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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
As long as the Grumpy Old Party holds any sort of national power, there is no way that any bid for statehood from any of the territories could be considered, and until then, they'll always be second-raters.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Cuba's spent the last few decades trying to build closer relations with its island and Latin American neighbors. It's more likely to join in some sort of political union with them rather than the US, anyway. And however conflicted Cubans may be over the state of their country, I think that "join the US" is very far out of consideration on account of not actually addressing any of their problems.
So. It turns out that Super PACs have spent over $32 million on Bush in the past couple of months.
The result? Jack diddly in the polls. (Of course, maybe he'll do a McCain and resurrect himself once the actual voting begins - until then, pollsters are just gazing into their crystal balls.)
Incidentally, Christie and Kasich are #2 and #3 in PAC money so far, while Trump is getting savaged almost as badly as Clinton. Does this mean that PAC support is inversely proportional to poll support?
edited 17th Nov '15 12:09:26 AM by Ramidel
I don't think it's indicative of anything. PAC money goes to whoever the PAC is created for, as I understand it. And Trump has basically gotten free advertising for quite a bit of this campaign, and from what I've heard hasn't even had to dip into his own money, let alone actually needing a PAC. He's basically his own PAC.
As for Clinton, I just hear nothing about PACS on the democratic side for whatever reason. Her poll numbers are rising, too, so I don't think she's being "savaged" so much right now.
Based on oddschecker history, I think Clinton's odds improved. If I'm reading the numbers right, 3 months ago you could place a bet wherein if she wins - you double your money.
Right now, the bets on her would just give a fraction of your bet, if she wins.
Trump still has better odds than Sanders.
On the Cuba-US thing I need to point out that Cuba itself likely does not want to be part of the United States. The people trying to get away from Cuba to go to the U.S are people who already have family in the United States.
But from there to territorial acquisition? that is a whole different thing
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesWhat is a country if not its people? It's kind of disingenuous to say that, "Cuba does not want X, but its people do." More accurate to say that a small minority of Cubans is trying to flee to the U.S.
edited 17th Nov '15 6:39:20 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Since 10 percent of Cuba's population is in the USA, chances are most of its people have family in the USA.
I expect it's similar to the Philippines - where most would choose to move to a richer country if they could. If it weren't for "being in the middle of ocean" filtering out our best and brightest for export aka brain drain, we probably wouldn't have model minority status overseas.
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.![]()
"But enough talk! Have at you!"
So in other news, it looks like it's more than four states that are opposed to Syrian refugees.
edited 17th Nov '15 8:39:44 AM by speedyboris
Unsurprisingly, all the states, even usually blue or purple ones, have Republicans governors but one.
Note, they don't actually have the authority to stop people from coming there, but they can make their lives miserable by doing petty stunts like refusing to release funds to help people learn English, go to school, feed their children, etc.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Well, a nation and its people are not necessarily the same thing. This is especially true in totalitarian nations where the people aren't given a voice.
Leviticus 19:34Basically, PACs are how campaigns raise money for themselves, while Super PACs are groups that spend money on a campaign's behalf without actually being part of the campaign. What this means is that while you can only donate a few grand directly to Candidate Bob via a PAC, you can donate as much as you want to a Super PAC that supports Candidate Bob, and that Super PAC will spend that money in support of Candidate Bob, only without actually talking to Bob about how to best spend that money.
In theory, anyway.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.And in fun politics, Ted Cruz claims there's no possible way Christians could be terrorists
.
According to the Washington Post, while discussing his opposition to granting asylum to thousands of Syrian refugees, Cruz said that only Christian refugees should be allowed into the country because Christians pose “no meaningful risk” of being terrorists.
“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Cruz said in the wake of a brutal terrorist attack in Paris by ISIS during a visit to South Carolina on Sunday.
“If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation. But it is precisely the Obama administration’s unwillingness to recognize that or ask those questions that makes them so unable to fight this enemy. Because they pretend as if there is no religious aspect to this.”
Of course, Ted Cruz is ignoring all of the acts of terrorism committed by Christians throughout world history.
In the United States alone, Christian terrorism is ingrained in American history.
The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, terrorized the South after the Civil War. They targeted African-Americans, Jews, and Catholics all while professing a Christian ideology. They committed arson, lynchings, murder, rape, and burned crosses. They intimidated anyone who didn’t agree with their ideology and they struck fear in anyone who crossed their path. Their reign of terror continued throughout the 1960s and they are still an active hate group to this day.
