Future of the Democratic Party


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MMCJawa wrote:
bugleyman wrote:
thejeff wrote:

The free market absolutely does not solve the problem though. Not in urban settings at least. Some form of subsidized, affordable housing is needed.

Because land is the premium and you can't invest in more of that. So it's more effective to make expensive housing on the limited land available and if poorer people can't find a place to live, that's their problem.

Rent control may not be the appropriate solution, but something needs to be.

Wow, this puts me on the side of the debate I don't often take. :-)

We know that price ceilings don't work. Nor is this a case of highly inelastic demand...yes, everyone needs a place to live, but one can usually move farther out from the urban center and find lower housing costs. If people value living closer to the urban center, then they'll be willing to pay more to do it. If not, they can drive in. If that's truly not viable, then business will grind to a halt (no employees), and property values will drop.

I guess in this case I have to disagree and say that something doesn't have to be done; instead, we should just leave well enough alone. I'm going to have to take the position that having to drive out to the 'burbs isn't actually a problem...or at least not one that the government should try to solve.

What this actually results in though is poorer folks still needing to take city jobs, and also forced to spend far more time each day commuting, not to mention having a larger portion of there paycheck get invested in said commute.

I mean I live on Long Island, and there is no way I can afford to live within a half an hour of the place I work. So I either rack up the miles on my car on a minimum hour and a half round trip commute, or I pay 11 bucks per day to take a train into work.

$300 or so a month is less than most car payments are going to be and not much more than a cheap leased car payment. Let alone insurance, M&R, personal property taxes where applicable, parking costs, etc.


bugleyman wrote:
thejeff wrote:

The free market absolutely does not solve the problem though. Not in urban settings at least. Some form of subsidized, affordable housing is needed.

Because land is the premium and you can't invest in more of that. So it's more effective to make expensive housing on the limited land available and if poorer people can't find a place to live, that's their problem.

Rent control may not be the appropriate solution, but something needs to be.

Wow, this puts me on the side of the debate I don't often take. :-)

We know that price ceilings don't work. Nor is this a case of highly inelastic demand...yes, everyone needs a place to live, but one can usually move farther out from the urban center and find lower housing costs. If people value living closer to the urban center, then they'll be willing to pay more to do it. If not, they can drive in. If that's truly not viable, then business will grind to a halt (no employees), and property values will drop.

I guess in this case I have to disagree and say that something doesn't have to be done; instead, we should just leave well enough alone. I'm going to have to take the position that having to drive out to the 'burbs isn't actually a problem...or at least not one that the government should try to solve.

The problem with moving out from the urban center is that not every urban center has reliable mass transit. The difference between living in an urban center and biking or walking to work and paying less in rent but having the expenses of a car in order to get to work are, if not indistinguishable, i can say for sure that at least in my area will end up costing you more, in gas, insurance, car payments.


This kind of thing is why I really hope 3D Printed homes take off enough to provide genuinely affordable housing for everyone.


And yknow, where I live is dealing with this on a different scale. There's a massive housing shortage in Eugene, but the only things getting built are 4 or 5 bedroom student housing apartments, which you can pay 600 dollars a room to rent out and live with strangers, if and only if you happen to be enrolled in college here. Many single family homes have been replaced by these kind of student housing apartments, and most large family homes have been subdivided into a series of 1 bedroom apartments. Rent control is on the docket because everyone's rent has gone up the maximum allowable by law every year for the past 5 or so (maybe longer but thats when i noticed it).


I think we're looking at this from different points-of-view. I am thinking from an overall efficiency perspective. There is no efficiency problem I can see, which, strictly speaking, means the free market is working.

Of course, what good is efficiency if it doesn't help real people? I think that is a question of distribution of wealth. If we had a more equitable (and arguably more market-driven) distribution of wealth, then more people could afford to live closer to work. Which leaves me wondering if the lack of affordable urban rent isn't a problem itself as much as it is a symptom of crony capitalism and our ever-growing wealth disparity.

