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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#12821 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2019-May-24, 00:12

View PostChas_P, on 2019-May-23, 19:23, said:

Actually I don't "support" either major political party. I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat. If you want to slap a label on me label me as a Libertarian. I believe in Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. So far I've achieved all three; I've lived for over 81 years, enjoyed liberty for all 81+, and not only pursued happiness but actually captured it. I wish the same for you.

That's exactly the impression you make in your forum persona. Someone who is genuinely happy with his life and not at all cranky about anything. I mean, who but a genuinely happy person would be cheering for an administration who fights with all its heart to make life miserable for incoming asylum seekers, including separating toddlers from their parents and letting six migrant children die in custody? Shows what a satisfied life you have!!
ALSO, TRUMP DID NOT THROW A TEMPER TANTRUM IN HIS MEETING WITH PELOSI! I KNOW IT BECAUSE HE SAID SO IN A TWEET!!!
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#12822 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-24, 09:43

Quote

Trump tries to steer border wall deal to GOP donor’s firm


And if we knew the size of the expected kickback to the Trump Organization, we would then probably know why the president is so insistent about "the big, beautiful wall."
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12823 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-24, 11:12

https://twitter.com/...917617252438016

This "Nancy Pelosi slurred her words" fake tape could easily be the product of the Russian troll farm that engineered the heist of the 2016 election, yet here we have one of the president' lawyers spreading this false message.

Quote

How quickly we forget. The whole edited/doctored Nancy Pelosi video thing isn't exactly new. It's ripped from the "Hillary Clinton is sick" handbook of 2016.


Giuliani as Goebbels in Springtime for Individual-1?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12824 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-24, 15:17

I wonder if the overt nature of the corruption of this administration will ever be enough to turn members of his own party against Individual-1.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12825 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-May-25, 20:39

View PostWinstonm, on 2019-May-24, 15:17, said:

I wonder if the overt nature of the corruption of this administration will ever be enough to turn members of his own party against Individual-1.

It's been over 2 years, and little has changed. We're starting to see small cracks (that one GOP Senator last week who broke ranks and said he'd support impeachment), but I think Trump was right when he said he could kill someone in Times Square and he wouldn't lose support. I think all the passes he's gotten just continue to embolden him.

#12826 User is offline   sharon j 

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Posted 2019-May-26, 07:14

I couldn't have said it better, "Crazy is as Crazy does"[https://www.msn.com/...ocid=spartandhp
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#12827 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-May-26, 09:13

I wonder if Trump got the idea for the doctored Nancy Pelosi video from Jimmy Kimmel. For years he has been doing a regular bit called "Drunk Donald Trump", where he shows Trump giving a speach, and slows down the audio so it sounds like he's drunk.

However, it's clear to everyone watching the Jimmy Kimmel show that this is manufactured for comedy. Not to mention, there's plenty of examples of Donald Trump actually getting words spectacularly wrong.

#12828 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-May-26, 11:42

From A Senator Wants to Have a Greater Impact. So He’s Leaving the Senate. by Carl Hulse at NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — It is quite a testament to the current state of the Senate that a successful veteran lawmaker of two decades believes he can accomplish more by quitting than by trying to stick it out another six years.

“This place is definitely broken,” said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico and a longtime advocate of government reform who surprisingly announced in March that he would not seek a third term in 2020 in his solidly blue state.

In assessing his political future, Mr. Udall said he had become convinced that he could do more to advance his progressive ideas on climate change, war powers and a comprehensive electoral overhaul by skipping another two years of relentless re-election fund-raising. Instead, he said, he intends to redouble his efforts in those areas in hopes of setting the stage for big changes should Democrats prevail next year, even though he won’t be back in the Senate himself.

“You don’t necessarily have to be there to see that they are completed,” he said.

Mr. Udall’s decision to not run again, discussed in an interview on Wednesday, showed how the gridlock infecting Congress and the wide political divisions in the country can frustrate even the most experienced lawmakers and make them rethink their careers. It also illustrates how overwhelming and time-consuming fund-raising for multimillion-dollar races can be, leaving lawmakers little opportunity for the work they are supposed to be doing.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#12829 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-26, 12:28

View PostChas_P, on 2019-May-23, 19:23, said:

label me as a Libertarian.


That is a broad category. What do you personally mean by Libertarian?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12830 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2019-May-26, 18:06

View PostWinstonm, on 2019-May-26, 12:28, said:

That is a broad category. What do you personally mean by Libertarian?


