Morning Ed: Politics {2016.05.26.Th}
Supporting The Nominee Who Shall Not Be Named: This, a database of Republican politicians and where they stand on Trump, could come in handy at a later date.
Black Republican groups are, tepidly, resigning themselves to Trump. Meanwhile, everything at Republican HQ is just dandy. And the Republican electorate just couldn’t be more pleased!
King Donald is just going to be so great.
David Wasserman confirms something I have been increasingly suspecting: The next time that the GOP wins the presidency, Pennsylvania is more likely than some “swing states” to be a part of the equation.
Connor Kilpatrick argues that liberal dismissal of the white working class actually signals something far worse. Matt Bruenig writes of demonizing and engagement.
While Trump is making the immigration issue potentially toxic for Republicans, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are potentially mitigating the damage.
David Drucker, meanwhile, wonders if Hillary Clinton won’t run into the same problems Trump’s Republican rivals did.
From Tod Kelly: I would like to think that all of us — liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike — can come together in unity and agree that this is fishing hilarious.
Matt Bruening’s post on demonizing and engagement kind of makes me wish that we had more than one part if only so that we could get a less confused political vocabulary in the United States. The part of the LGBT community and associated people that was arguing that same-sex marriage was anti-people of color for some reason were not liberals. They were from the Further Left, the Marxists and the Anarchists. If they lived in the mid-20th century, they would be the Radical LGBTs who argued that the goal should be to overturn heteronormativity rather than seek legal rights and mainstream acceptance. During the 19th century, they would be Marxists arguing that marriage was an irredeemable feudal and bourgeois institution to be gotten rid of in the coming revolution. Regardless of the merits, these are radical and not liberal arguments. If I’m remembering 2008 and Proposition 8 correctly, I think that most liberals preferred to blame it on the Mormons rather than the African-American community.
This gets us to the issue of race and class politics in the United States. I don’t think that the writers like DeBoer or Killpatrick are really understanding what members of the Further Left and some liberals are saying about class and race in the United States. I do not entirely believe this argument but they are saying is that class and race are intertwined too strongly in the United States to have a pure class base politics. To be working class or in poverty really means that you are a person of color or from some other marginalized group like the transgendered community. There might be working class or poor whites by the hundreds of thousands or millions but for the most part White Americans are much better off statistically on paper and reality and count as middle class and above. To the class/identity faction, the only real class politics possible is one that takes these factors into account.
I think many of these observations are true enough but have some problems. For one thing, we know that the social welfare programs that do the best politically and survive the longest are the ones that are the most universal. The more targeted a program is than the less popular it is. You really can’t get around this particular fact even if it seems unjust. I also think that they do marginalize too much of the white working class and ignore the need for pure class based politics as a political necessity at times.Report
Matt Brueing knows something about demonization, but he can’t read a fishin graph. Does he not see how African American support for same sex marriage *has* gone up since 2008?Report
Matt has always been pretty good at not letting facts get in the way of his narrative, even if that means he has to make shit up entirely. He’s also a first-rate asshole. Still, the way he lost the Demos gig is pretty shitty, and the people who are against him are, in general, pretty shitty people (and even when they’re not, they seem to lack self-awareness entirely).Report
@chris
I think it kind of shitty to put up a GoFundMe page saying you are an Internet martyr who lost your job when the reality is Demos was a side gig and Matt had a sweet gig as a lawyer for the NLRB. Plus his wife works.Report
The doxing of Bruenig to try to get him fired from his primary employer was absolutely, positively disgusting.
But the GoFundMe thing was pretty icky.Report
That’s quite the generalization in the last sentence!Report
It’s meant to be. The general response on Twitter has been to attack the Bruenig crowd pretty viciously for doing something unacceptable: attacking people viciously.
