[johnu]

Chas_NoDignity_NoIntegrity_NoHonor, on 2019-June-23, 17:36, said:

[barmar]

hrothgar, on 2019-June-21, 15:46, said:

For a change, looks like Trump actually got one right

(I'm referring to his decision to stop the planned military strikes against Iran this AM)

How many times has Trump fixed a problem he created in the first place?

[barmar]

Winstonm, on 2019-June-21, 09:28, said:

You cannot possibly believe this. I deleted it so you could have a chance to rethink and possibly delete your original.

It was intended to be provocative. I'm certainly no Trump apologist, but our history is not totally unblemished.

Quote

You might want to consider first things like Pearl Harbor before making any comparisons.

That was a military base, wasn't it? AIUI, the Geneva Convention makes a big distinction between military and civilian targets.

[johnu]

barmar, on 2019-June-23, 20:45, said:

How many times has Trump fixed a problem he created in the first place?

Robert Baden-Powell once said

Quote

Leave this world a little better than you found it.

Dennison has broken and disrupted things almost too many times to count. I can't think of a single time where he singlehandedly created a problem where none existed, and then fixed things so they were as good or better afterwards.

Obviously any sane president would not have unilaterally broken the Iran nuclear agreement which greatly escalated tensions between Iran and the USA. Or created a Mexican border humanitarian crisis for the sole purpose of fulfilling a campaign pledge. Or started a trade war with China and many other countries which is costing the US public billions dollars in added costs and farmers and manufacturers billions in lost sales (and Dennison is too F'ing stupid to understand that China and others are not the ones paying the tariffs, the tariffs are paid by the importing companies and usually passed on to the end consumer). Or created an intelligence community nightmare where other countries are worried about sharing secret information with the US because Dennison might privately share those secrets with Putin, or make them public because of incompetence and ignorance.

[y66]

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

I know there was a lot going on over the past few days. We still don’t know exactly what President Donald Trump is up to in Iran. The continuing disaster at the border demands attention. And there’s always the Democrats running for president to distract us.

However: On Friday, a woman accused the president of the United States of rape. Isn’t that a huge story? It sure seems like it to me. Evidently, much of the media doesn’t agree. As Katie Sullivan reports, the story didn’t make the front page of many newspapers, including the New York Times.

Is it being downgraded because the alleged assault took place 23 years ago? Because the only evidence the accuser can report is that she told two friends about it at the time (both of whom corroborate her story)? Is there some reason to doubt the accusation – a reason that evidently hasn’t been reported to clear the president? Has the national news media suddenly been cured of feeding frenzies?

I certainly hope it’s not because Trump’s crude boast about assaulting women, captured on video, somehow seems more newsworthy than allegations of the very behavior he bragged about.

I certainly hope it’s not because anyone thinks that, given all the serious accusations of assault against the president that have already become public, this latest one isn’t also important.

And I certainly hope it’s not because people have adopted a fatalism about Trump – that because his strongest supporters stick with him no matter what, new allegations of appalling misconduct are no longer news.

Could E. Jean Carroll, the latest accuser, be a liar? (The White House called her accusation a “completely false and unrealistic story.”) Could more than a dozen other women who have spoken up about the president also be liars? Many of them emerged publicly long before Trump’s 2016 campaign, and thus presumably had no political motive. That doesn’t prove anything. But the pattern is overwhelming, and Trump’s own denials have little credibility, given his well-documented history of making untrue statements about himself (including, for example, falsely denying payoffs to women to stay silent about alleged encounters).

I can’t say I know what the correct amount of press coverage for this story should be. I can say that if the president is a rapist, it should have scream-from-the-mountaintops importance. Both because of the fact itself, and because of the unacceptable message it sends to the nation if we don’t treat it as critically important.

[barmar]

y66, on 2019-June-24, 07:52, said:

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Isn't it just the old adage: "Man bites dog" is news, "dog bites man" isn't. While additional Trump and Cosby accusers are tragic, they're not really that newsworthy at this point (it would almost be more surprising if a woman came out and said they worked with one of these men and said they were perfect gentlemen).

Unfortunately, unless we can get Trump to lie about these incidents in Congressional testimony, it won't be considered perjury and an impeachable offense (remember, Clinton wasn't impeached because of his affair with Lewinsky, but for lying to Congress about it).

[y66]

barmar, on 2019-June-24, 09:43, said:

Isn't it just the old adage: "Man bites dog" is news, "dog bites man" isn't. While additional Trump and Cosby accusers are tragic, they're not really that newsworthy at this point (it would almost be more surprising if a woman came out and said they worked with one of these men and said they were perfect gentlemen).

