October 24, 2019

Brand New A- rated Quinnipiac National Poll: Warren 28, Biden 21, Sanders 15, Pete 10, Harris 5

October 24, 2019 - Warren Opens Up Lead In Dem Primary As Biden Slips, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Dems Say Sanders Is Most Honest Candidate

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3646

October 24, 2019

European leaders expected to grant Brexit delay

Donald Tusk tells Boris Johnson he has recommended that the EU27 accept request for extension

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/23/brexit-european-leaders-back-call-for-delay-end-january-extension

Boris Johnson will be left waiting for the EU’s terms for a further Brexit extension until Friday, with signs of momentum building behind Donald Tusk’s plan for a delay up to 31 January. The French government has privately voiced its concerns about taking the pressure off MPs to vote for the deal, which they believe could be ratified in 15 days, but EU sources said the bloc was seeking a “solution that works for all” and avoids a no deal exit.

Tusk, the president of the European council, told Johnson in a phone call on Wednesday his reasons for “recommending the EU27 accept the UK request for an extension”. The debate among the EU27 is whether to follow Tusk’s lead and offer a three-month delay that could be terminated following ratification of the deal, or seek to put pressure on MPs with a shorter extension, an idea raised by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Tusk has suggested leaders can avoid convening for a summit if they agree to the three months sought in the prime minister’s letter of request through a “written procedure”.

After a 90-minute meeting of EU ambassadors on Wednesday evening, there appeared to be momentum behind Tusk’s strategy. “All agreed on the need for an extension to avoid a no-deal Brexit”, an EU source said. “The duration of an extension is still being discussed. There was a strong preference to use a written procedure to take the final decision.”

One EU diplomat said: “It felt like we were all going in one direction – towards a flextension to 31 January – but nothing is decided. It needs to work for everyone.” The French ambassador is understood to have insisted that the EU avoid getting dragged in “domestic politics” in Britain, and questioned whether that would be a consequence of a longer extension. “If we give it, are we making an election happen?” said a source.

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October 22, 2019

Radio Host Says God Killed Elijah Cummings Because He Didn't Support Trump

https://newsone.com/3890812/christian-radio-host-elijah-cummings/

Maryland Congressman Rep. Elijah Cummings died early Thursday morning. He had been an elected official since 1983, always serving his community and yet Trump worshippers are still disrespecting. A conservative radio host said God killed him because he didn’t support Trump.

According to Right Wing Watch, Christian fundamentalist Stacey Shiflett claimed Trump was sent by God and Cummings headed a “cooked, deceptive, demonic attempt” to remove Trump from office. She also said about Cummings, “Everything that he’s done has been nothing but trying to take this president out. I believe that God had had enough, and God moved.”

Another so-called Christian, Dave Daubenmire, said Cummings was the “enemy of the cross” and “Maybe he didn’t know Jesus… I haven’t been sitting around praying that Elijah Cummings would die. But now that he did, I’m glad he’s gone . . . I bet he’s not pro-choice now. I bet he’s not pro-homo now.”

Jesse Lee Peterson, who is a Black, said about Cummings, “He dead. That’s what happens when you mess with The Great White Hope. Don’t mess with God’s children.” He also said, “If you notice, John McCain, he dead. Charles Krauthammer, he dead. And Elijah Cumming, now he dead. They all didn’t like The Great White Hope, they went against him, they talked about him, now they all dead. That’s amazin’.”

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October 22, 2019

lol, looks like Rump's Twitter account has been hi-jacked by his aides again (Trudeau win)

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1186500787922448384

what a load of shite!

October 22, 2019

awoo

https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/1186432040394055685

must have sound on!

October 22, 2019

Our shrinking economic toolkits

For four decades, mainstream economists and policymakers have been wedded to fixed dogmas. Their blind belief in fiscal discipline threatens the very stability of societies.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/our-shrinking-economic-toolkits



In the natural world, humans stand out for the complexity of the tools, technologies, and institutions that we have developed. According to the anthropologist Joseph Henrich, we owe this success to our ability to accumulate, share and adapt cultural information across generations. But just as interconnection causes our ‘collective brains’ to expand over time, isolation can cause them to shrink. Economists should take note.

