US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7000

On March 01 2017 14:57 Nyxisto wrote:
isn't exactly working out for Corbyn is it. The base can love you to death but you don't win an election by winning over your base. There's no need to over adjust really. Dems lost by 70k votes in three states this time, if < 0.1% of the population would have changed their minds you wouldn't have that discussion. Not to mention that three consecutive party wins in the US are very rare.

I think people are a little quick to see relations where none are, not everything is a policy issue.

On March 01 2017 13:53 GreenHorizons wrote:


Millennials aren't limited to blue states.



Yes, I mean progressives live everywhere, but I get your point. That's why they should be uniting around a message of Medicare for all. It's a policy that both "centrists" and the progressive wing of Democrats agree on, and 2-4 out of 10 Republicans do too.

You're not going to appeal to the demos that rebuttal was targeted at by promising them the same things as Trump, but less. That's just dumb.

On March 01 2017 12:28 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Xenophobia and bigotry often go hand in hand with racism. One can be forgiven for seeing the former and assuming the latter.

On March 01 2017 19:06 Nebuchad wrote:


They didn't just barely lose, they barely lost to Donald Trump. I don't really think you're dishonest when you say stuff like this but really how do you not see that "barely losing" isn't the same thing when you lose to a decent candidate or when you lose to someone who has perhaps the most blatantly shitty program I've ever seen (down to "I'm going to fight against income inequality by taxing the rich less"), is already hated by a significant number of his own population and ridiculed by an even more significant number, and can barely put coherent sentences together?

We can also pretend that this election is the only thing that happened and that the democrats haven't lost a zillion seats with their strategy since 2009 but that's not really productive either now is it.

Also are we really going to go to Corbyn every time now just because Dershowitz mentioned him in the middle of his propaganda piece?

On March 01 2017 22:43 Liquid`Drone wrote:


The republicans lost much harder to the same person. The fact is that for all of Trump's blatantly obvious flaws, we have to accept that he also has some (less obvious) qualities that resonate strongly with a significant amount of Americans. I mean, I definitely want democrats to push harder leftward, I definitely agree that Trump is a disaster, but I don't think he's as easy of an opponent to defeat as some people like to pretend. The whole, never argue with an idiot because he'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience holds some truth, and in a presidential campaign, you have no choice but to argue with him. Hillary being the democrat choice made the case of bringing her down much easier because a couple decades of smearing makes stuff stick, but I think no matter the candidate chosen, the person opposing Trump would have seen their favorability numbers tank during the election period - media fragmentation was a thing before the election as well.

On March 01 2017 14:19 ticklishmusic wrote:
medicare for all, like universal basic income and many over social programs, is very popular until people realize the level of taxation needed. i guess there's the leftist version of magic math where you tax the corporations and rich, do a little adjusting for "efficiencies" and all of a sudden the numbers add up. devil's in the details, though people don't seem to appreciate that.

On March 01 2017 23:00 Nebuchad wrote:


It's not a huge surprise to me that Donald Trump would beat the other republicans, given that on republican subjects he's basically saying the same general things with less filters (bonus, because "political correctness" is baaaad -_-) and when he departs it's on things that they appreciate more than what the other republicans have to say. Republicans should certainly fear someone like that because they're not in a very honest business in the first place so a better salesman is a real threat. The other side actually has sane policies on their side. An advantage in facts coupled with an advantage in fighting a ridiculous manchild with hateful rhetoric, that's not material for a close race, and we're doing a disservice to America when we pretend it should have been expected to be one just because they did happen to lose it.

On March 01 2017 23:56 Unentschieden wrote:
Medical care (not specifically Medicare) for everyone isn´t a question of "if" but "how". Otherwise you´d have to convince people of the economic benefits of suicide.

On March 01 2017 23:56 xDaunt wrote:


what democrats commonly overlook is that their message is not resonating with the voting public at large -- particularly anywhere outside of larger, urban areas.

Police chiefs from across the US, including several from states that voted for Donald Trump, are pushing back on White House moves to force them to become more involved in deporting undocumented immigrants.

