2024

[Sparko]

Assemble policies you support and take measure of who best fills those needs. For me, it is health care for all, social security shore-up by eliminating the cap for wealthy people, guarantee voting rights, eliminate wealthy tax loopholes, bring back American industry, oppose Russian/Chinese and other brutality, have government take better measure of the preamble to the Constitution than it does, secure food for the hungry, look to the needs of veterans and their families, bolster pensions and unions, protect the environment, leave the nation better than we found it. I could vote for a Third Party and get none of those things, or democrat and try to work for a majority that might bring about these things freely and fairly. Republicans are really not even on this planet any more.

[ousdahl]

“If your house is on fire, and your choices are either to pour gasoline on it or to try putting it out with an eye dropper, at some point maybe you should consider just building a new house”

[Sparko]

“If your house is on fire, and your choices are either to pour gasoline on it or to try putting it out with an eye dropper, at some point maybe you should consider just building a new house”

Need a fire, burn a strawman

[twocoach]

pdub the voice of reason in this thread.

zsn, Shirley, and 2coach, are C-walkin, throwing up their sets, and hanging their blue flags. 24th street, Garden Blocc holmes!

So if I just whine about the way things are it will move me to the "voice of reason" column? Nice!

no, but if you quit spewing the same bullshit that "we have choices, we just have to vote" that would be a good start.

The start of what, a change to the two-party system? I had no idea what I type on a message board had such power!

[ousdahl]

[ousdahl]

[twocoach]

Assemble policies you support and take measure of who best fills those needs. For me, it is health care for all, social security shore-up by eliminating the cap for wealthy people, guarantee voting rights, eliminate wealthy tax loopholes, bring back American industry, oppose Russian/Chinese and other brutality, have government take better measure of the preamble to the Constitution than it does, secure food for the hungry, look to the needs of veterans and their families, bolster pensions and unions, protect the environment, leave the nation better than we found it. I could vote for a Third Party and get none of those things, or democrat and try to work for a majority that might bring about these things freely and fairly. Republicans are really not even on this planet any more.

Agreed, although as a son to an amazing Mom, a brother to a great sister and a father to two strong daughters that I also take into consideration their policies and how they treat women.

I don't really give a shit WHO is President. I am not voting for the PERSON. I vote for platforms that move this nation forward in more of the direction that I want to see the nation go. There will be some wobbling backwards at times, many times due to the sheer size and complexity of our nation but the big picture has to move forward to me.

We have moved forward from where we were when Biden got elected. When you're on a 10 lane highway in gridlock traffic, you might have been able to get 5 car lengths further ahead if you had just chosen slightly different at some point in the near past but that decision point is behind me and I don't choose to fret over the what if. I have two choices right now and there really is no choice at all for me to make. One is a decision to grind along forward and the other is a decision to get in a fucking tank and drunkenly swerve around in circles, leaving a wake of destruction and chaos in its wake.

[Sparko]

Agreed Twocoach

[TDub]

2coach continually misses the point. Of course we don't want trump....thats not what this was/is about....

[zsn]

If the founders had meant for the Constitution to favor WASPs, then the founders could have written it that way.

They did not.

Unfortunately the sarcasm-font is not installed on my phone!

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Which is why it's so disheartening to see obviously-smart people (like Ann Coulter) say obviously-stupid things (like this: viewtopic.php?t=4581&start=1860).

If the founders had meant for the Constitution to favor WASPs, then the founders could have written it that way.

They did not.

I am asking this because I am open to being educated....

At any point in our country's history did Congress progressively not just allow but purposely influence states to have the right/s to instill (not sure that's the right word) religion as a factor in to their laws?

[jfish26]

Which is why it's so disheartening to see obviously-smart people (like Ann Coulter) say obviously-stupid things (like this: viewtopic.php?t=4581&start=1860).

If the founders had meant for the Constitution to favor WASPs, then the founders could have written it that way.

They did not.

I am asking this because I am open to being educated....

At any point in our country's history did Congress progressively not just allow but purposely influence states to have the right/s to instill (not sure that's the right word) religion as a factor in to their laws?

I’m not sure of the specific question. Certainly we see religion get mixed into public policy (and government function) at state and local levels all of the time.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Which is why it's so disheartening to see obviously-smart people (like Ann Coulter) say obviously-stupid things (like this: viewtopic.php?t=4581&start=1860).

If the founders had meant for the Constitution to favor WASPs, then the founders could have written it that way.

They did not.

I am asking this because I am open to being educated....

At any point in our country's history did Congress progressively not just allow but purposely influence states to have the right/s to instill (not sure that's the right word) religion as a factor in to their laws?

