2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

The measure faces an uncertain future in the Senate. Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pledged Thursday that the Syria bill won’t make it to Obama’s desk. Senators will likely attempt to tack the measure as a rider to the government spending bill that Congress has to address in December.

“We’ve explained here in some detail [that] the problem is not with refugees. I haven’t read the House language,” Reid said during a press conference on Thursday. “I don’t think we’re going to be dealing with it over here.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/syria-refugee-bill-vote-216053#ixzz3ryTNCZPI

To: Curbelo.house.gov
From: CurbeloIntern2.house.gov
Subject: RE: Latest version of constituent feedback summary doc?

http://i.imgur.com/MVasrLO.jpg

Automatically started looking for my Rep on that list of Democrats before remembering, oh yeah, we don't have any Democratic Reps anymore.

appreciated finally calibrated irony

i avoid sarcasm when sending screeds to my representatives

my congressman is a graduate of a fine Jesuit academy – he understands being spread eagled

Only if he ever reads the text of your message. Presumably, he'll be flooded on the subject and no aide is likely to choose yours as a representative example to put in front of him. Too bad. It was ace.

http://dudespaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/statueoflibertyflipsthebird.jpg

democracy demagoguery in action

This again--- 5 items (largely House Republican riders to appropriations bills) that could cause a government shutdown

the biggest holdups are 1) funding for Syrian refugees; 2) Dividing up a $30 billion spending increase both sides have agreed to in principle; 3) Environmental policy riders; 4) Crop insurance subsidies; and 5) a GOP push roll back financial regulations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/11/20/the-five-things-that-could-still-force-a-government-shutdown/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202

Bbbbbbut what about repealing Obamacare???

Re: the funding Syrian refugees option:

“I would be surprised if there are going to be a lot of Democrats who are going to object if we take a thoughtful, reasonable approach to this,” Thune said.

Labott’s crime wasn’t that she expressed an opinion. It’s that she expressed the wrong opinion: after Paris, defending Muslims, even refugees, is strictly forbidden. I’ve spoken with friends who work at every cable network and they say the post-Paris climate is indescribably repressive in terms of what they can say and who they can put on air. When it comes to the Paris attacks, CNN has basically become state TV (to see just how subservient CNN is about everything relating to terrorism, watch this unbelievable “interview” of ex-CIA chief Jim Woolsey by CNN’s Brooke Baldwin; or consider that neither CNN nor MSNBC has put a single person on air to dispute the CIA’s blatant falsehoods about Paris despite how many journalists have documented those falsehoods).

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/20/cnns-punishment-of-refugee-defending-journalist-highlights-media-abdication/

https://twitter.com/sts10/status/667428763660115968

i would've like to hear Woolsey say, like William Campbell's Squire of Gothos on Star Trek TOS, that Snowden should be hanged until he is DEAD DEAD DEAD.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUHYXfuWsAAyhMg.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/john-edwards-claiming-win-over-david-vitter-in-louisiana-governors-race/2015/11/21/a583fc06-9070-11e5-ae1f-af46b7df8483_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-high_louisiananew1018pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

A democratic win in the south! Although an old-school Southern Dem

From the start of his run, Edwards knew any chance of victory hinged on distinguishing himself from the prevailing image of Democrats among voters. In meetings with small groups in rural parishes, he touted his opposition to abortion and strong support for gun ownership. He had fellow members of West Point class speak about his character and values.

So what exactly makes him a democrat?

Louisiana gets Medicaid health care from the feds now.

related to Obamacare, etc.

So he's pro gun and anti-abortion but ... pro Obamacare? He must have a lot of friends down there.

Shows you how many friends David Vitter has!

haw. http://johnbelforobama.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period.

Stay at home white poor folks not vote for Republican white poor folks....

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

what's it like to be from a small town and actually like small towns

global travel alert for US citizens til Feb 24

travel to Canada not included, right? free n' easy there

it's Canadia.

godfuckalmighty

Avi Selk
‏@aviselk
The anti-Islam group that took guns to an Irving mosque has published the home addresses of dozens of local Muslims

http://irvingblog.dallasnews.com/2015/11/group-that-brought-guns-to-irving-mosque-publishes-muslims-home-addresses.html/

Murtaza Hussain ‏
@MazMHussain
I can see why Clock Boy and his family decided to move from this town to Qatar.

yup.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sen. Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that plans by aluminum giant Alcoa to close its North Country smelter have been averted due to a $70 million state aid package that will save its 600 jobs through at least early 2019.

However, during a news conference at the Massena plant, Schumer also said he had earlier helped Alcoa get a scaled-back federal cleanup of toxic PCBs from the Grasse River to help the plant stay open, and felt "betrayed" when the corporation announced last month the smelter was to close by early next year.

