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pencilhands posted:I'm really curious why mccarthy even wants the job. I'm not saying Boehner or Ryan were some kind of political geniuses or anything but they're clearly at least as talented as he is, and failed miserably with a way bigger cushion and in a time when the gop was somewhat more moderate than it is now. What does he think is going to happen? He's in California, so it's not like he has any real shot at getting elected to the Senate unless he moves to another state, which he can't really do because his political climb has been dependent on building up connections and patronage over a period of decades. And as long as the presidential candidates are coming from the Trump wing, all his old connections are gonna be worthless for getting him appointed positions. The speakership is his only real shot at being more important than "just another House rep" in the next few years. And he can't give up on that ambition so easily - he's spent decades slowly building up to it, and then eight years building up his political support again after the Freedom Caucus came out of nowhere and torched his ambitions the first time around.
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Jan 2, 2023 05:03
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Republicans posted:Who the hell else even wants the job? Andy Biggs, the current chair of the Freedom Caucus, appears to be the main challenger right now. It's unlikely that he has any real path to the speakership, but he seems to be well aware of that. The idea is that if they manage to block McCarthy long enough, someone else will inevitably be persuaded to enter the race, and I suspect the Freedom Caucus don't really care who as long as it's someone to the right of McCarthy. The important part is that they demonstrate their power and influence by knocking McCarthy out of the race. The punditry seem to think Steve Scalise will be the one to pop up if McCarthy fails, since he's a highly-placed House GOP member who's acceptable to the Freedom Caucus as well as the moderates. But McCarthy's loyalists are reportedly pissed off at the Freedom Caucus blatantly flexing like this, so it's possible they might make things more complicated. Ultimately, it comes down to how much each faction is willing to dig in their heels and gently caress with their rivals' picks out of sheer petty spite. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, since the moderate factions aren't usually that stubborn, but the GOP's narrow House margin holds a lot of potential for hilarity.
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Jan 3, 2023 03:28
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FlamingLiberal posted:Eh, it sounds like a lot of his caucus really doesn’t like him It's possible a few of the McCarthy loyalists might reject any alternate candidate just to spite the "anyone but McCarthy" group, due to a perception that the latter group doesn't have specific issues with McCarthy and are only doing this to demonstrate their influence. That's the really beautiful part about this speaker election. Rather than actually being about the specific candidate, it's become a stage for factional spite and resentment to play out. How long this goes on will depend on how insistent the various factions are on asserting their strength, and how much they bitterly hate each other. This will entirely depend on how stubborn everyone involved is willing to be.
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Jan 3, 2023 17:23
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Charliegrs posted:So is KMac just going to try to win by attrition basically? Just keep redoing the votes until everyone gets so tired and just let's him win so they can go home? He probably doesn't want to give people any time to start talking about serious alternatives to him. Biggs has no chance of getting a majority and he knows it. The big weakness in the Freedom Caucus plan is that they don't have a real competitor to McCarthy. They're hoping that the moderates will offer one up on their own if McCarthy is blocked long enough.
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Jan 3, 2023 20:17
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mmkay posted:Non-us here, a few questions: why does the freedom caucus hate Mccarthy? What is the rules package that's also voted on? Is that separate from the leader vote, and if it is what would happen if that failed too? Two reasons: First, he started out his political career as a moderate Republican, and paved his path to power by building close ties to other established leadership figures like Bill Thomas and John Boehner. And the Freedom Caucus hated Boehner, so much that they thwarted McCarthy's 2015 bid for Speaker largely because he was Boehner's handpicked successor. By the mid-2010s, he'd noticed which way the winds were blowing and moved well to the right, but the Freedom Caucus don't think he's a diehard true believer who'll stick with them no matter what. He's so openly ambitious that he's not especially trustworthy, as the general perception in DC is that he'll do drat near anything for power. Now that Trump's looking shaky, the Freedom Caucus are extremely worried that McCarthy will betray them or thwart their most ridiculous plans. Second, the Freedom Caucus want to assert their dominance by demonstrating that they're too important for the moderates to ignore. They'd likely be doing this to some extent no matter who the leading candidate was; the point is to show that despite being a small faction, they have the numbers and discipline to force major concessions from the rest of the party (especially with the GOP's extremely slim majority).
