I have a banker friend I talk to about the economy sometimes. He told me the housing crisis was coming in 2005 or so (he cashed out too early and didn’t make any money off the whole thing). He’s told me several times that the only thing that matters for the economy is the well-being of the middle-class and that everyone in economics and finance knows that, even if they don’t admit it publicly. I like this quote from William Jennings Bryant that begins a good piece in today’s Washington Post:
“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
We know the story of how the next 30 years went. A few parallels with today are a bit eerie:
In 1926, Calvin Coolidge’s treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men, pushed through a massive tax cut that would substantially contribute to the causes of the Great Depression. Republican Sen. George Norris of Nebraska said that Mellon himself would reap from the tax bill “a larger personal reduction [in taxes] than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska.” The same is true now of Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other fabulously rich people.
Let’s see what economists think about the latest Republican tax gimmick:
In a recent University of Chicago survey of 38 prominent economists across the ideological spectrum, only one said the proposed tax cuts would yield substantial economic growth. Unanimously, the economists said the tax cuts would add to the long-term federal debt burden, now estimated at more than $20 trillion.
It’s a strange combination of faux religion and greed that rule us right now:
In 2016, Donald Trump received the support of 80% of white evangelicals and born-again Christians, while Hillary Clinton drew just 16%. Clinton, on the other hand, won 60% of non-evangelicals. One year later, in the Virginia governor’s race. Republican Ed Gillespie carried 79% of white evangelicals, compared to Democrat Ralph Northam’s 19%. Northam carried a stunning 67% of Virginians who were not white evangelicals or born-agains.
I’ve said it before: I hope people of faith are right about the afterlife, so that today’s Republican politicians can all rot in hell for eternity.
Ithink
We should all be so lucky about that last sentence in this post:D…
Doug!
@Ithink:
Part of me believes that it’s true.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and up until a very few years ago, Andrew Mellon’s descendant and heir, was a major player in right-wing politics because of inherited money. (don’t know if Scaife is still with us)
Villago Delenda Est
Some obscure Scotsman 241 years ago figured out how an economy functions. Idiots wearing ties bearing his image, who have not read his book, have drawn the wrong conclusions ever since.
Oh, and the vast majority of “white evangelicals” are racists first, “Christians” a distant second or third.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I don’t think they actually believe in trickle down economics. After all, it was patrician/Yale-ly/Skull & Bones Poppy Bush who called it “Voo Doo Economics”. It’s just a spin/cover story they sell to placate the marks listening to Hate Radio and to assuage the know-nothing VerySeriousPeople in the Village.
A Ghost To Most
“No Depression” by Uncle Tupelo
Cheryl from Maryland
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Richard Mellon Scaife, may he rot in hell where he should be right now, died from cancer in 2014. So much of what we see today in terms of dirty tricks, birtherism, Project Veritas, was foreshadowed in the Arkansas Project against the Clintons in the 1990’s, in which Scaife was a major bankroller and participant. Needless to say, Scaife was a also a big supporter of Nixon.
Nicole
What has me despairing is that they seem so absolutely unconcerned with how unpopular the bill is, and how bad it is for the economy, both of which they seem to be aware of (just not concerned about). It means to me that they are either really and that truly disconnected from their constituents, or they have reason not to be concerned about electoral backlash next year (as in, it doesn’t matter how we vote; the results will be ratf*cked to put them right back into power). Bush backed off the attempt to destroy SS; Congress is moving full steam ahead. The difference is 10 years of improving how to interfere in free elections. I really feel that there will not be free and fair elections next year (or that, they’ll be noticeably less free and fair than they already are).
This is what feels so different to me- representatives who really don’t seem to give two sh*ts about what their constituents think. They are really not afraid of losing their jobs over this, and that worries me.
trollhattan
They are all down for this, just heard Hensarling lying through his (probably filed to pointy) teeth on my radio about how great the tax break will be (citing a number under $2/year on average, which won’t cover most people’s wireless bill) and how unconstitutional the CFPB is. Hell is too kind a fate for them.
Aleta
-from The Hill
Chris
I also hope that people of that particular brand of faith are right about the Rapture, so that Democrats can re-take the House and Senate.
Yarrow
If we’re going to have a recession it would be great if it could start right after the vote on this bill. Become obvious to even the uninformed by May or June. Make the campaign all about how Republicans destroyed the economy.
