Garland. ...Orrin Hatch described him as the sort of guy who’d have the GOP vote yes with no qualms, but I’m pretty sure the Democrats would vote for the guy.
Wasn't that before the voters gave the Senate to the GOP for the purposes of stopping Obama?
Which is weird, since you’d think the CBO would be able to predict a range...
The CBO is prevented by law from some types of predictions, probably including those.
So if your budget claims next year you're going to cut back on Doctor payments even though that would trainwreck the system, be politically painful, and for the last 10 years every Congress has at-the-last-minute Not put in place those cuts?
The CBO has to score those "cuts" as though they're going to happen.
He'll be helping Obama shift the court from Right leaning to Left leaning. This probably throws the Presidential election because the base will rightfully see it as a betrayal. It probably also throws a large number of GOP congressmen out of power. It certainly costs him his job.
Unless he's planning on switching parties or retiring this doesn't seem like a reasonable option.
2) Hold a vote, stop Garland by voting him down.
Chances of success are hard to predict but less than 100%. Garland is qualified and tele-charismatic and he'll have the backing of the press. If McConnell can't keep all of his troops in line then he's looking at a lot of the problems from above. Keeping the troops in line is hard.
And this would be really, really, nasty. To provide political cover, the GOP would try to destroy Garland. No more "he's a nice guy but...". Instead they'll do what the Dems are doing now and lie about who he is, what he is, what he's done, and so forth. Ideally they'll find some woman or man or child to say he sexually harassed or even raped them.
Trying to claim this is the nicer or cleaner option is just not dealing with reality. It's probably also *impossible* because of #3 below.
3) Hold a vote and filibuster Garland.
The Senate has never filibustered a qualified candidate before and the GOP had made promises that it wouldn't. This also has a lot of the problems of various other proposals above.
And he probably didn't have a choice but to do this if it got that far. Some of his troops *would* have done this, with or without his blessing.
4) Prevent any vote on anyone.
The optics are bad but many of the alternatives are worse. The chance of success was 100% because it was something he could do himself. This also somewhat shifts blame from vulnerable GOP members to himself
There are worse solutions than putting the choice to the people. This also has the strength of keeping his group together. IMHO it's also a lot cleaner than trying to destroy Garland, it's owning what you're doing and why.
Notice this could have blown up on him. At various points in the election, the Senate was thought to be in play and at most points HRC was viewed at the assumed winner. IMHO the people upset with what happened would NOT be upset if the Senate had flipped, HRC had been elected, and someone a lot more Left than Garland were in line to be confirmed.
...there are many other methods by which racist and antisemitic sentiments are displayed, and here are some examples which are increasing yearly, and that’s why I argue that antisemitism is rising”.
Sure. Let's pick 20 different measurements to evaluate this, then the media can pick the five which are going up and ignore the 5 which are going down and the 10 which are unchanged.
Bomb threats is a great one, very graphic, and absolute proof of a vast racist conspiracy... except oops... it was proven to not be racist, so it's time to change measurements so we can get to the real truth.
All but the sexual harasser and the guy who would say anything to anyone to advance,
That kind of misses the point. A filibuster stops outright Thomas and Alito. Roberts, Sotomayor, & Kagan *should* have been filibustered because they're clearly not representing anything like a political consensus, and given the other side voting in lockstep they don't get in.
Ginsberg and Breyer... are both liberals put in there by Clinton, but I don't remember who was controlling the Senate, by what margin, and how extreme they hit the radar. I think the Senate just looked into how competent they were, not how liberal. Under the rules the Dems are trying to claim are now normal, I doubt they get in.
Kennedy was a compromise candidate made to go through a Senate controlled by the other team so he would have made it.
First, does the data show an increase in anti-Semitism, or is the Press just making a lot out of what's always there because racism is supposed to increase under Trump because he's not a Democrat?
My impression is we're not comparing what happened this year to last year, but just pointing to incidents in general and saying they shouldn't happen.
2nd, some/many of the big "racist" incidents they're pointing to are the work of one nut, and a Jewish nut at that. Subtract that kind of noise from the data (which admittedly is hard), and just focus on the organized stuff and we have... what?
30 crosses a year (assuming a purely random distribution :cough:) means it will happen to me roughly once every 10 million years. That's not zero, but it's also not far off.
Society has gotten very, VERY, good at dealing with this... so much so that a lot of SJW really should be looking for other jobs, and just to make work for themselves they need to use a bigger microscope and move goal posts.
veronica d: Are there units in which I measure “racism”? Is there ever a clear line, where a critic cannot say, “Well, I know they were burning crosses and they literally called that guy the n-word, but that doesn’t mean they’re an actual racist.”
