Politics

[IrishLax]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We’ve uncovered 2 million fake <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/netneutrality?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#netneutrality</a> comments using the stolen identities of people across the country. This should raise alarm bells for every American. We need to delay the <a href="https://twitter.com/FCC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FCC</a>'s vote now. <a href="https://t.co/PbBWDoLmXh">https://t.co/PbBWDoLmXh</a></p>— Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) <a href="https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/941070886077071360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Anyone been reading up on this? Stolen American identities being used to post fake comments on the FCC website promoting dismantling of Net Neutrality.

That's crazy!

 

[Cackalacky]

My lawyers friends on the board... can someone tell me exactly HOW bad this is?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">MUST WATCH: Republican <a href="https://twitter.com/SenJohnKennedy?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SenJohnKennedy</a> asks one of <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a>’s US District Judge nominees basic questions of law & he can’t answer a single one. Hoo-boy. <a href="https://t.co/fphQx2o1rc">pic.twitter.com/fphQx2o1rc</a></p>— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/941484131757838337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 15, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Legacy]

Perhaps nationally. Trump lost 88% of the black vote compared to 96% lost by Moore. I can't find a 2016 racial breakdown specifically for Alabama.

Maybe Alabama's Voter ID law dumped more blacks since the 2016 election. If you are unsure about your eligibility to vote and stay home, you may also be dumped because you are an inactive voter.

Rep. Mo Brooks listed as 'inactive' voter in Alabama Republican Senate primary (Wash Examiner)

 

[Irish YJ]

Obama administration undermined anti-Hezbollah task force to help secure Iran nuke deal, report says | Fox News

This is pretty ugly.

 

[connor_in]

Franken urged to reverse his resignation - Politico

 

[Whiskeyjack]

First Things' Matthew Schmitz just published an article titled "Neuhaus Was Right":

As the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history—“the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Richard John Neuhaus wasn’t so sure. In a 1996 symposium on judicial overreach, he questioned the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democracy in general and the “American regime” in particular.

Not only had the Supreme Court usurped legislative prerogatives, Neuhaus wrote, it had proposed a notion of liberty inimical to true freedom. By approving the killing of the unborn, it had denied the moral law and cut itself off from the source of all authority: God. People of conscience must consider options including “morally justified revolution.”

Carefully argued essays by Robert P. George, Robert Bork, Russell Hittinger, and Hadley Arkes gave weight to these conclusions. George warned that America might be turning into a “tyrant state.” Hittinger explained how this unjust regime “withdraws protection from the weak and vulnerable.” Neuhaus extended their arguments: “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.”

Neuhaus thought attachment to our liberal democracy much weaker than generally supposed. “What is happening now,” he wrote, “is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.” He was particularly concerned by how this would affect coming generations. “What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate?”

Neuhaus’s provocation received more than two hundred responses. None was more pointed than that of Midge Decter, Neuhaus’s friend and collaborator. She challenged his radical rhetoric and dire assessment: “You threaten that millions of your fellow Americans have come to feel as alienated from this country as you claim to do. But there is in fact little or no evidence for that.”

Twenty years later, the evidence is in. Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, researchers drawing on the World Values Survey, have written a widely discussed series of articles showing that belief in democracy is indeed in decline—especially among the young and especially in America. I doubt he would be cheered by the news, but Neuhaus was right.

The decline in support for democracy is not simply the latest manifestation of youthful radicalism. It is what researchers call a “cohort” rather than an “age” effect, a sign of the difference between generations rather than a condition of youth. Twenty-four percent of young Americans now say that democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way of running the country. In 1995, only 16 percent of young people said the same.

Thirty-two percent of young Americans say they would welcome a strongman who doesn’t have to “bother with parliament and elections” (up from a quarter in 1995). And they don’t mind if he arrives in uniform. One in six supports military rule (up from one in sixteen). The authors describe a similar, but more moderate, surge in anti-democratic sentiment in Europe.

Young people in North America and Western Europe are becoming skeptical of free speech, human rights, and free elections. Not only are they less likely to vote than young people in the past, they are less likely to attend protests, marches, and sit-ins. They are half as likely as older people to join humanitarian organizations or human rights campaigns. Robert Bellah spoke of a “civil religion” that sustains democratic faith. In terms of that faith, today’s youth are unchurched. They are increasingly alienated from democratic rituals, from democratic values, from democracy itself.

It is tempting to see this political disaffection as a symptom of end-of-history complacency. Young people who have not had to fight for the free world cannot be expected to see its advantages. But Neuhaus warned that something else is going on. Today, even those undisturbed by the fact that sixty million Americans have been aborted since 1973 should be able to see that all is not well. Real average hourly wages have not increased for fifty years. A national increase in deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse has caused overall life expectancy to decline for the first time since the AIDS epidemic.

