Countdown to Extinction: The 2016 Presidential Election

[The new erato]

I observe a difference between telling someone he cannot express something, and finding for oneself that wisdom often resides in saying less.

Short post Karl?

Interesting:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-greatest-triumph-1459379804

He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan's legacy. (unfortunately requires login to read it all).

[drogulus]

He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan's legacy. (unfortunately requires login to read it all).

     It doesn't require a login. Just Google the title.

[Brian]

I observe a difference between telling someone he cannot express something, and finding for oneself that wisdom often resides in saying less.

I observe a difference between seeing a lesson to learn, and calling for totalitarian action. (Hey, that's also the problem with the Polish government...)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-greatest-triumph-1459379804

He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan's legacy. (unfortunately requires login to read it all).

I don't know that I'd give Obama much credit for destroying the Republican Party. That's like giving George Bush Sr. credit for destroying the USSR. The credit belongs mainly to Norquist, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Cruz, Rubio, the Tea Party, and the whole gang of extremists who destroyed Reagan's legacy of pragmatism in the 1990s, destroyed his legacy of optimism in the 2000s, staked out no-compromise policy positions betraying their working-class voter base, and with their rhetoric and political positioning helped create the Trump monster.

[Karl Henning]

So many differences to observe.

[Karl Henning]

Short post Karl?

Hmm. I make no claim to wisdom.

[Gurn Blanston]

I observe a difference between seeing a lesson to learn, and calling for totalitarian action. (Hey, that's also the problem with the Polish government...)
I don't know that I'd give Obama much credit for destroying the Republican Party. That's like giving George Bush Sr. credit for destroying the USSR. The credit belongs mainly to Norquist, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Cruz, Rubio, the Tea Party, and the whole gang of extremists who destroyed Reagan's legacy of pragmatism in the 1990s, destroyed his legacy of optimism in the 2000s, staked out no-compromise policy positions betraying their working-class voter base, and with their rhetoric and political positioning helped create the Trump monster.

Amen, little brother!  As I have said before: I didn't leave the Republican Party, they left me!   

[North Star]

Amen, little brother!

He ain't heavy...

[André]

http://www.lapresse.ca/international/dossiers/maison-blanche-2016/201604/01/01-4966544-trump-et-les-medias-des-journalistes-accuses-davoir-trahi-la-nation.php

Although the article is in French, the graph (scroll down, down) speaks its numbers in any language.

Trump has been given a media coverage that amounts to a 1.9 billion $ free pass in ad money, about 6 times as much as the coverage given Cruz. All others trail in the dust.

The Huffington Post has taken to putting a 'warning' on all its Trump campaign articles, labeling him a compulsive liar, misogyne, xenophobe and racist.

[drogulus]

Amen, little brother!  As I have said before: I didn't leave the Republican Party, they left me!   

     Sometimes a party will taken the opposite position to create a difference to fight over. There are ways to make it work, say if Obama steals your health plan, you come up with a better one. Repubs, though, are boxed in by their requirement that it be a bad plan. They can't make Obamacare better without endorsing their former position. They can claim the plan has been incompetently carried out, but that would require them to justify denying benefits the plan offers to citizens of Red states. That's the major flaw. How can they fight over how well the plan has been carried out without proposing the flaw be fixed?

     The Repub electorate has finally come to the conclusion that the party has nothing to offer them. Paul Krugman says:

"After all, what is the modern GOP? A simple model that accounts for just about everything you see is that it's an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class."

     What Repubs disagree? Is a vote for Trump a disagreement?

     Obamacare on Track

     OK, 2 cheers for Obamneycare. I withhold a 3rd on the grounds that it's failure was supposed to prove the necessity of a single payer system. Apparently it won't work that way. There's too much success in it for that, so we'll be committed to failure reduction inside the plan.

[Todd]

"After all, what is the modern GOP? A simple model that accounts for just about everything you see is that it's an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class."

You mean who disagrees with you and Paul Krugman, two paragons of objective, non-partisan analysis?

[drogulus]

You mean who disagrees with you and Paul Krugman, two paragons of objective, non-partisan analysis?

     When you're right, you're right, even if you're partisan. Repubs are finding their own way to agree while hating the Krug. I'm OK with that, let them put it in their own words.

[Todd]

When you're right, you're right, even if you're partisan.

Let us all know when you are right, because here you're not.

[Florestan]

the problem with the Polish government...)

