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Kalli posted:Saw this come across my feed and had a few dark chuckles: Honestly, I think this isn't as bad as it sounds, because the disapproval rate among 18-25 is lower than every other age group except the 65+. It's true that the approval rate is lowest, but it's not accompanied by a corresponding increase in the disapproval rate. Instead, the 18-25 group has by far the most people answering "Don't Know". That means that they're more winnable than the other age groups, and there's potential for big gains if he does something to win them over.
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Jun 23, 2022 02:45
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B B posted:What's the "something" Biden is going to do to win over this age group? Even if Biden moves heaven and Earth and wins over 100% of the "don't know" group (which is very unlikely), he's still underwater with that age group by 10 points. These are disastrous numbers for Biden, given that he won that same age group by 24 points in 2020. He would have likely lost the election with the numbers he is pulling now. If he wins over 100% of the "don't know" age group, then they would be his strongest supporters. He'd still be underwater, sure, but the point of the tweet was to compare relative support across different age groups - and the point of my response is that the high "don't know" percentage suggests lots of room to grow his support among young voters, compared to the other groups who've already settled on approve or disapprove. The second tweet points out that Trump had better approval among young people in 2018 than Biden does now. Given the fairly significant national developments since 2018, and the rather dismal state of affairs right now, I don't find this nearly as surprising or significant as the tweeter does.
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Jun 23, 2022 05:57
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Dick Trauma posted:I am weary of this. With what happened in Uvalde this seems like the exact opposite of what people care about. Decent pay and working conditions won't, by themselves, solve the massive cultural problems in policing. However, any realistic solution to those cultural problems will necessarily have to include decent base pay and working conditions.
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Jun 23, 2022 18:32
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Groovelord Neato posted:The problem with moving to one of the blue states where you don't have to worry about these rulings (like here in MA) is it costs a loving arm and a leg to live in most of them. Another problem is that if all the blue voters move to the bluest states, the rest of the states get redder, turning the Senate redder and giving the conservatives more power on the national stage.
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Jun 24, 2022 17:11
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Majorian posted:I'm not sure how we're supposed to actively build a stronger base of actual progressives, though. Again, the party leadership is pretty explicitly arrayed against it. When Pelosi and Hoyer and Clyburn either retire or die in office, it seems more likely to me that they'll just get replaced by folks like Hakeem Jeffries than Barbara Lee. The solution seems pretty obvious: build a strong on-the-ground political movement in favor of progressive politics. If progressives can't even win seats outside of overwhelmingly blue districts, then we have no choice but to build more support. The party leadership doesn't have that much power over the process. They can do things like draw district boundaries, but for the most part their actual ability to intervene in elections is quite limited. They can direct funding to a candidate, but money is not the single decisive factor in an election; there's plenty of cases where a charismatic and popular candidate beats a big-spending billionaire no one likes. And as for things like endorsements and media support, if the people still trust the media and the party leadership more than they trust progressives, then it's obvious progressives haven't won over enough support.
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Jun 24, 2022 19:03
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Epic High Five posted:It's going to be tricky going to convince people to bust their rear end for months on end to build something that only gets immediately destroyed by Dem leadership as soon as they can for a third time in 15 years because they cannot be dissuaded from viewing such things as an existential threat. I'm all in favor of it but it shouldn't ever rely on input from either party nor should it ever give either any degree of power or influence over itself. Also things like recognition that the wider media will never be on its side and agitating against trust in it as a means to prevent it being used a wedge among the coalition. I'm not sure what you're talking about. 15 years dates it back to 2007, so are you talking about the Obama campaign machine? If so, then you have profoundly misunderstood what I'm talking about. I'm not referring to a temporary organization to rally people behind a single national candidate who completely controls that organization. I'm talking about a movement to shift people's politics, a movement to convince people that progressivism isn't just pie-in-the-sky bullshit from idealistic fools who don't understand the first thing about politics.
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Jun 24, 2022 19:40
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Zero_Grade posted:In other unsurprising news, Log Cabin Republicans continue to be the densest motherfuckers on the planet: "Dense" is charitable, I think. They spent yesterday spewing transphobia and screaming about the left's "woke gender ideology". https://twitter.com/LogCabinGOP/status/1540029529678151680 https://twitter.com/LogCabinGOP/status/1540074333682339840 https://twitter.com/LogCabinGOP/status/1539297550892531713 That's not even getting into the articles on their website. I can't tear my eyes away from the one that talks about how gay pride is a "blind, meritless pride" that represents the "hubris, vanity, and arrogance of the LGBT community" in its demands to be treated as "a superior class, [who] feel they should be catered to and afforded special rights and privileges". I'm not really feeling honest defense of LGBT rights from them, if you ask me! I don't know if they used to be better or not, but it seems like they've gone full escalator these days.
