1. Not clear Russia is the reason for Trump's deep unpopularity moreso than say AHCA, unhinged tweeting and conspiracy mongering, inability to effectively govern, or various personal baggage he brought from the campaign (e.g., grab her by the pussy, insulting the Khan family, etc.)
2. Not clear how you effectively tie Russia to the rest of the GOP. Instead messaging that portrays Trump's policies like defunding Meals on Wheels and turning ObamaCare repeal into a huge tax cut for rich people as symptomatic and emblematic of the GOP does so many good things for the left and the Democratic Party. Russia is pretty squarely aimed at discrediting Trump and leaves the rest of the GOP mostly unscathed. In fact rest assured if Russia does bring down Trump, not only will the media anoint true guards of the oligarchy like Cotton and Paul Ryan as reasonable centrists, they will portray John McCain and Lindsey Graham and probably Reince ****ing Priebus and Mike Pence as hero saviors of the Republic and all that ****. Count on that.

Taking down Trump is a priority so of course I root for success but I strongly recommend Democrats and the left think bigger.

But Mom, he hit me first!

Your whining about Fly aside, it's true Democrats and the left should pay more attention to local offices and that's important.

Yeah, even if I think Team "Don't Bother With Russia, Talk About Helping People" has a point, the status quo is working. We got an unexpected victory on health care, and Trump has never been less popular. Keep on keepin' on.

Exactly.

Although this is the most critical investigation in American history, nothing concrete will come until at earliest mid 2018. Activists need to focus on the here and now to minimize the damage Trump can do.

Sent from my LG-K430 using Tapatalk

Like Dvaut, I assumed that HRC had a better shot to beat Trump than Bernie. And as DVaut says, we'll never know whether Bernie would have defeated Trump, though I suspect the answer is no.

I voted for HRC in large part because I thought she was more prepared, and better suited by disposition, to do the actual job of being president than Bernie was.

As Trump is showing, being the president is a really hard job. It is chock full of what I would call execution risk -- that is, the risk that you will do a suboptimal job of promoting your policy objectives, either because of incompetence at pulling the levers of government bureaucracy or because of poor prioritization (specifically, prioritizing the impossible over the achievable).

I thought that there was far less execution risk with HRC than with Bernie, and I still believe that. I also worried about whether Bernie would focus myopically on domestic issues to the near exclusion of foreign policy.

Disagree with Dvaut on the "political capital" of the Russia issue. I think I posted about this before, but the fact that it's an incoherent narrative doesn't necessarily mean it's not politically useful.

Political capital isn't a finite resource. Nor does the Russia story need to influence anyone outside of the Democratic base to be useful. The last eight years pretty much demonstrate this. The fact that the Obama "scandals" didn't stick in the broader political narrative doesn't mean that they weren't successful.

It's definitely true that Democrats will not succeed without an affirmative vision for America. But that's not to say that churning questionable outrage is harmful -- unfortunately, it is probably a winning approach.

That's the level at which it has become in Washington.

This is a red herring, and your link does not support the idea that it was okay to obstruct Garland or that there was precedence for it.

The link simply discusses the history of confirmation hearings, and that modern-style hearings don't go back hundreds of years, but rather for 62 years. It does not show any prior nominee being blocked the way Garland was, so your post is not a good rebuttal.

Maybe, but I wasn't making a claim Bernie would have beat Trump (I don't know that he would have).

The point is that the left ascendancy is dependent on making the arguments Bernie was making; doing it over the long-term and doing it with stridency. I agree 2016 was premature to assume great success but Donald Trump probably couldn't have been President in 2000 either. His success rests on the back of 50 years of the left ceding the working class -- wide swaths of the electorate --- and the space being filled with RWNJ entertainers and shock jocks and pundits.

No time like the present to correct those mistakes. Because the left counting on an upper middle class revival of centrists and the graduate degree class feels extremely tenuous and subject to the centrists pulling the ole Charlie Brown and re-engaging with the Paul Ryan crowd once Trump is sidelined.

There's distributed guilt. The left failed too. You are correct. But partly because we counted on the New Left and a coalition with centrists as a response to growing right-wing populism of the 1980s and 1990s to produce 2nd best compromises (tax cuts and deregulation for you, remaining shreds of dignity for poorer people, reasonable foreign policy and statutory legal protections for minorities for us). When push came to shove, however, the New Left and the centrists were reflexively defensive of capitalist interests in the end: your reference to Erik Prince as a murderous mercenaries was apt and proves the point. Blackwater had bipartisan consensus! So did the Iraq War. Erik Prince is a respected member of the elite. Mull that over. Is that also the left's fault? Well, maybe, for tolerating a coalition that made firms like BlackwaterXeAcademi or whatever part of the acceptable businesses our government contracts. But it ain't a bunch of Bernie Sanders voters rooting on Middle East adventuring. It ain't leftists who hand them government contracts. It ain't former Bernie Sanders staffers who sit on the boards of these mercenary murder squad companies.

