Trump, September 2017: Walmart Knockoff Hats and Other Indignities

Rhona Graff is not a real person, that's the editor of an electronic newspaper in a cyberpunk novel.

A Trumpster Darkly

Remarkable, this DACA suicide.

Setting aside its obvious cruel stupidity, it's remarkable how much of it seems to be driven by Trump's own two-minded cowardice and desperation. I read it this way: "I gotta act. But I can't be the bad guy, somehow. I can't do this immediately. Congress, they keep telling me not to do this. Okay, they gotta do this themselves. That's it." It's some convoluted attempt at a deal crossed with self-pity where the only one being hurt is him (according to him). Meantime, the whole caucus in the House and relevant figures in the Senate just took a look at the 6 month deadline, the upcoming primary calendar and more and are cursing his name. Of course, you shouldn't pity them either. And they are tied to that shipwreck leading their party all the more tightly now, and they too will think they're the only ones being hurt.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/03/trump-dreamers-immigration-daca-immigrants-242301

DACA is dead in 6 months.

Ned's read is more potentially positive.

I wouldn't call it positive, merely noting the calculus here.

jeff sessions is also a piece of shit

^have been adding this tacit acknowledgement to all my renditions of The Lord's Prayer lately

genius, give your opposition something huge to unite around and only six months to plan a response

we do usually need some time to get our shit together

It looks like there's going to be huge corporate dissent on the DACA repeal.

https://dreamers.fwd.us/Business-Leaders

Let's hope he'll be disgraced/dead by then and someone else can begin rebuilding the country

What would disgrace look like in that scenario tbh

live boy/dead girl obvs

i guess i mean universally disgraced beyond a few lingering Nazi sympathisers

Scratch one up for the classics there ted

Nixon 74 disgraced

The uh goalposts for disgrace have either moved or shrunk since 74 is prob the takeaway here

Best simplify options to 'dead' tbh

KFC needs to reintroduce the Double Down then, imo

Well I mean separate to any political argument then obv

Really hoping that the idea of norms hasn't been stretched absolutely out of shape too far already & that things can be rebuilt.
& that this doesn't signpost future behaviour for Presidents.
Is there any possibility that anything can be put in place to stop any future total neophyte from destroying things they don't like.
Or from getting into such a position of power in the first place.

Well this is it

what does "fixing" american democracy even look like at this point? by what means would it occur? the american political system has always implicitly rested on the idea of virtue; when the illusion of that virtue is so thoroughly shattered, how is such a system reparable?

so is Twin Peaks finale the first disaster of the era we can't blame on him?

No. Spoilers.

I'm already not clicking the hundred Twin Peaks/Lynch threads you're reviving, but can we keep this about rotten to the core politics like it's supposed to? At least till us Europeans get a chance to see the final tonight? Much obliged.

Fixing American democracy, a checklist

1. Redistricting after 2020 census to correct, as much as possible, the ridiculous partisan gerrymandering that was committed after 2010
2. Abolish the electoral college
3. Put voting rights in the Constitution (and amend the status of the territories & DC while we're at it to stop completely disenfranchising 4 million of our own people - a higher than average proportion of which are veterans and their families)
3. Restore balance to the SCOTUS and federal judiciary to help protect & preserve all of the above reforms

Fixing American executive branch institutions, a checklist:

1. Keep a running list of fuckups committed by this administration
2. Win all the elections
3. Appoint a special commissioner to roll back all the fuckups in, say, 270 days or less after inauguration

4. ???
5. Profit!

First, you get the democracy. Then, you get the power. Then you get the women.

I was going to go on about how rebuilding the talent pool of good Feds we're losing from all over (not just State, HUD, EPA; it's everywhere, even Morbius' beloved intelligence community) is going to take a decade, and how some of the law enforcement agencies are going to need multiple lumpectomies, but all that bothers me more than the numbered bullets above, to be honest.

you'd also probably have to do systemic reform of the justice and incarceration system, with particular attention paid to police and prisons.

also make some corrections to a wholly market-based media infrastructure which gives falsehood memetic advantages over truth.

oh, and by the way the entire two-party system the constitution basically requires is rotten and unsustainable, as we have proof positive that should at least one of the parties (probably either) produce an unfit candidate, most people with allegiance to that party will choose party over principle.

also, while we're at it the economy, particularly with respect to jobs, is permanently unstable and will continue to displace workers left and right. preventing the collapse of democracy will probably require addressing the growing reality that employment is not a realistic expectation for many workers.

i'm not optimistic about the possibility of "fixing" things.

rebuilding the talent pool of good feds _is_ a problem, though one which is difficult to measure. to rebuild democracy requires faith in democracy. i'm not entirely sure that, even should the democrats pull another obama out of their ass in 2020 (or, god forbid, 2024) the civic-minded would jump on board to help out. for what? for eight years of a rear-guard action that will end in eight years with somebody even worse than trump undoing everything they've accomplished in 100 days? it's not enough to fix the damage. you have to make people believe the disaster won't recur.

