[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Thanks for posting that cheeze. The way we completely mischaracterize life expectancy has always been a low simmering pet peeve of mine. All we’ve done is mitigate issues that cause premature deaths.

If a family has three kids and two die of measles at age 3 and one lives to be 100, the life expectancy of that generation is 35 years. If you save one of those kids via a vaccine and they live to be 90, the life expectancy is 64. Saying stuff like “back in the day they all died at 35” is incorrect.

I'm kind of surprised nobody is talking about the PAYGO vote. Dems in the house voted (this week?) for a pay-as-you-go spending rule. This is basically an austerity spending move, requiring new spending to be offset by tax increases or budget cuts. It seems on the surface to be sensible fiscal policy, but it seriously hobbles any new progressive legislation (like Medicare for All), because tax increases and budget cuts are a super hard sell.

It seems that Dems pretty much sold out their progressive constituents by overwhelmingly voting in favor of this super conservative spending rule.

BadKen wrote:

It seems that Dems pretty much sold out their progressive constituents by overwhelmingly voting in favor of this super conservative spending rule.

PAYGO was once of the reasons I wasn't a fan of Pelosi, though it beats the Republican's CUTGO I guess.

Though I'm also in favor of a huge tax increase.

House PAYGO is mostly posturing, because it can be set aside with a majority vote (so if you have the votes to pass a thing, you also probably have the votes to skip the PAYGO terms if it makes sense to) and even if it didn't exist there's already an actual law in place (statutory PAYGO) that exists whether or not either chamber of Congress has their own in-house rules about it.

It gave the progressive coalition something handy to negotiate around, and extract some concessions for their votes, without losing anything functionally because the practical effect is basically the same whether or not the rule exists.

Some are finally turning on Rep. Steve King, although it's pretty clear that it's for finally saying the special words and not for his opinions, which are unchanged from when the same people turning on him now were defending him 6-12 months ago.

Also, while I understand the "outcome oriented" take on this, again, how valuable is that outcome when the only thing that those turning on him disagree with him about is, again, the fact that he actually SAID the special words?

Prederick wrote:

Some are finally turning on Rep. Steve King, although it's pretty clear that it's for finally saying the special words and not for his opinions, which are unchanged from when the same people turning on him now were defending him 6-12 months ago.

Ooof...

Last week, as the new Congress was sworn in, Mr. King sat on his side of a chamber sharply delineated by demographics. The Democratic majority included record numbers of African-Americans and women, including the first Native American and the first Muslim women. Mr. King’s side was mostly people who look like him.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

clover wrote:

House PAYGO is mostly posturing, because it can be set aside with a majority vote (so if you have the votes to pass a thing, you also probably have the votes to skip the PAYGO terms if it makes sense to) and even if it didn't exist there's already an actual law in place (statutory PAYGO) that exists whether or not either chamber of Congress has their own in-house rules about it.

It gave the progressive coalition something handy to negotiate around, and extract some concessions for their votes, without losing anything functionally because the practical effect is basically the same whether or not the rule exists.

And as pointed out it is already functionally the law so to me it is hardly "selling out" progressives.

OG_slinger wrote:
Last week, as the new Congress was sworn in, Mr. King sat on his side of a chamber sharply delineated by demographics. The Democratic majority included record numbers of African-Americans and women, including the first Native American and the first Muslim women. Mr. King’s side was mostly people who look like him.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

It tracks. For people like King, any number of non-whites above perhaps 5-8% is a genocidal invasion.

OG_slinger wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Some are finally turning on Rep. Steve King, although it's pretty clear that it's for finally saying the special words and not for his opinions, which are unchanged from when the same people turning on him now were defending him 6-12 months ago.

Ooof...

Last week, as the new Congress was sworn in, Mr. King sat on his side of a chamber sharply delineated by demographics. The Democratic majority included record numbers of African-Americans and women, including the first Native American and the first Muslim women. Mr. King’s side was mostly people who look like him.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

IMAGE(https://66.media.tumblr.com/f45e3ff2ff90ea06e9b4988d1be43f89/tumblr_mq2kdkKeOK1qh402go1_500.gif)

clover wrote:

House PAYGO is mostly posturing...

