Lurker > red_sox_777

Well, I don't think the current prime minister being disloyal to the former prime minister is a basis to oust the current prime minister. I think an MP would know that. On the other hand, the Chat GPT version contains no grammatical errors.

Forceful_Dragon posted...

You can argue about "half", but at that point you are determining what % of Trump's supporters fall into those categories, and the issue is that it's a problematically high %. Whether you settle at 49% or 18% or 26% or whatever you think it really should be, it's a problem. Not only is it a problem, but it's a high enough % that it's the kind of rhetoric that won him the nomination. And sure, a large % of republicans allowed themselves to be fooled that he's just a "successful businessman" that they can hold their nose while they cast a vote for him.. But you can't deny the not-insignificant percentage of mask-off terrible people who loved Trump because of the way he enabled them. When you have that many awful people agreeing that one of the candidates is "their guy" then you should really spend a minute to try and figure out why that is.

People who were actually in the basket of deplorables were never going to vote for any Democrat. But when the leading presidential candidate comes out and says that about 25% of US voters think that way, that pushes a lot of people who aren't there into thinking that it is normal and okay, since so many people apparently think that way.

Like, why not just call Trump deplorable? I don't think Hillary ever directed that level of vitriol at Trump directly.

HaRRicH posted...

Especially in hindsight, the only thing wrong about what she said was describing them as a basket's amount of deplorables. A basket does not contain all of these deplorables.

Maybe that phrasing wasn't fitting for a President. Still, we know who she ran against. That dude's daily speech and previous life history wasn't fitting for a President. How many quotes could people pull up about Donald saying things just as bad or worse as "basket of deplorables" about Democrats?

Again, if you can find something in the 2016 campaign where Trump goes after huge numbers of Democratic voters - not politicians, not celebrities, not influencers, not billionaires, not union leaders - like that, please point me to it and I'll withdraw.

Her being mostly right or not is sort of besides the point. She was kicking people when they were down, just because she had more power and wealth than they did. If you can find me one instance prior to 2017 (so before MTG, George Santos, Lauren Boebert, etc. got elected) where Hillary called a Republican member of Congress deplorable or something equally bad, I'll be impressed.

_Blur_ posted...

I know it's red sox but come on. She very clearly was calling the more extremist Trump supporters deplorable and she was so obviously right. Should have never apologized for that comment. January 6th and trying to overthrow democracy is pretty fucking deplorable man

She said half of the people supporting Trump were deplorable. Not the far right fringe, but half. Also, January 6 happened years after that comment and was not perpetrated by anything like half of Trump supporters.

Forceful_Dragon posted...

Hillary: "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic people are deplorable" (paraphrased)

People: What did you say about ME?!

I mean yeah, if you're choosing to put those labels on yourself to be offended then you're probably not a good person. And if that's not you? Then she wasn't talking about you. It was pretty straightforward.

What's the point of the statement then? Almost everyone agrees those things are bad. She said it was half of people who supported Trump.

LightningStrikes posted...

If the Republicans were smart, they would be going Economy. Inflation. Economy. Inflation. over and over and over again. Dont even say the word abortion or anything like that.

Thank goodness they arent smart! Its a global crisis and sitting governments are getting punished all over the world. This should be easy for the Republicans and theyre bungling it. Good riddance.

If voters were smart, that economy/inflation message would not work. The US economy is doing great, and there are way worse things than a little inflation which has already come way down and appears to be under control.

It's depressing to me every time I hear people talk about how things have never been worse and blaming Biden, just because in 2022 we had inflation in the 7-9% range. Do they not remember 2008-2011? The Iraq War? Hillary calling working class people deplorable and giving speeches to banks for $250k a speech?

We can't always be in the worst crisis of our lives; not every election can be the most consequential election in decades. I won't speak for the rest of the world because as I understand it the US economy has been a top performer the last few years, but things are not so bad economically here and they aren't so bad overall either. They could get a lot worse if Trump gets reelected and enacts his promised policy of retribution. Wish Biden would start using Trump's strategy of bragging every time a good economic stat comes out.