Matt McIrvin
And in Bryan’s day, the Southern religionists were on his side.
trollhattan
@Cheryl from Maryland:
My wish is that everyone rewatch the Burns “Vietnam” series for the politics and more specifically, Nixon’s role in changing the arc of American politics. Between flipping the South and labor, he destroyed the Democratic Party and the notion of ethics above winning. We are reliving the Vietnam era and finishing Nixon’s job, only instead of the Soviets stepping into our role as world leader the Chinese are, instead.
JMG
@Yarrow: We have to have the speculative boom leading to bust fueled by the excess of capital in the hands of the rich first.Then we’ll get the recession. Probably take 3-5 years.
The Moar You Know
I feel the need to say it even though it doesn’t really need to be said: there’s something wrong, broken wrong, in America, and it’s been broken since I was a child.
I always held out hope that it would be fixable, until November of last year, when America was asked to choose between a decent future and payback for putting a black man in the Oval Office. America chose payback.
There are certain choices in life you can’t recover from, like the decision to acquire a heroin habit. America’s choice of payback over progress is one of those decisions.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nicole: They only care about what their fat cat campaign donors think.
Nothing else.
Which is why tumbrels are needed. For their donors, and for them.
cmorenc
How terrible and ironic that if we were offered the immediate swap of Nixon for Trump, we’d gladly take Nixon in a heartbeat. Yeah, we would far rather the magical offer be to swap someone like Truman, or either Roosevelt, but if the only offer the magical wizard would make was Nixon, we’d be foolish to not take it, despite Nixon’s huge flaws (e.g. initiation of the “Southern Strategy”). Trump makes George W. Bush’s presidency look like a reign of sensibly responsible prudence by comparison
Trump is that stupendously toxic and terrible. Even an offer for a swap for James Buchanan (who heretofore held title for “worst President ever”, albeit with some stiff pre-Trump competition) we’d have to think over instead of dismissing it out of hand.
trollhattan
@Aleta:
No Baptists, Mormons or fundys? Not real religions, then.
Brachiator
These are just a bunch of elitist eggheads. What do they know?
It’s amazing how evangelicals and others have deluded themselves. I guess they will cling to their guns and religion to the bitter end.
oatler.
Norman Mailer: “There is a sense in ‘Naked Lunch’ of the destruction of soul, which is more intense than any I have encountered in any other modern novel. It is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity.”
I try to hold on to some little faith that we will not tolerate this Lunch for long.
Jeffro
@trollhattan:
Rick Perlstein’s NIXONLAND is great book about the very same era and issues.
But her emails!!!
@Nicole:
They probably aren’t worried about losing their jobs, not because they don’t think they could lose them, but rather because they’ve been assured that if they do, they’ll be well compensated.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Moar You Know:
No.
Never forget that Hillary won the popular vote by millions.
77,000 votes in three key counties shifted the Electoral College to Donald. In Wisconsin, they cannot back up that vote with a paper trail.
Jeffro
@The Moar You Know: America didn’t choose payback. Republicans did. We need to be intentional about the language we use, now more than ever.
It’s easy to focus just on Trumpov and just on 2016. But Republicans have been, for lack of a better word, devolving for a long time now. This tax bill is it: true peak wingnut. Not peak Trumpov…peak Republican wingnuttery.
Brachiator
@Nicole:
The Republicans’ constituents are not the voters, but the Koch Brothers and other plutocrats.
They believe that plutocrat money, gerrymandering, and voter suppression will keep them safe.
They are wrong.
TenguPhule
So McCain has decided that his last act on Earth is going to be to send this country to Hell.
Fuck civility.
May you and every last GOP Senator who votes this through DIAF, Traitors McCain, Collin & Murkowski.
Emma
@Villago Delenda Est: THIS. THIS. THIS. The Democratic party should throw all its resources behind stopping voter suppression. AND increasing voter registration.
Chris
@Jeffro:
Still haven’t read it, because it looks incredibly dense. But I enjoyed reading the book club discussions here when that book was covered, way back when.
No Drought No More
The republican party is comprised of wicked people, led by evil people. There are absolutely no exceptions to that rule.
I once had a conversation with someone who told me he discovered he possessed, at rock bottom, an innate sense of decency because of the republican party. He explained it was his innate decency alone that prevented him from calling down a curse upon the heads of all congressional republicans (he would have included the Trumps had he foreseen the future). The curse on the tip of his tongue that went unuttered was: “May God afflict all their children and children’s children with cancer”.
