Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I should point out that James Buchanan is the president under which the United States collapsed into the American Civil War. I'm not joking or exaggerating. James Buchanan was indeed the president immediately preceding Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War started on Buchanan's watch.
Wizard Needs Food BadlyTrump with more competence probably wouldn't have won the election, paradoxical though it might sound. His dim-witted bungling is part of his charm. He's the ultimate extension of anti-intellectualism; the same traits that make him awful at everything he does also make him into the champion of Joe Average.
Rural right-wing voters cling to him because he's just some asshole with no idea what he's doing, rather than a brilliant politician. But he is absolutely terrible at governing, even at maliciously governing, because he's just some asshole. He was elected to be President Homer Simpson. So far, he's delivered on that.
Trump's relatability is his biggest strength. If he actually knew what he was talking about, he wouldn't be Joe President. He'd be another informed politician.
This is what decades of anti-intellectual rhetoric gets you.
edited 24th Apr '18 11:44:05 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.So there's at least one pessimist voice who thinks that SCOTUS is going to have Trump a win
and uphold the whole Muslim Travel Ban executive order, despite multiple lower courts ruling against it in numerous ways. Full article text
I wouldn't be surprised. We've had to rely on technicalities and flaws in the order's execution to block previous iterations. We've never been able to provably assert that the basic premise of the thing, prohibiting travel to the United States from foreign nations, is unconstitutional or not within the President's power to do.
If Trump can legally do it, then it was only a matter of time before his typewriter monkeys figured out a version of the order that can actually pass the courts. He's taking 20 on his travel ban.
edited 24th Apr '18 12:02:58 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The 5 to 4 ruling split the court along ideological grounds, and was the second time the court had cut back the reach of the 1789 Alien Tort Statute.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservatives.
“Courts are not well suited to make the required policy judgments that are implicated by corporate liability in cases like this one,” he wrote, adding, “Congress, not the Judiciary, must decide whether to expand the scope of liability under the ATS to include foreign corporations.”
He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. Jr and Neil M. Gorsuch.
The court has attempted before to give a 21st century interpretation to the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which was enacted by the first Congress. The justices have limited the kind of actions that can be brought but in 2013 declined to decide whether corporations were immune from suits under the statute.
The case at hand involved 6,000 foreign citizens who allege that the Arab Bank provided financial services to terrorists who engaged in attacks against Israelis in 2000. The bank is a multinational corporation based in Jordan with a federally chartered branch in New York.
The plaintiffs said the suit was authorized by the ATS, which was largely ignored for 200 years before human rights organizations began filing suits seeking relief for abuses overseas. The statute allows federal courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
Trump might be tossing Ronny Jackson under the bus.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/24/politics/ronny-jackson-donald-trump-veterans/index.html
Pretty much.
Officially, the old rate top tax rate was 35 percent, with an actual average tax rate in the mid-twenties, with several companies being able to get away with paying less, or even nothing. The new one is at 21 percent, but the assets being held overseas are taxed at a lower rate, around 8-15 percent.
edited 24th Apr '18 2:29:34 PM by megaeliz
Arizona voters to pick new member of Congress to replace Trent Franks
:
Republican Debbie Lesko, a former state lawmaker, is favored to win against Hiral Tipirneni, a Democratic physician making her first run for office. Even though President Trump won Arizona’s 8th Congressional District by 21 percentage points in 2016, the GOP took nothing for granted, investing more than $500,000 and tapping Trump for robo-calls to voters.
The president made a last-minute appeal for Lesko on Tuesday.
“Arizona, please get out today and vote @DebbieLesko for Congress in #AZ08. Strong on Border, Immigration and Crime. Great on the Military. Time is ticking down - get out and VOTE today. We need Debbie in Congress!” he said via Twitter.
Tipirneni closed out her campaign at a rally Monday night with former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).
“Do you have the courage to fight?” Giffords asked Democrats at Tipirneni’s rally. “On Election Day, please join your voice with mine.”
edited 24th Apr '18 2:42:03 PM by rmctagg09
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.This Maddow Segment about the Civil Lawsuit the DNC filed, alleging collusion between Russia and Trump campaign, and it's connection to Watergate is well worth a watch.
It goes into a lot of detail into the logic behind the DNC's lawsuit against the Nixon Re-election Committee, and it's importance in the Watergate Scandal, and what that could affect their strategy today.
edited 24th Apr '18 5:43:11 PM by megaeliz
So this long post got shared in another forum, and I found it interesting enough to re-share it here. Unfortunately, the original thread got shut down there due to the "article" that prompted it declaring that Conservatives seek to self-improve, while Liberals want to change society to match them. The post came to a similar conclusion, but a hell of a lot more flattering for both ends.
-Speaking in generalizations applicable to groups, not necessarily to individuals.-
Conservatives score higher in 'conscientiousness' while liberals score higher in 'openness'-near universally so.
When it comes to personal growth and development, this fundamental trait difference translates itself with conservatives seeking to perfect themselves, to an ever greater degree, to a value structure that's familiar to them, and the pursuit to attempt to approximate the 'ideal' virtue that value structure values as closely as possible. It's a valuable way of going about things, but also a rather rigid one, as the end results will only be as useful as the 'ideal' of the value structure originally chosen. (Pick neo-Nazism as your value structure, and approximating the 'ideal' might not be such a good thing after all... pick 'the emulation of Christ', and through the same mechanisms, you might attain heights of moral conduct most people have a hard time imagining.)