I’m not sure of the specific question. Certainly we see religion get mixed into public policy (and government function) at state and local levels all of the time.

I'm not sure of the specific question either.
I think you did a good job of answering it - and that's how I feel too.

* I just spent 10 minutes writing my thoughts and then deleted what I wrote.
All I am going to say is forgetting the separation of Church and State, I feel religion is fantastic. When it is kept to those who are like minded and are keeping their religion to themselves and not forcing it on others.
When it starts being forced on others, I feel religion is the root of a lot of evil. Which to me, is exactly what religion should NOT be.

On that note..... I think at this moment I am leaning towards writing in and voting for Jah/Yah for president in 2024.

[jfish26]

This crystallizes many of the small things that are giving me optimism that the dam is breaking (along with again noting that results from actual voting are more important than polling).

May 9, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-9-2024

Last night, 163 Democratic representatives joined 196 Republicans to stop far-right Republicans from removing House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led the effort to remove Johnson, but her motion received only 43 votes: 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Twenty-eight representatives either did not vote or voted present.

Greene promptly excoriated the “uniparty,” saying that “the Democrats now control Speaker Johnson. That was something that everybody’s suspected all along. They just voted to save him.”

But the majority of the House Republican conference appears to be tired of the chaos in their ranks that has made this Congress one of the least productive in American history. Jordain Carney and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported today that House Republicans who are not aligned with Greene and her cohort want to change House rules to create punishments for the extremists who keep stopping House business by, for example, voting against letting bills come to the floor of the House.

Greene and Thomas Massie (R-KY), her main ally in trying to oust Johnson, urged their colleagues to bring it on. Massie said that anyone trying to stop them was going to “take an ass-whooping from their base.”

Since the 1990s, right-wing media hosts have directed the Republican base, telling them what to think and urging them to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to do what the media hosts wanted. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was so influential in the 1990s that when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1995 for the first time since 1954, they made him an honorary member of their incoming congressional freshman class. And what Limbaugh did for radio, Fox News Channel hosts like Bill O’Reilly did for television.

But Limbaugh died in February 2021, and after the Fox News Channel (FNC) had to pay a $787 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for the lies the network’s hosts told about the company’s voting machines in the 2020 election, it let go of main host Tucker Carlson. There are indications that FNC founder and former chair Rupert Murdoch hoped to center Republican messaging around young activist Charlie Kirk, but Kirk has slid into MAGA extremism, too.

The Republican extremists no longer have a centralized messaging center. Instead, as CNN’s Oliver Darcy noted today, Murdoch’s outlets themselves—the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post—stood behind Johnson.

Yesterday, FreedomWorks, the right-wing organization that was backed by the Koch family at its start in 2004 and that was behind the Tea Party movement, abruptly shut down. FreedomWorks attacked Democratic measures for business regulation and social welfare because it embraced libertarian principles. Its revenue had dropped by half since 2022, its president, Adam Brandon, told Luke Mullins of Politico. But in the end, what did the organization in was the party’s split over Trump.

That split was crystal clear in Tuesday’s Republican primary election in Indiana. Trump won that election, but with only 78.3% of the vote. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who suspended her campaign in early March and has not campaigned since, won 21.7%.

Before the Indiana primary, on May 2 political statistician Tom Bonier debunked the idea that Haley’s support came from Democratic-leaning voters flooding the primary vote to hurt Trump. Crunching the numbers in North Carolina showed that Haley voters there “were not substantially younger than the GOP voters (41% over 65 vs 45% among reg[istered Republicans]). They were overwhelmingly white (94% of Ind[ependent]s vs 97% of [Republicans]), and were actually more likely to be men (51% of Ind[ependent Republican] primary voters vs 50% of [Republicans]).” In short, he wrote, “[e]very indicator suggests these Independents voting in [Republican] primaries are more likely [Republican] voters. They just don't like Trump.”

Political commentator Chris Cillizza today called attention to the numbers that landed before Tuesday. On March 12, Haley won 13.2% of the vote in Georgia (or 78,000 votes). On March 19 she won 17.8% of the vote in Arizona (111,000 votes), 3.9% of the vote in Florida (155,000 votes), and 14.4% of the vote in Ohio (161,000 votes). On April 2 she won 12.8% of the votes in Wisconsin (77,000 votes). And on April 23, Haley won 16.6% of the votes in Pennsylvania (158,000 votes).

If Biden picks up even one in five of these votes, Cillizza noted, “it matters bigly.”

