All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[Mister Mets]

I don't know how large it will be, but roughly 25% of them voted for McCain in 2008, and they tend to hate Sanders a whole lot more than they did Obama. Also, people tend to not think of their vote as having much of an impact on the Election individually, and this fact might abet their decision to cast a '**** you, Bernie' vote.

I thought the 25 percent number was bullshit but two surveys bear it out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.28acc119becc

But anyone who wouldn't vote for Beto O'Rourke and Kamala Harris against Donald Trump wouldn't be an ******* according to certain people on this thread, right?

In most cases, you shouldn't think anyone's an ******* based on how they vote.

"O'Rourke says adding SCOTUS justices is worth exploring"

"Newly announced presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke said changing the makeup of the Supreme Court is "an idea we should explore."

He said at a campaign stop in Iowa that he thinks it could be a good idea to have each party choose five justices and then to let those justices choose five more justices.

“What if there were five justices selected by Democrats, five justices selected by Republicans and those 10 then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first 10,” O'Rourke said. “I think that’s an idea we should explore.”

O'Rourke also floated the idea of putting term limits on the justices.

“There’s another idea of adding term limits on those justices so that there’s a more regular rotation through there,” he said. “ We’re a country of 320 million people. There’s got to be the talent and the wisdom and the perspective and that court should be able to reflect the diversity that we are composed of.

"This central objective that is to prevent the Supreme Court from continuing on this trajectory to become basically ruined by being a nakedly political institution," he said. "This idea of adding justices is one way to do it," he said.

"It may actually not be the most compelling way to do it," he continued. "I mean I’m interested in a policy where you would have five appointees of Republicans and five of Democrats on a 15 member court. And where you get the other five from is a consensus of the other 10 which has to be unanimous.""

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaig...orth-exploring

He does have ideas that go beyond court-packing (a dumb thing to speculate about at a time when Republicans have the White House and the Senate.)

Term limits has been suggested before, and wouldn't be about partisan advantage. It would have the benefit of allowing for the selection of older justices with significant experiences when there's no need to have them in the office for at least three decades. It may be a problem if the court is composed entirely of people who were eligible to be on the court by fifty.

So let’s further cement the two party system and allow each side (even if one is a massive minority) to select partisan judges to counter the opposing side and then let a bunch of hacks fight over the tie breaker.

Sounds great

The idea of giving every party the same number of justices is flawed since we don't know for sure that the parties will be relatively equal forever. One party may dominate for a while, or something new may emerge.

The justices selecting some new members has more promise.

Terming the SCOTUS picks or letting them go to a non-partisan popular vote are better than adding, IMHO.

I don't think voters know enough about the court/ legal principles for this to be a good idea.

Nonsense? Actually it was the intended mechanism and checks and balances put on the Supreme Court created by the founders of the country. The fact that the legislature implemented maneuvers that allowed a subversion of that is quite frankly on them. That's just reality. Tough pill to swallow.

The fact of the matter is, once that door was opened both parties were susceptible for that exact action being used to undercut Presidential appointments and the only way to prevent it was for the Party of the President to make an overhwelming public case against it so the other side would be shamed. I can tell you right now that if it was Bush or Trump who was losing out on a Supreme Court seat the Republicans would have went to war and stopped everything in the government over it and made the Democrats feel the heat. And they would have caved too. But once that mechanism was implemented, thatw was the only recourse you had against it.

Adding a couple of Justices isn't a fix. It just opens the door for the Republicans to come back and pack the courts further and then trying to force rulings while they control the government. Which will just completely break the consititution and **** the court into an even more partisan branch of government when the real goal should be to prevent that. It actually doesn't solve the problem. It aggravates it. And yes it is childish to suggest something as short sighted as that.

You want to fix the Supreme Court? Keep it at 9. Make the process so that the President gets to pick the Justice and only a 2/3rds majority in the Senate and a 2/3rds majority in the House can veto an appointment for a truly egregious case.

Unfortunately we fucked up what we had now, but going in the other direction and making it more of an absurd game is not the answer. It never was and it's a complete joke.

And that's not even going into how dumb Beto's actual suggesstion is of making it some game of both sides picking Partisan judges and then having them vote on additional judges. For one it incentives going as partisan as you can because you diluted the courts and are making it a one side vs the the other side dick measuring contest, also it has the additional facet of taking away the check the President has on appointments because the members of the judicial branch itself will be appointing the most crucial justices on the court. And that's before we even get into the realities of how little they will agree.