The issue isn't whether they're a racist (they are). The issues are whether it's newsworthy and how big of a problem for society is this? The number of crosses burned every year is roughly 30 (Southern Poverty Law Center).
We've hit the point where a string of bomb threats to Jewish churches is more likely to be a lone nut than an organized group. That's a good thing.
I read in the last few weeks how there were something like a thousand racist incidents a year under Obama. Of course the media didn't pay attention to that because it didn't match the narrative they want to push.
Accusations of racism are mostly about political power. Enthusiastically supporting his daughter convert to Judaism isn't enough to shield Trump for this sort of thing. Nor is having her husband be one of his big advisors.
In order to be fully shielded from accusations of racism Trump would have to be a Democrat.
The filibuster rule ideally serves as a way of requiring broad political consensus, beyond partisan majorities, on important matters and there are precious few more important things on the Senate's plate than the constituency of the Supreme Court.
No one Trump appoints is going to have "broad political consensus".
When was the last time a Supreme was filibustered? 1968? And that was over issues of bribery and/or him being simultaneously both a sitting justice and a White House staff member.
This is a politically motivated filibuster (as opposed to a politically motivated vote against him). I'm not sure that's ever happened. The standard, in practice, up until now, has been 51 votes, not 60.
Make the standard 60 to require political consensus and I don't think any of the current Supremes would have made it on the court. Now maybe that's a good thing, but it's certainly very different than what we've been doing.
That would do it... but if you accept and assume that all software has bugs, then going with ROM for an expensive piece of hardware is amazingly risky to the point of insanity.
Oops we found a bug, we need to *replace* every tractor we've sold in the last 3 years on our dime.
Or to put it differently, those expensive daycares with a year wait list will benefit by these sorts of rules because it gets rid of some of their potential competitors.
The thing I don’t particularly understand about this regulation is the connection between having a degree and the practical aspects of caring for young children.
My wife's teacher cert was a bunch of mickey mouse classes designed to burn time and show you were determined about it.
These sorts of regs are signs of regulatory or legislative capture. They're to reduce supply and prevent competition, not improve quality.
[te3] I'm surprised there's a Black Market.
If you *really* wanted to build your embedded software so it couldn't be tampered with, I'd think you could do so. It's not like normal software which works on anything piece of hardware. Controlling both software and hardware is a huge advantage.
Multiple chips talking together, locked bootloaders, encryption in bundled updates, and make it impossible for anyone without the key to update it without reflashing every chip in the series... and then you could put a chip somewhere where the engine would need to be destroyed in order to access it.
You'd be making a glass engine, i.e. one crack in the software makes the whole thing unusable, but it sounds like that's what they want.
As I said…there is no way we’d actually *do* that, but it’s kinda weird to realize, as society, we’d objectively be better off if we *did*.
This assumes criminals will follow the law. That assumption means it works much better on paper than any grubby reality where they don't. And you're not serious about this path so I'm dropping it.
That is almost a nonsensical question. ‘Respect’ is something that mostly exists *within the criminal universe*.
Claiming someone else's culture doesn't exist is a far cry from it being true. "Honor killings" are a problem even if the family has money. Japan historically went so deep into the whole "respect" thing that they had rituals for suicide at it's loss. It's not a big stretch to think the bulk of our own hot spot's problems are a cultural thing, and those hot spots are the bulk of the problem.
Now maybe ubi changes the culture... but culture is the hardest thing to change and I don't intuitively see why this would happen. IMHO it's unclear if ubi will reduce crime. Our "poor" have access to amazing levels of resources by 3rd world standards.
To use your example, right now, people who have $1000 in the bank wouldn't shoplift $20 worth of food... but is that because of the money, or is that because in order to have $1000 in the bank you have to be pretty functional?
And note the concept that someone needs to steal food in the US (an example picked for absolving the poor criminals of moral responsibility) is basically nonsense and an insult to every law abiding poor person.
What real people would do with ubi in the real world is unclear. We might be clearing away hoops the poor need to jump through and letting them progress. We might also be enabling dysfunctional people to be even more dysfunctional. We might be doing both.
I'd really like to see ubi run in a few localities and gather data on what people do. One of the attractions of ubi is, in theory, it'd get rid of a lot of gov micro-management of the poor.
The flip side is I remember Black community leaders clustered around Bill Clinton nodding approvingly as he signed the expansion of the war on drugs. What's good in theory can be terrible in practice, especially when one of the planks of that theory is people are going to obey the law.
The US has a malnutrition rate, about 0.6 per 100,000 people, which would be about 2000 people in 2016. The rate isn’t very high, but it’s higher than a lot of European countries.