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Jun 24, 2022 20:08
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Majorian posted:Predictably, the Democratic Party leadership is not promising any concrete action to redress this issue: This...really just goes to show how short people's political memories actually are. The Dems did attempt to codify Roe into law after the draft opinion leaked. It failed because Manchin refused to back it. Despite that, they held the vote anyway, according to the commonly-repeated idea that visibly taking action is better than nothing, even if you know it's going to fail. Doesn't seem to have made much difference - hardly anyone noticed it at the time, and it's already been largely forgotten only a month later. In the absence of any changes in individual senators' stances, they have only two choices for concrete action: start stripping stuff from the Women's Health Protection Act to see if conservatives will flip and support a cut-down version, or appeal to voters to put a couple more pro-choice votes in the Senate.
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Jun 24, 2022 22:15
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TheIncredulousHulk posted:No they didn't, and this is an inaccurate summary of what happened. If you're going to "well actually" people you should get the facts correct I don't see anything in this that contradicts anything I said? The Dems did attempt to codify Roe into law, and they did in fact send a bill to the floor of the Senate and vote on whether to move it forward, and the effort was in fact doomed from the start because Manchin didn't like the bill and refused to back it. I don't see how whether or not it was filibustered is really relevant to that point: any bill will fail when the vote is 49-51, and the exact stage in the process at which it fails 49-51 is not super duper relevant. theCalamity posted:Thank you. The nuclear option requires 50 votes, and the Dems have only consistently been able to line up 48 votes behind ending the filibuster. In other words, if just two Republican senators (or Manchin and Sinema) were to be replaced with Democrats who were willing to overturn the filibuster, then the filibuster could be ended. FlapYoJacks posted:The Dems have had 50 years to do this. It’s too late now. We voted time and time again. What on earth makes you think this time would be any different? Because now the Supreme Court is anti-abortion and Roe has been overruled, which makes the codification of Roe a significantly more pressing matter than it was back then. Just because Democrats didn't rush to pass a law guaranteeing abortion back when it was literally unconstitutional to ban abortion doesn't mean that they won't pass a law guaranteeing abortion now that it's illegal in over a dozen states. The situation has changed in ways that actually matter.
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Jun 25, 2022 00:36
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FlapYoJacks posted:On what earth is “some time in the last 50 years they should have codified abortion into federal law” rushing? I thought I was fairly clear in my statement that passing laws against abortion bans wasn't seen as a particularly pressing matter when it was already legal to ban abortion. It's not like this is unique to the Dems, either. Leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders weren't exactly making codifying Roe their top priority; hell, they hardly mentioned it until Trump put a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Ciprian Maricon posted:There states up for grabs on a national level are exactly the kind of states that produced Mancin and Sinema. Those two are the result of a party leadership that has not, and continues not to make reproductive rights a priority. Nancy Pelosi has literally said that pro choice focus was "hurting the party", she just finished campaigning for a member of congress that is anti reproductive rights against a primary challenger who did support reproductive rights. None of this stuff changes the fact that there's 49 votes for codifying Roe into federal law, and probably 48 for ending the filibuster to do so. By definition, adding two more Dems to the Senate who are willing to vote for those things will allow the codification of Roe. That's just basic arithmetic. Bringing up Pelosi and members of the House seems like a non-sequitur when you consider that the House already passed a law codifying Roe. It stalled in the Senate, but there's ample evidence that regardless of what Pelosi says, she has the votes to protect abortion and has been willing to use them. There are 21 GOP-held Senate seats going up for reelection this year. Two of them are in OK, so that's 20 states. If twenty states are all so deeply anti-abortion that it's impossible to elect a pro-abortion candidate in any of them, then I don't really understand where you expect the political support for a federal abortion guarantee to come from. Framboise posted:Where is the check or balance against a far-right and far-overreaching 6-3 majority in the judicial branch? Congress can change the laws the Supreme Court is using as a basis for their rulings. In the case of rulings on constitutionality, they even have the ability to change the Constitution. Though in practice, the bar for doing that is rather high when they could simply pack the court or impeach justices instead. The Supreme Court isn't actually all-powerful. It's just that modern Congresses have been too politically paralyzed to use the powers they have and exercise the checks and balances that already exist.
