by Ugh
Well, there we have it. Barring something completely unforeseen and unprecedented – or at least more so than to date - Donald Freaking Trump will be the GOP nominee for the 2016 United States of America Presidential Election/Leader of the Free World Rumpus. The frowny faces on journalists this morning is due to having their Christmas in July present of a contested convention taken away by America's Favorite Dad, Ted Cruz. Pout.
I like this article by Jonathan Chait regarding the current and possible future state of the GOP, if any. I have to say I'm a little confused* as to the number of people, which I assume will decrease by the day as the prospect of President Hillary approaches, on the right who are running around saying they would never vote for Trump. What is it about his policy platform, such as it is, that is so anathema in a way that Ted Cruz's or Ricky Rubio's wasn't? I guess because it really isn't about policy, it's about what Chait says in this paragraph:
Virtually the entire Republican apparatus will follow Trump sooner or later, because without the voters, they have no power. And those voters have revealed things about the nature of the party that many Republicans prefer to deny. Whatever abstract arguments for conservative policy — and these arguments exist, and a great many people subscribe to them earnestly — on the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason. Once a figure has been accepted as a friendly member of their tribe, there is no level of absurdity to which he can stoop that would discredit him. And since reason cannot penetrate the crude tribalism that animates Republicans, it follows that nothing President Obama could have proposed on economic stimulus, health care, or deficits could have avoided the paroxysms of rage that faced him.
Crubio were willing to toe the line on "conservative policy" – such as it is – but stoked conservative ressentiment in the modern, under the table, you know what I really mean, wink wink nudge nudge say no more! kind of style. Trump was (is) full-throated all ressentiment, all the time. Shout it from the rooftops! Why are we hiding what we all know to be true about "those people" and the decline and fall of the US of A! It's Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign in the age of social media, meth, and open carry.
Whee.
UPDATE!: Kasich is a quitter too. It's all over except for the rending of garments.
*Kind of in the same way I was when the pro-lifers freaked out when Trump said women should be punished when they have an abortion. I mean, is it murder or not? Make up your mind.
Now, will they force a VP on him that can backstab him once the establishment gives the signal?
The failure of the Never Trump folks? They knew that nobody (outside his evangelical base) actually liked Cruz. And most of the rest of us went well beyond mere dislike. But they didn’t consider that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” might apply.
The result? Trump actually managed (thanks IMHO to the anti-Cruz voters) to finally get above 50%. I don’t see that as growing support for Trump, so much as opposition to Cruz.
So, with Cruz gone, what happens? Put another way, will the anti-Cruz folks stay with Trump? Or vote for one of the other guys whose names are still on the ballot?
…and now the news is saying that Kasich is dropping out.
Star Wars Day 2016, a moment for the history books.
May the Farce Be With You.
“The failure of the Never Trump folks? ”
That they left it way too late. Cruz, for example, started his campaign by saying what a great guy Trump was.
Oh, and being a bunch of unappealing losers, too.
Nigel – you’re in the UK, what’s the view over there!
My guess:
Life imitates art – in this case, the Upper-Class Twit of the Year skit.
“what’s the view over there”
A mixture of amusement and deep apprehension.
As I said earlier, I truly hope that Hillary proves ‘likeable enough’.
(Though I can’t really claim to speak for the entire UK…)
“Though I can’t really claim to speak for the entire UK”
Go ahead, most of the US won’t notice. 🙂
Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason.
No more so than Progressive, now Democratic, politics boiling down to identitarian/social justice fixations ungoverned by reason.
Which may well be a case of both houses being equally poxed.
Except the Democrats don’t have anyone like Trump. It’s a proof-in-the-pudding sort of thing.
HSH – we will have to wait until Al Sharpton is the Dem nominee.
Or whoever the unreasonable identitarian/social justice fixating candidate as analog to Trump would be. I’m open to suggestions.
McKinney, note how Ugh explicitly did NOT say “Republican and conservative politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason.”
McKinney, note how Ugh explicitly did NOT say “Republican and conservative politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason.”
I did notice. My view of the two parties is somewhat different. I think a lot of people have very real concerns about the border, and while some number of those people are racist, many others are not. I have concerns about the border, but I have much bigger concerns about Trump. Trump’s stand on immigration–overwrought in many respects–isn’t that far off from of lot of what The Bern has to say. Bern just says it in a nicer way. The real culprit is the Tea Party which is f’ing bananas. I’m having ongoing professional encounters with one of our local Tea Parties, and collectively it is sort of a virgin mentality, having never been penetrated by an original thought. I agree it is dismaying that so many have latched on to Trump, although the number who refuse to do so is gratifying.
My gripe with the Dem’s is twofold. First, that HRC is corrupt, always has been, always will be. She is inherently transactional. Everything is bought and paid for. Yet, very few on the left say they will forego voting if she is the candidate. HRC doesn’t have to be *as awful* as Trump to be *awful enough*.
Second, the social justice/identitarian subset is getting out of hand. They are the counterpart to the Tea Party. They are growing, not shrinking, and they are well and truly statist in the worst possible way.
The DNC and Dem Super Delegates are all for HRC. So, corruption. In time, as the next generation of illiberal, social justice warriors gains ground, you will see Trumpism from the left. The seeds are there. History tells us it won’t pretty.
Some choice. Some future. I’ll be writing in.
Yet, very few on the left say they will forego voting if she is the candidate.
You mean the ‘real’ left? Heh. Well, for the record, the Nader fiasco in 2000 pretty much broke ‘us’ of that, though some purists who just cannot bring themselves to vote for The Hillary are still out there. So yes, very few…and for good reason.
The crew at LG&M are determined to hound them to the ends of the earth.
The DNC and Dem Super Delegates are all for HRC. So, corruption.
I thought this was mostly a thing with Bernie’s supporters. The party has been nominating candidates more or less the same way for a while, with a few tweaks here or there. It really has nothing to do with Clinton, per se.
There’s no requirement for any public vote at all in a party’s internal selection process. It’s all a matter of what is in the party’s best interests, as the party sees it. But, even if they get that wrong, it’s not a legal or moral question, really. It’s one of the competence of the people running the party.
If the party leadership simply get together and pick someone, by some undisclosed process, they may, without intending to (and why would they intend to?), alienate the public, harming their brand. Doing so may well be stupid, but I have a hard time seeing it as being corrupt, short of some serious shenanigans.
And if you took the superdelegates out of the picture, would it change the outcome of this particular nomination?
Yet, very few on the left say they will forego voting if she is the candidate. HRC doesn’t have to be *as awful* as Trump to be *awful enough*.
Awful enough for what? It’s her or Trump, so *as awful* is the bar. What other course of action, at this point, do people “on the left” or anywhere else have?
Awful enough for what? It’s her or Trump, so *as awful* is the bar. What other course of action, at this point, do people “on the left” or anywhere else have?
Well, one place to start might be a full on attack against the DNC, the rules and the process–call it out for what it is and call her out for what she is. Which is what a lot of people on the right are doing with Trump, and a lesser number did with Cruz.
So, perhaps taking and maintaining a stand on principle is a good place to start. You can still hold your nose and vote for her if you are in a swing state. Otherwise, you have the luxury–as I do–of being able to write in.
At the risk of seeming to put words in his mouth, perhaps McKinney is making a point about purity. To wit: if you support someone, you must necessarily support everything about them. That is if (for the sake of discussion) a candidate is corrupt, you are necessarily a supporter of corruption, and arguably corrupt yourself. No matter what the alternatives may be.
Logically the same applies to any feature/shortcoming of any candidate. If you vote for them, you must be in favor of everything about them. In short, you should probably not vote for anybody ever . . . unless you happen to be running and can vote for yourself.
Posting from Florence, on a phone (not my preferred mode, to put it mildly),but felt I should add to Nigel’s account of UK attitudes to Trump: even my Tory friends (some of whom tried to justify a McCain/Palin ticket (!)) are incredulous about Trump. I think it’s fair to say that to the rest of the world a Trump presidency is pretty much inconceivable. One can list his “liberal” attitudes til the cows come home, it’s still horrific to contemplate anyone with his non-existent attention span, vulnerability to flattery, egocentric and erratic behaviour etc with any power whatsoever.
McKT: re HRC’s corruption: I thought there had been exhaustive enquiries into e.g. Whitewater, Benghazi etc without anything of substance being found. Is this not true? If it isn’t, please give links, or at least an indication of where to look for evidence of her corruption. I would be most grateful.
Well, one place to start might be a full on attack against the DNC, the rules and the process–call it out for what it is and call her out for what she is.
Putting aside what she is, what is it? They have some number of party officials or high-raking members who have a say in who gets nominated as their party’s candidate. I don’t get what’s so problematic about a party having some degree of internal control over their own nominating process. And, again, this isn’t something they cooked up for Hillary Clinton. They’ve been doing more or less the same thing for decades.
So, perhaps taking and maintaining a stand on principle is a good place to start. You can still hold your nose and vote for her if you are in a swing state. Otherwise, you have the luxury–as I do–of being able to write in.
I’m guessing NJ won’t be up for grabs this November, so I suppose I could write in or just not vote at all (since it won’t matter, anyway!). I don’t see what sort of meaningful stand that would be, though.
Incidentally, I’m probably going to vote in NJ’s primary in (I think, without looking it up) June. I’ll be voting for Bernie, just because I can. Hillary all the way in November, though. Sour milk’s better than raw sewage.
At the risk of seeming to put words in his mouth, perhaps McKinney is making a point about purity. To wit: if you support someone, you must necessarily support everything about them.
Not even remotely.
I thought there had been exhaustive enquiries into e.g. Whitewater, Benghazi etc without anything of substance being found.
I don’t catalogue her issues, but even my limited memory can recall: cattle futures (100K), Mark Rich pardon (400K), her undisclosed Wall Street speeches for incredible, off the charts fees, intersection of Clinton Foundation donors with business before the State Department and the State Department emails. I do not expect the Obama administration to appoint independent counsel or to conduct a thorough investigation. Anyone with the time could round up a ton of her smaller issues: FBI files on political opponents showing up in the white house, Rose law firm’s billing records showing up in the white house, etc, etc. Always someone there to take the fall. Add to this her and her husband’s love of oppo research and the art of personal destruction. Ugly people. Disgusting.
The DNC and Dem Super Delegates are all for HRC. So, corruption.
Well HRC still has a 1683 to 1362 regular delegate lead over Bernie, 321 delegates or 23% more than Bernie. So, it’s hardly being taken away from Bernie by corruption in the process via super-delegates. Not that the DNC isn’t leaning Hillary (and Bernie, after all, being a latecomer to the Democratic party so…).
I do have to say that much as Trump is awful, although I would say potentially less awful than any of Cruz/Rubio/Kasich would have been but also potentially infinitely worse, at least it seemed to me a democratic enough process that the R primary voters got pretty much what they wanted rather than having the “elites” or “establishment” being able to swoop in and select who they wanted.
But accepting that HRC is corrupt and “inherently transactional”, what horrible outcomes might that lead to that wouldn’t occur under an HRC (or Dem) presidency anyway? Other than continued erosion of faith in our public institutions, which seems to be 85% of the GOP’s raison d’être these days, IMHO.
Putting aside what she is, what is it?
A party that stacks the deck for HRC is as corrupt as she is. And so is the process that allows for stacking the deck.
Just because the Republicans are currently leading the race to the bottom doesn’t mean the Democrats aren’t in the running.
The milk may be sour today. It could be toxic tomorrow.
But accepting that HRC is corrupt and “inherently transactional”, what horrible outcomes might that lead to that wouldn’t occur under an HRC (or Dem) presidency anyway?
I’m not sure this is a point I’d want to make if I were arguing from the ‘she’s not as bad as Trump’ point of view. That said, what standing do Democrats have going forward to address any issue of integrity when the standard they hold themselves to is “our corruption is ok because we wouldn’t govern any differently if we were honest”?
But, again, would removing the superdelegates from the equation change anything this time around? And you call it “stacking the deck.” What deck, and whose is it? It’s a political party. It’s an organization. It’s their nominee. To the extent that it’s in the party’s best interest to have an open (small-d) democratic process, they should have that. To the extent that they don’t, which also may be in the party’s best interests, how is it corrupt?
Which is what a lot of people on the right are doing with Trump
I see little, if any, criticism of the GOP rules and procedures for choosing delegates coming from anybody but the presumptive nominee.
Another way of looking at it is that, in all likelihood, the only way for the superdelegates to subvert the will of the voters will be to switch to supporting Bernie and handing him the nomination. That would prevent Clinton from getting it. Would that be “stacking the deck?”
A party that stacks the deck for HRC is as corrupt as she is.
You might actually read up on the history of how ‘superdelegates’ came to be. Here’s a start.
And yes, they do by and large, represent the “establishment”, but then again many if not most of them have to win either a public or party election to be where they are.
McKinney,
Just for curiosity: which potential presidential candidate, of either party, would you have considered NOT-corrupt?
By “NOT-corrupt” I mean “by the same standards you apply to Hillary Clinton”. I specify that because I can imagine various ways to define corrupt/non-corrupt, and under some of them a Dick Cheney or a Denny Hastert would be as NON-corrupt as you can get.
–TP
BP and HSH–is my point to the effect that a thoroughly corrupt, transactional person being the party favorite is a bit problematic not getting through?
Does pointing out that the Super Delegate concept once made sense somehow ameliorate the current stench?
Is asking one’s party to not be corrupt, to not support corrupt candidates a bad idea? Something people could and should do rather than sadly noting they wish things were different but, really, what can be done about it and would it make any difference in the end even if they could?
If nothing else, doesn’t the present state of affairs disqualify all HRC supporters from complaining about Republican corruption?
And for those of you who haven’t read the entire thread, I wouldn’t pour raw sewage on Trump OR Cruz if they were on fire. A sizeable minority of establishment conservatives oppose and will continue to oppose Trump on principle. That most of these people would accept Cruz is as disappointing as the Democrats’ support of HRC.
Just for curiosity: which potential presidential candidate, of either party, would you have considered NOT-corrupt?
Sanders is a clean as a whistle as far as I can tell. I don’t know of any Republican who, while in public office, conducted business on a quid pro quo basis in even as remotely similar a fashion as the Clinton’s. Which is not to say any of the Republican candidates were worthy of being elected president, although I once thought a lot of Carlie Fiorina. Limiting the topic to corruption, HRC is in a league all of her own.
As far as the UK is concerned, I think the cartoonist Matt might speak for the majority with today’s cartoon:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/30/matt-cartoons-may-2016/
Transactional ?
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-court-gets-ready-to-legalize-corruption
From over here, all US politics appears transactional.
From over here, all US politics appears transactional.
There has always been an element of sleeze, going back to the 19th century. What we are seeing is ever higher levels of sleeze becoming the norm. I read the Newyorker article. It spins both Citizens United and McConnell’s case. The former *is* a legitimate First Amendment issue, the latter is not but it is a case with valid nuances that blur the line between criminal conduct and extremely bad taste and bad optics.
The former *is* a legitimate First Amendment issue,
An issue, sure. A deeply questionable decision, though.
A deeply questionable decision, though.
Depends on how you read the First Amendment but I don’t mean to threadjack. The topic is HRC’s corruption and the DNC’s open and notorious support of her notwithstanding. And, the seemingly helpless acknowledgment that this is the case but, really, what can be done about?
Yeah, McTx, this crazy talk about social justice is really getting out of hand – it’s not as if the US was the most unequal society in the developed world.
The topic is HRC’s corruption and the DNC’s open and notorious support of her notwithstanding.
Citizens United published a blatant lie-fest about Hillary Clinton during an election, claiming to document the “corruption” you also allege. The Supremes (the Republican hacks on the court) said, sure, as long as it’s the Clintons, why not. And while we’re at it, let’s make sure that moneyed interests always carry the day in election law, with money being speech and all. Because, you know, we Republicans on the Supreme Court can’t throw every election!
And people wonder why Hillary thinks money is important.
So comes now McKinney, with all his nuance. I’m not buying it.
BP and HSH–is my point to the effect that a thoroughly corrupt, transactional person being the party favorite is a bit problematic not getting through?
On the contrary. But consider, given current institutional relationships, we will have an effective choice as between only two candidates for the most powerful position in the world. So pick one and own the decision.
This is, as they say, not rocket science.
If it comes down to being sold down the river by a “corrupt” candidate who otherwise buys into at least some elements of a socially progressive political program and some hack who will sell us out on principle (Markets! God! American Exceptionalism!), deeply held or not, I will vote for the first one every time.
From over here, all US politics appears transactional.
Yes, good cite, Nigel. In just about every instance that McKinney damns the Clintons, those actions fit the Citizens Unitedmodel quite explicitly, a model where our esteemed legal commenter from Texas takes the opposite side.
Well, for the record, the Nader fiasco in 2000 pretty much broke ‘us’ of that
This year’s youngest voters were two years old in 2000. The hanging chads, the Brooks Brothers Riot, Gore’s concession and 9/11 are events in history books to them, if they know about them at all.
From over here, all US politics appears transactional.
From over here, the Brits appear not to be ready to throw stones.
An interesting point – the first election I remember being conscious of in any way was in 1970, when I was eight. And the first real political issue, a couple of years later, as I had to do my homework by candlelight, owing to the miners strike…
Throw as many as you want, Nigel. I didn’t take you for a Boris Johnson supporter anyway. According to sapient’s own link, other Brits condemned Johnson for his racism.
You can still hold your nose and vote for her if you are in a swing state. Otherwise, you have the luxury–as I do–of being able to write in.
Well, McK, it may hearten you to know that unlike many here I’m not sure I have the hand strength to clench my nose tight enough to vote Clinton.
OTOH, I’m definitely in a swing state, making my vote anything but a statement to the DLC, so I probably can’t please you even by (broadly) agreeing with your argument (though I despise Clinton as much for policy as for buying into the Citizens United lifestyle). Alas, alas…
(I’ve actually already had conversations on this line with fellow leftist Democrats (who like me are Ds only because of how the system is stacked R/D), and the conclusion we reached was much as yours: in a swing state, nose holding should be done, but elsewhere never HRC. But I still don’t know that I can bring myself to endorse such a model patrician center-right neocon hawk. Perhaps a down-to-the-wire election and Trump becoming even more cartoonish will help, but I’m not optimistic.)
other Brits condemned Johnson for his racism
Never said the Brits were a monolith. Nor are the Americans. There are evils on both sides of the pond.