Also along this line, after Trump's budget ballooned the deficit so much Democrats probably feel like putting a barrier, even a flimsy barrier, at this level is more likely to help them than hurt them. With support for higher taxes on the rich what it is I'm not at all certain that more pressure on the "fewer services for all or more taxes for the rich" may actually help the Dems get the latter rather than the Reps get the former.

Normal disclaimers about this being the darkest timeline apply.

Even smug, ill-educated buffoons who pick fights with college first years to look smart on social media videos are ditching King.

Ben Shapiro says King should be censured and urges his minions to donate to King’s primary challenger. Ben Shapiro is everything that sucks about toxic masculinity, but hey: broken clocks.

I just can't give him credit for that. I don't think Shapiro has, to my knowledge, expressed serious, meaningful criticism (or even significant disagreement) with most of King's opinions, it's just that he said the secret word.

If he'd never said White Nationalist or White Supremacist, he'd be fine and they'd likely be defending him.

Shapiro shouldn’t be given the benefit of doubt- he’s arguably worse than King is because he’s more savvy about his sh*tty beliefs, periodically taking safe positions like this that he can use to deflect when people call him out on his *constant* dogwhistling.

Nobody who *just now* thinks that Steve King might be a white supremacist gets any kind of brownie points.

It was more important to ignore these facts a couple months ago when there was an election that he almost lost to a *gasp* Democrat. Only now that that threat has passed can someone like Shapiro start talking about not supporting King.

Watching King backtrack on this right now is a bit amusing because it's clear he's surprised that, after everything, it's this that has gotten him in trouble.

Anyway, let's change the subject to something else infuriating:

“Leave No Soldier Behind”: The Unsolved Mystery of the Soldier Who Died in the Watchtower

On the morning of May 11, 2008, a U.S. Army private second class named Matthew Warren Brown died of a single gunshot wound to the head while manning a watchtower at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Brown was 20 years old. He was a skinny, all-American kid, a bit aimless but affable and unassuming. He was a good guy. You could see it in his face. At his funeral back home in Pennsylvania, some 200 people showed up.

In the aftermath of Brown’s death, army investigators created files about the circumstances. The bullet that killed him was fired from his own weapon, an M4 carbine. He was working the six A.M. shift, alone in the watchtower by the fortified main gate to the base. The tower was known as the Gun Tower. It was made of concrete, and looked medieval when viewed from the outside. It was three stories tall. On the second and third floors it had openings covered with two-piece Plexiglas windows, some of which had broken off and been left lying in shards on the floors. The forward operating base was known as FOB Asadabad, after a beleaguered provincial capital up the road. It was a former Soviet stronghold, a grim-looking installation on a shelf above a fast river in the Hindu Kush mountains, near the border with Pakistan. It had two concentric walls. The outer FOB contained a helicopter landing zone, munitions and fuel depots, vehicle parking, barracks for Afghan army units, and a bazaar where locals were allowed to sell their goods to the Americans stationed there. The inner FOB contained living quarters and offices for hundreds of soldiers and civilian contractors, and a small detention center used to hold suspected insurgents before shipping them on for processing elsewhere.

Matthew Brown had been plucked from an artillery unit at a distant firebase and assigned to Asadabad to work at the detention center. Like the other low-ranking soldiers there, part of his job was to stand guard in the towers. It was a dull duty. On the morning in question, staying alert was a problem for Brown. Soon after he began his shift, the sergeant of the guard—the man responsible for the soldiers manning the towers and gates—tried to raise him on the radio. Only after the third attempt did Brown respond intelligibly. The sergeant went to the chow hall to assemble breakfast plates for his crew, then drove to the Gun Tower, arriving around 6:25 A.M. He grabbed a Gatorade and Brown’s breakfast, and shouted up the staircase that he was coming. He heard nothing in response.

When he got to the top, he found Brown seated on a high bench at an elevated gun table, but slumped over and leaning against the wall and Plexiglas window to his left. At first he thought Brown was sleeping. Then he thought Brown had a bloody nose. Then he saw blood and brain matter on the ground. He set the food and Gatorade on the table. He tapped Brown as if to wake him, and felt his neck for a pulse. Now he saw blood and brain matter on the wall and ceiling. Brown was still alive. He was breathing shallowly and making a gurgling noise. His weapon was standing on the floor, muzzle up, with the strap loosely around his left leg. A bullet casing lay nearby.