Charles Crawford is the former UK ambassador to Warsaw, 2003-2007. Here´s what he says on the matter:

http://charlescrawford.biz/2015/11/12/poland-gets-a-new-government/

http://charlescrawford.biz/2016/01/31/poland-threatens-europe/

http://charlescrawford.biz/2016/01/13/poland-and-eu-again/

http://charlescrawford.biz/2016/01/07/pis-and-polands-democracy/

You might also find this comment by a Polish citizen interesting (long quote but very illuminating):

Contrary to the alarmist media reports we, the free citizens of Poland, want to reassure you that in Poland today there are no threats to democracy. The mainstream media in the West, taking cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government (recently ejected from office for corruption) continue to criticise the current freshly, democratically elected government and deliver incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground. This active "spin" is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last 8 years as well as to "poison the well" for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history. (This is the first government elected with a unilateral mandate to govern without coalition partners.) This propagandist treatment is occurring at an unceasing and even increasing pace from those who cannot claim objectivity as they have been personally, professionally, and financially connected to those who have just been ejected from government for many years. No one in Poland denies that a free people are endowed with a right to public protest. This is self-evident in a modern democracy. But western press accounts strongly suggest that this is the case in Poland today.

It is important to set the record straight that during the last eight years in Poland this was NOT the case and these democratic ideals were not always upheld. It was during the ruling years of the Civic Platform and the Polish People's Party (PO-PSL) coalition that these standards, generally accepted by contemporary democracies, were frequently and brazenly violated. For the record, here are some examples of what transpired in clear breach of democratic norms under the PO-PSL ruling coalition years:

– Independent journalists were repeatedly harassed by the security agencies. The staff of, among others, Gazeta Polska Codzienne (GPC) had their homes searched. In May 2011, at 6:00 AM the agents of the Internal Security Agency entered the private residential apartment of an Internet user who operated a satirical website lampooning then President, Bronisław Komorowski.

– Independent journalists were dismissed from their posts when they pushed for a transparent investigation into the Smolensk crash. Tomasz Sakiewicz and Anita Gargas, among others, lost their jobs in the public media. Cezary Gmyz was dismissed from the editorial staff of "Rzeczpospolita" (a daily paper partly owned by the state) for publishing information indicating that there were traces of TNT found on the wreck of the plane that crashed in Smolensk in April 2010. This information was later confirmed by the prosecutors leading the investigation.

– In June 2014, agents of the Internal Security Agency raided the headquarters of the news weekly "Wprost" after the magazine published the transcripts of recorded conversations held by some of the highest level PO politicians in Warsaw's most expensive restaurants. During this raid the agents attempted to confiscate computers and data storage devices belonging to the journalists. The so called "tape scandal" ("afera taśmowa") that had erupted upon publication of the content of these tapes, provided evidence of many scandalous and criminal behaviours, including the revelation that state-owned companies actively subsidized those media platforms that were writing in favour of the ruling government. It was only the large scale mainstream media outlets, sympathetic to the ruling coalition government and by design NOT covering the government's corruption scandals, who were the recipients of lucrative advertising contracts from Poland's largest companies (which are in-part state-owned enterprises with large discretionary budgets). For this reason the independent media, regardless of readership or audience, were deprived of paid-for commercial advertising opportunities by government fiat.

– In December 2014, two journalists (Tomasz Gzela of the Polish Press Agency and Jan Pawlicki of Telewizja Republika) were arrested. They were covering the protest held at the headquarters of the National Electoral Commission after the local elections. For a week after the election the Commission would not certify the results of the elections which agitated many Poles with a material contingent deciding to protest by occupying the premises of the Commission in a demand for electoral transparency and oversight. The journalists were arrested even though they possessed press passes and were doing their job. They also had to face a lawsuit. All this was going on against the backdrop of the highest level PO politicians such as the then-President (Komorowski) and the Mayor of Warsaw (Waltz) giving public comments that it was an act of treason to question electoral processes and opacity. Likewise, the head of the Constitutional Tribunal, Andrzej Rzeplinski, despite having no legal right to do so, publically stated that there were no grounds to question the results of the election. To this very day the results of these last local elections remain highly questionable. The shining example of this pertains to PSL having received well more votes than expected (by a factor of 10) in a region (Gdynia) where they have had little historical support yet enough votes to give them the ability to preserve PO's ruling coalition. In addition, there still remain two thousand protest notes lodged in local courts.

– During the last 8 years the previous government kept journalists and citizens under surveillance as a routine practice. In 2014, the secret service applied to access 2,177,000 telephone bills. This is a Europe-leading level of prying into ordinary citizens' every-day lives. The District Public Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw is currently leading an investigation into the wiretapping of independent journalists. In all likelihood, the secret service had no court warrant to do so.

