@Fardragon: I think what @smeagolheart is getting at is the fact that Trump has so far turned out to be the status quo candidate in several ways. People didn't like the status quo of X, Y, and Z and therefore voted for Trump. But Trump is currently doing X, Y, and Z.
Everyone knows Trump voters liked his outsider status and supported him because they wanted him to change things. The question is whether that perception was accurate.
And for what it's worth, if you read Clinton's campaign platform, she did stand for change. Her policies looked nothing like the politics of the past 6 years (the platform represented what Obama had not been able to accomplish with Congress, plus some further-left stuff like campaign finances reform), and her voting record is barely any different from Bernie Sanders, who was as much an anti-status quo candidate as Trump. Her policies didn't represent the status quo.
But people almost never talked about her policies or her voting record. They talked about her years of experience in politics, and assumed that she wouldn't shake things up like Trump would.
I do think Sanders would have been a better choice in retrospect, since he had always been projected to win the election by wider margins than Clinton. But if you win the popular vote, you definitely had a strong candidate--you just didn't win the right votes.
"You voted for Trump because the Democrats didn't, and still haven't, got the faintest notion how you mind works."
Straw men or no I definitely heard these arguments against Hillary, didn't you?
Heard them? Yes. Think they determined how many people voted? No.
Consider this: you have no job, no money and no prospects. So long as you remember, things have been getting steadily worse. Does it make any sense to vote for the status quo candidate? No, you will vote for a change, ANY change, or the closest thing to a change available on the ballot paper.
In order to understand, liberals and democrats need to grasp that, outside of a few fanatics, many of those who voted for Trump hate him just as much as they hate Clinton.
Yet these same people "stay red" every election anyway, sticking with a republican status quo instead of investing in innovation and ideas to help pull them from the status quo.
If the above was true, there would be more swing states than there are.
Trump didn't win the election, the Democrats lost it. And they lost it the moment they chose a candidate of the status quo.
It has nothing to do with Clinton being corrupt, or incompetent, or a women. It's just down to her standing for no change.
I wish people would have looked deeper at the stakes which we are seeing play out now. That's very superficial, to want change and ignore the threat of a guy who's now attacking the only real checks and balances on his power - the media and the courts. The GOP Congress has shown no interest in standing up to him. A lot of individual people (eg protesters) are standing up to him but individual power is limited.
Not to mention the policies we're getting.
Change for the sake of change isn't always a good thing.
I think a lot of Americans have little perception of just how bad things are for some of thier fellow citizens.
When you have nothing left to lose then you are going to pick ANY change.
Except the average Trump voter makes over $70,000 a year, or essentially DOUBLE what I take in personally. The median income of Hillary voter was far lower.
The economy of the blue collar worker that existed in this country was killed during the Reagan Administration. Or at the very least, was given a terminal illness due to just how far he shifted the country to the right. The destruction of unions, the fantasy of trickle-down economics. We've been living in this paradigm ever since. Reagan was a disaster in retrospect, but he was unbelievably consequential, mostly due to the myth building surrounding his legacy. The irony?? Someone with Reagan's exact policies couldn't get arrested in a GOP primay currently.
I'm not surprised Trump voters have above average incomes. Generally speaking, the poor disproportionately vote Democrat, not Republican. That's been the historical norm for decades.
In fact, that's the longest-running demographic difference between the Democratic party and GOP that I know of--I think it even dates back to Lincoln. The Democratic party's based used to be blue-collar whites back in the day, which changed when LBJ helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (being pro-racial equality used to be an upper-class urban Republican thing). Blue-collar whites started shifting to the GOP, upset that the Democratic party hopped on the civil rights movement, but even after that, the Democratic party's base remained relatively poor--mostly because of tax issues.
I think a lot of Americans have little perception of just how bad things are for some of thier fellow citizens.
When you have nothing left to lose then you are going to pick ANY change.
Makes sense, but not always true. I just met a homeless guy earlier today. I bought him and his friend a pizza and asked him to go to the homeless shelter and take advantage of the resources there, but I know there's a good chance he won't do it. A lot of people end up on the streets and then stay there. There are plenty of people who have nothing left to lose, but do NOT pick change.
Those are the folks who don't think things can get better.
Sure, there where wealthy people who voted for Trump - but they are life long Republicans who would vote for anyone under their banner. They are the whole reason Trump didn't stand as an independent. But it was the votes of the poor that sung it. And if the democrats, or a genuinely left leaning alternative, can't empathise with them they are going to continue to loose.
In France it looks likely that it will be an independent liberal centerist internationalist candidate who will be taking on the facists for the presidency. The traditional parties are floundering.