I suspect one could write their economics dissertation on this topic (which is certainly beyond me). I guess the only thing I can say with confidence is that price ceilings do not generally have the intended effect.


It might also be argued that the real issue here is a lack of affordable mass transit (which we know the free market struggles to provide).

Hmmm...if there's an obvious solution, I'm not smart enough to see it.


Jesse Heinig wrote:


So you're a poor person who doesn't own a car. You get to work how?

You move to some awful place in the middle of nowhere, where there are no jobs and no opportunities, because it's the only place you can afford to live. All the jobs are over in the expensive city. How do you get there?

Or worse still you're a poor person living in the city and you have a crappy job there, and your landlord hikes your rent. How do you move? You have no money and no car. Where do you go to live?
Keep in mind that public transportation in the U.S. is super-limited, also not cheap when you're at the poverty level, rarely goes where you need it to, and constantly fought against by people who argue that it's either (a) not needed or (b) "bringing the wrong kinds of people to our neighborhoods."

Not to mention that in places like San Francisco and New York, now we're seeing international investors buy up properties and take them off the market, just to have investment property or to have a prestigious address that they can put on their letterhead. This reduces the available housing in already-crowded markets, thereby driving up the prices even further.

Cities form, and companies move their operations to cities, because they provide massive externality benefits. This is why in Los Angeles you can run a business whose sole purpose is to supply rental props to movie companies - because there are so many movie production companies in Los Angeles that you will have enough business to stay open. The concentration of services and resources in one area is itself an advantage, but only if you can actually live there. Living out in the boonies because it's cheap is not a viable solution for everyone.

I personally am in the top 20% income bracket in the U.S. and I can't even afford to live in the city here any more. I'm currently looking at the lose-lose situation of being priced out of my apartment here, but the only affordable locations are over an hour away from my job, which means that the added cost of gas and wear on my car would eat up any savings I made on lower rent; so stay and get priced out and homeless, or move and be unable to afford the commute and become homeless. And there's no public transit going to my workplace from these outskirts areas.

"Free market" solutions to housing are not solutions. This is a very basic material problem: People need a place to live, and they cannot have a place to live if they are poor. Our society should value people's lives enough to prioritize having places for them to live, rather than simply leaving a market to create rental value for property owners while telling the poor (and in some cases, middle class) that they should just go away and disappear (i.e. move or die).

The answers are "it depends". Awful places in the middle of nowhere with no jobs or opportunities are usually 'obvious' by their general lack of mention. "Where?" "Awfulsville." "Never heard of it. Why'd you move again?" "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

If you're in the top 20% income bracket and you can't afford housing within an hour, you have to rent a place further out, rent a smaller place, buy a place or consider relocating to another of your employer's offices in a cheaper area or get a job somewhere cheaper. There are almost always options one has not considered.

I am surprised that public transit is unavailable in your area. From the sound of it, you're in the type of area of in the U.S. that typically has decent-to-good mass transit options.

Ownership is often cheaper than renting. If renting wasn't, there'd be no value to being a landlord.

Have you looked into purchasing a home?

Re: San Francisco and New York, they already have the tools that can be used to solve a housing crisis. It's heavy-handed, but it's there. Eminent domain and re-zoning.


@bugleyman: Real wages, adjusted for inflation, basically haven't budged since the 70's for most people. Meanwhile, many costs (housing, education, etc.) have been rising faster than the rate of inflation. The natural result of this, of course, is that more of most people's income goes to the basics and they get pushed out of areas they'd prefer to be in. You can't raise prices without equivalent rises in pay forever - sooner or later, something breaks.


The Mad Comrade wrote:
MMCJawa wrote:
bugleyman wrote:
thejeff wrote:

The free market absolutely does not solve the problem though. Not in urban settings at least. Some form of subsidized, affordable housing is needed.

