US Politics

Halftrack

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You know how some politicians, like AOC and Ilhan Omar, attract a lot of angry republicans and chuds who want to yell at them and call them communists?

I replied to one who replied to Ilhan Omar on twitter, semi-jokingly calling the US a failed democracy. Within minutes, I had been swarmed by idiots telling me that the US is a republic, not a democracy. Cool story, I guess you don't vote then.
 

Drifter

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Mitch McConnell just adjourned the Senate until November 9, ending the prospect of additional coronavirus relief until after the election

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday motioned for the Senate to adjourn until November 9.

The move shuts down the Senate from doing any legislative business, including reaching a deal on additional coronavirus aid, until after voters have cast their ballots, and it comes on the heels of Monday's 52-48 vote to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court.

David Popp, a representative for McConnell, told Business Insider there was "nothing to add" to what he described as McConnell's "extensive remarks on the continued Democrat filibuster on COVID relief in the Senate."

Alex Nguyen, a representative for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, referred Business Insider to a Saturday statement accusing Republicans of sidelining coronavirus talks while pushing forward with Barrett's confirmation process ahead of the election.

"Today, we're going to give the Republican majority in the Senate the opportunity to consider critical legislation that has so far languished in Leader McConnell's legislative graveyard," Schumer said in the statement, adding: "We should be doing that, not rushing through this nomination while people are voting, and want their choice listened to, not the Republican Senate choice."

Republicans and Democrats have increasingly sparred as the election approaches, particularly over additional federal coronavirus relief and Barrett's nomination.

On Friday, Democrats used a variety of procedural tactics in a last-ditch effort to stall Barrett's confirmation, and the two parties have extensively rehashed talking points and arguments that have built up from decades of Supreme Court battles.

"You will never, never get your credibility back," Schumer told Republicans in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday, warning the GOP that it had no right to tell Democrats how to run Congress next time Democrats were in power.

On coronavirus aid, the two parties have been unable to find enough common ground to reach a deal, with Republicans nixing proposals they describe as too expensive. McConnell effectively torpedoed a stimulus bill of $1.8 trillion to $2.2 trillion earlier this month that Democrats had been negotiating with the White House.

Republicans had instead insisted that a "skinny" bill of $500 billion would be enough, but their proposal omitted aid to states as well as $1,200 direct payments to taxpayers, both key Democratic priorities, and the Democrats ultimately tanked the measure last week.
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Revan

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Eboue said:
why
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Because Republican states are in play and can be decided by Republicans who will vote Biden (and with a bit of luck also some Democrat senators). They will vote for Biden not cause they love him but cause they hate Trump. They are still Republicans though, and something that lowers the power of Republicans like this might not be in their best interest, so consequently, they might decide to just not vote at all.

So far, Biden, Harris, and Schumer have played this perfectly. Win the election, and then expand the court and give statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Until then, play this strategically.
 

Revan

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MrMarcello said:
You have far more hope in Dems taking off the gloves than most of us, @Revan.
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Dunno, but they have to. SC can destroy any law or executive order that Biden will do, essentially destroying the hope for a successful presidency.

And if they give statehoods to DC/PR, then the senate becomes tough to won from GOP (especially with 2022 being unfavorable to them). The problem is that they need to convince Manchin and Sinema for this which is not gonna be easy (though to be fair to them, both voted to impeach Trump and against the new SCOTUS).
 

Eboue

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Revan said:
Because Republican states are in play and can be decided by Republicans who will vote Biden (and with a bit of luck also some Democrat senators). They will vote for Biden not cause they love him but cause they hate Trump. They are still Republicans though, and something that lowers the power of Republicans like this might not be in their best interest, so consequently, they might decide to just not vote at all.

So far, Biden, Harris, and Schumer have played this perfectly. Win the election, and then expand the court and give statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Until then, play this strategically.
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You are delusional. The Democrats won't do any of that. They won't even try.
 

Drifter

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Biden as said that if he wins, he will get together with Republican/Democrat scholars and thrash out a solution to the courts and come back in 6 months. Which really means we will do nothing and hope people forget about it.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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The Polling Crisis Is a Catastrophe for American Democracy
If public-opinion data are unreliable, we’re all flying blind.

"Even with the results of the presidential contest still out, there’s a clear loser in this election: polling.
Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink."

"Silver didn’t want reporters to stop going into the field; he just wanted them to contextualize what they heard. “The impulse maybe isn’t bad,” he told me last year. “But, you know, polls are also a way of talking to voters.” He hoped, however, that by combining the polls into averages and creating models of the electorate, he might free up reporters to write other stories. Instead, horse-race journalism simply became more sophisticated and poll-obsessed, and in the process, it became even more central to political coverage—now enhanced by the sheen of quantitative rigor."

