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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
But Republicans are the party of personal freedom!!!!111oneone
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Okla. Senate approves bill barring doctors from performing abortions
. It almost looks like they are trying to prove that the Sooner State is a distillate of all the worst aspects of right wing politics.
Chaos in House after GOP votes down LGBT measure
. Some last minute vote changes are to blame here, it seems.
Huh, Trump supports equal opportunity slander. He threw off Rubio and Cruz by taking potshots at their wives, now he's opening his campaign against Hillary by swinging on Bill.
You know that trope where the villain shoots at the hero's girlfriend knowing that the hero will jump in the way and take the hit himself? That's Trump.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.This is how Fascism comes to America
.
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.
And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.
That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.
Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death.
In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks down into predictable categories — and democratic politicians are the most predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers will get them in the end anyway.
A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces, rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass following. After all, they are voters and will need to brought back into the fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins.
What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following will have grown dramatically. Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?
This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.
First, he’s running a campaign fundamentally based on racism. But Republicans couldn’t call him on that, because more or less veiled appeals to racial resentment have been key to their party’s success for decades. Clinton, on the other hand, won the nomination thanks to overwhelming nonwhite support, and will have no trouble hitting hard on this issue.
Second, Trump is proposing wildly irresponsible policies that benefit the rich. But so were all the other Republicans, so they couldn’t attack him for that. Clinton can.
Third, Trump’s personal record as a businessman is both antisocial and just plain dubious. Republicans, with their cult of the entrepreneur, couldn’t say anything about that. Again, Clinton can.
I mean, he is a ludicrous figure, and everything we learn just makes him more ludicrous. So why couldn’t Republicans make that stick? I’d argue that it was because there was something fairly ludicrous about all his opponents, too.
[...]
Clinton, on the other hand, is not ludicrous. She can think on her feet; she’s tough as nails. Do you really think the person who stared down the Benghazi committee for 11 hours is going to wither under schoolboy taunts?
Yes, Trump has been much more successful at taking down men ("Little Marco", "low energy campaign", "Lyin' Ted" and so on) than women (the Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina flaps, the dispute about Heidi Cruz, the Twitter tussle with Elizabeth Warren and the like). It isn't a guarantee of Clinton kicking him but a good omen regardless.
Also, Krugman's statements are not entirely true - some Republicans have attacked Trump on the racism and bigotry issues, but living in glass houses as they say...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanClinton is not beholden to the Republican Party's official line of "feed the rich at all costs"; her backers are irrelevant in this case as far as her popular appeal goes.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Blue Ninja
Also, if you take a look at Sanders' donors and his assets, he's not near as disconnected from "big money" as he'd like people to think. I'm not going to say he's in their pocket or anything, but he's played up the differences between himself and Clinton in this regard to a far greater degree than is the reality.
To switch tracks only slightly, the Public Policy Polling center released data on their latest survey
. The link includes breakdowns on every question, including demographics and comparisons to similar questions asked in 2012.
“Paul Ryan’s standing with Republicans nationally has declined precipitously since taking on the job as Speaker of the House,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “They’re not all that crazy about having him in that role, much less being the party’s candidate for President.”
Ryan is at least still a lot better off than Mitch Mc Connell who has just an 11% approval rating nationally to 66% of voters who disapprove of him. What's remarkable in Mc Connell's numbers is how little deviation there is in them across party lines. He's at 14/64 with Republicans, 10/69 with Democrats, and just 6/66 with independents.
There's been a lot of discussion about the impact that Donald Trump's nomination might have on down ballot races. We find Democrats leading the generic Congressional ballot 46/41 right now. Trump's ascendancy is unlikely to cause Republicans to abandon their own party- we find 86% of Democrats planning to vote Democratic and 86% of Republicans planning to vote Republican. But Democrats do have an edge with independent voters at 38/32.
We also asked specifically how voters would respond to a Senate candidate in their state supporting Trump. It's a 19 point net negative, with 45% of voters saying they'd be less likely to vote for a Senate hopeful who supported Trump to only 26% who say that would make them more likely to vote for someone. Among independents it's a 23 point net negative.
President Obama's approval rating stands at 49/48, the first time we've had him with a positive approval spread in a considerable amount of time. There continues to be a lot of misinformation about what has happened during Obama's time in office. 43% of voters think the unemployment rate has increased while Obama has been President, to only 49% who correctly recognize that it has decreased. And 32% of voters think the stock market has gone down during the Obama administration, to only 52% who correctly recognize that it has gone up.
In both cases Democrats and independents are correct in their understanding of how things have changed since Obama became President, but Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.
“It’s a fact that unemployment has gone down and the stock market has gone up during the Obama administration,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “But GOP voters treat these things more as issues of opinion than issues of fact.”
We also tested a handful of issues:
-Americans are evenly divided on the concept of sending a human mission to Mars- 39% of voters support it and 39% are opposed. Democrats (44/34) are in favor of a mission to Mars while Republicans (33/47) are against it.
-Americans are also evenly divided on Obamacare with 42% of voters supporting it, 42% opposed, and 16% having no opinion one way or the other. It's not unpopular in the way it used to be, and it's not likely to be a liability for Democratic candidates running this fall.
-78% of voters nationally support increasing the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, and 49% support going to at least $12 an hour. Only 10% think the current minimum wage is fine, and another 10% think there should be no minimum wage at all. 95% of Democrats, 69% of independents, and 61% of Republicans support a hike at least to $10 an hour.
-83% of voters nationally support background checks on all gun sales, to just 12% who are opposed. There's very broad bipartisan support for that with Democrats (89/9), Republicans (79/14), and independents (78/14) all overwhelmingly in favor of it,
-68% of voters support the EPA Clean Power Plan to 26% who are opposed. That includes 65/29 support from pivotal independent voters.
edited 19th May '16 12:08:20 PM by BlueNinja0
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - SilaswDon't know if everyone has already seen this
but while we're talking about who contributed to who, thought I'd post it.
I didn't, but the most interesting thing is the following:
And in light of this article from 538
it may be a good idea.
So Az. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is currently charged with contempt of court
for violating a previous court order to stop profiling Latinos, and that might get upgraded to criminal charges if they can prove he did it intentionally. And the article points out that he said he'd violated it "out of spite" at a rally at Houston in 2014, so the prosecution's got some rather handy evidence.
Oh, and which Republicans voted in favor of that Maloney amendment? I've tried tracking it down online, but that's a bit tricky when you don't know the official "name" of the amendment.
edited 19th May '16 12:43:59 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

Why would that be the sort of thing that even needs legislation? I mean that, in the sense that why do you need an upper age limit on strippers and who the fuck has the right to put someone's weight into fucking law? Even as a joke, that makes no sense. Legislation is not the place to play a fucking joke, if that's the real reason.