I feel like he's had it too easy. I don't exactly know what I mean by that
Maybe you mean the Obama administration?
That they had it harder? Or that they were easy on Beto?
Slightly unfair of AOC: Klein hasn't been treating her with suspicion and accusing her of being a fraud. For it to be double standards, it has to be the same person doing it both times.
Still too easy. Ergo, Beto more too easy.
BHO had a pretty straight shot to the top, and I think he paid for it in his endlessly dumb attempts to reach across the aisle. But I also trust him to be an incredibly conscientious workaholic every step of the way to the Senate and then after.
It is true that I distrust people who coast on their charm. I don't know enough yet about Beto to put him in that category, but I don't know enough to rule it out, either.
3 I don't think so, I mean maybe with regard to Ezra but she's gotten a lot of that shit from many other quarters.
I agree that Beto is a good campaigner, and I think his performance in Texas was equally impressive to winning a statewide election elsewhere. It's the charm thing, though. I'm sick of people who are just charming and then pawn off all the labor.
I always got Paul Ryan and Rand Paul confused, so never gave either the benefit of the doubt.
"I gave [any republican] the benefit of the doubt. I was wrong."
For it to be double standards, it has to be the same person doing it both times.
When both takes receive considerable attention within the same media/talky circles, there is a collective double standard even if it's hard to pin it on individuals.
Yes! It is hard to pin it on individuals! But she did it anyway! If you link to an individual's tweet and say "this is an example of a double standard" then you're pinning it on an individual - and, rather unfairly, one who a) doesn't himself hold the double standard and b) has just written a long piece about how wrong he was.
13 is correct. How hard would it be to point to Chuck Todd or Chris Cillizza or one of the other conventional-wisdom definers without a brain in their head.
I disagree. She's using him as an example of the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Paul Ryan then that even Ezra Fucking Klein was momentarily dazzled by him.
Right. But EFK didn't say that she was a phoney. That was someone else. EFK is guilty of being too gullible, but not of double standards.
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Strong Belwas is the fucking best.
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But it's all false. No one was making a fuss about Paul Ryan when he was first elected to Congress.
I'm sick of people who are just charming and then pawn off all the labor.
Me too, but charismatic is what america wants, everything else is invisible. The US, Pakistan, and the Philippines are the three countries where sports or film to politics is a viable career path.
Anyone age 28 who gets elected to Congress gets some degree of fuss made about them. Even if he is an obvious dimwit whose father bought him a seat, it's an unusual event.
19: Interesting. Argentina. Don't know if Eva Peron could have made it solo though.
I don't think AOC was accusing EK directly, although it could be read that way, paucity of Twitter and all - the environment and culture is the problem.
I think we're defining the problem differently here. If person A puts a just-starting-out woman under a microscope, and later person B lauds a just-starting-out man as a very serious and smart person, and people C through J look on and keep both A and B around with equal public credit, a problem exists whether or not charges of hypocrisy can be made to stick against individuals.
(I guess it's true that Ryan was already a several-term congressmember when the media got all hot for him, but he had as few concrete personal accomplishments under his belt.)
Oh dear, someone has tweeted without 100% accuracy. Someone get me my pearls.
(I guess it's true that Ryan was already a several-term congressmember when the media got all hot for him, but he had as few concrete personal accomplishments under his belt.)
But, when you put it that way, Ryan is the outlier. Most young congress-critters don't attract the sort of attention that Ryan did (or AOC for that matter).
I like how AOC has played the game so far, so I don't want to complain, but it seems just slightly like the case in sports* where somebody is unhappy about their contract and they point the most obviously overpaid player on the team and say, "that guy's worth $X and I'm only getting $Y" when everybody knows he isn't worth $X.
* violating the analogy ban
19. Or in Italy, porn.
The US, Pakistan, and the Philippines are the three countries where sports or film to politics is a viable career path.
Also the UK, Brazil, Liberia, Mexico, Kenya, Ukraine, Finland (several presidents), arguably Uganda (Idi Amin), Italy (porn to politics), India, many others.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-42502890
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_actor-politicians
It would help prevent compromise by foreign intelligence services if the porn-to-politics career path became commoner.
"Mr President, there are rumours that Russian intelligence has a video of you being weed on by two nude women!"
