[kenberg]

Chas_P, on 2019-June-03, 18:02, said:

I agree with you and Galbraith 100% Winston. As previously stated.... "as much liberty as possible" and "as little government as necessary."

I was going to let this just slide by but, well, it's a slow day.
You announced that you agree with "I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.” and then re-phrased it as " 'as much liberty as possible' and 'as little government as necessary.' "


Re-phrasing is seldom actual agreement.


The original formulation suggests caution with government programs. I certainly agree with that. Your re-formulation is different. If a hurricane strikes, or a flood, we could tell the people we wish them luck, but that's the way it is and we see no necessity to help and we certainly wouldn't want the government curtailing anyone's liberty. People could carry machine guns walking down the street and build bombs in their basement, there is no necessity to interfere. It might be a good idea to interfere, I think it is, but good idea or not I cannot argue that it is necessary to interfere


So most of us are fine with more government than is necessary and not fine with as much freedom as possible.


Caution with government programs is natural, caution with anything is a good idea. Myself, I would be very cautious about forgiveness of student debt. I favor scholarships, I favor keeping expenses low, both of which could be helped by government programs. They are not necessary, but they have a lot of merit. However, scholarships are given with the understanding that the money is not to be paid back, loans are given with the understanding that the money is to be paid back. I am very uneasy about blurring this distinction.


Some would disagree with me on the above example, of course. On any program, some will favor it, some not. But most of us are not prepared to junk any idea for government help unless it can be shown to be necessary. Very few things are actually necessary. I had coffee, eggs and toast for breakfast. It wasn't necessary.

[johnu]

OMG

GOP Chairwoman Claims D-Day Anniversary Should Be About ‘Celebrating Our President’

Quote

“We are celebrating the anniversary, 75 years of D-Day,” McDaniel said. “This is the time where we should be celebrating our president, the great achievements of America, and I don’t think the American people like the constant negativity.”

This sycophant and bootlicker disgraces the memory of those who sacrificed so much 75 years ago by comparing soldiers who risked their lives with a draft dodger whose father bribed a doctor to falsely write a letter that said Dennison had bonespurs and therefore was able to avoid getting drafted.

[Winstonm]

Sung to the tune of "Take a Good Look at My Face" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles


People say I'm the leader of a party
'Cause I tell a lie or two
Although I might be loud and pretend to know a lot
Truth is I haven't a clue

So take a good look at the race
When I won I came from last place
If you look closer it's easy to trace
The tracks of the bears

I need them
Need them
Need them

I left Ivana and now been with some other girls
acting like I'm rich and hung
Although they may be cute, they are no substitute
for a mirror cause I'm my only number 1

So take a good look at the race
When I won I came from last place
If you look closer it's easy to trace
The tracks of the bears

Outside I'm exaggerating
Inside I'm disintegrating
I'm just a joke since I'm really broke
My smile is for Putin
I swear I won't break up - with him

Baby, take a good look at the race
When I won I came from last place
If you look closer it's easy to trace
The tracks of the bears

[Winstonm]

Interesting information from CNN. The Republican party is now made up of 59% white non-college educated. 90% of Republicans are white. They have lost a huge amount of college-educated whites.
Kind of makes sense. The same people who think pro wrestling is real also believe Individual-1 was sent by God.

[hrothgar]

Winstonm, on 2019-June-05, 21:50, said:

Interesting information from CNN. The Republican party is now made up of 59% white non-college educated. 90% of Republicans are white. They have lost a huge amount of college-educated whites.
Kind of makes sense. The same people who think pro wrestling is real also believe Individual-1 was sent by God.

I’ve been doing some thinking about the modern conservative movement, especially how fluid its policy foundations appear to be.

• Free trade
• Deficits
• The imperial presidency
• Stare decisis

All of this has been thrown out the windows over the past few years.

Personally, the conclusion that I am drawing is that it is a mistake to analyze the conservative movement as an intellectual tradition. We can throw out all that discussion about Oakshotte, Locke, Burke, Taft and the rest and instead focus on cash flows because what I can tell the modern conservative movement is all about money. On the one hand, you have efforts to shield large estates from any obligation to contribute towards society. On the other, you have a never ending series of long and short cons designed to separate the masses from their paychecks.

Take a look at the advertisements that you see on conservative media sites. What do you see?