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Jan 3, 2023 22:56
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I don't think "the courts are dominated by liberals who keep striking down conservative laws and can't be overruled, let's spend the next fifty years doing everything we can to appoint conservative justices to those courts to get those liberal rulings overturned" is exactly a stroke of political brilliance. Calling it a "project" or a "strategy" is, I think, rather generous. Taking every opportunity to put loyalists in extremely powerful lifetime appointments is not something that takes a genius. Especially given that those extremely powerful lifetime appointments had been used against them for several straight decades. And the fact that it took more than half a century to accomplish suggests that it wasn't much of a strategy by itself.
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Jan 5, 2023 00:00
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haveblue posted:The new normal cannot be that the legislative branch is entirely shut down for two years. Like, that’s just not an option if we want to continue calling ourselves a country. We’d collapse into anarchy before the next election The cause of McCarthy's extensive public humiliation isn't just the Freedom Caucus. Sure, the Freedom Caucus is being pointlessly obstructionist and defying party leadership, but they've been doing that for years. It's not uncommon for the House to have a couple dozen cranks that are quietly shoved into a corner and ignored when voting time comes around. The reason they're able to cause such problems this time is because the GOP completely loving flubbed the midterms and came out of it with only a single-digit margin in the House. Historically, it's pretty rare for the majority party to have a majority this thin - usually, they have a hefty enough majority that a handful of their own members kicking up a fuss can be safely ignored. Granted, House margins have generally been thinner in the 21st century, but usually not this thin. When Trump took office, the GOP had a 47-seat margin on their majority. They're in this situation because they got absolutely walloped in Trump's midterms, and then barely managed to scrape back a majority in Biden's midterms, leaving them with absolutely no breathing room to ignore the usual selection of fringe weirdoes.
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Jan 7, 2023 03:25
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Nix Panicus posted:The conservative project has achieved victory on all fronts so total that the largest 'progressive' victory of the last twenty years was a lovely hand out to private insurance spearheaded by a crypto conservative who also tried to cut social security while letting his banker buddies off the hook for the colossal economic collapse they initiated. Complaining that their strategy wasn't particularly clever seems like a non sequitur. It also begs the question of why couldn't democrats stay laser focused on a grand project over decades and achieve success by increments? Perhaps they did, and the entrenchment of corporate power is the fruit of the New Democrat's efforts since the 90s. What are you saying was the "largest 'progressive' victory"? At first, it seems like you're saying it's Obamacare, but then you immediately add in a bunch of unrelated complaints about Obama, so are you trying to say that the "largest 'progressive' victory" was electing Obama? I don't think there's anyone in this thread who'd agree with that. And that's without even getting into your extremely minimalistic descriptions of some very large and complex bills with a number of different measures. You spend half this post complaining that progressives haven't been making incremental progress toward anything, and the other half of it complaining that Obamacare didn't immediately abolish private insurance on the spot. I'm certainly no lover of Obamacare, but it's a prime example of a incremental step in a long-term push toward a larger policy project. Which in turn exposes one of the serious issues with these long-term policy projects - they take a really, really long time! I guess it doesn't necessarily sink in when we just say "over the course of 50 years", so let's put it this way: someone who was 21 years old when Roe v Wade was decided would have been 70 years old when Roe was overturned. There's people out there who spent their entire working life - and a few years of their retirement - voting for politicians who said they were going to overturn Roe and then being pissed off when Roe still hasn't been overturned. But honestly, I'm not a fan of talking about individual policy goals as "projects". You know what the big conservative project was, the one that made all these other policy pushes of theirs possible? Figuring out how to win more elections. Figuring out how to build the base and then mobilize it. All of these policy gains of theirs only came about because they were able to win solid control of various levels and branches of government. And note that when I say "they", I don't just mean "Republicans", I mean "conservatives". One of the anti-McCarthy faction's demands, after all, was that he stop funding primary challengers against far-right candidates- and despite the fact that he'd been putting the party's thumb on the scale against them in elections, the anti-McCarthy faction was more than three times as big as the Squad is. Freakazoid_ posted:Something I've suspected for years now, the common advice around here and elsewhere has been that if you want to see change, you need to start from the bottom and work your way up. The bottom isn't the House, state politics, or even local politics. The bottom is the electorate. If the movement doesn't have wide and strong public support among the voters, then it's only natural that it's not going to have many diehard loyalists in national politics.
