"At least they're trying" is what you say about the local kid's baseball team, or Trump's white house, not a party that wants to rule an entire country.
They are trying the wrong things. They are trying badly. Stupidly. They are trying wrong stupid bad things that are, as you put it, "unlikely to work". They won't and they will fail and America will get Trump for another 4 years. They need to do better and stop piddling around with these incredibly cynical ploys to win over people they clearly don't respect.
Oh and, no, this wasn't aimed at urban-centric communities. It's blatantly obvious that this was aimed at rural communities and what they seem to think they care about (beer and patriotism, in that order). Yes, aim at urban issues, but if you are going to win over the rural communities, honest and straightforward talking about their ACTUAL wants, their ACTUAL plans, with NO pandering nonsense, is what they need. It is literally the only possible option now!
Quote: but if you are going to win over the rural communities, honest and straightforward talking about their ACTUAL wants, their ACTUAL plans, with NO pandering nonsense, is what they need. It is literally the only possible option now!
This is probably much harder to do than you make it sound, considering how strongly rural parts of this country have gone to the Republican Party over time... the Dems have been trying to figure out how to reverse that trend for decades now, with no success. The fact that Republican economic policies make rural America's lives worse doesn't seem to matter, people keep voting Republican either because of lies or based on social issues anyway...
The dems have been using flowery overly simplified language and/or out and out lies to try and trick rural communities into voting for them. How about long explanations with examples of people from that walk of life and how such people have been directly hurt by republicans and how they can be helped by progressive policies?
As I said, any attempt to deceive them will no longer work. They are willing to be lied to by TRUMP rather than democrats. Can't you see just how insulting and disingenuous that "beer" speech was? I mean can't you? You can right?
A) The Mueller investigation continues. The latest is that FBI agents raided Paul Manafort's house a few weeks ago, and not only that but they did a no-knock warrant, apparently out of fears that if they knocked he'd destroy evidence before they could get in. And interestingly enough, that very same day is the day that Trump tweeted about 'why didn't Sessions fire the acting FBI director'... huh, I'm sure that timing is a complete coincidence!
B) Trump and Kim Jong Un are quite a pair, two people with serious issues, in way over their heads, with far more power than anyone like that should. My guess is that while they will continue to saber-rattle, North Korea won't actually start anything serious since they know that while they could kill a huge number of people if a war started, it would end with their inevitable destruction and they do not want that. So the question is, will Trump attack them unprovoked? ... Probably not? I'm more worried about that than Kim Jong Un starting something, though, because of the power imbalance...
Now, North Korea has been a growing threat for several decades. The problem that is their horrendous regime is not new, and it has grown steadily over time as their nuclear program advances. The situation with North Korea is not only worse because of Trump, but because of other factors, most notably their nuclear program. But this is a difficult problem for anyone to try to navigate, and we have to rely on an idiot and his ever-changing team of toadies to keep the world safe? I do think that there are enough sane people around that we aren't going to start a war, so I'm not too worried, but the possibility does exist.
(I've heard a little talk that maybe Trump is trying to cover for the Manafort raid story by annoying North Korea. Maybe, who knows? We know he likes to cover one news story with another, he was very successful with those tactics during the campaign. It's more likely a coincidence though, brought on by North Korean words and Trump's nature.)
Dark Jaguar Wrote:The dems have been using flowery overly simplified language and/or out and out lies to try and trick rural communities into voting for them. How about long explanations with examples of people from that walk of life and how such people have been directly hurt by republicans and how they can be helped by progressive policies?
As I said, any attempt to deceive them will no longer work. They are willing to be lied to by TRUMP rather than democrats. Can't you see just how insulting and disingenuous that "beer" speech was? I mean can't you? You can right?
Where's the part with the beer speech? Who said that one?
Beyond that in specific though, the general problem is that since the 1968 "southern strategy" the share of white voters, particularly more rural and less educated white voters, who support the Democratic Party has steadily declined because, mostly, of racism; as the Dems changed into the party of social justice, the Republicans chose to reverse their previous views on race and become the party of entrenched white racism, and it has brought them far. Now, as the share of white people in this country slowly declines, they hold on to their power through race-baiting fear to get people to the polls, that older white people vote a lot and vote heavily Republican now, through computer-aided gerrymandering, and through voter suppression efforts. Of course we can look at other causes for their success at dominating white and rural America other than racism -- that the Republican appeal to freedom hits at some core American values (it's deceptively applied, but convinces some people anyway), that social issues like gay rights and abortion have become crucially important voting issues and the Republican base opposes them, and such, but racism is at the core of it.
So yeah, it's horrible, and for me inexplicable, that anyone would even consider believing Trump over, well, pretty much anyone. He is a serial liar and anyone who paid a quarter-seconds attention to anything should have known that. But either they were dumb enough to believe his right-wing populist economic message anyway (and now many have realized that they were lied to and he isn't doing what he promised he would), they voted for him despite misgivings because he promised to continue the culture war against gays and abortion and such (this he has done more of), they were racist too and went for him because of that, or something, and as a result he won, presumably. It's tragic that that kind of thing won out over reality, truth, fact, or anything else reasonable.
What can Democrats do though? I think that part of it is to do the kind of thing you see in those speeches in Virginia -- point out Trump's lies, particularly on the economy. Explain how what he promised rural America is not happening, and won't. Present a platform that actually might work, and which would actually be acted on. Sure, as you suggest, give direct examples of people hurt by Republican policies; politicians like anecdotes and they can at times be moving. I do have a few concerns, though. First, is this plan too reactive? I mean, Trump is doing a good job of tearing apart his party and base on his own, but as we saw in 2016 you cannot rely on just that to win, we need to have a strong plan of our own. "A Better Deal"? Yes, Trump won, but is that term there and the meaning behind it reacting too much to Trump, and should instead Dems just focus on what we want to do? I'm not sure, maybe. At least it's focused on policy though, which is necessary. Hillary ran a decent campaign, but did mess up when she focused so much on Trump's electability and not enough on the issues, and issues SHOULD be what matter the most, even when running against someone as willing to lie as Trump is.
As for lying, for a long time now Democrats have lied far less than Republicans, but it doesn't always seem to matter. It's yet another frustrating thing about American politics. The solution to that isn't to lie a lot as well though, that would just make our nations' badly strained political system even worse! I just hope that maybe the disaster that is this administration will convince people that facts and competence really do matter and they should not be rewarded. When you look at how Trump's poll numbers are extremely low and dropping, despite a continuing decent economy and no major disasters (yet, though he sure seems to want to start one with North Korea), it gives me some hope that that may be happening. It needs to, America has some big problems that we need to work on.
I know it's a long list, but of all the terrible things Trump has done as President, I think that pardoning Joe Arpaio might be the very worst one. By pardoning a very obviously guilty man who persecuted and horribly mistreated large numbers of people over many decades, Trump sends two messages:
First, for white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, racists, and their ilk, Trump stands with you and is one of you. Trump is the most openly racist president since Woodrow Wilson, but has none of Wilson's good traits to ameliorate the bad. Trump would surely like it if there were more Charlottesville-like racist rallies.
And second, for anyone worried about the Mueller investigation, don't; Trump will pardon you of any federal charges they bring up. Don't talk to them, I'll just pardon my way out of this, says Trump! I've found this loophole in the Constitution that is called the pardon power, and having abused it once I will surely continue to do so.
So, between those two things, pardoning Arpaio is an utterly revolting act which takes America one more step towards the failure of our political system; you cannot have Presidents pardoning their people for extremely blatant crimes while the Congress looks the other way if we want to continue being a functioning democracy! Maybe it won't work out for him and this will end with Trump being removed from office, but until that happens this is a clear signal that he will resist with everything he's got, and he will help out the extreme right as much as he can along the way. It's revolting that America has come to this.