• Fundraising appeal for various petitions
• Quack medical cures
• Prepper kits
• Gold coins and bitcoin schemes

Short con after short con. Its enough that even the National Review has taken notice.
https://www.national...YrchYXGTSz7TDxU

A few years back, I saw a really good analysis of the Spanish Prisoner / Nigerian prince cons that circle the internet. One of the points that folks were making is that the grifters actually work in such a way that folk with half a brain get weeded out of the funnel as quickly as possible. After all, it’s good to fail early before you waste a bunch of time barking up the wrong tree. Can’t help but think that the conservative media establishment is working in much the same way. They are deliberately cultivating an audience that is detached from reality because it's easier to exploit them financially…

In turn, I think that this has a lot of implications for the way in which people need to engage with the conservative media establishment. There isn’t any kind of policy compromise to be found because none of this is about policy…

[y66]

Here's Roger Cohen at NYT channeling johnu:

Quote

PARIS — How small he is! Small in spirit, in valor, in dignity, in statecraft, this American president who knows nothing of history and cares still less and now bestrides Europe with his family in tow like some tin-pot dictator with a terrified entourage.

To have Donald Trump — the bone-spur evader of the Vietnam draft, the coddler of autocrats, the would-be destroyer of the European Union, the pay-up-now denigrator of NATO, the apologist for the white supremacists of Charlottesville — commemorate the boys from Kansas City and St. Paul who gave their lives for freedom is to understand the word impostor. You can’t make a sculpture from rotten wood.

It’s worth saying again. If Europe is whole and free and at peace, it’s because of NATO and the European Union; it’s because the United States became a European power after World War II; it’s because America’s word was a solemn pledge; it’s because that word cemented alliances that were not zero-sum games but the foundation for stability and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Of this, Trump understands nothing. Therefore he cannot comprehend the sacrifice at Omaha Beach 75 years ago. He cannot see that the postwar trans-Atlantic achievement — undergirded by the institutions and alliances he tramples upon with such crass truculence — was in fact the vindication of those young men who gave everything.

As Eisenhower, speaking at the Normandy American Cemetery, last resting place of 9,387 Americans, told Walter Cronkite for the 20th anniversary of the D-Day landings: “These people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before.”

That was a solemn responsibility. For decades it was met, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Doing better, however, is not rising nativism, xenophobia, nationalism and authoritarianism given a nod and a wink by the president of the United States. It’s not Brexit, Britain turning its back on the Europe it helped free.

The American moral collapse personified by Trump is not “beautiful” or “phenomenal” or “incredible” or any of the president’s other clunky two-a-penny superlatives. It’s sickening and dangerous.

My impression here is that Europe has gotten used to Trump to the point that it is no longer strange that the American president is a stranger. In less than two and a half years Trump has stripped his office of dignity, authority and values.

His foreign policy increasingly consists of a single word, “tariffs.” His contempt for allies undermines American diplomacy, or whatever is left of it, from Iran to North Korea, from Venezuela to China. His trampling of truth is so consistent that when he says in London that Britain is the largest trading partner of the United States — it’s nowhere near that — the impulse is to shrug.

Before arriving in London, Trump set the tone. He mocked the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, as short. It was a tweet in keeping with the president’s signature stunt as schoolyard bully. Khan, who had criticized “rolling out the red carpet” for Trump, responded by comparing the president to an 11-year-old.

This was generous. Most 8-year-olds know better.

Of course Khan — the brown Muslim son of a bus driver, self-made guy — would get under the skin of a man like Trump, who was born on third base and imbibed his reflexive racism in the family real estate business.

Khan called Trump’s policies — on the reproductive rights of women, on immigrant children at the Mexican border, on “amplifying messages from racists” — the antithesis of Londoners’ values and “abhorrent.” In response, Trump tweeted that Khan was as bad as the “very dumb” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, “only half his height.”

There is something so disturbing about a very small man like Trump impugning the height of the mayor of the great international city he is visiting that even 28 months of progressive inurement to his outrages feels inadequate.

America is much better than this, much better than an American president who, as the cartoonist Dave Granlund suggested, probably thinks the D in D-Day stands for Donald and spends the night of the commemoration trashing Bette Midler on Twitter.

As for the Republican Party, don’t get me started. To recover its bearings the G.O.P. would do well to recall one of its own, Eisenhower, who in that same 20th-anniversary interview said that America and its allies stormed the Normandy beaches “for one purpose only.”

It was not to “fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest.” No, it was “just to preserve freedom, systems of self-government in the world.” It was an act, in other words, consistent with the highest ideals of the American idea that Trump and his Republican enablers seem so intent on eviscerating.

Sickening indeed.

