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

[Tazirai]

But Medicare for all is Pie in the Sky?

Well Taz, how do you pay for it? Same way you pay for the tax cuts and military spending. Fuck a Duck!

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Not surprising. He's always been a party loyalist at heart. Republican politicians are shameless opportunists by nature anyway.

And I’m sure Graham is slurping Orange Foolius in the hope of being considered for a position the Abominable Administration.

From Mollie Tibbetts' father: Don't distort her death to advance racist views

Sadly, Republicans aren’t going to stop. With Tibbetts having been murdered by an illegal, Trump and the GOP will milk that for all it’s worth, sensitivity be damned, because they have none.

[Tami]

Beto O’Rourke Dreams of One Texas. Ted Cruz Sees Another Clearly.

LONGVIEW, Tex. — Beto O’Rourke was racing left again, insisting he knew what he was doing.

“Hydroplaning there a little bit,” he said softly, doing 75 in the passing lane through an East Texas downpour, double-fisting beef jerky in his silver pickup.

This self-assurance was understandable. In his campaign against Senator Ted Cruz, Mr. O’Rourke has been attempting the Texas equivalent of walking on water — winning statewide as a liberal Democrat — without yet losing his balance. There is bipartisan consensus, including from Mr. Cruz, that Mr. O’Rourke could actually prevail in November — maybe — if the blue wave crests just so. And now, 15 days into a 34-day road trip, Mr. O’Rourke was 50 miles from another disarmingly large crowd in a typically red county, primed to cheer his calls for brash progressivism deep in the heart of Trump country.

New gun restrictions. Fifteen-dollar minimum wage. Marijuana offenses expunged from arrest records.

“This moment, this year, this time is not easy,” Mr. O’Rourke thundered once he reached the stage, by turns swearing playfully in two languages to make his case. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”

But why not try? This is Texas, he reminded them. Or it can be.

For a quarter century now, a blue Texas has seemed both inevitable and impossible, the central political contradiction in a state defined by them — where conservatives joke that the best thing about Austin, the left-leaning capital, is its proximity to Texas; where the largest American flags are often flown by those agitating for outright secession.

[abulafia]

did i miss something about this senator mccain? nothing bad about the dead and all, but did the guy cure cancer or ended a bloody war?
european media posted the whole week on this topic in a way you might expect for martin luther king, elvis or ghandi.
this extreme overexposure was really annoying.
guy was a a senator, there are plenty of them.
i wonder what will happen when the next ex-us president (gw sr?) will die?
this all smells of agendas

[Tazirai]

did i miss something about this senator mccain? nothing bad about the dead and all, but did the guy cure cancer or ended a bloody war?
european media posted the whole week on this topic in a way you might expect for martin luther king, elvis or ghandi.
this extreme overexposure was really annoying.
guy was a a senator, there are plenty of them.
i wonder what will happen when the next ex-us president (gw sr?) will die?
this all smells of agendas

This should help some.
It's long, but the information provided should show you what it means to be a sorta "Maverick".

[Tazirai]

This is a bit shorter, but comprehensive as well.

[Tami]

did i miss something about this senator mccain? nothing bad about the dead and all, but did the guy cure cancer or ended a bloody war?
european media posted the whole week on this topic in a way you might expect for martin luther king, elvis or ghandi.
this extreme overexposure was really annoying.
guy was a a senator, there are plenty of them.
i wonder what will happen when the next ex-us president (gw sr?) will die?
this all smells of agendas

You should read up on him before making assumptions.

What we lost in John McCain

We are mourning Sen. John McCain this week — most of us, at least — and well we should. But what exactly are we mourning? Why do we feel a sense of loss?

It’s not that McCain’s politics were universally popular; far from it. Democrats enjoyed his bouts of rebelliousness, but he was never really on their side; he was always a conservative and a hawk. Many Republicans distrusted him; by the end of his life, his party’s pro-Trump base considered him an apostate.



Nor is it the record of bipartisan legislation he leaves; that record is, in fact, rather thin. His most important achievement, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, has been eviscerated by the Supreme Court. Most of his other projects, like immigration reform, ended in failure.

An easy answer is that McCain is an object of reverence for his personal courage, which was considerable when he exerted it, and for his old-fashioned civility in political battle. His concession speech to Barack Obama at the end of the nasty 2008 presidential campaign — “Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and his country.” … “[He] will be my president” — was a model of grace amid disappointment.

But plenty of politicians, even in the age of President Trump, still manage to behave civilly toward their opponents. McCain was more complicated and more interesting.

What distinguished the Arizonan most was his adherence, worn on his sleeve, to a rigorous code of honor inherited from his father and grandfather, both decorated Navy admirals — combined with his recurring habit of falling short of his own standards and reproaching himself for his failings in public.

