meanwhile
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Oh godddddddddddddddd. Why is politics so moldy? I voted for her, but damnit, I want a fresh face. Why do we have to run over the same old ground???
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Are you kidding? Grover, Snuffalupagus, Cookie Monster, and the other Muppets would be terrific poltitcians! They know all about kindness, so they’re great at diplomacy. They understand cooperation, so they’d get things done. We’d never have to wonder if our President could read, and with their knowledge of numbers, the budget would be balanced in no time.
No more malevolence and incompetence! Sunny days for everyone! Muppet Party 2018!
( 
)
(Edit: made small addition to campaign slogan.)
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Thanks to gerrymandering, voter suppression and the general corruption of the US electoral process, there is a good chance that the GOP will retain control of the House regardless of public opinion.
These sorts of bills have been coming out of every GOP state legislature for years now, and that process only accelerated with the rise of the Trumpists. There is no good reason to expect the Trumpist GOP to conduct an election honestly.
I’m yet to hear anything from any Democrats that even recognises the problem, let alone anything suggesting an effective response.
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And guess who that betrayal screwed the most?
Key passage:
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Oh bleaugh. Where’d you hear that?
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That would be great if it weren’t for the demonstrated fact that the corporate dems who run the party machine would rather have Trump in charge than a progressive.
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Mark Blyth, the political economist who predicted Trump and Brexit.
BTW his book on Austerity a history of a dangerous idea is really good read.
and his talks and podcasts are quite interesting. Somehow economic ideas delivered in a thick Scottish accent with wry humour pack a more powerful punch.
He is a leftie, but coming from a working class background in Scotland
he can relate to the working class in the US that was cast to the side by the Democratic party.
He’s been saying this about Hillary for some time, I hope he’s wrong.
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I think it’ll come down to a crisis that the party will endure. Right now, it’s not at that point but it will be come 2018 or 2020. Which by the way, the GOP is at their crisis point right now. It’ll be fun to see if they implode in 2018 even a little. It’s clear that both parties have structural and generational flaws that need ironing out. Simple reforms won’t do it anymore. It’s going to be a bold set of actions that are needed to fix them and fix the system of governance. Otherwise, I expect a slow boil of chaos to set in and it’ll get much worse as a decade or two passes which then just don’t be alive or around in the US when SHTF.
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Heck the GOP were supposed to implode after the financial crash in 08. But guess what like Thomas Frank says, they had no intention of imploding. They just doubled down on the wedge issues, took advantage of all the racism against Obama and got a huge number of people out to vote in 2010 giving them the house.
I was most interested to see how the GOP will deal with Trump but it looks like he pretty much took it over, because anyone who opposes him like Flake for instance will be ousted in the primaries. There;s hardly any criticism of Trump even though most of them are for free trade, more hawkish towards Russia etc, as long as he gave them that 1.5trillion tax cut, and continues to destroy the EPA and Education from within.
The tariffs on China are kind of counterproductive given that Apple and a lot of manufacturers are a large part of those products made in China and China is already talking about retaliating against US soybean farmers (since they are obviously subsidized as is much of farming) so when they start sourcing their soybeans elsewhere it will hurt Trump in the Red states.
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Part of why they didn’t implode then was they still had enough of voting base and a donor base to sustain a comeback. The Tea Party was the astroturfing that they needed. Heck, I remember watching that one jerk on CNBC talking about the need for a “tea party.” It was clearly engineered but it was enough to spur people into action. But now it’s clear those folks were props to keep the GOP going and Trump’s ascension was purely luck based with little engineering involved. If anything this shows how bad things are for them since the Kochs didn’t expect this at all. It was totally off script (or at least mostly). This shows a severe weakness in the GOP that if left alone will cause a splintering of the party. I’m just waiting to see if the Kochs can recover control. My bet is they won’t regain much control and the situation will gradually worsen until another crisis pops up to topple the whole thing over. No amount of DC wonkery will fix them after that.
As for the Democrats, they got similar problems but oddly theirs isn’t so fatal. It’s really a question of whether they can adjust tactics where they work. And most of all, are they willing to ditch corporate interests or at very least put them on the back burner. I think 2018 they’ll keep corporate interests since they pay the bills. So this is the year that we’ll see pushback but no real reforms. 2020 might be the year the Democrats get their wakeup call (I hope).
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Yeah, let’s start stockpiling the knives we’re going to pull out of our own backs after the predictable midterm thing happens and only 42% of people turn out. “It’s because the policies of the Democratic party weren’t progressive enough, not this basic procedural failure that has been repeating for over a century!”
2020 might be the year the Democrats get their wakeup call (I hope).
not if Hillary runs again
Also they really need to look at the traditional base they abandoned in the past 30years and stop moving to the centre right. Pretty much all the centre parties in the West have been clobbered with the rise of populism. The reasons are economic,ie 30 years of neo-liberalism. The backlash to that is what brought about Trump and Brexit. Except for the Bernie and Warren wing I don’t see the Democrats changing and the constant focus on Its the Racism or Russia (of which there certainly is but is not the main cause) means the Democrats don’t have to accept any responsibility.
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Speaking as an outsider, the whole “Clinton’s totally going to run again!” thing seems to me to be 1/3 hopeful Republican wish-fulfillment (“She’s going to get crushed again!”, never mind that Trump’s win wasn’t crushing in the first place), 1/3 pessimistic Leftist doom-mongering (“The democrats never learn, everything’s doomed!”), and 1/3 people on both the right and the left arguing about the thing, rarely pausing to ask if there’s actually any genuine sign that she’s going to do it, or whether it’s just some pundit somewhere making noises.
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