McKinney: HRC is corrupt, always has been, always will be. She is inherently transactional. Everything is bought and paid for.
Could you please list the transactions? Inquiring minds want to know.
Once a figure has been accepted as a friendly member of their tribe, there is no level of absurdity to which he can stoop that would discredit him. And since reason cannot penetrate the crude tribalism that animates Republicans, it follows that nothing President Obama could have proposed on economic stimulus, health care, or deficits could have avoided the paroxysms of rage that faced him.
I am always amazed when someone deigns to comment on one side of the tribal abyss. Even more so when we have tribalism at its peak defining both parties choices. “Crude tribalism” is an opinion proposed by an anti-ethno-nationalist author. The depth of the rage in that 40% of the population against Obama are built ON their underlying distrust of “them”, but built WITH the brick and mortar of his contempt for their nationalism, and buttressed by his constant reminding of how stupid they are. Trump is the product of the combination of this hatred and their disdain for those on the right who would placate him for trivial gains while he talked down what they believe is the very essence of the American ideal. Faith, family and country.
These are not people who accept that we are responsible for every human being on the planet. They do believe we should build a society that rewards success. No matter how many ways that gets twisted as punishing the unsuccessful, it is not that. Most of these people believe in a safety net, they believe it should not be a hammock.
They don’t believe constantly expanding the governments control of our daily lives is good, they do believe that building a future includes the government that makes reasonable promises and keeps them. And on specific policy issues they often disagree among themselves, which is always used to paint them as hypocritical. My goodness, they aren’t a monolithic pack of jabbering lemmings after all.
They believe, as a group, that despite any specific policy issues they may have with him, that he actually is nationalist, America first, and will hire the smartest people to defend their country and way of life. It has proven to be a powerful message, potentially as powerful as hope and change. Probably as empty.
The topic is HRC’s corruption and the DNC’s open and notorious support of her notwithstanding.
Notwithstanding the title of the OP. Marty is even more clear.
Trump is the product of the combination of this hatred and their disdain for those on the right who would placate him for trivial gains while he talked down what they believe is the very essence of the American ideal.
It’s all our fault. (I guess we upped the ante by electing the Kenyan) Before, I’d try to reason, but at this point, I’ve got lots better things to do than to try to deal with the delusional.
Over here, that’s known as ‘whataboutery’, sapient.
(And I’m unclear as to what Johnson’s borderline racist comments have to do with transactional politics, embarrassing though they might be.)
Of course there is an element of the transactional in most politics; a great deal of party funding comes from either the unions, or business, and some commonality of interest is naturally expected.
It is, however, a matter of degree. MPs ability to get re-elected is not directly linked in any real way to their ability to fundraise. That is simply not true of congressmen and congresswomen. There are (fairly) strict campaign finance limits in the UK, whereas in the US…. Campaign spending in national elections is in the low tens of millions, not billions.
Campaign spending in national elections is in the low tens of millions, not billions
Per capita? My understanding is that the UK is smaller.
No political ads on the tv in the UK, thus no need for the vast amounts of filthy lucre involved in US political campaigns.
BP and HSH–is my point to the effect that a thoroughly corrupt, transactional person being the party favorite is a bit problematic not getting through?
Does pointing out that the Super Delegate concept once made sense somehow ameliorate the current stench?
If your point is simply that the party is essentially corrupt for generally supporting an obviously corrrupt candidate, then I guess I can at least understand that. I might disagree, not being convinced that Hillary Clinton is particularly corrupt by our national political standards, but that’s a different kettle of fish.
You seemed to be making a point that it was, strictly speaking, the mechanics of the nominating process that were somehow corrupt as well, and that said corruption was particularly in evidence because of the existence of superdelegates. If not, then never mind, though I still don’t see how superdelegates are no longer sensible (which is different from their existence being a form of corruption).
my take on it all is as follows:
the last moderate conservative to win the white house was bill clinton.
post-clinton, there was simply no moderate conservative turf left for the (R)’s to occupy, so the only way for them to differentiate themselves was to move further and further to the fringes.
also, it strikes me that politics in any society that isn’t almost completely homogenous is inherently transactional.
you want x, I want y, I’ll trade you some of what I want for some of what you want.
in general, it’s better than shooting at each other.
hilary may be corrupt, but if so it seems, to me, to be in a kind of party for the course way.
Boehner handed out checks for votes, not metaphorically but literally, on the house floor, and ended up as speaker.
he’s considered one of the good guys.
so, whatever.
My impression is that Clinton opposes trade deals while running for office and then supports them when in power. She apparently changed her position on the bankruptcy bill–there’s a clip of Warren talking to Bill Moyers about this. Here is a piece about her stance on the banks–
http://usuncut.com/politics/video-surfaces-of-hillary-clinton-blaming-homeowners-for-financial-crisis/
Her AIPAC speech was probably in part donor driven, though she is such a hawk she might be perfectly sincere defending Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which to my mind is worse. I’d rather she be the person who secretly welcomes the advice from Sidney Blumenthal to read the work of his son Max, but it is hard to know when she publicly claims BDS is antisemitic. The person who quipped “we came we saw he died” about Gaddafi’s death and then laughs seems pretty crass about violence when she thinks people will approve. If a Republican had said that every liberal blog would have talked about what it meant.
I ought to google for that scholarly article which claimed that politicians in general support policies that line up with what their donors want. It would be surprising if Clinton were an exception.
I am voting Clinton on lesser evil grounds, though it shouldn’t matter in my state. Protest voting doesn’t do anything so far as I can tell, but if her victory in my state is certain I might do it.
Found the paper. It wasn’t quite what I said’ but close. They found that the wishes of ordinary people had almost no effect on policy, in sharp contrast to business groups.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
McKinney – If Bush/Cheney were running for a third term vs Hillary/(VP that you wouldn’t care one way or the other about) – would you vote Bush/Cheney?
…they do believe that building a future includes the government that makes reasonable promises and keeps them.
Like most interest groups, THEY believe that the government should make and keep promises to THEM. The historical record is quite clear in this regard.
To try to deny this is just denial or bullshit. THEY are simply not “EVERYBODY”. THEYU never were.
Please stop inferring otherwise.
Thanks.
Boehner handed out checks for votes, not metaphorically but literally, on the house floor, and ended up as speaker.
Whaddaya’ say, McKinney? I am curious.
….are events in history books to them, if they know about them at all.
Perhaps. But I opine this assertion simply sells these folks short, and in fact, is a kind of insult wrt their historical knowledge.
I was 20 once. Weren’t you?
Marty: …the very essence of the American ideal. Faith, family and country.
If by “faith” you mean religious faith, then your conception of the “American ideal” is not merely wrong but dangerous. Religious faith is a basic ingredient of tribalism.
“Family” sounds nice, but it can easily become small-scale tribalism. The Hatfields were “family”, and so were the McCoys. But they were probably good old-fashioned patriarchal families with strong religious views on chastity for their womenfolk and paternal authority over their offspring, so …
Now, “country”. The thing about “country” is that, unlike “faith” or “family”, we only have one of it — for the moment. The people Marty eulogizes think it’s their country and often talk as if only they love it. Such people, if they actually exist, can get stuffed. When they get it through their heads that theirs is not the only valid form of patriotism, I will withdraw that invitation.
–TP
Marty: “…talks down what they see as the very essence of the American ideal. Faith, family, country.”
I’m rather at a loss to recall Obama talking down any of those.
But what really, really mystifies me is this. Obama appears to be the very embodiment of their ideal of a family man. Yet their protest is to support Trump? A man who, every decade or two, trades in his wife for a younger model. And who has fathered at least one child out of wedlock. If that makes any sense at all, I just can’t see it.
Russell: “the last moderate conservative to win the White House was Bill Clinton.”
Well except for Obama. Who would have been considered a conservative any time before 1990. (And, I suspect, still looks like one from outside the United States.)
Concerning Citizen United: imo the decision in the narrow case of that ‘documentary’ was correct. The content of that ‘documentary’ is a different matter and Clinton should have simply sued for libel/slander (and won*). Where Citizens United went off the rails completely was the general precedent spun out of it (of the kind ‘we can’t hang that toddler that played with matches, so arson shall henceforth be legal’). In a way that’s the opposite of Roe v. Wade where imo the legal reasoning was highly questionable in the specific case while the precedent set was valid independent of that.
As for Clinton herself, I think she is as low and unprincipled as one can be without being actually evil. Some of what she does as a politician borders on passive evil (i.e. letting** bad/evil stuff happen because there is no personal advantage in fighting it). For comparision Kasich seems to be solidly in the passive evil camp and Cruz a standard bearer of the active. Trump? Not fully sure. Perhaps active once it gets personal and passive otherwise. The type of guy that would be content with photorealistic virtual kiddie pörn because for him it’s about the optics not the fact that real innocents were harmed in making it (while an actively evil type would not accept the surrogate for that very reason).
*There is a difference between harsh criticism and brazen fabrication
**passive sense, i.e. not ‘make it happen’
From where I sit in England, Obama is a sane and competent politician, somewhat to the right of David Cameron. Hillary Clinton is an unattractive exemplar of dynastic politics, but how much substance there is in the specific charges against her I’m not sure. And no country in possession of its senses would consider either Trump or Cruz as a candidate for high office.
It seems to me that the whole Primary Election process is broken – a successful candidate has to be a celebrity, or a billionaire, or a member of a political dynasty, or freakishly good at campaigning, or a rabid populist. None of which has got anything to do with being a good president.
Trump is best compared to Boris Johnson – and make no mistake, beneath his village idiot / nutty professor shtick he is the most ruthlessly ambitious politician in the UK. Good times!
“HRC is corrupt, always has been, always will be. She is inherently transactional. Everything is bought and paid for.”
Yeah, her support for unbridled Capitalism is a bit troubling, it’s true.
I second PaulB’s first para above. But McKinney, what is your reply to Ugh’s very interesting question at 9.59? It looked very much, from what I remember, as if the Bush family’s ties to Uncle Bandar and Saudi oil were pretty suspect, not to mention Cheney and Halliburton.
And as far as Boris Johnson is concerned, nobody who read the recent biography could mistake him for anything other than an amoral, unpleasant and deeply ambitious character. It is however an astonishingly effective impersonation to the contrary, I do admit.
Hell, forget Bush/Cheney corruption. Let’s talk about Trump. This short piece is from 2012, so not motivated by Trump’s candidacy.
(Of course, it comes from a left/liberal/Democrat-leaning source, so it’s probably suspect.)
The depth of the rage in that 40% of the population against Obama are built ON their underlying distrust of “them”, but built WITH the brick and mortar of his contempt for their nationalism, and buttressed by his constant reminding of how stupid they are.
I’m actually very familiar with this particular set of grievances from personal experience, having grown up in the rural Midwest and also having performed uniformed service. And what I’ve personally seen is that it’s BS. It’s generally professed by thin-skinned individuals who operate on stereotypes to understand people they don’t superficially identify with. If you don’t look, act, and talk like them, you’re a scornful elitist spitting down on them from high (well, that, or an ignorant, contemptible degenerate, but the focus of this is “anti-elitism”, right?). It’s reflexive, and it’s frankly elitist, albeit in a very specific and extremely populist and faux-persecuted way. Disagreeing with them while not looking and acting like them is proof of absolute contempt for everything they hold dear, plus condescension, and is justly met in kind, while further providing ample cause to assume unremitting bad faith.
That’s anecdata, just like yours, but still. So take it for what you will.
When I read NV’s quote from Marty, I’m struck by how people can look at the same situation and see it so differently. I don’t doubt Marty’s sincerity. At the same time, while I can see very minor and rare instances of what I think he’s getting at (most notably, the “clinging to guns and religion” thing from however many years ago), one the whole, it still looks crazy to me.
Where is this “constant reminding of how stupid they are”? I just don’t get it. And the “they” is supposed to be 40% of the population. How did the 40% figure out who they were?
For those with short memories, the Bush I administration saw a steady drumbeat of “the most corrupt ever!” cries. It’s pretty clear that those griping were simply ignorant of the Harding administration.
But still, the complaints about corruption have occurred across administrations and parties. Some of them were justified.
Coming in late basically to endorse most of nigel’s points above from across the pond. But I and a lot of people I know feel that whereas Clinton may make an adequate domestic President, from the point of view of the other seven billion people in the world she’s way too kneejerk aggressive on foreign policy, especially in western Asia. Perhaps not as likely to get us all killed as Trump, but not entirely unlikely to either.
It’s really only 13% who are upset about faith, family, and country, and according to a writer or two at National Review, they have meth problems and are too reliant on Obamacare and Medicaid, which will be withdrawn by the murder syndicate of Trump-Ryan-McConnell in due time.
You get to 40% by adding back in the 27% base who were upset about Obama’s melanin content and his witchdoctery ways (definitely too much for them, unless it’s too little, when convenient) long before he got around to insulting their mistaken notion that they are the sole proprietors of faith, family, and country values in this here Republic.
They think owning weaponry secures their sole proprieter-ship of those values, but gunfire can go in two directions and I expect if Trump loses and takes some of Congress with him, we are all going to get a taste of it.
If he wins, the 40% will kill via government, their favorite government value.
As far as “stupid” goes, among the Donald’s memorable quotes this season Trump himself extolled the “poorly educated” voters who are falling for his dangerous shtick, so if you’re going to wear a sign that says “I’m stupid!”, don’t be surprised when that becomes your name.
No doubt Ann Coulter would explain that Trump uses the word “S” word to describe her and his people like Larry Wilmore used the “N” word to describe Obama the other day.
That could fly, because in these latter, empty-content media days of the United States of America, all turds are made to fly for at least one news cycle.
McKinney – If Bush/Cheney were running for a third term vs Hillary/(VP that you wouldn’t care one way or the other about) – would you vote Bush/Cheney?
At the request of GFTNC, I will respond:
I’m not sure this is relevant to the inquiry–apologies to GFTNC–because I am unaware of any significant, established acts of quid-pro-quo transactional corruption. If you are asking would I prefer Bush/Cheney over HRC/????, I’d have to think long and hard about whether I’d vote for them or write in. I have no major philosophical disagreements with Bush AFAIK, other than my view that invading Iraq was, in hindsight, a huge mistake.
I can think of two policy disagreements with Cheney offhand: I view waterboarding as torture and I’m not a fan of intervention in the way he is.
When it comes to policy issues, there is a general conservative set of preferences and a liberal set. I subscribe generally to the conservative set of preferences. I don’t know to what extent, if any, Bush or Cheney fall outside the conservative policy preferences.
So, against that background, if I wrote in rather than vote for Bush/Cheney, it would be out of concern for another war I’d rather not fight. It would not be out of a sense that they were corrupt.
Once a figure has been accepted as a friendly member of their tribe, there is no level of absurdity to which he can stoop that would discredit him. And since reason cannot penetrate the crude tribalism that animates Republicans, it follows that nothing President Obama could have proposed on economic stimulus, health care, or deficits could have avoided the paroxysms of rage that faced him.
I’ll take a stab at this, too. The first sentence is somewhat correct and is playing at in this thread at this very moment, but not in a way the author intends; the second is partisan hyperbole, the like of which can be found with great frequency at any number of right’ish blogs and other sites. The second sentence is the rhetorician’s simultaneously sidestepping of any substantive debate on health care, or stimulus or deficits and so marginalizing the opposition that no one need ever listen to what they have to say.
That said, I get what Marty is saying, although I’d put it differently. I’d say that Obama is highly partisan and knows that he is highly partisan. He is a product of the Chicago Democratic Machine. He lies as much as any politician. His bent–not uncommon on the left–is to view rank and file conservatives, in his own words, clinging to their guns, their god and their whatever (I can’t remember the third). There is more than a bit of smugness and condescension and it is tiring.
He can barely conceal his disdain for the private sector. He is fairly aggressive identitarian, which galls the living shit out of a lot of us.
Finding him to be a bit of a snot, plus all of the above, is no more related to his color than finding HRC to be corrupt is related to her plumbing. Bill was and is a sleaze bag too.
And I get that GWB and Cheney send just about everyone on the left into orbit, in just the same way that Obama & Co get under my and Marty’s skin. I’m not rock throwing here, I’m just trying to describe the phenomena.
It’s common stuff to see here at ObWi, statements like “Obama is conservative” or “Bill Clinton was a conservative”. That’s like saying a particular picture is pleasant to look at–it’s entirely in the eye of the beholder.
The quote, and it’s general acceptance here at ObWi, is just part of the echo chamber that all of us to one degree or another live in.
There is a general conservative set of definitions and a progressive set.
Dick Cheney, meeting with his fossil-fuel confederates behind closed doors as a sitting VP in charge of an “energy task force”, is NOT an example of “corruption”. Hillary Clinton, speaking to banksters as a former SoS, is. Conservatively speaking.
Hillary Clinton is not my favorite politician in the world, but unchallenged presumptions of “corruption” annoy me.
Also, McKinney: if your problem with Obama is that he is “highly partisan and knows that he is highly partisan”, are you suggesting that less-objectionable-to-you politicians like Mitch McConnell are NOT partisan? Or that they are but don’t KNOW they are? Or what?
–TP
Dick Cheney, meeting with his fossil-fuel confederates behind closed doors as a sitting VP in charge of an “energy task force”, is NOT an example of “corruption”. Hillary Clinton, speaking to banksters as a former SoS, is. Conservatively speaking.
I don’t consider either of these examples to be *corrupt*. Bad taste, bad optics, yes. Corrupt, no. Eye of the beholder and all that.
if your problem with Obama is that he is “highly partisan and knows that he is highly partisan”, are you suggesting that less-objectionable-to-you politicians like Mitch McConnell are NOT partisan? Or that they are but don’t KNOW they are? Or what?
Not at all. Obama presents himself as just a regular, try to fix things in whatever way works kind of a guy. To me, that’s BS. He’s very partisan. So is McConnell. One is no better than the other.
TP, I posted too soon. I have no issue with partisans per se. Just when they pretend objectivity, I find the dishonesty and hypocrisy to be a bit much. Regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
He can barely conceal his disdain for the private sector.
