All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[SquirrelMan]

Well, well, well and Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Cho may have got themselves into a conflict of interest problem. Was watching this story being reported a few hours ago on Rachel Maddow's show. The story comes from Politico Elaine Cho's position as Secretary of the Dept. of Transportation along with her "special intermediary" for the state of Kentucky, got some key road projects pushed to the top of the line, a total of 78 million worth. One project had been rejected twice before for a grant but voila, Elaine and her assistant Todd Inman got it OK'd. Inman even helped put the grant together for them so that it would get approved. Besides acting as her chief of staff, Inman was working as a special intermediary for the state of Kentucky. BTW, no other states has a person assigned to them to work on getting their grants approved. This is not sitting well with other GOP senators who'd like to get a similar boost for their projects. McConnell is up for re-election in 2020 so this is something he can tout in his campaign.

Won't have any negative consequences for either of them. Their voters do not care if they are deeply corrupt and evil. Not one bit.

[Gray Lensman]

1. Maybe Trump is right to call Biden "Sleepy Joe," because if Biden really believes that the Republicans will play nice once Trump is gone, then he really has been asleep for the past two and a half years.

2. Kelly Anne Conway does check her facts. They're just "alternative facts," remember?

The day those words came out of her mouth is exactly when she earned her nickname "Kelly Anne of Green Goebbels."

Although I do kinda feel bad about calling him Benedict Donald - Mr. Arnold at least did some things for his country before turning on it, making the comparison to Trump rather unfair.

[SquirrelMan]

Alec Baldwin calls Sarah Huckabee Sanders a 'mouthpiece for fascism'


Depressingly true.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The Trumpies are gearing up to go after Biden the way they went after Clinton. This could prove to be a mixed blessing. If Biden takes most of the heat, it will free up the other candidates to talk policy and be bogged down in defense mode.

At least until someone separates himself/herself from the pack and becomes enough of a threat to Trump that he orders the Republican smear machine turned on the challenger. It’s been said that a second term as president is the only thing keeping Trump from a trial and maybe prison from all his nefarious dealings, so he’s gonna do all he can to get himself re-elected.

[master of read]

[Mister Mets]

The universalism that comes with monotheism, and more specifically The Enlightenment, is really more the foundation for justifications. When people are found not living by the "universal" truths you've discovered and not worshiping the "one true God", you can feel pretty justified in "educating" them.

This really just amplifies the idea of "our way" being better than other ways, the way it has throughout history, which is going to include "our people".

The concept of white is more complicated than that. Franklin famously bemoaned the influx of Germans to Pennsylvania and how he worried they were making it less white.

A lot of the peculiar American brand of racism was intentionally fostered by plantation owners and other wealthy people to drive a wedge between indentured whites and black slaves, to protect their own asses. (Something to keep in mind anytime one is about to praise a corporate entity for adopting (read co-opting) a progressive cause.)

Racism seems to come from hatred of "the other" but it has to be a group that there's some exposure to. In the US, there isn't much interaction with Maori, so there's less bigotry against them than you would find in New Zealand. In China, there is a history of bigotry against other Asian groups (white Americans may think of Asians as one homogeneous population but they have centuries of opinions about one another), to say nothing of minorities like the Uighur, a population of more than 10,000,000 second-class citizens.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/15/176842...united-nations

I will ponder on this over the next few days. It is...I think...an interesting thought experiment to wonder if racism was magically removed from World tomorrow which country...UK, Russia, Japan, South Africa, China, USA, etc would be most altered.

But let me put a challenge back to you. I suspect that 300 or 400 years ago the basic racist mindset was just as widespread as it is now. It wasn’t restricted to the UK....it was (and is) incredibly widely spread, if not universal.

So any one wanting to understand why England, France, Holland were the main colonising powers needs to look at other factors than racism to fully explain what happened.

It's interesting to consider what a United States without racism would look like going forward. How do we even define racism, let alone an absence of it? Is it a system where bias on race is as rare as bias on left-handedness, or something more complex?

Is equality of opportunity enough? How would we define that? Do we look at how people are treated going forward, or compensate for the consequences of decisions made generations ago? For example, African-Americans are more likely to drown because they're less likely to have learned how to swim, because there's less of a culture of learning to swim at a young age, largely because of cultural reasons going back to restrictions on access to public pools in the era of segregation. Children of parents with college educations are more likely to succeed, which creates a feedback loop for African-Americans. Lead paint has correlated to serious problems (academic deficits, poor impulse control) and it had a disproportionate effect on African-Americans in the past. Can we expect the children and grandchildren of these people to perform as well on average as everyone else academically and professionally?