We are told that these outcomes are simply the result of individual choice; to stop them would be an intolerable infringement on the rights of privacy and private property. This is the logic that has done so much to discredit liberal democracy. Economics is now treated as less a question of justice than a narrow and technical science. Politics is confined to policy questions rather than competing visions of right and wrong. Our regime hopes to maximize happiness by encouraging individual choice. It accepts abortion and overdose as the price for free love and free trade. It offers us every personal satisfaction, but nothing we can share. Even if our regime did maximize individual preference, that would not be enough. It is not good for man to be alone. Our good is necessarily common rather than merely personal and private.

For drawing attention to these facts, Neuhaus was shouted down. William F. Buckley defended him: “Loyalty has always got to be contingent. . . . We cannot love what is not lovely.”

Neuhaus reached his radical conclusions after reading John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, a document he pored over so closely that his heavily annotated, water-stained copy nearly fell apart. Like other witnesses against Soviet tyranny, John Paul was an acute critic of the liberal order. In economics, politics, and culture, he saw denigration of truth and praise of efficiency enabling a “war of the powerful against the weak.” Language of freedom and democracy cloaked a “culture of death.”

John Paul warned against the temptation to make democracy an absolute value. “Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality,” he wrote. “Fundamentally, democracy is a ‘system’ and as such is a means and not an end. Its ‘moral’ value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law.”

Neuhaus reprised John Paul’s argument:

A polis composed only of the state, on the one hand, and the atomized individual, on the other, is the exact formula for totalitarianism. It is little comfort that it may present itself as democratic totalitarianism. The procedural rules of democracy, when untethered from the substantive truths of democracy, result in the end of democracy.
For making such arguments, critics accused Neuhaus of being illiberal and anti-democratic.

When Neuhaus wrote an essay on the many reactions he’d received, he gave particular attention to one. Scott Moore of the University of Notre Dame wrote that Neuhaus had seen “the inadequacy of purely procedural commitments for ensuring the legitimacy of government.” Neuhaus’s critics, by contrast, had more classically liberal commitments, and so viewed his raising questions of moral legitimacy as an unmannerly violation of civil procedure. Thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas exuberantly proclaim that Christianity and liberalism are incompatible. Moore observed that Neuhaus had come to the same position, however reluctantly.

Neuhaus conceded that Moore had a point: “There is important truth in Moore’s analysis . . . and it provides an interesting angle from which to explain why the First Things initiative on judicial usurpation occasioned such a strong reaction.” Though Neuhaus was unwilling to sever his Christian faith from his liberal convictions, this was a moment when he took a stand for the sovereignty of moral truth, which transcends any political order, including a liberal one.

When John Paul II wrote Evangelium Vitae, he was able to hail “an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy.” That consensus is now collapsing. A war on the weak has been conducted in the name of democracy, and whoever resists it is called “anti-democratic”—no matter how broad his electoral support. We should learn from, rather than denounce, these dissenters. Candidates as disparate as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, and Marine Le Pen share one great thing: Against a regime that enshrines private interest, they assert, however crudely, the primacy of the common good. In doing so, they have revived the practice of democracy while challenging its ideology. We must do the same.

 

[yankeehater]

Obama administration undermined anti-Hezbollah task force to help secure Iran nuke deal, report says | Fox News

This is pretty ugly.

I can't believe this is not getting more play.....well, yes I can. The story was even written by Politico, not Breitbart, National Review or Drudge. I cut and pasted the opening paragraph which I feel summarizes the 60 pages (when printed) article. The Iran Deal is the gift that just keeps on giving. And the left wants to impeach Trump. This is actually an impeachable offense.

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

 

[ACamp1900]

I can't believe this is not getting more play.....

Seriously tho....

 

[Irish YJ]

I can't believe this is not getting more play.....well, yes I can. The story was even written by Politico, not Breitbart, National Review or Drudge. I cut and pasted the opening paragraph which I feel summarizes the 60 pages (when printed) article. The Iran Deal is the gift that just keeps on giving. And the left wants to impeach Trump. This is actually an impeachable offense.

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

Yup. Paging Buster... The left just doesn't want to talk about it. Hey, whatabout Russia.... Did you forget about Russia. I mean Russia is something we need to talk about. We can't talk about Saint Barack.

