Everything Is Great and Amazing

Big Magilla
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by Big Magilla »

Sonic Youth wrote:
Big Magilla wrote:
There's still the electoral college to give him the edge next time around with the same set of voters and non-voters.
Magilla, did you not see where Mister Tee said "Trump achieved margins of 0.22% in MI, 0.67% in WI, and 0.71% in PA"? He's not going to get exactly the same voters next time around.
Unless there's a third party to take votes from the Democrat again. I agree with Tee's quote of MLK that eventually the arc of history will bend toward justice, but eventually is taking an awfully long time.

We should have gotten rid of the electoral college or rendered it toothless by making each state's vote count equal to their percentage of the national population a long time ago.

The best quote I've seen about the two parties lately is: "The Republicans fight like they're at war. The Democrats fight like they're playing badminton."
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Sonic Youth
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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Big Magilla wrote:
There's still the electoral college to give him the edge next time around with the same set of voters and non-voters.
Magilla, did you not see where Mister Tee said "Trump achieved margins of 0.22% in MI, 0.67% in WI, and 0.71% in PA"? He's not going to get exactly the same voters next time around.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by OscarGuy »

Approval Numbers:

Gallup - 36%

That was released today. Also released was Rasmussen who no one with a brain would ever cite and it's at 47%.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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I'd love to be wrong, but the last I heard his approval rating had gone up to 40%.

There's still the electoral college to give him the edge next time around with the same set of voters and non-voters.

Of course we can wait until next year and hope, but even if the Dems take back the Congress, they won't be able to get anything done with Trump or Pence's veto power which will only disillusion the masses further.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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I'm glad Sonic and Oscar Guy have chimed in first, so I don't have to bear the full burden of lecturing you Debbie Downers.

What part of 36% presidential approval ratings leads you to expect 12 years of Republican rule? Trump is MONUMENTALLY unpopular for a president only five months in -- and this with an economy (his legacy from Obama) that should be massively propping up his numbers. (Who gives a shit that the Times keeps finding hardcore Trump voters to say they still like him? They still liked Bush in 2008, as well. The rest of us gave Obama a big victory.) And of course the entire Russia investigation is still only a looming thing. If the murmurs about how deep the probe goes are anything close to the truth, Trump -- and the party that has decided to cleave to him -- will be toxic for a long time to come.

To address the fact that the GOP recovered/became dominant despite Watergate -- context matters. The Democratic Roosevelt coalition had completely collapsed in the mid-60s -- first from the Civil Rights bill, then from Vietnam. The 1968 election somewhat camouflaged this, with Wallace drawing off anti-Dem votes and making it a close contest. But Nixon's 1972 landslide made the situation plain: the country had rallied around a new GOP coalition. Watergate interrupted that, but barely: despite the scandal, a deep recession, and the humiliating end in Vietnam, Carter squeaked by Ford in the smallest way possible. He then found it almost impossible to govern, since he was running against the tide of popular opinion. The Reagan/Bush years were an affirmation of that ideological tide; Watergate -- more a personal scandal for Nixon than evidence of party-wide corruption (esp. with significant numbers of GOPers coming out against Nixon during the impeachment run-up) -- was almost irrelevant, given the prevailing political winds.

(The Harding analogy is even further off. Republicans won all but four presidential elections from 1860-1932. The four Democratic wins were either by microscopic margins or enabled by third-party runs (Wilson never got 50% in either run). And Harding's death enabled the party to sweep the entire Teapot Dome affair under the rug.)

Today's situation is not remotely comparable. The Democrat coalition isn't coming apart. Have we forgotten, Hillary Clinton got almost three million more votes than Trump? (And every Dem presidential candidate from 1996 on has got a minimum 48% of the vote.) She lost the office only because Trump achieved margins of 0.22% in MI, 0.67% in WI, and 0.71% in PA, and picked up 46 crucial EC votes because of it; her only comparably close state was NH, worth a measly 4EVs. He also won FL by 1.18%. Give her just an even split of those states, and she's in the White House, vetoing any attempt to take health care from 22 million people. (And we may never know how much better she'd have done without the clear interference from Moscow.) Do we think this statistical fluke is so easily replicable? And as for Congress -- I saw figures today saying the 48 Dem Senators got 24 million votes more than their 52 Republican counterparts...and we know the gerrymander of 2010 has kept Dems from capturing their share of seats every cycle since. We live under a variant of apartheid, with the minority exercising power it has earned only in a technical sense. We should be angry about this, and develop tactics to fight it...but to drop back and say we're doomed is ridiculous.

Believe me, I WISH the Russia investigation was moving more quickly...but, as Preet Bharara told Hasan Minhaj last week, you can't binge-watch history. It'll happen at the rate it can happen. (Though, compared to Watergate, this is moving at warp-speed.) Also believe me: in the meantime, I'm finding it agonizing to watch a shouldn't-be-there Gorsuch issuing vile rulings...and I have a fatalism that the allegedly undecided Senators will fall in line in a few days and take health care away from a vast number of our citizens. I wish it could be stopped. I wish it had been stopped last November, and I curse every idiot who decided Hillary wasn't quite worthy of his or her precious vote (people are calling the current Supreme Court the Sarandon Court, with which I fully agree). But I'll stick with Martin Luther King, and presume the arc of history will eventually bend toward justice.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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American politics are cyclical and it's easier to run on change and strength over patience and intelligence. The problems we have require so much patience and intelligence, and we've never been less of either. In that sense, we deserve Trump. He and this group of deplorables are as unfit to steer us in the right direction of today as the Republicans of the 20's were. The only difference between then and now is that because of the internet we can see and inform each other of the signs of radical instability a mile away...but nobody cares.

