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US PoliEra 2018 |OT| Welcome to the Resistance, the only funded organization in D.C.

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Ether_Snake

Ether_Snake

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
11,306
Aaron said:
Nunes:

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"What memo?"
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How he shoved that pad away killed me.

Btw CNN has been on this memo thing today nonstop, like not even a minute on anything else.
 
aspiegamer

aspiegamer

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,491
ZzzzzzZzzzZzz...
I don't want to wait until tomorrow for this. Christ. Get on with it. The situation hasn't actually changed the past few days around the memo. It's going to be a clusterfuck regardless. In fact had they just put it out a few days ago we wouldn't have had all this time for the people surrounding it to look dumber. It was always obvious it was being used to try to mess with the Russia investigation, but it's actual news and has been discussed now. It's entirely out in the open for people to use in context. Were it released the story would mostly be it proper.

At this point I'm almost rooting for a Deep State. Someone has to actually take care of the country, and the President and his congress have demonstrated they can't be bothered to. If every other President before now has manged just fine through horrible diplomatic, domestic and economic disasters without secret forces at work, imagine how bad things have to be for "them" to actually feel obligated to get involved.

Right, and shutdown in 1 week, everyone! Might as well be a year away at our current pace.
Double 0 said:
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What. The. Fuck.
 
Chae3001

Chae3001

Member
Oct 27, 2017
597
Zolo said:
At worst, all it seems to do is try to paint the same narrative about FISA abuse which is something that's already come along and gone through as a scandal.
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All they ever had were straws. Unfortunately, mix straw with mud from the propagandists at Fox, and you get bricks to throw at the people trying to do their job, while some other bastard is trying to sneak in the back and ruin things.

Dubbedinenglish said:
By tomorrow we'll find out the memo never existed
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If only they would be so bold. The memo has been pushed so hard, they have no choice but to go through with it, as ill advised as it is. All the White House has left is distractions and propaganda.

I don't know if this is their final gambit to clear the way to firing Mueller, but it has to be close to it.
 

RupertM

Banned
Nov 18, 2017
1,482
Jeez just release it and end the misery. This is the most amount of drama and news coverage devoted to a memo that everyone hates and is not even true probably.

Just release it and stop this nonsense.
 
Stinkles

Stinkles

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
20,459
Abstrusity said:
He harassed reporters who were asking about negative stories, with regards to allegations of domestic abuse and some improprieties with his hedge fund.

He never bodyslammed them, but then Politifact isn't looking for Grimm or Gianforte as a republican. I don't know the Republican on their list, though.
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THAT makes more sense, because as a repub, he's pretty darned moderate.
 

Deleted member 171

Oct 25, 2017
19,888
The memo was the friends we made along the way.
 
skullmuffins

skullmuffins

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,456
When the Nunes memo comes out and it's a flop, can networks stop inviting on all the House GOP cranks that hyped it up to infinity and insisted it would result in mass firings and arrests? Thinking of you, Gaetz. Why the fuck do we have a congressman going on MSNBC and Infowars on the same day.
 
chainlinkspiral

chainlinkspiral

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,615

I very much expect the new narrative to be "Our Nunes Memo was so good, so truthful, but having listened to legal counsel, gotten input from the FBI and other partners, we took out all the awesome stuff that totally would've vindicated us. We're still going to fire Rosenstein anyways, though, maybe, or say he resigned, because that was always the plan."
 
JayC3

JayC3

bork bork
Administrator
Oct 25, 2017
3,861
Poodlestrike said:
Oooh, housing policy and rural towns, that's always a fun discussion.

First off, the death of rural towns: it's inevitable, and our focus should be on facilitating their death and easing the fallout rather than trying to stop it. Trade generates wealth (which is good, because it means that things get better on net for everybody), the amount of trade scales with the number of people, big cities have more people than small towns, small towns will always be out-competed by big cities; q.e.d. This is exacerbated as the value of a square mile is decreasing due to improved technology. Miniaturization, automation, and interconnectivity means that there's just less need for huge amounts of space in all industries, which removed their last competitive edge. So, there's no reason to live there aside from existing relationships (also rapidly disappearing due to population decline), base stubbornness (not really a great reason to do anything), and culture warz. As the culture of these small towns is, on average, illiberal bordering on fascistic, it's clearly in the common good to kill them faster rather than slower so as to end the culture war quickly. The best way to do that is to expand housing options and transportation in big cities, as well as defraying the economic hit of moving by improving our social safety nets across the board.

Now, housing. This discussion started off with homelessness, so I thought I'd address that quickly, since the rest of this post won't have much to do with it. Chronic homelessness is not something you can solve with market forces. Definitionally, these people are cut out of the market due to lack of resources. So they do need government assistance, so they can get their feet under them and enter the market and thereby benefit from the non-zero-sum nature of trade. Think of it like kickstarting an engine. We know that giving them housing works, so let's just... do that.

For everyone else, the big problem is cost. People really want to live where their jobs are, which means living in the densest parts of the cities, which means living in the most expensive part of the cities because there's never enough housing to go around. We can alleviate these pressures in two ways: the first, by making the densest parts of the cities even denser. More housing = lower cost for housing, tautologically. Sometimes, liberal activists get caught up in the idea that most new housing is high-cost housing, which is true, but the very existence of any new housing is going to drive down rents across the board. The best way to do this is to ban stuff like maximum building height zoning restrictions on a national level. Local communities are too mired in NIMBY-ism. Stuff you have to do on the local level, like streamlining the permitting process, is going to be more of a slog, but growing YIMBY movements have me encouraged it's doable.

