Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead at 79

Part the First

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Wide-eyed recitations of naïveté aren't much of an argument.

The left made its compromises from '92-'08. And we made another compromise when we voted for Barack Obama. That gamble seems to have paid off reasonably well.

But let us take two aspects of Obama's presidency, two of the greatest improvements in my societal quality of life, as a consideration.

In the late eighties into the early nineties, conservatives developed this weird idea for health insurance called the "individual mandate". It was offered up as a desperate alternative to single-payer. A Republican managed to enact it in Massachusetts, and while pretty much anyone can question the wisdom of metaphorical fellatio for the insurance industry, it was certainly, demonstrably better than nothing.

Barack Obama conceded single-payer from the outset; I would say it was too early in the process, but we really could have used the Sanders brand of activism in 2008-09; it just wasn't there. What we got out of it all was the Republican plan, which Republicans promptly turned against.

Where are the voters on this? Siding with Republicans, to judge by the election returns since then. That the GOP can't send a good candidate to the presidential circuit is the good fortune of accident.

So what do you do if you're the politician?

Alright, sounds good. All Democrats stick to liberal principles and expect, despite history, that the people will move dramatically leftward simply because they have a chance to do so. The Democrats get waxed, Republicans run the show for four or eight or twelve years, and by the time the people get so sick of it, the next Democrat spends the term cleaning up the mess. Then the people complain about a lack of progress and vote Republicans in.

Show me somewhere, please, in our society, that the cognitive dissonance of blaming liberals for conservative ideas and behaviors breaks.

Because here's the alternative: No health care reform.

Welcome to 2016; it looks just like 2007, only worse.

Let us also consider marriage equality. In recent years, conservatives have even asked that we hold President Obama's 2008 opposition to marriage equality against him. So let us talk about the Obama gamble in gambling terms.

If you're playing a single hand of poker, how do you play it? More specifically, I would posit that if you and I were playing a single hand of Hold 'Em in order to settle which movie to go see, or which pub to hit for a drink, you might play a certain way. But what if you're at a table of eight, in a room with sixteen hundred gamblers, and your object is to stay in the game long enough to beat every other player in the room?

Historically, President Obama said what he needed to; asking me to hold that decision against him is a fool's errand―was there some Democrat who could win a presidential election pushing marriage equality? How about abortion rights? It's true, I believe in total access, with none of this parsing of trimesters or legislated ontology, but I damn well know we're not getting it anytime soon, and also that any candidate pushing that in a banner year is going to get carved.

What did we get out of Obama? A couple years of impatience, to be certain. To the other, as soon as he had what he needed―in this case an unexpected Tenth Amendment decision in favor of gay marriage―he started playing his hand. And we rode that case to victory.

Should I have held Obama's hesitance in 2008 against him? Okay. So we all pull our votes from Obama, McCain is elected, and you tell me what would have happened.

Let us try the gambling metaphor again: Just because we're allowed a seat at the table doesn't mean we get to hold all the chips; it also doesn't mean we're going to be dealt an ace and the Bug in the pocket and three aces on the table.

Sports? Just because we're allowed into the tournament doesn't mean we automatically make the Sweet Sixteen, and it certainly doesn't mean we're going to sink every three.

Construction? This isn't a matter of being allowed into the room so all we have to do is switch on the lights and open up the tap. We'll be allowed on the premises, then we have to inspect the pipes and the wiring, patch the gaps, replace the broken swtiches and valves, and make sure the workspace is suitable for the work.

There are reasons, structural, societal, and also self-imposed why the left has a hard time capitalizing on foundations build from compromise. In any given year, regardless of right and wrong, the best retort to a careful and correct leftist argument is to simply blurt out "God, Guns, and Greed". They're coming for your wallet. They're coming for your rifle. They're coming for your Bible. They're coming for your children. What part of history informs you otherwise?

Our voter frustration is one of constantly compromising and never seeing the other side pay off the contract. The conservative voter frustration is one of simply not being able to bully people like they used to.

There were some strategic errors about the rise of the DLC; that much is indisputable. We're hemorrhaging in local elections, and the DLC way of doing things is part of that outcome. It's pretty damn good for winning statewide elections, but other than that we hold metropolitan locales, lose rural, and trade off the in-betweens; 2010 is an example of what happens when we lose those in-betweens.

Your approach sounds nearly sensible if we pretend the Clinton years, especially the first term, looked, sounded, felt, and operated the way things do right now. Perhaps I'm unusual in remembering. In '92, the thing was Poppy Bush's poor run; in '96, it was Dole's awful run. In the post-Cold War years, liberalism was still the goddamn Devil; it took another Bush presidency to crack that, because what did it was Republican dereliction of duty in favor of schemes to start a new Cold War, and then a World War. We didn't claw our way back in on merit; we slipped in amid the chaos as everything else fell apart.

So if we're going to build a leftist coalition to move this country forward, where is that base? Where have they been? Ah! But the Bernie Revolution is young! Yes, this is true; that base might well be emerging.