Unfortunately, unless we can get Trump to lie about these incidents in Congressional testimony, it won't be considered perjury and an impeachable offense (remember, Clinton wasn't impeached because of his affair with Lewinsky, but for lying to Congress about it).

From Bill de Blasio Says NYPD Will Investigate the Latest Rape Allegations Against Trump. An Expert Says It Probably Can’t. by Kara Voght at Mother Jones:

Quote

It’s been rough goings for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio since he declared his presidential intentions. More than three-quarters of his current constituents wish he hadn’t run—and even tried to ban him from his gym for doing so. The rest of the country hasn’t felt inspired, either: Since he entered the race in May, he’s consistently polled in the gutter. And according to a new analysis from the Washington Post, he’s the candidate voters would most like to see drop out.

But on Friday, when New York magazine published journalist E. Jean Carroll’s horrifying account of being raped by President Donald Trump in New York City’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, de Blasio suddenly found himself in the role of could-be hero. As mayor of the city in which said department store exists—in a state where no statute of limitations on prosecuting rape accusations exists—de Blasio, surely, could put some real mettle behind his campaign’s raison d’être: “Donald Trump must be stopped.”

And during a weekend of presidential forum round robins in Columbia, South Carolina, de Blasio announced his intentions to do just that. “This is the most serious of all the charges,” de Blasio told reporters. “The moment we, in New York City with our police department have a complaint, we will investigate immediately, and we will find out the truth.”

Not so fast. Mother Jones‘ Madison Pauly spoke with Roger Canaff, a former sex crimes prosecutor in the Bronx who now trains law enforcement on how to handle sexual violence cases, just as Carroll’s allegations came to light. And she learned that prosecuting the president for this heinous act might be impossible.

The primary reason is that the statute of limitations for first-degree rape in New York was only five years during the mid-1990s. New York updated the law in 2006 to the current standard, “but the new law doesn’t apply to cases in which the statute of limitations has already expired,” Pauly writes.

And Canaff told Pauly that federal case law has enforced that precedent:

MJ: Today, there’s no statute of limitations for first-degree rape in New York. But that’s only been the case since 2006. Before then, New York’s statute of limitations for first-degree rape was only five years. Which laws apply, the current ones or the laws at the time?

RC: The Supreme Court case is called Stogner vs. California. Basically what it says is you cannot change the statute of limitations, and then charge somebody under it retroactively. So if a crime is committed in 1995, and the statute of limitations at the time of the crime is five years, then even if the statute of limitations is changed 10 or 15 or 20 years later, a person who committed that crime in 1995 cannot be charged under it. The person has to be charged under the law as it existed at the time.

Which means:

MJ: So if the allegations are true, the president gets away with it?

RC: Correct.

[y66]

From Democrats’ ongoing argument about free college, explained by Matt Yglesias at Vox:

Quote

On a philosophical level, the free college debate is fascinating.

You have on the one hand a vision of higher education as part of a bundle of free (or at least very cheap) public services offered on equal terms to all — an extension of the principle of free high school and a natural complement to the aspiration to create a single-payer health care system. Then you have on the other hand a vision of higher education as primarily a private benefit to students that should be financed through loans, with targeted assistance to particularly needy cases.

Precisely because this cleaves so neatly into two contrasting visions of higher education and, more broadly, the nature of the good society, it’s easy to become entranced by the pros and cons of the social democratic romance.

The more you dig into the particulars, however, the less obvious it is what this contrast amounts to in presidential politics.

In theory, a candidate could propose using an extremely sharp stick to essentially force states to make college free by eliminating the federal student loan program and replacing it with the carrot of matching funds. But in practice, nobody in the field is actually proposing that. Instead, presidential aspirants have different varieties of carrot-oriented plans that are ultimately going to leave authority in the hands of governors and state legislatures.

Meanwhile, proposals to boost the generosity of federal higher education spending in a targeted way — the main Democratic alternative to free college — would also make it easier for state governments that want to do free college to do it.

So regardless of what happens in presidential politics, the success or failure of the free college movement is ultimately bound to be determined in the states — where most legislative houses remain firmly under GOP control.

[Chas_P]

y66, on 2019-June-24, 17:16, said:

From Democrats’ ongoing argument about free college, explained by Matt Yglesias at Vox:

Bill Maher had an interesting question regarding "free" college. The question was, "Should those who choose not to go to college be forced to pay for those who do?" As Milton Friedman said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And that's what it boils down to. Those who choose not to go to college but choose to go to work (and pay taxes) will be paying for those who prolong paying taxes by going to college. Whaddaya think?

