Delaware Liberal

The December 2, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

President-elect Donald Trump “inherited a complicated world when he won the election last month. And that was before a series of freewheeling phone calls with foreign leaders that has unnerved diplomats at home and abroad,” the New York Times reports.

“In the calls, he voiced admiration for one of the world’s most durable despots, the president of Kazakhstan, and said he hoped to visit a country, Pakistan, that President Obama has steered clear of during nearly eight years in office.”

You’ve all seen his call to the Pakstani President, yes? If not, here it is:

Jeet Heer at The New Republic explores boundaries of our post-truth era in Trump’s Lies Destroy Logic As Well As Truth:

At the end of a wholly persuasive refutation of Trump’s claim about actually winning the popular vote, for instance, Glenn Kessler at TheWashington Post offered this meta-analysis: “Now that Trump is on the verge of becoming president, he needs to be more careful about making wild allegations with little basis in fact, especially if the claim emerged from a handful of tweets and conspiracy-minded websites. He will quickly find that such statements will undermine his authority on other matters.

This analysis assumes that Trump wants to govern like a normal president, so that if he’s caught in untruths, he’ll face a credibility gap like the one that plagued Lyndon Johnson. What it fails to entertain is the possibility that Trump’s lies aren’t just incidental to his approach to politics but essential to it, that the president-elect sees lying as the source of his authority rather than as something that undermines it.

To be able to constantly lie and get people to accept contrary statements is, after all, an assertion of power. And it’s a type of power Trump understands all too well.

that it is untrue but also that, when combined with his other comments, it shows Trump doesn’t care about rational logic at all.

It looks like a few Republican Senators are trying to clip Paul Ryan’s wings when it comes to his plan to move forward on privatizing Medicare.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was blunt about the outlook for a major Medicare overhaul.

“I think we should leave Medicare for another day,” he said. “Medicare has solvency problems. We need to address those, but trying to do that at the same time we deal with Obamacare falls in the category of biting off more than we can chew.”…

Most Senate Republicans agreed that there was still a lot of work to do on Obamacare before the topic of Medicare changes could even come up in the Senate.

“I’m all for a kind of step-by-step approach, so let’s do one thing at a time,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told TPM. “A step-by-step approach makes a whole lot more sense as opposed to something big and comprehensive. We don’t do big, comprehensive very well here in Washington, D.C.”…

“It’s just too much to bite off,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told TPM. He added that he thought Ryan’s plan was “worthy of consideration,” but that ultimately any changes to Medicare should be considered in a bipartisan manner.

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post tell Democrats to skip the civil war:

Trump’s narrow wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (unless they’re miraculously overturned in recounts), plus his larger victories in Ohio and Iowa, have the Democrats focused on the white working class — and on whether it’s time for “the end of identity liberalism,” the headline of a recent New York Times opinion piece by Mark Lilla, a Columbia University political philosopher.

Lilla’s New York Times essay provoked a polemical tempest. Many advocates for African Americans, gay men and lesbians, immigrants and women fear Lilla’s suggestion would lead liberals to abandon beleaguered constituencies at the very moment when they most need defending.

In fact, Lilla is right that liberalism needs to root its devotion to inclusion in larger principles and should not allow itself to be cast (or parodied) as simply about the summing up of group claims. He is also dead on when he writes: “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.” Democrats, who gave us the New Deal and empowered the labor movement, should be alarmed by the flight of the white working class.

But Lilla’s critics are right about something, too: An effort to reach out to the white working class cannot be seen as a strategy for abandoning people of color, Muslims or immigrants, or for stepping back from commitments to gender equality, or for withdrawing support for long-excluded groups. Liberalism’s very inclusiveness offers Democrats long-term advantages both in the Sun Belt and among younger voters who will own the future.

First Read: “An interesting thing happened in the 2016 presidential race: There was no big fight over the politics of Medicare, seniors, and entitlements — like there was in 2010, 2012, and 2014. (The reason why was due to Donald Trump’s promise not to touch entitlements, as well as the Clinton campaign’s effort to go after Trump on temperament, not policy.)”

“But with Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress come Jan. 20, and with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s long-awaited effort to privatize/voucherize/restructure Medicare, entitlement politics are coming back… The biggest unknown, however, is whether President-elect Trump goes along with Ryan’s plans.”

Key takeaway: “Trump joining Ryan’s Medicare efforts could achieve a long-standing conservative goal, but open up the GOP to some mighty political attacks from Democrats in 2018 (including that Trump broke his promise on Medicare and entitlements). Or Trump blocking Ryan could uphold his promise on entitlements, especially with the kinds of voters who won him the election, but it would produce a significant fissure inside the GOP and conservative movement (which Democrats could still exploit). This will be one of the most important storylines to watch next year.”

Matt Bai: “The emergence of ‘fake news’ is a searing hot topic these days, as you’ve probably heard — a new, truth-free media to go with our new, truth-free politics…And the problem with cracking down on social media sites is that it’s a little like the war on drugs. You can try to stamp out the supply of garbage news, but the Web is a vast place, and as long as someone can make money off misinformation, it will always find a crack through which to seep…The answer doesn’t lie in hectoring tech companies into policing content, but rather in teaching our kids how to consume it.”

“Here’s a radical thought: If President Trump is looking for a bold and useful education initiative that might serve the incidental purpose of redeeming what’s left of his soul, media literacy would be a pretty good place to start.”

Nate Silver: “In the 10 states with the largest share of white voters without college degrees, Trump beat his polling average by an average of 8 percentage points — a major polling miss. But in the 10 states with the lowest share of white voters without college degrees, Clinton beat her polls by an average of 3 points (or 4 points if you count the District of Columbia as a state). Overall, the correlation between the share of white non-college voters in a state and the amount by which Trump overperformed (or underperformed) his polls is quite high.”

So a bailout for insurance companies while the sick, elderly, poor and young can go fuck themselves literally to death. If this happens, we must burn everything down. All of it.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook acknowledged that the Clinton campaign lost the election because “younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race,” according to the Washington Post. He noted that the campaign needed to win upwards of 60% of young voters but it was able to garner something “in the high 50s at the end of the day. That’s why we lost.”

Vice President-elect Mike Pence told the Wall Street Journal that the incoming Trump administration “is planning a burst of activity that would take aim at the gridlock in Washington, pressing forward with its goals to overhaul the tax code, health care and immigration laws.”

He said President-elect Donald Trump “is preparing ambitious 100-day and 200-day plans aimed at fulfilling core campaign promises and jump-starting economic growth.”

Asked what might surprise voters about the Trump White House, Mr. Pence said: “I think the only thing that will surprise them is that Washington, D.C., is going to get an awful lot done in a short period of time.”

So Hillary lost the election in those three states combined by less than 80,000 votes, and in each of those states, the Jill Stein and Gary Johnson vote was more than double the margin between Hillary and Trump. Fun times.

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