All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Gray Lensman]

Well, looks like it's off! Newfoundland just went to the Liberal Party.

Edit: Now all Newfoundland and Labrador, save the two St. John's districts, are Liberal. Trudeau's hit the ground running, it seems!

IIRC, it's the west of Canada that trends towards the Conservatives. Until those results are in we won't know who is in charge there.

[InformationGeek]

Ladies and gentlemen, I need some help. I'm trying to wrap my brain around this article. It's giving me a headache reading it. I think I might have found one of the dumbest articles I've read in a while with one of the dumbest questions I've seen as well.

What's the word to best describe the article and writer?

'



And for other news that will also cause headaches, the newest trending thing on Twitter is #BoycottStarWars. Why? Well, because of "white genocide" the new movie is apparently promoting! Ah... umm... yeah....

Then there's real politic news from here in Wisconsin:

On Monday, a federal district court in Wisconsin rejected demands from local students, veterans, and low-income residents to allow them to use alternative forms of voter ID or have the ability to sign a sworn affidavit at the ballot box.

A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union — representing a formerly homeless Army veteran, several technical college students, and an elderly voter who couldn’t access her birth certificate — argued that the strict voter ID law Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed in 2011 placed “an unjustified burden” on their ability to vote. While earlier lawsuits aimed at striking down the entire requirement as unconstitutional made it all the way to the Supreme Court before failing, this case sought only to force the state to add additional kinds of identification to its short list.

The ruling issued Monday dismisses this claim. Federal district judge Lynn Adelman writes, “The plaintiffs have not convinced me that there are a large number of people who do not possess Act 23-qualifying ID and who could not obtain one.” Responding to demands that the state accept photo IDs issued by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, the judge says he won’t push for such an outcome because the state then might be forced to accept all “secure” forms of government ID. “That would produce a very long list,” Adelman writes. “The state had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of ID somewhere.”

ACLU attorney Sean Young, who argued the case before the court in Milwaukee, disagrees, telling ThinkProgress: “Defenders of voter ID laws claim to care about verifying that voters are who they say they are. But these forms of ID do that. They’re all verified by a state or federal government office. Wisconsin hasn’t given a single good reason in litigation for excluding these forms of ID. I think it calls to question the real purpose of these voter ID laws.”

Monday’s decision is difficult news for its plaintiffs, including 56-year-old Army veteran Carl Ellis, who had to beg for bus money in order to make the multiple trips to the DMV to obtain an acceptable voter ID, because the state would not accept his veterans card.

Following the Monday ruling, ACLU Voting Rights Director Dale Ho says he is exploring “next steps” in his legal efforts “to dismantle these obstacles to voting.”

“It’s unconscionable that even veterans, who have so valiantly served our country, can’t use their government-issued IDs under this law,” he said in a statement. “People should have a broader range of common-sense options.”

[worstblogever]

Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, most famous for amping up the "War on Whites" last year, has decided to start rallying for the impeachment of Hillary Clinton.

This would be the same Hillary Clinton who has yet to secure even the Democratic nomination. And who Republicans insist they have a shot at beating in the general.

At least this shows us if a Republican House has any intention of working with a Democrat who isn't Barack Obama in the White House.

[weezer17]

IIRC, it's the west of Canada that trends towards the Conservatives. Until those results are in we won't know who is in charge there.

You're very right, I'm interested to see how middle provinces like Ontario go. Atlantic is usually Liberal/NDP, so no real surprises so far. Except for the fact that NDP isn't doing so hot, not a single district so far! Quite a shame, I was pulling for Mulcair...

[Mister Mets]

Two liberal journalists think the Democratic party has structural problems.

Writing for Vox, Matthew Igleisias notes that Republicans have a strong chance of winning the White House, but are also favored to keep the offices they have.

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.

Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren't even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don't even admit that they exist.

Instead, the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama's left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor..

In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.

Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:

An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
The spread of union-hostile "right to work" laws into the Great Lakes states
New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats
Admittedly, one of the Democrats' seven states is California, which contains more than 10 percent of the nation's total population. But Texas and Florida combine for more people than the Golden State, and the GOP also dominates Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina — all of which are among the 10 largest states by population. Democrats' largest non-California bastion of unified control is Oregon, home to only about one percent of the American people.*

The GOP is flexible

Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won't want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP's broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility.

Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don't want to pay taxes and business owners who don't want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.

Democrats, of course, are conceptually aware of the possibility of nominating unusually conservative candidates to run in unusually conservative states. But there is a fundamental mismatch. No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.

But there are many states in which labor unions are neither large nor powerful and non-labor national progressive donor networks are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues. This is why an impassioned defense of the legality of late-term abortions could make Wendy Davis a viral sensation, a national media star, and someone capable of activating the kind of donor and volunteer networks needed to mount a statewide campaign. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, this is precisely the wrong issue profile to try to win statewide elections in conservative states.

And the Democrats are unlikely to take back the US House, which limits their ability to implement policy. There's no such restriction on Republicans.

One striking fact about this is that the presumption of continued GOP control is so solid that you don't even get pushback from House Democratic leaders when you write it down. Privately, some backbench Democrats express frustration that the leadership has no plan to try to recapture the majority. In their defense, it's not like anyone outside the leadership has a great plan either.

But this isn't just a parochial issue for the House Democratic caucus. It means that the party's legislative agenda is entirely dead on arrival at the federal level. And it's particularly striking that this stronghold of conservatism comes from the exact institution that so frequently generates embarrassing headlines for the GOP. House Republicans act extreme in part because they know they can get away with it.

The GOP, by contrast, has basically two perfectly plausible plans for moving its agenda forward. One is to basically change nothing and just hope for slightly better luck from the economic fundamentals or in terms of Democratic Party scandals. The other is to shift left on immigration and gain some Latino votes while retaining the core of the party's commitments. Neither of these plans is exactly brilliant, innovative, or foolproof. But neither one is crazy. Even if you believe that Democrats have obtained a structural advantage in presidential elections, it's clearly not an enormous one. The 51 percent of the vote obtained by Barack Obama in 2012 was hardly a landslide, early head-to-head polling of 2016 indicates a close race, and there's always a chance that unexpected bad news will hit the US economy or impair our national security.

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.

Ian Milhisser of Thinkprogress agrees with Ygleisias, but he's also worried about the Courts. Milhisser also thinks gerrymandering plays a bigger role in Republican dominance (Yglesias thinks it's a factor, but that geographic sorting favors the party.)

When the next president takes office, conservative Justices Kennedy and Antonin Scalia will both be 80 years old. If a Democratic president replaces them with, say, Justices Nina Pillard and Sri Srinivasan, then it is likely that partisan gerrymandering will be struck down, Crawford will be overruled and the Voting Rights Act will be reinstated. The newly constituted bench would also be able to undo any judicial attacks on unionized workers.

On the other hand, if a Republican president replaces Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — who will be 83 and 78, respectively, when the next president is sworn in — the newly constituted bench could leave Democrats pining for the days when their only challenges were rigged districts, voter suppression laws and hollowed-out unions. At the very least, an even more conservative Supreme Court would entrench decisions like Vieth, Crawford and Friedrichs, but it is likely that it would do much, much more.

To give an idea of just how bad things could get, the 2015 Supreme Court case King v. Burwell asked the justices to gut the Affordable Care Act based on the unique legal argument that much of the law’s text does not count. This proved a bridge too far for two of the Court’s Republicans, Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts, who joined the Court’s four Democrats in an opinion reminding conservative lawyers that “in a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people” and not with five members of the Supreme Court. Notably, however, three of the Court’s Republicans — Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — embraced the argument that the law most reviled by Republicans must be read to destroy itself.

King is a double warning for Democrats. It is a sign that the Court’s right flank — and the sort of judges who are likely to join that right flank in a Republican administration — are willing to sign their names to legal arguments that take them far afield from well-established legal principles. It’s also a warning that Democrats probably will not be able to anticipate the many unique and creative ways that a Court led by extraordinarily conservative justices like Thomas or Alito will be willing to transform the law.

[Tendrin]

It's all pretty much correct. The Dems do have a lot of problems, many of which are born of 2010 and the massive gains that allowed Republicans to entrench, along with the rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression, Citizens United and all the rest.

The Dems have taken some nasty hits in the last years at the state level, and DWS is an awful, awful, awful head for the DNC. There's no fifty-state strategy anymore, and as WBE will attest, /tons/ of state and national level Republicans run unopposed.