It's bad, one of the worse decisions he's made, but frankly gutting the EPA and muzzling them is far worse. Dooming the planet is simply a bigger problem than pardoning one racist abuser.
Yeah, that's also really bad. The two are similar in a way -- both are things that have been getting worse over time in recent years/decades, but that Trump is making significantly worse as fast as he can. But we wouldn't be doing anything even remotely near close enough to what would be needed to to actually slow down climate change. Making a bad situation even worse is a big problem when we are at a point where we badly need to make serious actions on climate change, but the damage he has done to America's political system is worse compared to where we were when he started running for President, I think. I mean, yes, he's a complete climate change denier, but all he's done are make a lot of cabinet and executive order-level decisions that can easily be changed. I don't know if we can wait that long, but again it's not like a Democrat would actually do what's needed either...
But our political system? He has built on the Republican Party's move towards anti-democratic measures and amped them up. Maybe we can recover from this, actually have two parties again, not have an avowed white supremacist in the White House, etc, etc, but it sets a very bad precedent for the future. I think that our democracy can survive this, but Trump is testing that.
Of course, side effects of catastrophic climate change will test that as well (storms like Harvey are becoming more common after all), so yeah, both of these are really bad.
Sure, but how much damage has Trump done? I mean, the US is a big polluter and his administration's rules and such are sure to increase emissions, but zero other countries have gone along with his 'we're out of the Paris agreement' idiocy, and US states like California, along with many cities, have made it clear that they will do what they can to implement those regulations here. Trump will and is having an impact but his is not the only word.
Of course that is true in Washington politics as well, but the only way to actually stop him is for Republican lawmakers to turn on him and agree that he has to go, and so far that obviously is not happening so the damage he is doing to the American political system continues.
If the US and the US alone is the sole contributor, we're still doomed. If it gets bad enough, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the rest of the world might ally to invade the US JUST to enforce these rules.
If things got bad enough that would probably be defensible...
But otherwise, something quite interesting happened recently: Trump decided to back the Democrats' plan for hurricane relief and increasing the debt limit. The Republicans wanted separate bills for the debt limit and hurricane relief funding, and wanted a long-term debt limit bill that raised it until after the 2018 election, since their base hates raising the debt limit and it's a very difficult bill to pass in the Republican party. The Democrats however wanted a short-term 3 month debt limit bill that also funded hurricane relief, in order to get that done and also get a lot more leverage in December when the debt limit will need to be raised again. They claimed that they would oppose a longer-term debt limit bill, but that is unlikely to be true if it was actually up to a final vote. There is no good reason for Trump to support the Democratic position here, it makes getting major legislation done this year -- such as the tax bill he claims to badly want -- a lot harder. Plus the speculation is that Dems will demand that DACA funding (for the Dreamers) in the debt limit bill that will need to be done in December, too, to keep that program going despite Trump's awful actions on that recently.
So, why? The speculation of course is that he probably mostly did it just because he hates McConnell and Ryan now, so he's helping the Dems to spite them, and that sounds petty enough for Trump, yes... so it's probably true.
But yeah, it's weird to see Trump do something sort of good, but I guess he did, if not for good reasons.
I previously said I think the two party system needs to change. I want to say now that I'm now more certain than ever before that our two party system is fundamentally flawed and absolutely must change. A massive selection of parties like other countries have is not a bug, it's a feature, especially if it comes with a change in how voting works. The very fact that the two parties currently in charge prevent even the possibility of the two party system ever dying is proof enough that it should.
The right-wing meltdown over this is pretty amusing. What, they actually thought that Trump believes anything he says? He doesn't have the brainpower for it, he only regurgitates whatever gets the biggest rise from a crowd! Well, and sexism and racism, those things he clearly does believe in. Actual policy positions on most of anything, though? Nope. His complete lack of intelligence has been obvious for a long time, but who cares as long as he's on your side, right? But now Trump's stupidity has come back to bite them, as he has decided that he hates Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell now and wants to work with Chuck and Nancy because only they can get him approval from the people Trump wants it from the most, the New York elite, the NY Times and CNN...
