All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

Policy discussions are good and all, my friends, but NOW is the time for gloating and joy! I feel so happy right now that I want to adopt a puppy. It's like saving up to have a wart removed from your nose, and now, after four years it's finally happened and you're just so pleased with the results that you want to hug the world!

[InformationGeek]

The White House has called a lid, which means we will not see or hear from President Trump for the rest of the day. (In the past they have called the press pool back after a lid was called, but it’s very rare.)

You want to bet on that? He's already talking.

THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS. I WON THE ELECTION, GOT 71,000,000 LEGAL VOTES. BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE. NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WERE SENT TO PEOPLE WHO NEVER ASKED FOR THEM!

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Unless you have instances of those guys murdering American citizens without a trial or utilizing The Patriot Act, I'd tend to disagree.

Never mind ramping up deportation.

In Greece, under SYRIZA, a left-wing party, they ran a refugee camp in Moira very much in the spirit of Obama's immigration issues (https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...lure/601132/0/). Is SYRIZA not a left wing party anymore? It was once the big hope of the left for a while.

Any politician who takes office tends to get blood on their hands and do horrible stuff here and there, and you should condemn it of course, but that doesn't mean the platform and policies are suddenly not left-wing anymore. The politics of purity aren't favorable to everyone. Bernie Sanders for instance supported crime bills in the 90s (https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/111164...-incarceration) that everyone wants to hang around Biden's neck but gives him a pass for. Sanders is also quite pro-gun because Vermonters like guns.

Let's not get into this kind of childishness. Obama took the Democrats left of Bill Clinton, if you want to challenge this, offer up some evidence. Or if you think Bill Clinton is somehow the hope of the left, tell me.

Tony Blair is the most successful Labour Prime Minister in UK history. He won three straight elections making him the longest serving Labour Prime Minister in history, with the biggest historic win margin for Labour.

That doesn't mean as much as you think it does on the face of things. On paper yes it sounds good, but in practise it came at a steep price. A politician can have success and be a failure. Woodrow Wilson had success in his time, today he's considered a terrible President (rightly so). Bill Clinton likewise has diminished.

Labour just got thumped in the last election because they went with a hard left candidate (Jeremy Crobyn)

They got thumped for a whole bunch of reasons but I don't want tog et into. I agree with Corbyn's platform in general and I felt really depressed when he got clobbered because the innately sadistic spirit of the English (the British are naturally more Draco Malfoy and Dudley Dursley than Neville Longbottom or Ron Weasley) would have had a field day on him, and it's depressing seeing the spectacle of his national humiliation. I do feel about Corbyn and the Labour Party, "they're a rotten crowd, you're better than the whole damn bunch of them put together".

Corbyn suffered because he wasn't a political genius and he really needed to be. He got a brilliant opportunity for any major leftist. That he lasted as long as he did from 2015-2019 in the face of that was impressive. But then he lost, and to quote a line from Casino, "that was the last time street guys ever got their hands on anything that f--king valuable again."

If the Democrats went with a hard left candidate outside of Sanders (who I view as just an old school statist democrat) than we might be looking at different results.

Well we don't know. Fact is Sanders never managed to get the majority of the Democrats to support him. Jeremy Corbyn, for a time, did.

Anyways I don't really wish to revisit this center left vs hard/far left argument

I agree.

[BeastieRunner]

You want to bet on that? He's already talking.

Tweeting from your toilet conspiracy theories based in no facts is not talking to the media.

He cannot face people.

They will throw the truth in his face and he will lose it, possibly costing enough of his support to sliver into the Ds. The Rs cannot have any of their votes leave when the senate is officially on the line. GA senate is going to be close!

[Mister Mets]

Not charging interest on student loans would go miles towards that goal. The rates oughta be criminal.

Who would want to loan money if there's no interest?

I’d be interested in what most people regard as the acid test for Joe establishing himself as a genuine progressive. The two I’d place most emphasis on would be:-

1/ Making the route to citizenship for immigrants who have been in US sometime faster and fairer.

2/ Making college education appreciably less expensive.

How would we go about making college education less expensive? Should the government give more money to institutions that do not spend it wisely? Should the government undo regulations which force colleges to spend more money? Both?