"Yes, that's right, they do, and if they bought the special edition DVD they'll have the making-of documentary as a bonus."
AOC became famous outside of her district mainly because national Republicans decided she would be a good democrat to run against everywhere. She is young, Hispanic, female, and had lots of tweets, most either innocuous or straight democratic, but a few socialism-curious, and a few dumb. She is embracing the role Republicans cast for her, continuing with both lifestyle and provocative. Why not? She likes attention and she has a safe seat. Her press on the Democratic side is quite positive. I suspect that the rest of the Democratic party is happy that she's drawing so much of the negative attention.
This particular tweet is in the dumb category. Klein was in middle school when Ryan was first elected, and he regrets that he found Ryan respectable in 2010, when Ryan was a 40 year old six term incumbent and an official Republican spokesman. Klein notes that at that time, Ryan was getting much deserved flack from Paul Krugman and others.
Has Stormy Daniels definitively ruled out a run in 2020?
Here's my case against Beto, if anyone's interested:
Some of the scandals surrounding him sound credible to me.
Aside from that, the people pushing him to run are people who wanted the extremely bad Deval Patrick to run and who think people like Harris and Gillibrand are too leftwing. Beto represents a solidly blue district and is a New Democrat member who supported Tim Ryan against Pelosi. You can't for sure that he would end up less progressive than Kamala Harris but all democrats aren't the same, and you can make reasonable inferences.
His thin resumee is bad in itself, but it also makes it harder to guess what sort of president he'd make.
Trump is awful, but if you'd want to break the cycle of Democrat wins one step ahead, Republican wins three steps back you can't just try to guess which candidate will be 5% better than the rest. The climate won't survive that for one thing.
Would Beto be a stronger candidate than the rest? I doubt it. He'd surely be better at campaign rallies, but that's a minor factor. I find it really hard to say which candidate would be strongest this time. Politics is in flux.
One of the first current top contenders I would eliminate if possible would be Cory Booker, because he talks about (vom) global competitiveness.
30: I wouldn't say that it's dumb. It's getting a lot of positive responses, especially from women. (Unless you're saying that Klein was dumb for not realizing what Ryan was when he was a six term incumbent.) I agree that it's slightly unfair to Klein, but only slightly and I think he'll get over it.
To clarify, it's Klein 2018 who says that Klein 2010 was dumb, or at least naive, to believe Ryan was a serious thinker in 2010.
28. Don't forget Poland: Concert pianist and composer to Prime Minister.
minivet and david weman have it right on this thread, and the idea of supporting beto in preference to *harris* bc harsh-on-crime-tm-harris is too left wing is an amazingly shitty place to be at this stage in the pre-pre-pre-primaries. harris!!! too lefty!!! the mind boggles.
DQ, if it consoles you, I worry about Harris from the left. I mostly think they're all mostly as good as I could hope for from an American president and I'm happy to let them all fight it out. That said, I'll be mildly bummed if it is a white person and substantially bummed if it is a man (whom I will then vote for).
It's the charm thing, though. I'm sick of people who are just charming
Yes, but I'm fairly mad at not-charming people for running. By strange coincidence, I happened to see Jill Stein speak last month (it wasn't something I sought out). Dude. She was a boring speaker! I am probably exactly her target and she couldn't hold a small-ish room interested in things they agreed with. A young attendee from Fresno State was drastically more compelling. I know it isn't fair that charisma is the overwhelming factor, but it is. I am angry at Clinton and Stein both for running without it. I fully believe Clinton would have been an excellent administrative executive, but not-charismatic on a campaign is disqualifying! As we saw.
I think so far I'm on team Klobuchar, because I'm boring and sometimes prefer to read about advanced statistics over actually watching sports. Also I think Trump won't know how to handle actual midwesterner without alienating a lot of midwesterners. What I really want is more of the lower tier candidates to run for Senate instead of president (Beto or a Castro in TX, Bullock in MT, Hickenloper in CO, etc.). I'd be reasonably happy with Harris, I think.
Klobuchar for me, too. Whatever that means at this point.
Is there an outsider--that is, non-politician--candidate that anyone supports? Or have we all agreed that that's absolutely awful and should never happen again?
41. If you run for the Senate and win, you accumulate a record. You don't want that. You want to be all things to all people, the person on horseback who will save us all. Obama was lucky he didn't serve a full term in the Senate!