I don’t think I’ve seen a measured response from either side yet.Report
It’s gone up, but not as much as whites, and is not responsible for the change in public opinion at large. And even if it has gone up, he actually compliments how the black community was engaged (in contrasting to how similar whites are engaged) so playing that up increasing black support would help rather than hurt his argument if he had chosen to do so.Report
His narrative implies, if it doesn’t explicitly say, that engagement has only swayed white people, which is why his own graph is a problem for the narrative.Report
I’m just not really seeing that. I’m seeing at least two references to liberals engaging black folks on the issue, and both in a complimentary fashion. The whole thesis of the piece seeming to me to be that this is how lower-class white people should be approached (though engagement and not demonization).Report
Perhaps I’m reading the paragraph right before the graph uncharitably.Report
It seems more like he’s demonstrating that there are certain ways that heretics should be treated and certain ways that the heathen should be treated and he’s disagreeing over who is which.Report
And in thinking about this some more, this is one of the logical places for “intersectionality” to have ended up.
How could it have not?Report
What’s interesting is that he’s making his opponent’s point for him: After Prop 8, what happened was activists tried to engage both white and black voters, and didn’t vilify anyone.Report
Correct me if I’m wrong, but nationwide de jure same sex marriage wasn’t achieved through the political process*, it was achieved judicially, right? So the majoritarianism doesn’t really matter, because there was no “GOP-like demographic strategy of maximizing white margins”, because that wasn’t the strategy at all.
What we are seeing in the graph is a complete lack of *backlash* to the judicial strategy, and an increasing acceptance of the new status quo.
*though in detail, the table was set by the legalization of same sex marriage via plebiscite and legislative action in some states, the repeal of DADT, and the Obama administration’s decision not to defend DOMA – these were all political processes and decisions.Report
@kolohe I believe that it was achieved both judicially and culturally. Which is an important distinction to make, I think.Report
It all depends on your perspective. If you look back at some of Burt’s posts, you’ll see the argument that many the important changes were made by state legislatures and society: the elimination of couverture laws and the recognition of women as their own persons in a marriage; the widespread use of contraception, especially the Pill; the legislative approval of no-fault divorce; the spread of pre-nups; the general disconnect between marriage and fertility; the judicial recognition of a fundamental right to marriage such that convicts, the elderly and the infertile may marry; the approval of adoptions by unmarried couples and single individuals; the acceptance of homosexuality by medical and judicial communities, and society, as normal.
Once you’ve got all of that going on, what’s the basis for excluding gays from civil marriage? Sure, the Sup Ct fired the final shot, but there were a lot of changes to the definition of traditional marriage along the way.Report
“Does he not see how African American support for same sex marriage *has* gone up since 2008?”
That’s not what he’s writing about. He’s writing about how blacks in California voted by a huge majority to ban same-sex marriage in 2008, and yet there weren’t vast swathes of e-ink spilled over the Fundamental Homophobia Of Lower-Class Black Voters. Imagine if whites in a state had voted two-to-one to ban gay marriage. We’d still be hearing about it.
He’s wondering why that would be the case.Report
Do we have to imagine? IIRC that was happening fairly regularly 10-15 years ago.Report
“Criminal Justice Reform Act” for NYC
When you hear those wrods you know it’s going to be bad. This is what DeBlasio wants for the city.
http://nypost.com/2016/05/26/new-york-city-is-about-to-become-a-lot-more-disgusting/Report
“The council also passed other bills as part of the act that will re-codify offenses committed in parks to civil violations from misdemeanors, set littering and public-urination fines between $75 and $450 and allow administrative courts to mete out community service instead of fines. The new laws could be in effect within a year.”
Do you think a substantial portion of the population will think, “I wouldn’t have previously drank on the street/peed on that building/slept in a park but now that the consequence is a fine instead of imprisonment, let’s do it”?Report
I don’t know if a “substantial portion” (whatever that is) will, however, I do think a sizeable number will and the result will make the city less livable than it has been in quite some time.
I compare it to CA’s recent experience lowering penalties for shoplifting. Surprise, surprise, shoplifting went up.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/14/california-ballot-measure-blamed-for-shoplifting-jump.htmlReport
You are only looking at one side of the issue though. How much money will be saved by teh change? How much time will be saved? If that money and time can be directed into other quality-of-life issues, is that a net gain or loss? We simply don’t know.