[Winstonm]

Richard posted this in the climate change thread. I stole it. Here are the people Individual-1 sent the army to the border to stop. A good Christian response, I might add.

Quote

I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student on a reporting trip, and we’ve come to Guatemala to report on migration. My student winner, Mia Armstrong of Arizona State University, and I have heard from innumerable Guatemalans that the most fundamental driver of emigration is desperation — and, to an extent that most Americans don’t appreciate, this desperation often reflects drought and severe weather linked to climate change.

“Food doesn’t grow here anymore,” Jorge Jorge said. “That’s why I would send my son north.”

[Winstonm]

hrothgar, on 2019-June-06, 03:43, said:

I’ve been doing some thinking about the modern conservative movement, especially how fluid its policy foundations appear to be.

• Free trade
• Deficits
• The imperial presidency
• Stare decisis

All of this has been thrown out the windows over the past few years.

Personally, the conclusion that I am drawing is that it is a mistake to analyze the conservative movement as an intellectual tradition. We can throw out all that discussion about Oakshotte, Locke, Burke, Taft and the rest and instead focus on cash flows because what I can tell the modern conservative movement is all about money. On the one hand, you have efforts to shield large estates from any obligation to contribute towards society. On the other, you have a never ending series of long and short cons designed to separate the masses from their paychecks.

Take a look at the advertisements that you see on conservative media sites. What do you see?

• Fundraising appeal for various petitions
• Quack medical cures
• Prepper kits
• Gold coins and bitcoin schemes

Short con after short con. Its enough that even the National Review has taken notice.
https://www.national...YrchYXGTSz7TDxU

A few years back, I saw a really good analysis of the Spanish Prisoner / Nigerian prince cons that circle the internet. One of the points that folks were making is that the grifters actually work in such a way that folk with half a brain get weeded out of the funnel as quickly as possible. After all, it’s good to fail early before you waste a bunch of time barking up the wrong tree. Can’t help but think that the conservative media establishment is working in much the same way. They are deliberately cultivating an audience that is detached from reality because it's easier to exploit them financially…

In turn, I think that this has a lot of implications for the way in which people need to engage with the conservative media establishment. There isn’t any kind of policy compromise to be found because none of this is about policy…

You realize that you are describing an American-style Russian oligarchy? All that is left is to sell off the national parks for pennies on the dollar and organize an infrastructure $2 trillion skimming operation for "private businesses".

Edit: things like this.

Quote

Two Democratic lawmakers on Thursday morning launched an investigation into a former top Trump administration official who is profiting off the White House’s policy of family separation and child detention.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) sent an open letter (pdf) to the head of Jim Van Dusen, the CEO of Caliburn International, which recently hired former Gen. John Kelly, who ran President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security until January 2, 2019, and later became White House chief of staff.

Caliburn manages Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. (CHSi). CHSi runs the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Florida as well as three facilities in Texas. All four CHSi-run shelters are used to house child victims of President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy on migration. According to Warren and Jayapal, the Florida facility could receive $340 million in federal funding in just six months.

[y66]

From G. Elliott Morris, data journalist @TheEconomist:

Quote

If I were a GOP politician, this graph would keep me up at night. There is a huge positive correlation between education and Democratic voting for older Americans. But not so much for youth voters. 18-30 year olds with no degree vote more Dem than even college-educated seniors.

Winter is ending?

[Winstonm]

Here is another reason I like Kamala Harris for the Democratic nominee.

Quote

We need more ideas like the one Senator Kamala Harris of California proposed last week to stop abortion laws from going into effect unless the federal government agrees they comply with Roe v. Wade.

This idea, known as preclearance, is widely considered the single most effective civil rights tool in American history, because it blocks bad policies before they can take root and spread harm across generations.

Ms. Harris’s proposal focuses on laws that harm women. But the concept ought to be extended to racial disadvantage. Every presidential candidate should offer similar proposals in areas like policing, housing, education and transportation. It’s the best way to stop discrimination.

[hrothgar]

So, Buttageig has come forward with a proposal that I really dislike. His plan to address structural problems with the Supreme court is "the court would have 15 members: five affiliated with the Republican Party, five with the Democratic Party and five “nonpolitical justices” selected by that group of 10. Those unaffiliated members would serve one-year, nonrenewable terms. If the 10 partisan justices couldn’t agree on whom to pick, they would lose the ability to hear cases that term."