That doesn’t mean a typical republican voter can’t possess fine attributes. But they all rendered inconsequential in light of their support of American fascism, and it is only a goddamn un- American fool who will argue otherwise in 2017.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Villago Delenda Est:
That special election in Georgia was tampered with too – voting machines were scrubbed after questions were raised. I don’t know if we’ll ever find out the extent to which this election was interfered with, and I believe without a doubt vote totals were altered – either by tampering with the machines, or with machines deliberately put out of service in critical Dem areas. It seems very coordinated. Paper ballots are critical.
Chris
@TenguPhule:
I don’t think we’ll ever know what the hell it was that made McCain give the ACA a reprieve, but I’d already figured at the time that it was going to be pretty much limited to that. The man is still a colossal dick.
TenguPhule
@Nicole:
Worse, they’ve arranged it so that assuming we win in 2018, the GOP can campaign against us in 2020 for raising people’s taxes and not fixing the economy.
Because the worst parts of this bill are designed to show up AFTER the next election.
Brachiator
@Cheryl from Maryland:
An old WaPo story called Scaife the “Funding Father of the Right.”
I had almost forgotten how deep and pernicious his influence was.
The Koch Brothers, I suppose, have picked up where he left off.
Archon
How Christianity got merged with the American right-wing ethos on issues like power and money when they should be incompatible in every way is a truly bizarre phenomenon.
Yarrow
@Emma:
I put this in the previous thread:
I’d REALLY like to see a series here on what is happening to get Dem voters registered in all the states. National programs should be included as well. Highlight their good work. Get people involved. We have to fight back.
Yarrow
@JMG:
Maybe. Muller’s investigations are a wildcard. We don’t know what’s going to happen there and it may impact our economy.
Chris
@Archon:
Not all that bizarre. It basically did the same with the Roman Empire early on in its history.
LurkerNoLonger
Like I said yesterday, and I won’t bore you guys with it again so I’ll condense it:
Republicans: We want to shoot ourselves in the d*ck!
Us: Don’t do that!
Republicans: * Aims gun at d*ck, fires.
Us: Now we’ll have to take that gun away and clean up this mess.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Thanks for the reminder. I missed the series the first time around and need to catch up with it. I’m especially interested in the earliest years of the conflicts in the region.
Nixon formally gave white Southerners a place to go, but they had been fleeing the Democratic Party the moment the Democrats sided with Civil Rights.
The inevitable shift was seen in the 1964 presidential election.
Even with this shift, Johnson still won the South.
But the change was coming. Nixon only encouraged what was happening anyway.
ruemara
@Chris: How do we do that from heaven? It’s not like these folks will be raptured.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Archon:
Is it bizarre to you? YMMV, but much of Christianity as it presents itself in America is extremely judgmental, and having money is a sign “you’re right with God.”
Saturday night sinners, Sunday morning saints….
trollhattan
@Archon:
St. Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly et al turned fundys from non-voters into Republicans.
Chris
@Brachiator:
Yes, it’s notable that the first major Dixiecrat challenge came not in the sixties with George Wallace but in the forties with Strom Thurmond, as soon as Truman did that civil rights thing. Years before Republicans even dreamed of winning the South.
Also notable, and somewhat civil rights related: in 1928, all the border states in the South voted Republican, which was unheard of since the end of Reconstruction. Why? Because the national Democratic Party had had the gall to nominate a Papist.
It’s always about These People, of various kinds, not knowing their place.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Yep, and George Wallace served as a catalyst for the inevitable.
Kay
it’s just infuriating that the giant financial crash is barely over and this same pack of thieves are in power AGAIN.
The next one will be much, much worse because the safety net will be gone . The level of greed is just incredible.
They want it ALL. They can’t leave old people with 740 dollars a month. They have to steal that too.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Emma:
No, Emma, we need to just roll over and pee on ourselves while chanting WASF!
TenguPhule
@Yarrow: Its going to be hard. Not only do we have to win 2018, we will be fighting massive headwinds coming into 2020 because all the GOP shit is going to start dropping around then and guess who the public is gonna probably end up blaming thanks to a very loud and lying media machine?
JMG
Right wing Christianity is a particularly American heresy, since its creed is “God is just like you.He wants what you want and hates what you hate and therefore anything you do God thinks is just great.” At least Ayn Rand had the decency to be an atheist. It’s the same value system.
TenguPhule
@Kay: Parasites, left unchecked, will inevitably kill their host.
Emergency supplies, people. They could save your life in the year to come.
Kay
Wait till the next crash. Forget foreclosures. There will be bread lines.
Maybe it’s good. Maybe that’s what it takes. LESS THAN 10 years ago and we’re doing it again.
I don’t think it’s fair that I have to live thru another one. the goddamn great depression was ONCE in a lifetime
Chris
@ruemara:
Well… if their particular brand of faith is right, sure they will. We’re the bad people because we’re not in the right theological tribe.
Of course, we’ll all die seven years later when Jeebus comes back. But at least we’ll get seven years without having to listen to these people.
Jeanne
According to Washington Post,(can’t link at moment) the one economist who disagreed later stated he misread question.
Booger
@Aleta: Yeah, but what does Franklin Graham have to say about it?
Kay
@TenguPhule:
a extra billion in the sleazy Trump Family coffers
just galling
Jim, Foolish Literalist
that made me chuckle
Yarrow
@Kay: They will not get to keep that money. Mueller’s investigation and Schneiderman’s investigation coordinating with it will make sure of it. It’s hard to pay your lawyers when your assets are frozen.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
In all fairness, at the end of the old Great Depression, they went out and killed the Nazis.
This time, they let Nazis into Congress and the White House.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
No bread lines because even the food pantries are running out of supplies due to the surge in demand.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: No. Of all things, Carter was the first guy to go out and hit up the churches for support. The promise – they were going to finally get a seat at the table.
Reagan swung them over by making them a marginally better offer, which shows you what kind of people they were from the get-go. It was a true shame that Carter, because of his religious background, could not recognize just what kind of people he was climbing into bed with.
Kay
wait until this massive heist passes
we’ll all get to watch these loathsome people flaunt their obscene wealth.
Calouste
Any Democratic challenger of a Republican in a blue state should run on “Representative X voted to raise taxes on this state’s citizens to give to millionaires in Texas”
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
If I didn’t have to talk Mr IOL into it, I’d be cashing out all our stocks. They’re sky high now, but if they crash, we’re broke.
Steve in the ATL
Guy sitting next to me on the airport shuttle in Atlanta this morning was wearing an NRA jacket. Thankfully we were going to the airport so he almost certainly wasn’t carrying.
I wish people were ashamed to identify like that in public.
TenguPhule
@Kay: And cue the first kidnapping for ransom. And then the first robbery/murder, and then just murder because that terminal patient just lost that Medicare treatment.
RIP, respect for the laws of the land.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Kay: Mnuchin’s “wife” is already doing that.
TenguPhule
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Now might be a good time to look at bonds and a six month emergency fund.
Tom
@Jeffro: It is true that Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are causing all the mayhem of which they are capable right now. But Reaganism (of which this is the spiritual heir) is 40 years old during the next Presidential election and getting long in the tooth. Given the number of women who are running for office at all levels in 2018, and the results from Virginia earlier this month, I think we may have cause for guarded optimism that these malign measures can be undone before they bear their full fruit of misery.
Yarrow
@Calouste: “Representative X voted himself a tax cut and made you pay for it.”
Kay
I hope these geriatric Senators are proud. they’re robbing people who aren’t even born yet
They should have to return what they took in subsidies when they were coming up- pay it back with interest.
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
Yeah, it’s going to be hard.
So what?
Water is wet. The sky is blue.
There is no alternative. This shit must be opposed.
A good chunk of the public was bamboozled by Trump in 2016. Still, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. We just have to turn this into an electoral vote majority.
TenguPhule
@Tom:
Sadly, instead of being reviled as he so richly deserves, the passage of time is beautifying Reagan in the public’s memory. This is in part due to our very very bad no good terrible media.
Yarrow
@TenguPhule:
Are you afraid of hard work or something? Who cares if it’s going to be hard. Get to work. Recruit people to work with you. More people involved means less work for all and better likelihood of success.
Cheryl from Maryland
@trollhattan: I hear you. We have it on DVR, but just can’t face watching it right now.
Van Buren
@Nicole: Should Democrats regain control of things, it will take the media about a week to start running stories about overreach.
