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

I just got a sponsored ad on FB for the Newsom campaign asking for my support because the former LA Mayor just announced he is running too.

ugh so is Villaraigosa.. they're two sides of the same milquetoast coin, imo.

sad lol all my LA friends assured me Villaraigosa's career was DOA after his disastrous mayoral tenure

Well, it isn't that Newsom is milquetoast, it's that as mayor, he supported the wealthy over the poor all the time, and did stupid things like make a major statement about public health by banning the sale of cigarettes at Walgreen's stores.

didn't he take a fucking 18 year old to the sf opera opener

xp - i wonder how much that election will be Bay Area people voting for the guy from L.A. because he isn't Newsom, and vice versa.

yeah Newsom is v much in the Clinton mold imo - a number of policy things I actually agree w, p loathsome on a personal level, way too comfy w oligarch

oligarchy

also looks like American Psycho

I dont think Villaraigosa left office super unpopular? At least in the mind of people not paying a ton of attention. He just couldn't stop fucking tv news reporters. I'd need to look it up. He's currently taking credit for the LA Metro.

xp - Well yes, the only enjoyable part of Newsom's tenure in SF politics was comparing him to Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman.

@donnabrazile

What's on your menu? Just ran into James O'Keefe in Florida at a conference hosted by David Horowitz. We live in interesting times.

@tinyrevolution

This is like Reince Priebus showing up at an ANSWER conference 3 days after Cynthia McKinney was elected president

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/us/politics/democrats-house-senate.html?_r=0

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, long a critic of trade deals, said in an interview that he had spoken extensively with Mr. Trump’s trade adviser and would work with him on issues concerning steel workers. “We can work with him on things we agree on,” Mr. Brown said. “On Bannon, no.”

Mr. Brown sent a letter to Mr. Trump urging him to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, make changes to the trade relationship with China and fight currency manipulation, which is also a pet issue of Mr. Schumer. Mr. Sanders put out a statement after the election saying he too would work with Mr. Trump on areas of populist agreement.

At the same time, they remain his adversary on other matters. For example, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, now the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday that “the committee will pay very close attention to proposed nominees to ensure the fundamental constitutional rights of Americans are protected.”

Re NAFTA, there's Brown's above take and then I read the following from mostly liberal Kevin Drum:

The OECD estimates that NAFTA had essentially no effect on employment, and the International Trade Commission estimates that it had essentially no effect on wages. So withdrawing wouldn't do any good for all those working-class folks Trump appealed to, but it would cause plenty of upheaval for businesses that are tightly integrated with their Mexican supply chains.1

Of course, NAFTA's impact hasn't been the same everywhere. There are a few industries where employment has been negatively affected. So Trump could focus on those and boast about how he's bringing jobs back to America. Prices of Mexican imports would go up too, but that's a pretty diffuse effect and most people probably wouldn't notice it.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/trump-talked-big-about-nafta-can-he-deliver

A big deal.

The case could now go directly to the Supreme Court

Er, lol?

This means that it's status pro pre-Nino: the Most Important Man in America will decide the case.

status quo

Katrina vanden Heuvel on Putinmongering:

The hysteria being drummed up around Putin’s alleged intervention in the U.S. elections isn’t accidental. Neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have been pumping for a new cold war with Russia. Now, with Trump suggesting that he might seek a new detente with Russia, cooperate to attack the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and cool tensions over Ukraine, hyping Putin’s alleged intervention in our elections makes any cooperation more difficult.