But with youth also comes a certain necessariy naïevté; I need these young voters to study and comprehend history. We don't have the base to deliver Bernie Sanders' promises, and if he wins the nomination but blows the election, or wins the election and flames out after a term spent getting his ass kicked by Congress, the left will lose another generation of voters.

And the thing is that people like you and me can put our heads together and try to figure out solutions all we want, but if we ignore history that endeavor would be doomed. Winning the Senate is within our grasp, but not necessarily this year; maybe this cycle plus the midterm. Winning the House? We need one of two things. One is a drastic shift in Congressional districting that won't happen until after 2020 at best, and that's if liberals can start picking up the local elections we tend to get trounced in. The other is the arrival and commitment of that liberal and leftist base that we just don't have right now.

Losing an election doesn't hurt so bad; being relegated for a generation hurts like hell. And not just egos; those losses take their tolls on millions of Americans.

You know, if everything was mathematically determined, like a video game, it would at least be easier to figure out; playing 32,000 turns of FreeCiv is easy enough theoretically, with the path to world domination clear. It's the part when each of those turns takes over an hour to execute that things get hard to follow. But here's the thing: When the people in your CivNation want a Sewer System, they are happy when they get the Sewer System.

That is to say, in the game it's almost literally "easy as one-two-three". But what happens when the people demand a sewer system, you deliver a functional sewer system, and then they turn against you for giving them what they wanted? In real life it's not one-two-three, but, rather, the decision tree is a complex mess of contingency plans that, laid out as a graph, starts to look like a fractal. Dive in; how deep can you go before you hit bottom, or run out of air?

The day we can walk back into the discussion with our hats on our heads instead of in our hands is also the day everything has gone so far to Hell that the people have no choice left. Forestalling that disaster requires a certain amount of maneuvering we often describe as "compromise".

I'm a leftist; I'm not winning my Revolution today. Or tomorrow. Or next year. Indeed, if I'm lucky, and we start today and do everything right, and I live to my hundredth birthday, we'll be close enough that I'll find a way to stay alive long enough to see our victory.

This is the metaphor: When I came out of the closet in middle age, I promised myself the one thing I wouldn't do is jump on the first available comfort. Underground, we take the risks because we have the chance and feel the need, and that can get someone like me killed. For various reasons, liberalism has a chance right now. I won't hop on the first Revolution to come along. And if the wartime metaphor is to gamble ceding hard-won territory for the sake of feelgood politics, that Revolution is problematic.

―End Part I―​

 

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Part the Second

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The problem with that statement is the range of Americans implicitly deemed irresponsible. Compared with historical liberalism, sure, your point is not without merit, but that definition is not in play, here. Switching between definitions is functionally dangerous; we're Americans, living in a time when the proposition that women are human and have human rights is radically liberal.

To reiterate: Wide-eyed recitations of naïveté aren't much of an argument.

It's true I don't know who that pitch is intended to convince, but it's also true such vague, ahistorical notions in lieu of an argument have some market value.

Underlying it, however, is a problem Democrats have largely avoided in recent years, and any time they don't they get destroyed. Once upon a time, say, oh, the Cold War era, liberalism was seen as a movement toward instant gratification. We fought hard against that depiction, and history has proven our point. The problem isn't whether or not anyone is capable of perceiving that history―plenty are―but to what degree that history matters. Because as we find now, the same ideology that denounced "Citizenship" ribbons in schoolhouse and summer camp is integral to the conservative-libertarian notion that considers that definition of citizenship an assertion of tyranny. The same conservative ideology that denounced the moral relativism of liberalism is now drowning in its own moral relativism. The same conservative ideology that protested books and movies because their rights were inherently violated as long as someone else's were intact now holds sway in the Republican Party.

And whether we want to blame the media, educational institutions, or simply the notion that "people are stupid", various manners of equivocation create a practical context of similarity that has far more functional influence over electoral outcomes than reality itself.

It bugs me, for instance, to see the press draw Sanders/Trump parallels based on voter frustration. Sanders, meanwhile, seems as pseudocapitalist as any, aiming to play up the equivocation.

Look at liberal progress in recent years; we've been surviving at the ballot box, but our progress has largely come through the courts.

To wit, we say, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact"; we might say the same of any general propositon of civilized society. At the same time, we've been hearing laments about judicial activism from conservatives nearly forever, but historically conservatives have benefitted more from judicial activism, and where we're stuck is this weird market juxtaposition. Since Romer v. Evans, we've been hung up on this idea that it is some sort of offense that voters cannot arbitrarily defy the supreme law of the land. To the functional, how is this even arguable? How does, say, two equal one? How does equality under law work if one side requires supremacy in order to fulfill their equality? Yet this is somehow a contentious issue. Probably because we're not Sims. We are human beings, and no matter how smart and rational people think they are, the feelgood politicking feels good.

You know how many people I've known who resent accusations of bigotry? Yet when presented with the choice of supremacism versus equality, they back supremacism? I've heard it for decades about gay people. I've heard it my whole life about women and nonwhites. You'd think, if people were as rational as your simplistic argument requires, they would have figured out by now that two does not equal one.