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Jan 7, 2023 17:38
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HookedOnChthonics posted:this would not be an issue if there was not a huge amount of people desperate to anesthetize themselves against the intolerable conditions of poverty, loneliness, etc. that they are in I thought the opioid epidemic was a consequence of pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to heavily overprescribe highly addictive drugs with insufficient caution or controls, driving many patients to become addicted and continue to seek the drugs afterward. Portraying it as "people desperate to anesthetize themselves against the intolerable conditions of poverty" is, I think, incredibly uncharitable at best. It looks sympathetic at first glance, but it's really just a slight reframing of War On Drugs narratives on addiction: it's based on the idea that drug addiction is simply a result of poor people lacking willpower and driving themselves to death to escape their unhappiness, rather than a physical dependence. Though of course, those kinds of narratives long predate the War On Drugs - it's long been convenient for the elites selling the drugs to suggest that addiction is just poor people becoming obsessed.
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Jan 8, 2023 22:10
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Fister Roboto posted:Pretty sure it's a little bit of both. Capitalism creates the material conditions that drive people to seek relief from them, and capitalism also pushes a terrible solution on them. That's not the same as saying it's their fault for not being strong enough. In the case of the opioid epidemic, it wasn't that people were seeking relief from "the material conditions of capitalism", it's that they were seeking relief from things like injuries or post-surgical pain. Their doctor prescribed oxycontin or something as a routine painkiller, and they got addicted. To repeat myself, it's actually bad to describe drug addiction as poor people taking drugs because they're unhappy. Even if you're trying to blame the reasons they're unhappy, it's still a narrative that treats addiction as a choice rather than as a condition. And that's especially crappy when it comes to the opioid crisis, which was created by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies deceiving doctors into prescribing highly addictive substances for legitimate medical reasons. Gumball Gumption said earlier that the roots of the opioid epidemic were in homelessness and poverty, but that's mixing up cause and effect. It's certainly true that there's a lot of homeless opioid addicts. But they didn't start using drugs because they were homeless - rather, they became homeless because they were addicted to drugs. Substance abuse disorders are expensive, and tend to destroy a person's financial health as well as their physical health.
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Jan 9, 2023 03:31
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Youth Decay posted:https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/01/09/dc-home-rule-kevin-mccarthy-budget-riders Knew what was gonna happen? The article doesn't actually say anything is happening. It just describes a hypothetical situation that could potentially happen.
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Jan 9, 2023 16:44
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Here is something that will probably be controversial. I don't think your summary really lines up with the article. You summarized it as "people just can't/won't make the lifestyle adjustments required", but the article appears to go a lot further than that: it entirely rejects the idea of lifestyle factors influencing weight at all! It compares obesity to asthma, treating it as a condition that some people are just born with and can't ever escape without medical treatment. Incidentally, the article also doesn't mention the word "parent" or "parents" at all. I wonder if that's related. Because when it comes to lifestyle diseases among 12-year-olds, there's a lot about their lifestyle that they don't get to pick. They're not choosing their own meals, for the most part - that's up to the adults around them.
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Jan 9, 2023 22:52
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Timmy Age 6 posted:I've read a few articles on the subject and even the people who are nominally Pence's "allies" or confidants have all been saying "we have no idea what Mike thinks his lane is or how he thinks there's a viable path for him." I think the God's Plan mindset is probably the best explanation. Maybe he thinks Trump will be charged with something bad enough that he'll be able to rebrand as a #Resistance hero who fought to restrain Trump? Maybe he thinks he can run as the successor to Trump's legacy? Maybe he thinks he can thread the needle as a compromise between those two factions? Sure, his chances look dicey no matter which path he chooses. But he obviously really wants to be president. And if he doesn't at least give it a shot, then having suffered through four years as Trump's VP would have been for nothing. Eric Cantonese posted:I am probably missing something by not tracking right wing media very often, but it seems like Biden's classified document mixup hasn't really blown up. Am I being overly optimistic? Is this too early in the normal scandal life/death cycle? It was never likely to attract much notice outside of the right-wing outrage-o-sphere. The big issue with Trump wasn't that he took files, it was his reluctance to fully cooperate with authorities when they found out.
