General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)

glennmagusharvey

one of the weirdest things this cycle:

former AK governor Sarah Palin (yes, that Sarah Palin) fucked over her former LG and current gov Sean Parnell (R) by endorsing the fusion ticket of Bill Walker (I) for Gov with Byron Mallott (D) for LG

(previously, Walker and Mallott were both gov candidates, and Hollis French was D for LG)

still not sure whether to conclude that Palin did Team Blue a favor

Stormtroper

That's why I've taken to press Save Draft after every sentence.

Needs more colours.

fourteenwings

You'd think that the shutdown fiasco would prevent the Republicans from being elected ever again,

>electorate of anywhere having memory of events before election fever hits*

*does not apply if death/murder/civil war/etc is involved

lrdgck

One has to wonder, what made the Democrats fare so poorly.

Bee

Midterm turnout sucks in general for Democrats.  Sucked worse with voter suppression.  Sucked worse when Democrats saw their own candidates running right to try and win conservatives they were never going to win anyway.

Also lol Kochs.  Oregon was one of the only states that kicked them out, and we're blue enough that they knew it wasn't going to happen after like one month.

glennmagusharvey

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/28/1347618/-Looking-back-at-the-biggest-electoral-themes-of-the-2014-election

In summary:

* money didn't matter as much as people thought

* hard to measure effect of voting restrictions, but they may have mattered in some close races (e.g. FL-Gov and NC-Sen)

* hard to say why people who don't vote, don't vote despite having potentially a lot to gain from doing so

* late deciders seem to have swung in the Dem direction, as opposed to conventional wisdom which says that they swung in the Repub direction as the polls were apparently too Dem-friendly.  what happened, though, was that the "swing" was not from Repub to Dem, but rather from not voting at all to Dem.  Dem voters apparently just didn't feel like voting at all.

* ...which may have been partly because of "orphan races" -- ones with no major top-of-the-ticket action (e.g. a high-publicity governor's race) driving turnout.

Other factors (my opinion, not in the article) included a general sense among Team Blue supporters that the message was "we're not crazy, unlike those Repubs" as opposed to anything more motivating, as well as a number of small mistakes by various candidates -- for example, from Bruce Braley (IA-Sen D candidate), most notably.

glennmagusharvey

http://jacktrammell.tumblr.com/post/104782995979/the-problem

how gerrymandering is a core problem of U.S. politics, as it gives outsized influenced to whoever is in charge in state legislatures once every ten years.

Stormtroper

So yesterday I lost an argument on US political representation, specifically over the winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college. So a question:

glennmagusharvey

Because more dramatic, arcane, and crazy.

Honestly, I don't know the real reason.  I could look up the history of the Electoral College on Wikipedia right now but my internet connection is very poor.

I do know that the actual electors of the Electoral College used to actually matter, or something like that, because the whole idea was that direct election of the president was poorly advised because the framers/founding fathers/whateveryouwannacallthem felt the people should leave the executive leadership of the country to educated political elites.  Or something like that.

Of course, that wasn't a very popular idea, and that was later changed.

How each state allocates its electors is actually voluntarily up to each state.  So each state could make its own law regarding how its electors are allocated.  There are two states -- Maine and Nebraska -- that allocate them not completely by winner-take-all but only two EVs winner-take-all and the other two are based on whoever wins each congressional district's votes.

Incidentally, there is a National Popular Vote thing going around, where states are passing a bill saying that, if a number states -- whose EV total is a majority -- pass that bill, then they will all pledge their electors to the winner of the popular vote.

I've heard two arguments against using national popular vote:

1. At least in the past, it might have been difficult or take a long time to get results from some states.  Having an electoral college system would allow some states to be "left out" just in case problems arose.

2. In case an election is extremely close, rather than recounting the entire country, you only need to recount those states that have very close results, since the math -- or, technically, the criteria for how to count the votes -- is unambiguous otherwise.

Neither of these arguments address why (closest) proportional allocation of electoral vote doesn't work, though.  The need for recounts is still there, but it just happens at different cutoff points -- which, to be fair, could make the system slightly even more arcane.  Or we could just make people learn math better...

