Politics Thread

Watch the whole video.

What the fuck is this???!!!

It's Texas. Like Idaho, ot hasn't gone blue since the 60's.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME?

Like, I know this isn't a final result, but if there is even a chance of Texas voting for Biden then that's a pretty fucking epic REJECTED sign for Trump.

Oh trust me, I'm not hedging any bets on Texas. Too many rednecks.

But if that state went against Trump, it would be delicious. So much electoral college down there.

Barret set to be confirmed on Monday.

Gorsuch (remember his mom was the first director of the EPA... Hired to make it look ineffective by nixon I believe, and it worked), bitter beer face, now this ****. These are the greatest legal minds the right can come up with?

No wonder they are lead by an army of trolls.

No. That was Reagan. Nixon is the one that created the EPA. He was actually in favor of protecting the planet.


I had this exchange with Dracula in 2017:





I wonder what’s his opinion now.

Not only has Trump made Nixon look good, but as a nation, we’ve devolved since the 1970’s. Nixon resigned cause of Watergate. Trump has committed dozens and dozens of crimes and we're two weeks away from him possibly getting re-elected.

We’ve become a farce.

So I've had this conversation a bunch over the past couple years and maybe you can shed light on some stuff.  When people say they want to 'make Texas blue' what exactly are they aiming to do?  I'm a CA man as you probably know and everybody who lives here knows someone or several people who have left to go to Texas or Idaho or Colorado or some other state where they actually can buy a house, increase their spending power, not have to worry about getting stabbed with a rusty syringe by a homeless person, the list goes on.  If you live in CA there's a 99.999% chance that you've looked up apartments/houses similar to yours just to see how much less you would be paying if you moved literally anywhere else.  Why wife brings it up frequently that Los Angeles is a pretty crummy place to raise a family and I don't think it would take much at all to make her leave.  Fortunately my job keeps us grounded here at least for the foreseeable future.  I'll be honest, I vote blue in national elections but good lord is it becoming next to impossible to justify voting for Democrats at the local or state level outside of 'well they're still better than Republicans.'  Fortunately for Democrats all the Republicans have left so they have nothing to worry about.

I know that one-party rule can wreck a state, look at the Republicans in Kansas and yeah, look at the Democrats in California.  We've got a lot of great stuff here, the weather, entertainment, tons of travel opportunities from forests and mountains to beaches and deserts.  We also have some of the highest taxes, highest housing costs, highest homeless rates, highest income inequality and the folks in charge are simply unable or unwilling to do much about it short of passing new bills that usually just make things worse.  So when people say 'make Texas blue' what part of a blue state like California, if any, are you guys hoping to adopt?  I'm not trying to be a smartass or anything, I just know a lot of people who have moved to Texas and Colorado and when they hear people say 'make Texas Blue' they go 'what the hell is the matter with you?'  If it's social stuff like abortion rights, LGBT issues and such, that I understand, I get it.  But if it's 'hey we need more rent control' or 'hey we need to adopt a state income tax' well....

You are bringing up a lot of Los Angeles problems and calling them "blue state problems" when they really aren't.  I live in a blue state and the rent is relatively cheap and there aren't homeless people trying to stab me.  

Los Angeles, like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, is a highly in demand city.  When demand is high and supply is low prices go up.  If they want to decease rents all they need to do is free up the zoning and allow more homes to be built, but when you try to do that NIMBYism steps in and the established people in the various neighborhoods whine that the increased density will potentially decrease their property values and bring "undesirables" into the neighborhood and the legislators in question cave.  But that's not a uniquely "blue state" problem.  Failing to upzone is not part of the Democratic platform, it's just kind of a phenomenon built into the governance of large cities and the Republicans certainly aren't making any promises to reverse the phenomenon.  "Turning Texas blue" certainly isn't going to suddenly make the rents in Dallas spike, nor would turning California red somehow bring down L.A. rents, they're largely unrelated.

I wish it were just Los Angeles but it's also San Diego, Orange, Alameda, Sacramento counties and the entire Bay area.  If it were just LA then the thousands of the people who have left the state would have just moved to another city or county.  If it were just NIMBYism in these larger cities then we'd be seeing a boom in the central valley and inland but that's not happening either.  The long and short of it is that there are myriad regulations, fees, codes etc. that developers in California have to follow that just don't exist in other surrounding states like Arizona or Nevada and those states only happy to have Californians bring their business.  Many residential development companies have picked up and moved east in recent years.  You're right, there is a high demand in all these cities and counties and naturally you would think they would try to build more, the problem is that it's impossible.  In Venice for example a state commission tried to build low income housing to help ease the exploding homeless population there.  Not long after planning started they calculated that it would cost over half a million dollars per unit to build said low income housing.  The commission asked Sacramento if they could be exempt from some specific regulations.  Their simple answer; no.  So they pulled the plug on a lot of those and in the meantime homeless people are still heading there in droves.  If Sacramento was interested in fixing the housing and homeless problem they would start by incentivizing people to build again by cutting all the red tape, something Republicans in the state have proposed but have absolutely no power to do so.  But no, instead they pass state-wide rent control which is fine if you're good in your current apartment and don't mind living there the rest of your life.  In the meantime people don't move because vacant units jump in price  which only adds to the housing crunch and developers who might otherwise be interested in building apartments go 'Rent control?  I'll pass' and build luxury condos instead which is exactly what we're getting.  At the same time businesses can't leave fast enough.  If memory serves I believe over 15,000 businesses have left California since 2008.  That's...not good.  Instead of asking how they can retain businesses though politicians put Proposition 15 on this current ballot.  That'll raise property taxes on commercial properties worth $3 million or more.  In many cases it will raise them immensely.  They advertise it as a 'Google and Disney rich fat cat tax, they can afford it' but because property values are so high it's also going to apply to a number of commercial complexes occupied by multiple small businesses and the landlords are simply going to pass the tax onto them.  Because that'll definitely convince people to want to set up shop in California, for sure.  Oh and lest we forget, we're still in the middle of a pandemic in a state that's still mostly locked down.  I think it was Adam Carolla who said that California is a state that for some reason has declared war on the people who pay the bills.  It's hard not to feel that way once you've lived here long enough.  These are problems created by Democratic solutions and everyone here knows it, they just don't care to do anything about it.  I'm sure there are other blue states that are doing just fine but like I said California is an example of a place that's suffering from one party rule and something desperately has to change. 

Wow that's a lot, sorry for being long-winded.