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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Federal employees are allowed to go against a presidential order they believe to be illegal. That's kind of necessary for our system to work.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Luigisan98: Good Is Impotent, Doomed Moral Victor, probably Then Let Me Be Evil in the near-future if those bills to legally treat protesters like terrorists go through . . .
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryOn the subject of Republicans dodging town halls...
Arizona is in the process of stealing the property of protestors
.
White House budget blueprint includes a 54 billion dollar hike in military spending.
For comparison, this is more money than the State Department receives annually (50 bn, when it's functional and exists.)
It's also more than 1.5 times the amount of money France spends on its entire armed forces annually, half of Russia's yearly military budget, or a third of the total defense expenditure of China.
Or to put it a different way, it's enough to build and outfit 3 Nimitz-class supercarriers (of which the Navy already has 10) with 85 airplanes.
Or build six thousand state-of-the-art Abrams tanks.
edited 27th Feb '17 8:50:55 AM by math792d
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.![]()
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Maybe they can put up lost Rubio posters in FL too?
And the UN seems to have misplaced a giant...
Is there a US diplomacy vacuum at the UN in Geneva?
Only a few months ago, such a comment would have been unthinkable. Former United States secretary of state John Kerry was a regular figure in Geneva, leading US diplomacy not only on Syria, but on the Iran nuclear deal and on Ukraine.
Now, however, the US is conspicuous by its silence, the "soft power" expected of the leader of the Western world strangely absent. In Washington, there have been no State Department briefings since the new administration took over and around the world, US embassies are empty of ambassadors.
...under President Trump...dozens of diplomats were told to clear their desks and leave. In Geneva, not only are there no US ambassadors to the United Nations, there are no nominees either, meaning replacements are likely to be months away.
So when the UN Human Rights Council begins its four-week annual session on 27 February, what can we expect from the US? "We can't communicate a message until we know what the message is," are words heard regularly from permanent staff now manning the phones at empty US embassies across Europe.
Sources, preferring to remain anonymous, have confirmed that embassy staff have been told by Washington not to talk to the press at all. Some, not wishing to cut all ties with correspondents with whom they regularly communicate US policy, have taken to contacting journalists via Skype, from home, presumably so that their calls cannot be traced.
"It is clear the United States is opting out of global governance," says Jean-Pierre Lehmann, emeritus professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne. "It's 'America First'… and populism really doesn't translate to humanitarianism."
The US is the biggest donor to the World Food Programme (WFP), supplying more than 30% of its budget, $2bn (£1.6bn), last year alone. The WFP has this month declared a famine in South Sudan, the first in six years, and has warned of famine in Yemen and the Horn of Africa this year as well. To be able to support millions of people facing starvation, the WFP needs guarantees from its biggest donor that support, both moral and financial, will be sustained.
So too does the UN Refugee Agency: currently dealing with the largest number of forcibly displaced people in history, it is dependent on the US for more than a third of its funding and has long relied on America to resettle some of the world's most vulnerable refugees.
...even if the UN devised a bold strategy to persuade Washington of its importance, there is still the awkward question of who to pitch that strategy to.
As one senior UN official remarked, "it is not clear who we need to talk to… or where the mailbox is".
How should these new diplomats, political appointees of a president known to be sensitive to criticism, be handled?
Should the UN Refugee Agency, for example, question Washington's tough line on refugees from countries such as Syria, or should it stay quiet in the hopes of protecting its funding?
"Everyone is picking their battles very carefully," confessed one UN official. "We don't to want burn any bridges," admitted another.
edited 27th Feb '17 8:49:20 AM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesI've got to say, if there's one thing Trump managed to do is making Bush II look good by contrast. I'm worried the next GOP POTUS could be so terrible as to do the same for Trump.
