onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
If you are tossing it off as, "a few judges and a tax cut", you need to look more closely. It's not a bad place to start, since both are significant and far-reaching, but it's just a start.
J
2020 US Election (Part One)
- Thread starter Lexicus
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J
So, I'm with you on this one and I am with Jay. In retrospect, it will not have been worth it. But no one should really deny how damned effective Trump has been.
Even his clowning is effective. Everyone hates him but people think he's an imbecile. And because of that, they are less scared than they should be
More than once, I have emphasized on CFC that people should be doing a lot more than they are in order to defend against Trump. And I've never been kidding
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
It depends on your perspective. Conservatives are ecstatic about a lot of what the Trump Administration has done. Most of the first year went to dismantling Obama's legacy. Much of last year has been rewriting large sections of administrative law. Some of this was decades overdue, eg WW II era rules that were still in effect. However, them that writes the rules, shapes the rules.
Trump gets knocked on healthcare. This is a list of things he had done as of October 2018.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...-in-just-20-months-relentless-promise-keeping
Health Care
- Signed an executive order to help minimize the financial burden felt by American households Signed legislation to improve the National Suicide Hotline.
- Signed the most comprehensive childhood cancer legislation ever into law, which will advance childhood cancer research and improve treatments.
- Signed Right-to-Try legislation, expanding health care options for terminally ill patients.
- Enacted changes to the Medicare 340B program, saving seniors an estimated $320 million on drugs in 2018 alone.
- FDA set a new record for generic drug approvals in 2017, saving consumers nearly $9 billion.
- Released a blueprint to drive down drug prices for American patients, leading multiple major drug companies to announce they will freeze or reverse price increases.
- Expanded short-term, limited-duration health plans.
- Let more employers to form Association Health Plans, enabling more small businesses to join together and affordably provide health insurance to their employees.
- Cut Obamacare’s burdensome individual mandate penalty.
- Signed legislation repealing Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as the “death panels.”
- USDA invested more than $1 billion in rural health care in 2017, improving access to health care for 2.5 million people in rural communities across 41 states
- Proposed Title X rule to help ensure taxpayers do not fund the abortion industry in violation of the law.
- Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy to keep foreign aid from supporting the global abortion industry.
- HHS formed a new division over protecting the rights of conscience and religious freedom.
- Overturned Obama administration’s midnight regulation prohibiting states from defunding certain abortion facilities.
- Signed executive order to help ensure that religious organizations are not forced to choose between violating their religious beliefs by complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate or shutting their doors.
Combating Opioids
- Chaired meeting the 73rd General Session of the United Nations discussing the worldwide drug problem with international leaders.
- Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand, introducing new measures to keep dangerous drugs out of our communities.
- $6 billion in new funding to fight the opioid epidemic.
- DEA conducted a surge in April 2018 that arrested 28 medical professions and revoked 147 registrations for prescribing too many opioids.
- Brought the “Prescribed to Death” memorial to President’s Park near the White House, helping raise awareness about the human toll of the opioid crisis.
- Helped reduce high-dose opioid prescriptions by 16 percent in 2017.
- Opioid Summit on the administration-wide efforts to combat the opioid crisis.
- Launched a national public awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid addiction.
- Created a Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis which recommended a number of pathways to tackle the opioid crisis.
- Led two National Prescription Drug Take Back Days in 2017 and 2018, collecting a record number of expired and unneeded prescription drugs each time.
- $485 million targeted grants in FY 2017 to help areas hit hardest by the opioid crisis.
- Signed INTERDICT Act, strengthening efforts to detect and intercept synthetic opioids before they reach our communities.
- DOJ secured its first-ever indictments against Chinese fentanyl manufacturers.
- Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement (J-CODE) team, aimed at disrupting online illicit opioid sales.
- Declared the opioid crisis a Nationwide Public Health Emergency in October 2017.