Requiring a veto to override a court pick could be a problem since there are no guardrails against going with ideological extremists or shady friends.

Imagine if all President Trump needed to get someone on the court was 34 Republicans to override a veto.

The conservative equivalent is imagining what President Sanders would do with that power.

Tell that to Merrick Garland.

That was litigated in the 2016 presidential election.

Far-right Australian senator blames New Zealand attack on Muslim immigrants
Fraser Anning has a history of inflammatory remarks, but this one stands out.

That's terrible. I was hoping this was the Australian equivalent of a cooky committee member, but their Senate is pretty much the same as ours.

Is this worse than anything any sitting American politician (at least at the congressional level or higher) has said?

[Mister Mets]

It was during the Vietnam War that the discussion over dropping the voting age to 18 was most intense. It was reasoned, after all, that if you could be asked to die for your country then you ought to have a say in how its run.

Today, we regularly ask sixteen year olds to be willing to die for the right of others to bear arms. The same logic applies.

About 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam, so the odds an individual teenager will die due to gun violence are significantly lower than the odds that a solider under 21 would die.

We have near 60% of 18-27 year old Americans living at home, not paying taxes, living off their parent's insurance.

Better take their right to vote away, too!

Better yet, let's just go back to the old way: White, male, land owners.

/s

Minors have limited autonomy, as there is the understanding that they shouldn't make certain decisions (IE- dropping out of school, acting in porn, buying alcoholic drinks) since their brains aren't developed enough.

It wouldn't work for a group that has limited life experience and a lack of serious responsibilities voting on what to do with other people's money.

For those who think minors should vote, what would the cutoff be and why?

At eighteen, people are making some decisions about their professional success.

Well I think it's an improvement that Republicans are now at least saying what they really feel instead of trying to couch it in weasel words. For the longest time, they would always go on about how it wasn't all immigration that they were opposed to but just illegal immigration, and that they would welcome everyone who came in legally, but now they aren't shy about stating their opposition to legal immigration as well, and openly rationalizing it on racist terms. This might be difficult to endure for the time being, but in the long run they're just stripping away that veneer of gentility and respectability from the conservative movement and exposing the ugly truth underneath, and once they've done that there's no getting that legitimacy back.

Have conservatives claimed there shouldn't be limits on legal immigration?

How many investigations into Hillary's emails does that make? 30? 40? 30,000? THAT is a goddamned witch hunt, and they've never found one witch.

Unlike the investigation into the Tangerine Tyrant's corruption, which has found, I THINK, close to the same number of 'witches' as there have been pointless wastes of taxpayer money that Republicans called an investigation into Hillary's emails and Benghazi...

With Clinton, there was wrongdoing. The argument is that it may not have been deliberate enough

Even if they do find investigate again, what could Hillary be charged with? Mishandling emails? It was never proved that her server was hacked. Trump uses an unsecured phone all the time and has had private conversations with Putin with no other official around to report on what they talked about. Why doesn't Graham want to investigate that?

The main argument is that she handled classified information in an unsecure way, sending it in unclassified emails.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...en-prosecuted/

The conservatives are most upset about it are those who were in positions where they had to handle sensitive and top-secret information, and considered what the likely penalty would have been if they had handled it the same way.

[jetengine]

About 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam, so the odds an individual teenager will die due to gun violence are significantly lower than the odds that a solider under 21 would die.

Vietnam war lasted roughly 20 years. America beat that number in the last 5. Your gun violence killed MORE AMERICANS THEN A WAR YOU LOST IN A QUARTER OF THE TIME.

[aja_christopher]

I don't recall ever claiming that a majority of Democrats have passed "open border" policies.

I know you didn't -- you just use "t-shirts" to try to argue that they support them so I called you out on it and told you to show factual proof.

Which you couldn't.

That was litigated in the 2016 election.

No, it wasn't -- most non-Republican voters weren't even thinking the Supreme Court when they cast their votes -- if they voted at all: "litigation" is a legal process, not a voting process and if it were actuallly "litigated" you'd probably lose all of your picks due to Trump's blatant campaign violations, minority voter disenfranchisement and Russian collusion.

But it wasn't "litigated", regardless.

Mets, the dishonesty in your arguments in on par with Trump, which makes perfect sense since he is the person your party nominated to the presidency.

I've often seen you talking about people like you think they are stupid and it shows in nearly every post you make.



