[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.

fangblackbone wrote:
and that the middle-class of the mid-20th century is the ultimate form of family and church.

Except that none of them live that way even remotely closely. And there is barely any middle class anymore to people to live like or aspire to be.

Maybe that is how someone should frame it: rallying for Trump's Wall Street boon and tax cuts for the wealth are beyond just a threat to the middle class, its directly killing it beyond the point of resurrection.

Yeah, I think one major cause of cultural stress right now is that there's an impossible-to-live-up-to ideal that many people believe is their religious duty to fulfill. And, maybe more significantly, they measure the success of their families and children against an ideal that was largely constructed out of cold war propaganda, latent Confederate racism, and early 20th-century tent-revival-preacher grift. Prosperity and the appearance of righteousness as proof of salvation.

No surprise that Ras (3rd Verse) saves his best lines for evangelical Christians.. The real Demons.

Gremlin wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:
and that the middle-class of the mid-20th century is the ultimate form of family and church.

Except that none of them live that way even remotely closely. And there is barely any middle class anymore to people to live like or aspire to be.

Maybe that is how someone should frame it: rallying for Trump's Wall Street boon and tax cuts for the wealth are beyond just a threat to the middle class, its directly killing it beyond the point of resurrection.

Yeah, I think one major cause of cultural stress right now is that there's an impossible-to-live-up-to ideal that many people believe is their religious duty to fulfill. And, maybe more significantly, they measure the success of their families and children against an ideal that was largely constructed out of cold war propaganda, latent Confederate racism, and early 20th-century tent-revival-preacher grift. Prosperity and the appearance of righteousness as proof of salvation.

Well said. This, along with toxic masculinity, may be responsible for the high suicide rate among white, American men.

These are being called “deaths of despair.” Harvard public policy professor Robert D. Putnam, told the BBC, "This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health.”

And can you imagine how much worse these failed men feel when they see women and minorities improve while good patriotic white men are not? It's clearly the immigrants' fault they couldn't grasp and hold the American dream. /s

While white fragility is a thing, and I get the sentiment, I'm really uncomfortable with any acceptance of suicide, or rationalizing that some suicides are "deserved." Is that the message you really want anyone that is thinking about suicide to consider? That their demons should win?

Jayhawker wrote:

While white fragility is a thing, and I get the sentiment, I'm really uncomfortable with any acceptance of suicide, or rationalizing that some suicides are "deserved." Is that the message you really want anyone that is thinking about suicide to consider? That their demons should win?

Whites in general? Nah. White conservatives? That's a tougher question.

Jayhawker wrote:

While white fragility is a thing, and I get the sentiment, I'm really uncomfortable with any acceptance of suicide, or rationalizing that some suicides are "deserved." Is that the message you really want anyone that is thinking about suicide to consider? That their demons should win?

The message is that their despair is the result of false ideals and values fueled by decades of religious and government propaganda. The followup question is how do we, as a nation, convey a message of hope and inclusion that lifts one of the wealthiest nations in the world out of its self-inflicted death spiral?

I think that suicide is never the answer, and that wishing death on anyone is poison.

I get the catharsis, but I find that the damage to myself isn't worth the sense of gloating revenge.

Ultimately, I can't save other people, and I would rather spend my energy supporting innocent victims rather than abusers. Sure, in their own way many white conservative men are victims of a system that is constructed to exploit them. That doesn't give them the right to hurt others, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on people who both refuse help and drag down those around them.

Locking certain people up in a humane way, on the other hand, I can get behind. Some people are a danger to society, and need to be separated for the protection of others. For example:

CNN: Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein accused of paying girls as young as 14 for sex
NBC: Jeffrey Epstein charged with sex trafficking, allegedly molested underage girls
CBS: Jeffrey Epstein charged with operating sex trafficking ring involving dozens of underage girls
Bloomberg Op-Ed: Epstein Arrest Is a Worry for Donald Trump: The man facing accusations of sex-trafficking and pedophilia has been associated with many high-profile figures, including the U.S. president.
Miami Herald: With Jeffrey Epstein locked up, these are nervous times for his friends, enablers
NYT: Why the Trump White House Is Caught Up in the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: In the years since Mr. Epstein was first accused of sexually abusing minors, one of Mr. Trump’s Cabinet officials has been accused of letting him off easy.
The Daily Beast: I Tried to Warn You About Sleazy Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003: When Vicky Ward profiled Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair, allegations of his attempted seduction of two young sisters were excised from the final piece.

He's allegedly had a lot of 'clients' over the years who participated in this, so the best case scenario is that he gets nailed for this and the convictions spread. (For the record, because it apparently has to be said, if any Democratic politicians are implicated in this I think they should also be removed from office.)