The sergeant was not an investigator, expected to withhold judgment. He assumed the obvious—that Brown had shot himself. He radioed to the base office and the medical team, but got no response from either. Finally he got through to some civilian security contractors working for a company called Cobra. He told them there was an emergency in the Gun Tower, and asked them to send help. By now, Brown had stopped breathing. A man from Cobra soon appeared, felt him for a pulse, and said, “Yeah, he’s dead.” A few minutes later a doctor arrived and made the finding formal.

The doctor was an army major named Matthew Mayfield. A medic who accompanied him tilted Brown upright on the bench so his wounds could be examined. The entry wound was a hole in his front right temple; it was a “contact wound” of the sort made when a muzzle is placed directly against skin. The exit wound was a larger hole on the back left side of Brown’s head. Mayfield laid Brown into an approximation of his original position against the wall for photographic purposes. Later someone else got him upright again and strapped him to the bench to keep him from sliding under the table.

Far to the west, at the Bagram air base, the army’s Criminal Investigative Division, the C.I.D., promised to send investigators. Meanwhile, all sorts of people milled around in the Gun Tower, disturbing the scene and contaminating evidence. The sole person there with knowledge of normal procedure in such circumstances, a National Guard lieutenant named Brad Faust, who in civilian life was a Virginia police officer, tried to get people to move away from the scene. But he had no authority over the situation, and grew so frustrated that he left to interview soldiers nearby. By noon, when word came that the C.I.D. investigators had not yet boarded a helicopter in Bagram, Brown was placed into a rubberized body bag, carried down the stairs, loaded into an ambulance, and driven to the coolness of the women’s shower room in the inner FOB, where he lay at rest. Guards were placed outside.

That evening, Brown’s body was airlifted to Bagram. Two days later it arrived in a casket at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and after a flag-draped off-loading was delivered a short drive away to the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner. That office is the coroner for the U.S. military and other federal agencies. It is responsible not only for performing autopsies on the dead, but also for carefully considering the evidence presented to it before rendering a solemn finding on the manner of death—preferably a choice among “natural,” “accident,” “homicide,” or “suicide,” and rarely and reluctantly “undetermined” or “pending.”

rown’s autopsy concluded with the obvious: the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. Blood tests showed that Brown had enough of the sedative Valium in his system to render him incapable of coherent action. As for the manner of death, on May 15, 2008, four days after the event, a deputy medical examiner in Dover, Lieutenant Colonel Ladd Tremaine, officially declared Brown’s death to be a suicide. The examiner had little information to go on, since the C.I.D. investigation in Afghanistan had barely begun. But the ruling didn’t seem to account for some of the physical evidence. High-resolution photographs of Brown’s fully clothed body as it arrived in Dover show no signs of back spatter. Back spatter is the atomized blowback of blood from an entry wound caused by a high-velocity round fired at extremely close range. In Brown’s case, with an entry wound on the right side, had the gun been fired as it was said to have been fired—stock down, muzzle up, between his legs—crime-scene experts would expect it to have been present, and it was not.

The belief that Brown had killed himself was widely shared in Asadabad, even though not a single soldier who gave a statement after his death was aware of any recent difficulties he may have had. Those who knew him best thought of him as a goofy kid, quiet around his superiors, but relaxed and funny among his peers, invigorated by a recent home leave, excited by a subsequent promotion, and looking forward to the successful conclusion of his army service after a few short years. His drug use, if they were being honest, was not exceptional. Valium was a way to get through the days. They were surprised that Brown had killed himself. They attributed it to the unknowable in life, and moved on.

Prederick wrote:

I just can't give him credit for that. I don't think Shapiro has, to my knowledge, expressed serious, meaningful criticism (or even significant disagreement) with most of King's opinions, it's just that he said the secret word.

If he'd never said White Nationalist or White Supremacist, he'd be fine and they'd likely be defending him.

Shapiro knows how to play the racism game. Be racist, but utilize only dog-whistle terms and give your allies plausible deniability. Steve King has been openly racist for years. The faux pearl-clutching from his fellow racist Republicans should fool no one.

