Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

"was deblasio a product of occupy?"

does anyone like him?

iirc her voting record in the senate was to left of most democrats

― marcos, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:58 PM (40 seconds ago)

i'm getting a little tired of the is-hillary-a-progressive-or-not arguments -- at this point people should probably have their minds made up -- but being the 11th most liberal senator is not really that impressive if you're representing new york

yeah sure but nobody here is actually mounting the "move hillary to the left" argument, right? so why linger on it?

i think the party/country spending six to nine months arguing around terms of income inequality, wealth inequality, "the 1%", big-money influence on electoral politics, and the pros and cons of redistributive measures is a good thing. sorry. i don't need to wait to see the end-result legislation getting signed to say "this is a positive development," just as i don't need to see President Trump in office building his wall to look at his campaign of vitriol, violence and bigotry to say "this is a negative development."

i for one look forward to the conventional-wisdom "safe" positions of cowardly middle-of-the-road positions running for minor office becoming "well you gotta say you're for taxing wall street, i mean come on" instead of that being taken as basically the position of a dead-in-the-water fringe communist student radical. america's parents at america's dinner tables can talk about something other than dinky tax credits for "the middle class." this is not a failure.

yeah OWS very clearly brought economic inequality into the mainstream conversation in a meaningful way. that's an accomplishment in itself. i'm very pro-BLM but you could make the same arguments about how it hasn't gotten anything "done". you're cherry-picking

iirc her voting record in the senate was to left of most democrats

― marcos, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:58 PM (40 seconds ago)

i'm getting a little tired of the is-hillary-a-progressive-or-not arguments -- at this point people should probably have their minds made up -- but being the 11th most liberal senator is not really that impressive if you're representing new york

― k3vin k., Wednesday, March 16, 2016 5:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not saying it is particularly impressive, i just think the hyperbole around her is kind of absurd

like some bernie dude i know literally adds a #hilaryiscorporatepersonhood hashtag to every FB post he makes on politics

(i admit though than bringing up every FB post made by idiot friends to support arguments isn't great)

yeah OWS very clearly brought economic inequality into the mainstream conversation in a meaningful way. that's an accomplishment in itself. i'm very pro-BLM but you could make the same arguments about how it hasn't gotten anything "done". you're cherry-picking

my point is that BLM is mobilized around v specific goals, and it's showing signs of success already. Electoral gains, actions from the justice dept., convictions, etc. OWS and Bernie have not, because they were/are shitty at organizing and achieving goals.

i think the party/country spending six to nine months arguing around terms of income inequality, wealth inequality, "the 1%", big-money influence on electoral politics, and the pros and cons of redistributive measures is a good thing. sorry.

i do, too. and if her opponent was anyone other than trump, the chances of those topics dominating the conversation would be higher. but trump obviously has a way of bending all media coverage to whatever he wants to talk about, so most of those topics (except for "big-money influence on electoral politics", which he sometimes brings up as a way to deflect criticism that he donated to causes deemed heretical to conservatives) don't seem likely to gain much traction

re "liberal senator" scoreboards: statistics, damned lies, etc

had some long post about BLM being associated with a threat of violence/riots (which OWS and Bernie never have been) being tied to political effectiveness but my thoughts about it are a bit muddled... there's something there though, I think. Maybe about how it has framed the political calculus of BLM's goals as political accommodation vs. urban destruction, with institutions and voters siding for the former.

yeah what an awesome liberal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Protection_Act_of_2005

if her opponent was anyone other than trump, the chances of those topics dominating the conversation would be higher.

i was counting backwards! the conversation has been going on!

i dunno i'm very much in the camp of, my entire life as far back as i was aware of politics, the discourse has been totally dominated by reagan/clinton attitudes about the role of government and the role of corporations. everyone here is used to it by now maybe, but: i think it is kind of blindingly huge news that a cranky old socialist, talking about jacking up taxes on the rich to pay for enormous new entitlements, has held possibly the most 'inevitable' candidate in years and years down to 57.8% of the democratic primary vote so far (a number which might plausibly go down further). (this particular silver chart is kinda helpful to put that in perspective. the next one down is sitting president ford staving off reagan in 1976 and look where the party went after that.) so far, counting primaries and not caucuses, nearly six million people have walked into a voting booth and chosen the income-redistributing big-government socialist. history books may well record that as the most important political development of 2015-2016 depending what ultimately happens with trumpism.