Furthermore, a nationalized system for voting procedures, registration, technology, etc. would take out some of the ambiguity in the way the votes are counted, diminishing the problems of recounting somewhat.  There are advantages and disadvantages to this, of course -- the disadvantages being that it may make updates to voting technology more difficult, and that federalism is a huge thing in the states, sometimes for good reasons but also sometimes for corrupt reasons (e.g. racism).

glennmagusharvey

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/14/1356640/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Live-Digest-1-14

9:03 AM PT (Jeff Singer): VA State House: It's pretty common for a politician to resign in disgrace. What's not at all common is for that same politician to run in the special election to replace himself- and win. But that's exactly what happened to Democrat-turned independent Del. Joe Morrissey in Virginia's 74th House District. Johnny Longtorso gives us the details of this strange and sordid affair:

Last year, Democrat Joe Morrissey was indicted on charges of having sex with an underage girl. He eventually entered an Alford plea to a misdemeanor charge, went to jail (though he was being allowed to continue his job as a delegate through a work-release program), and after pressure from all sides, resigned his seat. However, he immediately jumped into the special election, first as a Democrat, then as an independent. Morrissey is still serving his sentence, and can only leave prison for up to 12 hours each day to campaign or serve as a lawyer.

Democrats nominated Kevin Sullivan, the vice chair of the Charles City County Democratic Committee and a union official, while Republicans picked teacher Matt Walton. The district is heavily Democratic, having given 74 percent of the vote to Mark Warner in 2014 and Barack Obama in 2012 and 71 percent to Terry McAuliffe in 2013, so there was little chance of a Walton victory. However, Sullivan started with largely unknown here. His base in Charles City County only accounts for about a tenth of the district, with most voters living in Henrico.

A Morrissey victory looked possible before Tuesday... and that's just what happened. Morrissey took 42 percent of the vote, while Democrat Kevin Sullivan came in second with 33 percent. Republican Matt Walton brought up the rear with 24 percent.

On Wednesday Morrissey was sworn in, though his saga is not over by a long shot. Both parties are looking at expelling or at least censuring him, and Democrats are not letting him back into the caucus. But as Jenna Portnoy of the Washington Post tells us, if two-thirds of the chamber votes to expel him, another special election would need to be called... that Morrissey could also run in.

Suddenly, I really want to see this happen just so he can win a second special election.  It would be freaking hilarious.

glennmagusharvey

And one from the previous day:

8:19 AM PT (David Jarman): WA St. Senate: Washington's state Senate continues to challenge the New York state Senate for the weirdest legislative chamber in the nation. On Monday, they upped the ante: the chamber's minority Democrats voted unanimously to elect a Republican as the Senate President Pro Tem, defeating the Democrat that the Republicans wanted in that position. And not just any Republican, but Pam Roach, who the Republicans threw out of their caucus for several years, not for moderate ideological heresy but for outright mental instability. (The Democrat that the GOP wanted to elect was Tim Sheldon, who was part of the coup that swung the chamber to the Republicans in 2012 and is the only remaining Dem who still caucuses with the GOP.)

Lest you think that the Dems were simply trying to improve their lot for 2016 by moving the GOP's looniest member to the spotlight, it's not that simple. For starters, Prez Pro Tem is a ceremonial presiding job; the majority leader wields the real power. Also, Roach was re-elected in 2014 as something of a quasi-Dem, thanks to Washington's Top 2 primary. She's in a red-enough district that her November opponent was a more neurotypical but also more conventionally conservative Republican; Roach beat her thanks to public employee union support. (Roach is in that odd Don Young-type space, where she's rabidly conservative on guns, and social and environmental issues, but friendly with labor. Because the GOP has a bare majority in the Senate now, though, she needed one GOP vote beside her own to win; she got that from fellow social-con Don Benton.)