Dark_Silvergun posted...

Hard to say.

Curious though, why is this topic tagged with *Politics* though?

All of my polls are tagged with politics. I guess this one isn't super political (unless a public poll by definition is political).

I can't imagine Republicans are going to care much about Trump's running mate.

How do you render a verdict without listening to the testimony of the most important witness? I think you need to just listen to him, and then rule against him.

I think the Trump strategy of pushing for a mistrial/reversible error that can be appealed might be working. From media reports, the judge seems to want Trump to answer yes or no questions and not explain his answers, and is even threatening to refuse to listen to his testimony entirely.

LordoftheMorons posted...

I don't really agree with that line of thought. In any other job you wouldn't need a criminal conviction to be fired for egregious conduct, and George Santos's rights aren't the only ones at issue here; he's making decisions for the whole country despite being a massive fraud (similarly, Bob Menendez should be expelled from the Senate).

(You could punt it to a House investigation, but I don't think there's a single person here who has any doubt that George Santos has committed acts that should disqualify someone from a position of public trust)

It's not his rights that are critical here. It's the rights of his voters. They selected him, and if you expel him you are silencing their voices. Perhaps they believed him, or they thought he was lying and voted for him anyway. Impossible to tell. Most likely, he is not going to win reelection (but if he does, then it's a sign that his district just doesn't care about fraud).

LMS, please think through what you are saying before posting.

I feel like moderates missed an opportunity here. The repeated GOP conference nomination votes showed a bit over 55% of the Republican conference is more in the moderate camp than the hard right one, since Scalise and Emmer won with about that percentage. But the moderates are unwilling to use the hardball tactics the far right is. Really doesn't make sense how 75%+ of the House (Dems + moderate Republicans) can't get together and outvote the others.

The California high speed rail suffers from the problem of not being nearly ambitious enough. When you start by telling people it's going to take 15 years, it's hard for people to get excited about it.

I really think they should have stuck with Boris Johnson. He at least had a plan for winning elections.

I hope this experience will help moderate Republicans learn that nothing bad will happen if you reach compromises with Democrats on stuff 80% of the country wants. I feel observers even from 20 years ago would be puzzled by this idea that Republicans are supposed to get 218 out of 220 GOP members to agree on a bill so that it can pass with 0 out of 215 Democrats.

It's very rare for anyone to die of old age at 85. Complications associated with health problems can result in death at that age, but to die of old age itself is very unlikely.

So would you be okay with raising the minimum age to 65?

If people want younger leaders, they will get them. I think we need to recognize that the increased age of our leaders is strongly connected to increased life expectancy generally. Also, it's not unusual historically for leadership to largely skip a generation. We can expect to see a power transition soon from the generation that is currently in their 70s and 80s to the generation currently in their 30s and 40s, with the people in between simply being passed over.

I think if we're going to have stronger ethical rules for people holding the top offices in the land (president, vice president, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices), they should be paid a lot more. I don't think it's fair to ask someone as brilliant as Clarence Thomas, who's had a transformative effect on law in this country in his 30 years at SCOTUS, to live on a sub-200k salary. If you do that it will strongly disincentivize people who are not already independently wealthy from serving in these high offices.

By the same argument, I'm totally fine with Nancy Pelosi using information she gets from serving in Congress to make money in the stock market.

Forceful_Dragon posted...

Are you sure about that?

As a Federal employee I have restricted rights with regard to political speech/activity. Not all the time, but particularly with regard to fundraising and with regard to actions done in my official capacity or while using my job title. Once a year we have to take a refresher course on the Hatch Act as part of our annual refresher training (it's one of about a dozen of yearly reminders we have to endure). This isn't the video we use, but here's a more concise video discussing the Hatch Act:|

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCYVTYDmv0g

Pay particular attention to the bit starting around 1:50
"don't ask for or receive any campaign donations at any time"
"this is very strict and applies 24/7, even when off duty and not in a federal building"

And going onto the scenarios I can't even LIKE a post on facebook relating to a fundraising event because it displays my preference for all to see.