Ocasio-Cortez Pushes Democrats to the Left, Whether They Like It or Not

“Whether Democrats like it or not, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is now the face of their party,” said Steven Cheung, a former communications adviser in the Trump White House.

Yet Republicans face their own risks if their attacks on her are perceived as sexist or condescending.

“Over 200 members voted for Nancy Pelosi today, yet the G.O.P. only booed one: me,” she wrote on Twitter on Jan. 3. “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

It has already been retweeted nearly 50,000 times.

From a certain perspective, she’s basically Doomsday - an enemy perfectly designed to defeat the Regressive Right.

From another perspective, she’s a goddamn hero who knows more about the pseudoscience of economics than any breathing republican.

I disagree that she is the 'face of the party' or whatever. I think it is a lot of media invention and they want to push controversy and snappy quotes, and to your average democrat voter she just doesn't matter that much.

I don't think the definition of "face of the party" is about what rank and file members care about but what the opposition and media care about.

Never mind the fact that it's an ex-Trump communications adviser branding her as "face of the party".

Which isn't so much a grain of salt as an entire ocean's worth of salt that needs to be taken.

Right -- it's the Republicans' attempt to identify a scary woman (because you know it wouldn't be a man) that they can rail against and use to rile up their base. Doesn't really have much to do with the Democrats at all.

Plus, they can paint her as a boogey-woman now to lay the grounds for their continued character assassination / scaremongering over the next decade. It's a deposit on their eventual negative campaign against her should she run for president (see Clinton, Hillary).

LeapingGnome wrote:

I disagree that she is the 'face of the party' or whatever. I think it is a lot of media invention and they want to push controversy and snappy quotes, and to your average democrat voter she just doesn't matter that much.

It's a media invention of a particular segment of the media. I don't hear non-conservative outlets like the New York Times or NPR or the Washington Post having a lot to say about AOC. But the right is working hard to make her "the face of the Democrat party" because they believe that she's frightening to their base, and because they believe more moderate Democrats will be frightened by her politics.

She's a rising star in the party, for sure, especially among younger voters. But the face of the party? Nah.

I do enjoy that she seems perfectly willing to play low without being dirty. I wonder how the GOP feels, having someone who isn't afraid to call their bullsh*t "bullsh*t".

firesloth wrote:

Right -- it's the Republicans' attempt to identify a scary woman (because you know it wouldn't be a man) that they can rail against and use to rile up their base. Doesn't really have much to do with the Democrats at all.

Plus, they can paint her as a boogey-woman now to lay the grounds for their continued character assassination / scaremongering over the next decade. It's a deposit on their eventual negative campaign against her should she run for president (see Clinton, Hillary).

I think all the "progressives" that trashed HRC ought to be read this. This is what happens when you propose a medicare for all plan. The GOP will never stop trashing AOC for the rest of her life. And in 20 years, progressives will trash her, too. Apparently, it works.

That sounds like a GOP desperate gasp. The amount of people that will buy into that will diminish over the next decade. Although since it is Russian fueled, they will keep it around until they find a new audience...

Jayhawker wrote:

And in 20 years, progressives will trash her, too. Apparently, it works.

Only if she drifts into the Center-Right, champions “tough on crime” policies that wreaked havoc on inner cities, repeatedly and publicly pledges allegience to the corporate barons that are slowly killing us all through poverty and pollution, and during nearly every public appearance shows everyone how horrifically out of touch she’s become with how most people live.

But until then we’re cool with her.

I get that you are a big HRC fan, Jay, but you need to stop with this delusion that the antipathy that the Left has for her is because of a conservative snowjob and not because she’s a Status Quo politician in an age where the status quo has been getting increasingly horrible for nearly everyone. I’m sure the constant propaganda didn’t help but even without it she wouldn’t have been any Leftist’s first pick.

ruhk wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

And in 20 years, progressives will trash her, too. Apparently, it works.

Only if she drifts into the Center-Right, champions “tough on crime” policies that wreaked havoc on inner cities, repeatedly and publicly pledges allegience to the corporate barons that are slowly killing us all through poverty and pollution, and during nearly every public appearance shows everyone how horrifically out of touch she’s become with how most people live.

But until then we’re cool with her.

Word.

She's a Rorschach test.