US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Platapus

So has everyone ordered their copy of Hillary's new book?


Evidently in her book she reveals why she lost the election

It was not because of her expensive but poorly run campaign
It was not because she has the charisma of a bowl of tapioca
It w...
In other words, it was not her fault. It probably never is.

She just does not get it. Hillary' legacy is that she was probably the only candidate that could possibly lose against Trump.

No hurry to order this book, I am sure there will be plenty of copies on the shelves for a long long time.

Yes, an amazing level of hubris to publish a book of excuses like that.

Michael Bloomberg, this is all your fault for not getting in the race.

[August]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

Yes, an amazing level of hubris to publish a book of excuses like that.

Michael Bloomberg, this is all your fault for not getting in the race.

You just named the other person who couldn't have beaten Donald Trump. The guy is a bigger fascist than hillary even.

[Mr Quatro]

CNN has another un named source from un named friends of Rex Tillerson.

Rexit? Rex Tillerson 'to quit as Donald Trump's secretary of state before the end of the year'

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rexit-rex...202336340.html

Mr Tillerson has found himself undermined by the president, who openly contradicts him and appears disinterested in the work of Mr Tillerson's team of career diplomats at the state department.
Friends of Mr Tillerson's had previously believed he would ride out the roller coaster at Foggy Bottom - home of the state department. But CNN on Monday reported that the friends had noticed "a change in tone," and thought that he could well be planning on leaving Washington.

[August]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

CNN has another un named source from un named friends of Rex Tillerson.

Some friends these republican officials have eh? It's almost like they hang out with a bunch of closet democrats.

[Mr Quatro]

Found this note of a post I saved last year from the long gone Presidential thread we had before this one. Don't cheat and scroll to the bottom to see who it was, but it was from his heart.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can neither do nor teach are leftist comedians.

Why should they be the goto source of wisdom in defending a position? That fact alone screams lack of validity for a hyperbolic position.

You have to redefine the meaning of the word to call Trump hypocritical. His weakness is that he is too honest, that he fails to filter out positions that might offend some, that he speaks his mind regardless of the consequences. Of course that got a lot of help when "some of the immigrants are criminals who must be expelled" became "all Mexican immigrants are criminals" in the press, shame on the "objective" (another word that has been redefined) press.

Hypocrisy is being head of the State department, sending memos to your people telling them now to handle e-mail in a secure manner and in a way that preserves historical records, but violating those guidelines for yourself, ensuring that the enemies of the US have access to the country's most sensitive top secret and above information. Hypocrisy is denying that you had more than one cell phone when you had at least 10 different ones, denying that any top secret e-mails went on your server when many did, denying that any wrongdoing was done and that at most an inconsequential mistake was made.

Hypocrisy is claiming to work for women's rights when the 1990's was spent destroying women who claimed sexual relations with her "husband" in direct opposition to her "women don't lie. They have the right to be believed" nonsense. Hypocrisy is paying your women 70% of what the men working in the campaign are paid and claiming to stand for equal pay for equal work. Hypocrisy is handing out crumbs to the residents of our inner cities for their votes while doing not one thing to bring them true opportunity and bring them out of their economic plight. Hypocrisy is blaming the deficit on the top 1% of taxpayers not paying their share when they already pay over half of federal revenues. Hypocrisy is a plan to increase corporate taxes on companies who are already paying the highest corporate taxes in the world, effectively paying them to leave our country and relocate to one with lower expenses.

Finally, hypocrisy is taking a tens of millions of dollars from the same countries that finance ISIS, the same countries where women can't vote, can't leave the house without escort, are not allowed to get an education, cannot drive a car and are strictly treated as property: toys to be taken out of the closet to play with and when you're done they go back in the closet. 90% of that 70 to 100 million dollars went to the Clintons. The other 10% went to the purposes of the Clinton Foundation.

That's the short list. You do not have to redefine the term to attach "hypocrisy" to its correct owner here.

Oh, hypocrisy is stiffing your supporters on the night of your predictable loss of the presidency, for selfish reasons not thanking them for their support, sending the message that this defeat is final, that an unspeakable wrong has been committed, that THIS defeat is final and that somehow her supporters, as evidenced by her absence, are to blame, in her mind. It was a horrible act of selfish hypocrisy. Being better than Hillary, they still came back and cheered her the next day.

Hillary has had plenty of object lessons that the universe is not all about her, but has steadfastly rejected each opportunity to become a better person and take responsibility for her own shortcomings, which all, thankfully, cost her the Presidency.

I'm not saying Trump will fare any better or be a great President. He's a bit of a crapshoot. But if he fails, it will be because of his forthrightness, not because of his parsing and redefining of formerly well-understood and shared values and terms. He's not a professional politician. That is both his primary strength and his greatest weakness.
__________________
11-18-16
subsim forum
rockin robbins

[eddie]

Old Donnie boy, is now making threats against Congress over health care,lol Does this idiot know how hard they can make life for him!?! He's a first class chump!


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...lawmakers.html

[vienna]

Instead of trying to chase down non-existent 'millions of duplicate votes' in an vain effort to appease the Great Yellow One and make his fantasy of having won the 2016 Presidential Election popular vote, perhaps the time, effort, and money would be better spent dealing with very real and very relevant election problems:

Hackers break into voting machines in minutes at hacking competition --

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecur...ng-competition

It took DEF CON hackers minutes to pwn these US voting machines --

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07...hines_hacking/

A real problem needing a very real solution...




