info graphic from nytimes

Your pony is a day late and dollar short usually.

My roommate got the Anarchy! zine, which without fail had one pro-NAMBLA article per edition.

Wildcat means a strike that violates a no strike clause. That's an issue for the union officers to worry about, as they can be jailed in contempt if they don't attempt to follow a court ordered back to work.

That is of zero concern to anyone else. I can advocate for a wildcat all day any day. So can the politicians. Politicians who want to help the left, would be doing just that. Politicians who don't want to "open that can of worms" are helping the Right. Just that simple.

Since the officers of the flight attendant union is calling for a strike, we can safely assume that such a strike would be legal. In general a safety related strike is always legal.

qatar: "oh it was THAT jared kushner? we had no idea?!! we were just paying upfront on a 99 yr lease of a building that owes more than 3x its value in loans.. nothing to see here, definitely not some kind of bribe.."

still faster than yours, apparently

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1095416500754640896

lol he'll study fox news for about 8 hours today then come to a conclusion

almost every time i see kellyanne conway i end up googling "crypt keeper puns" but none of them really translate to politics unfortunately

the back row looks like Maya Rudolph, the Cryptkeeper and a war-mongering walrus.

Isn't the entire point of a strike is that it's being performed in such large numbers that it's just not feasible to take action against them? I know that it usually refers to firing them, but wouldn't arresting them be as unrealistic? Are there resources to arrest thousands of people across the country?

At this point I don't know how to feel about what the Dems gave up. On the one hand, they gave them 55 miles of wall and got nothing in return. On the other, if he rejects the deal and shuts down the government again on a temper tantrum, they baited him into an even bigger unforced error that can give them even more leverage moving forward...



I guess you could argue that the Dems "get" to avoid another shutdown, but in reality that is best defined as "getting" to look like the responsible adults in the room. The problem is, this can easily blow up in their faces in a few ways. Like, "Hey, look, it's okay if we give this buffoon another term because the Democrats will be responsible enough to keep the country running and he'll cut our taxes and stuff." It could also blow up by pissing off some of their base and depressing turnout.

But I struggle to see the long game here. The Democrats strategy was to insist that Trump end the shutdown before they discuss any immigration deals or wall funding. Trump ends the shutdown, they give him a little something and get nothing. If he takes it, they ultimately take a small loss and he takes a small win, but still has egg on his face from the shutdown. If he shuts it down again, they absolutely have to take the same position (no negotiations during a shutdown). So he caves and ends the shutdown, maybe in a month and a half or two months this time, and then what? Why do I have any reason to believe that they will do any better in THAT round of negotiations than in THIS round? Like, did they even push for the Dreamers or TPS or anything that the Republicans don't want? There is no give and take here, just the GOP negotiating with the Dems over how much it gets to take - a little or a lot.

Ultimately, if the point of each round of negotiations is to avoid the next shutdown, Democrats are still just negotiating against a hostage taker...

If they approved 55 miles of fence instead of 2000 miles of wall I think what they get is a win. Especially if he signs it despite getting roasted by his media friends.

Whatever deal was made will be killed tonight by Hannitaids. This is a fact.

Well, we currently have ~600 miles of wall. He wants ~1000 more miles of wall. So what they're giving him is 655 miles instead of 600 miles.

Or to put it another way, 55 new miles instead of 0 new miles.

Or, to put it yet another way:

Trump gets: 55 miles of wall
Dems get: ????

What is the win? That he only got part of what he wanted and not all of it, while they got nothing? That's an odd definition of a win.

Wholesale arrests are unlikely but wholesale firings have actually happened (ATC under Reagan) so that would be the chief concern.

Dems keep the lights on for a while and made President McDeals look like a clown. That’s worth a little additional fencing. If they refuse the deal then this time they look like the ones who are shutting down the govt.

If I were trump rn I'd just start claiming that the wall is being paid for and built by Mexico and if anyone tries to fact check me I call them fake news enemy of the people

Under the circumstances I doubt any airline would take the publicity risk of a mass firing.

You can't always get what you want.

Just photoshop the great wall of China onto a satellite photo of the US-mexico border and say it's already built

The win is that Trump doesn't get what he wanted, and in order to show that he did you have to start explaining details that deplorables don't want to listen to. "I wanted a wall from see to shiny see and fought hard for it and the Dems gave me 5% of it, I'm such a great negotiator!" is a loss.

Is it 55 miles of wall or 55 miles of Obama-fence?

You can't just pick up flight crews and flight attendants on short notice. I wouldn't be surprised if it would take longer to replace fired flight crews than to resolve a strike.

I think the win here is that he gets such a pathetically small part of what he wanted (and Hannity has already said it's a terrible deal) that if he accepts it, he could lose base support. It will take a magnificent amount of spin to make it seem like a win, especially if he doesn't have the support of Hannity, Coulter, et. al. And just as Trump put himself in a lose/lose by being blamed for the shutdown and having his polls take a hit, but then getting flamed for being weak when he ended the shutdown, he is in a similar lose/lose here.

This of course will only matter if the Dems are able to get the message out well based on what happens. Yes, the Dems should've asked for something but I JUST had this thought:

The Dems want to make an offer to Trump that is super pathetic but appears as if they're negotiating in good faith. They want there to at least be a CHANCE that he accepts it. They have 2 options:

1. Give him the crap offer but not ask for anything (the current offer)

2. Give him the crap offer and ask for something small, such as the temporary DACA protections that he'd offered in his pathetic offer during the shutdown.

#1 is better for 2 reasons. First off, there is a ZERO percent chance he takes offer #2, because even his offer during the shutdown when he offered this for much MORE money for the wall, he was raked across the coals by the far right. So he would never take an offer where he's giving up the same thing, but getting so much less.

Other reason: The Dems had turned down his offer calling it a non starter. It would be a bad look if they then made an offer asking for the same thing (even if extended DACA protections might be worth giving him 55 miles).

Any way you slice it, even if this seems like a small loss for Dems, it's a bigger loss for Trump. Shutdown, accepting a bad deal, or national emergency, every one of his options here is unpopular.

It would've actually been so baller if Pelosi had been like, "I'd like to announce that i'm actually going back on my word when I said not one single dollar for the wall. I've changed my mind. We are offering exactly that, one dollar for the wall. Our treat. And we don't even want anything in return." And then pull out a single and flick it off her palm making-it-rain style.

The best part about this deal is that the amount of mo es they're offering ($1.6 B?) while seemingly substantial, is less than he could've had before the shutdown, another great talking point that is already being addressed.

Trump is the President, which unfortunately comes with a lot of unchecked power if he's the people around him are smart enough to figure out how to use it. The Democrats hold one house of one branch of government. I don't think you can measure wins and losses as if they're on a level playing field.

The goal of the next 2 years has to be not necessarily racking up big wins, but minimizing the damage he does, while not completely alienating centrist voters who won't let the Democrats off blame-free for a game-theory-optimal strategy of obstructionism. Getting huge concessions from him for nothing was never really on the table despite all the fantasizing here; just look at how his base is reacting to a deal where he gives up nothing. The best case scenario is to give him a token win, really nothing more than an extension of Obama border policies, just enough to allow him to declare victory and weasel out of the corner he backed himself into, while still making him look super weak to anyone who's really paying attention and ensuring that the big beautiful wall he campaigned on never gets built. Also, if he rejects this deal now, it just makes it even clearer to even the most casual observer that the resulting shutdown is 100% on him, where if there was no compromise deal offered at all it becomes more ambiguous.