It seems likely that malnutrition is not a "food" issue or even a "money" issue in the first world. It's a mental illness and/or physical infirmity and/or end-of-life issue. Treating it as a "food" issue is unlikely to solve anything.
This "repeating theme" is happening because a nasty war (internal or external) every few decades is Normal. The idea that it's Not supposed to happen is a modern invention.
Take this long a view of history and it happens everywhere in the world. The wiki page for France's wars over the same time period is too large to quote.
That’s sorta buying into one side of a reasonable political debate...
One of the problems was there was no "reasonable political debate". England decided on how to raise the money, and how much money to raise, and if it was politically painful for the colonies then that was just tough.
Calling it dispute of which level of government was increasing the taxes is correct but minimizes the problem(s). England was set on informing the colonies they were far, far less than "real" citizens. They don't get a parliament or anything like it, they got orders like you'd give your slaves orders.
In politics optics are often reality, and the optics of repeatedly grinding home that people are serfs was pretty ugly.
So yes, it becomes about "freedom", and it also about "taxes" because that was how the crown kept driving the point home. It's possible there were less politically painful ways to raise the money, it's possible there wasn't, but none of that mattered because the crown figured the colonies not only didn't but shouldn't have a voice.
The actual, original dispute was ‘We, as Englishmen, have the right to operate our colonies as we see fit as laid out in our charters and our rights under English law.’
True, but this only became a problem because the English decided that the colonies would be run for the economic benefit of the English.
Look at the laws the English were passing (the Stamp act, the Tea act), and they always come back to taxes (lots of them) for England without any political representation by the colonies so they could oppose the passing of those laws.
it’s nearly impossible to imagine certain sorts of crime existing if the criminals had more money than they did.
When we look at the blood soaked streets of Chicago, how many of these murders are about money (economics), and how many are about respect (culture)?
The problem, of course, is that this discussion quickly turns into the fact I’m sorta proposing we give criminals money so they stop committing crimes.
What would be the incentives here? One hopes that you don't give them money for committing crimes. If you *stop* giving them money if/when they commit crimes... then that sounds a lot like what we've got now.
but when that level is ‘cannot afford my food’, or, even, yes, ‘cannot afford my drugs'(1), that is actually a solvable problem.
The number of people who starved last year is roughly zero.
The opioid crisis is more or less free of crime because of gov support... maybe that's the model going forward?
Taking a substance that people cannot live without, or at least cannot live without without suffering horribly, and *pricing it our of their price range*, so *obviously* results in crime it’s a bit astonishing we’d think there would be any other outcome.
Your tax dollars at work.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Safer Response to Garland-Gorsuch”
Wasn't that before the voters gave the Senate to the GOP for the purposes of stopping Obama?
On “The Data Says Everything Is Fine”
It is immoral for you to do X (or not do Y), so it is moral for me to *force* you to do so using the power of the government.
And just so everything is good I appoint myself the ultimate priest of morality.
And like usual, God is going to be on the side of the Priests. So anyone who disagrees with me is not only going to be wrong but evil.
"
The CBO is prevented by law from some types of predictions, probably including those.
So if your budget claims next year you're going to cut back on Doctor payments even though that would trainwreck the system, be politically painful, and for the last 10 years every Congress has at-the-last-minute Not put in place those cuts?
The CBO has to score those "cuts" as though they're going to happen.
On “A Safer Response to Garland-Gorsuch”
McConnell's choices were...
1) Hold a vote, let Garland get on the court.
He'll be helping Obama shift the court from Right leaning to Left leaning. This probably throws the Presidential election because the base will rightfully see it as a betrayal. It probably also throws a large number of GOP congressmen out of power. It certainly costs him his job.
Unless he's planning on switching parties or retiring this doesn't seem like a reasonable option.
2) Hold a vote, stop Garland by voting him down.
Chances of success are hard to predict but less than 100%. Garland is qualified and tele-charismatic and he'll have the backing of the press. If McConnell can't keep all of his troops in line then he's looking at a lot of the problems from above. Keeping the troops in line is hard.
And this would be really, really, nasty. To provide political cover, the GOP would try to destroy Garland. No more "he's a nice guy but...". Instead they'll do what the Dems are doing now and lie about who he is, what he is, what he's done, and so forth. Ideally they'll find some woman or man or child to say he sexually harassed or even raped them.
Trying to claim this is the nicer or cleaner option is just not dealing with reality. It's probably also *impossible* because of #3 below.
3) Hold a vote and filibuster Garland.
