Presidential election, 2016

[Warren Dew]

(12-11-2016, 04:16 AM)taramarie Wrote: "A strophic ballad, “One Tin Soldier” tells the tale of the materialistic “valley-people” who kill and cheat in search of a rumoured treasure on a mountain. The only treasure, though, is a stone inscribed with “Peace on earth”; ironically, the valley-people, a metaphor for mankind, destroyed this treasure whilst in the pursuit of it. The song ends with a repetition of the chorus which is a common arrangement technique used to engrain a song in the listener’s memory."

Now that is a blue hippie message if I ever saw one.
Look to the external links provided in this link of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_Caste

There are no external links for that paragraph.  Indeed, as an unsourced paragraph, it will probably be removed when someone notices, since it's just one Wikipedia editor's opinion.

[Warren Dew]

(12-11-2016, 11:35 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-10-2016, 03:32 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I wish I could understand you guys from Trumpland a little better. I wonder if there's something more in your minds than just deceptive ideas and fears. What could make you this way? I don't know.

As an FYI, I believe that Warren Dew is from Massachusetts, which is definitely NOT Trumpland.

Indeed, I come from a city which had only one third the Trump support that he had in Massachusetts overall.  All the slots on the town Republican committee are empty because the last person who tried to get elected to one couldn't get the five signatures required to get on the ballot.

[Anthony '58]

I have always seen One Tin Soldier as a prayer against envy set to music - but then again, a Baby Buster probably would see it that way.

[Warren Dew]

(12-11-2016, 04:08 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-11-2016, 11:47 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-11-2016, 04:16 AM)taramarie Wrote: "A strophic ballad, “One Tin Soldier” tells the tale of the materialistic “valley-people” who kill and cheat in search of a rumoured treasure on a mountain. The only treasure, though, is a stone inscribed with “Peace on earth”; ironically, the valley-people, a metaphor for mankind, destroyed this treasure whilst in the pursuit of it. The song ends with a repetition of the chorus which is a common arrangement technique used to engrain a song in the listener’s memory."

Now that is a blue hippie message if I ever saw one.
Look to the external links provided in this link of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_Caste

There are no external links for that paragraph.  Indeed, as an unsourced paragraph, it will probably be removed when someone notices, since it's just one Wikipedia editor's opinion.

I meant the references provided in the link and no it is not just one persons "opinion" when they have used references. Please pay attention and look a the persons references before commenting. Wikipedia is fantastic for those references which are accurate.

There are no references at the link which are relevant to your quoted paragraph.  That's why there are no footnotes in the paragraph.  That means that the paragraph is pure opinion.  Wikipedia is not so fantastic for its statements that have no footnotes/references.

[Mikebert]

(12-11-2016, 04:35 PM)taramarie Wrote: Every link that I can find says EXACTLY the same thing. But hey as they are apparently on facebook you can ask them yourself if you have any doubt. Everyone else seems to know what the song is about and they say exactly the same thing. But hey ask them. Until you have evidence (which i have proven with my sources which are consistent with what the meaning of the song is about) you have nothing. I looked it up with no knowledge of the song and that is what I have come up with and as it is consistent that is the fact for now. Unless you have evidence you are arguing just for the sake of it. Find me proof.

Good lord what time it is there, 1AM?

[Eric the Green]

(12-11-2016, 11:35 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-10-2016, 03:32 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I wish I could understand you guys from Trumpland a little better. I wonder if there's something more in your minds than just deceptive ideas and fears. What could make you this way? I don't know.

As an FYI, I believe that Warren Dew is from Massachusetts, which is definitely NOT Trumpland.

Right; I don't think he's a typical Trumplander; he's too intellectual. I was of course referring to Mr. Classic Xer.

[Eric the Green]

(11-22-2016, 03:50 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-16-2016, 07:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Trickle-in electionomics:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...rue#gid=19

Hillary leads Trump by about 1,200,000 and still counting.

Now her lead is over 1,700,000, and projected by google to be 2,400,000

Now it's up by 2,850,000, and it appears that California did not supply the additional margin this time. Don't know where it came from; the recounts have not been posted and no further votes from Philadelphia were added. New York, possibly.

Hillary Clinton 65,751,995
Donald Trump 62,908,073
others 7,648,738
Clinton 48.2%
Trump 46.2%

[Eric the Green]

The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral
By Jonathan Chait
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...b-share-di

Marge: The moral of the story is that a good deed is its own reward!

Bart: But we got a reward, the head is cool!

Marge: Well, then maybe the moral is, no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter we wouldn’t have gotten anything.

