StrangeSox

SF will wipe thousands of marijuana convictions off the books This is really good. Decriminalization and legalization are good, but they don't directly help the people already sitting in prison.

Cashing out (the actual words that several GOPers last December when talking about rushing through their tax cut plan) before a blue wave, maybe secretly sick of having to put on a good face about Trump and will make more than enough money in the private sector to not have to put up with that bulls***. A lot of these retirements are coming from seats that either looked particularly vulnerable to a Dem wave or are in blood red districts. NPr had a little segment a couple of weeks ago: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/13/577833713/wh...ns-are-retiring

That makes #34. The previous record, in 2008, was 29, and we're still only in January. Gowdy is also the 9th committee chair to announce retirement

A train carrying GOP lawmakers to a retreat in West Virginia has collided with a garbage truck. The writers have no sense of subtlety this season. (truck driver was injured, everyone on train was okay) e: one fatality confirmed so now I feel bad about making a joke

It's not so much "rigged" as "god damn Democrats are f***ing awful at politics" because they keep prioritizing "how much money can you raise to pay our consultants?" over "do you have good ideas and can you actually win?" though. When the preference you're pushing to the forefront is "raise money so we can enrich our garbage consultant class," I think it's fair to expect some criticism over that. We're not talking about competing grassroots efforts here. eta: the end of that big chunk I just quoted to SB kinda directly contradicts your "they're just whining" angle, too.

Soxbadger, you might find this portion of the article gosox posted relevant: The good news is that the DCCC (and DSCC and DNC) are not all-powerful, and outside groups can still end up getting more progressive candidates on the ballot over money-raising establishment preferences. Running centrists everywhere and beating back progressives within your own party doesn't have it's own great track record, and it's hard to say how well "run progressives everywhere" would really work because it's never been tried. Could someone more strongly advocating for progressive economic policies have won in Alabama, or is Doug Jones the best we can hope for? Is it worth taking a shot on something different in races where you're "doomed" anyway?

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Jan 31, 2018 -> 10:36 AM) ... I dont know how to respond to this because I think many would argue that things like Obamacare (a progressive policy) lead to a lot of those problems. I'm pretty sure a big chunk if not a majority of the "disapproval" numbers for the ACA was from people who didn't think it went far enough. A lot of the progressive base got disillusioned when the Democratic Party let the Nelsons and Liebermans dictate the terms of the debate and gave us a half-measure plan, and then in the years after that Democrats spent their campaigns running away from the ACA rather than supporting it.

You could read the Intercept article that details numerous cases of centrist candidates failing hard and "hopeless" progressive candidates winning upset victories which includes several of the races I mentioned in a previous post. The article also highlights why progressive and more activist candidates may struggle to catch on--the party apparatuses favor establishment candidates who can bring in big money, and the outside funding can flood a race and make other candidates non-viable. The article, along with many others written over the past decade, addresses some of the reasons why the Democrats completely fell apart after their wave elections in 2006 and 2008--there was a lot of disappointment from the left that the ACA didn't go nearly far enough, that not nearly enough was being done to hold Bush and the banks accountable for their destruction, and that the party was abandoning any progressive principles including defending the ACA in order to run as status quo centrists. And, for what it's worth, the conservative Blue Dog democrats took some of the biggest losses in 2010 and 2014. Running a socialist in every race isn't the One Neat Trick To Break Democracy---Republicans Hate It!!! but neither is running boring centrist blah everywhere. When has an aggressive progressive message been "consistently rejected at the voting booth," though? Obama's campaign in 2008 was very progressive, especially for the time, even if a lot of the promises and hope didn't end up going anywhere. Clinton's heavily calculated technocratic centrist campaign lost to Donald Trump. Centrist, wishy-washy Democrats lost nearly a thousand seats from 2008 to 2016. The bit of a blue wave we've seen in the backlash to 2017 has been a wide mix of center-left, like Northam, to out-and-out socialists. You analysis seems to be focused exclusively on Presidential politics, too. I think Obama's terms shows the serious short-comings in that regard--losses in many statehouses throughout the country, decimating the lower ranks of the party and draining the upcoming talent pool in addition to losing all control within the federal government. If the DCCC swoops in to back some money-raising centrist candidate with business connections but no real grassroots backing over a local candidate who has dozens or hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers but doesn't have deep pockets, why is that a good thing? Where's the evidence for that being the path to success? Why should the volunteers turn their efforts to the centrist candidate who might not really support any of the more progressive policies that has them enthusiastic beyond "well they're not a Republican!"?

QUOTE (GoSox05 @ Jan 31, 2018 -> 09:27 AM) Pretty standard Republican speech from Trump last night. North Korea and Iran are evil, Iraq and Afghanistan wars are going great, pull yourself up by your boot straps economics and Cuba is still evil. I guess the one part that was really different was Trump going straight fascist on immigration. Pretty much calling all immigrants, MS-13 gang members that will come and murder you. Likes to talk about that, but didn't mention Heather Heyer or any of other people who were killed by white nationalists who backed him. Just about the whole GOP has shifted to backing Trump's views on immigration at this point, too, readily adopting the preferred white nationalists' terms like "chain migration" and arguing for drastically reducing legal immigration. Zero pushback on deporting hundreds of thousands with TPS for no reason. The nativist wing of the party is now fully in control.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Always running to the center to chase people who aren't going to vote for you anyway absolutely destroys base enthusiasm, and without that, you don't have the thousands upon thousands of volunteers across the country who will work hard to find, run and support good candidates who can actually win (contra soxbadger's contention, the data isn't exactly on the side of "run centrists and win!") ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh Keep running these useless clowns who lose anyway and watch all of the passion and outrage currently aimed at Republicans fade away into nothingness.