[shooshoomanjoe]

Trump promises Kim Jong Un protection from CIA spying

Sometimes I feel that trump says these things to troll Americans that dislike him.

President Trump promised he wouldn’t allow the CIA to use spies against North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un after reports surfaced that Kim’s half brother had been a U.S. intelligence asset before he was assassinated in Malaysia.

Kim Jong Nam was killed in February 2017 — allegedly while he was en route to meet a CIA contact — by two women who sprayed a nerve agent in his face. U.S. officials quickly placed the blame for the killing on North Korea.

Trump, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn Tuesday before leaving on a campaign trip to Iowa, was asked about Kim Jong Nam’s spying, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“I don’t know, I have not heard about that,” the president said, before contradicting himself and assuring Kim Jong Un that his administration wouldn’t do anything so underhanded.

“I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices, that’s for sure,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

The president, as he has in the past, lavished praise on Kim and expressed gratitude for his friendship.

“I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can’t show you the letter, obviously, but it was very personal, very warm, very nice letter,” Trump said.

“North Korea, under his leadership, has great potential,” Trump continued.

A deal to denuclearize North Korea has proven elusive to Trump, despite two high-profile summits with Kim. In February, Trump walked out of his second round of meetings with Kim without reaching an agreement. Still, Trump offered compliments to the dictator, calling their relationship “very strong” and describing Kim as “quite a guy and quite a character.”

Less than two months after the failed summit in Vietnam, North Korea resumed testing new weapons.

On Tuesday, Trump once again had far more negative things to say about Democratic political rival Joe Biden — who has been sharply critical of North Korea — than he did about Kim. While he described Kim as someone “who gets it,” he blasted Biden as “a dummy.”

[Mister Mets]

Hmm, Let's acknowledge slavery was terrible and not keep fantasizing how wonderful the Confederacy was. Maybe we should allow abortions when the mother will die or her health severely jeopardized. Maybe we should look at the Jackboot tactics of ICE and see if we can build a better agency to enforce immigration. RADICAL!!!

The late-term abortion fight isn't about the mother's health. Polling is limited, but the polling does suggest that the main reasons for late-term abortions aren't the sad cases where the mother's health is jeopardized or even when the life of the child will be short and full of suffering. If it were, we could carve out specific exceptions.

The argument about reparations isn't about acknowledging harm. It's not about acknowledging that the confederacy was bad. Both can be done without a massive spending project.

The most important writing about reparations in the last few years, Ta-nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations isn't really about the effects of slavery, but focuses on the other racist policies in living memory (IE- redlining in Chicago.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ations/361631/

The wisdom of the policy is a different question from whether it's a good idea for politicians to support it. The law of averages suggest that each of us will support some policy that is deeply unpopular, and that some deeply unpopular ideas would make good policy if implemented. However, in many cases it will be a bad move for the politicians to push in that direction, because of the ensuing political fight.

Only 26 percent of the population favors reparations, so it's not a smart thing for presidential candidates to endorse. Does it make Trump less likely to be reelected if Democrats running for President back a policy that polls in the mid-20s?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ted-questions/

There are some major problems with reparations as a policy. What are the costs? The current suggestion, endorsed by Coates and various Democratic presidential contenders, is to make a commission that will recommend the specifics of a spending program, which seems to be an effort to outsource responsibility for improving things. It's creating an outside bureaucracy to handle large sums of money outside the control of any elected official, which isn't going to be a popular item to defend.

[PwrdOn]

The universalism that comes with monotheism, and more specifically The Enlightenment, is really more the foundation for justifications. When people are found not living by the "universal" truths you've discovered and not worshiping the "one true God", you can feel pretty justified in "educating" them.

This really just amplifies the idea of "our way" being better than other ways, the way it has throughout history, which is going to include "our people".

The concept of white is more complicated than that. Franklin famously bemoaned the influx of Germans to Pennsylvania and how he worried they were making it less white.

A lot of the peculiar American brand of racism was intentionally fostered by plantation owners and other wealthy people to drive a wedge between indentured whites and black slaves, to protect their own asses. (Something to keep in mind anytime one is about to praise a corporate entity for adopting (read co-opting) a progressive cause.)