The Senate has never filibustered a qualified candidate before and the GOP had made promises that it wouldn't. This also has a lot of the problems of various other proposals above.
And he probably didn't have a choice but to do this if it got that far. Some of his troops *would* have done this, with or without his blessing.
4) Prevent any vote on anyone.
The optics are bad but many of the alternatives are worse. The chance of success was 100% because it was something he could do himself. This also somewhat shifts blame from vulnerable GOP members to himself
There are worse solutions than putting the choice to the people. This also has the strength of keeping his group together. IMHO it's also a lot cleaner than trying to destroy Garland, it's owning what you're doing and why.
Notice this could have blown up on him. At various points in the election, the Senate was thought to be in play and at most points HRC was viewed at the assumed winner. IMHO the people upset with what happened would NOT be upset if the Senate had flipped, HRC had been elected, and someone a lot more Left than Garland were in line to be confirmed.
"
Vote for HRC.
On “The Data Says Everything Is Fine”
Sure. Let's pick 20 different measurements to evaluate this, then the media can pick the five which are going up and ignore the 5 which are going down and the 10 which are unchanged.
Bomb threats is a great one, very graphic, and absolute proof of a vast racist conspiracy... except oops... it was proven to not be racist, so it's time to change measurements so we can get to the real truth.
On “A Safer Response to Garland-Gorsuch”
That kind of misses the point. A filibuster stops outright Thomas and Alito. Roberts, Sotomayor, & Kagan *should* have been filibustered because they're clearly not representing anything like a political consensus, and given the other side voting in lockstep they don't get in.
Ginsberg and Breyer... are both liberals put in there by Clinton, but I don't remember who was controlling the Senate, by what margin, and how extreme they hit the radar. I think the Senate just looked into how competent they were, not how liberal. Under the rules the Dems are trying to claim are now normal, I doubt they get in.
Kennedy was a compromise candidate made to go through a Senate controlled by the other team so he would have made it.
So I guess I can't say none of them make it.
On “The Data Says Everything Is Fine”
First, does the data show an increase in anti-Semitism, or is the Press just making a lot out of what's always there because racism is supposed to increase under Trump because he's not a Democrat?
My impression is we're not comparing what happened this year to last year, but just pointing to incidents in general and saying they shouldn't happen.
2nd, some/many of the big "racist" incidents they're pointing to are the work of one nut, and a Jewish nut at that. Subtract that kind of noise from the data (which admittedly is hard), and just focus on the organized stuff and we have... what?
30 crosses a year (assuming a purely random distribution :cough:) means it will happen to me roughly once every 10 million years. That's not zero, but it's also not far off.
Society has gotten very, VERY, good at dealing with this... so much so that a lot of SJW really should be looking for other jobs, and just to make work for themselves they need to use a bigger microscope and move goal posts.
"
Roughly 1% of the population are sociopaths. They're over represented among politicians.
HRC hit the radar as that too so whoever was elected we'd be in for interesting times.
"
My assumption is that Trump thinks of other people as objects to be manipulated.
"
The issue isn't whether they're a racist (they are). The issues are whether it's newsworthy and how big of a problem for society is this? The number of crosses burned every year is roughly 30 (Southern Poverty Law Center).
We've hit the point where a string of bomb threats to Jewish churches is more likely to be a lone nut than an organized group. That's a good thing.
"
I read in the last few weeks how there were something like a thousand racist incidents a year under Obama. Of course the media didn't pay attention to that because it didn't match the narrative they want to push.
Accusations of racism are mostly about political power. Enthusiastically supporting his daughter convert to Judaism isn't enough to shield Trump for this sort of thing. Nor is having her husband be one of his big advisors.
In order to be fully shielded from accusations of racism Trump would have to be a Democrat.
On “A Safer Response to Garland-Gorsuch”
No one Trump appoints is going to have "broad political consensus".
When was the last time a Supreme was filibustered? 1968? And that was over issues of bribery and/or him being simultaneously both a sitting justice and a White House staff member.
This is a politically motivated filibuster (as opposed to a politically motivated vote against him). I'm not sure that's ever happened. The standard, in practice, up until now, has been 51 votes, not 60.
Make the standard 60 to require political consensus and I don't think any of the current Supremes would have made it on the court. Now maybe that's a good thing, but it's certainly very different than what we've been doing.
On “Linky Friday: War Machines”
That would do it... but if you accept and assume that all software has bugs, then going with ROM for an expensive piece of hardware is amazingly risky to the point of insanity.
Oops we found a bug, we need to *replace* every tractor we've sold in the last 3 years on our dime.
"
Congress exempting itself from regulations which will reduce supply?