Russ
@Villago Delenda Est: they choose their church and pastor to match their politics and bigotry.
scav
@Kay: Of course they want a do-over of the depression along with the War of Northern Agression: The Wrong People Won. The govt funded poor people during the depression — including Artists! doing artistic things no less! They built infrastructure — public infrastructure <spit> — that lasted: how anti-business is that?!
Hungry Joe
We’re deep in the coal mine, and that tax bill is one monster of a canary.
Emerald
@Nicole:
“they seem so absolutely unconcerned with how unpopular the bill is” (Can’t highlight text these days)
They know or believe that a large chunk of Democrats are not going to be allowed to vote in 2018. They’ve got the voter suppression in place and they’re getting the judges in place to uphold it.
Only reason they’re voting for this. They know, or believe, that they’re safe.
Social Security and Medicare are next. (Actually, a good chunk of Medicare is automatically taken care of when the deficit explodes next year, so there’s that too.)
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: We need more then that. We need super majorities in both House and Senate at the same time or else we’re never going to be able to reverse all of this shit. We still need to try, but let’s not pretend that simply winning a bare majority in either House or Senate in 2018 is anything more then it actually is.
Promising the voters that Democrats can make things better in 2018 and not being able to follow through on those promises is the kind of thing that causes our casual voters to stop voting.
TenguPhule
@Hungry Joe:
The tax bill has squashed the canary, set it on fire and is now looking for its next victim.
Kathleen
@Chris: Dixiecrats walked out of Democratic convention in 1948 when Hubert Humphrey spoke in support of Civil Rights.
different-church-lady
It’s a murder/suicide pact, and only half the voters signed it.
If I’m lucky I’ll be dead before the part where the Jared Diamond of the year 2300 is writing about us.
TenguPhule
@Tom:
No. Let’s not kid ourselves here with false expectations.
If this shit passes it will be THREE YEARS minimum for us to reverse it.
We will need super majorities in the House and Senate in 2021 to undo this.
Ithink
@Doug!:
Yay! Got fort comment on thread for 1st times every! And yep, Doug. I absolutely believe its true as an esoteric Christian. What does karma mean if nothing @ all of these black holes of human masquerades aren’t forever punished for what they’ve wrought upon American democracy?
trollhattan
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Significant portions are enervating/enraging/devastating, it’s the opposite of binge-watch material. My low point was Kent State, which rattled me for days. It did not help to learn more than half of Americans polled said the dead students deserved it and those blaming the National Guard numbered in the teens. It also caused me to rip into some folks who were having vapors over the kneeling NFL players.
gene108
@Kay:
Pre-New Deal the country basically ran on boom and bust cycles.
It looks the party that rejects science and learning also rejects history and economics.
Raoul
I was listening to Nice Polite Republicans last evening, and Jim Zarroli had a story about the tax bill. It was a trainwreck of onesided journalism. Not a single ounce of economic analysis of the bill, it accepted as given that supply side econ would work. I was (and remain) livid.
Emerald
@Villago Delenda Est:
THIS!!
We have to remember that we had a coup in this country. This was not a legitimate election, and I’m happy to see that Hillary has been speculating about that recently.
Her margin of 2.1% was a clear and decisive victory. That was overturned by only 77K votes in three strategically placed counties. And nobody is interested in checking the forensics.
The truly depressing thing is that our system appears to be incapable of fighting back. So yes, I think you’ve been right all along VDE: it’s gonna have to be tumbrels.
The Thin Black Duke
@TenguPhule: Give it a fucking break, dude. Jesus.
gene108
@TenguPhule:
You don’t need a super majority in the House. A simple majority that sticks together is sufficient. There’s no filibuster type shit in the House.
The Senate is a tougher nut to crack.
O. Felix Culpa
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
Sell just 5-10% of your stock holdings to reap your profits. Much less scary than selling everything and provides a rainy day fund for the inevitable bust.
TenguPhule
@gene108: Having to override a veto takes 2/3rds in both chambers.
Raoul
@gene108: What is worse now is that the vultures on Wall Street have way more vehicles to skim profit on a crashing market than they did pre-1929. So they have the heads I win/tails you lose angles covered, and we all watch our 401(k)s and IRAs (if we’re lucky enough to have them), shrink by 40-50%.
