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US Politics: Shutbound & Down


DMC

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5 minutes ago, DMC said:

It's you who's not looking at the bigger picture. 

We view this fundamentally differently, and I see little point in arguing over it. Our similarities are more important than  our disagreements so I will leave it alone other than to say that I want to believe I'm wrong.

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1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I like you. I respect you. I often feel comfortable in deferring to you.

But in this you are wrong. 

This is a game of tomorrows. And you're playing it with yesterday's rules.

DACA is not a winning issue, it's a nothing issue.

And that's horrible. And it's awful and I hate having to type it now but look at the bigger picture! For once, for ONCE, the optics for Democrats are good across the board. There's support for standing up to this tantrum throwing madman. There's resolve against this boondoggle. 

And I know it seems so straightforward. It seems perfectly logical to make a deal here. Everyone wants it, look at the polls right? 

But the polls are too overwhelming. I have tears in my eyes right now thinking about all those people, and how we should be able to help them. How it looks like we can help them. But we can't right now. The stakes are too big, they're fucking everything. 84 per cent. That's the last poll I could find. 84 per cent of Americans think DACA kids should be taken care of. And that's too much.

There's no more political weight to draw on from DACA, it's tapped out. 

I know it looks counterintuitive, but a DACA resolution is so overwhelmingly popular that it means nothing. 84 per cent. 84 per cent of people wanted a solution. And nothing happened. Not only did nothing happen, the public turned on Democrats when they stood up for it. 16 per cent of America got to dictate their insanity on the rest of us because they tied DACA to putting 'real' Americans out of work. 

And you think we can just let them do it again?

These people need to be made whole, affirmed in their paths to citizenship. Because it is morally the right thing to do. But it's not going to be the political victory you're imagining. There's too much broad support. The Republicans will swoop in and siphon idiot centrists who think reasonable heads prevailed. At this point saying you support DACA is no different than saying you 'Support the Troops'. It's just words. Checking a box on the societal immunization card.

 

Sorry, but this is insane. If Dems can extract the concession of a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million people for $5 billion in wall funding, then it's an absolute win for Dems, considering that Dems were offering $25 billion for the same thing last year.  Trump's base will be furious for capitulating on something that they wouldn't accept 5x that amount last year. 

However, if Trump just offers a temporary 3 year extension and nothing else, then Dems should tell him to sit and spin, because that's basically something that is already going on. 

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Gotta say, I'm quite surprised Trump even went along with this.  Other than inaction, Trump had basically two options - declare an emergency or offer the Dems an opening offer for a compromise.  The latter would be the traditional move for past presidents in such a position, the former is the quintessential Trumpian move.  I did not think he'd blink and take the carrot over the stick approach.

Of course, with Democrats likely to reject the proposal, this probably will only harden Trump's position, and he'll use the rejected offer as an excuse that declaring an emergency is his only option.

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12 hours ago, karaddin said:

think this is a very reasonable consideration given how badly the job aged Clinton, Bush2 and Obama.

Don't forget the visibly aging Reagan who was already old -- and ended his regimes while having alzheimer's.

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Every time republicans have bent toward cooperating on immigration and the undocumented the right wing extremists have whipped the entire party into a frenzy against that cooperation, and then those republicans willing to fix it clamped up tighter than McConnell’s sphincter. Just because trump is offering it won’t change that.

and since this is a McConnell deal, let’s ask the senator from Maine how well accepting one of his deals for a future promise of passing something works out.

democrats are going to agree, the Wall will get its money the government will reopen and then exactly and utterly nothing will happen on anything McConnell is supposed to do for his part of the bargain.

 

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2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

As @Mindwalker pointed out, mine was a lazy reference to Bert Brecht's Three Penny Opera.

There are several versions on youtube.

I'll just leave two here Ella Fitzgerald and my personal favorite Frank Sinatra

I know, there's also one from Louis Armstrong, but that one is just not my cup of tea.

How dare you leave out Bobby Darin's version?????????

 

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23 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

democrats are going to agree, the Wall will get its money the government will reopen and then exactly and utterly nothing will happen on anything McConnell is supposed to do for his part of the bargain.