And that is before we get into the issues of justice involved in jailing people for victimless crimes.Report
Come on, you are going to tell me that If someone pees in the streets next to your place and you have to smell it, there is no victim? It degrades the quality of life for everyone in the neighborhood. The broken windows theory works and it strikes me as odd that liberals want to roll back the progress the city has made since Rudy cleaned up NYC by starting with quality of life issues.Report
So much for freedom and small government! People have a right to be free from the smell of urine? Should we arrest everyone whose dog pees on the street?
And these acts would still be illegal… Just fines, not jailtime.Report
“How much money will be saved by [the] change?”
How much *more* money will be brought in by some rich guy saying “it’s easier to sell people on $5000-a-month condo rentals if there aren’t bums pissing in the landscaping”?Report
1. Lindsey Graham has already flipped for Donnie because it is more important to defeat HRC. I suspect that most elected Republicans are going to join the Endorse/Support brigade and partisanship shall reign.
2. Pennsylvania. This seems like solid analysis but I think PA is still pretty safe for the Democratic Party. They managed to elect a Democratic governor in 2014 and a Democratic Attorney General. Though their GOP Senator seems safe in his reelection bid for now. The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas that are heavily Democratic still dominate the state. Oregon and Washington are just as conservative in their rural areas, very white, and no one is calling those tipping point states for Republicans. Older populations are dying populations. Who is replacing the Trump base in Pennsylvania?
3. The Conor Killpatrick article is bullshit. How is the party calling for a 15 dollar minimum wage signalling a broader anti-worker agenda? I’ve always wondered if Bernie supporters in the Democratic Party are partially motivated by not being the center of gravity in the party. Again this great NY Times essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinion/campaign-stops/do-sanders-supporters-favor-his-policies.html?_r=1Report
Trump voters in PA are democrats, like as not.
If we can have Reagan Democrats, we can have Trump Democrats.
Or maybe we just ought to call them Fentanyl Democrats and be done with it.
The odds I hear (from someone who has a rather good betting history) is 1 in 3 that Hillary wins against Trump. Unlike a lot of Democrats, I think that’s a good thing…Report
The Graham story turned out not to be true. Or, at least, somewhere in between “completely unsupported” and “false.”
(Should also point out that the day that the Graham story was revealed to be false, a similar story came out about Paul Ryan. Which also turned out to be unsupported.)Report
Wouldn’t surprise me if it were Trump’s own people putting these stories out.
If enough people (like Saul!) hop on the “Graham already came out in support of Trump! What a jerk!” train, there’s no upside to staying off the Trump Train and only downside to doing it. While the downside to the Trump Jump had already been realized and those costs are already paid… which means the switch has nothing up upside.Report
@jaybird @will-truman
I stand corrected on Graham but many Republicans do seem to be falling in line and supporting Trump. There is nothing shocking about this to me.Report
There is even a handy chart!
It’s going as I thought it would. Mostly tepid and pro forma support. Enough to pass me off, but not enough to avoid complaints of sabotage.Report
Oregon and Washington are just as conservative in their rural areas, very white, and no one is calling those tipping point states for Republicans.
Oregon and Washington collectively are even more heavily dominated by the Portland and Seattle metro areas than Pennsylvania is by Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The Portland and Seattle metro areas continue to grow explosively, contributing to the trend towards the Democrats that the article shows in the map near the bottom. In Pennsylvania, OTOH, the Pittsburgh metro area and the Pennsylvania part of the Philadelphia metro area are somewhat smaller by population than they were in 1990, contributing to the Republican trend there.Report
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are natural republican cities. (Same as Illinois and Indiana).Report
Illinois and Indiana are not cities. Philadelphia used to be a Republican stronghold and Pittsburgh had a strong Republican backing with the Mellons but the Unions also dominated.Report
The vast right wing conspiracy ought to also ring a bell.
And yes, Illinois and Indiana aren’t cities. Funnily enough, attitudes don’t always change based on which township you’re in.
