2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

It's inane. Governments with the power to mint sovereign currency, not to mention take on the cheapest debt in the world, are nothing like a household. I know basically nothing about macroeconomics and yet this just seems obvious to me. idk.

Never underestimate the power of shitty analogies to shape how people think I guess

Reagan popularized that shit btw ("Pay as you go")

My dad and I spent 1980-88 shouting about Reagan. If it was Sunday morning, my mom would dash into the living room and shout off This Week with David Brinkley[ like she was swatting a fly. (At Home with the Morbiuses)

The McMorbs Group

would watch, get iatee and gabbneb on there imo

and special guest William Jefferson Clinton

shouldn't that be "musical guest"

and Lee Atwater on guitar

Chose not to engage when a childhood friend on Facebook posted tedious debt limit stuff about how it should be like managing your own home. Of course, he doesn't mention mortgages, car payments, school loans and a various other things that might make the analogy not work. Since I see this all the time, I am tempted to engage, though.

― curmudgeon, Friday, October 30, 2015 3:40 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does your friends household have a standing army as well?

fucking morons

no, we wd have Joan Crawford Loves Chachi on to do some old socialist songs

xp

I can see your house as the kind with photos of FDR and Bella Abzug on the wall

would watch, get iatee and gabbneb on there imo

― pizza rolls are a food that exists (silby), Friday, October 30, 2015 12:23 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(W)RONG

So Paul Ryan apparently made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows. I didn't watch any of them. I did read this morning that he is still opposed to paid family leave, and is happy just going back to Wisconsin every weekend to see his kids & wife part of Saturday when not meeting with constituents and all of Sunday. He sleeps on a cot in his office during the week rather than getting a DC home.

I saw his interview on NBC; I don't remember much, other than laughing when he said he was going to have his new office radically cleaned to get the cigarette stink out of everything.

holy shit check this out

https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral

Anonymous is going through the KKK data dump

i don't trust "Anon" much so i have a baseline skepticism

but fuck, john cornyn?

where did this information allegedly come from?

i don't know

Yeah, wtf? The KKK has central databases of personal information sitting around? Some KKK ass would actually provide a credit card or some other identifying info to that (anonymous?) org for monthly membership dues or something? Like "oh, just charge the hood to my account, you know where to find me, it's John Cornyn, C-O-R ... yeah, like the US senator."

Since they have a long, long history of engaging in conspiracy to murder, commit arson and similar felonies, I should think that the KKK would be leery of infiltration and would like to have some unfuckwithable knowledge of who they are admitting into the organization. Since it is a quasi-national organization, they'd probably want to have some way of identifying out-of-state members, too.

Awful lot of .ru email addresses in those data dumps.

Ha, you ever browsed vk.com? It's like the Facebook for American Nazis.

(I mean, I've only got like 50 friends on there, not like I'm a regular or anything.)

i don't trust "Anon" much so i have a baseline skepticism

People have gotten a lot of shit wrong under the banner of Anonymous. I'll be really happy if some journalist fact-checks this stuff and finds it to be true. Just not holding my breath.

same

I just noticed Madeline Rogero is on that list, which means it is patently bunk.

yup
http://www.wbir.com/story/news/2015/11/02/mayor-rogero-scoffs-claims-kkk-ties-calls-them-defamatory/75040018/

Even the suggestion that are four current GOP senators in the Klan deserves some skepticism -- were there ever that many at once in the past? I mean, Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, were there others?

Doesn't the Council of Conservative Citizens kinda mitigate the need for belonging to the Klan?

CCC?

Even the suggestion that are four current GOP senators in the Klan deserves some skepticism -- were there ever that many at once in the past? I mean, Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, were there others?

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Monday, November 2, 2015 3:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would not be surprised if 3/4 or more of the entire southern congressional delegation circa 1920-1940 were klansmen tbh

Nope, sorry. Just doxxed their email addresses and nothing shows up.

Even the suggestion that are four current GOP senators in the Klan deserves some skepticism -- were there ever that many at once in the past? I mean, Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, were there others?

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive),

Hugo Black. Robert Byrd. Black's SCOTUS nomination was in jeopardy as a result.

