Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[ldrews]

 

You are right, the 1st Amendment only constrains the government. So I was incorrect to apply it to this forum.

 

That said, do you personally support the effort to suppress my posting?

[hrothgar]

Is ranting all that you are capable of? Pretty boring.

 

Oh, I'm plenty of fun...

 

You don't deserve anything more than insult and invective.

[hrothgar]

Is ranting all that you are capable of? Pretty boring.

 

Oh, I'm plenty of fun...

 

You don't deserve anything more than insult and invective.

 

Seriously, if you were capable of an intelligent and nuanced discussion, things might be different.

But look at your last post.

 

You don't bother addressing any of the actual comments that I make.

[Winstonm]

From now on, this thread should be re-named Fredo.

 

“I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!

I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!

 

Btw, this would make Don Jr. the product of Fredo lay. B-)

[y66]

From now on, this thread should be re-named Fredo.

And trolls re-named Phishers for Fredo and the rest of us phools?

[MrAce]

You are right, the 1st Amendment only constrains the government. So I was incorrect to apply it to this forum.

 

That said, do you personally support the effort to suppress my posting?

 

As you know I write in "water cooler" rarely. But I do follow and read everything.

No, I do not support the idea of suppressing your postings.

[PassedOut]

I read ‘Fire and Fury’ so you didn’t have to, President Trump

 

Trump was sitting on the floor trying to glue two televisions to one another so that the personalities on them would appear to kiss. This, he felt, would solve the Middle East. Then he ate six hamburgers, which he had sent Reince Priebus, wearing a full face of unflattering powder, to retrieve for him, in case they contained poison.

:D

[Winstonm]

Two of the more accurate evaluations of Fredo:

 

Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.[/size]

 

The search for meaning in Trumpism reflects the desire of both his supporters and his opponents for the president to be what he is not: profound, larger than life, grandiose. Trump’s self-evident pettiness defies those sensibilities. Recognizing that there is no greater meaning may help us address his challenge. Reflecting on how such a small man ever came to occupy such an important office may inspire us to prevent a repeat performance.

[RedSpawn]

I (personally) find the concept of a government applying "business like" solutions completely horrific

 

Businesses (typically) have a fiduciary responsibility to engage in profit maximization.

You really don't want an entity with the power of a government trying to maximize its profits.

 

Businesses are able to discharge their debts through bankruptcy.

Really bad things happen when governments do so. If the US were to do so, the results would be catastrophic.

 

Businesses and governments (should) have very different time horizons.

 

(I can go on like this for quite some time. The two types of organizations are very very different)

 

FWIW, I do agree that Trump is ignoring existing sensibilities.

In doing so, he is doing enormous and lasting damage to the long term reputation of the United States.

 

Other than "Brown people are inferior" and "Jews are good with money" its pretty damn hard to figure out what kind of "assumptions" Trump bases his policies on.

Mostly he is just twisting in the wind, boasting about stuff that he had little or nothing to do with, and acting like a disgrace on Twitter.

If anything, Trump is showing us how bad or compromised his judgment and common sense can be when he clings onto his cognitive biases for dear life.

 

Our President and the American populace must get out of autopilot and get to know their fellow man on a personal level. These misplaced

prejudices from the old societal order hold us back as a nation.

[Winstonm]

Gorka accidentally blows another hole in the Fredo lie about the Fire and Fury book: (emphasis added)

So, when I met Michael Wolff in Reince Priebus’ office, where he was waiting to talk to Steve Bannon, and after I had been told to also speak to him for his book,

 

So, Wolff was never given permission...that right, Fredo? You're sure about that? Maybe you want to rethink that part, you marmaluke?

[Winstonm]

Now this is how you govern as a narcissist. Trump's trumpets trumpet trump of Trump.

 

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry that would have propped up nuclear and coal power struggling in competitive electricity markets.

 

The independent five-member commission includes four people appointed by President Trump, three of them Republicans. Its decision is binding.

 

Here is the plan they nixed - Trump's free-market approach, for all the dumbasses who believe his schtick and support him.

 

The coal and nuclear industries have more than a few old power plants, which are struggling badly in the energy marketplace, and which are widely seen as obsolete. Trump administration officials, eager to help their political allies, worked with the industry and its lobbyists on a plan to prop up those plants in ways the market has not. Indeed, the president had run on a platform of rescuing some of these coal plants, and so Trump World had to think of something in order to deliver on the promise.

 

The result was, well, a little bizarre. As Vox explained a few months ago, Rick Perry unveiled a proposed solution in which utility companies would pay coal and nuclear power plants "for all their costs and all the power they produce, whether those plants are needed or not."

