US Politics Thread |OT| THE DARKEST TIMELINE

[Kara]

The torch? Knickerbocker you ain't LP.

[Phoenix Dark]

@mmurraypolitics

The Latino Vote: In new NBC/WSJ poll, Hillary leads both Jeb (66%-28%) and Rubio (63%-32%) among Latino voters

[Great Rumbler]

[benjipwns]

Does Bill Clinton Not Want Hillary to be President?

Honestly, honestly honestly. I think there is some secret, dark part of Bill Clinton – not that he actually has many “secret” dark parts, but stick with me here – that does not want his wife to be president. How else can one explain how this most sublime of politicians seems to do everything possible to destroy her chances?

He constructed a shady charity/business empire when he knew full well she would run for president. He helped screw up her 2008 effort with some dumb remarks about race.

The most recent unforced Bill Clinton error is his revival on the Today show this morning of the “We were so poor” theme, which Hillary already took for a test flight and crash landed with a few weeks ago.

Bill said:

Let me remind you, when we moved into the White House, we had the lowest net worth of any family since Harry Truman.

The explanation for Bill’s behavior is very simple: It’s male ego combined with grotesque infantilism.

If Hillary became president, she would then clearly eclipse him, having already been a New York senator and Secretary of State, while he was the governor of Arkansas, which I think has the population of Brooklyn or something.

So he was the governor of Brooklyn.

No offense to the people of Arkansas. I’m from New York City. I dig Brooklyn. But still.

I watched Bill Clinton closely when I covered him during during the final couple of years of his presidency, met him several times, and feel like I get him.

He is, at his core, a child stranded in the Freudian oral stage of development, ever seeking the next scrumptious thing to place into his mouth. And only his mouth. Nobody else’s.

He is America’s Greatest Living Narcissist, which is not an easy title to seize and hold. I know many pretenders to the throne in Washington.

[Kara]

Mods please change my name to "a child stranded in the Freudian oral stage of development, ever seeking the next scrumptious thing to place into his mouth" thanks in advance.

[benjipwns]

Honestly, honestly honestly.

[benjipwns]

She'll easily win, but her favorable/trustworthy/etc. type numbers have taken a hit back towards what they were like in 2008:

In just seven weeks, a period in which Mrs. Clinton formally began her presidential campaign, the share of people with a negative view of her jumped to 42% from 36% in last month’s survey, and only a quarter of registered voters said they viewed her as honest and straightforward, down from 38% last summer.

Also, http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/joe_battenfeld/2015/05/battenfeld_john_kerry_could_prove_safe_fallback_for

It’s the question Democrats can no longer ignore: Who will replace Hillary Clinton?

Martin O’Malley? Toast. Joe Biden? A punch line. Elizabeth Warren? Not ready. Bernie Sanders? Seriously?

“We don’t have a backup,” one top Massachusetts Democrat lamented.

John Kerry, report for duty. Again.

This is not the scenario Democrats really want, but may have to accept if the Clinton campaign continues its death spiral over her family foundation’s shady ties to foreign nations. Even Bill Clinton’s been called in for cleanup, but saying you’ve done nothing “knowingly” wrong isn’t helping.

Kerry has plenty of weaknesses, but most of them were already exposed in his 2004 campaign and he still almost won. No other Democrat can say that. He’s the safest bet as a Clinton alternative.

...

“I can’t see Kerry resigning,” one source close to Kerry’s operation said, adding that it’s highly unlikely the former Massachusetts senator would challenge Clinton.

But if Clinton is forced to abandon her campaign, all bets are off. Democratic leaders will have to confront the fact that they need to draft someone else to run.

[Phoenix Dark]

Remember the part in The Little Princess where Sara was reading a boring story to her classmates when she suddenly started making up her own romantic story, thus exciting everyone and getting them on the edge of their seats? Well that's how the author of that Bill Clinton article must have felt as the prose left his finger tips. He did that for us, we should be grateful.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Be a grown African American man and start a sentence with "remember the part in The Little Princess" brehs.

[close]

[benjipwns]

Popped in on PoliGAF, Angry Fork and the Sanders gang is perfect. You, me and Meta are obsolete.

Also, this is perfect:

[Phoenix Dark]

Btw Benji did you vote yesterday

I didn't have time. Looks like Prop 1 failed big time, less than 30% of the vote.

[benjipwns]

Fuck no.

Prop 1 got slaughtered considering who was backing it (everyone!), how much they spent ($7 million) and how much they flooded the airwaves in comparison to the opposition (who spent, TOTAL, $168,500).

All kinds of bond measures around the state got swept up and got battered too. Total "fuck off" wave.

The death knell for Prop 1 was I think a couple months ago when people started finding out that the funds weren't actually for fixing up the current roads but for future large scale road projects and all sorts of other stuff.

[benjipwns]

Forgot to mention the lol at the Sanders gang talking about his prospects against Hillary in debates. Like there's going to be debates on the Democratic side. 

[benjipwns]

In the new Quinnipiac Iowa poll, 17% of Evangelicals (23% GOP Overall) say Rick Santorum is too conservative. 

% positions are about right: (GOP Overall/Tea Party)
Bush - 36/16
Carson - 56/71
Christie - 29/19
Cruz - 58/77
Fiorina - 34/41
Graham - 23/16
Huckabee - 59/60
Jindal - 53/63
Kasich - 28/30
Paul - 51/58
Perry - 61/67
Rubio - 65/61
Santorum - 54/65
Walker - 62/74

[Brehvolution]

Bush - 36/16
Carson - 56/71
Christie - 29/19
Cruz - 58/77
Fiorina - 34/41
Graham - 23/16
Huckabee - 59/60
Jindal - 53/63
Kasich - 28/30
Paul - 51/58
Perry - 61/67
Rubio - 65/61
Santorum - 54/65
Walker - 62/74

[benjipwns]

Can't like because the loop leaves out the first part but they still put it in the caption.

That's like foreign donations to a gif Foundation.

[Phoenix Dark]

Walker 21%
Paul 13%
Rubio 13%
Cruz 12%
Huckabee 11%
Carson 7%
Bush 5%
Christie 3%
Perry 3%
Fiorina 2%
Kasich 2%
Santorum 2%
Jindal 1%
Graham 0%
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/iowa/release-detail?releaseid=2223

Bush has to be the weakest "front runner" in quite awhile.

[Trent Dole]

Are any of those dudes remotely electable? Some of them I've never even heard of.

[Joe Molotov]

Are any of those dudes remotely electable? Some of them I've never even heard of.

One of them is a dudette.

[Trent Dole]

I meant dudes in a non gender specific way then?

[Joe Molotov]

I meant dudes in a non gender specific way then?

I'll accept this explanation. 

To answer your question, most of these individuals have the electability of a dead squid and make Mitt Romney look like FDR.

[Dickie Dee]

nvm, possible bullshit link

[Phoenix Dark]

Register Minority Voters in Georgia, Go to Jail

Quitman, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, sits in Brooks County, Georgia, ten short miles to the Florida state line. In 2010—for the first time in the county’s history—the county elected a majority-black school board. This upset victory followed a sudden surge in local black voting that was catalyzed by a group of get-out-the-vote activists.

For weeks after the historic primary, Kemp’s armed investigators, along with officials from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, went door-to-door in Quitman’s black neighborhoods. Without evidence of actual voter fraud in Quitman, the state’s case against the town’s voting activists came to rely on allegations of less glaring breaches of absentee ballot procedure.

Echoing Kemp’s investigation into AALAC, many accusations against those in Quitman focused on voting organizers improperly possessing voters' materials. (The Quitman investigation was spurred by a local district attorney with strong enough connections to the county's white school board members that he could not work on the case.)

State agents arrested a dozen voting organizers, three of whom had won seats on the county school board. With the charges pending, Georgia’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, issued an executive order temporarily removing those women from their posts, reinstating the county’s white-majority school board.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121715/georgia-secretary-state-hammers-minority-voter-registration-efforts?utm_content=buffer43e1a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[Dickie Dee]

2015 y'all

[helios]

Obama's America

[Yeti]

http://carlyfiorina.org/

[Brehvolution]

2015 y'all

Imagine if Obama issued an executive order to remove those people and replaced them with the elected ones? 

[Great Rumbler]

You missed the best part of that article, PD:

Last month, Brian Kemp told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that his elections director, Linda Ford, was resigning at his request because of a “technical error” that caused nearly 8,000 voters to be improperly removed from the rolls. “It was an honest mistake by a hard-working person and, unfortunately, she has to pay the price,” Kemp said.

[Joe Molotov]

It takes a nation of millions (of hard-working persons) to hold us back.

[Trent Dole]

I meant dudes in a non gender specific way then?

I'll accept this explanation. 

To answer your question, most of these individuals have the electability of a dead squid and make Mitt Romney look like FDR.

So errbody git red e for Hillary then. Yay?

