Random Political Posts

[AnBr]

very good piece.

Jun 10, 2021 13:35:01 GMT pnwguy said:

We might create a separate post thread to discuss it.

Go for it.

Near the start of the article was this:

The libertarians were different. They slipped more easily into the American stream. In their insistence on freedom they could claim to be descendants of Locke, Jefferson, and the classical liberal tradition. Some of them interpreted the Constitution as a libertarian document for individual and states’ rights under a limited federal government, not as a framework for the strengthened nation that the authors of The Federalist Papers thought they were creating.

Yet many of these wannabe libertarians cite from The Federalist Papers to "prove" the Founding Fathers were libertarians themselves rather than the Classical Liberals that many of them were.

Some of it reminds me of a PBS documentary I saw back in the '80s called "The Rise of the Right" that tracked this from its start with the defeat of Goldwater to the right's ascendancy with Reagan and beyond. One of the things that I most clearly remember from it was an interview with Pat Buchanan where he noted that in planning the elections of Nixon they could see no clear path to winning without first factionalizing the country, thus the Southern Strategy was born to take advantage of Southern white resentment of the passage of the Civil Rights bill. Part of those plans also was to create, in Roger Ailes' words "a Republican friendly media." And the Republicans have hammered  on those divisions ever since.

For several years I have tried to track down this documentary, but could find little trace of it. I thought I had found it once, but it was inaccessible in private library somewhere in California.

[indy]

Palin kept looking for a second act that never arrived. She suffered the pathetic fate of being a celebrity ahead of her time.

It's amazing (and depressing) how hindsight reveals your feeble lack of foresight, isn't it? At the time, I thought Palin was an oddity, a one-off, a bizarre circus clown who would quickly return under the rock from whence she came. How idiotically naive that was. Instead of the canary in the coal mine she was, I could only view her as something like a paltry imitation of The Mule from the Foundation Series, a kind of mutant with a limited and somewhat meager ability to telepathically inflame the emotions of a (reasonably small) group of people. Nope. Man, was I wrong.

Under the watchful eye of their parents, the children of Smart America devote exhausting amounts of energy to extracurricular activities and carefully constructed personal essays that can navigate between boasting and humility. The goal of all this effort is a higher education that offers questionable learning, dubious fulfillment, likely indebtedness, but certain status. Graduation from an exclusive school marks the entry into a successful life. A rite endowed with so much importance and involving so little of real value resembles the brittle decadence of an aristocracy that’s reached the stage when people begin to lose faith that it reflects the natural order of things. In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

On this front, at least, I can claim some awareness of the problem. Buffett said value is what you get and price is what you pay.  A college education has become pricey but it's value is dubious except as a hurdle that you have to clear in order to make it to the next hurdle. I'm as guilty as the next person in promoting this narrative. When I filled positions that really didn't require a college degree, I still used it as a first approximation for a person's willingness to sit quietly, follow instructions, and raise their hand when they have to go to the bathroom. I mean, that's just the raw, unfiltered fact of the matter.

[jackd]

I understand the sentiment of the college remarks. However, despite the conventional view of college as a career building experience, I think it goes well beyond that. Exposure to culture and cultures, together with the development of critical reasoning skills, helps to create good citizens and good relational humans. Is it essential? No, but it is useful and a desirable experience or perhaps I should say it can be. All value is not measured in money.

[Deleted]

Jun 11, 2021 14:21:02 GMT jackd said:

I understand the sentiment of the college remarks. However, despite the conventional view of college as a career building experience, I think it goes well beyond that. Exposure to culture and cultures, together with the development of critical reasoning skills, helps to create good citizens and good relational humans. Is it essential? No, but it is useful and a desirable experience or perhaps I should say it can be. All value is not measured in money.

Horrible ideas. Especially, critical reasoning skills. Yikes!

[LFC]

Jun 11, 2021 14:21:02 GMT jackd said:

I understand the sentiment of the college remarks. However, despite the conventional view of college as a career building experience, I think it goes well beyond that. Exposure to culture and cultures, together with the development of critical reasoning skills, helps to create good citizens and good relational humans. Is it essential? No, but it is useful and a desirable experience or perhaps I should say it can be. All value is not measured in money.

Libtard nonsense. If everybody just believed in Republican Jeebus then 'Murica would be "great again."