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Jun 25, 2022 01:17
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TheIncredulousHulk posted:It's relevant because it skips a bunch of steps to just conclude "Manchin!!! Manchin's explanation for opposing the bill actually matters, because he didn't say "I support this bill but I don't believe in overturning the filibuster for it". He gave the same explanation that Collins and Murkowski give: claiming that he'd vote for a bill that only codified Roe and nothing else, but that the Democrats' bill went too far. Gripweed posted:Democrats have held both houses of Congress and the presidency for almost two years since then. Which brings me right back to what I said in the first place: they tried to codify Roe in this Congress, but failed because Manchin refused to back it. I realize you're mad, but that's no excuse for falling for poo poo that just straight-up isn't true. Ciprian Maricon posted:It is not a non-sequitur. Its not simple arithmetic that more Democrats = More votes for reproductive rights because as is shown by Pelosi's efforts to support Cuellar, party leadership is unwilling to have it be a litmus test. That's exactly why I didn't just say "more Democrats": I said "more Democrats who support codifying Roe".
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Jun 25, 2022 01:53
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" while eliding the actual dynamics at play during that vote by presenting it as a straight up-or-down decision that failed by a razor-thin margin. Failing a cloture vote with 50 vs failing a cloture vote with 49, especially on arguably the most high-profile individual issue, signals to everyone that yeah actually you could pass the bill if the filibuster wasn't in the way, but you need to get rid of it first, which then puts a lot of pressure on Democrats who aren't named Joe Manchin who were otherwise completely protected from having to make any difficult decisions. Manchin's goofball explanation for "not liking the bill" or whatever meant nothing, and it wasn't what decided his vote. It was just filibuster defense, and it worked
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Majorian posted:Where, do you think, this attitude stems from? Because it looks to me like it stems from lived experience: the Dems failing (or outright refusing) to protect vulnerable people's rights, even when they had supermajorities in Congress and the Presidency and a more amenable SCOTUS. Denial, mostly, with a side order of social media disinformation. People descending into Twitter echo chambers and closing their eyes to the poo poo that is actually happening in the government is hardly unique to liberals, and results in leftists being excessively disillusioned, resulting in things like an abject refusal to take part in the political process at all, or loudly complaining that the Dems didn't try to do a thing that they actually in reality did try to do. Ciprian Maricon posted:Which seats? how many? which candidates? What is the plan here other than "vote more" If you want to get poo poo done politically, you don't just sit there and wait for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to spoonfeed a course to you. You get out there yourself and start pushing for policies you support, whether by convincing the people around you, by getting out there and supporting potential candidates who back your preferred policies, or hell, if you really can't find anyone, go run for office yourself! There are at least 48 Senators who back both abolishing the filibuster and codifying Roe. So if you want Roe codified, then we have to get that number to at least 50. I'm quite sure there's at least two pro-choice Dems running for seats that are currently GOP-held. And if you think it is literally impossible for that to ever happen, then...what the hell are you expecting? If your stance is that more than half the states are anti-abortion, then the reason abortion isn't getting codified isn't because "Dems bad" - it's because the voters aren't backing it. If you think pro-abortion candidates can't win in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin, then I don't really know what to say. The left being so quick to write off red states as permanently unwinnable is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's just the 20 GOP-held states up for election in 2022. Those 20 states have 40 Senate seats, out of a total of 100 seats in the Senate. Add in the other red states like Georgia and Tennessee and well over half the country is written off as permanently conservative. It's time to stop complaining about bad Senate maps and start making inroads in those states any way we can.
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Jun 25, 2022 02:21
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Gripweed posted:And what party does Joe Manchin belong to? Could you please respond to the arguments I'm actually making? It seems like you're perceiving me as taking a particular stance that I'm trying to be very clear about not taking. Main Paineframe posted:In other words, if just two Republican senators (or Manchin and Sinema) were to be replaced with Democrats who were willing to overturn the filibuster, then the filibuster could be ended. Main Paineframe posted:That's exactly why I didn't just say "more Democrats": I said "more Democrats who support codifying Roe".
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Jun 25, 2022 02:26
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Cimber posted:I wonder how long President DeSantos would take before pardoning Trump? To him, Trump is a rival, not an ally. He'd gladly throw Trump under the bus, I think. While there's a fair few genuine Trump loyalists out there, there's also a lot of GOP figures who hitched their wagons to him because they thought they could ride his wave to the top. They didn't dare to betray him as long as he was powerful and influential with the voters, but if he's sent to prison despite that, I doubt they'll do much for him: they'll all be too busy fighting to claim his legacy for themselves.
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Jun 28, 2022 23:47
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Meatball posted:I cant get in becauae of the paywall - Are there policy objectives in the article? Anyone who talks like that strictly speaks in platitudes, because "moderate" policies always seem to be "Republican policies, but with less visible racism". It doesn't appear to be about policy at all - it's entirely about supporting centrist candidates, not centrist policies. Their one endorsed candidate, a Democrat, is portraying it as basically a NeverTrump Republican party dressed up with the usual bipartisanship platitudes. https://twitter.com/Malinowski/status/1534269849635016705 Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Long wasn't assassinated by the U.S. government. He was shot in public by the son of a rival politician whose district he just gerrymandered out of existence a earlier that day. If anything, Long perfectly demonstrated the downside of merciless, authoritarian power-at-any-cost politics.