 

No, seriously, that was the plan. Consumers -- which is to say, us -- would effectively bail out obsolete plants, creating unnatural profits for their owners, even if utility companies had more affordable alternatives, and even if the plants themselves are not economically viable, because the Trump administration would mandate it.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

A Republican is in the White House. That means it's time for Republicans to believe that the economy is booming -- and Democrats to get pessimistic about it.

 

The Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy has some fun poll results demonstrating exactly how that is happening. Virtually all surveyed Donald Trump voters believe -- incorrectly -- that the economy added more jobs in 2017 than in 2016. A plurality of Hillary Clinton voters believe the opposite. Overall, a plurality of people surveyed believe more jobs were created in 2017 than in 2016. But when given a stronger prompt, the picture changes a bit: When people were asked whether more jobs were created in Barack Obama's last year or in Trump's first year, the numbers flip, with a narrow plurality crediting Obama.

 

There are several things going on here. One is that people in general probably believe (correctly) that, overall, 2017 was a better year for the economy, and also may have heard (again, correctly) that the official unemployment rate went down, and concluded (incorrectly) that all the economic and employment news, including newly added jobs, must have gotten better as well.

 

Another thing is that a stronger partisan prompt has no effect on Trump voters in this case because they don't need it. It seems likely that Republicans in 2017 were more likely to listen to good economic news and ignore the bad, and since all in all there was more good than bad, they would up thinking everything was good. From 2010 through 2016, as the mild but steady economic recovery chugged along, those same Republicans almost certainly underrated the economy -- just as Republicans tended to deny that the U.S. had entered into a recession during the first half of 2008, when George W. Bush was president.

 

That was an impressive feat of cognitive bias, but it's not the worst one I know about. Democrats during Ronald Reagan's presidency somehow convinced themselves that inflation actually rose while that Republican was in the White House. Since Reagan had been elected in large part because of 1970s inflation and few by the end of his term even talked about it, that was a truly impressive feat of partisan cognitive bias.

An even more impressive feat of cognitive bias is giving Reagan credit for getting inflation under control when, in fact, it was Paul Volcker who was appointed by Jimmy Carter.

[barmar]

No, seriously, that was the plan. Consumers -- which is to say, us -- would effectively bail out obsolete plants, creating unnatural profits for their owners, even if utility companies had more affordable alternatives, and even if the plants themselves are not economically viable, because the Trump administration would mandate it.

There's plenty of precedent. It reminds me of the government paying farmers not to farm.

[PassedOut]

Reading Glenn Simpson's testimony to Congress helped me to understand why the committee republicans hoped to keep it under wraps: Read the Transcript of Glenn Simpson's Testimony to Congress

 

No matter how we feel about Trump, I'm sure we can all join in on saying, "Thank you, Dianne!"

[hrothgar]

Good summary of the transcript that Feinstein dumped today

 

https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/950884746082562048

[Winstonm]

Good summary of the transcript that Feinstein dumped today

 

https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/950884746082562048

thanks

[y66]

From North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally Gerrymandered by Alan Blinder and Micahel Wines at NYT:

 

A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on Tuesday, condemning it as unconstitutional because Republicans had drawn the map seeking a political advantage.

 

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander, and it instantly endangered Republican seats in the coming elections.

 

Judge James A. Wynn Jr., in a biting 191-page opinion, said that Republicans in North Carolina’s Legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent” as they carried out their obligation in 2016 to divide the state into 13 congressional districts, 10 of which are held by Republicans. The result, Judge Wynn wrote, violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

 

The ruling and its chief demand — that the Republican-dominated Legislature create a new landscape of congressional districts by Jan. 24 — infused new turmoil into the political chaos that has in recent years enveloped North Carolina. President Trump carried North Carolina in 2016, but the state elected a Democrat as its governor on the same day and in 2008 supported President Barack Obama.

 

The unusually blunt decision by the panel could lend momentum to two other challenges on gerrymandering that are already before the Supreme Court — and that the North Carolina case could join if Republicans make good on their vow to appeal Tuesday’s ruling.

 

In October, the court heard an appeal of another three-judge panel’s ruling that Republicans had unconstitutionally gerrymandered Wisconsin’s State Assembly in an attempt to relegate Democrats to a permanent minority. In the second case, the justices will hear arguments by Maryland Republicans that the Democratic-controlled Legislature redrew House districts to flip a Republican-held seat to Democratic control.

 

The Supreme Court has struggled without success for decades to develop a legal standard for determining when a partisan gerrymander crosses constitutional lines. The court once came close to ruling that such cases were political matters beyond its jurisdiction. But the rise of extreme partisan gerrymanders in the last decade, powered by a growing ideological divide and powerful map-drawing software, has brought the question back to the justices with new urgency. A Supreme Court ruling outlawing at least some such gerrymanders could reshape the political landscape.

 

Fights over voting rights and election procedures have often taken center stage in Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital, and Tuesday’s ruling noted that “partisan advantage” had been a criterion lawmakers used when mulling how to map the state.