Op Ed in Spiegel Online, one of the most widely read German-language news Websites, titled Trump as Nero: Europe Must Defend Itself Against A Dangerous President
There was a major constituent effort targeting varioua Republican Senators to get even ONE more of them to vote against DeVos. I heard multiple reports that many of them just flat-out stopped answering the phones at their offices.
The attack on teachers specifically by the right is something I take personally. First off, they do not get 3 months off a year. Both my parents were teachers, and at most it amounted to a month and a half. Their work did not end at the last bell of the day. My dad graded papers at home every night. I personally went with him on trips to a bulk school supply store where he bought supplies for students out of his own pocket. Lastly, if a kid isn't learning, it's almost assuredly the fault of the parent not instilling any value of education or joy of learning in their child. Many parents send their kids to school and simply expect teachers to perform some sort of miracle with a child who has clearly never been read to in their life. If a kid is failing in school, the answer almost always lies if the parent looks in the mirror. Yet teachers are among our most demonized professions.
"If a kid is failing in school, the answer almost always lies if the parent looks in the mirror."
Granted this is the case fairly often, but I would lay the majority of the blame on the system. Standardized testing only benefits children who think in a very specific way, and can royally screw over those who are no less intelligent, but whose minds work even slightly differently. The very real issues teachers face as mentioned by jjstraka34 above, and the issue of schools valuing secure funding and the right numbers over actual education. The U.S. education system is a hot mess.
It's just disgusting how Republican representatives just stopped picking up their phones after they were stormed with millions of calls from people--their people--begging them not to vote this woman in. And meanwhile, it's the kids and young adults--those who don't get a say in who makes decisions in our government--who will pay the price.
I'm having flashbacks to George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and all the standardized testing I had to go through as a kid. It was miserable and soul-crushing, especially since there was nothing I could do about it. I kept feeling like, these adults making decisions don't have a darn clue what going to school is even like anymore. Why should they get to call the shots?
Admittedly, I was in middle-school and like...twelve. Still. Just the idea that there will be another generation of kids who will be cheated out of a quality of education thanks to this embarrassing woman makes my stomach churn.
The whole Republican party makes me sick right now.
Standardized testing is nothing but a boondoggle for the companies that make the tests. Watch Season 4 of the phenomenal TV series "The Wire" for a fantastic dramatized look at how this works.
No Child Left Behind was a disaster, without question. Ted Kennedy went along with Bush on it and said he felt completely betrayed by how it was implemented. Standardized testing has no place in public schools. But hey, that's fine. Betsy DeVos wants to destroy them anyway.
I will have to track down the article now because I read it a few weeks ago but a recent standardized test included questions from a poem. To its credit, the test maker sent the questions and the answers to the poem's author so she could review them for accuracy; unfortunately, the author could not correctly answer the questions about her own poem!
I never minded tests--in fact, I looked forward to Saturdays when I was in high school because Saturday meant math/science meets where I could take more tests and win contests--but I was in school before the first big push to standardize everything. My problem with standardized testing is that school funding has been tied to the test results and this forces teachers to "teach the test" rather than an actual curriculum; this also forces administrators to demand that teachers teach the test so that they keep their funding and they can get those stupid "recognized" or "exemplary" banners which mean nothing.
If you want to make certain that kids are learning then force them to read out loud in front of the class to demonstrate their ability to read and understand information, don't teach them ridiculous methods for solving math problems in lieu of memorizing their addition and multiplication tables (or at least give them all abaci, which actually helps them to learn math more effectively), and don't politicize the history or science classes--teach only the facts, leaving interpretation for later. Other than that, schools should encourage creativity instead of robotic homogeneity--our daughter wants to write so right now I am having her free-write a page every day which I critique upon arriving home.
I'm certainly not against tests, that would be insane. I'm against tests where the only avenue of success a teacher or administration has is to teach specifically to the test, at the expense of actual learning. I got through pre-Calc in high school by staying home sick when there was a test I wasn't prepared for and then having the smartest kid in class tell me exactly what type of problems were on the test and have him walk me through them in study hall prior to taking it later in the day. I learned absolutely nothing, because my only goal in that situation was getting a good grade on the test. In hindsight, I should have never taken that class. My math skills peaked at around Algebra 2. In Knowledge Bowl (academic quiz competition basically), we had two people there SPECIFICALLY for math problems. I was there for everything else. I didn't even pick up a pencil on those questions.
Mark my words, Betsy DeVos will be an abject disaster for American education.