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Jan 11, 2023 19:05
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I wish they asked people more freeform questions like this in polls because it is always interesting and sometimes a little wild to see what random people think about policy issues or the economy. The crosstabs on a lot of these are either really interesting or really bizarre. For example, on the question about diversity, richer people (>$100k income) were more likely to say that diversity made the US worse...but they were also more likely to say that diversity made the US better. The 18-29 demographic was the second most likely to answer "worse", just one point behind the 65+ demographic. And the racial group most likely to say "worse" wasn't white people, but rather Hispanics - whites were most likely to answer "doesn't make much difference". Similarly, Hispanic respondents were most likely to answer that racism is "not a problem" in our society today. Saying that most or all issues as important when asked about them individually is pretty common. Generally, what's much more valuable is the "most important issue" question, which forces people to rank them and show what they care about the most. And in that question, the top answer by a considerable margin is inflation, followed by healthcare. Taxes, crime, and foreign policy all ranked near the bottom. But this list of priorities changes considerably if we look at individual demographics. According to this poll, Trump voters are overwhelmingly concerned about inflation, immigration, and taxes (in that order), while Biden voters are most concerned about healthcare, climate change, and inflation. Despite the Roe repeal, only two groups stood out as placing particular importance on abortion: people with six-digit incomes, and non-white people. As a last item that particularly baffles me, younger people were far more likely to say the current Supreme Court is liberal, and much less likely to say it's conservative. I know you just get weird poo poo in polls sometimes, but what the hell?
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Jan 11, 2023 22:37
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I'm going to guess that Anthony Devolver was the alias. His full name is reportedly George Anthony Devolder Santos. The "Devolder" comes from his mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder.
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Jan 12, 2023 06:49
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BonoMan posted:How is there not a mechanism for removing someone like Santos from office when he clearly only got in by lying about everything? It's ridiculous. There is a mechanism for removing a House rep, but a significant portion of his own party would need to be on board with removing him. And politicians lying to win elections is pretty par for the course, so it remains to be seen whether this will actually be scandalous enough. Ultimately, the really ridiculous thing is that the press and his opponent both failed to notice any of it. The NYT revealed all this stuff a month after the election, which is unusual timing. I would really love to hear the backstory on how this stuff came to their attention in the first place. Was it an independent investigation or were they tipped off? When did they realize something was up? How long did they sit on the story before going to print?
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Jan 12, 2023 17:20
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Charliegrs posted:So now Biden has a special counsel to investigate the classified documents at his office and residence. The problem for Trump was never that he took home classified files. The problem was that he knew he had classified files, concealed them from the government, and failed to fully cooperate when the government found out. That's what elevates it from "mistake" to "crime".
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Jan 12, 2023 22:29
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BiggerBoat posted:The thing that grates the most about this is if I lie on my resume about my GPA or even some creative embellishments for a $45,000 a year job and get caught, I can easily be fired with cause. I mean, I don't DO that but, like most people I tend to put a little icing on the cake I'm baking and decorate it nice. It appears that the Dems' oppo research missed it because his actual opponents never did any. The DCCC did some oppo research, but being a national entity, they had dozens of weirdoes and crazies to investigate, so they didn't do super deep dives. His direct opponents would be the ones who'd dig super deep, but they apparently didn't bother to do any oppo research at all. Reporters had been tipped off that something wasn't right about Santos, but they apparently ignored it until after the election, when the NYT suddenly decided to investigate it for some reason.
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Jan 14, 2023 06:42
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BiggerBoat posted:Honest question but does the VP usually have top secret clearance and access to classified documents? And, either way, what the gently caress is going with motherfuckers just stashing them in their storage closets and garages like 15 year old tax returns and unused ping pong tables? It varies. The VP is usually told a lot of what the president knows so that they're not completely clueless if the president unexpectedly dies, but not necessarily everything. For example, Truman only learned of the Manhattan Project after Roosevelt's death.
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Jan 16, 2023 15:49
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the_steve posted:https://twitter.com/healthbyjames/status/1614719393312694276?s=20&t=Enn-SbtI-OiWLl6COre5kg It's not really shocking that they're saying they'll at least consider it. One likely GOP presidential candidate is already openly calling for it, and the rest are likely to follow suit, so no one wants to be the guy who goes on record saying "no loving way" to a reporter. Not a good career move if one of those candidates ends up being the next commander-in-chief. The Pentagon opposed lifting the mandate in the first place, so it's unlikely that military leadership are actually enthusiastic about giving back pay to those who were booted for violating the mandate. I suspect that they're being noncommittal for political reasons, and that they intend to "lose" this proposal deep in the back of a filing cabinet and forget about it until 2025.
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Jan 16, 2023 16:48
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GOP House candidate Solomon Pena, who was overwhelmingly defeated in November, spent the rest of November ranting about election fraud and screaming that the election was stolen, including showing up at the homes of two county commissioners to personally tell them that they shouldn't certify the election results. Apparently, he spent December and January doing three things. The first two are extremely funny, the last one not so much:
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1615172198288789505 To no one's surprise, he's a big MAGA guy, Jan 6th attendee, and apparently enough of a true believer (and extremely mad) to actually go put his own fingerprints on the crimes instead of just riling up followers with wink-nudge rhetoric. Luckily, no one was injured, but poo poo like this doesn't exactly bode well for the future of US politics.
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Jan 17, 2023 05:41
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selec posted:Hochul maybe just dumb? That’s an acceptable reason for why politicians act this way, right? I only know anything at all about it because Leon Trotsky 2012 called attention to it, but apparently it's a quid pro pro thing. The conservative justice was the only one of the available options who publicly committed to appointing Hochul's pick for court administrator. And as far as I can tell (which admittedly isn't very much), NY state politics under Hochul have played host to a lot of petty feuding over how the courts should be run, which in turn affects how some policies (like bail reform) are implemented. Enthusiastically backing a terrible judge in exchange for increased influence elsewhere is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from NY state politics. It's all the pettiness and personality-driven clashes of general local/regional politics, combined with the patronage networks that pop up in an area with strong political machines. That said, she's long been a conservative Dem. She spent her early political career as a self-proclaimed "independent Democrat" who frequently defied her own party. As she told a reporter during her first run for a House seat: quote:"I’m not afraid of telling my own party when they’re wrong, or embracing a Republican idea when it’s right. I’m not partisan,” Hochul said. “I believe that’s why I was elected (clerk) with 80 percent of the vote last November. And that shows people of all parties will support me, because they trust my judgment and they know I’m a fighter.” Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 19:55
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Kalit posted:This original story is from pages ago, but figured a follow up might be of interest to those here. So far, it looks like Hamline is just backpedaling their words (calling her an Islamophobe), but not their actions (canceling her contract). So the lawsuit will likely continue, at least for now.
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Jan 18, 2023 06:32
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Fister Roboto posted:Seriously, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, how the gently caress did none of this come up before the election? There appears to have been a lot of buck-passing, with everyone assuming that someone else would put in the effort of digging into the guy. The DCCC did a bunch of oppo research on him, but with how many candidates they were doing oppo for, it makes sense that they wouldn't pursue stuff too hard - after all, you'd expect state parties or their opponents to use that report as a basis to dig deeper. But the NY Dems apparently felt that oppo research wasn't their responsibility, and his 2020 opponent felt Santos was a nobody who wasn't worth seriously campaigning against. And Santos' 2022 opponent apparently decided that the DCCC report was enough to campaign on, and that the campaign's resources would be better spent on more door-knocking and phonebanking rather than extensively investigating Santos' resume. In fairness, absolutely no one would have expected him to be lying about this much stuff. The oppo research actually did find that his nonprofits were fake and that his finances were suspicious, and it's kinda understandable that they'd stop there. You'd normally expect that to be the most damaging stuff.
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Jan 18, 2023 17:41
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Discendo Vox posted:I wish I had a clearer sense of what Hochul was trying to get through this court admin figure that LaSalle had agreed to support. I've tried to research it a bit, but it's mostly petty interpolitical feuding with very little coverage. So far, the big one seems to be this: With tough-on-crime politicians like Eric Adams openly opposing NY's bail reform law, it became a political issue in the election. Hochul (who was supporting the law at the time) somehow ended up accusing judges of failing to keep up with the law and apply it appropriately. She even publicly threatened to create a state-funded training program for cash bail and force judges to attend. NY judges and legal organizations didn't take kindly to this, and the court administrator actually went to the press to openly criticize it. I have no idea who's in the wrong on that, and my gut instinct is that they all are, but it seems like exactly the kind of situation where having a loyalist as court administrator might be helpful.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:51
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FlamingLiberal posted:Is Santos actually gay or not? I thought it previously came up that he was gay, but like with everything else that may not be accurate. Whether or not he's actually gay isn't really something we can judge. The thing that was doubtful that he claimed to have long been openly gay, out and proud for a decade and completely confident in his sexual identity the entire time.
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Jan 19, 2023 04:59
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BDawg posted:I swear I saw an article this week or last where they said they all but had it figured out. I don't think there's been anything reliable, no. The Court's been quiet about it, so the rumor mill and gossip press have been quite active about it, but they didn't really have anything of note to say about it. It's not shocking that they couldn't find the source. The impression I got is that the Supreme Court hasn't been particularly concerned about monitoring or security on their computer systems, instead relying on conventions and trust to keep things secure - which left the investigators with not much to go on.
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Jan 19, 2023 21:31
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Randalor posted:So... poo poo will go up in price? More like "immediate major worldwide recession", if not worse. It'd be the kind of thing that shows up in history books fifty years from now. Much of the global financial system relies in some way on the assumption that it is essentially impossible for the US to run out of dollars and be unable to pay its debts. Look at how the Great Recession, the result of a global financial crisis, was caused by banks misjudging the risks of subprime mortgages and ending up with more risky debt on their balance sheets than they expected. A US default would be a much, much worse version of that - there's a lot more money in US debt, and the risk of a US default was widely expected to be zero.
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Jan 19, 2023 22:40
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-Blackadder- posted:I can't seem to find the drat article I saw it in (it mentioned something about someone "seeing things for how they are") but the concern I keep seeing is that the GOP aren't just the dumb kid running at the brick wall this time. Doesn't matter. As soon as payments get missed on any US debt, that's a crisis. We actually had a pretty good demonstration of the kind of chaos that can result just a few months ago, when a newly-elected conservative governor in a South Korean province decided to refuse to pay some debt that had been taken out to subsidize the construction of a Legoland. The result was a months-long credit crisis across the entire country. local governments couldn't take out any more debt because they couldn't get anyone to buy it. Banks stopped offering some types of loan to anyone, including private companies and individuals. Skyrocketing interest rates made the remaining kinds of loan nearly unaffordable, and many major companies were soon at risk of bankruptcy due to a liquidity crisis as loans were no longer available. The South Korean federal government was able to avert a full-blown crisis by rapidly plowing a ton of money into the market and issuing various guarantees, but the country isn't out of the woods yet, as the shock threatened to destabilize a real estate market that was already in a risky state as (like the US) South Korea was intentionally driving up interest rates in hopes that it would counteract inflation. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/10/legoland-south-korea-bond-market-crisis/ quote:Imagine the turmoil if a newly elected president of the United States announced that the U.S. government would no longer honor any outstanding Treasury bills because most of them were issued under his profligate predecessor. That’s essentially what Kim Jin-tae, the governor of South Korea’s Gangwon province, did. In doing so, Kim sparked a nationwide credit crisis that is spreading internationally, in the most farcical and unnecessary economic self-destruction this side of Liz Truss.
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Jan 19, 2023 23:26
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DancingMachine posted:https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/the-debt-limit-and-the-constitution-how-the-fourteenth-amendment-forbids-fiscal-obstructionism/ The 14th Amendment says the US can't stop paying the debt it already has. The debt ceiling prevents the US from taking out new debt. So the 14th can't be a full solution. The "gently caress off, we're ignoring the debt ceiling" argument could potentially be used for taking out debt to continue to pay actual debts the US has already incurred. However, it would be unlikely to cover any other spending. "Congress passed a budget saying we have to spend $X on program Y" wouldn't qualify as public debt even under a fairly expensive definition of the term. So the 14th Amendment gambit would result in a situation where the government is only spending money on debt payments and nothing else.
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Jan 20, 2023 02:53
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a.lo posted:https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1616118423704010752?s=20&t=DNcomyBwQycc_a0qcCTswQ Putting this up for a vote was one of the things McCarthy ended up promising the HFC in exchange for their support, so this'll be a good chance to see how much the rank and file are willing to play along. Note that the rules package only committed him to putting it up for a vote - it didn't require that the bill pass, nor did it require him to whip for it. He might have privately promised to whip for it, but he didn't put it in writing.
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Jan 20, 2023 06:20
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Shooting Blanks posted:Do we know if this was a request from one or more specific people, or just a generic HFC requirement? No one's named a specific person who demanded it. It was one of the demands of the holdouts, but we don't know how many of them actually wanted it. https://twitter.com/sarahnferris/status/1612931558662365184 And actually, I was wrong about it being in the rules package. The rules package did specifically call for a half-dozen bills to be brought to a vote, but the sales tax wasn't one of them. So this was a purely verbal promise from McCarthy.
