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US politics: Donny, you're out of your element


IheartIheartTesla

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Apropos of nothing in particular has anyone seen any stories about the successful euthanizing of elderly Americans thanks to the Obamacare death panels?  Now that the law has been in place for several years I would have, as a supporter of the law, hoped to have seen quite a bit of progress on this front by now.   

Have the death panels failed due to poor design much like conservative critics say of the rest of the law?

 

Well it's like the liberal plans to have undocumented immigrants vote and win all future elections. It's still in the works, but it's going to happen someday. Rush Limbaugh says it's so.

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3 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

You honestly believe that rounding folks up in such numbers that you'll have to create camps isn't going to engender some measure of sympathy among a large percentage of this country? That you are a relatively recent immigrant to this country makes your attitude doubly puzzling to me.   

Well if my disgusting country (Australia) is anything to go by...yeah? They'll criminalise any form of whistleblowing and media reporting, deny basic health care to the people in the camps and the majority of people will...shrug. And as many will be demanding harsher treatment as objecting to the whole thing. I still don't understand it, and I'm utterly ashamed of my country, but I don't do any good to those we're locking up by pretending my country isn't completely on board with it all. Obviously the numbers involved are several orders of magnitude greater, but I'm pretty cynical on this. Maybe that scale would save them though.

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1 hour ago, supernintendo chalmers said:

i heard Ross, McConnell, Grassley et al were getting dragged by constituents, who were mad as hell at not getting their promised death panels

McConnell must be almost due to appear in front of a Death Panel actually isn't he a year overdue? And I'm sure DJT's urgency in repealing the ACA is because he's due to appear before a DP before the end of his first term.

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17 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Well if my disgusting country (Australia) is anything to go by...yeah? They'll criminalise any form of whistleblowing and media reporting, deny basic health care to the people in the camps and the majority of people will...shrug. And as many will be demanding harsher treatment as objecting to the whole thing. I still don't understand it, and I'm utterly ashamed of my country, but I don't do any good to those we're locking up by pretending my country isn't completely on board with it all. Obviously the numbers involved are several orders of magnitude greater, but I'm pretty cynical on this. Maybe that scale would save them though.

Even New Zealand's collective (including all political parties other than NZ First) finger waggling has had no effect on you. But we are a little Island that's hard to find and hard to get to in a leaky, barely seaworthy boat. So we have little to be directly concerned about when it comes to large numbers of people of unknown status and unknown motives flooding the country. Not that some of us have been above using the spectre of boat people flooding our shores for political gain.

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10 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Even New Zealand's collective (including all political parties other than NZ First) finger waggling has had no effect on you. But we are a little Island that's hard to find and hard to get to in a leaky, barely seaworthy boat. So we have little to be directly concerned about when it comes to large numbers of people of unknown status and unknown motives flooding the country. Not that some of us have been above using the spectre of boat people flooding our shores for political gain.

Not even finger wagging, you keep offering to take the asylum seekers currently in detention and our government keeps refusing to continue trying to get Trump to honour Obama's deal. Which wasn't even for all of them.

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3 hours ago, MerenthaClone said:

Also not immigrant related.

Not even CNN has dared to trot out this laughable line.

2 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Months ago: rounding up millions is ridiculous and contemptible, but I support Trump because it's obvious he doesn't actually mean to do this, and wouldn't be able to anyways.

Now: rounding up millions is the right thing to do, and I support Trump and can't understand the objection to this.

I never called it ridiculous and contemptible. I did say that there is no way for him to deport all of them (or even, say half) without additional funding from Congress and there still isn't: as the Vox article points out, there needs to be a hearing on every case and the current system simply doesn't have the capacity to process anywhere near that many cases.

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19 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

McConnell must be almost due to appear in front of a Death Panel actually isn't he a year overdue? And I'm sure DJT's urgency in repealing the ACA is because he's due to appear before a DP before the end of his first term.

we thought so too, but the vet said to just dust his meal worms with vitamin a powder, and he could live another 30-40 years

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How can Democrats win future elections?  Texas shows us the way;

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Amid the happy lawyers, journalists, and other movers and shakers at the victory parties, one group of seventy-five men and women, who had arrived on a chartered bus, stood out. Most of them were Latinos, like Petra Vargas, a Mexican-born hotel worker who had spent the day walking her fellow immigrants to the polls. Others were African Americans, such as Rosie McCutcheon, who had campaigned relentlessly for the ticket while raising six grandchildren on a tiny income. All of them wore turquoise T-shirts bearing the logo top. Not only had they made a key contribution to the day’s results — they represented a new and entirely promising way of doing politics in Texas...................