"FiveThirtyEight, which smugly boasted that it had given Trump a better chance (roughly 30 percent) than most analysts did in 2016, gave him just a 10 percent chance in 2020. The Economist was even more bullish on Biden. Then came the vote. In every swing state but Arizona, Trump outperformed the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This is not to pick on FiveThirtyEight, which went to unusual lengths to ensure that its averages were accurate, but simply to indicate how far off the polls as a whole were."

"Expect two lines of defense. First, many pollsters insist that their polls are snapshots, not predictors (and bridle at people such as Silver, Nate Cohn of the Times, and G. Elliott Morris of The Economist using them to create forecasts). If their snapshots are so far off, though, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother? Second, the analysts will protest that they’re only as good as the polls, but who cares? Whatever the instructions on the bottle, the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed. "

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/polling-catastrophe/616986/
 

Drifter

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Family leave, a living wage, and marriage equality: Progressives score major wins

Ballot measures containing progressive policies were approved by voters across the country.

Voters across the country approved progressive policies on Tuesday, moving the country to the left even when Democratic candidates in their states came up short in their races.

A look at ballot measures across the country shows voters moved their states to the left on their own, going around state legislatures that have blocked progress on everything from drug laws to workers' rights.

Here's a look at ballot initiatives that passed after votes were tallied on Tuesday.

Legalized marijuana
Four states legalized marijuana for either recreational or medicinal use.

Voters in New Jersey and Arizona legalized recreational marijuana use.

Voters in South Dakota and Mississippi, two Republican strongholds, voted to legalize the drug for medicinal use.

The voting results include them as part of a trend of states approving marijuana for medicinal or recreational use, or decriminalizing the use of the drug.

Minimum wage
Voters in Florida voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour — something Democrats have pushed for but Republicans have blocked.

Currently, Florida's minimum wage stands at $8.56 an hour.

The ballot measure will raise the minimum wage to $10 in September 2021, and then will incrementally add $1 every year until it is $15 in 2026.

Florida voters also rejected a GOP ballot measure that would have made it harder to pass ballot initiatives. The measure would have required amendments to the state Constitution to be passed in two successive elections instead of one before they are approved.

The ballot measure was a response by Florida Republicans to the one in 2018 that restored the right to vote to people with nonviolent felony convictions who had served out their sentences.

Republicans tried to weaken that measure by requiring those who were eligible to gain back their franchise to pay back all outstanding court fees and fines beforehand.

Voting rights
In California, voters approved a ballot measure that will allow those out on parole to vote.

Paid leave
Colorado passed paid family and medical leave, which will require employers to provide 12 weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child or to deal with personal or family medical emergencies.

LGBTQ rights
In Nevada, voters passed the Marriage Regardless of Gender Amendment, codifying marriage equality in the state even if the Supreme Court overturns the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that marriage equality was protected by the Constitution.

Replacing the Confederate flag
In Mississippi, voters officially approved a design for a new state flag, removing the Confederate battle flag that had been a feature of the state's flag since 1894 and replaced it with a Magnolia flower.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill in June that removed the Confederate emblem from the state flag. But the ballot initiative that passed on Tuesday requires the state legislature to "enact into law the new design as Mississippi's official state flag during its next regular session in 2021," CNN reported.
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altodevil

Odds winner of 'Odds or Evens 2023/2024'
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Massachusetts voted against somewhat fixing the main hurdle to progress though.
 

calodo2003

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Adisa

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The idea that the SCOTUS is a sacred cow dies when you see things like this.
Democrats don't know they are in a fight for survival.
 

Dudu

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:(

People really do live in alternative realities, that or they are being purposely petty.
 

Drifter

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Democrats keep worrying about what the GOP wants. They need to stop immediately.

After Ohio delivered a .01 percent increase in votes for President Donald Trump compared to the 2016 election, former Gov. John Kasich said that Democrats would have won “if they’d have been more clear in rejecting the hard left.”

"The Democrats have to make it clear to the far-left that they almost cost him this election," Kasich told CNN in the hours after the election results were announced.

This sentiment was echoed in a strategy call for high-ranking Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Wednesday, as Politico reported: “The message, Pelosi and others agreed, was clear: If they didn't rein in the far left, their fragile majority would be doomed in the next election.”

Progressives pulled off one of the largest electoral victories in recent American history. So why are they taking cues from the losing party about winning?

It didn’t take long for rising stars on the Democratic left to clap back. "Progressive policies do not hurt candidates," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted. And as she pointed out in a recent interview with The New York Times, “Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat.”

