You thought of one thing, there's like 5 more to go for his statement to be "pretty much correct" let alone "not idiotic"! Like rep said, LOL

Trump firing comey lead to Mueller investigation. I would just say that isn't nothing.

Somewhere along the line I'm sure Trump scammed Putin by promising things he did not know he could not deliver.

Well I was in a cluster of people saying it . I'm not ambitious enough to prove my point but you can search my posts itt if you want to prove me wrong.

I picked the most popular one. Just read the first 100 days thread and you'll see a blueprint of the days where people here got excited. Just as a bonus, that Comey firing was after the first 100 days. Now this Jr. thing. It'll go away as well. Nobody that's important enough to do anything cares. There really needs to be more (notable) protests against Trump and his garbage government. It seems like people itt and around the news sites that disapprove of Trump are resigned to one of these scandals actually hooking republicans and that's not going to happen. Even if it were to happen, we get Pence. Pence ****s up too? We get Ryan. What good is there in even removing this asshat, honestly? These people I speak of need a new strat that can get their kind out to vote to make a change in the government. All we have now is an echochamber of "herp derp Russia".

/ignorant ranting post

.isolated, you are not wrong. A political movement dedicated to simply scandalizing their opponents is no real movement at all. At best, it's a kludge -- a tool or strategy that is inelegant and clumsy and only accomplishes a very specific goal (e.g., obstruct or remove Trump). It's probably justifiable given the circumstances that he's a dangerous moron sitting on incredible military might but it's not a coherent, viable long-term political strategy. Republicans can get away with it far more as an overarching long term party strategy because in the end, they're happy enough with the status quo in most important areas, and so scandalize+obstruct is good enough for them most of the time.

That would take hours, surely if there were so many "NO WAY TRUMP WILL SURVIVE THIS" moments you can post a few of them

I already proved you wrong. You said "Comey's firing and the circus of contradicting statements afterward and his subsequent testimony but mostly his firing. Everyone here (including me) were saying that was it for this guy." I was here, and I didn't say that. Neither did a bunch of regulars. Not going to go back and check, but I doubt goofy, Fly, DVaut, Riverman, et al said anything like that either. Some people did, but I doubt it was most of the regs.

I think the herp derp Russia critique is way less valid here than almost any other place with Democratic leaning commenters. Only a few posters are really hung up about Russia and pin any hopes on it. Afaict, most appreciate that it's politically damaging but don't expect much else at least in the short term.

Why would anyone root for top US officials to get away with a bunch of serious crimes, and still want them to keep running the government, unless you're anti-US, brain dead/washed, or part of the corruption?

Still trying to figure out this frightening mess*.

*Not the mess Trump "inherited" from Obama, but the mess he himself created and is in charge of fixing as POTUS. It is LITERALLY his #1 job description to keep us safe from all threats, not all threats except Russian ones because those make him look bad. And if the President and the people around him are really bad for our national security, we're not doing too well are we?

As someone who reads this thread somewhat infrequently, it always has a feel of people venting a ton, kind of like a BBV thread in a way. No idea if someone said the specific "no way trump survives this" phrase, but the tone is definitely that type of hopeful complaining all the time, whether it be people praying for their "one time" about Mueller or other ways of expressing it.

Mueller isn't ancient history, he's an aggressive cancer feeding on the body Trump. Trump may survive, but proclaiming him in good health is at least as unealistic as claiming he's dead man walking. I'm not saying it's over, but Iran Contra is the best case and Nixon is not the worst.

Hope <> expectation.

Back when I first started paying attention to politics, I was basically a religious neocon. At the time I was working on my family's farm and would consequently spend hours on end in tractors listening to radio, so I consumed a lot of right wing talk radio like Limbaugh and Boortz. Imo, the thing that set Limbaugh apart from other less successful radio personalities is his skill for doing exactly what you are describing. Spinning these narratives of liberal decadence and incompetence from tidbits in the news and weaving them into a "coherent" narrative.

This is not going to be a popular post, but part of the problem is that progressives/the left are surprisingly short on actual ideas. There are some policies that leftists like, but they're generally the most knee-jerky responses possible to perceived problems:

*Rent is too high -> rent control
*Wages are too low -> minimum wage
*Banks are bad -> bring back Glass-Steagall
*Citizens United is bad -> inpeach Citizens United
*College is too expensive -> free college for everyone
*Healthcare is too expensive -> free healthcare for everyone
*No one likes taxes -> insane MMT nonsense about how you can print money for everything

A surprising number of these things are literally policies that were popular in the 1940s before people tried them and realized that they were bad. The rest are just crankery (MMT) or out-of-context pilferings from European social democracies. Obamacare itself was famously ripped off from Romney and one of the conservative think-tanks. The hot new political philosophy on the left is Marxism, a nineteenth-century economic philosophy designed to address the problems of the urban proletariat, a class that is virtually nonexistent in this country. The only "ideas" thread currently on the forum front page is a study group for Das Kapital! Leftist spirit animal Bernie Sanders is a living fossil from the 1970s who was living in a remote corner of the Senate for decades and has only recently been re-contacted by broader society.