But they haven't.

Empowerment feels good, and feelgood beats reality at the ballot box nearly any day.

Again with the switching definitions. We're going to be stuck with Giant Douche versus Turd Sandwich for a while, and that's if we go about this responsibly.

But cake-frosted puppies and Dippin' Dot unicorns will leave us with nothing but wishful mythology and hair of the dog.

Compared to my idyll, sure, we're stuck.

Compared to what happens if the Democrats lose this year, the path forward is pretty damn clear.

Think again of gay rights. I would have much preferred if Bill Clinton said of DoMA, "Over my dead veto". And that's how it would have gone; it was a veto-proof majority. And it's true, he might have been able to wrangle a few votes out of straddling Democrats, but not enough to win. So he signed. This was a political necessity in terms of what happens and costs Democrats how many votes. Our vindication came twenty years later when the Chief Justice of the United States found himself pretending that he didn't remember his own damn career in order maintain a distortion of history.

If I hold every politician to the standard you're pitching to, none of them gets my vote. Not even Bernie Sanders, whose fealty to the NRA is problematic, and whose vote for the CMFA in 2000, by the uncompromising standards you would have me judge other politicians, is a betrayal.

No politician is pure. What I want from my politicians and for my society goes well beyond how I feel about things today.

It's not that I don't share any number of sentiments I'm hearing from the Sanders movement. Rather, if we're going to stage this Revolution, it ought to be real, and it ought to have a calculable chance of actual, genuine success. Watching Bernie's supporters imitate their right-wing neighbors is actually more problematic to me than the senior U.S. Senator from Vermont himself. He won't destroy the country from the Oval Office, but he can't make good on these promises, and the price Democrats, the country, and by proxy the world will pay for that failure is immense.

―Fin―​

 

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i'm sorry Tiassa but that a whole lot of its hard so we shouldn't try, and that my friends is whole lot of bullshit. we are in this shithole because the left keeps compromising instead of actually pushing for the right things. the problem is not that people aren't liberal they are. most of the liberal things we want to do have a majority of people support them. its getting them to the ballot box and past republican obstructionism. you might be happy running the prevent defense but that doesn't work. I'm tired of compromises with assholes for micrometer gains.

 

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Long before that.

That was not a compromise, that was a bait-n-switch. The left voted for the farthest left candidate it could find, and the first thing he did was discard his leftist advisors and adopt Hillary's aides-de-camp.

And so we got banking regulations catering to Goldman Sach's convenience, drone warfare expansions, and Obamacare - a kludge, a slow motion crash, a handout to the private insurance and drug industry wrapped in the banner of "socialism" and "leftwing" at the same time as it embodies every inefficiency and cost driver the corporate profiteers can muster.

And you are worried about Sanders's possible loss bringing "socialism" down with it? Sanders may be your last chance to save universal health care from the scrap heap, after Obamacare gets done with it. Your last chance to get a basic regulatory leash on Wall Street, or the NSA. Never mind actual socialism, you've got basic governmental services on the line here, and -

->Clinton is not on your side <-

Please. Fealty to the NRA? One bad vote that has reasonable excuse? You don't have to get silly here.

Look in the mirror. I'm not the one claiming Clinton is just "a little bit left", or that she is some kind of reliable getter of votes on the national scene compared with Sanders.

You're worried about electability? Let's make a list of the Democratic campaigners less effective than Hillary Clinton, or more vulnerable to disaster - - - - (sound of Jeopardy theme) - - - - .

That's your bet. You give up on banking regulation, diminution of military violence, adequate rehab of the health care system, reasonable immigration policy, K Street influence suppression, campaign finance reform, etc etc etc, and you sign up the worst Democratic campaigner for President you've seen since Dukakis - because you're realistic?

Look, I'd vote for a Labrador retriever before any of the current Republican candidates. But Hillary Clinton's track record is really not good, not at all. She's been on the wrong side of every gut check decision she has ever faced, she's lost voting share and favorability ratings over time in every political campaign she's ever run, and she does not represent me or my concerns in any significant respect except default compared with some Republican.

 

Keep repeating the mantra, cultist.

No, you're just the one pushing Republican fantasies.

Let's compile a scientific list of the factors affecting her presentation. There is, after all, a big-assed gorilla in the room we're all politely ignoring.

Give up? Oh, goshy-gee, Iceaura! I can't have everything I want today, so I'm trying to plan around that. Apparently that means I've given up.

You want a flashy campaigner. I want a good president. The distinction is pretty clear.

Look, I've got nothing against the dogs, but it might be helpful to stick to people who can actually be president. Otherwise, as much as I adore my canine neighbors, why not vote for Kanno Yoko for president? (Anyone who can needlessly rip off Hooverphonic like that, get away with it, and one-up the original has clearly demonstrated an ability to affect the system by working within it.)

For purists, yeah.

