BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Your "Master" has proclaimed that the Maria response was an "unsung success" without qualifications or excuses. Do you think you know more than Dennison?

So rather than sitting at your keyboard snarking about President Trump's "failure", if you have a masterplan to avert death and suffering from a natural disaster such as a Cat 4 hurricane please rush it to FEMA right away. Time is short.

No. And I don't think mankind can control the forces of nature. Apparently you do. Good luck with that.

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas on August 25, 2017. Texas has a population of ~24 million. FEMA deployed 30,000 personnel, 5.1 million meals, 4.5 million liters of water, and 20,000 tarps. 20 days later on September 10, Hurricane Irma hit Florida. Florida has a population of ~21 million. FEMA deployed 22,000 personnel, 10.9 million meals, and 98,000 tarps. 10 days later on September 20, Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has a population of ~3 million. Personnel was already stretched thin, key emergency supplies were already scarce, and basic provisions like food, water, and tarps were dangerously low. FEMA deployed 10,000 personnel, 1.6 million meals, 2.8 million liters of water, and 5,000 tarps. The National Hurricane Center describes a Cat 4 hurricane thusly:

This isn't really a job interview. The Constitution says that the Senate provides "advice and consent" on the presidential appointment. There isn't even any requirement for a hearing, it's just the normal practice, so they can give the appearance of making an informed decision.

TUCKER CARLSON IS SHOUTING when he tells me he isn’t shouting. The barrage of his voice has been relentless throughout the interview.

“I don’t want to be John McLaughlin yelling at people. Why would I want to do that? I don’t need to do that,” he insists. “I actually don’t think the audience likes that. I don’t like it. But the idea that I win debates because I yell louder, it’s, like, absurd.”

“I didn’t say you win because you shouted. I just said there is a lot of shouting.”

“There is not a lot of shouting. I do the show every night. I know what’s on it.”

“Okay,” I say, “but you are shouting right now.”

“It’s because I talk loud. I was shouting before.”

I am confused. “You were definitely shouting before. That’s why this is funny,” I say laughing nervously. “Because you are like, “I AM NOT SHOUTING!”

Carlson then tells me how he is the loudest person in the restaurant. Just ask his family. I mean, sure he was shouting, but he’s a loud guy, okay?

We’ve moved from denial to acceptance in less than a minute. It’s pure Tucker Carlson, a move I’ve seen hundreds of times in the over 40 hours of Tucker Carlson Tonight clips I’ve watched on Fox News in recent months. Reporters go on his show believing they’ll be discussing health care or Donald Trump’s mental health, only to be met with the question, “Do you think you are practicing journalism?”

Reeling guests stumble and fall. “Answer the question,” Carlson demands. “Answer the question!” But the question is unanswerable.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TUCKER CARLSON? People in media ask themselves this question with the same pearl-clutching, righteous tone they use when discussing their aunt in Connecticut who voted for Trump.

In a tweet, Jon Lovett of Crooked Media and Pod Save America, noted, “Tucker Carlson’s transition from conservative serious-ish writer to blustery CNN guy to Daily Caller troll to race-baiting Fox News host is like ice core data on what led to this moment in our politics.”

In June, Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, “Carlson squandered his considerable God-given talent for scrupulously true commentary, opting instead for clickbait at The Daily Caller or dumbed-down demagoguery at Fox.”

There’s something to all the liberal hand-wringing. In a speech Carlson gave to CPAC in 2009, he pleaded with conservative journalists to focus on reporting rather than punditry. He held up The New York Times as a standard bearer, begging writers “to go out there and find what is happening….not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media.” His pleas were met with boos.

But just six years later, Carlson was calling out The New York Times for pro-Clinton advocacy, and in June 2018 accused the paper of blatantly lying to the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Bashar Al-Assad, and Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

“You don’t know,” says Carlson, “Well, I do know… You oughta let people say what they think and you shouldn’t punish them for that, period. That’s how I feel.”

