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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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What I'm worried about is our political system looking more and more like that of Russia as times goes on; an all powerful executive with a legislature that alternates between enacting comically stupid and/or draconian laws that everyone ignores and rubber stamping the policies of the head of state. Under such a system it's only a matter of time before someone starts putting their finger on the scales when it comes time for elections, even in a situation where there's every indication they're popular enough to win them fair and square.
edited 25th Apr '17 7:03:19 AM by CaptainCapsase
x 4 I'd expect that would bounce off teflon don and hit Congress. Some will see Trump failing at governance—again. Others will see Congress holding back the wall that's gonna save us all!
x 3 Uh...that's happening. Because votes aren't outright bought or big fellows with crowbars and salt don't "watch the polls for fraud" doesn't mean that rigging isn't going on. See the endless discussions on gerrymandering and, in the sixth, the change from a three week cooldown between first round and runoff and the two months that Kemp changed it to.
Hell, we even have the people overlooking blatant corruption because "he's our guy and everyone does that anyway." Not as bad yet—as that's not the majority, but this is zero hournote , not the time before a someday might be a problem.
EDIT: Albeit the legislature hasn't reached that state yet. Trump's an outlier, but President Obama had a hard time getting things through a democratic congress. (Too bad they couldn't see the future).
edited 25th Apr '17 7:19:52 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 livesWasn't one of the big things that came out of the Trump victory that polls are only so reliable? That goes both ways I suppose, judging from the protests and the fact that he lost the popular vote we can surmise that Trump is very unpopular, but just to what extent I don't think is something gallup can tell us.
Speaking of Georgia 6th:
And Elizabeth Warren being an awesome voice of reason.
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/330364-warren-on-coulter-let-her-speak?amp
edited 25th Apr '17 7:25:22 AM by megaeliz
This is really cool. It's an experiment in crowd funding news and creating engagement. I think this has a lot of potential to do good.
edited 25th Apr '17 7:33:56 AM by megaeliz
@Captain Capsase, True enough. And Trump is no Mobutu.
About Wikitribune: Wikipedia Founder Aims to 'Fix the News' With Collaborative Website
Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has launched a website aimed at countering the spread of fake news by bringing together professional journalists and a community of volunteers and supporters to produce news articles.
The new platform, called Wikitribune, will be free to access and carry no advertising, instead relying on its readers to fund it, while the accuracy of news reports will be easily verifiable as source material will be published, Wales said.
"The news is broken, but we've figured out how to fix it," he said in a promotional video posted on the website's homepage.
The online proliferation of fake news, some of it generated for profit and some for political ends, became a major topic of angst and debate in many developed countries during last year's U.S. presidential election.
Wales argued in his video that because people expected to get news for free on the Internet, news sites were reliant on advertising money, which created strong incentives to generate so-called "clickbait", catchy headlines to attract viewers.
"This is a problem because ads are cheap, competition for clicks is fierce and low-quality news sources are everywhere," said Wales.
He also argued that social media networks, where an ever-increasing number of people get their news, were designed to show users what they wanted to see, confirm their biases and keep them clicking at all costs.
Wales said Wikitribune would combine professional, standards-based journalism with what he called "the radical idea from the world of wiki that a community of volunteers can and will reliably protect the integrity of information".
He said articles would be authored, fact-checked and verified by journalists and volunteers working together, while anyone would be able to flag up issues and submit fixes for review.
"As the facts are updated, the news becomes a living, evolving artefact, which is what the Internet was made for," he said.
The Wikitribune homepage said the platform would go live in 29 days. It also indicated that the intention was to hire 10 journalists, but none had been hired so far.
That sounds like an idea that's guaranteed to end in disaster.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Idaho’s Labrador finds friendlier crowd in Canyon County for second town hall, but topic is still health care
http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article146544919.html
My local congressman had a second town hall yesterday
And one brave MC stood the tide and dared defend his policy alone. Seriously, that willingness to actually face his constituents, implies alot about character there.
For those advocating a convince and convert strategy note
An estimated 1 in 5 Republicans voted for Jon Ossoff
That’s what Nate Cohn of The New York Times deduced after crunching a new set of numbers in the 6th District race. Past GOP primary voters outnumbered Democrats by 52-29, he wrote in The Upshot, meaning that Ossoff had to have won 15 to 20 percent of Republican-leaning voters – and about two in three voters who had never cast ballots in a partisan primary.
Cohn also found that a larger portion of Democratic-leaning primary voters turned out than Republican primary voters – a rare feat for Democrats in Georgia or, really, across the nation.
The news wasn’t all bad for Republican Karen Handel, though. Writes Cohn:
The electorate was not as favorable for Mr. Ossoff as the electorate was for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
The electorate was almost exactly as old and white as would be expected in a normal midterm electorate. This is not surprising — there is no recent precedent for a strong turnout among young and nonwhite voters in midterm elections. But this sort of pattern would hamper Democrats in relatively diverse districts where they depend more on nonwhite voters, like those in Southern and Central California, south Florida and Texas.
edited 25th Apr '17 9:09:02 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
For all the horrid domestic crap George Senior abetted stateside, he did OK with what he had in terms of foreign policy entirely due to his experience in the CIA-which is why he did not remove Saddam in 91', because there was no way to stabilize the region at the time and Kuwait was a mess. Ironically, perhaps his best domestic policy also cost him reelection-raising taxes to avoid a recession, another reverberating legacy left by Reagan's rampant deregulation. Bush Jr. had no sense of scale or nuance, which is why he pushed so hard to correct his father's 'failure' in Iraq, and failing to see it for the move it was.
edited 25th Apr '17 9:30:19 AM by ViperMagnum357
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Yeah, I don't know much about his tenure there but the impression I got (reading a book about Robert Ames, one of the key operatives in the Middle East and a major influence in making the 1992 Israel-Palestine deal happen) that Bush was regarded as competent in that role.
edited 25th Apr '17 9:29:43 AM by Elle
@Elle: The state of the political system in modern Russia and the United States under George H. W. Bush aren't really comparable enwhen trying to diagnose a countries problems, people often focus on the personalities of the people in charge far more than the underlying systems and institutions that incentivize leaders to take certain courses of action, which in my view are far more important in many situations.
Can you even imagine what Nixon (for example) would do in a system which didn't place any checks on his power?
edited 25th Apr '17 10:20:45 AM by CaptainCapsase

On that note (review and authorization) I had one of my little random thoughts. What if Congress tried to pass a short term budget bill or a continuation bill has been discussed, what would happen if Trump vetoed it (as has been discussed) and then Congress overrides the veto just to keep the economy going?
I doubt it would happen, especially with Trump seeming to back down on the wall, but a veto override within the first 100 days would definitely not make Trump look strong.