Then there are those who have firebombed abortion clinics such as Eric Robert Rudolph in 1996. He is most notably responsible, however, for the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in that same year.
But wait! There’s more.
In 2015, former Christian right-wing candidate Robert Doggart was arrested by federal authorities before he could carry out a plan to attack and kill Muslims in New York. He intended to commit a massacre using an M-4 rifle, Molotov cocktails, a pair of hand guns and a machete all to prove his “commitment to God.”
The list, of course, goes on and on.
But since Cruz was in South Carolina, he should have known better than to make that claim in the same state where Confederate sympathizer Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church and murdered nine parishioners in an act of terror that shook this nation so much that a national outcry over the Confederate flag ensued.
And finally, Cruz forgot the worst act of domestic terrorism ever committed on American soil, and it happened in the reddest state in the nation.
On April 19, 1995, Timothy Mc Veigh detonated a truck carrying 7,000 pounds of explosive material in front of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 men, women, and children. Mc Veigh slaughtered more people that day than ISIS did in Paris, yet Republicans like Ted Cruz insist that Muslims are who we should all fear. And terrorist attacks in America are only the tip of the iceberg since there are Christians around the globe who have committed acts of terror in the name of God.
The bottom line is that Ted Cruz is, as usual, full of shit and needs to think before he speaks. Because clearly, this claim can be fact-checked easily enough. The fact is there are Christians who want to kill us just as much as ISIS does, even within our own borders, and we would be smart to remember that.
In other words, in his world, Christians are right, therefore they cannot be terrorists by definition.
edited 17th Nov '15 11:41:46 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"And then we have Marco Rubio, who is doing exactly what ISIS wants
by stating that they are Islam.note Emphasis mine.
But given the Florida senator’s reputation in GOP circles as a foreign-policy wonk, it’s worth looking in some detail at just how ridiculous his response was.
“The attacks in Paris,” Rubio began, “are a wake-up call.” Forgive the pedantry, but this is among the stupidest clichés in politics. Wake-up calls are things you plan yourself because you want to be awoken from your slumber at a set time, usually by a hotel clerk. The Paris attack was a horrific surprise orchestrated by France’s enemies. It wasn’t a “wake-up call” unless you believe its ultimate author was France itself.
The linguistic weirdness continues a couple of lines later. “This is not a geopolitical issue where they want to conquer territory and it’s two countries fighting against each other,” Rubio declared. “They literally want to overthrow our society and replace it with their radical, Sunni Islamic view of the future. This is not a grievance-based conflict. This is a clash of civilizations.” Notice that Rubio never explicitly defines who “they” are. According to the French government, the Islamic State perpetrated Friday’s attacks. Rubio, however, said what occurred in Paris is a “clash of civilizations.”
But ISIS isn’t a civilization. In parts of Iraq and Syria, it’s a self-declared, though unrecognized, state. Elsewhere, it’s a network of terrorist groups linked by a common ideology. “Civilizations” are cultural groupings. In calling the Paris attack a “clash of civilizations,” Rubio evoked Samuel Huntington’s famed 1993 Foreign Affairs essay of the same name. In that essay, Huntington defined “civilization” as “the broadest level of cultural identity people have.” And he suggested that the world contains “seven or eight” major ones: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.”
The most straightforward way to interpret Rubio’s statement, therefore, is that the civilizational “they” that attacked Paris is Islam. Among the grassroots conservatives Rubio is wooing in his campaign for president, that’s a popular view. After all, recent polling in states like Iowa and North Carolina suggests that upwards of one-third of Republicans would like to make Islam illegal in the United States.
Rubio is doing exactly what the Islamic State wants: He’s equating ISIS with Islam itself. Ben Carson and Donald Trump have indulged that sentiment crudely. Rubio, typically, is doing so more subtly. But it’s worth noting how fundamentally his analysis diverges from that of both of America’s post-9/11 presidents. George W. Bush said America was at war with an ideology that had “hijacked Islam” in the same way Nazism had hijacked Germany or communism had hijacked Russia. Barack Obama has argued that even this assessment gives violent jihadists a stature they don’t deserve. Rubio, by contrast, is going far beyond Bush. And he’s doing exactly what the Islamic State wants: He’s equating ISIS with Islam itself.