I caught Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders debating tonight. Cruz said that, like Sanders, he felt that both parties were corrupt and in the control of lobbyists. Cruz's solution was to impose a flat tax and abolish the IRS. This, he said, would end the problem of lobbyists.
I had 2 conflicting thoughts on this. My first one was this:
1. Yes, a flat tax would indeed mean an end to lobbying. Because then the lobbyists would have won the war, and we would have lost the war, because the lobbyists would have gotten everything they wanted. One of the most important jobs of the lobbyist is to pressure government officials to give their company tax breaks. And if you give them the biggest tax break in history--well, then companies won't need those lobbyists anymore. Because we already surrendered.
Then I realized something much more disturbing:
2. The exact opposite would happen. Because you'd be rewarding companies for using lobbyists, by giving them exactly what they wanted. But it wouldn't end there, because no matter how little a company pays in taxes, it can still donate to an election campaign and pay its lobbyists to pressure government officials. And even if you reduced all taxes to zero, and companies didn't have to pay anything to operate in this country, they'd still be able to ask for more. Because lobbyists aren't just there to ask for tax breaks.
They're also there to ask for subsidies. The government already offers subsidies to businesses, handing out taxpayer money to private corporations as a reward for their aggressive lobbying and campaign contributions. If lobbyists get all the tax breaks they want, they will just switch to asking for more handouts. And with a lower tax burden, they'll have even more money they can use to purchase political power.
The solution to corruption in government does not lie in giving corrupt people all the tax breaks and subsidies and free money they want.
The solution to corruption in government is to ban campaign contributions and throw lobbyists out of the halls of Congress.
Ted Cruz has got to be one of the slimiest politicians in the country, and that is saying something. He went all in at the Republican Convention by not endorsing Trump at the end of his speech and banking on a Hillary victory to put himself in the driver's seat for 2020. Boy did he lose that bet. He still maintains strong support among hardcore evangelicals, but the far-right has found their cult figure. Ted Cruz succumbed to Trump last in the Republican field, but he succumbed all the same. It was obvious what was going on the entire time. Trump was saying things out loud that the other candidates (and the Republican Party) have been saying in code for 30 years. Trump unleashed the conservative id that people like Ted Cruz have been tapping into but trying to keep a lid on for decades. Frankenstein's monster is loose in the village now. The standard Trump has set is to be openly racist, xenophobic and misogynistic. If the Alt-right and the anti-PC movement has taught us anything, it's that there is a great number of people who are just DYING to express these viewpoints openly and loudly. What use do they have for some guy like Ted Cruz who only goes halfway when Trump gives them a pure mainline of the same drug??
Of course, all the incidents of the left supposedly doing it are ordinary citizens who have no power to do so. This was the Senate Majority Leader in the hall of the Senate. No dissent will be tolerated. This is now an autocracy.
By the way, no one would have covered her reading Coretta Scott King's letter about Sessions if she'd been allowed to read it. Now that letter is the top story in the country. Well played, McConnell.
In these two tweets, Trump is both setting up being able to blame the judiciary for any terrorist attack under his watch and literally RALLYING law enforcement officials tasked with carrying out judicial orders in opposition to them. This is bad, bad news folks. Not normal.
Yeah during a debate on a cabinet nominee's fitness Elizabeth Warren was silenced as she read a letter about exactly the character of the nominee. Because his character is so low that talking about it impugned his reputation.
Isn't that hearing exactly the time to discuss the guys character???
In these two tweets, Trump is both setting up being able to blame the judiciary for any terrorist attack under his watch and literally RALLYING law enforcement officials tasked with carrying out judicial orders in opposition to them. This is bad, bad news folks. Not normal.
Couple things wrong here. To begin with, the Bannon administraton didn't clear the order with anyone - just surprise everybody, Muslim ban... They didn't talk to lawyers or departments prior to implementing it. You know the people that would have told them it's unconstitutional or a bad idea.
And now Trump is like "omg, I can't believe my facist order is being questioned.." when he never bothered to check the legality of it to begin with.
And of course there's the whole attacking the judiciary part of things too.
Furthermore, Sessions was held til last so he could continue to vote on these nominees from his Senate seat. There is no reasonable code of ethics under which Sessions should be casting a vote for ANY of these cabinet posts.
President of the Unites States attacking a company for not carrying his daughter's products anymore. This is a flat-out mafia extortion tactic. "Be a shame if something happend to your stock price". Trump is a thug, a mafia hood given the nuclear football.
The solution to corruption in government is to ban campaign contributions and throw lobbyists out of the halls of Congress.
Please, yes. I have been saying this for years and I am glad to see someone else saying it, as well.
