Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Fox News"
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Women are weak, but can twitch their hips or simply SMILE or worse, CRY, and every alpha male in the vicinity is her slave. Women have quietly been pushing men's buttons since we lived in caves.
It was always an equally powerful position as the men held, only different. But it came with trade-offs, such as playing that game tends to make you be treated like chattel by the very men they manipulate. They want all the benefits of their feminine powers but they don't want to pay the piper, as can be seen when a woman hits a man, the man hits her back, and she's outraged because he hit a woman.
If they want equality, then that means registering for selective service and picking up garbage at the curb and drilling for oil and climbing telephone poles and working next to high-voltage transmission lines and saving babies from burning buildings...
They want the "male privileges," but NONE of the responsibilities and dangers that go with it.
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Liberals are supposed to criticize the establishment from the outside, and argue for a devolution of centralized power and control systems. But that's not what "liberal" means, any more. It used to mean "Leave us alone. We know that all of your 'help' is an urge to power on your part." But nowadays, "liberal" means "Govern me harder, Daddy!"
I've been arguing with "liberals" since the 1980s, and every time I dug into the philosophical underpinnings with a few "What if?"s they always showed their authoritarian side. There was no end to the rules and regulations they were willing to endorse, if their big giveaway programs created NEW problems with the system. Too many babies born to poverty? Maybe welfare moms with 4 children should be sterilized. Stuff like that.
I'd argue that that kind of intrusion into the reproductive decisions of a human being by the state was just WRONG, and that was why the big giveaway program was wrong in the first place. Now the government dominates health care (while pretending there's still a free market), and it's locking us down and mandating experimental medical procedures on the entire populace. Is Fauci a crumb bum? Yes. But he or somebody like him is ALWAYS going to rise to the top in a big, bureaucratic hierarchy. The problem isn't Fauci, or at least not entirely. The problem is a public medical system that puts guys like Fauci in charge of medical decisions for EVERYbody. If he gets one thing wrong, for whatever reason, it's a national catastrophe!
But people still clamor for their Med-4-All, which for all intents and purposes, it's already HERE. It's just a little less efficient than it might otherwise be, due to all the circumlocutions necessary to preserve the illusion of a free market. But it will never be as affordable and ethical with government running it as it will be in a true free market. But they have the perfect grift going. The illusion of free markets justifies more government intervention, when systemic problems become glaringly apparent. Yes, the insurance companies are expletive deleteds. But what makes them REALLY toxic is the government intervention that tries to keep them afloat, so it can pretend we're still free-market.
Nothing about medical care is free market, except a small but growing number of cash-for-services clinics. The government and medical establishment that profits most from government intervention don't like those clinics. But if you go to one that doesn't take insurance or medicare/medicaid, you can get treatments for about 20 cents on the dollar (based on very little research, but suffice it to say, MUCH CHEAPER). My knee surgery with great group insurance? $70,000. Shoulder surgery for cash for my nephew? $3,000.
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Anti-cop sentiment flows from the War on Drugs. There are literally millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who want to PARTY using substances a bunch of moralizers don't want them to have! It's Prohibition, staring us plain in the face, with all the organized crime entailed with PROVIDING the prohibited substance(s). MILLIONS smoke marijuana in states where it remains illegal. We have laws that make criminals of huge swathes of society, and we wonder why the public doesn't feel comfortable around police.
Also, the War on Drugs puts police in temptation's path, PERPETUALLY. There's big money changing hands, big money being confiscated, and big-money DRUGS being confiscated. There's an entire corrections industry making BANK off incarcerated drug offenders. There are police budgets and salaries that are built up to FIGHT drugs. And, as our friend Robert Mueller could once attest, the intelligence agencies can be weaponized against drug dealers, using tools designed to fight TERROR. And it comes as no surprise when we see such use of those tools becoming so commonplace, that those tools got used to spy on presidential campaigns. But that's another topic, I suppose.
End the War on Drugs, and 90% of the public-police hostility goes away.
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Total about-face on border policy, while pretending it's not an about-face, because Orange Man Bad.
Foreign Aid is how the USA props up corrupt governments, in return for their compliance on whatever the U.S. government wants. Most or all of the money ends up in the pockets of government officials, and more than a few times, some of that money has found its way, directly or indirectly, back into the hands of the policy-makers in the U.S. government who sweetened the aid package.
They're very cagey about it. A year or 10 years down the road, somebody will get a seat on a board or some other do-nothing post that pays big money, and you see the money or influence behind the plum position coming from one of the politicians they basically bribed. Hunter Biden is the poster child for this phenomenon. Before he became a big name, I think Chelsea Clinton was one of the most conspicuous "What has she ever done in her entire life to be appointed to that board of directors for high 6 figures?" It's all about connections and quid pro quo, which, I am convinced, is why they pushed the quid pro quo nonsense in the Trump Ukraine phone call. Dirty him up as much as possible as a distraction and mitigating factor when and if the expected allegations about the Biden Crime Family surface. They already built their trenchworks with the smear on Trump, for sure.
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I think they vastly under-estimated Trump. I think he spent his whole life keeping his focus on what HE did best, and delegating everything else to others. It's the only way to have "scalability" as an executive. Most businesses can never grow beyond the amount of work that the guy at the top can do. Trump has plenty of energy, but largely because he sticks to what he does and keeps tabs on what others are doing for him. And if there are too many of those people to keep track of and still get HIS stuff done, he hires somebody ELSE and keeps an eye on THAT guy.
Great presidents/generals/captains-of-industry have one thing in common: A good staff and the ability to delegate. I don't think Trump's particularly gifted at choosing staff, but he has no hesitations about shuffling the deck and getting somebody in who MIGHT do a better job.
But the point I'm belaboring, here, is that, unlike any president I've ever seen, before, Trump takes EVERYthing in stride? Gonna go after him in court? Hire a couple more hot-shot lawyers. Any other president under the kinds of unfair, unceasing and seemingly overwhelming partisan attacks from every quarter would've been beaten down, by now. Trump just hires someone to handle the little bit extra, and lets his lawyers do all the fighting in court. Meanwhile, he just gets back to implementing policies and trying to get government to work better.
Pro athletes are known for this kind of attitude: Do what you can (train and prepare) and leave the rest up to fate.
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@davedee6745 : You really think the government is your friend and is providing good health care at reasonable cost? You're too ignorant to realize that most of the problems in health care, today, are the RESULT of heavy-handed government interference, in cahoots with Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Corrupt Politicians who buy the votes of fools like you by making promises with everybody's money but their own.
Take the Red Pill. Break your addiction to Fake Free Stuff, on which we, the people are lucky to get 50 cents on the dollar, by the time the government bureaucrats are paid and all the red tape is filled-out. Maybe you're just unable to care for yourself, and so you NEED stuff from other people to get by. So you're OK with taking from them by force, rather than seek to improve your own situation in a setting that has opportunities for schmucks like us to get ahead, withOUT robbing somebody who works harder or better than we do.
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These things take time. They have to be patient. Let the process work. I also think that actions SINCE Trump's election may be key to back-tracking to the real dirt. Just as with Nixon, I think you crack the Deep State by the actions taken to cover up from inside the government. That's why I THINK Trump has "let" them play him for so long. Yes, they CAN use their office to stonewall legitimate oversight. But by doing so, they open up FRESH cans of worms.
I think that over time, as key spots up and down the chain are turned over, the DOJ and FBI become Trump's DOJ and FBI. I think that if they'd gone all-out against the Never-Trumpers, from Day 1, that there were enough residual partisans up and down the chain, to torpedo the effort.
I THINK there's a bit of rope-a-dope going on here, allowing the partisan hacks to punch themselves out in the early rounds, so we can knock them out in October-November.
I THINK they're trying to time things for maximum impact. Certainly the Democrats are planning to have Mueller make HIS big (fake) reveals in the fall, to hurt Trump like Comey hurt Hillary. It's all coming to a head, at the end of summer and early fall.
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AwakeAmericanow. Trump's policies were solid. I didn't vote for the salesman in 2016. When people like you lost your minds, I changed mine. "I didn't vote for him, but he's pissing off all the right people!" Unlike Democrats, he stayed within the law. He didn't abuse his office. He didn't weaponize federal agencies against partisan foes or the press, like his predecessor did.
While you were giving Obama a tongue bath, he was abusing the office. Then when someone who didn't abuse the office came along, all you could think to do was impeach him. Fast and Furious, alone should've gotten Obama impeached. Setting the IRS on his political opponents should've gotten him impeached. Benghazi should've gotten him impeached and Hillary arrested. Uranium-1 was on his watch. The deal with Iran was criminal.
I thought he might be an OK president when he was one of few senators who opposed the invasion of Iraq. But once elected, he became the drone-bomber-in-chief.
He ENCOURAGED the riots. He pushed CRT for all he was worth (which ain't much, granted).
Trump was like a breath of fresh air, and I didn't even like the guy before November, 2016.
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I think you'd be surprised, then, to learn how many Republicans are part of the problem. Mitt Romney's a Democrat in all but name. He's the new John McCain. I can't believe I thought he was a good presidential candidate compared to a Democrat. What I've learned, since, almost makes me glad the Democrat beat him. McCain was scary. Romney has proven himself a never-Trumper. He was always a RINO, anyway. Dems would never vote for the Republican, and at the same time, Republicans and independents weren't very excited about Romney. He wouldn't have to change much to run as a Democrat. Just move back East where he enjoyed so much success, and leave Utah alone, since they'll re-elect the most famous Republican, every time, and he's it.
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The writing's on the wall for all these elite globalist types. One after another, countries in Europe are seeing broad nationalist center-right movements. The more the Brussels (and Berlin) agenda is pushed, in opposition to the movement, the elites are committing political suicide.
The EU have seen Hungary and others as exceptions, and "How do we sort this out and get them to come around?" is their mind-set, instead of "This is a trend, and these policies ineed to be re-examined." Instead, they dump refugees in poor working class neighborhoods, and go home to their own gated communities at night. They are insulated from the consequences of their decisions by their privileged positions and great wealth. But the dock worker, living paycheck to paycheck, can't afford to move anywhere else, when what they do causes his neighborhood to deteriorate, and him to worry about his daughter's safety, in a situation over which he has zero control.
And what does he get from his government? "You're an intolerant racist Islamophobe." No, he's not. He's a guy trying to get by, and he doesn't need to be preached at. He needs his next pay check and a safe neighborhood to raise his kids. He doesn't want to live next to people who have to be TOLD it's not OK to rape a pretty girl, just because she's not shrouded head to toe or unaccompanied by a man.
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@HolyCanoley : No. That's just ordinary ignorance. I see it all over CNN, CNBC, CBS, ... The ones that get me are the libtards who think a degree confers some sort of expertise in all things, which it doesn't. My PhD is in math, but I was about a year away from a history/poli-sci degree, when I graduated (and econ and chemistry and physics), but I learned more history since LEAVING school than I ever learned in school.
Anyhoo, what you're witnessing is the lowest common denominator and it's actually a lot HIGHER than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. The schools are worse than they ever were, but the silver lining to that cloud is all the people who are learning on their OWN. The lowest common denominator a couple decades ago didn't read much and didn't write at all. You're criticizing people who are expressing their thoughts in the written word.
You don't like their words, but we've come a long way in a pretty short time. Legacy media and legacy education are built for a technological and social landscape that no longer exist. Government, too, for that matter. You appear to be one who clings to the "old way" of central control and public harassment of people outside of your narrow liberal orthodoxy. We had a name for people like that, back in the '50s. We called them "McCarthyists." Before that, there were the Puritans, and before THAT, the Papists. Same game, different people, different time. Still the same.
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High-school marching band really brings back the memories. I remember in the '70s, when I saw my first black high-school marching band. I felt like we were really good marchers, with our dressed lines turning corners in unison, with the guys on the inside marking time and each marcher as you went out taking bigger and bigger steps, so the line was perfect as you made the turn as a group. Then the black schools would not only do THAT, but they'd start bustin' dance moves with that same precision, and my mind was blown. I remember being jealous because their bands were way more hip than ours. It would've been a blast to have band leaders that taught THAT.
Marching bands and music programs aren't what they used to be. Band, team sports, vo-tech, ... THOSE are the things we need schools for, more than the book learning. The schools are failing on the book-learning part, already.
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YIN YANG: Yes. I think it took about a New-York minute for agencies to start abusing unprecedented NSA surveillance capabilities. In a frenzy to sabotage Trump, the Obama admin explicitly opened the walls between agencies and it was a free-for-all leak festival.
We have guys - starting with Mueller - who are past masters at parallel construction, boot-strapping their way with illegally obtained intel, and back-filling how they got there, by bullying individuals into guilty pleas or bankruptcy. Miller's an advocate for parallel construction. It's how he leverages fruit of the poison tree into a fake semblance of factual, legally-obtained evidence.
We see cracks in the whole leverage-and-backfill strategy, when a big company with plenty of its OWN lawyers stepped up to represent one of the Russian troll-farmers. Faced with the prospect of discovery, Mueller's stalling, suggesting an empty - or illicit - hand.
I think a combination of becoming complacent within the good-old-boy network and sheer incompetence PLUS using these weaponized agencies against somebody big enough and cocky enough to fight back is what it took to expose this behavior, which we know stretches back to J. Edgar Hoover (and beyond), but in the current era, their surveillance capabilities are orders of magnitude more powerful, and the stakes are higher.
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@magicsam8247 : Because it devalues the quality and overall value of the learning product. The more we divorce the customers from the true cost of the product, the lower the quality, the fewer the choices, and the higher the cost. There are many learning products out there that do a better job than public institutions and at a tiny fraction of the cost. But the teacher's unions don't want you to know that. Over the next 10-20 years, we're going to see more and more cheap, high-quality learning products taking up more and more of the education market.
When you make the product free, there's less pressure on the student to pursue productive skills. They can indulge themselves in all kinds of nonsense that adds zero value to society, like the entire Grievance-Studies wing of the humanities, in which students learn nothing of value, but everything about how to protest and virtue-signal in a game of high-stakes I'm-more-oppressed-than-you contests . I got all the activist training I needed just by hanging out with the hippie crowd, in college. It had nothing to do with the language, science and math skills on which I built a successful career. Now even math and science are giving way to political correctness, with science-deniers trumping the facts and evidence with victimization ideology.
The quadratic formula DGAF who you voted for or what color your skin is. It simply IS.
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Now you're catching on, Pat Hunnicutt. It's so funny how he's kept the opposition off-balance, so far. You can tell from the MSM coverage that it's total spin mode, now.
MSM still has many followers, but their ranks are thinning as more and more people catch on to the shifting narratives and the abandonment, one after the other, of narratives slowly, inexorably being proven false as more facts roll in.
It's kind of funny. Hannity sounds like a nut. Then 6 months later, things happen pretty much as he predicted. It seems like things are moving slowly, but on a historical time scale, things are happening very quickly.
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@sebsignat8286 You've decided you fear the one thing above all others. Hopefully NObody dies off in large numbers, but frankly I'm more worried about joining the experiment being run by people who are proven liars than to take my chacances with herd immunity, my natural immune system, and treatments that are known to work very well when it's caught early.
IMO, the proper response to COVID would've been "See your doctor if you present with cold or flu symptoms." And to make HCQ, Ivermectin, remdesivir and other off-the-shelf treatments that are clinically proven. Of course, you wouldn't know about the clinical results, because those don't fit MSM narratives, so if you rely on MSM, you wouldn't even know about these treatments other than to call them conspiracy theories.
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Yes. Interesting crowd dynamics taking place. Seeing the current state of discourse and protest, it appears that SOMEbody on the conservative side decided to go about knocking the legs out from under the Alinsky playbook. Crowd tactics with big bodies. The only ones bringing weapons are the Antifa. And frankly, sizing up the two crowds and the tip of the spear on the Patriots side, if push came to shove, the Prayer side would just take the weapons away from Antifa and use them against Antifa if the Antifa side got stupid.
I think if the Antifa side behaved in a civil manner, the prayer group would have a nice, feel-good little parade, some brief inspirational speechifying, and a lot of good barbecue! Heck, they could feed the homeless + Antifa, if they all just showed up to party, even if they plugged their ears when the preacher got started, and started shufflin' towards the door, so to speak.
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I think I saw her on The View, where she acquitted herself, very well, I thought. Thought she was a young talent on the rise, who would make a compelling spokesperson for anyone who wanted one. Seemed like she had a firm grasp and defended her turf quite gracefully. Managed to poke right back at Behar, who tried to poke at her for how fine she looked, if I recall correctly. Thought to myself "This girl can think on her feet. I like her."
What SHE said was quite different from what the one reporter said. We'll see where this goes. So far, every time I've seen her on camera, she's made sense. But I haven't watched more than 5 minutes of Reality TV, since that 3-month stretch of Springer, when I was laid up, and watched a lot of antenna t.v.
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@mikelly1128 Nothing short of profound reduction and rollback of federal role and scope will even put a dent in the corruption. The corruption in government institutions is inevitable. The ONLY way to keep a lid on it is to severely restrict what we empower the government to do in the first place. Only then do we have even a chance of overseeing everything, in detail.
We will never abolish these institutions. I doubt that the legislature will ever reduce these institutions' role or scope. There is no reward to a politician for doing LESS, and nothing but praise for doing MORE. So agencies and programs are spawned - and spawn each other - far beyond anything the Congress can HOPE to oversee.
I fear that the only way to get even close to the kind of freedom and individual responsibility we once had (for the most part) in the USA is if these institutions crumble of their own weight, and that's a world none of us wants to see. But it's coming. Stuffed-shirts will issue mandates, dicta, and commands, but there will be nobody to carry them out. Basically it'll be like the fall of the Soviet Union, and for much the same reasons.
Companies will scrap their EPA-compliance divisions, but they'll still make being clean a selling point, because customers want that, and they won't be shielded by regulators any more - the companies won't, I mean. People will generally be non-racist, but companies and institutions will eliminate the dead weight of their divesity-and-equity offices, because things will be tight, and they don't produce anything but problems, the same way political (communist) commissars sort of disappeared in Russia.
Same thing happened with the Roman Empire. Everything was outwardly the same, but if the locals didn't maintain the status quo, there was no maintaining it from Rome or Constantinople. The farther away from the metro centers, the less of Rome you saw. Like England as compared to France, the latter of which retained many of the trappings - and the authoritarian mindset - of Old Rome.
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"Reportedly exposed?" smh It's exposed in almost every single show and every single talking head they've got. It's just funny that it takes an exposé by Veritas to draw attention to what any but a brain-dead zombie doesn't know.
