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

[JCAll]

So, in reading this article I found out that Josh Raffel and Reed Cordish are leaving now, too.

WBE ... take it away!

BTW: that's 43% of senior staff now, an all-time record.

If they were leaving any faster, they'd be jumping from the roof and racing to hit the ground.

[Malvolio]

That was ONE politician off the top of my head, turnip breath. It is called an "example." Google that word.

It's quite a stretch to claim that there were no others. Your hatred for Democrats is what is laughable.

It's typical from #30. Whenever we destroy one of his arguments, he moves the goalposts.

[Gray Lensman]

It's typical from #30. Whenever we destroy one of his arguments, he moves the goalposts.

They aren't just outside the stadium now, I think the goalposts have switched continents.

[BeastieRunner]

Trump asked senior aides to describe interviews with Mueller.

He's his own worst enemy sometimes.

[TheInvisibleMan]

Geek Squad BE SNITCHIN'

The information obtained by the EFF shows the evolution of a detailed process that begins when workers find potentially illegal material on hard drives. The techs relay the information to the FBI, which then investigates the data and sends the information to a field office near the customer’s home for further investigation. However, it was the next step that is most important:

Then the FBI would sometimes obtain a warrant.

Even in cases that were not prosecuted, Best Buy employees would make exact copies of the hard drive on blank drives, CDs and flash drives and forward the borrowed data to the FBI. In most of the cases, the FBI notes made sure to specify that no warrant was obtained prior to the Snitch Squad’s search.

[worstblogever]

Trump asked senior aides to describe interviews with Mueller.

He's his own worst enemy sometimes.

That can be added to obstruction. He's not just a moron, he's a moron who doesn't learn from his (recent) past mistakes.

So, in reading this article I found out that Josh Raffel and Reed Cordish are leaving now, too.

WBE ... take it away!

BTW: that's 43% of senior staff now, an all-time record.

At this point, where there are staffers resigning DAILY and members of the Trump campaign are spazzing out on multiple cable news shows while wetting their pants over Mueller as new details of the investigation break multiple times a day...

Is there any clearer sign that the end is nigh on the Trump presidency? And are his supporters stupid enough not to realize that?

[wjowski]

Geek Squad BE SNITCHIN'

I mean Google, Facebook, and others are already selling your personal information to the highest bidder, including the FBI. This is no big surprise.

[numberthirty]

so Ted Cruz is trying to attack Beto O'Rourke for using his nickname "Beto" as an attempt to fit in

Excuse me, RAFAEL

im pretty sure no one would be using "Beto" to fit in

That was good for a chuckle.

[numberthirty]

That was ONE politician off the top of my head, turnip breath. It is called an "example." Google that word.

It's quite a stretch to claim that there were no others. Your hatred for Democrats is what is laughable.

In a post where there isn't even a second name...

No one is claiming that there is not a potential handful out there.

The reality is that the fact that you, maybe, have a handful here and there willing to run on that issue post-'99 is pathetic.

[numberthirty]

Isn't #30 from Illinois? Then he probably should have known that Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was also at the forefront of the marriage equality struggle more than a decade ago:
"They love each other, just as much as anyone else. They believe that the benefits they don't have, they should have. And so I have a very open mind on it."

You are using "More Than A Decade" in the year 2018 like it is really something.

Take a minute to seriously consider that.

While Daley certainly was a step in the right direction, he was also a Daley running in the state of Illinois.

[numberthirty]

It's typical from #30. Whenever we destroy one of his arguments, he moves the goalposts.

"Destroy" when you have...

- Newsom
- A Daley running for Mayor in the city of Chicago.

As usual, you guys are a hoot.

It's someone else moving goalposts, but your list of Democrats who were supporting marriage equality is still Newsom and a Daley running for an office that may as well have come with a crown.

Never mind that they are still both "State" level Dems.

You could just be honest with yourselves about that their support of the issue was still pretty lousy at the time.

[BeastieRunner]

The Nader collar has brought back to light Erik Price, the DeVos, and Blackwater conversation.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

The party of the majority (cis white straight Christians) will attract members of nasty majority groups. It's a bit of a category error to suggest I'm comparing bigots to Muslims and environmentalists. I talked about crazies within larger groups, and organized bigots would mainly be a subset of a larger group (straight cis white people) just as the people willing to give financial aid to Islamic terrorists would be a subset of the larger group of Muslims.

As a note, we could add antifa to the list of bad Democratic groups.

To be entirely fair, there are legitimate arguments for why Democrats would have been strategically inactive on these key issues. They're not going to be in a position to make a difference if they don't win elections, so it makes sense to avoid topics until a majority on their side. There are clear downsides to their approach (activists might be pissed off, conservatives have a talking point about how Democrats aren't willing to tell voters what they really believe, Democrats are unable to push the country on an issue and just play catch-up) though a key moral question is whether it really would do any good for Democrats to be on the vanguard. Will people come on board to a topic because Democratic officials are there, or will it just cost the party votes? We're seeing this a bit now with Democrats taking some extreme (in the sense that it goes against the polls) positions against voter ID, and in favor of late-term abortion, which will give a test for whether this is helpful (perhaps getting voters who are with the party on other issues to appreciate the wisdom of an unpopular position; activists could be more excited), whether it hurts and by how much (it might be worth it to have a smaller US House majority with a mandate on key issues than a larger majority that lacks the mandate), or whether it makes no discernible difference at all (in which case it's still strategically useful from a policy perspective).