Of course with how short his attention span is I'm sure he will repeatedly and randomly go back to being hard-right at some point in the near future, but it's definitely nice to win something and I hope we can get more, starting with an actual signed DACA replacement.
ABF you underestimate Trump. He's not just an idiot. He's an evil idiot! He's entirely selfish and his moral code is more or less the opposite of what we mere mortals would call moral.
More like an amoral code? I mean Ayn Rand, you know, that stuff that rich kids raised on the austerity doctrine have to read to become fully functional spoiled rich adults?
Graham-Cassidy... it really says something that two Republicans who like to (clearly falsely) claim that they actually care are behind this awful bill. Fortunately however, it's looking like its chances of passing are similar to that of the last one -- they're not quite there, and hopefully never will be. But this is a good reminder that for as long as the Republicans control both houses of Congress they will continue to try to do this, until either they succeed (and kill a lot of people as a result) or they lose. Right now though it's looking like they will fail this time too (if things continue as they are...), and for this year there is a Sept. 30 deadline for reconciliation bills so that should be it for the moment.
And of course, them losing is made much harder thanks to gerrymandering, which the Republican establishment are fiercely protecting, right up to the Supreme Court which continues to block any progress against gerrymandering, tragically enough for our democracy. They could change on this, but signs are not good -- recently the Court, by its 5-4 right-wing majority, blocked lower court decisions overturning some Texas districts on racial-gerrymandering grounds. They haven't issued a final decision yet but that stay is not good news.
Graham Cassidy sounds like the great duel that divided the town oh say ten years back. That market was just a cattle ranch back then. Anyways so Graham was accused of ungodly relations with Cassidy's daughter so Graham challenged him to a duel to set things straight, claiming he had those ungodly relations with his son. This didn't sit well so the duel was on. In the end Cassidy won but only because Graham ended up dying of infection the night before.
So, while the Senate Republicans are trying to figure out a way to take health care away from millions of Americans and Trump is tweeting about protesting NFL players, Puerto Rico is suffering horribly and badly needs a massive governmental and military response... which, of course, they haven't even started considering because it's not like those people are real Americans, right? It's not even a state!
Either that or, like Trump, they are racist against Hispanics and think Trump is great for going after those greedy bums who want the government to do everything for them... like provide water and electricity and working roads and stuff? And actually fix those things when they are destroyed by a storm? How dare they want such things? (But if some natural disaster hit that right-winger's community, they'd be first in line for a handout, guaranteed... that's totally not hypocritical though, no way!)
On another note, you usually link these, but the recent Some News on Antifa is great. Depressing, but great:
I've only recently heard of horseshoe theory, and I already hate it. I mean, the central premise is so easy to dismantle, since we already know that for any country what the "extremes" of their political spectrum look like are going to vary greatly. Heck even within the same country, or within the same issue across the history of that country. The civil rights movement had a lot of "extreme centrists" wringing their hands whining about how they just wish everyone would stop fighting, as though the thing that was being fought about was just some trifling matter and not whether or not black people were allowed to use the same public resources as white people. Centrists, by and large, take great pride in how "above it all" they are, in how they just look at two sides fighting and wouldn't lower themselves to taking a side in the matter and just "becoming another extremist". Without fail, all the centrists I've met or seen tend to be well-off and the issues they are sitting on the fence about tend to be ones that wouldn't affect them personally one way or another. In other words, they have no skin in the fight, no dog in the game, so they literally don't see what the problem is, making it so much easier to just not take a side. Oh, but wait 10 years for the political landscape to shift, and bam, their new "center" will just shift to whatever detail is being hashed out now.
Centrists only care that people are fighting or unhappy, which makes no sense to them, because it would be so easy to just "be happy", wouldn't it? They don't care WHAT is being fought about, even though there is a universe of difference between punching someone for stepping on your shoes vs punching the neo nazi that just pepper sprayed you. I've said before we shouldn't get too comfortable with using violence as a solution, and I still think that, but context is everything.
