The General US Politics Thread

I feel like most of the complaints about american education are really more state specific than most people think. I live in Jersey and we learned about the good and the bad. Especially the fact that many of them owned slaves(Washington's got a bit of a reason though, they were mostly technically his wives and his will set them to be freed upon her death, about the only legal way to do it by my understanding, so a case of Lawful Good if there ever was one)

Not sure if most of my classmates even remember half of it because I was one of the only one who seemed to give a shit about history but that's another issue.

edited 22nd Nov '14 6:38:38 AM by Joesolo

An investigative report prepared by the House Intelligence Committee found little to support questions raised about CIA actions on the ground in Benghazi.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

And yet I feel this won't change anything.

@Joesolo: Here's a book about George Washington and the years between being general and president. It touches on his attitudes towards slavery, and why it became such a big issue in the Constitutional Convention. http://www.skjam.com/2014/11/19/book-review-the-return-of-george-washington-1783-1789/

Flawed=not agreeing with their preconceived notions, of course.

President Obama decided in recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year.

Short version please: Why is the US back in Afghanistan?

What do you mean, "back"? We've been in Afghanistan since 2001.

And the answer is to try to prevent it from collapsing like Iraq did when we pulled out.

Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias note something rather peculiar, Republicans are the Congressional majority party and over the last 5-6 years could of easily claimed conservative brownie points by getting the ACA to be more Republican leaning and include more medical lawsuit tort reform, had looser EPA regulations, and a more solid and hardnosed immigration policy, yet they've been consistently acting like a fringe party in a proportional-representative Democracy where they gain their seats from satisfying the ideological preferences of a small political minority than the pragmatists of a majority party.

What is exactly going on?

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:27:12 AM by PotatoesRock

There's a n#@!%r in the White House is what's going on.

White supremacism - America's original sin - rears its ugly head again.

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:31:23 AM by Achaemenid

Pretty much. It's so twenty years from now they can point at this and say this is proof that the black man is unsuitable for wielding power.

Not gonna lie, it took me like a solid 2 minutes to parse through that link sentence.

And it's still annoying that racism is the cornerstone of politics in America. I blame Lincoln, he was nowhere near as thorough and heavy handed as he should have been during Reconstruction.

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:35:11 AM by LeGarcon

Let us not forget how rabid they were in opposition to Clinton. It's not just that Obama is black, although that's part of it. It's that Obama's administration coincided with the metastasization of movement conservatism into its current malignant form.

20 acres and a mule. It's depressing to think how American history might have been different had Sherman managed to carry that through.

I remember down here he was always portrayed as some monster in history class and of course that went hand in hand with the whole "Civil War was about State's Rights" along with fervent denials that the South was really that racist. And they pointed out that there were slaves in the North and that somehow made things ok.

Oh well. Love this song even more as the days go by.

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:45:12 AM by LeGarcon

Weird. I don't recall my Georgia history class being anti-Sherman. Maybe it's a matter of how rural (i.e. conservative) your area is.

Anyway, I don't think Obama being black was a major factor (though it may have contributed). The Republicans likely would have been just as obstructionist against any Democrat. The real problem is polarization and partianship.

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:53:37 AM by storyyeller

For Lincoln and Johnson/Hurrah, boys, hurrah!/Down with the traitors and on with the war/As we rally round the flag boys, rally in our might/Shouting the holy cause of freemen!

A man in the grave can only do so much about the policies of his successor.

I blame Lincoln for not tanking that headshot and dying.

edited 22nd Nov '14 11:05:47 AM by LeGarcon

About Lincoln's harshness during reconstruction you do realize he died like three days after the war ended right? As to Republican opposition to Obama I would like to remind you

1: How much Democrats detested Bush,half the rock music of the era could be summarized as Fuck you George Bush. Living in a liberal state and being relatively conservative I may have witnessed this phenomenon more than most.

2: I blame the time magazine cover showing Obama as FDR. Not literally, but the impression that his election would lead to another golden age for the Democrats, and the impression that the Republicans would soon be animated and we would be a one party state, that one guy switching parties didn't exactly help.

I'm sure he wasn't exactly keen on it.

edited 22nd Nov '14 11:04:15 AM by JackOLantern1337

Working on a college paper, and I'm having trouble finding some information - namely: what, exactly, are and aren't the powers of the EPA? I do understand that they can't legislate, only Congress can do that not that they've been doing anything productive with it of late, and I know that the EPA is an executive, i.e. enforcement agency, but I'm still unclear on specifics.

I tried both Google and the EPA website, but neither of them have been especially helpful to me.

Really Obama is Clinton 2.0, just that the Republicans have become that much more crotchety since then that compromise, which did work in Clinton's day still (welfare reform), has since become a sign of betrayal. Obama seems more radical to the Republicans because they have really just gotten that much worse themselves, and the problems would be just as bad if it had been Hillary, or even (in some world where he wasn't the kind of asshole who cheats on his cancer-stricken wife) John Edwards, the white southern man, would have gotten roughly the same amount of flak.

Racism is a part of it, but it's all about the party affiliation at the end of the day.

I've also been reading Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom" for one of my classes, and he suggests that the primary process is responsible for radicalization, because it effectively destroys the "party" as an institution with any real sense of top-down control, and means that the party is really controlled by its most passionate grassroots voters: sounds good on paper, terrible in practice, because primary voters are not representative of the party as a whole: the average Republican primary voter is more conservative than the average registered Republican, and so for the Democrats as well.

You just don't see the radicalization manifest in the Democrats because we're still in the Reagan era where Democratic candidates are still scared shitless of being seen as moonbats, so they skip to the center as soon as they get that nomination no matter how liberal Dem primary voters might be.

Edit to explain the link from Potatoes (which is a bit tortuously worded, btw): it means that Republicans could have given their input on Obama's policies in order to make them better for conservatives: they could, for instance, have traded the Keystone XL pipeline for the EPA Regulations, have made medical malpractice lawsuits harder to file as a part of the ACA, have gotten entitlement spending cuts in exchange for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. But because they have become the party of NO, they refuse to do anything that isn't one hundred percent authored by them, and so get outcomes that have nothing of what they want. This does have the benefit of making Obama look ineffective, but does not do anything to really promote Republican positions.

The Republican gamble seems to be to pull in 2016 what they pulled in 1980: to see a nation afflicted by an intense malaise vote Republican because the malaise afflicted them under a Democratic president, without really putting any substantive policies forward. The problem is that their "better than the other guy" solution only works in midterms. The younger and/or poorer people who vote in presidential years want to see solutions, not more passing of the buck.

edited 22nd Nov '14 12:14:31 PM by Ogodei

How much Democrats detested Bush, half the rock music of the era could be summarized as Fuck you George Bush. Living in a liberal state and being relatively conservative I may have witnessed this phenomenon more than most.

Yes but they didn't set out to block everything he did from day 1. Many of his policies got bipartisan support, even disastrous things like the Iraq War. Bush's immigration reform got killed by his own party. The democrats talked about using the budget to defund the war, but they never actually did, let alone cause a government shutdown.

Of course, part of that is increasing polarization in recent years. But then again, if it was recent years, Bush wouldn't be a republican president in the first place. He's downright communist by today's standards.

edited 22nd Nov '14 12:29:18 PM by storyyeller