Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Thia Halmades]

Something something history, something something repeat it:

 

 

[Starlord]

Trump's Covid announcement is his most-liked Tweet ever

[archer]

20 minutes ago, Starlord said:

Trump's Covid announcement is his most-liked Tweet ever

 

Everyone was paying attention, waiting 18 hours, for his next tweet. They would have "liked" anything he said.

 

I thought it was very interesting that the tweet was a pre-recorded video rather than a live video or a spontaneous tweet.

 

That suggests to me that Trump either isn't up to his normal twitter activity or that someone has finally convinced him to put away his phone.

 

Considering they just took Trump to the hospital, I'd suspect at this point that he isn't feeling well enough to tweet.

[Old Man]

1 hour ago, archer said:

Considering they just took Trump to the hospital, I'd suspect at this point that he isn't feeling well enough to tweet.

 

Just a reminder that Trump paid $750 for his Walter Reed medevac and state of the art covid treatments.  Who is paying for the rest, reader?

[wcw43921]

Suppose The Vice President Became Ill?

[Starlord]

4 hours ago, wcw43921 said:

Suppose The Vice President Became Ill?

 

It's a good question, we should ask Putin.

[Cygnia]

 

[DShomshak]

18 hours ago, Old Man said:

Is he considered an essential worker?

 

This reminds me of the ambiguity in the phrase, "essential worker." The work of the head of government is essential -- but in a constitutional and democratic republic the person who fills that role is a temp worker, meant to be replaced every few years. As such, quite expendable.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

In his column for yesterday's New York Times, economist Paul Krugman said that Moody's Analytics and Goldman sachs -- not exactly a crew of flaming socialists, he notes -- believe that Joe Biden's economic plans, far from destroying the economu as Trump claims, would in fact boost the economy much more and better than anything Trump or Republicans propose. So I looked it up and found a page of similar stories. Here's the one from Forbes -- also not exactly a liberal rag.

 

• Biden, Democratic Victories Would Be Best Outcome For The ...

  www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/09/25/...

  A victory for Joe Biden over Donald Trump and a Democratic ... according to a recent analysis of both candidates’ economic proposals by Moody’s Analytics. ... with the unemployment rate ...

   

  But as Krugman points out, this is in no way surprising to students of economic history. Demoncratic administrations and policies rather consistently create greater growth and higher employment than Republican ones, while Republican tax cuts consistently fail to deliver the promised benefits. (/At least to the American people at large.)

   

  Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Also in the Oct 2 NYTimes, center-right columnist David Brooks has some things to say about the debate and what it showed about Donald Trump -- nothing that wasn't obvious to anyone who paid attention before, but maybe this time it'll penetrate to some people who were blind to it before.

 

• Opinion | At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist - The New York ...

  www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opinion/trump-ethics...

  But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty,...

  "Duroing Tuesday night's debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump's vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible. Debate watchers were confronted with a core truth: What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he'll do to America in a second term."

  "With his conduct, Trump assaults this core conservative instinct. He is separating the nationalists from some temperamental conservatives. The nationalists relish Trump's savagery. Some everyday conservatives -- homeowners, parents, shopkeepers -- feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot." (Here Brooks cites polling that some of the groups that preferred Trump in 2016 are slipping away.)

  "Some Republicans see Trump's immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is a widening gyre that threatens the stability of civic life."

   

  Dean Shomshak

[unclevlad]

Said it before...I believe Trump is a narcissist.  Lead paragraph from MayoClinic.com:

 

Quote

Narcissistic personality disorder — one of several types of personality disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism.

 

So Mr. Brooks' immoralist label is rather effect, not cause.

 

One thing I want to see is whether the Republican leadership starts retreating from Trump.  They may not, before the election anyway, because the timeline is so short at this point.

[Old Man]

With three GOP senators having tested positive now, the ramming through of Trump’s third SCOTUS pick may be delayed. (Ironically, the event where they announced her as the nominee might be where they all got infected.)

[archer]

3 hours ago, Old Man said:

With three GOP senators having tested positive now, the ramming through of Trump’s third SCOTUS pick may be delayed. (Ironically, the event where they announced her as the nominee might be where they all got infected.)

 

To expand upon that:

 

At least two of those three GOP senators are on the Judiciary Committee. Without them, the committee is split 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans so they can't pass a nominee out to be discussed or voted upon by the Senate at large if they vote along party lines.

 

Senate rules do not allow the Judiciary committee to do its work remotely. The Senators have to show up for at least the votes.

 

So the two infected Senators would either have to break quarantine and risk exposing everyone else in the Capitol complex or they have to put off the Judiciary committee vote for at a minimum of two weeks.

 

If those two Senators come back in two weeks to attend a Judiciary Committee vote, that would leave the Senate at large barely two weeks before the election to discuss the vote. And that at a time when a third of the Senators really need to be back home campaigning rather than be in Washington.

 

So the discussion would chew up all the remaining time before the election, unless the Republicans want to abandon any pretense that they are doing their jobs and just ram through a vote without debate.

[Lawnmower Boy]

3 hours ago, Old Man said:

With three GOP senators having tested positive now, the ramming through of Trump’s third SCOTUS pick may be delayed. (Ironically, the event where they announced her as the nominee might be where they all got infected.)

Comity and the norms of the Senate demand that their Democratic colleagues absent themselves to balance the effects of illness. 

[Iuz the Evil]

3 minutes ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

Comity and the norms of the Senate demand that their Democratic colleagues absent themselves to balance the effects of illness. 

🤣 Fantastic

[Old Man]

3 minutes ago, archer said:

 

So the discussion would chew up all the remaining time before the election, unless the Republicans want to abandon any pretense that they are doing their jobs 

Pretty sure we’re already past that point. 

[archer]

47 minutes ago, Old Man said:

Pretty sure we’re already past that point. 

 

Well, it was at least theoretically possible that the Republicans could have done their jobs before this. The average Supreme Court nomination runs around 75 days. The shortest was something like 43, and Ginsberg died about that number of days before the election (I don't have the exact numbers at hand and I just woke up, so not as precise as I'd like).

 

Not all of those days, even in the shortest one, was completely consumed with committee hearings about the nominee and floor debates about the nomination.

 

So before this covid outbreak on the Judiciary Committee, it had been had been at least possible that the nominee could have gotten a full and complete hearing in the Judiciary Committee followed by a robust debate on the floor of the Senate which had just as many hours in each place as you'd expect from a normal nomination. 

 

edit:

 

Just heard that the Senate has suspended activity until October 19 but that the Judiciary Committee will continue its nomination hearings. Politico is stating that Senate rules have been changed to allow the committee to have the hearings remotely. (The story doesn't mention whether the committee vote itself can be held remotely if that becomes necessary.)

 

The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin four days of hearings for Barrett on Oct. 12, with Graham planning to hold a committee vote on Oct. 22.

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/03/ron-johnson-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-425829

[Ternaugh]

I just received a mailer from the Trump campaign telling me that he's counting on me, which is odd, since I changed my party affiliation to Independent after his 2016 win, because I was fed up with the Republican Party.

[Pariah]

5 hours ago, Old Man said:

With three GOP senators having tested positive now, the ramming through of Trump’s third SCOTUS pick may be delayed. (Ironically, the event where they announced her as the nominee might be where they all got infected.)

 

One man's irony is another man's Karma, I suppose.

[Old Man]

#RoseGardenMassacre

 

[unclevlad]

2 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

I just received a mailer from the Trump campaign telling me that he's counting on me, which is odd, since I changed my party affiliation to Independent after his 2016 win, because I was fed up with the Republican Party.

 

Names never get struck from lists.
I got TONS of calls from Republicans...from the local Party here, and from some candidates...to Make Sure I Voted in 2016.  My mother registered Republican...I darn sure never did.  I might have, at some point, somehow gotten onto some Republican lists...it's always possible.  But darn if I can remember when or how.  

[unclevlad]

Stories about the whole timeline here, of diagnosis, start of treatment, etc....sound a whole lot like White House Revisionism...change the story to shape the narrative, even if it's intentionally misleading.

 

On CNN, Samantha Vinograd raised an interesting point.  It's reported that Hope Hicks was quarantined on Air Force One on Wednesday.  Vinograd points out that it's completely implausible that this wasn't sent up the chain, as Hicks worked directly with Trump.  Same after the positive test.

It's also being reported that Trump knew about the positive result for Hicks, but STILL attended a fund raiser in New Jersey.  No mask of course.

 

Yes, this is Donald Trump.

 

 

[archer]

2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

Names never get struck from lists.
I got TONS of calls from Republicans...from the local Party here, and from some candidates...to Make Sure I Voted in 2016.  My mother registered Republican...I darn sure never did.  I might have, at some point, somehow gotten onto some Republican lists...it's always possible.  But darn if I can remember when or how.  

 

I sign up for emails from every campaign because I used to do political commentary (many times they send out messages to followers which they won't verbalize in public). But I'll admit that the Republican party under Trump has been more dense than any I've ever seen.

 

They called me to ask if I'd be willing to work from my own home for a Trump phone bank. I told the person, "Sure I will. I'd be willing to do almost anything to defeat Trump. What do I need to do to get started and get access to those phone numbers?"

 

This was like the fifth time that they'd contacted me to ask me to work for the campaign in some fashion but apparently nothing I'd said up to that point had gotten through to them.

 

Oddly enough, I haven't gotten a phone call from them since. Plenty of mail but no phone calls.

[archer]

I hope Chris Christie pulls through. I hear he was in the running to be cast as Bouncing Boy in DC's Legion of Superheroes movie.

[unclevlad]

1 hour ago, archer said:

But I'll admit that the Republican party under Trump has been more dense than any I've ever seen.

Rumor has it that astrophysicists are hotly debating if Trump’s skull will collapse to a neutron star;  it’s clearly a white dwarf.