Countdown to Extinction: The 2016 Presidential Election

[kishnevi]

Since Babin doesn't accept emails from outside his district, I wrote my own worthless congressman to tell him: "Re Babin: sometimes an asshole needs to be told when he's being an asshole."

His campaign website seems happy to accept donations from outside his district.

[kishnevi]

http://reason.com/archives/2016/10/20/what-if-liberty-is-attached-to-humanity

[Pat B]

Actually, that was part of his appeal, to me at least.  He was not one of the Republican social issue dinosaurs.  His pandering to the evangelicals was a mistake, imo.  I keep hoping for a new Conservative coalition to emerge based on individual liberties (including the right to choose an abortion) small government, low taxes, economic strength and reduced global footprint for the US.  And nothing about the religious right's agenda.

This already exists. It's called the Libertarian Party. I used to hope it would become a bigger factor in right-wing politics, either as a 3rd party or as a faction of the GOP, but the way I see things now is that if the Republicans move in that direction, they will lose more votes than they will gain.

[Ken B]

A write-in vote is only counted for candidates who are properly registered. There is only one, Laurence Kotlikoff. He can legally win in every state, and a vote for him is counted in every state. He is thus one of only 5 people who can actually be elected by the Electoral College.

I am not a voter but if I were I would not vote for Trump or for Clinton. I can sympathize with both those who fear Trump enough to vote for Clinton, and those who fear Clinton enough to vote for Trump. But I would not accept either. Rejecting such a choice requires actually rejecting both choices. I do. I would write-in Laurence Kotlikoff and Ed Leamer. After Watergate Massachusetts drivers could proudly sport a bumper-sticker "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts." I want at least a bumper-sticker in my future if I cannot have a decent president.

https://kotlikoff2016.com/

[Rinaldo]

No love for McMullin?

How Evan McMullin Could Win Utah And The Presidency

[Ken B]

No love for McMullin?

How Evan McMullin Could Win Utah And The Presidency

Some.  But he cannot win in the EC. It takes some fantasy of the incumbents in congress favouring an anti-party insurgent rather than making a corrupt deal. Kotlikoff can win outright. Plus he's just plain better than McMullin. But, with the polls in Utah showing him hollowing out Trump, if I lived there and voted I would give him serious thought.
Kotlikoff can still be elected if he wins 49 other states. 

[drogulus]

     Kotlikoff thinks we can owe a gazillion unfunded liability dollars (we can't, unless they are funded), that therefore you can have liabilities without assets, no more true than dollars will exist as assets with no liabilities. No, we won't half create dollars, we'll create only as many liabilities as assets. There is no more reason to be scared of today's fantasy projection of horrors tomorrow than there was yesterday when we tried to imagine the "horror" of today. Our grandparents didn't just leave us with vast debt alone, they had no choice but to leave the vast assets, too.

     Now guys like Kotlikoff think we should look out for the grandkiddies by not creating the asset/liability dollars to grow the economy now and in the future. He thinks dollars are something a money system can run out of. You can run out, I can, Missouri can, IBM can, a money system can't. It can and does furnish as many dollars as needed, so just as a football scoreboard can create as many touchdowns as it needs to record who wins the game the currency issuer too has no means or reason to run out of its "thin air" touchdowns.

   

[Ken B]

     Kotlikoff thinks we can owe a gazillion unfunded liability dollars (we can't, unless they are funded), that therefore you can have liabilities without assets, no more true than dollars will exist as assets with no liabilities. No, we won't half create dollars, we'll create only as many liabilities as assets. There is no more reason to be scared of today's fantasy projection of horrors tomorrow than there was yesterday when we tried to imagine the "horror" of today. Our grandparents didn't just leave us with vast debt alone, they had no choice but to leave the vast assets, too.

     Now guys like Kotlikoff think we should look out for the grandkiddies by not creating the asset/liability dollars to grow the economy now and in the future. He thinks dollars are something a money system can run out of. You can run out, I can, Missouri can, IBM can, a money system can't. It can and does furnish as many dollars as needed, so just as a football scoreboard can create as many touchdowns as it needs to to record who wins the game the currency issuer too has no means or reason to run out of its "thin air" touchdowns.

   

This is a misunderstanding of what he argues. I am not going going to debate here, so I will just point out that he is talking about generational transfers, not rejecting the "we owe it to ourselves" argument. And just as a matter of logic, unfunded liabilities are quite possible. That is, for a flamboyant example, what German reparations were after WWI. And they too represented transfers.

[drogulus]

     That's what I'm talking about, too, as I thought I made clear. I made other points, too, but I make the same generational transfer argument from the present to the future as I make for the past to the present, which Kotlikoff can't do without revealing his parade of horrors is empty.

[Madiel]

From reporting here today:

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed only half of Republicans would accept Mrs Clinton as their president, and nearly 70 per cent of them said a Democratic Party victory would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging.

Oh, awesome. Just wonderful. No, there couldn't possibly be people out there in the rest of the country outside our bubble who prefer her.

[Herman]

Nah.  Liberals are the only ones paying attention to their shills in the media like The Atlantic.  As Dan Quayle famously said, "I wear your scorn as a badge of honor."

Time to point out once more that the GOP has moved so far to the right, that they're calling Obama and Clinton 'far left'  -  even though they could have been moderate Republicans a generation ago.