In a joint letter, more than 60 law enforcement heads are appealing to Trump in all but name to soften his aggressive drive to enlist police officers in the highly contentious job of deporting millions of immigrants living without permission in the country. They object to being thrust into “new and sometimes problematic tasks” that will undermine the balance between the local communities they serve and the federal government, and “harm locally-based, community-oriented policing”.

The letter is signed by 61 current and former local police chiefs and sheriffs, many of whom come from states won by Trump last November including Alabama, Arizona, Florida, South Carolina and Texas. The political diversity and geographic spread of the signatories underlines the deep apprehension felt by many within the law enforcement community toward the president’s plans to beef up their role in rounding up, detaining and ultimately deporting huge numbers of people.

The letter, written under the auspices of the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, a coalition of senior law enforcement experts convened by the National Immigration Forum, does not mention Trump by name. But it indirectly references his administration’s efforts to force police to play a more central role in the deportation business.

It was released to coincide with a hearing on Tuesday of the US Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, convened by Republicans under the provocative title “the effects of border insecurity and lax immigration enforcement on American communities”.

The letter writers – who include the commissioner of the Boston police department, William Evans; commander of the Los Angeles county sheriff’s office, Jody Sharp; and chief of the Salt Lake City force, Mike Brown – make plain their objection to being drawn into the immigration fray. They state bluntly: “Immigration enforcement is, first and foremost, a federal responsibility. We believe we can best serve our communities by leaving the enforcement of immigration laws to the federal government.”

Trump has pledged to deport millions of undocumented immigrants by widening the definition of those who should be removed, increasing numbers of federal immigration agents and detention centers, and co-opting police forces into the task. He did, however, signal late Tuesday that he might be willing to endorse legislation that protected some undocumented immigrants from deportation, though he gave no details and failed to make any mention of the idea in his address to Congress.

The prospect of police officers and sheriff’s deputies effectively acting as immigration agents while going about their daily affairs – for instance, stopping a Latino individual for driving a car with a broken tail light and then apprehending them for visa violations – has spread fear across communities with large immigrant populations across the US.

But the letter suggests that there is no shortage of opposition to Trump’s apocalyptic plans within law enforcement circles. The authors put forward a very different vision, arguing that police engagement should be strictly limited to targeting “threats such as dangerous criminals and criminal organizations causing harm”.

They also appeal to the Trump administration to draw back from its threat to penalize so-called sanctuary cities that are resisting the immigration crackdown. They point out that there is no agreed definition of what a sanctuary city is, and warn that a withdrawal of federal funds from those areas as punishment “would not make our communities safer”.

In one of his first executive orders issued from the White House, Trump tore up a recently implemented element of Barack Obama’s approach to immigration by rescinding the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), under which customised agreements were negotiated between the federal government and local law enforcement jurisdictions over joint working. The program focused on undocumented immigrants who had committed serious violent offenses, in contrast to the previous enforcement policy, Secure Communities, that swept up thousands of people with minor criminal convictions or no criminal history at all.

Cecilia Muñoz, former director of the White House domestic policy council under President Obama, told the Guardian that by ditching the PEP agreements that had been painstakingly reached with local police chiefs, the incoming Trump administration was paradoxically running the risk of making communities less secure. “For all the Trump administration’s tough rhetoric on security and safety, they are in practice discarding reasonable agreements in order to force local police chiefs into something that they think is unwise,” she said.

She added: “In the Obama administration we worked closely with local police officials to make sure our priorities fitted theirs, and as a result we concentrated on people who had engaged in serious violent crimes who we all agree should be removed.”

The Secure Communities program, piloted under the Bush administration and rolled out during Obama’s first term, expanded information sharing between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies. That allowed federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to sweep up large numbers of undocumented migrants arrested by police irrespective of the severity of their crimes.

On March 02 2017 00:16 mikedebo wrote:


Interestingly, 4/5ths of the US population lives in what appears to be defined as "urban areas", and this number is growing. This is a global problem that most of the world appears to be sitting on their hands about -- Canada is in a similar situation. When we define voting boundaries by geography and basically never update those lines despite massive change in population distribution, I think we have a bit of a representation problem.

Anyhow, this obviously isn't directly pertinent to the immediate issues you're describing, and you did specify _large_ urban areas, but it is something I find interesting to think about.