Steerpike

It's been fairly well documented that marijuana use is pretty evenly distributed across multiple ethnic/demographic/economic groups, yet the incarceration for marijuana use is focused almost entirely on blacks. There is a massive social cost associated with this practice, beyond the cost of jails and courts. Decriminalizing pot addresses this problem, and allows the police to focus on the more serious drugs such as heroin, crack, meth, etc.

Further - you cannot lump all drugs together in this simplistic manner. Heroin (as well as many pain killers, which are a related and probably even bigger issue) is a desperately addictive and destructive drug, and needs to be controlled.

Steerpike

(context - Joe Arpaio lost in AZ)


How about attorney general?

Giantaxe

Very unlikely, especially if Trump goes down the protectionist road as he is threatening to. Additionally, his economic plans just don't add up:

What plan?: Donald Trump’s sums do not add up | The Economist

Leslie

My coworker is being bullied on Facebook because she, as a Hillary supporter, is rightfully hurt and disappointed. She's been called names all day by people she actually knows from her small town. This is from the people that actually won the election. I was looking at some of their comments and feeds. There was one hilarious and tortuous threat for Texas to secede now that his guy has won --- he seems to have misunderstood what winning the presidency actually means. And then a whole lot of batshittery from religious nutters. This all was God's plan to vanquish the anti-Christ (Hillary) and Trump is some sort of avenging angel sent straight from heaven. Literally, somebody called Trump, "God's #1 truth warrior" ... Honestly though, they were saying very little about Trump or his policies, they seem completely fixated on staying as angry as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can.

I am well aware that everybody that voted for Trump is not as stated above. I've spoken to a lot of normal people in rural Texas who simply held their nose and voted the party line.

Leslie

He's already promised that one to Rudy. I shit you not.

Steerpike

My balance was up today; not sure where the markets will go in the near term.

On a personal level, my g/f is 63 years old, and is still working so has good 'group health coverage'. She's the one that would benefit from the 'pre-existing' provision of obamacare, but even if she were fired tomorrow, she'd have 18 months of cobra so is almost guaranteed coverage till she reaches 65, when she'll be eligible for Medicare. I don't personally have any pre-existing conditions so I can probably get insurance with or without o'care, although at my age (57) it's likely to cost more. At the 'country' level, though, I'm extremely pleased that o'care has extended coverage for many millions of people, and has guaranteed a realistic level of coverage. I can only hope that enough of o'care is embedded in the system by now that these aspects cannot be ripped out casually.

Steerpike

How do you explain today's market reaction? Seriously? I was expecting a big crash. Since it hasn't happened, I'm tempted to sell big-time and get to a cash position in anticipation of a pending crash ....

Steerpike

I can accept that the politicians got the election wrong - they live in their bubble and have no clue about reality.

I can also, to a lesser degree, accept that the media got the election wrong, although I have a hard time understanding it (even Fox's news side were predicting Hillary the day before the election).

But the polls - how could they have been so utterly wrong? I did comment earlier that the method used by pollsters was ridiculous - calls to landlines (which no-one has or answers). But do people think the pollsters were truly the biased agents of either the politicians or the media? Or is there another explanation? I guess they did a lousy job of defining their sample groups?

magnumpi

Protests "its the American way I guess"

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theg...?client=safari

Lion in Winter

He and Newt will make lovely couple.

Giantaxe

"God will use Trump and Pence to help make America Great Again! The People have spoken and more importantly, God has spoken!"

So there you go...

Giantaxe

Futures were way down but recovered when other markets didn't drop as much as feared.

Hard to know what the markets will make of Trump's plans given they are largely incoherent. His tax cuts will balloon the deficit (unless you believe in "trickle down economics"). His protectionism is down right scary. I did sell some positions prior to the election somewhat in the expectation that the stock market will decline and present a buying opportunity at some point.

Here's some more from The Economist on why they think his growth/spending plans don't add up:

http://www.economist.com/news/united...s-conversation

Leslie

Clearly the pollsters were behind the curve. Apparently they didn't change their methods from what they were using in 2008 and 2012. I personally have not had a land line in over 10 years. I don't think I'm unusual. That would mean that huge swaths of voters have had little chance of being polled for over a decade. The polls are going to have use new ways to accurately collect data. The results smack of carelessness and lack of interest or imagination.

It's funny that Nate Silver was trashed for reporting numbers that favored Trump too much.

md95065

Indeed. Alex Jones is already floating the idea that "globalists" will create an "economic crisis" to "punish" Trump - in other words, if the U.S. economy does suffer it won't be Trump's fault, and it will be his "enemies" that are to blame.

Nutmegger

Please don't say that. If anyone in the Trump retinue is batshit crazy it's him. I was hoping that, now Trump has got what he wants, he would ditch Rudy.

Amazing demos across the country tonight.