"
Or to put it differently, those expensive daycares with a year wait list will benefit by these sorts of rules because it gets rid of some of their potential competitors.
"
My wife's teacher cert was a bunch of mickey mouse classes designed to burn time and show you were determined about it.
These sorts of regs are signs of regulatory or legislative capture. They're to reduce supply and prevent competition, not improve quality.
"
[te3] I'm surprised there's a Black Market.
If you *really* wanted to build your embedded software so it couldn't be tampered with, I'd think you could do so. It's not like normal software which works on anything piece of hardware. Controlling both software and hardware is a huge advantage.
Multiple chips talking together, locked bootloaders, encryption in bundled updates, and make it impossible for anyone without the key to update it without reflashing every chip in the series... and then you could put a chip somewhere where the engine would need to be destroyed in order to access it.
You'd be making a glass engine, i.e. one crack in the software makes the whole thing unusable, but it sounds like that's what they want.
On “Pitchfork Republic”
This assumes criminals will follow the law. That assumption means it works much better on paper than any grubby reality where they don't. And you're not serious about this path so I'm dropping it.
Claiming someone else's culture doesn't exist is a far cry from it being true. "Honor killings" are a problem even if the family has money. Japan historically went so deep into the whole "respect" thing that they had rituals for suicide at it's loss. It's not a big stretch to think the bulk of our own hot spot's problems are a cultural thing, and those hot spots are the bulk of the problem.
Now maybe ubi changes the culture... but culture is the hardest thing to change and I don't intuitively see why this would happen. IMHO it's unclear if ubi will reduce crime. Our "poor" have access to amazing levels of resources by 3rd world standards.
To use your example, right now, people who have $1000 in the bank wouldn't shoplift $20 worth of food... but is that because of the money, or is that because in order to have $1000 in the bank you have to be pretty functional?
And note the concept that someone needs to steal food in the US (an example picked for absolving the poor criminals of moral responsibility) is basically nonsense and an insult to every law abiding poor person.
What real people would do with ubi in the real world is unclear. We might be clearing away hoops the poor need to jump through and letting them progress. We might also be enabling dysfunctional people to be even more dysfunctional. We might be doing both.
I'd really like to see ubi run in a few localities and gather data on what people do. One of the attractions of ubi is, in theory, it'd get rid of a lot of gov micro-management of the poor.
The flip side is I remember Black community leaders clustered around Bill Clinton nodding approvingly as he signed the expansion of the war on drugs. What's good in theory can be terrible in practice, especially when one of the planks of that theory is people are going to obey the law.
It seems likely that malnutrition is not a "food" issue or even a "money" issue in the first world. It's a mental illness and/or physical infirmity and/or end-of-life issue. Treating it as a "food" issue is unlikely to solve anything.
"
This "repeating theme" is happening because a nasty war (internal or external) every few decades is Normal. The idea that it's Not supposed to happen is a modern invention.
Take this long a view of history and it happens everywhere in the world. The wiki page for France's wars over the same time period is too large to quote.
"
A lot of your post I agree with.
One of the problems was there was no "reasonable political debate". England decided on how to raise the money, and how much money to raise, and if it was politically painful for the colonies then that was just tough.
Calling it dispute of which level of government was increasing the taxes is correct but minimizes the problem(s). England was set on informing the colonies they were far, far less than "real" citizens. They don't get a parliament or anything like it, they got orders like you'd give your slaves orders.
In politics optics are often reality, and the optics of repeatedly grinding home that people are serfs was pretty ugly.
So yes, it becomes about "freedom", and it also about "taxes" because that was how the crown kept driving the point home. It's possible there were less politically painful ways to raise the money, it's possible there wasn't, but none of that mattered because the crown figured the colonies not only didn't but shouldn't have a voice.
"
The big question is, what creates *that*.
"
Ban the box? Probably worth a try.
We'll probably find a blanket rule won't work and some crimes should be forgotten by society after time served and others should not.
"
True, but this only became a problem because the English decided that the colonies would be run for the economic benefit of the English.
Look at the laws the English were passing (the Stamp act, the Tea act), and they always come back to taxes (lots of them) for England without any political representation by the colonies so they could oppose the passing of those laws.
"
When we look at the blood soaked streets of Chicago, how many of these murders are about money (economics), and how many are about respect (culture)?
What would be the incentives here? One hopes that you don't give them money for committing crimes. If you *stop* giving them money if/when they commit crimes... then that sounds a lot like what we've got now.
The number of people who starved last year is roughly zero.
The opioid crisis is more or less free of crime because of gov support... maybe that's the model going forward?
Your tax dollars at work.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.