Prediction: Trump gets blown out of the water. Epic loss.
GOP keeps the House.
GOP, barely, keeps the Senate.
Very strong showing by Gary Johnson (by 3rd party candidate norms), but Hillary wins.
The problem is I'm not sure how much is wishful thinking.
IMHO we're not there yet. It depends on how hurt the GOP is by this election. Ideally they'll get hurt really bad and then give some Hispanic Conservative (maybe even one of the ones who was supposed to win this time) the nod to run against Hillary in 4 years.
The problem with the California-Wilson example is that for Wilson it *worked*. His policies passed, Wilson won reelection, party as a whole followed him, and yes, it sent the party over a cliff a few years down the line but that was down the line.
Mainstream GOP leaders still haven't really signed on to Trump. They've got the problem that the guy who won the election is who he is, but he really did win the nod. They've also got the problem that Trump is still pretty much an unknown in terms of what he's going to do.
And yes, agreed, there's still a lot of room for Trump to send the party over a cliff if he wins.
The reason I say it’s a question-begging study is because of their methodology. The study study notes that there’s a difference in admittance rates between academically similar Whites and Asians, and then concludes that if that difference in admittance rates didn’t exist, then more Asian students would be admitted. But that’s a tautology.
Fair enough, so let's look at other stats.
#1) A 2005 study... three highly selective private research universities... admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group)
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: –50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[74]
#2) ...students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.[75]
#3) After controlling for grades, test scores, family background (legacy status), and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete), Espenshade and Radford found that whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.
I can’t find the acceptance rate numbers, but here are the racial breakdown in offers of admission, and they paint a very different story:
Hmm... dueling links. So, fine, let's toss that study and look at the underlying data, ideally in a historical graph and not a snapshot.
I'm on page three
http://opa.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/UndergraduateDemographics.pdf
What I take away from this is:
1) Prop 209's 'effect' apparently took place before it's actual effect (meaning it was in the news and everyone was expecting it). Notice black+hispanic enrollment drop a lot ahead of time.
2) White enrollment... I'm inclined to call that blip down an anomaly and say it was largely flat.
3) Asian was trending up before and they continued to trend up after.
I don't think we have enough detail here to make a sound judgement (which is really weird, there's enough of a drop in the Black/Hispanic numbers that there should be a bounce somewhere else). Raw/Better numbers are below, but they don't cover the bridge years (probably deliberately).
@alan-scott
Siting the "actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated" is not "begging the question". The original question was whether Affirmative Action penalized Asians rather than Whites, the actual experience of removing it is "yes".
Only, there’s no real reason to assume that Harvard has policies that explicitly penalize being Asian in the same way that they have policies that explicitly reward being Black or Latino.
Harvard has "a number of slots to fill" as it's sometimes put, and for all the squeaking about it being a "holistic" practice, the actual results look like a quota system. They want a class which has X% of a race, they move the goalposts until they get that.
That Whites aren't rewarded or penalized is... weird. I'd think it deliberate but we see something similar with Silicon Valley employment stats broken down by race. For all the talk in the media about a lack of minority representation, the percentage of Whites is only at or slightly-below their population percentage.
The first couple of times, your brain stops whatever it’s doing and tries to figure out what’s going on.
At some point people become individuals I guess. I work with the shortest woman in the building. She told me it took a while but now doesn't process me as 'tall' unless it's pointed out somehow.
No. Perhaps in theory AA takes spots away from Asians. But in practice, when AA policies were implemented, it was white admissions that dropped. And even in theory, AA will have to be ended in a very specific way for the changes to increase Asian enrollment more than it increases white enrollment.
(Just going to quote here, but bold parts are for emphasis and I've snipped some. link at bottom)
Ending affirmative action would devastate most minority college enrollment
Study finds virtually no gain for white students
Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students.
In a study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, authors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung examined the controversial notion that eliminating affirmative action would lead to the admission of more white students to college and found it to be false. The assertion that qualified white students are being displaced by less qualified minority students was a prime plaintiff argument in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases against the University of Michigan (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger).