Because land is the premium and you can't invest in more of that. So it's more effective to make expensive housing on the limited land available and if poorer people can't find a place to live, that's their problem.

Rent control may not be the appropriate solution, but something needs to be.

Wow, this puts me on the side of the debate I don't often take. :-)

We know that price ceilings don't work. Nor is this a case of highly inelastic demand...yes, everyone needs a place to live, but one can usually move farther out from the urban center and find lower housing costs. If people value living closer to the urban center, then they'll be willing to pay more to do it. If not, they can drive in. If that's truly not viable, then business will grind to a halt (no employees), and property values will drop.

I guess in this case I have to disagree and say that something doesn't have to be done; instead, we should just leave well enough alone. I'm going to have to take the position that having to drive out to the 'burbs isn't actually a problem...or at least not one that the government should try to solve.

What this actually results in though is poorer folks still needing to take city jobs, and also forced to spend far more time each day commuting, not to mention having a larger portion of there paycheck get invested in said commute.

I mean I live on Long Island, and there is no way I can afford to live within a half an hour of the place I work. So I either rack up the miles on my car on a minimum hour and a half round trip commute, or I pay 11 bucks per day to take a train into work.

$300 or so a month is less than most car payments are going to be and not much more than a cheap leased car payment. Let alone insurance, M&R, personal property taxes...

Good luck getting that car loan with poor or no credit. When I bought my first (new) car, I had to get my wife to co-sign because I had no credit history. I made the mistake of following everyone's advice of not signing up for a bunch of credit cards while in college and only buying things I could afford to the point the dealership thought I had given them a fake ID.

Sovereign Court

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Purchasing a home! Ha! Ha ha! HAHAHAHAHA!

No. The reality is this:
* There's not enough affordable housing.
* There are no incentives to build affordable housing, because the investment opportunity value for the super-rich means that developers just chase those dollars instead of building affordable housing.
* There is no way to buy a home because the cost of living in cities is so high that there's no way to save enough money to buy a home; and if you move out of the city there are no good jobs or ways to get to a good job; and if you get mortgage assistance then you will always, automatically, lose out to rich investors who show up to snap up homes with cash down.

Basically you have a large lower and middle class that's chasing around trying to find affordable places to live and there are just not enough places for them. But there are tons of houses owned by investors and super-rich. The market might as well be in two completely different segments, and developers choose to occupy the super-rich segment while the segment of poor and middle-class people just continues to have less and less available housing.

We have a serious housing crisis in our major cities and people seem to think that the answer is "move out of the city" (demonstrably not a solution) or "just find a solution, how hard could it be?"

This is a real problem. We have massive tent camps of homeless people in major, affluent metropolises, because there's no affordable housing.

My rent on a one-bedroom apartment went up by $250 per month one year with no maintenance or services added because the landlords just decided they could, so they did. Can't afford it? Out on the streets you go, with an eviction on your record so nobody will ever rent to you again.

I am just shy of a six-figure income bracket and I am about to be priced out of my job because I can't afford to live anywhere that I can get to work. Moving somewhere that I can afford means a commute of an hour or more, which just means the money I save on rent turns around and goes into gas and car repairs instead. No savings.

Our cities have a real problem when it comes to housing and development, and it's not going to be solved by just "letting the market solve it by itself." What that will do is just throw more people into homelessness, lead to deaths from exposure, and possibly precipitate even more revolutionary sentiment from disenfranchised people who have nothing left to lose.


If i wanted to point fingers i'd add that a big problem in oregon is people from down south driving up our real estate prices by selling their modest home in cali for moderate california prices and moving up here where their modest california price enables them to buy a quite nice home and then 2 or 3 rentals that they place at the highest feasable rent (for oregon) because their perspective is all skewed from L.A. and Bay area housing markets.


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Not to mention moving to an area with lower property values means less funding for schools which means fewer opportunities for your children.