But so what? That's the American tradition! In the 18th, 19th and early 20th Century, everybody KNEW that the news reflected the opinions of the editor-owner of the paper. Warring papers would rise and fall all the time, and the public was aware of both sides. During the 20th Century, it became a monolith, with a pretense of objectivity that did more damage than any network being OPENLY partisan has done. It's just funny that CNN still tries to maintain any pretense.
I think it's great to see so many openly partisan content creators, nowadays. Listen a little to a LOT of different sources, and piece things together for yourself. And just recognize that CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC are all just part of one monolith. Sure, hear what they have to say. Then check it. Do the same with FOX and every other content creator out there. You get a much more complete picture of what's going on. And when Jimmy Dore agrees with Anthony Brian Logan, you can pretty much take it to the bank.
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FOX gets some good facts and commentary out there. Nice counter-balance to the competing voices on all the other (once-) major, mainstream networks. But I agree that it's only smart to keep track of who owns what, and what FOX conveniently leaves out of THEIR reports. I don't agree with Hannity or Tucker on a number of issues. I think there's often as strong of a neocon tilt from FOX as there is a neoliberal tilt from all the other networks. But there's more good, honest, libertarian-center commentary from FOX that I really respect.
Since Jon Stewart hung up his cleats, I think Jimmy Dore might be the pre-eminent honest voice from the Progressive side. I respect him, and on a good day, I don't entirely hate Noam Chomsky. But I think they're both collectivist idiots, who just... don't... get it, when it comes to the importance of LIMITED government on the federal level. If Massachusetts or Colorado want single-payer health care or hefty welfare benefits, that's up to them and their voters. But the feds need to butt the hell out of 90% of what they now do. Dore and Chomsky don't care how big and intrusive government is, so long as the people calling the shots on top of their rigid hierarchy do Dore and Chomsky want them to do. They don't get that the original mistake was putting ANYbody other than themselves in charge of their lives.
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@downwindfish1 Europe's trying it, now. But Texas, alone, is bigger than Germany. There is no law that says an individual state may not indulge in more socialistic programs to help the needy and so forth. But even just Texas is more diverse than Germany. There are not one-size-fits-all prescriptions to make your social democracy work on a large scale. And the only way to impose social democracy everywhere (because many states just won't stand for it), is by force, from above.
No. Centralized governance is the wrong direction to go. Government picking winners and losers is the wrong way to go. lots of problems cropping up in Europe as they embrace multiculturalism. Cultural restraints that make nanny-government features sustainable over long periods of time start to fall apart. Scandinavian countries, especially, are steeped in the responsibility of the individual to the whole. Bringing in a ton of refugees from other cultures, who aren't indoctrinated the same way is a problem for them. A Swede would be ashamed to be dependent on the state without working. A Somali might say "If you're dumb enough to pay me, I'll just stay home and make babies, fool!"
There are also many authoritarian features that leak into the culture and governance under "social democracy." Now, a state the size of Texas can make adjustments. But a nation made up of many states, like the USA and like the EU WANTS to be, ends up making policies that work in one place and not another.
The fundamental problem with social democracy is that 50% plus 1 of the population can force 50% - 1 of the population submit to things to which the latter are 100% opposed. Social Democrats aren't content to do what THEY can to help their brothers. No. That's not enough. They must convince the GOVERNMENT to perform any and all functions the Social Democrats deem necessary, and impose those functions on all the land, by force.
"You voted for it. It's fair."
"I didn't know that's what I was asking for. I just thought you were bringing me some free stuff."
"Well, here's your free stuff. Now, comply."
Make your social democracy work on the local level, as the locals see fit. I'm fine with that. Usher in your social democracy from on high on mere majority vote, and you're storing up trouble, especially in a large, heterogeneous nation such as the USA. This is also the problem with the Globalist Project. You can't achieve without imposing it from above. The people on top can't possibly tailor one-size-fits-all policies that are suited to the geography, climate, culture, and economics of widely divergent localities or regions.
In the USA, you might say "What works for New York City does not work for North Dakota.
When I talk to social democrats, I say "Make it work well in your TOWN before seeking to impose it on 320 million people in one fell swoop by edict from on high."
As an American, I watch the wild swings in policy that occur in Europe. Too collectivist one day. Too open borders one day. Then the next day, Austria's outlawing Burkas or Hungary's eliminating all the critical-theory garbage that the colleges are putting out. America is 10 years behind on the takeover by leftists like you, and takes 10 more years to be rid of them. That's because we understand that rapid change, in itself, hurts the most vulnerable of us and can lead us into blind alleys faster than we can extricate ourselves.
That's why we're so slow to turn socialist (by gradually more and more fascistic measures) and why it'll take forever to un-do those changes, barring total collapse.
On the scale of a European nation, social democracy MIGHT work. So far, what I see is governments whose sensibilities and interests diverge more and more from those of the people they're supposed to serve. But they're SMALL enough to rectify their mistakes virtually overnight. In a nation the size of USA, you can't turn on a dime. That's why there are careful and specific limits set on what the government is empowered to do in the first place, and an elaborate set of checks and balances to prevent too much change, too quickly. If you assume that everything isn't already broken, then you don't want to break it by meddling too much.
In the USA, the "social democrats" should make their ideas fact on the local and state level. They can't. So they go to the feds, who not only have say over all the states, but can also print money they don't have, so it all seems to sort of work. Except we keep slipping deeper and deeper into the hole. You can't be the All-Father, bestowing gifts on the people, without extracting obedience FROM the people. You can't leave any loopholes and expect the culture to carry the day like you can in Scandinavian or European countries over many generations.
If social democracy were really GOOD for us, it would build from the local level upward. That's not what we're seeing. I think it's because too many people don't need or want government to be their mommy.
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@ridew3072 : There are certainly hard-core Marxists who revel in chaos. They're probably no more numerous than the highly-over-reported boogeyman of right-wing white supremacists. Nevertheless, Marxist ideology HAS infiltrated our education system, whether by design or otherwise. Personally, I think that people already crossed the philosophical Rubicon of state-centric solutions for any and all ills of humanity, which is indistinguishable from morally bankrupt socialist ideology...
... an ideology written in Bohemian excess by spoiled trust-fund hippies who squandered the family fortunes handed to them, and spent their entire adult lives whining about what they thought they had coming to them, and NEVER, despite being well-educated and not disabled in any way, TOOK more from the world than they ever put into it. NOT the kinds of people you listen to if you want to get anything worthwhile accomplished. They're the drunks who sit and watch you dig a ditch, tell you you're doing it all wrong, and complain because they're out of whisky, and expect you to go get them more.
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Mike Hill : That's how it starts. It ends with "inconvenient." Roe-V-Wade is already outdated, because the restrictions it placed on abortions were based on early '70s medical science on viability of a fetus.
One day, I hope the debate will be over, because we learn how to put zygotes on ice, until the mom's ready to have a child. Or implant the fertilized egg in someone who WANTS a child, but can't. I think it's coming. Then we can turn the page on a very troubling and often hypocritical era. I'm a hypocrite, too, because I can't say "die" to a fetus and I can't tell a mother she has no right to take herself out of Darwin's game. I think she's really only hurting herself and her chance to participate in reproduction and passing on her genes.
And I don't even want to talk about the father in the equation, where his rights begin and end. But if I were thrust into such a situation, I'd want the mother to have the child and give it to someone who wants it. And if nobody else in the equation wanted it, I'd raise it, myself, however horrifying that might be for everyone else! LOL!
The only principled stand I could take on it was "I'm not gonna cause one."
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6 hours a day, 5 hours a week should be PLENTY to cover the required course work. Maybe junior or senior year, they should have college-prep work in a semi-college format, where the class meets 3 days a week, with 6 hours out of class required, with 2 of those hours in the classroom, transitioning to the 2-hours-out-for-every-hour-in that is the expectation for college math, for example.
In high school, they spend a whole year on courses that receive one semester in college, meeting 3 times per week, with an expectation of 6 hours of work outside of class for the average student. College Algebra can be easily covered with little or no homework in one year. Sneak in the trigonometry in one semester, with a fair amount (but less than college amount) of homework, and the student has an idea of the level of effort required at the next level.
Fact is, we cover stuff in high school at a snail's pace AND send kids home with a pile of homework, and they still don't come to college with the skills they need. It's not a homework or not-homework question. It's a question of what they're doing in the classroom.
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@miskatonicalumni5612 : Are you LARPing? LOL! You DO hit the talking points that a CIA proxy would hit! I think you're spot on! :o)
As for me, I don't know that there's a Deep State, per se, but I do know a little something about power and corruption, so it's only natural that people who are corrupt and in power or seeking power, would "work together" in pretty natural ways, just to feather their own nests. I'm not saying this very well, but for a nice entertaining take on Closet Aristocrats, Frank Herbert's DUNE Series. I think the saga climaxes in the 7th book, Sandworms of Dune, but the social commentaries in God Emperor in the form of the socio-political musings of Leto II, who had the memories of all his ancestors and lived for over 4,000 years.
Oh, uh. Back to the present:
That's what I think is going on, myself. People who despised Trump so much, that they'd go a little too far, and the next guy who also hated Trump would run with THAT and take it too far, spiraling into a bunch of mostly venal/petty abuses that grew into something quite big, because "everybody was doing it and everybody thought it was the right thing at the time."
There was ta culture of entitlement, wrapped in arrogance, that permeated the Obama Administration. Bush II used Terror and WMDs to go to war and give the president unprecedented power and discretion, and set the NSA loose on everybody. But Bush II wasn't as crass about using those newly-authorized tools and methods against his political foes as Obama was. Bush II made it possible. Bush II dished him the ball Obama laid it in.
Anyway, it was probably just a slow slide into a lazy and oblivious, privileged way of operating over time, with a relatively small number of psychopaths and sociopaths given far too much power and no conscience about using it. Weaponized IRS against the Tea Party Movement. Weaponized the security apparatus against an incoming Republican, who wasn't supposed to win. They were so used to winning. But too many people picked up on HOW they were winning and how they were governing after winning, and THAT was something they didn't account for. The same iron grip on the major networks was in place, as before, but the major networks are no longer that major!
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Most of the stories have already been told. In fact, most were told ages ago, and all we've been doing, ever since, is changing around with the details. Star Wars was just a space Western. Most Westerns tell old, old stories, with cowboys instead of men in robes.
What makes it entertaining and relevant is the execution.
About the only thing I'm racist about is when I read a book and it describes a character in detail, only to see them race or gender-swap that character to fill a quota. But it didn't start with wokesters. Before "woke," it was "Yeah, but that actor isn't famous enough, so we'll use this blonde-haired guy to play the Asian lead."
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The press's ORIGINAL job was to take sides, and the 1st Amendment exists to ALLOW that. In the 20th Century we forgot about that and we've been lying to ourselves ever since that the media are or ever WERE objective! And except for FOX, plus a bunch of other networks denied a place in cable, the legacy media are one-note. The Founding Fathers envisioned an open and free competition between competing viewpoints. In the 20th and on into the 21st Century, we bought into one perspective as The Objective perspective, when the networks should always have been fighting and bickering between different world views, while the American people decided for themselves which viewpoint is closer to the truth.
The "good old days" of objective journalism NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED. Things are contentious, now, and so much censoring is going on, now, because the MONOLITH lost its stranglehold on the public square. It's ugly. It's messy. It's the way things should be. Everyone agreeing is SCARY - or should be! Everyone bickering and arguing over proposed changes is SUPPOSED to keep things fairly close to what was already a pretty good thing, already.
Our system is supposed to keep it simple, and not deviate much from basic principles. The feds hastily stick their noses into EVERYthing, with less skill or competence than the average person working in the field or industry over which the federal government wrongly legislates. Free flow of information in a free market has ALWAYS gotten the people to a better place more quickly and with less unintended harm than anything idiot politicians ever did.
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Welp, most of the guys who are gonna be up on charges have left the administration, by now. We have a much better chance of making a case, now, than when, for instance, Comey was still FBI director. Maybe this isn't late. Maybe it's simply the right time. You don't want to go rushing at the enemy with spears, only to be mowed down by automatic weapons. There's a TON of stuff that's only recently been discovered.
And on a historical time scale, things are moving REALLY fast! I'm a geologist, and I haven't caught my breath since November, 2016!
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I disagree, foxbat144. I've known a lot of idealistic leftists, who treat the world like family and wonders why everybody isn't like that, and sincerely believe that the gov't should express their values, including being a giver. To them, every nickel spent on weapons systems is a nickel that could've gone towards Internet for some poor kid, or food in someone's belly, or a warm, dry, not-stinky place to sleep at night.
When you think like that - and it seems to hold up to scrutiny - you can miss the fact that gov't can't change as fast as society is changing around it, and believe me, we've got the gov't surrounded. That transparency thing is a 2-way deal. As the state learns to use high tech, so is high tech used against them.
Since my 1st e-mail, back in the '80s, I think, I've always assumed what I sent could live forever.
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I think you're only just starting to see the iron fist in the velvet glove of their so-called "compassion." Government gives you half the service, charges everyone double to pay for it, and pretends it's doing you a favor. But you don't see the true cost, sometimes for decades. But it is inevitable. The recipients are lulled into being less prudent and self-responsible, the providers have no incentive to provide quality at a low price, and the taxpayer is lulled into thinking everything's OK, even though the government puts us all in debt to pay for the crappy job it does... We just don't see the full cost right away, and then we're dependent.
This was always coming. It was just a matter of when, and how it would make itself apparent to the people who ignore history. Sorry if that's harsh.
On the bright side, half of us already knew this was coming, and many others are waking up before we lost all agency. I hope.
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P Nomis : I think that 9-million figure should be discounted, quite a bit, especially when you factor all the dead people still voting in Illinois, all the illegals voting in California, all the people voting in New York and Florida simultaneously, AND all the ballot-stuffing activities run every 2 to 4 years by Democrat fraudsters in control of virtually ALL city elections.
But more to the point, Trump won a RECORD NUMBER OF STATES. And the Electoral College is in place PRECISELY so that city people, cut off from God's Good Earth, can't in their collective insanity, insularity and group-think way, run rough-shod over the REAL PEOPLE out in the countryside and in the heartland. I'm guessing you probably live somewhere (probably a city) where you rarely encounter anyone who doesn't think the same low-information way YOU think, and when you DO, there's always a mob around to shame, harass, bully and smear the idiot with a different perspective than you and all your pals.
Conservatives don't labor under that handicap. We're typically SURROUNDED by people like you, who are OFFENDED by any opinion that is not 100% in line with your religion that you don't even realize IS a religion, because your faith is so deeply embedded in your consciousness that you don't even question most of your assumptions, let alone any of your conclusions, even though both are firmly footed in SAND.
For conservatives, it's kind of heady stuff to be in a comments section that isn't overrun by bigoted, low-information NPCs, who all have the same programming, so they think they're the smart ones. Hopefully, we're more gracious than libtards are, when the shoe's on the other foot. You're misguided, misinformed and otherwise a bit ignorant of the real world, but at least none of us here is instantly labeling you as a racist, in order to marginalize and otherwise SILENCE you.
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poodle dog: I think it was Berkeley where I saw Unite America First dude get messed with (standard camera attack and flee), and the cops witnessed the act, the UAF dude was super cool and super well-spoken. Cops made the arrest and then came back to UAF and asked if he wanted to press charges. It was a (malicious) misdemeanor where the guy took a hard swipe at the phone, knocking it from his hand and catching his head. But it didn't seem like there was much harm done to phone and person, other than having some dumb-ass do that to you, and put you through that
UAF is African, with dreads down his neck, and a bright red MAGA hat, just circulating around. I don't know how tough he is, but he'll go right into the crowd and start talking to people. He's got a unique look and a real gift for inoffensive gab. If ANYbody can engage crazy people in give-and-take, UAF can.
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Yes, MrLeermeister: But they will be happy in their new religion, because everyone (except the small ruling class) will be equally poor, powerless and miserable.
But you show me a protester and I'll show you a closet aristocrat. They think THEY will be the ones ruling the proletariat. And when things don't turn out that way, they'll start protesting all over again, only to be crushed by the police state they ushered in.
I'm very low on human nature, right now. I think the socialists have already taken over. I see the kids entering college, these days, and they're ignorant of history and brainwashed by a whitewashed history of socialism, which has done nothing but get hundreds of millions of people killed in the last century.
Government is like the One Ring. Everybody thinks if THEY could have the power, the world would be a better place, but Sauron wins every time.
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T. Henderson : Trump is a SALESMAN. He's up front on what he's selling, and he'll blow all kinds of smoke to sell it. "This truck has the power of 10 locomotives." And I can't tell you how many times I've seen the opposition in media make concessions they wouldn't, otherwise, without Trump FAR over-stating his case. As long as they can CORRECT what he said, they're more likely to let slip a fact or two on his side. It goes like this:
Trump makes wild claim.
"That's TOTALLY unreadonable. Now, if he'd said 'x' or 'y', then that would be reasonable."
Trump was just trying to get 'x' but he knew if he asked for it, that it would be only 'y'.
If you're not too caught up in the day-to-day, you see the method behind the apparent madness. The fact is that Trump is a better marketer than all who oppose him.
If you're not too caught up in the day-to-day, you also see that under all the smoke and fire, he's been more restrained and stuck to the law and the process, where other recent presidents have been like kids at Christmas, running wild with executive orders that took things beyond what Congress would do. Trump's fired off a kazillion executive orders, but a sizable fraction of them simply reversed previous presidents' end-runs around the legislature. And he's gotten criticized and even sued for doing it, by people who are pissed-off at how easy it was to dismantle so much of Obama's executive-order kingdom.
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@MAGA4EVA1986 I think a rational and intellectually rigorous atheist would immediately recognize that mere rationality doesn't explain everything. You can reason your way to most of the 10 commandments from a "Life Is Good" axiom, but that right there is something you must accept as true without proof before applying it. It's a grand act of faith of which most atheists seem supremely oblivious.
I'm not saying that every or even any religion gets it right. But most admit and are COGNIZANT of what they're taking on faith. Most atheists, I would maintain, are NOT.
I think someone who is truly rigorous in their thinking and reasoning should probably be agnostic. Atheists like, say, Sam Harris, think that destroying specific dogmas and doctrines with facts and science utterly destroys the IDEA of anything greater being out there or being responsible for all of Creation. The simple fact is that science and reason are utterly SILENT on the subject of the existence of higher-order intelligence arranging things, let alone running things or watching over us.
Personally, I'm kind of a superstitious agnostic. I come at it from sort of an evolutionary psychology point of view, thanks to Jordan Peterson. There's SO much buried in our subconscious, primitive parts of our brain that drive us without our very thin layer of rational thought even being aware of. And the ideation of the IDEAL is necessary to self and societal improvement. You can't make progress towards a better world if you never conceive of something better that is not already manifest in the world around you. This ideation lies at the core of human progress, and atheists don't seem to recognize that, or even give credence to the POSSIBILITY that our reaching for God in our clumsy, imperfect, beings-with-mass-and-subject-to-time is in any way legitimate.