They aren't even really the chosen firms of RWNJ. Go check out the RWNJ literature on InfoWars. They're just as paranoid about Erik Prince as the left. Who the **** is REALLY providing the institutional backing for murder squads for hire? Incredibly, it's not America's Worst People. It's the respectable centrist elites!

I agree the left voters failed in a lot of ways but the current situation is the result of a coalition with completely amoral political operators -- largely centrists and the New Left -- who ultimately served themselves and accumulating capital stores in the end. Allowed to their own devices, it's probably the true the left would have been less electorally successful than we would would have without the 1980s to Obama era center-left coalition. But at what cost? We have precious little to show for the coalition -- very few lasting, durable achievements -- and a complete chasm in our ability to talk to voters about literally anything. Our inability to talk to voters about Trump/Putin enrichment grift schemes is proof. Lots of voters think this is how the ideal formulation of government works! Isn't Trump wheeling and dealing with foreign autocrats how the business world operates? We need government to run like a great business, just like Trump runs his business empire, that's success!

I'm not suggesting you're wholly to blame but you've proven bad coalition partners: unable to keep the RWNJ wolves at bay and when their worst impulses manifested over the preceding decades and we pointed it out, you largely told us to shutup and play nice. We largely did, the wolves are now feasting on our carcasses. I think it's time to say the utility of this deal has run its course and I do sincerely believe it's the center that didn't deliver; you were supposed to provide the capital and elite opinions and objective-arbiter backing that kept the fascist right as anathema to our polity. Instead their creeping influence found favor. The right wing parties had all the votes and consensus for enrichment schemes and the centrists and New Left played along until it was too late.

Why is Erik Prince a guy we do business with? Why is the President favorably citing ****ing Fox and Friends as a source of information for mass public consumption? Why are miserable, awful wretched people like Roger Ailes the kind of people with vast amounts of influence over the political system? Did the left empower and flatter them, or was that the center and the New Left? I don't think an honest examination can lay the blame at our feet. Dick Cheney used to have a weekly call-in show with Rush Limbaugh. Where the **** were you? I assume sneering at Media Matters for hysterically raising the alarm about how bat**** that is, that public officials of the highest rank would go on his show. Don't look at me why Rush Limbaugh is now the reasonable center, that him and Mark Levin and Hannity and a bunch of celebrities who maxed out at GED level education and peddle in racist claptrap for angry idiots are now the voices with the widest reach among the electorate. That wasn't me. Wasn't us. What built to that? We were the Fairness Doctrine side. You were the lol silly liberals, the market has this one under control side. It's minor and a microcosm of the larger effects but proves the point. I'm not suggesting we bring the Fairness Doctrine back but we warned you. A lot of this was predictable and predicted and our coalition partners ultimately always stood guard for capitalist interests even if they were ultimately ruinous for the values we shared together.

The leftists largely did much of this to ourselves but the centrists provide weak coalition partners. I agree entirely the origins of the compromises were the failure of the left but our present situation is due to the centrists being unable to maintain their end of the deal.

How quickly how quickly we forget our own history:

McConnell throws down the gauntlet: No Scalia replacement under Obama
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...ination-219248

wow you're super triggered this morning aren't you, you're almost never this high-volume

how dare we talk bad about big daddy

Rococo, I'm not saying you had to vote for Bernie. I'm just saying there were several people who actually did vote for Bernie (maybe some who now would have) who either said nothing during the primaries or were hostile. I'm not saying they had to be in love with Lestat either, but joining in on the lols with dessin, bobman, campfirewest, seattlelou et al wasn't necessary and a word or two about how being a New Dealer isn't in and of itself insanity, repeating Bernie's positions didn't mean HRC was sincere, campaigning on wonkiness isn't necessarily astute, a million years in congress isn't exactly the description of a wildman who has no idea what government does etc, might have been comforting and might even have swayed a vote or three.

Whatever. I'm comforted enough that dvault sort of acknowledges this. What we need going forward is solidarity, er sorry, unity.

Hi.

(not really populism, per se, but I definitely think progressives had the right idea and should be given a chance to take control of the Democratic Party for awhile)

DVaut, not gonna quote that post, but I think the coalition concept you've mentioned a couple times is profoundly misleading. Obviously we don't have a Westminster-style system where a voter can pick the Lib Dem guy or the Labour guy. The strategic decisions that voters make in that kind of system are not present in the U.S. Instead, the process works something like this:

Step 1: Vote for the candidate in the primary that maximizes electability and policy fit.
Step 2: Vote for your party's candidate in the general.
Step 3: All the people who got elected meet in back rooms and pass some policies that they think will get them re-elected.