The Affordable Care Act was largely adopted from a Republican model, for instance. As soon as a black Dem. president touched it, it became a socialist takeover.

[The new erato]

.[asin]B01GS017IY[/asin]

[Karl Henning]

http://reason.com/archives/2016/10/20/what-if-liberty-is-attached-to-humanity

<only a wry joke, truly>

What if I wrote an opinion piece that consisted entirely of rhetorical questions?

</only a wry joke, truly>

Of course, I actually enjoyed both that aspect of the piece, and reading through it.

The distrust of Business-As-Usual (hereinafter BAU) government is real, and can be most sensible;  and of course, that was part of the fuel behind Bernie's campaign, too.

If only there were not so thoroughly tainted, despicable, and untrustworthy (yes, I understand that the Loyal Opposition apply the same adjectives to Clinton) nominee on the GOP side bearing the À Bas BAU! banner.

One family member of mine explains his intention to vote for El Tupé by saying he wonders if, before things can get better (viz. BAU guvmint), "maybe we need to reach bottom first."  My reply was, "That looks like the bottom from up here; but what if, when we sink to that point, we see that in fact the bottom is yet lower, and now we may not be able to overcome gravity?"

[Karl Henning]

No love for McMullin?

How Evan McMullin Could Win Utah And The Presidency

Some.  But he cannot win in the EC. It takes some fantasy of the incumbents in congress favouring an anti-party insurgent rather than making a corrupt deal. Kotlikoff can win outright. Plus he's just plain better than McMullin. But, with the polls in Utah showing him hollowing out Trump, if I lived there and voted I would give him serious thought.
Kotlikoff can still be elected if he wins 49 other states. 

The theoretical model that a McMullin win in Utah (if all the other states shake out just so) would deny either of the major-party nominees an Electoral College majority, that as a result the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, who would then make a rational and responsible decision, is a series of improbably idealistic hopes, the least realistic of which is that the House of Representatives is somehow suddenly capable of just that for which they have proved (over a decade and more) that they have no talent:  rational and adult governance.

[Karl Henning]

Ernie's and Ken's exchange exemplifies the challenge for any presidential candidate for any other than the present two major parties.  There's the need to distinguish yourself from BAU;  but the risk there is in doing so by promoting improbabilities (Johnson/Weld party want to do away with the Federal income tax, e.g. . . or maybe that is eminently practical, and I just haven't seen the diagram).  There is the need to get your face, voice and ideas out in the public gaze/ear/consideration;  but there is also a learning curve which, given the Season of Silly campaign we have been enduring, was not Gary Johnson's friend.  My thinking is that Bernie's insurgency-within-a-major-party was brilliance and a substantial success (without saying that Bernie was not himself something shy of The Perfect Candidate);  and it might just have succeeded if his opposition had been anything less than the practiced Clinton Machine.

[Karl Henning]

What, is he in the third grade? "It's their fault!"

[El Tupé ] likes to blame others for starting his more controversial lines of attack — even blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the birther conspiracy theory. But yet again, he's using very scant evidence and making a strained argument to avert the gaze from his own bare knuckles.

[Ken B]

From reporting here today:

Oh, awesome. Just wonderful. No, there couldn't possibly be people out there in the rest of the country outside our bubble who prefer her.

To be fair there was a lot of that crap when Bush was elected (the refusal to accept him as legitimate).

Let me point out this is an argument for supporting Kotlikoff. His main appeal will be to disaffected republicans and independents. If Trump is hollowed out by Kotlikoff (or McMullin) then the election will not be close. There is no debate about rigging if it's not close.

I am amazed in general by the shocked shocked reaction that anyone could suspect rigging or election theft. Examples of stolen elections abound in American history. Why the hell else did the Voting Rights Act matter for example. There has been a string of convictions over the years for organized vote fraud? And examples of complaints by both parties abound. Anyone remember all the stuff about Diebold? It's a legitimate concern. Trump's problem is that he conflates stuff like press bias or embarrassing old tapes with rigging.

[Madiel]

What kind of elections are the abundant examples of stolen elections, though?

[Karl Henning]

To be fair there was a lot of that crap when Bush was elected (the refusal to accept him as legitimate).

Let me point out this is an argument for supporting Kotlikoff. His main appeal will be to disaffected republicans and independents. If Trump is hollowed out by Kotlikoff (or McMullin) then the election will not be close. There is no debate about rigging if it's not close.

Yes.  (Wouldn't stop El Tupé from making the whackadoodle assertion, but no, there would be no debate.)

[Ken B]

What kind of elections are the abundant examples of stolen elections, though?

Senate, house, local, state. And a not insignificant number of presidential ones might have been. The most cited examples are 1960, 1876, and 1824, but also 1916 according to some. I have heard Democrats complain about 2000.
And not just in the US of course. Recently elections were reversed by courts in the UK.

Elections are valuable things; people try to steal valuable things.

It seems to me incompatible to say both that you cannot raise doubts about an election AND that you cannot demand scrutiny of the process.

Again to try to forestall the misquoters. Trump calls a lot of stuff rigging that is not rigging. Even if the moderators were unfair in the debate that would not be rigging, even if every major paper is against (as they are) that is not rigging. But if there is vote fraud say, that would be rigging.