2017 Democratic Thread

[caulfield12]

 

If either political party was thinking rationally, all three would be gone (Conyers, Franken, Moore).

 

The problem is the GOP is too concerned with their margin being trimmed down to just one vote in the Senate in the short term, but that’s a seat they should win 95% of the time. (And once tax giveaways are done, it really doesn’t matter as far as 2018 goes...Pence might even be president, or Ryan.)

 

Same with the other two, although one could argue Minnesota is actually becoming more competitive now for Republicans.

 

 

Ideologically, the Dems need to stand for something...such as the rights of women, and fighting for the working class. Letting both those guys stick around sends a terrible message. And Conyers should have retired due to age alone, he has been in Congress nearly 50 years now. Very few Supreme Court justices have made it to 88.

[LittleHurt05]

I feel quite confident that there are people reading this thread thinking the same thing about me. Pretty sure they just said so.

 

Then just prove the haters wrong.

 

[Reddy]

You never miss an opportunity to trash on the leader of the next big dem movement.

 

Let it go man, bow down to master Bernie.

 

Can you give an example of what he's done over the last year to "lead" this movement?

[Reddy]

He defends the idea of working with Moore in the future and scoffs at the idea of expelling him from the Senate.

 

If that's his stance, he should have zero issue working with franken.

Friends, hypocrisy is how politics works. Expecting anyone not to by hypocritical when it comes to getting the things done THEY want done is a useless exercise.

[caulfield12]

Can you give an example of what he's done over the last year to "lead" this movement?

 

http://www.whio.com/news/bernie-sanders-ca...mtDw5J/amp.html

 

Traveling to Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania this weekend...four total stops.

Where is the centrist/moderate wing?

Edited December 3, 2017 by caulfield12

[Balta1701]

Then just prove the haters wrong.

I'm rather amazed that the Republican party has shifted so rapidly into "14 year olds are so sexy how can you resist" mode, and I'm not going to drop that.

 

But if he gets to the Senate then I don't know how else you deal with Moore other than an ethics investigation. And creepily, the Franken allegations are easier to prove than the Moore ones. Franken has admitted wrongoing while Moore has Denied it. The Franken allegations are more recent and some of them might have even occurred while he was a Senate candidate. There's a good chance the ethics committee will decide that the Franken allegations are provable and the Moore allegations, even though there are more of them, are older and won't stand up in court.

 

I really wish there was a strong ethics committee in Congress. This is like my 7th post saying I wish I had confidence in that committee. The good news is that McConnell has said that he will face an ethics investigation immediately but I'm still not confident in any of it. If they find the allegations credible, the Republicans should expel him from the Senate, but I don't have any confidence in that since I don't have confidence in the ethics committee. There's going to be a child rapist in the Senate and we have to just kind of be ok with that. At least I don't have to look a 14 year old daughter in the eye about this.

 

At this point, Al Franken deserves his investigation but he should resign. I will wait until the ethics committee does something but there's no excuse for them not finding the other allegations credible. The last one even had photos again. The ethics committee should expel him if he doesn't resign. He should not run for reelection and if he does the Democrats should endorse his primary challenger. Roy Moore should remove himself from his election but he won't. The voters in Alabama should reject him but they won't. The ethics committee should expel him but I have no confidence they will. I don't know what else to say other than that. Whichever of these things does not happen - judge the people involved based on that. That includes the voters who say that child rape is ok if they say that.

[Balta1701]

Ironically, I made that post giving McConnell some credit, and today he backtracked on previous statements that Moore should drop out of the race, and he's now up to "The voters of Alabama should decide".

 

Sigh.

[StrangeSox]

There was never any doubt that they'd seat Moore.

[GoSox05]

Grassley explains why people don’t invest: ‘Booze or women or movies’

 

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley told the Register. “As opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

 

 

How do the Democrats ever lose to these people?

[pettie4sox]

Grassley explains why people don’t invest: ‘Booze or women or movies’

 

 

 

 

How do the Democrats ever lose to these people?

 

I think you have too much faith in humanity. A lot of the people you run across in life are simpletons who cannot think for themselves I'm afraid.

