US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3842

On May 19 2016 02:33 Naracs_Duc wrote:


The Dems didn't show up because they thought Obama was just joking about his reach across the aisle policy. When the ACA and the Iraq withdrawal was not just pure far left liberal ideals and actually tried to take into account multiple aspects of how both would affect the economy and future voters, he actually borrowed some right wing ideas just like he promised.

Liberal voters are very fickle.

On May 19 2016 00:52 Mohdoo wrote:


Audio recordings. I wonder if the campaign just flat out denies it's actually her? I mean, if it is her, this is huge. It directly shows Bernie to either be a liar or out of control of his campaign. This audio recording directly conflicts with his statement.

On May 19 2016 02:02 xDaunt wrote:

What do you mean "source?" That 2008 election was retardedly hyped for the very reasons that I set forth. How can anyone forget it? It was a media and pop culture phenomenon. The republicans probably weren't going to win anyway with all of the electoral headwinds that they were facing that year. But you can't possibly overlook the fact that Obama was awarded a fucking Nobel Peace Prize on the merits of teleprompted speeches.

On May 19 2016 02:40 Plansix wrote:

The majority of democrats are not that liberal, tbh. Most of them just wanted a functioning government and the issues of the financial crisis to be addressed. And to not be in Iraq any more. The ACA was nice, but I would have preferred the Democrats remove a lot of the dumb rules in the house that makes the minority party worthless. But they are short term thinkers.

And Dems losing in the mid terms has been happening since the 90s.

On May 19 2016 03:08 andrewlt wrote:


I'm a registered independent who voted for Obama twice because the other party is just insane. I just want a sane, functioning government that knows how to compromise with other sane people who disagree with them.

Trump releases 11 potential Supreme Court nominees: AP
Republican candidate Donald Trump released the name of 11 judges he would vet to consider for nomination to the vacant Supreme Court seat should he be elected president in November, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.

The unusual move is aimed at suppressing conservative fears that he would not name someone in line with their philosophies. The AP reported the list as: Steven Colloton of Iowa, Allison Eid of Colorado, Raymond Gruender of Missouri, Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, Raymond Kethledge of Michigan, Joan Larsen of Michigan, Thomas Lee of Utah, William Pryor of Alabama, David Stras of Minnesota, Diane Sykes of Wisconsin and Don Willett of Texas.

In small groups, Hillary Clinton answers questions in perfect paragraphs, sometimes long ones. It can be a dazzling display. She is so prepared that she rarely needs a pause to think about what to say.

One aspect of her precision and careful phrasing, with nary a “like” or “you know” ever tumbling from her mouth, is that you need to listen hard to take it all in.

Clinton is definitely the candidate for voters with long attention spans.

That could be a challenge in a world where the human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish, according to a recent Microsoft study.

At rallies, her studied speeches can drag on. In Kentucky last weekend, some of the school-age girls standing behind her with their Fighting for Us signs openly yawned or fiddled with their hair during the talk. One put her back to the audience to chat with a friend. Time described a recent stop at a Virginia bakery as “so boring that you could practically hear the muffins get crusty”.

As president, Bill Clinton, of course, was also famous for his long-winded, policy-rich speeches. But this was before the iPhone, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat helped usher us into the age of distraction.

No one is better suited to these times than Donald Trump, the candidate of short attention spans.

Unlike Clinton, who often starves the press pack following her, Trump is constantly feeding them a 24-hour diet of delectable and irresistible snacks.

He almost always wins the morning. Then he orchestrates at least three or four “news events” a day. His Cinco De Mayo buffoonery – the tweet showing him eating his taco bowl and declaring “I love Hispanics” – kicked off one recent day.

Then came Paul Ryan’s announcement that he was not ready to support Trump and Trump’s immediate rejoinder that he was “not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda”. Then he drew 12,000 people to a rally in West Virginia where he made the far-fetched promise “to put the miners back to work. We’re going to get those mines open!” Afterwards, there were pithy, quotable lashes at Hillary Clinton.

