American politics 2016: Lawyers, Guns, and D-Money

we'll try, man. still stinging from losing tom harkin's seat to a really lame republican

they didn't cite any polling or, well, anything so i'm not sure what makes this challenger "formidable" but yeah i'd love to see grassley get the boot

also wtf dude is 82, retire already

RIP Grassley Twitter account

i'm not sure what makes this challenger "formidable"

"Patty Judge, a former Iowa lieutenant governor and state agriculture secretary..." in a state where agriculture means almost the entire economy.

current US secretary of ag is the last reasonable Iowa governor

kind of wish he'd go back to being a governor, tbh

This is insane: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/the-debilitating-economic-disaster-louisianas-governor-left-behind/?tid=sm_tw

Bobby Jindal destroyed his state to better his chances in the election. And then he got Drumpfed. This Drumpfing of the Gop is the climax to a story that really kicked into gear in 2010. Once Clinton wins and the dems retake the senate, it'll almost be kinda fun. Almost.

Is it really Jindal's fault, though? Hasn't Louisiana been a tragedy since the 1920s, if not earlier?

The influx of cash from Katrina relief funds had the state beginning an upswing right before Jindal came into office; his policies smashed that surplus and dumped the state into its current hole.

An upswing compared to what, though? Seems like Louisiana's always been one of the bottom 5 poorest states, is my point. They didn't really have that far to fall.

It seems to pretty obviously have been made a lot worse by unfunded tax cuts, and then Jindal refusing to take hard choices due to him not wanting to look bad.

Did you read the article? They've always been poor but not cut-everything-60% poor.

“This was years of mismanagement by a governor who was more concerned about satisfying a national audience in a presidential race,” said Jay Dardenne (R), the lieutenant governor under Jindal who is now the state’s commissioner of administration. Dardenne said Jindal had helped the state put off its day of reckoning in a way that mirrored a “Ponzi scheme.”

An upswing compared to what, though? Seems like Louisiana's always been one of the bottom 5 poorest states, is my point. They didn't really have that far to fall.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Friday, March 4, 2016 2:38 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what the fuck man

the lesson is: you can always be poorer

that was Reagan's campaign slogan

On Jindal’s watch, nearly every agency in Louisiana shed employees, and state lawmakers say some teetered because of the losses. The Department of Children & Family Services shrank to 3,400 employees, from 5,000 in 2008, and social workers began carrying caseloads above national standards. The state also cut funding for youth services and mental health treatment.

“When you cut those programs, it doesn’t change the need for people to get those services,” said Walt Leger (D), a state representative. “It just means you’re no longer providing them. Those folks end up in jail or wandering the street, not being treated for mental health issues, and all of those things have a huge societal cost.”

Jindal out doing the rounds blaming the rise of Trump on OBAMA.

what in the actual fuck

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr05%2F2013%2F7%2F23%2F17%2Fanigif_enhanced-buzz-25022-1374615059-0.gif&f=1

Wasserman Schultz will be DNC chair on election day, Y or N?

Chief of Staff!

j/k god I hope not

i really can't see HRC giving two shits about her 'scandals'

esp when she's done such a nice job of running interference

She's so loathed by libs that the party's gonna keep her.

if Cory Booker wasn't considered such a comer he'd be tailor made for the part.

Murtaza Hussain
‏@MazMHussain
Military killed 150 people in one of the many countries it was bombing yesterday, we don't know who they are but luckily they were all bad.

"...the Obama administration on Monday announced that it will for the first time acknowledge the number of people it has killed in drone strikes outside of conventional war zones, including civilians. The report, administration officials said, will be released “in the coming weeks,” and will continue to be released annually. The news came as the Pentagon confirmed that it had carried out one of the largest airstrikes in the history of the war on terror.

Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, described the plan in comments made during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We know that not only is greater transparency the right thing to do, it is the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counterterrorism actions and the broad support of our allies,” Monaco said, adding that the operations described in the report would not cover areas of “active hostilities,” such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria."

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/07/drone-casualty-report-promised-as-u-s-airstrike-kills-150-al-shabaab-members/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdDVOO7W8AE4l7R.jpg

Oof.

was live for about 10 minutes

that can't be real

I mean come on

seriously, that's not real is it

ohmygod

that is simultaneously uforgivably horrible and the funniest fucking thing I've seen so far this yeat

ok it took me a minute, and then.... damn

giggling little assholes, what else do you even say

I think "giggling little assholes" about covers it

to be clear, I am laughing at the galling stupidity that leads someone to think that posting this is a good idea

either they're incredibly uninformed about who they're attacking, or they're gleefully cruel

both pretty damning

and they say the party won't fall in line behind trump?

New documents obtained through Freedom of the Press Foundation’s lawsuit against the Justice Department reveal that the Obama administration - the self described “most transparent administration ever” - aggressively lobbied behind the scenes in 2014 to kill modest Freedom of Information Act reform that had virtually unanimous support in Congress....

Today, we are publishing a detailed memo authored by the Justice Department that strongly objected to almost every aspect of FOIA reform put forth by the House of Representatives at the time....

(From the proposed bill:)

An agency may not withhold information under this subsection unless such agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would cause specific identifiable harm to an interest protected by an exemption [in the FOIA], or if disclosure is prohibited by law.

Doesn’t sound controversial at all, right? While the DOJ noted it was “seemingly analogous to the Attorney General’s ‘foreseeable harm’ standard contained in his 2009 FOIA Guidelines,” it referred to this language as “particularly pernicious.” They claimed a slight word change from the DOJ’s own policy would dramatically expand current policy; yet critically, they stated that they would be against it even if the language was exactly the same as their own stated policy. From the memo:

To be clear, we do not believe that this is fixable by amending the language, because any codification of a foreseeable-harm standard would undermine proper FOIA administration by requiring judges to determine on a document-by-document, subjective basis whether withholding is proper.

Imagine that: giving judges the power to be able to determine whether the government was lying!

https://freedom.press/blog/2016/03/new-documents-show-obama-admin-aggressively-lobbied-kill-transparency-reform-congress

Lawmakers Chug Raw Milk to Celebrate Legalizing Raw Milk, Are Mysteriously Overcome With Stomach Illness

#freedom

i know it's shocking that debbie wasserman schultz would be involved in this, but

In a bizarre display of bipartisan cooperation, a handful of Democratic lawmakers have joined Republicans in trying to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The question is: Why?

Most notably, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also serves as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, is co-sponsoring the deceptively titled Consumer Protection and Choice Act, which would undermine the watchdog agency's pending efforts to rein in predatory lending.

The bill would delay federal regulations for payday lenders by two years. It also would allow states to adopt more lenient rules for the industry.

Wasserman Schultz is joined by eight other Democrats in co-sponsoring the legislation alongside twice as many Republicans.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160308-column.html

Rep. Patrick Murphy is our party's choice to fill Marquito's Florida seat.

Ned brought my attention to this cover story.

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

whatta Nobel guy

"I love that guy"

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

i can't stop watching this

it's always been uncanny how much she looks like my beloved first-grade teacher but maybe it's that way for everyone

beloved and feared

explaining how 'kleptocracy' starts with a short e

treeship otm btw i can't stop thinking about this and idk it feels much less And Hello To Liberal Facebook! than yr average 21c harangue to an empty senate chamber because she is just so so so otm in it and the people she is haranguing are literally in the apparently helpless act of destroying the sixth party system

Holy shit, that speech is pure fire. In tears over here. When does she get to be president?

I hope she's in the Senate for years, inspiring good men and women to run for president.