(which side of the mountain range, otoh…)Report
No one is calling Oregon and Washington potential tipping states for Republicans because they’re not close and moving further away. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, remains reasonable competitive and will likely be a part of the next GOP victory. More likely, according to some, than Virginia.Report
3. The Conor Killpatrick article is bullshit. How is the party calling for a 15 dollar minimum wage signalling a broader anti-worker agenda? I’ve always wondered if Bernie supporters in the Democratic Party are partially motivated by not being the center of gravity in the party.
Well, yes and no.
I’ve been wondering if what is happening there is if a lot of people on the left do not actually understand the left is a *coalition*. The right seems understand that’s how they work, but the left seems completely baffled by it.
I’m a Bernie supporter. I like his policies better than Hillary’s. So I support him over Hillary…but I also support the party, because the other party is ten times worse. A *lot* of Bernie supporters don’t seem to realize that’s how it work, or that constantly attacking your own side for not being X enough is literally what rendered the Republican party into a joke, so perhaps let’s not do that on this side?
That said, there does seem to be an epidemic of completely ignoring the white, (used to be) middle-class section of the Democratic party. There is a little too much identity politics, and way too much assuming that anything *but* that is based in racism. Oh noes! White progressives have concerns about things that mostly affect the lives of white progressives! Film at 11!
Just because a bunch of Bernie supporters are not concerned about some issue that affects the black communities does not make them racists. It means, again, that the left is a *coalition*. Different people have different concerns. These concerns, mostly, are not in opposition to each other, so we can work together.Report
A couple somewhat related notes:
Foxconn Replaces 60,000 Workers With Robots
So first we were told that jobs were being sent to China because American workers were lazy and too demanding of high wages.
Then we were told that Chinese workers were prospering and eventually things would balance out and prosperity would return to America.
Now it turns out that even Chinese workers are too expensive.
And here is what is left behind-
After The Precariat, The UnnecessariatReport
Who said that? Do you have an actual statement from anyone?Report
Oh, did I misrepresent the summary of arguments in favor of global trade agreements?
What would be a better summation?Report
A summery of whose arguments? At least try and attribute them to some specific person instead of this nebulous summery.Report
@chip-daniels
The Unnecessariat article was discussed on Slate Star Codex recently. A lot of Scott Alexander’s comment threaders were seemingly sincere in discussing how the best way to deal with the chronically under and unemployed might be euthanasia.
I could not tell the extent of seriousness but it made me cynical about the chances of UBI anytime soon.Report
It’s very easy for those who are comfortable to feel smug and safe.
“They laugh at scars, that have felt no pain.”Report
You should meet my friend, you’d love him. He’s a smug person’s worst enemy.Report
The current neoliberal line is “how do we make money off these shmucks?”
… when you think about it like that, euthanasia may actually be preferable to fentanyl.Report
A lot of Scott Alexander’s comment threaders were seemingly sincere in discussing how the best way to deal with the chronically under and unemployed might be euthanasia.
Did that really happen? The closest I could find was people disingenuously suggesting that other people’s proposals were just like killing all the poor people. Granted, I didn’t read all 1500 comments, but if “a lot” of people were proposing this, it shouldn’t have been hard to find.Report
Chip,
Dude, where have you BEEN???
Of course chinese workers are getting too expensive. Didn’t you hear about their MINIMUM WAGE?Report
Both things can be true. Chinese manufacturing is massively more labor-intensive than American manufacturing, so the threshold for automating is much lower than it is here. A colleague of mine told me a story of one of our manufacturers having a guy hold up a table with a broken leg while people used it to continue working for the afternoon. Nobody batted an eye at how odd it was because incredibly low value added jobs are the norm there. The type of automation the Chinese are running into has pretty much already been done over here, or those jobs made a short stop over in China before being automated away completely.Report
And so, where is this road leading?
The premise of automation is that even though the value of labor is lowered, consumption rises, keeping the demand for labor high, leading to prosperity and pizzas with everything for everyone.
Is this happening? Has the demand for labor here in America kept pace with the supply?
Have real wages risen, or stagnated over the past few decades?
Is there anyone anywhere who can suggest how prosperity will return to America, and when that might happen?Report
“How prosperity will return to America”
Simple.
Elect Hillary.