In this situation, the press has to be careful that its reporting doesn’t peddle fear and neo-McCarthyite slurs rather than fact. For example, The Post’s front-page article touted “independent researchers” making the sensational claim that Russian propaganda efforts in the election “were viewed more than 213 million times” on Facebook alone. But the primary source of the report was the anonymous executive director of PropOrNot, which apparently started up just this summer and refuses to release the names of its leaders or the sources of its funds. PropOrNot, The Post reported, maintains a list of more than 200 websites that it claims were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” during the election....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putin-didnt-undermine-the-election-we-did/2016/11/28/b7cd6984-b594-11e6-959c-172c82123976_story.html

Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte
‏@HouseScience
.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists

Bernie Sanders
‏@SenSanders
Where'd you get your PhD? Trump University?

nice to see the execrable Delingpole take one between the eyes there

Repub concedes NC gov race

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy7eZrxUsAAmXe4.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/05/north-carolina-gov-pat-mccrory-r-concedes-closely-contested-governors-race/

Even in conceding the fucker has to play the voting fraud card.

every losing R is gonna do that from now on

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html

These stories have been legendary for eons, but getting a definitive account of over $100 billion a year in waste is pretty damning.

I'm an unapologetically pro-government liberal. I believe that the wheezy old Federal machinery, imperfect as it is, is often the only machine that is at least trying to work on behalf of those who are most vulnerable. I also frequently work for businesses that can be just as blindingly stupid.

That said, conservatives regularly exempt military spending from their litany of tsk-tsky "bad government, bad, naughty government!" The military is all that is noble and good and self-sacrificing. We need a strong military so that we can waggle our national erection before weaker nations. Military spending dwarfs every other category of non-entitlement spending. But when it turns out it's even more wasteful and bloated than anything mere civilians can come up with? Crickets.

Bad naughty government spending consists of PBS, the EPA, Common Core, Obamacare, grants for cowboy poetry.

So tell me if I'm simplifying this but if Scalia hadn't died, McCrory would likely have been re-elected.

xpost Reading that article, it seems less that it's guns 'n' planes 'n' bombs military spending, which offers the bang for the buck GOP loves best, and more just secretarial bureaucracy stuff. I honestly don't know how they determine what is "waste" and what is not, but I was impressed to see that the Pentagon at large employs over a million people, and, as it notes specifically, employs almost as many people working desk jobs in "business operations" as it does active troops.

What's sad is that lots of people will see that fact as a priori evidence of waste.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Those are all just abstract numbers, nowhere (that I saw) does it say what those people do, whether it's important, or what would happen if they were cut. Someone's got to be at a desk, paying bills, cleaning bathrooms, working at the cafeteria, signing checks, etc. It's not just people running around with guns or flying bombing raids, I imagine sending the aforementioned across the globe takes some extensive work.

Yeah and the more you decide to cut non-combatant costs by entrusting that work to junior junior purchasing clerks or bargain-priced contractors, the more likely it is to go wrong.

You'll just end up with the same $500 dollar hammers and thousand-dollar toilet seats*, but it will be due to incompetence in data entry as opposed to naked corruption.

* = note that many of these stories are overblown and/or misleading; e.g., the very expensive toilet seats actually turned out to be an entire toilet ASSEMBLY for a space shuttle, which one might expect to be solving slightly different problems than your shitter at home, thxbye

Yeah take "an army travels on its stomach" and expand to all the 1,000,000,000 things that need to be done to make every little thing happen around the world.

Tru facts from the front linez: at one time, my work involved analyzing and reporting procurement data for the U.S. Coast Guard. USCG technically predates the Navy, and has wandered among the War Department, Transportation, Defense, and Homeland Security; it therefore has interestingly overlapping procedural overlays and operates under several different regulatory frameworks all at once. Its acquisitions are complicated.

1. A junior procurement officer in Yorktown, Va. had purchased some photocopier parts. He looked at the box and it said "Made in Korea," and he dutifully entered a code he thought was right but that indicates North Korea. There was some consternation among people wondering why the American people were buying North Korean copier parts. I don't know if this rose to the level of Congressional attention, but it might have.

2. In a similar vein, these systems required a two-letter code for place of manufacture. "AL" is the code for Albania. Woebetide the clerk who is purchasing something from Alabama.