Knight who says Meh wrote:
Not to mention moving to an area with lower property values means less funding for schools which means fewer opportunities for your children.

Read up on oregon measure 5 and 50 if you want to really understand why Oregon is having such a budget problem. The issues we have now got their origins in the 90's. Sizemore is a canker on this state.

Sovereign Court

Ryan Freire wrote:
If i wanted to point fingers i'd add that a big problem in oregon is people from down south driving up our real estate prices by selling their modest home in cali for moderate california prices and moving up here where their modest california price enables them to buy a quite nice home and then 2 or 3 rentals that they place at the highest feasable rent (for oregon) because their perspective is all skewed from L.A. and Bay area housing markets.

This problem repeated in Seattle and Austin and it's going to continue to happen as long as this issue exists of people getting priced out of their homes and seeking new places to live.

In San Diego, back in the '70s and '80s that town was a small coastal town. (Now it's the 2nd largest city by population in California.) Sometime in the '90s the city politicians and businesses decided that they wanted to be a trendy tourist city with a "walkable" downtown space. The problem is that a large chunk of downtown was things like homeless shelters, auto yards, and old businesses, and then once you got to some of the adjacent neighborhoods like Golden Heights where people had been living in family homes for several generations and they weren't necessarily "wealthy" but they at least had a (tired and old, but livable) home in a decrepit neighborhood.

The civic leaders decided that this kind of image was incompatible with being a trendy tourist town, so they conducted a very deliberate purge. First they sent in police to roust all of the homeless people downtown and force them out. Then they conducted a program of re-assessment of several of the older neighborhoods, and jacked up the property values of residents so that poor people living in old family homes could no longer afford to pay property tax and they had to sell their houses and leave the area. The message was clear: If you're poor, get out or die. If you're rich, come play and spend money!

(Note: San Diego is not my current home town; I did live there through the gentrification of the early to mid-'90s. I simply use it as an example case.)


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bugleyman wrote:
thejeff wrote:

The free market absolutely does not solve the problem though. Not in urban settings at least. Some form of subsidized, affordable housing is needed.

Because land is the premium and you can't invest in more of that. So it's more effective to make expensive housing on the limited land available and if poorer people can't find a place to live, that's their problem.

Rent control may not be the appropriate solution, but something needs to be.

Wow, this puts me on the side of the debate I don't often take. :-)

We know that price ceilings don't work. Nor is this a case of highly inelastic demand...yes, everyone needs a place to live, but one can usually move farther out from the urban center and find lower housing costs. If people value living closer to the urban center, then they'll be willing to pay more to do it. If not, they can drive in. If that's truly not viable, then business will grind to a halt (no employees), and property values will drop.

I guess in this case I have to disagree and say that something doesn't have to be done; instead, we should just leave well enough alone. I'm going to have to take the position that having to drive out to the 'burbs isn't actually a problem...or at least not one that the government should try to solve.

Poor people - you know, the kind that get housing subsidies - can't live in the suburbs either. Suburbs are zoned for houses on lots, not apartment buildings and other dense affordable housing.

Sovereign Court

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Knight who says Meh wrote:
Not to mention moving to an area with lower property values means less funding for schools which means fewer opportunities for your children.

This is a super-important point as well in light of recent data that indicates that where you grow up has a huge impact on your eventual economic outcomes. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood you are statistically way more likely to end up poor for the rest of your life.


Rednal wrote:
This kind of thing is why I really hope 3D Printed homes take off enough to provide genuinely affordable housing for everyone.

It's not going to help. Most of the cost of a house is in the land, foundation, land, and plumbing.


Jesse Heinig wrote:
Knight who says Meh wrote:
Not to mention moving to an area with lower property values means less funding for schools which means fewer opportunities for your children.
This is a super-important point as well in light of recent data that indicates that where you grow up has a huge impact on your eventual economic outcomes. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood you are statistically way more likely to end up poor for the rest of your life.

well because your parents were poor. Hard to do the stats and look at rich people living in poor neighborhoods for a control group...

