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US Politics: A Mickey Mouse Operation


DMC

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This thread goes so quiet at points it’s scary. Trump fatigue, right?

I was just watching reports about the California fires and I hope any of you residing in that state are well away from them and if not, safe.

I know many of you hope both the Regans are burning in hell somewhere, and it looks like hellfire is coming to them in case they aren’t. Wildfires are burning just behind the Regan Presidential Library, where both are buried. The Library, fortunately or unfortunately, was built to survive fires.

And speaking of burning in hell, if you are watching the fires and have noticed some of the firefighters are dressed differently, the ones in orange are convicts. They get paid, get this, $1 to $5 a day with a $1 a day bonus for days they actually face flames. Holy smokes, so to speak, slavery is alive and well in the USA!

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37 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

This thread goes so quiet at points it’s scary. Trump fatigue, right?

 

There were four posts in the three hours before you posted this and you think that's "scary"? Don't you expect people to have lives outside of posting on discussion board threads? :)

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6 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah, all presidential libraries are invaluable to researchers.  Hell, the worst one's are usually the most interesting!

So true!

In that context reading Robert Caro's research experience inside the LBJ papers and library reveals just how valuable a pres. library is for historians, and how even those for the figures the historians may think he knows all about, or all about the event in question, the archives reveals valuable surprises.

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31 minutes ago, Zorral said:

In that context reading Robert Caro's research experience inside the LBJ papers and library reveals just how valuable a pres. library is for historians, and how even those for the figures the historians may think he knows all about, or all about the event in question, the archives reveals valuable surprises.

Yeah two of the top presidential scholars - Andrew Rudalevige and Doug Kriner - have produced some of their best works on unilateral action thanks to research from presidential libraries.  Both have helped me with my own research, and while I've never physically been to a presidential library, the libraries from Carter to Dubya (electronically) provided me with resources used in one of my diss papers.

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3 hours ago, Ormond said:

There were four posts in the three hours before you posted this and you think that's "scary"? Don't you expect people to have lives outside of posting on discussion board threads? :)

There have been 8 and 10 and 12 hour stretches, maybe longer, without posts, and so much is going on. I keep meaning to post the comment and never get around to it, but I think Trump fatigue is a real thing!

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12 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Do any Dem candidates have their healthcare policy as either "lower Medicare age" or "public option?"

Both Biden's and Buttigieg's plans include a public option.  Pretty sure most everybody's does, at the least.  The Dem party seems beyond simply lowering the Medicare age at this point.

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5 minutes ago, Triskele said:

I guess the reason I question that is that with the former there's some major uncertainty in terms how many many companies would switch to the public option and how many O'Care exchange types would sign up.

Good point.  Just because there's a "public option," the exchanges offered by Obamacare aren't necessarily up to snuff compared to Medicare.  I'm not sure how the candidates' various plans deal with that.  Although based on that link I strongly suspect Biden's assurance of a public option is closer to Obamacare exchange quality rather than Medicare quality.

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Yeah it was the first hit when googling "Pete Buttigieg public option."  The one right below it was another Vox article.  And the Heritage Foundation doesn't get to critique health care plans anymore.

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

Yeah it was the first hit when googling "Pete Buttigieg public option."  The one right below it was another Vox article.  And the Heritage Foundation doesn't get to critique health care plans anymore.

I'm sure they'll listen to you :P

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12 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

There have been 8 and 10 and 12 hour stretches, maybe longer, without posts, and so much is going on. I keep meaning to post the comment and never get around to it, but I think Trump fatigue is a real thing!

Oh horrors! A 12 hour stretch! :laugh:  (This wouldn't include the hours when most people in North America are asleep, would it?)

It still seems hilarious to me that you attribute that immediately to "Trump fatigue" rather than just people living their lives and having better things to do one day that post on a political board at an ASOIAF site. 

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This Is Still Happening: Betsy DeVos
An ongoing roundup of Trump administration malfeasance, Part 3.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/still-happening-trump-corruption-betsy-devos.html

Quote

 

What Democrats Have Done: Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for DeVos’ resignation after the judge found that she had violated the Corinthian court order.

The House Oversight Committee held a May hearing on “for-profit college oversight and student debt,” but DeVos was not questioned and neither was her DeVry appointee. In May, the committee further accused the Department of Education of obstructing its investigation into the inspector general interference case, after the department turned over just seven pages of redacted documents. It is unclear what further steps the Oversight Committee has taken since.

The House Committee on Education and Labor, meanwhile, last month scheduled a single subcommittee hearing on the Department of Education’s “ties to the loan servicing industry” and “obstruction of oversight.” But that hearing was “postponed,” and a new date has not been made public. House Democrats could hold the hearings that they’ve promised and additional ones into how 16,000 students had money seized from them in violation of a court order. They could also subpoena documents in all of these cases if DeVos continues to stonewall, and eventually hold her in contempt of Congress if she refuses to hand the material over.


What Is Likely to Be Done: Democrats might reschedule their postponed education subcommittee hearing, though there’s no sign they would seek to force DeVos to testify. Given the party’s reluctance to even hold potential presidential accomplices and critical witnesses in its high-stakes impeachment inquiry in contempt for obstructing that investigation, it seems unlikely House Democrats will escalate to subpoenas and contempt when it comes to mere abuses against students.

 

 

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13 hours ago, Triskele said:

It's funny looking at that Fox link on Pete's plan how there's a quote from Heritage Foundation saying it's clearly going to lead to single-payer and then to think about how there's a school of thought on the left about how unacceptable anything but single payer would be.  According to Heritage at least Pete is running on a version of single-payer.  

Pretty sure everything to the left of Reaganomics leads to single payer and Pol Pot according to the Heritage Foundation. 

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Sorkin’s letter repeatedly drew parallels between Facebook’s loose relationship with the truth and his own experience vetting The Social Network with his legal team and a select group from Zuckerberg’s staff at Facebook.
“The law hasn’t been written yet—yet—that holds carriers of user-generated internet content responsible for the user-generated content they carry, just like movie studios, television networks and book, magazine and newspaper publishers,” Sorkin wrote at one point in the letter. “Ask Peter Thiel, who funded a defamation suit against Gawker that bankrupted the site and forced it to close down. (You should have Mr. Thiel’s number in your phone because he was an early investor in Facebook.)” The timing of that latter remark is particularly timely, given former Gawker property Deadspin reporters’ recent decision to quit en masse after their new owners issued a “stick to sports” mandate that fundamentally altered the jobs many staffers had been hired to perform.

In the end, Sorkin meditated once more on Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress last week, during which he told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves.”

“If I’d known you felt that way,” Sorkin concluded, “I’d have had the Winklevoss twins invent Facebook.”

 

The Social Network Writer Aaron Sorkin Blasts Mark Zuckerberg in Scathing Open Letter
Sorkin called the Facebook boss out for defending his company’s policy of allowing politicians to blatantly lie in advertisements posted to the site, writing, “That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/aaron-sorkin-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-open-letter

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