Just poking my head in to see if E^3 has any sort of insight on Tillerson termination, UK assassination, US drones over Crimea, and, well, Russia in general. Something fucky is going on.

Do any Pennsylvania peeps have thoughts on Lamb's unexpected victory? Is he really just a republican in reddish clothing and will be more likely to vote alongside the president rather than party lines? Difficult to find an objective answer because Republicans are furious at his win and Dems are triumphantly resting on their laurels, but from everything I've seen this Lamb guy looks like a scumbag; at absolute best he looks like a slightly-less-shitty blue dog. Morally opposed to abortion? Get the fuck outta here.

Ignoring the details of the election or the man, I'm just enjoying that every candidate Trump has openly campaigned for has lost their election. He's basically poison to any Republican candidate. I hope he keeps campaigning for them. He's pretty much guaranteeing their failure.

You have to remember what PA's 18th district is like: something like 99% rural and middle-class whites, many of whom are very much in the Pennsyltucky mold. The district is so red that the last couple of elections, the Democrats didn't bother running a candidate at all. The fact that ANYONE with the Democrat tag won, someone who might occasionally vote in a liberal direction, is a huge, huge victory. By typical liberal standards, Conor Lamb is probably a boot-licking fascist, But by PA #18 standards, this guy is Bernie fucking Sanders.

He is exactly the sort of candidate Dems need in order to win regions lost to Trump fever. A party with its heart in NYC and its mind in San Fran cannot impose purity tests on candidates running in red country and expect to be anything other than a multi-decadal minority party in the House. They are not going to be blessed with Roy Moores or Donald Trumps as opponents forever.



Tillerson's termination is bad for diplomacy but good for DoS morale. The recent assassinations happened because Putin is a chekist thug, which was also true for 15 years before the American voter cared---nothing has changed, situation still fucked up. The drones are unarmed surveillance drones, and they aren't in Russian airspace.

Thus spake the MA court fear monger.

In more lighthearted news, the attorneys representing Trump in the porn star case are named Stonerock and Harder.

This confirms it. We've completely left the normal universe and are now living in a postmodernist satire. Unfortunately for us, those narratives usually end with a literal bang.

Hey, if you want another Republican in Congress voting to gut government programs and laying siege to minority protections, by all means, disavow Lamb. The Democratic Party doesn't really have the luxury of ignoring all these normally Republican districts they're suddenly competitive in, not when a good few of their incumbents are in districts Trump won handily. And as Earthcubed pointed out, it's silly to be upset at the Democrats for failing to run ultra-progressive left-wing candidates in areas where those candidates would get slaughtered-- if you want to flip an entrenched Red district, it takes candidates like Lamb, centrist Democrats who know how to speak the language of disaffected Republican voters in rural areas. Without them, you can look forward to seeing the west and northeast coasts being the only swathes of blue in an otherwise solid sea of red.

I mean how objectively worse can you say Russia is compared to North Korea? Yeah they're both bads but I'm sure one is CLEARLY worse.

I think we all know which country holds the record for the most murders in other countries. Or do things like drone strikes on wedding parties not count?

In the latest American Dictatorship news, Trump/Sessions fired FBI 2nd in command, Andrew McCabe--barely a day before he was up for retirement.

This is about as crooked and dictatorial as it gets--or it would be if this was out of the ordinary these days, which it sadly is not.



This badly smacks of Nixon trying to can the people involved in investigating the problems with him and his administration. Nixon was guilty as shit, and it's more and more clear than ever that so is Trump. Whatever it is he's guilty of, it's clearly something he's desperate to bury.

What difference does it make if those democrats make all the same votes a republican would have?

Are you saying centrists would do something this crazy?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-governor-has-monday-deadline-to-sign-nations-most-restrictive-abortion-law/

Because if you say 'yes', nothing will help you. But the correct answer for the most part is 'no'.

On abortion, no, but they will vote similarly on many things, such as expanding police powers, starting wars of aggression, wreaking social safety nets, privatization of public assets, destroying public education, union busting, bailing out bankers, helping powerful corporations form monopolies, and so on. You will, undoubtedly, deny that any of this matters.

Of course, democratic party apologists don't accept that there was any difference whatsoever between Clinton and FDR, or Obama and LBJ.

