Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

If you don't buy into the right wing talking points on Hillary, the one's the Citizens United movie pushed that Sanders, in desperation, is now taking up as he goes negative, Hillary is one of the better candidates out there - despite the points TM made, and one or two disagreements I have with her over issues of international trade (and you might agree with her on those), I'd take her over Gore, Kerry, or her own husband.

I hope you appreciate the enormous irony here that Bernie Sanders has made citizens united the first and central tenet of his campaign while also making throwing unsubstantiated shade on Hillary, in exactly the same way as the movie Citizens United financed, the second tenet. He's doing Citizen's United's work for them.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

So aren't you at all disappointed that the candidate you support, who said he'd never go negative, is now negative pretty much 24-7?

I mean, if you want purity, is Bernie really it? From my perspective, a guy I once liked, who I thought was rising above it all back in the debates and getting into good substantive stuff, is becoming an increasingly shallow asshole running a textbook negative campaign when the going gets tough.

Yes, I was insomniac last night and actually listened to a recent Bernie speech.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Serious question. Really. As the one person here who has served as the editor of a publication founded by Bill Buckley.

Doesn't that list of conservative media scare you? Back when I was a boy, if you referenced conservative media, you were talking about Buckley's National Review, which had meaty, substantive stuff. Or some of the think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that released thick analytical pieces. Today National Review Online competes with drudge to provide shallow ideological rants ... And one of my friends who was at the Heritage fled after the take-over there, fearing what it was becoming.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Look, I hear you. But this attitude is just ridiculous for a number of reasons.

1. National politics, like many hit sitcoms, is about bringing in the biggest audience. How the fuck else would we end up with Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory being massive hits? The assholes we get are trying to appeal to as many people in their party as they can without offending potential swing and independent voters on the issues that mean the most to them. That's just the way it is. That's how our system of government is set up. If you keep talking this shit about expecting to vote for a candidate that appeals to you and your little checklist, you might as well jump off a bridge right now.

2. We get the assholes we deserve. This isn't about party heads nominating this person vs. that person. This is about who we select. If we collectively chose to vote or even inform ourselves in the slightest, we'd get better candidates. We don't. Stop blaming the party. We are the problem They deliver the person we deserve.

3. The fact that you're willing to sit and pout in the corner because you're pissy about not having a brilliant candidate to vote for will not change the fact that if more people adopted this dumbass approach to the election, we will have a President Trump or Cruz. Then you can sit in the corner on fucking fire and bitch and moan about the actual destruction of the country. Apparently, the only question here is: What do you want to spend the next 4 years complaining about? Hillary not being perfect for you or the fact that your skin is burnt to a crisp and you're sitting in a hole in the ground trying to avoid the religion police.

Get over it, Wonk.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I haven't seen any of that. I think it's a load of bullshit. I like his stance on banks and I like a lot of his positions on tax. If I were to vote for him that would be why.

I need to look at what Adder posted about where Hilary is leaning on banks and assess whether or not I trust her to follow through. That may change my mind on Hilary. But I am not voting for anybody because of what they say about someone else, nor am I casting a vote because it's a vote against another candidate.

Stevenson said that in a democracy people pretty much get the government they deserve. I deserve better than a candidate whose primary virtue is that she's less odious than the other guy. That's how I'm going to vote. Perhaps if we all started throwing our weight behind who we felt should do the job instead of what the machine offers us, we might eventually get a choice of candidates capable of governing and willing to do so. From now on, that's the way I'm voting. Everybody else is free to vote for whomever they choose. I plan on using my vote to send a message that I won't accept the people being offered up at the moment.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I suspect Wonk will be among the 90% of Sanders supporters who do get over it by November.

The problem is the other 10%, which is still a larger group than the Nader supporters who brought us the Iraq War. And the fact that Sanders and his supporters are right now feeding the kind of idiocy that will grow this group.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I may not vote for Bernie if he starts going on the attack. Especially if he starts abandoning the positions I like him for. I don't demand purity. I just refuse to accept mediocrity any more.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I was with you on this, but recently had my mind changed.

Glass-Steagall really wasn't the culprit. It's true that doing away with it ended up putting investment bankers in charge of commercial banks in a way that would have never have happened when it was around. But the fact that these banks had commercial deposits to steady themselves really kept the whole system from completely collapsing. Yes, it took a ridiculous bail-out. But if commercial banks had been completely separate in 2007/2008, every single investment bank would have collapsed, no bank (even with TARP funds shoved down their greedy little throats) would have been in a position to steady the economy by acquiring banks that were on their way to extinction and the whole financial system would have failed.

Ah. I see. You're just in fantasy land now. It's Hillary's fault that she can't make Republicans or 65% of America understand that we should go single-payer. I suppose if Bernie became President when he failed at this, in 4 years you'd be whining about how the Democratic party failed you yet again. This is ridiculous.

I'm not sure I understand you. Democrats want to do this. Obama wanted to do this. They have been blocked at every fucking turn by Republicans. Either join the Republican party before making these ridiculous statements about what your party isn't doing for you or join us here in reality.

This one may be a legitimate criticism. I think Hillary doesn't want to rock the boat on the corporate tax scheme. I'll give you this.

But that's it.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

What about the attacks on her for the UBS case? This is right in your sweet spot.

You know as well as I that the UBS case significantly undercut Swiss banking in a way nothing else has for the last fifty years. You also have a sense for who gets involved in international tax disputes and where the balance of power lies between different agencies like Treasury, Justice and State.

So do you think the UBS case was a pro-foreign tax dodge settlement engineered by Clinton as SOS and bought and paid for by contributions, a few years later, by UBS-connected rich swiss folks to the Clinton Foundation?

There's one of the little Sander's campaign Citizen's United style hit-jobs that is right in your sweet spot. Doesn't that bullshit annoy you?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Read your second point. I'm not pouting. I'm choosing to no longer be part of the problem. Take comfort in the fact that I am likely to to be very lonely in that corner and thus, irrelevant. We have to start somewhere.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Or the problem is you aren't a Dem or a Rep.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

God, this make you sound like you may be itching to be a Naderite.

Enjoy your war with Iran.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Cool enough for me.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I don't have to motivation to find you citations, but this really isn't a thing that matters. Non-banks can, and did, cause just as much chaos (see, e.g., Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG)

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Nothing so racy as that or terrorism pictures.

I was deemed a bully because a rather delicate poster referred to a CBO release in support of her proposition regarding Obamacare. While the headline may have seemed favorable to her, the text of the release was exactly contrary to the proposition for which it was cited. She was terribly offended when I gently pointed out that given the circumstances, one might conclude (1) she only read the headline before citing, (2) she did read the entire release, but did not understand it, or (3) she intended to misrepresent its contents.

People here can generally handle being called out on their BS.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Nice! It's difficult to "gently" point out to someone that, based on the current evidence available, she is either 1) lazy, 2) stupid, or 3) a liar. But I'm sure you were very sweet about it.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I feel very alone watching those things. If you truly believe in liberty in this country, what's going on around you is truly distressing. The only thing more distressing is that nobody cares. We've clearly decided the choice between comfort and freedom.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

People, let's stop being lazy about these series. Before sticking your conjunction in, think, don't be stupid. Is an "or" appropriate? Should it be an "and/or"? Does "either" really belong in front of the series.

Obviously, in this case, this woman may well be a lazy stupid liar.

Watch now. Flower is going to lie about his original intent.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It certainly matters who controls Congress, but who is President also matters.

Put differently: Would you rather have today's Congress + President Hillary Clinton, or today's Congress + President Ted Cruz?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Thurgreed has my proxy on this issue.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I always just read the headline. how is that offensive?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

can you sum his post up in a headline for me?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

No, you are choosing to be part of the problem. The demand for ideological purity, the making the perfect the enemy of the good, is what got the GOP to the shithole that it's in now. And it's what got us Dubya back in 2000 -- but, hey, all those Nader voters could smugly point out how they voted for the best guy. And really the two parties are just the same.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

"Don't Listen to Hank"

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It's not just the Iraq war. It's Katrina, the collapse of our economy, and the embrace of torture. It's irresponsible tax cuts.

If anyone thinks it makes sense to withhold their vote and have people suffer through decisions like these because the Democratic party isn't catering to them enough, then I don't know what to say. This shit has serious repercussions for many, many people. Tell the family members of the people who died in Katrina waiting for help that Hillary just isn't tough enough on the banks. Tell the gay couples who Cruz will completely abandon when all the red states flat out ignore a Supreme Court decision that Hillary's foreign policy isn't to your liking.