1,000 years ago, God was OK with slavery, if you believe what people believed 1000 or 2000 years ago. Then, the act of reaching for God taught us that slavery was wrong and we sort of got things wrong. Does that mean God was wrong, or does it mean that our ideas are evolving to something closer to God, or - as the atheists would have us think - that there is no God? I think the recognition that humans must've gotten this or that wrong doesn't disprove the existence of God. But if I may paraphrase, "absence of evidence is not proof of absence." It just means that we don't know and for now, we CAN'T know.
Not knowing or "can't know" is very different from proof something doesn't exist. That denial requires a leap of faith all its own, and that most atheists are too closed-minded and, frankly, arrogant to admit.
I prefer to remain a superstitious agnostic. I was raised a Christian and have all those archetypes pounded into my head. Whether Jesus is savior or not, he represents an ideal human, a perfect human, that I carry in me and judge my and others' actions by. Live in love. Use reason to test whether what you're doing is coming from or of love. Also, be thankful that there's air to breathe, a roof over your head, food in your belly, and clothes on your back. Did you work for most of that? Sure. But being ABLE to work for that, even to be able to breathe, is a gift that I receive just by being born on this planet.
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Yeah. We saw how effective those Russkies were. One protest, here, for Trump, that got about 10 people to show up, and another across town for Clinton, that got about 10 people to show up. They talk about Russian collusion and in my mind's eye, I keep seeing guys in dirty underwear playing on their computer in Mom's basement. Sure, the Russians do this shit. Sure the Americans do this shit.
And of course, Putin wanted Trump over Clinton. Clinton would do anything to get her way, including starting a war for no good reason, or worse, if it meant she could wrap herself in the flag, and be seen as a big, strong leader. And she had no problem feeding the fires of Islamic terrorism if that meant causing problems for Russia, who live a lot closer to the Middle East. This is seen as a legitimate tactic in cold-war-hangover Deep State, engaged in by Neocon/Neoliberal types for decades.
Weaponizing the Taliban against the Soviets in the '70s and '80s, then bitching about the Taliban, years later, without admitting that we're the ones who built up and then exploited a very regressive and warlike interpretation of Islam, so we could beat the Soviets.
Much of what we don't like about the Russians the last few years is THEIR style of preserving THEIR culture against the rise of Islam and Sharia on and within their own borders. They're more brutal and ruthless than we are, maybe (although I kind of doubt it), but things also went a lot farther on and within their borders.
Imagine how we would feel if Muslims moved in, bred themselves up a majority in, say, Tennessee, and decided to declare their independence and impose Sharia Law in Nashville. Maybe we'd have a different take on Chechnya? I dunno. Just asking.
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Trump's re-defining the terms of engagement from the "We're war hawks when we're not busy being absolute pussies" of the past. I think there's a LOT of common ground. We bitch about ISIS, but we're the ones that exploited radical Islam and jihad, to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan. We showed them the way and we gave them the means (RPGs and SAMs versus Soviet helicopters).
EVERY time Westerners have sought economic or strategic gains in the Middle East, all we've accomplished is a lot of misery, death, and unintended consequences. We PUSH a bloody brand of liberation theology in the Middle East and then we bitch about radical Islam. Like Judaism before it, Islam was and is a way to unify the oppressed against the oppressor, which flows uninterrupted into religious oppression when theocracy takes over the government.
I suspect that Islam would have evolved very similarly to Christianity in the West if we hadn't reinforced its most dangerous and regressive forms. And MAYbe they'd've found a better balance between acceding to secular reality (and sprucing-up their dogma/doctrine) and societal decay. Formerly Christian - now mostly secular - Western governments have evolved to embrace the new, but haven't entirely figured out how to sustain - literally - a healthy society.
Just when we licked getting women voting, educated and in the workplace, we have found that the women doing so aren't creating a next generation to continue that. This is the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson ponders much more intelligently than I.
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@LoriDawnLynn1981 : Obama gave Trump the power to change a LOT of things by executive order, simply by bypassing the Congress on so many issues, himself! Trump dismantled much of what Obama created, using the same executive-order means as Obama. Trump didn't have to work with Congress to un-do Obama's executive orders. (And yes, the next president could un-do much of the un-doings with their own executive orders.)
But Trump also sneaked some key legislation under the radar during his 1st 2 years, in spite of RINO Republican leadership. The tax reform bill was HUGE, and is forcing big-tax-and-spend cities and states to pay the full freight for their "generosity." For many years, cities like NYC, LA, Detroit, and Chicago soaked the rich, but federal tax law allowed those rich people to turn right around and soak the out-of-state taxpayers, by getting most of it back as a federal deduction. Limiting state and local tax deductions to $10,000 slew the cash cow that corrupt Democrat politicians in state and local government have been milking for decades.
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Actually, they used FISA warrants to put a wire on a server in Trump Tower, didn't they? It's not exactly a wiretap.
You're quibbling over the difference between using a Mason jar or a juice class to listen to somebody's conversation through the wall. Snooping is snooping. Eavesdropping is eavesdropping, whether you're tapping a phone or tapping a server. That's mighty fine hair-splitting from a mighty well-spoken demagogue, right thar.
Hannity definitely beats the partisan drums, and keeps pushing the dossier as the primary basis for the FISA warrants, which isn't at all clear without more facts, and the DOJ and FBI ARE trying to keep the facts out of view. We need to hear from the FISA judges and keep a close eye on that front. FISC is notorious for rubber-stamping anything DOJ/FBI puts in front of them.
For the judges' part, they've generally taken DOJ/FBI at their word, and it sounds like DOJ/FBI have been scamming the system to go after anybody they want, including using incidental NSA materials to target drug dealers, for example. I can see a lot of law-enforcement types LOVIN' that shit, even though it violates the U.S. Constitution.
As for Mueller. It's hard to imagine a billionaire real-estate developer in the Big Apple not having skeletons in his closet. If Mueller keeps poking around long enough, and can flip or otherwise induce a witness to say bad things about Trump, he can definitely cause Trump problems.
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Modernization doesn't chew into jobs. It creates NEW jobs. But you're going to have to actually, you know, improve yourself and gain some skills if you want the new job.
Still, the old job that was lost was primarily lost because of the high cost of hiring people in Dimocrat's upside-down universe. So, you automate.
All goes back to "Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938." Nobody thought, then, that it would mean knocking the bottom rung off the career ladder. But my dad remembered...
Nobody's crying about automatic pin-setters in bowling alleys. But that was a pretty cool gig for young trouble-makers, about 70 years ago. A nice first rung on the ladder to prosperity. Dad lost his job as a pin-setter, due to the 1938 law, which made it more cost-effective for bowling alleys to install the pin-setters we all grew up with. The generation that used to set pins by hand - their first job! - are all mostly dead, now.
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I don't know the law well enough to judge, but after last night's stay at Holiday Inn Express, it occurs to me that Sullivan got caught in the middle. People on both sides of the Flynn case acted in bad faith, from his perspective. First, the prosecutors, who broke the rules over and over to GET Flynn. And for Flynn's part, he pled guilty to get the heat off, short term, but never turned state's evidence against Trump. I think it was that he didn't have any evidence to give, but he apparently kept stalling or failing to provide the 'dirt' that the prosecutors wanted.
Defendants who make a plea and then don't hold up their end of the plea agreement get pretty short shrift from the courts. What happened is pretty unprecedented, with the DOJ withdrawing all charges. Whatever the right of it is, the judge has a right to feel like he was played by prosecutors and defendant. That being said, he's acted a lot like a partisan hack in stretches.
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sergio perez: You realize that if they leave Social Security as is, that it will go bankrupt? What's YOUR proposal? MY proposal is that we do away with it, entirely. It was openly a pyramid scheme from the very beginning, propped up by a never-ending growth of new participants at the bottom of the pyramid, and plagued by adding more recipients to the list, while the population explosion that made it all seem like utopia is over, and the Baby Boomers expect MORE benefits, and they will ruthlessly extract them from a shrinking number of young people.
If Bernie Madoff does it, it's a felony. If the federal government does it, it's government doing a good deed out of love, compassion, and better-than-yours virtue.
To every concern, the answer is "No, this program will never be used for that. And we keep the money in a 'lock box,' that nobody will ever or can ever (ever ever ever ever) use for other purposes." And then they keep adding new ways for people to receive benefits without paying in.
I will grant 'em this, though. When they then do the inevitable 'lock-box raid,' they're careful to put a sincere and heartfelt IOU in the box. So we got that goin' for us. Also, they're very good about keeping it quiet, and it's good not to rile people up.
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I stand as living proof, aurora123borealis. Coming up, my math mentors were not uniformly left or right, but the lefties were more outspoken. Mathematicians have very strong reasoning skills, but our proofs and conclusions are no better than our initial assumptions. Einstein, himself stressed the fact that mathematics is always internally consistent, but the extent to which that internal consistency applies to external reality is never a sure thing.
We don't go from using the Bell Curve as a tool in analyzing empirical data to concluding there is a human being, somewhere, who stands 10,000 feet tall, even though the normal distribution says that there are.
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Sometimes religion is the main bulwark against oppression. It's a strong unifying/organizing force, like a labor union. It's good to have around in bad times. Some of the most progressive movements in human history were spearheaded by conscientious leaders of faith.
As a semi-superstitious agnostic, I think Hitchens missed a lot of the GOOD that religion brought. Without such an organizing principle, much good that has been done over the centuries by true believers that otherwise would have been left un-done. Many people who just get up each morning and make life possible and sometimes just BETTER, because their faith tells them it's the right thing to do, to take care of their bodies, because it is what God would want them to do, and so forth.
Sure, any hierarchy is subject to capture by the malevolent or simply the incompetent. Sure, believing in something that can't be seen, felt, smelt, or heard is nutty, but getting up every morning and doing the mundane stuff is also kind of nutty if there's no ultimate payoff and the whole thing is futile. Seeing yourself as part of something bigger is very beneficial to many people.
What I'm trying to say is that if there were zero religion, maybe we wouldn't all be here in the first place, with full bellies and the leisure time to poke holes in our superstitions.
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I'm not sure they started out with that in mind, but by the time they got done guaranteeing every farmer a living and every consumer cheap food, the profit margins were razor thin, and you really had to be bigger in order to comply with all the rules and still support the operation. It's the same in all industries that government "helps."
Now, after decades of meddling, the big corporate outfits have their lobbyists in Washington, DC, ensuring that those razor-thin margins will always be there for them, which squeezes all the family farmers out of the business.
I grew up in dairy country, and while I was just a townie, I hung out with a lot of farm kids, helping with the chores. Dairy farmers are NOT lazy people. I don't know how they do it, honestly. 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. You don't skip a single milking. You CAN'T skip a single milking.
But I don't get why they have to buy grain for their cows. Don't they grow their own corn, etc? That's how they did it in Pennsylvania.
I agree 100% that growing corn and such for bio-fuels is stupid. It's a scam. It makes no sense.
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@AATHEISTU : Kids also don't play outside, as much, because our over-protective society doesn't permit unsupervised play, outdoors, any more. Too afraid of child molesters and kidnappers. And the flip side is the inner city neighborhoods where it actually IS dangerous to let your kids out to run around.
I still remember my mom getting vexed with us for tearing up the house with our shenanigans and MAKING us go outside. "But Mom! There's nothing to DO!"
"There's PLENTY to do. Go clean your room, for starters. And when you're done with that, fold the laundry."
LOL!
I think we were lucky, with yard to play in (and MOW), and the small-town neighborhood that we terrorized on a daily basis, playing Army in the bushes or pick-up football in the street... Our folks were more worried about us running afoul of the nice neighbor lady (Your kids are shooting the birds in my back yard with BB guns!) than ANYthing some poor bastard trying to molest us might do. Heck, we'd probably knock the stuffing out of any real molesters in the neighborhood. Nothing more dangerous in this world than a gang of rambunctious 12-13-year-olds!
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@Bluesdawg : I knew a vegetarian who ran track for a high-mountain college. She really struggled, until she SWITCHED TO RED MEAT. Suddenly, her wind improved and her body's ability to metabolize oxygen improved, generally, and she started winning races.
Of course, red meat ain't what it used to be, before WW II. Since that time, they've been injecting antibiotics into healthy cattle and all kinds of other nasty stuff. Still, if you cook it well-done, you fight SOME of the problems with store-bought meat. Personally, I'd prefer to shoot a deer and an elk every year, for a couple hundred pounds of free range red meat.
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@BobbyCarr821 If for no other reason than to know what the other side's thinking is and what their rhetoric is. It's not easy, if you have a sense of history and the real march of human progress, which has always come in spite of what Juan and virtually all of MSM are pumping out, these days. But at least Juan's polite, listens, and takes his turn. Even when he says the most outrageous things, the other 4 of the 5 need to hear him out. If they feel the need to rebut, then they need to wait 'til he's done.
I always liked hearing opposing viewpoints, but all the legacy networks, including FOX, will just talk right over whoever's saying what their network pundits disagree with. Jesse Waters is the worst. Gutfeld couldn't help himself, today, either. When you talk over people, you hurt your own cause, at least in my eyes.
GENERALLY, libertarians/conservatives DO know what the statist left is thinking and saying. But for those of us (like me) who refuse to patronize the likes of MSNBC, Juan Williams might be the only establishment leftie we hear from, directly, most of the time. Of course, we end up hearing what they're saying on CONSERVATIVE channels, when they devote entire videos to critiquing what Nancy, Chuck, and other Democrats are saying.
That being said, there've been numerous times when I knew EXACTLY what DNC propaganda Juan was going to spew and I confess I've fast-forwarded through his bit.
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I'm actually BETTER off, because of the job I have, my seniority, and the benefits that accrue. But although things look pretty good for me, financially, I can see the federal government snatching it all away with hyper-inflation and an end to dollar dominance, due to fiscal malfeasance by the U.S. Congress, which has been buying votes with other people's money (our grandchildren's money, to be precise) for decades.
The only reason Republicans are any threat at all to Democrat hopes is they BECAME the Democrats in the 1990s, to remain relevant. "If you can't beat 'em, joing 'em," says Newt Gingrich. The Republicans became just as big of spenders as the Democrats. Meanwhile, the Democrats became even bigger war pigs than the neocons in the Republican Party.
Until the people learn to vote against candidates who push Free Stuff from government coffers (their neighbors' pockets), there will be no return to solvency. Eventually, economic reality will take over, and they'll still make their promises, but they won't be able to deliver on any of them, making 21st-Century USA look like late-stage USSR.
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Russia's trying to maintain a naval presence with ports with quick access to the Mediterranean.
Yes, they have the Black Sea, but they undoubtedly worry about access through the Bosporous Strait.
I think if you look at it from the Russian perspective, Islam remains a major thorn in their side, with access to (and from) the Black Sea being very dependent on the whims of Turkey, which to the Russians has got to be an unsettling strategic reality.
When we speak of Benghazi and the nonsense that went on, there, our meddling put an end to Russian use of the port, there. Or at the least, destabilized any deals he had with Gadhafi, by overthrowing the dictator who made the deal with Russia, who "bought" access to Benghazi in much the same way they "bought" access to Tartus in Syria: by forgiving debts incurred by those countries to the former Soviet Union.
I think Russian perfidy and meddling needs to be seen against the backdrop of our own meddling perfidy in the region. What it reminds me of is how European empire builders aced the Kaiser out of the kinds of colonialism England, France, Spain and Portugal had practiced for centuries.
This sheds a different light on England and France joining a coalition to mess with the Russians in Syria. It's nothing new. It's just a continuation of acing-out the competition.
And while I hate what they did in Crimea and Ukraine, against the backdrop of serious security concerns for the Russian Bear, their hereditary quest for warmwater ports, and the insidious rise of Islam outside and within Russian borders, it starts taking on more of a "We're fighting for our country and our way of life and we're Russians, so cheating is a part of winning."
I bet there is a lot we have in common with the Russians, when it comes to fighting the larger culture war against Islam. They could be a nice counterbalance to China, as well. And China's a MUCH more significant threat from economic warfare that we INVITE by running up our national debt the way we have, to keep the entitlement and war-machine gravy trains running on time, here.
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Last I checked the pot shops are still open and doing business in Colorado.
Then again, Sanctuary-City-and-Staters remain in office.
Interesting times we live in. The midterms could go either way. Dems hoping for the traditional die-back for the president's party in the first midterm after election. 30-some Republicans retiring from congress to 17 Democrats. Ominous signs for the Trump platform.
And yet, Trump, himself, is at an amazing 50% approval, now.
As for the retiring Republicans, it doesn't look like they're retiring because of a tide of anti-Trump or anti-Republican sentiment. It's a mixed bag. Some octogenarians, some Rinos, but also some solid conservatives, like Hensarling. One or two of the Rinos face tough challenges from more Trumpster-type upstarts in their own party primaries.
The toughest Democrat challengers are triangulating like Bill Clinton, taking centrist positions on many issues. Those are the contests that will be interesting to watch in November.
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Democrats complain about the rich people, and then fawn all over them for the high-dollar donations. The 2 leading Democrats in Congress, Senator Schumer and Rep Pelosi are in the bankers' hip pockets and have been for a very long time. Pelosi's husband works for VISA and - surprise, surprise - they both bought thousands of VISA shares, with their first IPO, while Pelosi stalled the legislation that would end the "3% fee for every swipe" that went into VISA and MasterCard's pockets, until VISA's IPO was already out there. If that legislation had passed before VISA's IPO, then the Pelosi family couldn't have made 100s of thousands of dollars LITERALLY overnight, as the IPO at $40 went to $90 in 2 days. They bought about 5,000 shares at $40 and another 15,000 shares at $60.
(5000)(50) + (15000)(30) = 250,000 + 450,000 = 700,000 dollars in 2 days. If it were money in a shoebox, it'd be bribery. But when it's insider information and manipulation of the legislature to capitalize, it's perfectly legal. CORRUPT.
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The outrageous things Trump does NOT exhort his followers to be uncivil, to harass, intimidate and bully others. Don't let the Democrat double standard leak into your commentary, blondie. He's not saying the other side is so bad we must shout them down, silence them, and assassinate their character with false allegations.
The left are at their wits' end. The populist wave they hoped to ride all the way to socialist utopia has hit a snag. The average folks don't want that, and because the Democrats are desperate, they're showing their teeth, like cornered rats. The curtain's parted into their thought process and the actual individual-destroying roots of their hare-brained leftist ideology that promises all and waits for somebody else to deliver, while at the same time making it tougher and tougher for anybody TO deliver. Prosperity doesn't come from a government check. Prosperity comes from a PAY check, for producing something of actual value in this world.
