General Politics Discussion (III) [ARCHIVED] • Page 770

Also, maybe try boosting up working-class candidates, not business-owners, as candidates.

 

it's absurd how heavily the deck is stacked in favor of cops for legal power, protection, and perpetuation

 

Canadians are mean too

 

Maria sucks:

 

We Helped Democrats Win in 2006. This Is How They Can Do It Again in 2018.

But Democrats don’t just need to choose the right battles, they also need to choose credible candidates who can win them. Candidate quality may not make the difference in a place like Montana’s at-large district, where Greg Gianforte won handily just hours after assaulting a reporter. Winning hotly contested swing seats, however, requires candidates who closely match their districts—even if they don’t perfectly align with the national party’s activist base. In 2006, the Democratic base was energized and angry, but then as now, capturing a majority required winning some tough races in red and purple states across the heartland. As leaders in that 2006 effort, we recruited a football player in North Carolina, a businessman in Florida, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania, and a sheriff in Indiana. The Democratic Party won twice as many seats as it needed to gain control.

There’s a long-term payoff for a party that gets this right. Good candidates not only help build a wave, they help sustain it. Wave elections offer the chance to establish new beachheads in hostile territory, but it takes gifted leaders to survive when the pendulum swings back. In the 1980 Reagan landslide, Republicans gained 34 House seats—only to lose 26 seats two years later—and 12 Senate seats, only to lose 8 senators and Senate control when those seats came open six years later. With the right candidates, the impact of a wave can be felt for decades. Half a dozen “Watergate babies” elected to the House in 1974 went on to serve in the Senate. So have three Democrats who joined the House in the 2006 wave.

Even with the right candidates in the right districts, a wave won’t get far without a credible plan to address the country’s problems, not simply run attack ads against the parade of horribles from the other side. In 2006, we published a book called The Plan, which offered detailed proposals on college, retirement, health care, and the economy. One reason today’s congressional Republicans are struggling to enact an agenda is that unlike the Contract-with-America Republicans of 1994, the GOP waves of 2010 and 2014 were built only on saying no to Obama.

(If you ignore the names of the authors, who I despise, I do think this strategy is correct. Not only does it have history behind it, it just makes sense to me on the surface. That said, there is a part of me that wonders what would happen if the Dems reshaped the party by saying "no compromise, we're going hard left" and ran leftists in all districts. Now, my prediction is they lose (badly), but if I'm wrong ... I get what I want. The bigger issue is that if I'm right, damn, I dunno, it may set back a progressive movement for a very long time.)

 

It's almost like she wants the worst things to happen to poor people or something...

 

Trump seeks sharp cuts to housing aid, except for program that brings him millions

President Trump’s budget calls for sharply reducing funding for programs that shelter the poor and combat homelessness — with a notable exception: It leaves intact a type of federal housing subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords.

One of those landlords is Trump himself, who earns millions of dollars each year as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. Trump’s 4 percent stake in the Brooklyn complex earned him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15, according to his recent financial disclosure.

 

This will be the GOP strategy in 2018, don't talk about Trump in many districts, and tie the dem candidate to everything you expect them to define as "liberal."

 

A Bunch Of CIA Staff Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines

 

I don't even like cheetohs

 

Yep.

 

BLocked.

 

"I'm rich and I want poor people to be homeless and stop having children"

 

I thought he didn't talk about health care though.

 

Here is my problem with this strategy, and this is also something I've been thinking about for a couple of day. The country, it seems to me, was fundamentally different in that era. People often think in terms of a post-9/11 America and act accordingly, politically and otherwise; for example, there's no stomach for a staunchly anti-war democrat or champion of civil liberties. Even Bernie has that "good war/bad war" dichotomy. However, it seems to me that we are in a post-Iraq/Libya, post-financial crisis, post-Ferguson/Trayvon Martin era. This has obviously affected the entirety of the electorate in various ways, both on the left and the right. Far better than the left, the right has understood this and acted to mobilize the fears of the downwardly mobile, upper-middle class, whites under the banner of restoration and keeping subaltern groups in their place. The democrats need to understand this as well and mobilize the folks for whom the accumulation of structural grievances has gotten to be more than they can bear. These are the folks that don't vote, these are the folks that feel so totally alienated from politics that they've just dropped out of it all together. We can mobilize these people, but it isn't going to be on the terms of a post-9/11 era, it is going to be on the terms of a world where college debt suffocates, where your father and mother lost their homes, where austerity on the local level has made police officers into de facto tax collectors through policing vulnerable populations and violently extracting value from them in the form of fines, where war day after day is the rule and the allocation of trillions to fund that war persists. Of course, this was all true before, but what was not true back then is that we have Black Lives Matters, the majority of people are openly hostile to intervention, the DSA has gotten 20,000 or so people to join them, students have been demanding the abolition of their debt and organizing on campuses. This is what's needed for the next stage, this is the milieu from which to draw new leaders and alienated voters. Obama managed to do it, but with post-political rhetoric of us all being Americans that can bring change. We want political change explicitly and to name the groups of people that are our enemies, that deserve our disdain and rage. That is to say, we must name and promise to act against the ruling class that has made the current conditions of existence so terrible. It can be explicit or informal like Bernie's "millionaires and billionaires". But, that's what I think should be done. I could be wrong. But, given that global warming will likely hasten the extinction our species and it isn't long before kids are hooked up to Peter Thiel for the extraction of their blood, it seems worth a shot. As I said, I could be off base, but this seems more credible than anything Rahm Emanuel - the guy who covered up a black kid's death - could come up with.

 

Yes, please shoot yourself.

 

Lots of pink scrubs and outfits at work today for #PinkOut. I'm honestly floored since most here are hardcore conservative. 2 of my fave guys went and bought hot pink shoes too just for this to show support! haha

 

I didn't mean to make the post that long. Ha. The other thing that occurs to me is the study that shows, in actuality, very few people actually agree with the GOP on economic issues or healthcare. This seems important. The racism is there, obviously, but I think it can be tamped down if we managed to actually turn out voters.