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When you say 6.067, do you mean 6 thousand and 67 (as it means in most countries) or 6 point 067 (as in the US)?
edited 27th Feb '17 8:56:54 AM by IFwanderer
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV@Mad Skillz
In short you've got absolutely nothing. Who donates to who is pretty much irrelevant. We went over this about a million times during the election. There was zero evidence that Clinton's "corporate donors" ever influenced her voting record, and the same holds true for the majority of the Democratic Party.
I'll say this again: if you're going to make sweeping statements like "the Democrats are bought and paid for" you better have some genuine hard evidence. Not a couple articles from The Daily Kos.
Seconding this. Voting record and policy position is everything. Big money corporations generally donate to everyone — declaring undue influence without actually having any action taken on the politician's part to back it up is essentially guilt by association.
To put a more governmentally-oriented spin on that defense hike, here are some things you could do with 54 billion dollars:
Triple NASA's budget.
Provide over a million households with the median American household income of 52 grand per annum.
Pay for 1,13 million teachers.
Put over a million students through four years of college without saddling them with any debt.
Double the current US contribution to both the UN Refugee Agency and the WFP.
Pay off a quarter of the debt currently owed by the Greek government.
edited 27th Feb '17 9:49:21 AM by math792d
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.![]()
It's also a form of abrogation of responsibility via declaring everyone "corrupt" and therefore the problem insoluble.
edited 27th Feb '17 9:47:11 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"So who loves the fact that Republicans are getting verbally crucified at town halls? Even in Jesus Land? I couldn't be happier about it, they deserve it.
I'm pretty sure we won't win the 2020 elections because yes, America is that bad. George W didn't win the popular vote the first time either. But in 2024 if we can reverse the damage and if minorities lives aren't ruined, it'll be satisfying hearing them gnash and wail while a competent person takes over and ignores criticism from his opposition, unlike Trump.
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Even if Democrats don't win in 2020, we can at least hope that Trump won't run again and they'll have a somewhat more sane Republican candidate. Which, considering that right now Trump is actually causing a loss of jobs, rather than creating new jobs, I can see as being a likely scenario.
edited 27th Feb '17 9:57:02 AM by danime91
x7 I think all of those things came up during the election too. naturally, the money goes to the place best suited for d*ck measuring.
edited 27th Feb '17 10:18:24 AM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

Meanwhile, the deplorables mobilize and Yates hasn't left the stage.
A pro-Trump ‘Spirit of America’ rally lands in Atlanta
Georgia tea party guru Debbie Dooley is helping to organize the “Spirit of America” events across the nation, which she said are open to anyone supporting Trump in his efforts to “bring back manufacturing jobs to America, put the security of our nation ahead of political correctness” and other staples of the president’s campaign rhetoric.
The event will be at the Liberty Plaza – across the street from the statehouse – at noon. It follows a rally held on Saturday at the Okefenokee Fairgrounds in southeast Georgia that featured state Sens. Michael Williams and Josh Mc Koon among the slate of speakers.
“People are kind of confused in Washington because he got elected – and then he did precisely what he said he was going to do,” said Mc Koon, a Columbus Republican, who said he spends more time at the Legislature fighting “elitists” than Democrats. “The sneering contempt of people in leadership positions was turned back, finally, on Nov. 8 when people like you showed up.”
“President Trump is under attack from the left, so we need to show the left we support President Trump,” Dooley wrote.
Senate Judiciary chair accuses Sally Yates of sabotaging Trump immigration ban
But a few days ago, we offered a few points that Yates might be pondering before she took any such leap. Among them was the fact that, while she might be through with Washington, Washington might not be through with her. This tidbit was reported by Law 360.com as the weekend began:
'''Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, launched a Judiciary Committee investigation Thursday into Sally Yates, accusing the then-acting U.S. attorney general of sabotaging President Donald Trump’s immigration ban by ordering government lawyers to not defend it. In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Grassley asked the U.S. Department of Justice for Yates’ communications between Jan. 20 and Jan. 31, the day after she was fired for publicly ordering the DOJ to not defend the immigration ban.'''
edited 27th Feb '17 7:43:36 AM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives