The General US Politics Thread

The name recognition she earned from decades of party leadership, plus her Senate and SecState experience. Sanders had been in the Congress since 1991; he had all the time he needed to build a presidential resume.

That did not stop Obama.

Anyway, part of it is my irritation with people who blame HRC for running a bad campaign while making excuses for Sanders.

But votes are votes, regardless of the sentiment behind them.

Edited by M84 on Jul 21st 2018 at 1:02:02 AM

My biggest issue here is the weird double think about minorities and alleviating poverty. Sanders is woefully ignorant or deliberately obfuscating the fact race has played a huge role in the poverty of black and Latin Americans. However, alleviating poverty for all impoverished Americans will benefit them and will do so greatly minorities because so many of them are impoverished.

Sanders is too old to run again.

He also wouldn't have won against Trump as he didn't have a bunch of votes Hillary did. I imagine he would have been beaten much more soundly. I have no illusions about Bernie despite how much I like him. He lost the primaries fair and square.

I do, however, thank the Force for his existence because it has forced the DNC to move its policies closer to Bernies. It justifies his entire campaign in the primaries and energized many voters.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 20th 2018 at 10:55:53 AM

Remember that post on Epstein and Trump? Looking around, it looks like Mike Cernovich may have been aided in his efforts against James Gunn by the two producers of An Open Secret.

For those who don’t know, that was the documentary on Hollywood pedophiles released back in 2015. The two producers, Gabe Hoffman and Matthew Valentina’s, run a Twitter account for it in addition to tweeting themselves on pedophile related content 24/7. Notably, Director Amy Berg has had nothing to do with the handling of the documentary or it’s Twitter since it’s release. The original documentary was rather interesting and respectful towards the victims, something that cannot be said about the current climate fostered by the producers. Browsing at their history, they’ve since devolved into an alt-right sympathizing bunch, as they retweet a number of folks like Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos. They also frequently retweet people involved with Pizza Gate theories, so yeah, they haven’t turned out so well. They previously posted an article from Milo’s website claiming Dan Olsen covered up Justin’s crimes and posted his work info so people could get him fired.

Notably, they’ve consistently tried to deny Trump did anything with Epstein and have been quite vocally opposed to people who dislike Trump. A key example I found was they retweeted a tweet that claimed to promote “the real news.” All of them were alt-right affiliated and included An Open Secret. Additionally, they’ve made several tweets trying to deny Trump’s predatory actions including people who believe he was in on Epstein’s ring.

The sad fact is other people I respected were involved in Epstein's child rape shitshow.

In September 2002, Epstein flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa in his private Boeing 727. Flight records show Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane 26 times.

Yes, Chris, how could you do this to us?

Epstein is also a longtime friend of Prince Andrew and Tom Barrack, and has partied with celebrities such as President Donald Trump, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and Woody Allen

Some of these names are "no shit, obvious" but Katie Couric? Really? It's like finding out Chloe from Smallville was part of an evil sex cult.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 20th 2018 at 11:10:26 AM

Katie Couric is a news reporter, right? So I'm not so sure why this surprises you, because she was likely doing her job at the time. And, while the title seems to make it out to be a big deal, all the article itself says is that the people named flew on the guy's plane. There's not actually anything they're accused of yet by actual authorities or the plaintiff. *shrug* Unless something more comes out I'm just like "yeah, rich and influential people tend to have contact with each other. It's how they stay influential." And also how news reporters get the news. So unless she's actually accused of something in the future, I'm not really sure why you're disappointed now.

Edited by AceofSpades on Jul 21st 2018 at 2:34:36 PM

Yes. It's mostly nominal. The actual amount was set decades ago, was not pegged to inflation and there is simply zero political will to raise it. But there's a factor to consider. It's habit forming. At a national level it was introduced in 1928, and even at a state level the last state to adopt it (South Australia) did so in 1942. Entire generations have grown up with voting in elections being the expected norm. It's probably why even in our recent, non-binding postal referendum there were returns of nearly 80% and in actual elections the turn out is routinely in the high 90s.

Yeah, this makes sense...we used to have 80% and higher from the early 50s to the late 80s, but they really went down since then...partly this might be due to reunification, because if your population suddenly adds a lot of people who are used to their vote actually counting for something, well, you suddenly have a huge chunk of people who will simply not bother to vote. But we had a huge drop again around the time of the financial crisis…

The good news is that we were up in the 75% for the last election...the bad news is that a lot of those new voters picked the Af D....