 

[IrishLax]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Trickle down: Income growth in America from 1980 to 2014<br><br>Top .001%: 616% growth<br>Top .01%: 423% growth<br>Top .1%: 298% growth<br>Top 1%: 194% growth<br>Top 10%: 113% growth<br><br>Bottom 20% 4% growth<a href="https://t.co/khndqyLPm4">https://t.co/khndqyLPm4</a> <a href="https://t.co/wlubB8NwQA">pic.twitter.com/wlubB8NwQA</a></p>— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) <a href="https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/943158694220632064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 19, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

When people talk about income and wealth inequality, it's important to realize the problem isn't really the "upper class".... it's not 30 million+ Americans, most of whom are entrepreneurs or some sort of "licensed professional" (doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, architects). It's the ultra rich... the 0.1% and above. To the ultra rich on that level, there is no difference between a doctor and a janitor. While the people in the top 10% can still take advantage of many of the same systems, they don't do so in the same fashion as the ultra rich. Accordingly, any tax system overhaul that attempts to be "fair" and raise taxes on the rich should target the top 10%... but it should target the ultra rich proportionally harder (as reflected in the above graph) in order to be equitable and fair.

 

[Bluto]

We can't talk about Saint Barack.

Sure you can, however he's not the President anymore. So if we want to revisit shitty drug pusher administrations that cut bad deals with Iran we should probably start with a discussion of the Reagan Administration.

 

[Buster Bluth]

Yup. Paging Buster... The left just doesn't want to talk about it. Hey, whatabout Russia.... Did you forget about Russia. I mean Russia is something we need to talk about. We can't talk about Saint Barack.

LOL Obama wouldn't even be the first US President to look the other way on drug deals and money laundering when dealing with Iran.

Do you need a brief on how international politiking works? We worked with fucking Joseph Stalin to achieve our goals. Hezbollah, a pawn of Iran, isn't shit in the scheme of Middle East politics.

You do know we let friendly Taliban factions and Afghan farmers grow god damn opium right?

Now this Iran Deal may work out or it may blow up, Obama is clearly pinning his legacy on it. He figured that a deal with Iran is worth it. We shall see. I see the merits in a cooling of relations, and of resuming the roll of an off-shore balancer. If relations were ever "good" with Iran this Hezbollah trade off would be worth it a thousand times over. Any strategist would agree with that.

Am I losing sleep over Hezbollah? No. Neither are you. It's why you didn't notice this until you read the story. Hezbollah doesn't bother me when our own friends in the Middle East funnel billions into their terrorist groups loyal that cause us geopolitical headaches and kill thousands during 9/11.

I'm willing to give Presidents a lot of legal leeway in negotiating. Even Trump. So long as they don't lie to conjure up wars and put boots on the ground that kill thousands of Americans and cost us trillions, I'm generally a Might Is Right, go for it Mr. President, kinda guy.

 

[Irish YJ]

Sure you can, however he's not the President anymore. So if we want to revisit shitty drug pusher administrations that cut bad deals with Iran we should probably start with a discussion of the Reagan Administration.

Happy to talk about RR, and so is/was everyone else. It was all over the news for a long long time. And Hollywood has made a ton of movies and shows about it (Snowfall on FX is a good series). The whole point is that nobody wants to talk about Obama. Everyone talked about RR.

LOL Obama wouldn't even be the first US President to look the other way on drug deals and money laundering when dealing with Iran.

Do you need a brief on how international politiking works? We worked with fucking Joseph Stalin to achieve our goals. Hezbollah, a pawn of Iran, isn't shit in the scheme of Middle East politics.

You do know we let friendly Taliban factions and Afghan farmers grow god damn opium right?

Now this Iran Deal may work out or it may blow up, Obama is clearly pinning his legacy on it. He figured that a deal with Iran is worth it. We shall see. I see the merits in a cooling of relations, and of resuming the roll of an off-shore balancer. If relations were ever "good" with Iran this Hezbollah trade off would be worth it a thousand times over. Any strategist would agree with that.

Am I losing sleep over Hezbollah? No. Neither are you. It's why you didn't notice this until you read the story. Hezbollah doesn't bother me when our own friends in the Middle East funnel billions into their terrorist groups loyal that cause us geopolitical headaches and kill thousands during 9/11.

I'm willing to give Presidents a lot of legal leeway in negotiating. Even Trump. So long as they don't lie to conjure up wars and put boots on the ground that kill thousands of Americans and cost us trillions, I'm generally a Might Is Right, go for it Mr. President, kinda guy.

You're getting lost in the point as well. See above. We as a nation do a lot of bad shit. When we do, Left or Right, it shouldn't be covered up.... especially due to bias. If this was on the GOP, it would be a year long front page story on CNN and we'd have a snowflake blizzard on Twitter bound with conspiracy. If Obama is pinning his legacy on Iran (thought it was Health Care), his legacy never had a chance.