Estebonrober
Deity
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That list is a whole lot of hot air. Taking responsibility for everything positive in America for the past year is part of the problem with the lying. Again why should this not come back to haunt you?
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
It's politics, so of course it's hot air. That does not change the basic fact that the Trump administration is doing a great deal while everyone is watching Trump. These were two out of about twenty. El Machine does not like the push to get NASA and the EPA out of climate change and back to the original mandate. That's an understandable position. There are fifty other special interests that are telling similar stories.
One side effect of this is that the Democrats have very little chance in the 2020 election. Trump has converted the doubters. 2024 is a different story.
J
Estebonrober
Deity
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Hahaha ok you get the centrists here to say they’ll vote for trump in 2020. Let’s see it. “Converted the doubters”. You’re a funny guy.
A theory of (mostly) recent American history, by Bootstoots
America is normally ruled by rich white men. The majority of poor and middle-class whites still vote for rich white men, partly out of coming in the middle two classes of the American South's old class system, which went crudely like this: slave/overseer/white farmer/plantation owner. (edit: corrected per Lexicus' post below). Keeping the bottom two or three classes from uniting was a primary goal of the plantation owner class, and it's mostly been successful although cracks can appear in unusual circumstances, like parts of the South between Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Anyway, rich white men like to party and behave irresponsibly. Sometimes these parties get out of hand. The snooty political family's mediocre son puts on a cowboy hat, home ownership gets underwritten by fraudulent loans and sold on to suckers, judges boof booze instead of just drinking it, a gilded con man/reality star/Twitter troll gets elected president, ... . You know, that sort of thing.
But all parties come to an end, and everyone wakes up the next morning with a pounding headache. It's like 9:30 am, and their last recollection was somewhere around 3, maybe? Maybe it was 2? Something like that. The boof guy is mumbling in a pool of his own...I hope that's just beer? Anyway, there's a lot of damage, and nobody feels up to cleaning up. Probably nobody even can clean up, beyond throwing a couple empty beer cans on top of the overfilled trash as they stagger out the door. They only have a vague idea of what a mop even is, and they're in no state to try to learn.
The white American people, the rich even more than the poor, then know it's time to elect the best freaking janitor ever. They're not going to clean up their own mess, of course, it has to be cleaned up for them. This is how a black president happens. The new president gets to work cleaning up the damage: taping up the windows and shopping for replacements, cleaning up all the booze and bodily fluids, mopping the floor another time to get what's left of that, donning Hazmat attire and cleaning the horrendous disaster in the bathroom, trying to dial the thermostat down because some frat boy dialed it up to 85 for whatever reason (only to find that it's actually broken entirely), and so on, and so forth.
He or she does a pretty good job. If the damage was serious enough, their contract might even be extended by another four years, and it's not even precarious and at-will! Finally, the wreckage is cleaned up and the house, while still having some permanent damage, is mostly okay again. This is when it's time for the rich white guys to come back for another party. And the cycle repeats.
Harris/Booker 2020.
America is normally ruled by rich white men. The majority of poor and middle-class whites still vote for rich white men, partly out of coming in the middle two classes of the American South's old class system, which went crudely like this: slave/overseer/white farmer/plantation owner. (edit: corrected per Lexicus' post below). Keeping the bottom two or three classes from uniting was a primary goal of the plantation owner class, and it's mostly been successful although cracks can appear in unusual circumstances, like parts of the South between Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Anyway, rich white men like to party and behave irresponsibly. Sometimes these parties get out of hand. The snooty political family's mediocre son puts on a cowboy hat, home ownership gets underwritten by fraudulent loans and sold on to suckers, judges boof booze instead of just drinking it, a gilded con man/reality star/Twitter troll gets elected president, ... . You know, that sort of thing.