Yeah, it has a lot of problems. In an American context though, perhaps the biggest problem with "both sides are bad" theory is that the media sets the center so far to the right that people who are only barely left of center are being called equal to very far right extremists. It's ridiculous. But because the actual American far left is minuscule while the far right is massive, it happens constantly and presents a very deceptive picture every time.
The thing is, American public opinion and politics are such that our "left" is a lot of western nation's "moderate right". That's the problem with centrism, the center moves constantly.
What do Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have in common? They're rapists.
I think I was trying to make a joke, but instead I just accused two presidents of being rapists, because they are. So are a lot of other powerful men, because the the world is darkness and horror.
I wonder who it'll be... the good bet is probably on Paul Manafort, but I guess we'll see soon. I hope things come from this, but it's good to see the Russia investigation finally going somewhere publicly; Republicans have succeeded in blocking or stalling all of the Congressional Russia inquiries, but they can't stop Mueller so I really hope that he can do a lot of damage to this President. Most of his party sure isn't interested, sadly, which is insane given the nature of the charges... I mean, I do not think that if the parties were reversed I would be in any way okay with this situation, you need American elections to be our own and not heavily influenced by Putin!
True or not, the two big parties do need some sort of oversight and accountability. They're just too powerful not to be put in check. Will this happen? No, because they're just too powerful and neither side wants to disrupt the status quo.
So yeah, Manafort and an associate of his indeed got indicted, and now the news is that he probably has enough evidence to indict Flynn if he wanted, too. That one is a bit trickier as Trump would be sure to give Flynn a pardon (as he could well do at some point with Manafort also), but it's very good to see this moving along.
I do hope that something connected to this continues on until the next election in Nov. 2018, though. The electorate can't be allowed to forget!
(On the note of elections though, it's election day this Tuesday, and while there are no national elections, we've got a whole bunch of important local and state ballot questions on our ballot, so here at least it's a significant election.)
Nothing was rigged, that's a misuse of the term. I'm sure that the DNC favored Clinton, but that is a VERY different thing from anything being "rigged". The system was set up impartially and the same rules applied to all candidates. Hillary won because she got more votes, and she got more votes because most Democrats decided she was the better candidate. And yes, I do still think she did better than Bernie would have.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:True or not, the two big parties do need some sort of oversight and accountability. They're just too powerful not to be put in check. Will this happen? No, because they're just too powerful and neither side wants to disrupt the status quo.
I've mentioned it before, but it'd be fantastic if America would switch from our first-past-the-post system to ranked-choice voting; that would allow minor candidates an actual chance for the first time, for one of multiple benefits. I don't think that you could get rid of the parties or anything, that'd never happen because people naturally come together to form organizations in order to do more than people can on their own, but we could have a system where people could more vote with their actual beliefs, instead only with one of the top two.
But yeah, thanks to the hold the two parties have, it's very difficult to make any progress on it. Maine passed a ranked choice voting ballot initiative last November, but since then it was partially blocked by a state court (who said that it could not apply to many kinds of elections due to various state and/or federal rules); the only way around this would be a state constitutional amendment, and so far there is not much momentum for that. Recently the legislature had to decide what to do: leave it in place for the few kinds of elections not blocked, kill it entirely, or delay implementation. They ended up going with the last option, sadly. There will probably now be a peoples' veto effort (ballot referendum) to force implementation for the races it is legal in, and I hope that effort succeeds!
What form of ranked choice was your state considering? Would it be a pure "this person is my first, this person is my second" system, or a system where each voter gets as many votes as there are candidates and gets to divide them up across the candidates as they so choose, including putting all the votes on a single candidate? Either way would be a marked improvement over "winner take all".