So...who are our strength & change candidates for 2020? Who's got the message? Who can run on solving the problems? Or are we going to really run on the emotional identity politics of "They go low but we go high" again? I'm not asking for a list of candidates. I'm just concerned that the only way to defeat Trump and his party requires losing tactics.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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I think referencing the Democrats voting for Trump is a misguided thing. Yes, some people who are registered Democrats did vote for Trump, but many of these Democrats haven't voted Republican in many years. A lot of that has to do with the shift the Democratic Party made in the 1960s and forward. They moved towards a more inclusive platform, which meant that a lot of blue collar workers who were once reliably Democratic shifted Republican because, sadly, many of them actually are racist or they at least believe minorities are stealing their jobs.

They also haven't been able to get away from the Industrial Era mindset that has stymied growth. They can't conceptualize that we are in a post-Industrial world, which means that what they still cling to in terms of job prospects is from an Industrial perspective, which are fading away. The same goes for retail employees as the retail world is moving into the online sales and delivery realm. These jobs will also disappear.

Fundamentally, we need to push towards an improvement in the job market that opens up jobs these folk haven't had access to by improving transitional job training and get out there and help them find the work. The Bernie Sanders mindset of wage parity isn't going to fly with a lot of these voters and, I suspect, it has more to do with the fact that the "livable wage" concept is important to them, but by elevating those who typically make minimum wage to a level more in line with where they have gotten after decades in their jobs, it makes them feel like their hard work isn't paying off any longer and that they are being devalued as employees by allowing "lesser" workers to make money more closely equivalent to their wages.

There are a lot of problems. The issue is that the Republicans AREN'T offering solutions, they are merely trading on fear. Fear of Others specifically. Until we can bridge the gap to those who feel that Others are stealing their hard-earned work, we won't be able to win back those once-reliable Democrats who are now Democrats In Name Only.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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I don't see any evidence that we're going to have 12 years of Republican dominance, unless we let burnout and low morale take over. If we think it's going to be a fait accompli, then that's what it will be.

ETA: I shouldn't say I see no evidence. I know there's evidence that things could go either way. Rather, I should say I see no reason why we should draw these conclusions.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by Sabin »

Big Magilla wrote
Whether Trump dies, is thrown out of office or is re-elected for a second term, the way it's going we're in for 12 years of Republican dominance.
Yep, that's sort of what I'm feeling too. I really appreciate not feeling alone on this. Something is very deeply wrong with the electorate. Either they're angry at Barack Obama for not fundamentally changing the game (as he did promise) or they're just simple racist assholes (and please...don't answer), we're just waiting for the next collapse under the Republican Party.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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Whether Trump dies, is thrown out of office or is re-elected for a second term, the way it's going we're in for 12 years of Republican dominance.

When you have life-long Democrats and independents who voted for Trump, making excuses for every lie that comes out of his mouth with the "give him a chance" mantra I don't see much hope of winning them back. It's going to take a shock to the system such as even more unaffordable health care to wake them up. If that somehow doesn't happen, it's going to take the current younger generation backed by the next one to outnumber the ones still breathing to swing the vote back to the middle, if not the left.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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I won't disagree on much of that. I've never said his Presidency most resembles Nixon's. The biggest difference between history and the present is that Harding was the compromise choice for the GOP, whereas Trump took the nomination lock, stock, and barrel.

I also won't disagree with you that really our best chance of getting rid of Trump is if he just dies. And if your analogy continues, then the shitshow that is the Democratic Party will only deepen in the coming year.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

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The presidency his most resembles is Harding's, not Nixon's.

Harding was not the favorite to succeed Woodrow Wilson in 1920. His election took ten ballots, but he made a message of "change" that made him popular with the great unwashed. In retrospect he was deemed the worst president ever. The major difference is that the scandals in his administration didn't come to the fore until after his death. He died of a heart attack while on a speaking engagement in San Francisco a year and a half into his presidency. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was elected in his own right in 1924, followed by Harding's Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, in 1928 and the crash of the stock market in 1929, leading to the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the return of the Democrats in 1932.

In his short term in office, he appointed four justices to the Supreme Court including former president Howard Taft as Chief Justice. His Treasury Secretary was Andrew Mellon who advocated lower taxes.

The sad thing is despite all the scandals of the Harding Administration it took twelve years to get the Republicans out of the White House. If this sorry episode repeats itself now, and it could, we're looking at 2028 before the electorate does something different.
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by Sabin »

I'm not sure if i should be surprised or not that it's been only a week and change since my last Trump meltdown. But Welcome Back!

I'm starting to fear again that we're in the room with this motherfucker for four years. If not eight depending on his Democratic opposition. I keep hearing how the axe is looming for him and how his incompetent administration can't last. And yet...it's starting to sound like the same musings before he became the presumptive nominee boiling down to one truth: "Nothing like this has happened before." The appropriate response should have been "So?"

I could talk about which way the whether is blowing in DC today, but really...Donald Trump is not the first Presidential candidate to be the first corrupt businessman to become President, to have massive conflicts of inflicts, to be involved in possible treason...why should he be the last? If the internet was around in 1980, I'm sure speculation would be abound at how Iran released the hostages the hour after Reagan's inauguration. And he would probably survive it.

I'm just getting used to him.
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Sonic Youth
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by Sonic Youth »

There are always rumors nearly every term. They're meaningless until the actual announcement.

Remember all those years Ginsburg was supposed to retire?
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Re: Everything Is Great and Amazing

Post by Big Magilla »

The rumor I heard was that every time Trump does something stupid he delays his retirement another week. He must be past 2020 by now.
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