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TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#285576: Jul 22nd 2019 at 11:39:08 PM

I wonder if yet another reason why the Rs are acting so brazen and extreme is because of the dismal senate projections for 2020 and 2022. Basically, Torch the Franchise and Run, but for politics.

I suspect that's why Trump keeps pushing ICE for more and more brazen measures.

He knows he might not be here in 2021. He wants to make sure he gets rid of as many brown people as he can before that happens. Today, he's doing this:

The Trump administration plans to use a fast-track deportation process to bypass immigration judges in order to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have illegally entered the U.S. within the past two years. Previously, the policy for "expedited removal" had been limited to migrants caught within 100 miles of the U.S. border who had been in the country for less than two weeks. The Department of Homeland Security defended the shift, saying the new plan will ease the backlogged immigration courts by allowing ICE to deport unauthorized immigrants without placing them in "timeconsuming removal proceedings." Expedited removals will take effect immediately.

Tomorrow, it will be some other mass-arrest or mass-deportation measure. Whatever it takes to "solve" the presence of Hispanic people in the United States before his four years are up.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#285577: Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:21:12 AM

I wonder if yet another reason why the Rs are acting so brazen and extreme is because of the dismal senate projections for 2020 and 2022. Basically, Torch the Franchise and Run, but for politics.

I feel like they don't have that kind of self-awareness. For the most part, anyway.

This reminds me of something I came across a long time ago and never got to sharing with this forum: multiple studies show that Congress and their staff think that America is much more conservative than it is.

Senior staffers in congressional offices hold highly inaccurate assumptions about what voters in their districts actually want when it comes to policy. They tend to believe that voters support much more conservative policies than they actually do. And this stunning misperception can largely be explained by the disproportionate attention lawmakers and their aides lavish on donors and special interest groups.

Those are the results of a new paper forthcoming in the American Political Science Review by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University and Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes of The University of California, Santa Barbara.

While voters have long believed that members of Congress are focused too much on the needs of special interests and out of touch with the general public, the paper provides some of the most convincing evidence to date that these perceptions are largely accurate.

In August 2016, the authors sent out a survey to the chiefs of staff and legislative directors of every House and Senate office. They targeted these senior officials because they’re largely responsible for setting an office’s legislative agenda: They play “a crucial role in the policymaking process, connecting the preferences of constituents with Members of Congress,” as the authors put it.

One section of the survey asked staffers to estimate public support in their own districts (or states, in the case of Senate aides) for five policy proposals: repealing Obamacare, raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, enacting universal gun background checks, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and investing $305 billion in infrastructure improvements over a five-year period. One could reasonably expect that a congressional aide would understand constituents' opinions on these issues, given that Congress had voted on bills related to these issues in the previous year.

The authors compared the aides' responses to actual district-level public opinion on the issues, as measured by large national surveys like the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The results showed a stark disconnect.

Aides' estimates of public support for the proposals were way off-base relative to the actual numbers. “In none of the five areas are staffers estimating their constituents’ preferences with any degree of relative or absolute accuracy,” the authors write. Legislative aides in Republican offices were particularly bad at estimating their constituents' support for various policies.

On the question of gun background checks, for instance, staffers in Republican offices underestimated public support by 49 percentage points. Democrats underestimated too, by 11 percentage points. Republican staffers also underestimated support for carbon dioxide regulation, infrastructure spending and minimum wage hikes by 20 percentage points or more. Democrats underestimated support for those policies by between five and nine percentage points.

There was one issue, however, where Democratic staffers were more off-base: Obamacare repeal. Democrats underestimated support for repealing the Affordable Care Act by 24 percentage points, while Republicans overestimated support by 10 percentage points.

Overall, the researchers found, aides in Democratic offices better understood public opinion in their districts by a margin of about 13 percentage points. But with the exception of Obamacare repeal, Democratic aides sided with their Republican colleagues in assuming their constituents were more conservative on the issues than they actually were.

“Overall, we find a conservative bias in staffers’ estimations,” the authors write.

What’s driving these legislative misperceptions? The paper offers some clues. The authors checked to see whether aides in more politically competitive districts did a better job guessing their constituents' preferences than aides in safer districts — they didn’t. Ditto for staffers' years of experience.

They did find, however, that, like all of us, congressional aides tend to believe that everyone else thinks like they do. If a given aide supported a policy, they tended to think that their constituents did too, regardless of whether that was accurate.

But perhaps the most significant factor the researchers identified was the role of interest groups. The survey questions yielded a number of key findings.

First, aides who reported more reliance for policy-making on business-oriented interest groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the American Petroleum Institute, had a poorer understanding of constituent preferences than did aides who relied more on groups drawing their membership from the general population, like the Sierra Club or the League of Conservation Voters. Of note, those business-oriented groups tend to support conservative policies, which could explain some of the aides' conservative bias in their estimates.