We're not -- aside from maybe thinking it was possible to have an honest and objective dialogue with someone who supports the Republican party -- a lesson learned the hard way by Obama and confirmed with the majority of your responses.

[Tuck]

Minors have limited autonomy, as there is the understanding that they shouldn't make certain decisions (IE- dropping out of school, acting in porn, buying alcoholic drinks) since their brains aren't developed enough.

Brains aren't fully developed until around 25. And the risk-assessment areas of the brain are some of the last to develop. No one is going to argue to raise the voting age to 25. (The age restrictions on different federal offices accounts for this anyway, since a voter is largely voting for a representative, not policy directly.)

It wouldn't work for a group that has limited life experience and a lack of serious responsibilities voting on what to do with other people's money.

And people without children vote for people who will decide how education and other child-related policy will be made. City voters will vote for people who will help decide farm policy. Blue Bloods vote for people who will decide how anti-poverty policy works.

If we really want to put a policy out of reach of ignorance, it should probably be science. A scientifically illiterate electorate votes for a nearly scientifically illiterate government that essentially decides what science we choose to believe . . . as if that's how science works.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

I feel like someone should start a 'Let's Relitigate the 2016 Election!' thread so we can stop wasting so much space on this thread...

The unfortunate problem is that the people in this thread who generally claim they don't want to relitigate the 2016 Election are the ones that take passive aggressive shots at Bernie and blame him in some part for the outcome. So yeah, they do want to relitigate it, just on their terms. There's been times where I and others have stopped because the discussion was going nowhere and then the same usually suspects use the silence to do the same thing a few days later and then get bent out of shape when they are called out.

The reality is, there's plenty of evidence of what happened.

1. Bernie supporters did not refuse to support Clinton at a higher rate than Clinton supporters refused to support Obama. It's a disengenous argument to make to blame them when there is virtually no evidence that it was a more than normal amount of people that would sit out for any high primary challenege and it wasn't even the most of the last two Democratic primaries.

2. We have multiple emails of behind the scenes work and just blatant things the DNC did to favor one candidate over the other in the primaries. Whether that was DNC operative giving Clinton debate questions, debate scheduling, freezing access of information to Bernie, all the emails behind the scenes, the fact that the person running the DNC went on to join Clinton's campaign. For a group of people that constantly love to blame Russian bots for spreading a misinformation campaign causing Hillary to lose, it's pretty self serving that they are so willing to ignore all that. It's just what happened. Now you can say "well she would have won anyways", well somebody else could say "well Trump would have won anyways". We simply don't know and it was a thing that made it less than an even contest.

Those facts have never really changed. But when the same 4 or 5 people complain about discussing it in the interest of unity and then can't help themselves to be divisive when it comes to one particular candidate (one of the two at the center of that discussion) naturally that debate is going to pop back up. Idk maybe the people who want it to stop should show some self control on that front, because Bernie supporters aren't really under an obligation to make them feel better if they want to be dishonest actors.

It's just telling that other people can come into this thread and see the same thing and wonder why there's a bunch of people in this thread with a craw in their throat about Bernie. Even stranger when those same people accuse Bernie supporters of the one being divisive.

[PaulBullion]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...n_2025456.html

Harris started programs to keep first time offenders out of jail going back to 2005.

[aja_christopher]

It's just telling that other people can come into this thread and see the same thing and wonder why there's a bunch of people in this thread with a craw in their throat about Bernie. Even stranger when those same people accuse Bernie supporters of the one being divisive.

What's telling is that a lot of those people weren't here during the 2016 election to really see how said "Bernie supporters" behaved during the 2016 election.

[aja_christopher]

The bottom line is that Sanders lost by millions of Democratic votes, yet some people here think he will somehow do better with the general populace, much of which is moderate or Republican.

They are more than welcome to believe that, but not to sink the Democratic party -- or endanger our nation as a whole -- in the process.

[Dalak]

1. Bernie supporters did not refuse to support Clinton at a higher rate than Clinton supporters refused to support Obama. It's a disengenous argument to make to blame them when there is virtually no evidence that it was a more than normal amount of people that would sit out for any high primary challenege and it wasn't even the most of the last two Democratic primaries.

This argument is ridiculous on it's face. Do you think that Clinton supporters would have gotten off with a shaken finger had McCain won in '08? Even if they refused to vote because they felt marginalized or slighted it doesn't make them immune to any share of criticism/blame, nor does it entitle them to try and dictate how 2020 will go more than a year before any primary has even started.

