Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Exactly.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Yup.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This is built on the assumption non-voters and third party voters were otherwise Hillary voters. On what is this assumption based? (FYI, empirically, juxtaposing 2012 Democratic turnout against 2016 does not make the case.)

Here's some different math. Trump should not have been able to get the amount of votes he did, at all, anywhere. A candidate like him in years past would have been bulldozed by someone with a machine like Clinton's. Looking at his numbers, it is inescapable that he somehow created a movement. Digging into the numbers, you see that movement was centered around an unusually high number of white lower to middle class voters. What caused them to so galvanize? Us. We ignored them. They exacted revenge.

Even with diminished turnout, Hillary should have beaten Trump. And your math only works if we buy into an assumption we can't prove. There is something worse than arguing with math. Selling assumptions as math. It's exactly that kind of thinking that led to the modeling that allowed Hillary to think she had it in the bag and didn't need to spend more time in WI, PA, or MI.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

The margin was so close that Hillary could have won by either turning out a few more people who didn't vote, persuading a few people who voted for third-party candidates, or persuading a few people who voted for Trump. Or, I suppose, by limiting the civil rights of a few more Trump people to keep them from voting, but she's not a Republican.

Because it was so close, one can choose to look at almost any segment of the population. Because they are more authentically American than the rest of us, the media have chosen to focus on white working-class voters in the heartland, but as Hank points out, you could focus on Stein voters instead and get to the same place.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This can be said only if you don't know anything about polarization and can pretend that most Republicans are reasonable people who might not vote for an inexperienced, narcissistic, bigoted monster simply because he is the Republican nominee.

(eta: Incidentally, I've already said I was wrong in thinking that Trump would not be able to consolidate Republican support.)

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I was a true idiot on this. Initially, I said that Trump would be able to consolidate Republican support, and that by election day everyone who usually votes Republican would have 20 reasons why they had to pull the lever despite Trump.

Then I acknowledged I was wrong when I saw a bunch of Republicans show some real backbone, particularly in the foreign affairs and defense communities (where an enormous number of traditional republicans endorsed Hillary) and among women, including some around here.

But I was actually right the first time. The women who bolted were a small, if fierce, group, and no one listened to the foreign affairs nerds.

Apropos of which, I recommend Kagan's article in FT today. I think Kagan (prepare yourselves) is fundamentally right on his policy analysis of Trump and the country, but is understating the danger of Trump, since he views war and policy as logical things and isn't worried about the wag-the-dog engagement or the quick twitter nuke sent to avenge us against a viral slight from some Pakistani or Mexican leader.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It's politics. Your opponent works with what he's got. The email thing was a useful device for Trump.

Personally, yes, I think the email thing was a huge nothing burger. But she really fucked up by erasing those 30k in emails. There's no way to spin that or deflect it.

I'm not convinced the foundation is totally clean, but I do believe whatever violations there are over there, they fit in the bucket of "criminalized politics." We have too many stupid laws on the books allowing prosecutions for things that are just how business is done in politics.

The Trump University thing deserved more scrutiny. That is troubling, and yes -- it's worse than the foundation's sins, if any. Instead of focusing on that, however, the identity politics wing of the opposition glommed onto a ten year old Access Hollywood tape. That worked for a while, but its effect waned quickly. And it played into the right's narrative that all the left does is whine about sexism and xenophobia. Trump University, OTOH, was a sticky scandal that was universally offensive to anyone, right or left, who detested a rich sleazeball stealing from poor people. I'll never know why Hillary's campaign didn't ram that down his throat more aggressively.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

What evidence do you have relating to anything in the foundation?

I don't have anything left to invest in defending Hillary personally against the incessant lies and investigations that you have chosen to accept as part of politics. The assholes and liars have won, congratulations to you for that. There is no more Clinton legacy in electoral politics. And you'll see Chaffetz continue the tradition of bs never ending investigations that did not exist in American politics prior to Gingrich.