Gremlin wrote:

...Jeff Epstein...

He's allegedly had a lot of 'clients' over the years who participated in this, so the best case scenario is that he gets nailed for this and the convictions spread. (For the record, because it apparently has to be said, if any Democratic politicians are implicated in this I think they should also be removed from office.)

Agreed. Twitter this weekend was all "what if Bill Clinton" and the left was like yeah lock him up.

Besides we already covered this a couple years ago. Al Franken is out of office. Roy Moore is running again. We've already established one party has morals and one doesn't. Deplorables will support Trump anyway, even if he screwed some underage girls.

Hell he already admitted to ogling them at Miss Teen USA.

fangblackbone wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

and that the middle-class of the mid-20th century is the ultimate form of family and church.

Except that none of them live that way even remotely closely. And there is barely any middle class anymore to people to live like or aspire to be.

Maybe that is how someone should frame it: rallying for Trump's Wall Street boon and tax cuts for the wealth are beyond just a threat to the middle class, its directly killing it beyond the point of resurrection.

Mormech wrote:

Whites in general? Nah. White conservatives? That's a tougher question.

I've wondered (and made a mess of the last time, so maybe I've got better words this time) how these deaths of despair break down politically. Are they evenly distributed across the political spectrum? Or are they, in a sad irony, most likely to kill the very people who are trying to resist bigotry?

Like, all the institutions that help sustain bigotry are, well, institutions. Institutions give their members a sense of place in the world, meaning in their lives, connection to like-minded people, etc: all the things that make suicide *less* likely, right?. I wonder if this problem is falling *more* heavily on people asking the tough questions, and less on people who just double down on their faith.

JeffreyLSmith wrote:

The followup question is how do we, as a nation, convey a message of hope and inclusion that lifts one of the wealthiest nations in the world out of its self-inflicted death spiral?

Conservative whites don't want an inclusive America. They want an America where they're on top and everyone else either serves them or is invisible (or both).

The only way out of this death spiral is to take even more social, economic, and political power away from them.

Of course conservative whites will respond to this by just clinging harder to their f*cked up beliefs, being even more susceptible to demagogues, and, in all likelihood, becoming more violent because they'll see everyone else just wanting them to chill the f*ck out as white genocide.

There's simply no room in America for white conservatives. Their ideology is incompatible with the country.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I've wondered (and made a mess of the last time, so maybe I've got better words this time) how these deaths of despair break down politically. Are they evenly distributed across the political spectrum? Or are they, in a sad irony, most likely to kill the very people who are trying to resist bigotry?

Similar to how there are a lot of LGBT people in the American South, not to mention most of the African Americans.

Or how older populations are more conservative...because rich people tend to live longer. Turns out, people don't get more conservative as they age, just that privileged people buy more luck and don't have to think about others as much.

Gremlin wrote:

He's allegedly had a lot of 'clients' over the years who participated in this, so the best case scenario is that he gets nailed for this and the convictions spread. (For the record, because it apparently has to be said, if any Democratic politicians are implicated in this I think they should also be removed from office.)

Good god, he's worse than I thought:
IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-95KJJXUAA6an0.jpg)

Behind The Bastards did a couple episodes on Epstein, in case you want a primer on a horrible person.

Jonman wrote:

Behind The Bastards did a couple episodes on Epstein, in case you want a primer on a horrible person.

amazing episode, the subject matter is so disturbing there comes a point where the comedian half of the podcast becomes unable to joke

Vicky Ward just tweeted about how Vanity Fair had her do a profile of Epstein back in 2002. She uncovered quite a few shady business deals he was involved with, but he didn't care. He kept asking her "What do you have on the girls?"

It turned out that she had three accounts--a mother and her two underage daughters--about how Epstein went after the daughters.

Graydon Carter, the editor at Vanity Fair, cut everything about the women from the profile. When Ward asked why the information was cut Carter responded "He's sensitive about the young women."

Epstein's crimes were only possible because a lot of powerful people--mostly, if not entirely--men helped him.

Why do all of these people know each other?

The Hill wrote:

AG William Barr: "I'm recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm that I subsequently joined for a period of time."

Gremlin wrote:

Why do all of these people know each other?

The Hill wrote:

AG William Barr: "I'm recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm that I subsequently joined for a period of time."

to say plainly the implication: They met in Epstein's mansion and/or on The Lolita Express.

In Barr's case I'm just confused, other than to say that the DC legal world is apparently tiny.

For the rest, well, the internet started re-circulating Epstein's address book today for obvious reasons.