Politicians and gut checks aren't a reliable indicator. The politician who properly follows the gut check will lose. It's something you and I have disagreed about before, though I'd have to search for the thread; as I recall, the implication that marketplace consumers affect the marketplace decisions of providers seemed to upset you. That is to say, as much as we disdain politicians, we reject the chance to break the system entirely. And now, for superficial reasons, Democrats are posturing themselves to piss away the White House in pursuit of a false assertion of ideological purity. Thanks, Bernie.

Carrying water for Republicans in hopes of helping Bernie is not exactly original at this point.

This is about your gun, isn't it?

I'm forty-two, Ice. In my lifetime, I have never had a president who represented me or my concerns until Barack Obama seized an opportunity none of us expected.

That's my reward. Marriage equality.

And all I had to do in order to get that out of Barack Obama was trade out single-payer, accept that Gitmo isn't closing anytime soon, and watch yet another expansion of our military misadventures. Oh, right, and settle for a compromise on the banks. And be generally okay with a bunch of earthquakes in the midwest where they shouldn't be happening. And ... and ....

This is how politics works. I would like the system to work another way. My life experience tells me that I'm not getting that just from a Sanders presidency. He makes the sort of promises I ought to like, but I have enough experience to know that we're not getting it.

My price is simple enough: Bring me the House of Representatives.

Hell, you can't deliver it, so tell me how we're going to get the House within striking distance for the midterms. Can you do that? No? Didn't think so. That's the problem, and unlike the fucking Dippin' Dots, it's a real, observable, quantifiable, practical problem. Show me President Bernie Sanders and I will show you a goddamn one-term disaster. Convince me that I'm wrong, and I'll back him to the nomination.

My problem isn't Bernie himself. It's this wave of uneducated bullshit he's trying to ride. By my cynical approach to politics, I can see the logic of what he's attempting. But it won't work, and the result will be even greater damage.

So get the Bernie Bros, and the hipsters, and the mods to actually sound like they have a clue what they're on about, and we've got more than simply common ground to work. But if you guys fucking blow this, for the sake of puppies and unicorns, you're going to blow a hole in American socialism that will take the rest of us twenty years to recover from. This is not our year.

We can have that year, soon, and yes, people will suffer in the meantime. But more people will suffer even greater tolls if y'all blow this one for the sake of some cake frosting and Dippin' Dots.

Attend my response to PJ, below.

• • •​

A'ight, Cap'n, you get a promotion. Well, for the moment. I need your battlefield advice.

All intelligence suggests the enemy is depleting their reserves. We can hold this line without significant losses if we choose; by all projections they need only keep sending, and soon enough we will be able to seize the initiative.

Some of our fellows, however, suggest this isn't good enough. So here's the proposition:

• To the one, we can hold the line, as we've proven ourselves capable of again and again. And along the line, we'll have opportunities for countercharges that will allow us to hold some new territory, and begin an expanded offensive. Our reserves will hold stable; we won't take severe losses.

• To the other, it is proposed that we muster for a charge based on a maneuver that has never, in history, worked. There are other generals who suggest we ought to muster everything we've got, and charge. This maneuver requires us to presume a left-flank maneuver that has never worked and is not presently available will both become available and, upon execution, actually work. If it works, we win a little bit of territory that might or might not be useful to an expanded offensive. If it fails, we deplete our reserves and need to start recruiting new infantry and vanguard.​

Are you willing to stand on "a whole lot of its hard so we shouldn't try, and that my friends is whole lot of bullshit"?

Because here's the deal: We do this and lose, it's on you and everyone else who wanted to do it this way. We do this and win, and then lose that ground when they muster up and charge again, there will be very little I can do to protect ground that, in our hands, is historically indefensible. You ask me to take that hill? Alright. How many soldiers are you willing to sacrifice? And can you promise we can take that hill at all?

That's where we run into the practical―that is to say, functional―problem. Nobody who tells me we should can tell me how this works. They're asking me to deploy the van to a suicide mission, bury the infantry on the field, and commit the reserves. They're asking us to take a generational one-shot risk. If we fail, it will take twenty years to rebuild. And the problem with taking that hill is that we can still lose for winning. You need to solve that problem, too, General PJ.

I actually don't like the idea of advocating against the Sanders campaign. But what I need from it, the campaign can't give, which is some reasonable assurance that this risk is worth it.

The introduction of a mercenary army to this metaphor isn't a terrible idea, but the thing is that they don't seem to care what happens if we lose. After all, their whole point is to blame everyone else. You want me to believe in the Sanders phenomenon, that is what has to change. Look at our neighbor; I write of history, and he offers zombie-eyed cultism.

Look ahead to the general, General.

How many soldiers are you willing to bury in the field for the sake of this skirmish?

You know, we're all tired of tiny gains through compromise.

But if we break the line and send everything we've got, there is no acceptable outcome save victory. Remember 1980-2000? Those were miserable years for our camp. You ready for another twenty like that?

Because that's the price. Even if we win the White House with Bernie Sanders, he still needs to make good on the puppies and unicorns, else the rest of us are right back out in the wilderness for twenty years, and we'll be sure to thank you every fucking day.