Since innovation and accumulation are socio-cultural processes, larger and more interconnected populations create more and increasingly sophisticated tools. The inter-generational expansion of our collective brains depends, according to Henrich, on ‘the ability of social norms, institutions, and the psychologies they create’ to encourage people freely to ‘generate, share, and recombine novel ideas, beliefs, insights, and practices’.

Disruptive isolation

To see how isolation can disrupt and even reverse this process, consider Tasmania, which some 12,000 years ago was separated from mainland Australia when the melting of polar ice caps flooded the Bass Strait. Archaeological remains indicate that prior to this separation, Tasmanian and mainland populations possessed the same skills—such as fire-making—and technologies, including the boomerang, the spear-thrower, and polished-stone and bone tools.

Yet, when Europeans arrived in Tasmania in the late 17th century, its inhabitants were using just 24 of the simplest tools any human population had developed. Not only had they been unable to develop new skills and technologies; they had also stopped using some of those they had previously possessed. In short, geographic isolation had caused them to lose significant cultural knowledge over generations. The Tasmanians did not choose their isolation. Yet, today, some societies and social groups are doing just that. And, as with the Tasmanians, this is having regressive effects, including the loss of both existing knowledge and some capacity to generate new knowledge and innovation.

Mostly ineffective

With interest rates still ultra-low or even negative in many countries, governments have few remaining monetary-policy tools with which to respond to a slowdown, let alone another recession. Yet they stubbornly refuse to employ fiscal policy—and, in particular, to increase public spending—choosing instead to implement tax cuts that are mostly ineffective in reviving real growth........

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About Jayati Ghosh

Jayati Ghosh is professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, executive secretary of International Development Economics Associates and a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.

October 22, 2019

Debunking the Buttigieg/Zuckerberg tosh.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287319902

October 22, 2019

Debunking the Buttigieg/Zuckerberg tosh. The FB employees went to them and ASKED Zuck and his wife

to forward their names and CV's to the Buttigieg campaign. It is right in the article that kicked all this spun up smear attempt off.


H/T to DU'er thesquanderer

the article itself

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-21/zuckerberg-offered-advice-in-hiring-to-buttigieg-in-rare-move?srnd=politics-vp

and their (thesquanderer's) reply

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287318853#post9



also see


Teachout walking her smear attempt back

https://twitter.com/MrsO9/status/1186302175128903681


and then some of Pete's campaign and surrogates and journo responses to all of the above

https://twitter.com/Lis_Smith/status/1186277310149922817

https://twitter.com/Lis_Smith/status/1186278926047420416

https://twitter.com/Lis_Smith/status/1186301759863578630


https://twitter.com/chrisjollyhale/status/1186279054258966531

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1186248010889609216

https://twitter.com/darakass/status/1186278648078356481

October 20, 2019

WaPo: Trump wants to make reality TV. But now the cast is ignoring his directions.

What happens when the reality TV president loses control of his production?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-wants-to-make-reality-tv-but-now-the-cast-is-ignoring-his-directions/2019/10/17/9b908b16-f0f6-11e9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html

It has always been appealing to talk about Donald Trump as the reality television president. For all his documented racism, and despite the many accusations of sexual assault, no jab at his unfitness for the job has seemed more ubiquitous than the reminder that he was previously famous as the guy who fired Cyndi Lauper on the tacky boardroom set of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” It’s a dynamic that was palpable this past week, when Trump invited the parents of Harry Dunn, the 19-year-old Brit killed in a traffic accident by American diplomatic wife Anne Sacoolas, to the White House. Without telling the grieving parents beforehand, he had Sacoolas waiting in the next room for a surprise emotional catharsis, to be played out in front of cameras ready to capture the moment.

