US Politics Thread 2021-24

[Onkel Neal]

Yeah, I'm not sure he should be either, but he's spent his life playing fast and loose and now it's coming round to bite him.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

Does it really matter? Trump will be in jail by the end of June... Nikki Haley, get your rest now, girl.

If I understand it correctly-A voter can put their vote on a prisoner

If I did understand it correctly Trump can still be your next President

Edit
I was right.

A convicted or imprisoned felon can not only campaign for president and other federal offices, but also be elected.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/n...tions/3518094/
End edit

Markus

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

Yeah, I'm not sure he should be either, but he's spent his life playing fast and loose and now it's coming round to bite him.

I would say he had a mouth on him, and didn’t care to learn how to play the game inside the beltway. But the world did live in relative for four years. Now we have one that can’t string a complete sentence together unless he’s jacked up on Adderall two new hot wars, and one boiling over in the pacific. Two pots of the same color and both just as unpopular as the other. Look at Pence you think polls were the driving factor to his not running? I’d bet ya he saw the writting on the wall how much it would cost to defend himself and bowed out.

Way I see it the judicial system is being abused by those currently in power. That IMO is the real threat to our democracy. The current case is basically challenging presidential immunity, do you really think either party wants that? Of course not, they won’t allow it, it’s just being used by the opposition party to wear down Trumps finances hoping he won’t run again.

Can you imagine the consequences if the immunity case set a new precedent? Lies about chemical weapons in Iraq, Operation Fast and Furious, illegal immigrants murdering U.S. citizens? The Presidency would be made ineffective scapegoat and never ending chaos and lawsuits.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by mapuc

You can say what you want but this man have(has) very high thoughts about himself

Markus

...that is the primary definition of: MEGALOMANIAC! It comes from the Greek: mega (great) and mania(madness). Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and presently, Vladimir Putin, who thinks he's a reincarnated Peter the Great, all suffered from this affliction. Their antics caused general misery for humanity.

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by August

Biden ran away from participating in the Democrat primary debates, including debating RFK, and now is too chicken to agree to debate Trump in the General. Is Old Joe also farting up a smoke screen of lame excuses or is he just too senile for his handlers to risk it?

No incumbent president of either party has participated in a primary debate since Gerald Ford. Try again.

[August]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

No incumbent president of either party has participated in a primary debate since Gerald Ford. Try again.

RFK is no longer a Democrat candidate. Is your old fart going to debate him in the general?

[Jimbuna]

Trump reveals his chilling plans for America should he be voted in for a second term

Donald Trump lifted the lid on his concerning plans should he be voted for a second term, after saying he believed he was too nice the first time around.

Six months ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Trump sat down with TIME at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, where he revealed that Americans can expect a mass deportation operation.

When politics reporter Eric Cortellessa asked whether Trump would override the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that prohibits the use of military force on civilians, Trump responded: "Well, these aren't civilians."

"These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before," he continued.
"They're coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you'll have 20 million by the time this ends," Trump claimed. "And that's bigger than almost every state."

Trump added that it's unlikely he would house people in detention camps as he would deport them swiftly. However, he did not rule out building more holding centres if needed during the operation.

"No, I would not rule out anything," he said. "But there wouldn't be that much of a need for them [detention camps], because of the fact that we're going to be moving them out. We're going to bring them back from where they came."

Trump also said he would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies, as per the outlet.

"Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?" the 2024 Republican candidate was asked, to which he responded: "I think they might do that. Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states."

"Look, [overturning] Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states, and that was a legal – as well as possibly in the hearts of some, in the minds of some – a moral decision."

When asked if he felt "comfortable" with states prosecuting women, Trump said: "It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions."

Other topics of conversation included the January 6 2021 Capitol riot, calling those who rioted the "J-6 patriots."

He also said he would find it difficult hiring anyone who believed Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

"I wouldn't feel good about it, because I think anybody that doesn't see that that election was stolen – it just, you look at the proof. It's so vast, state legislatures where they didn't go through the legislature," he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...e927fa7e&ei=17

[Rockstar]

Even Dick Van Dyke is worried about something going on.

[Rockstar]

Drain the national reserves for personal political gains, stop supporting the Saudis, basically arm Iran and their Houthi proxy threatening energy in the Middle East, Ukraine striking Russian oil. All the while our national reserves remain dry because this senile old clown in chief and his sidekick spank Jake Sullivan the boy wonder have through a mismanaged foreign policy driven up oil prices and now can’t afford to replenish our reserves. THOSE ARE THE CLOWNS THAT HAVE ACTUALLY THREATENED OR NATIONAL SECURITY.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/...oleum-reserve/

How and Why Biden Destroyed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Instead of unleashing more American energy, Biden has chosen to use America’s emergency reserves to solve his own political problems.

Last Wednesday, President Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) canceled a pair of oil purchases to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), leaving America’s energy reserves dangerously low at a time of global uncertainty.

The DOE originally planned to buy oil at $79 per barrel. But oil prices have stubbornly refused to cooperate and remain above $86 per barrel, leading the DOE to cancel the purchase.

When former president Donald Trump attempted to fill the SPR to the brim when oil prices were at a rock-bottom price of $24 a barrel, congressional Democrats blocked the purchase, claiming it would be an oil-industry bailout.. [Leave it to Dems to place their party first and screw up a good thing for the country.]

Taxpayers would have been left on the hook for the price increase since then had the Biden administration proceeded with the purchase. But simply refusing to replenish the oil supply is a risky decision given that now there’s almost no oil reserve left. America’s oil reserve has declined by 44 percent since Biden took office, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The SPR is at its lowest level since its initial filling in August 1983. The reserve can hold 714 million barrels. It’s currently about half full and thus could supply America’s needs for just 17 days.

Prior to Biden’s tenure, the SPR releases occurred for wars or natural disasters, such as the 1991 Gulf War or various hurricanes striking the oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Such events could cause unexpected disruptions of the oil supply.

The SPR’s purpose is to “diminish the vulnerability of the United States to the effects of a severe energy supply interruption, and provide limited protection from the short-term consequences of interruptions in supplies of petroleum products.” It was not intended to bail out a president’s policy of producing less American energy. But that’s how Biden has used it: more as a political reserve than a strategic one.

In 2021, Biden made the unprecedented move of releasing oil from the SPR to combat high fuel prices, although prices remained stubbornly high regardless. Mysteriously, the release concluded right before the 2022 midterm elections, when high gas prices were a key issue. Biden claimed his plan to release another 15 million barrels from the SPR was “not politically motivated at all.”

But the problem isn’t just that American taxpayers were robbed of the opportunity to buy oil at bargain prices during the last administration and then saw the SPR used in an arguable attempt to score political points under Biden. Now, if America needed to significantly increase oil use in a natural disaster or war, the reserve is already mostly depleted.

The SPR’s depleted state certainly shows weakness to America’s enemies, as it demonstrates a lack of capacity to fight a long war. But the situation is actually worse than that. Biden’s policies have fatally undermined America’s ability to quickly increase oil production in an emergency.

The number of U.S. oil-drilling rigs has still yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Rig counts are down 22 percent compared with March 2020, mostly due to the anti-energy policies of the Biden administration creating legal and regulatory uncertainty. Especially damaging was Biden’s blocking of U.S. energy exports, which greatly weakened the growth of this strategically vital industry, and forced America’s allies to rely on foreign dictatorships for their energy security. So America’s strategic reserves are not only depleted, but our capacity to rapidly refill them during a crisis is as well.

Biden has greatly shrunk the market for U.S. energy. America’s capacity to quickly ramp up energy production in the event of a global conflict is sharply limited. That’s a major problem, given that the U.S. is directly or indirectly involved in major conflicts in Israel, the Red Sea, and Ukraine.

The situation in Israel presents particular risk to America’s energy reserves. The U.S. has a legal obligation to sell a portion of those reserves to Israel if the latter is unable to purchase energy in international markets. Although Israel has never exercised this legal right, given the current political and military situation in the Middle East, discounting the possibility would be extremely foolish.

But instead of unleashing more American energy, Biden has chosen to use America’s emergency reserves to solve his own political problems, to the detriment of America’s strategic interests, and has made his country vastly more vulnerable to true emergencies.

One hopes Biden and congressional Democrats will stop playing politics with this strategic resource before such an emergency arises, or the consequences could be grave. Blocking the opportunity to refill the reserves when prices were low, and then using high prices as an excuse to refuse to refill them now while wastefully and non-strategically depleting the reserves for political points, is the height of irresponsibility.