A memo drafted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and the progressive wing of the party echoed the same sentiment:

“There is no denying Republicans levied salient rhetorical attacks against Democrats, but these will continue to happen as they do every cycle. We cannot let Republican narratives drive our party away from Democrats’ core base of support: young people, Black, brown, working class, and social movements who are the present and future of the party.”

Those who endorsed the most progressive policies on the climate crisis also performed well at the ballot box. Brian Kahn, an editor at Gizmodo’s climate vertical Earther, did an analysis and found that almost every co-sponsor of the Green New Deal won re-election. Of the 93 sponsors who were running, only one lost. Not to mention that one of the original sponsors of the Green New Deal became the vice president-elect.

But while Ocasio-Cortez and her more progressive colleagues received praise for their bold claims, they also received backlash, especially from self-identified centrists who are taking cues from Republicans like Kasich and saying that the Democratic agenda should be watered down to attract conservative support.

We know that progressive policies are far more popular with the general electorate than conservative ones. What’s so unsettling is not even the fallacy of the message, but the audacity of the messenger.

The Republican party is so unpopular that their leader is the only president in history to have lost the popular vote twice, which is unsurprising given that the GOP has never been so brittle, with top Republican operatives (many currently serving in office) as well as top military advisers and commanders defecting from their own leadership. The Republican Party is not only weak, it’s astronomically divided.

And now the top Republican leaders are weaponizing their unpopularity to reject the will of the American people by refusing to concede the election they lost, enabling a commander in chief who has packed the courts, his Justice Department and now the military with loyalists. “Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the nation’s national security bureaucracy — would be without parallel by an outgoing president who has just lost re-election,” The New York Times reported.

If this low-key coup d’etat weren’t happening in America’s backyard, our own foreign policy analysts wouldn’t hesitate to call it what it is. If we were witnessing a populist leader firing the head of the military 72 hours after refusing to acknowledge the results of an election, and reshuffling branches of government to institute sycophants, we wouldn’t be calling it “unprecedented,” we’d be calling it an “autocratic attempt,” a term the New Yorker writer Masha Gessen credits to the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar.

“Trump is trying to use his vertical of vassalage to thwart the electoral system,” Gessen writes. “If he succeeds, his autocratic breakthrough will be complete.” In her analysis, Gessen specifically warns about the peril of President-elect Joe Biden listening to or appeasing Republicans, not just as a danger to his party, but as a lasting threat to democracy.

"If, upon his Inauguration, a President Biden acts as though our national nightmare is over — if he attempts to build bridges and fetishizes bipartisanship in order to pass some watered-down legislation, rather than, say, even acknowledging the necessary and probably impossible task of unpacking the federal judiciary — then the autocratic attempt can return, and it will be stronger.”

Meanwhile, what are centrists Democrats arguing about? How to sound more like Republicans. Are the people who let their party get hijacked by one of the most authoritarian-leaning leaders in modern history really going to be the model for the party who narrowly saved us from it? It feels certifiably ridiculous that it needs to be said, but perhaps the people in the party willing to overturn the results of a democratic election shouldn’t be the blueprint progressives use to find their identity during this constitutional crisis. Democrats taking advice about how to govern from Republicans feels like a fish taking advice from a rock about how to swim.

I also do not want to hear a chirp about “unity” and “healing” from the enablers of a president whose sophisticated Covid-19 response plan was to let people in blue states die of it and then blame them for it. Democratic firebrands like Ocasio-Cortez are not a threat to the Democratic Party, they are its only hope. Forces of nature like Stacey Abrams and the legion of Black and diverse organizers didn’t turn Georgia blue by appeasing Republicans, they did it by defying them.

Instead of focusing on what Republicans want, Democrats need to remember who the hell they are. They were the quintessential and original party of the working class. They defend the economic interests and share the values of the average voter. They have consistently won the popular vote of every election in the last two decades. Now they have to start acting like it.

The Democrats have the chance at a great success story if they stop letting Republicans put an asterisk next to it. If they want to continue to win, Democrats need to stop trying to make Republicans like them. They need to realize that they have been the popular kids all along.
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https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/democrats-keep-worrying-about-what-gop-wants-they-need-stop-n1247538
 

Drifter

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Agree. Kamala bump fisting with a man that tried to suppress the black votes in Georgia, said it all for me.
 

Organic Potatoes

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This was an interesting episode: Barr drops the charges against high profile drug trafficker El Padrino that they arrested in LA in exchange for a promise from Mexico to nab an unnamed cartel leader.

Reuters Exclusive
 

utdalltheway

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It’s all about distraction isnt it? Keep throwing shit out there and it will keep people thinking and talking about that instead of the big picture questions.
Such as why does the US have such a large military industrial complex and why is it the only major industrialized country that refuses to offer healthcare for all?
 

WPMUFC

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