US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4995

On September 15 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:

The problem is that you really can't get rid of the wealth at the top without destroying wealth. Taxes are distortionary and when you move beyond revenue generation into reallocation of resources, a lot of productive wealth is destroyed in the process. I don't see the "birth lottery" issue as something to be solved by wealth redistribution; as long as individuals have a reasonable chance of upward social mobility within the country, then that should be mostly good enough even if it doesn't quite reach equality. Besides, even in communist countries there was still a wealth inequality / birth lottery effect that was the result of an implicit upper class that exists in every human society ever.

This discussion could go on forever, but I'd also note that some of the least pleasant discussions I have ever seen or had on this site have to do with inheritance taxes, redistribution of wealth, neo-Marxist philosophizing, and the like. That's probably why I've talked about it so rarely that it might not be clear that that's my position on the issue.

On September 15 2016 07:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Unfortunately, I expect Trump to keep lying (and have his doctors keep lying) about his health, like how Trump's physician insisted that Trump would be the healthiest individual to ever become president. My eyes rolled so far that they almost got stuck.

I had zero reason to think that anything was wrong with his health (or his wealth, for that matter) until he started really going out of his way to dodge releasing his medical records (or his tax returns, respectively). For him not to do what is the norm for presidential candidates (nowadays, anyway) calls attention to himself. I hope that Trump is healthy (because god forbid he becomes president), but him being evasive only calls negative attention and suspicion. I can't think of any reason why he wouldn't release "easy" things like these, unless he's hiding something.

I am David L. Scheiner, a board certified general internist licensed to practice in the State of Illinois. I am on staff at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Rush University Medical Center. I have been Senator Barack Obama’s primary care physician since March 23, 1987. The following is a summary of his medical records for the past 21 years.

During that period of time, Senator Obama has been in excellent health. He has been seen regularly for medical checkups and various minor problems such as upper respiratory infections, skin rashes and minor injuries.

His family history is pertinent for his mother’s death from ovarian cancer and grandfather who died of prostate cancer. His own history included intermittent cigarette smoking. He has quit this practice on several occasions and is currently using Nicorette gum with success.

Senator Obama’s last medical checkup was on January 15, 2007; he had no complaints. He exercised regularly often jogging three miles. His diet was balanced with good intake of roughage and fluids. A complete review of systems was unremarkable. On physical examination, his blood pressure was 90/60 and pulse 60/minute. His build was lean and muscular with no excess body fat. His physical examination was completely normal.

In short, his examination showed him to be in excellent health. Senator Barack Obama is in overall good physical and mental health needed to maintain the resiliency required in the Office of President.

If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes.

As a lot of political observers have noted, Trump’s grim-sounding language about a downcast America makes more sense if you realize just what’s happening for his rural base. And buried in the Census Bureau’s new report on income, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, are two piece of further bad news for rural America—trends that could keep shaping politics well after November’s election.

For Americans living in metropolitan areas, inflation-adjusted household income rose by 6 percent from 2014 to 2015—a robust bounce back from the recession. But for those living outside those areas­—totaling more than 40 million Americans—household income actually fell by 2 percent. The numbers on poverty reveal a similar trend. The number of people in poverty in rural areas did fall by 800,000, but that doesn’t appear to be because people are escaping poverty: Instead, people are simply leaving. The rural population, in that span of time, declined by five million people. Taken in total, the rural poverty rate actually rose slightly, by 0.2 percentage points. In the rest of country, the poverty rate declined by 1.4 percentage points.

The Census numbers come atop other findings about the worsening plight of rural Americans: they also face increasing addiction rates and increasing suicide rates. But Tuesday’s Census reports reveals just how unevenly distributed the economic recovery has been. Cities have bounced back, but the gains haven’t spread to those Americans.

For most of the country, 2015 was a great economic year, according to the new Census figures. Inflation-adjusted median household income rose by 5.2 percent, the official poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points and the percentage of people without health insurance fell to 9.1 percent. Income gains were strong across the entire income distribution, with the household income of the bottom 10 percent growing 7.9 percent. Economists across the political spectrum celebrated the new report.

