BC POLITICS
Saved by @jacobhtml

1/Politics thread time.

To me, the most important aspect of the 2018 midterms wasn't even about partisan control, but about democracy and voting rights. That's the real battle.

 2/The good news: It's now an issue that everyone's talking about, and that everyone cares about.

https://t.co/ipQ7Y0JCnG
3/More good news: Florida's proposition to give felons voting rights won. But it didn't just win - it won with substantial support from Republican voters.

That suggests there is still SOME grassroots support for democracy that transcends partisanship.

https://t.co/jHHieSkzTg
4/Yet more good news: Michigan made it easier to vote. Again, by plebiscite, showing broad support for voting rights as an issue.

https://t.co/ffEwTP2SPq
5/OK, now the bad news.

We seem to have accepted electoral dysfunction in Florida as a permanent thing. The 2000 election has never really ended.

https://t.co/auFaCR7WvH
6/Even worse news: What Brian Kemp did in Georgia was REALLY bad.

https://t.co/Bed8VRpopn
7/Kemp's success at engineering a victory for himself, through voter roll purges and other techniques of vote suppression, bodes ill for future elections, especially presidential elections.

The big worry is that it functioned as a trial balloon.
8/The worst news, of course, is Trump's continued lies about illegal votes - basically de-legitimizing democracy itself in the eyes of his base.

https://t.co/qcPP0wGGDR
9/The struggle over voting rights is important not just because democracy itself is important, but also because it tells us something about the future of race and partisanship in America.
10/After the 2012 election, the GOP had a big debate about whether to reach out to Hispanic voters or take a hard anti-immigration line - which would effectively represent a strategy of using xenophobia to try to win a bigger share of the white vote.
11/That debate was resolved when Trump won the 2015 primary.

The GOP abandoned hope of winning over nonwhite voters, and went with the "Sailer Strategy": https://t.co/jBH0K4JUv4 …
12/But since whites are a shrinking % of the electorate, the Sailer Strategy implicitly requires increasing vote suppression, gerrymandering, etc. to reduce the electoral power of nonwhite voters.
13/It was clear from the moment Trump beat Rubio and Jeb that electioneering would be increasingly important for the GOP electoral strategy going forward.

Which is why voting rights have become such a central issue.
14/Therefore, the voting rights issue isn't just about democracy.

It's about breaking the Sailer Strategy, and putting to bed the idea that electioneering can make nonwhite voters disappear.
15/Of course, the Sailer Strategy will probably be broken in time anyway by the desertion of Millennial and Gen Z white voters, simply because Trumpism is so horrible.

https://t.co/p3vGgC3A1D
16/But ensuring voting rights for all is the most important thing we can do to prevent our country from degenerating into a faux-democratic hell of ethnic bloc voting, racial division, spiraling distrust, and dirty electoral tricks.

(end)

More from Noah Smith

Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/Here is a thread about climate change that's going to make a lot of people mad.

Basically, America, on its own, has a LOT power to stop climate change than almost anyone admits.

2/China now emits far more CO2 than the U.S. It emits almost as much as Europe and the U.S. combined.


3/In fact, even this huge disparity dramatically understates the degree to which China is in the driver's seat of climate change.

China, being still much poorer than us, has much more room to grow its economy. Hence, the emissions gap will only grow larger.


4/This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: The battle to halt climate change will be won or lost in China.

America's power - and thus, the power of American politicians, activists, businesses, etc. - to save the planet from climate catastrophe is very marginal.

5/This is just a fact. But it's an uncomfortable one for a people like Americans who are used to thinking that the world lives or dies at their command.

Thus, I see many Americans desperately trying to preserve the illusion of control with respect to climate change.
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Met a Brazilian-American Lyft driver from San Diego who passionately attacked the racism of Republicans, then switched to passionately defending Bolsonaro.

If I were Thomas Friedman, I could tell you what this means.

Met a Haitian-American in a restaurant who said he'd always vote for Democrats because of the immigration issue, but that he has conservative beliefs too. "I don't want to pay for someone's abortion!", he declared.

Met a Latino Lyft driver from San Jose who said that while he was liberal, California was getting too liberal for him and he was considering moving to San Antonio.

Again, not being Tom Friedman, I am unable to offer any commentary on the political and policy implications of these conversations.

I guess my only thought is that political opinions are pretty complex and multidimensional, out there in the real world.

(end)
POLITICS
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Very interesting new report about how America's economic geography has changed since the great recession: https://t.co/l3YE4WzgKx

Short version: Places with lots of skilled workers are doing great, other places aren't. But more people are moving to the former, which is good.

And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.


Rural America continues to languish.
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We need 3 million vaccinations a day \U0001f407
We need 3 million vacc...
@Noahpinion
1/Alright, gather round, friends, and let me tell you the story of 1930s Japan, and how it's a cautionary tale for 2020s

2/Everyone knows that Japan became militarist, fascist, and (even more) expansionist in the 30s.

But what few people know is that this followed 6 years of coup attempts by EVEN MORE militarist/fascist/expansionist lunatics.

So let's review that history.


3/The first coup attempt was the March Incident in 1931.

Basically, some right-wing army officers planned to stage a riot to provoke martial law, and install a military dictator.

It failed when they couldn't get enough people to riot.


4/The coup plotters weren't really punished, so they just tried again a few months later. Some of their co-conspirators ratted them out and they failed again.

But AGAIN THEY WEREN'T PUNISHED! People defended them, saying they were simply too patriotic. 🤡


5/These coup plotters wanted the following:

1. A military dictator
2. Aggressive military action against Japan's rivals (i.e. every other country)
3. Increased colonial expansionism
4. Some mumbo-jumbo about cultural purity and economic egalitarianism
HISTORY
Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!
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Palmer Report
Palmer Report
@PalmerReport
That new attack piece about Seth Abramson is full of easily debunked false claims. Whenever the mainstream media gets annoyed at an indie pundit like Seth, it just publishes a bunch of bullshit about him, and most people mistakenly believe it. They've done the same thing to me.

The sad part is that when the author of that piece tried to smear a bunch of mainstream media journalists for daring to compare notes with him, they all responded by lying and said they've never compared notes with him. Even though Abramson has proof that they have.

This is the EXACT same strategy that certain mainstream media outlets used against me in 2017-2018. First they lied about me. Then they attacked my mainstream media associates for associating with a "fake news" pundit like me. Then some in the media felt compelled to disown me.

Sadly, it didn't matter that I had overwhelming proof that everything said about me in those attack pieces was false. When you defend yourself, no matter how factually, the average observer merely decides you're being "defensive" and therefore guilty as charged.

Ask yourself why the mainstream media is choosing now to dishonestly attack Abramson. The media's ratings are way down now that Trump is gone. Abramson presumably still has his entire niche audience intact. So the media gets jealous and takes it out on him.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Alexandria Ocasio-Cort...
@Ocasio2018
All the challenges to Leader Pelosi are coming from her right, in an apparent effort to make the party even more conservative and bent toward corporate interests.

Hard pass. So long as Leader Pelosi remains the most progressive candidate for Speaker, she can count on my support.


I agree that our party should, and must, evolve our leadership.

But changed leadership should reflect an actual, evolved mission; namely, an increased commitment to the middle + working class electorate that put us here.

Otherwise it’s a just new figure with the same problems.

I hope that we can move swiftly to conclude this discussion about party positions, so that we can spend more time discussing party priorities: voting rights, healthcare, wages, climate change, housing, cannabis legalization, good jobs, etc.
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Christina Warren
Christina Warren
@film_girl
A brief thread on Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, the crazy con man who is now claiming to have hacked into the Georgia voting machines in Fulton County. 90s kids and tech aficionados might remember Jovan as the inventor of the CueCat, the dumbest gadget of all time.

Also, for anyone who wants to claim that Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (not his given name, but one he changed legally after the CueCat debacle) invented QR Codes: he did not. Like that other right-wing crazy man who claimed to have invented email, Jovan didn’t invent QR Codes.

He did invent the CueCat, a product that somehow raised $185 million dollars for a tethered barcode scanner for magazines and newspapers, so you could get ads from your ads. As I said, the dumbest product of all time. Good backup barcode scanners after they were hacked, however

Oh, that’s another thing. When CueCat was a thing, its systems were hacked. I guess that’s what makes Jovan a security expert. His bankrupt company from 20 years ago was hacked and widely mocked. He’s a genius.

In recent years, Jovan pivoted to being a treasure hunter who was featured on and widely mocked on Curse of Oak Island, because the man is insane.
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BrianMier
BrianMier
@BrianMteleSUR
Congratulations to Jacobin for, the day after Lula's defense team filed it's 2nd motion to dismiss due to illegal US involvement in Lava Jato, its timid reference to the US DOJ partnership. This relationship has been public knowledge for over 5 years but better late than never.


When William Barr, from the US DOJ, responded to the 13 democrat's congressional inquiry into US involvement in in Lava Jato last year, he responded that they have been posting information about this partnership on their website since 2016 and linked this.
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal
Rep. Pramila Jayapal
@RepJayapal
We promised people that if we won the Senate, we would send out $2,000 survival checks. They delivered us to victory—and now we MUST deliver.

“Targeting” checks to a smaller group fails to do that. People need help like never before, and we must put money in their pockets.

“Targeting” checks isn’t just bad for people, it’s bad policy too! It’s not humane, it's not smart, it’s not effective, and it’s not even fiscally responsible. Not to mention that it doesn't meet the scale of this crisis.

Help me spread the word about 4 obvious reasons why:

1⃣The survival checks often use 2019 tax data to measure someone’s income.

Millions lost their jobs in 2020 due to COVID—that’s the whole point of this relief!—and therefore their income from 1 or 2 years ago is no longer accurate. They need help now and we must provide it.

Even if someone isn’t one of the nearly 1 million additional people losing their job EVERY single week, they likely lost hours and therefore had their overall income significantly reduced.

By “targeting,” we cut out people who are desperately in need of help.

2⃣The data from people who filed for unemployment shows that more than 20% of those earning between $50k and $70k were still food insecure.

That's up 16% from 2019—and it's why food banks have such long lines. We need to put money in their pockets so they can feed their family.
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