Well that's depressing. We need to set up a system of mass migration of libs to the "urban" centers in these rural states.

Grand statehood to DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, St Thomas, ez game.

Okay, can we stop pretending there is a functional opposition party now?

I totally agree, but by my Googling, seems like you need a majority of the Senate to vote yes to grant statehood. So that might be hard even after 2020 given the information above.

God, it would be so beautiful if Dems controlled all branches and then packed the SC and granted statehood to left leaning territories. Too bad even if they controlled everything the centrists would never let this **** happen.

Ohh, einbert. There is so much to criticize the Dems for, why do you always come up with horrible stuff.

We've been over this. What would you have had Schumer do? Not let the Dems go home to campaign, while the GOP gets to? That's literally just handing them retention of the Senate.

Nothing in there about politics. He gave her a cough drop, she said she ends up sitting next to him at all of the events with former POTUS's and she thinks he's a nice guy. Did you want her to pepper spray him at McCain's funeral? Attack him in the press for his policies 10 years ago? We've got bigger problems now.

As far as I know, you can't block somebody from registering in the party, nor should the Dems. Nor should you want them to, because guess who would be blocked way before Bloomberg? Bernie.

So basically Daria ruined America.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...t-2020/572860/

Can we please start a campaign to have this Lindenfeld dude fired? They still think there is this huge group of persuadable people voting Republican that they need to go after. If they keep taking this advice it's going to be 2016 all over again.

The issue is structural at some level, the think tanks that feed policy and messaging to the Democrats cannot give left wing policy advice because they rely on corporate donations and wealthy individuals to fund them.

So there's a whole cottage market of ostensibly liberal people whose job it is to sell centrism to the Democrats, because they'd rather lose than win by moving left.

There are no stakes for any of those people. Each and all of these New Democratic think-tanky politicos are going to live comfy privileged lives even if Republicans control every branch of government in perpetuity. No one's going to kidnap Chelsea Clinton's kids and throw them in an internment camp. That's not to say I think the Democrats are actively working with the Republicans in a grand conspiracy --it's more of what wrestling fans call a worked shoot: when the opposition party faces no consequences for ****ing up for decades, it's inevitable that they will continue to **** up on their own accord. Centrist Dems have positioned themselves to be the Washington Generals of politics.

FYI I’ve been reading the book Fantasyland, and the author has blatantly stolen all of your wrestling metaphors.

Also one totally underrated albeit obvious aspect of rolling back progressive taxation schemes since the 1970s is that it's left the rich with tons of capital to fund propaganda campaigns. So the structural issue is both that the think tanks rely on corporate/millionaire donations BUT ALSO that the corporations and millionaires have all the capital to donate and to create a big network of think tanks in the first place. It's adjacent to too big to fail principle where the government can no longer meaningfully regulate huge banks and companies because they are so large and so interconnected that no one can expertly articulate with precision what regulations won't cause some unfortunate economic cataclysm.

In both cases, we have introduced a moral hazard whereby the people that benefited from past policies (e.g., deregulation, regressive taxation) will create and have created a bunch of structures and protective policies to perpetuate them.

The ghost of Dids be damned, wrestling is and always was dumb. I can't believe anyone over 12 years old watched it.

Dumb or not, a working knowledge of wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s may be integral to understanding contemporary American politics.

The country elected the moral equivalent of Mr. McMahon.

The Shakespeare quotes that Trolly posts work just as well.

ban

I had a bad feeling when I saw the Hulkster posting right after me itt.

Hillary in CBS Sunday interview: Bill's affair with 22 year-old Monica Lewinsky was not an abuse of power

Please get her out of public life forever

Kinda this.

Problem with moving left is that a lot of people high up in the party establishment are going to lose their jobs. Unfortunately, people in those positions are happier running a perpetually losing party than watching a party win from the sidelines.

Like you said, the policies being passed by Trump have no tangible effects on Democratic politicians. If anything, they benefit greatly from taxes going to the rich and deregulation of the banks. They're not losing their health care. None of their family members have been separated by border patrol. They don't need Social Security.