You say this as though it’s so self-evident that it needs no support, but it sounds ridiculous to me. So is this something really obvious that I’ve just missed, or does this just reflect the particular accoustics of your echo chamber?
Hartmut: “The content of that ‘documentary’ is a different matter and Clinton should have simply sued for libel/slander (and won*). ”
No, she is a public figure and can’t win on that basis under U.S. libel law.
I am
Spartacusa partisan.You say this as though it’s so self-evident that it needs no support, but it sounds ridiculous to me. So is this something really obvious that I’ve just missed, or does this just reflect the particular accoustics of your echo chamber?
The acoustics of my echo chamber. It’s exactly what grates on my conservative ears in the way I imagine W’s voice and demeanor grated on others. I imagine you and I both gag when we hear or see Ted Cruz. So, yes, echo chamber.
No, she is a public figure and can’t win on that basis under U.S. libel law.
Public figures can sue for libel if they can show NY Times v Sullivan “malice”–actual knowledge of the falsity or reckless disregard of the truth. It’s a tough standard, no doubt.
It’s a tough standard, no doubt.
More than tough. Pretty much impossible.
Thank you McKinney. When I am back on a proper machine in a couple of weeks I will investigate the examples you gave of HRC’s corruption, as well as the latest findings on Cheney and Halliburton which seemed pretty suggestive at the time, but may since have been found “groundless” in the same way I believed all accusations against HRC to have been. In the meantime, given your sewage-related-non-intervention in the event of a Trump-on-fire situation reflects well on your judgement, does that mean you.will abstain come November?
does that mean you.will abstain come November?
I will vote down ballot. I will write in a name for president and vice president. I will not vote for Trump, or Cruz for that matter, if he becomes the nominee.
Cheney; Halliburton and multi-billion ‘no bid’ government contracts.
‘Bad optics’ seems a little inadequate as a description.
Or is that just my disdain for the private sector ?
🙂
One quite interesting result in November will be how many voters will actually pay a attention to the down ballot races. Particularly, how many places will see significant differences between the results of the Presidential election and those in the other races.
Of course, LBJ is probably the poster child for corruption in government, all the way back to the radio licenses he arranged to award himself.
Brown & Root – acquired by Halliburton in the early 60s – funnelled huge amounts of cash into his various campaigns, pretty well indisputably in return for favourable treatment for government, including large construction contracts in Vietnam during the war.
Daily Beast: Meet Milo Yiannopoulos, the Appealing Young Face of the Racist Alt-Right
A very thoughtful and thoroughly centerist lawyer posted this on my FB feed today, and it seemed apropos in terms of some points of the current discussion WRT tribalism and identity politics…
Cheney-Haliburton; Clinton-Goldman Sachs. Corruption or clientelism?
Note the beneficiaries are always the same: The well connected, the powerful, the rich.
Here’s another example.
If (the use of) money is speech, then it follows we need to find public policies that spread this speech around more equally or restrict the supply, because restricting the use appears to be a losing game.
I’ve gotta run out to a meeting but, very quickly:
1. The no bid thing in Iraq doesn’t bother me that much because no one but Halliburton had the horses to do that kind of heavy lifting.
2. Yes, LBJ got a lot of dough from Brown & Root and it stunk.
3. NV–will read the link, but please do not associate me or the conservatives I know with the alt right. NRO excoriated the Alt Right recently.
NV–ok, I did glance at your link. Great piece. The alt right is very dangerous. More dangerous than the social justice left, which the author rightly skewers. Thanks for the link.
Caro’s bio of LBJ provides a lot of fascinating detail of his relationship with Brown & Root. He saved their bacon, and in return, they financed his ascent.
“No one but Halliburton…”
Schlumberger or Fluor might disagree with you about that, but more to the point, KBR/Halliburton are arguably in that position precisely because of the cosy and almost exclusive arrangements with government that go all the way back to LBJ (and earlier).
Perhaps the only real difference in this respect between LBJ and contemporary politicians is that campaign finance rules mean passing round brown paper bags full of dollars just isn’t necessary today.
What the hell is an “identarian”?
It’s common stuff to see here at ObWi, statements like “Obama is conservative” or “Bill Clinton was a conservative”. That’s like saying a particular picture is pleasant to look at–it’s entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Actually, there is more objective substance to it than you seem to recognize.
The policies advocated by Clinton and Obama are, by historical US standards from the beginning of the 20th C to now, and certainly by any international standard of recent memory, are middle of the road conservative.
They are liberal only in the context of US political history since about 1980.
The quote, and it’s general acceptance here at ObWi, is just part of the echo chamber that all of us to one degree or another live in.
I frequently characterize Clinton and Obama as moderate conservatives.
The stuff I read regarding politics and economics ranges extremely widely. My own personal history covers a hell of a lot of socio-political ground.
I’m not in an echo chamber.
NV:
That piece on Milo Y. is seriously scary, thank you.
I do think the author is kind of naive? … blinkered? … it’s like he never heard of Lee Atwater, as though he thinks there was a time when White identity wasn’t a force in American politics.
No, Russell, they would have been center or center-right even thru the 1980s. You have to get to the early 1990s for them to be anything else.
The quote, and it’s general acceptance here at ObWi, is just part of the echo chamber that all of us to one degree or another live in.
Why, it’s as if triangulation never existed!
Following up on NV’s link to alt-right is this New Yorker piece. Some interesting grafs
The strains that run through the alt-right—that wrap together the vicious misogyny and plaintive victimhood of GamerGate with Prussia-venerating neo-reactionaries—are in their essence not matters of substance but of style. They share with the Trump movement a haughty success theatre that complicates their populism: the alt-right’s defense of the white working class, Yiannopoulos insisted, is not an instance of self-preservation but of “noblesse oblige.” The two also share the instinct for provocation. “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything—an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest f**king thing in the world,” the blogger Mencius Moldbug wrote to Yiannopoulos.
and
And as pointed as Zero Hedge’s Russophilia is, it was the Virginia co-chair of the Ted Cruz campaign who flew to Syria last week to assure Bashar al-Assad that President Cruz would be on his side.
and
Just before the New Hampshire primary, with Trump far ahead in the polls, establishment Republicans in the Granite State kept insisting to reporters that they could not name a single Trump voter. But when the exit polls came out, the Trump voters turned out to have come from the social center, not from the fringe. Trump’s support was not isolated in any subgroup of Republicans—it spanned them all. The income of Trump voters turned out to be essentially indistinguishable from those who supported Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Trump rallies, in light of these demographic details, no longer look so much like the invasion of a foreign army. They look more like the Republican base, moved by conventional grievances, trying out a different way of expressing them. Is the revolution a joke, as Colin Lokey, despairing, insisted it was? Yes, in a way. But, then, jokes are complicated.
Fun (end) times.
No, Russell, they would have been center or center-right even thru the 1980s. You have to get to the early 1990s for them to be anything else.
Clinton, sure, but Obama?
More important, Center right of what? McGovern? yes, Sanders? Carter? maybe. Carter had the same problem Obama does with Congress, he was just too far left to get most of his agenda passed. Or are we just comparing to the social democrats in Europe? I’m just struggling with the definition.
Maybe, outside the two or three big social issues (immigration, abortion, equal rights where I see Obama as plenty left enough now that he doesn’t need any votes from his wishy washy gay marriage stance) what are these center right policies that define that. He doesn’t even agree with Clinton on the role of government.
In a summary of the 1992 Democratic Platform, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/26/us/1992-campaign-platform-final-draft-democrats-reject-part-their-past.html :
Clearly Clinton was the moving to the center candidate to recapture the WH at most any cost. Most of that could be in the Republican platform today. I am not sure Obama really reflects that centrist view. IMO
It’s all OK, the Border Wall will feature drive up taco-bowl takeout windows at regular intervals for our side interspersed with one-way embrasures to allow machine guns ready access to their side.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/everyone-getting-todays-trump-tweet-totally-wrong
He loves “the blacks”, too. They are f*cked, but we’ll keep the soul food on the menu.
As for women and their body parts, there’s nothing like Mom’s home cooking to keep them busy while Trump ogles their behinds.
The 20 million folks on Obamacare and the medicaid expansion had better decide on decent menu offerings if they hope to remain relevant, not to mention unmurdered.
I’m sure hoping Clinton’s corruption is steadfast and corrupt enough to destroy Trump, though I doubt it, and to summon the full military and police powers of the government to put down the savage violence that will be directed at the rest of us by the Trump/Republicans if they lose in November.
What the hell is an “identarian”?
A very poorly-spelled adherent of identity politics.
Trump VP guess:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/05/06/trump-veepstakes/
Transactional, that.
I doubt these Republican trannies should be allowed to use the public facilities and I’m a little doubtful that they could ever learn to put down the toilet seat once they are done transacting, even at home, without a full frontal bribe.
Obama made them do it on account of their love for family, country, and the reverse cowgirl.
I’m not in an echo chamber.
I’d actually echo this myself. These days ObWi is about as leftist of a website as I frequently read; most of my newsreading (of which there probably should be more, yes) comes from filter-reading a spectrum of mainstream US and foreign news, and while I do still see random articles, etc. from the partisan web, I see them on Facebook, and they (uncoincidentally like my friend list) range from staunchly left to staunchly right.
“identarian” definition:
The opposite of an “identitarian”. The “identarian” would give his or her eye teeth to run political ads and billboards calling Obama the “n” word, and Hillary the “c” word. The identitarian is the person who would knock the identarian’s eye teeth down his throat if the latter tried anything like that.
The orthoidentarian is what the identarian will need when the identitarian gets done with them.
Get Bruce Bartlett out of the liberal echo chamber. He’s losing his mind in there.
Maybe he’ll be okay, though, so long as looks out the Overton window once in a while.
what politics is *not* identity politics?
The Bruce Bartlett article is interesting, but it does pretend that Obama was operating at his own will.
Politics is not identity politics when the group you support/identify with is “real Americans”.
☺
Carter had the same problem Obama does with Congress, he was just too far left to get most of his agenda passed.
This is simply not true. Carter was a what could then pass for a liberal southern Democrat at the time when there were still a good number or reactionary Southern Democrats in the Congress. He was significantly to the right of the northern liberal wing of the party.
what politics is *not* identity politics?
The politics that suddenly realizes it has an identity after several hundred years of getting its way on everything and never giving it a second thought.
“The politics that suddenly realizes it has an identity after several hundred years of getting its way on everything and never giving it a second thought.”
Straight white christian men, iow. The wailing and gnashing of teeth currently going on because of their loss of dominance is a balm to the soul.
what politics is *not* identity politics?
I actually agree with this point, but as far as the term is applied rather than dryly defined, it tends to be used to describe politics which explicitly acknowledge or refer to group identification. Which kinda meshes with what both wj and bobbyp said; if your politics makes a point of trying to present themself as by-everyone, for-everyone, you’re repudiating identity politics, even though your group identities will influence and shape your particular mode of political engagement.
Adherents are also more likely to equate (sight unseen) group membership with particular political affiliations, or buy into notions about group membership granting special insight or authority in addressing the wants or needs of said group. Consideration of intragroup differences (“individuality”) are less relevant (or even irrelevant) compared to considerations of intergroup differences. What you are is as or more important than what you do. Etc.
Which is to say it’s more about rhetoric, posturing, and rallying strategies than about political motivation and direction. You can certainly argue it’s a distinction without difference, but it is a distinction that it’s generally possible to make.
Bartlett writes that the ACA was ‘based’ on the GOP’s “Heritage” plan/Romneycare.
Scott Lemieux begs to differ:
http://prospect.org/article/no-obamacare-wasnt-republican-proposal
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/the-affordable-care-act-is-not-remotely-similar-to-the-heritage-plan
The Republican health care plan is, and always has been….nothing.
The Bruce Bartlett article is interesting, but it does pretend that Obama was operating at his own will.
Or it described what Obama did, as a factual matter, rather than getting into what he might have done in some other universe.
That aside, are you saying he couldn’t have tried to govern in a more liberal manner than he did? Did he somehow manage to calculate his maximum achievable liberalness under the given set of external conditions to avoid wasting his time on impossible, more liberal ventures?
HSH: I was also flummoxed by that wording. Only The Phantom knows.
My question is: Whose will was Obama acting under?
Seriously. If there is that powerful a puppet master out there, it would be very good to know who it is. Not to mention what evidence shows that he is the one.
Inquiring minds want to know.
McKinney – thanks for answering the question re: W. vs. H. Clinton. Although your note about Cheney and torture makes me wonder who was the de facto president from 9/11/2001 to the 2006 midterms.
On tribalism – I think Chait’s (and mostly mine) point on Trump is that he shows what really motivates the GOP “tribe,” which is that he shows what is the #1 underlying motivator of Trump’s supporters – which are apparently large enough to give him the GOP nomination for President and thus ISTM a fair proxy for GOPer/Conservatives in general – which is ethno-nationalistic passions (I might differ from him on the “ungoverned by reason” point).
Thus, Trump can commit all kinds of conservative policy faux pas – on gay/transgender rights, abortion, free trade, hawkish foreign policy, views on POWs – and suffer little damage to his standing since he gets the key/core/necessary & sufficient point correct.
Is that wrong?
I was pleased to vote for the Bern in the RI primary, even more pleased to see him win.
Hil’s inevitable victory means I can take it easy in the fall, unless down ballet and local issues look like they need me.
I do wish there was a way to get a Dem administration that would reign in the SJ left, particulary the Title IX nine assault on due process.
MkT has been making some good points here.
Obama was acting under Marty’s will.
Marty made Obama make Trump what he is today.
I don’t know, I have heard for almost two terms now how those just say no Republicans stymied him at every turn. So I guess he was ok with it after all.
bobbyp,
While it is certainly true that the ACA is not the Heritage plan (which originally was more poison pill than proposal anyway), it is also true that a major reason Republicans have never put forth a coherent alternative to Obamacare (despite all their repeal-and-replace caterwauling) is this: the ACA is already as “conservative” as you can get and still cover almost everybody.
Covering almost everybody is of course NOT a conservative or even a present-day-Republican goal. Maybe it even counts as Bad Thing, to True Conservatives. But to un-cover millions of people you’d run more political risk than True-but-not-Demented Conservatives seem willing to stomach. So: no repeal, because there’s no less-liberal replacement available.
–TP
Thus, Trump can commit all kinds of conservative policy faux pas – on gay/transgender rights, abortion, free trade, hawkish foreign policy, views on POWs – and suffer little damage to his standing since he gets the key/core/necessary & sufficient point correct.
If we were going to make an argument for some sort of equivalency with the Democrats, it would have to be based not on Clinton’s corruptness, but on her taking conservative positions, of which she does have a few. But then you’re left trying to figure out exactly what the unifying theme is that allows her to overcome some number of liberal faux pas (is that plural?), paralleling Trump’s ethno-nationalism. (Is it that she’s just so darned ident(it)arian?)
You also have to assume that the party umbrella doesn’t traditionally allow for some number of conservative positions, which I’m not so sure you can. The Democrats, in reality, are far more of a “Big Tent” party than the GOP, though you don’t hear as much about the Blue Dogs as you used to.
I don’t know, I have heard for almost two terms now how those just say no Republicans stymied him at every turn. So I guess he was ok with it after all.
But the Republicans would block him even when he was doing something they would otherwise (i.e. were it not Obama’s proposal) favor, making their obstruction ideologically neutral. ;^)
TP @ 05:51 PM
Yup. The true test would come if the GOP controlled all three branches of government with a slim majority in the House and Senate. Would they repeal the ACA root and branch? Not likely.
They’re stuck like a Florida tourist in the Michigan woods in January.
what politics doesn’t explicitly refer to group identification?
“I have no major philosophical disagreements with Bush AFAIK, other than my view that invading Iraq was, in hindsight, a huge mistake.”
Not everyone needed hindsight to realize it was an awful idea.
But even with hindsight, so still can’t accept that it was an awful idea. (And ineptly executed as well.)
The conservatives* still think the Vietnam war was a good idea, and should have been prosecuted with greater vigor, all the way to victory. Because dominos falling across asia, plus US credibility.
(*using the same standards of groupthink ID as is applied to ‘the liberals’ by SOME)
“and still cover almost everybody.”
Except it doesn’t cover everybody and doesn’t actually protect most of the new people it covers. A nice Medicaid expansion with a requirement added to not consider preexisting conditions would have helped almost as many people. The torturous law that exists is confusing, punitive and dishonest. Telling people who make 35k they have to buy insurance that doesn’t actually cover anything is a joke, if not a crime.
“A nice Medicaid expansion with a requirement added to not consider preexisting conditions would have helped almost as many people”
was that on offer?
Marty,
So why not a nice Medicare expansion? Certain “partisan” Democrats were pushing to reduce the age of eligibility; the real hotheads among them were advocating universal coverage by simply dropping the words “over 65” from the Medicare law; but the “small government” Republicans would not even countenance a public option.
Also, you will have to explain the “insurance that doesn’t actually cover anything” bit. I know all about high deductibles — is that what you’re on about?
–TP
“A nice Medicaid expansion with a requirement added to not consider preexisting conditions would have helped almost as many people.”
If this blog swerved to the identitarian right-wing (They are the most identitarian in-crowd going, the only group worthy of groupdom; all others are the Other whose birth certificates are bogus), here are the Gingrich/Luntz words that would be flung your way if you suggested such a thing at such a place:
“decay, failure (fail) collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, “compassion” is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocricy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor…) bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.”
Unlike a Chinese menu, you’d get them all.
Lately, boiled down to “the 47%” “the takers”, “the moochers”, and “parasites”.
Or as pigf*cking child molester Erick Erickson called Clinton the other day, ‘proto Communist’ if I recall correctly (this while Erickson ripped Trump a new one for his boorishness, including his insults of women, heh, this from the editor of the right-wing hog trough, Redstate, which called Clinton “a homely woman who slept her way to the top” — specially, streiff wrote that, but there is a rumor he is near death, so things are looking up.
That’s a lot to fit on the front of our group’s t-shirt, but if you order the XXLarge, it might fit.
Welcome to OUR group, Marty.
Medicaid/Medicare comes with, but make sure you use the correctly-labeled public bathroom because a right winger might inflict a pre-existing condition upon you if you’re caught in a confused state while answering nature’s call, with would throw you into Paul Ryan’s high-risk pools for with pre-existing conditions, which are essentially death panels with no magazines in the anteroom.
Well, during the debate over the ACA I was a firm proponent of a Medicare expansion to cover everyone for baseline care, so this isn’t a new thought. The ACA is not that, nor what it was advertised to be, and barely an improvement outside the preexisting conditions changes.
Yes TP, you are providing no one any help if the deductibles are so high that they couldn’t possibly be able to pay them, yet the policies that don’t have those deductibles are rationally beyond their reach. So they incur, even with subsidies, a plan that they have to pay for that then requires them to pay 12k before they get any coverage. So they just pay extra for nothing.
And most of those people don’t really benefit from catastrophic care beyond what they had before, because they don’t have a lot to lose. So the number of people who fall into the overlap in venn diagram of getting affordable health insurance that benefits them greater than preACA yet aren’t Medicaid recipients is vanishingly small. And costly.
Well, during the debate over the ACA I was a firm proponent of a Medicare expansion to cover everyone for baseline care, so this isn’t a new thought
So what? Where are your GOP Congresscritters and governors on this? MIA, that’s what.
bobbyp, So nothing, Obama couldn’t get enough Democratic votes to pass single payer of any kind in a Congress completely controlled by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. And knew it from the start. It wasn’t Republicans who told him not to go single payer, he didn’t have to listen to them, it was Democrats.
But, when TP asks why not a Medicare expansion I just agreed with him. Medicaid expansion plus a bunch of government bureaucracy to accomplish almost nothing is what we got.
And, btw, I only get to vote for one Congressman and two Senators. So they aren’t all mine.
I lost a long post in reply to Marty’s 3:37 PM, which agreed with some of the gist, but disagreed on certain points.
Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.
One detail is that millennials, millions of them, love high-deductible plans, whether they are employer-sponsered or administered under Obamacare:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/12/young-workers-like-those-high-deductible-health-plans.html
Or, do they?
https://www.mainstreet.com/article/millennials-prefer-high-premium-health-plans-with-low-deductible
In our data-rich age, no one seems to know jack-sh*t about the expensive, inefficient, non-transparent deliberately Rube Goldberg-like monstrosity that is called healthcare in this country and that Obamacare, by some self-inflicted delusion, could only be a provisional and politically possible bolt-on to the side of the monstrosity.
“It wasn’t Republicans who told him not to go single payer, he didn’t have to listen to them, it was Democrats.”
Is that the formulation? I suspect Reid and Pelosi told Obama, like he didn’t already know, that enough Democrats were too connected to the private healthcare lobby and/or were scared sh8tless about being labeled commies in their next midterm, which they were anyway.
As for “It wasn’t Republicans who told him not to go single payer”, the Republican Party settled on a simple all-inclusive f*ck you from the get go about everything, but most certainly regarding healthcare.
You speak as if they were coquettishly batting their eyes Obama’s way and fiddling demurely and invitingly with the hems of their skirts as if he might have a shot at the main chance.
Also, Medicare has its deductibles, copays etc too. But, yes, Medicare for all, I agree.
I am utterly sick across the board of the theory that high upfront costs in the form of high deductibles and copays make for a more rational “healthcare consumer”.
First I’m not a “healthcare consumer”. I’m a f*cking, bleedin’ patient. I’m not purchasing a f*cking Buick, an ice cream cone, or a cellphone plan, market as*holes.
I’m seeking help.
If Imelda Marcos was in charge of the shoe industry, she’d keep the designer labels priced out of everyone’s reach, but re-price the low cost footwear even higher to make everyone beneath her crawl barefoot to greater, wiser consumer footwear decisions.
That way, you could choose rationally to remain barefoot until you contracted various hookworm diseases and THEN be allowed to join the big boys at the catastrophic healthcare table, na lang.
It’s economic theory via behaviorist sadism.
Make us dance for awhile and let’s see how much we really think we want those symptoms checked out.
I want it blown up.
As for the cold-blooded murderers who call themselves professional Republicans, here’s where they are, trying to raise prices and prevent access to healthcare for the sick and the poor:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/7/1523640/-Really-House-Republicans-Obamacare-Still
Violence is the only answer to these grinning sadists. Plenty of violence directed at them across the board could serve as a high deductible/copay incentive and eventually cause them to make more rational decisions regarding their long-term health.
But I blame Obama for enabling the Republican Party. He’s like those young women who hitchhiked in remote areas in the west and north western states and thereby enabled conservative Republican community activist and psychopath Ted Bundy to rape them, chain them to trees, and bludgeon and torture the life out of them.
It was their fault then, wasn’t it, and it’s Obama’s fault now for what’s happening, no?
For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the medical insurance industry and how Obamacare is faring (quite well, thank you, despite its drawbacks), start reading insurance executive (so I gather) Richard Mayhew over at Balloon Juice.
He has dozens of posts going back several years which are well worth perusal.
Funny, United Health disagrees with Mr. Mayhew. Dropping out of the ACA entirely for 2017. I don’t read Balloon Juice but will look at his spin.
Because United Health couldn’t satisfy shareholders by serving sick people, which is their f&cking job.
Turns out their market is serving healthy human beings who pay a premium and don’t purchase product.
Here’s their stock price since Obamacare was passed:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=UNH&insttype=Stock&freq=2&show=&time=13
Oh, the humanity!
F*ck humanity.
Oh, the shareholders! Oh, the hedge funds! Oh, the profit margins! Oh, the healthcare consumers! Oh, the slavering b.f. skinner market dogs!
Spin?
How can you tell his from yours in the opposite direction, especially before reading?
Show me the downward blip in their stock price since then because poor diabetics on Obamacare required a little more medical nurture.
Show me a shoe company that decides to stop selling shoes because shodding humans just ain’t remunerative.
Yeah, it’s funny.
what politics doesn’t explicitly refer to group identification?
Not all use group membership/identification as rationale and/or justification for policy. They’ll spin on necessity or the common good rather than benefiting/improving the lot of Group X, Y, or Z.
Again, it’s a kind of superficial classification.
I don’t really disagree with you, NV. If I push back, it’s because I’m making a particular point.
McK claims that Obama is an “identitarian”, a neologism which apparently means he spends too much of his time advocating for groups of people defined by some specific commonly held identity.
I assume by this that he means blacks, or gays, or trans-gendered people, or Latinos, or whatever.
McK has argued here that he shouldn’t be required to contribute to health insurance for his employees if that insurance requires coverage of abortions. Because support for abortion, however attenuated, conflicts with his religious beliefs.
That is an argument based on his participation in a group – a subset of the overall population – identified by some commonly held identity. It is an identitarian argument.
Likewise, he has argued against restrictions on gun ownership. Because he has guns.
That is an identitarian argument.
Marty frequently criticizes Obama, and “liberals” in general, for their lack of respect for salt-of-the-earth Americans, roughly defined as people who ascribe to an “American Ideal” that he asserts as being faith, family, and country.
That is an identitarian argument.
You are correct when you say that many folks do not explicitly point to membership in some group as the rationale for their policy. What strikes me, however, is that in most if not all cases, not pointing to some kind of group affiliation is basically an oversight, whether disingenuously intentional or simply because folks don’t recognize that their personal experience and view of the world isn’t some kind of gold standard, and isn’t shared by everyone else in the whole freaking world.
In fact and in practice, politics is virtually always an exercise in negotiating between conflicting identitarian claims. And, there is rarely any kind of basis for one “identity” to assert greater legitimacy than another.
Different people want different things, and everyone’s efforts to secure what is in their own interests are equally legitimate.
IMO that is, and has to be, the starting point – the ground reality, the fundamental assumption – for any kind of discussion about anything to do with public life.
Shorter me – the argument that Obama is some kind of “identitarian”, and that his advocacy of some set of policies is somehow less than legitimate, is off point.
Yes, the policies Obama argues for are “identitarian”. The policies every single POTUS that has held office in this nation’s history have argued for have been equally “identitarian”. The policies that every person reading this argue for are equally “identitarian”.
We all belong to some cohort or other, most likely several all at the same time. And the things we think are good reflect that. And, the public policies we therefore advocate for, likewise.
Saying someone’s point of view is illegitimate because it’s “identitarian” is like saying it’s illegitimate because they have a point of view and a personal history.
“Different people want different things, and everyone’s efforts to secure what is in their own interests are equally legitimate.”
IMO this is almost right, the legitimacy of any effort to obtain what’s good for me is only tempered by what has to be taken from someone, or some other group, to obtain it.
yes, all of our efforts to secure our own interests must be tempered by how that affects those of others.
And now Trump is saying that he thinks it would be a great idea to restructure (aka default on) the national debt. Well, since he believes that government should be run like a business and bankruptcy is apparently a core feature of his business model, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
…and I see that TX has gone all “bathroom nazi”, following the NC example.
I do wonder what McTx’s reaction is, and whether he’s okay with “whippin’ it out” to prove admissibility to the Manly Men’s Room.
Documents can be forged, nothing beats physical proof. Plus entertainment for the geys, also, too.
IMO this is almost right, the legitimacy of any effort to obtain what’s good for me is only tempered by what has to be taken from someone, or some other group, to obtain it.
Which, amazingly, has people argue that any concession, any change in the status quo, is enough to bring anyone advocating such changes into disrepute, unless those concessions flow from those without power to those with it. Funny how that works out.
No, that makes perfect sense, lj. If people w/o power demand concessions from those with power, it shows that they are trying to make themselves powerful by reducing the power of the fellows. If the concessions are demanded by those with power, they plainly can’t be guilty of this sin, since the powerless have no power for the powerful to steal…
“Pandering” is when they give stuff to you. That includes not taking stuff from me to do so, but even just giving me less. And it goes double if I think of you as “them” – part of a group of people that clearly doesn’t include me and mine.
Giving stuff to me, however, is just a proper part of the natural order of things. I deserve it just for being me. And if, by any stretch of the imagination, any part of my taxes are even vaguely related to it, that means I’ve *earned* it. So you d*mn sure better not even think about cutting it back even a little. No matter whether it’s totally unaffordable and will leave my children and grandchildren bankrupt.
Which, amazingly, has people argue that any concession, any change in the status quo, is enough to bring anyone advocating such changes into disrepute, unless those concessions flow from those without power to those with it. Funny how that works out
This is surely true sometimes. But like most generalizations it isn’t as often as it is. Changes in the status quo are hard, most human beings don’t like change. They certainly don’t like to change their view of themselves. One of the challenges we regularly run into is the demonization of people opposing change, when it is a pretty standard response.
One of the challenges we regularly run into is the demonization of people opposing change, when it is a pretty standard response.
Yes, as NV pointed out, the demonization of people opposing change is the people without power being totally unfair to the people in power. After all, since they don’t have any other tools for change, they have a lot of nerve to resort to the only ones they have.
Marty is quite right: most human beings don’t like change. This was, after all, a matter of survival. For most of human history, life had very little margin for error and new stuff could therefore be fatal.
Indeed you can make a good argument that the most unique thing about Americans and American culture is how open we are to change. (Again it is a matter of our history – those who came here were those who were willing to uproot themselves and come, in short to change.)
But for all that, there are still limits. And those least comfortable with change have been being pushed beyond them. Stopping, let alone rolling back, technology change (of which we continue to have a lot) simply isn’t possible. Everyone can see that.
So the only place to make a stand is by fighting any and all social changes. That probably can’t be done successfully either, but it is clearly the only possibility.
If power is a zero sum game, then it follows that those with power “took” it from the less powerful, and demonizing them was a tactic most likely employed in that instance as well.
McK has argued here that he shouldn’t be required to contribute to health insurance for his employees if that insurance requires coverage of abortions. Because support for abortion, however attenuated, conflicts with his religious beliefs.
Several pre-comments before I comment. I mis-used the word “identitarian”, having somewhere along the way taken it to be the term for a practitioner of identity politics with race being used as a synonym for culture and cultural diversity being the focal point of that mindset. Turns out I was only partially right. “Identitarians” are into identity politics, but it seems to be a Euro-centric if not alt right level of racism that is beyond the pale–I could be overstating because I only looked into it enough to determine I was misusing the term.
Next, my point regarding being required to buy insurance that covers abortion, my position is that state action of that nature violates *every person’s* religious beliefs who is being required to pay for another’s abortion coverage. And I don’t see that as even remotely attenuated.
To get to what I take to be Russell’s main point: I think he’s saying “all politics are identity politics”, and if he is (please note I stand to be corrected), I disagree.
Identity politics is a stated preference for basing public policy, law, etc on ethnic, cultural and gender identity and representation. I have a very low opinion of this approach and advocating for a policy that is identity neutral is the polar opposite of identity politics.
I do wonder what McTx’s reaction is, and whether he’s okay with “whippin’ it out” to prove admissibility to the Manly Men’s Room.
I’ve made my position known and it’s in the middle. But, what you are seeing is the logical result of the SJ left trying to jam a very tendentious definition of transgender (“I am what I say I am, when I feel like saying I am what I am, and I can change from day to day.”) and demanding that outwardly-appearing men can use the women’s facilities if they state they really are women on the inside.
The vast majority of women don’t want that and the SJ left will not agree to a more restrictive definition of ‘transgender’. So, pick a fight like this, plan to lose. If SCOTUS were to side with the SJ left, doing could produce a very unwelcome backlash.
Yes, as NV pointed out, the demonization of people opposing change is the people without power being totally unfair to the people in power.
Since this statement is purely in the abstract, it is hard to determine what weight to give it. I would think we would want to see what the ‘powerless’ are demanding, assess the legitimacy of the demand, and go on from there. But, it may be that the mere fact that the demand emanates from the powerless is sufficient indicia of its worthiness that the debate ends before it begins.
Sabotaged by the GOP, some insurers are looking at a lot of red ink, and threatening big cost hikes or even leave the exchanges.
Looking at this “>http://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/~/media/1583311E0D844406A2AB57FF348D7886.ashx”> glowing quarterly report one cannot help but be surprised that they somehow did not see this coming. Furthermore, with over $40billion in revenue, you’d think they could make that up by eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse.
I have a very low opinion of this approach and advocating for a policy that is identity neutral is the polar opposite of identity politics.
So I take it then that you oppose voter ID laws?
Since this statement is purely in the abstract, it is hard to determine what weight to give it.
It was addressing Marty’s 7:17. If he would like to get into non-abstract questions, I’d be happy to make mine more concrete. However, his previous statement was
the legitimacy of any effort to obtain what’s good for me is only tempered by what has to be taken from someone, or some other group, to obtain it.
emphasis mine. I also assume that the ‘what’s good for me’ is not what is good for Marty, but a generic me. But ‘any’ seems to cover a lot of ground. Unfortunately, it looks to me more like any demand of the powerless is automatically dismissed precisely because of the argument that they have to ‘prove’ the value of their complaint. So blacklivesmatter have to prove that somehow, they deserve to be treated with respect by law officers before any discussion of the worthiness of their complaint can be entertained.
Of course, if they had power, their requests would be attended to with alacrity. Again, it is funny how that works.
But, what you are seeing is the logical result of the SJ left trying to jam a very tendentious definition of transgender (“I am what I say I am, when I feel like saying I am what I am, and I can change from day to day.”) and demanding that outwardly-appearing men can use the women’s facilities if they state they really are women on the inside.
I’m not sure if I know anyone on the “SJ left.” But it sounds like an impractical position they are taking, if you’re right about them, McK. I also don’t know that what these alleged people think is relevant to a discussion of what people commenting on this blog think.
Next, my point regarding being required to buy insurance that covers abortion, my position is that state action of that nature violates *every person’s* religious beliefs who is being required to pay for another’s abortion coverage. And I don’t see that as even remotely attenuated.
How is it not attenuated? Are you being forced to have or perform an abortion? Are you being forced to advocate for abortion? Would you have any knowledge of an abortion being covered by the insurance you’ve been required to provide? Would you have any personal involvement whatsoever in anyone’s decision to have an abortion simply because you’re paying for an insurance policy that might cover some cost of an abortion?
If the number of steps removed from the actual abortion, assuming there is one, since you wouldn’t know, isn’t sufficient attenuation, we might as well hang up state action on a whole host of things that might mean someone somewhere might do something that someone else somewhere else might object to on religious grounds.
” Are you being forced to advocate for abortion?”
Of all of those questions this is the most problematic, because the answer is probably yes.
If the number of steps removed from the actual abortion, assuming there is one, since you wouldn’t know, isn’t sufficient attenuation, we might as well hang up state action on a whole host of things that might mean someone somewhere might do something that someone else somewhere else might object to on religious grounds.
No antibiotics for you! Germ lives matter!!
Of all of those questions this is the most problematic, because the answer is probably yes.
How so? Why would an employer be discussing abortion at all with an employee? If anything, I would expect that sort of thing to be prohibited rather than encouraged.
This isn’t only about abortion.
Employers may now prohibit birth control as well through their employee healthcare plans as a matter of religious isn’t-that-specialism.
Skippy the Jehovah’s Witness has a word or two on that:
http://www.peterdavid.net/2012/02/10/hi-im-a-jehovahs-witness-and-i-run-a-faith-based-business/
Will Jewish and Muslin business owners be permitted to revoke business travel per diem because Bob, the regional sales rep, treated his prospective customers to a lunch of barbecued pork sandwiches as past of his sales fluffing?
Donald Trump, based on his deep reading of the terrific Books of Scripture, holds the religious scruple that his female employees must undergo breast implant surgery as part of their apprenticeship, but he also thinks Jehovah’s Witnesses have a really, really, really very, very beautiful thing going with their prohibition of blood transfusions so these same female employees are out of luck if they hemorrhage while under the knife.
Prospective female Vice Presidential candidates should expect their bodaciousness to be of primary focus during the vetting process, and I’m pretty sure Chris Christie’s eyes will be drifting downward during the interview process.
This line of judicial activism is a can of worms.
Well, it’s against my religious upbringing to eat worms or allow anyone else to do so.
America is full of sh*t.
HSH: “we might as well hang up state action on a whole host of things that might mean someone somewhere might do something that someone else somewhere else might object to on religious grounds.”
Especially when we consider people who have religious objections to things like:
War — so any tax that might go to the military is right out.
Eating meat — so any tax that might go to inspection of same is right out
Etc., etc., etc.
