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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Julian: Americans are perfectly fine with someone who is indifferent towards religion so long as they at least profess one. Bernie Sanders isn't practicing, but at least he still identifies with his Jewish faith - so nobody cared. But openly saying that you don't believe would make most Americans immediately distrust you.
Yeah...the joke is that an atheist can't be elected dogcatcher in America.
And of course it's because of the Red Scare and an attack on godless communism that they decided to put "In God We Trust" on the notes in the 50s (albeit an old idea that originated with Salmon Chase and was shot down by Teddy Roosevelt, who thought that money and God was a blasphemous mix). It replaced E Pluribus Unum.
So...uh...guys...Climate Scientists are paranoid...
“They have been salivating at the possibility of dismantling federal climate research programs for years. It’s not unreasonable to think they would want to take down the very data that they dispute,” Halpern said in an email. “There is a fine line between being paranoid and being prepared, and scientists are doing their best to be prepared. . . . Scientists are right to preserve data and archive websites before those who want to dismantle federal climate change research programs storm the castle.”
Embarrassing.
New Survey coming this weekend!Scientists always do have the eyes on the prize. It is very much in Trump's nature to destroy that data.
When he built Trump Tower in New York, he built over an earlier building that had these incredible Art Deco friezes that he promised would go to the Museum. During construction, those friezes were destroyed
and Trump just shrugged away.
He destroyed art, distorts facts, sues first and asks question later...destroying that climate data would fit the pattern.
Hmm deleting online data to escape criminal prosecution...so much for Emails
edited 13th Dec '16 9:48:07 PM by JulianLapostat
It reminded me of this famous incident
(which you can see in the late-90s movie Cradle Will Rock) where Nelson Rockefeller when he was a businessman commissioned Diego Rivera to build a mural at the Rockefeller center.
Rivera being a Trotskyite (which Rockefeller knew) created Man at the Crossroads
which has Lenin and the underclass revolting against the decadent capitalists. Yes, he created that mural and hoped to plant it smack at 30 Rockefeller Center...Punk Rock has nothing on that.
And just before it was to be open, Rockefeller ordered people to destroy it. Rivera reconstructed it after he went to Mexico, but it shows the power of art to disturb its patrons. Rockefeller was the last of the Northern Liberal Republicans, supporting social democracy in some small form, and he would have loathed Trump (even if he went out, according to legend, in a Trumpian fashion), but that just goes to show what Capitalism can do.
What Trump did with those friezes is worse...I mean the Rivera Mural exists in a copy and photographs but those friezes are gone.
Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination. When Obama moved into the White House in 2009, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division “was in shambles,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. “I mean, I had been there for 12 years as a line guy. I started out in ’76, so I served under Republicans and Democrats. And what the [George W.] Bush administration, what the Bush DOJ did, was unlike anything that had ever happened before in terms of politicized hiring.” The career civil servants below the political appointees, Holder said, were not even invited to the meetings in which the key hiring and policy decisions were made. After Obama’s inauguration, Holder told me, “I remember going to tell all the folks at the Civil Rights Division, ‘The Civil Rights Division is open for business again.’ The president gave me additional funds to hire people.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (who by the way needs his own Creator page on Tvtropes) was quite critical of Obama for a long time so he's not someone who is going to go light on the man. Obama was definitely a better President than Clinton, than Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon...(I would say he's better than Dubya, his Daddy, Reagan, Ford but that's Damned by Faint Praise).
Nixon's China deal has had more economic ramifications maybe in the world, but the Iran N-Deal showed more cunning and daring, and insight. "Only Nixon can go to China" well by that logic only Trump could have gone to Iran, but Obama somehow did go to Iran and he made that Deal pass despite the Republicans bizarrely importing Netanyahu to Congress to give a speech, despite Chuck Schumer opposing it, and yet he did it.
Also Obama had to come to office with a lot of crap on his table...the Recession, the 2 Wars, and so on and despite everything he brought social democracy back to American politics.
To add to that
Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, political scientists at the University of Washington and UCLA, respectively, have found a relatively strong relationship between racism and Tea Party membership. “Whites are less likely to be drawn to the Tea Party for material reasons, suggesting that, relative to other groups, it’s really more about social prestige,” they say. The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets. Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the president as the ghost of shambling factories and defunct union halls, as opposed to what it really was—a movement inaugurated by ardent and frightened white capitalists, raging from the commodities-trading floor of one of the great financial centers of the world.
That movement came into full bloom in the summer of 2015, with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who’d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American. It was birtherism—not trade, not jobs, not isolationism—that launched Trump’s foray into electoral politics.
edited 13th Dec '16 10:55:51 PM by JulianLapostat
The issue with the electors is there's likely not enough of them willing to do it to force the situation. And I'm sort of afraid of the chaos that would ensue if they did; no way would Trump take that lying down. And, for all that this was an intended function of the EC, I don't think anyone's actually prepared for if that actually happens. It'd be a shocking swerve, to say the least, and I kind of think it would be at least temporarily damaging to our democracy. (Certainly whoever they chose in place of Trump would face four years of accusations of illegitimacy.)
Lessig’s anti-Trump group, “Electors Trust,” has been offering pro bono legal counsel to Republican presidential electors considering ditching Trump and has been acting as a clearinghouse for electors to privately communicate their intentions.
“Obviously, whether an elector ultimately votes his or her conscience will depend in part upon whether there are enough doing the same. We now believe there are more than half the number needed to change the result seriously considering making that vote,” Lessig said.
Lessig’s claims contradict the assertions of Republican National Committee sources who report that a GOP whip operation intended to ensure Republican electors remain loyal to Trump found only one elector — Chris Suprun of Texas — would defy Trump.
Suprun is the only Republican elector to publicly declare his intention to cast a vote for someone other than Trump.
Lessig provided no evidence to back up his claim, but says his group has heard from 20 Republicans open to breaking with Trump. It’s unclear whether any of these potential anti-Trump GOP electors reside in states with laws that force them to vote for Trump or else be replaced by a pro-Trump alternate. Though similar laws are being challenged in court, it’s also unclear whether any Republicans in those states who vote against Trump would be counted.
The 538 members of the Electoral College – 306 Republicans and 232 Democrats – will gather in their state capitals on Dec. 19 and cast the official vote for president. If all Republican electors support Trump, he’d easily clear the 270-vote threshold he needs to become president. That’s why anti-Trump activists are lobbying to convince 37 Republicans to rebel against Trump.
The most electors to ever reject a presidential nominee occurred in 1808, when six Democratic-Republican electors rejected James Madison. There hasn’t been more than one so-called “faithless” elector in a single Electoral College vote for president since 1832, when two Maryland electors abstained.

He was hospitalized recently and just came out...but you know musicians get into weird stuff. Remember David Bowie's weird fascist-chic Thin White Duke period in the 70s (which he mercifully got out of and shut down before it went too late).
But this might just be an elaborate revenge on Kanye's part for Obama calling him a jackass. Man Obama must be regretting all the people he dissed over the years...Trump/Putin/Kanye.
Keith Olbermann
corrects that whole "These are the same guys who told us Saddam Hussein had WMD"...which was not corrected before. The intelligence told Bush no evidence was there and Bush went ahead anyway.
edited 13th Dec '16 9:07:30 PM by JulianLapostat