Second, the researchers found that aides in offices receiving more money from corporate interests did a worse job of estimating constituent preferences. In fact, “45% of senior legislative staffers report having changed their opinion about legislation after a group gave their Member a campaign contribution,” according to the paper.

Money talks, in other words, and congressional staffers are listening — even if it means becoming less responsive to the needs of their voters.

Perhaps the most alarming finding in the survey, however, was that “staffers are more likely to interpret correspondence from businesses as being more representative of their constituents’ preferences than correspondence from ordinary constituents." The survey asked aides to imagine receiving letters about a policy issue from either “employees of a large company” in their districts or “constituents" and to consider how much those letters represented public opinion in their districts. Sixty-two percent of staffers said they’d view the employees' letters as representative of public opinion, versus only 34 percent who said the same of letters from ordinary citizens.

Corporate lobbying, it really is the worst.

Here's another article on the same subject, which goes a little more in depth on certain subjects and also links to a 2013 study with similar findings.

Long story short, things in Congress make a lot more sense if you assume that, on average, when 40% of the population support the Republican position Republican politicians actually think it's 60%, and when 60% of the population supports a Democratic position, Democrats think it's more like 50% or lower.

That and the lingering paranoia among older Democrats that being anything other than Republican-lite will lead to a repeat of Reagan's 1984 landslide.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#285578: Jul 23rd 2019 at 1:57:51 AM

I might have an urge to vote Libertarian if, say, the Democrats nominated Tulsi Gabbard. But such a vote would be somewhat unprincipled of me, since I believe that in this election, once the primary is done? Democrats need to commit to pull the fuck together and back the winner, whoever it is.

3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
#285579: Jul 23rd 2019 at 2:14:34 AM

The GOP candidate has ordered Concentration Camps for children.

If you throw away your vote on a third party because "The Dems didn't court me enough' or 'I don't feel engaged by the Dem candidate' you are supporting the GOP and this makes you a moral coward.

For evil to triumph good people only need to do nothing. If you vote for a candidate with zero chance you are doing nothing.

And I have nothing but contempt for those since 2016.

There is a time for conscientious abstention but this? This is a time to make a stand.

"You can reply to this Message!"
AlleyOop Since: Oct, 2010
#285580: Jul 23rd 2019 at 2:30:00 AM

I'm just going to point out that given how authoritarian and corporate-oligarchic the Republicans are, the Democrats are the ones that come off looking libertarian by comparison. At least they respect the individual liberties of the people being put in cages.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#285581: Jul 23rd 2019 at 2:33:23 AM

The only candidate who would truly make me sick to vote for is, appropriately enough, the anti-vaxxer candidate.

Disgusted, but not surprised
GoldenKaos Captain of the Dead City from Cirith Ungol Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
Captain of the Dead City
#285582: Jul 23rd 2019 at 2:37:14 AM

Please see Sam Seder's entire library of work for reasons why I think the Lolbertarians are borderline as bad if not worse than the GOP.

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."
PhysicalStamina i'm tired, my friend (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
i'm tired, my friend
#285583: Jul 23rd 2019 at 6:42:08 AM

[up][up][up]As I've said, what libderptarians mean when they say "individual liberty" is "my liberty". They could give a fuck if anyone is oppressed by the government as long as it's not them.

i'm tired, my friend
speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#285584: Jul 23rd 2019 at 6:58:10 AM

Trump Issues His Daily Attack on Dem Congresswomen: Omar is an ‘America Hating Anti-Semite’ See, this is why Trump's excuse that he tried to stop the "Send her back" chant at the NC rally is bullshit (not like anyone here thinks that- this is more for lurkers). He's made a repeated effort to demonize these four women, including tell them to go back to their countries, yet he didn't want his supporters to chant "Send them back"? What kind of sense does that make? Why else would he continue to do this, other than to rile up his base?

Also:

In 2016 I almost won Minnesota.
"Almost" doesn't count in elections.

Edited by speedyboris on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:50:53 AM

Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#285585: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:27:20 AM

If I were American, there is no potential Democratic ticket I wouldn't vote for. Even if America enters a hypothetical End Times timeline and Williamson gets the nod, I'd still vote for her. And go home for a cold shower and then binge drink...

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#285586: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:29:45 AM

im totally from new England and my vote is for ron paul

what?

have a listen and have a link to my discord server
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#285587: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:30:14 AM

The funny thing is that I didn't even recognize Williamson until I mentioned her to my wife, at which point she freaked out and said, "Don't you have one of her books?" It's true; I read A Return to Love back in my self-improvement days. It was... interesting. These days, older and wiser, I regard it as a lot of fluff and woo: some decent ideas mixed up with truckloads of bullshit mysticism. Not coincidentally, that's also how I regard her as a candidate.

We self-evidently could do worse, so in the lightning-strikes-twice chance that she gets the nomination, I'd vote for her, but I'd be holding my nose on the way to the polls.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:01:02 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
PhysicalStamina i'm tired, my friend (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
i'm tired, my friend
#285588: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:32:03 AM

We can't entirely disprove that Williamson is one of The Fair Folk.