30. AOC "socialism-curious"? I thought she was officially a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Vis a vis Paul Ryan, my impression is that the GOP hard right (which is to say, most of the GOP) hates him as much as Democrats do: comity!
I hadn't realized until recently that Beto was a New Democrat. Do not want.
42: Exactly!
WTF is a New Democrat, and can it possibly be worse than the old ones (e.g. the Clintons)? Genuine question.
New Democrats was a word in the 90s for Democrats such as the Clintons who liked to "triangulate" between what Democrats want to do and what Republicans want to do, like your Tonys Blair.
It's also a caucus of moderate Dems.
Anyone who calls anything "New X" or "neo-X" or "post-X" should be put in prison. The fact that we're stuck with "New Democrat" for someone as long gone as Bill Clinton is a crime.
"The Senate New Democrat Coalition was founded in the spring of 2000 by Senators Evan Bayh (Indiana), Bob Graham (Florida), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Joe Lieberman (Connecticut), and Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas)."
Beto was the House, not the Senate, but that list of founders is pretty damning.
"Founders" in the year 2000 is not correct. Clinton, Gore, and Biden were all identified as New Democrats in the 1990s.
"New Democrat" = DLC (Democratic Leadership Council). The DLC was founded in 1985. They had a magazine called "The New Democrat" starting in 1990.
It's one of those things. Now that New York has been around for a while, we're still not going to change the name to Old York.
Not when the perfectly good "East Hoboken" exists.
To maximize rage, just call the whole damn thing Manhattan.
What's the oldest thing in existence that has "new" in the name? Novgorod?
Neuss was founded by the Romans in 16 BC as Novaesium, which sure looks like a "New" but I haven't found anyone directly claiming that it doesn't have some other etymology.
Very much stretching it: the Chinese character "新" (first tone "xin" in Mandarin) means "new" but it can also be an extant surname; one listed origin of it is as a variant of the Zhou Dynasty royal family's name.
60 Naples (Neapolis) or Cartagena (Qart-ḥadašt), probably.
OK, then, Naples. Apparently founded at the end of the 2nd millennium BC.
New England was formed 500 million years ago, but I don't think it was called that at the time.
64: I'd count Neapolis from when the Greeks settled it.
Cartagena is delicious since it was Carthago Nova to the Romans, but Carthage itself was also originally Qart-ḥadašt. But قرطاج is still around, despite the earth salting, so let's count it. Hard to find a date on it but I'd imagine it predates Magna Graecia.
65: Greek settlements were founded around then, but the name Neapolis might not have come until after Carthage was founded.
Ah, looks like Naples has it beat by far
My candidate preferences:
1. A celebrity, but only if their name is Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama
2. A Democratic politician none of us has heard of (see 45.1)
3. A Democratic mayor or governor
999. A Democratic member of Congress
By the Obama metric, the new Democratic Senators elected in 2016 and 2018 are:
* Kyrsten Sinema
* Jacky Rosen
* Kamala Harris
* Tammy Duckworth
* Maggie Hassan
Only one of them satisfies the Ogged metric.
I'll preface by saying I like Steve Bullock a lot. He laughs at my jokes! He's right to take a pass on the Senate race, at this point, I think. His best future is as a VP (unlikely, imo) or cabinet secretary, at which he'll be excellent. Does being an unsuccessful Senate candidate make that possible? Maybe! He doesn't have to decide now: his filing deadline for the Senate seat isn't until March, and the presidential race will have passed him by (I'm guessing) by then, so he can still shift. No one else who would run for the Dem nomination could beat Bullock if he enters the race, even on the last day for filing. It's uphill against Daines anyway, and I wouldn't think that dabbling in the presidential race would hurt him in that. So why not play on the national stage for a while, and see how it goes?
The change in the timing of the California primary makes everything we think we know about nomination races obsolete. Money raised in the fall and summer of 2019 will be a way bigger deal than ever before, and so is pre-existing name-recognition. Sanders has to be considered the prohibitive favorite at this point, I think. (I do not view this as a good thing,) Does Beto have the celebrity to place well enough in California to be a contender in the next month's contests? We'll find out, I guess.