And with this tax bill, Medicare and SSI will be under intense Bowels-Syndrome/Third Way pressure to be cut. The next few decades look stunningly grim. The upside (if there is such a thing) is that maybe we’ll have Democrats on clean up duty for decades, like we did after the last set of Hooverite disasters.
TenguPhule
@The Thin Black Duke: Was anything I said incorrect? Perhaps you could explain to me by what process we reverse prior legislation in 2018?
trollhattan
@Ithink:
Bot R done be Broked. ctrl+alt+del
Ruckus
@Doug!:
I’d like to think that they will rot in hell. But no part of me thinks any of it is true.
Hell is what people being fucked by the uber wealthy have to live in.
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator: @Yarrow: A-fucking-men! Yes, resistance is hard work. Nearly everything worthwhile is hard work and I consider reclaiming our country worthwhile.
So let’s just continue doing what needs to be done. The more the merrier.
O. Felix Culpa
@Ithink: Random word generator? Watson run amok?
Ruckus
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
They don’t believe in trickle down economics because that is the wrong word.
It’s Tinkle down economics. As in “We will steal all the money we can and piss on everything and everyone while we do it.”
Brachiator
@Kay:
Oh, the irony. GOP weasels put a little provision into the House bill to show how much they care about the unborn.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: What next, a pro-pollution provision that mandates rivers be able to be set on fire?
different-church-lady
@O. Felix Culpa: If Watson’s trying to learn from Balloon Juice, they’ve got much bigger problems than Urban Dictionary…
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
You’re wrong about the House. A simple majority is all that’s needed.
I really don’t understand your crystal bawling. Let’s take things one step at a time. Do what we can to oppose the GOP now. Win in 2018, and then take a look and see what is possible, what can be done next.
Lava
Another thing to do: call big companies and ask them what their stance is on the tax bill. They need to know that their customers connect the unpopular tax plans to their companies: we already pay for their products and don’t see why our taxes should go up in order to increase their profits. I started with Kroger, since they get a big chunk of my paycheck, and I also use their pharmacy.
Can we make a list?
Kroger (media). 513-762-4000
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
Overturning a veto takes 2/3rds.
Better safe then sorry.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: Realism. Despair. Two different things that almost everyone today thinks are one.
BellyCat
@Cheryl from Maryland: The playbook for right wing media domination was written by Richard Scaife way back in 1970, when he purchased what was to become Pittsburgh’s second largest paper (while creating an eager audience for Rush Limbaugh’s bile, who is from the area).
Almost 50 years later we inherited Scaie’s version of a grossly slanted right-wing media circus, fueled by opinion-as-fact and objectionable bombast.
Scaife was a brilliant bastard, but a bastard nonetheless. RIP — May he Rot In Perpetuity
swbarnes2
Re: the South changing from Democrat to Republican…this seems to be a pretty good slice of data about how it happened. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2017/08/how-southern-democrats-became-republicans-a-case-study-of-carroll-county-mississippi.html
sherparick
@cmorenc: Trump says on twitter and out loud what Nixon said behind closed doors (but on tape, the goofus!!). Trump is Nixon’s ID, with a strong mixture of P.T. Barnum and Ayn Rand.
The proposal of Tillerson out and Pompeo to State, with Cotton to CIA, does sound like the theme in 2018 will be war, or build up to a war with Iran (I think the North Korean thing will be stay a the tense, constant name calling stage). I think Trump, Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the war hawks on the Republican Party see it as the solution to all their intractable problems. I expect Russia will play a double game, egging Trump on, while at the same time supporting and supplying arms to Iran as Russia will be a huge beneficiary of a spike in oil prices if the Persian Gulf goes up in flames and an intractable war. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/what-war-between-iran-america-would-look-21615?page=2 These Republicans came of age when Bush and Rove played the patriot card in the 2002 and 2004 elections and used the impending Iraq war to either cause Democrats to support them or to be labeled unpatriotic (and in the case of John Kerry, both:-)” War is also a great took for throttling opposition and dissent at home, as both the Trump and Iranian regimes are both aware. This year has been horrible and next year will be worse.