[Madrun Badrun]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32620742

[Phoenix Dark]

Pretty easy to justify it in Georgia: the state is slowly trending blue due to the rising black population/declining white population. Atlanta is going to end up like modern Detroit or Philly, where the big city tilts general elections to democrats despite republicans winning more counties in the state.

[Kara]

That Georgia article makes me really angry. The Republican party has been involved in way too many shady efforts to prevent minorities from voting. If Democrats were the ones doing this, I'd actually vote Republican in protest.

I don't know how they justify it in their own minds, if they do at all. Maybe, "those welfare moochers shouldn't count the same as the hardworking white people", or whatever Charles Murray-inspired crap you see alluded to in dogwhistle comments all the time on right wing media.

They want something and believe in achieving it by any means necessary.

I could tell some fucked up stories about human depravity.

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

straws being grasped, etc.

give em' a few more years to think they've this shit locked down, they'll on their way out just a little bit later, that's all.

[Joe Molotov]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/sport/marshall-university-player-arrest/index.html

Be a jock, brehs. 

[Great Rumbler]

The victims, Casey Williams and Zackery Johnson, told police Butler stepped out of a car after seeing the men kiss.

Butler "approached the two (men) shouting derogatory words" before punching each of the men in the face, the police report said. The victims captured part of the assault on camera and photographed the vehicle.

 

[Rufus]

You make me feel icky! Die!

[Dickie Dee]

But when D'Souza — the maker of the anti-President Obama film "2016: Obama's America" — tried to take a summer vacation from his sentence at the Mater Dei School, Manhattan federal Judge Richard Berman sarcastically rejected his request. "With respect to [his parole officer's ] request that Mr. D'Souza's community service hours be 'waived' from June 1, 2015 until July 13, 2015, the request is respectfully denied," Berman wrote. "The short explanation is, as all criminal defendants are aware, that we don't provide 'summer breaks' in these circumstances."

[Steve Contra]

 

[Joe Molotov]

Obama's America  :'(

[Brehvolution]

Dinesh is a conservative. They don't have to play by the rules. 

[brob]

tfw yr memes are getting less upvotes than the jihadis

[CatsCatsCats]

Imma fixin to vote Sanders, he's the fried chicken guy, right?

[Joe Molotov]

CIA Director: "Sir, the terrorists' memes, they're too dank. Only one thing can save us now!"

Obama: *chuckles* "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

[Phoenix Dark]

allahuuu lmao

[Madrun Badrun]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/07/the-odds-of-an-iran-nuclear-deal-just-got-higher/

[Madrun Badrun]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/jeb-george-w-bush-adviser/index.html

[benjipwns]

Candidate Update
PAC*: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, Scott Walker

Santorum to announce on May 27th, Lindsey Graham to do declare on June 1st.

[benjipwns]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418055/how-five-republicans-let-congress-keep-its-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies-brendan

The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies.

The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the Obamacare exemption, it was clear that someone in Congress had falsified the document in order to make lawmakers and their staff eligible for taxpayer subsidies provided under the exchange for small-business employees.

But until Vitter got a green light from the Small Business Committee to subpoena the unredacted application from the District of Columbia health exchange, it would be impossible to determine who in Congress gave it a stamp of approval. When Vitter asked Republicans on his committee to approve the subpoena, however, he was unexpectedly stonewalled.

With nine Democrats on the committee lined up against the proposal, the chairman needed the support of all ten Republicans to issue the subpoena. But, though it seems an issue tailor-made for the tea-party star and Republican presidential candidate, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) refused to lend his support. And when the Louisiana senator set a public vote for April 23, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies got involved.

“For whatever reason, leadership decided they wanted that vote to be 5–5, all Republicans, to give Senator Paul cover,” one high-ranking committee staffer tells National Review. “So they worked at a member level to change the votes of otherwise supportive senators.” Four Republicans — senators Mike Enzi, James Risch, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer — had promised to support Vitter, but that would soon change.

Senate staffers, according to a top committee aide, reported seeing Missouri senator Roy Blunt make calls to at least two Republican committee members, lobbying them, at McConnell’s behest, to vote no on subpoenaing the exchange. By the time the committee was called to quorum, Enzi, Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer voted no.

To many observers, it was curious that any Republican would move to put the brakes on an investigation into Obamacare fraud, and particularly curious that they would pull back in an instance where the federal government was actually defrauding itself, one that so clearly illustrates Obamacare’s flaws by exposing the bureaucratic jujitsu and outright dishonesty required of federal employees themselves to navigate the law.

...

