US Politics Thread |OT| THE DARKEST TIMELINE

[Joe Molotov]

Todd is such an omega male.

[Brehvolution]

If Bristol attacked someone, why isn't she being charged with assault? If the dude attacked her, he'd be in jail.

[Broseidon]

"Track"

[Joe Molotov]

"Track"

I'd hit my dad too.

[Phoenix Dark]

Man, imagine if Obama ran for president with a daughter who had a kid out of wedlock before the age of 16, and another daughter who was calling people fegs. I can just hear Bill O'Reilly preaching on the destruction of the black family structure.

family values brehs

[Human Snorenado]

To be fair, Bristol was under 18 when she got preggers, over 18 when she delivered.

[I'm a Puppy!]

Man, imagine if Obama ran for president with a daughter who had a kid out of wedlock before the age of 16, and another daughter who was calling people fegs. I can just hear Bill O'Reilly preaching on the destruction of the black family structure.

family values brehs

I'm not sure Bill O'Reilly thinks there's such a thing as black family structure.

[Joe Molotov]

To be fair, she's still a twat. She turned her teen preggers into a book/tv deal and then joined the abstinence-only crusade to promote STRONG CHRISTIAN VALUES.

John McCain can never be forgiven.

[benjipwns]

http://www.courier-journal.com/videos/opinion/2014/10/09/17004149/

The video of the exchange is comically awkward. An off-camera female editorialist asks a straightforward question: “Did you vote for President Obama, 2008, 2012?”

“You know,” Grimes replies, “this election, uh, isn’t about the president. It’s about—”

“I know,” the editorialist assures the candidate. “But did you vote for him?”

Grimes remains on message: “—making sure we put Kentuckians back to work, and—” By this point, the editorialist has repeated the question a third time: “Did you vote for him?”

The candidate changes tack, responding with not one but two non sequiturs: “I was actually in ’08 a delegate for Hillary Clinton, and I think that Kentuckians know I’m a Clinton Democrat through and through. I respect the sanctity of the ballot box, and I know that the members of this editorial board do as well.”

“So you’re not going to answer,” says the editorialist. Whereupon Grimes displays her own keen command of the obvious: “Again, I don’t think that the president is on the ballot.” Then another non sequitur: “As much as Mitch McConnell might want him to be, it’s my name, and it’s going to be me who’s holding him accountable for the failed decision and votes that he has made against the people of Kentucky.” The conversation then drifts to other subjects.

[Great Rumbler]

It's a dumb question with no real upside in being answered.

[benjipwns]

But how can we trust her in the Senate then?

They'll come up and say "should we kill ISIS and Ebola" and she'll just duck the question and then we all die. 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Thanks Obama

[close]

[Phoenix Dark]

Should have said you voted for him in 2008 and wrote in someone else in 2012.

[Great Rumbler]

She should have said that she voted for Stewart Alexander.

[Joe Molotov]

I would have said I voted for Vermin Supreme.

[Kara]

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/08/im_the_welfare_mom_with_a_coach_purse/

[chronovore]

Open carry

More like “openly carried off,” amirite?

[benjipwns]

holy shit 

[Joe Molotov]

Wendy Davis going for the Hail Mary.

[Great Rumbler]

[benjipwns]

Random YouTube video.

First 1980 Presidential debate that Carter ducked because he refused to participate in any debate with Anderson:


Reagan finally relented to Carter's desire to have a debate without Anderson, which was held October 28...a week before the election. And Reagan said "there you go again", then asked if people were better off now than four years ago, and his lead went from two points to ten.

And then Reagan went on to personally defeat Communism after in August 1984 signing legislation to outlaw Russia forever and then bombing them five minutes later.

[ZephyrFate]

Wendy Davis is exactly the kind of no-nonsense Democrat we need in a position of power. I hope she slays in Texas.

[Great Rumbler]

Wendy Davis is exactly the kind of no-nonsense Democrat we need in a position of power. I hope she slays in Texas.

Probably she won't, though, at least not this time around; Texas is still too blood-red right now for a Democrat to win high office. Maybe by the end of Abbott's first term.

[Great Rumbler]

And all the liberal hand-wringing over that ad is ridiculous. Wendy Davis rightly pointed out that Abbott is a total hypocrite, who got his big payday and then fought hard to make sure that nobody else could.