@jjstraka34 Knowledge Bowl! I was in that, as well. We tried to one-up each other by seeing who could answer the questions the fastest, often before the question reader finished the question. I did fine with "The number of teeth in the adult--" *ding* "32" but my friend did much better with "Superman--" *ding* "Krypton". (it was the most logical answer based on the opening word)
The White House, and be extension the members of the First Family, are supposed to separate themselves from business dealings and/or brand endorsement. Nordstrom, being a corporation, doesn't care about politics so if they are dropping a product line it is because the sales numbers have slipped and they can assign that floor space to another line which will sell. The people buying--or not buying, in this case--the products may indeed be skipping over her products because of her family association but, truthfully, that isn't her fault--she did not choose her parents (none of us did, now that I think about it).
Comments
Everyone knows Trump voters liked his outsider status and supported him because they wanted him to change things. The question is whether that perception was accurate.
And for what it's worth, if you read Clinton's campaign platform, she did stand for change. Her policies looked nothing like the politics of the past 6 years (the platform represented what Obama had not been able to accomplish with Congress, plus some further-left stuff like campaign finances reform), and her voting record is barely any different from Bernie Sanders, who was as much an anti-status quo candidate as Trump. Her policies didn't represent the status quo.
But people almost never talked about her policies or her voting record. They talked about her years of experience in politics, and assumed that she wouldn't shake things up like Trump would.
I do think Sanders would have been a better choice in retrospect, since he had always been projected to win the election by wider margins than Clinton. But if you win the popular vote, you definitely had a strong candidate--you just didn't win the right votes.
If the above was true, there would be more swing states than there are.
Not to mention the policies we're getting.
Change for the sake of change isn't always a good thing.
When you have nothing left to lose then you are going to pick ANY change.
The economy of the blue collar worker that existed in this country was killed during the Reagan Administration. Or at the very least, was given a terminal illness due to just how far he shifted the country to the right. The destruction of unions, the fantasy of trickle-down economics. We've been living in this paradigm ever since. Reagan was a disaster in retrospect, but he was unbelievably consequential, mostly due to the myth building surrounding his legacy. The irony?? Someone with Reagan's exact policies couldn't get arrested in a GOP primay currently.
In fact, that's the longest-running demographic difference between the Democratic party and GOP that I know of--I think it even dates back to Lincoln. The Democratic party's based used to be blue-collar whites back in the day, which changed when LBJ helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (being pro-racial equality used to be an upper-class urban Republican thing). Blue-collar whites started shifting to the GOP, upset that the Democratic party hopped on the civil rights movement, but even after that, the Democratic party's base remained relatively poor--mostly because of tax issues. Makes sense, but not always true. I just met a homeless guy earlier today. I bought him and his friend a pizza and asked him to go to the homeless shelter and take advantage of the resources there, but I know there's a good chance he won't do it. A lot of people end up on the streets and then stay there. There are plenty of people who have nothing left to lose, but do NOT pick change.
Those are the folks who don't think things can get better.
"Biggest rally ever in the history of things. Period."
In France it looks likely that it will be an independent liberal centerist internationalist candidate who will be taking on the facists for the presidency. The traditional parties are floundering.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-1133177-amp.html
The attack on teachers specifically by the right is something I take personally. First off, they do not get 3 months off a year. Both my parents were teachers, and at most it amounted to a month and a half. Their work did not end at the last bell of the day. My dad graded papers at home every night. I personally went with him on trips to a bulk school supply store where he bought supplies for students out of his own pocket. Lastly, if a kid isn't learning, it's almost assuredly the fault of the parent not instilling any value of education or joy of learning in their child. Many parents send their kids to school and simply expect teachers to perform some sort of miracle with a child who has clearly never been read to in their life. If a kid is failing in school, the answer almost always lies if the parent looks in the mirror. Yet teachers are among our most demonized professions.
Granted this is the case fairly often, but I would lay the majority of the blame on the system. Standardized testing only benefits children who think in a very specific way, and can royally screw over those who are no less intelligent, but whose minds work even slightly differently. The very real issues teachers face as mentioned by jjstraka34 above, and the issue of schools valuing secure funding and the right numbers over actual education. The U.S. education system is a hot mess.
I'm having flashbacks to George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and all the standardized testing I had to go through as a kid. It was miserable and soul-crushing, especially since there was nothing I could do about it. I kept feeling like, these adults making decisions don't have a darn clue what going to school is even like anymore. Why should they get to call the shots?