But in all serious, a very strange and specific series of a event would have to happen for her to get the nomination.

Edited by PhysicalStamina on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:33:26 AM

i'm tired, my friend
Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#285589: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:39:39 AM

I'm wondering if her policies include making good vibes mandatory and making negative words illegal

have a listen and have a link to my discord server
Bur from Flyover Country (Living Relic) Relationship Status: Having tea with Cthulhu
#285590: Jul 23rd 2019 at 7:59:28 AM

The US could only be improved by more quality vibrators.

Parable Since: Aug, 2009
#285591: Jul 23rd 2019 at 8:08:24 AM

"negative words illegal"

That would be double plus ungood!

When is Mueller testifying again?

speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#285592: Jul 23rd 2019 at 8:50:17 AM

[up] Tomorrow.

EDIT: I'm not expecting much, but I really hope Mueller gets in some passive-aggressive barbs, i.e. "If you had actually read my report, I said _____".

Edited by speedyboris on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:52:34 AM

tclittle Professional Forum Ninja from Somewhere Down in Texas Since: Apr, 2010
Professional Forum Ninja
#285593: Jul 23rd 2019 at 9:22:33 AM

This is horrifying: Trump admin has expanded expedited removal, effective today, requiring someone who was stopped by an immigration official to provide proof "to the satisfaction of an immigration officer" they've been in the US for two years continuously and it also removes geographic limitations.

And since we were talking about American citizens being detained: an American citizen was detained by CBP while crossing the border with his non-American brother, CBP detained him despite him showing his Texas state ID (which requires a SSID), and have ignored any proof being sent by his mother despite being detained for three weeks.

EDIT: Washington Post: Department of Justice responds to Mueller's request for guidance when talking about the Trump probe.

“Please note there should be no testimony concerning the redacted portions of the public version of your report,” the letter said, and reminded Mueller that the prosecution of Trump adviser Roger Stone and a separate case are still awaiting trial, “and local court rules and specific orders issued in those cases substantially restrict the Department’s ability to make public statements about those cases.”

“In addition, it is the Department’s longstanding policy not to discuss the conduct of uncharged third-parties,” the letter continued. “Established Department policy also precludes any comment on the facts developed and legal conclusions by the Special Counsel’s Office with respect to uncharged individuals, other than information contained within the portions of your report that already have been made public.”

The final portion of the letter makes a broader, vaguer admonition not to discuss matters that could be covered by executive privilege — a legally and factually complicated assertion that could, in theory, cover many topics, given that Mueller’s task was to investigate President Trump while working in the executive branch.

Edited by tclittle on Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:22:51 PM

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."
ironballs16 Since: Jul, 2009 Relationship Status: Owner of a lonely heart
#285594: Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:29:36 AM

Oh hey, good timing for this, then. Apparently Roger Stone violated the gag order again, prompting the judge presiding over the case to ban him from using any social media whatsoever since he can't keep his mouth shut when on there.

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
BearyScary Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: You spin me right round, baby
Parable Since: Aug, 2009
#285596: Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:38:00 AM

I'd like to point out that the day after the judge banned him from using social media, Stone's wife started posting stuff about the trial for him on her accounts.

ironballs16 Since: Jul, 2009 Relationship Status: Owner of a lonely heart
#285597: Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:47:21 AM

[up]

Eesh. And unfortunately, unless she slaps a gag order on her (which I'm not sure she can because his wife's not the one on trial), it's just enough on this side of Implausible Deniability to be legally deniable.

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#285598: Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:50:19 AM

Que Judge hauling her in for contempt of court

right?

have a listen and have a link to my discord server
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#285599: Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:12:55 PM

Stone is going to play Loophole Abuse with this case until he and everyone he knows or has ever talked to is in jail for contempt, because he has no respect for the rule of law whatsoever.

To quote Transformers: The Movie in a completely inappropriate context, "I have nothing but contempt for this court."

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2019 at 3:13:33 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Larkmarn Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Hello, I love you
#285600: Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:45:47 PM

I'm not expecting anything from Mueller. Anything short of "Trump absolutely is guilty of the crime of collusion" isn't a win in the court of public opinion. And since that crime doesn't, you know, exist... yeah.

And since we were talking about American citizens being detained: an American citizen was detained by CBP while crossing the border with his non-American brother, CBP detained him despite him showing his Texas state ID (which requires a SSID), and have ignored any proof being sent by his mother despite being detained for three weeks.

... okay, do you mean SSN? Because SSID is about wireless networks. It genuinely took me a bit to figure it out.

I'm just trying to provide criticism because that kind of mistake can easily derail a conversation and make people (such as myself) overlook how utterly absurd and disgusting that is. It's willful ignorance by CBP.

Edited by Larkmarn on Jul 23rd 2019 at 3:47:40 PM

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