Now simply attending a fundraiser without calling attention to it is probably safe, but if your attendance is an important part of the fundraiser and if people are paying specifically because you're allowing those raising funds to display that they have access to you? Then i think that goes back to something that would be off-limits.

Now my job technically falls into the Executive branch, and Clarence Thomas is part of the Judicial branch, so the Hatch Act itself does not apply, but that's just another example of people being held to unfairly different standards.

Well, I thought the reason we're having all these issues is that the rules that apply to federal employees, or to judges, don't apply to Supreme Court justices.

I'm not seeing the problem here. He's allowed to donate to whomever he likes. He's allowed to promote whatever political views or causes he likes. If he was being paid by the Koch network, that's another matter but attending fundraisers? Not even 1/100 as bad as Hillary Clinton getting massive sums of money to give speeches to banks.

Unless Taylor Swift is personally running against her, I think Marsha Blackburn should be safe.

The Democrats should just tell McCarthy that they'll support his government funding bill. No reason something that in principle has the support of at least 90% of the House should fail because everyone insists that it should pass, if at all, with only Republican votes.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Trump literally did the same thing as Vice Admiral Holdo from The Last Jedi where he pretended not to have a plan for dealing with the pandemic when he did.

He gave daily press conferences. Are you sure you don't mean that he did the opposite - pretend to have a plan when he didn't?

He won by a lot in 2018 and I'm pretty sure he'd win that primary easily in 2024. It's too bad in the sense that he's one of the Republicans who isn't afraid of standing up to Trump.

Vote away!

paulg235 posted...

Hacking, doxing, data breach, illegal streaming and downloads, along that sort of line.

These can be very different.

The GOP has no good candidates. People like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, Ben Carson, etc. aren't even running anymore. Until Trump finally goes away and Republicans aren't competing with each other to see who is the meanest, Republicans' best chance of preserving the status quo is Biden.

I am pretty confident Trump doesn't win the general but those direct polls with Biden are scary. Fairly sure there's a lot of people who just don't want to say they're voting for Biden right now and will end up doing it because the alternative is Trump, but it's still scary.

To be clear, I am not including the tail end of his first term in that assessment. That was incredibly bad. And that's what he's been saying his second term will be like if he gets elected.

Trump has all but promised his second term will be much worse than the first.

And I don't think his first term was bad. He did some bad things, but overall it was much better than both of the Bush terms and somewhat better than both of the Obama terms. But Trump has made it clear that if he gets reelected, he will be doing all those bad things he was dissuaded from doing in his first term.

LordoftheMorons posted...

https://twitter.com/mattgertz/status/1694735109327401362?s=21

What a guy

Every time I see his name I think it's Matt Gaetz.

Given that the movie is set in the early 1500s, what they actually spoke is going to be pretty far from both modern Castilian and modern Latin American Spanish.

Vote away!

I would feel worse for Rudy if he hadn't been so aggressive in pioneering RICO prosecutions when he was a prosecutor. He had a very high conviction rate, I believe. I wonder how much of those people were innocent.

This Georgia indictment is very broad and aggressive in going after what appears to be the entire Trump legal team. Feels constitutionally unsound as to a bunch of the "conspirators."

Fulton County is of course a very bad venue for Trump given how blue it is. He'll probably try to get it moved to MTG's district.

The January 6th one is the one where I feel he is the most guilty in a moral sense. Although, in some sense it may be less open and shut than the documents case.

Reactions which are speech are covered by the 1st Amendment. Actions such as banning speech are not covered by the 1st Amendment.

Personal ideologies are protected by the First Amendment. Classic free speech.

LMS, you do realize in a nation of 300+ million people, different voters can have different reasons for voting the way they do? One person might vote for Trump because they really don't like Hillary, another might vote for him because they want lower taxes, another might be racist or sexist.