The comparison is to the New York State Senate, which is similarly nearly evenly divided but a handful of Democratic State Senators in an "Indepdent Democratic Caucus" side with the Republicans to essentially give the Repubs majority control of the chamber.

lrdgck

@ Longtorso: wow. I didn't expect this kind of weird shit to happen in places that, you know, have a bit more of a practice with democracy.

glennmagusharvey

same-sex marriages?  how about mixed-party marriages?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/how-did-politics-get-so-personal.html

[05:02:21] in 1960, 4% of democrats and 5% of republicans would have been displeased if their children married someone of the opposite political party
[05:02:29] in 2008, that was 20% of democrats and 27% of republicans
[05:02:33] in 2010, it was 33% of democrats and a whopping 49% of republicans

wtf happened, USA?

Naas_Human

Apparently a bunch of Republicans in Idaho want their state declared a Christian state. Because... screw the constitution?

lrdgck

Panderin' to the crazy survivalist vote?

fourteenwings

So how's that possible Government Shutdown 2.0 thing going (This time with added "We won't pay you but you can't quit because security personnel*!")?

*Actually this is a pretty smart move by the Republicans because I'm betting at least half of their rhetoric will be "Obama loves illegals more than working Americans!"

glennmagusharvey

http://redistrictinggame.org/game.php

This looks deliciously evil.

I want to try this sometime.

glennmagusharvey

2:59 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NY State Assembly: Normally there wouldn't be anything to watch in a special election in a 93-7 Obama seat,
but due to a very strange set of circumstances, there will be no
Democratic nominee on May 5. Instead, four candidates will run against
one another on existing third-party ballot lines or under the banner of
parties they just created.

The New York Observer's Ross Barkan tells us how we got to this point.
In Empire State special elections, the county committees pick their
nominees. The Brooklyn Democratic establishment never bothered to
nominate enough of its own committees candidates last September to for
this 10 person body: Even as perennial candidate Guillermo Philpotts was
only taking 5 percent in a Democratic state Senate primary, his allies
were winning spots on the local committee in this Crown Heights
district. On Sunday, the committee passed over Democratic District
Leader Shirley Patterson and gave the party's nomination to Philpotts.

But Philpotts, like so many candidates before him, got tripped up by a
paperwork error. Since he didn't turn in his routine certificate of
nomination, Philpotts was thrown off the ballot, and he has no
alternative party line to get him back on. However, Patterson will be
running as the Independence Party nominee. She will face Working Families Party nominee Diana Richardson,
fellow Democratic District Leader Geoffrey Davis (running under his new
"Love Yourself" ballot line), and Republican/ Conservative nominee
Menachem Raitport.

sauce: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/03/1367482/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Live-Digest-3-3

glennmagusharvey

IL-18: One of the fastest (and funniest) implosions in the
U.S. House in recent years is complete. It started only in early
February, with an innocent-enough story in the Washington Post
about how Republican Rep. Aaron Schock — then a young, rising-star
politician from rural Illinois — had furnished his congressional office
with lavish Downton Abbey-inspired
office décor. Schock's strange evasiveness about that story just led to
more stories about how he paid for the remodel, though, and things just
started unraveling for Schock from there, as a pattern of gratuitous,
improperly-reported, and perhaps even fraudulent expenses came to light.

Now, Schock is on his way to being a historical footnote (or if he's
really unlucky, a punch line for decades to come) instead of, say, a future governor of Illinois. On Tuesday, he announced he would resign
from the House, effective March 31. Schock's move comes a day after the
Office of Congressional Ethics began contacting Schock's associates in
an initial investigation.