Marge: Mmmm … then I guess the moral is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Maybe there is no moral, Mom.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

—The Simpsons, 1991

Back in the 1980s, when Democrats used to lose presidential elections on the regular, The New Republic would publish a post-election “Recriminations Issue,” which at some point was billed its “Quadrennial Recriminations Issue,” a tradition that finally ended in 1992. The ritual called for every faction within the Democratic Party to air its grievances with every other faction, and to blame them for the defeat. Donald Trump’s surprising victory has given liberals their first chance in a dozen years to revive this bygone tradition.

We are all inclined to believe that great events must have great causes, which is why so many people refused to believe that a lone assassin killed John F. Kennedy. In politics, the temptation to attribute a political defeat to the errors of one’s ideological rivals is overwhelming, and liberal intellectuals are wantonly indulging the temptation. Many of the disputes are so abstract they only barely touch upon actual political choices that may have impacted this, or any, future election. Everybody is simply rebranding their own doctrinal beliefs as a political road map.

I have my own grievances, especially concerning the trend toward illiberal suppression of discourse in some spaces dominated by the left. But, while I’m concerned about the long-term impact on the progressive movement’s ability to retain its liberal character, I doubt this played much of a role in the campaign. I don’t think any of the party’s ideological schisms played much of a role, actually. It is hard to think of an election defeat more singularly absent of important lessons, since the most important lesson of the election is glaringly obvious and shared by all sides: Don’t nominate Hillary Clinton for president again.

If you listened to the political scientists, Hillary Clinton’s defeat was relatively predictable — winning a third term for a party is pretty difficult. Most of us believed that dynamic wouldn’t matter in 2016 because the Republican Party nominated a singularly unfit candidate for office. But it turned out this factor was cancelled out by Hillary Clinton’s almost equal level of unpopularity. To many people who follow politics closely, it was hard to believe that the voters might see the ordinary flaws of a consummate establishmentarian pol as equivalent to those of a raving ignorant sociopathic sexual predator. And yet.

The liberal writer Amy Sullivan actually nailed the problem as early as 2005, in a Washington Monthly story arguing that Clinton suffered fatal distrust by swing voters. While “Clinton can win nearly any debate that is about issues, she cannot avoid becoming the issue in a national campaign,” she wrote. “And when that happens, she will very likely lose.”

Eleven years later, this prophecy came true, though by a somewhat roundabout means. The Democratic Establishment cleared the field for Clinton, whose favorable ratings had risen during her time away from the partisan conflict, and who they assumed was a fully known commodity. In reality, Clinton had not actually been vetted. In the time since her last presidential run, she and her husband had allowed their foundation work and private speech business to become enmeshed in ways rife with ethical conflict. The revelation that Clinton had inappropriately used a private email server came out in March 2015. This resulted in new batches of her emails being published every month for the remainder of the campaign.

The email story dominated coverage of Clinton’s campaign, creating a hook upon which the public and the media could hang the long-standing (and mostly, if not entirely, irrational) distrust of her that Sullivan had described a decade before. It was compounded by a series of aggravating factors. A two-term Democratic presidency had created a backdrop of liberal complacency and elevated expectations. The Democratic primary took place in a mood that took winning largely for granted, and focused instead on extracting maximal ideological concessions. In that atmosphere, Bernie Sanders’s success was a warning sign that the party’s base had come to see the alleged timorousness of its own leaders, rather than a Republican Party that controlled Congress, as the primary obstacle to social reform. Month after month of his slashing attacks on her as an untrustworthy shill for Goldman Sachs left an indelible residue of distrust.

It never went away. Russian intelligence carried out a successful campaign to steal emails from Democratic officials and use them to seed anti-Clinton stories in the mainstream media. And then FBI Director James Comey made the extraordinary, precedent-breaking decision to float the prospect of new charges against her, re-centering suspicions about her character and causing undecided voters to break sharply against her in swing states.

Sanders loyalists saw all the above as a reason why the party made a horrible mistake in nominating her rather than their man. Of course, how Sanders might have fared as the nominee can’t be proven either way, but the evidence suggests that his liabilities were at least as large. He identifies his policies with a term, “socialism,” that is wildly unpopular, as well as with specific policies, like higher taxes on the middle class, that are also highly unpopular. Reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who saw the Republican Party’s opposition research on Sanders, called it “brutal,” and described a small taste of it:

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

Clinton barely aired these themes in the primary — in part because some of Sanders’s general-election vulnerabilities were popular among primary voters, and in part because she led the race all along and deemed it counterproductive to attack an opponent whose supporters she knew she would eventually need. Once Clinton had elbowed out every other plausible nominee — like Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden — Democrats’ only real alternative was a message candidate who had no remotely plausible strategy to overcome his glaring general-election liabilities. Clinton would have beaten Trump anyway, if not for the combined efforts of Russian intelligence and the FBI to bring her down.