[pnwguy]

Jun 10, 2021 14:35:59 GMT indy said:

I can't recommend George Packer highly enough. I've been reading everything he has written since he started at the New Yorker back in the early 2000s. In my opinion, probably the best writer of the last two decades, at least stylistically.

Packer is interviewed by Charlie Sykes in today's Bulwark podcast

[LFC]

NYC f***ed up their election royally by including 135,000 "test ballots."

The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.

The bungle was a black mark on New York City’s first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city’s Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.

The disarray began as evening fell, when the board abruptly withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.

That data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.

Then the Board of Elections tweeted that it was aware of “a discrepancy” in its report on ranked choice voting results. It didn’t initially explain what that discrepancy was, even as it pulled the data from its website.

Just before 10:30 p.m. it released a statement saying that 135,000 ballot images it had put into its computer system for testing purposes had never been cleared.

“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported,” it said in a statement.

The results initially released Tuesday, and then withdrawn, were incomplete to begin with because they didn’t include any of the nearly 125,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary.

The Associated Press removed Tuesday’s vote update from its published vote count after the board pulled the results.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 30, 2021 14:38:45 GMT LFC said:

NYC f***ed up their election royally by including 135,000 "test ballots."

The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.

The bungle was a black mark on New York City’s first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city’s Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.

The disarray began as evening fell, when the board abruptly withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.

That data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.

Then the Board of Elections tweeted that it was aware of “a discrepancy” in its report on ranked choice voting results. It didn’t initially explain what that discrepancy was, even as it pulled the data from its website.

Just before 10:30 p.m. it released a statement saying that 135,000 ballot images it had put into its computer system for testing purposes had never been cleared.

“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported,” it said in a statement.

The results initially released Tuesday, and then withdrawn, were incomplete to begin with because they didn’t include any of the nearly 125,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary.

The Associated Press removed Tuesday’s vote update from its published vote count after the board pulled the results.

Why do people expect perfection in all things? I don't blame this on inability to handle ranked choice voting.  It looks like simple human error that someone caught before any final results were announced.  S*&$ happens.

[Deleted]

The gulf between perfection and extraordinary and repeated incompetence is huge.

[Deleted]

Everybody's a fucking victim.

[LFC]

As we already knew the FBI did a shoddy job on the Brett Kavanaugh "investigation."

Seven top Democratic Senators are criticizing the FBI and Director Chris Wray after recently learning how the Bureau handled its 2018 special investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, then President Donald Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says in a statement, "the FBI gathered over 4,500 tips in relation to the investigation without any apparent further action by FBI investigators. The Bureau also confirmed that tips from the tip line were instead provided to the Trump White House Counsel's office, where their fate is unknown."

Kavanaugh's nomination was almost derailed after he was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford during their high school years. Two other women have also accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. The 2018 FBI investigation was prompted by Ford's accusations.

According to Senator Whitehouse, the FBI declined to say if it actually investigated any of the 4500 tips it received on Kavanaugh. It also never opened a criminal investigation because the inquiry was a background check, The New York Times adds.

"The FBI apparently pursued none of these tips," Whitehouse says in his Thursday press release. "Instead, by the FBI's own account, it merely 'provided all relevant tips' to Trump's Office of White House Counsel, the very office that had constrained and directed the limited investigation."

Whitehouse blasted Wray and the FBI:

"It confirms my suspicions that the 'tip line' was not real and that FBI tip line procedures were not followed. There are FBI tip line procedures. They were not followed," Whitehouse added on Twitter.

"So when Wray said they followed procedures, he meant the 'procedure' of doing whatever Trump White House Counsel told them to do. That's misleading as hell," Whitehouse said.

[LFC]

This piece from TPM called Bipartisanship Needs to Die So Our Country Can Thrive seems to sum things up with the supposedly bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure being front and center.

As Congress and the Biden Administration engage in increasingly frantic negotiations around a bipartisan infrastructure bill, many of us are left wondering: Is any of this worth it?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doesn’t believe so. The Minority Leader told a Kentucky audience earlier this month the “era of bipartisanship” was over as he prepared for “a hell of a fight” over the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Mitch, after being one of the primary murderers of bipartisanship, has at least openly declared it dead. That means he understands that most of the Democrats accept he will never act in good faith or in the interest of the nation so he can't wring any more victories out of doing so quietly. He might as well own being all attack all the time because at least the base laps that shit up.