 

Republican officials in the General Assembly said Tuesday evening that they intended to appeal the ruling, which many elected officials and political strategists were still scrambling to digest. Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, criticized Judge Wynn and accused him of “waging a personal, partisan war on North Carolina Republicans.”

 

In a separate post on Twitter, Mr. Woodhouse argued that Judge Wynn had concluded that North Carolina’s Republicans “should not be allowed to draw election districts under any circumstances under any set of rules,” an effort he called “a hostile takeover” of the General Assembly and legislatures nationwide. Republicans could ask the Supreme Court to stay the decision and allow the disputed map to be used this year.

 

But critics of the congressional map welcomed a decision that was notable for its tartness and urgency.

 

“Clearly, the courts have realized that they do need to step in and police extreme partisan gerrymanders, and the court recognized that North Carolina’s gerrymander was one of the most extreme in history,” said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a lawyer representing some of the map’s challengers.

 

The chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, Wayne Goodwin, said the decision was “a major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans’ unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage.”

 

The judges issued their decision fewer than 24 hours before the General Assembly was to convene in Raleigh for a special session. The ruling unmistakably placed lawmakers on the clock, giving them two weeks to present a “remedial plan” and declaring that the court would institute its own map if it finds the new district lines unsatisfactory.

 

“Politically, this gives hope to Democrats,” said J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College, which is near Charlotte. “I can imagine the Republicans being furious, but they have to see political reality, and it’s not just in the next two weeks: It’s come November.”

 

Professor Bitzer, though, cautioned that the ultimate political fallout would not become clearer until the courts settled what could be a cascade of appeals and injunctions.

 

The ruling left little doubt about how the judges assessed the Legislature’s most recent map. Judge Wynn, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a member of a special panel considering the congressional map, said that “a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation.”

 

Most federal lawsuits are first heard by a district court, and later — if needed — by an appeals court and the Supreme Court. But under federal law, constitutional challenges to the apportionment of House districts or statewide legislative bodies are automatically heard by three-judge panels, and appeals are taken directly to the Supreme Court.

 

In addition to Judge Wynn, an appointee of Mr. Obama’s, Senior Judge W. Earl Britt of the Federal District Court in Raleigh joined the opinion. Judge Britt was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.

 

Judge William L. Osteen Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush and sits on the federal bench in Greensboro, said he agreed that the existing map violated the 14th Amendment, but he disputed other parts of Judge Wynn’s opinion, including the decision to appoint an independent expert to begin preparing an alternative map.

[Winstonm]

From North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally Gerrymandered by Alan Blinder and Micahel Wines at NYT:

 

My question is at the SC level - will Neil Gorsuch prove to be only a social conservative or will he be a true political partisan hack?

[RedSpawn]

Diana,

 

This story just won't end! :huh:

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/qatar-seeks-international-arbitration-blockade-180110132230125.html

[hrothgar]

Good piece in todays NYT talking about Trump's authoritarians tendencies:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/trumps-how-democracies-die.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

 

 

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

 

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

 

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

 

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

 

...

 

It matters when Trump denounces the “deep state Justice Department,” calls Hillary Clinton a “criminal” and urges “jail” for Huma Abedin, denounces journalists as the “enemy of the American people” and promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who “beat the crap” out of protesters. With such bombast, Trump is beating the crap out of American norms.

[cloa513]

Good piece in todays NYT talking about Trump's authoritarians tendencies:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/trumps-how-democracies-die.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Like Obama except Obama was a different sort of authoritarian- one who signed illegal treaties, one who empowered government authorities to do all sorts of illegal stuff.

[hrothgar]

Like Obama except Obama was a different sort of authoritarian- one who signed illegal treaties, one who empowered government authorities to do all sorts of illegal stuff.

 

First of all, did you see the part where "authoritarian" is defined as sharing all four tendencies.

You're talking about one. So, no, Obama is not "Like Obama".

 

Second, you believe that Obama signed treaties that were illegal and that he did all sorts of illegal stuff.

 

Interesting opinion. Not one that I share.

 

Luckily, we have a way to break the tie...

 

The US judiciary is the ones who get to decide this sort of thing and, as I recall, they don't agree with you.

 

Why not talk about the actual case that the authors make about Trump rather than trying to distract by throwing mud?

[hrothgar]

Another good summary of Simpson's testimony

[jjbrr]

Like Obama except Obama was a different sort of authoritarian- one who signed illegal treaties, one who empowered government authorities to do all sorts of illegal stuff.

 

A wild Whataboutism appears! Incredible insight into a fascinating topic, cloa!

[Winstonm]

A wild Whataboutism appears! Incredible insight into a fascinating topic, cloa!

 

Sure, Alex Jones has incredible insights, don'tcha know? :P