The second way we reduce housing costs is by expanding the definition of "living near their jobs" by improving public transportation. Everybody wants to live in the city center, but we can make city centers bigger. Better bus systems, subway and other rail lines between housing hubs and downtown, high-speed rail out to suburbs and exurbs, all of these things basically serve to bring everybody closer to the beating heart of the city by shortening travel time to said heart. The big problem there is the same big problem facing all infrastructural projects in the US, namely, absurd construction costs. For whatever reason, it's hugely more expensive to build stuff here than it is elsewhere, and when we do get it, the quality isn't even up to par. Solving that is going to require some serious structural changes to how we do contracting work with construction companies, which unfortunately may end up stepping on some labor group's toes.

So, we've made it easier for people to live in cities. Now let's talk about getting them there. People are reluctant to move for a number of reasons, but let's set aside stubbornness, sentimentality, and general shittiness for a second because that's hard to fix in any kind of short-term and we may just have to force the issue. After all that, the big problem is cost. Moving is expensive, and as the median wealth in America drops, economic and physical mobility has gone down. This is bad for a whole lot of reasons, both cultural and economic. So, how do we fix that? We give people benefits and the guarantee of economic stability wherever they go. Universal health care kills the notorious "need to keep my shitty job in this shitty backwater to keep my health care" dilemma, and a combination UBI and negative income tax means they'll be able to feed and house themselves while making the move. It doesn't even have to be a ton of money. UBI in this case can be a dirt-simple poverty reduction amount - say, $6000 per year. $500 a month isn't a lot, but it's enough to cover most of the (now lower) rent, and a negative income tax means they'll get even more while they're looking for work. My personal preference is that the combined amount would match the minimum wage, but that may be a hard sell. It'd be so cool to eliminate the coercive nature of the labor market, though.

TLDR: Small towns shitty, we should expand the housing market in big cities and provide a meaningful social safety net so people can get the hell out of 'em and also just give housing to people trapped in chronic homelessness.
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I know this is late, but thanks for this post. Catching up on the thread earlier was maddening. Felt like people kept talking past each other and responding to the most extreme posts even though I'm sure that everyone here is in favor of expanding the social safety net.

And now back to memo-gate eatingpopcorn.gif
 
Paches

Paches

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,646
At least John "Wu-Tang" Heilemann (and hopefully more of these DC pundits) has finally spoken the truth on Ryan and said he is completely complicit and in fact aiding the release of this memo. I think a lot of people think this is somehow out of Ryan's orbit when this has been directly approved by him. He is literally just as bad as Nunes.
 
chainlinkspiral

chainlinkspiral

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,615
Paches said:
At least John "Wu-Tang" Heilemann (and hopefully more of these DC pundits) has finally spoken the truth on Ryan and said he is completely complicit and in fact aiding the release of this memo. I think a lot of people think this is somehow out of Ryan's orbit when this has been directly approved by him. He is literally just as bad as Nunes.
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He's the one who allowed Nunes to get the requested documents from the FBI... of which he could only get a small fraction of, and cherry-picked from to sustain his narrative.
 
Wrighteous86

Wrighteous86

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,168
Chicago
chainlinkspiral said:

Maggie in with a sic burn before the droppo.
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Literally all of her comments these days feel like they could go either way, and I don't know if it's intentional so she can stand by it no matter what, or unintentional because she's completely lacking in self-awareness of her public persona.

Are the people named in the memo more than afraid because it will be bad for them? Or are the people who have been pushing the memo more than afraid because they are positive it will be a dud?

She's a paid writer, yes? How is clarity so difficult for her? Her vague snide comments are increasingly common and increasingly annoying.
 

Vixdean

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,855
At this point, it would be better for them to not release the memo at all citing national security concerns, and instead just continue harping about how damning it was. Kind of like a political unobtanium.
 
JayC3

JayC3

bork bork
Administrator
Oct 25, 2017
3,861
Linkura said:
Who thinks this?
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I think it's the bias of media reporters to talk about the Nunes memo without adding the context that Ryan is abetting and supporting Nunes in doing this. It goes back to the "earnest wonk" portrayal he's gotten in the media even though he's been proposing crazy tea party wishlists in his budgets for years that don't hold up to scrutiny.
 
Paches

Paches

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,646
Linkura said:
Who thinks this?
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It feels like he isn't taking the heat he should on cable.

Maybe my problem is watching cable in the first place.

JayC3 said:
I think it's the bias of media reporters to talk about the Nunes memo without adding the context that Ryan is abetting and supporting Nunes in doing this. It goes back to the "earnest wonk" portrayal he's gotten in the media even though he's been proposing crazy tea party wishlists in his budgets for years that don't hold up to scrutiny.
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This encapsulates my thoughts pretty well.
 
chainlinkspiral

chainlinkspiral

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,615
studyguy said:

what is today even.
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The Nunes Memo, from what folk can make of it out of the aether. Good Guy Devin Nunes does everything in his power to show how Good Guy Carter Page totally got ensnared by the Deep State over a Four Year Period and entrapped The Whole Transition Team in his Various Treasons. Forgive my unnecessary use of Dramatic Capitalization to underscore the absurd, plz.

I think a lot of folk will be laughing at, and not with, its many revelations.
 
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