Stepping back even further, we also have to cure the poison that's infected people's minds and beliefs via corporate propaganda over the past few decades. And to fix that we'd have to somehow maneuver around the media apparatuses and politicians that they have a near monopoly over... and somehow overcome the unprecedented levels of wealth and power they hold now... and the fact that they control both the Republican and Democratic parties... and it's all a self-reinforcing system.

And on and on and on. Fixing the US to work better for most people is a massive, generations-long project. My shit thrown on the wall guess is that we're going to experience a serious collapse or violent crisis before any of this starts.

I was mostly responding from my own context (DC, federal, executive) and since that's where Stevolende also appeared to be coming from, at least how I read his questions.

Systemic overhaul of the justice & prison system has to start at the local level to have any staying power. The federal justice system is not the most fucked up one at present, not even close.

The media infrastructure cannot be fixed by elected officials. That just has to eat itself, and it will.

I don't think Trump is unique to the two-party system. Blowing up the entire way we vote so that parties led by such luminaries as Dr. Jill Stein can have some seats in the federal legislature, on the off chance that disastrous coalitions don't form a la Cameron-Clegg, is frankly a waste of energy. I'd prefer we actually enfranchise the entire voting-age population first, then we can see if a new method of running elections is worth it.

Full employment is completely possible, just not under traditional capitalism.

Happy Labor Day you guys!

oh yeah labor day that's what u guys use to delineate when white clothes can or cannot be worn right

kinda like groundhog day iirc?

point of fixing two party structural advantage is not to give jill stein a few seats imho. and it doesnt have to be at the exclusion of other things. no one's yet really found a way to articulate it that's not super wonkish and detached from other concerns but I do think that at least at the local and state levels, the devices that generate the two-party structure (winner-take-all voting especially) end up suppressing turnout by a ton, and shd be in the same breath with other moves to expand the electorate. but obv they are less immediately sinister and urgent than active projects to rob ppl of the franchise.

emily post institute says dgaf re: old money labor day fashion rules

http://emilypost.com/advice/wearing-white-after-labor-day/

groundhog day has roots in old european pagan traditions and comes from german-speaking rural pennsylvanians

labor day is what the US and Canada do instead of May Day

It's incredible to me (and by that I mean totally not surprising) that with so much going on - Harvey, North Korea, debt ceiling, tax reform, Russia - he just decides to fuck things up more at the exact same time in the ugliest, stupidest way possible.

tombot - sorry if i was vague, but that was what i was going for - many of the most serious problems are problems that are not within the power of the federal government, any federal government, to fix.

i would say that trump's power _is_ unique to the two-party system, myself. i've been reading wonkish stuff like this paper, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3028990 . the presence of demagogues within the system is obviously not unique to america, but america is supposedly a "stable" democracy which nonetheless elected an authoritarian white supremacist to office in 2016, aided and abetted at every step by the system which political hacks said was supposed to prevent such an outcome. i'm not arguing for a full push towards parliamentary democracy, at least not until more moderate measures such as the elimination of the electoral college have been tried and found wanting, but at some point it becomes reasonable and appropriate to at least have a discussion about the systemic flaws inherent in our constitutional system. for instance, it seems certainly possible that the pitifully low rate of participation in a two-party democracy is, in some sense, an artifact of the two-party system.

DC, the franchise issues can and must be addressed at the federal level, by all three branches of government; the endemic use of FPTP voting method to the exclusion of other systems is something that would (and should?) need to be tackled locally and through amendments to state constitutions.

I guess what this points to is that the Democratic party needs to ensure it has strategies and candidates for the legislative, executive and judicial offices at all levels of government, which is something the GOP has been far more disciplined about for a long while. There have to be platform planks specifically aimed at state and local problems, and lists of rosters of judicial nominees like the one the Federalist Society has for Republicans.

Wait ... you think the Democratic party is part of the solution here? They're working for the same people as the Republicans, thanks to legalized corruption.

Ask the Dem establishment about overturning right to work laws. They'll laugh so hard in your face they'll probably give you $100 for the fun you gave them that day.

cool, I could use $100

Didn't Dems in Wisconsin flee from the state to avoid voting for right to work law? Then tried to recall Scott Walker over the issue?

State Democrats are a little different than federal Democrats...