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Democrats will flail around and then return to their same old "Vote for us and we'll give you more than you put in." Probably will be over health care, which needs fixing, but nobody's asking "How about LESS government intervention?" which is the right question. Instead, they'll just argue over who gets to run everything.
RFK may implement some decent reforms, but he's not going to want to see HHS down-sized, not once he's the secretary. He will, instead, see all the "great things" the government can do, if it's run by smart and moral people like himself, which is what everyone always tells themselves as they try on Sauron's One Ring for size.
Trump will most likely be all-in when it comes to military spending, and he won't want to make the tough choices on entitlements that need to be made. Superficial changes, to great fanfare, but leaving the same corrupt and prone-to-corruption institutional framework intact.
But we'll see how it plays out. Trump talks like he wants to MAKE changes happen, but when in office, he's been more "We need to get out of the American people's way and LET changes happen." Tax breaks in depressed urban areas. More transparency and less regulation.
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Since when is Democrats gaming the system considered to be news?
In a way, I like that the Congress is trying to limit the president's powers. I didn't much like the abuse of power by his last 5 predecessors. War Powers act is the thin edge of the wedge of WAR. A representative republic should be much less eager to prosecute wars (in everything but name) abroad.
I wish the Dems had been more concerned about presidential abuse of power when it was neolibs and neocons in office. Expand the power and authority of the state at home? Topple sovereign governments abroad? That's all well and good. But try to tap the brakes on government expansion at home OR abroad, and you're Satan, incarnate, to these idiots who insist they don't believe in God. To them, only Satan exists! LOL! All hail the New Religion!
Recall, the Dems, trying to give Obama MORE power passed the "Nuclear Option" to facilitate confirmation of appointments. This is why TRUMP has appointed 184 federal judges and gotten them confirmed! Now, as the opposition party, they're trying to take away the powers from Trump that they wanted Obama to have. This might be the only way to limit abuse of power by the president in the long run. They THINK they're tying TRUMP's hands, but in all likelihood, they're just making it so that the next Democrat president won't be able to bypass the legislature with endless, damaging executive orders. Most of the "abuse" of which they accuse Trump is his rescinding Obama's executive orders! If it's abuse of power for Trump to rescind those orders, then it was abuse of power to enact them in the first place!
Recall, Obama blurred the line between opinion and news. What happened? The mask fell off the Fake News legacy media. The restraints were removed and they showed their true face, exulting in the power of propaganda, only to find that the people no longer trust them! People like Brian Stelter are absolutely shameless in their propagandizing.
The DNC has had most of the government agencies in its hip pocket for years, most of the courts, most of the (legacy) media, all of the public schools. And it just... doesn't.... matter! The more they use force and abuse the rules for short-term gain, the more they lose and the more they are going to lose.
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@goodshipkaraboudjan : We do a lot of stupid stuff, and we don't go to our doctor unless we're really really sick. We ought to do more to boost General Practitioners, and go to them for regular checkups, but we eat too much, we party too much, and a lot of us die from "Hold my beer" syndrome and selfies.
We should do more preventive care, and incentivize it, but we don't. We just tippy-toe around our health care, and hope somebody else will pay for the million-dollar bill for the fancy life-saving (or genital-mutilating) surgery. Everyone fears a major illness and wants somebody else to pay for it. That's why I'm shocked the Democrats are committing political suicide, with programs that even the middle class hope to get more out of than they put in, which of course will never happen in a million years.
Also, due to red tape, more and more of the money goes to paper-pushers and form-filling-out and less and less of it goes to doctors. You have a $120,000 bill from the hospital, and the surgeon who saved your life gets about $600 of it.
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Food choices are largely under the control of consumers. I'd like to see a massive shift towards locally grown and permaculture. I'd trust the guy I can go visit a lot more than some farmer from another country.
But I don't want it sent down from on high as a mandate from Congress. That's the thing about a free market. It's what we make of it, with our individual choices, that decides the day.
Something I WOULD support from government is Cities and Towns, for max sustainability and min carbon footprint, to encourage import replacement. LOCAL tax breaks for LOCAL growers. And public awareness. MOST people making a decent living would probably choose to pay double or triple for their produce - the cheapest aisle in the supermarket! - to have it done in planet-and-people-friendly fashion.
Special deals on produce that's close to expiration date, for poorer people, for pennies on the dollar...
There are a lot of things we can do, locally, to make the feds irrelevant, but we always look to them to fix everything and then bitch because of the way things turned out. I think smart people like you could recruit a LOT of people to doing things, differently, of their own free will, and the marketplace would respond in more nuanced ways than any bunch of technocrats trying to define the physics of a frisbee, when any fool just uses their eyes, hands and legs to go get the damn thing.
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The issue isn't about whether we should or shouldn't keep troops in Afghanistan. That question was already settled. What these swamp creatures are squirming and blame-shifting about is THEIR failure to evacuate civilian and military personnel and assets before pulling out. They blew it and their pointing their fingers are Biden doesn't change the fact that they are all a bunch of political hacks, from the president on down.
I just see a bunch of turds who think pointing to stinkier turds is going to make them smell like roses. Nope. All turds, all spiraling down the drain. It wouldn't be a big deal, were it not for all the harm they cause to us, our allies, and even those countries we don't much care for.
We should almost NEVER resort to violence. It should suffice to simply refuse to do business with despots and criminal oligarchies who don't respect their neighbors or their own people. But at this point, I think our OWN government looks, sounds and talks like a corrupt criminal oligarchy on virtually every major problem/issue/crisis, most of which are self-inflicted, and turned invariably to the advantage of the corrupt and incompetent idiots who created the issues and crises in the first place.
'Bout fed up, and darn near certain Watters will miss the point, yet again, as controlled/half-informed "opposition."
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Colleges aren't going away. People will still want more or less traditional spoon-feedings in an environment they were conditioned to believe is a learning experience. But more and more people are going to be self-taught.
The only thing, other than offering live spoon-feedings that big institutions will have over self-teaching is they'll have the big-dollar equipment, like electron microscopes and high-dollar polarizing microscropes, NMR Spec, etc.
But arts, humanities, language, 99% of science, history and math? You don't need to sit in a classroom for that, any more. And with prices skyrocketing, more and more people will turn away from the big institutions, until they get their bureaucracies and regulations under control.
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It's "liberal bias," but liberalism as it is known, today, is not very liberal at all. It's all for big government, endless wars abroad, open borders, etc. More Democrat National Committee and Deep State bias.
And FOX locks arms with the others on the big stuff and stays silent on the corporate stuff. They all get their money from Big Pharma and other mega-corporations, and sweep any embarrassing stories under the carpet, if not on their own, then all it takes is a few phone calls from monied interests and they're in lock-step with the rest.
Support the up-and-comers. You WANT them to be biased and up front about their biases. They're ALL biased, depending on the issue. So sample left, right and middle and draw your own conclusions.
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I'm ambivalent about Taiwan. I love Taiwan, but I don't see much difference between our selling them F-16s and the Chinese selling fighters to (or placing missiles in) Cuba. I get that freedom is better than not, and that we have some moral high ground wrt Taiwan on account of that. But it's still a small island off the coast of a superpower. Aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which according to many almost brought open warfare between the US and USSR, Cuba hasn't been near the thorn in our side that Taiwan has been in China's.
The middle path appears to be pretty close to what Trump's doing. Aggressive rhetoric, but careful, considered, and generally restrained in our ACTIONS, because in the end, EVERYbody with half a brain knows Trump wants to MAKE A DEAL that's as good for the USA as possible. Until I really see otherwise, I'm pretty convinced that Pompeo is there to create a false opening position, so that Trump can get the deal (or a deal) that he wants (or we can live with) by appearing to make a major concession, or backing WAY off what he initially was asking for or claiming or threatening.
This is something Asians understand especially well. The horse they're selling is a Kentucky Derby, but the horse Trump sees has a sway back and spavined hooves. Both sides are lying, and circling around The Deal. Both sides know where the fair deal is, before they even start, but if you don't start out asking for more than you need, you have no concessions to offer, or you come out behind when you compromise from your bottom-dollar offer.
That's something other countries don't understand about America and most Americans don't understand about the rest of the world. America's in a hurry, so they don't want to waste time dickerin'. Give me your rock-bottom price, and I'll compare your price against all the other vendors' prices, and decide whether I'll buy from you at that price, or not. No negotiating. If I don't like your deal I go somewhere else. We needn't strike a bargain, because you're never the only vendor in town (unless you're Facebook or Google).
I could definitely see the fighter sales as a bargaining chip to induce the Chinese to back off in South America.
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The phone call was pretty much perfect. Juan sees it as a shakedown, because it suits his narrative. To an objective person, it sounds like a pretty typical phone call between presidents of 2 countries. So, just because Biden happens to get caught up in this, it's election meddling? No. The Obama administration installed a corrupt government in Ukraine, shamelessly, and Democrats have been plundering Ukraine, shamelessly, and our anti-corruption president called THEIR anti-corruption president, to talk about cooperating in rooting out corruption. The only reason this is cast the way it is by Dems and their pals, the media, is because they're terrified that their corruption will be exposed.
They spent 2 1/2 years, 35 million dollars, and saturated the media with smears that turned out to be a HUGE NOTHING BURGER. Now, the people want answers, Trump is seeking answers, and Dems and media cronies are doing everything they can to cover up. And it's too late.
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Teacher's unions want merit pay. They just don't know how to implement it. Who judges what good teaching is? It's very subjective and NONE of them want a 3rd party observing the moves they make or the things they say in the classroom. That's why I LOVED the cognitive dissonance biting them in the behinds, when they went full-on ZOOM for their courses, and parents got to see what actually was going on.
I don't want "merit pay." I want there to be a free, fair and open competition for education dollars. Charter schools, private schools, and all the rest, should get the SAME amount of subsidy from the taxpayer that the current monopoly gets. THAT will see the best money going to the best teachers, with head hunters actively recruiting the best teachers, and the WORST teachers remaining in the "traditional" schools, until those schools either improve or go out of business.
Eventually, I'd like federal $$$ to be taken out of education. Let the locals handle it. Harlem had better schools BEFORE the Department of Education was created, and it's been downhill ever since.
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Defeating RINOs in a sort of purge, was part of why Dems achieved a (small) 'blue wave' in 2018. A lot of RINOs lost support from core conservative Republican base, and lost. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and a large number of multiple-term Republicans (and leadership's awarded by seniority) were definitely part of the swamp, and Republican-voter support was lukewarm, at best. There are "establishment-approved" positions that are regressive AND bi-partisan by the long-term denizens of the swamp. They learn what to buck, what not to buck, and how to present themselves as the "alternative" to the Dem policies, without making waves and without being any kind of real 'alternative.' Support the welfare state, redistribution-of-wealth schemes of every sort, and surveillance state, and you are golden, as far as the establishment is concerned.
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Santos L Halper : The way they went after everybody Trump-related and let every Democrat skate (so far), and turned the power of the U.S. Government against Trump minions, one has to wonder if they're singing, now, or composing, as Dershowitz likes to say. If a prosecutor has it in for you, he can bury you, pretty easily. I wonder what Rosenstein's decision NOT to prosecute Manaforte at the time says about this situation.
Some of the charges (and convictions) sound like Manaforte was one of those guys who tapped into the free-for-all that was post-Soviet Russia. Russia was pretty much taken over by corruption, with apparatchiki under the Soviets morphing magically into Giants of Industry, and making a lot of people a lot of money by basically raiding the Soviet Union's carcass, while a lot of people were suffering. The only name I knew of in this regard, specifically, was that Browder character. But Putin definitely has a dim view of many of the people doing business in Russia after the wall came down. Guys made huge money and dodged taxes in the chaos, I think.
That's why Putin is very popular in Russia. They see him as the guy who more or less restored order after a bunch of fat cats picked what little meat there was left on the USSR's bones.
But we'll have to see what comes of Cohen's situation. Those are pretty juicy accusations. I guess we'll see how it all ties in.
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The facts just keep trickling in. Criminal referrals is a whole new level of escalation. Meanwhile the investigation that's gotten most of the attention remains a nothing-burger.
More and more it's looking like "He who smell't it dealt it," and there was partisan overzealousness in FBI and DOJ, and probably a few insiders at or near the top intelligence and national security. I'm not sure how close this comes to Obama. More like Iran-Contra, where a cadre of insiders believed in something so strongly that they put the law in the back seat and let their feelings drive the bus.
I think there's a history of mutual back-scratching and winks and nods by individuals across the upper echelons that created a culture of "We work these levers as we please or as our friends wish." Situations such as "Here's these drugs, and there's our buddies trying to rebel against a bad guy, but they don't have enough arms to win. So we'll use the proceeds from seized assets to buy weapons, because WIN."
Reaganers did it in the '80s. Obamers did it, later. It's scarier in the present day, because of the powers taken by Bush II in the Patriot Act, but which weren't used to the extent that they were used by is successor's administration. Bush COULD, but he mostly DIDN'T. Can't say the same for Obama.
But who's to say what Bush II actually got away with, given the low evidence bar in the FISA courts. Prosecutors didn't apply the same standards for exculpatory evidence. Just present all the clues (including hints and rumors) that make somebody look bad, as if it has as much weight as real evidence, and withhold anything that exculpates (clears) the target of any wrongdoing.
But you know that the FISA setup is seriously flawed, whether any of these Obama clowns go to jail or not. Any power created for gov't use will be abused, eventually. Just a matter of time until somebody corrupt comes along and grabs those levers.
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@katherinenichols4831 : You should learn more history and especially the Enlightenment Period and our grand experiment in self-government. Your postmodernist thinking is pre-modern, which is to say, will take us back to serfdom, which we fought so hard to put behind us. It all starts with "Government is our savior." Until you start understanding some Adam Smith, you will never understand why so many SMART people despise your government-centric perspective. Easy answers. And you think you're smart, because you accept your spoon-feedings in public ed. and legacy media.
It's about power and control. When government is big, people are small. Our country is the first to explicitly step away from patronizing government, and all you Democrats want to do is drag us back into the days when the elites decided what you could do, what you could own, and what you can say. It's hopeless trying to explain this to someone who's been brain-washed by establishment elites to advocate for what only the elites really want.
Real prosperity and personal autonomy comes from the ground up, not from the government down.
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FOX News is going downhill, pretending to be conservative/libertarian, but partaking of more and more leftist/statist narratives and shutting off the comments when they DO. FOX is the only legacy network I even SLIGHTLY patronize, by watching SOME of their stuff on YouTube. Now that they're shutting down comments on most of their controversial content, I'm about done with FOX, entirely. They're ALL pushing me away from ALL legacy networks.
I don't mind a network being partisan, if they're up front about it. I can balance conflicting takes against one another and make my OWN decisions. But now I'm just starting to think that ALL of the legacy networks - by which I mean commercial-interrupted programming - are a waste of time. They're incapable of open-format and NUANCED conversations just from their business model. I'd rather support channels, DIRECTLY, from Jimmy Dore (far left, but sane about SOME things, like foreign policy and corruption) to OAN (hopelessly partisan Republican, but they'll talk about things the rest won't). And guys like Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, Anthony Brian Logan, and a long list of independents. Tarl Warwick (Styxhexenhammer666), Towlie, ... The list keeps growing and shifting, as I find better sources, who check out when I fact-check them.
All I can be sure of from the LEGACY networks is that they don't put ANYTHING on air that isn't approved by their corporate sponsors or major stockholders. You might be surprised at how much clout the Saudis have in our supposedly "free press." Just look at who owns big chunks of their stock, and you KNOW you won't hear anything bad about THEM.
I'll show myself out.
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You just gotta understand that the networks are biased and their shrinking audiences are biased in the same way. So when they're critical of Trump, they're just reporting truth. When they're critical of Biden, that's just being mean.
I remember polling in the '70s and '80s being used to promote unilateral disarmament. Just because people don't like nuclear weapons doesn't mean they want us to disarm while nations who don't respect the rights of their own people do NOT disarm.
Now, before MY bias starts showing, our CIA and other intel agencies of that period made the same mistakes then that they make now. They VASTLY overestimated Soviet military capabilities, vastly underestimated the toxicity of the creeping socialism and de-construction of liberty taking place right under our noses. And our foreign-policy "leadership" propped up bloody dictators all over the world, if that meant gaining a proxy hostile to the Soviets.
The USA is founded on principles of anti-colonialism, but how long was it before Perry steamed into Tokyo Harbor and forced the opening of Japan at gunpoint?
Anyhoo, I just wish we would return to our core values and principles in inalienable natural rights of humans and limited government. But the people are too easily swayed by "Look! Free Stuff!" The Republicans USED to oppose the unending growth of government scope and power, but they saw the Democrats, who never hesitated to buy a vote, becoming the dominant party in the USA and so they became just as socialist as the Dems. And the Dems, seeing how a nice foreign war can boost popularity at home, they became just as hawkish as any Republican.
Today, everyone looks back wistfully on "bipartisanship" of the "old days." But to ME, "bipartisanship" means that both major parties agree to spend more money than we have to buy votes and get us embroiled in foreign wars to unify the people behind a corrupt and feckless establishment that just wants THEIR gravy train to keep running.
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It's getting harder and harder to shut out ANYthing, INCLUDING THE TRUTH! Of course, there's a lot more NOISE, now, too, but transparency is becoming harder and harder to AVOID, and most folks turns out are pretty OK with that.
But bad guys yearn for the days when you just had to kill a guy and muzzle the newspaper that you've got in your hip pocket, or make 2 phone calls and trust that the major news networks would skirt key issues for you.
Now we're ALL reporters, in a very real sense. And we're not even all that sophisticated in the new possibilities. And if the majors get muzzled, that's a SCOOP and Internet fame for somebody ELSE.
But you can sure bet that FB and YouTube are doing everything they can to keep the NEXT Trump from getting the word out. I just hope we manage to keep the government out of it. There's lots of pressure from more than one direction to limit free speech, because the last few years have been so LOUD. But the reason it's loud is because people are getting a voice, and that voice is quite a bit different (more raucous and irreverent) than the carefully spoon-fed drivel we've been consuming since the invention of TV.
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Meh. It depends. I imagine there are a number of lines of enquiry that Horowitz and his crew are all set up to pursue, that would be foundational to anything Huber could do. The new tidbit is that Huber was instead investigating Hillary. It all depends, now, on what Barr means by "fruition." Are they wrapping things up and it's a no-bill? Or are we about to start hearing about grand juries?
It's become fashionable, lately, to simply list a bunch of career-destroying evidence, and then go on to say you won't be prosecuting any of it. That's the standard being set by Comey and Mueller. As big a thorn as Comey's been in Trump's side, he at the same time single-handedly destroyed Hillary's chances of being elected. Or at least that's how he's portrayed. You might argue that, as with the FISA courts, he was just rushing to the microphone to get ahead of truth-bombs about to fall, anyway.
