fapping and then having a nice meal afterwards always insured I didn't make poor choices.
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Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will appoint GOP Rep. Martha McSally to the Senate seat being vacated by GOP Sen. Jon Kyl, Ducey announced Tuesday. Kyl was tapped earlier this year to fill the seat of the late Sen. John McCain."With her experience and long record of service, Martha is uniquely qualified to step up and fight for Arizona's interests in the U.S. Senate," Ducey said in a statement.
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How are Trump and right wingers reacting to Flynn’s sentence being delayed?
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/israel-texas-anti-bds-law/
Yeah. Several theories that would've been exculpatory to Flynn got blown up today.Kind of interesting to see Trump stick with Flynn while throwing Cohen under the bus, and basically the whole American right wing looking for and following his cues.
Guys guys. What if the storm happens, but it’s so underground nobody knows?
New Yorkers should be banned from all levels of politics. Fuck CuomoFuck SchumerFucker ever local asswipeFuck TrumpFuck HillaryFuck Bernie99% of our problems would be solved if we only let California run things
Quote from: james on December 18, 2018, 01:31:21 PMNew Yorkers should be banned from all levels of politics. Fuck CuomoFuck SchumerFucker ever local asswipeFuck TrumpFuck HillaryFuck Bernie99% of our problems would be solved if we only let California run thingsAs a Californian whose representative is best known for vaping during a congressional hearing, running an openly racist campaign in 2018, being comically corrupt, and (worst of all) being a gamer, I disagree.
As a native Californian born in SF (unlike all those other residents from out of town), I am all for this west coast jingoism.
Quote from: curly on December 18, 2018, 09:49:18 PMQuote from: james on December 18, 2018, 01:31:21 PMNew Yorkers should be banned from all levels of politics. Fuck CuomoFuck SchumerFucker ever local asswipeFuck TrumpFuck HillaryFuck Bernie99% of our problems would be solved if we only let California run thingsAs a Californian whose representative is best known for vaping during a congressional hearing, running an openly racist campaign in 2018, being comically corrupt, and (worst of all) being a gamer, I disagree.Congrats, you are the 1%
I feel like benji will appreciate this:https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1074932509014667264
The center is failing to hold, and the passionate intensity of our worst impulses is filling the vacuum.No matter how alarming the abuses and incompetence of the present administration might be, we face the prospect of much worse. Without bold and effective leadership, the nation’s real and serious problems — which are the ultimate cause of our deranged politics — will only fester and worsen. Which, in turn, will only increase the political openings for future anti-democratic demagogues — who, unlike Trump, may possess the self-discipline and focus to translate their dark designs into explicitly authoritarian usurpations. It is no exaggeration to say that the future vitality and integrity of American republican selfgovernment now hang in the balance.There is only one sure way to quiet our populist distempers and restore faith in democratic institutions, and that is for those democratic institutions to deliver effective governance.
We can make real headway toward a better society by spotting and rectifying the most obvious and egregious injustices. We don’t need to know what awaits on the mountain’s summit as long as we can tell the difference between “down” and “up.”
While we are opposed to the kinds of sweeping substantive constraints on democratic government that some on the right favor, we vigorously support what we call deliberative constraints. Those are rules that correct for democratic pathologies, but without taking away from the people the right to rule themselves.
Because our policy vision so thoroughly scrambles the prevailing ideological categories of left and right, our worldview is hard to pin down with a handy, reductive label. Perhaps one will emerge over time, but for now we’re happy for our combination of idealism about the ends of government, realism about the limits and downsides of government, and pragmatism about how to advance our ideals in a pluralistic society to be intriguingly unclassifiable. That said, we don’t want there to be any mystery or confusion about the foundational ideals that inspire and inform our policy work. At the Niskanen Center, we are dedicated and unflinching partisans of what Karl Popper called the “open society”: We believe in the equal moral dignity of every individual, the power of reason to guide human affairs, and the promise of peaceful cooperation and exchange among free and autonomous people.
Here in the United States, the illiberal outrages and abuses perpetrated by Donald Trump and his enablers include blatant corruption, racial and religious bigotry and divisiveness, incessant and shameless lying, and repeated attacks on the free press and independent law enforcement. In the face of this dark menace, the Niskanen Center decided to expand its focus beyond policy analysis and reform. In November 2016, we started the Open Society Project to defend the philosophical and political foundations on which our system of government and social order stand. We have recruited scholars and intellectuals to restate the principles of the open society in terms relevant to contemporary challenges. We have joined and led efforts to defend the norms and institutions of liberal democracy against the corrosive onslaught of the Trump administration and its lackeys in Congress. And we have worked with other small-r republicans and small-d democrats to lay the groundwork for reviving a decent, constructive center-right.
Finally, moderation goes together with a strong commitment to democracy. If we believe in a system of laws created in concert with our fellow citizens, we need to recognize our obligation to understand those fellow citizens and treat them as partners in a collective enterprise even when we disagree. We have an obligation to try to justify our beliefs in terms they can recognize. That is hard, in part because the imperatives of social mobilization — revving up our troops — and persuading the other side draw on very different temperaments and tools. But democracy, of necessity, requires both modes. We need to generate enthusiasm and engagement, or else ordinary citizens will not participate in their own governance. But we need to be capable of persuasion, or we cease to see ourselves as a people engaged in a common enterprise, and politics simply becomes a kind of cold civil war. Learning to do both simultaneously is one of the moderate democratic arts.This is not an easy task. It means, among other things, that we regularly have to accommodate our understanding of justice to the habits and ways of life of fellow citizens that we might find at best uncomfortable, and at worst repugnant. But for democracy to work in a pluralistic society, we must learn to be moderate even in our pursuit of what we think to be justice. That is why toleration — a virtue that is far from natural and is under significant strain today — is such an important habit to learn, and to teach one other. Our distinctive vision represents an attempt to learn from and incorporate what is best in a variety of ideological traditions. With this approach, we hope to model the art of moderation. With hard work and a bit of good luck, we can help move our divided society toward the best version of itself, and away from the toxic tribalism of our current politics.