 

[RDU Irish]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Trickle down: Income growth in America from 1980 to 2014<br><br>Top .001%: 616% growth<br>Top .01%: 423% growth<br>Top .1%: 298% growth<br>Top 1%: 194% growth<br>Top 10%: 113% growth<br><br>Bottom 20% 4% growth<a href="https://t.co/khndqyLPm4">https://t.co/khndqyLPm4</a> <a href="https://t.co/wlubB8NwQA">pic.twitter.com/wlubB8NwQA</a></p>— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) <a href="https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/943158694220632064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 19, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

When people talk about income and wealth inequality, it's important to realize the problem isn't really the "upper class".... it's not 30 million+ Americans, most of whom are entrepreneurs or some sort of "licensed professional" (doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, architects). It's the ultra rich... the 0.1% and above. To the ultra rich on that level, there is no difference between a doctor and a janitor. While the people in the top 10% can still take advantage of many of the same systems, they don't do so in the same fashion as the ultra rich. Accordingly, any tax system overhaul that attempts to be "fair" and raise taxes on the rich should target the top 10%... but it should target the ultra rich proportionally harder (as reflected in the above graph) in order to be equitable and fair.

How much is "fair"? With state taxes it is currently over 50% in many states? 75% then? 95%? Half is not enough?

I would love to see some historical perspective here - what does 1960 through 1980 look like for example. Or break it down by decade. The rich have always gotten richer - you tend to make more over your career and compound wealth which compounds earnings. The limiting factor is death and the fact most wealth does not survive more than a couple generations. It gets divided, squandered and screwed up by beneficiaries over time. Getting rich is hard, staying rich can be even harder.

I would suspect the IT economy is somewhat to blame here too. 30 year old self made billionaires weren't exactly happening in 1980.

 

[Bluto]

Happy to talk about RR, and so is/was everyone else. It was all over the news for a long long time. And Hollywood has made a ton of movies and shows about it (Snowfall on FX is a good series). The whole point is that nobody wants to talk about Obama. Everyone talked about RR

You're getting lost in the point as well. See above. We as a nation do a lot of bad shit. When we do, Left or Right, it shouldn't be covered up.... especially due to bias. If this was on the GOP, it would be a year long front page story on CNN and we'd have a snowflake blizzard on Twitter bound with conspiracy. If Obama is pinning his legacy on Iran (thought it was Health Care), his legacy never had a chance.

Ok, given that high standard I would think you would appreciate the massive amount of coverage dedicated to an administration that has had more people associated with it indicted and or coping pleas than any I can remember one year into a Presidency. Maybe the stuff Obama did would be recieving more attention if the current Buffoon in the Oval Office wasn't who he is and didn't surround himself with the people that he does. Or maybe no members of the Obama administration broke the law or banged interns and it's as simple as that?

Anyhow, Bill and his folies were all over the news so this whole media bias thing regarding Donald seems like total bullshit. Donald is a loudmouth jerkoff who does and says shady shit. It makes for great television. Marshall McLuhan says hello.

 

[GowerND11]

How much is "fair"? With state taxes it is currently over 50% in many states? 75% then? 95%? Half is not enough?

I would love to see some historical perspective here - what does 1960 through 1980 look like for example. Or break it down by decade. The rich have always gotten richer - you tend to make more over your career and compound wealth which compounds earnings. The limiting factor is death and the fact most wealth does not survive more than a couple generations. It gets divided, squandered and screwed up by beneficiaries over time. Getting rich is hard, staying rich can be even harder.

I would suspect the IT economy is somewhat to blame here too. 30 year old self made billionaires weren't exactly happening in 1980.

http://federal-tax-rates.insidegov.com/l/45/1960

 

[Legacy]

Compare Top Federal Tax Rates (Insidegov)

Thanks. Nice Site with historical perspective.

Also, Promises made to Collins for tax bill support are slipping. That’s reason for concern. (Bangor Daily News, Editorial)

President Donald Trump hasn’t even signed a Republican tax cut bill into law and the promises Sen. Susan Collins said she received to gain her support for the bill have begun to unravel.

In exchange for her support for the GOP tax bill, which weakened the Affordable Care Act by repealing the mandate that individuals buy insurance or pay a penalty, Collins said she received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that two health care proposals, which could lessen the impact of the mandate repeal, would be passed before the end of the year.

On Wednesday, Collins and Sen. Lamar Alexander, a co-sponsor of one of the provisions, said there would be no vote before the end of 2017.

“I think the policy is more important than the deadline, and the deadline is slipping. And I am the first to say that I am not happy about that, that I’m disappointed about that,” Collins told the Portland Press Herald on Wednesday. “But I believe that at the end of the day, we’re going to end up where I want us to be — in fact, maybe even with a better bill.”

