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

Hi! Welcome to Florida!

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

or, you know. most states! the two-party system has fundamentally broken down on the state level.

not in NY, where the Dem governor openly blocks his party from taking too much control.

not in NY, where the Dem governor openly blocks his party from taking too much control.

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius)

in my experience it's less about systems of formal political control (though gerrymandering certainly does play into it) as it is about money. you have a gross financial imbalance between one party and another, and soon people who might actually have some political acumen avoid that party like the plague. the party's complete lack of quality leadership candidates leads in turn to a diminished ability to raise funds. ordinarily these differences of opinion would lead to and the death of the weak party and a schism in the dominant party, but since local parties are necessarily beholden to national parties, this isn't allowed to happen. both parties weaken. the dominant party becomes increasingly corrupt due to the lack of competition. sometimes this gets bad enough that the marginal party manages to get somebody elected, but in most cases their candidate proves to be so completely and totally politically inept that it only further marginalizes their party.

anyway, all this goes some way towards explaining why a guy like evan bayh appears to be a veritable titan of statecraft in comparison to everybody else available.

oh bullshit, he has a fortune to run with and a name the mouthbreathers know, PERIOD

"in my experience it's less about systems of formal political control (though gerrymandering certainly does play into it) as it is about money."

"oh bullshit, he has a fortune to run with"

boy, political discourse with you sure is a valuable and rewarding pastime.

but that does not connect, even generously, with yr wrapup "seems like a titan of statecraft"

i know yr being hyperbolic and you make good points, but on Bayh's level it's just money, power, and narcissistic disorder. Simplify.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/us/politics/congress-recesses-leaving-more-stalemates-than-accomplishments.html?_r=0

7 weeks recess time

but that does not connect, even generously, with yr wrapup "seems like a titan of statecraft"

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius)

ok i was being overly ambiguous here. bayh is unquestionably an opportunistic slimebag who only ever got any votes in the first place because of his dad. i'm simply saying that, even taking that into account, he _still_ manages to tower above the rest of the indiana "left". you want to take a good close look at joe donnelly and his accomplishments in the senate?

Republicans have never made it easy for President Barack Obama to confirm judges. But Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) came up with a new reason the Senate shouldn’t be filling empty court seats: It’s not our job.

Democrats including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) made repeated requests Wednesday to confirm a batch of Obama’s judicial nominees who are ready for votes. Each time they tried, Tillis objected and suggested the Senate shouldn’t be spending time on judges.

“What we get are things that have nothing to do with doing our jobs,” he said. “I’m doing my job today and objecting to these measures so we can actually get back to pressing matters.”

It’s a weird thing to say since it is literally the Senate’s job to confirm judges, as spelled out in the Constitution. It’s also ironic that Tillis is the one saying this, given that he’s overseeing the longest federal court vacancy in the country. There’s been an empty seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina for 3,848 days, or 10.5 years.

If hillary wins these guys aren't going to do shit.

i guess that's probably the biggest reason behind the dems' push to retake the senate- they want at least to be able to fill judicial vacancies.

While Dems have blocked the filling of judicial vacancies, Mitch McConnell and the current Republicans in the Senate have blocked more than any other prior Congress'.

DNC emails! from Wikileaks

http://www.salon.com/2016/07/22/dnc_emails_wasserman_schultz_furiously_pressured_msnbc_after_it_criticized_her_unfair_treatment_of_sanders/

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/dnc-staffers-mocked-the-bernie-sanders-campaign-leaked-emails-show/

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/756523316941324288

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/new-leak-top-dnc-official-wanted-to-use-bernie-sanderss-religious-beliefs-against-him/

@thehill
Leaked email: DNC chairwoman wanted 'unrealistic' number of Hamilton tickets

former ILXer Vic Perry a prominent commenter on The Intercept.

good old Vic "incoherent thick-headed piece of half-sentient shit" Perry

and that's the more affectionate nickname for him

Vic Perry
July 22 2016, 2:50 p.m.
turn the page. vote Jill Stein.

you smoke the day's last cigarette, remembering what she said

man i normally don't say stuff like this, but that guy was a bad poster.

i always got him confused with that other perry

joeks

kind of saddens me the way pro-transparency activists keep winding up inadvertently doing the work of authoritarians. i guess i wouldn't feel so bad about it if i saw any evidence they're attempting to reckon with the moral implications of snowden being in russia.

http://gizmodo.com/wikileaks-just-published-tons-of-personal-data-like-a-b-1784140603?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

wow, fuck them. that means a bunch of people are going to be victim to identity theft, fraud, and worse.

frankly while plenty of the stuff in the leak is evidence of the corruption of our democratic system we've all known about for decades (except mores, he's known about it for centuries), the stuff that so far has gotten press doesn't seem all that awful to me. one asshole in the DNC leadership floated using sanders's lack of religious affiliation against him. that's bad, but you know what isn't bad? the fact that neither the clinton campaign nor its surrogates took the advice.

attempting to reckon with the moral implications of snowden being in russia.

man, what garbage

attempting to reckon with the moral implications of snowden being in russia.

man, what garbage

― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius)

please, go on.

Edward Snowden has criticised Russia for its crackdown on internet freedom and lax attitude to gay rights, despite having been granted asylum by the country.

