Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

The true caveat? The word law is meaningless without two requisites: 1) an ability to enforce, and 2) a willingness to enforce.

 

When you get someone totally corrupt into a position of power and influence who understands the unwillingness or inability of law, the end result is corruption in every circle and of everything.

 

What will you vote for? Law? Or the corruption of Trump?

[Winstonm]

Omg, I just nearly fell of my chair! A woman from some Republican Women group just described DJT on BBC News as "a construction worker who happened to become a millionaire". This shows probably even more clearly than the covid blindness just what an alternative reality some true US conservatives live in.

 

Luxury! When I was a lad we lived in a hole in the road!

 

If you really want crazy, watch or read some of the interviews with Q-anon believers: https://www.towleroad.com/2018/08/qanon-believers/

[johnu]

Omg, I just nearly fell of my chair! A woman from some Republican Women group just described DJT on BBC News as "a construction worker who happened to become a millionaire". This shows probably even more clearly than the covid blindness just what an alternative reality some true US conservatives live in.

I believe the Manchurian President started out as a humble carpenter, as was his father Joseph.

[Winstonm]

I believe the Manchurian President started out as a humble carpenter, as was his father Joseph.

 

Stalin was a carpenter?

[Winstonm]

Watching the Biden town hall tonight made me realize that Trump voters shouldn't be castigated but pitied: anyone who would choose Trump over Biden has to be so psychologically damaged that their lives can only be ruled by fear of progress coupled with a childlike reliance for protection on a father-figure. That is quite a sad existence.

[y66]

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, castigated President Trump in a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday, accusing the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.

 

In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Mr. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.

 

“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Mr. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”

 

“We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” he added.

[y66]

You’re the president, you’re not someone’s crazy uncle where you just retweet whatever.

 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/10/15/21518763/savannah-guthrie-trump-town-hall-nbc-miami

[cherdano]

Ah, Ben Sasse. One of those principled Republicans who had a strong sincere belief that a corrupt racist incompetent misogynist candidate Trump who would cause Republicans to lose elections is to be despised and denounced, who then proceeded to support corrupt racist incompetent misogynist President Trump with every power granted to him in his constitutional role, and now returns to denouncing corrupt racist incompetent misogynist President Trump when it looks certain he will cause Republicans to lose elections.

 

Too bad the polls are quite stable this time around, otherwise we'd see Ben Sasse spinning around in his flip-flops throughout this campaign season.

[y66]

I’ve occasionally been known to brag about one prediction that’s working out well: that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act would eventually be adopted by the entire nation. Although we’re not there’s yet, it’s on the way.

 

But I had another expectation that hasn’t worked out at all. By this point, I thought that the U.S. would’ve returned to normal health-care politics. Republicans would push to reduce spending and coverage; Democrats, to expand both. Republicans would claim Democrats are overspending; Democrats would argue that Republicans are too cheap. Republicans would push to increase the market aspects of the system, while Democrats might, as former Vice President Joe Biden seeks to do, add more public aspects. But the basic structure would work well enough that, at least for a while, structural change would be off the table.

 

I was certainly wrong about that.

 

On the Democratic side, of course, the near-consensus from the 2008 campaign and the 2009 congressional debate collapsed in the 2016 presidential-nomination process, with Senator Bernie Sanders’s faction pushing to replace the ACA with a single-payer system. For now, at least, that’s still a minority position, and Medicare-for-All supporters haven’t won enough offices to make it the party’s policy.

 

But at least that’s a legitimate policy disagreement. The Republican side?

 

Instead of accepting the ACA, the party position is still to get rid of it. Well, technically, it’s to “repeal and replace” it, but 10 years after adopting that slogan there’s still no replacement plan that Republicans support. To say that this has caused problems is an understatement. In both the 2018 and 2020 elections, Democrats have made health care their lead policy issue; during confirmation hearings in the Senate this week, it was the main thing they wanted to talk about. While Republicans are still trying to have the entire law thrown out in court, they’re increasingly on the defensive about the issue.

 

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made everything worse. He has barely bothered to learn the vocabulary of health insurance, let alone any of the actual arguments at play. When challenged about it during an NBC town-hall program Thursday night, his argument was that “the problem with Obamacare, it’s not good.” His solution? “A much better health care.” This is not exactly inspiring rhetoric. Yet it’s really not much better than the typical congressional Republican talking points.

 

It’s not that conservative health-care reform is impossible; the journalist Philip Klein wrote a book about it a few years ago giving multiple options. One problem is that very few Republicans enter politics to deal with this issue; they tend to just not be very interested in it. A bigger problem is that the Republican Party at the national level just isn’t able to handle policy development these days.