With the timeline already slipping, we fear other aspects of McConnell’s pledges will falter as well...

Collins before the tax bill vote and after promises from Trump and McConnell:

“I’m counting on the administration to make sure that does not happen. I would consider it a very serious breach of a promise to me. And they don’t want to do that.”

Jim Manley, a Democratic consultant:

"How any senator – much less one who has served as long as Sen. Collins has – ever agreed to such a deal is beyond me. The promises she extracted were never, ever going to be binding on rank-and-file House Republicans, and now she has nothing to show for all of this. She got rolled big time.”

McConnell assured Collins two items would go to a vote before the end of the year - a bipartisan backed bill restoring health care subsidies to providers and a bill assisting insurers for taking high risk patients.
Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma:

"That thing put on the floor on its own would fail spectacularly, and we don't owe that kind of concession to them. The speaker made it abundantly clear that while the Senate leadership is fee to make whatever commitments they want in their body, to their members, that does not apply to our body and our members. If we get into that kind of game, I think it will be very destructive."

 

[Irish YJ]

Ok, given that high standard I would think you would appreciate the massive amount of coverage dedicated to an administration that has had more people associated with it indicted and or coping pleas than any I can remember one year into a Presidency. Maybe the stuff Obama did would be recieving more attention if the current Buffoon in the Oval Office wasn't who he is and didn't surround himself with the people that he does. Or maybe no members of the Obama administration broke the law or banged interns and it's as simple as that?

Anyhow, Bill and his folies were all over the news so this whole media bias thing regarding Donald seems like total bullshit. Donald is a loudmouth jerkoff who does and says shady shit. It makes for great television. Marshall McLuhan says hello.

LOL... so it has nothing to do with clear media bias of most mainstream media (confirmed by Harvard, a Left leaning school). Indicted, coping please... for what???... Nothing even close to proving Trump colluded with anything. To use CNN's description, it's still a nothing burger. Will bet all my Vbucks they don't prove anything against Trump with the exception his team was open to getting oppo (no different than the dems). There's more evidence to suggest the Clintons took bribes (speaking fees, Foundation) in support the Uranium One deal. I guess it just circumstantial and the timing of those fees and donations were all just coincidental... give me a break.

And Bill was all over the media about the BJ. The other women's stories, and the efforts of HRC to quiet those women, not so much.

It's pretty clear you're OK with stories being low-played or no-played so long as it fits your own bias or supports your candidate.

 

[drayer54]

I can't believe this is not getting more play.....well, yes I can. The story was even written by Politico, not Breitbart, National Review or Drudge. I cut and pasted the opening paragraph which I feel summarizes the 60 pages (when printed) article. The Iran Deal is the gift that just keeps on giving. And the left wants to impeach Trump. This is actually an impeachable offense.

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

It's huge news. If this were discussed by anonymous sources, the left wing media would have it front and center. However, it doesn't fit the narrative.

It is too damning on the wrong POTUS.

 

[Legacy]

The color purple: How millennials and Gen X after electing Doug Jones could change a red state (Al.com)

Beth Clayton believes that she saw her home state's political future in the exit polls from the Dec. 12 Senate election. And it's not an Alabama that anyone has known lately.

"We have a lot of young people in this state who are not hung up on those social issues that tie up our grandparents and parents," said Clayton, national committeewoman with the Young Democrats of Alabama. "Those don't matter to young people who are struggling to pay off student debt, and buy a house and start a family."...

"Alabama's young voters, I don't think they consider themselves aligned with any party. They may lean Republican because their parents may have been, but they are not red or blue. You cannot categorize them," said Steve Flowers, a former Republican member of the Legislature who now writes a political column published in more than 60 newspapers.

Flowers said, "There is what I would consider a purple gleam to that voter that looks more like the 20- to 40-year-old in Ohio or California."

Black Turnout in Alabama Complicates Debate on Voting Laws
(NYT By ALAN BLINDER and MICHAEL WINES DEC. 24, 2017_

At issue, at a time when minorities are becoming an increasingly powerful slice of the electorate, is how much rules like Alabama’s voter ID law serve as a brake on that happening. The turnout by black voters in Alabama raises a question: Did it come about because voting restrictions were not as powerful as critics claim or because voters showed up in spite of them?

 

[wizards8507]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I join the people of Utah in thanking my friend, Senator Orrin Hatch for his more than forty years of service to our great state and nation. Read my full statement: <a href="https://t.co/YwjUpjez5y">https://t.co/YwjUpjez5y</a></p>— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) <a href="https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/948286054313938944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 2, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

He's running.