Well now is the time for him to show that. Unity and healing should ONLY involve conservatives getting behind progressive policies, that will likely help them anyway, and NO concessions of any kind to the GOP whatsoever, particularly if the Democrats can grab those two Senate seats in Georgia.

And if Democrats can't grab those two Senate seats?

There will likely be some kind of concessions in order to get the Senate to pass a bill.

Even if Democrats get a narrow majority, Joe Manchin will be the deciding vote.

Are you sure that Trump would have lost without the virus?

I think the Donald is such an unusual politician that I am not sure it’s safe to draw any conclusions from the defeat.

If he handled COVID better, he could also have been elected.

At the end of the day, if you look around the world in the last 20 years, America is the only major democracy that has kept the right wing in check where the liberals and leftists have managed to credibly push back and hold the right at bay. You look at England where Tony Blair poisoned the Labour party irreparably, leaving a negative legacy that has left the party in pieces. In France, the left-wing and liberals are polarized and now the French nation is divided between a neoliberal shill like Macron and a fascist like LePen. Italian politics had Berlusconi and okay they got rid of him and now you have neo-fascists and neoliberals again. In India, you have a right-wing theocratic government. Germany lucked out with a genuine tiny-c conservative like Merkel but even there, even in Germany, really right-wing parties like AfD have made gains over social democrat opposition.

American democracy right now, and the Democrat Party even under Biden is the only major force for liberal and left-wing politics globally at least in major democracies. I am not saying that because I am blind to Biden's flaws. I am saying that because it happens to be true. Barack Obama is the only successful left-wing major politician of the last 20 years. And Biden is his successor and inheritor.



The Obama era optimism was a lot like this. It's just that it was different because whatever his numerous flaws, W. was not a fascist. He was just a typical garden variety American imperialist and warmonger, and an incompetent...i.e. a kind of politician who can be harmful without being actively malicious. And for all his flaws, W. genuinely believed that he was doing the right thing and acting in America's best interests rather than a nihilist like Trump. In the case of Trump, this is like a collective victory for 4 years of unrelenting degradation.



I don't think Chomsky is saying anything that mainstream pundits haven't said. Van Jones said on Tuesday at CNN that the greater than expected Trump turnout and the lack of an immediate landslide was concerning and disappointing. And yeah it was. But again for months we have seen anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests in red states. I mean these people didn't follow mask guidelines and attacked science for 8 months, now suddenly on Election Day people expected a repudiation?

Look right now, as I said above, the Democrat Party is the only left-wing party in the world right now that has had success keeping the right at bay in a major first-world democracy*. Whether that says something about the state of international politics and so on, I leave that to you. If meaningful action has to be taken against climate change, it will be the Democrat Party who does that. I mean do you expect England's Labour Party, aka the real gang that couldn't shoot straight in global politics, to be the one who saves the day?

I absolutely want to see progressive politics work and so on, but at the end of the day no left-wing party is worth its salt so long as it doesn't do the first job of a left-wing party...protect people from right-wingers. The Democrats have kept their eyes on the prize.


* FYI major first world democracy means a democratic state with a population of roughly a quarter of USA. So don't bring up New Zealand or Taiwan with his wonderful social-democratic leaders.

Tony Blair will be the only winning labour leader in a fifty year period, so it's not clear the party would be better without him.

Macron beat La Pen by a two to one margin in the runoff, so France is hardly divided between the two.

A major casualty of 2020 -- Bellwether Counties and States.

https://mustreadalaska.com/how-could...t-it-so-wrong/

Bellwether counties are those counties whose winners have consistently won the electoral vote for many decades. All of them went for Trump in 2020, and all of them came up snake eyes.

Ohio and Florida, the emblematic swing states, candidates who won either or both have won the Presidency consistently in the modern era...both came up snake eyes.

Trump won these bellwethers and lost popularly and electorally by a significant margin.

I think the answer is again Pandemic turnout. A normal US election turnout would maybe have seen the usual patterns. But a Pandemic turnout pattern changed it all.

Curiously enough, the other catholic Democratic President JFK won a presidential election while losing Ohio and Florida.

[Castle]

I wonder if it will ever truly sink in for Trump that he is a one term president when you think Obama served two terms. for a one term president you would have to have done something so grievous and awful.

If the trump cult fans truly care about USA, they should at least be honest about the great wrongs that Trump did that he now is on a rare list of one term president. a one term president that lost the popular vote TWICE.