And that’s before we consider that money is fungible. So, any tax of any kind is an infringement of someone’s religion at some remove. So, no taxes of any kind.
Therefore no government, thus no laws, and McKinney is out of work…
Employers may now prohibit birth control as well through their employee healthcare plans as a matter of religious isn’t-that-specialism.
Identitarians!
But, what you are seeing is the logical result of the SJ left trying to jam a very tendentious definition of transgender (“I am what I say I am, when I feel like saying I am what I am, and I can change from day to day.”) and demanding that outwardly-appearing men can use the women’s facilities if they state they really are women on the inside.
Iowa has had a state-wide public accommodation law every bit as overbroad and fungible as the Houston proposal that was so very far beyond the pale. They’ve had it for around eight years now. Despite this, they haven’t had a rash of sexual assaults, voyeurism, etc. resulting from it, and the parties wishing to see it repealed still warn of a potential plague of pernicious perverts that should be penetrating public private places any… day… now…
It’s also worth noting that there has been vanishing small amounts of legal action arising from it, and while the judicial record is mixed, it includes decisions betraying understandings of statutory construction that you scoffingly dismissed as absurd and naive the last time we discussed this. To say that the courts will of course read the legislation in question – owing to its incredibly vague definitions – as allowing anatomical males who present as males to declare that they’re “gender-fluid”, “female now”, and entitled to unrestricted access to “female” facilities is by all appearances a conclusion that has not borne itself out in practice.
So… yeah. I’m not even vaguely convinced that this is “the logical result” of anything except the conservative media trying to induce mass hyperventilation.
This line of judicial activism is a can of worms.
As long as they are not unduly burdened, we’ll deal with it, although fishing bait fodder seems reasonable to me.
What say you, mr. worm?
I think he’s saying “all politics are identity politics”, and if he is (please note I stand to be corrected), I disagree.
Yes, if you define “identity politics” to only apply when the distinguishing factors are race, ethnicity, or gender identification, then it certainly does not cover all political points of view.
If you consider “identity politics” to refer to political points of view that are related to, and that flow from, how one identifies oneself within the larger body politic, then IMO it does.
Apologies if I’m mis-using the term, “identity” seems, to me, to be a pretty broad concept. Maybe it has a much more narrow definition in common use. If so, maybe it shouldn’t.
Regarding the question of funding insurance policies that cover abortion, and without seeking to re-visit the topic at length, it remains unclear to me how paying somebody a salary, which they then use to procure an abortion, differs from providing insurance coverage as a form of compensation, which they then use to fund an abortion.
I’m leaving the moral question of abortion off the table here, because IMO it’s intractable. I understand and respect that it’s morally abhorrent to many people, and I also understand and respect that for others it is not. It is IMO impossible to reconcile the two positions without sorting out profound metaphysical questions that are well above my personal pay grade. They certainly are not questions we’re going to sort out in blog posts. In any case, I’m not here to try to dissuade anyone from their moral, ethical, or religious point of view.
I just don’t see how being complicit in one way is any different than being complicit in the other. And, I don’t see how it’s possible to do anything whatsoever in the area of public policy without stepping on somebody’s conscientious toes.
We all take our lumps. Really, we do.
As far as trans-gendered people using bathrooms, I imagine they have used bathrooms corresponding to their apparent gender basically as long as their have been public bathrooms, and I imagine that in the vast majority of instances nobody has really noticed. It strikes me that what the law is trying to do is to prevent people from barring, by law, that practice continuing. And, it strikes me that responses like NC’s are so impractical as to be insane on their face.
I’m sure there are some SJ types who advocate a “your gender is whatever you say it is today” position. I probably know some, although I haven’t really pursued the discussion with them.
There’s a shoe for every foot, as they say.
As a practical matter, there are a generous number of people who consider themselves, and present themselves to the world, as the gender other than the one on their birth certificate.
They would like to be able to pee when they’re not at home.
It’s a tractable problem. I wish we could just all agree to do the obvious thing, which is basically what we’ve always done, and quit worrying about it.
“I wish we could just all agree to do the obvious thing, which is basically what we’ve always done, and quit worrying about it.”
Hey, what do you think you’re doing?1?? Suppress GOP voter turnout?
“It strikes me that what the law is trying to do is to prevent people from barring, by law, that practice continuing. ”
But it isn’t what the law did. If it had we would not be having a discussion about it.
Did the law actually do anything? As in, did it have a chance to, or was it preemptively smote by legislative restroom gatekeepers because of the potential evil it would unleash if it was implemented? My impression was that in both NC and TX, the forces of good rode in to the rescue before the laws ever took effect, so it’s not actually all that clear that the laws did what their opponents said they did. Or as the DOJ put it, they “solved a problem that doesn’t exist“.
Again, compare this to Iowa’s public accommodation laws, which, again, have been on the books since 2007, and have been tested in court.
But NV, Iowa is such a well known hot bed of far left political correctness! Why should we think experience there is relevant to other, more normal, states?
An opportunity to post the (NSFW) Iowa Nice video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZZ6JD0g9Y
MV,I thought the definition in the Iowa law wad interesting
“Public accommodation” means each and every place, establishment, or facility of whatever kind, nature, or class that caters or offers services, facilities, or goods for a fee or charge to nonmembers of any organization or association utilizing the place, establishment, or facility, provided that any place, establishment, or facility that caters or offers services, facilities, or goods to the nonmembers gratuitously shall be deemed a public accommodation if the accommodation receives governmental support or subsidy
I’m a nonmember of countless organizations.
I assume the poor formatting is from phone commenting (my sympathies), but as a result I can’t tell if you mean it’s “interesting” in the irrelevant sense, or “interesting” in the interesting sense. If it’s the former, you’re throwing a red herring, though. If it’s the latter, please disregard my assumption it was the former.
http://publications.iowa.gov/13719/1/SOGIPublicAccom.pdf
The world would be safer if this hopeless romantic used the ladies’ powder room from here on out:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/joe-boeckmann-resigns-sexual-abuse
So would he, if you think about it.
All bathrooms, public or private, receive gratuitous governmental support/subsidy of some degree if you count the pipes leading to the sewage treatment plants.
I need to check my Scripture and see if there might be another monkey wrench I can throw into America’s increasingly backed-up works.
How do we differentiate between members who have had their members removed and non-members who retain their working members?
Two engineers are standing in a large room that is nonetheless cramped because almost all of it is taken up by a machine. The device is loudly but smoothly running at full speed, with no sign of slowing. The first engineer turns to the second, grins happily, and shouts, “You see? I knew we could build it!”
Their colleague sighs, shakes their head, and looks at the first with a mix of pity and contempt. As if speaking to a stubborn and particularly dense child, they begin “Yes, but in theory…”
NV,
I was on the train and it was just interesting in its wording. No real point, except you ask me to read it and I did. One thing different, I think, because I can’t find the actual text of the Charlotte ordinance, is that in Charlotte they specifically separated gender identity and gender expression and included both. In Iowa there is the likelihood that expression is expected as the default criteria for gender identity, thus russell’s common sense approach is supported by the law. In Charlotte either is expressly permitted. A difference in kind.
No worries, I really couldn’t tell what you meant by interesting and I was a bit defensive. And uncaffeinated. I’m better on both counts now.
“How do we differentiate between members who have had their members removed and non-members who retain their working members?”
Perhaps we should go with the Marxist doctrine of not being a member of any club that would allow you to be a member.
How is it not attenuated?
Opposition to abortion is not a minority viewpoint. Requiring insurance to cover abortion and requiring every employer to pay for insurance that covers abortion is one step removed from requiring employers to pay directly for the abortion.
I’m sure there are some SJ types who advocate a “your gender is whatever you say it is today” position. I probably know some, although I haven’t really pursued the discussion with them.
There’s a shoe for every foot, as they say.
As a practical matter, there are a generous number of people who consider themselves, and present themselves to the world, as the gender other than the one on their birth certificate.
Ok, if there was a clearly stated rule that was widely held applicable to the effect, “Your gender is how you present and it is deemed immutable”, then we’d be having one conversation. But, that is not the definition and it certainly isn’t widely held. And, it isn’t just bathrooms. How do you tell an outwardly male college student claiming to be a transgender that he can’t stay in the women’s dorm at his/her college? Or play on a woman’s sports team? Or compete in the LPGA? Is any of that in any way fair to women?
Requiring insurance to cover abortion and requiring every employer to pay for insurance that covers abortion is one step removed from requiring employers to pay directly for the abortion.
If you consider that just one step, it’s still a pretty big one, which makes it attenuated. And, to russell’s point, since the employer has no role in making the decision about or knowledge of the abortion, should there be one, it’s no less attenuated than paying a salary that then pays for an abortion. You can’t control your employees’ personal decisions either way, but refusing to pay for insurance that provides coverage for abortions is an attempt to do so – a small way of forcing your beliefs on your employees.
(Let’s also not forget that there are <>legal restrictions on abortions that don’t suddenly get set aside because of insurance coverage, so there is some accommodation of the anti-abortion POV built into this cake already.)
Allow me to add that, if there were no such thing as a medically necessary abortion, I probably wouldn’t care as much whether or not abortion fell under mandated coverage. But sometimes they are medically necessary, and getting into the medical necessity on a case-by-case basis seems to me to be onerous.
But, that is not the definition and it certainly isn’t widely held.
The most widely held views I’ve encountered on gender all tie it to anatomy. Right up to saying you can’t be transgender if you’re pre-op. Incidentally, that’s the tact the Iowa courts have taken, to again taint our pure theorycrafting with messy observations of the world. I’m not saying I think it’s right – I don’t – but it’s a very widespread view. A bit further from the mainstream, you’ll find some who hold that once you start hormone therapy, you’re transgender, and beyond that those holding that presenting is sufficient. I certainly know of no mainstream or widespread viewpoint on gender that holds it to be strictly mental, let alone strictly lexical. So why the advocacy for accepting “gender is whatever I say it is, whenever I say it is”?
I have to wonder: if you feel we must take seriously a claim that someone changes their gender without changing their anatomy, their clothing, or really anything at all… what are you taking gender to mean? You appear to be advocating (in bad faith) for the idea that’s it’s literally just a word. Even trans activists who argue for gender-fluidity wouldn’t agree with that – in fact, they’d probably be the loudest opponents of such an argument. Do you have any evidence that this view is widely held, or even commonly held as something other than a theoretical possibility?
There is no widespread acceptance of the idea that you present above: an anatomical male, who behaves, appears, and dresses in a manner that is culturally associated with masculinity, and uses masculine identifiers, must be accepted as having a female gender despite their unwillingness to change their name, behavior, appearance, dress, or anatomy towards those culturally associated with femininity. This is a caricature of a zealous advocate’s argument; it utterly ignores the underlying assumption within transgender advocacy (and shared by traditional opposition to transgender advocacy) that gender is an actual – generally, in fact, discernible – thing (whereas the opponents agree, but add “immutable”), and not merely an arbitrary label that stands on its own, wholly independent of the person claiming it.
“There is no widespread acceptance of the idea that you present above: an anatomical male, who behaves, appears, and dresses in a manner that is culturally associated with masculinity, and uses masculine identifiers, must be accepted as having a female gender despite their unwillingness to change their name, behavior, appearance, dress, or anatomy towards those culturally associated with femininity.”
I disagree completely. Again, going back to the Charlotte ordinance, there is only one reason to separately identify gender identity and gender expression: to accommodate the exact circumstance you are arguing has no proponent. The law as enacted in Charlotte demands a consideration of the consequences of that idea and its consequences.
and its something, I have no idea.
McTX: Opposition to abortion is not a minority viewpoint.
So what? Are constitutional rights subject to majority rule?
McTX: Ok, if there was a clearly stated rule that was widely held applicable to the effect, “Your gender is how you present and it is deemed immutable”, then we’d be having one conversation. But, that is not the definition and it certainly isn’t widely held.
I guess they are.
Good news for the gun control crowd, I suppose.
–TP
McKinney: “Opposition to abortion is not a minority viewpoint.”
Yes and no. Certainly opposition to *unrestricted* abortion on demand is not a minority viewpoint.
On the other hand, making abortion flat illegal *is* very much a minority viewpoint. It all depends on how you (carefully!) define your terms which result you succeed in getting.
FWIW, I think there is a lot of confusion and imprecision around terms like trans-gender, trans-sexual, etc. And, there is confusion and imprecision around the actual phenomena of people who, however they express it, don’t identify precisely with their nominal birth gender.
Some folks have surgery to physically change their anatomy to align with the gender they identify as. I think they are actually a relatively small percentage of the folks who identify with a gender other than their birth gender.
Some folks don’t have surgery, but in most or all other ways present themselves as being other than their birth gender. If their birth certificate says “male”, they appear in every way to be women, and vice versa.
Some folks don’t really try to live as the opposite gender, but do like to dress as the opposite gender, either all the time or just sometimes.
And some folks are just kind of ambiguous about what gender they are, either in terms of how they see themselves, and/or how they present themselves in the world.
And all of this is sort of independent of what gender or genders they are attracted to sexually or romantically, if any.
I can understand concern about the lack of clarity in the various laws as written. For better or worse, it seems to be a hard topic to be clear about.
I am, really, extremely skeptical about claims that men are going to pretend to be trans women so that they can sneak into the ladies room and abuse women. It seems like a great way to call attention to what you’re about, for one thing, and it also seems like an unnecessary step for folks who want to stalk and assault women.
In any case, the response in NC is utterly lame-brained. Requiring people to demonstrate that their apparent gender aligns with their gender of birth is unenforceable absent truly intrusive measures. And, given the fact that some people present themselves as being of the opposite gender, the result will be that people who appear in every way to be women will be using the men’s, and people who appear in every way to be men will be using the ladies’.
Which seems like the opposite of what anybody wants.
It’s just stupid, knee-jerk, reactionary boneheadedness.
Some people have somewhat unusual personas. Nonetheless, they need to pee. Surely, there is a simple way to make that possible.
“It’s just stupid, knee-jerk, reactionary boneheadedness.”
I don’t disagree, I think including this in the law in Charlotte was boneheaded also. Do we ever get to the point where we think through things, like this whole discussion we are having , and say lets not do this. You describe a common sense approach that existed prior to all this, the people who tried to change this weren’t the boneheaded conservatives, it was the boneheaded people in Charlotte. (Liberals. progressives, ? idk what their politics is).
I can understand concern about the lack of clarity in the various laws as written. For better or worse, it seems to be a hard topic to be clear about.
I am, really, extremely skeptical about claims that men are going to pretend to be trans women so that they can sneak into the ladies room and abuse women.
Two issues here: First, sympathy is not a solution and no solution is offered on the lack of clarity and second, a straw man. Together, they make the point that (1) until someone defines gender specifically, any male can say he’s female and (2) the issue is not transgenders using the law as a pretext, it is male sexual predators masquerading as transgendered solely by self-identifying as such and using the law as a pretext (and, incidentally, making the majority, if not the vast majority of women uncomfortable).
And, all of this ignores the larger questions of college dorms, athletics, etc.
I don’t understand what’s a straw man here. You seem to have repeated the more or less the same thing russell wrote, only using a few more words, McK. Did you misread russell or am I missing something?
my solution is that if present yourself to the world as a man, use the men’s, and I’d as a woman, the ladies’.
my solution to the specific laws you object to is to fix the law.
I suppose that may leave some folks who appear and behave as one gender, but in some other way identify with the other, in the position of not being able to use their preferred bathroom.
IMO that is perhaps unfortunate, but that’s probably something they will need to live with in order to avoid making lots of other people uncomfortable.
that’s how I see it all.
as noted above, the idea that a man, who looks and behaves like a man, is going to insist on access to a ladies room based on a stated identification as a woman, in order to then stalk and assault women, just seems fantastically improbable. to me.
I could be wrong, it’s a more or less daily if not hourly occurence.
but it just seems bizarrely unlikely.
we’ve been sorting out how to accommodate each other in dorms a ball teams for quite a while now, I’m sure we’re up to the task of doing so for transgendered people.
what I really think is at the heart of the drama is discomfort with people who are different in some way.
it’s an issue we chip away at, and will likely continue to chip away at.
sometimes we need a nudge to do the right thing.
I suspect much more physical harm will come to women who have transgendered to men and who attempt to use the men’s room than will come to women preyed upon by male predator’s wearing dresses and carrying handbags who attempt to gain entry to the ladies’ room for unseemly purposes.
In fact, I think bullies will figure out that the best strategy is to remain in the men’s room and get their yaya’s off by beating the crap out of women who have transgendered to men.
That way, they can both prey on women AND tell their buds that “yeah well, you should have seen what the other guy looked like when I got done with him.”
I agree that straw men should have separate facilities in case they burst into flames.
This should be trending, and if not, I want hearings convened:
https://twitter.com/jonward11/status/730041812736303104/photo/1
This too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDDl7MkJqHk
“what I really think is at the heart of the drama is discomfort with people who are different in some way.”
Ya think?
In fact, it sometimes seems like current-day “conservatism” is focused far more on concern about those who are different (in whatever way is the feature of the day) than it is on anything resembling a discernable conservative ideology.
GFTNC,
Posting from Florence, on a phone (not my preferred mode, to put it mildly),
Florence, huh? Gee, too bad about having to use the phone to post. You have my deepest sympathies. 🙂
Posting from Florence, on a phone (not my preferred mode, to put it mildly)
The biggest hassle I was seeing (doing the same from the Rhone River valley last week) was that my phone does not appear to provide > and < symbols. Which meant putting quotes in italics was not possible. Not to mention the impossibility of links. Sigh.
Then again, maybe someone more tech savvy could have figured it out.
I always did like this guy’s take on things.
Phone, go to numbers press right arrow on left of phone > symbols appear
Thanks, Marty. Learning something new every day….
” maybe someone more tech savvy could have figured it out.”
Bring a laptop.
After I went to all the trouble to actually get a tablet (which has the same challenge with regard to < and >) and move forward into the 2010s???
Byomtov:you couldn’t be more right. We are about to move from central Florence to a more rural, or at least seriously gardened/pooled version for a few days, and the food throughout has been absolutely wonderful, but if anybody was verging on envious I can only say that you have no idea what things are like in The North Country!
I always did like this guy’s take on things.