I need a break.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I was just mirroring the conjunction from SEC Chick's original post. I agree that it is entirely possible the woman could be a lazy stupid liar, or a lazy liar, or a stupid liar, or some other combination. But SEC Chick appeared to give her the benefit of the doubt, assuming only one applied. Which makes it all the more unfathomable that the woman would take such offense and have her 86ed from the chatting board.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

While I disagree with the Chick on everything, I have no patience for people who can't handle criticism on something they post.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It contributed a bit, but you're right. The culprit was thirty years of wage stagnation and debt accumulation. The Internet boom of the '90s papered us around a reckoning we'd otherwise have had. Then the engineered housing bubble of the '00s papered us around the reckoning once more.

We've enabled a situation that can only be unwound with a debt workout of epic proportions. We cannot inflate our way out of it. We cannot lie our way out of it with misleading measures like the unemployment rate or adjustments to our calculation of GDP.

The country is diseased with an approximately 1/2 of society who simply cannot afford to live at a decent standard. We cannot pay for them with transfers. We cannot give them better jobs. Our ability to raise all boats with the usual tools is lost for many decades to come to global labor arbitrage and technology.

We dither at the fringes and offer silly fixes like "Education will save us!" It will not. The robots and cheaper labor abroad are eventually coming for all of us.

We can blame Hillary for Glass Steagall. We can blame bankers, or the entitlement classes, or any other group we'd like to demonize if it makes us feel better. But the only people really worth blaming are All Of Us, and the only fix is a massive repudiation of private debt. This would, of course, savage most of the elites and affluent in the country in the short term. And it would also savage the older people who live on income derived from investment. That's true.

But the alternative, which you're seeing right now in the Sanders and Trump voters, is a prolonged populist backlash. It's a splintered country of extreme haves and have nots. It's more Fergusons, more xenophobic demagogues... It's more of the cycle of economic decline > nationalism > war you see played out over and over throughout history. Is there anyone here who doubts that, among prominent Ds and Rs in DC, the following statement has been made thousands of times since we've realized the 2008 collapse could not be fixed with mere monetary tools:

"What we need is a good old fashioned war! That'll prime the pump, and reset the chips in our favor."

With Hillary, or Trump, you're going to get exactly that.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Or, to put it in words Wonk may understand:

Imagine you are cooking a meal. And you are going to throw out everything that is not perfect.

You start by making a pretty good souffle. It's light and airy, a bit cheesy but not too cheesy, and you really do like it. But it just isn't going to fully satisfy your hunger. That's Bernie. Throw him out. The souffle isn't perfect.

Then you make a curry. It's got a whole lot of different vegetables, some nuts, some spices. Really a bit of everything. A lot of good tastes, and fairly complex, and much more substantial than the soufle. But almost everyone you are cooking for doesn't like something in the mix, whether it's the cashews or the spices or the vegetables, and it's very hard to match the curry with the right wine. That's Hillary. Throw her out. Not perfect.

You're starting to run low on ingredients, but you can still make chili. You throw in the beans, the meat, the spice and get it all going. It's simple, but you hope it will still be good. Even if it is going to be one dish short of a meal. But somehow you can't get it to cook quite right, a bunch of it burns, and it has a bad flavor. That's trump. You really do need to throw him out, or he'll probably make you sick.

Now you're left with nothing but scraps, stuff no one really wants to touch. You throw the potato peels and vegetable scraps in with whatever spices you have left. The resulting dish is best described as a thin, disgusting gruel. That's cruz. But you're hungry, it's all that's left for dinner, and now you have to eat him. And make your friends do the same. Because you were holding out for perfection.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Glass-Steagall would have prevented the banks from being able to securitize all the mortgages and other crap assets like credit card and auto loan receivables. It would also go a long way toward preventing the situation now where the banks are essentially squeezing out the consumer customer, at least the smaller retail customer. Somewhere along the line, "financial services" became "finance."

I also think that many of those banks that were on their way to failure would not have been in that position if they had not been allowed to invest so much of their depositors funds in the bullshit the I-banks were putting out. If they had stuck with things like making commercial loans, consumer loans, home mortgages, etc. they would not have over extended themselves with straight-up wager like credit default swaps.

Last but not least, although this is not related to Glass-Steagall, I believe that too big to fail means too big to exist. I know that Bernie wants to break up the big banks. Adder has pointed me to something that suggests Hilary may be in the same place.

Concentration in banking has left working poor and lower middle class consumers fucked. Huge swaths of people can no longer get your basic checking account and passbook savings account. How exactly are those people supposed to save and invest if the little money they have that is discretionary is eaten up by fees on prepaid debit cards and account and transaction maintenance fees?