Uh, someone should tell this to Nancy Pelosi:

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“Democrats were hopeful that the President was finally willing to re-open government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border. Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives,” she said in a statement.

“It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.”

 

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On BBC Newshour, a Dem whose name I didn't catch, just said, this so-called deal is no deal because it is no deal, as it leaves everybody where they were already were, particularly the DACA people,  is as insulting, disgusting and immoral as it can possibly be.  It was a woman, but not Pelosi. She also said that the Dems are finished with him and his shut-down and are going to vote funds to re-open big parts of the government.

Favorite sign from the Women's March, which was originally seen at another demo in Austin last year, in Spanish; I know because amiga L sent me a photo she took of it back then: 

Quote

"Menstruation blood is the only blood not born from violence but it is the blood that disgusts you most." 

 

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The Freedom Kids are back I guess.

Quote

 

A diocese in Kentucky has apologized after videos emerged showing students from an all-male Catholic high school mocking Native Americans outside the Lincoln Memorial after a rally in Washington.

The Indigenous Peoples March in Washington on Friday coincided with the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, including a group from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills.


Videos circulating online show a youth staring at and standing extremely close to Nathan Phillips, an elderly Native American man singing and playing a drum.

Other students, some wearing Covington clothing and many wearing red "Make America Great Again" hats and sweatshirts, surrounded them, laughing and jeering.

 

Diocese apologizes after students mock Native American at D.C. rally

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/19/students-mock-native-americans-investigation-1116055

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Those were Trump loving Christian students, wearing MAGA hats, that were disrespecting that Native American Veteran.

America is upside down, this just cannot continue to stand, the cradle must fall soon.

  “This is Trump’s America,” wrote actress and activist Alyssa Milano. “And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body.” 

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47 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Those were Trump loving Christian students, wearing MAGA hats, that were disrespecting that Native American Veteran.

America is upside down, this just cannot continue to stand, the cradle must fall soon.

  “This is Trump’s America,” wrote actress and activist Alyssa Milano. “And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body.” 

She is so good at finding her lens!

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1 hour ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Those were Trump loving Christian students, wearing MAGA hats, that were disrespecting that Native American Veteran.

America is upside down, this just cannot continue to stand, the cradle must fall soon.

  “This is Trump’s America,” wrote actress and activist Alyssa Milano. “And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body.” 

Powerful video of Nathan Phillips, the Native American man being harassed by that snot-nosed punk, talking about the event. 

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On the proposed-and-now-rejected deal:

Look, to be worth taking, any deal McConnell or Trump proposes that includes wall funding doesn't just have to be a good deal. It has to be sensationally good.

Why? Because right now Trump is as deep in a corner as he has ever been, and he painted himself into it. If he doesn't get this wall funding, politically he is deeply, deeply damaged. Maybe finished. His base will not forget it. This truly has the potential to be the thing that breaks his hold over quite a lot of them.

The stakes are very high for Trump here. This chance may not come back for Democrats. He can only be allowed to get that funding at a dear, dear price, if at all.

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

On the proposed-and-now-rejected deal:

Look, to be worth taking, any deal McConnell or Trump proposes that includes wall funding doesn't just have to be a good deal. It has to be sensationally good.

Why? Because right now Trump is as deep in a corner as he has ever been, and he painted himself into it. If he doesn't get this wall funding, politically he is deeply, deeply damaged. Maybe finished. His base will not forget it. This truly has the potential to be the thing that breaks his hold over quite a lot of them.

The stakes are very high for Trump here. This chance may not come back for Democrats. He can only be allowed to get that funding at a dear, dear price, if at all.

The biggest thing is not to be trading temporary policies for permanent ones. Democrats learned that the hard way when they agreed with Republicans to extend more of the Bush tax cuts then they wanted in exchange for a year(? maybe a couple years?) of continuing extended unemployment insurance benefits. Democrats assumed Republicans would never allow those benefits to lapse, but they did.

