All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Tendrin]

And the bigger picture include tackling the production of cocaine in Colombia, specially that at the beguinning of this year the cultivation of cocaine was larger than what the Colombian goverment expected, even after signing a peaxe treaty with of the oldest terror organizations in the world.

One of the reason for it is because the Colombian goverment isnt giving enough incentives for the cocaine farmers to leave and start producing different stuff, which comes down to how little they get when farming products different from cocaine.

This is a serious problem. The USA faced the same issue in Afghanistan with regards to the opium poppy production.

[worstblogever]

Going "well at least" doesnt help you case, also nobody was talking about Weinstein here anymore, why bring him up?

Nobody? The media cycle is still talking about Weinstein, with more victims coming forward, and people were slagging on Democrats who got donations from him within the past week.

Meanwhile, Roy Moore is taking money from Nazis to his charity, which he funnels into a salary for himself, but I haven't seen any critics demand he return the money.

[worstblogever]

is Cruz the most popular republican senator?

OH LAWD, he is not.

[Jack Dracula]

W Bush is still responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians, and bears the lion's share of the blame for the current situation in the Middle East.

Trump may very well do worse, but let's not whitewash Bush's 'legacy'.

Agreed. In many ways the Bush/Cheney administration was far worse. In fact, you could say that they even bear some of the responsibility for our current dilemma.

[numberthirty]

And the bigger picture include tackling the production of cocaine in Colombia, specially that at the beguinning of this year the cultivation of cocaine was larger than what the Colombian goverment expected, even after signing a peaxe treaty with of the oldest terror organizations in the world.

One of the reason for it is because the Colombian goverment isnt giving enough incentives for the cocaine farmers to leave and start producing different stuff, which comes down to how little they get when farming products different from cocaine.

This is a serious problem. The USA faced the same issue in Afghanistan with regards to the opium poppy production.

Certainly.

That said, I would be interested in seeing if minimizing the current marijuana black market infrastructure causes any change in the surviving black market for harder drugs.

[Mister Mets]

Is anyone else watching Sanders vs Cruz debate?
I wonder who selected those two to be the representatives in those debates?

Tazirai have postef some links that show Bernie might be the popular senator, is Cruz the most popular republican senator?

They were both the runner-ups in the most recent presidential primary winning some key early races (Cruz in Iowa; Sanders in New Hampshire)

[mojotastic]

Nobody? .

I said nobody here, in the thread.

[Mister Mets]

I dunno, maybe that she hadn't demonstrated that she was f***ing insane and in way over her head like her opponent in all three debates. Or that she had detailed policies and not lies.

Guess you're still working to leap off that cliff like your lemming ilk, though, in the face of the reality that your president is obviously quite mentally ill. But hey, at least he's not that woman who Rush Limbaugh, a noted pill popping lunatic himself told you was da debbil for a quarter century, right?

This seems to mostly be about Trump's flaws, which doesn't quite contradict the notion that conservatives had little reason to support Hillary on the merits.

Detailed explanations of liberal policies isn't going to persuade people who hold opposing positions.

Foreign policy.

Thanks.

[Dalak]

I said nobody here, in the thread.

#30 brought it up out of nowhere last night in 2 posts

[mojotastic]

This is a serious problem. The USA faced the same issue in Afghanistan with regards to the opium poppy production.

It doesnt help thay 50% of all shipments of drugs from Colombia go to Venezuela and from there they are send to Africa, Europe and Mexico.

Links in Spanish
https://www.google.com.co/amp/www.el...-africa-104794

And to make matter worse the nephews of Maduro (president of Venezuela) admitted that they were selling drugs that came from Colombia, so you cant expect the Venezuelan goverment to regulate the traffic of drugs.

https://www.google.com.co/amp/amp.el...e91491757.html

[mojotastic]

OH LAWD, he is not.

So this guy from North Dakota is the most popular republican according to your link, interesting, dont know anything about this John Hoever fellow, maybe you or mets could tell me why do you guys think he is popular.

[mojotastic]

Another thing that has affected the prices of crops in Colombia, which is a reason for why people want to continue to cultivate cocaine, is because how cheap is for the US to buy these crops compated to 5 years ago so the farmers get less in return, all because the price of a dollar in Colombian pesos increased, it used to be 1 dollar = 2000 pesos, now 1 dollar = 3000 pesos.

And this increase on the U.S dollar can be track down to the decrease of the prices of oil.

[Mister Mets]

You "think" this despite all evidence to the contrary -- including the nomination of a racist, sexist, Islamophobe to the head of the Republican party.

And it's not just the "South" -- it's the Midwest as well (truth be told it's all over the country).

And it wasn't "coded" from Trump -- it was direct.

We'll just agree to disagree on this one, and the deficit as well.

It's not a matter of agree to disagree. The southern strategy, the idea that the use of race as a wedge issue, is the primary reason for Republican success in the South is highly flawed.

Writing for the Atlantic, Matt Ygleisias suggested that while race played a role it was more about how the Democrats kept the South for so long, rather than why southern conservatives shifted to the Republican party.

It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.

And for a long time the strategy worked. Democratic politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt loyally upheld white supremacy. The dam began to crack with Harry Truman, and then under Lyndon Johnson the national party decisively broke with this corrupt bargain. With that done, white southerners just took their conservative views on taxes and national security into the Republican Party where such views belonged. Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.