But I've worked with the Clinton Foundation on a couple of occasions and deeply value the fact that a former President and a former Secretary of State who had Presidential ambitions put together a charity that focused on the needs of the broader, less developed parts of the world, a task that is electorally utterly thankless, and even a liability, but in which they have excelled. I really hope that Bill and Hillary will rededicate themselves to the Foundation with gusto, and that people will recognize it for the enormous good it does.

So kill the bullshit shade. Do you have anything concrete to complain about, or is it just the usual bs. If it is, then tell us what you've done for the world.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

You're getting emotional. I just said I'm not sure it's entirely clean, but that if it had any violations, they were not things worth further investigating. Do I have to say it's the most wonderful thing since ice cream and every time I think about it I have to contain a massive erection to satisfy your demand for its veneration? I'm on your side here.

I hope Bill and Hillary rededicate themselves to it, and will be the first person to bitch if that asshat Sessions tries to further investigate it. The battle's over. Grace and decency demand that the attacks on the Clintons cease.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I know tons of Republicans who did what I did, or left the top line blank. I know a ton who flipped over to Hillary.

It's the height of arrogance to think the Rs voted lockstep. What you might better consider is how many middle class Ds switched over to Trump.

It's no secret the union heads were pledging allegiance to Hillary while the the actual members were voting for Trump. I heard as much from almost every union member I know from DC to NYC.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Damn straight I'm getting emotional. I'm an angry white guy these days. It seems to get a lot of sympathy.

The "I'm not sure it's entirely clean" is the kind of throwing shade that gets us trump. There's no there there, but you're going to throw shade anyways.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Hank, I'm going to let you deal with math class.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

There is no way to prove Hank's assertion. Ty admitted as much above. You cannot tease out a conclusion as to which population caused Trump to win. You can call Hank's position math all you like. I can call you Archduke Franz Ferninand from now on if I like. All you have is rhetoric.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Look, you've followed Hank and I on these boards. We occasionally mix it up. I tend not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The main difference between Hank's math and your posts is that his is convincing.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

conf to ggg- cool people don't post on the weekends....

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

See, Hank, you are good at recursive jokes.

I knew you could do it.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It's not arrogance, it's statistics. There were certainly Republicans who voted for Clinton -- just very few of them, proportionately.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

So even I were to detail the at least questionable conflicts of interest on the Clinton Foundation, you would not be persuaded, so I won't bother.

While I was half expecting the GOP to spontaneously combust post election, it has been most interesting to see the Dems response to defeat. If Trump had lost, we would have seen a chorus of joyous "I told you so!" from Never Trump, but the loss of all of those new racist voters would have destroyed the party. But Hillary blames it on Comey. Warren thinks the party didn't go big enough. GGG says she was too wonkish and that's why people don't like her. I may be unusual on this board because the entire time I have lived in the US, I have never lived east of the Mississippi or or west of the Rockies, but this is some special kind of being out of touch. (Ok, I actually lived a portion of my first year in Hank country, but I don't really count that, and it's still deep in flyover land.)

I know you all will argue that the House is stacked because it's gerrymandered, but what about losing the 7 competitive Senate races? Since Obama took office, the Dems have lost 60 seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate. In the states, it's been even worse. Per the WSJ, before 2010, 54.5% of state legislators were Dems, controlling 60 of the 99 state legislatures. Dems totally controlled 17 states. Now they control only 31 state chambers, losing almost a thousand seats since Obama took office and control half as many states. The number of states controlled by the GOP more than doubled.

I am fascinated that I have not seen a single possible thought that perhaps a large portion of American voters have rejected Democratic ideas as they have shifted farther to the left (and as I have seen here are unwilling to acknowledge that there has even been a shift to the left at all). That maybe they should focus less on identity politics and more on the things most people actually care about? Or a real discussion that they pretty much outright ignore almost half the country. That maybe doubling down on ideas voters rejected may not be the best path forward. That polling indicates that the party is far to the left of most Americans on the issue of abortion or that things like the Hamilton cast and the designer who won't dress Melania reinforce the presumptiousness that the Left knows better than everyone else.

