fraud and he's not willing to play that game; he will push them to agree on greater transparency but will not do anything to let Republicans lie and claim there's any evidence of malfeasance.
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Nov 12, 2018 18:56
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Space colonialism is still colonialism, and thus still fundamentally immoral. We don't belong in space, ever. will nobody think of the rights of the moonmen?????
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Nov 13, 2018 19:24
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Edmund Lava posted:Scott and DeSantis are still very likely to win at the end of this poo poo show. No reason for the judiciary to take a hit in ya reputation when the Republicans get what they want anyway. Scott's election basically seems to hinge on if the Broward County undervote is a ballot design issue or a mechanical issue that will be fixed via recount. I see no way DeSantis loses but I would be happy to be wrong.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:37
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Lemming posted:I guess I just assume that since that ballot design seems pretty standardized that it would've been found out earlier and at the very least the important races wouldn't be put in that spot. This is definitely just a gut feeling and not really based on anything. It would easily have flown under the radar if it were a less important race or the race was not so close. I'm sure there were tons of cases of lost votes from butterfly ballots before 2000 that nobody noticed.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:59
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friendbot2000 posted:So is this the kind of thing that might make a difference in the runoff? We were joking that only if some pedo stuff came out like Roy Moore would it flip....but...referencing lynching? Thats uh...something. not all white southern republican voters are down with pedophilia, especially pedophiles who target young white girls, but they're all just fine with racism
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Nov 14, 2018 15:51
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realistically they're going to lose if the white house challenges the subpoena, but good on them for trying
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Nov 14, 2018 15:54
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Honestly the Mississippi senate election barely matters because even if the Dems somehow pull out a miracle a win they’ll just most likely lose it in 2020 along with Alabama so it won’t contribute to the fight for 50 seats. It would matter because the narrower the Senate majority is, the less room there is to slide someone super crazy through. If Republicans had a 55-45 majority I bet you'd see Attorney General Rudy Guliani. With a smaller majority, that sort of nonsense is somewhat less likely.
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Nov 14, 2018 16:18
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Rinkles posted:Seems like an exceptional amount of close races that ultimately tip dem this year, or is it not out of the ordinary? There's an exceptional amount of seats Republicans barely won as well, they just don't get reported on.
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Nov 14, 2018 16:19
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dwarf74 posted:Isn't there a thing where an absurdly lopsided contract can be annulled due to its absurd lopsidedness? In theory yes, in practice basically no (especially between two sophisticated entities with lawyers).
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Nov 14, 2018 16:21
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fox news is showing unusual amounts of foresight about avoiding the revocation of their white house pass in the next democratic administration
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Nov 14, 2018 17:03
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oopsie https://twitter.com/jedshug/status/1062742285815869440
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Nov 14, 2018 17:25
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axeil posted:I'm not a lawyer, is this a serious enough oopsie that it completely undermines what DOJ argued? I recall the ACA case was also based on a completely laughable legal argument and yet it still got heard and had the Medicaid expansion get thrown out. At the end of the day the Supreme Court can always do whatever it wants, but assuming this guy is right this is massively embarrassing for the OLC attorney who wrote this, and they'd need to find a new argument about why it was legal instead of a time-warp argument.
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Nov 14, 2018 17:49
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Deteriorata posted:"Speculating." Which means they don't know anything. That Pelosi's supporters no longer believe she's got it locked down is important.
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Nov 14, 2018 22:06
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Now that Jeff Flake has been replaced by a Democrat and is a lame duck, he has finally found the leverage he refused to find for the past two years: https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/status/1062817992617140229
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Nov 14, 2018 22:27
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also, facebook is apparently aware that it has only a little goodwill with the american public these days and wants to kill off that last bit https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1062817439476523011
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Nov 14, 2018 22:29
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Charlz Guybon posted:If they can't win that argument with his public statements, they aren't going to win it with anything. very true, but i don't know how i'd word "the court should deny discovery on how racist my client is, because we all know he's racist as all loving hell but my plan is to appeal this to the supreme court where they'll ignore any amount of evidence that the other side can present" in a motion
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Nov 15, 2018 00:06
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Nemo Somen posted:Shouldn't it be the opposite? That since you know that you are a lame duck, you start being aggressive with your agenda since there is no downside. Does that mean that Jeff Flake actually cared about decorum but crumpled when pressed instead of a conservative that was just trying to use decorum to pretend that he is sensible adult? Although I guess that's still up in the air. He might still flake. Yeah it sort of seems like that he does care about decorum (or more precisely, he wants to be the kind of person who cares) but cares about his party more and thought that being too  would hurt Republicans. But now he doesn't give a gently caress, his term is over, they lost his seat anyway so he might as well try to act like he cared.
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Nov 15, 2018 00:08
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Wait...so they're pissed that he took too much power away from the superdelegates? They're all superdelegates (like every other representative). He took power away from them.
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Nov 15, 2018 01:17
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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.
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Nov 15, 2018 16:38
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Has Lee even expressed any interest in becoming Speaker? Nobody with any sense at all has publicly expressed any interest in becoming Speaker, nor will they until Pelosi definitively will not be the next Speaker.
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Nov 15, 2018 16:42
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Hellblazer187 posted:I'm not sure if this counts as posting about posting, but I think the SA D&D regulars are mixed on Pelosi. If you're a left winger, you should prefer Pelosi to Tim Ryan, but still want someone else in the Speaker's chair. There's no doubt she's an excellent parliamentarian and has a strong hand on her whip. Depending on your ideology she may be too much of a capitalist. I don't think she's serving well as a "face of the party," but even there I wonder how much that perception is fueled by right wing attacks sinking into popular consciousness. There's also been a lot of discussion on whether "face of the party" is really a proper job requirement for a speaker. I tend to think it should be, at least right now. Pelosi, last time she was in the Speaker's chair, was solidly in the left wing of national democrats. Doesn't mean everything the House produced between 2008-2010 was as progressive as she wanted, but she was pulling things to the left and trying to drag the remaining Blue Dogs along, and then trying to push the Senate into action farther to the left than they wanted to be. Between 2010-2014, she would generally be pushing less compromise and more fighting with Republicans than Reid/Obama were. People have really sort of bought into the Republican framing that she's Bad but without really a good feeling why she's bad. Replacing her with someone who is younger would be good, because it doesn't help the party's image that it's a bunch of ooooooooold people in House leadership and that nobody under the age of 60 has been given any real responsibility. But I think the best thing to do would be to keep her for the next two years, grooming a younger leadership team that could then have the house turned over to them in 2020.
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Nov 15, 2018 16:48
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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