Here, Trump is offering a three-year policy (and really, just undoing his own policies and going back to the Obama-era status quo) in exchange for a permanent wall (or at least, parts of a wall). Fuck that. There need to be permanent protections for the DREAMERS and the other technically temporary resident groups Trump keeps trying to deport (like the Vietnamese and Hondurans who've ben here decades) before Democrats even consider giving any wall funding.

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What is funny about this wall isn't a wall wall government shut-down bs is this is the same thing Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War and associated Dixicrat assho1es tried to pull off when Franklin Pierce was President.  The Gadson Purchase was the last significant manifest destiny land grab -- the borderlands between US territory and Mexico, the Gadson Purchase. 

The fantasy was to build the essential transcontinental railroad along this southern border -- in order to make it financially and temporally feasible to transport overstock slaves to the California territory until, of course, California came into the US as a free soil state.

However, even without a slavery market in California, if the transcontinental ran in the south, the South would have control over the transport of California gold and other products through the territory it controlled, making Charleston an international port city. Never mind that the southerners could never be bothered to invest in carrying trade ships in the first place (or even in railroads either, or canals, earlier -- though some fellows in Mississippi particularly got Europe to invest in the canals they were going to build, but never did, and never paid the debt they'd incurred either), thus were dependent on the north for the transport of cotton to their overseas markets and to bring everything they needed in the south including their slaves' tools and food and clothes, as well as their own carriages and silks and wine and furniture -- not that this stopped them from the constant whine of how they were FORCED into this.

The problem with this fantasy railroad scenario of building a transcontinental railroad on the southwestern borderlands? Every competent surveyor and anyone who knew this territory understood that a railroad could not be built there due to geology and the technology for the grade beds of the tracks. There was no water and no wood to power the steam locomotives.  Jefferson Davis and his fellow assho!es insisted this was not so, falsified records and suppressed others -- as well as concocting secret deals to keep control of the territory in their own possession, and sell the bonds themselves.  The railroad bond market was notably corrupt in any case, and were fundamental to lobbying, bribing and buying Congressional members -- something the television series, Hell on Wheels did an excellent job of showing.

Further, the building of this fantasy railroad would demand a huge labor force and the slaveocracy just happened to have an overstock of labor for which it desperately needed a market.  This railroad would be built with slave labor and the Mississippi millionaires would get even more millions in credit! And California gold too.  Also, while we're at it, lets grab Cuba too, make it a state, whose sugar would provide a huge demand for their overstock slaves, since sugar killed the labor force within ten years, and with Cuba a part of the USA, by the Constitutional abolition of the African slave trade in 1808, it would have to buy the more expensive labor from the Southerners instead of the much less costly Africans.

However, this did not change the facts that the current technology wasn't capable of constructing a railroad on vast stretches of these borderlands-- just as many have shown that thr orange nazi's fantasy wallfencebarrier (which incidentally would put billions in the pocketses of the orange nazi's runners, controllers and fellow traitors) can't be built either on vast stretches of this planned borderland route.

It took secession to put this ridiculous scheme finally into the grave.  As we see throughout history, the South was incapable of doing anything, much less financing and building any kind of railroad anywhere.  When, in the 1880's it did become more feasible technologically to build railroads on this border, it wasn't the South who did it.  In the meantime the north continued working on the transcontinental across the midwest and the Rockies even during the Civil War (1863-1869). As with so much progressive action, such as cheap land sales of government lands to people desperately looking for a start for their own farm, public education, etc., this kidn of thing was constantly blocked by the Southerners in Congress. With them gone from D.C. progress could take place.  (Plus the US got its first national currency too!)

Even after all this time I never cease to be astounded by the degree to which the nation's previous history is repeated.

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4 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Americans use that term differently, I believe. As in, worthless person, lowlife...

We do--it's interesting I hadn't thought much about that term in the way you describe. It can mean both in America, but you never hear it referring to the subculture anymore. I mean, no doubt that calling kids a bunch of "punks" is rooted in fear/hate of the subculture.

Those kids were just monsters. I always tell my son you can't look at someone and know what they're thinking, but that kid in front of the vet just wears years of smugness and privilege on his face. His mom's out there defending him now saying that "black Muslims" are truly at fault here. I'm not surprised at all (that this kid's mom would respond this way). 

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