 

[Buster Bluth]

It'll be interesting to see what tone he takes towards Trump. If he's vocally anti-Trump it may impact the Nevada race due to all of the Mormons.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Francis X. Maier just published an article in First Things titled "The Most Important Thinker We Don't Know":

This spring marks the twentieth anniversary of NewTech98. Officially the “International Conference on New Technologies and the Human Person: Communicating the Faith in the New Millennium,” Newtech98 was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and the Archdiocese of Denver. It had one main achievement. It brought together in an unprecedented dialogue dozens of Church leaders from Latin America, North America, Europe, and the Vatican, and senior executives from Adobe Systems, Microsoft, IBM, and other tech innovators. Media scholars and journalists also took part.

Amid the meeting’s praise for all things techno, two men raised concerns. The first was Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, who spoke of technology’s subversive effect on human identity and self-understanding. The second was Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Postman gave the most arresting talk of the three-day event. It included these words:

[A] sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one’s being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies …

In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we may use technology rather than be used by it.

At the time, sitting in the audience, I thought both men—the Christian leader and the secular scholar—were prophetic. But in fact, they were thirty years late to the party. As early as the 1960s, the philosopher Augusto Del Noce had raised the same concerns more deeply and comprehensively. And he’d written some of the best analysis anywhere of technology’s impact on Western politics, economics, and culture, and postwar Europe’s soul.

At the height of Soviet power, Del Noce predicted with stunning accuracy the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. He foresaw the sexual revolution in its weirdest forms, including the transformation of the political left from advocate of the working classes to defender of sexual “freedom.” He explained the link between the fierce rejection of traditional morality in the 1960s and the same decade’s ferocious moralizing for radical change. And he described in great detail the fundamentally totalitarian nature of the West’s emerging tech civilization.

A committed Catholic and one of Italy’s leading public intellectuals until his death in 1989, Del Noce is largely unknown in the United States. But one hopes that will change with the recent release of The Age of Secularization, translated by Carlo Lancellotti and published by McGill-Queens University Press. The Age of Secularization is a kind of “prequel” to Del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity, also translated by Lancellotti and published (in 2015) by McGill-Queens. Both books are collections of essays. But whereas Modernity deals with Del Noce’s later work, Secularization covers the social turmoil of 1964–69.

Del Noce’s use of the word “totalitarian” needs some explanation. He did not mean a society run by bullyboys in jackboots. He was far more worried about a culture addicted to science and technology as the only “real” forms of knowledge; a culture hollowed out and stupefied by the material well-being its tools provide; a culture subject to the resulting philosophy of scientism that renders questions of transcendence irrelevant by confining the human horizon to the here and now.

He defined the technological society as one that, in practice,

accepts all of Marxism’s negations against contemplative thought, religion and metaphysics; that accepts, therefore, the Marxist reduction of ideas to instruments of production; [but] that, on the other hand, rejects the revolutionary-messianic aspects of Marxism, and thus what is still religious in the revolutionary idea. In this regard, it truly represents the bourgeois spirit in its pure state, the bourgeois spirit triumphant over its two traditional adversaries, transcendent religion and revolutionary thought.

Put another way, Del Noce believed that Marxism is inherently atheist—atheist at its core. It succeeded as a mass movement by combining a strong critique of economic injustice with its claim to be scientific and its “metaphysical” promises of a utopian future. It fatally crippled the old religiously informed social order precisely because of its own capacity for religious-like zeal. But the logic of Marxist atheism inevitably destroys its own metaphysical, millenarian dimension.

Thus, historically, Marxism is a stalking horse for something else. It’s a stage in the development of a fully technological civilization. By discrediting traditional moral ideals and comprehensive systems of belief—including even belief in itself—Marxism clears the way for a more effective, pragmatic materialism that has little need to attack religion directly, because it renders the supernatural useless and implausible. The more well-being technology provides, the stronger its momentum toward technocracy. And technocracy becomes technopoly—becomes totalitarian—not by gassing dissidents, but by gradually commandeering the human imagination and excluding human reason from appeals to any higher rational benchmark, any higher moral authority, than itself.

Sex plays a key supporting role in this process. Absent a higher meaning to life, what matters is feeling as alive as possible, right now. And few things impart that feeling more pleasantly than sex. For Del Noce, the sexual revolution has nothing to do with personal liberation or “healthy sex.” He sees it as the ethical expression of scientism and a masked form of neo-gnostic contempt for the body. In technological terms, the human body is inefficient and awkward—it’s weak, it’s clumsy, it decays, and ultimately it dies. It’s a defective machine in need of rewiring. Moreover, if the only legitimate form of knowledge is empirically verifiable facts and data, then sexual relationships and love have no higher moral meaning. They’re reduced to mere biology and the satisfaction of physical release—in effect, a social safety valve. The rest is emotional illusion at the service of evolution.