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In fairness to gullible, biased media, they HAD their confirming sources leaking these stories from inside the government! Starting at the very top, with DCI John Brennan and DNI Jim Clapper and others. I bet CNN and the rest will be able to duck responsibility. What this shows for sure is that the higher-ups - the career bureaucrats - are leakers and liars, who will happily sabotage the presidency to cover their own petty, venal, and sometimes high crimes. This was what I sort of suspected, all along, although I wasn't sure. Just as with Richard Nixon, it was the petty and venal stuff that they committed SERIOUS crimes to cover up that took things to the level of high crimes, including sedition.
Now that there's no longer the "obstruction of justice" club hanging over his head, I wonder if we'll now see Trump's administration take off the gloves and go after these clowns. REALLY go after them. Until Mueller finally closed-up shop, any direct action Trump took against the Clinton Crime Family and Obummer Gang would look like he was trying to cripple the investigation into HIM. Now the investigation is over, and he's free to act. If he'd confronted the Deep State types, prior to this, it would've been portrayed as his trying to deflect and obstruct. Interesting times, indeed.
But maybe I'm jumping the gun. Let's see what's actually in the report.
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It diverted attention from pay-to-play and Russian bribes to Hillary and others. It generated the Mueller investigation which was specifically told to stay away from anything non-Trump. I think they played it, masterfully, but it's going to blow up in their faces. By keeping Mueller strictly confined to all questions Trump, they left the field open to Trump's people to do all the looking at what THEY did. If Mueller team had had broader scope, they could've done more to sweep crimes of the Democrats under the carpet. But because Mueller studiously avoided any investigation of Democrats, they left the field open for the Trump team. If Mueller HAD investigated the Democrats, they could claim "That's been investigated and there's nothing there."
In hindsight, that's what they should've done, where they could fine-tune where and how the investigation went. But they overplayed their hand, controlling what got looked at by their guys in the first place, in their rush to get Trump and only Trump. They had it all sewn up, and were PLEASED by the scope memo Rosenstein handed to Mueller. But that's hindsight. At the time, I bet they didn't see how this kept Mueller team's mitts off of a lot of leads that led in the Democrat direction, which Weissman could have buried while pretending to investigate.
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They all do it. It's an artifact of live television. So often they HAVE to step in, because the interviewee has never been on camera, live, before. The professional newsie is far more sophisticated in that one way, and they start thinking they're more sophisticated than everyone about everything. There are very few things that are important to broadcast live. All other things should be long format and tastefully edited.
The one thing I wish they took power over by technical means is like they do on some of those sports shows, where 3 guys get their shot at a topic, and if anybody tries to jump in, his mic is muted. These t.v. people should totally control THAT. When they let people rant at the same time or shout one another down, they're being very unprofessional. Also when they just cut people off when they don't like their answers.
There used to be a tradition of a "talking stick," and the stick would be passed around the group, and everybody but the person with the talking stick must absolutely STFU. You get a lot more good information out of a group with that one rule. Only one person speaks and all persons speak.
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The most glaring shortage I see is in the trades. People who make and fix Real, Tangible Things, like houses and appliances.
The system has done everything possible to discourage skilled American work and workers. But they persist. Every time I move to a new town, I figure out who's reliable and competent, and I cultivate them and their knowledge and connections to other good tradespeople. They're typically the first and longest-lasting friends I make. I'm an academic, but if you come to one of my barbecues, it's wall-to-wall what my colleagues call "rednecks." There are some white collars in there, like the guy who handles my IT needs. He's not a liberal-arts-degree type, though. Just a guy who's been building computers for people since the 1980s and knows how to build it, populate it with software, etc. Because he works for ME and not my institution, he actually knows what's on it, what my needs are, and what they're likely to be. Weird how that works. To IT at work, I'm a pain in the neck. To my guy, I'm easy to work with...
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@jgroovy1973 : They used the thinnest of evidence to launch a huge investigation of Trump. They weren't serious about counter-intel from the Russians, in general. About the only thing they turned up of substance was that Manaforte was a tax cheat, which they had known (but I doubt Trump did) for many years, although they waiting to go after him until it could hurt Trump, which of course it didn't.
The irony of all this is that if the Russians really were trying to meddle in U.S. affairs, their biggest success was through collusion with Democrats to set the Trump administration on fire with misinformation. As it turns out, most of the stuff came from rumor mills in Ukraine, who sourced some of THEIR dirt back in the USA, essentially laundering lies that Ohr and Fusion GPS made up. Then they leaked to more than one outlet at the same time, and they used each other to confirm the information. Then the government used the media reports as more evidence!
LOL! This is how you get Grievance-Studies articles published! Just quote all the liars who passed muster before you and draw conclusions that square with the White Privilege and Patriarchy narratives, and you can be published in the highest academic circles! Sokal proved it in the '90s and Pluckrose, Bogossian and Lindsey proved it again much more recently. All it takes is one piece of garbage to be mistaken for scholarship/true-evidence, and they can build MOUNTAINS of supposition into reasonable-sounding allegations.
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I think each of the major networks definitely have their taboo subjects, to avoid hurting the interests of corporate ownership and major shareholders. But I think they pretty much let their people do their thing as they see fit, more or less. I think when you watch Don Lemon shilling for the left, it's not because he's being told to do so. He's really that closed-minded. You lefties can say the same about Sean Hannity.
Personally, I find that by checking both FOX and any of the others, that FOX (especially Hannity) will take video from those others and deconstruct what's being said, and pick it apart. I've found that going and checking the CNN or whatever doesn't really add anything of substance, so I kind of get CNN and FOX by watching some FOX. Yeah, sometimes FOX reaches, to make a point. And any time you appeal to the authority of God, you're no longer debating. Then you're proclaiming a faith-based idea, which can not be rationally supported or disputed. You can BE Christian, but you must use facts and good logic to support your claims.
I see fewer retractions (and firings for flat-out makin' shit up) in the non-FOX networks. It's generally a better product than the other networks, but that's not saying a whole lot. I don't rely on FOX as much as my own researches.
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Jim Comey and others in government and the Democrat Party Apparat mounted a palace coup against a sitting president. Government officials committed blatant acts of sedition, crippling the presidency from within. Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Wray, Sztrok, (Lisa) Page, ... It's a real ensemble cast, all of whom are still walking around, free, and even being invited on cable t.v. to repeat the same lies and even make up new ones. No justice? No trust, ever again.
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He has a heavy, ponderous way of expressing himself that lends a false credibility. He's one of the main reasons that so many news outlets still feel they can look their viewers in the eye and say "Russia" at the same time. The standard set by Woodward and Bernstein for confirmation was met and exceeded, when you consider so many highly placed officials - with Brennan topping the list - saying the most damaging things. They probably had 18 or 20 Deep Throats all seeming to say the same thing. And it wasn't men in trench coats meeting in a downtown D.C. parking garage. It was 5 or 6 of them at a cocktail party, making wisecracks and exchanging meaningful glances to say without saying, and feed the "Yeah, EVERYbody's in on this, and our Top People say it's gonna go THIS way."
It wasn't a matter of fact. It was a matter of culture. And Brennan can spin this for quite awhile, yet, just by dropping dark hints and veiled threats, without being arrested. If he can say those things and continue walking free without being seen by ALL as either a malicious liar, or the most incompetent DCI in memory.
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@Kymerican : I think it's "Tennant." I've forgotten most of what I remember reading about Tennant. But yes. It does appear that Brennan was the ultimate coat-tail rider. He hitched his wagon to Tennant and earned rapid promotion. He has a ponderous habit of speech and he pushes things as far as he absolutely can, at every opportunity. Good for a climber. But if this Kiriakou fellow is correct (His animus towards Brennan must be understood.), then Brennan wasn't too swift when it came to intelligence. Obvious political hack appointment. I can see that, given how he says absolutely the most damaging thing he possibly can, and people believe he knows something.
Even after Mueller says "No joy" on indictments, Brennan can keep on his same line, claiming to know something nobody else knows that he can't TELL you, but he KNOWS. He's been playing that card ever since Trump was elected. I don't see anything acting to stop him, so far, but I think he was discredited as DCI long before Trump came along, and had all the telltales of a political-hack promotion-and-appointment.
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The fact is that Republicans DID go after Bill Clinton for fooling around. And while Bill probably SHOULD have been prosecuted for sexual assault and his wife for character assassination of his victims, it wasn't an appropriate use of a special counsel appointed to investigate WhiteWater.
I like the idea of an independent counsel, who doesn't work for the guys he's investigating, but clearly they go on fishing expeditions.
New Rule: When you don't find grounds to go after a guy for the main thing (WhiteWatergate, Russiacollusiongate) you're investigating, you should close up shop.
It is well known in legal circles that if you target the man, you can always turn up a crime, since all it takes is one person's testimony contradicting your own to put you up on lying-to-investigators charges, as several experts have asserted with regard to the Mike Flynn case, and with regard to whether or not Trump should agree to a sit-down with Mueller (He shouldn't.).
That's basically all that got Clinton on: lying to prosecutors. And it wasn't even criminal, but it WAS impeachable, because there's a lower burden of proof for impeachment. I think Bill Clinton's a turd for treating women the way he does, starting with his wife. But if there's one thing a guy gets a pass for is not discussing matters of the penis and fidelity in public. Gentlemen never tell.
Getting him for lying about a consensual relationship is like getting Capone for tax evasion. But there's a very big difference. There are no laws against cheating on your wife. He probably SHOULD have been prosecuted for sexual assault, and covering-up for it or those who covered up for it should've been hauled in and charged.
But that doesn't mean getting him on the blue dress was a mis-use of prosecutorial powers, in my humble opinion. If they couldn't get him on WhiteWater, the prosecutor should've shut the whole thing down. He's been granted special powers for a very specific and narrow purpose.
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And back in the late '50s and early '60s, John F. Kennedy was a TOTAL dog. Remember this when people talk about Establishment Press. It's actually been going on since power-hungry individuals cooked up the whole Fairness Doctrine, and invented the myth of objectivity in reporting, which never has existed, EVER, in the history of spoken language.
But ALL D.C. reporters KNEW about Marilyn Monroe (and others). But major news has ALWAYS been hand-in-glove with government. We've NEVER gotten the full story. Just because it's become blatantly OBVIOUS with the proliferation of media and citizen reporters doesn't mean it hasn't been this way since NBC, CBS and ABC first opened a freakin' RADIO station...
There IS a journalistic ethos of reporting facts, honestly, however they cut. But nobody's perfect, and the market really needs to understand the axe-grinding has never ever ceased, so you listen to multiple sources and trust the ones who are more often correct, by your personal lights, as best you may.
But as consumers of news, we're idiots to uncritically accept ANY news source to be providing the truth, but more importantly, the truths that we most need to know in order to understand our world. It's what editors choose NOT to tell us that is most critical.
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I think in social media we're seeing people expressing themselves who, a generation ago, probably couldn't read or write, much, at all. And here you see them in all their glory, saying stupid shit, getting shot down, hearing other viewpoints. It's messy and it's beautiful. And we're all learning.
We all have our trigger buttons, and somebody out there who is eager to push them. Does it go off the rails, sometimes? Heck, discussing the Red Sox at the local oasis is something that's brought SOME to blows for generations.
What I see are a lot of people kind of working things out for themselves. And when you're in learning mode, you're in child mode. Again, it's messy, as children are messy. But it seems to me like people are growing up. People are developing thick skins against trolls. Slowly but surely. We're learning to tune out some of the noise.
Yeah, there are some who're going to take social media down a rabbit hole, like the 60-foot nephelem they see in satellite photos, or Sasquatch in yet another jiggly, blurry video. This kind of shit's been going on since there've been people.
But I think the overall tide is rising. If I can argue with a Swede about Nanny government, and we both keep it civil (if crude and irreverent), that's probably a good thing. Just for a Swede to know that there are people out there who think differently, when maybe everybody around him in Sweden is afraid to hold certain opinions, for fear of cultural marxists destroying his social life and his standing in the larger (very conformist) community.
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@dennisvance4004 : It's not easy, and you can't always succeed at it. But on THOSE matters, you need to maintain a healthy skepticism, which is very hard for a lot of people to do. It's easier just to believe the "facts" presented by those whose narratives align with your own.
I don't watch cable at ALL, but I pick up a lot of it, second-hand from other sources. FOX more often gets the facts and the interpretation of facts correct than the other big outfits. But yeah. It's still carefully selecting its stories and glossing over inconvenient facts that you can only get by casting a wider net, entering your OWN queries into the searches you perform, and not settling for "the feed" that YouTube wants you to be fed, based on what it THINKS you might like, based on your previous viewing habits.
It's really easy to get trapped in a reality of your own making, with little or no connection to objective reality. Over time, you CAN build up a "rolodex" of channels that seem pretty level-headed and bring you checkable facts that you aren't going to find in any "feed" provided to you by Big Tech or MSM. But it takes a lot of time and fact-checking, before you can settle down a just "consume" what the best people YOU can find are putting out.
It ain't perfect, and never will be. But it's better than it used to be. Easier than it used to be. Just keep a weather eye on Congress and the President, when they start talking about "protecting the public" from Fake News. Every single one of those bastards are really only out to silence the opinions they don't like.
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@thetruthchannel349 : Depends on whether or not the Congress drops the ball and the level of illegal immigration amounts to a social-services-breaking burden that may as well be seen as an INVASION. Congress enforces NOTHING. That's solely the purview of the executive branch. They can fling contempt citations to the 4 corners of the Earth, but nobody but the executive branch has the means of enforcing them. Ultimately, the main powers the Congress has are the ability to cut off the funding of anything the president wishes to do against their will, and advise and consent (or not) with regard to presidential appointments. Also, Congress alone has the power to declare war, and if they hadn't given the president more power than the constitution intended, we wouldn't've fought ANY wars since World War II, which was the LAST time we got a declaration!
I sure wouldn't mind seeing the War Powers Act be revisited. It's an atrocity that we fought for years in Korea and Vietnam, and overthrew more than one government in Africa, South America and the Middle East, without EVER getting a declaration of war. Sickening stuff. Those IN power want to run things like a Monarchy, with unfettered power to do what they want, and the American People just need to wake the hell up and rein in government run amuck abroad AND ESPECIALLY at home.
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Liberal establishments in North America and across Europe have been at cross purposes to the public for several years, now. In the UK, the Labor Party thwarted the BREXIT referendum for 3 years. In the USA, Democrats have sought to thwart the 2016 election. Regardless of where it's happening, be it France, Italy or the USA, the people see entrenched elites that are out of touch and think only of themselves and their cronies, all poised to profit enormously from their globalist (socialist, authoritarian, top-down) project.
And they're ensuring the voters will reject them at the polls, regardless of their control of legacy media. The miscalculation being made is that people don't trust the legacy media, which have been in cahoots with the establishment elites for decades. It's hilarious watching CNN and MSNBC confuse informed rejection of their lies for an insufficient understanding, and so now they're lecturing their shrinking audience in a very twisted take on civics. "If only the voters UNDERSTOOD, they would OPPOSE BREXIT/Trump/nationalist-populists." What they don't get is that the people are a lot smarter than that. They KNOW what's up, because they're much more informed (which isn't necessarily saying a lot) than they were, when it was just ABC, NBC and CBS in the USA, with the public square on total lock-down.
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Natural Selection: You insist on missing the point. If it acts, walks and talks like a duck, it's a duck, whether you use tortured reasoning to conclude otherwise or not.
You're arguing about artificial distinctions between brand-name police states.
The only difference between Stalin and Hitler was what country they were from. BOTH were totalitarians, which a REAL liberal would hate, equally. But it's OK if socialists collectivize everything, killing millions, because at least they're not Nazis, right?
The only form of gov't that respects the rights of all is a limited government. What libtards don't get is when gov't takes over everything, it's just a matter of time until totalitarianism. Just takes economic hard times or a charismatic leader, and the non-thinkers like you will be all-in.
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For every person saying what you're saying - and I agree with you - there are two or three who will talk about playoff appearances and how close he came to winning it all. But to me, he was kind of the reason the '9ers didn't quite pull it off. I can see wanting higher ceiling and lower pay than Alex Smith, but in the end, Kaep's decision-making seemed to keep them from winning a championship with him.
I keep coming back to that game against Seattle (NFC Championship?),, where Kaep - full of his own narrative - was going to throw to Crabtree on the critical play, no matter what, because that was the story he had in his head. Unfortunately, on the short field, Richard Sherman had Crabtree blanketed, but Kaep threw it to Crabs, regardless. He saw himself as legend, before he did anything, imagining how he'd tell the story "I told Michael he was getting the ball, and that's how it all happened, glory be to me."
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@ConcernedPublic some truth in what you and @Fyrch Myrddin are saying. I don't think progressives set out to enrich themselves. They just have an inordinate faith in government bureaucrats to actually deliver on whatever their pie-in-the-sky, feel-good dreams are. It's the bureaucrat who actually has to make progressive dreams a reality, regardless of whether they're competent to do so, or whether or not there are actually sufficient resources available to actually implement those dreams. Then there's the whole "The dream slips away" as the economy/ecology adjusts to the new rule set in ways the surprise NOone but progressives, who insist that they're RIGHT, and they just put the wrong guy in charge.
Our founding fathers KNEW about the oligarchs of Byzantine Rome. They studied the Fall of Rome, extensively. Any new agency or institution is, in a sense, a new life form introduced into the ecology/economy. It doesn't what birthed it, it is alive, in a sense, and it will grow to the absolute limit of the available resources, and BEYOND available resources, as long as it can get away with it, just like rabbits will breed beyond the capacity of the ecosystem to support them. In Nature, they just die back. In government, as long as they can keep borrowing or printing money, they can defy reality for long periods, causing untold damage and economic and ecological ruin.
The thing I don't get is how we feel like we're failing if we're not growing, when we should be maximizing quality of life. Government's insatiable appetite for resources and power always pushes growth rather than sustainability.
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frank loren : It puts Brennan in the spotlight, when things were kind of in a lull. He's been a liar for decades, and has made himself the Poster Child for Deep State, proving every day that there IS an entitled civil service class who think they're above the law. He said they didn't spy on citizens, and when he was called on it, he pivoted to "Yes, and we SHOULD spy on citizens." I don't know WHAT his come-back is for the lies he told about spying on Congress. And his claim that the dossier wasn't the prime mover in launching the investigation was either a lie or an admission that it was politically motivated and artificially manufactured "evidence" to green-light the weaponization of national security and department of justice against the opposition-party's presidential campaign.