[Chas_P]

JohnU said

Quote

Chas_NoDignity_NoIntegrity_NoHonor, on 2019-June-23, 19:36, said:

LOL! Double up on the Ritalin Johnboy, take two enemas and call me in the morning.

[hrothgar]

Chas_P, on 2019-June-24, 18:06, said:

Bill Maher had an interesting question regarding "free" college. The question was, "Should those who choose not to go to college be forced to pay for those who do?" As Milton Friedman said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And that's what it boils down to. Those who choose not to go to college but choose to go to work (and pay taxes) will be paying for those who prolong paying taxes by going to college. Whaddaya think?

I'm not in favor of free college tuition, however, this is an incredibly stupid reason to be opposed to it.

I won't personally need social security. Why should I be forced to pay for those who do?
I don't have any kids, why should I be forced to contribute to support people who do?

[Cyberyeti]

Chas_P, on 2019-June-24, 18:06, said:

Bill Maher had an interesting question regarding "free" college. The question was, "Should those who choose not to go to college be forced to pay for those who do?" As Milton Friedman said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And that's what it boils down to. Those who choose not to go to college but choose to go to work (and pay taxes) will be paying for those who prolong paying taxes by going to college. Whaddaya think?

Coming from the UK, I think the belief is that it should be at least subsidised (and some believe free). Our college fees are capped at 9K/year with essentially government loans and if you don't earn £22K a year you don't pay them back and they get written off later, if you do, you pay 9% of what you earn over 22K.

Why ? well trained people are good for the economy, pay more tax etc. It's an investment

Hrothgar makes another valid point, I don't have kids - why should I pay for schools ? There are some things even in the US that are done for the common good, and this could and possibly should be one of them.

[johnu]

Chas_NoDignity_NoHonor_NoIntegrity_NoSelfRespect_NoClue, on 2019-June-24, 18:19, said:

Cannot control himself and continues to embarrass himself.

[Winstonm]

The right-thinking are so easily manipulated. I don't drive at night; why should I help pay for the lights on the highway system? I don't fly; why should my taxes help pay for airports?

[y66]

From Elizabeth Warren Channels the Real New Deal by Noah Smith at Bloomberg:

Quote

Her plans to remake the U.S. economy are as sweeping as FDR’s.

Quote

In many ways, the economic debate in the U.S. has been stuck for quite a while. Progressives want higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the poor and more government health care; conservatives and libertarians want less. The 2016 election brought some innovation, with Donald Trump’s protectionism and the socialist revival sparked by Bernie Sanders. But the biggest breath of fresh air is coming from Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Just since the start of this year, Warren has released no fewer than 19 detailed economic policy proposals. This outpouring of ideas has been so dramatic that it has spawned Twitter hashtags such as #shehasaplan. Warren’s ideas are neither the cautious, technocratic tweaks that tend to emerge from centrist think tanks, nor the bold but vague promises often issued by the socialist left. Nor are they merely a laundry list of campaign promises. Instead, they represent a coherent, unified program for transforming the U.S. economy.

Four Warren proposals stand out as particularly original. The first calls for allocating some corporate board seats to workers -- an idea commonly known as co-determination. Used in Germany, the co-determination system has the potential not just to ensure that company policies take account of the interests of employees, but also to increase productivity by allowing workers to contribute more of their knowledge to the corporate decision-making process.

Warren’s second fresh idea is regulation of big technology companies. Although her proposal calls for companies such as Facebook, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon to be broken up, in practice most of her ideas involve enhanced oversight rather than traditional antitrust remedies. Since platforms such as Amazon and Google tend to have strong network effects -- people usually want a one-stop-shop for online retail and a single website for internet search -- breaking them up wouldn’t lead to a competitive market in the long run. Warren’s plan seems to recognize this, and would instead treat these companies more like utilities, forcing them to allow smaller businesses to profit off of the infrastructure they create.

The third big innovation concerns housing. With costs for shelter eating a bigger piece of Americans’ paychecks, and local government paralyzed by incumbent homeowners, the country needs a big solution. Warren’s would combine incentives for raising zoning density with increased public construction.

But the biggest Warren idea is industrial policy, which she calls “economic patriotism.” Instead of relying on tariffs as President Donald Trump has done, Warren would promote exports. She would also leverage research and infrastructure to promote U.S. industry, and pressure countries to stop holding down the value of their currencies against the dollar. This represents a decisive break with the free-trade consensus of the past few decades, but isn't simply a return to traditional inward-looking protectionism.

