Existing as of when? These are being changed all the time. It’s done to benefit whichever party is in power.
“Hurry! Hurry! They’re going to lock in the boundaries, grab as many people as you can!!!”
To build off what Stranger_On_A_Train wrote, if those 6 districts are Black-performing with a 31% Black electorate each… (enough to win the D primary) people will disagree as to whether it is fair to mess with that.
~Max
I’d like to be optimistic, but I can’t. The past few years I donated what I could to some lefty candidates at the national level. Not any more. The filibuster is intact and the Supreme Court will not get more members. Thusly a golden opportunity has been squandered. The future looks bleak. I’ll be teaching marksmanship and dirty fighting to my grandchildren.
The thing that has been getting down the most recently is the number of fic/nofic I’ve been reading - dating back 20-30 years - that consistently talk about how far gone the global warming crisis is. Sure, we’ve got more renewables and a few EVs, but we are nowhere near reversing this thing, and many calculations suggest we are well past doing so.
If we don’t give a damn about the fucking planet, why the hell should we expect people to give a damn about other people?
Nope. This is the “bad apples” logic that stifles police reform - insisting that the people that do nothing aren’t as bad as the people that are actively bad. The Democrats are part of the same bad system, many unwilling to change it because they benefit just as much from the corruption. Remember that Pelosi’s for insider trading too.
Dammit, this is the fourth Pit thread I’ve opened in which a debate broke out. What’s wrong with you people? Did everyone watch Frozen last night? If I don’t see some spittle flying toot sweet Imma head over to Reddit for “Am I the Asshole?”
I’m surprised you think that there will be agreement on which social issues are “minor,” never mind what to say to those people directly affected by said social issues.
Agreement is easy, they are the social issues that affect other people.
I’m not sure if this is posted elsewhere, but I thought it might make sense to drop it here.
A Michigan state senator gave a pretty badass speech in response to a colleague’s right wing fundraising efforts, which had asserted that she was trying to groom children when she voiced support for civil rights.
If words have any power, this was a strike at the hateful, and ignorant, rhetoric of the GOP. And it was delivered with some righteousness that made me feel good watching it.
Never mind
I agree. This is how Democrats should be taking on Republicans, not with mealy mouthed statements about trying to be bipartisan.
I’ve already figured one out, but nobody here takes it seriously.
This is apparently going viral and making the rounds and getting noticed.
Greg Sargent, WaPo columnist, discusses it with James Carville and reports here:
BTW, I see this topic now has its own thread over in P&E.
I’m surprised you say I think there will be agreement on which social issues are “minor” since I didn’t say that. There probably won’t be.
However I guess I mean any progressive goal that - if not achieved - won’t cause economic and social collapse. Right now there is a massive group of working class who would logically benefit from more left leaning policies, but who are wedged off by the right using social issues. They are a large enough group that the US may lose its democracy through their actions.
If that happens, the timetable for improving the rights of small minorities may not be deferred, it may be cancelled.
Yes they are ruthless and unethical. The quote from “The Newroom” is of course hyperbole because liberals quite obviously don’t always lose.
Republicans do however win a surprising amount of the time given how objectively crap they are.
The tightrope that must be walked is between a a winning strategy, and a strategy that stoops to their level because the latter will result in a race to the bottom that everyone will eventually lose. I’m not entirely confident that tightrope still exists.
I’ll see your nope and raise you a nuh uh.
Bothsiderism favors the Republicans. They benefit when people refuse to choose between what’s bad and what’s worse. Progress isn’t about making things perfect; it’s about making things better.
The irony of the “few bad apples” rationale is that the context of the entire analogy is lost; it is that “a few bad apples spoil the basket”. That is, that just one or two rotten apples cause all other fruit to also spoil. It isn’t enough to just make an example of the ‘bad apples’ after the fact; the entire ‘spoilage’ of behavioral ethics needs to be rectified to make a real improvement in policing and other areas where the ‘bad apples’ have ‘spoiled’. In the case of policing, the spoilage isn’t just the bad actors or even the system that enables them but many of the perverse incentives toward bad behavior such as no-knock drug raids (and quite arguably the “War on Drugs” in general), asset forfeiture, arrest quotas, and the general approach that every contact between civilian and cop is by default an enforcement action rather than mental health crisis, civil disagreement, et cetera. Until that basic premise is challenged, all of the business about police reform or defunding is moot because whatever replaces that system will still have the same problems.
Indeed, although Republicans under the tutelage of Newt Gingrich et al have turned corruption and public vilification of anyone who disagrees with the platform into an art form, leading Democrats have long enabled the same corruption and influence going back to at least the Clinton Administration where the decision was made that campaign financing trumped all ethical concerns. (I would go so far as to extend this back to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy but I’m not sure there is really a definable starting point.) Nancy Pelosi, of course, is part of the problem, being so compromised and corruptible that she compromises ethical members of the Democratic party. And she’s far from alone in that; so many Democratic candidates so readily have their hands out to take money from corporate interests (necessarily so in many cases) that distinguishing their duty to constituents from duty to benefactors requires a lot of squinting hard and smelling through the bullshit.
However, in our ‘two party system’ running as an actual alternative is a political death sentence that only masochists, Libertarians, and Green Party candidates can enjoy. The notion that there is some kind of revolutionary change to “the system” that will inherently sweep away such corruption is farcical at best; the real solution is to support and encourage candidates who will stand above the fray and serve as an example to others that ethical conduct can be successful even within a compromised system. There are a few—some would say very few—who actually make it their mission to represent their constituents above all, and you can see it in how ridiculed they are for their essential competence; witness all of the whinging over Rep. Katie Porter ‘grilling’ pharmaceutical executives for why their products cost so much beyond recouping their investment and their companies report record profits while people struggle to afford needed medications. That she is cited as a radical exception rather than an exemplar of what Congresspeople should be doing as a matter of course tells you all that you need to know about the place of the Democratic party in ‘the system’, e.g. it is mostly fine with the way thigns are.
Stranger
My emphasis.
To me it seems a little unfair to make the second statement given the first.
I know many of the incumbent Dems are probably too comfortable, but which side of politics has been broadly supportive of Citizens United and which side against it - that isn’t an entirely rhetorical question because I’d have to say I haven’t followed it all too closely. But my impression is that the answer is “the Republicans and the Democrats respectively”.