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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
We're seeing the results now, I think, of the constant selection pressure for GOP politicians to adhere to the party dogma above and beyond any concern for democracy, the Constitution, or the rule of law. It seems at this point that they'd willingly tear down our political system if it means they get to stay in power.
It's already obvious that they only care about ethics and propriety when they can wield them as weapons against Democrats, since the latter actually do care about having a functional government (mostly).
What can we do if one major party simply no longer cares about governing?
edited 4th Apr '18 9:39:16 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I've seen people say we should put people over party and try to vote actual sanity into the GOP through people like Richard Painter
, and as much as I like the idea of two sane governing parties, I don't think that would work.
The party is so corrupt and toxic that any principled sane person would be going into the wolves den.
The chance to rebuild sane parties will be on a state level, at least for now.
edited 4th Apr '18 11:11:10 AM by megaeliz
Roger Stone had dinner with Assange the same day he "predicted" that Wikileaks would release harmful leaks about Clinton.
Granted, it might just have been digital communication, given his passport records, but he's said different things at different times.
edited 4th Apr '18 10:12:22 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.It's not really up to Democratic voters to save the GOP from themselves. Even if we wanted to do it, we can't. What're we going to do, register as Republicans so we can vote in their primaries to ensure the "sane" candidates are the ones in the running, then vote Democratic in the actual elections anyway?
Disgusted, but not surprisedSomething I've seen some articles about recently (bu forget who wrote them off hand) is how one solution, which is both good for Democrats and morally good/good for the country is stopping voter suppression/expanding the franchise.
Because essentially, although voter suppression existed before then, there was a point when Obama was elected and then reelected, where the GOP had a choice of either expanding their appeal to a greater number of voters, or else to win by stopping people from voting and other anti-majoritarian means, and they chose the latter. It probably helped that the Supreme Court kind of sort of helped George W. Bush "steal" the election. Because that was a point that not only demolished the Court's pretense of nonpartisanship, but also showed that there were benefits/no costs to subverting democracy (interesting harbinger on all counts of what happened with Merrick Garland).
So, besides it other benefits, making sure that everyone who wants to vote can would force GOP candidates to have to win on the merits and would at least theoretically improve the candidate base.
@M84: My Dad actually once supported a law that'd let anyone vote in either primary regardless of actual party affiliations. He was convinced to support it after he saw an add attacking the policy by asking something along the lines of "Would you really want someone like Rush Limbaugh voting in Democratic Primaries?" and he responded with an enthusiastic "Yes!".
edited 4th Apr '18 11:19:44 AM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34This is beautiful.
The banner for a picture from CNBC coverage for The Easter Egg Roll of Trump and the Easter Bunny actually specified which one was the president (he was standing on the left).
An interesting Op-Ed from a Canadian journalist (who reported in the US for years). Not sure that I agree with the entire thing, but it does posit a few interesting points. Bolded part mine.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/anti-trump-resistance-1.4603520
The Fox News Channel manure-thrower has taken some time off, having been blasted right out of her cable-TV battlefield command post by a bunch of high school kids.
Such a satisfying outcome. And Ingraham, accustomed to siccing Fox's army of far-right orcs against the liberals and moderate conservatives they hate with such slavering intensity, plainly didn't see it coming, which made it all the more enjoyable to watch.
Ingraham, who began her career in university outing gay students, probably thought David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of the recent Florida high school massacre, would crumple, or maybe start crying — you know, the way sensitive liberals tend to do — when she unleashed one of her ad hominem attacks on him, mocking him for being rejected by UCLA.
Instead, Hogg turned around and pasted her. He in fact out-Foxed her.
"Soooo, @Ingraham Angle, what are your biggest advertisers…" Hogg tweeted after her attack. He and his friends quickly assembled a list, and began a boycott.
It was exactly the sort of hardball that far-right activists play, and boy, did it work. Ingraham's advertisers began deserting her Fox show, even after she rushed out a sanctimonious apology "in the spirit of Holy Week," which was promptly rejected by Hogg.
Facing the sort of destruction visited on her former colleague Bill O'Reilly by an early form of #Me Too! boycott, she abruptly announced she'd be taking a break to spend time with her family.