I'm not expecting miracles; I'm expecting effort. The ACA accomplished a couple of great things. It eliminated the pre-existing condition sinkhole. It also allowed for a Medicaid expansion that helped make health care somewhat more affordable for some people. But the bulk of what the ACA did was allow insurance companies to offer expensive policies with unmanageable deductibles that didn't put many uninsured in a better spot. Someone who has to pay $300/month (after subsidies) for a policy that offers 20% coinsurance after meeting a $500 deductible is not better off than they were when they were uninsured.

I want a candidate who intends to keep pushing to get where we should be. The Republicans voted to repeal the ACA 50 times. The Democrats should have introduced 50 bills to make the system single payer, or to make the entire nation one risk pool and make policies uniform, like Medicare Suplemental plans. It's not about winning the fight; it's about not cutting a shit deal and letting the rest drop. For every bill where the Republicans needed a single Democratic vote, the White House should have been pushing for an amendment that gave the people one more break.

I've seen Bernie talk about this. I haven't seen Hilary.

Tax reform is the area where the Democrats have the best chance of levering some cooperation out of the Republicans. It's also something she knows is going to be writ large on the legislative agenda. She should be positioning herself to bargain. Bernie is. It's also the place where the Democrats can actually start addressing income disparity. If a candidate has no other idea or plan going into November, they should have a strong tax policy.

Hilary won't touch this though, because the biggest welfare benefit in the country right now is the carried interest enjoyed by private equity and hedge funds. Hilary won't try to fix this though, because that's where her financial support lies. So the strongest Democratic candidate is letting the really rich get really richer and the poor get to pay for it. But I'm supposed to worry about religious fundamentalists not having to sell wedding cakes to gay couples?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I didn't even think I needed to say anything about the UBS deal. Or the Chase settlement where we underwrote the (deductible) slap on the wrist Chase got. This is precisely what I meant when I said Hilary has Wall Street up her ass. This and the carried interest.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It won't be my war with Iran. It will be Bibi Netanyahu's war. We're just going to be funding it.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Who is? If you're 1:1 with either party's platform, you're a fucking idiot.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Fuck you, asshole. Can we reconvene on the Mod Board? Someone needs to be banned, and his name rhymes with Furbreed.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Really? I trust you've seen this, or at least are familiar with the facts described.

The reason we still have carried interest is pretty simple. It's a tax benefit for the wealthy that incentivizes blue state investment. Rs don't attack it because they protect the wealthy, anyone from NY, Mass. or California would be crazy to attack it because most of the benefit flows to their states. Most of wall street isn't too excited about carried interest, that one is for the venture industry much much more than wall street. Wall street cares about offshore hedgefund managers, who pay much less in tax than VCs trying to get cap gains.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Whatever, Sidd. I've never demanded purity in anything. I'm just not buying into the idea that I have to vote for a cynical hack who looks out for the people who pay her and fuck everybody else because if I don't Ted Cruz and his white-sheet cowboys are going to march me off to the American Auschwitz like a Japanese internee. And before you accuse anybody of being smug I suggest you clean your mirror.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

And, of course, they really didn't. Nader would have been a terrible president, while Gore would likely have been decidedly competent.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

And here you see it, this is what the Citizen's United folks, Gingrich, Issa and the crew have been trying to achieve for all these years....

Money works.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

The embrace of torture is a horrible thing. About as horrible as the fact that it's still ongoing under the current administration and was blessed by Hilary as Secretary of State, as was dropping bombs on American citizens overseas.

While you're at it, let's take a moment to ponder Ed Snowden and the way the NSA and CIA are crawling through your computer, driving, and tv watching habits because both parties think that's just alright. As long as we can keep an eye on those radicalized muslims and their sympathizers. Like you and I.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Carried interest is indefensible. But we're talking about a rounding error in terms of the budget. That's not a good enough reason to cast a Nader vote.

But here's some comfort for you. Whoever wins will be viewed by more than half the country as an illegitimate President. This person will not be respected or treated with dignity by the public or our increasingly audience-participatory media.

Trump is proof the office, and politics in general, has degraded to a point where people are probably, in the next decade or so, as things worsen, going to challenge the enforcement capabilities of authorities. Look at Chicago right now. Look at silly things like the Bundy family lunatics. To borrow from the title of a recent great book, there's an "Unwinding" going on all around us.* The suit ascending to the Presidency is MC at the biggest kook carnival in history.

If you really hate Hillary so much, vote for her.

_______________
* We don't see it so much because we're not of the desperate masses. Trust me, in flyover land, or in the lower middle class to impoverished enclaves of cities, people are fucking nuts. And it's getting loonier by the day.