<O>

[Platapus]

One of the many reasons I am very happy my state went back to paper ballots.

There are some instances where newer technology is not necessarily better than older technology.

[August]

I like this guys take on things:

Monster swamp vs. swamp monster: A D.C. allegory



July 29, 2017 at 7:00 pm | By FRANK MIELE



Politically speaking, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, or more appropriately between a monster swamp and a swamp monster.
The swamp is the bipartisan disaster known more formally as the federal government. The monster is President Donald Trump, whose out-sized self-caricature approach to life makes him more of a tormented DC Comics superhero (or supervillain?) than a D.C. politician.

There is no way I am going to support the swamp and its bureaucratic morass, which has a bottomless national debt and the moral code of a toothy gator. But accepting Trump on his own terms means you have to accept him as a “muck-encrusted mockery of a man,” as the original Swamp Thing was characterized. Sure, he means well, but he is so elemental and so alien from what we are familiar with that he is terrifying not just to the Fake News Media whom he battles for control of the swamp, but also to the rest of us who are just distant observers on dry land.
No one likes the Twitter bombs that Trump dumps on the unsuspecting swamp creatures every morning. They are untidy and reckless. But no one liked the real bombs dropped on Dresden, Berlin or Hiroshima either. They were anything but tidy, but they got the job done.

If you know anything about Trump, it is that he is at war, and like Gens. George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant and Douglas MacArthur, he cares less about winning a popularity contest than winning the war.

The swamp creatures in Congress and the media pretend they like things nice and tidy, but that’s only because they are so deep inside the mud that they have no idea just how dirty they are. I guess we’d all like things nice and tidy at some level, and that’s why the swamp has survived so long. By keeping our eyes closed, we can pretend the muck doesn’t stink. We can pretend that senators and congressmen are statesmen instead of power-grubbing pigs living in the muck and feeding at the public trough.

It would be awesome if someone would clean the mess up, we tell ourselves, but we forget that cleaning up a swamp means getting your hands dirty. In some measure, Trump disappoints us not because he fails, but because he makes us confront our own part in allowing the swamp to exist.

To reference a superhero who pre-dates comic books by a couple millennia, it was Hercules who was tasked with cleaning up the filthy Augean stables that housed 3,000 head of cattle. According to Greek mythology, the stables had not been cleaned in over 30 years, a strangely fitting number since it also closely approximates the time period since Ronald Reagan tried to clean up Washington in the 1980s.

Hercules used his strength and his cunning to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of cleaning up the stables. It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will have similar success in draining the swamp, but it should be pointed out that Hercules did not get credit for his remarkable labor. Nor may Trump, but I venture to say that he will leave Washington, D.C., a fresher place than when he found it.

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articl...ICLE/170729875

[mapuc]

Don't know if it have been mentioned before.

A friends friend told me that an American who's unemployed and homeless does not have the right to vote in an election or referendum.

Markus

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Don't know if it have been mentioned before.

A friends friend told me that an American who's unemployed and homeless does not have the right to vote in an election or referendum.

Markus

Which is reasonable. Nobody should have any option to vote for forcing others to generate him an income. No representation without contribution, to lend a bit from the famous slogan of the Boston Tea Party (no taxation without representation).

I think prison inmatess cannot vote in the US, or some US states, too, but I am not certain. If true, I would agree with that as well.

None of the two points mean that I stopped arguing against elections and "democracy" in general. I'm just a little pedantic on those two points.

[MaDef]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Which is reasonable. Nobody should have any option to vote for forcing others to generate him an income. No representation without contribution, to lend a bit from the famous slogan of the Boston Tea Party (no taxation without representation).

I think prison inmatess cannot vote in the US, or some US states, too, but I am not certain. If true, I would agree with that as well.

None of the two points mean that I stopped arguing against elections and "democracy" in general. I'm just a little pedantic on those two points.

the Homeless and unemployed are allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

the following people cannot vote in U.S. elections:
mentally disabled
Resident non-citizens
residents of U.S. territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands).
Most convicted Felons.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by August

I like this guys take on things:

I posted on his blog. It was just to question the veracity of someone knowledgeable enough to know about a character from Greek mythology but obtuse enough to use the Roman form of his name. The "Greek" character was Herakles.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by MaDef

the Homeless and unemployed are allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

the following people cannot vote in U.S. elections:
mentally disabled
Resident non-citizens
residents of U.S. territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands).
Most convicted Felons.

If so, then take my words for like it better should be.

[August]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I posted on his blog. It was just to question the veracity of someone knowledgeable enough to know about a character from Greek mythology but obtuse enough to use the Roman form of his name. The "Greek" character was Herakles.

You did?, really?

In the model railroading community we call you people Rivet Counters. Someone who will trash a beautiful scale model that took months to create from scratch because the engine tender had 115 rivets on the side in real life but the builder only put 100 of them on.

Didja ever think the author was trying to talk to more than just fans of Greek mythology? How many people outside of that small collection of nerds do you think would recognize the alternate spelling of Hercules?