However, I don't put it past the Democrats to be in cahoots with Republicans and are merely putting on a show by fighting them on things like SCOTUS. There's nothing but filth at the top of the party. They needed to be that way to get to the top and must continue to be that way to stay there. Such a stunt is not beyond them.

The really sad part is all it would take is one weird trick (tm) to win an undefeatable mandate for a generation. The fundamental republican orthodoxy isn't free markets or any of the heritage foundation bull**** it's that shadowy elites who disdain and hate "Real Americans" are controlling the swamp and using their undemocratic powers to screw over the people. The reason it's such a beguiling narrative is that it's true! The only problems is that the righteous anger gets diverted to George Soros or campus activists or black people or whatever when the real enemy is the capitalist class as a whole.

Like if not for decades of fox news propaganda who would be more hated? The nebulous "Elites" who have no day to day impact on your life or your ******* failson boss who inherited his dad's car dealership, treats you like **** every day and utterly destroys the idea of a meritocratic society. If the dems weren't so beholden to the mythical centre and big business they could so easily judo flip the narrative.

There's a lot of truth there but it might be overstated. "Shadowy elites who disdain and hate Real Americans are controlling the swamp and using their undemocratic powers to screw over the people" works in right wing discourse because a lot of their followers think it's a wink-wink-nod-nod to how ivory tower liberals and Jews are colluding with blacks and other minorities to take their stuff and power and privilege. It's wholly wrapped up in white racial grievance rhetoric that emerged with the Civil Rights era and the emergence of the fantasy that liberals won a bunch of gains very unfairly and at the expense of white people. Hence all the conspiratarding and faux populism.

I think most elite Democrats are beholden to big business and temperamentally do not want any radical changes but I also do not think it's One Weird Trick level of easy, just a simple judo flip. "Real Americans are being cheated" is a beguiling narrative because it's effectively a huge Republican dog whistle meant to both capture some amount of the righteously angry and genuinely disaffected but it's also a huge signal to the deplorables.

I mean, glib maybe, but like the entirety of the right wing cultural grievance stuff was manufactured to destroy the generation-long strangehold "social democratic" thinking had on government after WWII. In other words, I think the Democrats more or less had that undefeatable mandate from say the 1940s-1960s and the Republicans used what academics would call simple wedge issues to dismantle it, and so I'm not convinced you can undo all that easily, the GOP figured out that white middle class loyalties were divided between their hatred of elites and their hatred of black people and, well, here we are. Democrats trying to say something like focus all your ire on the elites and the monied interests and put the Republicans into that category of elites who are set against you -- that is undone and undermined by right-wing white grievance politics, not sure there's an easy way out. The moment the Democrats pivoted in the late 50s/early 60s, embraced civil rights and started to dismantle their own legacy of white supremacist orthodoxy and unwound from the great white unspoken consensus that undid American apartheid -- and the GOP responded in kind by exploiting that -- I think the great "one weird trick" playbook was closed and this moment was predictable. In fact, predicted. LBJ the night he signed the Civil Rights Act:

https://books.google.com/books?id=x-...page&q&f=false

Schumer got worked, again. He's so ****ing bad at this.

Schumer is the county commissioners nephew from the movie Casino. He’s either incompetent or in on it, I don’t care which, dude has to go.

So basically, Schumer took sort of a bad but necessary deal with McConnell to confirm some judicial appointees and preserve the recess, then Grassley was like "**** that, here are some more nominees," and now the Dems got screwed on both ends? And of course, it's not like Grassley said "**** that," without McConnell knowing about it. They were probably drinking $1,000 a bottle Scotch with Bart, laughing hysterically as they ran a Devil's Triangle on Chuck.

The problem here is, I'm not sure what Schumer is really supposed to do. The recess is simply necessary for the Dems in close Senate races.

I'm also not totally buying that the Dems on Senate Judiciary can't be back... They're from the following states: CA, VT, IL, RI, MN, DE, CT, HI, NJ, CA. Without even checking who's up for re-election, none are in close races. Recent polling has Klobuchar ahead by 9 to 30 points, and that should be the only one that would even be close to being at risk.