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

[Revolutionary_Jack]

2016 always a fluke. Trump won off the rust belt off razor thin margins.

Exactly. And a campaign with much misinformation, and low Dem turnout in the rust belt that year.

The main point is that no change happens without a strong grassroots movement to ensure it happens. This isn't a controversial or new point that hasn't been made.

Absolutely agreed on this. Grassroots can't end with 2020 Election.

Biden isn't an imperfect friend, he is an enemy

That's quite harsh. I think you need to explain that to the LGBTQ community who haven't forgotten that Joe Biden, practising Catholic, was the first high office politician who openly came out for gay marriage and equality, doing that at a time when Obama was himself quite cautious about it. Besides political figures far to the left of Biden have done worse and had worse policies. I don't think treating Biden as an enemy is fair, accurate, useful.

The public simply being bystanders and not putting pressure on him to pass progressive policies for the next 4 years is bordeline suicidal...

Agree with this absolutely. But again that doesn't mean Biden is the enemy. The whole discourse about us trying to understand Trump supporters and so on, that's false and dangerous. But we absolutely should understand the points of view in the left of center. Social Democrats and others should understand liberals, like Bernie and AOC absolutely do. You can do that without thinking of them as the enemy and so on.

If the Obama years were so good then they wouldn't have ended with Trump.

It's precisely because the Obama years were so good, they ended up with Trump. Again Trump voters are white supremacists who could not countenance the success, achievements, and legacy of the first black President. Pure and simple.

Without a movement to put pressure on him, Biden like Obama will still adhere to a broken healthcare system
(Obamacare was a right-wing reform from the 90's)

Obamacare had multiple sources, the most obvious is the program passed in MA when Mitt Romney was governor. That law was passed by Democrats in MA Legislature. Romney signed it because the Dems had majorities to override veto. In fact Romney vetoed 8 provisions, and the Dems overturned 6 of those vetoes. Because of the association with Romney a lot of people think Obamacare was a Republican plan but that's not exactly the case. Healthcare is a long dream in US Politics and has been approved across the spectrum and factions. FDR announced health care as a policy in his last newsreel and had he not passed away, maybe it would have happened in the '40s. LBJ wanted to make it happen too. Then Richard Nixon became interested in (Keynesian Moderate deep down, Wingnut on the outside) it. In the Clinton years, HRC was very interested in it and wanted to put a health program that was subsequently to the left of what ACA became but the GOP stopped that. The point is that Healthcare was extremely difficult to pass, and as unambitious and quaint as the ACA is compared to what FDR/LBJ and even Nixon had in mind, leave alone the NHS in England, it was still a great achievement in legislation. If a man like Lyndon B. Johnson, a schoolyard bully by nature, couldn't get it done. If someone like Nixon couldn't get it done, then I don't know how you can judge Obama so low for actually being the guy who did get it done.

When Joe Biden said, "This is a big f--king deal" he was quite right. Obama fulfilled one of FDR's dreams.

Point is, don't just sit around for 4 years and hope that Biden brings real change. You and everyone else have to essentially bully him into doing it.

And I am for that. Push Biden to the left, support progressives and so on. Just remember that the real bad guys are not the Democrats. Obama's Presidency didn't have a crisis that saw 230,000 people dead in 8 months, most of them poor, from minority communities. In fact when this is over, Trump's body count would have exceeded the numbers of Obama's entire drone campaign and his entire Presidency.

[Zauriel]

But here's what I've written about gerrymandering (copied and pasted from older posts)...
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Didn't the word gerrymander come from the surname "Gerry" and the word "salamander"? Wasn't it named after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party? That's what I read on Wikipedia.

[Mister Mets]

Didn't the word gerrymander come from the surname "Gerry" and the word "salamander"? Wasn't it named after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party? That's what I read on Wikipedia.

Yup.

How was Governor Elbridge Gerry punished after he invented this despicable technique? He was made James Madison's Vice President!

[Zauriel]

Yup.

How was Governor Elbridge Gerry punished after he invented this despicable technique? He was made James Madison's Vice President!

Yeah, but he didn't live to complete his term. It might have been divine punishment for inventing this practice. But then again, he was 70 years old when he died. To die at the age of 70 years was not uncommon in the early nineteenth century since the medicine at that time was not advanced enough to prolong human lifespan.

[Tami]

Even science nerds are becoming politicos this election season

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yeah, but he didn't live to complete his term. It might have been divine punishment for inventing this practice. But then again, he was 70 years old when he died. To die at the age of 70 years was not uncommon in the early nineteenth century since the medicine at that time was not advanced enough to prolong human lifespan.

Gerrymandering is actually quite common in a lot of early elections and different countries had their own name for it.