Sovereign Court

I'm talking more about this sort of thing - certain places have a strong correlation to economic opportunity (or lack thereof) and if you can't get out, your kids are basically hosed.


Jesse Heinig wrote:

Purchasing a home! Ha! Ha ha! HAHAHAHAHA!

No. The reality is this:
* There's not enough affordable housing.
* There are no incentives to build affordable housing, because the investment opportunity value for the super-rich means that developers just chase those dollars instead of building affordable housing.
* There is no way to buy a home because the cost of living in cities is so high that there's no way to save enough money to buy a home; and if you move out of the city there are no good jobs or ways to get to a good job; and if you get mortgage assistance then you will always, automatically, lose out to rich investors who show up to snap up homes with cash down.

Basically you have a large lower and middle class that's chasing around trying to find affordable places to live and there are just not enough places for them. But there are tons of houses owned by investors and super-rich. The market might as well be in two completely different segments, and developers choose to occupy the super-rich segment while the segment of poor and middle-class people just continues to have less and less available housing.

We have a serious housing crisis in our major cities and people seem to think that the answer is "move out of the city" (demonstrably not a solution) or "just find a solution, how hard could it be?"

This is a real problem. We have massive tent camps of homeless people in major, affluent metropolises, because there's no affordable housing.

My rent on a one-bedroom apartment went up by $250 per month one year with no maintenance or services added because the landlords just decided they could, so they did. Can't afford it? Out on the streets you go, with an eviction on your record so nobody will ever rent to you again.

I am just shy of a six-figure income bracket and I am about to be priced out of my job because I can't afford to live anywhere that I can get to work. Moving somewhere that I can afford means a commute of an hour or more, which just means the money I...

Not to mention that a good chunk of my generation gets to leave school with massive debt, which further makes it difficult to buy a home.

I am currently paying 1000 dollars a month for a converted back room studio apartment, that's probably smaller than my postdoc advisor's office. Thankfully I am moving to Wisconsin at the end of next month, where the cost of living is far far lower than NY.

Sovereign Court

One of the problems with real estate in these big cities is absentee owners. People from places like China and Russia, where they got a lot of questionable cash from back home, and so they buy property in the big city with cash, over the listed price, and then a few years later they sell it maybe not getting back what they bought it for, but, more importantly for them, now with clean less traceable money in their pockets. I'm sure there's other reasons as well, but it seems to me creating regulations to discourage that sort of thing would probably be part of the solution.


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Personally, I'm looking forward to after the revolution when we can move all the homeless people into the mansions of the rich, Doctor Zhivago-style.

I haven't lived in what I'd consider a big city in over a decade, but apparently my old neighborhood in Boston, which used to be split even between retired Italian airport workers and Central American immigrants but has become gentrification-ground zero (alas, no one listened to Tim Robbins' character in Mystic River--"What we need is a good crime wave") but I did have occasion last year to attend a rally in Flatbush, Brooklyn which was a smorgasbord of anti-racist, anti-police brutality and anti-gentrification activists. It was pretty well attended by local residents, no reds, at least not openly, and I was pretty amazed at matronly black grandmother-looking woman after matronly black grandmother-looking woman getting up and denouncing DiBlasio.

Haven't been back in a while, but I guess they're still at it.


Housing Advocates Vow Sustained Protest of de Blasio Aide


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Jesse Heinig wrote:
I'm talking more about this sort of thing - certain places have a strong correlation to economic opportunity (or lack thereof) and if you can't get out, your kids are basically hosed.

I needed a Midnight Musical Interlude for Facebook and that headline made me think of Escape From the Killing Fields by Ice-T, so, thank you, Citizen Heinig.

Sovereign Court

Glad to be of service.


Education debt is not only destroying the future for young Americans, it's beginning to destroy the present for their parents

Social Security garnishments for student loans
The number of borrowers over age 65 losing out on a portion of their Social Security check to pay off their federal student loan grew 540% between 2002 and 2015, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office.


CrystalSeas wrote:

Education debt is not only destroying the future for young Americans, it's beginning to destroy the present for their parents

Social Security garnishments for student loans
The number of borrowers over age 65 losing out on a portion of their Social Security check to pay off their federal student loan grew 540% between 2002 and 2015, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office.

540% sounds alarming, but in the interest of clarity that should really be reported as a percentage of SS recipients. Just sayin'.


If you're talking about voting patterns, then looking at trends in issues (education loans) is useful. It looks like both ends of the voting-age spectrum are feeling more and more pain from student loans.

I don't see why reporting it as a percentage of SS recipients makes any difference to people looking for political pain points. The news is that it's not exclusively an issue for young people, no matter how you report it.


CrystalSeas wrote:

If you're talking about voting patterns, then looking at trends in issues (education loans) is useful. It looks like both ends of the voting-age spectrum are feeling more and more pain from student loans.

I don't see why reporting it as a percentage of SS recipients makes any difference to people looking for political pain points. The news is that it's not exclusively an issue for young people, no matter how you report it.

Because if the number of SS recipients went up 600%, then the percentage of people in that situation actually went down.

Obviously 600% is in exaggeration, but the point stands. Everyone is better off if we just report numbers as numbers without trying to spin them. Perhaps you're familiar with the quotation "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"?


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CrystalSeas wrote:

If you're talking about voting patterns, then looking at trends in issues (education loans) is useful. It looks like both ends of the voting-age spectrum are feeling more and more pain from student loans.

I don't see why reporting it as a percentage of SS recipients makes any difference to people looking for political pain points. The news is that it's not exclusively an issue for young people, no matter how you report it.

No, but a growth rate like 540% seems like a scare figure.

Apparently it grew to 114,000, which sounds like a lot, but is a tiny fraction of those on SS. And even a small fraction of 2.8 million older SS recipients who owe student loan debt.

The growth rate is troubling, but it might have more to do with the small starting numbers than any serious problem.

It's like when you see a glowing report about the fastest growing X, 400% in the last year. Usually just means it was tiny to start with, but it makes it sound like it's the next big thing.


Are you folks really arguing that it's ok to have an increasing number of people in their 60s facing garnishment of their Social Security? That as long as the numbers are small (but growing), there's nothing to be concerned about?

If the Democrats want to address the issue of the cost of education, does it not seem to you that the number of people with no other assets to attach except their Social Security income, still paying for educational loans, are too small to worry about? That the increasing numbers is just a statistical misrepresentation of the facts?


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CrystalSeas wrote:
Are you folks really arguing that it's ok to have an increasing number of people in their 60s facing garnishment of their Social Security? That as long as the numbers are small (but growing), there's nothing to be concerned about?

No...we're underscoring the importance of intellectual honesty, even in the face of crazy. Did either of us at any point claim that it was OK?

CrystalSeas wrote:
If the Democrats want to address the issue of the cost of education, does it not seem to you that the number of people with no other assets to attach except their Social Security income, still paying for educational loans, are too small to worry about? That the increasing numbers is just a statistical misrepresentation of the facts?

Again, no. In fact, the point is that the argument makes sense without twisting the numbers. We don't need to twist the numbers...so why do it? Because the other side does?

Of course that's probably too much nuance for the Internet.


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CrystalSeas wrote:

Are you folks really arguing that it's ok to have an increasing number of people in their 60s facing garnishment of their Social Security? That as long as the numbers are small (but growing), there's nothing to be concerned about?

If the Democrats want to address the issue of the cost of education, does it not seem to you that the number of people with no other assets to attach except their Social Security income, still paying for educational loans, are too small to worry about? That the increasing numbers is just a statistical misrepresentation of the facts?