Over the weekend, Hogg tweeted: "Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week."
Fox News, with an utterly un-self-aware absence of irony, denounced the boycott as an "agenda-driven intimidation effort." When I read that one over breakfast, I nearly passed coffee through my nose.
Instead, Hogg turned around and pasted her. He in fact out-Foxed her.
"Soooo, @Ingraham Angle, what are your biggest advertisers…" Hogg tweeted after her attack. He and his friends quickly assembled a list, and began a boycott.
It was exactly the sort of hardball that far-right activists play, and boy, did it work. Ingraham's advertisers began deserting her Fox show, even after she rushed out a sanctimonious apology "in the spirit of Holy Week," which was promptly rejected by Hogg.
Facing the sort of destruction visited on her former colleague Bill O'Reilly by an early form of #Me Too! boycott, she abruptly announced she'd be taking a break to spend time with her family.
Over the weekend, Hogg tweeted: "Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week."
Fox News, with an utterly un-self-aware absence of irony, denounced the boycott as an "agenda-driven intimidation effort." When I read that one over breakfast, I nearly passed coffee through my nose. Faces of an angry generation
Now, there's no doubt Hogg is cocky. Who wouldn't be in his place at his age? He and fellow Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez have gone from nobodies to the blazingly famous faces of an angry generation, kids who think their right to live in safety is more important than a gunned-up nation's right to target practice.
When Hogg and his fellow students announced a "March For Our Lives" march one month after the massacre, giant crowds turned out across the United States and around the world.
When Hogg called for town halls to discuss gun control over the Easter break, politicians in more than 70 Congressional districts were summoned by their constituents.
Hogg now has over 732,000 followers on Twitter. Gonzalez has over 1.5 million.
This is power, serious power. And it's driving Trump Nation nuts.
The flying monkeys who take their cues from Fox and Breitbart, and swarm in the service of America's boorish president, are determined to take down these damned young lefties, and are going about it with their usual viciousness.
They reserve a particular hatred for Emma Gonzalez. Not only is she a brave young woman, she dares to appear on camera with a shaved head, giving rise to "skinhead lesbian" attacks.
She wears a Cuban flag on her jacket, because she is of Cuban heritage. For that, of course, she is a traitor. When she posed for a photo tearing a rifle target in half, some clever drooler photoshopped the U.S. Constitution in the target's place and released the fake image onto the internet.
Happily, the students are not relenting.
Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members frittered away strong political traction by talking themselves to death, Hogg, Gonzalez and company clearly intend to weaponize theirs and adopt the tactics of their enemies, which is exactly what needs to be done.
America needs a real resistance, not slacktivists who talk about it. The left (and moderate right) needs to ape the Tea Partiers, who understood how to take over and use power.
When President Donald Trump, disregarding the advice of his own Pentagon, bans transgender Americans from military service out of sheer bigotry, targeting some of society's most vulnerable, the resistance should in turn target specific Trump donors by boycotting and starving their businesses, and then go after military recruiters on campus. Make the response hurt.
Trump toadies and enablers in the media — like the preening Sean Hannity of Fox News and the Sinclair broadcasting executives who struck a deal with Trump that effectively trades access for fawning coverage — need to feel the same pain Ingraham has suffered.
When white nationalists, inspired by Trump, gather in American streets denouncing Jews and minorities, the resistance needs to keep showing up with cameras, identifying individual marchers on social media, and targeting their employers. Cost them their jobs. Flatten them.
Any store that offers military-style assault weapons should find it difficult to ever sell anything else.
Any business that sponsors, directly or indirectly, the National Rifle Association or any of its lickspittles in far-right media outlets like Breitbart or Infowars should be boycotted into extinction.
Americans live in the biggest, best-stocked marketplace in history; exercising choice in that marketplace gets results. Ask Laura Ingraham.
But the real boycott has to be at the polls during the midterm elections this November. If Democrats and moderate Republicans mobilize and vote, the GOP's right flank will turn on Trump like a pack of hyenas.