“We deserve to know who signed that application, because they are robbing taxpayers,” says Michael Cannon, director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. The staffers who signed the fraudulent application, he says, “know who was directing them to do this. And so we have to follow the trail of breadcrumbs. This is the next breadcrumb, and whoever is farther up the trail wants to stop Vitter right here.”

...

When Vitter’s staffers tracked down the application and discovered obvious signs of fraud, Vitter requested approval to subpoena an unredacted copy of the application. The value of that document, says Cannon, is that it would reveal the name of the person who filed it. “Now you’ve got someone to call to testify,” he says, predicting that testimony would precipitate a congressional vote on whether to end the congressional exemption altogether.

“I think it makes sense to find out what happened,” says Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a noted conservative health-care voice and a National Review contributor. “It would be pretty interesting to see whose name is on the forms,” he says. “It has to go beyond mid-level staffers.”

Committee rules for a subpoena require either the consent of the ranking member or a majority of the group’s 19 senators. Because Democrats quickly made their opposition clear, Vitter needed the approval of all ten Republicans. Nine of them quickly consented via e-mail; one senator was strangely unresponsive.

Senior committee aides say that Rand Paul’s staff didn’t immediately reply to an e-mail requesting the senator’s consent and, when they did, they refused to provide it. When Vitter attempted to set up a member-to-member meeting, his overtures were ignored or put off. Paul’s policy staff refused to take a meeting. When Vitter tried to confront Paul on the Senate floor, they say, the Kentucky senator skirted the issue.

It wasn’t until after the vote that Paul shared his reasoning. “Senator Paul opposes allowing Congress to exempt themselves from any legislation,” an aide told the Conservative Review. “To that end, yesterday, he reintroduced his proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit Congress from passing any law that exempts themselves. Senator Paul prefers this option over a partisan cross-examination of Congressional staff.”

...

That’s absurd,” says Robert Moffit, the director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “You don’t need a constitutional amendment to get a subpoena . . . I don’t know where he’s coming from.”

“The answers he has given do not make sense,” Cannon says of Paul. “And when someone with his principles does something that is so obviously against his principles, and does not give an adequate explanation, you begin to think that politics is afoot. It would have to be someone very powerful that made him a powerful pitch — or threat — to keep him from doing this.”

Paul’s press secretary tells National Review that the senator “examines every opportunity to [oppose Obamacare] individually, and does not base his vote on requests made by other senators, including the majority leader.”

...

The flip-flopping Republicans justified their change of heart. Risch said in the April 23 committee meeting that legal wrangling with the D.C. exchange could take time away from the committee’s small-business work. Enzi said he saw little wrong with the application as is.

“Each of us has our own budget, each of us has our own staff,” he said. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m way under 50 [employees]. So my staff qualifies as a small business.”

Enzi was one of the original sponsors of Vitter’s 2013 amendment to end the congressional Obamacare exemption, but his press secretary tells National Review he felt the probe “could inadvertently target staff who simply completed paperwork as part of their job.” He insists that Enzi “made up his own mind.” Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer declined to comment.

...

Health-care experts dismiss Enzi’s claim that each member’s office is its own small business, and not just because the health exchange application was filed for Congress as a whole. “These congressional offices that think they’re small businesses, are they LLCs?” Cannon asks. “Are they S-Corps? Are they shareholder-owned? Are they privately held? What is the ownership structure of this small business that you’re running, senator? It’s just utterly ridiculous.”

“They’re transparently absurd,” says Moffit of Senate Republicans claiming small-business status. “Who made the determination that Congress is a small business and is therefore eligible for subsidies that do not legally exist? How did that happen?”

No one quite knows what’s behind leadership’s apparent push to kill the subpoena. The move baffled some committee staffers. “The amount of blood that McConnell and Paul spilled to prevent [the subpoena] from happening makes me wonder [if] maybe that isn’t all that there is to it,” the high-ranking staffer says. “Maybe other people signed it . . . They’re clearly afraid of something bigger than a person’s name getting out there.”

Others, however, think the motives behind GOP leadership’s apparent obfuscation are clear. “If there’s one thing that absolutely drives Americans fundamentally crazy, it’s the idea that Congress can set one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else,” says Moffit. “That’s political poison, and that’s why they have been so desperate to avoid the issue.”

“The most powerful interest group in Washington D.C., is not the Chamber or the unions or anyone else,” Cannon says. “It is members of Congress and their staffs. And when it comes to their benefits, they are all members of the same party.”

joebagodonutz • 6 hours ago
Apparently Rand Paul is just another grandstanding RINO whore.

