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US Elections: When Murder isn't Murder


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8 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Well the Democrats cant say they werent informed when/if the far left wont come out in droves to support the Kerry/Obama/Clinton type candidate who is far too hawkish for many. Just being better than a neocon is too low a bar. If there isnt a Kucinich, Wellstone, Nader, Conyers style true liberal to choose from in the Democratic elections of the future than I don't think Democrats can count on those voters to not stay home or vote Green.

I hope you got that Christmas card from the RNC.

(Fact is, the sort of purity tests being applied here can be used against anyone. Wellstone voted for DOMA, after all).

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8 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

The cynical view (argued by Chomsky, Vidal, Roy, the far left etc.) is he's the same U.S. President since Nixon (at least on imperialism). I am pleased the Obama regime has decided to free Cuba, he should've did it about 6 yrs ago. It's true Obama was dealt a shit sandwich from the onset, but the administration is far from an innocent after 8 yrs now pursueing it's own M.E. misdirections. He will be remembered squarely (right or wrongly) for owning Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. The seeds for problems in those states, it can be argued, were sewn  in the past. But who can tell the difference when we've had one continuous string of militarist, world policeing, CIC's for decades now? The differences (on foreign policy) from Truman to Ike to JFK to LBJ to Nixon to Ford to Carter to Reagan to Bush1 to Clinton to Bush the Lesser to the Obama regime have been little but window dressing. Even Carter armed Indonesia to the teeth for their E.Timor genocide, saints none of these are.

If one is comfortable with the U.S. as the worlds police that's entirely their choice and case. But argueing there is any real or meaningful difference in these foreign policies is like splitting hairs. They have been the same CIC for decades. Obama is only the latest in a long line (Clinton will be the next) of the purveyors of what Arundhati Roy is referring to here. 

 

 

 

Jeez that dog in a manger quote from Winston Churchill is an absolute shocker!

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9 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Jeez that dog in a manger quote from Winston Churchill is an absolute shocker!

Well, yes. Churchill was a racist Imperialist twat who sent tanks against strikers, was uncomfortably fond of chemical warfare, supported crimes against humanity on the sub-continent, and who famously said in 1945 that Clement Attlee would "need a Gestapo" to enact Labour Party policy. He was also the author of Gallipoli, and destroyed the British economy in the 1920s with his decision to go back on the Gold Standard.

Quite literally, the man was right about only one thing in his entire life. It just happened to be the thing that mattered.

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10 hours ago, Shryke said:

Sure, he's got good credentials. But so do. say, Janet Yellen and Eric S. Rosengren and Paul Krugman. You can find plenty of people not impressed with Kashkari in general and/or not agreeing with his statements back in February.

There's not necessarily anything inherent to large banks that makes them an issue as long as their risk is low. The connection of "too big to fail" to the financial crisis of 2008 is to many (like Krugman as an example) not as important as it's made out to be. That's one fo the big reasons Clinton's plan gets more praise from left-wing economists, because it more directly attacks what many see as the actual issue, the "shadow banking" industry.

But there's also a problem with the hidden assumption here. Why is the failure of smaller banks do to increased regulatory costs a bad thing? If they can't comply with regulation and still operate, why should I consider it a bad thing? We don't make these argument for other industries for a good reason. "Environmental regulation is bad because small manufacturers can't bear the costs of safely disposing of their industrial waste!" If small banks can't operate in certain sectors within rules to reduce risk then they shouldn't be operating in those sectors.

The only way small banks being unable to comply with regulation is bad is if the regulation itself is not useful. To argue otherwise is to confuse the issue by assuming "banks being large" is the issue rather then the risk of financial crisis. It's turning the chain of logic the wrong way around.

Interestingly, it goes back to at least frank Capra. The entire plot of "it's a wonderful life" hinges on the inability of George baileys small savings and loan to comply with the new banking regulations of FDRs new deal policies. 

so we need to save small entities from regulation because we can always count on jimmy Stewart to do the right thing and all small banks are like his.

(also worth noting the entire plot of "mr. Smith goes to Washington" hinges on principle that all new deal rural infrastructure spending is inherently corrupt graft.)

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18 hours ago, Shryke said:

There's not necessarily anything inherent to large banks that makes them an issue as long as their risk is low.

There are other things that go wrong when banks get too big, but let's disregard those for the moment and focus on one crucial point: we don't know the risk. There's an entire industry of extremely well paid people whose job it is to evaluate this risk, but as history has shown time and time again, the systems in question are too complex for these evaluations to be comprehensive and, obvious as they are in retrospect, the risks are not truly known.

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The only way small banks being unable to comply with regulation is bad is if the regulation itself is not useful.

Yes. The Frank-Dodd regulations were written by people who have taken substantial amounts of money from the large banks both before and after their passage. Many of the people who voted on them and worked to implement them have gone on to work for the banks. It's a pretty safe bet that the big banks found the regulations more helpful than harmful which makes the odds of them being useful pretty slim (albeit not completely negligible).

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On Saturday, April 02, 2016 at 10:35 AM, TrackerNeil said:

I know, and it's great! It's like no matter what happens the GOP is screwed.

 

On Sunday, April 03, 2016 at 8:40 AM, TrackerNeil said:

But hasn't he already made that threat, if not in so many words? Everyone knows that if the delegates spurn the frontrunner (assuming that's Trump) there is going to be a big problem.

I'll tell you, so far everything that could break for the Democrats is.

Is this another source of the issues of Clinton and Sanders? The brass ring is there to be grabbed, possibly in one of the greatest landslides in American politics, and they can't seem to get their shit together either.