[Amadeus Arkham]

Here’s good news: Trump lost re-election, and is denied a second term.

Here’s bad news: Trump is still president for 70 more days, and can do a lot of damage in his lame duck period, including firing many people out of petty spite - like Anthony Fauci.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Who would want to loan money if there's no interest?

The government? They'd be paid back in the taxes of educated workers and rewarded by a stronger working base.

And student loans rates in God damn crazy. I've seen some as high as twelve percent.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Tony Blair will be the only winning labour leader in a fifty year period, so it's not clear the party would be better without him.

Winning elections doesn't count for a great deal if your actual time in governance includes support for an enormously unpopular war, the prosecution of which derails your domestic agenda, makes the UK a target for terrorist attacks, takes the Labour party so much to the right that they appear genuinely indistinguishable from conservatives for a majority of voters. A lot of the problems in England -- Brexit, Scotland Independence -- can be traced to Tony Blair's premiership.

"It cannot be called virtue to kill one's fellow-citizens, betray one's friends, be without faith, without pity... by these methods one may indeed gain power, but not glory."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

In the long run, glory is what matters in politics. Electoral power and electability and so on, that's important and crucial but it counts for zilch if it isn't used to create something lasting which endures after you are gone. Tony Blair won three elections but he never created anything glorious, anything for the party to cling to. He left behind a spectacle of an unpopular war, with many dead soldiers and servicemen, and an inquiry that officially castigated him for leading a war that he didn't have to fight, and that wasn't necessary for the UK to get involved in...so the Labour Party lost their moral standing, and they didn't even get anything out of it.

At least LBJ got the Civil Rights Act and Great Society and Medicaid out of Vietnam. What does Tony Blair have to show for himself by comparison?

Macron beat La Pen by a two to one margin in the runoff, so France is hardly divided between the two.

You don't get it, Le Pen shouldn't have made it to the runoff to begin with. And even then she did better than expected. And she's likely to do well again next time 'round.

Curiously enough, the other catholic Democratic President JFK won a presidential election while losing Ohio and Florida.

Huh...so maybe Cathoic prejudice and the oldtime anti-Irish Catholic sentiment at that, did Biden in at Ohio and Florida.

[Iron Maiden]

Here’s good news: Trump lost re-election, and is denied a second term.

Here’s bad news: Trump is still president for 70 more days, and can do a lot of damage in his lame duck period, including firing many people out of petty spite - like Anthony Fauci.

unfortunately true. But I would think if he did fire Dr. Fauci, Biden would just call him and say just hang tight until January 2021

[Godzilla2099]

Junior is literally calling for 'Total War'

jr.jpg

How does anybody in their right mind support this family? They're completely sick

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I wonder if it will ever truly sink in for Trump that he is a one term president when you think Obama served two terms. for a one term president you would have to have done something so grievous and awful.

If the trump cult fans truly care about USA, they should at least be honest about the great wrongs that Trump did that he now is on a rare list of one term president. a one term president that lost the popular vote TWICE.

Truth be told...this stigma about a "one-term President" that needs to end. Politically it's useful for the Democrats to hang around Trump because it twists the knife in someone who really needs the knife twisted in him...but in practise a 1-term President and so on, that's not really something to make a big to-do out of.

JFK never completed his first term, but he changed American politics and not simply because of his assassination (though that too). Lyndon B. Johnson governed for a single term (and JFK's final year) but he got a lot more done in that time than Clinton and Carter did in their combined 12 years. Lincoln greatest Potus of all time, completed a full first time and just a little into his second before he got assassinated.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Junior is literally calling for 'Total War'

Open calls for war is a new one.

[Mister Mets]

Writing for New York magazine, Eric Levitz describes the bad electoral outcomes for progressives.


Things don't look great in the Senate.

This state of affairs makes it exceedingly difficult for the Democratic Party to win control of the Senate, while remaining faithful to the aspirations of its predominantly urban base. In the view of Democratic data scientist David Shor, 2020 was the party’s last, best chance to win a Senate majority for the foreseeable future: Red-state incumbents Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown held onto their seats in 2018 – with the help of a historically Democratic national environment – but are unlikely to be so lucky when they are on the ballot again in 2024. Thus, the party’s best hope was to eke out a majority in 2020, while it still had votes in unlikely places – and then, to use that majority to award statehood to Democratic leaning territories like D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, thereby mitigating the coalition’s structural disadvantage.