..."The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated."
According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While these declines are dramatic, the authors note that the long-term impact could be worse.
...The authors also cite other studies and the actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated: "The impacts are striking. Compared to the fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 55.... African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent. ...
Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. ...
So this is really about working class women finding their way into college, whereas working class men do not.
Now that's an interesting claim. I've never heard it expressed like that. How confident are you that this is the problem?
Anyway, these “concerned mothers” writing articles are almost all middle-class and above. Their sons will not be those who experience problems. So whatever “solution” we might find, it probably will not be reflected in their whitebread concerns.
However lots of their daughters will experience problems. Sexually, a 60/40 ratio instantly creates a female bidding war for the available men, and one third of them will lose (probably more considering the loss of power that occurs just from the existence of that bidding war).
(And yes, I know I'm greatly simplifying a complex subject).
certainly attacking “girl power” (or whatever) probably won’t help working class men much, whose social circumstances seem pretty far removed from a “women’s only study lounge” or the body image of a Barbie doll.
My issue is not a lounge which my daughters could use. My issue is equality of law and justice, which seems directly in conflict with the gov micromanaging desired outcomes for the politically favored block groups.
One thing I think the “right” (broadly defined) understands better than the “left” (broadly defined) is the nature of unintended consequences. However, when it comes to the collapse of the manufacturing sector, I don’t think “free market cheerleaders” really thought it through. The notion of “retraining” that was preached, or the idea that innovation and entrepreneurship were magic freaking unicorns that would save us — this turned out false.
Speaking as a former entrepreneur, imho it'd help a great deal if the gov got out of the job destruction business. It's a bad thing when the office conversation of the day can be 'how many jobs can we create before the gov shuts us down' (the business failed for other reasons), or 'if they actually pass this type of tax increase we'red dead retroactively'.
Small business used to be the engine of supplying employment. Way too many industries have large bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other bureaucracies.
I think it is fair to say that whitebread, well-educated feminists have shown very little real interest in working class people, exactly inasmuch as no one has paid much attention to working class people. I still maintain full support for feminist principles. We still have far to go, culture wide. That said, we also need to figure out what to do for the working class. I don’t think magic free market unicorns are coming.
Most mass market failures I see lead back to the gov with the solution for it to stop doing bad things in the name of doing good. The war on drugs. Gov run, gov mandated educational failure factories. Meaningless gov licensing for jobs.
I get what you're saying, see the issues, and I've got several daughters and push them *hard* into math...
My point: attempts to mitigate the gender divide are different from systems that entrench it.
...but I think in practice this quickly becomes about political power and entitlement. The moment the gov has a "good reason" to put its thumb on the scales of justice that thumb is going to be used.
For example, you're quoting girls' issues with high school math to justify college efforts to "fix" the gender imbalance, but in college the gender imbalance goes the other way.
On a national scale, public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. While that difference is substantial, it still is smaller than private not-for-profit institutions (42.5-57.5) or all private schools (40.7-59.3).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/#47931e921525
For another example, in practice affirmative action in college results in taking college spots away from Asians and giving them to Blacks.
Margo Dydek […] was a Polish international professional basketball player. Standing 7 ft 2 in (2.18 m) tall, she was famous for being the tallest professional female basketball player in the world. .
Thank you, and interesting... now if there were only a way to introduce her to my brother.
The next tallest WNBA players are 6’8?, so perhaps only her.
Ya, only her... although the idea of looking eye to eye at a woman seems really odd.
That situation leads to the election of the meanest SOB around who promises to outsource the pain and suffering of the situation. Thus 911 leads to the war in Afghanistan, and Israel leads to it's situation.
One of the points of electing Hillary is getting Bill back in the White House. The issue isn't whether we feel sorry for her (we will), the issue is whether we think she can do it by herself. I'm not sure how much of the electorate is that sexist... but then we need to worry about how much of a blow out this election will be and whether 1%(?) would matter.
That contract is 'anti-prorated', the longer you're with them the more painful it is to quit.
