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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Could you go more in-depth about these numbers?
Because if I'm remembering right, Hillary only narrowly lost the election in a couple of key states. And I'm sure the low turnout had a lot to do with the fact that it was, well, Hillary.
Why exactly would the numbers not add up if there was a charismatic candidate with a great platform who could successfully make the Republicans and Trump look weak and incompetent? The campaigns are writing themselves at this point with how many flops the Trump administration has amassed thus far.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to win over people if we can but this focus on courting conservative voters specifically seems terribly misplaced to me. To me it seems more like a matter of having the right salesmanship and a great candidate which will get people to vote in bigger numbers.
edited 5th Apr '17 1:47:11 PM by Draghinazzo
Yeah. That's pretty much my take on things. Although as anyone following this thread can probably guess, I was a supporter/fan of Clinton and think she would have made for a good President, there were a lot of issues she had with reception going in, and with her campaigning, I think that her attempts to win over wealthy Moderate Republicans who thought Trump was an ass backfired both because they ended up voting for him anyway and because it weakened the Progressive parts of her message.
This.
Clinton was campaigning on a model in which the media and the voters could be swayed by arguments of reason. She was badly outflanked by a party that cared neither for truth nor reason, but that lied shamelessly and continually, and was backed in those lies by a craven, opportunistic media.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Okay, one step to take is to stop saying shit like this. Seriously, you're impugning the character of an entire demographic block based on one election and the rhetoric of the candidate that got in - and keep in mind that this was one of the worst examples of "Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich" elections we've had on the national scene. On one side we had a man who'd said repugnant things from the start of his campaign, but got through the Primaries by virtue of the others splitting the vote early on and No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, and a woman who, for all her decades of service, was "tainted" by being a Clinton (which is bad enough for most Republicans, but some may have been averse to putting it in the hands of the same family after getting burned by Bush Jr.), and - regardless of whether the charges were "trumped up" or not - was under active investigation by the FBI during the campaign. A lot of people may have held their nose to vote for Trump, rather than be die-hard supporters of him.
But back to the main point - calling them racist/sexist/homophobic is one of the easiest ways to get them to stop listening to what you have to say. It's the exact same principle as Godwin's Law - once it gets invoked, the other party will no longer want to listen at all. Saying what, specifically, is racist/homophobic/sexist/etc. is fine, as it's calling out a specific behavior, but it's another matter when you call the person that.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"How exactly are Trump and Clinton remotely comparable?
The election was only between a giant douche and a turd sandwich if you stuck your head in the sand or willfully ignored any of the debates or facts.
If they're going to be that willfully ignorant then there's no point in reaching out to them.
edited 5th Apr '17 1:59:57 PM by LeGarcon
Oh really when?Have you been paying attention at all? This is based on evidence for the last FIFTY YEARS.
And stop with that False Equivalence bullshit. Hillary Clinton was in no shape or form as bad as Trump, or even a quarter of a way.
New Survey coming this weekend!On another US Politics note
Christie has managed
to pin all the blame for his little bridge scandal on his former aids. Christie will get off free and the aids will go to prison.
@Fighteer-
Thanks for the upvote. That reminded me of something I had wanted to comment on a discussion from a few pages back. So, I think there is some merit in the idea that the hacking of the Clinton campaign was as effective as it was because there were unsavory things or at least things that could be spun as unsavory, And perhaps there weren't equivalent things with say Bernie Sanders (at least in part because of different backgrounds and experiences in the political system).
However, the attacks worked because the information was deliberately released at the worst possible times so that it would kill off any bumps in favorability. Like for instance, one was directly before the DNC and harmed a lot of the unity efforts. It wouldn't be good sabotage if it wasn't effective.
And as for Comey, there has been some analysis of polls since the election which suggests he really did sink Clinton, because a lot of decisions on voting were made right before the election, and so there was really no time for her to recover.
Edit- Huh. Had posted this before Comey was brought up again.
edited 5th Apr '17 2:02:17 PM by Hodor2
@ironballs: If you're going to continue pushing the bankrupt "Hillary was corrupt" meme, then you're a part of the problem. It's BS, it was always BS, and the difference between a rational and an irrational voter is their recognition of this.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Thank you! It was incrontervertible that an investigation by the FBI was occurring - the validity of the investigation could be questioned, but not its existence, which the Republicans were more than happy to shout from the rooftops, and that, to most conservative voters, would be enough to outweigh Trump's words. And to reiterate the rest of my point since the first portion apparently drowned it out:
You're somewhat missing my point - my issue is with people here labeling the "White Working Class" as one monolithic entity with something of a Hive Mind, which is just as loathsome as Trump's infamous "Some, I assume, are good people" comment after calling every illegal immigrant (obviously Mexicans-only) rapists, criminals, and drug-runners.