Admittedly, I was in middle-school and like...twelve. Still. Just the idea that there will be another generation of kids who will be cheated out of a quality of education thanks to this embarrassing woman makes my stomach churn.
The whole Republican party makes me sick right now.
www.ottawasun.com/2017/02/05/american-education-is-at-a-crossroads
No Child Left Behind was a disaster, without question. Ted Kennedy went along with Bush on it and said he felt completely betrayed by how it was implemented. Standardized testing has no place in public schools. But hey, that's fine. Betsy DeVos wants to destroy them anyway.
I never minded tests--in fact, I looked forward to Saturdays when I was in high school because Saturday meant math/science meets where I could take more tests and win contests--but I was in school before the first big push to standardize everything. My problem with standardized testing is that school funding has been tied to the test results and this forces teachers to "teach the test" rather than an actual curriculum; this also forces administrators to demand that teachers teach the test so that they keep their funding and they can get those stupid "recognized" or "exemplary" banners which mean nothing.
If you want to make certain that kids are learning then force them to read out loud in front of the class to demonstrate their ability to read and understand information, don't teach them ridiculous methods for solving math problems in lieu of memorizing their addition and multiplication tables (or at least give them all abaci, which actually helps them to learn math more effectively), and don't politicize the history or science classes--teach only the facts, leaving interpretation for later. Other than that, schools should encourage creativity instead of robotic homogeneity--our daughter wants to write so right now I am having her free-write a page every day which I critique upon arriving home.
Mark my words, Betsy DeVos will be an abject disaster for American education.
I had 2 conflicting thoughts on this. My first one was this:
1. Yes, a flat tax would indeed mean an end to lobbying. Because then the lobbyists would have won the war, and we would have lost the war, because the lobbyists would have gotten everything they wanted. One of the most important jobs of the lobbyist is to pressure government officials to give their company tax breaks. And if you give them the biggest tax break in history--well, then companies won't need those lobbyists anymore. Because we already surrendered.
Then I realized something much more disturbing:
2. The exact opposite would happen. Because you'd be rewarding companies for using lobbyists, by giving them exactly what they wanted. But it wouldn't end there, because no matter how little a company pays in taxes, it can still donate to an election campaign and pay its lobbyists to pressure government officials. And even if you reduced all taxes to zero, and companies didn't have to pay anything to operate in this country, they'd still be able to ask for more. Because lobbyists aren't just there to ask for tax breaks.
They're also there to ask for subsidies. The government already offers subsidies to businesses, handing out taxpayer money to private corporations as a reward for their aggressive lobbying and campaign contributions. If lobbyists get all the tax breaks they want, they will just switch to asking for more handouts. And with a lower tax burden, they'll have even more money they can use to purchase political power.
The solution to corruption in government does not lie in giving corrupt people all the tax breaks and subsidies and free money they want.
The solution to corruption in government is to ban campaign contributions and throw lobbyists out of the halls of Congress.
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-02-08/gop-silences-warren-as-senate-debate-over-sessions-turns-bitter
By the way, no one would have covered her reading Coretta Scott King's letter about Sessions if she'd been allowed to read it. Now that letter is the top story in the country. Well played, McConnell.
In these two tweets, Trump is both setting up being able to blame the judiciary for any terrorist attack under his watch and literally RALLYING law enforcement officials tasked with carrying out judicial orders in opposition to them. This is bad, bad news folks. Not normal.
Isn't that hearing exactly the time to discuss the guys character???
And now Trump is like "omg, I can't believe my facist order is being questioned.." when he never bothered to check the legality of it to begin with.
And of course there's the whole attacking the judiciary part of things too.
President of the Unites States attacking a company for not carrying his daughter's products anymore. This is a flat-out mafia extortion tactic. "Be a shame if something happend to your stock price". Trump is a thug, a mafia hood given the nuclear football.
Either way she isn't doing very good at pushing Trump to do the right thing. Sad.
@jjstraka34 Knowledge Bowl! I was in that, as well. We tried to one-up each other by seeing who could answer the questions the fastest, often before the question reader finished the question. I did fine with "The number of teeth in the adult--" *ding* "32" but my friend did much better with "Superman--" *ding* "Krypton". (it was the most logical answer based on the opening word)
The White House, and be extension the members of the First Family, are supposed to separate themselves from business dealings and/or brand endorsement. Nordstrom, being a corporation, doesn't care about politics so if they are dropping a product line it is because the sales numbers have slipped and they can assign that floor space to another line which will sell. The people buying--or not buying, in this case--the products may indeed be skipping over her products because of her family association but, truthfully, that isn't her fault--she did not choose her parents (none of us did, now that I think about it).