The post-election debate on the left has largely relitigated the primary debate, substituting out the characters of Clinton and Sanders while returning to the dispute between the virtues of identity politics versus economic populism. One can follow this argument down any number of fascinating historical or philosophical rabbit holes, but the truth is that the Democratic Party is going to muddle through the problem in more or less the same way it always has. The party is going to run on some combination of more stringent regulation of finance and polluters, higher taxes on the rich, and more generous social-welfare spending, along with themes of racial and gender egalitarianism. Intellectuals who are invested in promoting one of these values over the others can emphasize tensions among them, but it’s a tension Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore all managed to resolve.

In the meantime, Republican government will quickly make liberal fixation with the shortcomings of Democratic governance quaint. Everybody from soulless neoliberal corporate shills to Marxist flag-burners can agree on a shared critique of the party in power. The Trump administration and its legislative partners are engaged in a program of self-enrichment, of both the venal self-dealing variety and the policy variety. Everything from Trump’s extraordinary profiting off his power to his team of millionaires to his agenda of deregulating Wall Street and cutting taxes on the rich can be attacked with the same simple, unified theme. The unflattering things that Americans believe about politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, happen in this case to be completely true. The alliance of Trump’s corruption and Paul Ryan’s social Darwinism presents Democrats with the simplest messaging challenge any opposition party has faced in memory.

The most unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling managed to very, very narrowly beat the second-most-unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling in a handful of swing states, while losing the national vote by 2 percent. Because of this, Democrats can escape their nominating disaster. Republicans can’t. None of us can, of course — a fact that is very bad for the country, but also good for the opposing party.

Consider how the world looked eight years ago. The Republicans lost power amid having let Osama bin Laden and his followers escape in Afghanistan, launched a failed war on the basis of misleading intelligence, managed a scandal-ridden administration stuffed with hacks, handed off an economy plunging into the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and had its outgoing president’s approval ratings bottoming out in the 20s. Barack Obama leaves office with a growing economy throwing off wage gains up and down the income ladder, and with a president whose approval rating has risen into the upper 50s. Some conservative intellectuals tried to grapple with their party’s governing failure in the Bush years, but their mental exertions wound up having no bearing at all on the circumstances that brought their party back to power. Sometimes there is no moral, just a bunch of stuff that happens.

The party that needs to search its soul about whether it has the capacity to govern competently is not the one out of power. And what should concern Democrats is not whether they’ll get back in power but what will be left of the country when they do.

[David Horn]

(12-13-2016, 05:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral
By Jonathan Chait
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...b-share-di

Marge: The moral of the story is that a good deed is its own reward!

Bart: But we got a reward, the head is cool!

Marge: Well, then maybe the moral is, no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter we wouldn’t have gotten anything.

Marge: Mmmm … then I guess the moral is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Maybe there is no moral, Mom.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

—The Simpsons, 1991

Back in the 1980s, when Democrats used to lose presidential elections on the regular, The New Republic would publish a post-election “Recriminations Issue,” which at some point was billed its “Quadrennial Recriminations Issue,” a tradition that finally ended in 1992. The ritual called for every faction within the Democratic Party to air its grievances with every other faction, and to blame them for the defeat. Donald Trump’s surprising victory has given liberals their first chance in a dozen years to revive this bygone tradition.

We are all inclined to believe that great events must have great causes, which is why so many people refused to believe that a lone assassin killed John F. Kennedy. In politics, the temptation to attribute a political defeat to the errors of one’s ideological rivals is overwhelming, and liberal intellectuals are wantonly indulging the temptation. Many of the disputes are so abstract they only barely touch upon actual political choices that may have impacted this, or any, future election. Everybody is simply rebranding their own doctrinal beliefs as a political road map.

I have my own grievances, especially concerning the trend toward illiberal suppression of discourse in some spaces dominated by the left. But, while I’m concerned about the long-term impact on the progressive movement’s ability to retain its liberal character, I doubt this played much of a role in the campaign. I don’t think any of the party’s ideological schisms played much of a role, actually. It is hard to think of an election defeat more singularly absent of important lessons, since the most important lesson of the election is glaringly obvious and shared by all sides: Don’t nominate Hillary Clinton for president again.

If you listened to the political scientists, Hillary Clinton’s defeat was relatively predictable — winning a third term for a party is pretty difficult. Most of us believed that dynamic wouldn’t matter in 2016 because the Republican Party nominated a singularly unfit candidate for office. But it turned out this factor was cancelled out by Hillary Clinton’s almost equal level of unpopularity. To many people who follow politics closely, it was hard to believe that the voters might see the ordinary flaws of a consummate establishmentarian pol as equivalent to those of a raving ignorant sociopathic sexual predator. And yet.