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Jan 20, 2023 09:20
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BiggerBoat posted:I'm all in favor of simplifying the tax code somehow but this Fair Tax poo poo and, worse, the people in my income bracket who support it, infuriate me. I can't gather why so many voters like this idea and it's a really stupid and elementary way of thinking about "fair". The idea isn't just "fair", but "simple". Fair Tax-style proposals point out legitimate issues that ordinary people have with the current tax system (the complexity, the perception that people need to hire tax preparers, the perception that the wealthy loophole their way into paying far less than they owe), and then lie and claim that their proposal will solve all those issues. As for the fact that they're usually blatantly regressive, these kinds of proposals usually claim they'll come with a compensation program such as a universal basic income that'll cover much of the impact on low-income workers. On top of that, they usually deploy other common anti-tax rhetoric to sell the idea that the current tax system is less progressive than it seems. For example, FairTax proponents claim that even people who seem to pay no income tax are actually paying tons of "hidden taxes" in the form of having corporate taxes passed down to them in the form of higher prices. Here's some snippets from the FairTax website that show how it handles such arguments: quote:Will corporations get a windfall with the abolition of the corporate tax? quote:Why is the FAIRtax better than our current system? quote:How does the FairTax affect wages and prices? You can see that it relies heavily on trickle-down reasoning to insist that income taxes are inherently bad for workers and the economy, claiming that taking money from the rich only serves to hurt the job creators and pass down price increases to consumers. There's a lot of little contradictions in it, but people won't notice unless they're actively looking at it with a critical eye. And most FairTax believers are primed for it by conservative media, since the organization pushing FairTax has close ties to conservative interests (and also to Scientology).
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Jan 22, 2023 20:11
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-Blackadder- posted:On the Fair Tax topic this was a pretty interesting jaunt back through history (always like reading background stories like this) and it has some insight into the interplay between the political factions. (Also like the "we're all capitalists now" moment.) I wouldn't go so far as to call it a musical-chairs. Reducing consumption is generally accepted to be a way to counter inflation. Thurow's proposal was that instead of having the Federal Reserve intentionally force a recession, a VAT (he drew heavily from the example of European social democracies) would be able to reduce consumption in a less destructive manner while producing government revenue that could be put to some useful purpose. It's also worth remembering that the income tax was much higher then. At the time, the tax rate on the top income bracket was 70%, and Thurow was concerned that the tax system wasn't progressive enough due to things like the capital gains tax being lower. That led to a bunch of other radical proposals from him, such as ending the corporate tax and instead directly taxing shareholders on the profits of companies they owned. The entire 1981 article is available online for free, if you want to see some of the things he suggested and how he argued for them. I can't say all of it was good ideas, and a lot of it certainly looks out of place these days, but it's understandable when considering the context: that he was arguing against Reagan's economic policies and trying to provide alternatives that would accomplish the claimed goals better. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/taxes/thurowf.htm
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Jan 22, 2023 23:38
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Solkanar512 posted:Why was Dean ignored by the Obama administration, anyway? That never made any sense to me, especially after his success actually making races competitive. A 50-state strategy is by definition a long-term plan, as it can take many years to build up a state party from basically nothing. It's not something where you're gonna see results in a single term. Obama, on the other hand, was all about short-term thinking. Building up the Dem Party a decade in the future was of no direct use to a guy who would be term-limited out after eight years, and it turned out he wasn't much of a party loyalist in the end. On top of that, Obama had a tendency to neglect national party figures and organizations, instead preferring his own inner circle and his own organizations. Obama surrounded himself with data-driven types who sought to make "efficient" use of money by identifying seats that were likely flippable and spending almost exclusively on those races, regarding any spending in areas that weren't immediately vulnerable as a waste. There were a lot of people in party machines who were skeptical of money spent in red states that weren't likely to deliver an immediate win, and Obama surrounded himself with those types. Also, and most importantly, many influential members of Obama's inner circle had a personal or political dislike for Howard Dean. In particular, Rahm Emanuel (along with his close friend and political advisor, David Axelrod) spent the mid-00s feuding with Dean over Democratic strategy. As one of the biggest skeptics of the 50-state strategy, he fought bitterly with Dean over the allocation of party resources in 2006, and then fought even more over the credit for the 2006 wins. By all accounts, there was an huge amount of bad blood between them after that (mostly due to Rahm's notoriously venomous personality). When Rahm and Axelrod were brought into the Obama camp, they made sure that Dean was completely ostracized from the White House. And they were hardly the only ones, either; for example, Robert Gibbs left the Kerry campaign in 2004 to join a plausibly-deniable dark-money group dedicated exclusively to running attack ads against Dean. Here's a snippet from a Rahm puff piece in 2006 that neatly summarizes both establishment opposition to the 50-state strategy, the general working relationship between Rahm and Dean, and what Rahm thought of people who didn't do what he wanted: quote:On a late-spring day in 2006, Emanuel and Charles Schumer, the New Yorker in charge of winning the Senate for the Democrats, walked into the office of party Chairman Howard Dean. Note that although that article credits Emanuel with the Dem wins in 2006, that wasn't the general perception outside of Chicago politics. Dean's 50-state strategy ended up getting most of the credit for the 2006 wins, and there's absolutely no chance that Rahm ever forgave him for that.
