Political Randomness

[Remus West]

You can lead the kids to come to the conclusion that their parents are entirely to blame for turning Michigan red. That'll bring some excitement to those boring parent-teacher conferences!

Ummm...I work just outside of Detroit. The area I work is VERY Blue. All it would do for PTCs is get me a few more pats on the back most likely.

[LordMortis]

You can lead the kids to come to the conclusion that their parents are entirely to blame for turning Michigan red. That'll bring some excitement to those boring parent-teacher conferences!

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004986.html

Michigan was the only state to experience a population decline over the decade, losing 0.6% of its population.

Add Blue flight to gerrymandering, the Granholm years, and no enthusiasm for the Blue Candidate concurrent with a large rural/elderly enthusiasm for the red and you have a bit more comprehensive look at the current color scheme. At the state level we are still on the blue side by popularity but the districts are so gerrymandered you'd never know it. The evidence beyond popular turnout is that we still have two blue senators.

Our largest problem at the state level mirrors the national federal problem. Rural ignorance rooted in various cultural intolerance has taken control and then proceeded to government itself more control so it doesn't get ousted in cycles.

[Enough]

22 actual headlines from Trump's first month that sadly weren't written by 'The Onion'

[Skinypupy]

A YouTube rabbit hole today led me to this fascinating/horrifying video about the Sesame Credit system that's being introduced in China. It's essentially the gamification of compliance to the government, issuing something akin to a credit score that does up or down depending on how "patriotic" a citizen is being. I figured it had to be BS, but looks to be a real effort. The gist, as explained in the ACLU article:

China is launching a comprehensive “credit score” system, and the more I learn about it, the more nightmarish it seems. China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, “authoritarianism, gamified.” Read this piece for the full flavor—it will make your head spin. If that and the little other reporting I’ve seen is accurate, the basics are this:

- Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
- The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
- In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
- It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create.
- Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
- Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.
- Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
- Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

It's apparently difficult to get accurate information on the state of the program (shocking, I know), but this WSJ article from Dec seems to indicate that it's still in full swing.

The video is a really interesting look at how gaming motivation/psychology is being applied to a meta issue such as patriotism and compliance. How Trump will decide to implement such a system in the US is still TBD, but stay tuned on how to receive your Patriot Points (TM) rewards catalog!

[malchior]

I think this might be the shortest bill in years.

To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. TERMINATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY.

The Environmental Protection Agency shall terminate on December 31, 2018.

[Defiant]

I think this might be the shortest bill in years.

Forget Bills, that's even shorter than Danny DeVito. *rimshot*

(I couldn't think of a short Bill)

[Jaymann]

A day that shall live in infamy!

[Max Peck]

I think this might be the shortest bill in years.

Forget Bills, that's even shorter than Danny DeVito. *rimshot*

(I couldn't think of a short Bill)

Bushwick Bill

[Zarathud]

Bills like this are idiotic stunts that show the author knows nothing about governing the country.

[Smoove_B]

Looks like someone leaked a plot line for the upcoming season of The Americans. Oh, no, sorry. This actually happened on Election Day.

NEW YORK — He was found just before 7 a.m. on Election Day, lying on the floor of the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side.

The man was unconscious and unresponsive, with an unidentified head wound — “blunt force trauma,” in cop parlance. By the time emergency responders reached him, he was dead.

Initial reports said the nameless man had plunged to his death from the roof of the consulate. As journalists rushed to the scene, consular officials quickly changed the narrative. The anonymous man had not fallen dozens of feet from the roof of the consular building, they said, but rather had suffered a heart attack in the security office, and died.

....

English-language news reports said Krivov, identified then only as a 63-year-old Russian national and Manhattan resident, was a security officer. But a November report from Sputnik, the English-language Russian media outlet, says he was a consular duty commander.

That position is no ordinary security guard. According to other public Russian-language descriptions of the duty commander position, Krivov would have been in charge of, among other things, “prevention of sabotage” and suppression of “attempts of secret intrusion” into the consulate.

In other words, it was Krivov’s job to make sure US intelligence agencies didn’t have ears in the building.

