Political Discussion Thread

Just passing through

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What an embarrassment to the country.
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Was shocked to see this, given it didn’t even happen after that expose on their bookkeeping practices. Good news.

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No! That man’s ego is far too large already. He doesn’t need emoticons.
From now on I shall refer to that man as Stanley Drumpuss. Because I find that name terribly amusing and stupid and it casually disarms his brand recognition and ego through passive/aggressive anti-appeasement.

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A bit late but shout out to any Hawaiians here. I hope you or anyone else didn’t do anything too crazy despite the Nuke Alert. I hope the suicide rate isn’t going to have a spike for you guys.

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Pezidency Redundancy…


Thanks.








Dude, really?:


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Alright, so the government has shut down. Color me annoyed, but more to the point I’m curious about something: who’s going to take the fall for it. You see, I’ve noticed a distinct discrepancy between how the media covered the shutdown (as a possible tactic for Democrats), and the predictions (as to how much it would hurt the Republicans). Now the argument is that since the Republicans hold trifecta control of the federal government the populace will be more upset with them. I’m less certain. In pointed fact I take a pretty dim view of the general public’s awareness of politics in general. As a result I suspect either both sides will take a hit, or the Democrats will take a hit. Could very well be wrong I admit, but I haven’t found the pundits persuasive on this one.

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With the middle ground shrinking, I suspect the blame will end up along party lines.
But, if the Dems are able to get out ahead they do have a chance of controlling the narrative.
Presenting it as Republicans holding CHIP hostage for DACA (which I believe has decent bipartisan support in the population) when they’ve had adequate time in the past year to address both well ahead of this spending bill, and keeping Trump’s rejection of the bipartisan immigration bill after publicly stating he would accept anything brought to him as a talking point in an election year could prove beneficial to Democrats.

Obviously it won’t carry any weight with the dedicated 1/3, but it’s something

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Now see, I agree with you had they gotten out ahead, but there’s been these headlines for a month basically osmosing about what the Democrats woul do, and the live coverage has been from that view as well. I can’t really call what’s happened here getting out ahead. Yeah though, I absolutely agree with you about party lines, there’s honestly only a small group of people who we’d be looking at who would be sitting enough on the fence for this to change their view of Trump and/or the parties. Further, the members of this group who pay close attention would already have this factored into their views given how much coverage its gotten, so we’re looking at a very specific sub group.

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This is true, but I did see a poll or two last night giving a hard preference to Repubs or Congress as a whole for this. Can’t recall the source, but it would have been a mainstream outlet, which is why I’m feeling the split will be pretty partisan.

Haven’t been looking at any coverage today to see how it’s playing out though

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Yeah, I saw that too, but that could just be an indication that people already dislike those institutions in the first place. I mean partisanship doesn’t break down evenly after all. What I’ll be looking at personally will be four areas, the favorability for each political party, Trump’s approval rating, and the generic ballot. Honestly though we probably won’t be able to tell till a good week after it’s over.

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Wtf…:


This is funny…:


They’re citing Politico and Washington Post/ABC polls so there’s going to be some bias to the numbers but I’d also be inclined to think that middle-of-the-road types would be the ones participating in mainstream media polls.

Interestingly I wouldn’t accuse a pollster of bias just based on who’s running it. Fox for example has an excellent pollster bizarrely enough. It’s not surprising in a way, since pollsters are paid to be good at what they’re doing generally. Also, to be clear, pollsters normally have to deal with ensuring they get a representative sample so I wouldn’t sweat that unless the pollster in question has a history of problems with it (Rasmussen for example due to not using live calling).

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There wasn’t as much info on the Politico poll, but the WaPo one’s info looked like it skewed toward Dem/Independent respondents. Hadn’t thought to check what Fox polls are showing

I heard an academic (so it must be true) discussing the debacle on the BBC at the weekend and he reckoned Trump and the Republicans will take most of the fall for this, although the 30% or so of those who support Trump won’t be swayed (they’ve put up with a lot of appalling behaviour). His description was of opposing sides very well dug into their foxholes for or against Trump, Trump’s problem being that there are twice as many people in the hole that hates him, so to speak.

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That I agree with, the vast majority of nation has opinions that are effectively beliefs at this point, so I wouldn’t expect this to change many minds. Still, we’ll see. I’m still waiting for this to sink in, there’s generally a bit of a delay before we’d expect the full results to be clear.

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You had me at “the government has shut down.”

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The government that governs best is the government that doesn’t pay its military.

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Meh, that wouldn’t have happened unless the shutdown extended into February - and I can’t imagine any US politician allowing that to happen (if they’d like to be reelected). Either way, it appears the Democrats have blinked and ended the filibuster.

Lamest shutdown EVER.

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