Democrats who sat on their hands in 2016, arguing about the soul of the Democratic Party, the ones who just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because they found her "strident," have seen the result of their self-indulgence: a churlish chief executive who sits in the White House eating cheeseburgers, tweeting out inanities and insults, laughing at women who object to his serial sexual misconduct, inspiring white supremacists, persecuting innocent undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as infants, dismantling environmental and fiscal regulations, demonizing the FBI and the Justice and State departments and even the courts (and probably preparing pardons for his cohort and maybe even himself), and of course borrowing future generations into debt to grant America's richest people – his pals — the biggest tax cut in generations, against all conservative principle.
Of course, conservative principles, such as they are, don't concern Trump or his followers.
But money does, and power does, and the only way to thwart them is to take it away. It can be done.
This will be dangerous, make no mistake. Trump Nation will retaliate ferociously. Some flying monkeys would no doubt kill rather than give up their guns or privileges. Those high school kids are probably in some danger, bless them.
Anyway, Trump was right when he says he founded a movement. It's time for another one. And it might just be here.
edited 4th Apr '18 11:24:38 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.![]()
![]()
This is beautiful, in any war if you allow the enemy to seize and hold the initiative then they will have a massive advantage over you. The Left needs to start treating the culture war as a real war and hitting the Reactionaries where it hurts.
edited 4th Apr '18 11:33:54 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangUsing the specific example of boycotting stores that sell semi-automatic carbines: the issue with that is that, at least for dedicated gun stores, that'd rapidly become a Periphery Hatedom. You can't boycott something you weren't going to buy from anyways.
Leviticus 19:34Apparently Trump wants to withdraw American Troops from Syria.
"I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation," Trump said during a press conference with leaders of the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. "It's time. We were successful against ISIS. We'll be successful against anybody militarily, but sometimes it's time to come back home — and we're thinking about that very seriously."
The president said getting rid of ISIS has been the United States' primary goal in Syria and that "we've almost completed that task."
He added that the U.S. will be making a decision “very quickly in coordination with others in the area as to what we'll do” and suggested that if others, like Saudi Arabia, want the U.S. to maintain a presence, perhaps they should pay for it.
"Saudi Arabia is very interested in our decision and I said, well, you know, you want us to stay, maybe you will have to pay but a lot of people, you know, we do a lot of things in this country. We do them for, we do them for a lot of reasons. But it is very costly for our country and it helps other countries a hell of a lot more than it helps us. So we're going to be making a decision, we've had a tremendous military success,” Trump said...
...The president's remarks come after he suggested last week in surprise comments that the U.S. would soon pull out of Syria.
Trump first floated the idea of "coming out of Syria, like, very soon" Thursday during a speech on infrastructure in Ohio.
Taking orders from the Kremlin again, I see.
edited 4th Apr '18 11:58:28 AM by megaeliz
You could boycott places that sell guns and other things, such as Wal-Mart or Amazon. The issue though with boycotting say, Wal-Mart, is that people are often fairly dependent on those businesses. As much as people complain about Wal-Mart, there is a lot of demand/need for a low-price supermarket like them right now (and the things we complain about keep those prices low). So they're not going anywhere.
Though, to be fair, as guns aren't that big a source of profit for them they'd be the ones to respond more quickly to any sort of boycott.
Leviticus 19:34I agree, it's in the American interest for that region to be stable and we should not be so terrified of casualties amongst our soldiery that we cowardly shirk from doing what's necessary.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWhen it comes to military interventionism, I don’t think our causalities are the only objectionable ones.
Oh God! Natural light!![]()
That's an argument for more effective intervention (like not withdrawing to early and letting anarchy settle in ala Libya, or keeping distance and letting the crazies form most of the viable parties to the conflict ala Syria) and refining rules of engagement.
Neither of which will ever happen on Trump's watch.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.In fairness, domestic violence does factor into a lot of shootings like this, male or female. Its (relatively) small scale of injuries also played a role in people chalking it up as that, since it was one male victim as the most injured, then two coworkers who were presumably sitting near him.
edited 4th Apr '18 1:05:33 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"![]()
Yeah, it's a bit like LA Noire during the homicide cases, wherein the player's partner simply chalks up women being murdered to "their husband killed them". He's wrong to get complacent because of this, but he does have a point.

edited 4th Apr '18 9:28:21 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang