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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
So, Hunks for Hillary is a thing...and um..wow.
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fans self
edited 29th Aug '16 9:37:17 PM by TacticalFox88
New Survey coming this weekend!![]()
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Look up herd immunity. Not getting vaccinated has a domino effect. Pockets of antivaxxers lead to a resurgence in diseases thought to be a thing of the past like measles and so on.
New Definition of Conservatism: A general preference for a previously existing order of society, and a opposition to any sort of change, sharp or otherwise, that has been made to that order, even if said opposition is batshit insane.
New definition is probably more accurately described as reactionaryism. Rational Insanity is right that "proper" conservatism has basically been subsumed by modern-day centrists and moderates. There's absolutely nothing wrong with conservatism in principle when it takes the form of an opposition philosophy to radicalism.
Ironically a lot of the modern US right reactionaries who call themselves conservative are actually pretty politically radical, and therefore the opposite of conservative. They don't want to maintain the status quo, they want to create a seismic shift in current-day society towards their particular ideal.
edited 29th Aug '16 10:29:40 PM by AlleyOop
Hillary Clinton, and how things are reported differently when the press assumes that you're guilty
Needless to say, however, Powell continued to be involved in American political life. His sky-high poll numbers ensured he’d be buzzed about as a possible presidential or vice presidential nominee, either as a moderate Republican or as an independent. Realistically, that wasn’t in the cards, and Powell was smart enough to know it. But his support for George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign lent him valuable credibility, and his recruitment to serve as Bush’s first secretary of state was considered an important political and substantive coup by Bush.
So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.
Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters. That’s the value of the presumption of innocence, something Hillary Clinton has never been able to enjoy during her time in the national spotlight.
The value of the presumption of innocence
Because Colin Powell did not have the reputation in the mid- to late ’90s of being a corrupt or shady character, his decision to launch a charity in 1997 was considered laudable. Nobody would deny that the purpose of the charity was, in part, to keep his name in the spotlight and keep his options open for future political office. Nor would anybody deny that this wasn’t exactly a case of Powell having super-relevant expertise. What he had to offer was basically celebrity and his good name. By supporting Powell’s charity, your company could participate in Powell’s halo.
But when the press thinks of you as a good guy, leveraging your good reputation in this way is considered a good thing to do. And since the charity was considered a good thing to do, keeping the charity going when Powell was in office as secretary of state was also considered a good thing to do. And since Powell was presumed to be innocent — and since Democrats did not make attacks on Powell part of their partisan strategy — his charity was never the subject of a lengthy investigation.
Which is lucky for him, because as Clinton could tell you, once you are the subject of a lengthy investigation, the press doesn’t like to report, “Well, we looked into it and we didn’t find anything interesting.”
Instead we get things like:
An Associated Press investigation whose big reveal is that Clinton once tried to help out a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was in hot water with the ruling party of his home country.
An LA Times story headlined “Billionaire’s Clinton Ties Face Scrutiny,” about a rich Lebanese-Nigerian man who appears to be genuinely somewhat shady, gave money to the Clinton Foundation, and received nothing in exchange.
A Wall Street Journal story about how the crown prince of Bahrain scored a meeting with Hillary Clinton years after having donated to the Clinton Foundation. The story somehow forgets to mention that Rice, Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Warren Christopher had all also met with him during their tenures as secretary of state
An ABC investigation that concluded a donor had used a foundation connection to get a better seating assignment at State Department function.
Three of these stories, in other words, found no wrongdoing whatsoever but chose to insinuate that they had found wrongdoing in order to make the stories seem more interesting. The AP even teased its story with a flagrantly inaccurate tweet, which it now concedes was inaccurate but won’t take down or correct. The final investigation into the seat assignments at least came up with something, but it’s got to be just about the most trivial piece of donor special treatment you can think of.
Did one of Alma Powell’s donors ever ask for a better seat at a Powell-era function? Nobody knows, because nobody would think to ask.
Hillary’s problem is people “know” she’s corrupt
The perception that Clinton is corrupt is one of her most profound handicaps as a politician. And what’s particularly crippling about it is that evidence of her corruption is so widespread exactly because everyone knows she’s corrupt.
Because people “know” that she is corrupt, every decision she makes and every relationship she has is cast in the most negative possible light. When she doesn’t allow her policy decisions to be driven by donors, she’s greeted by headlines like “Hillary Blasts For-Profit Colleges, But Bill Took Millions From One.”
AT&T is one of the very biggest donors to America’s Promise, and for much of the Bush administration, Colin and Alma’s son Michael was chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which, among other things, regulates AT&T. I never saw anyone write a story investigating whether AT&T’s donations improperly influenced Powell’s pro-telecom regulatory stances. But it’s genuinely unimaginable that if Powell had chosen not to help AT&T with regulatory matters the press would have blasted him as a hypocrite. That would have been ridiculous.
But once you “know” that a putative charity is really just a nexus of corruption, then even the failure to be swayed by contributions becomes a news story. And of course once your decision-making is put under that kind of scrutiny, your impulse is to shut down and try to keep information close to your chest. But when you “know” that a person is corrupt, her lack of transparency is further evidence of corruption. And any minor information that does slip out is defined as news, even if the information does not actually contain evidence of anything all that interesting.
Nope. "ei" makes a long A sound, like in rein, reign, etc. In names, like Stein, sure, it sounds like a long I sound.
Think of the the two vowels as a dipthong. "e" sounds like "eh" and "i" sounds like "yee".
"ehyee". Long A sound.
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
Not in the Deutches, no. "Weiner" is a German name, not English... so German rules.
A literal sound-for-sound transcription would be an almost spot-on "Viner".
"Wiener" would be "Veener" or "Vena" — kind of. Some English dialects actually do have the right sounds, but not all.
edited 30th Aug '16 6:28:36 AM by Euodiachloris
Anyone following the Colin Kaepernick story? He's a 49ers player who refuses to stand during the national anthem, out of protest of the racial problems (putting it lightly) in the U.S. Predictably, he's gotten a slew of racist insults on social media, and a bunch more calling him unpatriotic.
Anyway, I bring this up in the politics thread because good old Trump gave his two cents on the story: "Maybe he should find a country that works better for him."
...Yeah, I got nothing.
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Since when is it wrong to be un-Patriot-ic in American Football? I thought it was the only way to be?
Instead of a swift exit on this lame joke, I'll leave this article about the difficult negotiations over the TTIP and the fact that France demands that the negotiations stop
.
edited 30th Aug '16 7:24:53 AM by Julep
Hand over the heart is what's taught in school for the Pledge of Allegiance but I think the only protocol for civilians and the national anthem is to be standing.
Which is not to say I take much stock in protocol for symbolic gestures. Especially when they're used by people to lord how much more patriotic they are over others.
It is, actually
- it's just not enforced all that much since the penalty is supposed to be up to a year in prison
but the Supreme Court ruled flag-burning to be protected free speech (United States v. Eichman, 1990 for the federal government; Texas v. Johnson, 1989 for the states).
Fun side fact - the hand-over-heart thing was a replacement for the original Bellamy gesture (which got ditched in 1942 because it looks like the Nazi salute).
edited 30th Aug '16 8:40:31 AM by megarockman
The damned queen and the relentless knight.Meanwhile it's now Missouri state law that schoolchildren must recite it daily
.
Apparently West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) doesn't apply there or something.
edited 30th Aug '16 9:01:36 AM by Deadbeatloser22
"Yup. That tasted purple."

The anti-vaxx movement scares me far more than any terrorist.
edited 29th Aug '16 8:55:11 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.