Even more dangerously, absent a respect for permanent truths about the world and human nature, “a society stops judging in terms of true and false, [and then] it cannot but grant the right to mendacity, to insincerity, which will be regarded as licit whenever they produce a positive outcome.” As Del Noce notes, the rapid “diffusion of the technological mentality has been accompanied by the disappearance of the words true and false, good and bad, even beautiful and ugly.” And “the first consequence of the rejection of permanent values has been the replacement of the dyad ‘true-false’ with the dyad ‘progress-reaction.’”

Del Noce was not a Luddite. He welcomed the obvious benefits in new technologies. Like Jacques Maritain, whom he admired, he praised the good in modernity, especially “its attention to the subjective aspect of the apprehension of truth, and thus to freedom; to the form in which truth is welcomed as such.” In the words of Lancellotti, Del Noce understood that “we cannot just rely on a mechanical repetition of [religious] formulas, because what we received from our forebears is conditioned by the questions they faced, and we ourselves can only think in terms of the questions we are facing.”

But Del Noce also knew how easily a respect for historical circumstances can morph into a belief that truth is culturally created and conditioned—and therefore adaptable (read: malleable) as needed. Thus, he saved some of his sharpest criticism for Catholic progressives who, in his view, served as flacks for “progressive” politics and secular irreligion within the Church herself, no matter how pure their intentions. Complaints in today’s Church, even among some of her leaders, about “fixist,” “rigid,” and “abstract” doctrines policed by “doctors of law” are anything but new. Del Noce knew them well in his own time and saw them as anti-intellectual and rooted in a kind of neo-Modernism.

Twenty years after Newtech98, the possibilities for human development it addressed have matured into realities—some good, some much less so. How to understand our current cultural moment and what to do about it are urgent questions. They are dealt with eloquently in recent books by Patrick Deneen, Mary Eberstadt, Charles Chaput, Rod Dreher, R. R. Reno, Anthony Esolen, and others. But Carlo Lancellotti has done us an important service by making available in English the work of a man who saw the shape of today’s world more clearly, more deeply, and earlier than many others.

Augusto Del Noce is the most important thinker we don’t know. That’s our loss—but it needn’t remain so.

I'm glad Carlo finally got around to publishing his translations. He's been one of the best commenters on Rod Dreher's blog for years. Will definitely be adding this one to my reading list.

 

[IrishLax]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">ARE YOU KIDDING?!?! Check out these prices at Costco now that the Soda and <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SugarTax?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SugarTax</a> has taken affect in the Seattle area. 1.75 cents per fluid ounce. Pics <a href="https://twitter.com/DevinSenaUI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DevinSenaUI</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/HaydenBedsole?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HaydenBedsole</a> <a href="https://t.co/RcsPY4e8L4">pic.twitter.com/RcsPY4e8L4</a></p>— Tim Williams (@realtimwilliams) <a href="https://twitter.com/realtimwilliams/status/949453655740157953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I mean.......

 

[ickythump1225]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">ARE YOU KIDDING?!?! Check out these prices at Costco now that the Soda and <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SugarTax?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SugarTax</a> has taken affect in the Seattle area. 1.75 cents per fluid ounce. Pics <a href="https://twitter.com/DevinSenaUI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DevinSenaUI</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/HaydenBedsole?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HaydenBedsole</a> <a href="https://t.co/RcsPY4e8L4">pic.twitter.com/RcsPY4e8L4</a></p>— Tim Williams (@realtimwilliams) <a href="https://twitter.com/realtimwilliams/status/949453655740157953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I mean.......

It's a little over the top but really if it means people drink less soda nothing of value will be lost. I know, "muh freedoms" and all of that but I think casual soda consumption is probably one of the greatest health crises we face in this country. I think constant soda consumption is more damaging than cigarette smoking.

 

[phgreek]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">ARE YOU KIDDING?!?! Check out these prices at Costco now that the Soda and <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SugarTax?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SugarTax</a> has taken affect in the Seattle area. 1.75 cents per fluid ounce. Pics <a href="https://twitter.com/DevinSenaUI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DevinSenaUI</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/HaydenBedsole?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HaydenBedsole</a> <a href="https://t.co/RcsPY4e8L4">pic.twitter.com/RcsPY4e8L4</a></p>— Tim Williams (@realtimwilliams) <a href="https://twitter.com/realtimwilliams/status/949453655740157953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I mean.......

WOW...I'm behind here. Is the tax going to treatment of diabetics and counseling for the Obese. If not, its a pretty shitty way to pave roads.