[bmags]

I don't agree with that.

 

I think the issue at present and maybe forever is the idea of antagonistic politics. It's not as important that good policy comes out that benefits me, it's that I benefit from my politicians actively hurting the other side. The "Lib Tears" Doctrine.

 

Grassley's supporters, even if they are unemployed or alcoholics,, know that Grassley's not talking about them, he's talking about those other deadbeats that don't work at all and live in cities

[StrangeSox]

There's also a whole lot of ideology in this country that associates wealth with morality. If you're rich, you must have done something to deserve that money. If you're poor, there's some moral failing that's the explanation. A Just World belief system.

[pettie4sox]

I don't agree with that.

 

I think the issue at present and maybe forever is the idea of antagonistic politics. It's not as important that good policy comes out that benefits me, it's that I benefit from my politicians actively hurting the other side. The "Lib Tears" Doctrine.

 

Grassley's supporters, even if they are unemployed or alcoholics,, know that Grassley's not talking about them, he's talking about those other deadbeats that don't work at all and live in cities

 

Doesn't that in fact mean they are simpletons who cannot think for themselves? If you cannot realize that comment is a general statement and not one for the lazy liberals in the metro areas; then I don't know what else you would call it.

[bmags]

Doesn't that in fact mean they are simpletons who cannot think for themselves? If you cannot realize that comment is a general statement and not one for the lazy liberals in the metro areas; then I don't know what else you would call it.

 

I don't think so. You see people from all situations embrace that philosophy. It's not "I can't think for myself" because it's rather that they made the calculation that the best thing for them and the country is that the other side is embarrassed.

 

[StrangeSox]

I don't think so. You see people from all situations embrace that philosophy. It's not "I can't think for myself" because it's rather that they made the calculation that the best thing for them and the country is that the other side is embarrassed.

 

This has been around for almost a decade now:

 

[StrangeSox]

Another solid piece by Rick Perlstein:

 

The Elephants in the Resistance:

Don’t Trust the Anti-Trump Republicans

 

Sen. Jeff Flake and his ilk aren’t the heroes we’re looking for.

 

IN A PARTY THAT SHAMEFULLY PROSTRATED ITSELF BEFORE DONALD TRUMP, the junior senator from Arizona has stood out as a consistent voice against him. Jeff Flake was even an occasional voice of Republican sanity before Trump’s emergence—for example, crusading against the Cuban travel ban. On October 24, he won fans even among liberals by announcing he was quitting the Senate, giving a speech that accused his colleagues of normalizing “the daily sundering of our country” in ways that have “nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.”

 

That same day, Flake went on to vote for a Trump-supported measure preventing the people he had been elected to serve from being able to sue financial institutions that defraud them.

 

How do you solve a problem like Jeff Flake? Some would accept anti-Trump conservatives as a valuable part of the resistance. As Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Bernstein puts it, they show “how broad the coalition against the president is.”

 

Others maintain that these Republican critics of Trump represent a paradoxical danger: A Republican Party that follows their lead and gets rid of Donald Trump would surely be celebrated in the mainstream media as washed in the blood of the lamb—even though it would remain just as evil as before. It would still include, for example, Jeff Flake, who has voted in line with Trump 90 percent of the time.

 

Flake isn’t the only Republican winning centrist and liberal hearts. This summer, word in Washington was that people around the popular Democratic governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, were floating trial balloons for a 2020 bipartisan presidential run with Gov. John Kasich of Ohio—a lustfully privatizing and union-busting Republican who has jammed through some of the most invasive abortion restrictions in the country and a law allowing guns in bars.

 

Then, this fall, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was feted by the likes of historian Douglas Brinkley as a “real leader” after he called the White House an “adult day care center” bringing us to the verge of “World War III.” This Tennessee hero, however, also wants to gut Medicare and Social Security, disbelieves human-made climate change and stubbornly defended the war in Iraq.

 

Then came, of all people, George W. Bush, who once upon a time added torture to America’s military arsenal—but in an October speech complained some nameless you-know-who in Washington has introduced “bullying and prejudice in our national life.”