and again: how many of those are first-time voters? how different will the range of allowable choices look to you throughout the rest of adulthood when the first vote you cast is Socialist 4 Prez?

if ows posed no threat of violence you certainly wouldn't have known it from watching tv

obv there are certain factors that make blm a whole lot scarier to some people

agree w djp that there is a lot more occupy-->blm continuity than the These Are The White Leftists; These Are The Black Leftists categories allow for; i also think that bernie really did respond well to blm's criticisms, and black people not switching from hillary by the millions in six months is not some kind of damning referendum on his hopeless whiteness. certainly blm activists are not hostile to economic-justice ideas; its not as if their success comes at the expense of socialism. i think what we've seen over the past few years is a flourishing of leftist activism + a slow and heavily resisted reintroduction of leftist ideas into the Serious sphere, and which bernie's surprisingly good run is an example of this trend, not a culmination of it, regardless of how everybody's facebook friends are acting.

the next one down is sitting president ford staving off reagan in 1976 and look where the party went after that.

i've thought cautiously of this parallel too.

Whether it's Trump or Hills, this is the fist time we can say Reagan's dead.

Then we all diem

um i wrote that paragraph about three different ways and decided to use them all i guess

hopefully bernie will bring everyone to tears at the convention, then lie for years about having last-second improvised it

have we discussed Trumps anti-Hilary ad where she goes "arf! arf! arf! arf!" like she's in the freakin' dog police

i said "this is going to be really unpleasant" and then we all comforted ourselves with some good ol intra-left bickering

heh

dog police?

Dog police https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0359hSerDeE

for Morbz: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnzogby/2016/03/16/rest-in-peace-to-the-republican-party/#16bfb2bf6fe3

Wait, there's a serious call for Paul Ryan to run for ... president? As a third party? As what? How would that work? I mean, it'd be good, right, because he would split the vote? And also because it would be extra funny, because http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2012/10/11/11-paul-ryan-time-p90x.w245.h368.jpg

Wait, there's a serious call for Paul Ryan to run for ... president? As a third party? As what? How would that work? I mean, it'd be good, right, because he would split the vote? And also because it would be extra funny, because 🗻

Here come the RyanBros

paul ryan is a douche but he's not fucking stupid, he's not going to do that

paul ryan wouldn't waste his presidential bid this year. he is too ambitious. he is going to try to run in 2024 or something like that.

it is kinda funny that the muppet-faced doofus Ryan is actually the soothing potential candidate everybody wants now

but yea, not gonna happen

they're going to go with trump. good for them, they deserve it

maybe they'll change the rules to where in a contested convention, whomever can win a round robin 1-on-1 basketball tourney is the nominee

or maybe they will arrange for trump to be killed and then, at the convention, newt gingrich will come onstage and do one of these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ7RvRPCSWM

what do people think will happen to trump when he loses the general? is he going to go back to his previously annoying ways or is he going to linger around stenching up the US with political forays?

he is going to die because he is 70 years old, doesn't exercise, and subsists on a diet of grease, sugar, and bile

will return to Castle Greyskull

i seriously can't remember hating someone as much as i hate this guy. now i know something of the white hot rage some people get when they hear the names nixon and reagan. bush could never inspire this much revulsion in me, even though of course i was appalled by his presidency

i can but they were all 12-14 years old and classmates of mine

I didn't know about the "Ron Paul Rule" until today--something they concocted in 2012. If they honor it at the convention, Trump wins; they have to change it for anyone else to win.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eoin-higgins/rnc-rules-to-stifle-ron-p_b_8941816.html

are there any legal ramifications to RNC changing the rules at the convention and saying something like "and since the rule is anybody with RUMP in their name can't run, you're out"?

like if Trump was somehow led to believe he'd be the nominee through current procedure, would he have any recourse, or would it just be unethical but not something he could sue over?

clemenza - they may have to change that for anybody to get voted on at all, though, since winning majorities of delegates hasn't really been happening. but i can't imagine anyone was seriously thinking "aha, we'll use this one weird trick to keep trump's delegates from even getting to vote. he's done way way too well for that and you really would be looking at a riot situation. that's not to say no rules-based trickery will come into play, but this one seems undercooked. of course the article is from january and things probably looked a little different then.