Rejecting today’s ideological polarization over the size of government as a false dichotomy, our hybrid vision combines the best aspects of the “pro-market” right and the “pro-government” left
Because our policy vision so thoroughly scrambles the prevailing ideological categories of left and right, our worldview is hard to pin down with a handy, reductive label. Perhaps one will emerge over time....
our hybrid vision combines the best aspects of the “pro-market” right and the “pro-government” left
I’m not interested in identifying which among the many kinds of bleeding-heart libertarian I am because I’m not interested in identifying myself a libertarian. Ideological labels are mutable, but at any given time they publicly connote a certain syndrome of convictions. What “libertarian” tends to mean to most people, including most people who self-identify as libertarian, is flatly at odds with some of what I believe. So I guess I’m just a liberal; the bleeding heart goes without saying.Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.Given the prevailing public understanding of “libertarianism,” this ain’t it and I’m no libertarian. And it’s not at all clear to me what is to be gained by trying to get people to retrofit the label to fit my idiosyncratic politics. At any rate, that’s not a project I’m interested in. I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives.One thing I think people need in order to be free in the sense I prefer (I’m not going to spell it out here) is a high level of economic freedom, more or less as the libertarians who make indices of economic freedom understand it. Standard academic liberals badly understate the importance of economic freedom to freedom more generally. This conviction, that the protection of robust economic rights is essential to any regime shaped by a genuine concern for liberty–is essential to a fully liberal regime–is more than enough get you branded a sort of libertarian by many standard liberals. But one can hold to that conviction while siding with standard liberals against libertarians on many, many other important questions. The argument over which rights and liberties ought to be treated as constitutional fixed points, and thus ought to be off the table of democratic negotiation, is not a debate between liberals and the people who think taxation is theft or that the state is an inherently criminal enterprise. It’s a debate within liberalism between liberals.“Liberaltarian,” ugly as it may be, has been useful to me because it offers a convenient label for a position that is neither standard liberalism nor a standard libertarian altenative to standard liberalism. Jason Brennan and John Tomasi’s “neo-classical liberalism” is better, in that it isn’t such a barbaric neologism and doesn’t suggest as much affinity with libertarianism, but also worse, in that it suggests something like the liberalism of neo-classical economists, which it sort of is, but needn’t be.Labels aside, I’m more interested in arguing with standard liberals about the nature and scope of specially-protected rights and liberties within the settled context of the liberal-democratic nation-state than in arguing with standard libertarians about the justification of taxation, publicly-financed education, or welfare transfers. After all, there are many orders of magnitude more standard liberals than standard libertarians, and they possess many orders of magnitude more influence. We pick our fights, and I’d like to pick ones that stand a chance of making a real difference.
The Niskanen Center was founded in early 2015 by Jerry Taylor.[7] At its launch, the center was composed primarily of former staffers of the Cato Institute who departed in the wake of a 2012 leadership struggle pitting Ed Crane against the Koch Brothers for control of the libertarian think tank.[8] Niskanen Center founder Taylor[9] and vice president Joe Coon[10] publicly aligned themselves with Crane during the dispute. Both departed shortly after Crane was replaced by John Allison as president of Cato as part of the settlement with the Kochs.
ADVISORY BOARDBRANDON ARNOLDNational Taxpayers UnionRADLEY BALKOJournalist and AuthorTYLER COWENMercatus CenterJ. BRADFORD DELONGUniversity of California, BerkeleyDAVID FRUMSenior Editor at The AtlanticEVAN MCMULLINStand Up RepublicVIRGINIA POSTRELAuthor and Columnist
QuoteBecause our policy vision so thoroughly scrambles the prevailing ideological categories of left and right, our worldview is hard to pin down with a handy, reductive label. Perhaps one will emerge over time....Quoteour hybrid vision combines the best aspects of the “pro-market” right and the “pro-government” leftcongrats on inventing neoliberalism guys
“I’m not going to comment on whether it is a real thing or not a real thing,” Mnuchin said in a roundtable interview Tuesday at Bloomberg’s Washington office. “I’m saying for the moment we have other things we’re focused on.”
can't wait to hear my conservative family members', who have been saying Obama fucked everything up by withdrawing from Iraq too soon, hot take on this
Quote from: agrajag on December 19, 2018, 02:42:28 PMcan't wait to hear my conservative family members', who have been saying Obama fucked everything up by withdrawing from Iraq too soon, hot take on this Oh I'm sure they'll pin the blame for it on Obama somehow, don't you worry.
Seen Trump get rolled too many times to assume there's going to be an immediate, complete withdrawal based on one statement.
In other news, there was a ruling against the ACA in Texas which everybody thinks will be overturned.The obsession in the GOP with overturning "Obamacare" while also pledging to keep all the popular aspects of it makes for some weird politics.
