“He doesn’t even want to be president.”
“We’ll figure out a way to get you the challenges beforehand,” she quotes him as saying. “And we can devise your technique.”
Whenever she saw Trump on television for years afterwards, Daniels writes, an internal monologue would play out: “‘I had sex with that’, I’d say to myself. Eech.”
“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”
----
Also, I will never play Mario Kart again without thinking of 45's penis. Thanks a lot, Stormy!
"Always listen to the crazy scientist with a weird van or armful of blueprints and diagrams." -- Vibranium
"Do you remember “economic anxiety”? The catch-all phrase relied on by politicians and pundits to try and explain the seemingly inexplicable: the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016? A term deployed by left and right alike to try and account for the fact that white, working-class Americans voted for a Republican billionaire by an astonishing 2-to-1 margin?
The thesis is as follows: Working-class voters, especially in key “Rust Belt” swing states, rose up in opposition to the party in the White House to punish them for the outsourcing of their jobs and stagnation of their wages. These “left behind” voters threw their weight behind a populist “blue-collar billionaire” who railed against free trade and globalization.
Everyone from Fox News host Jesse Waters to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed this whole “economic anxiety” schtick. But it’s a complete and utter myth. As I pointed out in April 2017, referencing both pre-election surveys and exit poll data, the election of Trump had much less to do with economic anxiety or distress and much more to do with cultural anxiety and racial resentment. Anyone who bothers to examine the empirical evidence, or for that matter listens to Trump slamming black athletes as “sons of bitches” or Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” in front of cheering crowds, is well-aware of the source of his appeal.
The problem, however, with trying to repeatedly rebut all this talk of “economic anxiety” is that it’s a zombie argument. As Paul Krugman has observed, these are arguments “that have been proved wrong, should be dead, but keep shambling along because they serve a political purpose.” Or as the science writer Ben Goldacre has put it, arguments that “survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down.”
To be clear: “Economic anxiety” has been shot down repeatedly by the experts over the past 18 months. Four damning studies, in particular, stand out from the rest. The first appeared in May 2017, a month after I wrote my original piece, when The Atlantic magazine and Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, published the results of a joint analysis of post-election survey data. Did poor, white, working-class voters back Trump in their droves? Was it the economy, stupid?
Nope. The PRRI analysis of more than 3,000 voters, summarized The Atlantic’s Emma Green, “suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.” Got that? Hillary Clinton over Trump. Meanwhile, partisan affiliation aside, “it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.”
In fact, according to the survey data, white, working-class voters who expressed fears of “cultural displacement” were three-and-a-half times more likely to vote for Trump than those who didn’t share these fears.
Second, in January 2018, a study by three Amherst political scientists — Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta — asked: “What caused whites without college degrees to provide substantially more support to Donald Trump than whites with college degrees?” Here’s their answer, based on survey data from 5,500 American adults:
We find that racism and sexism attitudes were strongly associated with vote choice in 2016, even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and other standard factors. These factors were more important in 2016 than in 2012, suggesting that the explicitly racial and gendered rhetoric of the 2016 campaign served to activate these attitudes in the minds of many voters. Indeed, attitudes toward racism and sexism account for about two-thirds of the education gap in vote choices in 2016.
Racism and sexism. Who’d have guessed?
Third, in April 2018, Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that observed how “living in an area with a high median income positively predicted Republican vote choice to a greater extent in 2016,” which is “precisely the opposite of what one would expect based on the left behind thesis.”
Mutz found no evidence that a decline in income, or a worsening “personal financial situation,” drove working-class voters into the welcoming arms of a billionaire property mogul. Nor did a decline in manufacturing or employment in the area where Trump voters lived..."
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/18/...e-class-trump/
Last edited by aja_christopher; 09-18-2018 at 10:43 AM.
(refuses to talk about Trump's Junk)
I don't have a source indicating that the sun will 100% rise tomorrow morning, but when you consider that only 2 out of 65 women are willing to stand by this letter and the speed of it's appearance there's a distinct smell of rotten fish to be found.
If they didn't hold onto it as a deliberate tactic (Unlike the GOP bragging about their surprise for weeks) then there's nothing to 'reward' as you said. The fact that you believe keeping a sexual predator who's perjured himself before Congress and wants to let the president off scott-free off the SCOTUS is 'rewarding' the Democrats alone is a very disturbing thought, and as I said earlier it's very telling about how you think.
These are fair points and that might be why Republicans voted for Ginsburg and Breyer in such large numbers. It doesn't explain why half the Democrats (including Obama) voted against Roberts, and why all but four voted against Alito.
I think it sets a bad precedent for one side to benefit from mistakes that have the equivalent result of acting in bad faith.
Perhaps I'm expecting Democrats to live down to my expectations but I was under the impression they want to prevent the nomination of a Justice who is expected to make the Supreme Court more conservative.
I'll note that you're much more cynical on the motives of Democrats than I am, but this does get to an important point: the morality of actions is based on information we don't have access to yet. If you believe, as some people here do, that Kavanaugh has problems involving women that have been known for some time to top Republicans, it's less shady to wait until days before the vote to go public with the allegation, and the decision of Republicans to not shove him out immediately is shameful.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
A Republican is actually saying this.
A Republican is actually saying this after what happened to Merrick Garland. After nominating and electing Donald Trump. After nominating and endorsing a Pedophile for the Senate. After endorsing a credibly accused attempted rapist for the Supreme Court.Perhaps I'm expecting Democrats to live down to my expectations but I was under the impression they want to prevent the nomination of a Justice who is expected to make the Supreme Court more conservative.
You guys care a weird amount about Mets' opinion on stuff.
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
He's the guy who says he's trying to reform the GOP from the inside, so for some of us this is the only exposure to a republican 'of conscience' we'll ever get. I'm too surrounded by unrepentant MAGA nuts to get close to that.
E:
Even the batfans have retreated to the cave!
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate to flip the Suprene Court in a presidential election year. That had nothing to do with Garland's character.
I also hope you don't mean to suggest that Democrats are treating an allegation of sexual assault differently because they're upset about Garland.
A very important point is that I don't know that Kavanaugh is a sexual predator (presumably neither does anyone else here), and the claim that he perjured himself is suspect.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.e90019de1f78
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets