Voting disparity

Don’t kid yourself. She is reviled by many people in all groups.

Interesting question. I bet there are a number of reasons, maybe better than the one that comes to my mind, but I will venture this:

FOX News and all the talk radio. The viewers/listeners are predominantly older, white males. And FOX, Rush, Savage, and all those dicks are the primary Clinton hatemongers.

Ooo…here’s an article I found after I decided to double-check the demographics.

It finds that FOX news is actually more “monochromatically white” than the Republican Party, and the average viewer is 68. It concludes that “Fox News isn’t a television network. It is a retirement home/echo chamber for old white conservatives,” and that FOX is actually dying of old age since younger viewers aren’t going there for their news.

Fox News Is Literally Dying Of Old Age As Younger Viewers Refuse To Watch Fox

nittany ram wrote:

White males have always had the fortune of being the most privileged group. Now they are starting to feel put-upon because that privilege is being challenged more and more. But this oppression isn’t oppression at all. What they are feeling is some discomfort at losing a little bit of their privilege. As someone recently said, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”.

Anyway, a woman running for the most powerful position in the world only feeds into all that.

I agree with all of that, and that quote is excellent.

To me, however, one huge problem with the Democratic “fix” for this is the concept of “diversifying” the privileged. I think we need to get rid of that privilege, period. As in, instead of making sure CEOs and the rich and powerful “reflect America,” or even that the middle class does, I think it’s self-evident that getting rid of classes and hierarchies period is a much, much better route to social justice. End economic apartheid (capitalism), and the other apartheids and the funding for them virtually disappears.

Basically, if we end the vertical gaps, flatten the pyramid, racial, gender, sexuality divisions all but vanish. We still work on those. We still fight for civil rights and social equality. But if we get rid of class divisions, we get rid of the engine for those divisions.

And, as a side benefit? If we tackle it that way, there is no longer any reason for whites and POCs to be pitted against one another. There isn’t anyone with the power or wealth or privilege to do this in the first place.

I dunno why so many white men loathe Hillary,
but they are not alone. Lots of groups loathe Hillary.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/the_people_who_hate_hillary_clinton_the_most.html
…
…….“I think that Hillary Clinton is a sociopath, so I think that her main interest is in her pocketbook, and I think that’s obvious from looking at the Clinton Foundation,” says Uday Sachdeva, a 22-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia who is about to start medical school…

…Butcher says of Obama. “He believes the opposite of what I do on almost every issue.” All the same, he says, “If I met Barack Obama on the street, there’s a good chance I’d say he’s a decent guy. I don’t get that feeling from Hillary Clinton. I don’t feel like she’s a likable person at all. At all. I think she feels like she’s above the law, and she’s above us peasants.”

…
….It could be that the reasons people give for disliking Clinton have changed simply because she herself has changed. She entered the White House as a brashly self-confident liberal. Early on, some of the president’s advisers sought to undermine her plans for health care reform because they were thought to be insufficiently business-friendly; in response, Carl Bernstein, one of her biographers, quotes her snapping at her husband, “You didn’t get elected to do Wall Street economics.” Then, after the epic repudiation of the 1994 midterms, in which Republicans won a House majority for the first time since 1952, she overcorrected—becoming too cautious, too compromising, too solicitous of entrenched interests. As she would say during her 2000 Senate campaign, “I now come from the school of small steps.”

In other words, people hated Hillary Clinton for being one sort of person, and in response to that she became another sort of person, who people hated for different reasons. But this doesn’t explain why the emotional tenor of the hatred seems so consistent, even as the rationale for it has turned inside out. Perhaps that’s because anti-Hillary animus is only partly about what she does. It’s also driven by some ineffable quality of charisma, or the lack of it….
…see link

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by wv.

Billy_T wrote:

In

There are exceptions, but women in the media and in politics simply can’t get away with what the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Cruzes and Trumps do on a daily basis: angrily spew venom and hatred toward people and things they don’t like. They can’t, in general, do this, primarily because it screws with our (at least unconscious) view of how women should act in public — or private.

All of that said . . . . both choices are rotten.

==============
All i know is Hillary is going to win.
And she will be the most unpopular winner I can remember.
And she will continue the War against the Poor.

w
v

The Hillary Haters
6k
Few figures in American political life have inspired such deep and decades-long contempt. But why?
By Michelle Goldberg
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/the_people_who_hate_hillary_clinton_the_most.html

“…There are certainly people who don’t like Clinton because they don’t like her record and her proposals. Marcella Aburdene, a 31-year-old market researcher in Washington, D.C., has a Palestinian father and is horrified by what she sees as Clinton’s hawkishness and allegiance to Israel. “She is disingenuous and she lies blatantly, but that’s what a lot of politicians do,” Aburdene says. “It’s definitely more of a policy issue for me.” She plans to vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in November….

No matter who wins, half of this country is going to be pissed. I mean seriously out-of-their-minds pissed. It could be pretty ugly.

I think Hillary will win because at the end of the day, she’s safer.

But her negatives are high, and we are going to hear nothing but how crooked she is, and if there are further revelations about her emails, or another terrorist attack or two…. I can’t say I have much confidence. Just that – as things stand right now – election held today – she would narrowly win.

I feel PA’s pain being in a swing state. I tell you, though, the clincher for me is the SCOTUS appointments. I can’t see Ginsburg lasting another 4 years, and the other two 79/80 year-olds may also go. That could be up to three seats flipped from moderate/liberal to conservative, making the SC 7-2 conservative for the next 25 years. That would put an END to the efforts at reform because there is no way we could get rid of corporate personhood or anything else affecting trade, workers’ rights and safety, and so on. It would just completely be over at that point.

Trump is the end of the world.

Clinton probably is the end of the world. But. She DOES have a history of of pliability. She has an eye on the wind sock at all times. The left sees that as a sellout, but her backers see that as pragmatic. I see it as a tiny opportunity. IF the “revolution” keeps the heat on high, something might be accomplished. The main thing is to start making progress in every other public office downstream.

waterfield wrote:

“The main thing is to start making progress in every other public office downstream.”

Recently attended a campaign get out the vote meeting for Clinton and the message was just that -namely to urge the voters not to just vote for the top office but vote down the entire ticket. That is the only way to wrestle congressional power away from the Republicans. Real power is “downstream”.

The Dems need to do their part, too, and stop feeling entitled to everyone’s vote. They couldn’t even be bothered to run Democrats in half of the contests, and have lost more than a thousand seats since 2008.

Another key: If they get the majority again, no more compromising with the GOP. The GOP has no interest in that anyway. The Dems need to go big or go home, go all out left-populist, and push that agenda through all on their own. They’re not going to get help from the GOP even if they go small and center-right, which is their wont.

Might as well go full on left-populist, and that’s the ONLY way they’re going to inspire voters to turnout in the midterms.

The status quo is NOT going to work.

Zooey wrote:

No

Trump is the end of the world.

————–
I dunno, Zooey. Clinton is a known quantity.

But Trump has never held office before, right?
Do we really know what he would do or try to do?

I am not persuaded we do. And I am not persuaded that 8 years of Clinton
would be better than four years of Trump.

I dont think the Dems ever
change if Clinton wins. I think the only way they move left
is if Clinton loses.

So for me, its complicated. For me, Trump is a very strange mix of knowns
and unknowns.

I’m not trying to ‘persuade’ anyone of anything. Not the least bit
interested in that. Just sharing my own view.

Now the Supreme Court is a big deal, and it ‘almost’
decides things for me. But in the end, I dont trust Clinton
to nominate anyone that would vote against Corporate Personhood. Citizens United, maybe, but not Corporate Personhood — and the biosphere was being destroyed long before Citizens United. It just speeded things up. So, i dont see her as changing the trajectory of the war against the poor and the biosphere. I think she’d do all the usual things with regard to identity politix…..

w
v

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by wv.

and the biosphere was being destroyed long before Citizens United. It just speeded things up. So, i dont see her as changing the trajectory of the war against the poor and the biosphere. I think she’d do all the usual things with regard to identity politix…..

w
v

WV,

I almost feel like I have to keep qualifying everything I say with this beginning:

Both parties suck.

You’ve been at this longer than I have. Tell me, in your opinion, what’s the best way to navigate through these waters? As in, on the one hand, wanting radical egalitarian democracy . . . . a la left-anarchist communities along the lines laid out by folks like Elisee Reclus, Petyr Kropotkin and William Morris . . . while at the same time realizing we’re so far away from all of that, and that we live in this completely other, truly effed up world. That we’re also dealing with the cards already on the table, now, which are controlled by forces and people we can’t stand, etc. etc.

Anyway, on your particular comment. Trump has called Climate Change/Global Warming a hoax. His party has called it a hoax. He’s called for a return to Big Coal. His party has called for that. The GOP is adamantly opposed to the EPA even doing the most basic regulating of corporate pollution. Trump is as well, citing bogus numbers for the costs to businesses for those regulations into the several trillion.

The Dems, OTOH, at least acknowledge the existence of the science. They at least don’t call it all a hoax. They at least pay lip service to the need to reduce our carbon footprint and overall pollution, and support EPA regulations — as weak as they may be.

In short, on environmental matters, you have the GOP, which will actively pursue death to the planet . . . and the Dems who, while not vigorously fighting to protect it, won’t generally go out of their way to destroy it.

It’s tragic that those are our choices. But the Dems are superior on the issue, if for no other reason than they won’t be proudly, aggressively, denying all the science and giving the finger to Mother Earth.

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

No

Trump is the end of the world.

————–
I dunno, Zooey. Clinton is a known quantity.

But Trump has never held office before, right?
Do we really know what he would do or try to do?

I am not persuaded we do. And I am not persuaded that 8 years of Clinton
would be better than four years of Trump.

I dont think the Dems ever
change if Clinton wins. I think the only way they move left
is if Clinton loses.

So for me, its complicated. For me, Trump is a very strange mix of knowns
and unknowns.

I’m not trying to ‘persuade’ anyone of anything. Not the least bit
interested in that. Just sharing my own view.

Now the Supreme Court is a big deal, and it ‘almost’
decides things for me. But in the end, I dont trust Clinton
to nominate anyone that would vote against Corporate Personhood. Citizens United, maybe, but not Corporate Personhood — and the biosphere was being destroyed long before Citizens United. It just speeded things up. So, i dont see her as changing the trajectory of the war against the poor and the biosphere. I think she’d do all the usual things with regard to identity politix…..

w
v

I understand all of that, and have voiced the theory that 4 years of Trump > than 8 years of Clinton myself.

But in order to swallow that theory, one has to assume that congress wouldn’t let him do anything too outrageous, and that he would lose after one term. Now while I thought that was reasonable a couple of months ago – and still think it is partially (i.e. Congress wouldn’t build a damn wall, and he wouldn’t get a second term in all likelihood), I’ve started to consider him as more dangerous than before in light of revelations in the past month about the depth of his sociopathic behavior.

This guy has repeatedly, deliberately shafted small businesses. He has no honor. One of his signature glories is yelling, “You’re fired!” He actually enjoys crushing human beings. His ignorance of both domestic and foreign affairs is breathtaking for a 70-year old. He doesn’t have anything but the most superficial understanding of what policies are, or what they’re for, let alone how they work and affect people. And he doesn’t care.

You read, I presume, the Kasich insider claim that Trump offered Kasich oversight of domestic and foreign policy? Leaving Trump the task of Making America Great? Kasich refused, so he settled on Mike Pence. Mike Pence is one of those…I don’t even think there is a term for it. The conservatives who are so far to the right that they are terrifying – guys like Walker, Ryan, Cruz, Huckabee, McConnell, Bachmann, Coulter, Ingraham…oh, man, there are a LOT of names. And congress is filled with people like that.

So if you have Mike Pence basically being in charge of policy while Trump provides the bluster, you are looking at an agenda that wants to dismantle everything. They will lay assault on what’s left of unions, environmental protections, consumer protections, pensions, social security, public education, women’s rights, voting ID, overtime pay, the minimum wage for god’s sake, national parks, the Entire Wet Dream Agenda of the sociopathic corporatists. And then entrench it all permanently by making the Supreme Court a 7-2 majority of Thomases and Alitos.

The damage could be vast and irreversible.

You are handing over all three branches of government to a party filled with goblins.

You think that won’t happen? I don’t see how they could be stopped.

And that’s not even considering stuff like the likely increase in Hate crimes since Trump implicitly condones violence against the Others.

No.

Trump is the end of the world.

oh, dear.

you all are scaring the living shit out of me.

reading this board makes me want to take a rocket ship to mars. seriously. i’m gonna go hug my dog…

Donald Trump and the expanding power of the presidency

Some of Donald Trump’s plans — such as repealing the Affordable Care Act, cutting taxes or expanding Social Security — would require extensive, close work with Congress. But the White House is now so powerful that he could legally fulfill many of his other promises without it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-and-the-dangers-of-a-strong-presidency/2016/07/30/69cfc686-55be-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

Donald Trump has promised not only to be the voice of the American people but also to take decisive, immediate action. As president, he has said he would move fast to destroy the Islamic State, scrap bad trade deals, build that wall, “stop the gangs and the violence,” and “stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.” He would “immediately suspend immigration” from countries where terrorism is rampant. He might even defy treaty obligations and decline to aid NATO allies.

The Republican nominee has led some to conclude that he intends a sweeping expansion of presidential authority. His rhetoric implies a muscular, almost unitary, presidency that would be at least as expansive as what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously dubbed the “imperial presidency” — his critique of Richard Nixon’s abuse of power in the era of Watergate and Vietnam.

But scholars of the presidency say that Barack Obama, George W. Bush and their predecessors have added so many powers to the White House toolbox that a President Trump could fulfill many of his promises legally — and virtually unchecked by a Congress that has proven incapable of mustering much pushback for decades .

“Every president expands the power of the presidency,” said Neal Devins, a law professor at the College of William & Mary. “This is a constant pattern. They never shrink the presidency. A President Trump could say, ‘I’m going to use the Obama playbook’ and go pretty far. The difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not going to be one of lawlessness but of the policies they pursue.”

Plenty of politicians have pledged wholesale, game-changing shifts in policy, but Trump’s hot rhetoric stands out because his promises are rarely accompanied by details on how he might implement his initiatives. He doesn’t say how he might punish companies that ship jobs overseas, or how he would get Mexico to pay for a border wall, or how he would impose a ban on Muslims entering the country. He says he will make it happen — “believe me.”

Trump’s critics hear his sweeping promises as the words of a classic strongman, a ruler who seems prepared to push aside the cobwebs of bureaucracy and the checks and balances of American federalism to produce instant, decisive action. Critics have compared him to Mussolini, Hitler, Vladi­mir Putin, Saddam Hussein and Argentina’s Juan Perón. Trump has praised Putin and Hussein for being tough on terrorism. In the past, Trump has singled out China’s crackdown against pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a demonstration of “the power of strength.”

“Certainly rhetorically, Trump’s idea that ‘I alone can fix this’ does go beyond the template that President Obama and President Bush before him came in with, the idea that you try to fix things together,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College.

Trump’s defenders argue that his statements, whether off the cuff at rallies or in his scripted acceptance address at last week’s Republican convention, are not policy prescriptions but rather reflections of popular frustration. When Trump says he’s going to fix a problem immediately, some supporters say, he’s throwing down his marker, taking a stand rather than spelling out a plan.

A spokesman for Trump declined to comment for this article.

Some Trump initiatives, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act, cutting taxes or expanding Social Security, would require extensive, close work with Congress. But presidents already have the power to do much of what Trump has proposed. Congress has given the president the authority to negotiate trade deals, for example, and Trump could try to renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran.

Other promises put him in disputed terrain, such as his vow to bomb the Islamic State, “circle” their territory and “take the oil.” Some argue that such actions must be authorized by Congress under the War Powers Resolution, which was passed over President Nixon’s veto in 1973. But presidents since then have routinely ordered military action without seeking a congressional green light.

Trump could justify an all-out assault on the Islamic State by pointing to the same kinds of authority that allowed the Bush administration to use torture against alleged terrorists and allowed the Obama administration to expand the use of drones to kill terrorist suspects. Recent presidents have used their constitutional authority as commander in chief even to take actions that are specifically restricted by law.

In 2014, Obama announced a prisoner swap in which Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was brought home from Afghanistan in exchange for five Taliban commanders who had been held at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Congress had passed a law requiring the president to notify it 30 days before the release of any Guantanamo detainee, but Obama insisted he had a higher duty to protect American lives and U.S. troops.

“The presidential toolbox of unilateralism is quite deep,” Rudalevige said, “but you can’t have an imperial presidency without an invisible Congress that is willing to take a back seat because it doesn’t want to be blamed for a war or some other unpopular policy.”

There’s only one effective way to push back against presidential power grabs, he concluded in a recent study: “Congress has to do its job.”

That hasn’t been happening, however. The country is so politically polarized that many members of Congress are now elected on promises to resist the kind of compromise that is necessary to build majorities and be an effective check on executive power.

“The constitutional order set up by our founders is breaking down,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote this month in National Review. “What Congress wants today is to be weak . . . for fear of the political consequences of hard choices.”