And, of course, there's the guy who got him off the hook last time:
Salon: After Jeff Epstein's latest sex-crimes arrest, why does Alex Acosta still have a job?

CNN opinion contributor Raul A. Reyes wrote Sunday that "Acosta's actions are worthy of bipartisan outrage and should offend every American father and mother. Acosta betrayed the vulnerable to benefit the powerful. His deal for Epstein shows a disregard for child welfare, victims' rights and Justice Department procedures. Ironically, as secretary of labor, Acosta is responsible for monitoring human trafficking."

Barr's recusal ought to go over well with Trump.

This piece speaks to me

Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It

Especially this

As a matter of law, the operating speed method is exceptional. It enables those who violate the law—speeding motorists—to rewrite it: speed limits ratchet higher until no more than 15 percent of motorists violate them. The perverse incentives are obvious. Imagine a rule saying that, once 15 percent of Americans acquired an illegal type of machine gun, that weapon would automatically become legal. Other legislation amplifies the harm from this method. In California, for example, cities are sometimes obligated by law to raise speed limits against their will, and local governments are barred from lowering them even for safety reasons. This occurs against a backdrop of radical under-enforcement of the speed limit nationally, and the widespread banning of proven but unpopular lifesaving technologies like automated speed cameras.

I know about this first hand

States don’t require drivers to carry enough insurance to fully compensate people they hit. The most common amount of required bodily injury coverage is just $25,000; in some states, it’s zero. A number of states also employ no-fault systems associated with increased fatality risks. This all lowers the up-front cost of driving, but those who lack the protection of a vehicle suffer disproportionately.

Tort law is supposed to allow victims to recover for harms caused by others. Yet the standard of liability that applies to car crashes—ordinary negligence—establishes low expectations of how safe a driver must be. Courts have held that a higher standard—strict liability, which forces more careful risk-taking—does not apply to driving. Strict liability is reserved for activities that are both “ultrahazardous” and “uncommon”; driving, while ultrahazardous, is among the most common activities in American life. In other words, the very fact that car crashes cause so much social damage makes it hard for those who are injured or killed by reckless drivers to get justice.

I'm reminded of Balloon Boy for some reason.

Rat Boy wrote:

I'm reminded of Balloon Boy for some reason.

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/ru2no5noxoa21.jpg)

Fifteen minutes on cable television that illustrated one of America’s deepest political divides - The Washington Post
*thought this was a very good article

Much of Anderson Cooper’s hourly show on CNN on Tuesday night was spent in an interview with Megan Rapinoe, the biggest star on the World-Cup-winning U.S. women’s soccer team. The pair discussed that success, with Cooper admitting that his knowledge of sports was perhaps not as robust as it could be. Eventually, he asked Rapinoe about her broadly publicized dismissal of a post-victory visit to the White House.

No one she’d spoken with on the team planned to accept an invitation from President Trump to visit the White House, she said.

"I don't think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we've worked so hard to build and the things that we fight for and the way that we live our life,” she explained. “I don't think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration.”

Cooper said that there was a good chance that Trump, a cable-news aficionado, might be watching. Did she have a message for the president, if he was?

Rapinoe thought for a moment and then looked at the camera.

"I think that I would say that your message is excluding people,” she said. “You're excluding me. You're excluding people that look like me. You're excluding people of color. You're excluding, you know, Americans that maybe support you.”

“I think that we need to have a reckoning with the message that you have and what you’re saying about ‘Make America great again,’ ” she continued. “I think that you’re harking back to an era that was not great for everyone. It might have been great for a few people, and maybe America is great for a few people right now, but it’s not great for enough Americans in this world, and I think that we have a responsibility, each and every one of us, you have an incredible responsibility as, you know, the chief of this country to take care of every single person, and you need to do better for everyone.”

Three decades ago, the bottom 90 percent of America held 40 percent of total net worth. Today, it holds 30.

Cooper and Rapinoe, both of whom are gay, went on to discuss how the America of the past would intentionally marginalize people like them and other groups.

“It was a very oppressive place — and that’s not to say that it was the worst place in the world,” Rapinoe said. “I think that’s one of the things that a lot of people go to. No one is saying that they want to leave America, but I think as one of the great countries in the world, and for sure we want to see ourselves as that, we need to constantly look within and challenge ourselves to be better so everyone else can be better around us.”

That interview came during the 8 p.m. hour. At about the same time, over on Fox News — a network Trump was much more likely to have been watching — Tucker Carlson was presenting his own assessment of the problems with America.

