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

hero

xp it is awesome.

my governor, ladies and gents. He probably bought a tea no sugar.

lol

Glorious, although one has to assume Rick Scott's sense of shame is deeply buried if it exists at all, given all he's done to gut public services.

as suspected:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Report-4-credible-sex-abuse-allegations-7234198.php

Bruce Springsteen cancels Greensboro, NC show over anti-LGBT bathroom law: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bruce-springsteen/a-statement-from-bruce-springsteen-on-north-carolina/10153539447566824

awesome

Taibbi: Bernie or no Bernie, Paul Krugman is wrong about the banks

Krugman would likely argue that all those little things like laundering money for narco-terrorists, monkeying with world interest rates, and systematic cheating in the currency markets had nothing to do with the crash.

He would technically be correct in this. But the entire argument for breaking up the banks, which incidentally didn't originate in the Senate with Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren but with Ohio's Sherrod Brown and then-Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, was conceived with the idea that leaving over-large banks intact invited not only the potential for future bailouts, but future regulatory problems.

As MIT economist Simon Johnson pointed out in 2010, these institutions have become so big that they can confront and defy the government. Moreover the failure to punish the banks for the great mortgage frauds of the crisis years left all of these companies with the knowledge that the authorities were afraid to aggressively enforce the law, for fear of disrupting a fragile economy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-banks-should-be-broken-up-20160408

or to take comfort in knowing that the extent of the shit they did was so deep and all encompassing that prosecuting and getting convictions is both insanely expensive and not a slam dunk, which prosecutors dont want to be a part of.

can I just
http://iowastartingline.com/2016/04/08/iowa-gops-3rd-district-platform-is-totally-bonkers-especially-on-gay-rights/

impressive

"leave no repression behind"

Wow that's some comprehensive evil

I assumed ALEC just drafts shit like this and the states just do a universal draft and replace with their own state name but I guess not

ugh awful sentence

'hastert rule'

Rick Scott creates attack ad centered on the lady who publicly criticized him, showing that he's such a petulant fucking baby that being accosted in public by a civilian warrants the same level of smear campaign that an active political opponent would deserve (ok, she used to be a 'former government official' - who really gives a shit). He just outright doesn't care how he's perceived. I hope he has an aneurysm.

I still can't figure out who voted for the guy as even people I know who lean more conservative or moderate hate the guy.

Dems stayed home in 2010 and 2014, that's why.

there was more of a concerted effort locally in my community to vote the guy out - I left work early to cast my vote, and there were people circulating Rick Scott is an asshole bumper stickers. someone affixed one to my groin at karaoke night.

but then again as you imply there's a diff between people who loudly beg to vote a menace out and people who actually show up at gametime.

shoulda said more of a concerted effort in 2014, in 2010 I got the impression many of us didn't give as much of a shit which is how he got his foot in the door.

If every registered Dem in Broward had voted Charlie Crist would've been governor -- that's how close it was.

The other party is the Florida Democratic Party nominating goddamn Charlie Crist.

*the other problem

No mention on ILX yet of Democracy Spring. Also not much coverage in the media about it. Is it a big deal?

It's paying our boy Hoosteen so kind of a big deal

Flint, Michigan. Wasn't that something we all cared about at some point? Good to know someone's been held accountable... for all that!

Clinton will fix it!

Michigan already voted

No mention on ILX yet of Democracy Spring. Also not much coverage in the media about it. Is it a big deal?

― ejemplo (crüt), Sunday, April 10, 2016 4:03 PM (2 days ago

I had never heard of it till yesterday when I was doing a US Capitol building tour, and after we left the building we saw the Democracy Spring protestors outside. There was only 75 or so folks there and it did not look like much of a big deal. Some of 'em went up some steps that regular folks are not allowed on and staged a sit-in so they would get arrested.

Ooh, did not know Hoos was involved

it was #1 trending on twitter

Well today trending #1 on twitter is #NationalGrilledCheeseDay so Hoos has to work a little harder

i hope it becomes a thing + <3 h00s but i am skeptical that it will become a thing. not sure why breaking the 'arrest record' is so exciting but wherever i've seen it reported (cnn) it was about that as tho it was a Guinness world record feat.

