US Politics November 2017

unfortunately, they may lose less passing the tax bill than not. If they pass it, they piss off some voters, but please their donors and get to pocket a juicy tax cut. If they don't pass it, they lose their donors and their tax cut, while their voters will still be somewhat pissed because it seems like they aren't getting anything done. If they sense that they are going to be facing a wave election next year and will be losing their seats either way, why not at least get the juicy tax cut?

bc it's evil

at least i hope that murkowski and mccain believe that

Poll: Majority of small businesses oppose GOP tax bill

Seems an exploitable fissure in the GOP coalition.

made the mistake of watching a little Morning Joe this a.m. and they were incredulous that the Dems have not been able to make better political hay of this shitty tax bill. somehow collectively ignoring the fact that, as JiC points out, IT IS ACTUALLY MASSIVELY UNPOPULAR. aside from horse-trading I don't see what the Ds can do to actually stop this train if the GOP decides once and for all to send it down the tracks. doesn't matter if 100% of the public hates it. I guess in theory it could become as politically toxic as ACA repeal, but I think we knew all along this was going to be a far tougher sell, especially if enough people in the middle class are getting back something if only in the short term.

Murkowski seems to support the bill so far. I don't think evil ranks very high in their list of concerns. In fact, I'd call evil their raison d'être.

McCain is an evil prick on the vast majority of matters so idk why he wouldn't support this (beyond political expediency/PR)

mccain hinting he might thumbs-dumb tax "reform" too?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/mccain-recounts-obamacare-repeal-death-blow-in-new-interview.html

McCain's sole m.o. has been complaining about "regular order" (lol) and this tax bill has been through committee and will go to the floor for amendments, which is considerably closer to "regular order" than the b.s. process that the obamacare repeal bill went through.

I bet he's a yes.

maybe he dies sitting on his thumb up

CBO score is out and guess what?

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/domestic-taxes/361913-cbo-senate-tax-bill-would-hurt-poor

Fake news

will one GOPer have the guts to come out and say "poor people are subhuman" /tr3nch4n1

Why bother saying it when your every action clearly broadcasts the same sentiment?

I mean, also, part of their strategy is telling credulous masochists that they're totally in their corner while they beat them up and steal their wallets.

WH: Yam will not campaign with Roy Moore

five steps to passing this piece of shit

1. Make the bill even better for rich business owners, to win over Johnson and Daines.
2. Put in a $10,000 property tax deduction – and scrap the state-and-local tax deduction for corporations – to win over Susan Collins.
3. Give Lisa Murkowski some oil.
4. Let the deficit hawks eat wildly optimistic growth projections.
5. Convert all Senatorial seats to hereditary positions (for Republicans, not Democrats) j/k

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/how-the-gop-plans-to-get-its-tax-bill-out-of-the-senate.html

Meanwhile Mick Mulvaney is now head of two federal administrative bodies.

"this is what dictators do"

“It has come to my attention that Ms. English has reached out to many of you this morning via email in an attempt to exercise certain duties of the Acting Director. This is unfortunate but, in the atmosphere of the day, probably not unexpected,” he said.

“Please disregard any instructions you receive from Ms. English in her presumed capacity as acting director.” Mulvaney also asked CFPB employees to report any additional professional communications from English to the general counsel’s office.

congrats to mick mulvaney, somehow the biggest piece of shit in a piece of shit administration

mr. mulvaney should report to the lobby to pick up his commemorative sash

sounds like a fun day at work!

i hope he gets pelted with donuts in public for the rest of his life

literally everyone in that white house decorations video is white, including the three wise men

House Speaker Paul Ryan told donors assembled at a Koch brothers conference in Wichita, Kansas, late last month that Republican lawmakers would tackle welfare after tax reform passes the Congress, according to two people familiar with the remarks — an idea the president mentioned last week, telling reporters that “people are taking advantage of the system."

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/27/trump-agenda-tax-reform-260405

The fun just never stops with this bunch...

"People are taking advantage of this ghost ass skeleton program that barely helps anyone live a decent life, it's got to stop"

also fuck you Bill Clinton

FWIW, dude knows all about taking advantage of the system.

Trump is holding this event honouring Native American code talkers, and insulting Warren as "Pocahontas," in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act. pic.twitter.com/UoJpoOsoNC

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 27, 2017

i don't know why white supremacists would get the impression that he's on their side, weird

He's not on their side, he's just taking up a series of interconnected positions that just so happen to align with their world view and advance their interests. That doesn't mean he's on their side per se.

Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner

Leandra English's CFPB case has been assigned to Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump nominee who was confirmed to the bench in September.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told donors assembled at a Koch brothers conference in Wichita, Kansas, late last month that Republican lawmakers would tackle welfare after tax reform passes the Congress, according to two people familiar with the remarks — an idea the president mentioned last week, telling reporters that “people are taking advantage of the system."

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/27/trump-agenda-tax-reform-260405

The fun just never stops with this bunch...

what's even left to cut? are they going to go after disability? there's a fuckton of broke ass white people on disability who are trump voters, not sure if this is a good idea for them politically but they dgaf anymore

Eh, everything'll be rigged from here on out, they don't need those gross poor people anymore.

There's a *lot* of fraud in SSDI/SSI, if some on it in my extended family are any indication. In my case, morbidly obese alcoholics eeking out their last decade on mental health disability. However, the sensible reform would establish more stringent guidelines for the judges that look at SSDI/SSI appeals, and perhaps subsidizing employment of some currently helped in less physically demanding jobs, not blanket cuts.

In a number of respects, most of those who left the welfare rolls after the 1996 reforms wound up on SSDI/SSI.

Between 1996 and 2015, the number of Americans on the SSDI rolls jumped from 7.7 million to 13 million

Society has to do something with its morbidly obese alcoholics in their last decade of life. I'm not sure that sloughing them off into the disability insurance program is precisely the definition of "fraud", since the alternative is to push them into homeless shelters, drifting in and out of hospital emergency rooms and drunk tanks. We can't just stare past them and pretend they are already dead. If SSI and Medicaid can keep them minimally viable until their liver fails, its about as good as any other program in our piss-poor social welfare apparatus.

maybe i am simple but i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist 'you're on your own' / 'you have no one but yourself to blame' BS

Because Calvinism? It has nothing to do with improving the species or w/e, that's for sure.

It's the old "He who does not work, does not eat" Captain John Smith Mayflower bullshit.

maybe i am simple but i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist 'you're on your own' / 'you have no one but yourself to blame' BS

― reggie (qualmsley),

Funny you should say so! I'm at this moment reading One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and a gospel of individualism was the tenet of James W. Fifeld Jr. This fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fifield_Jr.

Because Calvinism?

Marilynn Robinson has been good in recent years explaining how many of the awful things we've been taught about Calvinism are wrong.

Daines and Johnson both "no" on current bill. Not sure if this is a new development, saw some grumbling from Daines earlier

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/361992-montana-republican-opposes-current-version-of-tax-bill

i can't wrap my head around why evolution-denying "conservatives" are at the same time beholden to social darwinist

Maybe it is because Social Darwinism is entirely distinct from Darwin's theory of the evolution of species. It was independently developed by social philosophers like Herbert Spencer and depends entirely on misunderstanding and misapplying the mechanisms of evolution that Darwin described.

Whenever this "lol stupid right-wingers don't realize they're hurting themselves" stuff comes up I go back to contenderizer's post from a few months ago:

progressives often cluck about the manipulation of poor conservatives, implying that they're mooncalf rubes too dumb to know when they're voting against their own interests. this seems wrongheaded on a number of levels. for one thing, it presumes that such interests can be measured objectively. they can't. the conservatives in question likely stack their towers of relative value quite differently than most progressives. it's also condescending and plays into a well-established conservative narrative, one which holds that the american left is a coalition built cynically on graft, on stealing from the common pot in order to buy the votes of the destitute & lazy. viewed through that lens, the refusal to be so bought, even when one is genuinely needy, becomes a point of pride.

― The sandwiches looked quite dank. (contenderizer), Saturday, March 18, 2017 11:00 PM (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

For at least some conservatives, the knee-jerk rejection of ideas like universal income, single-payer health care, and a robust safety net may be part of a proud "refusal to be so bought," not just "fuck those lazy brown people."

(Though there's plenty of that too.)

not exactly watergate

"When McCrummen put her purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers." https://t.co/1P3Nxirxe8

— Amy Argetsinger (@AmyArgetsinger) November 27, 2017

(watergate-quality ratfucking i mean)

It's interesting that both current "no" votes come from Senators no one predicted would be no votes. Johnson and this dude Daines. Plus the nebulous possible no votes of Collins, McCain, Flake, Corker ...

Basically, who knows, but the debt ceiling vote could take the steam out of this debate anyway, couldn't it? That's ... next week?

this is supposed to move to the floor this week, ahead of the debt ceiling votes

the plan is to vote it out of committee tomorrow, and Corker and Flake are both on the committee. If they want to kill it early here's their chance (I don't think they will)

If this does actually make it to the floor and is opened for amendments it will be interesting to see what Schumer does, I expect some theatrics