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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Haley was alright-ish, but also got a fairly irrelevant position. Trump has typically been giving fairly minor positions out to establishment Republicans while the rest go to some combination of elite economic (directly rather than via allied lawmakers) interests and senior military personnel. Thinking like a dictator indeed.
edited 29th Nov '16 9:40:52 AM by CaptainCapsase
The one thing that struck out to me was Chao is Mc Connell's wife, but she also cut the number of coal mining inspectors sometime before a couple of collapses while under GWB, and is a contributor for Fox News.
One thing I can give her is she organized an orientation for spouses of Republican senators.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."![]()
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Figures. Republicans don't give a shit about non-rich people once they're actually born.
edited 29th Nov '16 9:42:00 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary![]()
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From what I can tell, under her leadership as Sec. of Labor, a lot of Coal Mining Regulations were cut, up to 14% of Mines weren't following the bare minimum of Safety Regulations, and 2 major Mine Collapses happened, resulting in at least 15 deaths.
Also, she's the wife of Mitch McConnell (yes, that McConnell). A nice thing I'm seeing though, is that a lot of Trumpicans are starting to wake up and realize that "Draining the Swamp" isn't happening. So that's something.
edited 29th Nov '16 9:43:54 AM by DingoWalley1
Huh - if memory serves Trump's list of Supreme Court nominees was also filled with people that have relationships (either genetic or professional) with Republican congresscritters. I wonder if this is a more general thing.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Giving appointments to political allies isn't especially unusual, nor is giving appointments to allies of powerful interests. Appointing those interests directly to cabinet positions in such large numbers is what's alarming about the pattern of his picks. If nothing else, the fact that virtually every foreign policy position besides maybe Secretary of State appears to be going to senior military personnel kind of undermines civilian control of the military.
edited 29th Nov '16 9:46:58 AM by CaptainCapsase
Not only that, but senior military personnel with numerous black marks in their records, up to and including Michael Flynn who appears to get his foreign policy data from Infowars.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Rome and its Republic have been, historically speaking, common reference points for US politics, not only by commentators but, as Mad Skillz pointed out, the Founding Fathers themselves, concerned citizens such as John Wilkes Booth and others invoked the Roman references. And they do that, because of a major historiographical error and it is interesting to consider the implications of that glorification of the Roman Republic. When the Confederacy invoked Lucan's Pharsalia, "The victors cause favored the gods/the losers' cause favored Cato" and put that line (in original Latin) on cemeteries, you can't say its not relevant. And let's remember that the historiographical error of the Lost Cause resulted in a propaganda campaign more successful than anything in the USSR, it lasted more than a hundred years and was reified by many useful idiots like D. W. Griffith and David O. Selznick. And of course it resulted as Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Dubois and many others have documented...in the loss of actual lives, in the hundreds and thousands.
If you take that attitude you are condemning a good portion of the global population at present and for most of the 20th Century as being victims, which is not a healthy, useful and accurate attitude. These days, a lot of people are nostalgic for Saddam Hussein, since he didn't wreck up the Middle East the way Bush the Second did.
From a point of view global international relations, Good Republic, Evil Empire is not a useful attitude to have:
- — Noam Chomsky, explaining why
this trope is not necessarily true.
The US Constitution had a 3/5ths clause, essentially defining slaves as...untermenschen. It accepted slavery and built many institutions including the Electoral College around that, as many have pointed out. Apartheid South Africa was a republic that accommodated similar distinctions and that was in the 20th Century and during the Cold War, and against that Republic and its expansionism, Castro started to look like a hero. The US Constitution from a modern perspective would be considered to have violated human rights from the beginning. Now of course you bring all the amendments and you can even say, that America became a true democracy from the American Civil War onward...a position I am sympathetic to.
At which point one's definition and defense of democracy becomes a question about the system's ability to change and accept reforms which to me is the best and most truthful position to take but to say that a republic is inherently morally superior or that the worst republic is better than a dictator, to me that is contrary to history and plainly not supported by actual empirical evidence.
So at this rate, it seems more and more likely that losing the Cold War was in fact part of a Batman Gambit that rivals the term of convolution and luckiness like The Light
Congratulations "Hillary is too corrupt to be President" voters! You've helped elect what's promising to be the most corrupt administrant since Grant. With the added cherry on top that at least Grant himself wasn't corrupt, nor did he have the temperament of a spoiled 10-year old.
edited 29th Nov '16 10:04:49 AM by tricksterson
Trump delenda estThe corruption of President Grant's admiration was itself highly exaggerated and distorted by Lost Cause historians...to them Grant's enforcement of Reconstruction was part of "his corruption". I am not kidding when I call the Lost Cause a more successful propaganda campaign than anything in USSR, it has actively distorted and undermined facts and created many myths...some not related to slavery.
Ronald Reagan's administration was far more corrupt...
edited 29th Nov '16 10:07:27 AM by JulianLapostat
As far as "what does the democratic party do now", I think there's been a fair amount of people talking past each other when it comes to the matter of whether the democrats need to make more universal appeals rather than micromanagement strategically important demographics. The double meaning that terms like "identity politics", "political correctness" and so on have across the political spectrum certainly hasn't helped matters, and I definitely feel at times like we're having two completely different conversations in parallel rather than having a proper debate.
@ No Name:
Funnily enough, there is a conspiracy theory (possibly by one of the Societ defectors?) that the KGB had a master plan. Basically, the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union would be used to reinstate it in another form.
edited 29th Nov '16 10:17:56 AM by TerminusEst
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