It is highly doubtful that the U.S. would occupy the whole of Iran in the current plans. Even a half assed occupation of Iran, a country of over 650,000 square miles with about 80 million people would require the U.S. keep between 1.2 to 1.5 million troops in the country, which would mean given 1 year rotations and sending troops back in every 3 years a minimum of 4.5 million soldiers back in the states in a situation of seething guerilla war and thousands of casualties a month. That would mean reactivation of the Draft. Even with the best propaganda, voter suppression, and other steps to maintain power, the experience of Vietnam and Iraq would show that after two years the U.S. would be tired and sick of the war, especially a war that would also trigger all sorts of economic problems association high oil prices. The alternative to a full invasion would be an occupation of the Persian gulf coast and the seizure of Iran’s oil assets and then hope the combination of bombing and loss of oil revenue will cause Iran to say “Uncle.” This, at least initially could be done with the volunteer Army. However, Iran has engaged in long wars before and they know Americans don’t like stalemated struggles with constant casualties.
MuckJagger
Personally, I hope they’re wrong wrong, because as someone who’s been on the slow track to hell for 45 years now, while I don’t relish the thought of spending eternity with the Bible thumpers up in heaven, I’d much prefer that to spending eternity in hell with Republican politicians. :-)
O. Felix Culpa
@different-church-lady: LOL. Actually, I think many could learn from the sometimes distinguished and sometimes funny and nearly always entertaining conversations here. I nearly fell out of my seat laughing when you got all shouty the other night, by the way.
BellyCat
@sherparick: Seems (depressingly) accurate a forecast. If not Iran, Trump will gin up an easier target (at the behest of Mother Russia).
Brachiator
@swbarnes2:
Great link. Thanks.
Chris
@sherparick:
Would’ve listed war with Iran as leaning slightly on the unlikely side, but I’m afraid you may be right.
One thing I can totally imagine is that there won’t be war with Iran, but there’ll be airstrikes, and he’ll try to do to it basically what we did to Iraq in the 1990s. That would give him his triumph with a minimum of (American) casualties and no messy and catastrophic occupation.
It would also completely destroy any chance of peace with Iran for a generation and probably destroy the reform movement in Iran for at least that long, but… well… let’s pretend this isn’t exactly what they want.
Kay
@Brachiator:
Ivanka musta put that in – she’s passionate about children according to what her publicist told the NYTimes.
We used a 529 plan to pay for the first child’s college. Then the next one went and we couldn’t afford to put anything in the 529 :)
It’s like useful to 100,000 people. Congress MAY BE a TAD out of touch.
The Truffle
Virginia seems to @Chris: I’m hoping that the Dems at least win the House next year.
So far, that tax “deform” plan is the GOP/Trump’s only real accomplishment so far.
Still pretty pessimistic on the fate of this country. I don’t care what anyone says. I think this is the beginning of the end of the US as a unified country. I can see us going the way of Yugoslavia or the USSR.
debbie
What does your banker friend think of the current housing market? Has he begun to hear the tiny footsteps of dejá vu all over again?
WaterGirl
@O. Felix Culpa: I thought that, too! Lots of words used incorrectly. Did you see Colbert’s routine one day last week where he played clips of Trump and his usual incoherence and then randomly combined a lot of the words he uses – I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like something Trump could have said.
TenguPhule
@Chris:
Uh no. Airstrikes would result in immediate Iranian counterstrikes and heavy American casualties.
They have enough firepower in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf to make our naval forces there very very unhappy. Their missiles have more then enough range to pound our bases in their vicinity.
And that doesn’t even count what a state of active war would allow them to do inside the USA.
Citizen Alan
@Brachiator:
His point is that he assumes Shitgibbon will veto every attempt by a Democratic Congress to undo everything he’s done so far. It requires a 2/3 majority in both houses to pass veto-proof legislation.
Chris
@TenguPhule:
I didn’t say it would be a good idea. I’m saying that, from their point of view, I can totally see it looking like a good, mostly painless, idea. (Kind of like the Iraq War for Dubya).
The counterstrikes and the like would suck, but of course he’d simply go on to talk about how this only proves how dangerous and terroristy Iran is, and we must all rally to this war to ensure that the brave soldiers and sailors of (however you say “U.S.S. Maine in 2018ese).
ETA: should’ve said “from HIS point of view, that would give him…” etc. Sorry for the misleading statement.
TenguPhule
@Chris:
No problem. It happens to us all.
I would just note that political decapitation of the enemy government’s leaders is perfectly legal under the articles of war.
