Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Unitary Plan and grown-up…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
This is an interesting comment and one I broadly agree with. But isn’t it interesting that not only don’t we want councillors making long-term decisions about Auckland, we don’t even want council-appointed commissioners making decisions about Auckland?
My point was more that the quasi-judicial process makes feckless political attacks harder. But I do think it's true that a similar process has worked pretty well in the case of the Wellington flyover debate and the Waterview Connection (which was officially considered by a Board of Inquiry, but the chair was an Environment Court judge).
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Very interesting assessment on the role of disability activism and changes over time at DNC. Lots more focus this time, including disabled speakers. Hillary Clinton apparently started her career by fighting to get disabled kids into school.
I was wondering last night whether there has ever been this kind of visibility for disability issues at a convention. It's remarkable.
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to nzlemming,
Yes, I’ve been watching him. Not a snowball’s chance in hell (probably less than Stein)
I think I saw a poll where he was running at 10% vs Stein's 5%, so he may have a better chance of reaching the 15% benchmark for admission to the debates than her.
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Just now, from Bernie Sanders at the convention:
"I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States."
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Deborah,
But campaigning on a platform that promises big tax increases is a sure way to provide extraordinary ammunition to your opponents. The problem is not necessarily the tax increases per se, it is the politics of campaigning on big tax increases.
I think a particular problem is that the benefits are back-loaded – people would see across-the-board tax increases before they got any upside. You'd also be asking people to walk away from their existing coverage to get that benefit, and we saw the resistance to that with Obamacare.
As others have pointed out, Republicans have dishonestly campaigned on supposed Democratic tax increases for years – they've been able to convince many voters that their taxes will go up when they won't. In this case, they'd have the advantage of it being true.
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Wowzers. Respected liberal journal the American prospect is getting pretty terse with the Bernie-or-Bust contingent:
When it was Sanders's turn to speak at the convention, his message was clear: “I am proud to stand with her.”
Nevertheless, several Sanders delegates told MSNBC at the end of the day that they weren't yet ready to support Clinton. Delegates cited Clinton’s need to earn their “trust,” their anger that more Sanders supporters, despite receiving half the slots Monday, weren’t given more convention speaking roles, and their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement—even though Clinton is on record opposing the TPP. One particularly misguided Sanderista from Vermont complained that Sanders had been relegated to speaking last—when, in fact, his 10 p.m. slot, a prime time for the national audience, gave him the honor of closing the night.
How many other Bernie-or-bust delegates (and their counterparts around the country) share this basic ignorance about how politics really works and what Clinton really espouses?
Certainly the media are giving the Bernie-or-bust crowd much more attention than it deserves. This group represents no more than 10 percent of the Sanders delegates in Philadelphia, and probably even fewer. But news outlets can’t resist the dramatic story line of a convention and a party beset with internal conflict.
As Sanders reminded the rabble-rousers in his speech, he may have lost the nomination, but he has won the battle of ideas. His presence in the Democratic campaign has pushed Clinton to the left on issues from the minimum wage to debt-free higher education, tougher Wall Street regulation, TPP opposition, and expanding Obamacare.
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Speaker: The Uncomfortable Silence, in reply to LIISA,
I think you might be underestimating the ease of treating both of these conditions, sorry.
Very true. I think what Prudence was trying to say is that addiction could be more effectively treated if it was seen like any other heath problem.
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Stein’s also not very popular with autism groups. This is from a recent profile in Elle, but she’s been saying versions of these words for a few years:
I got involved as a mother and a medical doctor. I had been, for a while, very alarmed about the public health calamities that I was witnessing as a new doctor and a mother of young kids. There were these new epidemics of asthma and cancer and autism and diabetes and obesity. And I said to myself, ‘Hey, our genes didn’t change overnight.’ You know, my generation didn’t grow up with this.
I got to work with community groups to try to fix some of the drivers of these public health epidemics—everything from poverty to pollution and bad food and unemployment and homelessness and all that—and worked very hard to get our elected officials to fix them, because it’s not rocket science to fix these problems. And I realized that reform was not going to come through the Democratic Party.
Hmmm. Autism isn’t an “epidemic” and it’s not caused by bad food.
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Mick Rose,
I think Jill Stein is a far more impressive figure than any of them, but the faulty machinery of the US electoral process will ensure her voice is barely heard …
I'd be more impressed by Stein if she didn't spend so much time (check her Twitter) drawing false equivalences between Clinton and Trump and praising Bernie or Bust. She's clearly, and I guess understandably, looking to co-opt the Sanders campaign, but it comes across a little cynical.
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Nigel,
Whereas Bernie seems to have a clean past after 30 plus years experience. Bernie would have reduced Trump to tantrums but now we’ll never see it.
Oh, I think his involvement with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party would have been an issue. It might not matter to you and me, but it would have been red meat for a Republican campaign. Michelle Goldberg wrote about it earlier in the year on Salon.
The implications of his tax proposals have never really had a major public airing, because he wasn't the frontrunner, Clinton didn't want to go hard and it suited Trump to pretend to sympathise with him. The Atlantic looked at it in February. It would have been a bloodbath.
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