These four ideas, which are the most unique and original among Warren’s impressive oeuvre, give a picture of the senator’s economic philosophy. A good term for it might be “progressive industrialism.” Though Warren wants to rebalance the economic power of labor and capital, and use government to assist the needy, she also wants to harness private industry to create growth. Her plans for technology regulation and her export promotion would boost small businesses, while her housing plan would leverage the power of private development and her co-determination plan would more closely align the interests of labor and capital. The strategy is reminiscent of the New Deal, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt strove to integrate private industry with government spending in order to advance both growth and equality. It also bears some resemblance to the strategies used by Germany and Japan to recover from World War II.

Warren’s ideas are also notable for their specificity. In their recent book “Concrete Economics,” economist Brad DeLong and historian Stephen S. Cohen argued that successful policy programs should have concrete goal instead of leaving the future up to the vagaries of the market. Warren seems intent on doing exactly that -- under her industrialist program, Americans would get more housing, more opportunity to start their own businesses and more respect and power at work. They would also get more child care, cancellation of student debt, assistance with addiction, and a number of other tangible benefits. A health care plan is surely also forthcoming.

This isn't to say that Warren’s plans are ideal in their current form. Her co-determination plan could benefit from the inclusion of German-style worker councils, her industrial policy should remove its harmful “buy-American” provision, her corporate tax plan might discourage investment and her wealth tax might run into constitutional obstacles.

But ultimately no set of big, transformational ideas will be perfect. The New Deal certainly wasn’t. But by thinking big, combining intelligence with ambition, and being willing to engage both the public and private sectors, Warren has set herself up to be the closest thing modern American politics has to a successor to FDR. Now it remains to be seen if she can communicate this vision to the public in an inspiring way.

[y66]

It's not just Trump and chas_p who have no integrity:

Quote

Vice President Mike Pence once described global warming as “a myth,” so his refusal to acknowledge climate change as a threat to the United States during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday wasn’t shocking. But what was somewhat surprising, even by Trump administration standards, was how effortlessly and rapidly Pence lied to make his case.

During a single 20-second stretch, Pence pushed two big lies about how the US is doing environmentally. Tapper fact-checked the first of them in real time.

As Pence danced around questions about whether he regards climate change as a threat, Tapper tried to cut to the chase.

Quote

“So you don’t think it’s a threat?” he asked.

“I think we’re making great progress reducing carbon emissions. America has the cleanest air and water in the world,” Pence replied.

“That’s not true,” Tapper shot back. “We don’t have the cleanest air and water in the world.”

“Ahh ... but we’re making progress on reducing carbon emissions,” Pence said.

Neither of Pence’s claims is true. As an Associated Press fact-check details, with regard to air quality, the United States isn’t doing especially well:

The State of Global Air 2019 report by the Health Effects Institute rated the U.S. as having the eighth cleanest air for particle pollution — which kills 85,000 Americans each year — behind Canada, Scandinavian countries and others.

The U.S. ranks poorly on smog pollution, which kills 24,000 Americans per year. On a scale from the cleanest to the dirtiest, the U.S. is at 123 out of 195 countries measured.

It’s also not the case that the US has the cleanest water in the world. While the latest Environmental Performance Index indicates that the US is tied with nine other countries for cleanest drinking water, when sanitation is also factored in, the US drops to 29th overall.

Pence’s claim about the US making progress on carbon emissions also isn’t true. In fact, as my colleague Umair Irfan detailed in January, carbon emissions shot up last year:

The Rhodium Group on Tuesday reported that US energy-related greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2018 by 3.4 percent, the second-largest margin in 20 years, reversing a three-year decline. It’s an alarming shift, especially given that scientists recently warned that we are running out of time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.

Pence appears to have lifted his false talking points from Trump himself, who during a media appearance alongside Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar earlier this month claimed that “we have the cleanest air in the world in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m president. We have the cleanest water ... we’re setting records environmentally.”

Source: Aaron Rupar at Vox

[barmar]

Chas_P, on 2019-June-24, 18:06, said:

Bill Maher had an interesting question regarding "free" college. The question was, "Should those who choose not to go to college be forced to pay for those who do?"

Yes, they should. Those college-educated people are mostly responsible for creating the things they need or want. They become doctors and entrepreneurs, and we need them. I know there are exceptions (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out of college), hence "mostly".

And increasing the number of educated people is good for society as a whole. I expect there would be less crime, for instance, if more people could get out of poverty through higher education. A rising tide floats all boats.

[y66]

From The Ivory Tower team of wonks behind Warren’s policy agenda by Alex Thompson and Theodoric Meyer at Politico:

Quote

Warren ignored popular punditry that policy no longer mattered after 2016, when Clinton’s white paper-filled campaign lost to a Trump effort that was notably light on details. While Warren has found unexpected success so far in the primary, the level of detail she’s providing — on a very liberal agenda — also has plenty for conservatives to pick over, especially if she becomes the nominee.

