When Wall Street Journal comments sections look like this, you know GOP has found a loser:
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America just needs to keep fading Trump until he dies. The Dems can win when he’s off the ballot, when he’s on it 100 million illiterate cultists will overwhelm the Dems.
Sweet summer child, but I truly think there is a chance he goes to jail if he doesn’t win this time. Not a good chance, something like 25%, but even Trump can’t get convicted of 90+ felonies and completely skate.
He loses this election he’s 100% going to jail. I think he’s more likely to die than to be president or go to jail though. Trump is a high turnout candidate which is the opposite of what the GOP wants.
Yeah maybe there’s an extra step where the nutjobs get to win and do some nutty shit for a cycle and then the normies are like “WTF???”
They were raving about how smart this was on cable news last night, by the way.
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Just need to hold the presidency, I stand by my long standing prediction that nothing major gets done under Dems until at least 2028. It’s just holding the brakes on the fascism til then. As long as we hold the presidency, it’s not a huge deal whether we have 48 or 50 Senate seats.
Last night makes it clear the path of making it about abortion will work. Dems have to execute that now.
I’m with you except the bolded.
Most notably, minority in the senate means no judges.
I mean it would be nice, but big picture we’re going to need to pack courts at some point. I think stuff will happen faster than conventional wisdom would suggest once the Boomers start dying off in big numbers. Like Biden said, “Nothing will fundamentally change,” under him.
The stuff we really need to do? Like DC&PR statehood, a new VRA, court packing, nuking the filibuster, helping the working class, etc… That’s post-2028. In the mean time it’s about still having a functioning democracy to do that stuff through.
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Yeah it’s this unfortunately. I was absolutely very moderate and middle of the road basically fine with a gradual pace of change into a better future until Trump won in 2016. Now it’s very clear incremental improvements aren’t going to be enough so the whole equation is about when we can run the minnesota playbook on the national level.
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Yeah I think Dems are in the clear for a while if they can fade 2024, but damn it looks like 2024 will be close.
This phrase will never lose its negative connotation so it should be reframed starting now with a better term. Who could be against “enhancing the court” or “upgrading the court”?
One syllable would probably be best, maybe “boost the court” / “court boosting”?
I like court reform or anti corruption something. Obviously do this in concert with a bill putting a ton of not at all theoretical regulations about judicial ethics along with a pretty large pay boost.
One of the big things we have to do is we have to end the revolving door between government and private industry, and the only way that will work is if we pay high level government employees the way corporations pay high level private employees.
The East India Company nearly collapsed like a hundred years after it was founded because of rampant corruption by their people in India. The saying leading up to that was that a job with the East India Company came with a pitiful salary but enormous prerogatives, meaning you could freely use your position to personally profit any way possible. This resulted in a predictably large amount of insane behavior and was very bad for governance (we are here).
They found a second lease on life by changing the deal for company officials to outrageous salary but if you take a single penny and we catch you you’re entirely fucked. There was probably some profit share involved too.
We need the government to be able to attract talented people who want to work in government. We don’t want it to attract careerist assholes who see it as a stepping stone to a job exploiting the weaknesses in the regulatory structure they discovered while working there, lobbying their former coworkers (who will also be looking for a job in 0-48 months), and just generally being extremely effective tools for specific powerful people.
You wanna be the most powerful person you can be? The road to that should be in rising to the top of a federal agency with a half a trillion dollar budget and a workforce of 300,000 not quitting that agency and attacking it. I also don’t ever want to see the last job of the head of a federal agency be ‘VP of X at Bain/Government Sachs/McKinsey’. It should be 20+ years of stellar performance at that agency every single time.
For judges this means we’re probably paying federal judges with lifetime appointments seven figures with a mandatory retirement age and a pension that’s pretty good. The trade off for this is that they legally can’t receive money from anyone but uncle sam ever again… and that means that if you want to get on a private plane with your rich friends you’re going to have to pay for your share of the flight on your own amex. They won’t get the chance to make you feel indebted because you won’t be allowed to receive any gifts from them at all. Not even at christmas or for your birthday. You can get a joke card about how much money they’ve saved on presents since you got the big job. This goes for your parents, your kids, absolutely everyone. You’re a high priest of the legal system. Catholic priests aren’t allowed to get married and you’re not allowed to take presents that have monetary value from anyone.
EDIT: And yes I did just compare the US government to the East India Company. It’s an extremely fair comparison.
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Yep, this is the way to go. Use Clarence Thomas as Exhibit A, and say if the GOP won’t impeach and remove him we’ll just make his votes irrelevant since he’s bought and paid for.
I’m not unreasonable. I’ll allow $100 gifts from immediate family, and friends who you can prove gave you birthday/Christmas/etc gifts before you got the job.
Yeah it goes without saying that the East India Company first had to clean house of just about everyone who had been in senior leadership in the old days. I forget who the guy they sent to turn it around was but his first action was to have a bunch of people kicked out of the service and quite possibly killed.
No matter what there’s going to have to be some kind of cleansing fire event for all the politicians and government officials who thrived the last 30-40 years. We’ve been weeding out mission driven people and promoting self interest driven people that entire time and at this point it’s a big problem. You can’t fix the kind of person someone is lol. Nothing bad needs to happen to them personally they just need to be pushed out and then kept out of the meetings to discuss what happens next to the maximum degree possible.
You can’t do a turnaround and keep all the same people who drove you into the ditch in the first place. That’s not how turnarounds work lol.
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@boredsocial you are always going to have corruption in US politics from private entities and corporations when there are essentially no restrictions on campaign contributions
Right that has to change and if you’re going to pass a law changing it you might as well go all the way. There 100% should be a federal police agency that does nothing but investigate political corruption as well. Gotta keep these fucks honest.
but who’s going to vote for that? congress people have every incentive not to.
it’s a similar reason that public unions are so corrupt (at least in CA). The unions are bargaining collectively against the same people they essentially keep employed. There’s nothing built into the system at all that will keep that from becoming corrupt.