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Jan 23, 2023 16:31
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FlamingLiberal posted:If the GOP had run on the economy and not weird Internet nonsense they probably do a lot better than they did The problem is that their primary electorate absolutely loves the weird internet nonsense. Any GOP candidate who focuses too hard on the basic boring fundamentals like "the economy" or "healthcare" risks facing a surprisingly serious primary challenge from some weirdo screaming about woke M&M ads or classroom litterboxes or something. So they have to run on some level of nonsensical internet bullshit and act fairly serious about it until the primary's over, and then they can't pivot away from that stuff so easily in the general. Shrecknet posted:sorry if this is off topic and if there's a better thread I'll delete and post there but, from a purely electioneering standpoint, how would Hilary campaigning in Wisconsin have changed anything? Like from a purely "motivating people to vote and bring friends" aspect, what would a speech or two have done? It's impossible to tell. Wisconsin was rather close, but there's really no way of actually knowing how much campaigning it would have taken to flip it. After all, it wasn't really supposed to be up for grabs in the first place - Wisconsin picked the Dem in every presidential election since Reagan, and Hillary had consistently led in the polls there by a fair margin. The Clinton campaign expected an easy win there, but instead she got fewer votes than Romney had gotten there just four years earlier. That suggests a deeper weakness that might not have evaporated with just a few stump speeches and a bunch of door-knocking. Besides, she campaigned hard in Pennsylvania (which had twice as many EVs) and still lost it by a similarly narrow margin.
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Jan 23, 2023 19:30
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Charliegrs posted:I don't understand why people think DeSantis couldn't win the general after Trump won it in 2016? Like what negative qualities does DeSantis have that Trump didn't? Trump wasn't charismatic either. I don't think chuds care about charisma, in fact they want someone to be as outwardly evil as they are and DeSantis will definitely deliver when it comes to that. Trump was the Obama of the right, in many ways.
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Jan 24, 2023 01:21
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smackfu posted:How to get from “virtually everyone” to one in three? "virtually everyone" was a phrase invented by the Twitter user, not an actual quote from the judge's opinion. However, the judge did say that being inside the Capitol building at the given times would constitute probable evidence of a crime. The ~5700 devices were "devices that Google calculated were or could have been (based on the associated margin of error for the estimated latitude/longitude point) within the TARGET LOCATION." The 1500 devices had "at least one location associated with the device that [was] within the [Capitol] building and the margin of error [fell] entirely within the Geofence". In other words, the 5700 were devices that were probably within the Capitol building at the given time, and the 1500 were devices that were definitely within the Capitol building at the given time. There's a limit to the accuracy of geolocation, after all.
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Jan 25, 2023 17:14
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Leon Sumbitches posted:Lol that the subprime mortgage crisis is the same as tenant protection laws One of the far-right responses to the housing crisis was to blame it on fair housing laws, which they claimed were FORCING poor helpless banks and landlords to give risky loans with high interest rates to poor minorities even though everyone knew those people wouldn't actually be able to pay.
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Jan 26, 2023 17:04
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Staluigi posted:How much of this is private prisons being private prisons and how much of this is lovely red state governments being lovely red state governments (ignore for the moment that allowing institutional capture of prisons is itself lovely govt) It's mostly the latter, with the caveat that even publicly-run prisons still have a certain level of profit motive. Here's what the Times wrote last month, which goes a bit more into the specific causes and motives: quote:NEW ORLEANS — The judge told Johnny Traweek he had served his time, seven months, for hitting someone with a saucepan in a drunken fight, then suggested he could be released from the Orleans Parish prison by midnight.
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Jan 26, 2023 21:30
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