Political economists have spent much of the last year debating the cause of Trump’s success, and specifically about whether his supporters are really driven by economic anxiety, or is it more his appeals to strength and even racially-tinged nationalism. It’s a difficult question to answer because those two explanations are intricately related, but some skeptics of the “economy” argument have pointed out that his supporters’ incomes are relatively high.

A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that looking just at income levels masks a larger story about the economic state of Trump supporters. In August, Jonathan Rothwell, of Gallup, released a major new survey of 85,000 Trump supporters that found that they have relatively high household incomes but live in areas with lower mobility, lower health, and lower educational levels. They are no more likely to live in areas negatively affected by trade but at all income levels, Trump supporters report higher feelings of economic anxiety.

The new Census report may offer further proof that Trump supporters are, at least partially, driven by concerns about the economy. Rothwell did not examine whether low or negative real household income growth predicts support for Trump but he did find that Trump supporters live in areas with low population density—regions that may have seen low or negative income growth in the past year, according to the new Census data.

“It is possible that Trump supporters are more likely than others to have lost income or experienced low growth, even if their incomes are relatively high,” Rothwell said in an email.

Beyond Trump, the new Census report indicates that even as the recovery strengthens, it won’t necessarily lift every area of the country. That the vast majority of Americans are finally seeing strong income growth is great news. But rural America still needs significant help. The justified anxieties of people who live there are going to be an issue for whoever becomes president.

On September 15 2016 06:46 Plansix wrote:
The current polls are showing the issues with Clinton and her inability to pull in independent voters. Trump still has a hard path to 270, but no one in the Clinton camp can be happy with those numbers. Fuck, I'm not happy with those numbers at all.

On September 15 2016 08:28 On_Slaught wrote:


I'm telling ya, for better of worse this election is coming down to the debates. She better show up.

On September 15 2016 08:34 Plansix wrote:

Her advisers better ditch this pipe dream of baiting Trump and just try to seem like the more reasonable human. That guy can't string two sentences together without fucking up, so she should just bring her A game, which is very good.

Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a measure aimed at retroactively shielding paint makers from liability after a billionaire owner of a lead producer contributed $750,000 to a political group that provided crucial support to Walker and Republicans in recall elections, according to a report released Wednesday.

Citing leaked documents gathered during a now-shuttered investigation into the governor's campaign, the Guardian U.S., an arm of the British newspaper, reported that Harold Simmons, owner of NL Industries, a producer of the lead formerly used in paint, made three donations totaling $750,000 to the Wisconsin Club for Growth between April 2011 and January 2012.

Simmons' donations were made before and after Republicans approved two laws helpful to the industry — one in January 2011 and the other in June 2013. The 2013 measure was inserted in a budget bill in the middle of the night despite warnings about its constitutionality.

The documents confirm earlier reports that Walker solicited millions of dollars for Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group then run by R.J. Johnson, one of his top campaign advisers. The Guardian story says Walker was warned in an email about potential "red flags" with Simmons, who died in 2013, including a magazine story that described him as "Dallas' most evil genius."

Simmons' contributions mirror a $700,000 donation from mining firm Gogebic Taconite to Wisconsin Club for Growth around the same time, a donation that was earlier disclosed in court records. After that contribution, the GOP-controlled Legislature and Walker approved legislation aimed at streamlining regulations for an iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin.

The 1,352 pages of leaked John Doe records provide a window into the case that prosecutors were putting together in arguing that Walker's campaign and conservative groups such as Wisconsin Club for Group were illegally coordinating campaign activity. The Wisconsin Supreme Court shut down the probe last year, finding the prosecutors' case was "unsupported in either reason or law."

Walker's campaign said Wednesday that there was no sign the Republican governor had done anything wrong but did not directly address the donations from Simmons or the legislation touching on lead paint lawsuits.

"As widely reported two years ago, the prosecutor’s attorney stated that Governor Walker was not a target," said Walker campaign spokesman Joe Fadness. "Several courts shut down the baseless investigation on multiple occasions, and there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing."

Club For Growth attorney David Rivkin said in an email that prosecutors made up crimes that don’t exist and called their attempt to get the case to the Supreme Court “legally frivolous and just another publicity stunt intended to tarnish their targets’ reputations and salvage their own.”