I am trying to listen. I am trying to understand. I want to understand. If I can figure out what happened to Tucker Carlson, how he went from successful magazine writer to contrarian journalist to raving Fox News host, I believe I will understand what happened to my country, my life even. What happened to make a rich white man the vox populi? How did I, a mom in the Midwest who can’t afford health care, become the humorless, censoring, liberal elite? How are the winners still insisting they are losers? What happened to this whole mess of a world? So I listen and listen. But I get no answers. Most of the quotes I get don’t make any sense. And I’m no closer to an answer now than when I started.

All I know is, he was definitely shouting.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock — an ever more appealing prospect this summer — you have no doubt noticed the televised election campaign being waged for Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court.

Oops, Freudian slip there. Supreme Court justices are not actually elected, although if you picked the wrong day to skip civics class, or if you just landed from Mars, you would be forgiven for thinking they appear on a ballot.

For some time now, members of the court have been warning that the day was approaching when the world would “think we are sort of junior varsity politicians,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it during a visit to the University of Chicago last month. Justice Stephen G. Breyer has used the same phrase.

And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., speaking at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last year shortly after the Senate’s almost completely polarized confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch, mused, “It is very difficult, I think, for a member of the public to look at what goes on in confirmation hearings these days, which is a very sharp conflict in political terms between Democrats and Republicans, and not think that the person who comes out of that process must similarly share that partisan view of public issues and public life.”

If those fears have not already been realized, the day when they will be is hurtling toward us at accelerating speed. Here’s a spot entitled “Grand Slam,” paid for by the Judicial Crisis Network and now playing on a television screen near you. It showcases Judge Kavanaugh, on the night President Trump nominated him, proclaiming his fealty to the “American rule of law,” as the voice-over intones: “For conservatives, he’s a grand slam,” and, “Tell your senator: Confirm Kavanaugh.”

The Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions of dollars last year to block the confirmation of Chief Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee, and to promote Justice Gorsuch’s confirmation in his stead, announced three weeks ago that it had already spent $4.5 million on pro-Kavanaugh commercials, with a special focus on television markets in red states where incumbent Democratic senators are running for re-election. The Judicial Crisis Network is closely tied to Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, which has provided the Trump administration with nearly all its judicial nominees so far.

I should make a couple of concessions here. One is that there are television ads on the other side as well, ads that attack a cartoonish version of Judge Kavanaugh and that predict all manner of disasters if he joins the court. Last month, an organization called End Citizens United ran an anti-Kavanaugh ad entitled “Hold,” as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Over a doomsday musical score, the serial narrators declare that “Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court endangers protections for people with pre-existing health conditions,” “puts a woman’s right to choose gravely at risk,” and “threatens to continue selling out America to powerful corporate interests.”

While the second of those three claims is, based on what we know, a pretty sure bet, the first and third strike me as barely a step up from fearmongering. Whatever the anti-Kavanaugh campaign’s merits or lack thereof, its spending is barely a drop in the television advertising ocean. The amount that End Citizens United spent to run its commercial for a week was $350,000, little more than a rounding error in the Judicial Crisis Network’s checkbook.

As for my second concession: Anyone old enough to remember Judge Robert H. Bork’s confirmation battle in 1987 will not have forgotten the anti-Bork television commercial narrated by Hollywood’s icon of probity, Gregory Peck. Developed with the support of People for the American Way and entitled “The Last Word,” it ran for the first 10 days of the two-week confirmation hearing. It depicted a young family — mother, father, two children — walking up the Supreme Court’s front steps and gazing raptly at the glistening marble building. The actor’s voice informed viewers that Judge Bork should not be on the Supreme Court because, among other reasons, “he doesn’t believe the Constitution protects your right to privacy” and “he thinks freedom of speech does not apply to literature and art and music.”

Those were accurate, if reductive, descriptions of the nominee’s positions. The commercial was highly effective, capturing public attention, catching the Reagan administration flat-footed, and leaving Judge Bork’s partisans crying “unfair.” In “The People Rising,” an invaluable but sadly out-of-print chronicle of the Bork episode, the authors, Michael Pertschuk and Wendy Schaetzel, described the essence of the anti-Bork media strategy. The insight was that paid media would drive unpaid media: “A news conference to announce the ‘premiere’ of an anti-Bork commercial starring Gregory Peck, for example, is certain to attract more press coverage, especially TV, than the release of a scholarly report on Bork’s record (though the quality of the coverage may be inferior.)”