Well, for one, members of your party sometimes voting with the opposition is the price you pay in a multi-party democracy. That being said, Lamb has criticised the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, ran against the Trump tax reform, openly supported labour unions, and made defending the 'entitlements' Republicans are so dead-set against a priority. Claiming Lamb and other centrist Democrats are indistinguishable from Republicans is disingenuous (and is exactly what Republicans want people to think, as evidenced by the tack the GOP took to explain why Lamb won in the first place).

Also, the Republicans can't even get their people in Congress to vote the party line, so I'm not sure we have to worry about them swaying Democrats into doing it.

Besides which, as I mentioned above, a Democrat who only votes liberal half the time is still infinitely better than anyone else capable of getting elected in PA 18. Candidates represent their demographics, and you just ain't gonna get a super progressive liberal from that area of the state.

Indeed. You're not going to get progressive, firmly left-wing elected officials in places like the Pennsylvania 18th-- it's just not going to happen, not without a lot of time and change. I think it's kind of crazy to say that if you can't get a progressive candidate whose views align 100% with yours out of a vulnerable district, it's better to just surrender that district to a Republican who will probably be even less aligned with your views. That's the kind of thinking that will doom the Democratic Party to sempiternal minority status. If the Democrats want to even be competitive-- much less win-- in those districts and states that Trump won, if they want to snag moderates and voters who lean conservative and are disillusioned with the modern GOP, they need to run candidates who can actually win those districts.

That doesn't mean choosing a centrist over a progressive, because a progressive just isn't one of the realistic choices in these areas right now. It means choosing a centrist over a Republican.

We're talking about Lamb, though, so the choice was between a Republican and a Republican in all but name.

The democratic party has long taken up the position that left wing policies are indefensible, and thus have held that their candidates should become more and more conservative. Elected democrats' voting records since the Carter regime bear this out. The democratic party bosses are ideologically republicans. The difference between them and republicans is that they aren't quite as crude and thuggish in their demeanor. They have adopted some aspects of progressive identity politics cynically while republicans fully embrace "traditional" identity politics genuinely. They are also supported more by "new money" (silicon valley for example) while the republicans are supported by "old money" (like oil companies). These differences are impressive to many, but not much to me personally...

The only thing that holds the democratic bosses back from being more republican than they are is that they fear losing votes from the minority groups who form part of their voting base. They want to fix that problem by getting conservative republicans to form their base instead. This should tell you what their actual political goals are. Or does it remain opaque to you guys?

How does supporting turning the democratic party into a second republican party make the country *less* republican?

You're being obtuse. The point is to move the general attitude more left from the far right, even if it just slightly right or left or even center of center. It's a slow climb.

As far as everyone in the US should be concerned, every R backed R is as far right as possible right now.

The 'Democrats and Republicans are both the same' argument is whiffle. It's just not true. There's common ground where more center-aligned Democrats are concerned, but if you're actually going to argue that Nancy Pelosi's views are indistinguishable from Paul Ryan's, or Chuck Schumer's views are indistinguishable from Mike Pence's? Come on. That's just silly and reductionist. One party's platform stands for opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, rejection of environmental policies, lionisation of gun rights, and the virtual exsanguination of government programs that strongly benefit vulnerable segments of society. The other party, to varying degrees, is generally the opposite of all those things.

I don't adore the Democratic Party and its leadership as it now stands. I often wish they'd been bolder, more aggressive-- and yes, more progressive-- in the years leading up to the 2016 election. But let's not go from reasonable critiques of the party to pretending they're as bad as the Republicans, because they're not.


They're backing centrist candidates in order to win districts that would otherwise be voting Republican. I don't know why this isn't connecting. Conor Lamb isn't setting the national agenda for the Democratic Party or anything. As for the Democrats pandering to 'conservative Republicans'... No.

Besides which, Conor Lamb barely won. Most recent estimates I've seen put it at 113,813 votes to 113,186. That's .2% difference. A single iota less right-wing than he was, and he would've lost. And if he votes liberal on only one single policy during his entire tenure, he will have been better than the Trump-backed Rick Saccone would've been. You can grouse about how the Democratic party at large isn't progressive enough, and I'd agree with you, but in this instance being more progressive would've lost the election, and Lamb is definitely better than the alternative.

Of course, apart from that one liberal vote, the result will be the implementation of a bunch of right wing policies with democratic party support. Victory? On the other hand, we have seen that many progressive policies are actually popular with the kinds of people voting in these kinds of districts when presented to them in the right way, so taking those policies to them with messaging tailored to their sensibilities would make it possible for different candidates with better voting habits to get in office. But of course, that is not actually what the democratic party leadership wants. They want only the kind of victories that permit them to move further to the right. Apologetics for this strategy are self defeating if you don't believe in that same goal.

It is true that there are not no differences between the republican and democratic leadership, but it is also true that there are not no similarities. Since you didn't disagree with any of the similarities I pointed out, I assume you guys acknowledge and agree with them. Are there no red lines in there on *any* of those things?

In my experience, whenever people say "this is the only way" or "there is no alternative" they are 100% certain to be wrong! The idea that the democrats are going to turn the country around with a bunch of barely scraped by victories that result in long term losses does not sound like "the only way" to me.

Nobody is arguing the specifics with you because you've utterly lost the bigger picture. A handful of progressive policies being popular in GOP districts but only when framed in a very selective way is not the same thing as getting 25% of the GOP voters in a district to vote for their enemy.

There are so many right-leaning policies that became moderate (or "moderate") during the 80's and 90's that for a good chunk of the GOP those right-leaning policies aren't right enough anymore. Tax credits for poor people, or national minimum income, both championed by people like Milton Friedman? "GUBERMENT HANDOUTS." Forcing illegal immigrants to pay a fine and start the immigration process over? "THAT'S AMNESTY, THEY NEED TO BE KICKED OUT." Supporting allies and being wary of aggressive states? "DEEP STATE." The idea that you are going to convince even 5-10% of these people---much less the 20-30% needed to win districts like PA-18---to become even slightly progressive merely by rewording some leftist talking points is nonsense.

The most reasonable* people in this voting bloc chose Trump because a) they hated/feared Clinton and b) the Democratic party platform of 2016 was the most left-leaning one they can remember. Some of them will vote for blue dogs given the right circumstances, but there is no circumstance in which they are going to vote for the Dem platform of 2016, much less a more liberal one. Not if a candidate as poor as Roy Moore loses by less than 2%.

People shouting "BUT SANDERS HAD A BETTER CHANCE AGAINST TRUMP" don't even stop to look at why it looked like that. It wasn't just because he isn't Clinton. His voting history is that of a rural, anti-Brady Bill person who supported the indefinite detention of some immigrants and vehemently opposes open borders. That's exactly the sort of person who can win a rural state, but those are red lines for a plurality of progressives.

*(The least reasonable people in this bloc are the people who roast babies on a stick in McCarthy novels, so they aren't even worth wasting any effort on)

You know that this is textbook whataboutism, right?

Like, literally, literally textbook. lol.


Hello and welcome to the board. Just so you know, I've been saying this until I was blue in the face, but all it got me is not-so-subtle accusations of being a Hillary-worshipping Democratic fangirl (or something). So, you can probably expect some of that thrown your way some time soon, fair warning.

Those people mainly have a problem with the notion that critique of the democrats should never go as far as not supporting them, no matter how bad a given democratic candidate is, and that there should not be any pressure on the democrats to field better candidates because the stars have not yet aligned or something. It's a self defeating strategy that results in the party getting worse over time, as we have seen occur.

To be fair though, who are you gonna support instead of democrats? Third party candidates that nobody pays attention to? Because the only group with a base big enough to wrestle control away from the republicans are, yes, the dems. It'd be awesome if there were good third party candidates with even as much as half the influence that the two big factions have, but there really aren't any as far as I know. The safest bet (not the only one, but the safest) is clearly the blue side, based on the not insignificant facts that they're not as dreadful as their opponents and that they actually have a chance of beating them during elections due to an already established base. The other option is building a base from the ground up for a good third party, which would be ideal, but also a very long term and impractical goal as of the current political climate.

Believe it or not, abortion has not always been a major issue in American politics. It wasn't even a major issue in American evangelical Christianity as it was considered at the time to be a "catholic issue". That is until the late 70's when a guy named Francis Schaeffer realized that with a little organization, evangelical churches could get their congregations to vote, or not vote, together, and they formed a bloc in the republican party which gave and withdrew support for republican candidates based on either one sole issue (abortion) or a small number of key issues (abortion and guns). This is part of how the republican party came to be the abortion and guns diehards we know and love today. They saw the major party closest to their viewpoint was not doing enough to advance their general set of policy preferences, so they designated a simple set of policy red lines which they demanded from the candidates. The result is that they ended up with a party whose platform they truly believe in with candidates who often deliver the things they actually want.

Funny how neo-cons are against abortion, but they don't have a problem with innocent people being slaughtered in drone strikes. Or homeless people starving to death in the streets.

Thanks for the welcome (and the warning)!


That's mostly because in a two party system, 'not supporting' one party implicitly means empowering the other. Protest votes or indignant abstentions are worthwhile if you live in a place where it doesn't really matter how you vote because the outcome is out of the hands of voters-- for example, in Russia, or in Armenia-- but when you live in a place where your vote genuinely matters and you decide to throw it away rather than vote for the party that comes closest to representing your views... Well, that just seems silly to me. Sure, in the long run it may persuade the Democratic leadership to adopt the facade of greater progressivism in hopes of getting those voters to the polls, but in the meantime, the Republicans are wreaking havoc. Just look at what the Trump administration has done in a mere year: a Supreme Court seat effectively stolen and given to a young conservative who will probably be using the Supreme Court to oppose progressive policies for decades to come, a tax overhaul that economists broadly agree will exacerbate economic inequality at a time when we need to be talking about how to ameliorate that inequality, America's reputation abroad trashed by both rhetoric and action... Not to mention the white supremacists and Islamophobes who have been emboldened in the wake of the 2016 election.

All that and we're not even halfway through his term. And I think it's at least partially because of people who decided not to turn out and vote because Clinton wasn't 100% perfect for them and by God they weren't going to vote for somebody they weren't 100% wild about, no matter who the other choice was. Put pressure on Democrats to field progressive candidates (where such candidates are feasible), sure, but I think the 2016 election demonstrates that you're playing with live ammo when you decide to risk a Republican victory rather than supporting a Democrat who's not as progressive as you'd like.


Funnier still that most of the people today branded as 'neocons' (most of them would no doubt reject the appellation) are heirs to an intellectual tradition that started on the left rather than on the right. Hell, Senator Scoop Jackson-- who provided the template for a neoconservative foreign policy and for whom many of today's prominent 'neocons' like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle worked before they achieved prominence-- was a civil rights-defending, social welfare-supporting Democrat.

I don't wholly subscribe to accelerationism, but there is something to be said for a poor right-wing president who's also too incompetent to change public opinion or get anything done, potentially shocking the Democratic party into putting up a more progressive candidate. I mean, that's the only reason an embarrassment like Trump was elected in the first place, what's to say it won't happen again on the opposite side of the aisle? And this time, that candidate would actually be competent enough to get shit done.

McMaster leaving isn't the important part of that story.

First, Trump announced his plan to execute drug dealers. Now idiot Republicans in Ohio want to give doctors who perform abortions the death penalty. This is it -- this country has officially gone full-on fascist, and I'm not being hyperbolic.

NPR article

Because of how caucusing works, this isn't going to happen. A guy from a majority Republican area will generally side with the Democrats.


Reminder, most of the media (yes, including Fox) are effectively multinational-mercantilists who have a vested interest in pushing the narrative of "OMFG, IT'S CHAOS!!!" because the neoliberal/neoconservative globalist status quo directly benefits them. If you look at what Trump is actually done, it's a hell of a lot.


Protip: fascism is not "anything I don't agree with".

Pro-tip: using intimidation and threats of force to discourage people from exercising basic human rights is fascism.

The rule of law in general is intimidation and threats of force. "Follow the rules, or dudes with weapons will take your property, your freedom, or your life" -- that's the basis for every code of law ever. You're either claiming that dealing drugs and performing abortions are basic human rights (an absurd statement -- even if I'm pro-abortion, and I think most right-wing groups are being short-sighted by trying to ban it since the demographics being aborted are largely those that would vote against them in the future, calling it a "basic right" is insane), or you're claiming that everything that isn't anarchy is fascism, in which case, please, bring on the fascism!

Oh my fucking god.

Am I wrong? There's certainly a racial and socioeconomic skew to both abortion and voting patterns.

You've swapped your dog whistle for a referee whistle. If more cryptos would wear their cipher on their sleeve, the world would be in much better condition. Is this a sign of things to come? Perhaps.

So from the bottom of my heart: thank you.