It's obviously commonplace to **** all over neoliberal globalist new Clintonian triangulocentrist stab-in-the-back Democratic party elite politics, but it was at least a movement that had ideas about how to respond to the manifest inadequacy of socialism and the popular rejection of the high-tax, dirigiste economic policies of the 70s and earlier. It is amazing how much the current new wave of leftist thinking is basically to just...ignore... that history and go back to the old approach with no revisions. It's reverse Hegelianism where you pry apart the synthesis to get back to the good old-time antithesis. Not only is that unlikely to work electorally (remember, NGNCTSitBDPE politics was motivated by crushing defeats for Democrats in the 80s), it also forgets that socialism is terrible and that the high-tax dirigiste economic policies of the 70s were terrible too!

There is a huge hole on the progressive side of the spectrum for a political philosophy that focuses on economic security for all, government investment in infrastructure and public goods, racial justice, and skepticism of unregulated markets, but there seems to be remarkably little appetite for building up the ideological framework to do that in a smart and successful way. Consider for a moment just how stupid the idea of a nationwide $15/hour minimum wage is. There are entire states whose per capita income is less than a $15/hour minimum wage. The *only* reason to believe that a $15 national minimum wage wouldn't be an economic disaster is naive extrapolation of studies, themselves contested, of much smaller changes. And yet, that's a universally held tenet of the New New Left. Lots of hunger for a trillion infrastructure package, but no ideas about why ~every big infrastructure project for the last couple decades has been a massive boondoggle.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Marxist-inflected ideas seem to hold an irresistible lure for people on the left trying to come up with a "new" approach to politics that precludes serious study of social democratic models. I mean, obviously saying a policy is "just like Sweden" or Denmark or wherever is a common rhetorical flourish, but no one is seriously thinking about why corporate tax rates are significantly lower in Europe or why they all rely in part on huge regressive consumption taxes for revenue. It's way more popular to muse about the shortcomings of "late capitalism" and its possible replacements rather than to seriously consider how to embed capitalism within a social democratic framework. That is what needs to change.

Solid post.

Good post. Part of the reason that leftist policies are like half-century-old retreads is because they are in response and opposition to a party whose policy solutions are century-old "solutions."

Great post except it's wrong on all of the facts. The New Deal helped to alleviate unemployment and poverty greatly in this country before World War II started. Socialism does work, but it was dismantled in the 70s up to today and now we have neofeudalism. Imagine saying that a $15 minimum wage is a terrible idea but not taking time to criticize the current minimum wage policies which are just an absolute failure of our humanity. We are moving closer and closer to the wage-slavery and disastrous conditions of the turn of the 20th century. Where is our Upton Sinclair? Where is our Eugene V. Debs? We need heroes who are willing to take on and smash capitalism into a million pieces. Certainly not this Third Way crap. It works great for the elite and the upper liberal crust, not so great for everybody else. But then I guess a lot of people are just trying to carve out a Democratic party that doesn't involve workers at all. It looks like they are darn close to succeeding, and well this is the kind of result you get: Trump.



Socialism worked damn well for thousands of years before capitalism was even a thing. There are actually many more centuries of socialism working, and working quite well, in human history than there are of capitalism even existing.

Good post.

To be fair I think Warren and other smart dems are thinking hard about new policies, though Bernie not so much. Our tax system is a mess and few policy proposals reflect the fact that wealth has been able to capture many of the gains over the last 30 years, changes in credit, financialization and consolidation in many areas.

Policy entrepreneurship has definitely been lacking, including from Obama. At least the GOP is even worse wrt being locked in to outmoded ideas.

Please read this story from 2016 before responding to the poconoders plz

Also, I love the arrogance in the tone of the post. "Our philosophy has gotten us drummed out of power on the federal, state, and local levels and we are in danger of losing democracy completely to an orange-faced simple fascist, but dammit it's deeper and smarter than SOCIALISM. Oh, I can't describe what it is in any meaningful way, but it's smart and it wins I tell yas!"

I don't know that policy innovation really is lacking, though. A big theme that has emerged from Hillary's loss is that the policy proposals she put out were too wonkish and technocratic for the voting public.

My father once told me that everything before the "except" is horse****.

Also, if that picture doesn't illustrate for you the bankruptcy of socialist ideas about graphic design, you're a hopeless case.

Part of the problem is the lack of intellectual organs on the left. You have magazines and organizers and that's about it, but you don't have constellations of think tanks, etc. If a left leaning President came into power who would be there to have ready-to-implement plans on the go? There isn't one.

For centrist Democrats not to mention Republicans though there are a lot of think tanks spitting out policy papers that connect centrist Democrats ideas with actual governmental policy. That creates an air of seriousness which means their ideas are taken more seriously, plus it allows for more give and take on the realities on the ground vs policy ideas which makes their ideas seem more grounded.

People talked about Trumpism, but ignoring the laziness of Trump and assuming he actually meant what he said in some instances, there wasn't anyone behind the scenes who had a broad blueprint of what that meant which meant a lot of the policy was captured by normal Republican policy wonks even when Trump said he wanted to do the exact opposite.

Vox.com and The West Wing broke liberal politics. Made it about making themselves the smartest guy in the room instead of... you know... helping people and winning elections.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/...-the-west-wing

lol poconoderp

These aren't legal questions. Yes they all committed crimes.

@bobman: Interesting post. Agree about the $15/hr min wage across the board being unwise, even though I do support a higher federal min.

I have basically a high school knowledge of US history, so feel free to correct, but when you say there was a rejection of high tax policies, isn't that because Reagan et al promised dishonestly that low taxes would enrich the poor and middle class? Trickle down? And what makes you say that those left policies failed, other than Americans dick riding Reagan?