If you quit the first day then you pay back nothing. Quit at the end of the first year you owe about one third of a year's pay. Quit at the end of 3 years and you owe three times one-third of a year's pay (i.e. a full year's pay), and so on.
I suppose from some points of view this is aligned with the company's needs. If you're still working there after 2 years then they want to keep you... but I could argue the reverse as well. Having a pissed off worker who *can't* leave there for years seems unlikely to lead to good things.
Fundamentally I don't see why they need this. In terms of pay, they're top dog in their niche. You'd think they'd be attracting the best and brightest (by their niche's standards).
You left out how Trump will balance the budget by not paying federal contractors.
I view that as economic insanity which should be discouraged... but the point was to make a case for him. To be fair to Trump, Obama promised to lower the ocean, so making outlandish promises isn't new... but that's a dodge and I'm trying to be analytical here.
The big issue that kind of promise raises is: What happens to his followers when they find out he can't divide by zero or otherwise make economic insanity work, i.e. is there a 2nd Act?
There is still time, barely, for Trump2-the-master-of-economic-sanity to emerge, but I don't expect it. He becomes President on the thinnest of majorities, then he instantly disappoints his followers and tarnishes the GOP's brand, maybe as bad as Bush did.
This is a good effort; but are you actually convinced by these points or just flexing your brain?
Just flexing my brain, although imho a lot of these are reasonably close to correct (especially 'throw the rascals out'). But I have to judge him according to his claims, not what I want to read into him.
As for him being 'different'; we already know that. Everyone who meets him personally says something like that, he's been the showman from day one, and his kids aren't just able to give pretty speeches, they're functional people. Having said that, this just makes him 'unknown', not 'puppies and rainbows'. I could just have easily included this in a list of negatives.
To the extent he actually has a platform: he's anti-immigration, anti-free-trade, & pro-isolationism... and that's an economic train-wreck which deserves to be punished. He's also running on "big-man" government which I view as poisonous (although Hillary is similar here). Lastly the GOP's last President was pretty bad and that ended up giving the Dems a super-majority.
I don't think Hillary is going to lead this country where it needs to go, she's very much a 'state-control' gal, but I need to cut my losses.
Burt Likko:
Well, it’d be interesting to hear someone come up with an intellectually rigorous defense of a Trump policy or of Trump himself. Most of what I see out on teh Twitter — Trump’s favored medium of discourse — boils down to #HillaryIsWorse.
RE: Defending Trump
1) Throwing the rascals out periodically is good for democracy. For example if we're interested in holding the gov accountable for things like the IRS from suppressing free speech, this is the way to do it.
2) Trump-the-person is strikingly different (i.e. saner) than Trump-the-public-character. When you look at Trump's children, they're all seriously functional, sane, people.
3) Being President is mostly about management, delegation, and communicating with the public, those are Trump's strengths.
4) A reputation as a loose cannon isn't an entirely bad thing when it come to international relations.
5) Presidential Style and Presidential dignity aren't important when you get to the nitty gritty on any issue.
6) The GOP will keep both the House and Senate, and Trump probably doesn't care about what bills are passed as long as he gets credit, meaning breaking the log-jam would be a really good thing.
7) Trump as a businessman presumably has some idea on how to grow the economy.
8) Trump is very clearly not a social warrior, it'd be a good thing to end the GOP's attempts to police people's bedrooms and also end efforts to move God into the government.
9) Hillary is worse.
10) He's overweight, old, he'll be in a lot of stress... and his VP is solid. There's a joke making the rounds that his VP will be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
The problem is his 'act' makes him strikingly difficult to evaluate. Maybe he dumps the anti-free-trade (anti-immigration) parts of his leadership and the various other things which train-wreck the economy, maybe he doubles down on them.
Hillary is a corrupt state-power enhancer, and that, for it's flaws, is a known thing.
In a country that has democratic elections, that’s a recipe for someone running who says “we (and when I say ‘we’, I include myself) should not FREAKING HAVE TO LIVE WITH TERRORISM.”
Well put. And the next question to be asked in a Democracy is "who needs to die so I don't need to live with terrorism".