Yeah, he's out of office. But yeah, he's a swamp creature of the first order, and your weak LEFT jabs do nothing to hide that fact, although it's always fun to score points and win the Internet for 10 seconds.
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Beautiful girls like that probably had 20 guys pining for them and 5 or 10 semi-stalking them, in that little town. There are a lot of college kids, there, but there really aren't that many places to go, so there's lots of partying at residences. I don't know if it's a factor, but weed's legal just across the border, in Pullman, WA, 9 miles West. For its size, Moscow has a relatively large contingent of hippies. There are a couple hippie farms outside of town, and a lot of classic redneck farms.
By the pictures, these girls were teeny-boppers, rather than granolas, in the local parlance. Cheerleaders, not grim-faced math majors dressed like Ruth Buzzi as Gladys Ormphby on Laugh-In. Yeah. I had to look it up. But we all know the lady with the hair net and the ankle-length skirt.
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@bruno-vicious : This rings at least semi-true. As a libertarian, I'm often in the position of "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" Sometimes, the arguments made on FOX for the so-called 'right' are just as bad as the over-the-top lies and conspiracy theories of the left-establishment media.
I'm to the point, now, where if a network's business model is commercials every 5 minutes, they're not worth watching, because they've been sanitized by the advertisers and everything else is just right- or left-wing talking points.
I'm just an old-fashioned, limited-government, individual-rights, free-market-capitalism (Adam Smith. Read Wealth of Nations if you haven't, already.) kind of guy, and NOBODY'S ON MY SIDE! Regressive faith-based ideologies on BOTH sides.
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Remember that there is no double jeopardy if the prosecutor declines to prosecute. That means they can change their minds at any point in the future. And when I look at the charges they declined to pursue against Comey and McCabe, they look like cases that would be much easier to prove and get stiff sentences for AFTER facing charges for more serious crimes.
If Durham proves that (the) entire investigation(s) was(were) not predicated and that top FBI, DOJ and Intel officials perjured themselves or otherwise abused FISA, then the charges they "dropped" against Comey and McCabe (and others) are a slam dunk, and there's no stopping the DOJ from taking up those cases, again, because it's impossible to claim that you were just a patriot doing your duty in an extraordinary situation. If Durham proves that the lot of them MANUFACTURED the situation, then the leaking and lying looks FAR more sinister, is far easier to get a conviction on, and will lead to longer sentences.
I don't know if any of this be the case, but if there IS real meat to these FISA-abuse cases, these petty "lying and leaking" charges will be the icing on the cake, and much easier for prosecutors to prove ill intent and get convictions on what I believe to be spin-off crimes. Viewed in isolation, maybe they're in slap-the-wrist territory. But against a backdrop of a systematic smear-impeach-and-remove campaign, those cases are no longer in isolation, but part of a pattern of systemic bias and corruption. I think the average person who follows this news from BOTH sides of the political divide (i.e., not average at all) can clearly see the pattern of bias and double standard.
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Andy Jackson used half the Indian tribes against the other half, and then destroyed the tribes who fought by his side. I can see wanting to tear down his statue. But PUT IT TO THE PEOPLE. Don't just run roughshod over everyone in an orgy of outrage. That never ends well.
I think Obama said more to divide than unite. But the thing that's got everybody so worked up - police shootings - went down enormously between 2000 and 2020. Down by something like 50%. Tremendous progress. But more anger and resentment. I think people are missing the point, and scapegoating law enforcement, when law enforcement is only a symptom of underlying structural problems, by which I do NOT mean racism.
"Stop and frisk" is an authoritarian solution that is not going to win Trump (m)any undecideds. He's trying to oppose chaos, but that's not the way. Instead, he needs to ask why there's so much incentive for a kid to be holding guns or drugs in the first place. Law enforcement's in a losing guerrilla war with it own communities. It's no surprise that they are viewed as an occupying force in so many communities. He needs to ask himself why those communities are war zones. Much of it lies in the law, itself.
Anyway, touting Giuliani's stop-and-frisk is a pretty tone-deaf campaign tactic. He's appealing to his base, but he whiffed on the undecideds, like an inside fast ball.
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The Republicans acting so passively just puts the Democrats' tactics into starker contrast. And when they bend over backwards, it's hard to fault them, when the process, which DOES favor Republicans, thanks to VOTERS, grinds inexorably to its conclusion. Kavanaugh WILL be confirmed. Democrats will lose the midterms. The more they lose, the more shrill and irrational, petty, and downright wicked they show themselves to be. They're fighting a vicious rearguard action, which is another way of saying they're in retreat, and acting like cornered rats.
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For some strange reason, I find myself hoping that the number is closer to 10 than 3,000. Call me sentimental. As for Trump, you just have to understand that he's relentlessly overstating his case, as a counterbalance, to nudge the left towards the middle, where deals are made. In de-constructing his overstatements, the left is often tricked into something reasonable, because they're taking more time on the facts, in spite of themselves. They get downright smart about some issues, just to show he's dumb. That's OK. Water off a duck's back.
The left are bucking a trend towards immigration control and jobs. And rather than bemoaning demographic collapse, why aren't we celebrating the fact the the people, here, have voluntarily turned the corner on population growth. How about we worry about too few babies when we moderate our population down to maybe 100 million. Think of cutting the pressure we put on Ma Nature on the continent by 2/3? It turns out that economic success leads to lower birth rates. So rather than drag our nice little setup down by importing more and more people to put more and more burden on the American continent, why don't we seek to export our economic success to where those people came from? See them moderate THEIR birth rates, in the natural order of things.
Fact is that people higher up the economic ladder are higher on Maslow's ladder, and life is a lot of fun without kids or without too many kids. We no longer really NEED a bunch of kids to ensure a comfy retirement. There's less incentive to invest big in your kids. I think women making careers is a huge part of it. Kind of cool, though, how we've broken through and you see more nurturing fathers. Educated couples can easily see the wife making more money and the husband stay at home. We still have to break through in-bred tendencies of women to only pair at or above their status. Men just care if they like the woman, not what job she has or how popular she is. Men are bred to expect that they will at least hold up their end, economically, if not (and often not) around the house. A lot of us men just don't care if the place smells like our dirty socks, or if there's anything green to go with that hamburger.
But we don't generally mind if the woman is economically dependent on US. It's high male status to make enough $$$ that the woman doesn't have to work. I don't see anything wrong with a woman staying at home, but compared to having to leave the house and be presentable and civil every day towards strangers and compulsory acquaintances, it seems like you could keep yourself pretty busy and be able to SEE the good you're doing, at home. Might be surprised at the husbands who'd rather cook and do laundry instead of emptying garbage cans, which sucks, but pays pretty good.
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Penniless Pilgrim: I think your political beliefs are culture-destroying and freedom-destroying, but you, at least, can see the intolerance and bigotry of the regressive left. Gun control is a foolhardy attempt to treat a symptom.
Health care is a service, like any other. The problems we have in our system, today, are primarily BECAUSE of government interference. Who decides what's best for me? Me? Or some bureaucrat? You think a bureaucrat can do a better job of providing for you than YOU can. That's fucked-up.
That's where I part ways with guys like Jimmy Dore, whom I adore for seeing so much of the truth, but not to its core. The core truth is that government having too much power and say over our lives is the problem. Progressives - well-intentioned but only half-smart - thing all-powerful gov't is OK, if only it would do as THEY say.
But that can never happen. The minute something's in gov't hands, monied interests target the decision-makers, and what we THINK we're getting isn't what we're getting.
Who's destroying old-growth forest? The Forest Service! They build roads to the old growth without which the harvesting of those forests would not be economic.
Who's keeping us from converting from wood stoves to rocket mass heaters? The EPA!
I could go on and on with this.
PEOPLE take better care of themselves and their neighbors when they are NOT dependent on government for everything... when they DON'T look for government to step in and solve all their problems.
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There's all kinds of great female Republican or Libertarian candidates out there. We don't hear enough from such women in our society. But I get instant crushes on women who make sense in media. I thought Omarosa was amazing, because she went on The View and eviscerated them. But it was all I knew about her, because I never watch Reality T.V. Being ON Reality T.V. was why I didn't like Trump, because I couldn't help but see commercials, although I despised the unnecessary drama in all of reality t.v., so I can't bear more than about 30 seconds.
Star Parker's another smart woman who really impressed me with her American-Thought-Leaders interview. She's another who pops off the screen as somebody smart, with important experience and perspective. Stefanik is showing well in these hearings, but I don't know anything else about her. So I'm in that "crush" stage. Definitely worth looking into as an up-and-comer, though.
But what I'd like to see in the Republican Party is candidates like her by the bushel, they do their 2 or 4 or at worst 6 years, and then they go back to the real world. But that's not how Washington works.
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@arsailor2341 Mixing causes friction, for sure. It also elevates. New ideas from different world views. America has always been "cultural appropriators" in a very cool way. Germans, Italians, Polish, Kenyan, Nigerian, Libyan, Persian, Shoshone, ... It's not all pretty. But in a free society, where the rights of all are protected, good things sort of percolate to the top. All we think about is how mean Euros were to Indigenous, but the indigenous wronged each other, too. None of that stuff was good, but indigenous values permeate American society and cultural mores.
Foods, music, art, ... Saxons versus Britons. Danes versus Saxons. All bad stuff. But better ideas on both sides had a way of persisting. People who are afraid of mixing forget that we are one species, with more variation within races than there is between races. Generalities dissolve when he likes her and she likes him.
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@jenniferorr5170 : Junior-Senior class trip was to NYC. Went to a ball game. The one girl who looked 25 or 30 bought us all beers. She was kind of a frumpy girl, who FAIK wore her grandma's hand-me-downs and became quite popular after that trip. I raced as high in the statue of Liberty as they'd let you go. I was small, light, and used to covering long distances afoot. I seem to recall you couldn't go past the head at the time, but there was a set of stairs that went clear up the arm to the torch that we couldn't access. Memories fade, though.
Anyway, I saw enough and smelled enough on the bus ride in that I would never want to live in such a place, even though they had world-class-anything-you-want-if-you-can-pay-for-it. I grew up in a town of about 300, surrounded by a lot of open countryside. The weight of tall buildings and all the people is pretty oppressive. It doesn't bother me, per sé. It's only something you notice when you're out in the quiet and can actually see the sky at night, and it feels good, that you realize how the city ain't BAD, but it lacks a lot of GOOD.
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They read. They just put too much faith in vested authority, and blindly follow what the "experts" say. You need to be aware of what the experts are saying, but at the same time, hold them accountable. For instance, we're not all climate experts, but we CAN see if any of the climate predictions of the past are borne out in the future (They're NOT!), and always ask ourselves "Is the cure worse than the disease?"
Instead, what we get is hysteria over the "issue of the day" and never-ending "The end justifies the means" kinds of arguments from 'experts' who know little or nothing about the intricate interactions that sustain life in this world. They're experts on x, y or z, and that's it. And the more expert they are at one thing, the less likely it is that they can put everything all together into a unified whole.
Personally, I feel that NO ONE can POSSIBLY run 'everything.' Nobody has that much knowledge, no matter how smart they are. The imperfect best solution is limited-government, maximum individual autonomy, and let people figure out what works for them. Government's main role is "Harming none" in the "Harming none, do as you will" benediction. Government's there to step on people who do harm, and that's pretty much its main role in day-to-day operations of a nation.
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Sounds like a RINO report, to me. Russians didn't do any more or less than they always do. Manaforte shared published information that the Russians already knew. The "massive effort" by the Russians amounted to a few thousand dollars in troll-farm ads that disparaged BOTH parties, pretty equally, and mainly just to reach different audiences for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue. Russia-Russia-Russia is still the dominant narrative in the Beltway.
I have real concerns about Russia, myself, but these DC Beltway types mostly cover up the worst stuff that's going on, like bribery and other forms of corruption, while pretending to be "tough on Russia."
If I were Putin and Putin were a SAINT, I bet I'd still rather see Trump in office than a Clinton. You never know what harm a DC-Beltway insider is going to do. Putin can understand and deal with SANE opposition. But you never know WHAT kind of crazy fear-mongering nonsense will come out of Washington. Well, actually, you DO, if you know American history, but there's no telling what the nEXT colossal blunder will be. Trump's a pretty apolitical, common-sense kind of leader, who would probably still be a billionaire real-estate developer, who voted Democrat, except for how un-hinged the Democrats have become.
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I'm not sure anybody noticed, but the tide has turned on immigration. Democrats always want to follow the European way, and now that the European left has realized they're cutting their own populist throats with Open Borders, the left is coming around on this nationalism thing. Of course, Democrats always follow, so they're getting the memo, late, again, pushing policies that their brethren across the Atlantic have abandoned.
It's funny to watch Schumer capitulate on the immigration issue by focusing on how Trump's "Wall" idea isn't as GOOD as what "security experts" are saying. In other words, now he's arguing over means rather than ends, because he's folding on the issue.
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Our trade "partners" haven't been very straight-up with us, for a long time. Other countries carve out a niche to subsidize and protect with tariffs. This product. That product. Until the USA is importing everything and making nothing. I get wanting the 3rd World to join the 1st, and some tolerance is called for, here and there, to get a country on its feet. Maybe it starts with something simple like high-quality pool cues, made with home-made lathes in back yards...
The Chinese are autocrats. Command economy. No respect for the rules of commerce. If they wish to COMPETE with us, they will eventually have to give up on the command economy nonsense. It's not productive of self-sustaining systems. They can't compete with us if their people aren't on par with our people. And the minute their people are on par with ours, they start getting unruly. You see it happen all the time throughout history. Using force on people is not competitive in the long run.
Use of force always leads to counter-forces down the road, in very predictable (and unsavory) ways. That's why political correctness is shredding the Democratic Party, right now. They found a way to re-brand intolerance as "I'm offended" and obliterated everyone in their path, but their own logic has turned that engine of destruction back on them. It reminds me of the Emo Williams's "'Baptists' routine."
There are now some "blue-dog" Democrats in the house, who are moderate-to-conservative on immigration and some who are moderate-to-conservative on the 2nd Amendment. Project Veritas claims many of those Democrats were just posturing to get elected, but will vote as a bloc for every scrap of 2nd-Amendment restriction they can bring to the floor. And Democrat-run committees WILL bring those bills to the floor.
I think majority-black precincts, in particular, are no longer a done deal for open-borders Democrats. And if they VOTE open borders, the black vote could split off in favor of the Republican (with the better-read individuals maybe going for the Libertarian), especially in communities hardest-hit by immigrants, and ESPECIALLY in Sanctuary-City communities. And when I say better-read, it's because with the Internet, I see a LOT of people getting REALLY smart, in very short time, by just surfing for knowledge. If you apply yourself, you can learn as fast as you can absorb, and that tends to be about 10,000% faster than waiting for your school teacher to mention it.
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And the Chinese should pay a HEAVY price for their blatant theft of intellectual property and strong-arm tactics. Given the way things are, you couldn't shut them down, instantly, but I'd put 'em on a timetable to clean up their act, and prepare to get along withOUT their business on that same timetable. What they do is unacceptable. They should also pay a premium, at the LEAST for their dirty industries. The way things are, now, we're buying their cheap stuff and thinking "What a great deal!" but that great deal comes at the cost of the air we breathe and the water and the plant and animal life.
Don't get me wrong. If I were in charge, I still might blink if I saw that my noble intentions were hurting the most vulnerable of the people. That cheap-ass $25 Chinese jacket kept that poor kid warm for the whole winter, before the stuffing came out and the zipper broke. But by the time it wore out, he'd out-grown it and the weather was warming up. You can't forget those things. Or the cost of keeping an apartment warm or cool in winter. Go all noble on taxing energy and Grandma dies of heat exhaustion, because she got behind on her electric bill. The Democrat's answer is to find some way to spend somebody else's money to help Grandma. The conservative's answer is to create the conditions where everything is more affordable for everyone and 'most everyone is pretty prosperous, with plenty left over to help Grandma, out of individual kindness and compassion.
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It's a problem, all right. But what do we do about it without upsetting checks and balances? The fact is, the federal gov't has stuck its nose into too many things, and now Congress and the President have UNIMAGINED powers. The Congress, in particular, has the power to create agencies that even IT can't oversee, and THEIR power is terrifying!
We didn't stop it when FDR packed the Supreme Court to push HIS program, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. And federal judges can MAKE policies that cost the taxpayer billions, without one of us or a single of our representatives or senators voting on it. Forced busing. Interference in border control, which is arguably the MAIN thing the gov't exists to do!
What we have, now, is a system in which the gov't doesn't do its job but meddles in everything under the sun. There's a web of laws and regulations that's so complex that NObody understands it, fully, and a lawyer can twist to mean just about anything they please. And a judge can use the slightest technicality to thwart the will of the people and the actions of duly elected representatives and president. "General Welfare" has zero to do with "welfare check, crop support, bank bailout, automaker bailout."
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I think ending the War on Drugs and putting police back in the business of ONLY protecting persons and property would go a long way towards better relations with police. There's a culture of lawlessness that is fed by laws that a significant fraction of the population at odds with the police. Yeah, there are incidents of abuse by police. It's the nature of the position, and why you want to minimize any problems, starting by severely restricting their mandate.
If a man wants to ruin his life with a needle in his arm, it's not the job of the police to incarcerate him. Take every nickel on drug-law enforcement and plow it into public health to minimize the harm, and help addicts kick the habit, with clinics funded by the taxes on the drugs! Turn a net negative into a net plus.
There are a lot of the wrong incentives built into our system by policy-makers. And we know some things have to change. But BLM probably isn't getting us any closer to long-term, self-sustaining solutions. The next thing I'd attack is the absence of fathers in the lives of too many kids - especially boys. Too many boys, nowadays, don't know how to be a strong, restrained man, because they don't have a Dad around, who CAN kick everybody's ass, but DOESN'T, and doesn't impose his will by force.
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He's hard to listen to, but if you don't understand the arguments of your opposition, then you don't fully understand your own. The left-right principles have always and will always be in tension.
I would argue that left and right have flipped. Being left USED to mean that you were sick and tired of being robbed and told what to do, with your very life in the hands of the aristocracy, to a left that has quietly anointed bureaucrats as the New Aristocracy, who will provide your every need in return for abject subservience, unswerving obedience, and gray conformity. The left BECAME the establishment, and it turns out that their form of self-rule is identical to the serfdom under monarchy (and its minions in the aristocracy) that we fought for millennia to defeat.
Most leftists THINK they're the ones who understand "progress" better than anyone else, but really, whether they know it or not - and most seem not to - is dragging us back into serfdom. I say "seem," because whenever I drill a little deeper in debates with so-called liberals, the authoritarian measures they support in order to make it all work are horrific. "What if we breed up an entire generation of irresponsible welfare mothers, who make babies like rabbits? Is it OK to sterilize them?" It turns out it IS, if the "collective good" is threatened. "Do you realize what you're saying? Do you not see the iron fist in that velvet glove?" There's a mean-spirited contempt for "average people" that I find appalling. The whole REASON for nanny government is the deeply embedded notion that people are not fit to care for themselves and each other. And every program they create to solve the problem just makes more people who are a problem.
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What we're seeing is a free-for-all for views. And one thing we don't give legacy media credit for is the fact that there's a multitude of 'content creators' who piggyback off original content put together by the legacy media. I know a lot about what CNN puts on, not because I watch CNN and help CNN's ratings, but because I watch so-called 'independent media,' who take excerpts to criticize under "Fair Use," and CNN is basically paying the independents' bills. I think if all these so-called 'independents' gave something back to the networks on which they've built their channels. Do you think Mark Dice owes CNN anything for lifting Brian Stelter monologues for the purpose of mocking them? Should 1% or 10% of the proceeds from the video built entirely off another content creator's creations go back to the original creator?
The independent content creators aren't entirely without blemish, when it comes to fairness. And that's a big part of why the legacy networks got all click-baity. It's a big part of why the legacy networks throw their weight around (in toxic ways). And much as I whine about the domination of search resorts by legacy media I don't trust, the fact is, they're the ones doing the most original work and original reporting. The independents are rife with bloviators, but the amount of original reporting being done by independents is relatively small. They still ride on the back of a beast they make a living hurling curses at.
Legacy networks have been experiencing a steady decline, due to competing news and entertainment. They still have major sports on lock-down. But networks that used to garner 10s of millions of views are measuring their viewership in millions and even in just the hundreds of thousands. The people watching all those car commercials aren't the people buying the cars, and there aren't that many of them, any more, anyway.
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Dems might as well vote Republican, as Republicans are bigger spenders, now, than Democrats would've dreamed of being, 50 years ago. They basically gave up holding the line on fiscal conservatism in the '90s, and then the Democrats signed on for every conflict, abroad. The great compromise that makes the parties indistinguishable, but for rhetoric, is both parties spend too much, love war too much, and love the post-9/11 surveillance state.
Even though he was victimized by it, Trump did nothing to rein in security and intelligence agencies run amuck.
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Yeah, the Dems talk out of both sides of their mouths. So do the Republicans, who're playing the blame game, but they ALSO have been cowards about securing our borders and passing legislation that makes sense. Republicans owned BOTH houses and the presidency, but nothing got passed, because everybody wants to get re-elected and they're terrified they might be accused of racism if they propose anything sensible. It's been this way for decades.
How many can we afford to take in, each year, for a net BENEFIT to our country? What's your plan for getting these new people jobs? What's your plan for giving CITIZENS first crack at all those jobs? We already put the newbies at the front of the welfare and food stamp lines.
What are the effects on communities that receive a large number of immigrants? You KNOW they head to the cities where all the best handouts are, and housing is at a premium. And they have a negative impact on the poor neighborhoods where they congregate. The measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members, and when we let people in and look the other way, we're exacting a toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people already HERE. So to help foreigners, we poke our own poor in the eye with a sharp stick. That's hypocrisy, and it's rampant in government institutions and entitlement-driven cities.
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They indoctrinate young people into socialism and then they freak because they're voting far left in the primaries. But Bernie's the exact kind of guy Democrat indoctrinators in the schools tell our kids is the RIGHT kind of candidate! I think it's a glorious back-firing of all their plans. They control the education and legacy media. They're working on controlling health care. And they're absolutely inept.
Escalation of health-care costs is NOT because of "capitalism run amok;" rather, it's because of government interference to make health care "more affordable." Same with education. The more "affordable" government makes it, the more tuition skyrockets! Because their approach to make things "affordable" is to throw money at them. This allows the schools (or pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies or hospitals) to jack up their prices, grow their bureaucracies, and engage in make-believe in 2/3 of the curriculum, where "success" means they watered-down the content enough so everybody passes (and nobody knows anything, especially how to think for themselves.).
They do all these things that make everything more expensive, and then they come in with ridiculous "cost-cutting" measures that cut into the MEAT of the service being provided, and they make up for it with ridiculous paper-rationing, and other school-supply rationing and micro-oversight of office supplies - petty nitshit stuff. So they've got 5 or 6 new high-office bureaucrats at $100,000 a year (and up), but they're busy counting staples, paper clips and other cheap stuff that many TEACHERS end up paying for out of their own pockets, in order to do basic stuff like TEACHING.
They TALK about quality education, but NONE of the bureaucrats EVER visit the actual classrooms, to see what's going on and talk to teachers about how to make things run better. They just create new forms to fill out to run everything by remote control from on top, with ZERO regard for what's happening in the trenches. The BIGGEST complaint from GOOD teachers is that students are promoted without actually mastering the content. So NOW colleges and universities are bending over backwards and investing extra resources into teaching kids all the stuff they DIDN'T learn in high school!
It's a TERRIBLE business model. Same goes for health care. They bureaucratize EVERYthing to the extreme and BURY the people who actually do the work in forms to fill out, nonsense about race and political correctness (Hire more staff for the nonsense trainings, too! Don't forget that!), and the actual WORK/SERVICE takes a back seat. But the BEAN COUNTERS are having fun!
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Midler expresses the deep-seated belief of all liberals, today: "Most people are stupid, corrupt and greedy." That's why they want the government running everything. But the same stupid, corrupt and greedy people GRAVITATE towards government, imposing their stupid, greedy corruption on the entire nation at one go. When the government is LIMITED, stupid, greedy and corrupt people can't do NEARLY as much damage, and bear the immediate consequences of their actions. But when they're entrenched in the government, they can gaslight us for years on end, and even get Nobel prizes!
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@zefdin101 Contract with America is when the Republican Party officially gave up the fight against the expansion of the federal government into every aspect of our lives. People WANTED the government to "take care" of them, because the people forgot why the U.S. Constitution says what it does. Rather than risk being a permanent minority party, the Republicans bent the knee to Big Government.
Basically since George Bush, Sr., we've had uni-party. Big government at home. Forever War abroad. Gingrich is part of that. I really liked him in 1980. I used to watch him and other young Republicans holding their Special Orders in Congress, speaking to an empty House, for us viewers on CSPAN, back when CSPAN was still independent, before the blob got its hooks into it (basically after Brian Lamb took a step back).
But enough ancient history, imperfectly remembered.
At about that time, Democrats finally realized how forever war was just as useful to them as it appeared to be to the Republicans. Republicans could beat them by accusing them of being soft on communism.
Meanwhile, our schools got taken over by communists while both parties were fighting over who would give the military more money to fight communism abroad, while it crept into our schools. 90% of the teachers I know are socialist or have socialist leanings. All schools I know, push thinly-veiled communist ideology.
It might already be too late, because our youth are disillusioned with a fascist system they're told is "capitalism," so they're suspicious of the one thing that's pushed human progress forward throughout history. Oh, they'll teach you all about wars and generals, but they'll never point out the pockets of freedom throughout history that produced the most advancements in any given period.
Nope. We're taught that it's good to have one guy at the top bossing everybody around. It's for our own good, supposedly. But it's the only way you can send half the young men of a generation to some foreign land to die in battle.
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The president is not obliged to answer every tabloid question thrown at him. There's a time and a place for asking those questions. Try asking that Cohen question at a press conference NOT at a gathering of European dignitaries. I mean, by all means ask what you want, but don't expect an invite if you don't comport yourself with some dignity. And when you're asked to leave, by a gathering of world leaders, STFU and LEAVE. Nobody's gonna DO anything to you. Just un-invite you to the next event.
You newsies PRAISED Obama for giving news reporters and agencies a far worse time than Trump ever has. But it was OK to disparage FOX, wasn't it? And the other networks have been ABYSMAL. To know what the truth is, just ask what day it is. MSM narratives pivot to something new on a daily basis, without regard for what was reported the day before.
People are still on the "Trump hates babies and separates them from their families, because he's SATAN! He's a RACIST!" Turns out, Trump hasn't done half the things Obama did with regard to deportations and suppression of the press. Trump bitches about 'em, but hasn't (yet?) weaponized the government to go after political foes like Obama - the blameless - did on a regular basis.
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Depends on what government's keeping you safe from, Geraldo, but basic civilized behavior should be handled. But defending you from a hot cup of McDonald's coffee maybe not.
The programs the city council candidate is talking about are a lot of sound-good, feel-good platitudes, without any track record or "data-driven" justification. Just the kind of thing Democrats love, because it seems like they're doing something, and they can make up what "success" means as they go.
I didn't say that very well. Suffice it to say, if she had a shred of honor or dignity, she would resign after failing to lead, and pursuing policies that lay deaths at her door. Anyone with such perverse disregard for public safety, and utter lack of foreseeing recent events, should step down and give it to someone competent.
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Good progressives DO see through a lot of the smoke, when it comes to the surveillance state and our nation's foreign policy. They're spot-on, on these matters. They're quick to see corruption. What they're SLOW to see is that their ideology builds up government institutions so much, that these abuses proliferate throughout our society. The corruption they can so clearly see in the stuffed-shirt career bureaucrats in the Dept of Defense or the State Dept, but they're oblivious to the FACT that this is the nature of large institutions with ANY kind of power. They don't want to limit the powers of the FDA, FCC, USDA, EPA. They just want THEIR PEOPLE to RUN them! It's the exact same thing as RussiaGate Hoax.
Does the EPA really protect our environment, or is it a hammer to beat the little guy with, while protecting the BIG polluters? Is the USDA really protecting us or are they green-lighting GMO foods which are grown "organically," because they Put the Pesticide Inside the Crop's DNA, and feed the pesticides directly to humans? Is the FCC really doing its job or are the handful of people at the top ripe for being bribed, coerced, or propagandized/pressured by whichever party is in power at the moment? Is the welfare state really solving poverty or is it just enabling irresponsible behavior and creating a helpless and self-entitled citizenry?
We've got the federal government doing everything except what the U.S. Constitution commands it to do. The federal government has refused to protect our national border, which is its Job #1. But it can sure fight wars all over the world, overthrow what IT considers to be tyrants, and drop bombs all over the world, without a single declaration of War since 1941!
A lot of REAL, PRACTICAL green tech gets crushed by regulators who don't even understand the new tech, let alone know how to certify it, so a person can get homeowner's insurance when they put in a rocket-stove mass heater to save energy and heating costs. If you want a new home, you can't get a loan on it, unless you build the way the bureaucrats understand. And EVERY government-approved form of green tech and every government subsidy of green tech favors big business.
The more bureaucratized we become, the more we inhibit REAL, SUSTAINABLE alternatives to the status quo. The bureaucracy is there to lock the status quo in place.
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Greenhouses in the outlying vicinity of cities and towns. You can WAY out-produce conventional agriculture, per acre, with smart, climate-controlled installations.
We are very grains-based, though, but that's a holdover - some might say throwback - to our first experiments in civilization thru agriculture. We ARE very addicted to our breads and tortillas, though, aren't we? And for growing out West, in more arid country, maybe ancient Persia could give us some guidance on sustainability.
But the first thing I'D do - and piss of Rino Grassley - is end all subsidies on corn. Corn is a stupid crop to use for fuel. And it's a robber crop, requiring fertilization. Maybe the feds get off their asses and allow hemp, which, as I understand it, is a nitrogen-fixing crop, beneficial to soils.
We really do need to break free of the petroleum-to-fertilizer paradigm, imo. Another dumb thing. Farmers should take a lesson from the Amish or Pennsylvania Deutsch, and return to soil-BUILDING farming. We rob the soil and then inject nutrients, artificially. And rather than let the land lie fallow, we're dead set on using every square inch ...
... or, better yet, we like to COUNT every square inch and - hilarious - receive a government check for NOT farming it! What a scam for landowners! But ya gotta be big enough to really cash in.
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The Framers never envisioned government would grow into such an Octopus. They figured the executive would be much more limited than it has evolved to be. It was Congress, itself, who created the FBI - very much not in the Constitution - and now we understand how they created a monster they cannot control.
This has been brewing for a long time, since J. Edgar Hoover created his empire within an empire, with illegally obtained dirt on key policy players. This is the first time the Feebs have been publicly challenged by ANYbody, and you can see how entrenched they are by the road-blocks they put up at every turn.
I LOVE obtaining un-redacted e-mails and memos. The issue was NEVER national security. That was just a convenient way for key players to avoid embarrassment. I think it'd all work, beautifully, except maybe they forgot the techies handling all the e-communications, or mid-management FBI (basically honest) and maybe a ringer amongst the higher-ups, who keep bringing out more facts.
Nothing you put out there or send in e-mail can ever be un-sent. The arrogance of people like Hillary, Sztrok and Page may be the undoing of MANY bad actors.
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marks the end of Jim Crow. It ONLY applied to a handful of states where voter suppression was clearly present, when segregation was just starting to end. For him to claim this is the same country as it was in 1965 is BLARNEY. We made an exception to the Constitution that it is time to end. This is a very disingenuous argument being made by him, Democrats and many Republicans, who are terrified of being called "racist."
Meanwhile, the Dems want the feds to run EVERYthing, so they can operate the entire nation by remote control from Washington, DC. This is the last thing I want, and the last thing Democrats should want, because as soon as they mess things up - which is inevitable - it will be Republicans running the entire nation by remote control from Washington, DC.
This is ALL about winning TODAY, with total disregard for our children and grandchildren.
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LOL! NObody's gotten denuclearization of North Korea. No American set FOOT in North Korea. Trump put MORE sanctions on North Korea. Trump talked tougher to North Korea than Obama ever DARED, and he talked NICER to Kim Jong Un than Obama ever did.
This is historic, long-overdue progress with North Korea. We've always been tough when we should've been kind, and weak when we needed to be tough. Trump is turning all of that upside-down, and being tough, when it's called for, kind when it's called for and especially if it's in any way reciprocated. Trump's being criticized by the assholes who brought slavery and instability back to Libya, had their sights on Syria, bought a treaty with Iran that's not worth the paper it's printed on, and were steadily backing us into an ever-escalating crisis with North Korea, meanwhile making sweetheart deals for the Chinese in return for huge financial windfalls for family members. Joe Biden's the projection-est SOB going.
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If U.S. security apparatus were truly concerned about Russian infiltration into Trump's campaign, they would've handled things quite a lot differently. They warned the Democrat National Committee that some bad things were going on, but all they did for Trump was spy on him, and even try to infiltrate the campaign with agents provocateur of their own!
The double standard is thick enough to cut with a knife. It's gotta chap their hides that even direct attacks on Trump leave him still standing. If they weren't so crooked, they could've left Trump to sink or swim on his policies, and probably have the same standard mid-term swing in Congress to the out-of-power Democrats. But because (in my opinion) so many of them crossed the line that they're obliged to attack, 24/7, in a desperate attempt to hide their corruption.
I really love the latest Russian Bot narrative, which is so fake and so flimsy, that 10s of thousands of people are going on record with personalized "red-pill moment" videos. The more they squeeze us, the more sand slips through their fingers, and it's hilarious to watch. I'm not a big "prayer guy," but I'm praying for a Republican landslide in November, because the LAST thing this country needs is for Schumer and Schiff and their ilk to control congress.
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I don't have much faith in government programs, but we are at a tipping point. All kinds of new products and services that people want. Grocery and restaurant delivery are more efficient and can be cheap, yet lucrative for the shoppers and drivers. A shopper can handle 2 or more orders. Cut exposure in half. Combine trips to be more efficient than two separate shoppers. Buying online. Cut the number of trips we (have to) make every day down to a minimum. With all the carbon-footprint worries, environmentally-minded people should like this.
The time and fuel you save letting a pro do your shopping leaves quite a bit extra for a nice tip for the delivery person. Something anybody with a car can do, and more profitable because of the cheap oil prices. And still quite a savings in fuel for the community.
HUGE demand for printers, scanners, screens you can share and write on, microphones and webcams for distance learning.
I think the economy was already poised to pivot, with a lot of people worried about legacy industries, and without the vision to see the NEW industries. Greenhouses for back yards. All kinds of off-grid power, heating and cooling solutions. Replacing Chinese imports with factories at home will be HUGE for us. Just don't waste too much taxpayer money propping up what IS and slowing the transition to something BETTER in the future! There's no lack of good jobs to be had. But throwing billions at print-media companies whose products nobody's buying or keeping BuzzFeed or NPR alive an extra year isn't doing anybody any good.
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CNN is DEFinitely over-the-top partisan, BUT they had PLENTY of high-placed sources giving them PLENTY of confirmation, according to so-called journalistic "standards," which were never EVER even considered by our Founding Fathers. Nobody insisted that Thomas Paine's pamphlets be fact-checked and second-sourced. It's FINE to grind your axe in the public square. What is NOT fine is this mythological "Fairness Doctrine" under which mainstream American media have supposedly operated for most of the 20th Century and is only now being revealed for what it is in the 21st: Just another way of packaging the narratives of select, powerful elites and dominating the public discourse with the opinions and self-interested propaganda of the handful of monied power elites with the ability to influence and control the top levels of media giants, with bribes and simply by BUYING those outlets or a large or majority stake in those outlets.
I would much rather have a revolutionary like Thomas Paine saying HIS piece and some Tory loyalist saying HIS piece and let the American people decide for themselves which to believe in whole or in part, than this monolithic one-note media that PRETENDS fairness and diversity, while overwhelming by sheer size or even by specifically attacking alternate viewpoints. De-monetization is soft censorship (unless you're the independent content creator being shadow-banned or outright banned, like Alex Jones). Yes, nutcases will get their followings. But as long as there is a free and open public square, individual choices by individual Americans as to what holds up and what doesn't will lead us toward something that more closely approximates real truth.
Not a single person can guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, but the AVERAGE of ALL the guesses is almost always very, very close to the actual number. Some people aren't OK with that much chaos, that much noise in the signal. But over time, a very small impetus in the direction of TRYING to get it right, creates a highly nuanced ORDER out of the chaos that no one person can fully grasp and anal-retentive so-called liberals just can't BEAR to leave to the good sense of the people, on average, to achieve. That's why we see rules on EVERYthing, including plastic straws in restaurants. You can't be trusted to exercise good sense. The sad thing is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more you run things by more and more ridiculously complicated Iand internally inconsistent and self-contradictory) rule sets, the less control anyone has and the less sense the vast majority actually exercise in their decision-making. You worry so much about poor decisions that you end up crippling everyone's ability to MAKE decisions, resulting in a society that NEEDS to be told EVERYthing. It's a spiral towards a deprived and oppressed population under totalitarian rule and it's all in the name of the greater good, which NONE of us fully understand, but we all march towards over time, given the freedom and autonomy to pursue our own best interests, subject to the best interests of those around us.