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Jun 29, 2022 17:57
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Kalli posted:To wit Why are you mad? The quote says that Biden is taking a number of executive actions that all look like something of consequence. While it writes that "sources inside and outside the White House" state that he's concerned about "more radical actions", neither you nor the article say what kind of radical actions you expect him to take that he's not taking. Honestly, the opening of the article is pretty sloppy in general, and makes some pretty bizarre assertions. For example, it claims (unsourced) that "The White House [...] misjudged when the ruling would be issued", but that doesn't really make any loving sense at all. And while it highlights Dem Senators calling on Biden to take action, let's look at what kinds of actions they're supposedly asking Biden to take: quote:Since then, lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have suggested Biden limit the Supreme Court's jurisdiction or expand its membership, end the legislative "filibuster" rule, build abortion clinics on federal lands, declare a national emergency and establish Planned Parenthood outposts outside U.S. national parks, among other options. The first thing that jumps out to me is that half those options are things that the Senate does, not the president. And while the other two are indeed within presidential power, the article does in fact (much later) go into specific detail about exactly why the Biden administration isn't doing those specific things. quote:The White House does not support calls to allow abortion providers to work from federal property, because it is worried the federal government won't be able to keep them safe on or off the property, two sources explained. So one of them is straight-up illegal under current federal law, and the other wouldn't prevent cops from just waiting right outside the federal abortion clinics and arresting every woman who comes out for violating state laws. Both pretty good reasons to think While it's quite amusing that Biden is calling for the Senate to do something and the Senate is calling for Biden to do something, I'm disappointed that the article doesn't clearly point that out.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:15
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:post roe laws already affecting access to medical contraception. It's worth noting that Missouri's AG and governor both say that Saint Luke's interpretation of the law is incorrect, and so does Planned Parenthood. So far, Saint Luke's is the only provider in Missouri to take away access to Plan B. https://twitter.com/jonshorman/status/1542211036887089152 quote:State Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican and one of Missouri’s staunchest anti-abortion legislators, said Saint Luke’s interpretation of the law is “clearly wrong.” Missouri’s ban didn’t change the definition of abortion, she said, only how abortion is regulated. quote:The decision immediately fueled fears that birth control access in Missouri is under threat because of the ban. But Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which has repeatedly disputed the idea that Missouri law blocks access to contraceptives, rebuked the health system’s decision.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:00
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Herstory Begins Now posted:can you post the story, it's paywalled Archive.is tends to be pretty good at bypassing paywalls. quote:LOUISVILLE, Ky. — President Biden is poised to nominate a conservative Republican anti-abortion lawyer for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge in Kentucky, a nomination strongly opposed by fellow Democrat and U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville. I don't know that I really have much to say about a nomination that hasn't happened yet for a seat that apparently isn't empty. The idea of cutting deals with Mitch isn't an encouraging one, but I also don't see why Mitch would bother to offer a deal unless he saw his position weakening somehow.
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Jun 30, 2022 05:57
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bird food bathtub posted:It's McConnel. I would not at all be surprised if he made this "deal" with 100% full intention of not honoring a single part of it. He would absolutely lie to get another judge installed. There's nothing for him to lose that he gives the slightest hint of a sideways flying gently caress about and it gets him another judge. Yeah, but why even bother with it at all if he can hold the seat open for two and a half years and get everything he wants from a GOP trifecta in 2025? Even if we assume he's tricking Biden, why does he suddenly need to trick Biden? It's rarely something he bothers with; when he thinks his prospects are good, he can just stonewall and wait.
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Jun 30, 2022 12:23
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Ghost Leviathan posted:What did she think she was getting into? Biden's inner circle and Harris' inner circle reportedly get along very badly, too. We won't know the juicy details till the tell-all books start popping up in a few years, but plenty of staffers have been leaking gossip to the political press. As the story goes, Harris' camp feel that Biden isn't giving her chances to politically shine, while the Biden camp is wary of her ambitions and feels that she's flubbed the chances she's been given. As a result, the relationship between their groups is unusually tense. It's all anonymous sources, of course, so it could very well be false. But it's been a consistent narrative basically since Biden won the primary.
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Jul 1, 2022 18:13
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BiggerBoat posted:Biden is out dated and the wrong guy at the wrong time; fully unequipped to deal with the vast array of modern problems we face on basically any issue. Biden's already done good things for plenty of people, though. Sure, his legislative initiatives have largely stalled in Congress through no real fault of his own, but he and his administration have used executive power for some good things, including some things that covered for Congress' failings. He may not have done as much as many of us would like, but it's just plain wrong to say that he's done nothing.