Which will always play a hell of a lot better than “if you look at the numbers dispassionately, you’d see that we still have a lot fewer bombings than we were willing to put up with in 1973.”
It's part of the human condition to pay a LOT of attention to people killing people-who-are-potentially-me. Husbands killing wives gets a pass, but murdering-potentially-me could be 'war'.
These are instincts, supposedly we've had periods of time (long before history) when the lifetime murder rate (from tribal war) was 20%-50%.
Yes, agreed with all that. The problem with "claw backs" is most people spend the money when they have it.
As far as Rieves goes... that contract is interesting. It's built to prevent the 2+ year vets from leaving, so they want to train people and then have them work at that store, but it's a highly paid/priced convenience store. I wouldn't think retention/recruitment would be a big deal if you're the highest paid employer on the block.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules”
Prediction: Trump gets blown out of the water. Epic loss.
GOP keeps the House.
GOP, barely, keeps the Senate.
Very strong showing by Gary Johnson (by 3rd party candidate norms), but Hillary wins.
The problem is I'm not sure how much is wishful thinking.
On “This Party Cannot Be Saved”
IMHO we're not there yet. It depends on how hurt the GOP is by this election. Ideally they'll get hurt really bad and then give some Hispanic Conservative (maybe even one of the ones who was supposed to win this time) the nod to run against Hillary in 4 years.
The problem with the California-Wilson example is that for Wilson it *worked*. His policies passed, Wilson won reelection, party as a whole followed him, and yes, it sent the party over a cliff a few years down the line but that was down the line.
Mainstream GOP leaders still haven't really signed on to Trump. They've got the problem that the guy who won the election is who he is, but he really did win the nod. They've also got the problem that Trump is still pretty much an unknown in terms of what he's going to do.
And yes, agreed, there's still a lot of room for Trump to send the party over a cliff if he wins.
On “Linky Friday #177: Creatures, Cities, Calories”
@alan-scott
Fair enough, so let's look at other stats.
#1) A 2005 study... three highly selective private research universities... admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group)
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: –50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[74]
#2) ...students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.[75]
#3) After controlling for grades, test scores, family background (legacy status), and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete), Espenshade and Radford found that whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States
"
Hmm... dueling links. So, fine, let's toss that study and look at the underlying data, ideally in a historical graph and not a snapshot.
I'm on page three
http://opa.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/UndergraduateDemographics.pdf
What I take away from this is:
1) Prop 209's 'effect' apparently took place before it's actual effect (meaning it was in the news and everyone was expecting it). Notice black+hispanic enrollment drop a lot ahead of time.
2) White enrollment... I'm inclined to call that blip down an anomaly and say it was largely flat.
3) Asian was trending up before and they continued to trend up after.
I don't think we have enough detail here to make a sound judgement (which is really weird, there's enough of a drop in the Black/Hispanic numbers that there should be a bounce somewhere else). Raw/Better numbers are below, but they don't cover the bridge years (probably deliberately).
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/04/admits_archival.shtml
"
@alan-scott
Siting the "actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated" is not "begging the question". The original question was whether Affirmative Action penalized Asians rather than Whites, the actual experience of removing it is "yes".
Harvard has "a number of slots to fill" as it's sometimes put, and for all the squeaking about it being a "holistic" practice, the actual results look like a quota system. They want a class which has X% of a race, they move the goalposts until they get that.
That Whites aren't rewarded or penalized is... weird. I'd think it deliberate but we see something similar with Silicon Valley employment stats broken down by race. For all the talk in the media about a lack of minority representation, the percentage of Whites is only at or slightly-below their population percentage.
"
At some point people become individuals I guess. I work with the shortest woman in the building. She told me it took a while but now doesn't process me as 'tall' unless it's pointed out somehow.
"
(Just going to quote here, but bold parts are for emphasis and I've snipped some. link at bottom)
Ending affirmative action would devastate most minority college enrollment
Study finds virtually no gain for white students
Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students.