The liberal writer Amy Sullivan actually nailed the problem as early as 2005, in a Washington Monthly story arguing that Clinton suffered fatal distrust by swing voters. While “Clinton can win nearly any debate that is about issues, she cannot avoid becoming the issue in a national campaign,” she wrote. “And when that happens, she will very likely lose.”

Eleven years later, this prophecy came true, though by a somewhat roundabout means. The Democratic Establishment cleared the field for Clinton, whose favorable ratings had risen during her time away from the partisan conflict, and who they assumed was a fully known commodity. In reality, Clinton had not actually been vetted. In the time since her last presidential run, she and her husband had allowed their foundation work and private speech business to become enmeshed in ways rife with ethical conflict. The revelation that Clinton had inappropriately used a private email server came out in March 2015. This resulted in new batches of her emails being published every month for the remainder of the campaign.

The email story dominated coverage of Clinton’s campaign, creating a hook upon which the public and the media could hang the long-standing (and mostly, if not entirely, irrational) distrust of her that Sullivan had described a decade before. It was compounded by a series of aggravating factors. A two-term Democratic presidency had created a backdrop of liberal complacency and elevated expectations. The Democratic primary took place in a mood that took winning largely for granted, and focused instead on extracting maximal ideological concessions. In that atmosphere, Bernie Sanders’s success was a warning sign that the party’s base had come to see the alleged timorousness of its own leaders, rather than a Republican Party that controlled Congress, as the primary obstacle to social reform. Month after month of his slashing attacks on her as an untrustworthy shill for Goldman Sachs left an indelible residue of distrust.

It never went away. Russian intelligence carried out a successful campaign to steal emails from Democratic officials and use them to seed anti-Clinton stories in the mainstream media. And then FBI Director James Comey made the extraordinary, precedent-breaking decision to float the prospect of new charges against her, re-centering suspicions about her character and causing undecided voters to break sharply against her in swing states.

Sanders loyalists saw all the above as a reason why the party made a horrible mistake in nominating her rather than their man. Of course, how Sanders might have fared as the nominee can’t be proven either way, but the evidence suggests that his liabilities were at least as large. He identifies his policies with a term, “socialism,” that is wildly unpopular, as well as with specific policies, like higher taxes on the middle class, that are also highly unpopular. Reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who saw the Republican Party’s opposition research on Sanders, called it “brutal,” and described a small taste of it:

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

Clinton barely aired these themes in the primary — in part because some of Sanders’s general-election vulnerabilities were popular among primary voters, and in part because she led the race all along and deemed it counterproductive to attack an opponent whose supporters she knew she would eventually need. Once Clinton had elbowed out every other plausible nominee — like Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden — Democrats’ only real alternative was a message candidate who had no remotely plausible strategy to overcome his glaring general-election liabilities. Clinton would have beaten Trump anyway, if not for the combined efforts of Russian intelligence and the FBI to bring her down.

The post-election debate on the left has largely relitigated the primary debate, substituting out the characters of Clinton and Sanders while returning to the dispute between the virtues of identity politics versus economic populism. One can follow this argument down any number of fascinating historical or philosophical rabbit holes, but the truth is that the Democratic Party is going to muddle through the problem in more or less the same way it always has. The party is going to run on some combination of more stringent regulation of finance and polluters, higher taxes on the rich, and more generous social-welfare spending, along with themes of racial and gender egalitarianism. Intellectuals who are invested in promoting one of these values over the others can emphasize tensions among them, but it’s a tension Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore all managed to resolve.

In the meantime, Republican government will quickly make liberal fixation with the shortcomings of Democratic governance quaint. Everybody from soulless neoliberal corporate shills to Marxist flag-burners can agree on a shared critique of the party in power. The Trump administration and its legislative partners are engaged in a program of self-enrichment, of both the venal self-dealing variety and the policy variety. Everything from Trump’s extraordinary profiting off his power to his team of millionaires to his agenda of deregulating Wall Street and cutting taxes on the rich can be attacked with the same simple, unified theme. The unflattering things that Americans believe about politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, happen in this case to be completely true. The alliance of Trump’s corruption and Paul Ryan’s social Darwinism presents Democrats with the simplest messaging challenge any opposition party has faced in memory.

The most unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling managed to very, very narrowly beat the second-most-unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling in a handful of swing states, while losing the national vote by 2 percent. Because of this, Democrats can escape their nominating disaster. Republicans can’t. None of us can, of course — a fact that is very bad for the country, but also good for the opposing party.

Consider how the world looked eight years ago. The Republicans lost power amid having let Osama bin Laden and his followers escape in Afghanistan, launched a failed war on the basis of misleading intelligence, managed a scandal-ridden administration stuffed with hacks, handed off an economy plunging into the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and had its outgoing president’s approval ratings bottoming out in the 20s. Barack Obama leaves office with a growing economy throwing off wage gains up and down the income ladder, and with a president whose approval rating has risen into the upper 50s. Some conservative intellectuals tried to grapple with their party’s governing failure in the Bush years, but their mental exertions wound up having no bearing at all on the circumstances that brought their party back to power. Sometimes there is no moral, just a bunch of stuff that happens.