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Jul 2, 2022 01:18
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Timeless Appeal posted:Yeah, I think a lot of people on the Left or Liberals sort of overplayed the idea of "Actually Carter was right" in the face of 2000s Reagan worship. Carter was right on a lot of stuff, did some good things during his administration, and Regan sucked. But you can't poo poo on Regan for dog-whistling about segregation and then champion Jimmy "I have nothing against a community that is trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods" Carter. I think Carter's post-presidency has significantly tinted people's views of him - he's much more popular as an ex-president than he was as a president. Even then, though, he's still got some noticeable bad views. For example, just a decade ago, he went on Laura Ingraham's radio show to talk about how he was calling for Dems to be less pro-abortion.
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Jul 2, 2022 02:00
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Poe's law is a bitch. That's just one county, not the whole state. It's especially noteworthy, though, because Leon County (despite being in Florida) is a deep-blue county known for its relatively progressive politics. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the school board leans much redder than the rest of the county, because the progressivism is heavily driven by college students making up a large portion of Tallahassee's population.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:59
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BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:Looks like the buzz for Hillary 2024 is getting louder and harder to deny. The author is a former a advisor for Clinton so a)not a right wing plant like people like to claim b) he knows Hillary so is able to objectively speak on her abilities, not just regurgitate tired talking points. Doug Schoen joined Fox News in 2009, and by 2010 he was holding fundraisers for GOP candidates and calling for Obama to stop being such a far-left radical. He stayed at Fox until 2021, when he jumped ship to Newsmax. His only involvement with Dems in all that time was with Bloomberg 2020. It is rather telling that two of right-wing media's token self-proclaimed liberals are suddenly sending out Hillary 2024 thinkpieces to anyone who'll take them, though. One of them doing it isn't notable, but two within a week raises the possibility of some larger coordination.
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Jul 4, 2022 20:09
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VideoGameVet posted:Thomas Hartmann has an interesting thesis on how the SCOTUS upcoming ruling on State Legislatures overruling popular vote (Moore vs. Harper) will play out in 2024. Is this just doom and gloom or a real possibility. It doesn't seem like he really fully grasps the associated law. For example, he's right in that the Constitution doesn't require the electors to act based on the results of the popular vote. But he fails to grasp the obvious follow-on from that: under current law and precedent, state legislatures can already pass laws giving themselves the ability to override the popular vote and just choose the presidential electors themselves. In fact, states aren't required to hold popular-vote presidential elections at all - they can just skip the election altogether and go straight to having the legislature pick the electors. As I understand it, as long as the elector-choosing process follows current state law (as it exists on Election Day), the state governor and Congress are both bound to follow the result (although it's not clear that the Electoral Count Act really has the power to bind either the governors or Congress). Now, you might have noticed the one big caveat there: "as it exists on Election Day". The Electoral Count Act guarantees the recognition of electors chosen according to state law, but it guarantees it according to the laws as they exist on Election Day. If the state legislature decides after Election Day that they don't like the result and decide to change it, then their slate of electors lose the protection of the ECA and Congress is no longer legally bound to accept them,. That's a big hole in all the "what if the legislatures overturn the result of the election" theories. The primary impact of the Independent State Legislature doctrine is to remove any influence by state governors and constitutions over the electoral process and associated processes. This would give legislatures free rein to change the state law as they like, without any risk of populist measures being forced on them by things like opposing-party governors or constitutional amendments via ballot proposition. As such, it reduces the ability of the population to restrain the legislature, by removing some of the inter-branch checks and balances. However, these doomsday scenarios where it's some massive change that opens the gates to retroactive election stealing just don't really make sense. The rest of his story is just pure fantasy. The number one lesson of Jan 6th is that whatever ambitions they may hold, the GOP aren't really all that organized. He describes a nationwide mass action with simultaneous coordinated measures between fascist militias and police departments (but I repeat myself) all over the country acting in concert, but that's well beyond any organizational capabilities the right has demonstrated. And the idea that DeSantis could so easily suspend elections - something the US didn't even do in the middle of the actual Civil War - is pretty implausible.