 

One option, given all of that, would be to just move on. If Republicans stopped talking about Obamacare and trying to eliminate it, they’d make it a lot harder for Democrats to score points on health care. The party is capable of that; after President George W. Bush’s ill-fated effort to privatize Social Security, Republicans stopped talking about the issue (for the most part) and it lost its appeal to Democrats as an electoral weapon.

 

The thing is, there isn’t really a strong constituency within the party for actually repealing the ACA. What does appear to be true is that Obamacare-bashing is still a successful product within the conservative marketplace, and so Fox News and other partisan media keep talking about it. And where they lead, the party follows. That this is all a highly dysfunctional way for a political party to behave, at least if it hopes to govern well enough to keep getting re-elected, just doesn’t seem to enter into the discussion.

[y66]

Before Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Times editorial board warned voters that our presidents are role models for our children. “Is this the example we want for them?”

 

Kids who are too young to remember anyone else have now learned that racism, xenophobia and bullying tweets are hallmarks of presidential behavior. They don’t remember a Republican Party that wasn’t an obsequious cult of personality or presidential debates that weren’t confusing shouting matches. They think it’s normal for every other word out of a president’s mouth to be bravado, innuendo or, too often, a lie.

 

Worse still, they live in a country where representative democracy is under assault from algorithmic gerrymandering, institutionalized voter suppression and foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns.

 

“Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II,” we wrote in this weekend’s special section of the Sunday Review. If only that were a newspaper woman’s bravado.

 

The section lays out the substance behind that indictment, from his record of racism and corruption to his utter administrative incompetence. We took no pleasure in writing these pieces. They are urgent because they are a call to action, a call to deny Trump a second term and return the country to a more peaceful, stable and respectful form of self-governance.

 

In the midst of an economic calamity unmatched in generations, a pandemic of global scope and a nation more divided than in modern memory, the stakes couldn’t be greater. Soon, all that’s left will be to count the votes.

[Winstonm]

What Jonathan Bernstein doesn't seem to grasp is that the Republicans continued reliance on Obama-care bashing chants has nothing to do with health insurance and all to do with erasing the signature accomplishment of a black president.

[y66]

What Jonathan Bernstein doesn't seem to grasp is that the Republicans continued reliance on Obama-care bashing chants has nothing to do with health insurance and all to do with erasing the signature accomplishment of a black president.

No doubt that has some appeal to haters in the Republican party but I don't think it explains why Republican members of Congress and their financial backers would put that above self preservation. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they view self preservation as a lost cause and are hoping to notch one more win for corporations and private equity interests before the clock runs out.

[kenberg]

I have still not tweeted my first tweet but I will grab this from

https://www.washingt...es-crazy-uncle/

 

Apparently Mary trump tweeted

Need to take issue with @SavannahGuthrie for saying to trump "it's not like you're someone's crazy uncle."

[Zelandakh]

I have still not tweeted my first tweet

See if you can get yourself blocked by the POTUS, Ken :P B-)

[Zelandakh]

Silly question perhaps, but if Florida can just remove people with debts from the voter roll, could they also prevent the POTUS from voting?

[johnu]

Silly question perhaps, but if Florida can just remove people with debts from the voter roll, could they also prevent the POTUS from voting?

Convicted felons in Florida lose their voting rights. Under a new law and some court decisions, once they serve their sentences they must pay court related fines and debts to restore voting rights.

 

Right now, the Manchurian President is just an unindicted conspirator in the Michael Cohen case, and other felonies aren't indictable until he leaves office because of a DOJ memo. Once he is indicted and convicted, he would lose voting rights in Florida.

 

I expect him to self-deport to avoid prison.

[y66]

Third Justice Dept. Prosecutor Publicly Denounces Barr

 

WASHINGTON — A 36-year veteran of the Justice Department this week accused Attorney General William P. Barr of abusing his power to sway the election for President Trump and said he was quitting, making him the third sitting prosecutor to issue a rare public rebuke of the attorney general.

 

“Barr’s resentment toward rule-of-law prosecutors became increasingly difficult to ignore, as did his slavish obedience to Donald Trump’s will,” Phillip Halpern, a federal prosecutor in San Diego, said in a letter published Wednesday in The San Diego Union-Tribune. “This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy.”

 

Mr. Halpern said he chose to retire as well, calling Mr. Barr “a well-trained bureaucrat” without prosecutorial experience and alleging that he scorned honest apolitical prosecutors and selectively meddled in the criminal justice system to help Mr. Trump’s allies.

 

He said he would have quit earlier but stayed on because he worried that the department under Mr. Barr would have interfered in his prosecution of former Representative Duncan D. Hunter, Republican of California, who pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to steal campaign funds.

 

The condemnations by Mr. Halpern and the two other prosecutors, one in Seattle and one in Boston, broke with a longstanding practice by Justice Department lawyers not to publicly discuss internal affairs.