Chris
@TenguPhule:
Totes. But of course, Americans would never take it that way. Remember how every attack on American troops in Iraq was reported as “terrorism,” even though targeted uniformed combatants in a war zone is pretty much by definition not terrorism…
Sister Golden Bear
@Kay: It’s actually yet another attempt to get fetuses declared as legal persons, so the Talibaptists can then use to declare abortion to be considered murder under the law, and thus ban abortion.
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
It’s a narrow point, and still largely wrong.
And pointless. It is almost as though he is saying that nothing really matters until 2021, or that the wounded beast of the public is going to blame Democrats for … something, if they win the mid-terms.
Brachiator
@Kay:
The GOP don’t care about 529 plans. Their other proposals are attacks on college education.
They want to establish the principle that the unborn are people with rights.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: Yep, an attack on Abortion rights just to throw icing on top of the shit cake.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: We can’t undo anything until 2021. Not legally. Not unless we somehow get veto proof majorities at some point.
What winning in 2018 does is let us jam up the federal government and bring it to a standstill. That’s it.
And that is the best case scenario.
What we have to avoid is getting blamed by the general public for all the economic pain that is coming. Remember, we lost our majority in 2010 in large part because the public blamed the Democrats for their pain, despite all facts to the contrary.
Uncle Cosmo
@Brachiator:
Kindly explain to me why it’s wrong. Show your work. Among other things, name the GOP members of Congress you’d expect to vote to override a Twitler veto. The fucking zombies march in lockgoosestep to the oligarchs’ tune in order to hold onto their ticket to eternal wingnut welfare.
The Phule is correct. Until (& unless) a Democrat is in the White House & there are too few Thugs remaining in Congress to throw procedural spanners into the works, we will not be able to start undoing all their damage. IF we take the House & Senate next year we can probably slow the disaster-making machine to a crawl – but there are 13 months before the next Congress takes office.
This is not pessimism – it’s a realistic assessment of the magnitude of the situation. And the long slow hard slog that awaits. Anyone with the illusion it’s going to be a walk in the park will simply walk away when we need them the most.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Yarrow: amen. Please do this thing.
Matt McIrvin
@JMG: Just in time for a Democrat to be President, so they can be blamed!
The Moar You Know
@sherparick: I’m sure you already know this, but we don’t have that many people in the armed forces. And most of the people we do have are not combat troops. During Shrub’s excellent adventure, we could not at any point get 200,000 troops into Iraq…because we didn’t have them.
Occupying Iran would be like trying to occupy America. Everyone’s armed, religious, and pissed off.
Matt McIrvin
@TenguPhule: Well, there’s a difference: in 2010 the President was a Democrat. People generally don’t blame Congress for anything economic, or really anything whatsoever: they blame the President, who they abstractly imagine as a kind of absolute monarch.
I seriously doubt that a Democratic Congress who comes in in 2018 would be blamed for much by the general public. The Republicans will try their hardest to blame them but they won’t succeed.
On the other hand, if the crash is delayed long enough that it happens right after the inauguration of a Democratic President in 2021, we have a problem. Obama was to some degree lucky that the crash happened in 2008 rather than in 2009, which could just as easily have happened.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah. I keep thinking that we’ve been “lucky” that the last couple of serious economic downturns happened under Republican presidencies (late Reagan/Bush, late Dubya) while nothing horribly happened under the Democratic ones. The economy’s been fucked up all the way to hell and back so much that it wouldn’t be hard to imagine this happening to a Dem beyond his control, at which point everybody blames him/her.
TenguPhule
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s what we thought last time in 2010. We figured 2 years wasn’t long enough for them to forget about Bush and company’s epic fails.
We were wrong.
IOIYAR is real and works against us in the media.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The Democratic successors still got blamed two years later for not magically fixing everything, since the ensuing recessions mostly happened on their watch. But the pattern is pretty consistent that it’s the President who gets blamed.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: …I also do think it’s interesting that the mid-80s boom that made everyone love Reagan so much wasn’t really that great. When the “Morning in America” ad aired, we were clawing our way back from a pretty bad recession in Reagan’s first term and unemployment was still considerably higher than it is now. But I suppose some people were seeing palpable improvement.
Barry
@trollhattan: “St. Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly et al turned fundys from non-voters into Republicans.”
I’ve seen the right claim that fundamentalists and ‘people of faith’ were not involved in politics before the
Civil Rights MovementRoe v. Wade, but I’ve never seen even a smidgeon of proof.It’s just a way for the religious right to scrub history clear of their crimes.