I'm sure it's all just a coincidence. Also, hey look, it's Buzzfeed.

[Unagi]

I think this might be the shortest bill in years.

Forget Bills, that's even shorter than Danny DeVito. *rimshot*

(I couldn't think of a short Bill)

[LordMortis]

http://www.theolympian.com/opinion/arti ... 76504.html

It wasn’t just that McClintock got an angry earful from people concerned their health care coverage would be eliminated by the policies of Donald Trump. In his House speech, McClintock said he saw similarities between what transpired at his town-hall meeting and one of the darkest moments in our nation’s past.

“Once in our history, we stopped talking to each other. That was the election of 1860,” McClintock said. “That election was marked not by reconciliation, but by rioting in those regions where the opposition dominated.”

As we know from our history books, the election of 1860 swept Abraham Lincoln into White House and preceded a Civil War that caused the deaths of more than 600,000 people. “Have we not started down that road again?” McClintock asked in his speech.

Do the republican party honestly see these last 8 to 16 or 20 years as the actions of protecting the union a la Abraham Lincoln? Seriously? So the Party on "no" was "no-ing" to preserve the union? And that resisting "this movement" as Trump and the RNC apparently refer to it, is that same as protecting "the institution" of keeping human beings subject to slavery?

I'm either grossly misunderstanding or the level of delusion going on here is unfathomable to me.

[Jaymann]

http://www.theolympian.com/opinion/arti ... 76504.html

It wasn’t just that McClintock got an angry earful from people concerned their health care coverage would be eliminated by the policies of Donald Trump. In his House speech, McClintock said he saw similarities between what transpired at his town-hall meeting and one of the darkest moments in our nation’s past.

“Once in our history, we stopped talking to each other. That was the election of 1860,” McClintock said. “That election was marked not by reconciliation, but by rioting in those regions where the opposition dominated.”

As we know from our history books, the election of 1860 swept Abraham Lincoln into White House and preceded a Civil War that caused the deaths of more than 600,000 people. “Have we not started down that road again?” McClintock asked in his speech.

Do the republican party honestly see these last 8 to 16 or 20 years as the actions of protecting the union a la Abraham Lincoln? Seriously? So the Party on "no" was "no-ing" to preserve the union? And that resisting "this movement" as Trump and the RNC apparently refer to it, is that same as protecting "the institution" of keeping human beings subject to slavery?

I'm either grossly misunderstanding or the level of delusion going on here is unfathomable to me.

I'm not sure, but I think it's code for give all the money to the banks and oil companies, and suppress minority voting.

[Holman]

Do the republican party honestly see these last 8 to 16 or 20 years as the actions of protecting the union a la Abraham Lincoln? Seriously? So the Party on "no" was "no-ing" to preserve the union? And that resisting "this movement" as Trump and the RNC apparently refer to it, is that same as protecting "the institution" of keeping human beings subject to slavery?

I'm either grossly misunderstanding or the level of delusion going on here is unfathomable to me.

They justified it as patriotism back then too.

[Smoove_B]

And here you go - the GOP base benefits the most from federal anti-poverty programs:

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy-analysis group, found that in both percentage terms and absolute numbers, federal programs reduced poverty among working-age whites without a college degree more than they did among non-college-educated Hispanics, African Americans, or members of other races, and far more than they did among college-educated adults of any race. The number of these working-age whites, in fact, exceeded the combined number of non-college-educated blacks, Hispanics, and members of other races that made such gains.

...

House Republicans have repeatedly passed budgets that impose significant reductions on government anti-poverty programs, but those plans were mostly stymied in the Senate or by former President Obama. Now, with unified control of Washington, the GOP has a much clearer path toward enacting those cuts. But, as with the drive to repeal the ACA, they face the risk of withdrawing government benefits that many of their own voters rely on.

“[T]he election has brought increased attention to the economic difficulties that people without a college degree can face,” the CBPP report’s authors write. “Largely overlooked in the discussion of these issues to date, however, is the fact that the nation’s poverty-reduction programs provide extensive support to adults lacking a college degree, including working-class whites, and that such people would be the principal losers under various proposals to cut these programs that may emerge in coming months.”