Right • 7 hours ago
Rand Paul is done as a GOP presidential contender. Just another RINO

BRush • 35 minutes ago
I have been a consistent and dependable Republican voter for 20 years. I will no longer be ‘checking the R box’. Ted Cruz is an easy name to write in if the establishment gives us another Rino like Rand!

[Joe Molotov]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/jeb-george-w-bush-adviser/index.html

 

[benjipwns]

Also, it's weird that the Cato Institute has a health policy director. It's kind of like the Southern Baptists hiring a paleontologist.

They aren't anarchists. And they have a similar mindset to me in terms of evolutionary, not revolutionary ideas. Like how I want to abolish state recognized marriages, but settle for same-sex/etc. recognition. There's also two-sides to Cato like most think tanks. Their commentary-wing and research-wing. Most of their non-commentary policy work tends to be focused on "how can we remove the government from [X] with the least aftershocks/turmoil/etc." Along with studies that tend to find that government is harmful or what non-government policies work best.

For example here's a brief of an article that the health policy people cultivated from "real" academics:
http://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/do-doctors-practice-defensive-medicine-revisited

Myungho Paik is a research associate at Northwestern University; Bernard S. Black is the Nicholas D. Chabraja Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and Kellogg School of Management; David A. Hyman, M.D., J.D., is the H. Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law and Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois.

http://www.cato.org/research/health-insurance
http://www.cato.org/research/medicare-medicaid
http://www.cato.org/research/universal-health-care

I bet you want to sign up for this:
http://www.cato.org/healthy-competition-newsletter

Welcome to Healthy Competition, an electronic newsletter produced by the Cato Institute. This periodic newsletter will feature health policy news, commentary, and resources from a free-market perspective.

The dominant view in health policy is that greater government involvement is required to finance and deliver high-quality medical care. This newsletter will present what is a minority view in health policy, but one that is widely accepted in other policy spheres: that individual choice and free markets do the best job of making products of ever-increasing quality available to ever-increasing numbers of people.

We aim to make this newsletter useful to those who make, influence, and report on health policy.

[benjipwns]

Now if you had said the Mises Institute...

Though they admittingly do what I find to be some decent revisionist history work. That's about the only real research they do, not even much with Austrian Economics. And it's not rigorous to an academic level. (Though most history research isn't really all that rigorous to begin with...)

[Kara]

ron paul EVOLution

[benjipwns]

Signed up for the bullshit newsletter.

But wait, there's more:
http://www.cato.org/ecommunity?utm_source=mailchimp-signup&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=ecommunity-mailchimp-signup

I would like these Cato email newsletters:
  Periodic Emails on Cato Events, News, and Offers [ ? ]
 Cato Today [ ? ]
 Cato Weekly Dispatch [ ? ]
 Cato Monthly E-Update [ ? ]
 Cato Research and Analysis [ ? ]
 Cato at Liberty Blog [ ? ]
 Cato Trade Newsletter [ ? ]
 Healthy Competition [ ? ]
 Multimedia [ ? ]
 Regulation Magazine and Cato Journal [ ? ]
 Upcoming Events at Cato [ ? ]

[benjipwns]

Kara, any tips for our small businessmen Senators?

[Brehvolution]

ron paul GRIFTer

[sarslip]

5.4% 

[Mandark]

http://www.cato.org/research/health-insurance

*clicks first link*

"By Casey B. Mulligan."

yeah ok cato sure buddy

[Kara]

Kara, any tips for our small businessmen Senators?

Skimping on employee health insurance is like diapers--you wear them when you're breastfed and nearly dead.

Which is to say it's only an issue for mom and pop's corner dildo and pocket vagina superstore with 3 full-time minimum wage employees (alas the decline of artisan sex toy retail) or comical caricatures of public companies like Apple. Generally speaking I work with neither kind of concern so I don't have any #TopTips for our unlawful lawmakers. #EndTheState

“Health-care experts dismiss Enzi’s claim that each member’s office is its own small business, and not just because the health exchange application was filed for Congress as a whole. These congressional offices that think they’re small businesses, are they LLCs?” Cannon asks. “Are they S-Corps? Are they shareholder-owned? Are they privately held? What is the ownership structure of this small business that you’re running, senator? It’s just utterly ridiculous.”

Unless a formal business entity is formed, they'd be sole proprietorships you fucking goober.

[Phoenix Dark]

I'll admit I am curious to see how much of the lowering insurance rate is tied to the job market/economy. But clearly the ACA plays a role in the decline as well.

[benjipwns]

"By Casey B. Mulligan."

yeah ok cato sure buddy

Give him another chance.