...

IANAL but I'm pretty sure random lawyers can't bring criminal charges against people.

Bobman,

You are holding left or advocacy in general to a bizarre standard. You expect picket signs to be white papers or something.

Whatever. That post was fine and interesting and contained good points, but it was the same post you make all the time only with more words. Don't expect pitchforks this time.

Spambot is actually kind of interesting.

I'm not armed to dispute this properly, but I think you have it backwards. There was an episode of vox's weeds a couple months ago talking about the asymmetry in intellectual institutions supporting policy on the left on the right. The impression it gave was that the democrats DID have a robust collection of institutes putting out white papers, academics publishing, advocacy groups spending money on policy research, etc etc etc but that much of this was largely absent on right. People do work on minimum wage and minimum income and all sorts of climate change and of course ACA had this like crazy abundance of external policy experts available.

"This critical analysis of early-2000s TV show The West Wing explains how leftist discourse became about being the smartest guy in the room forgot about helping people and winning elections." True, but not necessarily the way the author meant.

If it's just standard politics, why was there so much lying about this meeting?

To be fair, if you could time travel them accusations of witchcraft may be warranted.

lol

This wasn't actually true in the early days of the US though, right?

It doesn't mean we are stupid, but it does mean that people from 2217 probably shouldn't take our words or policy decisions as gospel since the world will have changed a lot between now and then.

lol

I feel like the most likely explanation for the actions of the broader GOP is

1: They are terrible and largely agree with Trump's awful policies.
2: They are afraid of getting destroyed in elections if they take action against the Russia connections.

I think "all of them are co-opted by Russia" is unlikely.

lol poconoderp

lol





The biggest problem with minimum wage policies in the US imo is the lack of indexing to inflation.

I would like to see it raised to ~$10/hr nationally and explicitly indexed to inflation so that it automatically adjusts at the beginning of each year.




Also, lol at spambot.

There's an important distinction between policies and ideas. I would identify the failure more as one of political entrepreneurship than policy entrepreneurship. What's needed is for some politicians to group together some policies (making sure they are good rather than bad--key point!) and then come up with a compelling narrative that explains why these policies fix some problems with America today. I'm a huge Yglesias fanboy, and one reason is that I think he does a good job of tying together a bunch of snoozefest wonky concerns (zoning, transit policy) into a story about why our cities are failing to act as engines of economic progress and opportunity.

I differentiated between "the left" and the the centrist Democrats who do have a roster of think tanks with them. I think the right doesn't have the same intellectual rigor when it comes to policy because the right is much more evangelical and Utopian in their thinking, just cut taxes and regulation and it solves itself. They do have people who interact with government policy, law, etc as it is now so they do get roundabout ideas like Health Savings Accounts, Education Savings Accounts, whatever that thing was with making students sign away their future income to investors etc and how to implement those things. Things like the Heritage Foundation, Cato etc are substantial actors in Washington and so is things like Center for American Progress, nothing really exists for the further left.

Hmmm...Francis Rooney (R) just referenced Daddy Trump's decisions FROM LAST YEAR about Jr's meeting and how Trump, being an outsider Rooney can sympathize with, didn't understand the optics of such a meeting at the time.

Is that an oops? Anybody know this GOP guy's background, and whether he would be in a position to have the knowledge he just let slip?

I'll post the segment when it's available later and let you guys decide on what I'm pretty sure I just saw. Poppy from CNN was asking about Trump's tweet today saying again that most everyone would take the meeting and it was just politics as usual. To me, it seemed as if Rooney was so focused on avoiding disagreement with today's statement, that he tried to use the rookie argument for Trump Sr at the time they all accepted the meeting. It didn't look like he realized what he said, though I'm sure he's kicking himself now.

Would be nice to know where Trump and company would draw the line if not with Russia. Like, if China had damaging info about Hillary do they accept the meeting? What about North Korea? How about ISIS?

Going back to your first post then, I think when you said the left was short of "actual" ideas it sounded like you meant policy ideas. Because then you listed a bunch of policy ideas that you think are bad.

If you mean instead that the left is short of ideas on how to present good policy ideas in a compelling way, and that rather than finding a good way to present the wonkish, nuanced, and probably reasonable ideas they end up trying to sell the simple, easy to describe, and probably unreasonable ideas, well I think that's true enough. But it's a different problem.

It does seem like it's pretty difficult to sell complicated policy solutions to the American electorate, doesn't it?

Someone said they'd take the meeting if it were with the devil himself, so no, there is no limit rhetorically.

Counterpoint:

The neoliberal belief that a simple idea is bad, that simplicity is a mark AGAINST instead of for a policy, might explain all those people who hate Obamacare but are about to lose their insurance.

The NHS doesn't have that problem.

Kneejerky simple solutions that are ACTUALLY SOLUTIONS sound like a damn good idea to me.

I haven't read the article, but there is an op-ed on Politico titled, "Don't compare Trump to Nixon. It's unfair to Nixon."

Republican policy would come out even worse under this type of scrutiny. The left has the relative advantage in ideas.

Absolutely yes to the first two.

I'd never seen this before. deeply disturbing

Lying is standard politics

Without trying to speak for everybody else, I reply to poco and other potential Russians mostly for the lurkers who may be influenced by rational arguments.

The point is that they're not here to be influenced, they're here to do the influencing, you're wasting column space on them

Especially when McConnell and Ryan immediately brand any proposal that doesn't involve regressive tax cuts and corporate whoring as socialism.

i'm still confused why mcconnell stripped tax cuts from healthcare bill....is the plan that it frees up deficiet space for a larger sounding victory when they do taxes vs getting half the victory snuck into a healthcare bill and getting no credit for it then?

The Weeds kind of covered this but initially the bill looked like it was created by someone who just wanted tax cuts and less spending and now after the conservative policy wonks have had time to work on policy makers it's a mix of people who still want spending cuts with people who actually have a conservative vision for what healthcare should look like, but for that vision to happen it requires money. It's still a bit of a mix of both.