Morning Ed: Politics {2018.07.28.Sa}
[Po1] What if Andrew Cuomo isn’t the governor of New York at all?
[Po1] We can add woodchucks to the list of people who don’t like Paul Ryan.
[Po1] This strikes me as fundamentally correct: David Souter has a very, very long shadow. He doesn’t come up as often as Bork does, but it’s ever-present.
[Po1] Be prepared: Chris Beck explains how to avoid becoming the next Red Hen.
[Po1] Matt Welch says that if you want good governance, elect libertarians.
[Po1] People who live on the web dramatically overestimate how many people live on the web.
[Po1] When you’ve lost Ian Milhauser…
[Po1] I consumed Bill Clinton’s recent novel as potential post-fodder but found that it wasn’t actually interesting to write about except for the psychoanalyses we’re seeing a fair amount of.
[Po1] The Natural Law Party lives on! In spiritv, if not in name.
[Po1] A lot of people on the left are taking it as an article of faith that Trump proves you can win an election through motivating the base instead of reaching out to new voters because swing voters don’t exist anymore, but that’s not what happened.
[Po0]
Rank-and-file Democrats are way less woke on cultural issues than twitter takes would lead you to believe. https://t.co/G3SunK7yHK pic.twitter.com/VJwv6YHjIu
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 26, 2018
[Po1] and [Po0]… I keep saying that realignment stalks both parties… and if I *keep* saying it, I might just be right… some day. But I did find this concluding assertion (vox style) somewhat compelling.
There’s some weird torque in our political factions that our two party system is not handling very well.Report
Po1: Cuomo’s spokesperson is right. This is crackpot clickbait.
Po2: Paul Ryan has a car made out of wood?
Po3: Conservatives have seen the Supreme Court as a path to permanent governance for decades. The theory is that if you control the Court, you can just declare liberal legislation unconstitutional. David Souter was the last draw.
Po6: People who are intensely into some particular topic or in some particular community live on the web because they can connect globally. More average people treat the web as an escape. The web is the cafe of the 21st century.
P10: swing voters exist but winning elections is still about base turn out and enthusiasm.Report
Paul Ryan has a car made out of wood?
As it turns out, most rodents have a “sweet tooth” for several kinds of petroleum-based plastic. This has been an ongoing problem for telephone and electric companies since such plastics become the best available material for wire insulation. Power outages caused by squirrels are so common that the people who monitor outages have a separate event classification for it. Back in the day, Bell Laboratories (laser, transistor, Unix) spent a not inconsiderable amount of effort looking for anything that could be blended with the plastic that (a) didn’t mess up the plastics’ other properties, (b) tasted bad to rodents, and (c) didn’t kill the rodents or make them sick. Unsuccessfully.Report
The supposed governor’s spokesperson would say that.Report
Is the numbering system today some kind of snowflake socialism? Everything is #1?Report
Po5: It doesn’t take libertarians, it just takes an appropriate mindset. Every year, the Colorado General Assembly passes a “clean up” bill that removes obsolete and conflicting pieces of statute, adds sunset provisions to old (and in particular, small) regulations that don’t already have them, etc. Every couple of years they refer a constitutional amendment to the voters to do the same things with the state constitution (for assorted historical reasons, the state constitution includes hundreds of things that really ought to be statutes). There’s even a standard form for legislative staff — who spend a lot more time with statutory details than the members — to submit such items.Report
We are governed by uniformly horrible people:
https://www.thenation.com/article/six-year-old-girl-sexually-abused-immigrant-detention-center/Report
Ian Milhauser: Getting rid of the SALT taxes or keeping them is the difference between policy wonks and realpolitik. On a policy basis, they are probably unnecessary and indefensible. Liberal policy wonks have wanted to get rid of them for years. But politicians with a large upper-middle class (but not exceedingly wealthy) base of voters know that they are really popular among their bases and want to keep them. This is one of the few things that some blue-state Republicans balked at getting rid of.Report