Lee argued that presidents will continue to assume broader powers unless Congress fulfills its constitutional duty to “protect the American people from exactly the kind of arbitrary, unaccountable government-without-consent that Congress now for its own selfish reasons enables the executive branch to practice.”

In recent decades, presidents have stretched their ability to act unilaterally, bypassing Congress through executive orders, executive memos, national security orders, findings, signing statements and prosecutorial discretion. After the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Congress pushed back with a series of laws designed to rein in the president.

But the War Powers Resolution, the Intelligence Oversight Act, the Congressional Budget Act and the independent counsel act — all designed to limit presidential unilateralism — have proved toothless, and Congress since has ceded even more authority.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the rush to expand the president’s ability to respond quickly to attacks and to ferret out terrorists shifted the balance of power ever more decisively toward the White House. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a proponent of a stronger presidency going back to his days in Congress three decades earlier, argued that the fragility of a world with nuclear weapons mandated an expansive presidency: The fact that the president is accompanied at all times by a military aide carrying the nuclear codes, he said, means that “he doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.”

A president who might act unilaterally was one of the chief fears expressed in the original debates about the Constitution. Writing in what became known as the Anti-Federalist Papers in 1787, the pseudonymous Cato warned against the presidency becoming “a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America.” The system of checks and balances — giving Congress the authority to make laws and decide how money is spent, and giving the Supreme Court the last word on what laws comport with the Constitution — was supposed to rein in the president.

But as the size and scope of government ballooned, the president became the de facto manager of a sprawling, vital sector of the economy, and presidential authority expanded almost continuously. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt argued that presidents were allowed to do anything not specifically prohibited by law or the Constitution. And Nixon famously asserted, after he had resigned from office over the Watergate scandal, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

By 2004, George W. Bush could state that when “Congress wouldn’t act,” he had no choice but to issue an executive order expanding access to federal grants for faith-based charities. Obama similarly said in 2014 that “when Congress doesn’t move on things they should move on . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”

In today’s hyperpartisan politics, accusations of overly expansive presidencies fly across the aisle as a matter of course. “A strong presidency is one who is of your own party, and an imperial presidency is one from the other side,” Rudalevige said.

Potentially dangerous clashes could develop: If Trump were to ask the military to target terrorists’ families — an idea he has at various times proposed and disavowed — some military and intelligence officials have said that commanders might refuse to follow such orders.

“The American armed forces would refuse to act,” former CIA director Michael Hayden said earlier this year. “You are required not to follow an unlawful order.”

That scenario could lead to “a constitutional crisis,” Rudalevige said, “especially if we still have an eight-member Supreme Court,” assuming that the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat remained unfilled.

If a president does overstep his authority, Congress could cut off his funding or impeach him, but a President Trump could counter with the power of the bully pulpit.

“Any new president comes in with a certain degree of goodwill and political capital,” said Joe Hagin, who spent 14 years as a White House aide in Republican administrations, culminating in eight years as deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush. “What’s happening in the nation and the world at any given time affects your ability to move quickly. And if you look at what we were able to do post-9/11, it’s almost unprecedented.”

Congress acted within weeks to authorize war, pass the USA Patriot Act and establish the Department of Homeland Security — a sharp contrast to the administration’s failure to move on domestic initiatives such as overhauling Social Security and reforming immigration. What made the difference, Hagin said, was public opinion, and Trump’s knack for blunt communication could be an effective defense against efforts by Congress to rein him in.

“He’s thrown the rulebook out the window, and that could be a very good thing,” Hagin said. “He certainly understands how to communicate with a certain segment of the population, and the question is, can he expand that to a majority of the population?”

Public opinion also would likely have a big impact on Congress’s willingness to push back.

“No one knows what Trump would really do, which is why people are so freaked out,” said Devins, the law professor . “If he did push the boundaries dangerously, it really would depend on Congress, and it would take an awful lot for Republicans to join with the Democrats to assert themselves and slap him down.

“It took Watergate for the parties to stand up to Nixon and attempt to constrain the presidency. The question really is, what unilateral action against ISIS would be so extreme that Congress would pass a funding ban?”

Asked about Trump’s proposals to ban Muslims or build a border wall without congressional approval, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said last month that he “would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers.”

But Devins has concluded that the record of the past two decades shows that Congress “lacks both the will and the way to check the presidency.

“Today’s system of checks and balances,” he said , “is an abject failure.”