Eh, I find the proselyting mission to be more of a cover than anything, the underlying rationale for conquest is ultimately going to be economic. European colonists always accepted a small number of native converts into their hegemony and touted them as being the enlightened natives, inevitably set against the overwhelming majority of unconverted savages to whom any punishment was justified. The early Muslims did the same thing during their period of expansion, preaching how everybody should accept the true faith and what not. But then when locals in the conquered territories started actually converting en masse, the caliphs realized they were hollowing out their own tax base and did a complete 180 on that whole business. You could almost compare that to the American mission to spread democracy across the world, it definitely sounds like a noble cause to trumpet. But once we've set up these democratic governments and discover that sometimes these people might vote for things that go against American interests, then suddenly we don't care about democracy so much and start talking about how maybe these backward cultures don't understand how democracy works and yadda yadda.

[Gray Lensman]

Trump promises Kim Jong Un protection from CIA spying

Sometimes I feel that trump says these things to troll Americans that dislike him.

I repeat, the nickname Benedict Donald is extremely unfair to that guy who turned traitor during the American Revolution. The latter at least did a few good things for his country first, something Trump is unlikely to ever accomplish.

[Tami]

Jon Stewart Blasts Lawmakers In Hearing For Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund

Comedian Jon Stewart slammed representatives on Tuesday at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on funding for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, saying it was "shameful" that more of them did not attend.

"As I sit here today, I can't help but think what an incredible metaphor this room is for the entire process that getting health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders has come to," Stewart said in his statement. "Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders; and in front of me, a nearly empty Congress."

Rep. Steve Cohen noted that the hearing was held before the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties and not the full committee.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump promises Kim Jong Un protection from CIA spying

Sometimes I feel that trump says these things to troll Americans that dislike him.

My opinion: Trump, driven by his bloated ego wants to go down in history for denuclearizing North Korea, something no president has done, or even come close to doing for decades, that’s why he’s kissing up to Kim, hoping to soften him up so he’ll agree to a deal to surrender his arsenal. But, it’s all a sham, Kim is playing Trump like a cheap fiddle, Rocketman has no intention of giving up his nukes, knowing his arsenal is the only thing keeping him in power....and keeping him alive. Lose that advantage, and Kim ends up like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Ghadafi, i.e., dead.

[Mister Mets]

In the first politics thread, there was some talk about Virginia state delegate Joe Morrisey, who admit the paternity of his teenage secretary's child. There was some argument that he was technically an Independent at the time.

He has now won a Democratic primary against a sitting state senator.

A former Virginia lawmaker who used to spend his days at the state Capitol and his nights in jail after being accused of having sex with his teenage secretary has won a contested primary in his bid for a state Senate seat.

Joe Morrissey defeated Sen. Rosalyn Dance in the Democratic primary for a Richmond-area state Senate race.

Morrissey was jailed four years ago after a sex scandal involving a teenager, who Morrissey later married. The couple now has three children.

He denied wrongdoing but entered an Alford plea to a misdemeanor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, acknowledging that prosecutors had enough evidence for a conviction.

Morrissey lost a 2016 campaign to be Richmond's mayor and had his law license revoked last year.

Control of the state senate in Virginia is so close that it literally came down to drawing names from a bowl to settle a tied race.

[worstblogever]

A series of polls out today have all six Democratic front-runners beating Trump soundly. Corey Booker and Pete Buttigieg are the worst performers of the prospective matchups, only beating Trump by five. Liz Warren, by 7. Kamala Harris, by 8. Bernie Sanders, by 9.

Joe Biden would beat Trump nationally by 13 points.

Trump's son testifies before the Senate by the end of the week. Trump's Transportation Secretary and wife of the Senate GOP Majority Leader is now embroiled in scandal. The economy is starting to dip into a recession. Trump just promised to defend Kim Jong Un from the CIA.

Those numbers will be hard to improve.

[GindyPosts]

A series of polls out today have all six Democratic front-runners beating Trump soundly. Corey Booker and Pete Buttigieg are the worst performers of the prospective matchups, only beating Trump by five. Liz Warren, by 7. Kamala Harris, by 8. Bernie Sanders, by 9.

Joe Biden would beat Trump nationally by 13 points.

Trump's son testifies before the Senate by the end of the week. Trump's Transportation Secretary and wife of the Senate GOP Majority Leader is now embroiled in scandal. The economy is starting to dip into a recession. Trump just promised to defend Kim Jong Un from the CIA.

Those numbers will be hard to improve.

Before we go back and start focusing on the gravity of everything where numbers are meaningless and that we need to hammer home a campaign to unseat Trump considering that's one of the reasons why Hillary lost in 2016 (people got confident and didn't vote), let's appreciate the way people are reacting to this on Twitter by commenting on what is beating Trump.