In fact, just hours before he finalized his departure, Politico reported that there were huge discrepancies
in Schock's mileage reimbursement requests. Schock billed the federal
government for 170,000 miles logged in his Chevy Tahoe, but when he sold
the vehicle in July 2014, the odometer only read 80,000 miles, meaning
he overbilled by 90,000 miles (worth tens of thousands of dollars to
him). In conjunction with Schock's prior answer from last week about
whether he broke the law with any of his activities—"I certainly hope not"
... though he added the disclaimer that he's "not an attorney"—it
sounds like he decided things were only going to get worse from here on
out.

sauce: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/18/1371258/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest-Aaron-Schock-s-career-is-a-total-wipeout

FYI, Schock is notably a relatively young member of the House of Representatives, being its youngest member from 2009 to 2013 when he was dethroned by Patrick Murphy (FL-18) (who was more recently dethroned by Elise Stefanik (NY-21)).

glennmagusharvey

Speaking of former Babies of the House:

1:32 PM PT: WATN?:
This probably wasn't the sort of comeback Connecticut ex-Gov. John
Rowland had in mind. He's coming back, all right ... to prison. Ten
years after he was first imprisoned for accepting illegal gifts while in
office, he was sentenced again on Wednesday to 30 months in prison after being convicted in federal court of hiding campaign work from election officials.

("WATN?" means "Where are they now?".)

source for that: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/18/1371256/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Live-Digest-3-18

(Wikipedia says that he was the youngest member of the House from 1985 to 1990.  He ran for governor in 1990 but lost the election to A Connecticut Party candidate Lowell Weicker.)

(Incidentally, Weicker pulled successful third-party shenanigans in Connecticut back in 1990, 16 years before Joe Lieberman would do the same in 2006, albeit for a Senate seat rather than the governorship.  Incidentally, Lieberman was the one who beat Weicker in a 1988 election.)

(I just realized that Connecticut has fun political history.)

fourteenwings

So... Ted Cruz huh?

Noimporta

Meme candidate.

Zennistrad

I do hope Ted Cruz wins the primary if only because it would be pretty much the best argument that people shouldn't vote Republican.

glennmagusharvey

http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/03/post_171.html

The last days in office, of former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber.

Bee

TLDR: "They can't be serious about charging me for influence peddling OH SHIT THEY ARE AND WHY ARE THEY ONLY LOOKING HARDER WHEN I DELETE MY EMAILS AFTER A SUBPOENA"

glennmagusharvey

What I find slightly more stunning is that Hayes either didn't know or didn't care about how all this was affecting Kitzhaber.



In other news: gerrymandering mishap leaves nation without any borders whatsoever

WASHINGTON—Urging calm after citizens awoke to find the country’s
political boundaries had disappeared completely, authorities announced
Thursday that a devastating gerrymandering blunder had left the United
States devoid of any district, state, or national borders whatsoever.
“Though our investigation is still ongoing, it appears the North
Carolina General Assembly may have inadvertently wiped out all local and
federal boundaries while redrawing the state’s already heavily
manipulated fourth congressional district late last night,” said White
House press secretary Josh Earnest, addressing the millions of panicked
Americans now living in flux and untethered to any known county, city
ward, rural township, or municipal water district. “As of now, we have
no way of indicating where one location ends and another begins, let
alone the ability to separate ourselves from Canada and Mexico. Though
we are working to redraw our borders as soon as possible, it is vital
that no one in the United States or its territories travel outside their
home until further notice.” Earnest went on to acknowledge that despite
the ensuing chaos, the massive upheaval of district lines will likely
prove advantageous to incumbent electoral candidates.

glennmagusharvey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxbury,_Vermont

> the only town with an actually elected dogcatcher
> population in 2010: 1337

truly 1337

lrdgck

It claims to be the only municipality in the United States which has an elected position of dogcatcher.

In 1880, Emeline Meaker of Duxbury was hanged for poisoning her niece, Alice. The trial received much coverage throughout the country. She was the first woman hanged in Vermont.

Some claims to fame, eh?

glennmagusharvey

And is this policy only for weddings?


(24+ / 0-)

What about a gay book club that wants pizza? or a gay men's choir?
And if being gay is just a choice, and assuming that the pizza is really
worth it (which I doubt!), can you just choose not to be gay long
enough to get the pizza delivered?

source: comments section of http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/01/1374824/-Indiana-pizza-shop-won-t-serve-gays-owner-says-we-re-not-discriminating-against-anyone

my emphasis

lrdgck

Random thought: if being gay is a choice, doesn't it mean you're gay only when you get it going with another man?