The Politics Thread

[DRW50]

The pointlessness of "PostTV".

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114696/weird-desperate-world-washington-post-tv

[Max]

Obama gave one great speech (at the 2004 Democratic Convention). As a result, the press, the liberal base, and his handlers took that dynamic moment and turned him into a cult figure, so that resulted in people being mesmerized by his every word. I have yet to see him give a second blockbuster speech.

It embarrasses me as a Republican that Sanford and Vitter survived their scandals while Weiner and Spitzer were defeated. However, I am fed up at how some Democrats (not you, DRW, but others) are acting like they are superior to Republicans when it comes to rejecting womanizers. Democrats have no right to gloat until the very moment when they stop idolizing Jack Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton and start treating them like pariahs.

I have to say that I feel sorry for Christine Quinn. I strongly disagree with her politics (and the underhanded deal she made with Bloomberg to overturn the term limits law), but she was humiliated beyond belief, having lost the women's vote, the LGBT vote, and her own City Council district. I really have no idea how the gays could turn their backs on her, given her lifetime of involvement in LGBT causes. Many gays are extremely liberal, but the anger they (and a lot of heterosexual liberals) had at her for her alliance with Bloomberg was over-the-top. Such a reaction would have only been justified if she had aligned herself with the likes of Michele Bachmann. (And the fact that in a course of a decade the personification of evil has changed from Bush/Cheney to Bloomberg/Quinn really tells me a lot about how much to the left the Democratic base has moved during this time.)

Bill Thompson is another person who is being thrown under the bus by the far left. All throughout 2000, the Gore/NAACP mantra was that every vote needs to be counted. But that line is a bunch of bulls-hit, since tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted, and a decent man like Thompson is being told to concede "for the good of the team." (I am not at all surprised that the far left doesn't really believe in the "count every vote" mantra, since they had no problem in 2008 disenfranchising Democratic primary voters in Florida and Michigan in order to help Obama.) Ironically, given what an anti-Bloomberg election this has turned out to be, nobody seemed to even care that Thompson was the only prominent Democrat in 2009 who had the courage to run against the mayor (because everyone else was too chickens-hit to lose by a big margin; meanwhile, Thompson was left for dead, yet he lost by less than five points).

Now I come to Bill de Blasio, the man who will likely be the next mayor of New York City despite literally being the flavor of the month. The ad featuring his son (with the afro) was very exploitative, to say the least. I wouldn't go so far as to call it racist as some did (racist is when Joe Biden tells a black audience that the GOP wants to put them back in chains), but there is no question that it won him the election. Being the most liberal candidate on stop-and-frisk is also very smart politics, but those who think critically about the issue know that it is not black-and-white (pardon the pun). The fact of the matter is that such a policy is employed more in minority neighborhoods simply because that is where a disproportionate amount of crime takes place; the dramatic crime drop caused by Giuliani/Bloomberg benefits minorities the most. Unfortunately, such nuanced ways of thinking don't seem to come naturally to people who adore Al Sharpton.

Edited September 15, 2013 by Max

[DRW50]

There was a lot of anger at Quinn in the gay community because of her opposition to the paid sick leave bill, which went on for about three years or more.

This article goes into other reasons.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-05-01/news/lgbt-purists-to-quinn-we-would-love-a-gay-mayor-just-not-you/

Edited September 15, 2013 by DRW50

[DRW50]

This goes into more details on the campaign de blasio ran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/nyregion/luck-and-a-shrewd-strategy-fueled-de-blasios-ascension.html?pagewanted=all

[Wales2004]

This probably sounds perfectly logical and proactive to those who will never be affected by such policies. What gets overlooked is that all the people who are subject to being stopped and frisk are not criminals. Next, what's a little inconvenience if it's going to keep the neighborhood safe? It's more than a little inconvenience to treat law abiding citizens like criminals..

If stats showed that 20 year old guys who wear blue jeans are most likely to commit crimes, would the public applaud the police stopping all the guys that fit that description? It sounds pretty generic and so many guys would probably fit that description, so what makes "black or Hispanic male" any less generic? Nothing but bias.

The phrase "racial profiling" is tossed around as though it's something that can be fixed by legislation or policies. There's no federal law that says it's okay to discriminate on the basis of race but it happens. Why? People have biases of which they are sometimes aware and sometimes not. It's quite possible that some of those liberals who annoy you heard Barack Obama speak and thought to themselves that he's exceptional for "his kind." He's articulate. He's "clean" according to Joe Biden. And he is able to communicate in the "negro dialect," according to Harry Reid.

Try to imagine how you'd feel if your neighborhood experienced a crime wave and the police decided to stop every male "to keep the neighborhood safe" and as a result, you ended up being stopped and frisked three times in less than a month. Would the approach seems as logical to you then?

[Max]

Thanks for those links, DRW. As much as I felt badly for Quinn, I was really perplexed as to how tone deaf she was. Specifically, she should have known--from the moment Bloomberg won his third term by a much smaller amount than expected--that the term limits deal would come back to haunt her. While there was nothing she could have done about the past (i.e., she couldn't have taken back her decision to help Bloomberg get a third term), she should have immediately distanced herself from the mayor on most other policy issues. Instead, she arrogantly and stupidly assumed she'd be a shoo-in for 2013, and didn't try to separate herself from Bloomberg until her campaign was plummeting.

Wales, thanks for your eloquent response.

If I lived in a high crime neighborhood, I would be pissed off if I was stopped-and-frisked. But I would also most likely accept it as a "necessary evil" if it would help police prevent crime. The fact that NYC is one of America's safest cities speaks volumes in regards to the fact that their policing tactics are working (and it wasn't always this way, as crime was out of control twenty years ago). I understand and respect differing viewpoints, but I'd far prefer to be embarrassed/humiliated/angered as a unfair target of stop-and-frisk as opposed to being a victim of the crime wave my neighborhood was experiencing. Of course, it would be nice if we could have low crime without such controversial policies, but I personally believe such a scenario is not possible.

Edited September 16, 2013 by Max

[Wales2004]

I think it's wrong to constantly stop law abiding residents and to treat young men like criminals when they have not done anything illegal.

Bill de Blasio's son happens to be pretty big for a 15 year old and the message being sent to him and others is that they are never going to be treated with respect and dignity because they look like potential criminals and this is okay because it will make a whole lot of other people feel safer, and they should just accept it as their contribution to those who feel safer--as though this makes perfect sense.

People are focused on the policy which makes absolute sense to them but not on the application of that policy and the damage that application. The policy may sound color blind but the people enforcing it are clearly not and it's application is discriminatory in nature.

The police should try canvassing those high crime areas more frequently and focus on the known criminals instead of those who are just going to and fro.

[DRW50]

Seeing the Beltway acting as if the likes of Joe Klein, Dana Milbank, and Maureen Dowd are liberal voices cracks me up.

The media just sucks.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/obama-holds-fire-but-media-doesnt-96839.html?ml=po_r

[DRW50]

Looks like we're heading toward a government shutdown.

Beltway cheerleaders like The Fix are already trying to frame this as good for the GOP, branding the people pushing this as "cast-iron conservatives," but past leaders are saying it's not good for them at all.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/would-a-government-shutdown-really-be-all-that-bad-for-republicans-yes/279790/

As always no one in the press and most of the people in Congress do not give a flying !@#$%^&*] about the public, who will be the ones suffering for this.

[Greg's GL]

It IS wrong. And I don't believe that anyone would willingly submit to these searches "if they lived in a high crime area". That's baloney. Stopping random people on the street to question/frisk/search them for no reason is illegal. Period. I wouldn't want to live somewhere that it ain't.

[DRW50]

Holy crap. These are the people running our government.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/truly-in-lord-of-the-flies-territory

[Soapsuds]

http://www.bilerico.com/2013/09/does_this_anti-gay_federal_judge_have_a_gay_porn_p.php

[DRW50]

Chris Cilizza, shilling for the Beltway pets yet again, tries to tell us how awesome, wonderful, moving, and important Ted Cruz's ego trip blabberfest was. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/25/what-ted-cruzs-speech-accomplished/

[DRW50]

Republicans eager and giddy to shut the government down. Shocking. Remember when we used to hear about how Democrats hate America?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-cusp-of-shutdown-house-conservatives-excited-say-they-are-doing-the-right-thing/2013/09/28/2a5ab618-285e-11e3-97e6-2e07cad1b77e_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop

[juppiter]

I'm sick of hearing about it. Shut down the government already and then the Republicans will lose that bargaining chip for another 15 years like they did the last time the government shut down.

As for defaulting, unfortunately that could have permanent effects on our interest rates, but I say we go ahead and let them do that as well so they can lose that bargaining chip.

I don't want Obama to negotiate with them.