This is the ultimate old-school reality TV idea, recognizable to anyone who has ever indulged. It’s mid-’90s, daytime-trash gold — that box in the corner of the screen where we see a guy’s girlfriend waiting to burst onto the set and confront him for sleeping with her sister. It’s that moment on a “Real Housewives” reunion episode when a minor character is trotted out just to catch one of the stars in a lie. Since Trump clearly was looking to sell reconciliation, not conflict, my mind went to a more contemporary example from the most recent season of “Queer Eye,” when Karamo, the near-caricaturishly kind and sincere lifestyle adviser, brings the man he’s making over to a restaurant for a surprise. The guy who shot him and put him in a wheelchair for life is waiting to meet him.

The very temptation to compare such constructed, formulaic theatrics to the drama playing out on the global stage doesn’t just indict Trump: It’s also a condemnation of the rest of us, the viewers who voted him into office. We fell for the spectacle. A few months after Trump’s inauguration, Emily Nussbaum detailed in the New Yorker the way his “Apprentice” persona — the man in the power suit calling the shots, never challenged — was a cardboard cutout that could, at least, appear presidential, however free of substance it might be. Implicit in that point is the dynamic that makes any reality television production work: participants willing to engage in the spectacle shaped around them, and an audience willing to suspend disbelief in the face of that spectacle. Whether you loved or hated Trump, he was watchable because we’d seen all the bits before.

It’s easy now to point out that for the past three years Trump has been going back to that same playbook. Reality television, as noted by media critics like Nussbaum, political reporters like John Cassidy and the Bravo god himself, Andy Cohen, is the language he knows — a flip book of insults and set pieces ready-made for conflict or humiliation, or just fireworks. But it might be more helpful, or at least more hopeful, to point out all the ways the show breaks down around him: moments when he expects the production to play out exactly as he wants, but participants and viewers refuse to give him any moral or narrative authority. Often these are interactions with normal people, people who want nothing from him, who won’t be made to mean what they don’t want to mean. They are not contestants, they are citizens, and that is a distinction Trump seems unable to make. When he forces them into the show, their humanity in the face of the formula turns the familiar grotesque.

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October 20, 2019

WaPo: Hamilton pushed for impeachment powers. Trump is what he had in mind.

He wanted a strong president — and a way to get rid of the demagogic ones.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/18/hamilton-pushed-impeachment-powers-trump-is-what-he-had-mind/?arc404=true



President Trump has described the impeachment proceedings as a “coup,” and his White House counsel has termed them “unconstitutional.” This would come as a surprise to Alexander Hamilton, who wrote not only the 11 essays in “The Federalist” outlining and defending the powers of the presidency, but also the two essays devoted to impeachment.

There seems little doubt, given his writings on the presidency, that Hamilton would have been aghast at Trump’s behavior and appalled by his invitation to foreign actors to meddle in our elections. As a result, he would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump embodies Hamilton’s worst fears about the kind of person who might someday head the government. Among our founders, Hamilton’s views count heavily because he was the foremost proponent of a robust presidency, yet he also harbored an abiding fear that a brazen demagogue could seize the office.

That worry helps to explain why he analyzed impeachment in such detail: He viewed it as a crucial instrument to curb possible abuses arising from the enlarged powers he otherwise championed. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, with his sunny faith in the common sense of the people, Hamilton emphasized their “turbulent and changing” nature and worried about a “restless” and “daring usurper” who would excite the “jealousies and apprehensions” of his followers. He thought the country should be governed by wise and illustrious figures who would counter the fickle views of the electorate with reasoned judgments. He hoped that members of the electoral college, then expected to exercise independent judgment, would select “characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”

From the outset, Hamilton feared an unholy trinity of traits in a future president — ambition, avarice and vanity. “When avarice takes the lead in a State, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall,” he wrote as early as the Revolutionary War. He dreaded most the advent of a populist demagogue who would profess friendship for the people and pander to their prejudices while secretly betraying them. Such a false prophet would foment political frenzy and try to feed off the confusion.

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