The party that needs to search its soul about whether it has the capacity to govern competently is not the one out of power. And what should concern Democrats is not whether they’ll get back in power but what will be left of the country when they do.

I love Jonathan Chait, but he missed the point on this one.  It wasn't a loss of the POTUS race so much as a loss for Democrats everywhere.  Starting on January 20th, they will hold no power in Washington.  They have 11 of 50 governorships and have taken a 900 seat hit in state legislatures during Obama's eight years.  They have devolved into a rump party, much like Labour in the UK.  Now they have to find a way back out of the wilderness.

Call PW and tell him to start rethinking his party, since he's obviously an insider.  Boo-hooing about the FBI or any other single issue is totally irrelevant.  If Hillary had won, she would have faced a hostile Congress.  Not much belter in my book.

[pbrower2a]

Variant of an old Soviet joke within a few years:

Teacher: Who is your father?

Student: President Donald Trump.

Teacher: Who is your mother?

Student: The Republican Party.

Teacher: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Student: An orphan.

[Eric the Green]

(12-13-2016, 06:39 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-13-2016, 05:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral
By Jonathan Chait
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...b-share-di

Marge: The moral of the story is that a good deed is its own reward!

Bart: But we got a reward, the head is cool!

Marge: Well, then maybe the moral is, no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter we wouldn’t have gotten anything.

Marge: Mmmm … then I guess the moral is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Maybe there is no moral, Mom.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

—The Simpsons, 1991

Back in the 1980s, when Democrats used to lose presidential elections on the regular, The New Republic would publish a post-election “Recriminations Issue,” which at some point was billed its “Quadrennial Recriminations Issue,” a tradition that finally ended in 1992. The ritual called for every faction within the Democratic Party to air its grievances with every other faction, and to blame them for the defeat. Donald Trump’s surprising victory has given liberals their first chance in a dozen years to revive this bygone tradition.

We are all inclined to believe that great events must have great causes, which is why so many people refused to believe that a lone assassin killed John F. Kennedy. In politics, the temptation to attribute a political defeat to the errors of one’s ideological rivals is overwhelming, and liberal intellectuals are wantonly indulging the temptation. Many of the disputes are so abstract they only barely touch upon actual political choices that may have impacted this, or any, future election. Everybody is simply rebranding their own doctrinal beliefs as a political road map.

I have my own grievances, especially concerning the trend toward illiberal suppression of discourse in some spaces dominated by the left. But, while I’m concerned about the long-term impact on the progressive movement’s ability to retain its liberal character, I doubt this played much of a role in the campaign. I don’t think any of the party’s ideological schisms played much of a role, actually. It is hard to think of an election defeat more singularly absent of important lessons, since the most important lesson of the election is glaringly obvious and shared by all sides: Don’t nominate Hillary Clinton for president again.

If you listened to the political scientists, Hillary Clinton’s defeat was relatively predictable — winning a third term for a party is pretty difficult. Most of us believed that dynamic wouldn’t matter in 2016 because the Republican Party nominated a singularly unfit candidate for office. But it turned out this factor was cancelled out by Hillary Clinton’s almost equal level of unpopularity. To many people who follow politics closely, it was hard to believe that the voters might see the ordinary flaws of a consummate establishmentarian pol as equivalent to those of a raving ignorant sociopathic sexual predator. And yet.

The liberal writer Amy Sullivan actually nailed the problem as early as 2005, in a Washington Monthly story arguing that Clinton suffered fatal distrust by swing voters. While “Clinton can win nearly any debate that is about issues, she cannot avoid becoming the issue in a national campaign,” she wrote. “And when that happens, she will very likely lose.”

Eleven years later, this prophecy came true, though by a somewhat roundabout means. The Democratic Establishment cleared the field for Clinton, whose favorable ratings had risen during her time away from the partisan conflict, and who they assumed was a fully known commodity. In reality, Clinton had not actually been vetted. In the time since her last presidential run, she and her husband had allowed their foundation work and private speech business to become enmeshed in ways rife with ethical conflict. The revelation that Clinton had inappropriately used a private email server came out in March 2015. This resulted in new batches of her emails being published every month for the remainder of the campaign.