So does this summer’s pro-Kavanaugh campaign simply even things up with the past generation’s mother of all confirmation battles? While that’s a superficially plausible takeaway, it seems to me that there’s a difference between advocacy for and against a Supreme Court nominee, a difference that matters.

Within our current framework, the Judicial Crisis Network’s ads strike me as slick but entirely conventional in their blandness. But assuming that there’s still a line somewhere, I believe the National Rifle Association has crossed it with a commercial declaring that “President Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh to break the tie” between the “liberal justices” who “oppose your right to self-defense” and the “four justices” (who are seemingly without left-to-right ideology) who “support your right to self-defense.” The ad concludes: “Your right to self-defense depends on this vote. Tell your senator to defend our right to self-defense. Confirm Judge Kavanaugh.”

In other words, in this commercial, Judge Kavanaugh is being held out as the designated hitter for a specific cause that is often before the court. We are invited to picture the nominee as having been sent zombielike out into the world with a single mission. Confirm him, we are told, so that the Supreme Court, after a decade of deadlock on the Second Amendment, can finally get the project of expanding gun rights moving again.

Given the N.R.A.’s participation in the many Second Amendment cases that reached the court — in recent years, unsuccessfully — I wondered whether this aggressive advocacy would impel Judge Kavanaugh to recuse himself from future gun-related cases. After soliciting some expert opinions, I’m persuaded that’s not the case. The problem is one of taste rather than ethics, the continued degradation of our judicial politics.

Maybe I’m a bit touchy about the N.R.A. because of its underappreciated role in recent Supreme Court nominations. It was in 2009, with President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, that the organization agreed to do a favor for Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was then the Senate’s minority leader, and not only oppose Judge Sotomayor but “score” the vote on her nomination. Advocacy groups “score” a vote by adding it to the report card they put out at the end of a congressional session, showing at a glance whether a member of Congress was on or off the group’s bus. While an N.R.A. score of 100 percent is vitally important in some parts of the country, the organization had never before scored a Supreme Court confirmation vote.

But Senator McConnell needed the favor because, despite his public vow to make sure that President Obama accomplished as little as possible, it appeared that a good number of Republican senators were ready to vote for the appealing nominee with a compelling personal story. Following the N.R.A.’s announcement, Republican support melted away, and only seven Republicans voted for Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation. The scenario was repeated the next year, when the N.R.A. opposed Elena Kagan’s nomination. Neither of President Obama’s nominees had a record on guns that could have provided a principled reason for opposition; indeed, Elena Kagan, solicitor general of the United States and former dean of Harvard Law School, had never been a judge. Only five Republicans voted for her confirmation.

Where will this end? Here’s my fantasy, my fondest hope for rescuing the Supreme Court from the precipice over which the current confirmation process is pushing it. In Judge Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, scheduled to begin in less than three weeks, a senator will play the N.R.A. commercial. What do you think of this, the senator will ask the nominee, who will assume his most sincere expression and reply: “I’m Brett Kavanaugh and I disavow that commercial.”

President Obama's No. 1 job was to rescue the ruined economy he inherited, and he didn't do it.

At least not all the way. He took office in late January 2009 amid catastrophic conditions, and by the time he passed the baton to Donald Trump eight years later, things were a lot better but a substantial output gap remained. That's why even though I think Trump's policies are detrimental to the long-term economic outlook of the United States, Trump was able to boost growth in 2018 with fiscal stimulus in the form of tax cuts and increased spending.

Why didn't the economy fully recover under Obama? Not enough fiscal stimulus. Don't take my word for it; read this recent paper from Jason Furman, who was one of Obama's top economic aides.

Furman's view is that the inadequacy of the stimulus reflected, first, excessive Blue Dog deficit worries, and second, excessive Republican intransigence, and he points out that the White House actually got a fair amount of post-ARRA "stimulus" smuggled in through various vehicles.