I admit I did enjoy the agony of defeat stories about how Hillary didn't speak to her supporters on election night and sent out Podesta because she was in an uncontrolled rage. And that staffers had literally popped champagne on the plane that day. And that Bill had built his presidential library off of the center to leave room for hers. To think this might really be the end of the Clintonian grifting, until Chelsea runs for office.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

That's story makes sense as long as you ignore all of the numbers. Trump didn't win on a wave of angry turnout. He got the typical GOP vote numbers.

ETA: also, what does ignore mean? This group doesn't want the policy help we can offer. They don't want health insurance, education, job training & relocation assistance. They want to crack down on immigrants and brown people. That's not something "we" can or should offer.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

You're right that the majority of people don't care about the rights of women, POC, gay people and immigrants.

You're wrong that doing so is moving "left" and that this fact is anything but lamentable.

Hillary is the very definition of center (even slightly right) on fiscal, tax and just about every other type of policy. But the party is no longer willing to endorse oppression for political gain. The country just punished it for that. Everyone should be depressed.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

People that voted Stein, I've heard some say Hil is as bad because she voted for Iraq, but that is nonsense. No one who is that far left would vote for Trump. As to Johnson voters, I suppose it is possible to hypothesize a voter who would break for Trump rather than hil, but is that a thinking Johnson voter? Hil and a R congress seems like the best a libertarian would want, right? and a man who wants ethnic/religious registers probably not? but you are right, i cannot prove either- still if I'm mostly correct the Pa/Mi difference goes away.

But all that is beside the point. For whatever reason a shit ton voted for neither candidate. Why is the bigger story then, why Trump got sort of the same number of votes as Romney?

I know one third party voter, for certain. He voted that way because Hillary was going to win big. And that one person has an absolute right to his vote, not questioning that, but wondering if that one voter had believed the polls showing the race a toss-up, would em vote 3rd party? or how would em break?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

What's the single worst supposed conflict of interest, and how was it handled?

eta: I've said this before in a different way, but somehow it got completely lost that the Clinton Foundation raised money and mostly spent it on good stuff. Assuming that funds donated somehow enriched the Clintons makes only a little more sense than assuming that funds donated to other charitable causes benefited her.

Oddly, everyone seems to think that the election results vindicated their own strongly-held views, and that the rest of the party should listen to them going forward. As I've said, in an election this close, many people can correctly point to different things that might have made a material difference

I blame Obama.

I don't think Hillary is to the left of Obama.

You'll get a lot of agreement there.

And on some of this, too.

That said, one problem with your theory is that more people voted for Hillary. And if Democrats are to the left of most Americans on abortion, Republicans are well to the right.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

That's an assumption, not "numbers." Again, you've no idea which population of voters was most significant.

You just don't get it. These people don't want govt intervention. They want jobs. And stop with this stupid retraining and education fix. That's not going to work, nor is it realistic. These people want jobs that don't exist anymore. They're fucked. So they vote for the guy the dumbest of them think will ring back jobs, and the brightest of them think will blow up the global economy, forcing us to start manufacturing things domestically once more.

Hillary had nothing to offer these people but managed decline. Trump also had nothing to offer, except a lie, or, if he's serious about screwing up intl trade, a dystopian world where some jobs do indeed come back, but our collective standard of living goes to shit.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I thought I might vote for her in a pinch for a while, and there's no way to know how I'd have acted facing different projections, but if I had to guess, I'd have done what I did. As I noted earlier, I really had no choice.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

No. It's not. Trump did not get a big wave of turnout. Those are numbers. That undermines your story. We don't need to get into who stayed home to know that what you are selling is at least incomplete, perhaps even flat out wrong.

Of course they do ("keep government out of my Medicare"). They just want government intervention that they perceive as benefiting themselves and not "those people." How can you still be this clueless after the election we just went through?

This is part of the problem. You and they reject out of hand the only things we can do.

And they do work. They help those who actually want jobs get them. But you're talking about people who don't want jobs, they want the past. We can't do anything for them.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Prominent foreign interests, e.g. the royal family of Qatar, gave money to the CGI. CGI used it to pay for AIDS drugs that it gave away. Clinton family got reputational benefits for doing good. Hillary was nicer to Qatar than she otherwise would have been as SoS.