Everyone has their personal reasons for voting for Trump (and for the record, I voted Clinton), whether it's because they are a racist/sexist/xenophobic/etc., because they figured he was the Lesser of Two Evils, or because the voter is a Single-Issue Wonk (my mother, for example, voted for Bush in 2000 because she's Pro-Life-with-exceptions). If it's anything but the first, we should be at least making a good-faith effort to convince them otherwise, rather than brushing them off out-of-hand, which will only lead to their feeling ignored again, which could lead to someone else like Trump getting in again. Oh, and this is assuming that they'll avoid calling you "just another SJW" or something similarly dismissive when you make these points. Respect is a two-way street, after all - something that Lord Dampnut never deigned to learn.
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And it is genuinely rare that we're in agreement over something - should I be worried about that fact?
edited 5th Apr '17 2:32:38 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Doesn't it go both ways though? Shouldn't there be some impetus on the other side that if they want their problems and concerns to be addressed and for constructive dialogue to be had, they should try to stop supporting blatantly racist/sexist/homophobic acts and policies? People often cry "Respect my culture!" while trampling all over someone else's.
It's kind of relevant when criticizing their actions, depending on what your criticism is supposed to accomplish. If you're just pointing out that what they're doing is wrong to a broad audience, then it probably doesn't matter. If you're talking specifically to the people who did the thing, then yeah it does, because then you're probably trying to convince them to stop doing the thing. Rightly or wrongly, it's a lot easier to do that when they don't feel like you're attacking them. Shame can be a powerful tool, but it is a limited one.
Most people like all of that stuff. Up to a point. The problem is that as nice as all of that sounds to most people, America also has an unfortunate history of turning against all of those nice things as soon as it turns out that they will also be available to people of color.
This is a very long and very ugly pattern. Consider, for example, public schools and state universities. Americans loved that and supported the idea, reaping the benefits of expanded education and opportunity for all … up until Brown v. Board of Education. As soon as the benefit of quality public education was extended to include black people and other people of color, white Americans abandoned the idea. Support for public schools became “controversial” and politically divisive, private “Christian” schools sprung up all over the country as an alternative for whites fleeing the no longer “separate-but-equal” inequality of segregated public schools.
Now art and music are considered “luxuries” that public education can no longer afford. Now our education policy debates are over how much public education funding can be diverted in creative new ways to fund charter schools or to vouchers for private alternatives.
Or consider labor unions — once the backbone of America’s working class, protected by law as an indispensable tool for defending the rights, safety and living wages of wage-earning Americans. Strong labor unions helped to fuel America’s post-war economic boom … right up until workers of color began demanding and receiving equal representation and protection from labor unions. After that, white support for labor plummeted. Labor became “controversial” and partisan and divisive, and anti-union politicians were swept into office, empowered to nerf and neuter unions to the point that they’ve almost become a non-factor in our political and economic life.
Ugh. I just saw a disgrace of a campaign commercial that began "liberals will stop at nothing to push their extreme agenda," with a black bloc and rioting playing in the background, and trying to tie in Ossoff and Pelosi with a goal of "more spending, bigger government, and a weaker military." It wasn't for anyone, just anti-Ossoff. Just thought it was bizarre, even for GA. Anyway...
How a Bill Became a Law, Way Way Way Way Back in the Day How Congress Used to Work
Only after a bill had been exhaustively examined would it be placed on the House calendar for full debate. If anyone tried to short-circuit this process and bring up a bill that had not had hearings or a full markup, one of the senior members would inquire of the bill’s manager whether these things had been done. If the answer was no, that would usually be sufficient to kill a piece of legislation, regardless of merit.
On issues such as tax reform or health reform, presidents would often have the relevant department study them at great length and then develop a proposal that was sent to Capitol Hill for consideration. By the time these legislative initiatives began, the president and everyone else involved from the administration side was thoroughly familiar with the issues, understood the trade-offs, and knew where deals could be made and where the line had to be held lest the proposal collapse like a house of cards.
Historically, major legislative initiatives were all multiyear exercises—Social Security, Medicare, welfare reform et al.—and that doesn’t even count the many years before the legislative process began, in which scholars and other policy entrepreneurs plowed the ground to get to the point where legislation was feasible.
In the case of TRA 86, there had been agitation for tax reform for a good 25 years, dating back to the Kennedy administration, which saw the creation of the tax expenditures budget and led to the passage of tax reform bills in 1969 and 1976—both passed by Democratic Congresses and signed into law by Republican presidents. There were also tax reform efforts in Congress that laid the groundwork before the Reagan effort began.
Two Republicans, Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, my former boss, and Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, had been working on a tax reform bill for a couple of years that would lower statutory rates and pay for it with the elimination of tax loopholes in a revenue-neutral manner. (Concern about the deficit ensured that revenue-neutrality was honestly maintained.) Two Democrats, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, were working simultaneously on their own version of tax reform along similar lines.
