Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

idk how much a NYT endorsement is worth on the Dem side but on the Rep side you'd probably prefer they don't endorse you

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/12494974_10156429228390623_234325197527024804_n.jpg?oh=5dbc2d955f21df3cbe7bba3d355b53f8&oe=573B11A0

lol

Where was the original contradiction?

(*ahem*) supply side (*ahem*) trickle down (*ahem*) deregulation

*christian*

Mrs. Clinton can be more hawkish on the use of military power than Mr. Obama, as shown by her current call for a no-fly zone in Syria and her earlier support for arming and training Syrian rebels. We are not convinced that a no-fly zone is the right approach in Syria, but we have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton would use American military power effectively and with infinitely more care and wisdom than any of the leading Republican contenders.

man this is some spineless shit. her military record is disastrous. it's telling that -- in what is supposedly an endorsement in the democratic primary -- her contrasts with republicans are highlighted

the thing that strikes me about this race is the growing perception that, one way or another, this is endgame for american democracy, that the legislature is unwilling or unable to perform its prescribed duties and that the next president will more or less openly rule by fiat. of course when the supreme court strikes down rule by executive order this spring (an outcome the obama administration is openly courting, presumably because they assume it will give the democrats an electoral advantage) that will throw another wrinkle in things. all of the arguments of just a few years ago over the "nuclear option" in congress seem quaint and hollow now.

(this also neuters one of the key anti-bernie arguments, because you can answer "how will he work with congress?" the with "the same way clinton will- by ignoring them".)

Hilary's military record now is a hell of a lot less disastrous than Bush, Obama, Clinton (I), and what it will be in eight years...

I consider the Non-Invasion of Iran to be on the Pro side for the Obama admin's use of military power.

What point are you trying to make by observing that her record is less disastrous than it will be if she becomes president (xp).

man this is some spineless shit. her military record is disastrous. it's telling that -- in what is supposedly an endorsement in the democratic primary -- her contrasts with republicans are highlighted

― k3vin k., Saturday, January 30, 2016 5:36 PM (43 minutes ago)

yeah that is appalling. it's telling that a lot of the pro-hillary arguments basically elide her awful foreign policy.

yeah as much as i can wince whenever bernie addresses foreign policy and hillary clearly knows her shit so much more that a sanders administration would be so so much more likely to do or not do what i like than a clinton one

What point are you trying to make by observing that her record is less disastrous than it will be if she becomes president (xp).

― boxall, 30. januar 2016 19:06 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mainly just joking. But I honestly don't think her record can be described as 'disastrous'. Yet...

there are legitimate arguments that our intervention in libya and the surge in afghanistan, both of which she strongly advocated for and neither of which faced unanimous support w/in the administration, were disastrous. it's fair to argue that if obama had listened to her re: syria it would have been disastrous and that her judgment there (which btw she hasn't changed on) can be considered as part of her record. she may have voted for a war or two as senator as well iirc.

her foreign policy is one of the things that would prevent me from voting for her in the general. really p much "supreme court team captain for 4-8 years" is her biggest selling point for me.

NYT should've brought back Judith Miller to write the endorsement for old times' sake

the growing perception that, one way or another, this is endgame for american democracy, that the legislature is unwilling or unable to perform its prescribed duties and that the next president will more or less openly rule by fiat

your personal perception, you mean? this has happened before and IIRC the late 20th century model of "bipartisan" US governance is the anomaly, not at all the norm.

worth remembering that in 1979-1980 the smart chatter concerned the twilight of the presidency

then all of a sudden the pageantry was restored

then all of a sudden Nancy Davis saved my soul

hardly worth the trouble!

said Jane Wyman

"your personal perception, you mean? this has happened before and IIRC the late 20th century model of "bipartisan" US governance is the anomaly, not at all the norm."

the perception of the people i talk to, mostly. it's not about whether or not "the norm" is being breached but what direction economic and social forces are driving governmental institutions, which is to say an increasingly strong executive, an increasingly weak legislature, and no particular foreseeable trends that could change that.

I don't see this current executive as any stronger than the prior ones, but I see right-wingers trying to assert that Obama's executive orders are somehow worse, more controlling and illegal. The right-wing arguments seem pretty weak on this

http://www.infowars.com/study-obama-has-issued-more-restrictive-executive-orders-than-past-six-administrations/

Figures compiled by the Federal Register also show that while Obama has issued 229 executive orders, to George W. Bush’s 292 and Bill Clinton’s 308, the total length of Obama’s orders equates to 1,086 pages.
Bush’s orders comprised 922 pages and Clinton’s just 781 pages.
“Not all executive orders are created equal,” said John Hudak of the Brookings Institution. “Some are quite forceful, making dramatic changes to policy. Others are more routine, housekeeping issues.”

So Cruz still doesn't know what he would replace Obamacare with....