Of course you do–he favors the state compelling affirmative acts by individual citizens. Mandatory voting! People being told what to do for their own good, it’s a wonderful thing.
Smiley face emoticons everywhere.
We are about to move from central Florence to a more rural, or at least seriously gardened/pooled version for a few days, and the food throughout has been absolutely wonderful, but if anybody was verging on envious I can only say that you have no idea what things are like in The North Country!
You wouldn’t by any chance be headed for Rada in Chianti, would you? One of our two most favorite venues in Italy. Great village and a really superb hotel.
Smiley face emoticons everywhere.
Good catch. Somehow I missed that part of the essay. 🙂
Good catch.
And I was yanking your chain. It *was* an interesting piece, and probably correct even if a bit coercive.
Mandatory voting always seems like a bad idea to me.
If people self-select as too uninformed/disinterested to bother to vote, what is gained by forcing them to put random marks on the ballot? It’s not like there is any way to actually force them to become informed about the issues at stake in an election.
Mandatory voting always seems like a bad idea to me.
I have an issue being forced to choose between Trump and HRC.
I’d settle for making it easier to vote. More advance voting, advance voting locations, and election day voting locations. Federal election days, at least, as national holidays – actually make the Monday before and Election Day both national holidays, for a 4-day Election Weekend. All of those actions would increase turnout without brushing up against the registration fraud/voter fraud/voter ID tar babies. Yes it would cost some money, but secondary arguments about “lost economic productivity” or some such don’t cut much for me – the economy seems to survive unofficial holidays like the day after the Super Bowl, and, this year especially with them both falling on Thursday, the days after St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo. I would think voting would count as a more noble endeavor to endure productivity loss over than people nursing their hangovers.
No McKinney, heading for something called Villa Cora just out of Florence,never been but it seems to get raves all round. But Radda (I assume that’s right?) looks lovely. I couldn’t see which hotel you might mean though? Next time I’m planning a vacation I’ll solicit suggestions from Obwi…
I am not a fan of mandatory voting either (and the countries that have it iirc tend to give amnesty to non-voters as the first measure after the election). The main advantage in the US would be that it would have to put an end to a lot of shenanigans currently applied. It would require universal registration, make election day a national holiday (or generally allow votes in absentia). No “we did not expect this high turnout and thus did not print enough ballots but closed 70% of polling places.” anymore (or there would be lawsuits with a real bite galore).
As the article said: No one is forced to actually choose a party or candidate there, just to show up.
Cynic that I am my suspicion is though that in reality the system would be used to fleece the poor by keeping all the shenanigans in place and then to collect the non-voting fees with no mercy.
Hartmut, I’m curious what shenanigans you believe are really going on here. U am not aware of any place that doesn’t have absentee voting, in Florida you also have a ten day window to vote early in person, I
In Massachusetts not so much but the polling places are open a pretty long day. Of the thousands of voting locations there are very few each cycle that have a problem. Last cycle there were delays in Dade county, there wont be this election. This all strikes me as the equivalent if the voter fraud issue, the actual number of people waiting in untenable lines to vote, or being denied a vote for being absent is incredibly small.
I’m not Hartmut, and maybe I’m not clear on precisely what ‘shenanigans’ means but there is
Alabama
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/10/alabama-dmv-closes-voter-id
http://altoday.com/archives/9908-department-of-justice-called-to-investigate-alabama-for-possible-voting-rights-violations
North Carolina
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/study-north-carolina-polling-site-changes-hurt-blacks
Wisconsin, Ohio and Kansas
http://ivn.us/2015/07/20/report-2014-voting-machine-tampering-likely-wisconsin-ohio-kansas/
Arizona
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/arizona-primary-voter-problems-dnc-lawsuit-221957
New York
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-why-126000-voters-were-purged-from-ny-rolls/
Connecticut
http://www.acluct.org/weeklynews/voting-problems/
and
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/hundreds_wait_hours_for_same-day_registration
Rhode Island
http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20140913/NEWS/309139958
Thanks lj, my point exactly. If you read all of these links the only one, similar Broward/Dade county in FL that effected any number of voters to speak of is the Arizona polling station changes. Which is highly likely to be fixed for the next election.
Quotes from the links:
Alabama
According to the Institute, the city’s decision forced residents of one of the only districts with a sizable black population to travel more than two and a half miles away from their current polling place, while it preserved the polling locations for most of the city’s heavily white districts.
North Carolina
In total, black voters will now have to travel almost 350,000 extra miles to get to their nearest early voting site, compared to 21,000 extra miles for white voters. That’s even though white voters make up 71% of the state’s electorate and blacks are just 22%. The average white voter will now have to travel just 26 feet further to vote early. For blacks, the equivalent figure is a quarter of a mile. Me(Likely even that small number for whites is because a whole bunch of them are zero)
Voter Fraud (Wichita State statistical study, no charges or even investigation)
I want to emphasize, as I always try to do, that statistics don’t prove vote fraud. These statistics show that patterns exist in the data that correlate the type of electronic voting system in use with the %R vote changing with the total votes cast.
Such patterns are examples of what we might expect to see if some voting systems were being sabotaged, but that doesn’t mean that no other explanations are possible for these patterns. Voting machine manipulation is, in my opinion, the most likely explanation for these patterns. The most common pattern supports Republican candidates, but Democratic candidates are sometimes the beneficiary.
The only way to prove vote fraud is through a post-election audit demonstrating significant deviations from the reported totals.
Arizona
alleges that action taken by election officials is responsible for voters waiting up to five hours in line at polling precincts and that the state arbitrarily rejected provisional ballots, mainly from Hispanic voters.
New York
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he would open an inquiry after his office received more than 1,000 complaints on Tuesday alone, a number that rose significantly from the 2012 election cycle.
“By most accounts, voters cast their ballots smoothly and successfully,” Schneiderman said in a statement issued on Wednesday. “However, I am deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities, both in public reports and direct complaints to my office’s voter hotline.”
Connecticut
People who showed up at some polling locations were turned away or asked to wait because workers didn’t have voter registration lists to check off names.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill were among those who could not immediately cast their votes. Olga Vazquez, the Democratic registrar of voters, has said she did not know what time the official enrollment lists arrived at each city polling location, but that they were not ready to be distributed by her office until about 5:15 a.m. Voters reported that some polls faced a half-hour or longer delay.
Rhode Island
He added: “The Board of Elections does not recruit those poll workers. It is done by the individual boards of canvassers.”
He said the law is still new. “It’s understandable that there may have been some cases where poll workers did not properly follow the instructions. We’ll make every effort to make sure this does not happen” in the general election, Pierce said
Marty,
why are ANY of those reported situations acceptable?
“Why are any of those reported situations acceptable”
Big government is not perfect, poll workers don’t get trained quite right, polls move, in fact in North Carolina they moved the polling stations so much that folks had to go an extra 440 yards to vote. I’m not sure the 2.5 mile average in Alabama is even a big deal. If they moved your polling station 400 yards would you call anyone?
The second link is some mathematical paper written by a college professor that hasn’t even been vetted.
Both in NY and RI it looks any negative impacts were due to human error,
and the AZ situation is the only one that may have qualified as shenanigans.
It just irks me when all of these hyperbolized situations are interpreted as the US needs to fix its “shenanigans”. We have a very open and monitored election process, so lots of people complain about stuff. That’s ok it keeps folks in line, but it also means we are likely to have fair elections.
Like I said, I’m not sure precisely what is meant by ‘shenanigans’. But most or all of those situations would be less acceptable if voting were mandatory, which I think was the point Hartmut was making. Making something regular and knowing the number of people who are coming would serve to reduce all of the problems listed.
Of course, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to use the reasoning that if there are complaints that means the system is fair.
Of course, if you did you planning on the assumption that you would be 20% above your previous high as far as voter turnout, you’d still eliminate most of the capacity problems. (And at less cost than having to be ready for 100% turnout.)
But that assumes that all you are trying to do is let any elegible voter actually vote. And not make it hard for voters who are actually eligible register and vote. If your intent (admitted publicly or not) is actually curtail voting, a whole different set of priorities arise.
The gentleman’s gentleman likes to air his boss’s pigf*cking Republican conservative misogyny and racism on the social media site, AssWipe.
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/05/13/it-wasnt-just-the-butler-who-did-it/
I predicted Trump would use the “c” word against Clinton a few weeks ago, just like conservative vermin racist Republicans use the “n” word against Obama and his family.
Apparently that cat never was in the bag in to get out of in the first place.
No word on whether cold-blooded killer Paul Ryan’s butler finds areas of agreement with Trump’s butler, but considering their common policy agendas, it seems the killing that looms on the horizon will differ only in method.
Dr. Carson’s mouth was not available for comment because he was pressing Trump’s boxer shorts with his tongue.
It would a noble patriotic deed if the November election is completely and corrupted rigged by the Democratic Clinton machine with Sanders’ help to prevent Republicans from getting anywhere within gunshot range of a ballot box.
Stealing this election from the filthy, subhuman Republican Party will be God’s work.
F7ck the GOP!
It just irks me when all of these hyperbolized situations are interpreted as the US needs to fix its “shenanigans”.
You know what irks me? Being near the bottom of this list.
We can do better.
Well, I see Bacevich is at it again.
Damn him and his conservative good sense.
🙂
We can do better.
Really, better than 80% of registered voters? Or am I having another bad math moment?
Damn him and his conservative good sense.
Yes, he’s conservative. And not at all risible in his interpretations of post WWII history. 🙂
Well, almost 100% of n-words with voter registration voted in the Jim Crow era too.
[/sarcasm]
Trying to prevent people from voting at the polling place is the next to last line of defense (after that only not counting their votes remains). Better to prevent the registration (ideally the very attempt to register) in the first place or at least to invalidate it in time.
I don’t understand why the registration and voting process for national elections is left in the hands of state and county level folks.
The biggest take-away, for me, from the insane Bush v Gore Florida vote count train wreck was that the basic process of (a) figuring out who is allowed to vote and getting them registered and (b) counting their freaking votes is amazingly inconsistent and just generally half-@ssed, here in the good old USA.
How is this not a fixable problem?
Damn, it turns out the administration does not agree with Russell, and in fact, any boy who is transitioning into being a transgendered girl–to be determined by the boy’s self-identity–may not be denied access to the girl’s bathroom or locker room per Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
Here’s the skinny:
Restrooms and Locker Rooms
. A school may provide separate facilities
on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity.
14 A
school may not require transgender students
to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so. A school
may, however, make individual-user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy.
The Obama Administration has picked a Social Justice fight that it will lose, one way or the other. If someone wanted to give Republicans a made-to-order national campaign issue, it is a letter to every school district in the country with the above “guidance”.
This is the heavy-handed, statist, compulsory progressive left at its worst.
So much for debate, the democratic process and working through things together. Obama and his closest advisors know best.
Is this particular rule statist or is having any rule w/r/t bathrooms at all statist? Seems to me they are both statist
Hell, public schools themselves are statist.
Hey McTx, I think I saw an article about a HS building a huge expensive football stadium in McKinney, Texas.
Clearly, that’s a better use of their money than stuff like dealing with locker-room gender issues, but do you have an opinion on the stadium issue?
“Damn, it turns out the administration does not agree with Russell”
I get that a lot.
but do you have an opinion on the stadium issue?
In a general sense, I think we spend way more than we should here in TX on football. It’s fun stuff–hell, I played in high school and loved it–but there is no sense of proportion particularly given that the primary purpose of school is learning.
One of Ross Perot’s few contributions of value to Texas was overseeing a committee that developed and engineered the adoption of “no pass, no play.” My sense is that academics have been watered down over time to ensure that all student athletes can find a suitable course of study that will not interfere with suiting up on Friday night.
The Obama Administration has picked a Social Justice fight that it will lose, one way or the other. If someone wanted to give Republicans a made-to-order national campaign issue, it is a letter to every school district in the country with the above “guidance”.
That rather depends on just what fight they think that they are waging.
It may be that the real fight is about transgender bathrooms. It may well be that they lose that one. Although I, for one, would not bet the ranch on it.
Then again, it occurs to me that the actual fight may be the November election. The majority of the population may be seriously conflicted about transgender individuals and how to deal with them properly. Certainly I have trouble sorting out my personal feelings on the issue.
But I suspect that won’t be the actual issue. Rather, I think the administration is expecting (and not unreasonably, given their track record) that the Republicans will over-react. And there are probably significant electoral advantages to making the Republicans seem like intolerant and nasty customers. Or, more accurately, letting the Republicans make themselves look that way.
Because the actual merits of their respective positions will, I think, get lost. Instead, what people will see and hear are hysteria and intemperate language.
There may be a solid case to be made against the administration’s actions, and against the various proposed approaches to dealing with transgender individuals’ situation. But I doubt we will hear that case — not that it won’t be made, for example by McKinney. Just that those arguments will be drowned out by the hysteria.
And that will push a whole lot of people (“whole lot” as a percentage of those who are not automatically voters for one party or the other) towards the Democrats. You can argue that it should not be so. But do you really doubt that it will be?
‘One of Ross Perot’s few contributions of value to Texas was overseeing a committee that developed and engineered the adoption of “no pass, no play.” ‘
Perot was never a big fan of the running game.
‘The Obama Administration has picked a Social Justice fight that it will lose, one way or the other. If someone wanted to give Republicans a made-to-order national campaign issue, it is a letter to every school district in the country with the above “guidance”.’
As cold political calculus leading into an election, I agree with this. Especially in America, or in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, all locations where dick rivals only money and religion for political prestige.
Along with Bernie Sanders currently being a dick, it never pays to take on the yuge-handed dicks in the Republican Party on their own turf, the public restroom. Their stance on dick is wide and well-known, but in its customary place:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/08/larry-craig-hilzoy/225784/
Every Republican Big Dick running for President for can be certain of supporters:
http://www.conservativehq.com/node/23108
I’m sure these dick issues inopportunely and ham-fistedly pressed against the political lens by the Obama Administration in their untimely fashion will only further galvanize the American right wing to show up and vote against the poor receiving health insurance, an 8-Judge Supreme Court, and in favor of blocking funding to fight the spread of the Zika virus, for equal access of all military-grade weaponry in public bathrooms and all other issues near and dear to their crotches, including perpetual warfare.
President Trump, an actual walking, talking penis with a coif and a hat, has tapped …. scratch that …. nominated …. his former butler and current mansion curator to reinforce and sharpen the long-standing conservative, statist, identitarian, social justice approach to labeling public bathrooms.
After next November, all public bathrooms will be labeled either the Gentleman’s Little Gentleman’s Room for white, Christian men, and the Little C*nts’ Room for the legitimately dickless white persons of the opposite, contradicktory, and lower-paid gender.
Everyone else won’t have a pot to piss in.
In some way the whole “tran public restroom” stuff is a red herring; even public restrooms have private stalls for people to “do their business” without freaking out anyone else.
But when it’s school locker rooms and open showers, that requires a level of maturity that is totally absent from the US political scene, let alone the kids.
Now, one could SOLVE those problems by allocating roughly 1% of the school football stadium construction budget to upgrade locker/shower privacy, but clearly that’s entirely too sensible to be considered.
that requires a level of maturity that is totally absent from the US political scene, let alone the kids.
Are you sure? Because, as with homosexuality, it seems entirely possible that the kids are far more mature on this issue than their parents. Or the politicians.
it seems entirely possible that the kids are far more mature on this issue than their parents. Or the politicians.
You are such a hopeless optimist, wj. I just hope you’re correct.
Optimism is the only way to avoid dispair. Gives a reason to keep hoping for things to get better, no matter how bad they are.
Admitted, it can be harder some times than others. And this is one of the harder times. But . . . optimism….
McTX: This is the heavy-handed, statist, compulsory progressive left at its worst.
And there you have the over-wrought, religionist, liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee conservative right at its most “reasonable”.
A nice lady Texas Republican asked NPR, a propos of other Texas Republicans with less fear and loathing of LGBT Texans, “What part of the Bible don’t they believe in?” Whatever the NPR interviewer may have answered was not aired in the segment I heard.
I wonder why the nice lady (and McKinney?) want every Texan born with female genitalia, but who feels and acts like a man, to be required by the State of Texas to share bathrooms and locker rooms with the delicate flowers of Texas womanhood. I further wonder why the nice lady and her fellow Texas Republicans want both the federal government in Washington DC and the local government in Austin(?) TX to shut up and sit down when the State of Texas decrees “bathroom policy”.
–TP
I’d rather he hang out in the ladies’ restroom at Central Park West than in the White House, touching all of the historical bric-a-brak with his stubby man hands.
Better women could kick him in the nuts, which I am confident they would do, than he threaten the entire human race by placing his finger on the nuclear G-spot, which makes House Republicans and Putin wet.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-history-questionable-behaviour-women-ny-times-192204706.html
“What part[s] of the Bible don’t they believe in?”
All of them, Katie.
Well, except maybe for a few bits like the Sermon on the Mount.
*****
That lady’s incredulity that anyone alive could fail to believe as she does is only matched by my incredulity that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can imagine that a text like the Bible has only one interpretation — always, of course, the interpretation of the person making that assumption.
I envision the Kings men riding into each town of the realm and standing in the square unrolling the decree:
Hear ye Hear ye, from this day forward His Majesty decrees that al bathroom laws in every school, in every town, in every state of the kingdom shall allow for blah, blah, blah.
I think anyone who has two brain cells should see that almost everything he’s done in the last 2 years is unconstitutional, and egomaniacal.
F*&K Obama, I cant wait to se the next generation of expansion of executive power. Lots of precedent now.
Marty,
Where do YOU stand on state power vs local power?
I mean, if His Excellency the Governor should be able to tell His Majesty the President to fnck off, should His Localness the Mayor bow humbly before His Excellency’s men when they ride into town?
–TP
F*&K Obama, I cant wait to se the next generation of expansion of executive power.
I can’t think of a single POTUS since at least FDR who hasn’t broadened executive power, and done so enthusiastically.
Can you?
Speaking of Trump, this is making the rounds among my musical buddies.
If you ever want to know what musicians mean when they say someone has “big ears”, let the piano players here be your guide.
I can’t think of a single POTUS since at least FDR who hasn’t broadened executive power
For that matter, I remember a VPOTUS who made up his very own fourth branch.