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

if he was shitty, partisan attorney general (and it sure sounds like he was) then he's got a right to be called out on it.  Davis has gotten some pretty crappy attacks since the day she became a national figure.

Fair's fair is all I'm saying.

[Human Snorenado]

HOW DARE SHE??

*calls her "abortion barbie" without batting an eye*

[benjipwns]

I think that if you look at the maps, and the current polls that show much more reasonable numbers, there's a strong probability that the Democrats will have all 100 seats in the Senate by 2020. And also they'll be much more left-wing and we'll likely have a strong progressive President then or in 2024. Especially since the economy will be booming then thanks to Obama's increasing aggregate demand in the Middle East. 2020 will really help because then they can fix the congressional districts to be fair which will mean a three-forths majority in the House.

Then we won't have to pass right-wing hardcore libertarian policy like ObamaCare and assault weapons bans. We can just repeal the 2nd Amendment and modify the rest. As long as the Democrats aren't spineless and cave into the GOP loving media.

[benjipwns]

Oops, meant to post that as one of my GAF Alts.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

I respect you Benji...more than most.

But GOP loving media? The fuck are you on, man?

[Kara]

He's impersonating GAF's US political thread (a.k.a. PoliGAF) culture.

[benjipwns]

From that Stockman article I linked in the GAF thread:

IN the private deliberations, Stockman began to encounter more resistance from Cabinet members. He was proposing to cut $752 million from the Export-Import Bank, which provides subsidized financing for international trade—a cut of crucial symbolic importance, because of Stockman's desire for equity. Two thirds of the Ex-Im's direct loans benefit some of America's major manufacturers—Boeing, Lockheed, General Electric, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas, Western Electric, Combustion Engineering—and, not surprisingly, the program had a strong Republican constituency on Capitol Hill. Stockman thought the trade subsidies offended the free-market principles that all conservatives espouse—in particular, President Reagan's objective of withdrawing Washington from business decision-making. Supporters of the subsidies made a practical argument: the U.S. companies, big as they were, needed the financial subsidies to stay even against government-subsidized competition from Europe and Japan.

The counter-offensive against the cut was led by Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige and U.S. Trade Representative William Brock, who argued eloquently before the budget working group for a partial restoration of Ex-Im funds. By Stockman's account, the two "fought, argued, pounded the table," and the meeting seemed headed for deadlock. "I sort of innocently asked, well, isn't there a terrible political spin on this? It's my impression that most of the money goes to a handful of big corporations, and if we are ever caught not cutting this while we're biting deeply into the social programs, we're going to have big problems." Stockman asked if anyone at the table had any relevant data. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Tim McNamar thereupon produced a list of Ex-Im's major beneficiaries (a list that Stockman had given him before the meeting). "So then I went into this demagogic tirade about how in the world can I cut food stamps and social services and CETA jobs and EDA jobs and you're going to tell me you can't give up one penny for Boeing?"

Stockman won that argument, for the moment. But, as with all the other issues in the budget debate, the argument was only beginning. "I've got to take something out of Boeing's hide to make this look right ... You can measure me on this, because I'll probably lose but I'll give it a helluva fight."

Artful as it was, the Jones resolution was, according to Stockman, a series of gimmicks: economic estimates and accounting tricks. "Political numbers," he called them. But Stockman was not critical of Jones for these budget ploys, because he cheerfully conceded that the administration's own budget numbers were constructed on similar shaky premises, mixing cuts from the original 1981 budget left by Jimmy Carter with new baseline projections from the Congressional Budget Office in a way that, fundamentally, did not add up. The budget politics of 1981, which produced such clear and dramatic rhetoric from both sides, was, in fact, based upon a bewildering set of numbers that confused even those, like Stockman, who produced them.

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," Stockman confessed at one point. "You've got so many different budgets out and so many different baselines and such complexity now in the interactive parts of the budget between policy action and the economic environment and all the internal mysteries of the budget, and there are a lot of them. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there. It's not clear how we got there and it's not clear how Jones is going to get there."

These "internal mysteries" of the budget process were not dwelt upon by either side, for there was no point in confusing the clear lines of political debate with a much deeper and unanswerable question: Does anyone truly understand, much less control, the dynamics of the federal budget intertwined with the mysteries of the national economy? Stockman pondered this question occasionally, but since there was no obvious remedy, no intellectual construct available that would make sense of this anarchical universe, he was compelled to shrug at the mystery and move ahead. "l'm beginning to believe that history is a lot shakier than I ever thought it was," he said, in a reflective moment.