More people need to read their Blackstone. More people need to read and understand their Adam Smith. More people need to understand the TRUE sweep of history, and grasp the explosion of freedom and prosperity that occur every time the people are given maximum authority over their OWN lives that is consistent with the authority everybody around them SHOULD have over THEIRS! We all should bow our heads and thank God for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and that somebody like him was created and had the sense to write Wealth of Nations! We should CELEBRATE every bit of true progress and its roots in freedom, liberty and self-determination, but all we do is dwell on how backwards people were 100, 200, 300 or 1,000 years ago, and we now totally ignore the small victories and small Enlightenments along the way that got us to a much better place than we've ever been in human history.
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We were Methodists in a small town, living across the street from the Catholic Rectory, and about a block away from our Methodist church, just down the block on - fittingly - Church Street. We kids grew up runnin' all over the place. When we got big enough, we boys all worked for Joe Gallagher, Father Gallagher's brother, whose knees were as bad as mine are, now. Salt of the Earth. Paid us what he promised, and his disappointment when we lollygagged a little too long during breaks, was far more devastating than any yelling or screaming and he never laid a hand on us.
Can't tell you how many gravestones I mowed around. Go down the right side, make an 'L' cut, and then do another 'L' cut on the way back down the row of stones. Good hard work. Toughened us up quite a bit. Made us some money, besides. Joe was kind of everybody's firm but fair uncle. None of us kids were ever touched. And when Hurricane Agnes ripped through Northeastern Pennsylvania, the Methodist Church was on lower ground and got flooded. After we moved away, I went back to PA in the summer between Jr and Sr year of high school (with the plane ticket I bought, using my Perkins and McDonald's money), and as our house hadn't yet sold, and it was becoming an overgrown eye-sore that I cleaned up. Joe let me borrow his 3-on-the-tree Ford F-150 to haul away the yard waste.
I then abused the privilege by taking the girl with whom I was hopelessly and unrequitedly smitten on a shopping trip to Scranton. Bought her some perfume. Got in big trouble for taking the truck on a 30-mile road trip! Just a few stern words and the shame of letting Joe down.
But what could they do? I was just-turned 16, the year before, my folks were 2500 miles away, and although I was supposed to stay with the Methodist preacher (whose daughter held my heart), what could HE do if I too koff and did as I pleased? I pissed EVERYbody off on THAT trip, including the girl. sigh
During the flood, the Whole Town went to the Catholic Church just up the hill (Across from Kintner Milling Co.) from the Methodist Church. Those joint services were the best. Father Gallagher and Pastor Stork took turns talking and praying with us, everybody had a good time in tough times, and thought nothing of it, other than the prayer benches for your knees and the real wine that the Catholics used (and we boys might sneak in and take a few swigs of, when we were mowing the church grounds and some fool left the door open!
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3331: As with most things, there's a Yin and a Yang. Dark-Age Christianity was pretty foul, and yet the Roman Catholics kept the classics alive for future generations to rediscover in the Renaissance. Yeah, the leadership at the top of 'most ANY church is all about survival of the church in THIS world, which they pretend to measurer success in saved souls for the NEXT. How do they measure THAT success? Sadly, by the amount of money in their damn collection plate.
But if CO2 is a leading indicator for climate change (It isn't), it's worth keeping track of, and does correlate fairly strongly with all types of man-made pollution. CO2 ain't the only stuff we're pumping into the atmosphere, and as it has risen, so have levels of other pollutants, which are much stronger greenhouse gases. Don't get me wrong. I haven't heard a single solid, climate-remediating proposal from ANY of the "believers." All they seem to want is more government interference in everything, and especially in the U.S., while other major polluters like China and India get a free pass.
But in the larger sweep of things, folks who try to be Christ-like tend to be pretty good people. That's how churches keep 'em in line. They appeal to the BEST in people, but sometimes (often) for all the wrong reasons.
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By standing firm, he puts the Democrats in a very bad position. They're dead set on not letting him have his way, but they're out of rational arguments. The facts and the numbers are stacked against them, and the longer they hold out, the more people learn more facts. There are definitely some businesses that benefit by illegals depressing wages. But aside from those special interests, illegal immigration costs us 100s of billions of dollars, year in and year out. It puts a drain on localities that are disproportionately affected by the influx.
But stories are coming out. People who live next to the border and in affected areas in the inner cities are not being heard, unless they're in Sanctuary! mode. Right now, they're trying - and failing - to suppress local San Diego reports, because people are saying things have gotten a lot better since they put up barriers. But they can't quite keep these stories from going viral on social media.
Democrats are taking a big hit. Their control of legacy media does them no good - and actually hurts/exposes them - because its reach is a TINY fraction of what it was 10 or 20 years ago. They've lost a major advantage, and it may force them to concede this fight. We'll see. It's giving them a black eye. Or is that the 4 black eyes of sinister Schumer and Pelosi? No. Those are just the inevitable bags you get when you spend a combined 50 years as Washington, DC Swamp-Creature insiders. They know the money and they know where the bodies are buried. They are literally Ghouls of the Establishment.
Democrats are Saruman, surrounded by Ents in Orthanc, unable to tell different lies to different people, because all peoples represented. Sure, they still have their "private" speeches to the bankers. THAT veil hasn't yet parted.
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Fauci's medical opinions are fine. But he's NOT running public policy. What good is it if he minimizes the deaths directly from the virus, if we all die of starvation or descend into chaos? There's a balance, here, and I'm not just taking a doctor's word, because doctors aren't economists. Trump's seeking that balance between minimizing the medical threat without killing the patient by OTHER means. "We don't want the cure to be worse than the disease." And I'm totally OK with questioning the "infinite wisdom of experts." Let the questions be asked. Listen to what the experts' responses are. Make judgements. The juxtaposition of disparate ideas is what separates us from the totalitarians. Arguing is how we arrive at a better approximation of truth, guided by facts, evidence, and reason. (SJWs need not apply.)
I don't think anybody knows the proper balance, for sure. If the supply chain is broken because its members are sick, then we die. If the supply chain is broken because of government force, then we die. If the economy tanks, then all the wealth that the left so desperately want to re-distribute by force won't exist to BE re-distributed. They're always trying to gut the goose that lays the golden egg, because of all the shiny yellow metal they imagine in its belly, just there for the taking, er ah, re-distributing.
Personally, I think people just need to be careful, and not cut off their noses to spite their faces. Big crowds? Bad idea. Breathing on baby and grandma? Bad idea. Going to work if your work doesn't require large groups and close contact? Good idea! My job's gone totally online and I haven't missed a beat. Jobs for professional shoppers should be a huge niche, just waiting to be filled. You can be a big tipper to your delivery person, save money, save energy, and reduce the spread of the virus by a factor of at least 2, and maybe 3 or 4, because those professional shoppers can service 2 to 4 orders at the same time. More shopping. Fewer people.
Feeding truckers maybe won't be a Truck-Stop thing for a while. Some enterprising person will find a way to fill their bellies and keep them rolling, if we LET IT HAPPEN. All kinds of ways to keep the supply chain going, without unnecessary exposure. Frankly, I think small-scale entrepreneurs would solve the problem faster and with less harm than a MILLION experts in Washington, D.C.
Shutting everything down is just stupid. But we probably won't arrive at anything sensible until liberals start running out of groceries and demand that the economy re-start. Until they do, their hysteria will not permit public officials to do what needs to be done, which is mostly NOTHING.
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They didn't bring any trial lawyers to testify, because a trial lawyer would shred the case the Dems are trying to make. I don't like how the Dems managed things in the House. I'm not as freaked out as partisan Republicans, because impeachment IS political. If Dems can get articles of impeachment passed by holding partisan hearings in Democrat-controlled committees, presenting one side and controlling the proceedings, then they can do that. But a 2/3 majority in the Senate is a HUGE hurdle.
I think the big miscalculation is that by doing things this way, they could move the public-opinion needle far enough to create a hysterical rush to the cliffs of impeachment. They've been marvelously successful at stampeding us for many years. But I think they underestimated the longer-term public reaction to the unqualified successes enjoyed during the Iraqi Freedom campaign. Ratings were good, reporters were "embedded," and the whole country was behind our soldiers, so we stayed mostly mum on criticizing the decision. A few years later, we come to find out the whole thing was based on bad intel and hysteria. And the whole divide-and-conquer-identity-politics thing was also an unqualified success, with no one daring to question tenets of the New Faith. Marvelously successful. But there's been a quietly growing back-lash and red-pilling going on, virtually undetected, and certainly under-estimated.
The tactics that served so well for so long are turning out to be strategically unsound. They'd push our buttons and get the green light. Now they push our buttons and the RED light comes on. But they only know the one button to push. There's only so much you can do to subvert and abuse the process, before people get wise.
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We've seen so many "Smoking Gun" headlines, that I think this smoking gun is slipping under the radar. This is pretty damning, and with more such documents being unsealed, it appears certain that Flynn's conviction WILL be vacated, and maybe, just maybe, heads will finally start rolling.
Every time a document is unsealed or un-redacted, it turns out that it was never about "national security," but just a bunch of crooks hiding behind a Wizard-of-Oz curtain of "national security." But we'll see. I expected this to happen LAST summer, and things just dragged on, DOJ/FBI kept slow-walking documents to Judicial Watch, Flynn's Judge kept dragging HIS feet. But maybe it was gonna take a Durham investigation to finally stick it to 'em, and the accumulation of evidence just took time.
We'll see. Comey's "I sent them" is getting harder and harder for him to hide from. I don't think even the WuFlu can save him (or Brennan or Clapper or many others). I hope it doesn't just end with total public humiliation, but convictions, but just getting the humiliation may be all we can get and even be enough. Let's hope We the People take the right lessons from this and start a movement to pare down the size and scope of federal government, in particular the surveillance state. We the People all have smartphones, nowadays. It's pretty hard to hide just from US, and most of us are pretty darn good at managing our affairs and helping the needy.
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The NFL hitched their wagon to the US military, long ago. They hold Air Force fly-overs, ceremonies honoring war heroes, and the Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force run a lot of recruiting ads.
And the military, in turn, recruits a lot of soldiers into football fans. Lots of fan-atic football fans stationed overseas, and the NFL is a strong bond back to the States.
But as long as it gave me a chance to spout off about how Democrats are wrecking our cities and setting police against people with intended or unintended consequences of their policies, then maybe Kaep deserves a pat on the back. I just think he's idealistic, but pretty shallow.
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Biden is just carrying out the Obama legacy. It's just a feckless, un-American policy bundle that got Trump elected in 2016.
The American electorate have never in my lifetime been all that clear on what they WANTED, but they know enough to reject Democrats when they're the party in power and the nation is mired in malaise. This is much like where the USA was in 1984, only Trump lost and Reagan won.
I think Republican presidents are only slightly less insane than Democrat presidents, but that NObody who gains the oval office is really serious about limiting the size and scope of the federal government, which is where TRUE advancement lies. I think we pretty much got the system about as right as it would ever be when we ended Jim Crow once and for all. I'm not even sure we needed the Civil Rights Acts, but for the courts to fully implement equal treatment under the law. Pretty much everything the feds have done since then has been counter-productive.
They crossed the line from "This is the basic rule set for ALL" into "Let me be your sugar daddy!" We should've stopped at "equal treatment," period, and then gone about cleaning up our foreign-policy and intelligence agencies, who've gotten just about everything wrong since Gulf of Tonkin, if not before.
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Man, I don't think we're gettin' the straight of this. I kind of feel like Trump was the one friend of the anti-oligarch president, Zelensky, and the entire Washington establishment had more blood they wanted to suck out of the corpse of the former Soviet Union.
I think Russia would LOVE to have Ukraine back in the fold. So I doubt Putin's motives. But I also know that major players in the USA would LOVE for Ukraine to totter on as a weak country ruled by oligarchs. I think there are people in high places in the USA who profit enormously from the situation as it is, and so it is very hard for President Zelensky to truly enact real reform. Keep those board memberships coming, Burisma!
Anybody with a shred of discernment can see that the big to-do about Trump's phone call was to distract from public-record evidence of Biden extorting the Ukrainian government to keep the company that paid his son big bucks to do nothing from being prosecuted. "Fire the prosecutor or you don't get the $2 billion in aid (or whatever the # was)." There's pay for play right out in the open, and they had to "Trump up" something against Trump, to keep the wolves away from a MAJOR Biden scandal. I think the reason Biden ran was to keep his crimes on a political plane, where going after him for anything can be painted as a political vendetta and crushed by political control of media and investigating and prosecuting agencies.
Anyway, that's soapbox stuff, but I think it's important context for the situation in Ukraine.
Also, I consider the EU to be a catastrophically failing project. Wrong-headed at the top. Capable of so much good, but when the central body operates on numerous myths and misconceptions, it makes things worse for all its member states. I'm not sure - in fact I very much doubt - that the EU and NATO are great for Ukraine.
Then there's the history of invasion from the West. Russia doesn't want to have re-fight WW II. They're OK with Eastern Europe being independent, but there's a long history of Euros invading Russia in the last 2 or 3 centuries. They also want stable neighbors to their West, and the EU nations and USA seem utterly deranged.
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We finally have a president who'll stand up to those establishment types and defy establishment narratives, which sound really good, but end in half-a-million-and-counting dead, and millions of refugees swarming (and destroying) Europe through the back door. These "genius foreign-policy experts" NEVER consider unintended consequences of the use of force and just plain old meddling in the business of other sovereign nations.
These neocon/neolib "geniuses" CREATED and ENABLED the "terrorist threat" in the name of fighting "evil Soviets." Then use their blunders of the past to justify MORE blundering violence in the present. I'm sick of this kind of thinking, abroad, and its "government should stick its nose into EVERYTHING" attitude at home. All these jerks understand is power and how to use power for their own selfish, short-term interests, without regard for the untenable situations they set up for us down the road. They don't CARE if they create crisis. It just means we need them, MORE, to sort out the neverending string of crises They Created.
Guys like this will go through your neighborhood throwing rocks through the windows of every home on Tuesday, and roll through the streets selling windows on Wednesday. Screw that thinking and the incompetent assholes who protect their little kingdoms with this nonsense.
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probably not. It's the nature of the press. Those most motivated to dominate the public square are those with agendas to push. The founders of the USA understood this. That's why they kept government OUT of all matters "free speech," and why the big networks and Big Tech are doing everything they can to censor.
The founders never kidded themselves that the press was objective truth. They just insisted that no one could be silenced, so that if you lied, somebody could call you out.
Ever since our nation's founding, SOME of the rich and powerful have done their damnedest to dominate the media, so their lies would be the unchallenged truth in the public square. They sanitized almost all network t.v., radio and print media, and one message was all that was seen or heard for most of the 20th Century. Then the Internet happened, and they've been trying to put the Internet on lock-down ever since.
And everything they do in Washington, DC, to "help" just makes things worse. While they're debating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I'm the one guy out there saying "Legislating on decency in communications is a violation of the 1st Amendment, and a MASSIVE over-reach by the federal government."
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As eager manipulators, the Russians may actually serve to help us root out the worst, most blatant corruption in Washington, DC, by the time the last Russian-collusion shot is fired. And more and more, it appears that the mop-up will entail sweeping Obama administration hacks into the prosecutorial net.
Ironically, draining the swamp is probably a good thing for Russia. We're much less likely to do something really stupid. And much less likely to encourage stupidity in countries around the world, for the benefit of corrupt, entrenched elites.
Hillary would, by now, have wrapped herself in the flag, the stern Empress at war with dangerous enemies, and the media would've eaten it up.
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For the next few months, that desperation is going to make them very volatile, very dangerous, and potentially very destructive. Who knows what harm they're going to do? The fact that Trump waited out the Mueller investigation gives the good guys a much better chance than if he'd gone at it, hammer and tong, from Day 1. When the leftover Obama crowd were still dominating the workings of the ship of state, right after inauguration, any investigations on his part would've been shot full of leaks by never-Trumpers. I think he slowly, quietly got his ducks in a row.
Note there's no daily diet of damaging leaks from Durham and Barr. This is how things would proceed, if the guys running things were on the up-and-up and competent. But still too much remains to be done. The Trump base wants blood, but I'll settle for TRUTH AND TRANSPARENCY. The Dems and their Dem/Repub deep-state, careerist establishment insiders give us neither truth nor transparency.
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If you're a (poor) student of history as I am, then you (foolishly) believe as I do, that often the Good is served for all the wrong reasons. You need to take a step back from the posturing and parse the larger tide of human progress and living conditions of regular folks.
For instance, underneath the hysteria, it sounds like civilians in Damascus are no longer being shelled by Islamic rebels. Peace is setting in in the North.
The wars of aggression (overt and covert) have been going on for decades, spearheaded by a bunch of so-called foreign-policy and intelligence experts that serve elites and NOT the people. I'm giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, because for the first time in a LONG time, we're breaking away from a CRAZY globalist ideology that is ill-intentioned and incompetent, at the same time.
If we're getting it RIGHT, for once, we'll see things settle down pretty quickly. Neocons and Neolibs are going to kick and scream if we stop our meddling. I suspect that the way Trump's going about things is pushing us in the right direction, while simultaneously counteracting the propaganda from Deep-State-type "experts" who've been fucking everything up for DECADES.
It'll get louder before it gets quieter, but it looks like Trump is sorting out a lot of phony bullshit foreign policy that ultimately has served NObody, except maybe some political cronies in the war industry. I think what's been happening isn't quite conspiracy, but a lot of "fellow travelers" in the service of a global gov't that can only thrive by destroying all vestiges of nationalism in the West.
It's all wrong-headed. It's all authoritarian/totalitarian in its thrust. I'd like to see a little less nationalism, but it's a long-term goal, achieved by MORE autonomy on the people side, which is the opposite of what these one-worlders seem to want. It appears they want CHAOS, so they can step in and run things from on high.
This is exactly the opposite of a positive one-world vision. National boundaries should dissolve over time NOT because somebody's running the whole show, but because folks generally enjoy similar freedoms and prosperity on BOTH sides of the border, which then makes the border an artificial barrier to free trade between free people.
It's not something you can do away with from on high, which is where elites and elitists always get it wrong, thinking THEY will be able to call all the shots. As long as gov'ts treat their people like shit, there's no chance of a just, worldwide coming-together. Just like in love: If you love her, let her go. If she loves you she will come back.
I think the long-term answer is to campaign for freedom, liberty, human rights and the prosperity that inevitably follows. The more of THAT we see and the more we LIMIT the central powers of gov't, the closer we will come to the ideal that contemporary Globalists THINK they want, but can only see authoritarian means to that end. One world can only take place by LIMITING central authority.
Instead, we can't wait to find something NEW that gov't should stick its nose in. We're so stupid.
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