Step 1 and Step 2 are the only ones where voters participate, and they don't present many strategic alternatives. There's a judgment call over who to vote for in the primary if you love one guy but have doubts about his or her electability. But otherwise, it's all obvious. While Step 3 is happening, voters can call their legislators to register the salience of a particular issue and hope that it changes how the legislator calculates his best move to get reelected, but that's it. Legislators just do what is best for them.

That's what makes things happen. All this other stuff about centrism vs leftism, triangulation, the New Democrats, even the mercenary warlords, they're all epiphenomena that shake out from Steps 1 through 3. If you don't like it, you need to get the electorate to nominate and elect different people. Or change the entire political architecture of the country. Complaining that legislators tend to enact compromise bills when you need 60 votes to pass something through the Senate is misguided. The rules enforce that outcome.

WSJ reporting that they're thinking about extreme vetting everybody from every country coming here--ie search through phones, get passwords to fb/twitter and the like to search through your posts and ask their views on trump from every country upon entry. If you say no, you don't go.

gg tourism industry. gg whatever was left of liberty

Can't wait for HastenDan to get in here and explain how great Assad's gassing of children was for Syria. His girl Tulsi Gabbard can't wait to back him up in that.

the only extent we really need russia to be useful is to fire up the base and make dems feel like they have a serious obligation to GET THE **** OUT AND VOTE against this treasonous republican regime in midterm and local elections, and hammering this issue nonstop achieves that i think. for all that is said about the dem party being a broad and diverse coalition of different types of people, and "woe is us for not building a cohesive narrative that everybody can get behind", i think russia is a pretty ****ing unifying issue that would actually motivate people on a large scale to do more to try and take some power back from these pieces of ****. im either not entirely understanding, or just disagreeing with the idea that "centrist" or "moderate" dem voters have any incentive not to see this russia investigation play out openly and rigorously. but i strongly believe that this is a good way to stoke the fire of the resistance and drive dem turnout in midterms, and i have yet to see any convincing case attempted to the contrary.

separately, i think dvaut is correct in that we need to shape a separate and better narrative that encapsulates the rest of the GOP as being just as morally barren as trump, vis a vis their stated policy positions of wrecking the environment, destroying public education and healthcare, taking your privacy away and effectively stealing money from average americans to fund ridiculous tax cuts for richers...because lets say trump and his team get ensnared and imprisoned at the end of this treason investigation, i'm cynical and practical enough to agree that the media will likely anoint paul ryan/lindsey graham/john mccain as the new heros of the republic, and the GOP brand will come off less damaged than it should be, and that's a huge problem.

so like most things in life, we have a needle to thread and a balancing act here.

also, ive been looking for articles on right wing agitprop sites about the internet privacy repeal, and while they are predictably low on content/reporting about it, it appears that there are no comment threads on either of these links-

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...privacy-rules/

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...acy-rules.html

seems like these clowns are too shook to even give a platform for dissention amongst their ranks. this should definitely serve to drive down his approval ratings even further, if adequately hammered home in the news and social media

Sure, but let's be grownups here. Why didn't Obama get to replace Scalia with Garland? It' wasn't because of any procedural issue or whatever Republicans want to say it was. Let's be honest, they were scared that a more liberal judge would tilt the Court more liberal and they controlled the Senate so they stalled hoping for a long shot that a Republican would win. And a Republican won, and now they want to install a more conservative judge. Democrats do not.

The take away from this is the "we've never filibustered a Supreme Court nominee" or "no Supreme Court Justice nominees during election years" are just ploys. They're not what's really going on.

What's really going on is the Supreme Court isn't some neutral arbitrator and who sits on it isn't just a matter of qualifications. It's a political entity and who sits on it determines the slant of American law for years.

The meta issue is that we treat the law as some kind of moral arbitrator, a kind of playground where everyone knows the rules, and if followed then the "process" is deemed "fair". But here the curtain gets pulled back and we realize that the "process" is really made up of who has the power. A more liberal court means workers get more power "fairly" while a more Republican court means companies gain more relative power "fairly".

It wasn't just appointments. The GOP filibustered 500 times during Obama's terms.

Chomsky: With U.S. History of Overthrowing Govts, Outrage over Russian Hacking Claims is Laughable

Ze russians have compromised Chomsky! Quick, someone post the wiki link to whataboutism!

It is the stupidest argument ever: "You've punched people in the face before therefore you can never argue when someone else punches you in the face."

The only thing wrong with that argument is how it gets used and who uses it. Chomsky, unlike people who will trumpet that argument, has no problem railing against Trump without a hint of whataboutism.

Calling someone a hypocrite is often a rhetorical diversion, but hypocrisy is still a thing. Russia messing up our elections is something we should certainly fight, but Hillary "I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win." Clinton isn't the right person for that fight.

#smhwhatpassesforcentrism #foreignpolicyexpertisewtf #okiwillstop