At this point, intra-progressive arguments typically devolve into nitpicking over whether team Obama is right to fully externalize the blame onto the Blue Dogs or whether they could have made choices that would have brought about a different outcome.

But from a forward-looking perspective, the key point isn't who specifically got it wrong — it's that the Democratic Party collectively didn't get the job done when they had the votes and every incentive to want a full and rapid recovery.

What's the plan next time?

The question of what to do if you inherit an economy that's in rough shape has not played a role in the 2018 campaign, and it probably won't play a role in 2019 governance. It also probably won't be important in 2020 or 2021. But one shouldn't be too sure.

At the end of the day, poor economic conditions are a leading cause of incumbents losing elections, so "what will I do if I end up taking power in the middle of a recession?" is something opposition party politicians should always be thinking about.

And I think it's important to learn the lessons of Trump and Obama correctly here, because the answer is that fighting recessions is, in a sense, really "easy." The Trump stimulus isn't sophisticated, isn't well-targeted, doesn't solve any long-term problems, isn't paired with any long-term offsets, and doesn't reflect much of a policy process at all. But it works. The economy was in a state where it benefited from both a modest stimulus and a competent Republican Party Fed chair who wants to see the Trump agenda succeed, and Trump delivered on that big picture.

If Democrats find themselves governing in a weak economy again, they'll face pressure from deficit hawks. But they'll also face internal pressure because basically all progressives believe that one or more fundamental economic reforms would be desirable. If you believe in fundamental reform — whether that's stronger unions or more vigorous antitrust or curbing inequality or whatever — it's also tempting to believe that the need for fundamental reform is the "real issue."

But while fundamental issues are important, they aren't the only real issues. Sometimes the economy just needs a shot in the arm. Sometimes the shot it needs is really big. And when that's the case, delivering the needed medicine is the best way to get political space for your bigger reform.

I am not sure if I am bragging or confessing, maybe both.

This morning I saw a WaPo piece abut Tucker Carslon. I am reasonably certain that I had never previously heard of him.

I fondly recall my high school psychology teacher suggesting that I do my term paper on Freud and me responding "Who's Freud?"
Ok, so now I know who Freud was, but I am hoping that I can retain my ignorance about Tucker Carlson.

This is a good cause. I will be happy to delete that post if it helps.

"Advice and consent" is pretty much exactly the role of job interview panels in many situations.
But anyway, what's your point? Are you saying that misleading congress under oath should not be a big deal?

No, I'm a big boy now, I can handle it! I am still pretty successfully fending off learning anything at all about who Kim Kardashian is. And Hannity has a show on Fox but I don't know his first name. I do however recall the most famous Reindeer of all. You know, the important things.

No. I'm just not aware of what he actually lied about.

I didn't watch most of the hearings, I just saw some highlights. From what I could tell, he mostly sidestepped questions by saying he can't answer hypotheticals. And from what I've heard, this is SOP in such hearings. It's infuriating, but it's also expected.

Could you be specific about when he committed perjury?

Every time one of you calls Trump Denisson or otherwise mocks him as a useless clown, you're divorcing Trump the despicable human from the gravity of the office he holds. It's like saying oh that's just dennison (not the President of the United States). However for people around him and for the rest of the world what he says and does is still coming from Donald J Trump, the 45th and current President of the United States and they can't afford to ignore it.

No. I'm just not aware of what he actually lied about.

I didn't watch most of the hearings, I just saw some highlights. From what I could tell, he mostly sidestepped questions by saying he can't answer hypotheticals. And from what I've heard, this is SOP in such hearings. It's infuriating, but it's also expected.

So you are equating the population of 2 entire states, most of which were not hit (or even affected) with the full force of a hurricane, with the population of an an island which was pretty much totally devastated. Very nice. This is something that I would expect from a press release from Sarah Sanders.

I'd like to see how Chas or rmnaka would explain his tweets by arguing that the president doesn't mean what he says - and that's OK.