It always sucks when the other guy does it. Plus ca change.
Our own Constitution is a mere 200-ish years old, we have plenty of evidence to sift through with regards to the lives and writings of the men who wrote it, and we STILL struggle with interpretation when it comes to phrases like ‘well-regulated militia’.
Contrast this with the Bible, which is: a mish-mash of stories transmitted orally through centuries; later hand-written and hand-copied by scribes; arrived in its modern-day English translation through a complete mishmash of Latin, Greek, Ancient Hebrew, and Aramaic; has very little in the way of historical documentation supporting much of what it says; is flatly contradicted in many areas by the historical records kept by many other civilizations; has been proven wrong (or at least profoundly ignorant) in every area where it says anything pertaining to science and mathematics; was composed by dozens of different sources, all of whom are anonymous, none of whom we know more than a smidgen of anything about, and none of whom were contemporaries of Jesus when it comes to the New Testament…and yet we’re supposed to believe that not only is anything written in this collection of 2,000-4,000 year old writings at all pertinent to the world today, but that there is any way we could find one interpretation of it that is completely infallible, uncorrupted, unedited, and applicable to the lives of anyone currently living?
Sorry, if the jury’s out on the definitions of simple English terms like ‘well-regulated’ and ‘militia’, then a book more than ten times as old, rendered into a completely foreign language from its original texts (which are also unavailable for study and perusal today), is utterly hosed when it comes to matters of interpretation. 🙂
[The Bible] has been proven wrong (or at least profoundly ignorant) in every area where it says anything pertaining to science and mathematics;
Mostly, yes. But it is rather fascinating (at least to me) how closely the beginning of Genesis tracks to our current scientific understanding of how the universe, and the world, were formed. Not the timing, of course, but the sequence of events.
Every culture and religion has a “creation myth.” But every other one I have encountered has a sequence of events that is nothing like what we understand to have actually happened. Which, given the lack of scientific knowledge of the folks who created them. Which makes one which actually does track all the more remarkable.
Could be considered just chance. But….
Not to derail the thread into a theological direction, but the idea the Genesis story is anywhere close to accurate even in its sequence of events is…problematic at best.
Genesis states ‘night’ and ‘day’ come into being before the actual stars in the sky (concepts of ‘day’ and ‘night’ have no meaning outside of planetary boundaries and can only derive what meaning we give them from the presence of stars in the sky), postulates a firmament separating ‘the waters above from the waters below’ (a premise we know to be false), talks of creating ‘lesser light’ (presumably the moon, which we know not to be a source of light itself) to rule the night, and has birds arriving prior to the creation of the land-roving creatures from which we know they evolved, and has plant life showing up on land before the water-bound lifeforms from which we know they evolved.
YMMV, but to me, that’s “close” only as it pertains to a “horseshoes and hand grenades” interpretation of the term. 🙂
Consider the parallel between the time shortly after the big bang, when the density of matter dropped enough for electromagnetic radiation to first move, and “let there be light.”
wj: Could be considered just chance. But….
But me no buts, wj.
The Dogon tribe which lives in the neighborhood of Timbuktu in West Africa has a creation myth according to which the star Sirius has an invisibly-small, incredibly-dense companion star orbiting it with a 50-year cycle. The existence of the myth is documented by Western anthropologists; the veracity of its astronomical content is known to Western astronomers; the relationship between the two is a matter of dispute between Western spiritualists and Western skeptics.
My personal view is that modern-day cultural contamination is more likely than ancient cosmological wisdom. But the Dogon would certainly give the authors of the Joshua story a run for their money, if their ancient cosmology included Sirius B and the ancient Hebrews subscribed to geocentrism.
–TP
I can’t think of a single POTUS since at least FDR who hasn’t broadened executive power, and done so enthusiastically.
I’d place the start of that trend with John Adams, whom I am given to understand, was our 2nd president.
If you’re going to say that the Genesis creation story is “true”, the next question is “which of the two stories in Genesis do you mean”?
Yes, there are two. Look ’em up. The fact that one of them almost exactly matches the Sumerian creation story (with different deities) found in records from roughly 1000 years earlier is just a coincidence, I guess.
At least it doesn’t have the “ick” of the Egyptian creation story (First god, male, lacking a female god, wanked into the Nile; the results of which created all the other stuff, including the TeaBaggers most obviously)
I think anyone who has two brain cells should see that almost everything he’s done in the last 2 years is unconstitutional, and egomaniacal.
Anyone with two brain cells should see that “almost everything he’s done in the last 2 years is unconstitutional, and egomaniacal” is not literally true, leaving the dual-brain-celled individual to wonder what actual assertion you’re making, Marty.
The notion that the bible is a self-contradictory and fantastical mish-mash is far less controversial an idea for people capable of intellectual honesty, even those who are religious.
Snarki,
I’m familiar with the fact that the Bible has a lot of material from earlier religions. Which doesn’t make it any more “true” or otherwise.
I just think the fact that it lines up so well is interesting. Why is an interesting question, with multiple possible answers. For example, it could be that the Western scientists who work in cosmology have been influenced (perhaps subconsciously) by the Bible stories that they heard as children. 😉
“For example, it could be that the Western scientists who work in cosmology have been influenced (perhaps subconsciously) by the Bible stories that they heard as children.”
So when “I’m not a scientist” conservatives reject weight-of-the-evidence scientific consensus in virtually every scientific endeavor, they are also making hash of the Bible?
Or as cosmetologist Sarah Death Palin would decree: “In the beginning, there was eyeliner, and it was good, but not on Alice Cooper. Hark, the blowing of the Trumpers and the Trumpeters and the dropping to your righteous knees to service the true, one God.”
What makes us most and originally human in the Bible, both Old and New Testament? The pages and pages of begats, mostly joyless and recounted like items on a shipping manifest … the grueling punishments, floggings, beatings, stonings, floodings, immolations, flayings, crucifixions, waterboarding, and salt pillars, usually for misbegotten begetting, even the mere thinking about it …. or the frequently gorgeous myth-making, and metaphor-mongering, not that those three groupings aren’t intermingled?
At least Yahveh and the torture transcribers in the Old Testament didn’t hit the delete button after recording God’s wrath:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/the-cia-actually-deleted-a-copy-of-the-torture-report
I can’t think of a single POTUS since at least FDR who hasn’t broadened executive power, and done so enthusiastically.
Can you?
A new form of tuo quoque? So there’s precedent for this? Show me.
The closest I could come was Nixon’s wage and price controls, and in the brief time I had to research, I found a hint that congress had pre-approved but could not verify.
This is a very big thing. No discussion, no debate, no nothing. It is not ho hum, business as usual. Unless progressives push back, anytime progressive say they believe in the democratic process and gov’t accountability, this will be proof of the big lie.
If progressives defend this, then we know what the rules are: whatever progressives say the rules are.
You know how pathetic things are when the substantive response to criticism of this clear and gross overreach is to point with alarm to some woman in TX.
A recurring refrain from the Left of the Bush years was the “Imperial Presidency”. At least they went to congress. Given the elitist lifestyle adopted by President and Mrs. Obama and their complete disdain for process, the hypocrisy could not be more glaring.
Good grief.
Unless progressives push back, anytime progressive say they believe in the democratic process and gov’t accountability, this will be proof of the big lie.
[…]
If progressives defend this, then we know what the rules are: whatever progressives say the rules are.
You want tu quoque and sweeping generalization? Fine. We can do tu quoque and sweeping generalization.
Conservatives defending Bush’s imperial presidency already established what the rules are: whatever conservatives say the rules are.
Since conservatives never pushed back – indeed, they gloated and defended it – anytime conservatives say they believe in the democratic process and gov’t accountability, this remains proof of the big lie.
Plus ça change, indeed.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/unrepentant-trump-butler-secret-service-obama
‘Bertie Wooster: Tell me, Jeeves, were you always like this, or did it come on suddenly?
Jeeves: Sir?
Bertie Wooster: The brain, the gray matter. Were you an outstandingly brilliant child?
Jeeves: My mother thought me intelligent, sir.
Bertie: Well, can’t go by that. My mother thought me intelligent.’
When Trump’s butler asks the Donald to “walk this way”, I’m sure he does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNTToXKgwZc
“Character 1: Excuse me, I’m looking for talcum powder.
Character 2: Walk this way, please. (Starts to saunter off)
Character 1: If I could walk that way, I wouldn’t need the talcum powder.”
At the 3:34 minute mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZZOxeGgGr4
… and, the original, in movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoMmn31q-d0
Oh, and McK, Bush never went to Congress unless he knew in advance they’d agree with him… and even then, his sweeping signing statements meant that what Congress approved was subject to executive approval. Note as well that Obama does not share the Bush administration habit of changing policies just enough to avoid court challenges… but only if it looked like they’d lose at the highest level.
There’s plenty of precedent, and most of it’s recent.
Good grief, indeed, too.
You know how pathetic things are when the substantive response to criticism of this clear and gross overreach is to point with alarm to some woman in TX.
I think it was incredulity, not alarm. And a couple of blog comments is all we’re talking about here.
I’m kind of curious what the directive means from a legal standpoint, beyond simply the threat of taking away federal funding. It sounds like a statement of the administration’s legal position on how the law applies, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure whether it’s truly overreach or if people are using “overreach” to mean “something I don’t like.”
McTx: This is a very big thing. No discussion, no debate, no nothing. It is not ho hum, business as usual.
What is “this”? I mean, I assume you are referring to the recent Obama administration guidance regarding transgender students. Are you objecting to the entire guidance or just the bathroom thing?
the elitist lifestyle adopted by President and Mrs. Obama
I’m curious what they have done, different from how previous Presidents have lived, that constitutes an “elitist lifestyle.”
Or WTF Mrs. Obama has to do with the issue at hand.
Congressionally-approved bullsh*t based on bald-faced Bush Administration lies seems a low bar to meet.
Or LBJ Administration lies about the Gulf of Tonkin.
This:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/suing-president-executive-overreach
It’s interesting to compare conservative outrage at the alleged denial of due process for individuals accused of sexual assault and/or harassment on college campuses and now the even greater outrage when they are told they can’t presume to accuse an entire class of people … men in frocks … of sexual assault/abuse in public bathrooms before even one of them has been accused of doing such a thing.
And natch, the “reverse dichotomy”, as a Woody Allen movie character might say, on the liberal side.
When the do-nothing Republican Congress decides to do one of their basic jobs of simply holding hearings on a Presidential Supreme Court Nominee (a conservative one at that), instead of grossly congressionally underreaching, THEN I think it would be incumbent upon this President to follow precedent and permit them to decide who pees where in North Carolina.
But as long as he is black, the racist elected Republican politicians will let him dangle on EVERYTHING:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92AmGY8P2po
“Given the elitist lifestyle adopted by President and Mrs. Obama ….”
?
I guess they’ll always be adoptees, unlike Trump and his murderous butler who come naturally to it.
But I get Marty’s position that its all Obama’s doing that Trump’s butler (what, we don’t think Trump and his butler didn’t talk like this to each other for years?) can set down the tray of sherry glasses and opt to go Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, and Saddam Hussein all over an American President.
And while I’m at it, I now agree with John Cole on Bernie Sanders and his followers:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/05/16/just-an-fyi-2/
If they join/enable the Trumpeters to defeat Clinton, and Trump brings jobs back to America, he knows not how, they’d better get diapered up and cross their legs because no one … men, women, and trans, will be allowed near a potty in a timely fashion, because there will no executive or judicial overreach whatsoever in the service of social justice by abusive conservative congressional chickesh&ts:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-11/poultry-workers-in-diapers-as-bathroom-breaks-denied-oxfam-says
It’s in the Republican Party platform: equal access to forced covering in their own feces for chickens and humans.
Regarding the stories we tell ourselves, I think Americans, and their less exceptional unequals elsewhere, follow the the Mayan way:
“The day after the market crashed on October 19, people began to worry that the market was GOING to crash. It has already crashed and we’d survived it (in spite of our not having predicted it), and now we were petrified there’d be a replay. Those who got out of the market to ensure that they wouldn’t be fooled the next time as they had been the last time were fooled again as the market went up.
The great joke is that the next time is never like the last time, and yet we can’t help readying ourselves for it anyway. This all reminds me of the Mayan conception of the universe.
In Mayan mythology the universe was destroyed four times, and every time the Mayans learned a sad lesson and vowed to be better protected—but it was always for the previous menace. First there was a flood, and the survivors remembered it and moved to higher ground into the woods, built dikes and retaining walls, and put their houses in the trees. Their efforts went for naught because the next time around the world was destroyed by fire.
After that, the survivors of the fire came down out of the trees and ran as far away from woods as possible. They built new houses out of stone, particularly along a craggy fissure. Soon enough, the world was destroyed by an earthquake. I don’t remember the fourth bad thing that happened—maybe a recession—but whatever it was, the Mayans were going to miss it. They were too busy building shelters for the next earthquake.
Two thousand years later we’re still looking backward for signs of the upcoming menace, but that’s only if we can decide what the upcoming menace is. Not long ago, people were worried that oil prices would drop to $5 a barrel and we’d have a depression. Two years before that, those same people were worried that oil prices would rise to $100 a barrel and we’d have a depression. Once they were scared that the money supply was growing too fast. Now they’re scared that it’s growing too slow. The last time we prepared for inflation we got a recession, and then at the end of the recession we prepared for more recession and we got inflation.
. . . This ‘penultimate preparedness,’ is our way of making up for the fact that we didn’t see the last thing coming along in the first place . . .
One Up On Wall Street, Peter Lynch, formerly of Fidelity-Magellan Fund”
Meanwhile redux, the ACA:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/yet-another-state-succumbs-obamacares-greatest-weapon-math
Those armed conservative Oklahoma legislators, who illegally carry weapons in the State Capitol, adjust the killing targets on their backs:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/yet-another-state-succumbs-obamacares-greatest-weapon-math
I guess they figure indigent, unemployed Republican oil workers know the Second Amendment guarantees health insurance.
John Lithgow was utter genius on this and…well, nearly everything he has ever starred in.
I say “nearly” because I am not 100% sure that I have seen it all.
At least they went to congress.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….ha.
“”Given the elitist lifestyle adopted by President and Mrs. Obama ….”
IOW, normal presidentin’ previously, but uppity when Obama does it, gotcha.
Tell me again how the GOP isn’t full of racists? I love that story.
John Lithgow is a national treasure. Here he is as the “only normal person in the place”, regardless of which bathroom he uses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlZUBUSKbFk
McTX: You know how pathetic things are when the substantive response to criticism of this clear and gross overreach is to point with alarm to some woman in TX.
McKinney,
As hairshirt pointed out, I originally mentioned the “nice lady Texas Republican” with “incredulity, not alarm”. Also, for a good laugh. But mostly to introduce the substantive questions which you heroically evade:
1) Do the anti-“statists” really want female-born men to use women’s facilities? Or male-born women to use men’s facilities?
2) Do the anti-“statists” object to State power over local government, or only to Federal power over State government?
The first is a question about taste, the second is a question about principle. Answer them or don’t answer them, but don’t pretend you haven’t been asked them.
–TP
” Do the anti-“statists” object to State power over local government, or only to Federal power over State government?”
The answer to this is in the secession movements in any number of states over the years. The difference, of course, being that the States actually negotiated their sovereignty at the time of the formation of the union, where the federal government was specifically limited to its enumerated powers. The individual counties and smaller jurisdictions didn’t have that written into the states constitutions, AFAICT.
Interestingly, the Obama guidance came out after this ruling.
I don’t know if that tempers claims of executive overreach. I would think a ruling from the judicial branch ahead of the same general interpretation from the executive branch should do just that, but I could be wrong.
I think maybe things have happened w/r/t state sovereignty since 1787.
Marty,
“Secession movements” are a red herring here. North Carolina’s
dictatorgovernor is not proposing to secede from the Union (again) but is filing suit in federal court. Thedictatorgovernor of Texas is not proposing to secede again (this time) but merely ordering his minions to defy Obama’s minions.So do we come down to the anti-“statist” position being that States like NC and TX have the right to over-rule local governments in Charlotte or Austin because towns did not “negotiate their sovereignty” way back when?
If that’s the position, I’d call it “pro-Statist” myself.
–TP
Marty, that doesn’t actually answer the question. McK was criticizing gov’t policy on the basis of it being statist. Anti-statism does not particularly care about whether niceties were performed before gov’t claimed and exercised power; they’re against it in principle. Anti-statists don’t want gov’t to be small enough to potentially drown it in the bathtub; they want gov’t drowned, period, full-stop. McK is at most a minarchist, so seeing them decry statism in general as a principled object is rather hard to swallow, and hence why the pointed question was raised as to whether “statist” really meant “federalist” in this context. Past discussions strongly suggest it does, but that’s for them to answer, not me. In any case, though, if McK is actually objecting to statism, the origin of the social contract underwriting the power of the state is not relevant; any such social contract is an unjust usurpation of individual liberty. If they’re objecting to federalism, then yes, it’s relevant. But if we don’t put words in McK’s mouth, it’s irrelevant.
Hey, look, California:
California law reinforces the rights of transgender students to be treated as the gender they identify with, whether in bathrooms or on sports teams.
…
When another student’s parents had a problem with her using the girls’ bathroom, the principal was able to point to district policy and California law to affirm that students have the right to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with.
The horror.
I think maybe things have happened w/r/t state sovereignty since 1787.
But, but. . . since all that matters is “original intent”, changes in the real world are irrelevant. Right? ☺
I think maybe things have happened w/r/t state sovereignty since 1787.
To some, the Civil War and the New Deal never happened, and therefore their relevance can be ignored because, you know, Founders.
Yep, totally irrelevant, wj. When e.g. Hawaii joined in ’59, it joined with the understanding that it would enjoy the same relationship with the federal gov’t negotiated by Connecticut et al in 1787 rather than the relationship enjoyed by contemporary states. Ofc, since original intent is the only meaningful factor, there was no difference between how the states related with the federal gov’t WRT sovereignty in 1959 and 1787. Differences didn’t crop up until… what… 2008?
Wouldn’t the fact that some states were subject to special supervision, due to violations of the right to vote constitute differences in sovereignty? I seem to recall that kind of difference going back further than 2008. Just sayin’.
first TP, the secessionist movements I was thinking of were the ones to secede from a state, Colorado? Second, the question was not whether McK was or not, it was whether anti Statists were lowest level of government folks, or just anti Federalists.