The email story dominated coverage of Clinton’s campaign, creating a hook upon which the public and the media could hang the long-standing (and mostly, if not entirely, irrational) distrust of her that Sullivan had described a decade before. It was compounded by a series of aggravating factors. A two-term Democratic presidency had created a backdrop of liberal complacency and elevated expectations. The Democratic primary took place in a mood that took winning largely for granted, and focused instead on extracting maximal ideological concessions. In that atmosphere, Bernie Sanders’s success was a warning sign that the party’s base had come to see the alleged timorousness of its own leaders, rather than a Republican Party that controlled Congress, as the primary obstacle to social reform. Month after month of his slashing attacks on her as an untrustworthy shill for Goldman Sachs left an indelible residue of distrust.

It never went away. Russian intelligence carried out a successful campaign to steal emails from Democratic officials and use them to seed anti-Clinton stories in the mainstream media. And then FBI Director James Comey made the extraordinary, precedent-breaking decision to float the prospect of new charges against her, re-centering suspicions about her character and causing undecided voters to break sharply against her in swing states.

Sanders loyalists saw all the above as a reason why the party made a horrible mistake in nominating her rather than their man. Of course, how Sanders might have fared as the nominee can’t be proven either way, but the evidence suggests that his liabilities were at least as large. He identifies his policies with a term, “socialism,” that is wildly unpopular, as well as with specific policies, like higher taxes on the middle class, that are also highly unpopular. Reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who saw the Republican Party’s opposition research on Sanders, called it “brutal,” and described a small taste of it:

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

Clinton barely aired these themes in the primary — in part because some of Sanders’s general-election vulnerabilities were popular among primary voters, and in part because she led the race all along and deemed it counterproductive to attack an opponent whose supporters she knew she would eventually need. Once Clinton had elbowed out every other plausible nominee — like Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden — Democrats’ only real alternative was a message candidate who had no remotely plausible strategy to overcome his glaring general-election liabilities. Clinton would have beaten Trump anyway, if not for the combined efforts of Russian intelligence and the FBI to bring her down.

The post-election debate on the left has largely relitigated the primary debate, substituting out the characters of Clinton and Sanders while returning to the dispute between the virtues of identity politics versus economic populism. One can follow this argument down any number of fascinating historical or philosophical rabbit holes, but the truth is that the Democratic Party is going to muddle through the problem in more or less the same way it always has. The party is going to run on some combination of more stringent regulation of finance and polluters, higher taxes on the rich, and more generous social-welfare spending, along with themes of racial and gender egalitarianism. Intellectuals who are invested in promoting one of these values over the others can emphasize tensions among them, but it’s a tension Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore all managed to resolve.

In the meantime, Republican government will quickly make liberal fixation with the shortcomings of Democratic governance quaint. Everybody from soulless neoliberal corporate shills to Marxist flag-burners can agree on a shared critique of the party in power. The Trump administration and its legislative partners are engaged in a program of self-enrichment, of both the venal self-dealing variety and the policy variety. Everything from Trump’s extraordinary profiting off his power to his team of millionaires to his agenda of deregulating Wall Street and cutting taxes on the rich can be attacked with the same simple, unified theme. The unflattering things that Americans believe about politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, happen in this case to be completely true. The alliance of Trump’s corruption and Paul Ryan’s social Darwinism presents Democrats with the simplest messaging challenge any opposition party has faced in memory.

The most unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling managed to very, very narrowly beat the second-most-unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling in a handful of swing states, while losing the national vote by 2 percent. Because of this, Democrats can escape their nominating disaster. Republicans can’t. None of us can, of course — a fact that is very bad for the country, but also good for the opposing party.

Consider how the world looked eight years ago. The Republicans lost power amid having let Osama bin Laden and his followers escape in Afghanistan, launched a failed war on the basis of misleading intelligence, managed a scandal-ridden administration stuffed with hacks, handed off an economy plunging into the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and had its outgoing president’s approval ratings bottoming out in the 20s. Barack Obama leaves office with a growing economy throwing off wage gains up and down the income ladder, and with a president whose approval rating has risen into the upper 50s. Some conservative intellectuals tried to grapple with their party’s governing failure in the Bush years, but their mental exertions wound up having no bearing at all on the circumstances that brought their party back to power. Sometimes there is no moral, just a bunch of stuff that happens.

The party that needs to search its soul about whether it has the capacity to govern competently is not the one out of power. And what should concern Democrats is not whether they’ll get back in power but what will be left of the country when they do.

I love Jonathan Chait, but he missed the point on this one.  It wasn't a loss of the POTUS race so much as a loss for Democrats everywhere.  Starting on January 20th, they will hold no power in Washington.  They have 11 of 50 governorships and have taken a 900 seat hit in state legislatures during Obama's eight years.  They have devolved into a rump party, much like Labour in the UK.  Now they have to find a way back out of the wilderness.

Maybe Trump will give them some tools.

It isn't quite THAT bad; Democrats have 16 governorships and one independent.
Pretty bad though. Here's the situation today:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14...-governors
I think a late-decided race in CA has made it veto-proof.