When I think of the state of the body politic in America today, I am reminded of the Yeates poem, the Second Coming. While it's best known for the line about the 'center can not hold', I tend to think of another as far more relevant.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

[Tendrin]

And DOWN GOES HARPER. Woo! Go Canada!

[Spike-X]

And DOWN GOES HARPER. Woo! Go Canada!

[weezer17]

I'm glad it looks like Harper is out, but shame the NDP isn't pulling through too well! Was hoping Mulcair might win this election.

[Spike-X]

Ladies and gentlemen, I need some help. I'm trying to wrap my brain around this article. It's giving me a headache reading it. I think I might have found one of the dumbest articles I've read in a while with one of the dumbest questions I've seen as well.

What's the word to best describe the article and writer?

To be invited to such a waste of time was the biggest insult I’ve received in a good few years.

I get the feeling that's about to change.

[Shawn Hopkins]

Gowdy would disagree on the claim of why the redaction occurred. We'll know whether it's a big update if anyone other than Democratic lawmakers, or left-wing blogs starts saying that it was inappropriate.



I'm not questioning the wisdom of the prosecution, but I don't think anyone needs to make an example of the idiot in order to drive home the importance of keeping guns out of the hands of kids. Most gun owners, "responsible" or not, would consider the death of a child a more significant penalty than several years in jail.

Seems like to me no penalty at all, because this guy's actions clearly show he didn't give a shit about his kid.

[Spike-X]

The Republican War On Women continues, with the state of Texas planning to withhold Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, based on the debunked video of lies that's been getting around lately. Which makes them the second state so far willing to jeopardize women's health for the sake of political grandstanding.

The issue here is that Medicaid money comes largely from the federal government; as the Texas Tribune points out, Texas put just $310,000 towards Planned Parenthood in 2015, but dispersed $2.8 million of federal money. And it’s not free money: it’s reimbursement for services rendered to Medicaid patients. Those services cannot, under federal law, include abortion, except in the cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. (There are fifteen states that will allow Medicaid to cover abortions in other circumstances. Texas is, as you might guess, not one of them.)

In other words, Texas is attempting to take away money that mostly isn’t theirs. Also, Medicaid rules explicitly give the patient their choice of provider; cutting PP out of the program because they provide abortions or allow fetal tissue donations is illegal.

[Gray Lensman]

You're very right, I'm interested to see how middle provinces like Ontario go. Atlantic is usually Liberal/NDP, so no real surprises so far. Except for the fact that NDP isn't doing so hot, not a single district so far! Quite a shame, I was pulling for Mulcair...

I used to live an hour away from Montreal, so I was at least generally aware of Canadian politics. The local newspaper ran Peter Black's Chronically Canadian columns every Thursday. The local university there even had a Canadian studies degree. I'm less plugged in now that I live in a small town in Nevada.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Because most sane people realize that firearms and alcohol are a terrible mix. It's the right to bear arms, kids. Not the right to be a dumbass.



It's not intended as a plug for the specific group, but they do have a point.

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! I wonder how long it'll be before the NRA gets their collective panties in a bunch and raises an unholy stink when they get wind of that ad?

[worstblogever]

One year ago today, we took our first look at the U.S. House Representative from South Carolina’s 4th District, Trey Gowdy, and HOT DAMN is the timing of the anniversary of that for an update perfect right now. Rep. Gowdy is a man who centuries ago, would have made a fine witchfinder general, as he obsessively looks for conspiracies being carried out by Democrats that never actually manifest, and complains about the media when they have the nerve to report when he's unable to find any wrongdoing. Gowdy was placed in charge of the Benghazi Select Committee in 2014, which given current events slowly revealed thanks to Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, looks even more partisan and ridiculous than it did this time last year. In addition to the Benghazi Committee/fiasco/waste of taxpayer money that Gowdy has been making himself famous for, he also tried hyping the IRS scandal, calling for Lois Lerner to be held in contempt of Congress for invoking her 5th amendment right to not testify against herself. It was the first time that Congress held someone in contempt for doing that since... wait for it... Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare hearings. Gowdy also has expressed his desire to use torture not just against terrorists... but against IRS employees to root out all the crimes they committed, "like Jack Bauer on 24", and tried hyping outrage about the closing of the World War II Memorial during the 2013 government shutdown by claiming that special consideration was given to Occupy Wall Street protesters to stay in Zuccotti park (which unlike the war memorial, is privately owned). Rounding out Gowdy's resume is one of the most conservative voting records in Congress, and an hard policy in favor of Voter ID laws that disproportionately curb the ability of minorities to get registered to vote, which he feels "can't be racist" because sometimes, people in South Carolina elect minorities.