 

[Buster Bluth]

It's a little over the top but really if it means people drink less soda nothing of value will be lost. I know, "muh freedoms" and all of that but I think casual soda consumption is probably one of the greatest health crises we face in this country. I think constant soda consumption is more damaging than cigarette smoking.

 

[Buster Bluth]

Personal opinion, that tax seems pretty steep. I'm not against the idea of a sugar tax, and as ickythump says it is a national health crisis and diabetes needs faaaaarrrrr more national attention.

Let's start with "sugar added" labels that Trump apparently postponed.

One of the good things about Obamacare is the calorie count visible on chain restaurants and especially fast food. I know it's changed what I've ordered.

I'm of the opinion that sin taxes like that shouldn't be put into the general fund but should have a specific, uber-social impact, use that otherwise wouldn't be covered by government spending. In Seattle's case, maybe affordable housing.

 

[ickythump1225]

Personal opinion, that tax seems pretty steep. I'm not against the idea of a sugar tax, and as ickythump says it is a national health crisis and diabetes needs faaaaarrrrr more national attention.

Let's start with "sugar added" labels that Trump apparently postponed.

One of the good things about Obamacare is the calorie count visible on chain restaurants and especially fast food. I know it's changed what I've ordered.

I'm of the opinion that sin taxes like that shouldn't be put into the general fund but should have a specific, uber-social impact, use that otherwise wouldn't be covered by government spending. In Seattle's case, maybe affordable housing.

I agree that sin taxes shouldn't just go to general funds. I'm actually not opposed to a universal health care system (provided health insurance is for citizens only) that could in part be paid for by sin taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, and sugar. If/when pot gets legalized throw that in there too.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty just published an article titled "Wonks Made Celebrity Presidents Possible, Maybe Necessary":

After Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes, her friends are urging her to run for president. Meryl Streep says Oprah “doesn’t have a choice” but to run. Oprah’s speech — about how women are rising up to speak “their truth,” telling “those men” who have oppressed them that “their time is up” — has some dreaming of the day she announces her candidacy by telling a certain misogynist in the White House that his time is up, too. Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier of California was tweeting, “Run, Oprah, run! An Army of women would fight for you in the #2020 election.”

This isn’t the first time Oprah has been talked up for president. Michael Moore, of all people, suggested her or Tom Hanks right after last year’s election. Heck, even Donald Trump had suggested her as his own running mate in the year 2000. Other celebrities have had boomlets recently, including stars of cinema like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and businessman–cum–television personality Mark Cuban.

The average voter is going to be blamed for this. The great disdain of the educated class will fall on the Uhmurkans who have been hypnotized by their televisions. Maybe some of that’s right. But I blame the wonks. It was the wonks who, unawares, made the celebrity president not just desirable but logically necessary.

The wonk’s role is well-fitted to the centrist political ideal in the post–Cold War West. For them, government is most highly admirable when it is totally denuded of questions of value or morality (these having obvious and uncontroversial answers), and reduced to a purely technical exercise. The politician working with the wonk finds that his job is reconciling the public with what’s good for them. And this fits the machinery of the executive branch, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of civil servants, overseen by a much smaller retinue of political appointees almost all chosen from within the governing class of the country. Where this model of government is most advanced — in Europe — policy questions are routinely taken away from the passions of democratic peoples, and quarantined for expert management.

Taken together, these trends are more or less the abolition of traditional democratic politics. And so there is little use for the traditional politician, a person of judgment and charisma who represents the community from which he or she emerges, using his own wisdom in reconciling the diverse interests and needs of his nation and constituency.

Having eliminated the need for real probity in politicians, why shouldn’t the parties turn to celebrities as their political leaders? The celebrity will do the job of winning elections and riling up the public, but the machinery of government will go on, almost undisturbed. We can see how the permanent class of Republicans in government almost immediately tamed the Trump presidency. Instead of the populist presidency Trump promised, Trump is ushering in much of the pre-existing “moderate” Republican agenda of corporate tax cuts and economic deregulation. The political class and the media allied to it were able to expunge most of the populist figures from the administration. Soon, they might even succeed in expunging Trump, too.

Oprah Winfrey is perfect for this moment. So what if she believes in, and spent gobs of her career promoting, New Age quackery. That will be as relevant to her presidency as Donald Trump’s critique of military adventurism is to his: not at all. The wonks’ dream is coming true: A bureaucracy has come into shape, one that is able to fend off all democratic challenge, even as it uses a celebrity to gain democratic legitimacy. Wonks are now the producers, behind the scenes. The celebrities are just the talent, reading lines and leveraging their brand for the great project of governance.