“The Democratic candidates for president are on the road this week telling voters that the United States is an awful country,” Carlson said, coming back from a commercial break. “Of all the lies these people tell — and there are many — this is the most absurd,” he continued. “In fact, the United States is the kindest, most open-minded place on the planet. The U.S. has done more for other people and received less in return than any nation in history by far.”

He singled out the example of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who immigrated to the United States from Somalia as a refugee when she was a child. She became a citizen and, last year, was elected to Congress.

"Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful,” Carlson said. “Not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.”

He quoted from a recent Washington Post article profiling Omar. Greg Jaffe and Souad Mekhennet wrote that in a presentation Omar made at an event earlier this year, she offered one version of the story of America. In it, the United States “wasn’t the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. It wasn’t a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into Congress. Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that had disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees and minorities like her.”

The article continues, quoting Omar.

"I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all,” she said to an audience of high school students. “So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”

The double-edged significance of Pelosi’s ‘Make America White Again’ slam

Carlson didn’t include the part of the story that Omar relayed about her frustration at the arrest of a woman who stole bread to feed her grandchild. Carlson instead stopped reading after the line about how Omar felt that the United States had disappointed immigrants and minorities like her.

“If anything, that’s an understatement. Omar isn’t disappointed in America; she is enraged by it,” Carlson said. “Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism.”

He quickly went much further.

"Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country,” he said. “A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.” He claimed that the United States was perhaps “importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours” — behavior that he claimed had doomed ancient Rome.

"So be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is,” he said. “She’s a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us we better change our immigration system immediately. Or else.”

At about the same time, a few cable networks apart, Rapinoe and Carlson were inadvertently staking out two poles in America's broad political fight.

Earlier this month, a survey from the Economist and YouGov dug into partisan views of patriotism. Democrats were less likely to say without qualification that they were proud to be American and more likely to say that one could criticize the country while still being a patriot. Republicans were more likely to see actions like refusing to serve in a war or burning a flag as disqualifying someone from being considered a patriot and more likely to express pride at being an American.

That pattern plays out in the comments on Fox and CNN. Rapinoe — a representative of the United States on an international platform — presented a view of the country as improving but not perfect. Carlson presented frustration at injustices and problems in the United States as an example not only of Omar being insufficiently grateful but as a purported example of how immigrants are a threat to the United States.

About 1 in 8 voters say Trump acts in an unpresidential way — and also approve of his presidency

Omar’s and Rapinoe’s frustrations aren’t dissimilar, but it seems safe to assume that Carlson doesn’t consider Rapinoe — white, not Muslim, famous — as a “living fire alarm” we must immediately heed. Carlson’s presentation of Omar as a hostile outsider who demands unrealistic change in the United States collapses once you recognize that the differences between her complaints and Rapinoe’s are superficial ones tied to the nation of Omar’s birth. By contrasting Rapinoe’s comments with Omar’s — America can and should strive to be better — the racial and religious bias in Carlson’s commentary is made obvious.

As Carlson was disparaging immigrants like Omar, Cooper was asking Rapinoe about having in the past knelt during the national anthem.

"Can you see a day where you don't — where you do put your hand over your heart and sing the national anthem?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m very hopeful for that, absolutely,” she replied. “I mean, I think it’s going to take a lot of years and a tremendous amount of work by this country, but I’m absolutely hopeful for that. . . . It’s going to take a tremendous amount and maybe we — you know, maybe in my lifetime, likely in my lifetime we don’t get there, but that hope still persists.”

“I think that if we’re not striving for that,” she continued, “then we’re sort of just in this dead space.”

A fire alarm in its own way.

“Virtually every public statement [Omar] makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism,” said Carlson as he spun off into a bigotry-laden and overtly racist rant about how immigrants are destroying white America.

Gremlin wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I've wondered (and made a mess of the last time, so maybe I've got better words this time) how these deaths of despair break down politically. Are they evenly distributed across the political spectrum? Or are they, in a sad irony, most likely to kill the very people who are trying to resist bigotry?

Similar to how there are a lot of LGBT people in the American South, not to mention most of the African Americans.

Or how older populations are more conservative...because rich people tend to live longer. Turns out, people don't get more conservative as they age, just that privileged people buy more luck and don't have to think about others as much.

Yeah, the statistic I was always skeptical of was the one about people getting happier after they hit a low point in late middle age. I've always wonder if it was more like, you know: people who die early in their senior citizenhood are the ones already dealing with setbacks in life. The setbacks that were pulling the happiness average down in late middle age finally killed them. People don't get happier, you're just measuring a population that survived because they were happy.

So... getting ahead of the actual pictures of the actual affairs he's having then?