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u.s. politics: a cruel and unusual government


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Re the debt ceiling / three months funding reprieve: he's doing his typical behaviors, to blatantly punish those who have failed him as he perceives it by elevating their rival?  What a way to do government -- unreliable for EVERYONE.  Course, he's never been a repug, or anything, really.  Just for himself, whatever that is at any time.

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1 hour ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

carry on

 

1 hour ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

indeed, it is.

Hehe, the title made me chuckle. :) 

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1 hour ago, Zorral said:

he's doing his typical behaviors, to blatantly punish those who have failed him as he perceives it by elevating their rival?  What a way to do government -- unreliable for EVERYONE.

Indeed.  It's like he read Goodwin's Team of Rivals or how FDR ran his WHO and took away the exact wrong lesson.  Anyway, it's always fun when Republicans get all catty with Trump:

Quote

“A three-month debt ceiling? Why not do a daily debt ceiling?” cracked Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). “He’s the best deal-maker ever. Don’t you know? I mean, he’s got a book out!”

BTW, great title RRL.

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16 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Indeed.  It's like he read Goodwin's Team of Rivals or how FDR ran his WHO and took away the exact wrong lesson.  Anyway, it's always fun when Republicans get all catty with Trump:

“It’s fine,” McConnell said of his relationship with Trump. “Everything’s fine.”

https://imgur.com/c4jt321

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19 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Indeed.  It's like he read Goodwin's Team of Rivals or how FDR ran his WHO and took away the exact wrong lesson.  Anyway, it's always fun when Republicans get all catty with Trump:

BTW, great title RRL.

"maybe we could just get rid of the debt ceiling?" i cry, as senators, hootin and hollerin, pummel me and cover me with their own waste

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38 minutes ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

"maybe we could just get rid of the debt ceiling?" i cry, as senators, hootin and hollerin, pummel me and cover me with their own waste

I don't think you'd as much legislator feces on you as you might expect.  It's only been truly politicized by Gingrich then the GOP during Obama (granted, Dems used it to extract concessions on bipartisan measures during Reagan, but that was much more marginal).  Perhaps after a few rounds getting a taste of their own medicine, many GOP members may start changing their tune.  The only real constituency for it is Norquist and the ilk, not like it's salient with voters.  It outlived its procedural usefulness forty years ago.

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12 minutes ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

ok, fine, this has little to add to serious political discussion here, but aaaaaaahahahhaha oh my god 

eta: it's even better if you start from the beginning with mcmullins brain dead tweet

https://twitter.com/ZachOsterman/status/905647049495896064

This one? 

Try it? I will NOT good sir. GOOD DAY.

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6 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

I don't think you'd as much legislator feces on you as you might expect.  It's only been truly politicized by Gingrich then the GOP during Obama (granted, Dems used it to extract concessions on bipartisan measures during Reagan, but that was much more marginal).  Perhaps after a few rounds getting a taste of their own medicine, many GOP members may start changing their tune.  The only real constituency for it is Norquist and the ilk, not like it's salient with voters.  It outlived its procedural usefulness forty years ago.

eliminate the debt ceiling but you can vape in restaurants and airplanes.... grovers head explodes like that scene in scanners and i am swept into office on a groundswell of populist support

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26 minutes ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

ok, fine, this has little to add to serious political discussion here, but aaaaaaahahahhaha oh my god 

That was...fascinating.  Brick killed a guy.

6 minutes ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

eliminate the debt ceiling but you can vape in restaurants and airplanes.... 

Yeah saw that was his new thing.  WTF?  I say this as a smoker - who gives a shit?

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7 minutes ago, r'hllor's red lobster said:

sorry i have no idea what this means

Bah, nvm. Random tweet that Evan retweeted was this first thing that came up for me after clicking on that tweet you quoted. 

 

Eta - more importantly, wikileaks released documents claiming a regime charge conspiracy including Obama, the CIA, and ... Seth Rogen. Making all the wikileaks believers look real smrat.

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25 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

I don't think you'd as much legislator feces on you as you might expect.  It's only been truly politicized by Gingrich then the GOP during Obama (granted, Dems used it to extract concessions on bipartisan measures during Reagan, but that was much more marginal).  Perhaps after a few rounds getting a taste of their own medicine, many GOP members may start changing their tune.  The only real constituency for it is Norquist and the ilk, not like it's salient with voters.  It outlived its procedural usefulness forty years ago.

Nope wrong again. gephardt created an elegant mechanism where the debt ceiling was deemed to have passed when congress authorized the spending, no two step process for the debt ceiling from 79 to 95. Newt Gingrich brought it back. 

The idea that "democrats did it to Reagan so it's fair for republicans to do now." Is almost always a lie and never actually happened. But democrats are so obeisant to the mythology of Reagan that even hardliners happily repeat lies and myth in their efforts to seem open minded and fair. Just more mechanisms of control for the enemy to exploit. ;)

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I go back and forth on whether or not we ought to be surprised by what he's done. I think we're probably all a bit shocked at the level of incompetence, but in terms of the callous immorality, I always return to the fact that very early on in the primary lead up he openly enthused about torturing the families of suspected terrorists or those who might have information thereof, and when it was noted that that would inevitably mean torturing innocent kids, he shrugged it off as part of the deal.