Have World War 3 (that’s a 1 in 5 shot if she gets elected, by the way).
America will prosper above the rubble of the other superpowers.
[This works a lot better if we go to war against Russia than China, by the way]Report
@chip-daniels
The problem is that the economy has too many moving parts. Some places and fields are booming. Others are filled with despair and look post-apocalyptic. Oklahoma and Appalachia strike me as the post-apoclayptic zones.
There just might not be any good solutions. Lots of jobs are not coming back and cheap consumer goods might be some kind of weak or moderate medicine we can give to ease the pains of being part of the unnecessariat or feeling unnecessary.Report
Stakes and hammers not a good solution to you?
Pity.
You do realize if you want them to stop, you have to actually work at it?Report
Back in the turn of the 19th/ 20th centuries, as the Industrial Age was hitting its stride, the massive factories had armies of technical workers, with job titles and descriptions that are incomprehensible today- the oilers, steamfitters, tenders, toolmakers braziers and lathe operators, tap and die men, the sort of workers that were held up as the beneficiaries of automation.
Yet all these workers were doing was tending to the machines. Eventually the machines became self-reliant as to not need someone to oil it, to walk around with a wrench tightening this or adjusting that.
Today I see small armies of tech workers with job titles that are equally mysterious- the coders, developers, systems architects, analysts of this or that kind. These are the people who are the beneficiaries of the digital revolution.
Yet all these people are doing is mimicking the machine. Not the old machines of the steam era, but the new thinking machines.
If someone has a job that requires them to calculate, analyze, perform logical analysis, comparison and decision-making, then that job is the steamfitter of the digital era, and ripe for being automated out of existence.
My point isn’t to be pessimistic, but to refute the idea that with some simple retraining, anyone can be kept ahead of automation.
They can’t, no one can.Report
“Decision making” –
It’s hard to automate ethics and impossible to automate aesthetic preferences.Report
“Technocrat, I’ve worked countless jobs, yet I’ve never met a job market that could offer what we ‘Mericans call “A Beautiful Economic Death”. I can only hope with all the multinationals and opiates gathered against us, there might be one down there who’s up to the task.”Report
Peter Thiel and the bankrolling of lawsuits to destroy media organizations:
http://fusion.net/story/306927/peter-thiel-gawker-dangerous-blueprint/Report
You see, the people that want an aggressive and empowered plaintiff’s bar and a crack down on revenge porn only thought those tools would be used for good, not evil.Report
Champetry and maintenance along with barratry have been considered bad under the common law for centuries before people became concerned about an aggressive and powered plaintiff’s bar. This might be one of those areas with no good solution but the Courts are sometimes the only recourse that a lot of people have considering certain aspects of current American politics. Lets say we really restrict access to the courts more but don’t change anything else. What does that leave a lot of people with? Suffering evil at the hands of abusers and other exploiters without effective recourse. Is that a better solution?Report
False dichotomy. There are other options that can be sought.Report
Legal words are funny.Report
I think one of those words involves piracy.Report
Please to be including the context. It’s not like Gawker just published some silly little opinion column critical of Thiel and he decided to blow them up in a fit of pique. Even Fusion admits that “[Thiel] promised that he would rain destruction on Denton and his associates if Gawker ever outed him as being gay, which they did, the following year.”
I also am quite tickled by Fusion describing Thiel as “investing” in lawyers. Like if I go to Kohl’s and buy jeans I’m actually investing in Kohl’s Inc. and being rewarded with the gift of a pair of pants.
“Gawker is a fast-moving site; it can’t (and doesn’t) carefully lawyer every single thing it publishes. ”
oh come on. COME ON. Checking and “carefully lawyering every single thing it publishes” is THEIR. FUCKING. JOB.Report
@densityduck
Gawker is not the most sympathetic defendant in this case and I generally dislike their in-house style. They produce some great articles but for every article that is good, there are at least five that horrible and self-righteous.
Yet I am disturbed by the idea of Billionaire’s suing media organizations that they dislike out of existence.Report
Thiel and Hogan won. That’s Gawker’s problem and maybe Free Speech’s problem.