-- In England they called it pocket-boroughs (or "Rotten Boroughs" as critics more accurately called it). These were districts and allotments that were so unrepresentative that people could write their nomination and elections into Parliament. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten...ocket_boroughs). And in the 19th Century there were calls to reform and eliminate it, and it was done.
-- That said, even in UK today, Gerrymandering exists in Northern Ireland specifically to enforce Unionist sentiments and ensure that Irish Reunification (which is always on the table per the Good Friday Agreement) never takes off.
-- It was also done in Bismarck's Germany and Austria, where the term was "electoral geometry" (in America considering the bizarre districting, it should be electoral scribbling).
-- One can argue that the US Constitution was founded on gerrymandering. The entire Electoral College, the notorious "3/5ths clause" was designed so that the South could increase representation by claiming that the large slave population counted for 3/5ths of human beings and use that as a basis for their power...that allowed the South to direct national politics until the Civil War and also during Jim Crow. Electoral College, which is basically an artificial districting and allocation that's inconsistent and illogical (it was concieved when it had 13 Colonies and not for a country with more and states added in...with two more on the table, set to be added in the coming decade).

The thing about gerrymandering though is this. In most countries that kind of thing ended in the 19th Century. That's not to say that countries don't use dirty tricks and regional quirks to game the system of course, but it's just not the same. What you see in USA since 2010 is the kind of gerrymandering directly comparable to UK before the Reform Acts of the 19th Century. It's very much the kind of system that European democracies evolved out of.

Partisan gerrymandering (and yes both parties gerrymander, but the Republican one is more extensive) in USA is an extraordinary instance of a 21st Century Democracy directly backsliding into an 18th-19th Century system. It's the definition of reactionary, i.e. overturn progress altogether.

[Tami]

A little-known Trump appointee is in charge of handing transition resources to Biden — and she isn’t budging

A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.

But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter. And the Trump administration, in keeping with the president’s failure to concede the election, has no immediate plans to sign one. This could lead to the first transition delay in modern history, except in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided a recount dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush in December.

“An ascertainment has not yet been made,” Pamela Pennington, a spokeswoman for GSA, said in an email, “and its Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.”

The GSA statement left experts on federal transitions to wonder when the White House expects the handoff from one administration to the next to begin — when the president has exhausted his legal avenues to fight the results, or the formal vote of the electoral college on Dec. 14? There are 74 days, as of Sunday, until the Biden inauguration on Jan. 20.

“No agency head is going to get out in front of the president on transition issues right now,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The official predicted that agency heads will be told not to talk to the Biden team.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

A little-known Trump appointee is in charge of handing transition resources to Biden — and she isn’t budging

You know effectively speaking, USA doesn't have a Head of State active right now. Trump is not doing any President work.

[GindyPosts]

You know effectively speaking, USA doesn't have a Head of State active right now. Trump is not doing any President work.

What it amounts to is Trump is unhappy he lost, so he wants to make sure nothing happens in the transition process as long as possible in the hopes he can stay president.

[Farealmer]

Any chance of a Al Gore situation arising out of this?

[JCAll]

Any chance of a Al Gore situation arising out of this?

I can't see how at this point. He'd basically have to go to the Supreme Court and get them to declare the entire concept of mail-in voting unconstitutional.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Any chance of a Al Gore situation arising out of this?

Unlikely, but not impossible.

In 2000, the race came down to Florida with the recount. And the recount in Florida was really really close. Genuinely so that people were confused about who won. That's not the case in PA, GA, MI, AZ. The vote leads are clearly and unambiguously in Biden's favor. There's none there. The election in 2000 was genuinely, for real, too close to call. In 2020, not at all. It's as clear a victory as 2008 and 2012.

Why is that significant? Basically if a vote margin is that small, you could justify taking it to the courts as happened with Bush v. Gore (it was W. who went to the courts, not Gore...he just wanted FL to complete the recount by law). Remember that Al Gore won the popular vote but he won it by a small margin over W. and even then neither candidate claimed a majority of 50% votes (which to be fair happened to Hillary too in 2016, and also her husband Bill in 1992 and 1996). So the sense of unfairness that happened with HRC winning the vote by 3 million votes isn't there.

In the case of 2020, the victory is convincing and decisive. Biden's going to get a majority of 50% of the vote and upwards (in fact when this is over he's popular vote count is going to be around 80 million...basically the full population of Germany, largest pop. in Western Europe). Not a small sliver, but a huge one.

In fact, 2020 is essentially, for Biden (if not the Democrat Party), but for Biden this is a landslide. A landslide in slow motion.

[Robotman]

Really enjoyed SNL last night. The cast seemed to be in full celebration mode. Michael Che even partaking in a little whiskey during Update.

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[worstblogever]

But that’s also a product of the GOP trying to make her a new boogeyman, likely because they recognize she’s got the charisma and dedication to be a powerful force if she builds up momentum, and thus they have tried tarring her with every bigoted invective they can the second she showed up.

Which is was concerns me... the Democrats are letting the GOP's "torches and pitchforks" crowd dictate what the voice of the party sounds like.

Republicans are failing to reject fascism and white nationalism at the moment. Their opinion over what the Democratic Party should sound like to appeal to them is f***ing irrelevant. Don't listen to them, it's the independents and base you should be courting. And on that front, AOC is incredibly appealing.

[worstblogever]

Any chance of a Al Gore situation arising out of this?

NONE. Absolutely none.