Quote:Call PW and tell him to start rethinking his party, since he's obviously an insider.  Boo-hooing about the FBI or any other single issue is totally irrelevant.  If Hillary had won, she would have faced a hostile Congress.  Not much better in my book.

Not much. The White House makes a big difference in stemming the damage Republicans do. Now they have free rein; under Hillary they would not have had this.

The difference may be the energy that Republican fanatics are able to bring to bear to their efforts to manipulate the system, while the Democrats' chief supporters are young, diverse and apathetic. Also there's the problem of not enough unity, as you mentioned. Too much recrimination against fellow Democrats and liberals for one reason or another. Democrats just don't get the stakes, and don't realize just how evil the other side is. And harmful it is to desert the Democrat now because (s)he's less than perfect. In a country like America, to expect perfection or utopia is just horribly naive. It is like expecting perfect democracy in Russia or Syria any time soon.

The Republican ideology has drilled into the people young and old alike that government is inherently inefficient and tyrannical, so mobilization to support government activity on behalf of the people is harder to overcome. Free market ideology is what I would cite as the biggest obstacle Democrats face. Frankly, the biggest problem is people like Galen. Democrats need to be ready to debunk, tackle and fight this ideology at every turn.

People can start here:
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html

[Earl and Mooch]

(12-12-2016, 03:09 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(12-09-2016, 12:43 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 03:12 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: WASHINGTON― Ohio’s Republican-led House and Senate passed legislation Tuesday night that would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected― as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

The measure was attached at the last minute as an amendment to an unrelated child abuse bill. It has no exceptions for rape or incest.

If it’s passed into law, physicians could face a year in prison if they perform an abortion after a heartbeat is detected or if they fail to check for one before a procedure.

The measure is the most extreme abortion restriction in the country, effectively banning the procedure before most women even realize they’re pregnant, pro-abortion rights advocates said.

“After years of passing anti-abortion laws under the guise of protecting women’s health and safety, they lay bare their true motives: to ban abortion in the state of Ohio,” said Dawn Laguens, a spokesperson for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Does this apply even to ectopic pregnancies?  Yikes!

If thou art a good woman, thou shalt die for The Lord ... increase and multiply! / Pre Millennial, Pre Tribulation, Cultist

Governor Kasich vetoed that bill, but signed one banning abortion after twenty weeks.

[David Horn]

(12-13-2016, 10:05 PM)Earl and Mooch Wrote: Governor Kasich vetoed that bill, but signed one banning abortion after twenty weeks.

As long as Millennials don't care enough to stop it, abortion rights will be whittled away to nothing.  I'm shocked that Millennial women seem to be totally disengaged, but apparently they are.

[Odin]

(12-14-2016, 06:28 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-13-2016, 10:05 PM)Earl and Mooch Wrote: Governor Kasich vetoed that bill, but signed one banning abortion after twenty weeks.

As long as Millennials don't care enough to stop it, abortion rights will be whittled away to nothing.  I'm shocked that Millennial women seem to be totally disengaged, but apparently they are.

Unlike gay marriage, abortion is just as controversial with Millennials as with older generations, and Millennials have no memories of back-alley abortions. Also, 20 weeks is almost 5 months, it's almost at the point of viability outside the womb, anyway. Even many of us who are OK with abortion in general are morally uncomfortable with on-demand abortions that late, the absolutism many on the left have on the abortion can make them look ridiculous for this reason, the absolutists I mentioned elsewhere who almost bit my head off for saying that abortion is a necessary evil rather than a "liberating social good".

[radind]

The election is not over yet.

Quote:https://www.archives.gov/federal-registe...dates.html

December 13, 2016
States must make final decisions in any controversies over the appointment of their electors at least six days before the meeting of the Electors. This is so their electoral votes will be presumed valid when presented to Congress.
December 19, 2016
The Electors meet in their state and vote for President and Vice President on separate ballots. The electors record their votes on six “Certificates of Vote,” which are paired with the six remaining Certificates of Ascertainment.
December 28, 2016
Electoral votes (the Certificates of Vote) must be received by the President of the Senate and the Archivist no later than nine days after the meeting of the electors. States face no legal penalty for failure to comply.
If votes are lost or delayed, the Archivist may take extraordinary measures to retrieve duplicate originals.
On or Before January 3, 2017
The Archivist and/or representatives from the Office of the Federal Register meet with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House in late December or early January. This is, in part, a ceremonial occasion. Informal meetings may take place earlier.
January 6, 2017
The Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes. Congress may pass a law to change this date. 
If no Presidential candidate wins 270 or more electoral votes, a majority, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution provides for the House of Representatives to decide the Presidential election. If necessary the House would elect the President by majority vote, choosing from the three candidates who received the greatest number of electoral votes. The vote would be taken by state, with each state having one vote.