So who do we blame for Dems lack of success in elections yesterday in Kentucky, Virginia, and elsewhere? In Virginia, Dems won seats they were expected to win, but just didn't get the additional seat they needed to win control of the VA Senate. I thought the Kentucky governor race was supposed to have been much closer.

Bevin’s top economic priority is making Kentucky a Right To Work state.

The voter turnout numbers everywhere were low...

Above takeaways from a Washington Post article...

yeah downballot, off-year and uh "outstate" elections (as we city people call them) are bad and getting worse.

Pierce:

There are a couple of lessons that the Democratic Party can take from yet another ass-kicking, this in a freakish off off-year election. (The results in Virginia, where Democrats hoped to overturn the state senate, were particularly painful, and not much of a testimony to Governor Terry McAuliffe's influence.) The first one is an old lesson, but one the party has yet to learn. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to go, and she has to take her approach to building the party with her. How many times does Howard Dean's 50-state strategy have to be vindicated before the Democratic Party admits that he was right, and that Rahm Emanuel (and DWS) were wrong? Pay attention. These elections are where your next Louie Gohmerts and Joni Ernsts come from. If you want to kill crackpot politics in the cradle, this is where you have to do it.

The second lesson is one more apropos to the set of circumstances surrounding this election. (And, yes, I also am suspicious of the fact that no poll showed Bevin leading prior to the election and yet he won going away. There seems to be one of these in every election now, and the Republican almost always wins it.) Please stop running retreads, what we here in the Commonwealth call "the Coakley Factor." I'm sure Jack Conway is a swell fella, but, like Coakley in Massachusetts and Tom Barrett in Wisconsin, this is the second statewide race he'd lost in five years, and the last one he lost was to Rand Paul. In addition, how can a major political party not exploit the fact that the elite of the opposing party dislikes their candidate? Nominate strategically and then campaign strategically and then vote strategically. The Republicans do all these things at once, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing any of them.

otm

it's kind of shocking that dems are so stubbornly bad at this

as Pierce points out, there are specific people/policies in the Dem party to blame

I need to start checking more for those Pierce articles. I think that's the second longish quote of his I've seen on these boards. Seems v informative

he can get repetitive but he posts 3-4x a day so its worth checking up on

I'm all for the 50 states approach, and dropping Wasserman Schultz, but one also has to consider this, regarding getting back control of the House--

Whenever the Democrats next control the House, it’s likely that their majority will include hardly any seats from Appalachia and the Deep South, which would be a change from any of their previous House majorities. The seats Democrats are likely to target in the future are in places like suburban Philadelphia, Greater New York and New Jersey, suburban Denver, Greater Chicago, Northern Virginia, Las Vegas, Minnesota’s Twin Cities and other suburban areas. These are districts where the number of college graduates is generally higher than the national average and where there are below-average numbers of white evangelicals. It is not outlandish to suggest Carson or Trump would perform poorly in these places.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/how-democrats-could-win-the-house-213318#ixzz3qYEUwSR2

Dems are in part of Northern VA, but parts that are more exurban, and farther from DC, lean Republican now but have sizable numbers of folks who are Dems or who have gone that way

Pierce has flourishes I dislike – his prose is steeped in Mencken – but he's my favorite columnist.

what is rong w/ Mencken's prose, if you please?

Nothing if done well.

Was reading some glass half full articles about Dems success in the New Jersey legislature, Pennsylvania courts, a few mayor elections here and there, suburban Denver...

I mean , in addition to that Politico one.

a victory in Politico

Yeah PA Dems swept the three open seats on the state Supreme Court, and flipped it. I guess this is good news for the next round of redistricting in 2021; they are the tie-breaking vote on an always deadlocked bi-partisan legislative redistricting commission.

Kevin Drum--

I don't want to go all Pollyanna on you, but the basic result of yesterday's elections is that conservatives won big in the South, while liberals did OK everywhere else. Losing Kentucky was a kick in the gut, but I can't work up a lot of surprise when Democrats lose ground below the Mason-Dixon line. It's unfortunate, but it's hardly big news.