Despite the political uproar, Stockman thought a compromise would eventually emerge, because of the pressure to "save" Social Security. This would give him at least a portion of the budget savings he needed. "I still think we'll recover a good deal of ground from this. It will permit the politicians to make it look like they're doing something for the beneficiary population when they are doing something to it which they normally wouldn't have the courage to undertake."

But there was less "courage" among politicians than Stockman assumed. Indeed, one politician who scurried away from the President's proposed cuts in Social Security was the President. Stockman wanted him to go on television again, address the nation on Social Security's impending bankruptcy, and build a popular constituency for the changes. But White House advisers did not.

...

The White House rejected that idea. Ronald Reagan kept his distance from the controversy, but it would not go away. In September, Reagan did finally address the issue in a televised chat with the nation: he disowned Stockman's reform plan. Reagan said that there was a lot of "misinformation" about in the land, to the effect that the President wanted to cut Social Security. Not true, he declared, though Reagan had proposed such a cut in May. Indeed, the President not only buried the Social Security cuts he had proposed earlier but retreated on one reform measure—elimination of the minimum benefits—that Congress had already, reluctantly, approved. As though he had missed the long debate on that issue, Reagan announced that it was never his intention to deprive anyone who was in genuine need. Any legislative action toward altering Social Security would be postponed until 1983, after the 1982 congressional elections, and too late to help Stockman with his stubborn deficits. In the meantime, Reagan accepted a temporary solution advocated by the Democrats and denounced by Stockman as "irresponsible"—borrowing from another federal trust fund that was in surplus, the health-care fund, to cover Social Security's problems. Everyone put the best face on it, including Stockman. The tactical retreat, they explained, was the only thing Reagan could do under the circumstances—a smart move, given the explosive nature of the Social Security protest. Still, it was a retreat, and, for David Stockman, a fundamental defeat.

But the young budget director once again misjudged the political context. The scaled-down version of the administration's tax bill would need to carry a few "ornaments" in order to win—a special bail-out to help the troubled savings-and-loan industry, elimination of the so-called marriage penalty—but he was confident that the Reagan majority would hold and he could save $70 billion against those out-year deficits. The business lobbyists would object, he conceded, when they saw the new Republican version of depreciation allowances, but the key congressmen were "on board," and the package would hold.

In early June, it fell apart. The tax lobbyists of Washington, when they saw the outlines of the Reagan tax bill, mobilized the business community, the influential economic sectors from oil to real estate. In a matter of days, they created the political environment in which they flourish best—a bidding war between the two parties. First the Democrats revealed that their tax bill would be more generous than Reagan's in its depreciation rules. Despite Stockman's self-confidence, the White House quickly retreated—scrapped its revised and leaner proposal, and began matching the Democrats, billion for billion, in tax concessions. The final tax legislation would yield, in total, an astounding revenue loss for the federal government of $750 billion over the next five years.

Two weeks after selling Congress on the biggest package of budget reductions in the history of the republic, Stockman was willing to dismiss the accomplishment as less significant than the participants realized. Why? Because he knew that much more traumatic budget decisions still confronted them. Because he knew that the budget-resolution numbers were an exaggeration. The total of $35 billion was less than it seemed, because the "cuts" were from an imaginary number—hypothetical projections from the Congressional Budget Office on where spending would go if nothing changed in policy or economic activity. Stockman knew that the CBO base was a bit unreal. Therefore, the total of "cuts" was, too.

Stockman explained: "There was less there than met the eye. Nobody has figured it out yet. Let's say that you and I walked outside and I waved a wand and said, I've just lowered the temperature from 110 to 78. Would you believe me? What this was was a cut from an artificial CBO base. That's why it looked so big. But it wasn't. It was a significant and helpful cut from what you might call the moving track of the budget of the government, but the numbers are just out of this world. The government never would have been up at those levels in the CBO base."

...

"I don't believe too much in the momentum theory any more," he said. "I believe in institutional inertia. Two months of response can't beat fifteen years of political infrastructure. I'm talking about K Street and all of the interest groups in this town, the community of interest groups. We sort of stunned it, but it just went underground for the winter. It will be back ... Can we win? A lot of it depends on events and luck. If we got some bad luck, a flareup in the Middle East, a scandal, it could all fall apart."