The libertarian or “classical liberal” perspective is that peace, prosperity, and social harmony are fostered by “as much liberty as possible” and “as little government as necessary.” Libertarian is not a single viewpoint, but includes a wide variety of perspectives. Libertarians can range from market anarchists to advocates of a limited welfare state, but they are all united by a belief in personal liberty, economic freedom, and a skepticism of government power.
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#12831 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-May-27, 06:36

View PostChas_P, on 2019-May-26, 18:06, said:

The libertarian or “classical liberal” perspective is that peace, prosperity, and social harmony are fostered by “as much liberty as possible” and “as little government as necessary.” Libertarian is not a single viewpoint, but includes a wide variety of perspectives. Libertarians can range from market anarchists to advocates of a limited welfare state, but they are all united by a belief in personal liberty, economic freedom, and a skepticism of government power.


I find it highly amusing that Chas's personal perspective is a cut and paste job

https://theihs.org/w...is-libertarian/
Alderaan delenda est
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#12832 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-27, 08:17

They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means. :P
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12833 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2019-May-27, 14:47

View Posthrothgar, on 2019-May-27, 06:36, said:

I find it highly amusing that Chas's personal perspective is a cut and paste job

https://theihs.org/w...is-libertarian/


Oddly, my computer won't go there. Not to anything connected with ihes. Maybe my virus protection is watching out for me!
Here is a question that can serve as a quick identity check of libertarian.
How does he feel about publicly funded elementary schools?
From what I can tell, a person who favors public funding of elementary schools would be kicked out of the libertarian club by the true believers.

But this happens all the time. Bernie Sanders is a Socialist. Ah, but a Democratic Socialist. Which I suppose, to a true socialist, means that he is not a socialist.What's a liberal? What's a Christian? What's a whatever?

Having concerns about government overreach hardly makes a person a libertarian, else we are all libertarians. Do you have to oppose public funding of elementary schools to be a true libertarian? Let those who so describe themselves argue that one out.
Ken
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#12834 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 06:48

From How Liberalism Loses by Ross Douthat at NYT:

Quote

In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.

The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing. Right-wing populism struggles to govern effectively, but it clearly has a durable political appeal — which, as Tyler Cowen points out in a Bloomberg column, has not yet been counteracted by the new socialism, the new new left.

The global context is useful for thinking about how American liberals understand their own situation. Since the shock of Donald Trump’s election, many liberals have decided that their own coalition is the real American majority, victimized by un-democratic institutions and an anti-democratic G.O.P. Their mood is one of anger at the System, and confidence in their unacknowledged, temporarily-impeded mandate: They’ve got the structures, but we’ve got the numbers.

But what if American liberals, while unfortunate in the Electoral College, are luckier than they think in other ways? The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump’s specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism. If we had a populist president who didn’t alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.

That liberal belief may also misunderstand the real correlation of forces in our politics. We had an example this week on our op-ed podcast, The Argument, where my colleague and co-host David Leonhardt interviewed Pete Buttigieg, the Midwestern mayor running for president with promises to build bridges between the heartland and the coasts. Leonhardt pressed Buttigieg on whether that bridge-building might include compromise on any social issues, and the answer seemed to be “no” — in part because Mayor Pete argued that on abortion and guns and immigration most middle Americans already agree with Democrats, that the liberal position is already the common ground.

The strategic flaw in this reading of the liberal situation is that politics isn’t about casually held opinions on a wide range of topics, but focused prioritization of specifics. As the Democratic data analyst David Shor has noted, you can take a cluster of nine Democratic positions that each poll over 50 percent individually, and find that only 18 percent of Americans agree with all of them. And a single strong, focused disagreement can be enough to turn a voter against liberalism, especially if liberals seem uncompromising on that issue.

A pattern of narrow, issue-by-issue resistance is also what you’d expect in an era where the popular culture is more monolithically left-wing than before. That cultural dominance establishes a broad, shallow left-of-center consensus, which then evaporates when people have some personal reason to reject liberalism, or confront the limits of its case.

None of this needs to spell doom for liberals; it just requires them to prioritize and compromise. If you want to put climate change at the center of liberal politics, for instance, then you’ll keep losing voters in the Rust Belt, just as liberal parties have lost similar voters in Europe and Australia. In which case you would need to reassure some other group, be it suburban evangelicals or libertarians, that you’re willing to compromise on the issues that keep them from voting Democratic.

Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.

But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.

In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax-sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.

Which liberals may do in 2020, because Trump remains eminently beatable. But in the long run, the global trend suggests that a liberalism that remains inflexible in the face of variegated resistance is the ideology more likely to be crushed.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#12835 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 07:09

Douthat's international comparisons would be more convincing if any of these parties were as extremist on healthcare and taxes for the wealthy as the GOP.
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#12836 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 07:16

From Federal judge temporarily blocks part of Trump’s plan to build border wall by Fred Barbash at WaPo:

Quote

A federal judge has temporarily blocked part of President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border with money Congress never appropriated for that purpose.

U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr., of the Northern District of California, said that those challenging Trump’s actions had a good chance of prevailing on their claims that the administration is acting illegally in shifting money from other programs to pay for the wall.

Gilliam wrote that the government’s position “that when Congress declines the Executive’s request to appropriate funds, the Executive may simply find a way to spend those funds ‘without Congress’ does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic.”

The law the administration invoked to shift funds allows transfers for “unforeseen” events. Gilliam said the government’s claim that wall construction was “unforeseen” “cannot logically be squared” with Trump’s many demands for funding dating back to early 2018 and even in the campaign.

With some contracts already awarded for construction, Gilliam said that allowing work to go forward before the legal issues have been fully resolved could cause irreparable harm.

He ruled in response to lawsuits brought by the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

The plaintiffs sought preliminary injunctions against the administration’s diversion of billions of dollars meant for other purposes. The plaintiffs alleged that Trump’s actions violate the constitutional requirement that no money may be spent without an appropriation from Congress as well as legal restrictions on the purposes for which funds can be reallocated.

The suits asked Gilliam to block any wall-related activity paid for with those funds while he fully considers the merits of the suits.

About $1 billion has been moved from military pay and pension accounts, transfers that Gilliam ruled against Friday, but no money has been transferred from the emergency military construction fund for which the president declared a state of emergency in February. That fund represents about $3.6 billion of the money President Trump wants to use.

Gilliam said he would rule on that issue separately when the administration actually shifts money using that authority. He doubted the administration would prevail on that, either, questioning whether a border fence met the definition of “military construction,” an interpretation that would give the government “unbounded authority” not authorized by law, he said.

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#12837 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 07:59

View Postcherdano, on 2019-May-28, 07:09, said:

Douthat's international comparisons would be more convincing if any of these parties were as extremist on healthcare and taxes for the wealthy as the GOP.


Douthat would be a bit more credible if he weren't a racist little piece of ***** who owes his current position to affirmative action.

Take a look at some of his college era writing.
He's learned not to be so blatant about his beliefs, but they're still there.
Alderaan delenda est
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#12838 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 08:23

View Posty66, on 2019-May-26, 11:42, said:

From A Senator Wants to Have a Greater Impact. So He’s Leaving the Senate. by Carl Hulse at NYT:

Quote

It also illustrates how overwhelming and time-consuming fund-raising for multimillion-dollar races can be, leaving lawmakers little opportunity for the work they are supposed to be doing.


It's long amazed me that legislators are allowed to get away with all this fund-raising. Can you imagine any other job where the employees are routinely allowed (nay, [i]expectedi/i]) to spend half their time in meetings negotiating to keep their job, rather than doing the work they were hired to do?

#12839 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 08:48

From Ted Gup

Quote

This spring, I received a much-sought visa from Britain that allows me to apply for settlement in that nation after a total of three years of working and living there — as I have been doing off and on in recent years. Receiving it was an occasion for both celebration and sober reflection.

It represents an option to exit a United States I now barely recognize — one that almost daily distresses me with its xenophobia, its saber-rattling, its theocratic leanings, its denial of facts and science, its tribalism, and its petty and boorish president. I think of that visa as my “Trump card.” Come 2020, if the nation chooses to continue on this toxic path, it may well be my way out.


https://www.washingt...m=.0a0ed4672ac7


I wonder how many feel this way but don't have the ability to follow suit.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#12840 User is offline   sharon j 

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Posted 2019-May-28, 09:07

View PostWinstonm, on 2019-May-28, 08:48, said:

From Ted Gup


https://www.washingt...m=.0a0ed4672ac7


I wonder how many feel this way but don't have the ability to follow suit.

Is there an emoji for raising a hand?
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