75: And Tina Smith. I'm amazed they're all women.
|| Guys, at my building's annual holiday party, I won a gift basket. One of the things in the basket is a bag -- 4x2x1 inches -- filled with shredded money. The label says it's $20 up to $1,000. Is this a thing? I don't get it. |>
They sell them in the gift shops at the Mint. Or they did in 1987.
I thought they gave them away at the Federal Reserve money museum in Kansas City. Maybe you can regift it at next year's party.
I hope the rest of the bag has things that aren't literal garbage.
I was turned off from Kamala after she pushed that tremendously stupid bill to give tax credits to people with high rent. It was federal subsidies for landlords in the richest parts of the country, basically. It makes me concerned about what other monstrosities might get cooked up in her policy shop.
Anyone who calls anything "New X" or "neo-X" or "post-X" should be put in prison.
Oh, sure, consign more people to late stage capitalism's neoliberal carceral state.
I thought that rent subsidy bill was stupid but it didn't turn me off her. I think bills like that are best understood as chits symbolizing aggressive action, in this case aggressive spending, whereas the status quo is nothing. Dems have the infrastructure to make legislation workable once the coalition is forming. There was a recent Sanders bill on employee pay that was asinine as policy, but the owner class noticed it as directed at them.
Warren, incidentally, put out a much better bill that combined more money for construction with incentives to open up zoning.
I recognize it as a chit too, but her choice of this particular chit was disturbing to me. She could have laid down that chit with any number of aggressive, progressive housing policy proposals, and the one she reached for was "tax subsidies for rich people."
83 Couple bags of ground coffee, a bottle of hazelnut syrup, a couple of aluminum water bottles.
77: "Sanders has to be considered the prohibitive favorite at this point, I think."
Shoot me now, plz. Two shouty septuagenarian white guys from the northeast? No, no, no, no, nonononono
Obama's going to wind up as the only Gen X president, isn't he? We'll be stuck with superannuated Boomers until some Millennial megastar comes along to give us all avocado toast and student debt relief. Gah.
Slight pushback against listing Finland among the countries where showbiz or sport can get you into politics. Finnish sports tend to be ones which demand real strength of character and are carried out in lonely cold and darkness -- cross country ski-ing, shooting bears, shooting Russians, etc. The only exception is ice hockey but even that requires exceptional physical toughness and all your front teeth. Also, I can't think of an ice hockey player who moved over into politics, though I'm sure a Canadian will be along to say I'm wrong.
All I am trying to do is to break the implicit link between fame and phoniness, even if that is obviously present in most cases of people who move from showbiz or televised sports into politics.
"Sanders has to be considered the prohibitive favorite at this point, I think."
Logically, the only person who can beat Trump is the candidate who lost to the candidate who lost to Trump. It's like scissors-paper-stone, you see.
OT but I really, really want there to be a Mad Max Christmas Special. Tom Hardy in a big beard, massive chase scene through the desert, remote jollity-deprived settlement besieged by post-apocalyptic bandits, Charlize Theron at the wheel of huge armoured tanker of mulled wine.
Sanders has to be considered the prohibitive favorite at this point, I think.
I think that's the single worst news I've heard since 2016.
ice hockey but even that requires exceptional physical toughness and all your front teeth
The teeth are required as a sacrifice to the sport, though, not strictly required to play. (AJ played hockey as a kid, but lost his front tooth playing catcher in Little League. It's funny to see people's faces when he tells them which sport cost the tooth.)
90. Obviously only athletes who exhibit leadership should be running for office. Those "who dat?" guys on the offensive line or setting the post for LeBron are clearly unqualified. How about "Tom Brady for President"?
There is no way Sanders is going to be the next Democratic nominee. Maybe he'll run, but if so I promise he'd just be hoping to be a kingmaker or pull the debate to the left. When he loses he'd wholeheartedly and actively support the nominee, exactly like he did in 2016. I assume people are talking about him due to the MoveOn straw poll, where he came in a close second to O'Rourke? It's moderately good news for both of them, certainly better for their prospects than losing it would be, but still almost meaningless. I'll bet I could find a poll from December 2010 or 2014 that showed Huckabee, Santorum, or Cain winning the following Republican nomination.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Sanders still wants to be the next president, or maybe he'll make that protest run and turn out to win contrary to his own expectations. I hope that's not the case, I don't think he'd be a good candidate in 2020 or good president if he won, and I think highly enough of him that I think he'd see things the same way as me. Maybe I'm wrong, it's happened before, I don't have any insider information on this, and I hesitate to make any predictions these days. But if I were going to make predictions, I'd predict him not being a serious primary candidate.