And that infuriates me. I don't need to see my Facebook feed full of Bernie supporters throwing out Republican talking points about Clinton as if they're some sort of gospel. I don't need my Facebook feed full of Clinton supporters filling it full of vitriol about Sanders.  Let's talk about the damn issues and get on with it.  Watching my feed lately is like watching a meeting between a couple divorcing on not so good terms...

 

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2 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Is this another source of the issues of Clinton and Sanders? The brass ring is there to be grabbed, possibly in one of the greatest landslides in American politics, and they can't seem to get their shit together either.

Honestly, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with either campaign, and it's interesting to remember that the 2008 was much more hotly contested. This year, most people who watch politics know that, barring some tidal shift, Clinton will be the nominee. I don't recall the current level of self-righteousness back then, but maybe that is my idyllic memory at work.

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2 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

 

And that infuriates me. I don't need to see my Facebook feed full of Bernie supporters throwing out Republican talking points about Clinton as if they're some sort of gospel. I don't need my Facebook feed full of Clinton supporters filling it full of vitriol about Sanders.  Let's talk about the damn issues and get on with it.  Watching my feed lately is like watching a meeting between a couple divorcing on not so good terms...

 

Amen.  I've got both going back and forth.  And I'm like "seriously?"

Separately, it's interesting to me how medieval and mercantile the economic debates are becoming on both sides.  

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Weird, because my facebook is about 80% Sanders supporters and 20% people who are probably Hilary supporters but don't bother arguing with Sanders supporters and instead just post about what the Republicans are doing.  I would honestly prefer an annoying low level conflict between Hilary and Sanders supporters over this wall-to-wall "Sanders is so great even birds love him!" coverage.

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2 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Weird, because my facebook is about 80% Sanders supporters and 20% people who are probably Hilary supporters but don't bother arguing with Sanders supporters and instead just post about what the Republicans are doing.  I would honestly prefer an annoying low level conflict between Hilary and Sanders supporters over this wall-to-wall "Sanders is so great even birds love him!" coverage.

Same. The overexcited conspiracy-hunting (apparently Arizona's voting problems were Hillary Clinton's fault) I see from my Sanders-supporting friends has cooled my own ardor for the Senator's candidacy. But the bird thing was pretty cool.

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This Trump interview is, well, remarkable. It's long but worth reading. Not sure I could pull out a single takeaway message, there's a lot in there, but amongst the humble-bragging about his golf game and just plain bragging about how much money he got paid for The Apprentice (which he offers as a reason for not running for President four years ago) there's some interesting and, I think, accidentally revealing stuff.

I'm particularly struck by how ready Trump is to admit that he was 'part of the establishment' right up until he decided to run, and how he intends to find a Washington insider to be his VP.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04/02/transcript-donald-trump-interview-with-bob-woodward-and-robert-costa/

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44 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Same. The overexcited conspiracy-hunting (apparently Arizona's voting problems were Hillary Clinton's fault) I see from my Sanders-supporting friends has cooled my own ardor for the Senator's candidacy. But the bird thing was pretty cool.

Oh, I know. I might be a Sanders supporter if it weren't for the Sanders supporters on Facebook.

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

This Trump interview is, well, remarkable. It's long but worth reading. Not sure I could pull out a single takeaway message, there's a lot in there, but amongst the humble-bragging about his golf game and just plain bragging about how much money he got paid for The Apprentice (which he offers as a reason for not running for President four years ago) there's some interesting and, I think, accidentally revealing stuff.

I'm particularly struck by how ready Trump is to admit that he was 'part of the establishment' right up until he decided to run, and how he intends to find a Washington insider to be his VP.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04/02/transcript-donald-trump-interview-with-bob-woodward-and-robert-costa/

Gosh.  This is truly something.

 

Woodward's reaction:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/bob-woodward-discusses-his-very-unusual-trump-interview/2016/04/02/da07feb8-f92b-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_video.html

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Back a few days ago I suggested that Trump might take some money to not run. And this was mostly dismissed as being blatantly illegal.

It might - maybe - be illegal if the GOP paid him directly. I don't honestly know what the rules are here, and it's pretty new ground anyway. However, it's not remotely illegal for the GOP elite to pay Trump and call it good. Koch could do it without too much difficulty, for instance. It might be subject to a gift tax or something along those lines, or it might be for services, but paying someone to not run for office doesn't fall on the bribery charges as they are at that point not an elected official nor are they gaining money as a result of being an elected official; they're getting money to not be an elected official. 

I've been looking for a bit now and find nothing about bribery charges actually sticking, here. 

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It is interesting that Donald has floated Icahn's name a few times during the campaign. As he (Icahn) is well known as one of these coporate raiders who has made a fortune being "paid to go away" in past deals. Personally I hope it doesn't happen though. I'd like to see the R's dragged to the start line (noses firmly forced into their own doodoo) and let them race the pony they trotted out. They created their bed of thorns, they deserve to stay right in it and experience the consequences.

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3 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Weird, because my facebook is about 80% Sanders supporters and 20% people who are probably Hilary supporters but don't bother arguing with Sanders supporters and instead just post about what the Republicans are doing.  I would honestly prefer an annoying low level conflict between Hilary and Sanders supporters over this wall-to-wall "Sanders is so great even birds love him!" coverage.

I'd say the overwhelming majority of political comments/posts on my feed are people mocking Trump, with a handful of strong Sanders supporters spamming the feed ad nauseam. The thing that shocks me though is the few anti-Clinton posts are all coming from young women.

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Demographically Sanders should win Wisconsin 52-48. This is pretty close to what the recent polls have been saying, too.

In order to continue to catch up, however, Sanders needs to win +10 of this - or have it be Sanders 62, Clinton 38. 

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