[$iljanus]

And here you go - the GOP base benefits the most from federal anti-poverty programs:

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy-analysis group, found that in both percentage terms and absolute numbers, federal programs reduced poverty among working-age whites without a college degree more than they did among non-college-educated Hispanics, African Americans, or members of other races, and far more than they did among college-educated adults of any race. The number of these working-age whites, in fact, exceeded the combined number of non-college-educated blacks, Hispanics, and members of other races that made such gains.

...

House Republicans have repeatedly passed budgets that impose significant reductions on government anti-poverty programs, but those plans were mostly stymied in the Senate or by former President Obama. Now, with unified control of Washington, the GOP has a much clearer path toward enacting those cuts. But, as with the drive to repeal the ACA, they face the risk of withdrawing government benefits that many of their own voters rely on.

“[T]he election has brought increased attention to the economic difficulties that people without a college degree can face,” the CBPP report’s authors write. “Largely overlooked in the discussion of these issues to date, however, is the fact that the nation’s poverty-reduction programs provide extensive support to adults lacking a college degree, including working-class whites, and that such people would be the principal losers under various proposals to cut these programs that may emerge in coming months.”

Oh Smoove, they're talking about cutting the programs benefiting the illegals, not real Americans. And you know which Americans I mean...

[Max Peck]

At least some members of Congress are tackling the important issues of the day.

Today Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), and Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.) introduced bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would eliminate federal alcohol taxes on kombucha and update regulations for kombucha companies in Colorado and nationwide.

“It’s important that our tax code evolve to address its unintended consequences on emerging industries, and its effect on Kombucha manufacturers is an example of why Congress must act to amend it,” said Senator Gardner. “This bipartisan legislation is a commonsense fix that will provide regulatory and tax relief to small businesses in Colorado and throughout this country so that they can continue to create good-paying jobs.”

"Kombucha is the fastest growing beverage category in the United States," Rep. Jared Polis said. "This bipartisan bill will eliminate unfair taxes for kombucha brewers, many of whom are small businesses. By taking kombucha out from under alcohol in the tax and regulatory code, we can help a new industry grow throughout Colorado and across the country."

“Too often, federal regulations get in the way of small business innovation,” Rep. Scott Tipton said. “The challenges that the nation’s Kombucha producers have come up against in the federal tax code are a clear example of this. I’m glad to join Congressman Polis and Senator Gardner to put forward this common-sense solution that will help create further economic opportunities for Coloradans.”

In the Senate, the Keeping our Manufacturers from Being Unfairly Taxed while Championing Health (KOMBUCHA) Act is co-sponsored by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Scott Tipton (R-Colo.) worked together to introduce a companion version in the House.

“We are relieved that this bill will permit us to brew safe and compliant Kombucha here in Colorado while maintaining the correct classification as non-alcoholic,” Ed Rothbauer, President of High Country Kombucha said. “We are grateful to all of the original co-sponsors for their support of our growing industry of healthy beverage choices, and specifically to Rep. Polis’ for his help dealing with regulators on this issue since 2010.”

Kombucha is a fermented tea that has been consumed for over 2,000 years. Trace amounts of up to 1 percent alcohol can occur naturally in the production process, which currently triggers the type of federal excise taxes usually reserved for alcoholic beverages. The KOMBUCHA Act eliminates those unintended tax and regulatory burdens by increasing the applicable alcohol-by-volume limit for kombucha from 0.5 percent to 1.25 percent. Kombucha would still have to meet the health and safety requirements generally applicable to non-alcoholic beverages.

The kombucha industry is one of the fastest growing beverage categories with a current economic impact of $600 million and expected growth to $1.8 billion by 2020. Colorado's kombucha industry is estimated at $20 million in annual sales and provides hundreds jobs across the state.

[Holman]

https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/832592784754348033

This is starting to look like Nixon doing photo ops with WH tourists while Watergate splashed itself all over the news.