How do you possibly go down from that? How does what he's done since that reveal new things about what/how he thinks? 

When I'm at my most 'Merica bashing...and honestly, the fact that we're playing around with nuclear holocaust again does trip that wire a bit for many who had no say in Trump but might well die burning too...I suspect that what made things worse as time went on was the degree to which Americans became the victims. There are some very troubling studies about things like how Americans register tragedies/casualties in tragedies with respect to if/how many victims were American, but I don't want to get too dark ATM. 

Eh, this really wasn't where I meant to go with this. More just being surprised on one level but kinda 'does what it says on the tin'on the other. He had to be coerced into disavowing the KKK during a freaking campaign. He has for years talked nostalgically about nuclear brinkmanship and complained about the US losing it's edge by not threatening holocaust more often in negotiation. His past is littered with every conceivable kind of scandal, litigation and/or settlement excepting he does it all stone cold sober. Forget even the specific idiocy of yet another born-into-millions-Ivy-league Republican Everyman being touted as this year's model maverick/anti-establishment guy. I think a lot of it is the 2 options thing. It leads to lazy voting. And it's not just yo guys...my mom recently dropped the bombshell that she was kinda a Dubya fan because he was 'cute'. This is the woman who single-handedly raised me a feminist while working with abused women.

But in the past decade she's found God and so many of the things she raised me to abhor are now back on the table. We poke around Trump because though early on she was livid at my wondering if she might support him (religion, she's basically a single-issue voter at this point) telling me 'he's horrible', more recently I'm picking up undertones of her buying into the whole 'media bias' angle. She's now Catholic, very CatholIc, and as such is used to reducing any issue to catholic vs. anti-catholic...there is no objective 3rd party...and so I can see her buying into the Fox/Fake news thing along those lines. She gets evasive when I bring it up and I don't push too hard because frankly I don't know how I'd ever move past it if she were in fact even a partial apologist. Cannot tell you, this was a brilliant woman, like my dad a literal genius on paper, had me into the Russians and semiotics and philosophy in my pre-teen years, she'd take me out of school to go off on a week long sketching trip, my birthday parties she'd take my friends to art galleries and surrealist film festivals when we were like 9. 

My friends thought she was the shit, maybe because she wasn't too long from her years modelling at the time. Just this wonderful, baffling, contradictory, chaotic, interesting and interested life's-an-adventure artist/social worker/teacher/activist...and then cut to her second marriage (nice guy, but a zealot end-is-nigh if you get him going) and then we arrive at our great schism, where she tells me he is now the head of the household because the Bible says that's how it works. This is where our political/moral/philosophical breach began, and we're never really mended it. I cannot forgive her for abandoning the beliefs that are largely now my beliefs...to be fair the whole 'head of the household' bit didn't last too long, but still. She is in large part why I am who I am, and that man cannot believe how authoritarian and dogmatic and...honestly...dumb she's become. 

This might be my most tangential post yet, and that bar is set very high indeed. Sorry, lots of angst ATM, apparently. 

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4 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Nope wrong again. gephardt created an elegant mechanism where the debt ceiling was deemed to have passed when congress authorized the spending, no two step process for the debt ceiling from 79 to 95. Newt Gingrich brought it back. 

The idea that "democrats did it to Reagan so it's fair for republicans to do now." Is almost always a lie and never actually happened. But democrats are so obeisant to the mythology of Reagan that even hardliners happily repeat lies and myth in their efforts to seem open minded and fair. Just more mechanisms of control for the enemy to exploit. ;)

I'm well aware of the Gephardt rule but I'm also aware of the legislative history of the debt ceiling under Reagan, which you apparently aren't:

Quote

In the end, the president accepted the debt ceiling deal forced on him by the Congress, bitterly swallowing the policy changes packaged with it. "To play around with the debt limit this way means really that you're playing with dynamite," his treasury secretary said on a "Today" show appearance, adding, "There is a gun at [the president's] head, if you will." The president himself complained "the choice is for the United States to default on its debts for the first time … or to accept a bill that has been cluttered up. This is just another example of Congress trying to force my hand."

The president was Ronald Reagan; the treasury secretary was James Baker, and the year was 1987.

The idea that I'm being "obeisant" by pointing out historical facts or my statement made any equivalency between what Dems did under Reagan and what the GOP did under Gingrich and in the Obama era - when I literally clarified it wasn't - is ludicrous.

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2 hours ago, dmc515 said:

I'm well aware of the Gephardt rule but I'm also aware of the legislative history of the debt ceiling under Reagan, which you apparently aren't:

The idea that I'm being "obeisant" by pointing out historical facts or my statement made any equivalency between what Dems did under Reagan and what the GOP did under Gingrich and in the Obama era - when I literally clarified it wasn't - is ludicrous.

Thank you, that's what I get for googling and then just skimming to see if I remembered it right. Clearly I didn't.

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