And the thing is, as this goes on, it turns out the basic, rational political discourse that can sell me on the idea that this is our year is exactly entirely absent from the movement.

President Sanders will do well enough insofar as he won't wreck the country. But I need his supporters to start attending history, and answering its challenges, because dead-eyed sloganeering isn't going to win us the White House, and in the long run can only bury us. And those who don't care because they want to believe it makes no difference otherwise can either answer history or go screw.

 

I think it is an all-or-nothing gamble, and Hillary is trying to jump on the train. It's just sad that she has no heart but swims in a quagmire of crud that comes from being a member of the establishment. If your willing to accept the few crumbs that she might throw your way, then do vote for her. Sanders is a real person, believing what he says. I know he will actually work in the right direction, not sell out to those who have purchased the leadership before him.

You worry about the republican reaction to a Sanders' presidency and his agenda? I assure you that a Clinton White House will be met with even more disdain. Yeah, they will probably do well on those issues that revolve around private capital, but where domestic policy is concerned, not a chance.

There's no chance for any real change with Clinton. Again, if you have a home, family and secure income, and you don't mind watching it slowly disappear, if you don't mind the way things work from the top down, vote for Clinton.

Sanders offers new prospects for America's youth. If you are young, living in your parents basement, and have no foreseeable future, vote Sanders. He actually give a damn about you.

 

? For example.

I'm just hypothesizing that Clinton is going to keep doing what she has been doing her entire career in public life.

Pure what, exactly? When and why did a desire for halfway reasonable government become a purity issue?

I don't own a gun. Never have. You have been told that five or six times now, in response to exactly that kind of post from you addressed to me. Do you have some kind of psychiatric disorder that blocks memory formation whenever your fuckwitted preconceptions run into an item of fact, or are you just trolling?

Hillary is a standard well-meaning authoritarian incompetent about guns, true. And that's yet another (and fairly important) reason to doubt the electability you have fixated on as her chief virtue. (Trump has already drawn the relevant line, vis a vis Scalia). But that's a pretty minor glitch in her record - she's never actually done anything about that, or cost the Democrats a seat by it. Yet. Meanwhile, she has never represented me or my concerns in any significant respect except by default compared with some Republican. She has instead opposed them. Successfully opposed them. Done them damage. War, banking, torture, surveillance, drugs, light bulbs, cars, health care, prison reform, taxation - she's always coming down on the wrong side. Why would I vote for someone like that, if I had a choice of someone better?

Exactly. And he didn't, actually - he just stayed out of the way, in the right tone of voice. Do you recall how that happened? It happened when a whole lot of people faced with a choice between Hillary Clinton and someone obviously unelectable but better representing their concerns voted for him, in the primaries.

I think it's the other way around. You're betting the rent on one thing and one thing only: Clinton's superior electability. Do you have any basis for that? Because I when I watch her campaign, I don't see it. And if you guys sack the prospect of decent government and lose anyway - - - that's pretty grim.

No, you haven't. You've been losing, continually, since 1980, to the Republican agenda. The only advances you've made are in areas where the Republican corporate elite has some common cause with you - marijuana, gay marriage. Everywhere else, your "line" has been pushed back so far you can't even remember where you started - Hillary is "slightly left of center" in bubble world only. She's to the right of Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon. That's how far down the line you've been pushed - you're recommending voting for Dewey, to hold the line where it is.

 

Actually, you're right. I apologize.

Because you're the one who wants to keep some of the most dangerous criminals in society armed because you don't like some woman in Minnesota. So you're advocating for the continuation of disparate impact against women. And now here you are refusing to provide an actual case for Bernie Sanders, only arguing against Hillary Clinton, while refusing to attend history in order to simply repeat the same attacks I can hear from any Republican.

The pattern is pretty clear.

Sorry I thought this was about your gun, when it's clearly about women.

So is it just you, Ice, or is Bernie drawing the whole pro-stalker contingent?

 

Meanwhile, in Supreme Court News

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One of the genuinely entertaining aspects of Justice Scalia's passing is the speculation about who will replace him:

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat whom pundits and journalists have mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, spoke about the possibility on Tuesday.

“There are many qualified people that could serve on the Supreme Court,” Klobuchar said when asked about potentially replacing the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, “but only a few of us are charged with the job of getting a nominee through the Senate. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I plan to make the case to the people of this country that we cannot leave this position vacant and it must be filled as soon as possible.”

The response is not an absolute, “No, I would not serve if nominated,” but it does not indicate she expects to be nominated either.

In an interview with Pioneer Press partner Forum News Service she said, however, that she is not planning to shirk her current job representing Minnesota in the U.S. Senate.

“I have a job and I don’t want to shirk it,” she said.

(Stassen-Berger↱)​

What would be really interesting would be to watch Republicans try to foil a Klobuchar nomination. Might even be entertaining.