Nearly all politicians cut corners on their way to the top. Few of them apologize when they do. (The current president of the United States, who loathed McCain, never apologizes for anything.) None, at least none in recent memory, ever apologized as fully and relentlessly as McCain.

All honest politicians hate the squalid little tradeoffs that politics demands — the favors, the compromises, the truckling to campaign donors. But most of them express their distress in private. McCain felt compelled to express his in public.

In his 2000 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, for instance, McCain faced a difficult choice in South Carolina. Demands were rising to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, and McCain’s first instinct was to agree: “It’s a symbol of racism and slavery,” he said. But after aides told him his position, however admirable, would lose him the state’s primary, he backed off, saying he “understood both sides.”

Months later, after losing, McCain returned to the state to confess his error. “I chose to compromise my principles,” he said. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth.”

In a later memoir, he was even tougher on himself: “I had not just been dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interest from my country’s. That was what made the lie unforgivable.”

That was McCain’s most oddly attractive characteristic: He hated hypocrisy — especially if he was the one practicing it.

It was attractive because it conveyed a larger lesson. In his life and in his words, McCain preached that every American should try to meet the highest standards of honor and valor — but he recognized that no one will always succeed, including himself. The test of character, he argued, was whether you owned up to your errors and spurred yourself to do better.

No wonder he found himself in bitter opposition to Trump, whose standards of honor and valor have proven undetectable.

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, McCain became the de facto leader of the GOP opposition in the Senate, more willing to condemn the president's offenses against decency and good government than most of his colleagues.

He warned the president against cozying up to Russia's Vladimir Putin ("a thug"), criticized Trump's order banning U.S. entry to people from seven mostly Muslim countries ("harmful"), and denounced his proposal to tax imports from Mexico ("insane").

[abulafia]

You should read up on him before making assumptions.

What we lost in John McCain

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[Carabas]

Hillary was over 90% to win, and still lost.

Polls from after Comey's little oops moment had her more at 50-ish%.

[abulafia]

You should read up on him before making assumptions.

What we lost in John McCain

so, he was a fair sportsman (“Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and his country.” … “[He] will be my president” ), eliteist and born into the industrial/military complex (rigorous code of honor inherited from his father and grandfather, both decorated Navy admirals) and he admited some errors. something mostly only old politiciancs do, cause they don´t have any ambitions anymore... costs them nothing

frankly, i see nothing here that qualifies him as an outstanding statesman of recent history. hence, my astonishment on the massive media coverage.
might be ok for united states media (but still over the top), but the guy is of little importance for worldwide politics, so why did even the european media spend a whole week with daily updates.
this is highly unusual and normally only reserved for persons of the highest importance for recent history.

and i read a little about mccain, back when he was running for office with palin

[DrNewGod]

McCain is a complicated story.

• He is from a slave owning Mississippi family, steeped in privilege. He would not accept early release from (literally) torturous imprisonment at the expense of others.
• He cheated on his wife. He publicly berated himself and his second family became everything to him
• He participated in a sketchy money deal. He declared it was wrong and pushed thru an attempt to reform campaign finance.
• He had staggering ego. He would declare himself wrong.
• He threw bombs at Vietnamese innocents. He fought abuse of power and against Sanctioned Torture.
• He would bully colleagues; abusively. He would reach out to the same people to cooperate on other issues the next day.
• He would make a party stand. He would infuriate his party.
• He was conservative. He would work with liberals.
• He would fight you tooth-and-nail. He would personally ask you to euligize him.

He was, by his own admission, imperfect.

My greatest fear is that the best title for his biography is The Last Great American.

[ed2962]

Michelle and George W sharing candy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...rkf?li=BBnbfcL

[abulafia]

Michelle and George W sharing candy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...rkf?li=BBnbfcL

gossip?
edit

drnewgod writes about war crimes and you inform us about sharing candy...

[Malvolio]

But Medicare for all is Pie in the Sky?

Well Taz, how do you pay for it? Same way you pay for the tax cuts and military spending. Fuck a Duck!

We all know where the money will come from. The problem is we don't have enough liberal Democrats in Congress yet to push it through. And in order to get those liberal Democrats the power they need, we may have to vote in a few conservative Democrats in order to get a Democratic majority.

[numberthirty]

I think he had a fair chance myself. People who think that he absolutely would have won based on early polling are ignoring any facts that contradict their line of thinking, however.

Exactly.

Saying that someone is in denial about the electorate when the alternative to Sanders lost all across red states just makes zero sense. Never mind that he has a pretty solid "Red State" counter pitch.

Do I think it was an absolute lock? Probably not. Would it have been about the same chance as what we all know actually happened? At the very least.