The finish of this piece should be required reading for Manchin and Sinema.

The question Democrats should be asking ourselves right now is whether we are addressing the defining problems on which Biden hinged his campaign: COVID-19 response, climate, economic inequality, and racial justice. Somehow the process by which things get done in Congress has become more important than actually getting things done. We cannot continue to fail to deliver change for the American people, as we continue to deal with the fallout of a devastating global pandemic, no less.

If Democrats aren’t confident in the veracity of their ideas — and the support of the 90 million Americans who voted for Democrats in the last three cycles, 10 million more than GOP voters — then they don’t deserve to govern in their name.

Democrats have a responsibility to drive forward the mandate of the American people. They should embrace it without fear. Because if Democrats enact real change and succeed in telling that story clearly, the votes will follow in 2022 and beyond.

[jackd]

The Republicans just announced that they had agreement on all major issues.

[LFC]

Jul 28, 2021 17:46:40 GMT jackd said:

The Republicans just announced that they had agreement on all major issues.

If that's true and a bill goes to the floor for a vote then how many votes do you think they'll actually deliver? Remember that one of the supposed 10 is Little Lindsey. He's nearly guaranteed to come up with some excuse to allow him to keep s***ing Trump's truffle.

And then there's the "debate" and amendment process which I'm sure Schumer will keep a tight rein on.

[jackd]

There is all of that but the Republicans are signaling optimism and if they don't come through, that's on them. I don't think they'll be allowed to stall and maybe this effort will persuade Manchin and Sinema that "they tried". I think the object of the exercise is to try to get the Democratic Senators onboard for the reconciliation bill.

[indy]

'Hard' infrastructure bill passes cloture with 17 Republican votes. Trump is going to be spread pretty thin with this much of a target rich environment.

Schumer seems to be indicating he wants to pass the companion reconciliation bill in the next two weeks. He also implies he has 50 votes for it, though it just may be posturing.

[jackd]

Looks like the bipartisan bill may pass. Sinema is already arguing that the price in the reconciliation bill is too high. Sounds like she's negotiating and something, by way of reconciliation, is likely to pass. The strategy may be working.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 29, 2021 1:03:46 GMT indy said:

'Hard' infrastructure bill passes cloture with 17 Republican votes. Trump is going to be spread pretty thin with this much of a target rich environment.

Schumer seems to be indicating he wants to pass the companion reconciliation bill in the next two weeks. He also implies he has 50 votes for it, though it just may be posturing.

Call me a pessimist but I predict most of that 17 will vote against the bill in the end.

[LFC]

Jul 29, 2021 2:19:07 GMT jackd said:

Looks like the bipartisan bill may pass. Sinema is already arguing that the price in the reconciliation bill is too high. Sounds like she's negotiating and something, by way of reconciliation, is likely to pass. The strategy may be working.

I posted an opinion from TPM earlier that basically said the Dems can't let anybody get away with a general price tag argument. If they want to justify that this and this and that and that need to be cut then fine but waving your hands and saying the cost is too much is lazy and unacceptable.

[jackd]

It may be lazy and unaccptable but they need her vote.

[AnBr]

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Attachments:

[goldenvalley]

I debated whether to post this in Random or Misc but I think this is a random thought.  Whatever happened to the "Alt Right"?  We heard so much about them in the early Trump years.  Has QAnon become the shiny new object?  Or have we just understood that the Alt Right were young white supremacists.  They may or may not be joining Proud Boys, 3%ers, Oath Keepers.  Those groups appear to be older white dudes.

[jackd]

They seem to have been white supremacists although not necessarily young and no more formally organized than anti-fascists, black lives matter, or Q-anon for that matter. They're still there adopting different names as the mood strikes, I think.

[LFC]

Jul 30, 2021 18:34:58 GMT goldenvalley said:

I debated whether to post this in Random or Misc but I think this is a random thought.  Whatever happened to the "Alt Right"?

They dropped the “Alt.”

[pnwguy]

Jul 31, 2021 14:46:43 GMT LFC said:

Jul 30, 2021 18:34:58 GMT goldenvalley said:

I debated whether to post this in Random or Misc but I think this is a random thought.  Whatever happened to the "Alt Right"?

They dropped the “Alt.”

The prefix they prefer now is Absolutely-