Over the weekend, msnbc↱ reported potential nominees, including Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (strongly implied no), California Attorney General Kamala Harris (explicit no), D.C. Circuit Appeals Judge Sri Srinivasan, Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford, D.C. Circuit Appeals Judge Patricia Millett, D.C. Circuit Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

A similarly-timed AP report↱ includes U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Ninth Circuit Appeals Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, D.C. Circuit Appeals Judge Robert Wilkins, and Eighth Circuit Appeals Judge Jane Kelly.
____________________

Notes:

Coleburn, Christina. "Speculation begins over Scalia replacement". msnbc. 14 February 2016. msnbc.com. 14 February 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/1Xs3FD2

Lederman, Josh. "Who Obama might nominate to replace Scalia on Supreme Court". Associated Press. 14 February 2016. BigStory.AP.org. 18 February 2016. http://apne.ws/1VqrUjT

Stassen-Berger, Rachel E. "Amy Klobuchar says Judiciary role trumps Supreme Court job". Pioneer Press. 16 February 2016. TwinCities.com. 18 February 2016. http://bit.ly/1Wur6uB

 

It works quite well in Scandinavia, a much better educated population than the US has; possibly because they offer a great educational opportunity to ALL, not just those rich enough to live in expensive neighborhoods.

They have lower debt to GDP ratios, greater life expectancies, with less than half the total cost to society and a tiny fraction of their population in prison, strong social safety nets (no one sleeping on the streets, etc.) Free to the patient quality health care.

If that is your idea of bullshit, I think you have your head screwed on backwards.

 

Well, if we had a similar polity and similar cultures and similar political parties, you would have a good point. But we don't. What flies in Scandinavia doesn't fly in the US, and what flies in the US doesn't fly in Scandinavia.

Politics in the US isn't going to change overnight, it will be a very long and hard fight. The good news is after nearly 35 years, I think the pendulum of American politics is beginning to swing toward liberals. People on the left and more importantly on the right are beginning to tire of getting screwed - even though the screw jobs are largely of their making. I think things are a changing.

But as Tiassa has pointed out, liberals can screw it up as they did in the 70's and 80's.

 

Emotional issues do bring the troll out, don't they. I'm surprised that Clinton is one of them, however.

You provided sufficient case for Bernie, when you drew the parallel with Obama.

Attending history? You're the one ducking it. Clinton has fought, delayed, and corrupted, most of my favored significant liberal initiatives of my political life. She has abetted, supported, enabled, and defended, many of my opposed significant reactionary and authoritarian initiatives. She has made a self-interested expediency her primary decision criterion in every single one of the significant political decisions of her career, and abetted harm to the country in consequence. Her major financial supporters have been bad guys, her major ideological supporters have been problematic (American Zionists, say). And nationally she is one of the least electable major Democratic politicians available. (Your single effective criterion is electability: Do you see any danger in running a widely hated politician whose major advantage over her primary rivals is in States no Democrat is likely to win anyway?)

Seriously: what do you guys see in that politician? She's intelligent, sane, and not a public embarrassment to the US (which is the only explanation for her Democratic affiliation), and would probably nominate better Supreme Court Justices than any Republican running (are you sure? Citizens United, say: who's more reliable in choosing a Justice who would have opposed that: Clinton or Trump? You had to think about it, didn't you.), but that's a bar most major Democratic politicians step over fairly easily.

So let's celebrate the fact that we have Obama choosing the nominee for Scalia's replacement, from a much better lineup than anything Mitt Romney or Sara Palin would have had to hand.

 

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Actually, the bullshit I'm referring to is the bullshit you just attempted.

Like I said, I can see what Sen. Sanders is attempting, but it won't work; we'll come back to that in a moment.

Because this is the point:

So get the Bernie Bros, and the hipsters, and the mods to actually sound like they have a clue what they're on about, and we've got more than simply common ground to work. But if you guys fucking blow this, for the sake of puppies and unicorns, you're going to blow a hole in American socialism that will take the rest of us twenty years to recover from. This is not our year.​

This is one of the reasons I'm crashing so hard on you guys right now.

You want to lecture on how we can be like Scandanavia, great. I'll probably agree. But if we want that to happen, we need the House of Representatives. The first, obvious reason for this is that none of this happens without the House. The second is what that would signify, because as it stands we can probably sell that on the west coast, most of the northeast, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and two cities in Texas. If it's a good year we might get Minnesota, too.

Thus: Tell me how you're going to sell it in Alabama. Arkansas. South Carolina. Have you been following the chaos in Kentucky? Something about buyer's remorse goes here, but tell me you can sell single-payer, free tuition, and Scandanavian socialism in Kentucky, and tell me how you're going to do that over the next five years.

Oklahoma? Nebraska?

Kansas?

Louisiana?

Anybody? Anybody?

Hello?

The people will not forgive liberals if we make these promises and fail.

And that's the reason why Sanders supporters can only argue against Clinton. That's why we need to pull her from the race so Bernie can win. That's why the practical questions must be ignored. That's why the Sanders train looks and sounds like a conservative steretype of vapid liberalism.

As I said:

My price is simple enough: Bring me the House of Representatives.