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Jul 5, 2022 02:50
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Yeah absolutely. It's just...really obvious. It's not a hollow point, so either this cop was smart enough to not just pop a round out of the mag of their duty pistol and actually put some effort into it, or they roll with wadcutters on the reg. I'm not sure which would be sadder. "Left-wing college professors brainwashing your kids" has been a conservative boogeyman for at least half a century. As such, the intent of this move is fairly obvious: 1) collect statistics to support their claims that colleges are overrun by liberals and socialists who oppress the poor conservative minority 2) use that data as basis for a new round of culture war against universities, pressuring them to hire more conservative faculty and dismantle anti-bigotry policies and give preferential treatment to conservative groups projecthalaxy posted:OK so this is coming from a position of moronic ignorance but is there really no rule that says people get to vote for the President? Like I see the Constitution says the several states shall send electors to Washington to pick the President or whatever but there was never a statute or anything saying "by the way, hold a popular vote to see which electors you send"? I know a lot of the stuff like that is technically just party rules and norms and whatnot but you'd think we would have written down "people get to vote for the President" explicitly on the books at some point. That's correct. For the first couple decades of US history, many states didn't hold presidential elections at all - the state legislature directly picked the electors with no public input. There's nothing in the US Constitution that mandates a popular-vote election. Florida could pass a law today saying presidential elections are canceled and that the choice of electors rests in the hands of DeSantis. It's entirely legal.
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Jul 5, 2022 20:18
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selec posted:Just lie about your political views jeez. The Salon article doesn't mention it, but the bill also has a provision that gives students the right to record professors without their knowledge or consent for the express purpose of making a complaint against that professor. There's also a bunch of other smaller things, like a provision reforming university disciplinary systems to have standards similar to those of real courtrooms, such as a presumption of innocence, a right to remain silent or plead the fifth, a statute of limitations, and a right for the accused to have a dedicated advisor who will have full access to advocate on their behalf and basically act as their lawyer. Overall, it's basically just a wishlist for right-wing firebrand students, turned into a bill and shoved through the legislature.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:04
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BRJurgis posted:One more question, a crazy hypothetical: say republicans do indeed get majority control (rather than their current minority control) in a few years and themselves enact sweeping gun control or even targeted confiscation. Imagine! How would that go, who would be targeted, and would you ask people to cooperate? "What if the party that's overwhelmingly against gun control enacts gun control" is so massively counterfactual that it doesn't really make any sense to discuss. It's not a hypothetical, it's just a fantasy. There's no real basis to go off there. Usually Reagan's stint in California gets brought up at this point, but that was more than fifty years ago, when both the GOP and US gun politics in general were completely different. Since that time, there's been a major realignment in gun politics, a major realignment in US politics in general, and two realignments of the GOP.
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Jul 6, 2022 15:15
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Orthanc6 posted:So what's really happening is Tucker refuses to take his meds and wants the rest of the country to back him up. Nah, it fits right into the popular conservative self-image of how they're BIG TOUGH STRONG MEN who can get over all their problems with guts and manliness, unlike those wussy soy-loving lefty whiners who just go cry and complain whenever anything they don't like happens. Mental health care is also taking an increasingly large role in various political wedge issues. Aside from the fact that it now comes up in pretty much every conversation about gun violence, conservative parents are also on a crusade against school counselors or therapists who might provide a supportive influence to kids who dare to develop their own identity without the permission of their parents.
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Jul 6, 2022 22:16
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Willa Rogers posted:As an aside, why are news outlets saying she might be sentenced into a "penal colony"? Looking up the definition I can't see the difference between that and a good ol' American prison: The difference is that the prisons are on a distant, remote, lightly-populated frontier, where the prisoners are typically used as a labor force to develop the area, building up the infrastructure necessary to make the region hospitable for free settlers and industry. It also made for a convenient way to deter escape, since the prisons were often so isolated that it would be extremely difficult for fugitives to hide out on their own or return to a major settlement. The British and French empires primarily used penal transportation to expand their overseas colonies, but the Russian Empire made heavy use of penal labor for the colonization of Siberia. While later governments reformed the prison system in various ways, several aspects of the penal colony system - including the name - were inherited in some form to this day. It does sound scary and foreign to American sensibilities, but that's mostly because for various reasons, the US never really had any interest in to shipping prisoners off to a distant frontier. Our demands for forced labor and our systems for providing that involuntary labor were different enough that we never really did anything quite like the penal colonies used by the British, French, and Russian empires. After all, there was little need for temporary prison labor when straight-up slavery was thriving.
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Jul 7, 2022 18:34
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bird food bathtub posted:Is a possible explanation for it "real, actual people have been hammered by real, actual reality and all the numbers fuckery is fake anyway?" That's my gut reaction but I'm frequently wrong about that stuff. No? There isn't really any basis at all for jumping straight to assuming that the numbers are all made up. That doesn't make any sense, and in the first place, this data isn't so confusing that people need to start casting about for alternative explanations. It's just that "the state of the entire US economy" is too complex a matter to fit into a single tweet. "Unemployment is dropping and nominal wages are rising" and "people are getting absolutely loving wrecked by skyrocketing rents and gas prices" are not at all contradictory. It's historically unusual, but I don't understand why you're acting like it's so baffling that it simply can't be true.