[Smoove_B]

Probably not amusing to anyone but NJ residents, but since it takes a shot at Governor Christie, figured it was worth a share.

[Defiant]

Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to UN, dies suddenly at 64

[Moliere]

Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to UN, dies suddenly at 64

Probably the first to stop clapping after a Putin speech.

[Defiant]

14:58... 14:59...

[Enough]

https://twitter.com/aparnapkin/status/8 ... 9217449984

[Jaymann]

14:58... 14:59...

This creep is the rancid cheese in the marketplace of ideas. Yet no matter how repugnant the message, his right to free speech should never be curtailed.

[Defiant]

Yet no matter how repugnant the message, his right to free speech should never be curtailed.

It isn't when a private company decides to cancel their publishing of his book.

[Jaymann]

Yet no matter how repugnant the message, his right to free speech should never be curtailed.

It isn't when a private company decides to cancel their publishing of his book.

Of course. I was referring to the A-hole Berkeley protesters.

[RunningMn9]

Right, we should curtail their right to free speech to protest him!

[Holman]

Dude sure takes up a lot of air time for someone unable to speak.

[Max Peck]

Right, we should curtail their right to free speech to protest him!

One would hope that he was referring to the so-call black bloc thugs that caused the police to shut down the protest and event, rather than the peaceful protesters themselves.

[Captain Caveman]

Jeebus.

I'm a faculty member at a public university in Texas. I fear this is in my future.

https://twitter.com/raleighreporter/sta ... 9071474688

[Fretmute]

Jeebus.

I'm a faculty member at a public university in Texas. I fear this is in my future.

https://twitter.com/raleighreporter/sta ... 9071474688

Obviously they mean elected and not registered, right? Because registered would be too close to 50/50.

[Jaymann]

Right, we should curtail their right to free speech to protest him!

One would hope that he was referring to the so-call black bloc thugs that caused the police to shut down the protest and event, rather than the peaceful protesters themselves.

Yes, I was referring to the violence (like the pepper spraying of a woman wearing a "Make Bitcoin Great Again" hat. I 100% support peaceful protest, just as I do freedom of speech.

[Max Peck]

Right, we should curtail their right to free speech to protest him!

One would hope that he was referring to the so-call black bloc thugs that caused the police to shut down the protest and event, rather than the peaceful protesters themselves.

Yes, I was referring to the violence (like the pepper spraying of a woman wearing a "Make Bitcoin Great Again" hat. I 100% support peaceful protest, just as I do freedom of speech.

A thing to remember is that a black bloc is a tactic, not a specific movement. Usually they're associated with anarchists, antiglobalists and such, but in any given scenario it could be anyone (that's the whole point of the get-up). It still strikes me as interesting that the one person who came out ahead from the Berkeley fracas was Milo himself. Hell, he even leveraged his 15 minutes there to score a spot as a keynote speaker at CPAC, at least until his pro-pedo interviews bobbed to the surface and scotched the deal.

[Holman]

Jeebus.

I'm a faculty member at a public university in Texas. I fear this is in my future.

https://twitter.com/raleighreporter/sta ... 9071474688

I predict a sharp rise in AAUP RINO's.

[Zarathud]

Because colleges and universities should make you think about party loyalty oaths and ideological purity tests. I thought Republicans were supposed to want fewer regulations!

[Paingod]

Because colleges and universities should make you think about party loyalty oaths and ideological purity tests. I thought Republicans were supposed to want fewer regulations!

Theoretically, you won't need any regulations at all if everyone believes the same things and acts the same ways.

[Max Peck]

Because colleges and universities indoctrination facilities should make you think about party loyalty oaths and ideological purity tests. I thought Republicans were supposed to want fewer regulations dissenters!

Goodthink rectified.

[malchior]

Ducking constituents because you know what you are doing is unpopular (and vile) - Democracy in America these days.

[tjg_marantz]

Not even where to put this.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism ... bart-news/

[Captain Caveman]

Not even where to put this.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism ... bart-news/

Meanwhile, the man who hired him is now one of the most powerful people in the world.