Hell, you can't deliver it, so tell me how we're going to get the House within striking distance for the midterms. Can you do that? No? Didn't think so. That's the problem, and unlike the fucking Dippin' Dots, it's a real, observable, quantifiable, practical problem. Show me President Bernie Sanders and I will show you a goddamn one-term disaster. Convince me that I'm wrong, and I'll back him to the nomination.​

And you can't. That's the problem. You cannot bring me the House of Representatives. We cannot win it this year. Who can figure out how to actually take a majority in '18? No, seriously, this is a massive challenge we must address if we intend to make anything more than incremental progress resulting largely from complex political maneuvering.

And that's why you skipped over that part in order to diddle around with fisking.

• • •​

It is true, I find the insistent vapidity of the Sanders phenomenon nearly as wearying as dangerous.

You were asking something about purity?

Politics is not, metaphorically, a series of small wars. Politics, in that metaphor, is a perpetual war with myriad battles.

I may not like the Machiavellian attitudes of American success, but you damn well better bet in a time like this, with the master Machiavellian herself on my side, I'm going to need a reason to not send her. And yes, she is on my side, contrary your zombified recitation; she comes from a political era I know, operates a familiar strategy that has, in fact, won progress along the way, and I can still read between her lines.

And all you have is an argument against, centered around your own personal priorities. To the one, that's well and fine, as that's how you see the world and generally isn't my business. But where we make these sorts of things each other's business, such as this discussion, you're going to need more than that to change my mind.

You know who's really terrified of President Hillary Clinton?

Congressional Republicans↱.

That's why.

You want me to send President Sanders out to do battle with Congress? With that agenda↱?

What do I want? What can I get? Who can get it?

And there is the ever-present question of what is at stake if President Sanders blows it.

I hear that Clinton isn't on my side. I hear that she needs to be pulled from the race so Bernie can win. What I don't hear is how we're going to pull off 5.3% growth, and what's going to happen when we don't. You want Presidnet Sanders to throw down with Congress over that agenda? What I don't hear is how this is going to work. And if he fails to deliver? You know, all that plus 5.3% growth?

The world is running out of money for Americans to borrow, by the way. There's also that. Fuck, I hadn't even thought of that, yet. Thanks. Now I'm even more dubious.

What I don't hear is any response to the challenges of history.

Yes it is. And this is the one we've got. And, let's face it, she's good at the Machiavellian stuff, one of the smartest politicians on the planet. And if it was just that or a more liberal candidate? But it's not. There is more at stake, and more in play, than you are thus far willing to acknowledge.
____________________

Notes:

Benen, Steve. "The perils of 'wishful thinking'". msnbc. 16 February 2016. msnbc.com. 18 February 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/1omPqUG

Nakamura, David and Robert Costa. "Why Clinton’s immigration speech left many Republican rivals speechless". The Washington Post. 7 May 2015. WashingtonPost.com. 18 February 2016. http://wapo.st/1zG5c0Q

See Also:

Calmes, Jackie. "Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans". The New York Times. 15 February 2016. NYTimes.com. 18 February 2016. http://nyti.ms/1KYuJIt

 

No, I was responding to your trollish innuendos about history. Part of the history here is Clinton's track record. The problem with it is not that it isn't pure. The problem is that it is a continual record of bad consequences from what she should have done differently.

And you call me naive. And you say I am ignoring history.

Where did you get the idea that Hillary Clinton was a master Machiavellian at all, let alone in your interest?

Evidence?

Take this, say: She has rich and powerful friends, she's connected to the deepest sources of inside information and analysis in America, she has plenty of time to think and evidence to think with, and she votes unlimited war powers to W&Cheney on the basis of obvious bullshit. Your choices: 1) Evil - Machiavellian tactics in the interests of bad people and bad agenda, including herself 2) Incompetence - she got took by a third rate con run by known conmen familiar to her both personally and politically, at the worst possible time. 3) Cowardice - she knew it was a con, and knew the agenda as well as the people were bad, but couldn't face the various risks and abuses of opposition to something she probably couldn't stop anyway.

Blows what? Your silly-ass version of what he has to accomplish in light of all these promises you say he has to fulfill lest everyone in America suddenly decide socialism is bad? That is preblown. The task of doing better for the US than Hillary Clinton is likely to manage - facing the same Congress, or possibly an even worse one if her coattails perform to her historical standards, and with a history of negotiating even her lame agenda to harmless ineffectuality in advance? - be hard to blow that. Realistically, what are her chances of getting anything worthwhile done in the face of this Congress? No better than Bernie's. Maybe worse. What are the chances she will even attempt to get anything worthwhile done? Hard to calculate. Are her Judicial nominations going to be welcomed by the Reps more than Bernie's? Only if they're no good.

And knowing her, they might not be.

 

This is disgusting. I'm not a fan of Scalia's views but he's not some murderer or dictator. To be so happy about the death of a man whose views are respected by half of this country is . . . well . . . shameful. You are what's wrong with this country . . . not Scalia.

 

His views are not respected by half of the USA. The majority would likely repudiate most of his views. Sadly, he had authority and influence that could only end in death, so it is a good thing for the USA that he is dead. In many ways, his decisions did lead to the harm and deaths of many and he did have a certain dictatorial control.

 

You are also what's wrong with this country.

You probably wish death on all those whose views are not the same as yours. Nice guy you are.

 

LOL...what was disgusting is Scalia and his patrons. What is disgusting is the corruption of our government as exemplified by Scalia and the tolerance of that corruption. What is disgusting is to put political correctness above the truth as YOU have done. Death is the only way things change on the Supreme Court. You do realize Supreme Court justices serve for life?

What is wrong with our country is too much ignorance, too much misinformation, and a tolerance for abuse. No one I know of has ever accused Scalia of being a murder or a dictator. But he has been accused of fomenting corruption (e.g. Citizens United). He has been accused of illegally intervening in the election of 2000 and giving us Baby Bush 1.0 whose actions have resulted in the deaths of thousands and the disablement of many more. What is wrong with this country is people like YOU, who sit on their butts and worry about political correctness rather than dealing with and solving the critical issues which vex the nation (e.g. corruption).

Here is the problem, if nothing changes, violence will ensue at some point. It's just a matter of time and history. The peasants with their pitchforks will show up on the nation's doorsteps at some point. Things need to change, and they will change at some point. And we are seeing a bit of that change in our election cycle this year. Sanders and Trump are a reflection of that unrest in the peasantry. We need some fundamental changes, because the current system isn't working. There is too much wealth and income inequality. That condition isn't sustainable. Things will change. The questions are how, and how much damage will be inflicted in the process? A good part of our economic woes are directly attributable to wealth inequality.

Scalia was an important agent in the destruction and demise of this country. Scalia and those like him on the court spat on the rule of law. He was anything but an agent for the rule of law as he was suppose to be. He corrupted the law and made the court a non-elected legislative branch of government which was above the law. Scalia and those like him (e.g. Thomas) turned the court into a de facto legislative arm of the Republican Party. Scalia disgraced the courts and the nation. But more importantly his illegal actions led to the deaths and disablement and suffering of thousands if not millions of people at the expense of the law and to the favor of his wealthy patrons. Scalia was an immoral scumbag.

Scalia should be remembered for what he was, not what he wasn't.

 

What's wrong with our country is people like you friend who prefer to ignore truths in order to avoid discomfort. Additionally, no one here has wished or advocated death for anyone who views things differently. That's an illogical argument on your part, a straw man. When you have to resort to illogical argument as you do, you had best reevaluate your beliefs and argument.

I and those who share my opinions celebrate Scalia's death because it is an opportunity for change. We celebrate the opportunity for change his death brings to the nation. This isn't about vengeance. This is about the opportunity to change, to take a different course. Unlike congress change on the court is a rare event because justices serve for life. Scalia sat on the court for 30 years.

Personally, I think we need to change the way Supreme Court justices are appointed and ratified. Because of Scalia, I think we need to rethink about and reorganize the court. We need to impose ethical standards on the court - ethical standards Scalia and Thomas sorely lack. But that's a different story.

http://www.politicususa.com/2013/11...icial-ethics-headlining-wing-fundraisers.html

 

Yes, and if he could get to be POTUS, he would win that battle too by the same means he got to be POTUS.

To do his agenda, he must energize these non-voters. If he does that, he can both become POTUS & get much of his stated agenda passed by a transformed Congress these new voters will elect. If he can not, we will have more of the big money PTB, controlling the US. It is time for the people to take back "government of the people, for the people, and by the people." - Don't be a defeatest - it is possible, just not very likely.

The key agenda points are: Free education paid for by new taxes on automated machine and day trading on Wall Street, no cap on the amount of Social Security tax collected, and higher taxes rates on the top incomes, as US had once when it was growing much better than now. (I. e. Making more money is still an incentive, even if Uncle Sam takes an even bigger bite of it.)

On health care, doing as Scandinavia does would cut US's total cost in half. Medical drugs ordered in huge (annual needs) quantities via negotiated contracts, not when needed by small drug store chains;* no medical insurance cost for patients as they don't pay medical bills; no cost of malpractice suit insurance which doctors must recover in their fees as you can sue the government only with its permission. No "ambulance chasing lawyers" taking a cut, for same reason; Most doctors are on controlled salaries, with performance evaluated, not charging high fees for service; and although not an immediate cost saving, centralized medical records not millions of illegible scrawls stored in tens of thousands of doctor's filing cabinets is a very desirable change.

If that had been the case when when aids epidemic started, its cause would have become quickly known** and it might not even exist today - think how much money that would save. These and a few lesser factors are why the total cost to US of health cares is about twice what it is in Scandinavia and yet American life expectancies are at least two years less.

Note also when a doctor is on salary he can take 15 minutes to discover what is your real problem. Average US doctor will see you for less than 4 minutes and has a small army of aids who examine you first - Time is money to him. Seeing a dozen patients per hour is how to make money.


* That is why same drug cost half as much in Canada, if it is not completely free to the patient.

** Computer correlation for common factors in the central data file. It is also great for medical research.