To paraphrase Optimus Prime: Trump must be stopped, no matter the cost to anyone's Ego.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

What's telling is that a lot of those people weren't here during the 2016 election to really see how said "Bernie supporters" behaved during the 2016 election.

Oh no they had a walkout! The horror. Should I go look up those Clinton supporters who said nasty things about Obama and then didn't support him against McCain?

You can find extreme cases everywhere when it's literally hundreds of thousands of people.

[aja_christopher]

Brains aren't fully developed until around 25. And the risk-assessment areas of the brain are some of the last to develop. No one is going to argue to raise the voting age to 25. (The age restrictions on different federal offices accounts for this anyway, since a voter is largely voting for a representative, not policy directly).

"From Sydney to Seoul, Cape Town to New York, children skipped school en masse Friday to demand action on climate change"

"“I’m supposed to be in school, but instead I’m out here trying to make sure that my kids don’t grow up in a wasteland.” — Arielle Geismar, 17"

It was a stark display of the alarm of a generation. It was also a glimpse of the anger directed at older people who have not, in the protesters’ view, taken global warming seriously enough. The student protests, first inspired by a 16-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg, have spread across Europe in recent months. Thousands have marched in Berlin, Brussels, London and other European capitals on Fridays over the last several months.

In the United States, there have been small protests in a number of cities, including New York, where a high school student named Alexandria Villasenor has stood outside the United Nations every week for the last 13 weeks. The largest strikes on Friday seemed to be outside of the United States.

The strikes have underscored a significant generation gap in concern about climate change, particularly in a handful of countries. The 20 warmest years on record have all come in the past 22 years, essentially the lifetime of today’s children and young adults. In a recent Pew survey, carried out in 26 countries, a significantly larger share of young people said they worried about the threat of climate change, compared to people over the age of 50, in the United States, France, Australia and the Philippines.

In the Pew survey, the generation gap was significant even after statisticians controlled for political affiliations. And in the five years since the global survey began, concern about climate change has swelled overall among Americans, but at a far higher rate among young people. Other surveys have found that younger Republicans to be significantly more concerned about climate change than older members of the party.

Nadia Nazar, 16, from Baltimore, one of the organizers of the Friday rally in Washington, said young people didn’t see the crisis in the same way.

“My generation is first generation that will be significantly affected,” she said. “I want them to understand they’ve been able to live pretty normal lives. If climate changes continues and gets worse and worse then we won't be able to.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/c...l-strikes.html

[ed2962]

Controversial Opinions:

Bidden is running because he doesn't like these uppity progressives with their loud music and wants them to get off his lawn. He thinks Sanders should cut his hair and get a job.

The GOP would LOVE for someone like Harris or Booker to be the democratic nominee. These are watered down version of Clinton and Obama and they already know how to deal with them. They are frightened by Sanders because his actual policies poll well with their audience. It's why they spend so much time attacking AOC who has similar views...they are attacking Bernie by proxy.

[aja_christopher]

[Deleted.]

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

This argument is ridiculous on it's face. Do you think that Clinton supporters would have gotten off with a shaken finger had McCain won in '08? Even if they refused to vote because they felt marginalized or slighted it doesn't make them immune to any share of criticism/blame, nor does it entitle them to try and dictate how 2020 will go more than a year before any primary has even started.

To paraphrase Optimus Prime: Trump must be stopped, no matter the cost to anyone's Ego.

It doesn't matter because people in this thread wipe it aside that Clinton's supporters lack of backing Obama was FAR MORE egregious than any negative impact Bernie supporters have simply because Obama was a much stronger candidate and was able to overcome a harsher internal Party challenge. And no I haven't seen you, or any of the other usual people in this thread condemn that the way some of them have been going at Bernie supporters. Usually it's been some conveniant excuse like "oh well McCain wasn't as bad as Trump so it's not applicable that our faction did that" or "Obama won anyways so we don't have to acknowledge the bad behavior there". So whose really the divisive side? The side that was worse in not supporting Democratic candidates and constantly shits on Bernie supporters or the Bernie supporters who bring up the actual **** that happened and their criticisms of the candidate?

At this point, it's really just not a good faith argument and that's what you need to bridge the divide. No Bernie supporter is going to back down and play nice when the same group of people who exhibited more egregious bad behavior take every opportunity they can to blame Bernie and his supporters for all their problems. Their the side that got the candidate they wanted. They are the side that simultaneously want to blame people they also want as allies as to why she didn't win. It's just not a genuine ask anymore.