In a study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, authors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung examined the controversial notion that eliminating affirmative action would lead to the admission of more white students to college and found it to be false. The assertion that qualified white students are being displaced by less qualified minority students was a prime plaintiff argument in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases against the University of Michigan (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger).
..."The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated."
According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While these declines are dramatic, the authors note that the long-term impact could be worse.
...The authors also cite other studies and the actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated: "The impacts are striking. Compared to the fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 55.... African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent. ...
Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. ...
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/78Q19/index.xml?section=newsreleases
"
And off topic, but how do you put that "@name" notification in there?
"
@veronica_d
Now that's an interesting claim. I've never heard it expressed like that. How confident are you that this is the problem?
However lots of their daughters will experience problems. Sexually, a 60/40 ratio instantly creates a female bidding war for the available men, and one third of them will lose (probably more considering the loss of power that occurs just from the existence of that bidding war).
(And yes, I know I'm greatly simplifying a complex subject).
My issue is not a lounge which my daughters could use. My issue is equality of law and justice, which seems directly in conflict with the gov micromanaging desired outcomes for the politically favored block groups.
Speaking as a former entrepreneur, imho it'd help a great deal if the gov got out of the job destruction business. It's a bad thing when the office conversation of the day can be 'how many jobs can we create before the gov shuts us down' (the business failed for other reasons), or 'if they actually pass this type of tax increase we'red dead retroactively'.
Small business used to be the engine of supplying employment. Way too many industries have large bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other bureaucracies.
Most mass market failures I see lead back to the gov with the solution for it to stop doing bad things in the name of doing good. The war on drugs. Gov run, gov mandated educational failure factories. Meaningless gov licensing for jobs.
"
Hmm... one in a thousand? Intuitively that seems low.
Assuming it's 3.6, that means... 99.98%
http://www.intmath.com/counting-probability/z-table.php
"
I get what you're saying, see the issues, and I've got several daughters and push them *hard* into math...
...but I think in practice this quickly becomes about political power and entitlement. The moment the gov has a "good reason" to put its thumb on the scales of justice that thumb is going to be used.
For example, you're quoting girls' issues with high school math to justify college efforts to "fix" the gender imbalance, but in college the gender imbalance goes the other way.
On a national scale, public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. While that difference is substantial, it still is smaller than private not-for-profit institutions (42.5-57.5) or all private schools (40.7-59.3).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/#47931e921525
For another example, in practice affirmative action in college results in taking college spots away from Asians and giving them to Blacks.
"
Thank you, and interesting... now if there were only a way to introduce her to my brother.
Ya, only her... although the idea of looking eye to eye at a woman seems really odd.
"
I've got you beat by 8 inches. :)
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2016.07.28.Th}”
That situation leads to the election of the meanest SOB around who promises to outsource the pain and suffering of the situation. Thus 911 leads to the war in Afghanistan, and Israel leads to it's situation.
On “Linky Friday #177: Creatures, Cities, Calories”
:Amusement: Probably not by my standards. I could met the girl mentioned and I'd still be multiple inches over her.
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2016.07.28.Th}”
You won't win the election with that answer. :)
On “Linky Friday #177: Creatures, Cities, Calories”
I still can't.
On “I am a Muslim doctor. I saved a Christian in Pakistan and it nearly cost my life”
This is a good example of why Trump makes traction with anti-immigration, and also why that policy is a problem. Their loss, our gain.
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2016.07.28.Th}”
One of the points of electing Hillary is getting Bill back in the White House. The issue isn't whether we feel sorry for her (we will), the issue is whether we think she can do it by herself. I'm not sure how much of the electorate is that sexist... but then we need to worry about how much of a blow out this election will be and whether 1%(?) would matter.
On “Morning Ed: Labor {2016.07.27.W}”
That contract is 'anti-prorated', the longer you're with them the more painful it is to quit.
If you quit the first day then you pay back nothing. Quit at the end of the first year you owe about one third of a year's pay. Quit at the end of 3 years and you owe three times one-third of a year's pay (i.e. a full year's pay), and so on.
I suppose from some points of view this is aligned with the company's needs. If you're still working there after 2 years then they want to keep you... but I could argue the reverse as well. Having a pissed off worker who *can't* leave there for years seems unlikely to lead to good things.
