American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

Trans person columnist:
The difference between a blue state and a red state is safety that could vanish any moment beginning in January, when we might be swallowed in a wave of quiet blood flowing across my country. My people’s forgotten blood. It will rest not on the hands of those who hate my kind, but on the hands of those who ignore…
https://medium.com/prismnpen/are-trans- ... c5cc71cf71

[Tero]

Trump cannot charge Hunter. Therefore he must charge...Joe. As VP. Because the VP does not have immunity.

Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.

President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.

Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.

https://news.yahoo.com/haven-t-seen-par ... 00296.html

[Sean Hayden]

“Extraordinary”!

[Sean Hayden]

“As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to protect and defend America’s working people, the Wage and Hour Division has recovered more than $1 billion in back wages and damages—achieving both justice and economic relief for more than 615,000 workers,” said Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su. “Thanks to the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, this department has been focused on protecting those workers who need us most—the hotel cleaners, home care aides, meatpackers and hundreds of thousands more. And by ensuring that employers who violate the law are held to account, we are deterring businesses from exploiting workers in the future. I am so proud to say that we are putting money back in workers’ pockets and signaling to bad actors that they won’t get away with wage theft and illegal child labor on our watch.”

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20241022-0

[JimC]

The Wage and Hour Division will no doubt be terminated with extreme prejudice by the new Trump administration. How dare they interfere with an employer's right to do what the fuck they want to their workers!

[Brian Peacock]

“As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to protect and defend America’s working people, the Wage and Hour Division has recovered more than $1 billion in back wages and damages—achieving both justice and economic relief for more than 615,000 workers,” said Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su. “Thanks to the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, this department has been focused on protecting those workers who need us most—the hotel cleaners, home care aides, meatpackers and hundreds of thousands more. And by ensuring that employers who violate the law are held to account, we are deterring businesses from exploiting workers in the future. I am so proud to say that we are putting money back in workers’ pockets and signaling to bad actors that they won’t get away with wage theft and illegal child labor on our watch.”

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20241022-0

So the state is subsidising the wage costs of bad employers?

Sounds like communism to me!

[Tero]

NYT morning letter:

Disenchanted Democrats
For one, the story doesn’t apply to the battlegrounds, where turnout was much higher. In all seven battleground states, Trump won more votes than Biden did in 2020.

More important, it is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her.

How is that possible? The low turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups — especially nonwhite voters — was a reflection of lower support for Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly backed Harris or even made the leap to Trump.

Hands folding away an American flag.
Packing up after a Democratic election-watch party. Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times
During the campaign, The New York Times and Siena College polled many of these voters. After the election, we analyzed election records to see who did and didn’t vote. The results suggest that higher turnout wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Harris.

That may be surprising. It’s not usually how people think about turnout. Typically, turnout and party-switching are imagined as independent. After all, millions of voters are all but sure to vote for one party, and the only question is whether they’ll vote. In lower-turnout midterms and special elections, turnout can be the whole ballgame.

But in a presidential election, turnout and persuasion often go hand in hand. The voters who may or may not show up are different from the rest of the electorate. They’re less ideological. They’re less likely to be partisans, even if they’re registered with a party. They’re less likely to have deep views on the issues. They don’t get their news from traditional media.

Throughout the race, polls found that Trump’s strength was concentrated among these voters. Many were registered Democrats or Biden voters four years ago. But they weren’t acting like Democrats in 2024. They were more concerned by pocketbook issues than democracy or abortion rights. If they decided to vote, many said they would back Trump.

(flipflopping voters in Las Vegas)
But this lower Democratic turnout would explain only about one-third of the decline in Democratic support in Clark County, even if one assumed that all Democrats were Harris voters. The remaining two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped his way.

Even that back-of-the-envelope calculation probably overestimates the role of turnout. Our polling data suggests that many of these nonvoting Democrats were no lock for Harris. In Times/Siena data for Clark County, Harris led registered Democrats who voted in 2024, 88 percent to 8 percent. But she had a much narrower lead, 71 percent to 23 percent, among the registered Democrats who stayed home.

There’s no equivalent pattern of a drop in support for Trump among Republicans who stayed home. Indeed, many high-turnout Republicans are highly engaged, college-educated “Never Trump” voters who have helped Democrats in special and midterm elections.

In Las Vegas and elsewhere, our data suggests that most voters who turned out in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 voted for Biden in 2020 — but about half of them, and maybe even a slight majority, appear to have backed Trump this year. Regardless, there’s no reason to believe that they would have backed Harris by a wide margin, let alone the kind of margin that would have made a difference in the election.

[Tero]

The people embarrassed to get gov't help.
(See below)

“They’re not going to bail me out,” Nelson said. “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”

It was an epic rant, in large part because the actor didn’t seem to recognize the flaw in his observation. Taxpayers helped him out by paying for his food stamps and welfare, but in Nelson’s mind, no one helped him out. As far as he’s concerned, food stamps and welfare just don’t count.

[Tero]

The people embarrassed to get gov't help.
Link.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/07/0 ... n-problem/

[Sean Hayden]

Everyone likes to tell their "I've been on food stamps story". I have also. I used to get free lunches before it was the norm, and you still had to present your broke as fuck card to get it. But that's bullshit. That was my dad's life, and I didn't always live with him. My mother did better, and we were able to move up.

A lot of times--not always--that's the difference.

Yeah, you used food stamps. And they obviously helped you when you needed it. But how about your mom, your grandma, and her mother, were they all on food stamps? This is how I approach the conversation with these kinds of Republicans, and they do tend to understand it when it's put this way. Many of us experience rough patches, but it's a whole different world when your lights are out, and you can't call anyone for help because their lights are out too!

[Sean Hayden]

“As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to protect and defend America’s working people, the Wage and Hour Division has recovered more than $1 billion in back wages and damages—achieving both justice and economic relief for more than 615,000 workers,” said Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su. “Thanks to the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, this department has been focused on protecting those workers who need us most—the hotel cleaners, home care aides, meatpackers and hundreds of thousands more. And by ensuring that employers who violate the law are held to account, we are deterring businesses from exploiting workers in the future. I am so proud to say that we are putting money back in workers’ pockets and signaling to bad actors that they won’t get away with wage theft and illegal child labor on our watch.”

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20241022-0

So the state is subsidising the wage costs of bad employers?

Sounds like communism to me!

[Sean Hayden]

The Wage and Hour Division will no doubt be terminated with extreme prejudice by the new Trump administration. How dare they interfere with an employer's right to do what the fuck they want to their workers!

Right. Regulations are always being threatened, and that's if we've been lucky enough to get them at all! I just read an article about Texas farmers who believe they lost animals to PFAS --"forever chemicals"-- from the use of biosolid based fertilizers. The fertilizers have been used for years, but only recently are authorities talking about the need to test them for PFAS. At first, I was skeptical after reading about farmers in Texas. The amounts of PFAS seemed really small—measured in parts per trillion (ppt). But now I’m seeing that farms in other states have had to stop operations because unsafe levels of these chemicals were found in their beef. Unfortunately, biosolid fertilizers became widely used before anyone bothered with standardized regulations for testing them for these chemicals. Will we ever get the regulations now?

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/02 ... ertilizer/
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/12414734 ... f-farmland

I'm going get my Teflon arteries after all!

[Tero]

Dan davidson in Quora thinks a good portion of the right is not racist

Fast forward to today: we don't have slavery, we don't have Jim Crow, but we still have an awful lot of black people dying by the hands of police. The police say the acts were self-defense, and most white Americans believe them- until the videos start popping up.

Of course, the videos are not enough to convince everyone. After 400 odd years of cultural identity, Americans have been programmed to believe the now subtle cues of white superiority, black crime, and that are identity as Americans is defined much more by our European ancestors than our Native American, African, Asian, and many other ancestors. Meanwhile, modern Europeans stare in horror at American politics. The thing you all need to know is that racism, and to a lesser extent, classism, are built into the very fabric of American identity. There still exists a coalition of old-thinking, religiously justified Southerners who in truth do not control politics, but do have a very strong hand in defining conservatism in modern America. Many conservatives are not racist, not even latently racist as some liberals are, but they must work with a coalition of some of the most backward-thinking people we have. Ever since the Constitutional Convention the Dixie coalition has had enormous influence on the politics in this country. It's not an accident that four of our original five presidents were slave-owners, and the one who wasn't is largely ignored in US history nowadays.

https://www.quora.com/Why-have-American ... -the-right

I am not completley in agreement about the South. It is pretty much all but the coasts that are deep right now.

[Tero]

Yang and her team have created a dynamic model that was able to predict the polarization of the parties and has been tested against 150 years-worth of data. The model, which was detailed in the SIAM Review, shows that the polarization is not, as one might think because Americans are taking more extreme views but because the parties are using political strategy to gain votes.

“It’s intuitive to think the parties are drifting because voters are holding more extreme views on policies and disagreeing with each other more,” Yang said. “It feels true because we see a lot of antipathy in the news and social media but the true picture of polarization among the population is actually a lot more nuanced than people think.”

.... created a model that works a little differently. They took all of those factors into account along with 150 years-worth of U.S. Congressional voting data from the American Nation Election Study. They then compiled all of this information using complex mathematical formulas and came out with something that explains why politicians are becoming more polarized.

Yang’s model is one of the first steps in understanding what is happening in American politics. With information like this, we might be able to explain why parties are losing votes when they try to move to the center. The reason most likely has to do with political theater. As a party softens their position they become open to attack from the opposition. The result is that the other side looks tough and resolute in their beliefs and the softening side looks weak and appears to be pandering to get votes. The result is the creation of an “us or them” feeling to American politics.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinander ... fographic/

https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/19M1254246

[Tero]

Some links to her works
https://www.vcyang.com/