Sean Trende noted that before Civil Rights legislation, Eisenhower and Nixon did pretty well.

In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections.

But the big breakthrough, to the extent that there was one, came in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won 48 percent of the vote there, compared to Adlai Stevenson’s 52 percent. He carried most of the “peripheral South” -- Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida -- and made inroads in the “Deep South,” almost carrying South Carolina and losing North Carolina and Louisiana by single digits.

Even in what we might call the “Deepest South” -- Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi -- Eisenhower kept Stevenson under 70 percent, which might not seem like much until you realize that Tom Dewey got 18 percent in Georgia against FDR in 1944, and that this had been an improvement over Herbert Hoover’s 8 percent in 1932.

In 1956, Eisenhower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the vote in the South, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent. He once again carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53 percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama. This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the administration had opposed the school board.

Nor can we simply write this off to Eisenhower’s celebrity. The GOP was slowly improving its showings at the congressional level as well. It won a special election to a House seat in west Texas in 1950, and began winning urban congressional districts in Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia with regularity beginning in 1952.

Perhaps the biggest piece of evidence that something significant was afoot is Richard Nixon’s showing in 1960. He won 46.1 percent of the vote to John F. Kennedy’s 50.5 percent. One can write this off to JFK’s Catholicism, but writing off three elections in a row becomes problematic, especially given the other developments bubbling up at the local level. It’s even more problematic when you consider that JFK had the nation’s most prominent Southerner on the ticket with him.

But the biggest problem with the thesis comes when you consider what had been going on in the interim: Two civil rights bills pushed by the Eisenhower administration had cleared Congress, and the administration was pushing forward with the Brown decision, most famously by sending the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to assist with the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

It’s impossible to separate race and economics completely anywhere in the country, perhaps least of all in the South. But the inescapable truth is that the GOP was making its greatest gains in the South while it was also pushing a pro-civil rights agenda nationally. What was really driving the GOP at this time was economic development. As Southern cities continued to develop and sprout suburbs, Southern exceptionalism was eroded; Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.

The shift concluded as a result of the post-integration generation that was less racist than their parents.

. The Democrats weakened the seniority system in the 1970s, reducing the clout of the old bulls. Many retired. Some lost primaries, as newly-enfranchised blacks and poor whites flexed their muscle. And Democrats who remembered the Great Depression and for whom voting for a Republican was simply unthinkable absent a thoroughly unacceptable Democrat, were literally a dying breed by the 1970s. These Democrats also happened to be the ones who fought desegregation, while also fighting their national party on almost every other issue.

By the 1980s, they were outnumbered by young people like Barbour, who were ideologically sympathetic to the Republicans (as were their parents and grandparents by this point), but also typically as well-off as their Northern middle class counterparts, and didn't have any great partisan attachment to the Democrats.

Matt Lewis points out that another factor for Republican success in the South is the party's shift to rural voters.

The Republican electoral shift transcends the deep South. While the GOP became the Southern Party, it also became the Rural Party. That’s a big part of this story, too.
In the introduction of this book, I wrote about my rural background in western Maryland and the deep abiding respect I have for rural Americans who have done much to make this a great country. I don’t want to see an America where everyone is huddled into cities. In the words of Hank Williams Jr., we need Americans who still know how to “skin a buck” and “run a trotline.” But one of the many challenges confronting conservatives is that America has transitioned from the agrarian age to the industrial age to the information age. Unlike the industrial age, where the top‑down assembly line model favored liberals, the tech revolution may favor the rugged individualism embraced by libertarian‑leaning conservatives. Regardless, given these trends, it makes little sense for a movement or a party to allow the rural‑versus‑urban paradigm—and the many cultural issues tied up in that—to define and assign membership status. So long as Republicans could win this way, it made perfect sense to exploit the cleavage between city folks and “Real America.” Not only was this smart politics, but it also tapped into deep‑seated beliefs.

So where did this traditional deification of rural areas come from? Among other things, credit (or blame) the influence of religion (think the Garden of Eden versus the Tower of Babel), philosophy (Rousseau’s notion about noble savages, and later, transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson—and Walden Woods-loving Henry David Thoreau), and various ideas conceived during the time of America’s founding, such as Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,” Jefferson wrote Madison, “as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” This was bipartisan. Believe it or not, in the run‑up to his 1932 election, Groton‑ and Harvard‑educated Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed far more support from rural and Southern voters than with big‑city types—and painted himself not as a former Wall Street lawyer but rather as a simple “farmer.”

So this guy from North Dakota is the most popular republican according to your link, interesting, dont know anything about this John Hoever fellow, maybe you or mets could tell me why do you guys think he is popular.

My guess is that he holds the right views for the state (conservative, but not controversially so.) It's a rather small state which allows politicians to have outsized influence, and he was an immensely popular Governor for ten years, reelected twice with more than 70% in the vote, including in a Democratic wave election (2008).

[InformationGeek]

OH LAWD, he is not.

But yet, he's more popular than Tammy Baldwin, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren. That does not compute to be honest.

[worstblogever]

#30 brought it up out of nowhere last night in 2 posts

Thanks for getting that.