I mean, that's not super crazy, except that no one has been able to identify a single instance of such favoritism, despite unprecedented access to her emails.

And that story is far less direct corruption than a campaign finance system, in which elected official get money directly for their own benefit that gets spent on nothing at all useful.

But the incoming administration is about to make it look downright quaint with how much it diverts government money and the money of those seeking to do business with the government into it's own pockets.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

The discussion of the utility of retraining the chronically unemployed steel workers and coal miners is depressing. It simply isn't going to work. Perhaps in small slivers of the economy it might work for a short time. I think, or hope, that solar power may be one area where manufacturing and installing jobs may increase significantly.

For those of you who are insufficiently depressed about the outcome of the election, I offer last year's Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. I just finished it.

Combine:

(1) the bleak job prospects Ford projects in "Robots", which The Economist not too long ago described as "forced leisure"'

(2) the collapse of municipal finances and the concomitant collapse of municipal pensions (see this morning's news about the implosion of Dallas, which is just the tip of an iceberg with New Jersey and Illinois as dominoes), and the inability of those pensioners to support themselves,

(3) my fellow baby boomers who have saved nothing for their retirement, and those that were counting on pensions, are in for a shock,

(4) the drastic insolvency of the PBGC,

(5) the shrinking number of employed people who support an increasing number of social security beneficiaries, who will live much, much longer than their parents,

(6) the anger that will increase when Trump can't deliver on jobs, because nobody can,

And the result is as bleak a ten-to-twenty year economic picture as has existed in my front-edge-of-the-baby-boomer cohort lifetime. Drink up!

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Best book I've read in years.

Could be retitled, Why No One Should Read Adder (Or Anyone Else Still Married to the Assumptions of Conventional Economics)

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

1. You're not considering how many GOP voters Trump lost. That's a huge #. He made up for that by turning out Trumpkins like mad.

2. You're so fucking predicatable. When I wrote that last post, I thought, "Adder will cite the 'don't touch my Medicare' thing." Putting aside that was one dumb sign that created a meme, what of all the Trumpkins who are nowhere near retirement. What do they want?

3. If the best you can do for these people is nothing - and retraining and education are useless to 90% of these people - why shouldn't they take s chance on Trump?

4. Retraining works for a very small % of these people. Your solutions sound nice, but as you admit, they're not effective. They're just "the best [Democrats] can offer." Someone else promised these people a possible better deal. They took the chance. Logically, even the slightest possibility of what you seek is preferable to a scenario under which you have zero chance of getting it.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

You cannot provide jobs to people who don't want them. The only thing we can do for people who don't want them is income support, which Sebby tells us they don't want either.

They're aren't many human jobs in a chip fab. But installing perhaps.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

No, these are assumptions. Might be true, and we all know of an anecdote or two, but given that his support - in numbers and distribution - looks a lot like Romney's and McCain's, I'm skeptical that this effect was huge.

Definitely fits in the "not really knowable" category though.

Apparently they want to register Muslims, stop Muslim immigration, build a wall, adopt national stop and frisk and erect barriers to trade.

Perhaps they should. The rest of us shouldn't, and believe it or not, there are actually more of us than them.

No, they are the best anyone can offer.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It truly takes a big man to have the Flower apologize for him.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Are you actually crazy?

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/up...ower.html?_r=0

This is one of the biggest problems this country faces.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I wish anything you said was based on substance instead of what you feel is true.

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/03/the-...icy-proposals/

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I agree with all of this. Economically speaking, Republicans don't offer these voters anything. Democrats offer them weak sauce. After eight years of weak sauce, they're ready to try what's behind Door #2.

But the other part isn't economic. For people who are getting screwed economically, Republicans offer them traditional hierarchies, a chance to feel superior to blacks and Hispanics and immigrants, a chance to say "fuck you" to a whole lot of people. If the jobs aren't ever coming back, that's something, amiright?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

HAMLET

Madam, how like you this play?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

The lady protests too much, methinks.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Exactly. You'd want to see something like this.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Cite, please.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Remember when Sebby loved Bill Clinton and wished he could vote for him for a third term?

But, you know, there's something, uh, different, about Hillary....