Conservatives have a hard time giving up their value structures once selected. Their conscientiousness will drive them to strive for refinement within a structure, not to attempt to remedy or change it. Again this has pros and cons, depending on your goal, and the value structures selected.
Liberals, on the other hand, have their openness drive them to seek new ways of looking at things. They test new ideas and are constantly looking for value structures that are superior to the ones they already have. They're open to changing their value structures to new ones when they figure out their previous ones were wrong. And they're constantly engaging in value comparisons between what they know, and what they're just learned, easily substituting the new for the old when they find out it's 'better'.
This is also a constant path of self-improvement, but a very different one from the conservative path. It's a path that seeks the meaning of what is valuable in and of itself, instead of continuously striving to perfect an ideal already chosen. It's a rejuvenating, and exploratory approach towards personal self-improvement.
The problem with your article is that, instead of understanding and acknowledging those differences in approach, it's focussing on dividing people into two camps and ascribing virtues to one camp, and a lack of virtue to the other.
The world doesn't work that way. Half of mankind isn't virtueless because they have a different approach to virtue than you do. We need both approaches.
Without conservative conscientiousness, we can't refine the things we already have. Without liberal openness, we won't explore new ideas.
Without both, we'll get nowhere.
It's a decidedly NSFW forum, which is why I'm not crediting the author publicly.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Apologies for double post:
How Devin Nunes Turned the House Intelligence Committee Inside Out
It's long, but it basically details Nunes' rise to power and how his distrust for people considered experts goes way back.
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.But... do American conservatives seek to self-improve? I mean, they say they do, but a lot of it seems more like "Fuck you, got mine." Or: "If things get bad enough, I can take what I want." Or some tedious variation of the "Just World" crap, where their food stamps and unemployment checks were earned, but those darker-hued people are stealing it somehow.
If you assume morality is tied to profits then they are improving by becoming richer.
Read my stories!He later apologized. But his hysterical outburst had deep roots: At the state and local levels, the conservative obsession with tax cuts has forced the G.O.P. into what amounts to a war on education, and in particular a war on schoolteachers. That war is the reason we’ve been seeing teacher strikes in multiple states. And people like Bevin are having a hard time coming to grips with the reality they’ve created.
To understand how they got to this point, you need to know what government in America does with your tax dollars.
The federal government, as an old line puts it, is basically an insurance company with an army: nondefense spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. State and local governments, however, are basically school districts with police departments. Education accounts for more than half the state and local work force; protective services like police and fire departments account for much of the rest.
So what happens when hard-line conservatives take over a state, as they did in much of the country after the 2010 Tea Party wave? They almost invariably push through big tax cuts. Usually these tax cuts are sold with the promise that lower taxes will provide a huge boost to the state economy.
This promise is, however, never — and I mean never — fulfilled; the right’s continuing belief in the magical payoff from tax cuts represents the triumph of ideology over overwhelming negative evidence.
What tax cuts do, instead, is sharply reduce revenue, wreaking havoc with state finances. For a great majority of states are required by law to balance their budgets. This means that when tax receipts plunge, the conservatives running many states can’t do what Trump and his allies in Congress are doing at the federal level — simply let the budget deficit balloon. Instead, they have to cut spending.
And given the centrality of education to state and local budgets, that puts schoolteachers in the cross hairs.
I'm a Kentuckian and our government is insane because the state government is just a sideshow to the use of the Republican party to work stuff on a Federal level. It's basically a war chest and the massive failure of basic social services, opiod crisis, and worse have the place falling apart.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.So, the Special Elections in New York and Arizona are over, the Results so far are very promising:
- The Democrats technically gain the majority of the New York State Senate (although due to one Democrat caucusing with the Republicans, they don't actually have it)
- The Democrats technically flipped 2 New York Assembly Seats; 1 with a Republican who's a Registered Democrat and has pledged to caucus with them. The Democrat who flipped a Seat flipped it by 36% swing from it's usual Republican Voting Streak.
- The Early Votes in the House Election in Arizona has Debbie Lesko (R) the lead, but only by a 6% lead against Hiral Tipirneni (D). That is a 19% swing from 2 years ago. Although the NYT has already declared Lesko the winner, it is possible for Tipirneni to win.
Overall, this has been good, but it could've been better; if Tiperneni wins, then it will indeed be great!
That's actually a very good result from Arizona; it's a district that's solidly Red and the GOP poured a bunch of money into that race, and it leans ~14% redder than the state as a whole.
Which, considering Arizona is where one of the most plausible 2018 Senate pick-ups for the Dems is and this is our first indication of where things are at there since 2016... it's a promising sign.
And having an near majority in he New York state senate is incredibly important as well. It will make it easier to get a bill closing the presidential pardon loophole, and allow Mueller to prosecute to the full extent of the law, without having to worry about presidential pardons.
And here's the page
of the senator that caucuses with the Republicans, for any New York folk here. Does anyone know anything about the New York State Republican Party?
edited 24th Apr '18 8:39:53 PM by megaeliz
Tiperneni probably never stood a chance of winning, barring a Moore level scandal hitting her opponent in the 11th hour, but the degree of the swing is the important stat here. If that kind of vote shift occurs in more competitive districts, or state wide, that will translate into substantial gains.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Page 3 in the court filing
by the Office of the Special Counsel is kind of hilarious.
First, the Affidavit (rest of sentence redacted). In particular, (rest of paragraph redacted)  Second, the Affidavit (rest of paragraph redacted)
Third, the Affidavit (rest of paragraph redacted) .
edited 24th Apr '18 10:56:30 AM by megaeliz