Free Speech’s problem is that that the plaintiffs has the funds to litigate a non-frovolous case.Report
There’s an alternate universe where it was Drudge Report that outed Thiel instead of Gawker, and people are chortling over how Someone Messed With The Wrong Homo.Report
Eh, from what I’ve seen of his site Drudge is way less likely to publish something that opens him up to this level of liability.Report
I’m usually pretty quick to see threats to free speech, but I don’t really see anything here. Third party lawsuit funding is already legal and the suit did not, as far as I know, break any new ground in libel law.
If it turns out the suits Thiel claims to be funding are frivolous and aimed purely at draining resources on defense I’ll change my mind, but the main lesson here is that prying into the sex lives of businesspeople and D-list celebrities is risky, which seems like a reasonable place to be.Report
Checking and “carefully lawyering every single thing it publishes” is THEIR. FUCKING. JOB.
You have heard of the internet, right?Report
The SJW clickbait industrial complex was fine shutting down speech via litigation last year:
https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/arthur-chu-would-like-to-make-lawyers-richer-and-you-quieter-and-poorer/
Live by the sword die by sword.Report
Oddly, they’ve also been pretty critical of people who post sex tapes without the subjects’ consent.
I wonder why they changed their minds.Report
Sanders and Trump might debate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/05/26/bernie_sanders_donald_trump_say_they_ll_debate.htmlReport
This is absolutely BRILLIANT.
Oh my gosh. It makes Sanders look like the presumptive nominee, he’ll get his arguments out there in the wild, Trump will argue against Sanders’ arguments, and we’ll have two guys work the populist argument against Hillary’s elitism for two hours.
News organizations should be lining up around the block now because this debate will have the biggest debate numbers this year.
And Hillary’s name won’t be attached to it other than to discuss “why isn’t she debating anybody?”Report
The Clintonistas are spittle-fleckedly pissed at Bernie for agreeing to this debate. They completely agree with Hillary for not agreeing to this debate.Report
How it was explained to me (and I didn’t research this further because it confirmed my priors) was that Bernie called for Hillary to debate him in California and Hillary declined. Trump said “Oh, I’ll debate you!” and Bernie agreed to it.
I almost don’t want to know what really happened if it’s less perfect than that.Report
She’s a candidate of principle. She said no to Bernie, she’ll say no to Bernie and Trump. Consequences be damned.
Or it could be yer priors.Report
Thinking about that some more, seems to me that Hillary’s campaign strategy – luver or hater! – is based on leverage and not appeal. And that’s why people who don’t already like her prolly never will.Report
We might not like her principles, but at least they’re obvious and she sticks to ’em, huh?Report
Well yeah. Bernie will not be the nominee, so instead he’s going to go on for two hours with Trump about how The System is rigged and Washington Politicians are terrible. When Trump inevitably starts spouting conspiracy theories and schoolyard taunts aimed at Clinton, Bernie will barely defend her. The guy is trying to find the least graceful way imaginable to lose a primary campaign.Report
Exactly. Hillary should show up, no?Report
Given that Bernie has accepted for god knows what reason, maybe? I’m not sure if getting ganged up on and making herself look less like the presumptive nominee is worse than letting Trump and Sanders do it without her. A lot rides upon whether Sanders actually acts like he wants Clinton to win the general.Report
Bernie accepted because it’s another opportunity to get his message out there. Hillary could have accepted for the same reasons… Trump? He apparently thinks it’s a good move too.
Politics is about presentation and taking advantage of opportunites, whatever they may be. Hillary’s absence is a big negative since it’s entirely obvious (given her refusal to participate) that she doesn’t view another primary debate as an opportunity to get more support.
Who the hell other than a Strategerist thinks like that?
Add: Strategerist isn’t the right word, but it’s close. “Leveragist” might be better (since I already used it and it’s on my mind 🙂 But leverage is one of the reasons people reallyreally dislike Hillary.Report
IOW: Hillary is content to have won the primary (and check out) whereas both Trump and Bernie are still taking advantage of opportunities to persuade voters and change their minds and gather support.Report
Trump gets to be to the right of Bernie.
He gets his message out to the vaguely conservative who are still in the “Sam The American Eagle” camp who look at Trump and wish we could have someone Presidential. Someone who is not a weirdo. So all Trump has to do is show up, be genial without talking about… you know. His genitals.Report
If Bernie doesn’t agree to this, it is a total non-story by now and doesn’t hurt Clinton in the slightest. She’s going to have debates to get her message out there, and they’re going to be in the fall, just against Trump, and they’re going to happen after the acrimony of the Dem primary has mostly faded away. Doing a debate now, with Bernie still on the stage, means doing this in the least advantageous situation possible. And besides, who but total political junkies who have already made up their mind forms opinions on this kind of campaign trail minutia?Report
Doing a debate now, with Bernie still on the stage, means doing this in the least advantageous situation possible
Exactly. But why?Report
I don’t think fall debates were or are a foregone conclusion.Report
What do you see causing them to not happen?Report
Depending on their state of mind, I could see either candidate deciding that it’s not in their best interest. That the potential perils of a debate outweigh the potential benefit.Report
Imagine a universe where Clinton refuses to debate Trump.
Imagine that, in this universe, Trump debate Sanders instead.Report
Believe me that’s one of the first things I thought about when I heard of this.Report
Remember Ian Holm’s big scene in Alien?
Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Parker: Look, I am… I’ve heard enough of this, and I’m asking you to pull the plug.
Ash: [Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts] Last word.
Ripley: What?
Ash: I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.
Report
Bernie is out of cash and has to compete in California, and still thinks he can win.
He needs the free air time badly.Report
And it sounds like he’s getting the free air time he needs and one heck of a signal boost by the Republican challenger.
On top of that, Bernie and Trump both get to complain about the Democratic Party and how the system is rigged when the news media starts calling Clinton the presumptive nominee before the polls close on Tuesday (because, win or lose, she crosses the delegate/superdelegate threshold on Tuesday due to the proportional allocation of delegates) and, on top of that, the media is in the bag for Clinton because they’re calling a winner before the polls close.Report
Nobody is going to care in a month. Even if it was actually true they wouldn’t care. Nature of the modern media and public attention span.
It’s been weird watching Sanders since New York, I can’t quite figure out what’s going through his mind. Most cynically, I suspect he realized he got within shouting distance of winning the primary (I mean he was never that close, but closing to within about 10 points isn’t nothing), and got hit by the realization that it might have actually been possible to win under other circumstances. (Of course, I think under most “other circumstances” he would have Dean’d out rather quickly, but opinions vary).
I think he’s just not willing to let go of the dream he didn’t realize he had, and I suspect he’s probably not getting the most realistic advice.Report
Biden’s your clue to why Bernie is acting the way that he is.
Look sharp.Report
Clearly, Biden is holding a literal (but unloaded) gun to someone’s head.Report
Nah, whose head would he hold it to?
He’s a backup plan — perhaps a pawn about to become a knight.Report
I’m about halfway through Dan Scotto’s series of Lincoln podcasts. Oddly enough, this is not that far off on how the Lincoln Douglas debates started. A few years before the real Lincoln Douglas debates, when Lincoln wasnt running for anything at all, Lincoln would crash Douglas events and offer to the crowd a chance to hear a ‘rebuttal’ to what they just heard from Douglas.
I think Bernie debating Donald would actually be pretty good for Hillary. We need to be remember that Donald was ok when the stage was crowded and speaking time was limited, but got worse as it winowed. The most incredible thing was that the guy who banked record amounts of free media coverage wound up skipping the penultimate debate. And that was a very good idea that worked.
Donald at a rally, at a press conference, even in a hostile interview, can hold his own, but one on one with an ostensible peer is not a good look for Donald.Report
You raise an interesting point. Our earliest indications of Trump’s debate skills are that they’re poor when he’s one of three or four guys rather than one of eight (where he was much stronger).
So what could go wrong?
When Donald Trump was debating the Republicans, he was the leftmost guy on the stage. When he’s debating Bernie, he’s going to be the rightmost guy on the stage by a damn sight. This will allow him to be right around where Hillary is on the right/left scale and still establish himself as the conservative option.Report
Scott Adams says it’s win win for Trump.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/144955383691/the-sanders-debate-gambit
“By agreeing to debate Sanders, Trump minimizes Clinton and embarrasses her. It will look to the public as if she’s hiding, afraid to debate.
By tying a Sanders debate to charity, Trump signals that Sanders isn’t a “real” opponent. So Sanders gets minimized at the same time. And it puts Sanders in follower mode. Trump suggested, Sanders followed.”
“As usual, Trump has created multiple ways to win and only one (improbable) way to lose. If the debate never happens, Trump wins by making the offer and getting the attention. If the debate happens, it minimizes both Clinton and Sanders. The only risk is that Trump loses the debate to Sanders in a huge way. And that seems deeply unlikely.”
Wow.Report
Yeah, Scott Adams has not struck me as a particularly deep thinker, or terribly good at political prognostication.
You know what this is? Bernie being desperate for free airtime, Trump trolling Bernie, and Hillary ignoring it. And exactly zero voters will recall this, whether it happens or not, by July.Report
Bernie isn’t the one Trump is trolling.Report
Poleznyy durak.Report
Useful, yes.
To the extent that Bernie may see that many of his enemies are similar to Trump’s… well, what’s the word for “short-sighted”?Report
Trump’s not trolling anyone anymore.
Someone’s got him to be serious.
Even Trump doesn’t know how he’d govern.
But, hell, Chaos is good for business.Report
The post was interesting not for it’s political prognostication. It’s all about image and persuasion. If you look at the angles, I think Scott’s right about that. Does that translate into a better change at winning the election? I don’t know.Report
Louisiana Is About to Extend Hate Crime Protections to Cops and Firefighters
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/louisiana-blue-lives-matter-bill-police-hate-crimes
And wouldn’t you know a liberal whines about I saying,”Adding police officers to the list of protected classes, she says, distorts the purpose of the original legislation.” god for bid people use the legislation for the “wrong purpose.”Report
It’s a bad law. Correcting DAs who don’t know how to charge people properly by putting more, weak, legislation in place is just stupid. If something’s honestly organized, we have laws for that already.Report
We have laws for assault and battery yet liberals say we need them to protect gays, women, blacks etc. If it’s good for them, why not cops? You sound like Kazzy from the CEO Chic case. these laws are only to be used by the “right” people.Report
notme,
more importantly, we have laws for terrorism, and organized crime. If you dare to organize yourselves to hurt other people, they ought to be using the “throw the book at ’em” laws.
Coupla years ago a bunch of white guys decided to go to Philly and… “hunt black people” (that’s sanitized, obviously). Call ’em terrorists, string ’em up. Catch a good few more with conspiracy, if they weren’t holding guns but were aiding and abetting…
We don’t need new laws for any of this crap. We need to use the ones on the books, and I don’t mean simply assault and battery.Report
Did you wake up in a world where there aren’t cop killer enhancements to murder and assaulting an officer of the law isn’t already a crime?Report
That’s not what I said. Not that you care though.Report
You didn’t think the white men should be allowed to sue under that discrimination law. Am I wrong?Report
Enviro solar showpiece catches on fire
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/wired-ivanpah-solar-plant-huge-fire-huge-problems
Yet this is the future of green energy that will save us?Report
notme,
read your own fucking article, and get back to me.
Dude. It says civil war in the subtitle.
READ YOUR ARTICLE.Report
Chill, Kim.Report
Eh? An outdated industrial solar boiler is “the future”? Okay.Report
If this is such bad tech then why does CA and the fed gov keep subsiding it? Someone must think it works.
http://www.cato.org/blog/ivanpah-time-end-subsidiesReport
See? This is a much better point to make.
The answer is complicated… but mostly lies in the “government is slow and creaky” and “DoE throws money around” veins.Report
Sunk cost fallacy at work, simple as that. Public Works projects are notorious for it.Report
The Matt Bruening piece is fascinating to read, knowing what we know would happen less than a week after it was published.Report
I don’t get the reference. What happened?Report