I'm glad you're with us on the two party system being flawed though. Again, I don't want parties themselves to die, just for the two-party deadlock our country has to die. If a change in the voter rules leads to that outcome, I'm satisfied.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:What form of ranked choice was your state considering? Would it be a pure "this person is my first, this person is my second" system, or a system where each voter gets as many votes as there are candidates and gets to divide them up across the candidates as they so choose, including putting all the votes on a single candidate? Either way would be a marked improvement over "winner take all".
I think it's the latter system, where you can rank as many people as you want.
Quote:I'm glad you're with us on the two party system being flawed though. Again, I don't want parties themselves to die, just for the two-party deadlock our country has to die. If a change in the voter rules leads to that outcome, I'm satisfied.
If I lived in a different state maybe I wouldn't agree with you on this (because I do support the Democratic Party after all), but here in Maine it's particularly needed because we have so many three-way races. Independent candidates do well here, but sometimes that leads to disasters like Paul LePage winning his first term, a race he never would have won with ranked choice voting...
So its the voter system where you are given, say, 5 "votes" and if you felt like it you could just use all 5 on one candidate, or 3 on one and 2 on your second favorite? I must admit that one does sound compelling. There is the matter of the electoral college though. Does or will your state operate such that instead of "winner take all" electorally, it divides up all state's votes so that an equivalent number of electors get voted in for each candidate? That's another big problem our country needs to solve, but if all the states can adopt such a rule, it would at least defeat the electoral college's ability to spoil modern elections.
So, the Dems won huge in the election yesterday! It's really nice to win stuff for once... :) And in this one things have gone so well pretty much everywhere taht it's hard to find races that didn't go the Democrats' way. Sure, it's a small sample size being an off-year election, but still it feels good, and hurts Donald Trump. :love:
Dark Jaguar Wrote:So its the voter system where you are given, say, 5 "votes" and if you felt like it you could just use all 5 on one candidate, or 3 on one and 2 on your second favorite? I must admit that one does sound compelling. There is the matter of the electoral college though. Does or will your state operate such that instead of "winner take all" electorally, it divides up all state's votes so that an equivalent number of electors get voted in for each candidate? That's another big problem our country needs to solve, but if all the states can adopt such a rule, it would at least defeat the electoral college's ability to spoil modern elections.
Sorry, no, I misunderstood what you meant. There'd be a list of all the candidates, and you can rank them from first to last. You can choose as many or as few people to rank as you want. Then when counting the votes, the election clerks look at the overall totals, and if one person running for the office does not have over 50% they then drop the person with the fewest votes, and re-allocate those peoples' votes to their next choice. Then the process repeats until someone has over 50% and is thus the winner.
It would be "winner take all" once someone is over 50% though, since that is how the American political system works; we do not have a system that distributes votes based on how many people voted for each party or such. But by allowing people to rank multiple candidates, it lets voters vote for minor candidates in a way that is impossible with the regular "first past the post" system and in a place like Maine where we're constantly having three-way races that would be a very good thing.
As for the electoral college for President, currently Maine is one of the two states that isn't "winner take all". The state gives 2 electors to the person who won the statewide vote for President, and one elector for the winner in each of the two Congressional districts. Trump won district 2's popular vote but not district 1 or the statewide total, so Maine had 3 electors for Hillary and 1 for Trump last year. (The other state that divides its electors is Nebraska. The Republicans almost always win all of them there, but Obama did win one district, and thus one electoral vote, there in '08; their system is similar to ours.)
I actually don't like the way we do things here, though -- because of the way that the House is gerrymandered in so many states, if all states used the Maine/Nebraska system Republicans would win for President in everything except for the largest wave elections! If the House was all drawn with nonpartisan lines maybe it'd work fine, but with things as they are it'd actually be a significantly less representative system than the 'winner takes all' system that the other 48 states use does.
Ok so that's BAD way to handle electors. I would prefer ignoring district lines entirely in the presidential races and simply assigning electors based on percentage of votes across the state. For Oklahoma, that would mean liberal votes might actually count for something.
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