Ever since the era of Ann Richards, Democrats had been focusing their efforts (without success) on winning back white swing voters outside the big cities. But Zermeno realized that there was no reason “to beat our heads against the wall for that group of people anymore, not when we’ve got a million-voter gap and as many as four million non-voting people of color in the big cities, who are likely Democrats.” By relentlessly appealing to that shadow electorate, and gradually turning them into habitual voters, TOP could whittle down and eliminate the Republican advantage in elections for statewide offices such as governor and lieutenant governor, not to mention the state’s thirty-eight votes in the presidential Electoral College. In other words, since the existing Texas electorate was never going to generate a satisfactory result, TOP was going to have to grow a new one..............

Beginning with the 2012 election, TOP canvassers — volunteers and paid employees working their own neighborhoods — were trained to open a doorstep interview not with statements about a candidate but with a question: “What issue do you care about?” The answer, whether it was the minimum wage or schools or potholes, shaped the conversation as the canvasser explained that TOP had endorsed a particular candidate (after an intensive screening) because of his or her position on those very issues. These were not hit-and-run encounters. Potential voters were talked to “pretty much nonstop for about eight to ten weeks leading to the election,” according to Goldman. “They got their doors knocked three to five times. They got called five to seven times. They signed a postcard saying, ‘I pledge to vote.’ They circled which day they were going to vote on a little calendar on the postcard, and we mailed those postcards back to them. We offered them free rides to the polls. We answered all of their questions, gave them all the information they needed, until they cast a ballot. And what we saw was that the Latino vote grew by five percentage points in Harris County in 2012.”

This is a long article in Harpers.  Go read it, it's worth every word and really shows what organization and activism can do. 

http://harpers.org/archive/2017/03/texas-is-the-future/3/

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4 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

How about some small understanding of how immigrant labor actually benefits our economy on a myriad of levels.

Well, it does keep prices down. As immigrants who didn't enter the country legally can be exploited and paid less than a living wage since they don't have practical recourse to complain.

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34 minutes ago, AverageGuy said:

Well, it does keep prices down. As immigrants who didn't enter the country legally can be exploited and paid less than a living wage since they don't have practical recourse to complain.

Sure, that is an unfortunate side-effect. That said, how many stay when faced with that eventuality? Unless it is still a better living than they can earn back in their home country...

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5 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I get the wanting to punish crime. I have no issue with that, but how about some measure of practical sympathy? How about some small understanding of how immigrant labor actually benefits our economy on a myriad of levels. How about at least a nod to the fact that this is a nation of fucking immigrants?

They're getting practical sympathy -- they've taken over certain sectors of the economy so there's no way to actually get rid of all of them on a short time scale and everybody knows it. And while this is indeed a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation with a long history of resistance to immigration.

5 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

You honestly believe that rounding folks up in such numbers that you'll have to create camps isn't going to engender some measure of sympathy among a large percentage of this country? That you are a relatively recent immigrant to this country makes your attitude doubly puzzling to me.

I don't believe that they'll be rounded up in camps -- the associations are too recent and you're right, it will create a lot of sympathy.

11 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That said, how many stay when faced with that eventuality? Unless it is still a better living than they can earn back in their home country...

All of them stay because the conditions are calibrated to be marginally better than what they'd have back home. It's a brilliant setup from the perspective of the capitalists: this not only gets them effectively third world labor in their native country, but also the opportunity to piously say things like "We're not taking any jobs away from Americans because no Americans want to do these jobs."

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2 hours ago, Altherion said:

Not even CNN has dared to trot out this laughable line.

And not even the alt-right media goes beyond saying there were a few dozen youths involved, who were in all likelihood second or third-generation immigrants and thus Swedish citizens. No sure what the lesson is supposed to be here...

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I was surprised to hear a story this evening about how many people US border patrol agents have shot and killed, across the Mexican border. They've shot ten and killed six, and none of the agents have had any kind of discipline applied against them. And the Mexicans who have been killed have been told they have no US constitutional right to sue the US government or the agents.  One of these cases went before the SCOTUS on Tuesday, that of a 15 year old boy in Nogales, Mexico, who had been fooling around with friends in the zone between fences, running up to the US fence and touching it, and then running back. A US border agent, standing in Texas, shot and killed the boy. The facts seem pretty straightforward, since the events occurred beside a bridge with cameras, and people on the bridge took video with their cell phones.