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/30/uncomfortable-question-for-ted-cruz-on-obamacare-silences-the-room/?action=click&contentCollection=Americas&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Mark never had health care until Obama care,” Mr. Valde continued. “What are you going to replace it with?”

Mr. Cruz expressed condolences and pivoted quickly to a well-worn answer assailing the health care law.

Mr. Cruz said “millions of Americans” had lost their jobs and their doctors as a result of the law, and that many had “seen their premiums skyrocket.”

He said he had often joked about a pledge by Mr. Obama that premiums would drop: “Anyone whose premiums have dropped $2,500, as President Obama promised, should vote for Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Cruz said. “I’ll take everybody else.”

Many in the room laughed.

Mr. Valde — who said in an interview later that he did in fact intend to caucus for Mrs. Clinton — pressed on.

“My question is, what are you going to replace it with?” he said.

hero

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

well i never

Genuinely not sure what the CDs are supposed to signify there.

"I don't see this current executive as any stronger than the prior ones, but I see right-wingers trying to assert that Obama's executive orders are somehow worse, more controlling and illegal. The right-wing arguments seem pretty weak on this"

i'm far from a right-winger, and i don't see the executive orders as "bad"- they're the only possible response to a fundamentally broken (and universally despised) legislature. i also don't see this as a partisan issue, but a long-term historical trend, particularly clear when you look at the leading candidates from both parties this year, all of whom exemplify, in various ways, a fetishization of autocracy. i don't think the notion that executive orders should be judged qualitatively as well as quantitatively is a bad point, either. combine the sweeping use of executive orders with the fairly novel (that i know of) claimed executive right to selectively enforce laws on the books and the long-term trend is definitely towards greater centralization of power in the executive.

as for whether the orders are unconstitutional, the court will be ruling on the issue this year, and i for one have very little doubt as to how they'll rule- i do not see this as an issue that will split the conservative majority. the only question is what the reaction will be to that ruling, and i genuinely have no idea myself.

tried to make a Mean To Hillary thing but hey who wants to see a Katha Pollitt cartoonface, ewwww

Genuinely not sure what the CDs are supposed to signify there.

I think the image is from South Park back in the days when a CD burner was part of one's system pretty routinely, they signify "this guy is sitting around at his computer all day" i.e. it's a joke one can't really make any more because the forum on which you're making it is certainly the internet and we're all the guy who wants the hot pocket

He uncharacteristically used one scripted line, citing a Bible verse from “two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians,” drawing some chuckles from the audience. Back on his plane, an angry Mr. Trump reviewed his page of notes and saw he copied “2 Corinthians” exactly as emailed from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who suggested its usage in the Liberty speech.

With social and cable media highlighting his gaffe, Mr. Trump blamed it on a momentary lapse of listening to someone other than himself. “I’m self-funding my campaign; no one can tell me what to say or do,” Mr. Trump said. “I do better that way.”

Mr. Perkins said: “I gave him the reference as you would find it in any English Bible.”

xp That makes sense - I can see the South Park guys thinking "This guy just burns CDs and leave them around, that's what they do, on the internet".

ugh:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/10/06/struggle-for-soul-democratic-party-pits-wall-street-backed-think-tank-against-elizabeth-warren/pYk3SXRnZDmpi7C7N4ZpXN/story.html?event=event25#comments

Is the guy's mom just off-screen to the right in that one room apartment?

...i actually do have stacks of burned cds laying around my computer desk, although i suppose if i'd cleaned off my desk at some point in the last decade i wouldn't...

the fairly novel (that i know of) claimed executive right to selectively enforce laws

Relatedly, the general consensus on US v. Texas is the opposite of yours - a comfortable reversal (that is, federal government upheld).

x-post to a fundamentally broken (and universally despised) legislature

Despised but I don't see it as "fundamentally broken." Or are you suggesting gerrymandering and demographics will forever leave House and maybe Senate in one stubborn party's hands, and presidency in another's. Stubborn Republicans keep pushing same old ideas without a veto-proof majority now, while in the past during Reagan and Bush years they could get some Dems to sign off on their ideas be they tax cuts for rich or Iraq. Bipartisanship for its own sake is not necessarily good.

"It is the opposite of novel - executive discretion to enforce or not is extremely broad, and especially in an area like immigration."

i'm not even talking about immigration, necessarily, though that's part of it. there's also things like the federal ban on marijuana, where the administration is giving states a great deal of leeway. as in the case of immigration, i am broadly in agreement with the position of the executive branch on the issue, but i disagree with the notion that individual states can "opt out" of obedience to federal law.

interesting to hear the consensus on us v. texas. i confess i haven't been following the case terribly closely- has it been argued yet? do they think kennedy will join the liberal bloc on that one?

re: legislature being fundamentally broken- i don't mean simply the presidency being in the hands of one party and the legislature in another- that seems to be more or less par for the course in the american system. the main twist here is that the party in control of the legislature is itself fundamentally broken and ideologically bankrupt, and the social, economic, and political structure of the country right now tends to encourage this outcome. specifically what outrages me most is the ongoing attempts to exert power over the executive by refusing to raise the debt limit unless their demands are met. that's not good governance, that's some dr. evil shit right there. a group with that sort of destructive power, the will to use it, and a lack of good judgment or principle ought to have that power stripped from them.

the parties are much more ideologically coherent now. alot of bipartisan governing was born out of southern yellow dog dems or liberal northeastern republicans. 30-40 years ago you could have a democrat like larry mcdonald in congress who was further to the right than ronald reagan. nowadays the most liberal republicans are generally still to the right of the most conservative democrats. the move toward ideological purity tests and threat of being primaried (which obv conservatives have been far more successful at than progressives) has only amplified the trend. i'd also argue that a reduction in a certain kind of hamiltonian corruption eg pork has reduced the mechanisms thru which government in the past was made possible.

Sure - it's clear that not being "conservative" enough is a the kiss of death for a Republican... so yeah, the purity thing is there, but I don't know if that makes them ideologically coherent. I mean, just look at these primaries! It's been said many times before but there's really no strong reason on paper why xenophobia, apocalyptic religious mania, big-government subsidies for corporations, small-government views of regulatory agencies, military might, turn-back-the-clock culture war stuff, the death penalty, etc., etc., would all go together. In the America that we have, they happen to line up with a lot of the same demographics and you can win elections by bundling them all together as "conservative," but it's not like they all stem from the same intellectual tradition, or that one logically leads to the others or anything. They've been effectively welded together, but they're not coherent.

american two-party democracy encourages coalition parties, and this has been the case since at least the start of the third party system in ~1860. in some senses the coalition of parties around, say, 1900 made more sense than the current coalition (militaristic imperialism, for instance, seems a more logical complement to a vision of an interventionist "big government" than it does to a government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub), and in some senses it did not. the issue here is that one of the current coalition parties has developed, as one of its core tenets, the refusal to compromise. i'd argue that this is an intrinsically toxic trait for a coalition party to possess.

what comprises this coalition in 2016?

by ideologically coherent i mean that previously the parties were rooted in geographical factors and history as much as (and honestly probably more than) any shared ideology. ignoring this history is how you get nro types nowadays saying that actually democrats opposed the civil rights act and republicans supported it. there's some truth to that statement - the biggest opponents to civil rights legislation during the sixties were indeed democrats - but it's still fundamentally dishonest; when you remove party labels and exchange it for political ideology it doesn't hold up - liberals and progressives supported civil rights legislation and conservatives opposed it, either out of open bigotry or thru hemming and hawing adherence to conservative 'principles' (cf goldwater in 64 and buckley's 'why the south must prevail'). w/ these southern dems there were still some roots in new deal principles, if only the ability to point at a hospital or highway built helped reelection efforts. as identity politics became a larger factor in democratic party politics and the conservative movement took firmer root in the south you have the gop become competitive in senate and house races in the eighties to winning them during the nineties (w/ as many or more yellow dog dems switching parties esp following the 94 election)(and not really having to change their ideological stripes much) to winning statehouses and governor's mansions this century.

we can argue that shared ideology is now rooted in part on geographical factors, as the data about the GOP's most fervent constituency has shown (i.e. poor rural white voters). And they still want government help so long as it doesn't go to Mexicans and other people not like them.

this isn't to say that the democratic party label in the south was basically meaningless or purely a vestige of civil war grudges. zell miller became a cartoon on the national stage and ppl wondered exactly how the hell this guy was a democrat but the hope scholarship, for all that is decidedly not progressive about it (funded by lottery), is still far more progressive a program than you'll ever see from any of the republican governors that will control this state until well after i die. nevermind a similar expansive classic liberal program, i can't imagine you'll even see a restoration of what hope was under miller and barnes before perdue and deal eroded and chipped away at it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDTAR36WMAAS90J.png:large

HIV?

"And they still want government help so long as it doesn't go to Mexicans and other people not like them."

they do and they don't - cf the govt better keep it's hands off my medicare. and yeah shared ideology is rooted in geographical factors (praying to god gabbneb doesn't fly into that opening to drop some more poli sci he picked up from a book you can buy at walgreen's). just that a realignment that started w/ nixon's southern strategy (or arguably thurmond switching parties in 64) has now settled firmly into place. there's the lbj quote about losing the south for thirty years and while this kinda came true w/ presidential elections (exceptions made when relatively conservative dems from the south were on the ticket) it took much longer for it to happen downticket. when it did it wasn't because of any mass shift in the ideology of southerners, the back country of alabama and mississippi weren't filled w/ hillbilly whitaker chambers and irving kristols who'd had the scales fall from their eyes.