(xpost) It sounds like the existing rules become void the minute the convention starts, and while they're usually renewed as a matter of formality, they can basically change whatever they want. (I'm sure your reductio ad absurdum example would present problems...)

Yeah, the article points out that even Trump might fall short of the Paul rule.

he is going to die because he is 70 years old, doesn't exercise, and subsists on a diet of grease, sugar, and bile

no way. i can state unequivocally, if elected, he would be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.

http://i.imgur.com/6fPYIzR.png

http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834515c5469e201b7c81b3d03970b-pi

this is dr. harold n. bornstein btw

but yeah, if trump doesn't walk in the door with a >50% majority, the first thing on the agenda for the RNC will be to set very expansive rules for delegate seating ("we want all voices to be heard in our big tent party") so that every single non-trump delegate - even Jeb!'s sad foursome - can be mobilized.

one shenanigan they might more plausibly consider would be releasing the three-per-state RNC-representative delegates from the requirement that they vote for whoever won their state. these, together with a very small number of miscellaneous unbound delegates, are the GOP equivalent of superdelegates, and were previously considered something of a non-issue (by me, for one) since there are so few of them. but in the contested convention scenario, those 150 extra delegates would be a huge bloc. mind you i'm not sure if this is a rule they actually could change at this date.... but suppose it were slipped in that they were only bound to vote for the winner of a state if it had a true majority winner? i'm definitely not an inside expert on these matters, just kinda imagining, which i admit is silly at this point, but the part of me that double-majored in political science can't help but find this kind of rulesy what-if shit fascinating.

That rule was always going to be changed (they all are every time afaict) but that one has to be changed this time: even trump hasn't won a majority in any state except lol Northern Mariana

Rubio's delegates, most of them are going to wind up being reallocated somewhere, too (except for the 20 or so that by state law have to remain bound to Rubio, fuckin stupid as hell)

and then we all comforted ourselves with some good ol intra-left bickering

i'm def not in the same SF prosecco-sippin' "left" as Shakey

xpost well, yeah. i mean first round they have to vote for their candidate and then the interesting thing is, what kind of deals get cut to move those people around and assemble a majority for somebody. again we're in what-if territory. rubio managed to soak up 172 delegates, a decent-sized piece of the pie right now though it'll be less of one by june.

deep pointless broker speculation territory ahead: so, the big question is, does trump make up the gap in the remaining contests and push himself over 50%? it's possible but it does depend on him doing better than he's ever done so far, even though the field has narrowed again. for the sake of fun, assume for a minute that he fails to do so and we are headed to a contested convention (or pre-convention deal-making). then, the most important sub-variable becomes how well kasich does in the time between now and then. cruz currently appears to be the second-place guy, but the assumption has long been that he's already passed his best states and is thus much further behind than he seems. rubio was hoping to do wait this period out and then beat cruz in those later states. but clearly ran the numbers and found it would never be enough, with trump doing as well as he's turned out to do - and certainly not in a four-man field.

IF kasich gets most of the dwindling rubio support in those later states, AND they really are ill-suited to cruz, AND trump's numbers slip just a little (not a "flame-out," just one of his periodic wobbles, facing slightly less trump-friendly states), THEN it's possible that kasich wins some of the remaining winner-take-all states, cruz wins few or none of them, and trump is held just shy of 50% with kasich as the second-place guy. the RNC and company, i think, would find it much easier to broker a deal for the rubio-and-assorted-delegates around a Kasich/Cruz ticket than Cruz/Kasich. for one, they may hope that cruz's extremism is less serious ballot-box poison if he's #2 (a la paul ryan) though in reality the dems will have a field day portraying such a candidate as a double-whammy of right-wing ideologues.

I dont even know what prosecco is

Xp

but yes its been well established that you are a party of one morbz