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat who launched the investigation in 2012, noted in a statement that it is illegal to leak records from a John Doe investigation.

"The public release of this John Doe evidence without court authorization is not merely a violation of the John Doe secrecy order; it is a crime under Wisconsin law," Chisholm said. "As Special Prosecutor Fran Schmitz has done in the past when other secret materials have been publicly disclosed, we support any effort that may be undertaken to determine the source of these newest leaks."

Such an investigation appears possible.

GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel "is currently reviewing the available options to address the serious legal questions raised by the leak and publication of these sealed documents," Schimel spokesman Johnny Koremenos said in a statement.

State Rep. David Craig (R-Town of Vernon) said he wants to form a special legislative committee with subpoena power to look into how the investigation was conducted and the leak of documents. Craig, who is running for state Senate without opposition, helped lead the effort to end the ability of prosecutors to use John Doe investigations to investigate campaign finance matters.

This leak of John Doe documents comes just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is to meet in closed session on a petition from prosecutors to revive the investigation.

Prosecutors argue that former state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser and current Justice Michael Gableman should not have been allowed to hear the case because their campaigns benefited from work by some of the groups being investigated.

The Guardian story quotes a Walker email to Karl Rove, a former top aide to President George W. Bush who oversaw a major political action committee, in which the Republican governor credits Johnson and Wisconsin for Growth in the election of Gableman and Prosser. Both justices voted to shut down the John Doe investigation.

"RJ was the chief adviser to my campaign," Walker wrote on May 4, 2011. "He put together the team to flip the Senate three times and the Assembly two times.

"He ran the effort that defeated the first incumbent Supreme Court Justice in decades back in 2008, and Club for Growth-Wisconsin was the key to retaining Justice Prosser."

Since the recalls, Walker and Republicans in the state have sought to shield paint makers from liability in lawsuits involving lead paint, though federal courts have in turn blocked some of those actions from standing.

For instance, in an overnight meeting in June 2013, Republicans on the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee inserted a provision into the budget long sought by the paint industry that was meant to block lawsuits pending against them by 171 children sickened by lead paint.

But in July 2014 a federal appeals court ruled that a lawsuit by one of those children could continue despite the 2013 state law. The boy who suffered lead poisoning can sue a half dozen major manufacturers of paint used on the Milwaukee house where he lived, based on a theory approved in a controversial 2005 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled.

In an interview Wednesday, the boy's attorney, Peter Earle, said he was "trembling with rage" at the news of the contributions by the industry, saying that they were meant to block claims by "the most vulnerable among us." He said that Republican leaders in Wisconsin had benefited from industry money and then acted to try to retroactively block lawsuits by children harmed by lead paint.

"What I see is a corrupt morass of government in Wisconsin that has been fueled by corporate money," Earle said. "How can people have faith in a system like that?"

State Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) said he was shocked by the lead paint company's donations.

"He answers first and foremost to large donors and that's kind of underscored in the lead paint (example)," Erpenbach said of Walker.

He said it was frustrating the state Supreme Court had concluded prosecutors weren't allowed to look into whether there was a connection between the money from the lead paint industry and legislation helping it. He said conservatives on the state court benefited from their own decision to shut down the investigation into these contributions.

"A majority of the Supreme Court benefited directly from the dark money that flowed into this state," he said.

Walker won his recall election in June 2012, becoming the first governor in U.S. history to do so, and GOP senators faced recalls in both 2011 and 2012.

Three GOP senators faced recalls and then voted on the Joint Finance Committee budget motion in June 2013 that sought to retroactively shield the lead paint industry from lawsuits. Those senators were Alberta Darling of River Hills, the panel's co-chairwoman, Luther Olsen of Ripon, and Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls — none responded to requests for comment.

That controversial motion came at the end of the panel's budget-writing work and, as is common, came in the middle of the night and included a grab bag of special interest moves, including a failed attempt to allow bounty hunters to start work in Wisconsin. The lead paint provision was added to the bill despite a memo from the nonpartisan Legislative Council that warned the retroactive change would "raise significant constitutional concerns."

Erpenbach said he didn't know if Republicans in the state Senate were aware of the donations to the Wisconsin Club for Growth that helped them in their recall elections, but he expects them to face tough questions about it now.

"Republicans bent over backward to get this (lead paint) legislation through," Erpenbach said.

A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) had no immediate comment.

A controversial 2005 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision intensified legal and political fight in this state over who is responsible for paying for those sickened by lead paint in cities like Milwaukee.

The decision in the case Thomas vs. Mallett was written by then-Justice Louis Butler, who was later defeated for re-election, based partly on a backlash by business interests against the ruling.

In 2010, then-U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa in Milwaukee threw out a young plaintiff's lawsuit on the grounds that the "risk contribution theory" advanced in the 2005 state Supreme Court decision violated the substantive due process rights of the defendants — the makers of lead carbonate pigment. In its 2014 ruling, the U.S. 7th Circuit reversed Randa and let the lawsuit continue.

In December 2011 and January 2012, GOP state Sen. Glenn Grothman was drafting legislation to make immunity from liability lawsuits retroactive. The drafting file for the bill shows that Grothman, now a congressman, and his aides gave drafting attorneys an unsigned memo on the issue that appears to have been written by an outside attorney.

Grothman declined to comment. The proposal failed to pass in 2012, but Grothman was on the Joint Finance Committee when it ended up passing a similar measure in 2013.

The leaked documents were gathered during the secret probe launched by Chisholm.

The investigation focused on whether Walker's campaign had illegally coordinated with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups. The documents released Wednesday once again made clear the GOP governor was active in raising money for the group.

One donor gave the group $10,000 in 2011, writing on the check's memo line that he made the contribution "because Scott Walker asked."

It was not clear who leaked the documents to the Guardian. Some of them have been already disclosed during various court cases and reported by the Journal Sentinel, among other media outlets, while others have never been released before because they were filed under seal or never showed up in court documents at all.

Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz led the probe, which was conducted under the John Doe law. That law allowed prosecutors to force people to testify and turn over documents, while barring them from talking about the investigation with others.

The probe was effectively halted in January 2014 when the state judge overseeing the investigation found the activities in question were not illegal. Schmitz sought to overturn that finding, while the Wisconsin Club for Growth and two of its advisers brought legal challenges to stop the investigation for good.

Johnson worked both for Walker and the Wisconsin Club for Growth at the same time.

The state Supreme Court last year ruled 4-2 against the prosecutors. The court initially determined all evidence prosecutors had gathered had to be destroyed but later told prosecutors they should instead turn it over to the justices. The high court has allowed prosecutors to hang onto it while they pursue their appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Chisholm has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decision by Wisconsin's high court to shut down the investigation.

They also want the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether the Wisconsin court got it right when it ruled candidates have free speech rights to work closely with advocacy groups during their campaigns, according to sources.

On September 15 2016 07:14 xDaunt wrote:

Yes, he'd fit in there, too, but really what we're after are the liberal Hillary supporters who also aren't ridiculous shills for her. Mohdoo is a good example of one.

On September 15 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:

The problem is that you really can't get rid of the wealth at the top without destroying wealth. Taxes are distortionary and when you move beyond revenue generation into reallocation of resources, a lot of productive wealth is destroyed in the process. I don't see the "birth lottery" issue as something to be solved by wealth redistribution; as long as individuals have a reasonable chance of upward social mobility within the country, then that should be mostly good enough even if it doesn't quite reach equality. Besides, even in communist countries there was still a wealth inequality / birth lottery effect that was the result of an implicit upper class that exists in every human society ever.

This discussion could go on forever, but I'd also note that some of the least pleasant discussions I have ever seen or had on this site have to do with inheritance taxes, redistribution of wealth, neo-Marxist philosophizing, and the like. That's probably why I've talked about it so rarely that it might not be clear that that's my position on the issue.

On September 15 2016 07:22 TheYango wrote:

Mohdoo almost jumped off the Hillary train when the DNC leak stuff came out, before sleeping on it and changing his mind.

But I legitimately think Clinton is worse as a candidate than I originally thought