When people compared the Kemp-Kasten and Bradley-Gephardt bills, it was obvious there was a great deal of overlap, enough to convince people there was a sufficient community of interest to make the bipartisan enactment of tax reform viable.
So many of the specific provisions that constituted TRA 86 and its various versions along the way were familiar to policymakers long before markups began. Most members of Congress knew exactly how, say, the proposed elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes would affect their constituents or how the elimination of the investment tax credit would affect various industries. There were no surprises in the final legislation. People understood the trade-offs and they either accepted them or they didn’t. Partisanship played little to no role because each side got things they wanted and it was a genuinely bipartisan exercise.
Republicans got a sharp reduction in the top personal income tax rate to just 28 percent—virtually a flat tax. The top rate had been 70 percent as recently as 1980. Democrats got full taxation of capital gains as ordinary income, something they thought was essential for fairness. Neither side got 100 percent of what it wanted, but everyone felt they got enough of what they wanted, a classic compromise.
This sort of traditional legislating came to an end in 1994 when Republicans got control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1954. Republicans elected Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House and most believed that they owed him personally for having devised the strategy that led them to this unexpected outcome. After spending so long in the minority, Republicans had a large, pent-up demand for things they wanted to do as soon as they got control. But Gingrich had his own ideas. Chief among them was the dismantling of the traditional legislating process based on the committees. He was in too much of a hurry for hearings and markups on the things he wanted to do. Nor did he have any interest in being challenged by a bunch of “experts” telling him that his ideas wouldn’t work.
So Gingrich slashed several thousand staff positions from the congressional committees and abolished the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations—agencies of Congress that brought scientific expertise to various issues and studied the impact of federal policies on state and local governments. He probably would have abolished the CBO and the Congressional Research Service if he could have. All legislative power was centralized in the speaker’s office, which used the House Rules Committee to bypass the committees of jurisdiction.
During the Obama years, Republicans made no effort whatsoever to pass any of their initiatives. That would have required meeting some of the president’s demands, which were assumed to be unacceptable, regardless of what they were. All Republican legislative efforts went into one thing: stopping whatever Obama wanted to do, no matter the merit or the possibility they could get something for themselves with a small amount of compromise. To the GOP base, compromise equaled capitulation and therefore was forbidden.
Now, Republicans in Congress have what they always hoped to have—a president with few ideas of his own, who won’t try to ram his own ideas down their throat and will passively sign whatever legislation is sent to him. The problem is that the legislative machinery has atrophied from lack of use for so many years on the Republican side. Republicans have forgotten how to properly draft a bill, vet it, built coalitions, make deals and put a major piece of legislation across the finish line. The president can’t help because he knows nothing whatsoever about the legislative process, not to mention the larger policymaking process that includes lobbyists, trade associations, citizen groups, think tanks and the news media.
The health reform farce is proof that the legislative Republican emperor was wearing no clothes. The Republicans had systematically lied to themselves and their base for 8 years about having an Obamacare replacement ready to go the minute a Republican president took office. Even President Trump was taken in by this lie because, it appears, the White House’s policymaking muscles are as weak as those in Congress.
As yet, Republicans show no sign of returning to the old methods of slowly building a major legislative proposal that would actually work and get enacted into law. They seem to have learned nothing from the health debacle and are plunging ahead with tax reform despite lacking any consensus even on their own side. Their plan, as it was with health, seems to be to rush something through before anyone realizes what a piece of crap it is. It’s highly unlikely this will work.
Meanwhile, no effort is being made to involve Democrats in any way, even though their involvement was essential to enactment of TRA 86 and the 1996 welfare reform law, both of which Republicans take great pride in. Trump may slowly be awakening to the need to deal with Democrats, but he spurned them on health and is stonewalling any investigation into Russia’s role in the election, so future cooperation will require enormous effort on his part that is unlikely to be forthcoming. And Speaker Paul Ryan is apparently so worried about his right flank that he explicitly ruled out the idea of cooperating with Democrats on Wednesday, telling an interviewer, “If this Republican Congress allows the perfect to become the enemy of the good, I worry we’ll push the president to working with Democrats. He’s been suggesting that much.”
Of course, one can imagine scenarios in which some major legislation can slide through Congress using reconciliation, or tied to a debt-limit increase or whatever. But the sands of the hourglass are pouring quickly because the 2018 elections are very likely to erode the thin Republican margins in both the House and Senate. For Republicans, it’s do or die right now if they hope to enact major legislation. Which path will they choose?
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gosh, I'm sorry about how angry I've been about disrespecting their culture!
I really should have thought about how I should respond to people not wanting me to have a right to employment or housing ir marriage. Perhaps if I treated them better, they might find it in their hearts to treat me with basic human dignity.

Good
Oh really when?