But all parties come to an end, and everyone wakes up the next morning with a pounding headache. It's like 9:30 am, and their last recollection was somewhere around 3, maybe? Maybe it was 2? Something like that. The boof guy is mumbling in a pool of his own...I hope that's just beer? Anyway, there's a lot of damage, and nobody feels up to cleaning up. Probably nobody even can clean up, beyond throwing a couple empty beer cans on top of the overfilled trash as they stagger out the door. They only have a vague idea of what a mop even is, and they're in no state to try to learn.
The white American people, the rich even more than the poor, then know it's time to elect the best freaking janitor ever. They're not going to clean up their own mess, of course, it has to be cleaned up for them. This is how a black president happens. The new president gets to work cleaning up the damage: taping up the windows and shopping for replacements, cleaning up all the booze and bodily fluids, mopping the floor another time to get what's left of that, donning Hazmat attire and cleaning the horrendous disaster in the bathroom, trying to dial the thermostat down because some frat boy dialed it up to 85 for whatever reason (only to find that it's actually broken entirely), and so on, and so forth.
He or she does a pretty good job. If the damage was serious enough, their contract might even be extended by another four years, and it's not even precarious and at-will! Finally, the wreckage is cleaned up and the house, while still having some permanent damage, is mostly okay again. This is when it's time for the rich white guys to come back for another party. And the cycle repeats.
Harris/Booker 2020.
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Lexicus
Deity
You got the middle two reversed. Overseers typically were overseeing because they lacked the economic basis for self-sufficiency (ie, the landholdings of a small farmer).
^^^ @Bootstoots Isn't that in the wrong thread.....
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Dude, I'm one of them. I voted for Hillary's opponent. If it had been Dick Cheney I would have swallowed hard and done it. That's how bad Clinton is.
That said, there was a lot of skepticism among Republicans. The Libertarian candidate polled three times what he did in 2012. Write-in votes exceeded the Green party. Some of it is still there--rah obviously, the Bush family, George Will, etc.--but mostly they have been won over by results.
J
Actually I was wondering about that. I know that there were quite a few poor white subsistence farmers too, though, including tenant farmers/sharecroppers. But yeah I agree, as a cartoon image of a more complex reality, the order should be flipped.
^^^ @Bootstoots Isn't that in the wrong thread.....
It seemed really random to me at the time! But okay, wrong thread. Fair enough. I'll fix it.
Moderator Action: Merged own post in wrong thread, plus replies, to correct thread.
Lexicus
Deity
Think of overseers as mostly people too poor to make a go even of subsistence farming.
I am considering writing a disagreement with the substance of your post in the 2020 election thread. Succinctly, Obama was less of a janitor and more of a PR flack hired to convince everyone that a cleanup had actually happened. He's not entirely culpable because he was lied to about the extent of the mess. Had he known the truth he might have taken up a torch and pitchfork himself rather than promising to protect the rich white boys from the public's torches and pitchforks.
Lexicus
Deity
J is probably completely wrong about "convincing the doubters." or however exactly he's framing it, but he's absolutely right that underestimating Trump in 2020 is a huge mistake. I also think he's correct that as things stand now Trump is likely to win the election. But it's still 20 months away.
Yeah, I've moved my Trump odds up to about 40%. I think it's more likely than not that he'll lose, but I'm not at all confident about it. Things are not shaping up well at the moment.
My semi-serious "rich white guys partying" post basically contains the thesis that the irresponsible/malicious rich white guys will get reelected if the party keeps going. It's unlikely to continue all the way through 2024, but there's a lot of damage that can be done between now and then.
Lexicus
Deity
It's possible that he wouldn't win today, but I'm deeply unimpressed with the Democratic field, and I have a feeling about Trump. I also think that it's possible that making Trump a two-term President will get liberals to start realizing the system is broken, not just Trump.
We may see a recession between now and 2020, which would help with removing Trump. But I worry we might be in for another extended bubble-driven hyperboom, and I can only hope it comes to an end when a Republican is in office, or we're going to have trouble that makes the Trump Administration look like a utopia.
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