"We worked hard to come to an agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency," Schumer said. Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld "told me you make sure we don't have to put up a billion dollars to clean up the Grasse River, and we will put it into this plant ... when I read in the newspaper that the plant was closing, I felt totally betrayed."

http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Alcoa-jobs-saved-in-North-Country-6655805.php

Great job, Chuck Schumer

i mean i know it's obvious to everyone here but like just employ those 600 people and have them clean up trash on the highways with that 70 million my fucking god...

i think politicians have a really reactionary response to this kind of stuff.... like as soon as any business threatens layoffs they start thinking "what concessions can i provide to keep that from happening?" just so they don't have to face those dozen people yelling at them about jobs... rather than step back and think about the bigger picture.

this is one of the baselines of politics, it has nothing to do with party or ideology.

@jaketapper
tomorrow 11 am: Unveiling Ceremony of the Marble Bust of VP Dick Cheney at the United States Capitol Visitor Center, Emancipation Hall

‏@mattduss
A great sign to the world of how seriously the US takes the ban on torture.

you're on Twitter?

nope

I find this fascinating: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-can-t-understand-american-politics-without-reading-this-study

Here's the followup: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-that-most-important-study

Yeah follow up (on Gelman's study) complicate things somewhat.

they complicate Marshall's primary conclusions quite a bit

what were Marshall's primary conclusions again?

the way I read this part:

Beneath the often febrile and sometimes race-tinged Republican talk about Obama "radically tranforming" America, or being a socialist whose erasing American 'exceptionalism' or various other regular themes on Fox News, one fairly straightforward, clear message is almost always discernible: The country people know, their country, is being taken away from them.

...in summary is that white people are mad because Govmit and immigrants and Obama...and their coping mechanisms (or inability to cope physiologically) is bad for their life expectancy.

(and in fact, it's worse for white life expectancy for a certain demographic than other demos in the study.)

But Gelman et al pointed out that methodology and reporting had ignored some nuances--what was driving the life expectancy numbers in Marshall's conclusions was actually women in that demo.

I don't think many people would have ever guessed that.

"How many times do we have to learn not to fuck with banking laws from the 1930s?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trust-indenture-act_5661c3f1e4b08e945fef2bbe

sounds like those middle age white red state takers need to pull themselves up by their bootstaps

the point of the marshall article is pretty clear to me. these people are terrified because they're dying.

I thought the point was, in addition, that racism paid off for these people, and now it's not paying off anymore, and they're stressed because it gave them enough of an edge to overcome their terrible habits.

those follow-up interpretations of the data point out that the increase in mortality rates is more severe among women. i really wonder if the opiate crisis we're in isn't much more severe than we think.

lol @ talkingpointsmemo guy's blurry screencaps

Jon Cogburn has a thorough and thoughtful take on this study (http://www.philpercs.com/2015/11/white-punks-on-dope.html) here's some paragraphs towards the end:

"The New Deal was an astounding success at pulling poor whites out entrenched poverty. Because of concessions to racists to get it passed (primarily by exempting jobs from Social Security that southern African Americans worked in and by designing housing policies that to gut cities and redline everything), it did not function nearly as well for African Americans (please read Ta-Nahesi Coates' article on reparations for a glimpse at the full horror show). But for the Arkansas/Oklahoma Cogburns, and people like us, it was astounding. In one generation you had everyone getting college degrees. Consider my father, who had neither running water nor electricity as a child. He would have died as an infant if he hadn't been carried over to someone who had electricity and a chicken incubator. He had scurvy and life threatening untreated strep throat as a child and as an adult recognized the bit in Angela's Ashes where the kids are excited to get to eat the food at the funerals of their friends. Rural Arkansas/Oklahoma wasn't so different from the poorest parts of pre war Ireland. But my grandfather went to college on the GI Bill and my dad went on a ROTC scholarship during a time when college was incredibly cheap and his cousins, who were impoverished as children, also went to college and had middle class lives.

And the New Deal Consensus broke in the 1970s. All of our public policy innovations since then (privatization, deregulation, 401Ks instead of defined benefit pensions, a tax code that taxes work radically higher than capital, increased immigration, offshoring manufacturing, productivity gains from information technology) have served to ensure unprecedented economic growth that does not go to the actual people doing the overwhelming majority of the work. And any time wages have started to creep up since the 1970s, a recession comes along that serves to increase the reserve army of unemployed and relegitimate all of the other neo-liberal economic policies that are part of the problem.

The recent rapid increase in suicide rates started in 2007 (again, before Obama was President) with the onset great recession. But it also started at the end of thirty years or so of the constant and increasing erosion of the New Deal consensus.

I don't want to pretend that there are easy solutions to any of these problems. I just want to note that the generations being robbed from are the very generations whose parents inculcated the terror of falling back into poverty. The New Deal was largely passed by the "tweener generation," the one just prior to "the greatest generation." It's been dismantled mostly by the greatest generation (Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose are full of it) with baby boomer help. And the victims of the dismantling are boomers not in on the grift and the children and grandchildren of the boomers. The downwardly mobile people who inherited bad Calvinism and whose parents and grandparents benefited from the New Deal can't handle it. They hate themselves."