The US government chose not to take any action against the guard and the Obama administration refused to extradite him to Mexico.

You can read the story and hear the interview here: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.3991263/a-free-killing-zone-u-s-top-court-hears-case-of-teen-shot-dead-in-mexico-by-american-border-agent-1.3991266

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"It simply cannot be the law of this land that the constitution doesn't apply to U.S. law enforcement inside the United States when you're talking about the most fundamental of all rights, the right to life," Robert Hilliard, lawyer for the Hernandez family, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

"When the bullet leaves the gun, it has constitutional consequences."

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I know am not wanting to dredge up this issue again but I was reading some facebook comments and it struck me how much the alt-right lives on a totally different planet.  There is not a one of them that isn't convinced that Milo was "taken out" by some sort of ultra left smear campaign.  

Then I thought about Trump's comment about being able to shoot someone and not lose any votes.  Utter lack of hyperbole and it is completely terrifying.    

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8 minutes ago, Crazydog7 said:

I know am not wanting to dredge up this issue again but I was reading some facebook comments and it struck me how much the alt-right lives on a totally different planet.  There is not a one of them that isn't convinced that Milo was "taken out" by some sort of ultra left smear campaign.  

Then I thought about Trump's comment about being able to shoot someone and not lose any votes.  Utter lack of hyperbole and it is completely terrifying.    

Somewhat related:  Ben reading the comments attached to political articles about the Trump/Sweden fiasco.  The conservative posters are absolutely convinced that Sweden is a hotbed of crime and that the liberal media is covering the truth up. 

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I'd rather take the Swedish polices' word for what happens in Sweden, than some random  guy's on the internet. The Local: 

"A Swedish police officer has caused controversy after he made a Facebook post claiming that the majority of the cases he deals with in a week come from people whose country of origin is not Sweden, leading to an internal police investigation of him, and even provoking Prime Minister Stefan Löfven to respond.

In the post, Peter Springare lists what he claims to be the countries of origin and names of those he dealt with while carrying out preliminary investigations of suspected crimes in Örebro, noting that what he posted "is not politically correct" but that he "doesn't give a shit".

"Suspected perpetrators: Ali Mohamad, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed, Ali, again, again, again, Christoffer… what, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name sneaked its way in on the fringes of a drug related crime, Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again," Springare wrote.

"Countries which represent all of the week's crimes: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown country, unknown country, Sweden," he added. Springare then promised to make new posts on the subject every week.

"

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34 minutes ago, Crazydog7 said:

I know am not wanting to dredge up this issue again but I was reading some facebook comments and it struck me how much the alt-right lives on a totally different planet.  There is not a one of them that isn't convinced that Milo was "taken out" by some sort of ultra left smear campaign.  

Then I thought about Trump's comment about being able to shoot someone and not lose any votes.  Utter lack of hyperbole and it is completely terrifying.    

I think it’s very clear that both the right and left wing media have been hammering Milo over this, so the alt right are living in lala land as usual.

That said, I can’t help but think that the we on the left would normally have been more sympathetic/less harsh towards a person – even if we have to take a hard stand against his statements – if that person was someone who taken advantage of sexually back when he was still in his early teens, and who now might be trying to normalize his past experiences as a form of coping mechanism, but we  are now making an exception because it’s the hated Milo Yiannopoulos.

Or am I alone in thinking this?

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19 minutes ago, Savannah said:

I'd rather take the Swedish polices' word for what happens in Sweden

Very wise.

19 minutes ago, Savannah said:

than some random  guy's on the internet.

Ah. You realise that the person you're quoting doesn't speak for the Swedish police, or anyone other than himself, and that he doesn't give any official facts or figures, instead giving an anecdotal account: and so he is, in effect, a 'random guy on the internet'? True, one who happens to be a Swedish policeman - but there's a difference between working for the Swedish police and being the Swedish police.

I'm comforted by the fact, though, that you would rather take the word of the Swedish police than believe this one guy's ramblings. The official figures released by the Swedish police, after all, present a markedly different picture.

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41 minutes ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

Well, I guess one can have sympathy for Milo's younger self while still despising what he has turned into.

Very true.

This also makes me think of Ed Harris’ character in The Rock (a movie I’m too fond of rewatching). You can understand why he is upset with the US Government, but his actions are still completely indefensible.

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