It's a thing to watch. See if it keeps spiking, levels off or dies back. Any measures that help the much larger problem of student debt will likely help this as well.

For the moment, it's a fairly small problem. It's not OK, but it's one small thing on a huge list of things that aren't OK.

Liberty's Edge

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CrystalSeas wrote:
Are you folks really arguing that it's ok to have an increasing number of people in their 60s facing garnishment of their Social Security? That as long as the numbers are small (but growing), there's nothing to be concerned about?

I believe they are trying to explain math;

Going from 5 to 32 would be a 540% increase... and a minuscule problem in comparison to many other issues.


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What will be interesting to see is what happens to the various existing programs that deal with student loan forgiveness. I am currently on the Public Service loan forgiveness program, which means that as long as I consistently work for a university, non-profit, or government institution, and consistently pay my alloted loan amount every month, in ten years whatever that is not paid will be forgiven. But that is one program that I have heard rumors of possibly being on the chopping block. If it disappear, that's going hurt teachers and scientists pretty bad.


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 Ben Jealous Is Running for Governor of Maryland—and He Has an Inspired Agenda-- The former head of the NAACP is putting social and economic justice at the heart of his campaign.

[Shrug] say I, but I now have an interest in keeping tabs on the white male progressive Berniecrats.


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Back to Voting Rights, just watched this Empire File from a month and a half ago or so. There were a lot of things I didn't know, so I'll link it:

The Hidden Purging of Millions of Voters


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Greed is like hate - we all are quick to denounce it, but no one is willing to let theirs go.


Terquem wrote:
Greed is like hate - we all are quick to denounce it, but no one is willing to let theirs go.

I haven't gotten mine yet dammit..


Just saw in the paper today front page in fact that trumps lawyers are begging him to stop tweeting cause hes undermining his own case. for his travel ban.
I'm gonna bet however that he doesn't stop.


Or he will pause but only for a week, as he has done in the past.

It's pretty obvious that his tweets on a regular basis manufacture problems for him that he doesn't need, which was true even before the election. All of his staff and the Republican Congress pretty much acknowledge this. But he doesn't have the discipline to either cut it out or at least phrase things more diplomatically.


More likely to cut it out then suddenly learn how to phrase. But its definitely an addiction.


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Supreme Court rules more N. Carolina districts illegally gerrymandered on race

Wooot!


Comney testifies tomorrow.

Assuming no last minute executive privilege claims, putin offering him a glass of glowing water, or something else..

Sovereign Court

Lets keep this thread about the Dem party. Dump on Trump on another.

Looks like Handel down in Georgia prefers trickle down mythology to living wage. Fed min is 7.25 but cost of living is about 12 bucks an hour in Georgia. As it develops, its looking like a classic R v. D race as any.


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Some local acquaintances in the news:

Sanders Backers Plant Left-Wing Flag in the Massachusetts Democratic Party

And a fun story in the wake of that Filippino "I had a slave story" in The Atlantic:


THE CLINTONS HAD SLAVES


Eric Trump: Democrats aren't people


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"never seen hatred towards a president like this before...."-ET

I guess ET just wiped the last 8 years from his memory. Forgot Hannity's segment about Obama being uppity because he likes spicy mustard on his burger....

Liberty's Edge

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Kansas Republicans finally turned against Brownback's disastrous 'experiment' with supply side economics. They over-rode his veto and reinstated previous tax provisions.

Problem is... nothing Brownback did was at all out of line with GOP 'orthodoxy' on the economy.


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Orville Redenbacher wrote:

"never seen hatred towards a president like this before...."-ET

I guess ET just wiped the last 8 years from his memory. Forgot Hannity's segment about Obama being uppity because he likes spicy mustard on his burger....

Not to mention the years his father spent pretending Obama wasn't a US citizen.


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BigNorseWolf wrote:

Eric Trump: Democrats aren't people

Wow...literal, explicit dehumanization. That seems to be a new low for U.S. politics.

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