All but one of South Carolina's sitting members in the U.S. House of Representatives are Republican, as the state leans that red, and in 2014, he was unopposed in his primary, and only faced a Libertarian challenger in the general election, winning with 85% of the vote. With no consequences to have curbed his extremely right-wing views, Gowdy's politics veered even farther to the right since the last time we profiled him:

• July 10th, 2014: Rep. Gowdy votes for House Amendment 1040, to prevent the implementation of the dreaded United Nations Agenda 21 Treaty, that in spite of just being recommended climate change guidelines, have many conspiracy theorists within the extreme right convinced it’s a plot for global domination.
• On January 22nd, 2015, an anti-abortion bill, HR 7, was moving through the House, and was halted because even some members of the GOP were put off by the language in the bill regarding its definition of rape. Trey Gowdy, however, had no problem with that, and voted for it anyway.
• On February 3rd, 2015, Rep. Gowdy co-sponsors and votes for the latest Republican attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act. This in spite of the fact that the law is not just working, but better than experts predicted.
• On March 3rd, 2015, Gowdy votes against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a Republican protest of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
• On May 13th, 2015, Trey Gowdy voted for HR 36, a ban on abortion at 20 weeks, which he also co-sponsored.
• March 27th, 2015: Rep. Gowdy claims that Hillary Clinton had her e-mail server "wiped clean" and that she had failed to respond to subpoenas in the Congressional investigation, receiving a rebuke from his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings, who pointed out that she had already turned over all e-mails that the investigation deemed relevant.
• May 14th, 2015: Trey Gowdy delays a Benghazi hearing he himself scheduled, and blames it on the State Department, accusing them of not handing over all the documents he requested (note, this is part of a larger pattern of implying guilt by demanding the Obama administration reveal a complete negative).
• On September 11th, 2015, Gowdy votes against the United States' nuclear treaty with Iran.
• On September 18th, 2015, Rep. Gowdy co-sponsors and votes with most House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, based on highly edited “sting” videos submitted by a Pro-Life advocacy group that have been repeatedly debunked by investigators.
• September 29th, 2015: Trey Gowdy participates in a different House Oversight debacle, this time harassing Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, and interrupting her to claim she made statements she had never actually said.

I'm not going to act like Trey Gowdy's in any danger of being voted out of office, unless he's beaten in a primary, somehow. Democrats are highly unlikely to unseat him when South Carolina's 4th has been gerrymandered into having a Cook Partisan Voting Index of +15 Republican lean, after all. But a more likely ending to his career might come due to some ethical lapse based on the witch hunts he's participating in on the House Oversight Committee.

I mean, at the moment, as he's claiming the Benghazi investigation isn't partisan, it's amazing that he doesn't show up to hear the deposition of witnesses who were actually on the ground during the attack, but makes it a point to clear his calendar to attend all the hearings where someone close to Hillary Clinton is being questioned. After over $4.5 million in taxpayer dollars have been wasted, multiple Republicans starting to admit the whole investigation is a partisan scheme, and even former investigators claiming they were told to direct their investigation specifically upon Hillary Clinton... Gowdy is growing more desperate every day, even reporting one such investigator, Bradley Podliska was fired for "a classified info breach" and not refusing to harass Clinton. Podliska, a self-identifying conservative Republican, pointed out Gowdy violated federal law by releasing his employment information in the attempt to discredit him (Add the forthcoming court settlement to the cost of Gowdy's Benghazi crusade).

While it might seem much more likely we'll be profiling this firebrand for years to come, and documenting how many times he tries and fails to destroy a Democratic administration member, only to have his efforts blow up in his face like Wile E. Coyote with Acme explosives... there are rumors he might be considering just quitting Congress in 2016. Hopefully, that's the case, and whoever replaces him won't be as much of a hack.