 

“I have never seen sitting prosecutors go on the record with concerns about the attorney general,” said Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law who served as a federal prosecutor during Mr. Barr’s earlier tour as attorney general in the George Bush administration. “This is unprecedented.”

[y66]

The GOP could win elections by:

 

(a) Dropping its unpopular support for regressive tax cuts

 

OR

 

(b) Embracing lunatics and trying to curtail the basic functioning of democracy

 

And they’ve gone for (b)

 

GOP political strategists acknowledged in interviews with Insider that Republicans view QAnon believers and the movement not as a liability or as a scourge to be extinguished, but as a useful band of fired-up supporters.

 

How the GOP learned to love QAnon

[Winstonm]

Somehow, someway, a subset - a minority - of the Republican party has found a way to rule the U.S, It is time to root out that group and cast them aside for the good of us all.

[Zelandakh]

Is this story true, Ken? Should Dems be worried despite 538 giving Biden an 8% lead?

[Winstonm]

Is this story true, Ken? Should Dems be worried despite 538 giving Biden an 8% lead?

 

Can't answer for Ken, but this guy obviously did not watch the Biden town hall.

 

"Lifelong politicians like Joe Biden are out of touch with the working class, out of touch with what the country needs, and out of touch with those of us here on the Iron Range and in small towns like ours across our nation," they said.

 

Why should we care about him? He is ignorant and is proud to stay that way.

[y66]

Wannabe kidnappers and throat slashers stand by.

[y66]

From Fearing a ‘Blood Bath,’ Republican Senators Begin to Edge Away From Trump

 

We always knew that there were going to be a number of close Senate races, and we were probably swimming against the tide in places like Arizona, Colorado and Maine. But when you see states that are effectively tied, like Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina, that tells you something has happened in the broader environment.

It tells you something? Yup, it do.

[y66]

I know some of you are thinking of sitting this election out. Let me tell you why that is not an option.

 

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/opinion/the-money-men-could-save-us-but-theyre-stuck-in-the-seventies.html

 

...In August at the Fed’s annual, exclusive retreat, Fed Chair Powell unveiled the outcomes of the framework review. The supposed big reveal was that the Fed would now try to achieve inflation that averages 2 percent, instead of exactly 2 percent annually. Wall Street and Fed watchers heralded it as a sea change in monetary policy. In reality, it did nothing about the here and now. It only promised it would not overreact to inflation in the future. Yet inflation has rarely reached its modest 2 percent target since 2008. Why should we believe it will be any different after this severe recession?

 

Nevertheless, we cannot give up on the Fed, especially now, as it has consistently been the most effective, stable force in the Covid-19 crisis. And because it appears to be the last bastion for hope of further remedies. The Fed must combine the urgency of its response in March with the creativity of its world-saving actions in the Great Recession.

 

What more can the Fed do? First, it must get its Main Street and Municipal Lending facilities truly working for medium-sized businesses and state and local governments: Lowering the interest rates on the loans, which are currently above market rates, and extending the repayment time to five or more years.

 

The Fed must also be willing to make loans to businesses and communities that might not be able to repay in full. Generous loan forgiveness would effectively turn the loans into grants — a helping hand that the Fed has been willing to lend to struggling large firms in the recent past.

 

Second, the Fed must think big. As trouble was brewing in financial markets in 2007, Ben Bernanke, then Chair of the Fed, sent an email to senior staff with the subject line “Blue Sky.” They needed new thinking — new ways to calm markets and support the overall economy. They used obscure emergency powers in 2008 and later purchased over one trillion dollars in mortgage-back securities after the housing bubble imploded. Tools that were new and untested in the United States at the time.

 

The same goes for 2020. We need blue sky ideas, and they exist. One example, a proposal by former Fed economists Julia Coronado and Simon Potter, is that the Fed could get money directly to people, using digital currency not unlike a direct deposit. To avoid politics, this emergency support would be tied to macroeconomic conditions, like the unemployment rate. Such policies would blur the line between fiscal and monetary policy, but if done well, the independence of the Fed from Congress could be preserved.

 

Finally, the Fed must get serious about exorcising its hawkish demons. It must commit — not simply promise — to meet its dual mandate. They must define maximum employment with numbers not good intentions. They must explain, in detail, what hitting their new average inflation target will look like. Then they need a plan to get it done.

 

Yes, to take some of the boldest measures under consideration — like sending money directly to people — the central bankers would need more authority from Congress. But Congress has been more than happy of late to delegate economic policy to Fed officials. So they should ask for it.

 

Much like the Constitution, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created the central bank, is a living document that Congress can change. Even without more explicit guidance from Congress, there is much that the Fed can and needs to do for Americans. The U.S. economy will eventually recover from this crisis. Getting the country back on track within months, not years, and doing so equitably, is the Fed’s mission.