“Democrats brought a stack of fact sheets to a gunfight,” Goolsbee said of the 2016 campaign. While he admires the Warren team’s policy chops, he added that “it does give me a little heartburn when there’s so much policy detail this early in the campaign.”

Warren had her game plan in place months before her announcement. She rolled out a centerpiece anti-corruption plan in August, and a housing measure a month later. Warren aides and allies spent the fall prepping other potential proposals.

The campaign has many more initiatives in the pipeline. Aides told POLITICO they're in the process of adding more policy staff, to ward off any rival looking to steal her policy thunder. The focus on policy is also reflected in the campaign's salary structure: The head of the policy team, Jon Donenberg, makes the same as the campaign manager and other senior leaders.

“It's all we can do to keep up with her,” said Donenberg, a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for former Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Richard Blumenthal before he joined Warren's 2012 campaign and then served as legislative director in her senate office. "The job of the policy shop is to help her fill in the details around these proposals, to present data, and to talk through the costs and benefits of various approaches.”

Longtime Warren confidante Ganesh Sitaraman, an old friend of Pete Buttigieg from their time as undergrads at Harvard, is not on her campaign's payroll given his job at Vanderbilt. But he has taken a lead role in formulating her domestic policies.

Sasha Baker is the former deputy chief of staff to Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and focuses on national security. And Bharat Ramamurti, a longtime Senate aide who Warren pushed to fill a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2017, has been handling financial issues. The campaign said that both have been expanding their portfolios to other domestic policy topics as well.

Academics who have heard from multiple campaigns say that Warren's team tends to go deeper into details than her rivals. In March, Ramamurti reached out to Thomas Shapiro, a Brandeis University professor who studies the racial wealth gap, for help crafting the campaign’s student debt proposal. Other campaigns have sought his advice, Shapiro said in an interview — but Warren's was the first to ask him to model how different policies would affect those with student loan debt.

Shapiro recruited three researchers and spent about a month running numbers to try to determine the most effective way to cancel student debt without exacerbating the wealth gap between white and non-white households.

“They could ask more in-depth questions because they had more of a foundation to do so,” said Joe Maxwell, executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, whom Warren and her team consulted to develop her plan calling for the breakup of “Big Ag.”

[kenberg]

Chas_P, on 2019-June-24, 18:06, said:

Bill Maher had an interesting question regarding "free" college. The question was, "Should those who choose not to go to college be forced to pay for those who do?" As Milton Friedman said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And that's what it boils down to. Those who choose not to go to college but choose to go to work (and pay taxes) will be paying for those who prolong paying taxes by going to college. Whaddaya think?

Well, there are quite a few of us who went to work and went to college. Earlier I noted that of various suggested D priorities I favored "free college" but I also noted that I wasn't so sure that is should be completely free. I want a good college education to be within the reach of someone who regards it as worth doing, worth putting some effort into it. I started at the University of Minnesota in 1956, the tuition was $72 a quarter, maybe $73. I could get jobs paying from about $1,25 to, when lucky, $2.00 an hour. I also got a scholarship, it of course helped a lot. But the U of M was heavily subsidized by Minnesota tax payers and I am very appreciative. I want something like that to be available to young people today. I am willing to discuss details, but the general idea is that I vary much favor having it be that a person with modest economic background can manage a good education. I think that a strong argument can be made that this will benefit the country but the truth is that I appreciate what I was given and I wish it to be passed on to others. That's the argument in a nutshell.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2019-June-25, 17:39, said:

Well, there are quite a few of us who went to work and went to college. Earlier I noted that of various suggested D priorities I favored "free college" but I also noted that I wasn't so sure that is should be completely free. I want a good college education to be within the reach of someone who regards it as worth doing, worth putting some effort into it. I started at the University of Minnesota in 1956, the tuition was $72 a quarter, maybe $73. I could get jobs paying from about $1,25 to, when lucky, $2.00 an hour. I also got a scholarship, it of course helped a lot. But the U of M was heavily subsidized by Minnesota tax payers and I am very appreciative. I want something like that to be available to young people today. I am willing to discuss details, but the general idea is that I vary much favor having it be that a person with modest economic background can manage a good education. I think that a strong argument can be made that this will benefit the country but the truth is that I appreciate what I was given and I wish it to be passed on to others. That's the argument in a nutshell.

For myself, I learned to appreciate much more those things I had to pay for myself. At the same time, I have never owned a Bentley, either. What I am suggesting is that perhaps a sliding scale based on affordability might make sense.