– In May 2015, after the Presidential election was lost by President Bronisław Komorowski, the PO-PSL coalition violated the constitution and appointed new members of the Constitutional Tribunal before the justices' terms were up. The politicians of the departing coalition wanted to appropriate the Tribunal by limiting the right of the new ruling party to elect judges of their choice. Today, after the reforms implemented by the democratically elected Law and Justice Party (PiS), the judges elected by the Civic Platform still constitute the majority. They occupy 9 of 15 seats in the Constitutional Tribunal.

These are just a few glaring examples of the way in which the last government subverted democracy to its will to engage in an attempted looting of the country (and in many ways having succeeded). Similar violations of civil liberties became the norm but they went unreported by a pliant media that was directly and indirectly on the previous government's payroll. The number of corruption scandals that occurred under this PO-PSL coalition government was staggering. These encompassed every sort of corrupt behaviour from bribes (to one minster in the form of expensive watches), to patronage, to bogus un-bid contracts, to self-dealing of bonuses and pensions, to preferential tax treatment for allies and supporters, and even the nationalization of the private sector managed segment of the pension system. Under their nose a pyramid scheme ("Amber Gold") flourished and many thousands of Poles were cheated out of their savings while the politically connected head of the National Bank said nothing despite having been fully aware of the scheme (also revealed in the "tapes scandal"). And all of this occurring with a media complex that could not be bothered to report on this institutionalized lawlessness. On October 25th this year the public said enough is enough and in a democratic election, with not a single allegation of any irregularities, rebuked and removed the PO-PSL coalition from power.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has been in 25 years and certainly as compared to the eight years under the previous government. The people have finally purged, through democratic elections, the post-communist machine that was never held to account or reformed after 1989 and its accompanying corruption. The reform begins now and Poles are optimistic....despite what has been printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

[drogulus]

Let us all know when you are right, because here you're not.

     Krugman is only saying that what the Repubs do fits the formula. You can infer motives about realistic expectations of the negative results for the economy. That's too much credit to award the Repub establishment. That would require them to know how bad supply side "shrink to grow" is when they choose it. It's more like wanting to believe that this time it will work, and we can favor our interests by not looking too closely at the dismal outcomes. This time we will neglect our way to prosperity! It's a very "beliefy" understanding, the world is wrong if the ideas don't pan out. Krugman doesn't make explicit whether the Repub program is the effect of actions or intentions, but I don't see this as a resolvable question. How much do Repubs know, and how much is the convenience of aligning beliefs with interests? "A simple model that accounts for just about everything you see" correctly leaves that question for another time.

[Todd]

It's a very "beliefy" understanding

I see.  Sorta like belief in MMT. 

[Rinaldo]

Contrary to the alarmist media reports we, the free citizens of Poland, want to reassure you that in Poland today there are no threats to democracy.

I guess some of his compatriots didn't get the memo.

https://www.youtube.com/v/DKGoIvpL9sk

[The new erato]

Florestan: The people getting their will is a good thing. The people's will is not always a good thing. That's democracy for you.

It's look to me like the Poles are currently milking as much as they can from the benefits of being an EU member without delivering on their obligations. They probably should be kicked out and left to be another Ukraine, but the desperately undemocratic EU politicians (according to you) don't want that. 

[Todd]

The people getting their will is a good thing. The people's will is not always a good thing.

Which is exactly why a central government set up with checks and balances (eg, competing branches jealous of each other's power) and some convoluted election processes (eg, the Electoral College) can be viewed as very good things.  Majoritarian tyranny is the worst because it can be seen as legitimate from a democratic standpoint.

[The new erato]

Which is exactly why a central government set up with checks and balances (eg, competing branches jealous of each other's power) and some convoluted election processes (eg, the Electoral College) can be viewed as very good things.  Majoritarian tyranny is the worst because it can be seen as legitimate from a democratic standpoint.

Indeed, and why I dont support Florestans (to me) pretty naive view that major issues should be decided by referendum. It's much better to have a well balanced system with much transparency, little corruption, a free press and the real option of replacing politicians that don't perform both in the long and the short run. Which seem to be exactly the opposite direction in which Poland currently is heading.

[Florestan]

I guess some of his compatriots didn't get the memo.

https://www.youtube.com/v/DKGoIvpL9sk

Big deal! Supporters and sympathizers of the former government protest against the newly elected government. What is this supposed to prove, other than that democracy is alive and well in Poland? That the government is wrong? I can post videos of equally numerous supporters and sympathizers of PiS marching in support of the newly elected government. Would you accept that as a prove that the government is right?