FBI Director Opposes Memo Release Because of Inaccuracies, Source Says Devin Nunes Won’t Say If He Worked With White House on Anti-FBI Memo Republicans are voting along party lines to release this memo against the wishes of the DOJ and FBI because it will provide some almost definitely dishonest cover for criticizing the Mueller investigation and Trump's continued politicization of the DOJ and law enforcement. They're also blocking a response memo prepared by the Democrats details all of the false and misleading statements in Nunes' memo. GOP leadership is fully behind tarring and feathering the FBI and career civil servants to give Trump cover.

More lies from Trump (or really his speech writers) on how family reunification immigration and the visa lottery systems work. These aren't differences in how policies might work out like whether "tax cuts pay for themselves," these are blatant lies about how extant policy works.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Jan 30, 2018 -> 05:57 PM) Another thing people should stop doing is referring to Native Americans as Indians. Sure, "Cleveland Native Americans" doesn't have the same ring to it, but Indians... are... from India. Sorry, Columbus, but you missed your target. American Indian is actually the preferred term for a lot of indigenous groups in the US. They use First Peoples a lot in Canada, not sure about Central and South America, but here American Indian is perfectly acceptable. e: thoroughly beaten by Leonard!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 30, 2018 -> 04:44 PM) Start with Andrew Jackson if you want to talk Indian issues. And that dude is on our currency. The previous admin was going to replace him with Tubman, but the current admin decided not to.

I don't even disagree with your utilitarian approach to voting, either! That's my own view, too, but there are a lot of people who don't agree with it. That may be frustrating, but that's still not going to get them to vote. It's more than just bothering to go vote, though. It's about organizing, registering voters, getting good candidates on the ballot from local dog catcher on up. In so many races, people run completely uncontested. That's been changing with the groundswell over this past year+, but how long will that enthusiasm last if it doesn't really result in changes that the organizers and activists want? How well were Democrats able to hold together Obama's coalition? Candidates don't just materialize out of thin air. Why not push for better candidates in the first place rather than hoping they'll listen to you once they're in office (lol if you haven't donated at least four figures to their campaign)? And what's the "crazy" ideology that the progressive base it pushing for? If you look at opinion polls, it's things that a majority of Americans want! Expanded, actual universal health care; Dreamers protection; a substantially more progressive tax structure; actual infrastructure investment, and more. But they do a terrible level of communicating this at the top, and a lot of people subscribe to a "pox on both houses"/"they're both the same" stance. When you always take wishy-washy stances and allow the opposition party to dictate the terms of the debate (how quickly has "chain migration" now become a talking point when it's been known as "family reunification" forever, both in policy discussions and legally, because white nationalists in the GOP want to make it sound scary to further limit legal immigration), you constantly lose ideological ground. Lastly, Hillary was also an extremely dogs*** candidate for a whole host of reasons, some in her control (campaign strategy, run up the score, turn Texas blue!) and some not (decades of right-wing propaganda targeted at her made it more than comfortable for a lot of R's to hold their nose and vote Trump or at least sit out rather than vote for her). Trump may have been many, many times worse and it says a whole lot about this country that he was actually elected and still maintains tens of millions of supporters, but that doesn't mean Clinton wasn't dogs***. Hell, she lost to Trump!

Our Comcast contract is up in a few days and I was eyeing DirecTV Now. Seemed like a better selection than Sling for only a little bit more. Glad to hear that you like it. We'll probably start our free trial of it soon.

Assuming that always chasing after centrist and center-right votes will net you more votes than paying any attention whatsoever to your own base gets pretty damn annoying for the base after a while. Especially when you keep losing bigly. The Republicans have listened to their base and sprinted farther and farther to the right after every election. Democrats have hemmed and hawed and offered nothing meaningful other than "hey, we're not Republicans" and keep getting their asses kicked. Not voting won't accomplish anything, but at some point, you're going to kill the enthusiasm and the motivation for activists to actually get out and build the party if you keep running dogs*** policy to chase after people who aren't going to vote for you anyway (or to appease your big donors). e: we've seen various results across the country in the past 14 or so months since "go hard to the center to chase after suburban republican votes" failed spectacularly for Clinton. We've had centrist/center-right candidates like Doug Jones win in Alabama (and then proceed to be fairly Republican-friendly in the Senate thus far, which is still miles better than Moore but a slap in the face to the progressive base that worked their asses off to get him a win). We've had a center-left candidate win VA Gov, and an outright socialist unseat the GOP Majority Whip in VA. A strong criminal justice reformer won DA in Philly. Extremely Centrist candidate Jon Ossoff lost in Georgia. More progressive candidates did fairly well across the country in recent elections. There's not one clear roadmap that'll work in every race across the country. Primaryin Joe Manchin from the left is *probably* doomed to fail spectacularly in somewhere like West Virginia, but we can definitely push for more progressive candidates in places like NY, CA, and IL (looking at you Lipinski). And when Democratic leadership caves again and again to centrists or conservatives, well, it just keeps killing enthusiasm.

I wasn't ever "offended" but I always thought 'The Chief' was dumb and corny as hell

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2018-stat...-better-n842501

Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does

How This Is Different Than Watergate

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/579690595/th...hy-so-many-guys

QUOTE (Quin @ Jan 29, 2018 -> 08:33 PM) Trump violating the Constitution by not enforcing sanctions. Dereliction of duty. House GOP responds by opening an investigation into the DOJ and FBI Just straight up refusing to enforce a law that passed with huge majorities. And the response is to deepen their cover up. Getting harder and harder to see a political path back to normalcy from all of this.