Grunching a bit but keep seeing two mistakes that annoy me:

1. Replying to pocodonor/similar posters rather than simply skipping over their posts

2. Thinking that Trump is purposefully trying to seize power over the government. His advisers may be doing so and Republicans certainly like anything that consolidates their power and makes them harder to remove but Trump himself is just a simple idiot following his amygdala. His main goal is STILL simply to be liked and not have people criticize him and he pretty much takes any action that leads him in that direction. It may be the end result but it certainly doesn't seem purposeful.

Sincere apologies for #1. That is the correct play.

Poconder,

The real deficiency the Dems have compared to the Republicans is that there are a lot of poorly educated people in the country, especially poorly educated selfish white males.

Consider how much educated people favor democrats and then how white people generally have more education than black and Hispanic people and then do the math on how much uneducated white people love Trump.

The GOP knows this and wants to kill public education.

I've already mentioned that in my first post on this subject earlier today, and I acknowledge the effects. It reinforces my point: that Democrats have deeper problems than gerrymandering. And very specifically, I was responding to iron -- that in a very specific respect, gerrymandering which creates minority-majority districts does a very important, critical thing for black people. The left and Democrats should take that thing seriously even if we acknowledge majority-minority districts are a catch-22 for Democrats; their presence particularly in the south means that lots of Democratic voters are packed into districts to ensure minorities are a critical mass of voters in districts and therefore effectively ensure the election of minorities to legislative bodies. But they ultimately serve as a burden on Democratic electoral power on the whole. If we did away with that prohibition in the Voting Rights Act, and/or existed in some hypothetical world where districts were drawn up in a non-partisan way, where racial minorities aren't packed into districts -- that may very well end up making the Democrats a whiter, less inclusive, more segregated party. Such a hypothetical world means Democrats are going to be competing for southern and rural white sympathies -- consider the effects that would have on candidate recruitment and messaging across the party, and then later on priorities when/if Democrats were successful. Without being Socratic and coy: I think it's almost inevitable and not debatable this would make the Democrats far more racist, far more committed to flattering angry white sensibilities. Democrats have been able to ditch *some* of that reflex on the whole, particularly after the mid 1990s because so many of those voters are lost in hopelessly Republican districts. That wouldn't be the case if we changed the map around. That's not a trivial thing and we need to think critically about it.

This ain't fence jumping to say poconoder is correct that all Democrats need is messaging help; but Democrats have a problem here that's beyond simple fixes. I've made this point before, but the GOP has a very simple job to do on the whole -- keep taxes low and keep whites agitated and anxious. By the fact that Democrats have a bunch of competing virtues and priorities, we have these knotty problems and competing interests. There's no easy way for Democrats to make a bunch of electoral reforms that doesn't jeopardize the character of the party as one even half-heartedly committed to social and racial justice. Gerrymandering I think is on the whole pernicious but that prohibition in the Voting Rights Act to allow for majority-minority districts allows for a substantial number of black legislators in a country still overflowing with angry racists. That's important to me, and rolling it back and leaving everyone to play nice and hope for the best without statutory support may return back to the ante Voting Rights status quo where both parties elected leaders are largely made up of whites and black representation is hard to find. Modern America has proven the absolute durability of white supremacist sympathies; without majority-minority districts, I suspect the Democratic party could easily be overrun by a bunch of Tim Ryan clones running all over the south, the midwest, in rural districts, justified by Welp This is The Only Way to Win mentality. That's a hard outcome to stomach but I find it almost inevitable.

MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.




http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/30/medi...ugh/index.html

Its hard to believe someone so good at spotting fake news would think that people would believe a National Enquirer hit piece.

Well not quite. If the Dems do retake the WH, Senate, and the House, they could just add two more seats to the SCOTUS to negate Gorsuch. Not sure if they would actually do that, but I believe they could.

Calling her teenage kids? The ****?

And just a huge LOL at Kushner spending his time trying to get Joe to call and apologize to Donald.

The ****ing President using the ****ing National Enquirer as a tool of his ****ed up administration. What the **** is going on?!?!?!

Yeah, if there was some conspiracy wouldn't they just lie about the cause of death anyway?

This.

While this is technically true the structure of our elections puts urban areas at a disadvantage in representation.

You're an idiot.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they once break a yuge story about something that wound up being true? I feel like I heard that somewhere but I cannot remember what it was about. John Edwards' affair maybe?

John Edwards and Gary Hart affairs

Rush Limbaugh's Oxy addiction.

If there were all kinds of FAKE NEWS coming out of CNN, we have to stand in awe at the fact that millions of Trumpists looking for examples of it had to wait 5 months for them to issue ONE retraction of a story that targeted Anthony Scaramucci (Who? LOL) from Trump's circle.

If a mistake, which isn't even FAKE NEWS, were so damning against CNN's credibility, why did all the people citing it have to add extra lies and heavily edit video clips just to show how fake the news is?

The media's credibility tanked a bunch after Russia got involved in 15/16, but they're as solid as James Comey compared to Donald Trump and his entire FAKE administration. It looks like credibility will be rising after the fallout and escalation from yesterday's Mika tweets settles down.

wrong

wrong

wrong.

Sorry I wasn't more clear. I agree the Supreme Court seat was stolen. I don't agree the ruling on the travel ban represents some subverting of the Constitution.

Rosie O'Donnell was also outed by the NE iirc. Real hard hitting journalism.

Oh, they also paid a woman $150k for the rights to her story about an affair she had with Trump in 2006, then buried it.

"Hmm. I could either be president, or I could remain loyal to a known idiot. Wat do?" --thoughts of Lord Michael of Pence, ADWD

The story referenced there was published June 2nd, idk if they bumped it on their front page maybe (probably not?), seems like a sketchy accusation

One of the problems with this forum is that it bans contributing people for making vaguely racist or sexist comments yet let's ****ing poconoder run wild with his transparent bull**** trolling.

Yeah I see that in the thread, people are telling him that it's old. I assume this is the story Joe referenced this morning though so maybe this all happened in May?

Here comes the Trumpist defense line. "If Morning Joe is telling the truth, why did he wait so long to report a crime committed by the President?" Or "Is this really blackmail, or is it just Trump being Trump?" Awesome.

CNN did bring up a good point. What a fantastic reply to Huckabeast if when she told everybody that Trump is a fighter who hits back harder when attacked, someone said "For himself maybe, but not for the country. Why won't he ever hit Russia back?"

Other Trumpist defense lines:

"Trump is such an unvarnished truth teller he doesn't even know what blackmail is! He simply wants to MAGA and win, that's a great quality to have after so much losing"

"Trump is just delivering on his promise to drain the swamp by personally insulting a TV show host."

"I don't like everything Trump says and does but I love that he's a strong leader and says what he thinks about important issues like the plastic surgery of TV show hosts."

etc. etc. You have to give them credit because they often acknowledge Trump is an idiot or into petty insults but they are quick to point out that either Barack Obama was a complete and total failure because he wasn't so brash or whatever the ****, or that your pretend shared-consensus goal of draining the swamp starts with America's punditry and well, seemingly ends there.

This ties into the 1984 vs Idiotocracy conversation Dvaut and I had yesterday. This isn't the usual dystopian setup where the president uses the Ministry of Disinformation and state police to attack his foes, he's using angry tweets and The National Enquirer.

DERSH is available on Twitter to handwaive all this as predicted