Three high-level Republicans this week told media they would not vote for Trump, helping to pave an off-ramp for other Republicans. Former House speaker Paul Ryan told Yahoo Finance that he would write in another Republican rather than vote for Trump. “Character is too important to me,” he said.

Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also cited character when she said she would not vote for Trump. “I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would absolutely consider voting for Joe Biden this upcoming November because he will not seek to destroy our nation [or] our Constitution, and he has the statesman character that we need in an elected official.”

Georgia’s former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan went further on Monday night, endorsing Biden, whom he had called in an op-ed a “decent person I disagree with on policy,” over Trump, whom he described as “a criminal defendant without a moral compass.” “Sometimes the best way to learn your lesson is to get beat, and Donald Trump needs to get beat. We need to move on as a party. We need to move on as a country,” he said.

Meanwhile, as Khaya Himmelman noted in Talking Points Memo, MAGA Republicans are already blaming a potential loss in 2024 on illegal voters. On Wednesday, Speaker Johnson and other Trump Republicans held a press conference to promote their new bill to make it illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.

This is a political stunt: It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that this is happening. In 2017, Trump created a commission to root out the illegal voting he claimed had affected the 2016 election; less than a year later, he disbanded it when it could find no evidence of his claims. Johnson admitted there was no evidence of voting by undocumented immigrants when he told reporters: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number."

Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles retorted: “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”

For his part, Trump appears to have tried a more direct approach to reelection. According to Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post, last month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told about two dozen top oil executives that if they gave him $1 billion to get reelected, he would immediately reverse the environmental regulations the Biden-Harris administration has put into place and stop any new ones. A $1 billion gift would be a “deal,” according to Trump, because the tax cuts he plans to enact and the regulatory cuts would be worth far more than that. Since then, Ben Lefebvre wrote yesterday in Politico, oil executives have been drawing up executive orders that Trump can sign as soon as he takes office.

Yesterday, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, President Biden said the U.S. would continue to supply defensive weapons to support the Iron Dome over Israel, but it would not send offensive weapons to Israel if it went forward with its controversial invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter from Israeli strikes. The administration has publicly opposed that invasion since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced it. “If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah,” Biden said. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”

Trump and other Republicans promptly accused President Joe Biden of “taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses.”

“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” Biden told Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

[twocoach]

2coach continually misses the point. Of course we don't want trump....thats not what this was/is about....

I know, it's about whining about how you don't like your choices. Feel free to rewrite our entire voting system. I don't have any great ideas on how to fix the system without breaking it more and I haven'ytheard any other ones either.

I am probably just at the point where I spend my day around people who bitch and complain too much so I have reached my limit. Everyone hates everything around here. Bitch about NIL, bitch about conferences, bitch about voting, bitch about everything. Some people just like to bitch and complain and it's annoying to be around after a while.

[jfish26]

A reminder that democracy itself isn't perhaps even the most significant existential issue on the ballot.

What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ign-money/

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid.

[...]

Despite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the United States is now producing more oil than any country ever has, pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year.

Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump vowed at the dinner to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports — a top priority for the executives, according to three people present. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the recollection of an attendee.

[...]

“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives, according to the recollection of the attendee.

[...]

The Biden campaign initially declined to comment for this article. After it was published, however, Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement that “Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple.”

“It doesn’t matter to Trump that oil and gas companies charge working families and middle-class Americans whatever they want while raking in record profits — if Donald can cash a check, he’ll do what they say,” Moussa added.

[...]

Dan Eberhart, chief executive of the oil-field services company Canary and a Trump donor, said the Republican onslaught of donations was not surprising.

“Biden constantly throws a wet blanket to the oil and gas industry,” Eberhart said. “Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ philosophy aligns much better with the oil patch than Biden’s green-energy approach. It’s a no-brainer.”

Alex Witt, a senior adviser for oil and gas with Climate Power, said Trump’s promise is he will do whatever the oil industry wants if they support him. With Trump, Witt said, “everything has a price.”

“They got a great return on their investment during Trump’s first term, and Trump is making it crystal clear that they’re in for an even bigger payout if he’s reelected,” she said.

[Sparko]

Nice planet you have there. A shame if it were set on fire. . .

[jfish26]

Of course the other hostage-taking going on here is “nice profits you’ve got there, would be a shame if (you didn’t pay my election cheating, classified document stealing, and insurrection inciting legal fees to keep something from happening to them).”

[Sparko]

Extortion is a ugly word.

[jfish26]

This is all why I wonder if these folks are ACTUALLY going to put material money forward. These aren't online pillow loon-magnates we're talking about here.