Fundamentally I don't see why they need this. In terms of pay, they're top dog in their niche. You'd think they'd be attracting the best and brightest (by their niche's standards).
On “NYT: Donald Trump Encourages Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails”
I view that as economic insanity which should be discouraged... but the point was to make a case for him. To be fair to Trump, Obama promised to lower the ocean, so making outlandish promises isn't new... but that's a dodge and I'm trying to be analytical here.
The big issue that kind of promise raises is: What happens to his followers when they find out he can't divide by zero or otherwise make economic insanity work, i.e. is there a 2nd Act?
There is still time, barely, for Trump2-the-master-of-economic-sanity to emerge, but I don't expect it. He becomes President on the thinnest of majorities, then he instantly disappoints his followers and tarnishes the GOP's brand, maybe as bad as Bush did.
"
Just flexing my brain, although imho a lot of these are reasonably close to correct (especially 'throw the rascals out'). But I have to judge him according to his claims, not what I want to read into him.
As for him being 'different'; we already know that. Everyone who meets him personally says something like that, he's been the showman from day one, and his kids aren't just able to give pretty speeches, they're functional people. Having said that, this just makes him 'unknown', not 'puppies and rainbows'. I could just have easily included this in a list of negatives.
To the extent he actually has a platform: he's anti-immigration, anti-free-trade, & pro-isolationism... and that's an economic train-wreck which deserves to be punished. He's also running on "big-man" government which I view as poisonous (although Hillary is similar here). Lastly the GOP's last President was pretty bad and that ended up giving the Dems a super-majority.
I don't think Hillary is going to lead this country where it needs to go, she's very much a 'state-control' gal, but I need to cut my losses.
"
RE: Defending Trump
1) Throwing the rascals out periodically is good for democracy. For example if we're interested in holding the gov accountable for things like the IRS from suppressing free speech, this is the way to do it.
2) Trump-the-person is strikingly different (i.e. saner) than Trump-the-public-character. When you look at Trump's children, they're all seriously functional, sane, people.
3) Being President is mostly about management, delegation, and communicating with the public, those are Trump's strengths.
4) A reputation as a loose cannon isn't an entirely bad thing when it come to international relations.
5) Presidential Style and Presidential dignity aren't important when you get to the nitty gritty on any issue.
6) The GOP will keep both the House and Senate, and Trump probably doesn't care about what bills are passed as long as he gets credit, meaning breaking the log-jam would be a really good thing.
7) Trump as a businessman presumably has some idea on how to grow the economy.
8) Trump is very clearly not a social warrior, it'd be a good thing to end the GOP's attempts to police people's bedrooms and also end efforts to move God into the government.
9) Hillary is worse.
10) He's overweight, old, he'll be in a lot of stress... and his VP is solid. There's a joke making the rounds that his VP will be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
The problem is his 'act' makes him strikingly difficult to evaluate. Maybe he dumps the anti-free-trade (anti-immigration) parts of his leadership and the various other things which train-wreck the economy, maybe he doubles down on them.
Hillary is a corrupt state-power enhancer, and that, for it's flaws, is a known thing.
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2016.07.28.Th}”
Well put. And the next question to be asked in a Democracy is "who needs to die so I don't need to live with terrorism".
It's part of the human condition to pay a LOT of attention to people killing people-who-are-potentially-me. Husbands killing wives gets a pass, but murdering-potentially-me could be 'war'.
These are instincts, supposedly we've had periods of time (long before history) when the lifetime murder rate (from tribal war) was 20%-50%.
And who was bombing whom in 1973?
On “Morning Ed: Labor {2016.07.27.W}”
Yes, agreed with all that. The problem with "claw backs" is most people spend the money when they have it.
As far as Rieves goes... that contract is interesting. It's built to prevent the 2+ year vets from leaving, so they want to train people and then have them work at that store, but it's a highly paid/priced convenience store. I wouldn't think retention/recruitment would be a big deal if you're the highest paid employer on the block.
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