On Tuesday, Democrats likely missed their shot. To win a Senate majority (after Doug Jones’s inevitable loss to a non-child molester Republican in Alabama), Democrats needed to flip four Republican seats without losing any more of their own. Their most plausible path for hitting that mark was to win races in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina. But Susan Collins won handily in Maine, and Thom Tillis appears to have bested Cal Cunningham in the Tar Heel State. That leaves Democrats two seats short of a bare majority.

The party still retains an outside shot at capturing those two seats: It looks like both of Georgia’s Senate races are headed for January run-off elections between the top two finishers, with Republican Kelly Loefller facing off against Democratic pastor Raphael Warnock, and Republican David Perdue taking on former Barack Obama impersonator Jon Ossoff. The odds of Democrats sweeping these races aren’t great. Generally speaking, in special elections held right after presidential ones, the party that’s just lost the White House tends to enjoy a turnout advantage, as winners get complacent while losers thirst for vengeance. Further, if Ossoff forces Perdue into a run-off, he will do so only barely: Perdue needed 50 percent plus a single vote to win reelection Tuesday; he appears likely to finish with something in the neighborhood of 49.9 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, anyone with remotely progressive political commitments should contribute anything they can to winning these two races.

If Democrats fail to pull off an improbable triumph in the Peach State, then the Biden presidency will be doomed to failure before it starts. With Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate, Biden will not be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice, or appoint liberals to major cabinet positions, or sign his name to a major piece of progressive legislation; and that may very well mean that the U.S. government will not pass any significant climate legislation, or expansion of public health insurance, or immigration reform, or gun safety law this decade.

With Biden in the White House, there is a good chance that Republicans will grow their majority in 2022, as the GOP will enjoy the turnout advantage that almost always accrues to the president’s opposition in midterms. Two years later, Democrats are more likely than not to lose their aforementioned red-state incumbents. Extrapolate from current demographic trends, and Democrats don’t take the Senate again until 2028 or later.

And then there was the House of Representatives, state legislatures and ballot initiatives.

The bad news for Democrats extends to the one site of federal power where they had appeared to be building strength, if not a structural advantage: The House of Representatives. As the borders of blue America extended farther into the suburbs, it was possible to imagine that Republicans would eventually see their base of support become more geographically concentrated in rural areas than the Democratic Party’s base was in cities, leading the GOP to “waste” more votes by running up the score in exurban districts. But, contrary to expectations, Democrats did not fortify and expand their caucus Tuesday night; rather they surrendered recently won suburban districts on their way to a significant loss of seats.

Making matters worse, as of this writing, Democrats have failed to flip control of any state legislative chambers ahead of next year’s House redistricting. To the contrary, Democrats lost control of the New Hampshire state Senate and Alaska state House. Now, the GOP boasts full control of state government (and thus, of redistricting) in 22 states, while Democrats control only nine. This will enable Republicans to produce a new and improved gerrymandered House and state legislative maps for the next decade of elections (gerrymanders that may be further enhanced by a shoddy Census that undercounts Democratic constituencies).

Finally, although liberals can take heart at a major victory in Florida’s $15 minimum wage referendum, and various drug decriminalization or legalization ballot measures across the country, some of the most basic premises of progressive politics were rejected by voters in the bluest of U.S. states. In California, voters rolled back the labor rights of rideshare drivers and rejected a proposal for affirmative action, while in Illinois, a majority of voters refused to free their state from a constitutional obstacle to raising taxes on those who earn over $250,000 a year in the middle of a fiscal crisis. There is little reason to think that the latter outcome reflects the unpopularity of raising taxes on the affluent; heaps of polling indicate that there is broad, bipartisan support for soaking the rich. But the outcome does testify to the fact that moneyed interests are capable of poisoning even the most broadly appealing of progressive ideas in the minds of the public through well-funded propaganda campaigns.

[The Cool Thatguy]

unfortunately true. But I would think if he did fire Dr. Fauci, Biden would just call him and say just hang tight until January 2021

That'd be the best thing for everyone.

If Fauci gets fired, then he can unleash on Trump safely, without worrying about damaging the little good he could do. Trump takes more heat and the anti-maskers look even dumber than usual.