Second, “Things have change since 1787”, really? What the hell does that have to do with the answer to any of these questions? The fundamental document our country was founded on very unambiguously protects states rights. That is not simply “original intent”, it was the foundation contract the country was built on. That you don’t like it doesn’t make it not true. The overreach of the federal government, all three branches doesn’t change that, they are just wrong.
It is why we need to make sure the court doesn’t lean any further left, or the constitution and that basic agreement will be wiped away by the court system.
What this discussion shows is the absolute lack of any regard for anything except the success of the progressive agenda, at whatever cost.
This very discussion is the bedrock of Trumps strength, f#$k what America was, it wasn’t so great anyway, it will be what we say it is, and we will mock anyone who thinks it was even a good idea.
What this discussion shows is the absolute lack of any regard for anything except the success of the progressive agenda, at whatever cost.
Yes. This would explain the rampant advocacy on this blog for mass murder in the furtherance of the progressive agenda.
The fundamental document our country was founded on very unambiguously protects states rights.
It also very unambiguously protects peaceable assemble, against unlawful search and seizure, against cruel and unusual punishment, against loss of life/liberty/property w/o due process, and equal protection under law. That is not simply “original intent”, it is the foundation contract the country was built on, and has continued to be built upon. That conservatives don’t like it doesn’t make it not true. The overreach of the federal government, all three branches, as well as subordinate governments, doesn’t change that; they are just wrong.
It is why we need to make sure the court doesn’t lean any further right, or the Constitution and that basic agreement will be wiped away by the court system.
So, the Civil War Amendments, much like deficits, don’t matter.
Marty,
I am mind-reader enough to know that you were talking about intra-state secessionists. And I am consistent enough to repeat: secession is a red herring — at least in the Potty Rebellion context. If NC or TX want to secede again, I would be the last to stand in their way. But they’re not threatening to secede, with all the fuss and bother that would entail. They’re declaring that, as States in the Union, they are being repressed by that dictator Obama and his “statist” Federal Guvmint.
McKinney and you both seem to assert that States asserting control over cities and towns is NOT “statist”. You defend your position on the strictly legalistic grounds that the US Constitution was ratified by sovereign State governments, and not by ordinary townsfolk who looked to the US Constitution for protection of their personal rights against the “States’ Rights” statists.
As a principled argument, that’s just laughable.
–TP
If the object is to “drown government in a bathtub” why stop at the federal level? Is not government in fact f*cking government no matter what the level?
Are you seriously trying to assert that state and local government have never and do not engage in “tyranny” however defined? Are you kidding me? Are you asserting they have some “Constitutional” standing to engage in tyranny? Again, are you kidding me?
This is an argument that smacks of ‘ends justifying means’ at a very deep level. As Tony remarked, “Laughable.”
All. The. Way. Down.
Bobbyp take: Way to go. ’bout time you came around!
A prediction on trans issues: they’ll work against Republican candidates for the same reasons LGB issues have.
There aren’t as many trans people as there are LGB cis people, of course. (The most serious research on answering the “how many” question comes from computer scientist Lynn Conway, who’s been studying the matter as an involved party. She finds a floor of about 1 in 500, in North America, and no clear idea of how high the ceiling might be. This is substantially higher than estimates from others, but she gives excellent reasons to doubt smaller estimates.)
But for most people it’s the same general kind of deal. Oh, hey, these folks are already in your life, and they’re the same spread of good souls through walking piles of waste as everyone else. As a group, they are if anything a lot warier about making trouble for you in public spaces than the general population because they know about phobic people inclined to violence. They’re…just people.
I wish that this kind of realization led to wider rejection of hate mongering candidates, but I’ll settle for what I can get. On the margin, it certainly helps some, as people realize “they are completely lying and making things up here” and begin to wonder “what else are they making up and lying about?”. Conversely, it won’t win the right many recruits – it’s only going to tip the balance for people who were pretty much already there and looking for any handy excuse at all. If not gaybashing, then attacks on post office pensions or something.
The fundamental document our country was founded on very unambiguously protects states rights.
And this was fundamentally altered by this thing called the “Civil War” and subsequent Constitutional Amendments.
But those actual historical facts apparently mean nothing.
Be it noted that there were public hearings and opportunities for comment on ACA section 1557.
Sorry for the unclosed link.
I’m not sure it counts as tu quoque if I cite FDR as an example.
Lincoln freed the slaves with the strove of a pen. among other things, and humanitarian and moral isues aside, slaves were the largest capital asset in the nation at the time.
that was a big deal.
I’m not seeing the bathroom thing as being in quite the same league.
well see how it plays out. my money is on most folks not really giving a crap.
Obama is extending the concept of guaranteed access to public accommodations to folks of ambiguous gender. using the tools at hand, which is how he interprets and implements the law.
is there precedent for the executive doing stuff like that, with or without the blessing of congress? yes, there is.
We’re going to need five separate public bathrooms soon … one for Trumpeters, one for Cruzers, one for disenfranchised moderately conservative Republicans, one for Clinton Democrats, and one for BernFeelers, though the latter may be invited to use the Trumpeter facilities soon, which is the one, other than the Cruzer facilities, that has a gun a gun taped behind the toilet in case things don’t go their way:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/05/16/rules-it-appears-have-no-place-in-a-revolution/
And here’s some video of what went down in Utah thanks to Sanders’ crazy people. I don’t know about this video, but another I saw this morning, and can’t find now, had pissed off male Sanders supporters repeatedly calling the females on the dais the B-word, so these manf*cks shouldn’t have any trouble dribbling on the toilet seats in the Trumpeters’ man rooms and won’t mind the lack of sinks to wash their hands.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/15/heres-what-happened-at-saturdays-dramatic-nevada-democratic-convention/
Maybe a sixth bathroom for normal people, like the characters John Lithgow plays.
TP, I defended nothing, I answered a question. There are, however, successively smaller distances between people as the governmental unit gets smaller, so the overlap has to be managed more often. But it’s pretty clear that no one in Massachusetts is impacted for crap by 99% of what goes on in Texas, different than Frisco and Farmers Branch and Carrollton and McKinney. But, I am a smaller capable level of government person, so while I completely understand the reaction in NC, I do believe that it is an unnecessary intrusion to impose a state law on the City of Charlotte.
And no, the post Civil War amendments did not fundamentally alter the original agreement. In fact, they ensured black people had full standing as citizens. While the court has broadened the interpretation of the 14th amendment, the intent was fairly narrow and again the federal government uses for overreach.
for the record, the states negotiated their sovereignty at the beginning of the union. and then, 12 years later, they figured out that they had screwed it up, and tried again.
state ‘sovereignty’ was significantly reduced the second time around.
Bruce B, Trump today said he would rescind the ACA’s language (I gather along with the rest of it, given his priors) which makes it unlawful to discriminate against transgendered American patriots in all states, some of whom are probably registered republicans (that’s a second, more complicated surgical procedure), in the provision of medical care.
Also, he would rescind the bathroom edict issued by the Obama Administration, natch.
He still managed to sound more reasonable and vaguely more compassionate than the hate mongers to his Right in that Party, leavening his blithering by saying he needs to study the issue.
Whatever that means. I’m afraid it means he doesn’t mind if men who transgender to female use the men’s room, as long as they have large breasts.
But still, no medical care for them.
Marty,
If MA residents are not impacted by whatever foolishness TX government chooses to impose on Texans, then neither would Texans be impacted by MA passing, say, a total ban on private gun ownership.
Of course, some Texans may feel inclined to move to MA, and vice versa, without giving up their rights under the US Constitution. In fact some Massachusettians, as well as some Texans, may feel that it’s the federal government’s duty to protect their personal rights from the predations of their State (“Statist”?) governments. Would you (or McKinney) tell such people that they are “statists” who should shut up and bow to “States’ Rights”?
–TP
Hey, last time they came for your n-words when you crossed state lines with them, and the result was a major and rather uncivil inconvenience. Now they will come for your guns. What will be the Fort Sumter of the impending new major uncivil inconvenience that a century later will have had absolutely nothing to do with guns (like the first one had nothing to do with n-word employment)? Will it be a North Carolina transgender bathroom?
Blah blah. I believe in federal gun licensing, I’m incredibly tired of any and every lesser issue being compared to slavery and the subsequent battle for blacks equal opportunity. Smallest, closest to the voter capable government. Neither Texas nor Massachusetts should be responsible for foreign policy. The (stupid) bathroom law doesn’t come close. All theater.
we’re all incredibly tired, marty, just about different things.
who remembers when Reagan’s USDA declared condiments to be vegetables?
who remembers the excellent adventures of James watt and Anne gorsuch, as they applied their creative interpretations to laws passed by congress?
there’s your tu quoque, McK.
Smallest, closest to the voter capable government.
“Small” and “capable” are often at odds.
–TP
Often
Yeah, if you really want to feel the tyrannical Boot of Stalin on your neck, I’d say you need to look toward your local Home Owners Association (HOA).
Oh sure, “private”, makes the libertoons cream their jeans, but never has there been such a nest of little tin dictators puffed up with their power. Cross them, even a bit, and of course they’ll call on the full power of THE STATE to enforce their dictats.
(I’m sure that #NotAllHOAs, but enough do that I’m a #NeverHOA kinda person).
Hyper-local control != Freedom.
“What will be the Fort Sumter of the impending new major uncivil inconvenience that a century later will have had absolutely nothing to do with guns (like the first one had nothing to do with n-word …?”
Historians will be chewing for decades on the question: “Who flushed first?”
“who remembers when Reagan’s USDA declared condiments to be vegetables?”
I do.
It’s when Hillary Clinton declared condoms and zucchinis to be Christmas ornaments on the White House tree that Donald Trump and every other tinpot lame brain in the land, probably the one closest to you, realized that the loonytoons bullsh*t quotient in America was ramping up and clearing the way for his path to the Presidency.
Most civilizations end dramatically. Ours will end when the last whoopy cushion gives out its final sad and exhausted clown toot and ruffling blat.
America is a frat prank gone sour.
I suppose if you want to say that SCOTUS has gotten it wrong on the Civil War Amendments for the past century or more, not much I can do.
I suppose if you want to say that SCOTUS has gotten it wrong on the Civil War Amendments for the past century or more, not much I can do.
Up to and including the Shelby County decision, that erased a clause of the 15th Amendment, during the watch of John “lawless” Roberts, yes.
I guess it’s ‘tradition’ by this point.
Often
Interesting thing is, it’s often harder to fight lower-level corruption if there’s no higher-level gov’t to hold the small, responsive gov’t to account simply because fewer people are affected so it’s easier for single powerful/wealthy individuals to bring to bear influence w/o those who oppose them reaching the critical mass needed to counter them.
Whether this is a bug or feature is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
I have to say that I don’t give a crap about the bathroom thing one way or the other. Three bathrooms is fine with me. Or one. Whatever; just friggin’ decide and get it over with.
Your kids have never been safe in the bathroom.
As for tu quoque: you guys do it, too.
Here you go Slarti:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/05/16/forget_men_s_and_women_s_the_restrooms_of_the_future_will_be_single_or_shared.html
Yeah, I am ok with that.
Inner vestibule for privacy stalls. Outer vestibule for hand-washing, grooming, etc. Might even be ok having separate chambers for men’s and women’s grooming; not rigidly divided.
I have somehow completely avoided being sucked into the maelstrom of outrage on this topic. Oh well, maybe next time.
Our enjoyment of your outrage will not be denied!
Face it Slarti, there are people who revel in being outraged, and people who do not. Since you apparently don’t, you are going to be on the outside looking in regarding a lot of topics.
You should really go read the OW archives. All of it.
I do that myself from time to time, in chunks. There are some cringeworthy moments in there.
Probably not as many as you’d want, but there are some.
“you are going to be on the outside looking in”
That’s definitely out of bounds behavior in a public bathroom.
Actually Nombrilisme Vide, James Madison addressed that over 200 years ago:
“The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.”
OK, two personal public bathroom stories. (Doctor Science just did a spit take with her coffee and rolled her eyes, and Slart is making a note to check the archives at some far point in the future when he needs a cringe).
Let me preface the first one by noting that it took place in my mid 20’s, not too long after I had returned to the States from nearly three years in the third world as a Peace Corps Volunteer (just thought of a third story, maybe I’ll get to it) and world traveler. And if you haven’t experienced going to the loo in some third world countries, you may THINK you’ve been and gone to the bathroom, but really you have no idea of the full, rich, and worldly experience it can be.
Look, people are generally and personally hygienic to the best of their abilities wherever you are, but so much of it depends on clean water, electricity, and facility (as in none, or minimal at best) availability, etc.
Plus, look, it is just assumed the bathroom, outside the big cities, is what it is and it’s going to be “yucky”. Let’s put it this way: have you been camping in the wild? Are the words “men, go dig a latrine” somewhere in your past? Or put another way, the “toilet” such as it is, and the septic tank/leach field are virtually the same thing in many places.
As a man, you learn to squat for long periods of time. You develop the knees of a major league catcher.
The variety of bathroom experiences in the rural Philippines was vast. You remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine Benes takes a deep breath and holds it, while scrunching up her nose as she enters the airplane potty?
There you go. Multiply that exponentially.
Gender problems in the bathroom in rural India are moot when it’s you and 100 other men, women (some in beautiful saris) and children squatting along a stretch of railroad track next to the village as the blazing morning sun peeks over the horizon.
Avoiding eye contact IS the privacy, though it can be a social occasion too for those who know each other. Any thoughts of groping are, well, crowded out of even the most lurid mind, I imagine.
Wanna take a righteous, spiritual swim in the Ganges in Varanasi? Here’s a tip: first, walk the two miles upstream alongside the river to your bathing spot and get a load of what you are swimming in.
It is soooo sexy.
That said, everyone the world over wants pristine western bathroom sanitation where salacious thoughts can be pondered or acted out in peace as the tile gleams to all sides, the toilet paper is in abundance, and there is this new-fangled thing called a soap dispenser on EVERY sink.
A hand dryer/blower. Seriously? For what?
Oh, yeah, the first story. See next comment
So, I get this job in an office in Denver as a public information writer with a Federal government agency, the Bureau of Reclamation as it happens, which suits our plumbing/water theme here, but not so much the gender one, but we’ll get to that.
One day, it’s time to hit the men’s room. Off I go, accompanied by the daily newspaper sports page, because despite what jerk Americans think, NOT reading the baseball box scores at your desk while work languishes is an ethic we share with all of you perfect, productive specimens in the private sector.
I glide through the push door of the men’s room, which had been the men’s room since day ONE. My eyes noted, I think, but my brain did not receive the memo, that there was something affixed to the door that hadn’t been there for the months I was working. I enter, slapping the sports page against my thigh like a rake sauntering down the Champs Elysses, and as I round the corner to occupy one of the four stalls, I see that all three urinals have been boarded up.
Hmm, I think, but not deeply enough to form a thought bubble over my head.
Three of the four stalls are occupied and locked.
I enter the fourth, drop trough, sit, and issue forth with a long and loud throat-clearing, geez, I hope that was all, as a preliminary to audibly snapping the sports page open to the box scores for perusal during the duration of my stay.
I may have even exclaimed … out loud … but to myself … “how bout them Yankees!”
Tile provides a natural reverb, as you know.
I didn’t launch into a rousing take of “Can’t Buy Me Love” to take advantage of the acoustics. Nor did I whistle the tune, God help me, though I presume God is female and would not be in the joint to render assistance like some sort of balm-offering bathroom attendant who would require tithing.
That was a slight miscalculation.
Now, it was somewhere in here that I sensed that the room was preternaturally quiet, for a fully occupied men’s room, that is.
I think I put one elbow on a knee and sat my chin in my hand like Rodin’s thinker, and started to vaguely consider the surroundings, if not existence itself and my mistaken place in it.
I looked to the left, dipping my head just enough to spot two little, not very male-like shoes clamped together.
Then to the right. High heels. As close together as they were in the box they came in. Stockinged legs issuing upwards therefrom.
Well, he thought, as some heat overtook his countenance and the flop sweat of embarrassment beaded on his forehead.
I see. Yes, I do see now. I don’t know how this happened, but now … how does one finish one’s task and extract oneself, while maintaining everyone’s dignity, and exit stealthily and silently enough to not interrupt the deafening silence that is roaring around one this late in the game.
Newspaper folded very delicately. All other items on the bathroom checklist accomplished with deft precision like a test pilot landing the Space Shuttle.
Goddamned jangling belt buckle.
Wince and flush, thinking whether to cough really really loudly like a tuberculosis patient to cover up the jet engine sound of the flushing. Wish I was exiting down the tubes myself to avoid the dead man walking out of there.
Wash my hands … check.
Out the door. I did not, though I wish I had as I departed, turn and say in a shocking falsetto like a Monty Python character, “So long, ladies! We shall meet again!”
Took a gander at the outside of the door, avoiding eye contact with whomever was standing nearby the adjacent drinking fountain and there, in plain language, the temporary new sign on the door, said “Ladies Room”.
Back to desk. Consider for a moment spending the rest of the day under it.
Check my inbox, the manual paper kind back then.
Yup, there is the memo announcing that the now former men’s room would, starting today, henceforth be the ladies’ room, to make things more convenient for the ladies on our end of the building.
The men’s room would now be down the hall a ways.
I felt very threatened, but a hetero time was had by all.
If you’re not selling short stories to, say, Reader’s Digest (cleaned up some, perhaps, to comply with Reader’s Digest standards of decency: maybe you should be.
I hate to see good talent wasted. But having been wasted some of my adult life, I can see how that might be a good thing.
So, you really didn’t get the memo!
My tombstone will refer to that, but thanks Slart. If you are referring to me. 😉
I just lost the second bathroom story to an errant click of the mouse. Drat!
Maybe more tomorrow.
I will add to the overseas bathroom comment that I once shared an outhouse with a pig in a tribal area in northern Thailand, years ago.
It was a recycling scheme.
I went unmolested and I hope the pig testifies to the same.
Also, from first hand experience with dysentery abroad, when on public transport, the bathroom too often for mention, he mentioned, is your pants.
Wherever you go, there you go again.