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Jul 8, 2022 15:36
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cat botherer posted:They aren't made up (I don't think bird food bathtub was being completely literal), but they are inherently very, very subjective. Collecting, cleaning, processing, presenting these data are subject to political considerations, unconcious biases, etc. This all means that thinking the numbers are meaningful reflections of real conditions is a very big assumption. I think you're making some big unspoken leaps here that go well beyond what we're actually talking about right now. When Jason Furman says that that the unemployment rate is surprisingly low, he doesn't mean that the economy is great and people are doing wonderfully. He means that usually companies freeze hiring and institute mass layoffs when GDP growth gets this negative, but this time that doesn't happen yet. It absolutely does reflect real conditions. But it doesn't, but itself, totally explain real conditions. It just illuminates one aspect of real conditions: the way in which business is interacting with the labor market, at a macro scale.
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Jul 8, 2022 16:23
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projecthalaxy posted:I know states of emergency give the President pretty wide powers to do like whatever to solve the emergency but do health emergencies work the same way? Like when the trigger laws or whatever they were called went into effect and abortion became illegal in those states would the emergency have let President Biden just say "actually it is still legal"? Use National Guards to keep the clinics open? Do we know? No, absolutely not. Moreover, the Biden administration has already had its nose bloodied over the abuse of public health agencies to try to claim powers the president definitely did not actually have, when the Supreme Court struck down the eviction ban (which the administration had justified as a public health measure). So the current Court has made it pretty clear that they aren't in any mood to tolerate the administration claiming vast powers via expansive interpretations of public health powers. Using such powers to try to entirely halt the implementation of a Supreme Court decision would obviously get sent to the courts pretty much immediately, and the courts would issue an immediate injunction against the Biden administration's measures. From the article: quote:Becerra said in an interview last week that the administration must move cautiously in the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending Roe. You can agree or disagree with this statement from a PR and election-campaigning POV, but there's no way something like that isn't going straight to the courts.
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Jul 8, 2022 17:44
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Flying-PCP posted:I think a lot of people don't agree with and/or don't understand the framing of 'the administration had its nose bloodied' because the Supreme Court struck down something they tried to do. It's not clear to most people how this amounts the administration actually losing something it had before, or to be more specific, it gets into the 'political capital' idea that is both controversial, and to whatever extent it is a real thing, it is very poorly understood. Why can't the administration just, yknow, "Tatakae...tatakae!", particularly now in what feels to so many like the the 11th hour of the nation's existence in any reconizeable form. If the Supreme Court has recently ruled that the executive branch can't stretch a particular power well beyond the text of its underlying laws for the sake of implementing political policy, and the composition of the Supreme Court hasn't changed much since that ruling, then there's no point in trying to stretch a similar power in a very similar way with a similar lack of Congressional support - it's just going to get slapped down immediately with similar reasoning.
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Jul 8, 2022 18:48
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TipTow posted:What can the Supreme Court do to enforce its rulings? Well, let's turn that question around. What can the President of the United States do to implement his policies? For the most part, he gives orders to federal employees, who follow legal orders from the president. Now, if the Supreme Court rules that a given policy is illegal and unconstitutional, then not only do the orders to implement that policy no longer have legal force, but implementing that policy would actually be illegal. While some federal employees may choose to follow illegal orders regardless (such as, notoriously, the various intelligence agencies who can hide behind secrecy to avoid their crimes coming to light), it's unlikely that enough would rally behind "gently caress the Supreme Court" to implement an illegal policy nationwide in active defiance of not only the courts but also state and local officials. Buckwheat Sings posted:Didn't the Republicans attempt to kill off Obama care like over a hundred times by calling it to a vote constantly? And by doing so got to bring it up constantly in the news? I don't see anyone cheering on the current Congress for repeatedly bringing progressive policies to a vote even though they knew they didn't have the votes to actually pass them.
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Jul 8, 2022 19:40
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To pull us away from hypotheticals for a bit, the White House has taken some action today. https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1545440070156648450 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1545447455558406145 The Executive Order is pretty clearly aimed at protecting patients who cross state lines, keeping options open for those who can't, and (importantly) aiding in the legal defense of people and organizations that get prosecuted. The full list is here, but here's a quick summary of the meaningful measures, along with my interpretations:
Overall, it's very Biden-like: completely abiding by the law and Supreme Court jurisprudence as it currently stands, but staking out against any attempt by red states to stretch things beyond the letter of the law. Honestly, promising to aid legal defenses is more than the nothing I expected from the administration. And expressing a clear intention to stand with pro-abortion states against anti-abortion states in the event of any across-state-lines clash between them bodes well (though, of course, it isn't a binding promise). Lastly, beyond the executive order, there's one more promise from Biden: https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1545462917079990274 A commitment to veto any federal abortion ban in Congress. Not a bad thing at all, but the only way we're going to be in a position for this promise to matter is if the GOP takes the Senate, in which case we're not getting Roe codified anytime soon.