Then there’s the end of Rubio’s statement: “[T]hey do not hate us because we have military assets in the Middle East. They hate us because of our values. They hate us because young girls here go to school. They hate us because women drive. They hate us because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs. They hate us because we’re a tolerant society.”
This is simply false. The Islamic State may hate tolerance, liberty, and women’s rights. But that’s not why its cadres attacked Paris.
A review of the organization’s history makes this point clear. The Islamic State began in 2004 as al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, not because its then-leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, discovered that female motorists populate America’s highways, but because America had just invaded Iraq. When the United States began withdrawing troops from the country, al-Qaeda in Iraq did not follow them home. It instead went to war against Iraq’s Shiite-led government. Then, after the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011, it began fighting his Alawite regime as well, changed its name to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and declared a caliphate in the territory it controlled. “For more than a decade,” notes the Georgetown University and Brookings Institution terrorism expert Daniel Byman, the Islamic State “focused first and foremost on its immediate theater of operations.”
According to Rubio’s logic, this focus makes no sense. If what motivates the Islamic State is hatred of liberal democracy, why has it spent years fighting the authoritarian governments of Syria and Iraq? And why did it reportedly down a Russian airliner last month? After all, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not known for its commitment to liberal democracy either.
Women drive in Costa Rica too, but the Islamic State is unlikely to attack it, because Costa Rica is not contesting ISIS’s control of the Middle East. The obvious answer is that the Islamic State fights those who block its path to power, whether they are liberal democracies or not. It attacked Russia because Russia joined the war in Syria on Assad’s side. Although Moscow has focused many of its air strikes on other Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State evidently now sees the Russians as a battlefield enemy. That’s also how it sees France, which in September expanded its air strikes against ISIS from Iraq to Syria. Just last week, France announced it was sending an aircraft carrier to launch raids against the organization from the Persian Gulf. ISIS specifically cited France’s participation in the “Crusader campaign” in Syria in its statement claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks.
To be sure, the Islamic State doesn’t only define its enemies militarily. Its statement of responsibility also referenced those in France who “dare to curse our Prophet,” a reference to the attacks this January, claimed by al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad. But as repulsive as the Hebdo attack was, it still wasn’t motivated, as Rubio suggests, by hatred of liberal democracy per se. Had the jihadists merely wanted to strike at tolerance and free speech, they could have attacked any French university, bookstore, library, or publication. The assailants, Said and Cherif Kouachi, chose Charlie Hebdo because, in their twisted worldview, mocking Muhammad represents a form of war against Islam. In Cherif’s words, “We defend the prophet.”
Obviously, explaining the Islamic State’s attacks does not in any way justify them. Only a totalitarian sees cartoons as an act of war. And viewing Friday’s attacks as a response to French foreign policy, as opposed to French liberalism, does not make French foreign policy wrong. It was the Islamic State’s genocidal attacks on the minority Yazidi sect in August 2014 that drew the United States and its European allies into the war against the group in the first place. Both morally and strategically, limiting—and ultimately eliminating—the Islamic State’s nightmarish dominion over millions of human beings justifies war.
But a just war is still a war. Contra Rubio, the struggle against the Islamic State is absolutely “geopolitical,” and it has everything to do with America’s “military assets in the Middle East.” Women drive in Costa Rica too, but the Islamic State is unlikely to attack it, because Costa Rica is not contesting ISIS’s control of the Middle East. The United States and France are challenging that control, and as long as they are, the Islamic State will try to attack them. America’s domestic freedoms, precious as they are, don’t have much to do with it.
edited 17th Nov '15 1:37:02 PM by BlueNinja0
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - SilaswYes! For example: No one can be bothered to type the name correctly!
Anyways...
Oh Rubio. God ruined a perfectly good asshole when he put teeth in your mouth.
Also pls don't point the Daesh to us. We are quite incapable of defending ourselves.
edited 17th Nov '15 12:49:46 PM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes![]()
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I'd argue more in favor of his mindset being "Well, No True Christian would do that!" Amazing how the irony would be lost on him with such an argument, though.
And even worse is when you've got shock-jocks (namely Kimberly & Beck in Rochester, NY) saying "We should just bomb Syria into the ground" with no regard for casualties. They might've walked the statement back, but I swapped stations after that little nugget.
edited 17th Nov '15 12:48:03 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

Right, we're just pointing out that, no, for all intents and purposes, they can't, and we really shouldn't encourage that kind of shoddy thinking.