Archive for November, 2016
UPDATE 2: Carper STILL has no position on the Trump/Ryan plans to end Medicare
Nov 30th, 3:20 pm UPDATE: I just called Carper’s DC office at (202) 224-2441, and Senator Tom Carper “has no position” on Paul Ryan’s plans to phase out Medicare next year and replace it with a voucher program which will force seniors to attempt to buy private insurance. I asked this time if there was […]
Carper Coy on Congress Capo Convo
How utterly sick would it be for Carper to be the Senate minority leader? The answer is, so nauseatingly sick.
Lisa Blunt Rochester’s first test & a DL Action Item
The Republicans want a big bipartisan vote on banking de-regulation to gauge how cowed Democrats are by the election results. If past results give any future guidance, I’d bet that they are very cowed indeed. Congressional Democrats do not require election results to be cowed. That is their natural state. A bright spot could be a “No” vote from Lisa Blunt Rochester, but I’m not holding my breath.
As early as Wednesday, the House will take up H.R. 6392, the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act. This bill would lift mandatory Dodd-Frank regulatory supervision for all banks with more than $50 billion in assets, meaning those financial giants would no longer be subject to blanket requirements regarding capital and leverage, public disclosures and the production of “living wills” to map out how to unwind during a crisis….
You can see with this bill’s framework how financial regulation in the Trump era will be relaxed, not by outright repeal but through deliberate atrophy. Republicans want to replace any mandatory rules for regulation with discretionary ones. That way they can claim that they’re merely improving the system by putting the decisions in the hands of the experts instead of members of Congress.
The November 30, 2016 Thread
President-elect Donald Trump says he intends to set aside his business interests to focus on “running the country,” Bloomberg reports.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday, the President-elect wrote: “I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to make America great again!”
That’s insufficient if his children will be running the businesses and also acting as paid or unpaid, official or unofficial advisers. He must liquidate all his businesses and all his real estate holdings across the planet at once or face unconstitutional conflicts of interest that will require his immediate removal of office upon his inauguration.
In Which We Find That Legislators Can’t Read Contracts — The Sallies Contract vs. Charles Potter
So this deal is still dead and I think that the expectation is that if it gets revived it will be because the new Mayor will work at reviving it. No idea if it is even possible at this point, but that is where we are. In the meantime, we have Rep. Charles Potter putting out a piece of propaganda that specifically misrepresents the terms of this dead deal — I guess so that he can make himself look like a hero or something for standing up to the big bad Sallies and their desire to make Bayard Stadium into a working home field for everybody. He counts, of course, on the fact that no one will spend any time on that document and just get fired up because he says to. I did look at that contract and here is the response to the propaganda with references to the page numbers where I found this info. The items in BOLD are the ones listed on the “Highlights of the major points of the contract with Sallies” that he has posted to Facebook. My responses and references follow.
How Tom Carper’s Votes and Positions Screw People and Help Rethugs to Screw People. Volume 2
I was gonna release these at a more leisurely pace, but this one sticks in my craw. Well, they all do, but I couldn’t let this one slide any longer. When it comes to grandstanding, Tom Carper is right there with the best. With support for the military (and braggadocio about his own service) near the top of the list. When the rubber meets the road, though, that’s a different story. This one is about how Tom Carper screws the grunts in the military…
Daily Delawhere for November 30, 2016
The John Aull House, on the Strand in New Castle. The frame-sided house was built in 1790.
A horrid wish…
I have a horrid wish that I recoil from as it rises in my heart. I wish that Tom Carper would go ahead, as he as he seems willing to do, and vote for the Trump/Ryan plan to phase out Medicare.
Then he would be beatable in a primary and it he survived the primary he would certainly lose in the general.
How Tom Carper’s Votes and Positions Screw People and Help Rethugs to Screw People. Volume 1
I think a lot of people view Tom Carper as an essentially well-meaning, if occasionally eccentric, public servant. That includes a lot of Democrats and plenty of liberals who I know. They are wrong.
His votes and stated positions, all a matter of public record, and easily discovered via a simple Google search, reveal that he largely ignores the needs of those who routinely vote for him. He does, however, pay fealty to those who finance his campaigns, and he also gives away votes on behalf of his search for bipartisanship. That search, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football held by Lucy, never comes to fruition.
Carper’s desire to ‘reach across the aisle’ becomes even more dangerous in the era of Trump and Republican-controlled government. He could well end up as the key D who enables the gutting of Medicare and Social Security.
So, while it will take several pieces to flesh out his many sins of commission and omission, let’s get started.
Tom Carper and the Keystone Pipeline…..
The November 29, 2016 Thread
Nate Silver: “Let’s not call it a ‘recount,’ because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.”
“So what we’re talking about is more like an audit or an investigation. An investigation that would look for signs of deliberate and widespread fraud, such as voting machines’ having been hacked, whole batches of ballots’ intentionally having been disregarded, illegal coordination between elections officials and the campaigns, and so on. Such findings would probably depend on physical evidence as much or more than they do statistical evidence. In that sense, there’s no particular reason to confine the investigation to Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, the states that Hillary Clinton lost (somewhat) narrowly. If the idea is to identify some sort of smoking gun indicating massive fraud perpetrated by the Trump campaign — or by the Clinton campaign, or by the Russian government — it might be in a state Clinton won, such as New Hampshire or Minnesota. Or for that matter, it might be in a state Trump won fairly easily, like Ohio or Iowa.”
I’m not back yet….
I just can’t get my head around how binary our choices as Democrats are right now. It is all so stupid and reductive. There are Democrats here who were flat out wrong and have been wrong for years about how to fight Republicans, but they can’t budge. It would reveal that they were wrong. That Clinton was the wrong choice, who made poor campaign choices… whatever. That’s yesterday’s news.
I don’t mind revealing when I’m wrong, and I’ve tried to think through what I’ve been wrong about on this blog. So much… where to start? I made a game out of the Republican primary race. I thought Trump was a joke. Wrong and wronger still. As much as I know that it is naive I still thought that “the truth” would matter. Wrong.
I’m still searching for something productive to do or say to get beyond how wrong I’ve been. Hopefully what I come up with will be something to “do” and not something to “say” as I think the old adage from fiction writing is fitting – show, don’t tell.
The November 28, 2016 Thread
Donald Trump tweeted without evidence that millions of people voted illegally in November’s presidential election, Politico reports. Said Trump: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This is a lie taken directly from InfoWars. But if Trump does believe that there are millions of frauduelent votes out there, it would seem that he just endorsed a nationwide recount. Thanks Donald.
Ezra Klein: “This tweet is an example of one of Trump’s other dangerous qualities: his tendency to believe what he wants to believe about the world, facts be damned. Trump lost the popular vote, and he lost it by a wide margin — more than 2 million votes and counting. A wise man would take that information seriously and think about how to staff his White House, set priorities, and moderate his message to win over a majority of the public. Instead, Trump appears to have told himself the vote count was riddled with fraud and that he really did win a majority of the legitimate vote — and thus he doesn’t need to consider what it means that most voters didn’t want him to win the presidency.”
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