 

But then again, it’s a bald fact that Trump is bringing us to the brink of World War III, so maybe we need all the help we can get to be rid of him. So when two new anti-Trump jeremiads from prominent conservatives—one of them by Flake—recently appeared on shelves, one might have approached them with a desperate sort of hope. Maybe, just maybe, they might demonstrate a path to a broader enlightenment—a recognition that the deformities some Republicans now observe in their president were not born yesterday, but have long been baked into the conservative cake.

 

 

The natural home of conscientious conservatism—which has always existed uncomfortably alongside its embarrassing, ill-bred populist cousin—is the think tank. One role of the conservative think tank within the right-wing firmament—like the one Flake once ran, Phoenix’s Goldwater Institute—is to present conservatism’s “respectable,” “principled” and “intellectual” face. As a cherished instance of the Empyrean heights from which he believes conservatism has fallen, Flake describes a beloved keepsake: “a T-shirt from the early 1990s, commemorating the barnstorming battle royale national tour taken by two Texas Republican congressmen—Dick Armey and Bill Archer—selling out lecture halls to debate the benefits of a national flat tax versus a national consumption tax.” Thus his cri de coeur: “We desperately need to get back to the rigorous and fact-based arguments that made us conservatives in the first place”—not today’s “race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

 

Well and good, and kudos to him for that recognition. The problem this book reveals, however, is just how crazy, vicious and non-fact-based conservatism remains even at its most “conscientious.” What else is a debate between a flat tax and a consumption tax, after all, than a contest between different methods of starving the state at the expense of the poor? Or consider his critique of current Republican immigration policy. He prefers the days “when crossing the border could be done frequently and easily”—because then, “the workers didn’t tend to bring their families, because they didn’t intend to stay.” It was better, in other words, when Mexicans kept their heads down as cheap, interchangeable units of labor power. Those were the days!

 

It’s true, of course, that politics is the art of persuasion. As practiced by modern conservatism, however, the persuasion is underwritten by a con. The policies favored by “conscientious” conservatives have never been popular. Goldwater, after all, won only 38 percent of the popular vote in 1964. Flake, experts on Arizona politics inform me, owes his power largely to the fact that he is Mormon royalty in a state with an enormous concentration of politically active Mormons. What wins elections for conservatives has never been libertarian policy—certainly not in 1984, when Reagan won 60 percent of the votes while only 35 percent told pollsters they wished to see cuts in social programs. It is the role played by the ill-mannered stuff, the things Flake here derides as “nationalism, populism, xenophobia, extreme partisanship, even celebrity,” that puts conservatives in office.

 

It’s a pickle, for sure—and that makes Charlie Sykes an interesting case: For a nanosecond in the middle of his new book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, Sykes begins to grapple with this dilemma, almost. “The reality that many conservatives have been unwilling to face is that despite their insistence that America was a center-right country, there has never been a strong constituency for the kind of tough budget cuts that would either limit the size of government or reduce the national debt.”

 

Then it’s gone, and Sykes is back to hawking his preferred explanation for the Right’s recent ugly turn: It’s the Left’s fault.

 

Sykes won the contract to write this slapdash book on the strength of a genuinely interesting December 2016 New York Times op-ed announcing his retirement as a right-wing talk radio host, partly in shame at his own medium’s role in “delegitimizing the media altogether.”

 

The problem, for those who know Wisconsin politics, is that Sykes was not just a radio host but a sort of right-wing political boss—a think-tank impresario at the center of the ugly political culture that has characterized the reign of Gov. Scott Walker, whose political survival Sykes takes some proud credit for in the book. This fall, the darkest corners of that political culture were held up to the light during Supreme Court oral arguments about how Republican operatives, working in secret in a Milwaukee law office, gerrymandered legislative maps to give Republicans 60.6 percent of the seats in the Wisconsin Assembly with only 48.6 percent of the vote. A Democratic victim said it reminded him of an “episode of The Sopranos.”

 

While this was going on, without any criticism from Sykes, he carried out his own role within this culture, as a conveyor belt for arguments that Democrats only held on to power thanks to hordes of fraudulent black voters, who only ended up in the Dairy State in the first place because Milwaukee was, he claimed, a notorious “welfare magnet.”