And now I wonder what the actually numbers for the US are…

• looks it up*

wow...that's...pathetic. How can a country work when only roughly half of the people who are allowed to vote usually bother to do so? (Not to mention the huge chunks of population which aren't allowed to vote in the first place).

@CharlesPipps: Energizing voters is a problem, IMO. It makes people feel entitled to have an opinion on matters without relevant background or expertise.

@M84: Obama is incredibly charismatic, had solidly centrist/center-left policy positions in line with party orthodoxy, and more to the point won because he managed to win the party bosses over to his side with said charisma. The outcomes of presidential primaries have more or less exclusively dictated by party machine politics and backroom dealings aside from a brief period after the initial reform to the primary system in the 70s [1], which is why even 538 gave Trump a 2% chance of winning the GOP primaries, and why the whole country was taken so off guard by his victory in the primaries.

[1]. The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Jul 21st 2018 at 8:34:02 AM

Are we really bringing up the "DNC rigged the primaries" narrative again?

Edited by M84 on Jul 21st 2018 at 8:46:36 PM

The DNC only started showing favor to Hillary once it became clear that Bernie didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Anyone who still thought that Bernie had a chance (including Bernie) was just in a state of delusional denial at that point.

You'know it interests me how I've seen vast swathes of people insisting that the DNC was an incompetent dumpster fire (it was) and yet it somehow managed to steal the election from Sanders... Schrödinger's Democrat if you will.

I know this stuff shouldn't surprise me at this point, but it still made me go "Wow you've gotta be kidding":

Rev. Robert Jeffress Defends Trump Amid Tape Chaos: We Also Supported ‘Known Womanizer’ Ronald Reagan

So policy is more important than having a moral leader. Unbelievable what some "Christians" have sunk to. Before anyone says, "Hey, nobody is perfect, so let he who is without sin cast the first stone": That some Christians could support a man who is the embodiment of sin, yet never repents, changes, or admits he's wrong, is disturbing.

With the Epstein stuff - be careful not to fall into the Guilt by Association fallacy here. One plane ride does not a pedophile make. And ye gods that was a weird sentence to write.

That was more in reference to the person bemoaning the involvement of various celebrities.

Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 21st 2018 at 6:37:07 AM

@M84: Party machine politics are a very different animal from some nebulous concept of "rigging" (a term meant to imply things like ballot box stuffing), and considering the results you tend to get when voters break through the guardrails (Trump), it's a important safeguard against populism, and a check on unrestrained democracy.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Jul 21st 2018 at 9:28:11 AM

On its own it's easy enough to excuse. But when you consider the rest of the shit surrounding Trump — the accusations of marital rape, the recent payoff tape, his habit of peeping on underage beauty contestants — it does seem pretty suspicious.

With the DNC favoring Clinton, it wasn't "rigging", but the perception that the DNC was putting their thumb on the scale in her favor.

As I really don't want to rehash the entire thing for the umpteenth time, let's just agree on one thing - fuck Debbie Wasserman-Schulz for her incompetence as DNC Chairperson.

Trump mentioned in a CNBC interview that he's preparing to add more tariffs to other Chinese-made goods heading to the US soon.

The rates are due after consultation is done by August.

Probably. Would help if I remembered what exactly she did(n't do) at this point, but probably.

In general, I think it was largely administrative incompetence that helped feed things like "Bernie has the primary stolen from him".

Democracy depends on the voter feeling they are entitled to have not only opinions but influence.

Otherwise, why vote?

For a brief recap, there were accusations that Debbie Wasserman-Schulz was discreetly favoring Clinton over Sanders in a combo of Unwanted Assistance and Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat.

But more concretely, it was her incompetence as DNC chair that led to the organization floundering in debt, as she didn't downsize after Obama's election in 2012 (as is customary), so they had a lot more employees than necessary for the intervening 4 years, all of whom needed to be paid, and she also didn't do a good job of raising funds. She also kept committee members in the dark about this, while assuring those in charge of finances that she was keeping the others abreast of the situation.

This bankrupted them to the point that the Clinton campaign essentially had to bail them out, which didn't help to dispel accusations of favoritism, and led to Donna Brazile alleging that this gave Clinton control of the DNC itself as the latter became indebted to the former.

Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 21st 2018 at 8:24:59 AM

That about covers it, she was a lying liar who lies and worse incompetent.

That and if memory serves there were also concerns that she was too friendly with some House Republicans to the point of not supporting Democratic challengers to said House Republicans.