Indeed, when the Republicans and Democrats began their competition for authorship of tax concessions, Stockman saw the "new political climate" dissolve rather rapidly and be replaced by the reflexes of old politics. Every tax lobby in town, from tax credits for wood-burning stoves to new accounting concessions for small business, moved in on the legislation, and pet amendments for obscure tax advantage and profit became the pivotal issues of legislative action, not the grand theories of supply-side tax reduction. "The politics of the bill turned out to be very traditional. The politics put us back in the game, after we started making concessions. The basic strategy was to match or exceed the Democrats, and we did."

This was the core of his complaint against the modern liberalism launched by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He did not quarrel with the need for basic social-welfare programs, such as unemployment insurance or Social Security; he agreed that the govermnent must regulate private enterprise to protect general health and safety. But liberal politics in its later stages had lost the ability to judge claims, and so yielded to all of them, Stockman thought, creating what he describes as "constituency-based choice-making," which could no longer address larger national interests, including fiscal control. As Stockman saw it, this process did not ameliorate social inequities; it created new ones by yielding to powerful interest groups at the expense of everyone else. 'What happens is the politicization of the society. All decisions flow to the center. Once we decide to allocate credit to certain activities—and we're doing that on a massive scale—or to allocate the capital for energy development, the levels of competency and morality fall. Then the outcomes in society begin to look more and more like the work of brute muscle. The other thing it does is destroy ideas. Once things are allocated by political muscle, by regional claims, there are no longer idea-based agendas."

But, somehow or other, the Senate Budget Committee staff insisted upon putting the honest numbers in its resolution—the projected deficits of $60 billion—plus running through 1984. That left the Republican senators staring directly at the same scary numbers that Stockman and the Wall Street analysts had already seen. The budget director blamed this brief flare-up on the frantic nature of his schedule. When he should have been holding hands with the Senate Budget Committee, he was at the other end of the Capitol, soothing Representative Delbert Latta, of Ohio, the ranking Republican in budget matters, who was pouting. Latta thought that since he was a Republican, his name should go ahead of that of Phil Gramm, a Democrat, on the budget resolution: that it should be Latta-Gramm instead of Gramm-Latta.

Actually after re-reading this, it reads a lot like those Obama Brain Trust articles that were coming out after they left about how they thought they could just walk into Washington and change things which is why they all hated Rahm and tried to ignore Congress, etc. At least nobody has tried to be their own chief of staff since Carter though.

[benjipwns]

 

[benjipwns]

http://www.electmarybuzuma.com/

 

http://www.jimfulner.com/index.html

 

[Kara]

http://www.jimfulner.com/index.html

 

[Broseidon]

rution

[Broseidon]

Please thoughtfully and meditatively read the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

[Kara]

I'm surprised benji never posted this:

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians?page=0%2C2&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Wilson: With the apparent ongoing demise of the capitalist state,

[benjipwns]

I didn't know he had fully made the jump, last I knew he was still drifting between describing himself as a libertarian socialist/anarcho-syndicalist depending on the day of the week, which was progress from when he was trying to roll with just the first part. Interview is a good example of why Chomsky should only keep everything to one paragraph, after that he starts drifting off into incoherent madness and talking about things he doesn't seem to understand.

Why isn't Chomsky's name bolded to start his responses, see the oppression inherent in the system!

[Kara]

He's been ansyn for a long time now and tbh a lot of ansyns consider ansyn and libsoc mostly synonymous which is how I always viewed his switching between the two terms.



Foucault

[benjipwns]

Good god are there some awful fashions and facial hair in that video. Also, is this The Barry Gibb Talk Show?

Young Chomsky talk always make me think of this video which so many TPM types post as an example of conservative hate/Buckey's evil/etc. not realizing it's a joke referencing what he said to Gore Vidal:

Date: 1969. Chomsky was a guest on William Buckley's show. This is how guests are treated.

[Phoenix Dark]

Good god are there some awful fashions and facial hair in that video. Also, is this The Barry Gibb Talk Show?

Young Chomsky talk always make me think of this video which so many TPM types post as an example of conservative hate/Buckey's evil/etc. not realizing it's a joke referencing what he said to Gore Vidal:

Date: 1969. Chomsky was a guest on William Buckley's show. This is how guests are treated.

That's one of my favorite Chomsky quotes, and really mirrors my favorite MLK quote

Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

[benjipwns]

To bring it back around to PoliGAF that's one of the problems I have with a lot of the "policy" thinking they and their like engage in (and to tie it to GamerGate you see this in some SJW), it's all temporal and relevant only to this singular point in time. Chomsky and MLK there are both establishing a principle of justice that's more permanent and thus despite being perhaps not "achievable" today actually creates concrete standards for what justice  looks like rather than being a nebulous ever shifting standard ready to be hijacked by the best demagogue to come along and use for real injustice.

Like forcing me to play as a girl in Call of Duty.

[Kara]

While I share a similar viewpoint on justice as Foucault-sama in that vid I linked, having no concept of justice in a class-based society leads to you staning for blowing up weddings in countries with horrible economic development from the comfort of your nearest drone operation center or apologizing for surveillance on such a scale that one-time pads in a dead drop are the only way you can be sure no one is listening in on your conversations. (And even then, that's only if you're not on a list.) So really there are worse things you could be doing with your life.

[benjipwns]

 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

from Ebola, thanks to no Ebola Czar saving us

[close]

[Great Rumbler]

Grampa's off his meds again.

[benjipwns]

And since I know you're wondering:
https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/1972425520

John McCainVerified account
‏@SenJohnMcCain
Obama has more czars than the Romanovs - who ruled Russia for  3 centuries. Romanovs 18, cyberczar makes 20.
9:12 AM - 30 May 2009

[Kara]

And since I know you're wondering:
https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/1972425520

John McCainVerified account
‏@SenJohnMcCain
Obama has more czars than the Romanovs - who ruled Russia for  3 centuries. Romanovs 18, cyberczar makes 20.
9:12 AM - 30 May 2009

[Phoenix Dark]

Obama should name Bill Nye his Ebola czar and just have him travel around discussing evolution.

[benjipwns]

Wait.

MMT and Chartalism are the same thing? 

How did I not put this together.

Fucking animists.

[Kara]

For practical purposes it's not worth distinguishing between them, but they are distinct from one another.

I just call MMT Chartalism to demean it and show that it's hardly modern (in a temporal sense) at all.

[benjipwns]

Scientific Chartalism.

[Kara]

Chartalism-Leninism

[benjipwns]

Chartalism with Chinese characteristics

[Kara]

Georg Friedrich Knapp Thought

[benjipwns]

Knapperism

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Okay, that doesn't really work straight-forwardly, but I was trying to go off Nasserism.

[close]

[benjipwns]

Oh man, just by accident looking for more communism offshoots to spoof, I found a guy who's written a massive nine piece attack on BA  :
http://kasamaproject.org/kasama/4345-9-letters-to-our-comrades

How do we make revolution in a world that seems to conspire against liberation?

With apparent singlemindedness, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) has been insisting that its leader, Bob Avakian, has the answers for humanity. His new theoretical synthesis (this party says) is a major rupture with, and leap beyond, even the best of previous communism, including Marx, Lenin and Mao. And (this party says) this New Synthesis represents the best and even only hope for the future.

The “Nine Letters” unfold a detailed Maoist critique of Avakian’s synthesis. It engages and criticizes Avakian’s claims and methods. The main author is Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP’s Revolution newspaper.

These “Nine Letters” excavate the RCP’s inability to establish any mass base or revolutionary movement over more than thirty-five years. They dissect the RCP’s escalating cult of personality around Avakian – with special focus on the cult’s theoretical assumptions, denial of practice, and implications for revolutionary strategy.

In a beginning way, these Nine Letters point to a different road for communists and call on others to join in a very presumptuous work of re-conception and new revolutionary practice.

Letter four is fucking huge.

[Joe Molotov]

Charlatanism

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Last weekend Rush Limbaugh....america's favorite shitdick.....Basically accused obama of relaxing our medical standards to assist the ebola outbreak.


LOL

[ToxicAdam]

Surprised it took the Pentagon so long to jump in on the Climate Change bandwagon. Never-ending wars based on illegitimate reasons and fear-mongering are their specialty.

[Phoenix Dark]

probably a ploy to get Barry Obama to spend money on the military for once.

[Steve Contra]

Surprised it took the Pentagon so long to jump in on the Climate Change bandwagon. Never-ending wars based on illegitimate reasons and fear-mongering are their specialty.

Acting like there's a real discussion about climate change going on

The Army Corps has been planning for this shit for years.