Oh I don't disagree with that and there were some good reasons why. It's just there is an overreach of certain people who are ingrained in the whole "Democrats are the good guys and they never make mistakes" mantra that want to proclaim them the part of gay marriage when the mainstream party and mainstream candidates did not support that view even in an era when gay marriage was becoming legal in certain states and then citing a few outliers who did to try to make the case.

It's just, again, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't by and large sit on the sidelines on issues until it politically pragmatic to support it, then expect the people who care about it to be on your side.

Both parties have this issue with their base and they usually win when they go with the people who more closely resemble their base. I think the difference is that for Republicans they've moved so far right, that there is a center that they can capitalize on. The establishment of the Democratic party is so far right that now that they are the center. The independents they don't have are just the left progressives who view themselves as too far outside the platform to jump on board. Which theoretically is fine, as long as you don't act like you are entitled to that vote. A lot of Democrats act like they are and then a blame game starts when it bites them.

It's an entitlement thing. The establishment Dems want to point fingers at progressives for not rallying enough for them, while the progressives are like "well you ignored us and knew we really didn't like what you were offering up". Same thing happened for Republicans in 2012, no big deal. As a person who always votes Democrat 99% of the time, I just think if you get your way the whole process through, and you lose, you shouldn't blame the people who didn't get what they want for your plan not working.

[numberthirty]

It's just, again, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't by and large sit on the sidelines on issues until it politically pragmatic to support it, then expect the people who care about it to be on your side.

Yep.

"Give Democrats The Credit For What They Have Actually Done?" Fine.

"Really Come Off Of The Sidelines For Democrats Based On That They Have Stuck Their Collective Neck Out On Tough Issues?" Come on with that noise.

[Mister Mets]

Responding to Aja_Christopher (the character limits prevent me from quoting)...

I don't think your positions on the characters of Cheney and Rumsfeld have been established. The main readings seem to suggest the Bush administration thought they were bringing "freedom" to Iraq and Afghanistan, which was in line with their foreign policy efforts elsewhere.

There are further divides on abortion, with extremes on all side. The right-wing extreme is the people who think abortion should be illegal in the case of rape and whether the mother's life is in danger, and to be fair there are Republican statewide officeholders who seem to hold this position. The left-wing extreme would be supporters of partial birth abortion, an issue with majority support from the country, and roughly 50/50 support for Democratic voters.

With the pathway to citizenship, who gets accepted and who gets rejected? How do you go about preventing new waves of illegal immigrants in the wake of policies that would allow those who have been here for a while to come out of the shadows? You say that you won't deport, but does this mean that there will be a new pathway to citizenship to those in the country illegally, or a different kind of status.

Your points on the Democratic approach to voting haven't been about how legislative districts should be determined. For example, the Pennsylvania state supreme court decided to go with decisions that really favored Democrats, because they prioritize partisan balance when other standards (combining communities of interest, randomly selected geographic bodies) would favor Republicans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/u...ans-court.html

Many of those choices are easy to spot on a map. Every potentially competitive Republican-held district juts out to add Democratic areas, like adding York to the 10th District, Lansdale to the First District, Reading to the Sixth District, Stroudsburg to the Seventh District, South Philadelphia to the Fifth District, or Mount Lebanon and Penn Hills to the 17th.

There are also subtle choices that are harder to see. They’re less about picking and choosing municipalities and more about how to group counties. These choices also often work to the advantage of Democrats, like the decision to center the 12th District in Beaver rather than in Butler County, or to have the Fifth District, rather than the Fourth or the First, take population in Philadelphia.

Any of these decisions can be justified. It is also possible, although unlikely and unproven, that only this combination of choices yields the absolute minimum number of split counties or municipalities, the key criterion of the court order.

But in all of these cases, there were Republican-leaning alternatives of seemingly comparable merit. Collectively, it’s a pattern of augmenting Democratic strength, inching the statewide map closer to partisan parity.

This does not necessarily mean the map amounts to a “Democratic gerrymander,” as some have suggested. Over all, it admirably adheres to traditional nonpartisan redistricting criteria, like compactness and the avoidance of unnecessary county splits. But the map makes Democratic-tilting choices so consistently that it is hard not to wonder whether it was part of an intentional effort to achieve partisan balance in a state that is fairly evenly divided.

It would be somewhat surprising, at least to me, if the court drew this map without that goal in mind. Nathaniel Persily, the Stanford professor who helped draw the map, has been barred by the court from discussing it.

A series of pro-Democratic choices would be necessary to create statewide partisan balance, since lopsided winning margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh put Democrats at a considerable disadvantage in translating their votes to seats statewide. In fact, the new map still slightly advantages the Republicans with respect to the statewide popular vote.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise if the court strove for partisan symmetry in the context of a partisan gerrymandering case. But the court order did not say that the maps should strive for partisan balance, and it seems that’s the reason Democrats did not strive for it, either.

This is gerrymandering, but for a defensible goal that does favor Democrats. It would be something that should be articulated so that the decisions can be made openly.

How many non-famous representatives do you know that aren't yours? I don't think many people know any. Regardless: He got my vote last night and with the money he has already gotten he'll be able to spread that name recognition statewide well before November. And if Ted Cruz' stupid new song ad is anything to go by I'll bet on Beto making this a close race at least.

I was actually familiar with O'Rourke mainly because I follow politics pretty heavily.

The problem is that he does seem to have had a decent amount of media coverage so he really should've beat his obscure opponents by more.

As a comparison, Wendy Davis got 78% of the primary vote when she was a candidate for Governor, and she was a state legislator.