What trends on your Twitter - this is for the both of y'all - isn't exactly what everyone else sees.

To go off-topic for a moment, Twitter would like for me to pick one of these places in my region so it can post "what's trending."

http://i.imgur.com/6JV2x3T.png

I don't really identify with any of those places, so I always see this instead.

http://i.imgur.com/AWDo6Qs.png

Hey, look! #NationalGrilledCheeseDay is trending! And Yuri Gagarin!

tbh i'm not even sure where the trending section is on twitter! but i saw hoos post a screenshot that showed around 200,000 tweets about #DemocracySpring yesterday

Well, wait. I guess I do kinda identify with "United States", sorta in the same way I identify myself as a Roman Catholic.

xp

aka the tweettrender

the tweet trender, the death threat sender

i think that media outlets rarely run stories about 'deliberate' protests now unless they draw more interest from the uninvolved (spontaneous joining in, hitherto unidentified interest, etc.). BLM still protest round my parts a lot and it seems it's really only the effect of significant shutdowns (highways, ballparks, big events) that gets them headlines.

During daytime and afternoon news segments, CNN did not devote any coverage to the actions. MSNBC mentioned the protests for approximately 12 seconds, while Fox News mentioned the arrests and discussed the protests for about 17 seconds.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/12/democracy-spring-media-coverage/

:(

i did hear the NPR story this morning

looks like some bankster apologists may have a bone to pick with Senator Warren.

‏@ggreenwald
To whom is Warren referring when she says "Revisionist history is dangerous" on (Too Big to Fail)? Interesting

"Eight years ago, Too Big to Fail banks sparked a financial meltdown, then sucked up hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Today, after an extensive, multi-year review process, federal regulators concluded that five of the country's biggest banks are still - literally - Too Big to Fail. They officially determined that five US banks are large enough that any one of them could crash the economy again if they started to fail and were not bailed out.

"This announcement is a very big deal. It's scary. And it means that, unless these banks promptly address the concerns identified by the regulators, the government must push these banks to get smaller and less complex.

"The announcement also dramatically demonstrates the danger of taking our focus off the big banks as we think about how to prevent the next major crisis.

"There's been a lot of revisionist history floating around lately that the Too Big to Fail banks weren't really responsible for the financial crisis. That talk isn't new. Wall Street lobbyists have tried to deflect blame for years. But the claim is absolutely untrue...."

https://www.warren.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1112

spoiler: she's talkin to Krugman, Frank and Shakey

it's funny all the flack Krugman got past week for those TBTF comments. he was probably the most OTM person in the world on the crisis while it was happening, mostly due to having the right analogy in mind with Japan (the book he wrote in 1999 is crazy prophetic). i'm sure he's against TBTF but the thrust of his argument was that it's deregulated/shadow banking of investment banks that lead to these types of crises, rather than moral hazard in regulated banks. so ending TBTF may be desirable but it's not necessary or sufficient to prevent the next crisis. and like, Bernie Sanders agrees with that, TBTF isn't the only part of his financial reform plan, says he wants to "make Banking boring again" and all that good stuff. and i mean, obviously if you're running a populist campaign it's the stuff like jail bankers or end TBTF that gets people motivated, and not like, higher equity requirements. so no one really disagrees, more like the left are realizing how lazy and smug the guy with a Nobel prize they relied for a gloss of legitimacy to anti-Austerity is.

lol Morbz do you know how much air there is between Frank and Warren on this cuz its not a lot

(I don't care about/don't read Krugman)

but keep on misrepresentin, I know that's yr thing

i suspect part of Krugman's skepticism re:Sanders (other than shilling in hopes of getting a CEA chair under Clinton???) is that he doesn't trust Sanders to follow through with the unsexy, technical but necessary parts of financial reform. but it's a good big name easy-to-understand wedge to get people riled up with. also ending TBTF has pretty bi-partisan appeal

I mean who do you think wrote the goddamned law that led "federal regulators [to] conclude that five of the country's biggest banks are still - literally - Too Big to Fail"

er xp