 

His thesis is that the 2016 election “marked not only a rejection of the Reagan legacy, but also the abandonment of respect for gradualism, civility, expertise, intelligence and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives.” The book provides a reasonable canvass of some of the more objectionable qualities of the alt-right, the poisonous mediascape epitomized by Alex Jones and Breitbart, and the vicious racism of Trump’s constituency—with barely any acknowledgment of how the preexisting conservative political culture in which Sykes was a not inconsiderable figure helped lead to these phenomena.

 

By Sykes’ heroes shall you know him. Not just Scott Walker, but the noted gradualist William Kristol—author of the infamous 1993 memo demanding no compromise with attempts to provide health security for Americans, lest Republicans “revive the reputation” of the opposition party. The ever-civil Jonah Goldberg—who “argued” at book length in Liberal Fascism that fascism, an ideology defined by its eliminationist hostility to liberalism, was another name for liberalism. Stephen Hayes—best known for his expertise in arguing that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Erick Erickson, who, before he took on Donald Trump, prudently went after the National Rifle Association for being “a weak little girl of an organization.”

 

Oh, and Paul Ryan. “Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had in decades,” Sykes writes. When I read that, I couldn’t help thinking of the time Ezra Klein scoured Ryan’s 2012 convention speech to find something in it that was true, and found only two claims that were even “arguably true.”

 

Those are the good guys. The bad guys, besides Trump and his close associates, are you and me. “The excesses on the Left,” he argues, “pushed many small-government conservatives into an unnatural alliance with the authoritarian and nationalist right.” It is the “excesses on the Left,” I suppose, that impelled Paul Ryan to advance Donald Trump’s policy agenda all down the line.

 

Ryan made his bet that Trump’s populism could help him jam through unpopular policies. Which shows Ryan understands conservatism better than Charlie Sykes or Senator Flake: He knows the Right’s wonks and weirdos comprise a unified system. Show me an anti-Trump conservative who both understands this, understands their implication in it and is willing to articulate a thoroughgoing rejection of the whole package—and then, maybe, I’ll welcome them to my side. I haven’t found one yet.

Trump is a symptom, not a disease.

[Reddy]

http://www.whio.com/news/bernie-sanders-ca...mtDw5J/amp.html

 

Traveling to Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania this weekend...four total stops.

Where is the centrist/moderate wing?

I'll take you a Bernie and raise you a Martin O'Malley, who's campaigned in 21 states for local races since election '16.

[Reddy]

oh, and Bernie's tours are just to promote himself for 2020, while O'Malley's are actually to help win elections for Dems. So. I'll take that every day of the week.

[GoSox05]

What policies does Martin O'Malley even back? I have nothing really against him, it's just what does he even stand for?

[StrangeSox]

Your next Senator from the great state of Alabama:

 

Roy Moore spokesman appears on CNN, says Doug Jones wants to kill host’s unborn baby https://t.co/j5Wnma58aF pic.twitter.com/qLbmgyKwxS

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 5, 2017

 

[bmags]

What policies does Martin O'Malley even back? I have nothing really against him, it's just what does he even stand for?

 

Usually to pose shirtless.

[pettie4sox]

I don't think so. You see people from all situations embrace that philosophy. It's not "I can't think for myself" because it's rather that they made the calculation that the best thing for them and the country is that the other side is embarrassed.

 

I get your point, I just see blind partisanship as a dangerous way to conduct oneself.

[pettie4sox]

Your next Senator from the great state of Alabama:

 

Roy Moore spokesman appears on CNN, says Doug Jones wants to kill host’s unborn baby https://t.co/j5Wnma58aF pic.twitter.com/qLbmgyKwxS

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 5, 2017

 

Good lord where how did pro choice evolve to Dems love killing babies? If you don't want an abortion, don't get one?

[StrangeSox]

Good lord where how did pro choice evolve to Dems love killing babies? If you don't want an abortion, don't get one?

[GoSox05]

Usually to pose shirtless.

 

 

He also plays guitar. So dreamy.

 

 

For 54 he is pretty good shape. I would probably never wear a shirt either.

Edited December 5, 2017 by GoSox05