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Jul 8, 2022 20:40
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Gripweed posted:This story, and the upcoming Supreme Court case that could give total control over federal elections to the states has got me thinking. Republicans write election law to disenfranchise Democrat voters, making it much harder for Democrats to win. If that SCOTUS case does turn out how one would expect, then the Republicans can make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win in red states. As soon as Republicans take power in purple states they'll change the elections there too, turning purple states into red states. The Democratic plan is to take the Senate, overturn the filibuster, and implement federal voting rights legislation. The independent state legislature theory doesn't block this - that theory is based on Constitutional text which delegates election powers to state legislatures unless it conflicts with federal law passed by Congress, which overrides. It prevents state governors, state constitutions, and federal courts from intervening in election processes, but Congressional law would still override state law when it comes to federal elections. Even if that weren't the case, it's worth noting that gerrymandering isn't a magic wand that just banishes a party from any chance of victory forever. It's based on the idea that there's some groups that tend to be inclined to vote for one party, and other groups that tend to be inclined to vote to the other party. Gerrymandering works to diminish the influence of some demographics while boosting the influence of others. That's more effective nowadays due to political self-segregation, which causes geography to line up with political inclinations more and more, but even then it's not absolute unless it's paired with a powerful political machine of the kind we don't really hear about nowadays. So gerrymandering isn't necessarily an eternal defeat - it diminishes the influence of traditionally Democratic voters, but that just means the Dems have to broaden their appeal and pull in more voters that aren't traditionally Democratic. Relying entirely on the Dem base and writing off the rest hasn't been going well anyway, even before the GOP gerrymandered things to further marginalize them. A genuine mass progressive movement that could make real inroads with people who don't live in big cities would swiftly topple the GOP gerrymanders.
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Jul 9, 2022 20:42
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Mustang posted:Who are these people the Democrats need to broaden their appeal to and what do they need to do to do it? The GOP doesn't get people to vote for them because they see to their economic interests, they vote for them over culture war issues that they're constantly picking fights over. I'm skeptical that there's some hidden, potential progressive movement hidden within the American countryside. In my opinion, more likely is any further "broadening" of Democratic appeal will mean even more Manchins and Sinemas, not more AOCs. Personally, I'd rather the Democrats not start embracing conservative rhetoric on CRT and LGBTQ issues just to MAYBE capture some votes outside the cities. The left doesn't really have any real choice but to come up with an answer to that question. All this talk about gerrymander and election laws and court decisions doesn't go anywhere if, at the end of the day, we believe that progressivism has already gotten all the votes it's capable of getting and is unable to expand its appeal beyond big cities and colleges. There's only so much of the electorate we can write off as impossible to win or not worth winning.
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Jul 9, 2022 22:22
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A big flaming stink posted:https://twitter.com/jordanzakarin/status/1545876493263323136 I didn't realize Bedingfield was still at the White House (her resignation "to spend more time with the family" was announced a couple days ago), but I guess she's stuck there for a couple more weeks. It'll be interesting to see who replaces her, since she was a pretty significant figure. The context of the statement isn't really clear (it doesn't appear to be a public statement), but from the White House's perspective, they're doing everything that's legal for them to do, with a robust response that does their best to protect women any way they can. It's not really surprising that they'd be sour about the fact that, not only are their efforts and initiatives being completely ignored, but people are showering them with demands to waste their time on stuff that's they believe is unlikely to make any difference and is often outright illegal. As far as they're concerned, they're already doing everything the executive branch can really do, and anything more is in the hands of Congress. Obviously, many of us disagree with how they see things, but a statement like that makes perfect sense if you consider their perspective.
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Jul 10, 2022 01:06
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Gripweed posted:But that was Bernie Sanders' plan. The Democratic establishment was firmly against it and the Democrat primary voters rejected it. Isn't it more accurate to say that Sanders failed? His plan, after all, was that he would expand his own appeal and activate voters who don't normally turn out for Dem centrists, ousting the centrists in a massive wave of working class votes. Given that he totally failed at doing so, it wouldn't make much sense for the party to follow his lead. Plenty of leftists have certainly insisted that activating new voters was the key to Dem success...but they themselves have totally failed to do so, finding very little electoral success outside of the bluest of the blue districts.
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Jul 10, 2022 02:59
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