January 20, 2017 at Noon—Inauguration Day

[pbrower2a]

The Gleichschaltung has already begun.

[David Horn]

(12-14-2016, 08:02 AM)Odin Wrote:

(12-14-2016, 06:28 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-13-2016, 10:05 PM)Earl and Mooch Wrote: Governor Kasich vetoed that bill, but signed one banning abortion after twenty weeks.

As long as Millennials don't care enough to stop it, abortion rights will be whittled away to nothing.  I'm shocked that Millennial women seem to be totally disengaged, but apparently they are.

Unlike gay marriage, abortion is just as controversial with Millennials as with older generations, and Millennials have no memories of back-alley abortions. Also, 20 weeks is almost 5 months, it's almost at the point of viability outside the womb, anyway. Even many of us who are OK with abortion in general are morally uncomfortable with on-demand abortions that late, the absolutism many on the left have on the abortion can make them look ridiculous for this reason, the absolutists I mentioned elsewhere who almost bit my head off for saying that abortion is a necessary evil rather than a "liberating social good".

The courts pinned the viability of the fetus outside the womb to development rather than any rigid gestation period.  They also cited 24 weeks as a guideline.  Obviously, this is an attempt to whittle away.  Get it down to 20, then start lobbying for 16.  It's cynicism in action.

I do agree that abortion is bad, but less bad than the alternative.  It should never be just an alternative .contraception option.  Unfortunately, there is no viable way to allow the one while disallowing the other.  Millennials are just like every other generation: unappreciative of the struggles of the past ... until it affects them personally.  You guys have raised it to an art form, though.

[David Horn]

(12-14-2016, 08:50 AM)radind Wrote: The election is not over yet.

Quote:https://www.archives.gov/federal-registe...dates.html

December 13, 2016
States must make final decisions in any controversies over the appointment of their electors at least six days before the meeting of the Electors. This is so their electoral votes will be presumed valid when presented to Congress.
December 19, 2016
The Electors meet in their state and vote for President and Vice President on separate ballots. The electors record their votes on six “Certificates of Vote,” which are paired with the six remaining Certificates of Ascertainment.
December 28, 2016
Electoral votes (the Certificates of Vote) must be received by the President of the Senate and the Archivist no later than nine days after the meeting of the electors. States face no legal penalty for failure to comply.
If votes are lost or delayed, the Archivist may take extraordinary measures to retrieve duplicate originals.
On or Before January 3, 2017
The Archivist and/or representatives from the Office of the Federal Register meet with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House in late December or early January. This is, in part, a ceremonial occasion. Informal meetings may take place earlier.
January 6, 2017
The Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes. Congress may pass a law to change this date. 
If no Presidential candidate wins 270 or more electoral votes, a majority, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution provides for the House of Representatives to decide the Presidential election. If necessary the House would elect the President by majority vote, choosing from the three candidates who received the greatest number of electoral votes. The vote would be taken by state, with each state having one vote.

January 20, 2017 at Noon—Inauguration Day

If this election is not overturned, then I doubt one will ever be.  In other words, the EC is useless as an institution.  Worse, it tilts the power to small states (typically rural) at the expense of the larger ones.  Individual California voters are much less powerful than individual voters from Wyoming.  In fact, each Wyoming elector represents 195 thousand people and each California elector represents 711 thousand, for a ratio of 3.65:1.

[David Horn]

(12-14-2016, 01:24 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(12-14-2016, 12:56 PM)David Horn Wrote: If this election is not overturned, then I doubt one will ever be.  In other words, the EC is useless as an institution.  Worse, it tilts the power to small states (typically rural) at the expense of the larger ones.  Individual California voters are much less powerful than individual voters from Wyoming.  In fact, each Wyoming elector represents 195 thousand people and each California elector represents 711 thousand, for a ratio of 3.65:1.

Fix the ratios so it's the same for all states. Then maintain it ongoing.

It's simple enough to just eliminate two words in the first sentence of Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution: Senators and.  This reduces the Electoral College to 436, the number of Representatives in the House plus one for the District of Columbia.  It's not perfect, but it's a lot better.

[Skabungus]

The EC meets and fails to elect Trump
.................................... A joint session of congress meets and elects HRC, cuz she crooked but not nutz.

Right wingnuts arm up.

Suddenly the nation discovers that left wing nuts are armed up as well (and have been all along)!

The fun begins.

One thing I 've found interesting is,  since November 8th, Antifa chapters have been popping up all over the place like pustules on an open wound.   Even in the heart of Trumpland!!!  Midwest Antifa, in Lansing, Michigan?  REALLY?  The far left is gearing up and gaining adherents.  Typically peaceful/non-violent strategies don't really seem to be the talk of the town.  Black Block numbers are swelling.

Ahhhh the crisis is upon us.