3. While junior clerks were being hassled over minor data-entry problems like these, an entire billion-dollar shipbuilding program decided the system was too cumbersome to even bother interacting with, so they just kept their own records on a locally-maintained Excel spreadsheet.

Did I read that right that at one point the report was made top secret?

uh, Clinton thinks CONGRESS should "act" against 'fake news'? What a smashing civil libertarian. See what you've done, max?

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/309532-clinton-blasts-epidemic-of-fake-news

What a stupid thing to do with a repressive regime coming into power, what the fuck is wrong with her?

@dick_nixon
Finger on the pulse, just like the campaign.

In his Daily Beast article, published on November 21, Chacon describes how he manufactured the forged Goldman Sachs speech transcript. He says he did it prior to learning that the WikiLeaks releases of Podesta emails contained actual Clinton speech excerpts to Wall Street banks. But once he realized WikiLeaks had published actual Clinton transcripts, Chacon began trying to lure people he disliked – Clinton critics – into believing that his forged speeches were real, so that he could prove they were gullible and dumb.

Sadly for Chacon, however, the people who ended up getting fooled by his Fake News items were the nation’s most prominent Clinton supporters, including supposed experts and journalists from MSNBC who used his obvious fakes to try to convince the world that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and thus should be ignored. That it was pro-Clinton journalists who spread his Fake News as real now horrifies even Chacon....

Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/

You worry about her & her campaign, and I will worry about this instead:

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/09/womens-march-on-washington-barred-from-protesting-donald-trump-inauguration/

National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst told The Guardian that agency rules in place since 2008 give an inaugural committee preferential access to some public areas along Pennsylvania Avenue, the National Mall and surrounding land. Litterst said it will likely take crews until March 1 to dismantle the barricades and seating assembled for Trump’s inauguration.

they've secured an alternate location

still bullshit, obviously

They still have not announced the "alternate location" as far as I can tell

next time you want to buy the media just remember to buy the fake media too

https://twitter.com/haircut_hippie/status/806727683195355136

TX's refusal of medicaid expansion doing a lot of work vis a vis the point of that story

Right, the fact that states are turning down free money in a bid to undermine their poorest citizens' right to health care is the real scandal

"Well, the Republicans..." is generally the response to anything of that sort - which is simultaneously true and irrelevant. Did anyone think the Republicans were going to work with Obama to make the ACA a success once passed? If they did, would they like to buy some beachfront property in Montana?

The masses aren't going to suddenly understand the complicated ways in which the American right undermines them - all they see is a party that's just as integrated with wealth and power and not doing anything they can see to help them, because the measures that would are automatically off the table.

Yes, but what about the Republicans?

@gatorgoat
You know what a good message is to non-voters? "Vote for me, and I'm going to give you a raise and make sure you can go to the doctor."

Not "if you make between $24,678 and $29,284 you will receive a subsidy of 9.3% of your adjusted income toward a tiered-access health plan"

"Consult subsection VI, graph 4 to determine your indexed income (adjusted for current interest rates) to see if you qualify for a 1% raise"

"If your locality participates in an exchange market and you qualify for the earned income tax credit you may get a 0.931% incentive"

"Just go fill out this 336-page form and we will contact you for your initial interview to determine eligibility in 4-6 weeks"

THIS SHIT IS WHAT DEMOCRATS CALL "HELPING" AND THEY'RE CONFUSED WHY THEY LOSE ALL THE FUCKING TIME

https://twitter.com/gatorgoat/status/809064589715456000

can we talk about what a piece of shit the israeli ambassador to the US is?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ron-dermer-praises-frank-gaffney

Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official, also has promoted the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim, as well as the conspiracy theory that public figures including Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist have covert ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Ambassador Dermer is not aware of any anti-Muslim views held by the Center for Security Policy and certainly would not endorse any such view,” a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. told the Southern Poverty Law Center in November when asked about Dermer’s acceptance of the award.