The National Security Agency whistleblower described Moscow’s tightening grip over online activities and treatment of gay people as “fundamentally wrong”.

The former US intelligence contractor was given a three-year residence permit in August 2014, but insisted that it was never his choice to go there. He said he would prefer to live in the US, although he cannot return without facing arrest for leaking to the Guardian classified documents revealing the vast scale of the country’s surveillance programmes.

The 32-year-old was accepting the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression’s Bjornson prize – which he was awarded for his work on the right to privacy – by videophone from Russia when he described the country’s restrictions on the web as a “mistake in policy”. He said: “It’s wrong in Russia, and it would be wrong anywhere.

“I’ve been quite critical of [it] in the past and I’ll continue to be in the future, because this drive that we see in the Russian government to control more and more the internet, to control more and more what people are seeing, even parts of personal lives, deciding what is the appropriate or inappropriate way for people to express their love for one another ... [is] fundamentally wrong.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/05/snowden-criticises-russia-internet-homosexuality

so he speaks at the convention and refuses to endorse the candidate. i'm so fucking proud of him. what a hero!

I would be more concerned by the idea of releasing stuff when it has the maximum impact, which is just another form of political control of information.

my experience is that people who are the proudest about not "taking sides" tend to wind up on the wrong one. in russia, snowden can say whatever he likes without fear, unlike russian journalists, because he's a propaganda asset to the regime.

really couldn't have cared less if snowden had found asylum in the dprk

didn't the us basically freeze his flights/visa to get him trapped in Russia? That would make sense, as it looks pretty bad for him. if i'm remembering right i think he was on his way to ecuador

snowden can be forgiven, it's not like he had any good choices.

and i think he's made the best out of an impossible situation, basically. wouldn't want to be in his shoes.

yeah snowden did not intend to get stuck in russia, it may be a bad look for a pro civil liberties whistleblower to take asylum in a country with such a poor civil liberties record (tbh can't think of many countries w/ good civil liberties records but russia has a fairly bad one among countries that aren't outright dictatorships) but his only real alternative is going home and facing what would probably be life in prison. i don't think snowden (or manning for that matter) should automatically be grouped in w/ wikileaks which has done some deliberately fucked-up things.

the moral implications of snowden being in russia.

the main moral implication is that the US government would gladly extradite and imprison Edward Snowden if he lived in any country on earth the USA has an extradition treaty with or the power to coerce. that leaves one known option for snowden other than imprisonment in a federal prison. and what would you say are the moral implications of that?

Question about the two-party nature of American politics: I saw a member of the Green Party defend herself against the claim that they only care about presidential elections, and she said that the amount of signatures needed to get on the ballot in local politics is so high that it's impossible without the publicity of a presidential candidate. Is that true? And can that be changed without a constitutional amendment?

Possible thread idea: Where we all complain about stupid stuff in our political systems.

Taking Sides: Two- vs Multi-party Democracies.

Or something.

the amount of signatures needed to get on the ballot in local politics is so high that it's impossible without the publicity of a presidential candidate

this is a huge falsehood

Though we all now the best would be a single party system devoted to permanent world revolution, but, y'know.

In San Francisco, Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales came very close to beating Dem candidate Gavin Newsom in 2003 (a non-presidential election year), for ex.

And can that be changed without a constitutional amendment?

also FYI the Constitution details the powers and limits of the federal government, it does not have anything to say about municipal or state elections.

that being said, a two-party structure is deeply embedded in the Constitution, the result of the way majority/minority rights and powers are delineated

My city council representative belongs to the Socialist Alternative party, I don't think her electoral success has much relationship to whether they run a candidate for president.

Ohio requires a mere 5,000 signatures to get on a ballot for state or federal office as an independent or non-major-party candidate. (Ohio has a total population just shy of 12 million.)

In my county, with a population of 1.26 million, independent candidates for county office are required to get a number of signatures dependent on the number of votes cast in the last election for that office. If there were fewer than 5,000 votes, they need 25 signatures or 1% of the votes, whichever is lower. If there were more than 5,000, they need 1% of the votes as signatures.

Jill Stein is a fucking moron and so is everyone voting for her.

In San Francisco, Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales came very close to beating Dem candidate Gavin Newsom in 2003 (a non-presidential election year), for ex.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, July 28, 2016 11:40 AM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This doesn't really refute the argument. It's unquestionable that the Green Party's ability to do this stems from national visibility due in large part not just to running a candidate in the prior presidential election but running an already somewhat well-known one.

or whichever Green Party shithead that Frederik heard. But Stein is still a moron.

It's unquestionable that the Green Party's ability to do this stems from national visibility due in large part not just to running a candidate in the prior presidential election

it is absolutely questionable, because Matt Gonzales' popularity and prior service to the City was totally unrelated to the Green Party's candidate in the previous presidential election so gtfo with that shit. He did not have any problem getting elected to the Board of Supervisors and then running for Mayor, and it had nothing to do with the national party apparatus of the Green Party and everything to do with the fact that he didn't want to be part of the Democratic Party machine in SF, of which Newsom was a golden boy.

that being said, there are third-party candidates in every mayoral election in SF, often unaffiliated with any party