I'm a partisan Democrat, however, even I find a proposal that locks in seats defined as "Democratic" or "Republican" as abhorrent. A system like this will further lock in the structural biases that force the US into a two party system. Moreover, the world is seeing a lot of political upheaval right now. Old parties are dying across Europe and new ones are emerging. Why should the US further ossify our sclerotic political system? Major American political parties have died in the past and I sure hope that ones will die in the near future. I don't see that as feasible with a system like this one in place.

[kenberg]

hrothgar, on 2019-June-06, 15:30, said:

So, Buttageig has come forward with a proposal that I really dislike. His plan to address structural problems with the Supreme court is "the court would have 15 members: five affiliated with the Republican Party, five with the Democratic Party and five "nonpolitical justices" selected by that group of 10. Those unaffiliated members would serve one-year, nonrenewable terms. If the 10 partisan justices couldn't agree on whom to pick, they would lose the ability to hear cases that term."

I'm a partisan Democrat, however, even I find a proposal that locks in seats defined as "Democratic" or "Republican" as abhorrent. A system like this will further lock in the structural biases that force the US into a two party system. Moreover, the world is seeing a lot of political upheaval right now. Old parties are dying across Europe and new ones are emerging. Why should the US further ossify our sclerotic political system? Major American political parties have died in the past and I sure hope that ones will die in the near future. I don't see that as feasible with a system like this one in place.

I had not heard this, but it sounds like a truly awful idea. Partly for the reasons you give but for other reasons also. I can well imagine someone who was appointed to the "Democratic Seat" decing, on a particular case, that is more aligned with Rs than Ds is actually the correct view based on legal thinking. Or the other way around of course. Right now, he would be praised for independent thinking,going with what he believes is legally correct rather than adhering to the party that gave him his seat. But in this new set up he could well be denounced for lack of loyalty., Well, "could be" is wrong, he surely would be, the only question is how broadly and how bitterly.

The Supreme Court is not perfect, what is, but there is still a principle that those who are on it are to decide cases on legal merit, as they see the legal merit. Even if that principle is sometimes nibbled at, I do not want to see it abandoned. To give up on this important principle because it is sometimes not followed as closely as we hope is really a bad idea. Very bad.

[barmar]

I think I see where Buttageig is coming from. Even though political the Justices aren't officially linked to political parties, they all have de facto affiliations. We all know which are the liberal vs. conservative justices, and it's big news when one of them crosses party lines in a ruling. So rather than deny this, he's trying to come up with a way to mitigate the effect.

[y66]

From Automakers Tell Trump His Pollution Rules Could Mean ‘Untenable’ Instability and Lower Profits by Coral Davenport at NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — The world’s largest automakers warned President Trump on Thursday that one of his most sweeping deregulatory efforts — his plan to weaken tailpipe pollution standards — threatens to cut their profits and produce “untenable” instability in a crucial manufacturing sector.

In a letter signed by 17 companies including Ford, General Motors, Toyota and Volvo, the automakers asked Mr. Trump to go back to the negotiating table on the planned rollback of one of President Barack Obama’s signature policies to fight climate change.

The carmakers are addressing a crisis that is partly of their own making. They had sought some changes to the pollution standards early in the Trump presidency, but have since grown alarmed at the expanding scope of the administration’s plan.

Mr. Trump’s new rule, which is expected to be made public this summer, would all but eliminate the Obama-era auto pollution regulations, essentially freezing mileage standards at about 37 miles per gallon for cars, down from a target of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The policy makes it a near certainty that California and 13 other states will sue the administration while continuing to enforce their own, stricter rules — in effect, splitting the United States auto market in two.

For automakers, a bifurcated market is their nightmare scenario. In the letter to Mr. Trump, they warned of “an extended period of litigation and instability” should his plans be implemented.

Warning Trump of impending litigation and instability is like warning a pig of an impending mudslide.

[Winstonm]

Lawfare:

Quote

In a remarkable interview with Axios on HBO, Jared Kushner, a senior adviser in the White House (and, coincidentally, the president's son-in-law), made a number of notable statements. Among them is his ambivalence regarding how he might handle a Russian approach (akin to the infamous Trump Tower meeting) if it were to happen again. Asked if he would call the FBI in similar circumstances, Kushner responded: "I don't know. It's hard to do hypotheticals, but the reality is is that we were not given anything that was salacious."

Let's be clear—that's the wrong answer. I will limit this discussion to legal obligations; the moral failings are self-evident. Even if Kushner had no legal obligation to report the Russian contacts in 2016 when he was a private citizen, he no longer is. At the direction of the president, he now holds a top-secret (TS) clearance. And with that clearance comes a legal obligation to notify relevant authorities in the FBI and White House regarding suspicious foreign contacts.