I promise he'd just be hoping to be a kingmaker
I don't think Donald Trump expected or wanted to be president either, but what the candidate wants is just one factor.
I don't doubt that if Sanders loses he'll support the nominee, and that, again, a substantial majority of his followers will discount his prior criticisms of the nominee and the political systems and positions that led to the nomination.
89: If Sanders were President, he'd arguably be our only Silent Generation president. (H.W. Bush and Carter are borderline.)
On the other hand, we haven't had any Boomer presidents not born in 1946.
97 gets it exactly right. The most liberal candidate never wins, and next time won't be any different. Or maybe he is roughly tied with Warren for most liberal, in which case neither will win it.
Obama, born in 1961, is by most standards a Boomer.
Obama, born in 1961, is by most standards a Boomer.
103. Heard of the concept but never before that name for it.
Is this a good time to point out that I think that 90 percent of discussions about generations is stupid? As discussion topics go, we're all wasting time around here and it's not like this particular topic is much worse than average, but it's not even like it's original. Can we all go to the Cube Rule of Food post instead?
What do the following have in common:
English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian Navy, the PG Wodehouse character Rupert Psmith, Pogues lead singer Shane MacGowan, and Genghis Khan?
They've never been in my kitchen.
I remember the halcyon days after "Gen X" and "Gen Y" became tired terms, and before "millennial" was coined. I remember a lot fewer thinkpieces about Kids These Days. Another point for Sapir-Whorf (weak version).
Moby, Shane MacGowan is in your kitchen RIGHT NOW. He's in the cupboard under the sink. (As any true Pogues fan will know, he is in fact only three inches high; this is concealed on their videos by means of clever forced perspective.)
I better check the glue traps when I get home.
There's been a funny smell from there lately.
They all went to Westminster School?
You can't land a 737 on any of them.
112. Psmith went to Dulwich College (perhaps lightly fictionalised), along with Mike.
Their passage through the Turkish Straits wasn't contested under the Montreux Convention?
I'm probably overly smitten by generation talk, but it can be useful if kept sufficiently fuzzy. Hard definitions are almost entirely useless--you're forced to either have big groups that you can't say much coherent about (25 year long generations), or tiny ones that are over-specific. There are meaningful hard differences between groups of cohorts--say, whether someone went to college when or bought a house when it was cheap relative to income, or whether they experienced a pre-Internet world--but they never quite line up well.
The answer is, of course, the aria Che faro from Gluck's Orfeo. Kathleen Ferrier had a hit record with it; the crew of the Kuznetsov had worked up an arrangement for 1600 voices that they were going to challenge the Aleksandrov with, had tragedy not struck; Psmith sang it to Lord Emsworth to comfort him after the Empress of Blandings was shown to have lost weight; Shane McGowan was expelled from Westminster for singing it in the Abbey; and Genghis Khan's a capella rendition led the garrison of Baghdad to so unwisely surrender to make him stop.
116 is so great I don't want to hear if it's wrong.
I know something! All of their names are versions of "smith" (as in "blacksmith").
|| So, Brits, does May surviving the no confidence vote tell us anything about where this Brexit thing is going to go? |>
I think it makes catastrophe more likely, by prolonging the period of paralysis.
94: yes i meant you have to sacrifice your teeth
118 is very quick compared to the time it took people at the other place. But 116 wins because too beautiful not to be true.
Too bad "faro" in "che faro" doesn't also mean "blacksmith."
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I doubt it's actually going to happen, but Jared as Chief of Staff would be so perfect.
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Great. One more thing to worry about.
It would be two more things to worry about except that I saw the guy who sold us this place leaving it with his wife as we got the keys.
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One of Jammies's older relatives just posted this on FB and it's making me laugh:
All of a sudden I can't return any pokes. Says I'm not connected to Internet. But I am. Any ideas what's going on?So hard.
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've haf vays of making you wall'
130: Does "wall" mean "fence" in American?
Before a throng of desperate knaves
Stood wall, with lofty ramparts grave,
And blocked afar. Before wall spreading
Sprawled broad border, defenseless save
For one long wall up-skywards heading ...