For law to succeed, there must be a willingness to enforce and an ability to enforce. Who is going to stop Kushner, et al?

[y66]

From Deceased Strategist’s Files Detail Republican Gerrymandering in North Carolina, Advocates Say by Michael Wines at NYT:

Quote

June 6 - When the hard drives of a deceased Republican strategist revealed new evidence last week about the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, many people wondered whether the files hid other revelations.

On Thursday, in a county court in Raleigh, N.C., they got an answer: there is potentially much more.

The late strategist, Thomas Hofeller, was the mastermind behind the G.O.P.’s gerrymandering strategy, and left behind four hard drives and 18 thumb drives containing more than 75,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August.

The advocacy group Common Cause said in court documents submitted in Raleigh on Thursday that the Hofeller files include new evidence showing how North Carolina Republicans misled a federal court to prolong the life of their map of state legislative districts, which had been ruled unconstitutional.

The Republicans told the federal court hearing the map case that they would not be able to draw new legislative districts and hold public hearings on them in time for a proposed special election in late 2017 or early 2018. In fact, Common Cause said, Mr. Hofeller’s files show that almost all the work had already been done.

While the advocacy group’s court filing did not include any of the underlying documents from Mr. Hofeller’s storage drives, it stated that a detailed analysis of the maps found among his files showed that new boundaries had been drawn for more than 97 percent of the state’s proposed Senate districts and 90 percent of House districts.

The federal court’s decision later not to call a special election left the existing legislative gerrymander — and a veto-proof Republican majority in both the state House and Senate — in place for roughly an additional year.

Republicans used that extra time to, among other things, try to tilt the state judiciary rightward, remap elected judges’ districts in the state’s largest county, and tweak election rules for the state Supreme Court. They restructured the State Board of Elections to dilute the influence of Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor. And they tacked six proposed constitutional amendments onto last November’s ballot — many of them, like a proposal to make fishing and hunting a constitutional right, aimed at pumping up Republican turnout.

The new evidence about the actions of the Republicans in North Carolina “raises serious questions about the legitimacy of their hold on power in the state,” said Eric Holder, an attorney general in the Obama administration who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The committee’s nonprofit arm has financed the Common Cause lawsuit. “They should now explain to the court — and the people of North Carolina — why they are so intent on manipulating the election process for their own benefit,” Mr. Holder said in a written statement.

[cherdano]

Richard, here is your first misunderstanding:

hrothgar, on 2019-June-06, 03:43, said:

I’ve been doing some thinking about the modern conservative movement, especially how fluid its policy foundations appear to be.

• Deficits

The principled Republican position is that deficits matter whenever there is a Democratic president, and do not matter when there is a Republican president. They have been consistent on this for as long as I've been following politics.

[cherdano]

hrothgar, on 2019-June-06, 03:43, said:

In turn, I think that this has a lot of implications for the way in which people need to engage with the conservative media establishment. There isn’t any kind of policy compromise to be found because none of this is about policy…

Do you not read Matt Yglesias? One of his sticks for quite some years has been that the conservative movement is basically a con, selling unpopular tax cuts via popular bigotry.
I think a better example than the ones you gave is gay marriage - Republican politicians opposed it while this position was popular and seemed to drive turnout, and they dropped it like a hot potato the moment gay marriage became more popular.
Against that - they do seriously chip away at abortion rights.

[hrothgar]

cherdano, on 2019-June-06, 22:20, said:

Do you not read Matt Yglesias? One of his sticks for quite some years has been that the conservative movement is basically a con, selling unpopular tax cuts via popular bigotry.
I think a better example than the ones you gave is gay marriage - Republican politicians opposed it while this position was popular and seemed to drive turnout, and they dropped it like a hot potato the moment gay marriage became more popular.
Against that - they do seriously chip away at abortion rights.

I do read Yglesias and like his analysis, however, I don't think that he takes things far enough (I don't think that he focuses enough on the grifting and how this impacts choice of audience)

[barmar]

y66, on 2019-June-06, 19:54, said:

From Automakers Tell Trump His Pollution Rules Could Mean ‘Untenable’ Instability and Lower Profits by Coral Davenport at NYT:


Warning Trump of impending litigation and instability is like warning a pig of an impending mudslide.

Why is this a problem?

I seem to recall that California has long been a leader in auto emissions standards. And car makers simply adopted their standards across the board, because it was cheaper to have one design than try to take advantage of lower standards in other states.

Is Trump trying to prohibit state-level emissions standards that are more progressive than the federal standards?