By generating so much “news”, Trump keeps the press in a reactive state. It’s head-spinning for reporters, unless they are the “chosen ones” he calls between stops. And some of their bosses don’t mind: Trump is traffic and ratings gold. In return, he gets more than a billion dollars in free media.

The hyping of stories, like the inconclusive meeting between Trump and Paul Ryan, only adds to the din of distraction. For efficiency’s sake, Politico’s Playbook has launched a feature called “The Daily Trump”, which aggregates many of the lesser stories about him.

There have been some long investigations recently that examined Trump’s past, including his apparent use of the false identity “John Miller”, which he denies, and his treatment of women. But to absorb these stories requires more than one swipe of the mobile screen. Then, in serial tweets, Trump blasted the unfair hit-jobs, reclaiming the headlines. With so many Americans reading with their thumbs, Trump’s advisers seem to believe he’s helped by any attention as long as you spell his name right.

Nate Silver studied the headlines over the nine months since Trump entered the race. He concluded: “With his ability to make news any time he wants with a tweet, news conference or conveniently placed leak, Trump has challenged news organizations’ editorial prerogative.”

Then he asked, “Should the press cover a candidate differently when he makes trolling the media an explicit part of his strategy, on the theory that some coverage is almost always better than none?”

It’s a dilemma. As the presumptive nominee of his party, the campaign press corps has to cover much of what he says and does. But his own background as an entertainer means that Trump makes the line between news and entertainment fuzzier than ever. He’s unbelievably clever at exploiting that.

Clinton, meanwhile, has all but disappeared from the coverage in recent days, except for a Washington Post front-page piece about her supporters worrying about how bad a campaigner she is. Her wariness of the media is well known. Although she’s made repeat appearances on shows anchored by favorites like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and did a hilarious turn as Val the bartender on Saturday Night Live, she never seems like a natural.

Given that she is the long attention span candidate, it’s not surprising that she doesn’t have a memorable or catchy campaign slogan that sums up what she wants to change or do as president. Is it Hillary for America or Fighting for Us? I can’t remember (perhaps my withering attention span is to blame). It’s certainly nothing memorable like Making America Great Again, or Hope and Change, Morning in America, or even Bill’s It’s the Economy, Stupid.

The press, too, is bored with her. Some reporters have covered her since the Clintons arrived in the White House. Even if they have shorter attention spans, they have long memories. Revisiting Whitewater or watching reruns of the Benghazi hearings isn’t an exciting prospect.

The Clinton supporters I called last week sounded worried but resigned. Having been criticized for being inauthentic, she can only be who she is, they say: a sincere policy wonk who has the experience to be an excellent president, even if she’s a dull candidate. Compared to Trump, “She can never be entertaining in the same way,’’ one supporter noted.

Trump is the exploding watermelon of politics. Recently, 800,000 people, a record audience for Facebook Live, watched two employees of Buzzfeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon to see how long it would take to explode (44 minutes, it turned out). One Buzzfeed editor said suspense was the key element of the experiment’s success. Trump builds the same kind of suspense: you never know what he might say.

It’s unclear whether the public, or for that matter any goldfish who cares to tune in, will find the spectacle entertaining or horrifying.

On May 19 2016 02:56 oBlade wrote:

Yes, he got a Nobel Peace Prize for talking about nuclear nonproliferation and now the DPRK has multiple bombs.

On May 19 2016 03:51 CannonsNCarriers wrote:


DPRK tested their first nuke in 2006 during the Bush2 administration, after he walked away from all the deals the Clinton administration had set up.

On May 19 2016 03:54 Plansix wrote:

The ongoing struggle of everything that was bad about the Bush administration somehow being connected to Obama. Just last week I talked to someone who blamed him for TARP and the poor response to Katrina.

On May 19 2016 03:51 CannonsNCarriers wrote:


DPRK tested their first nuke in 2006 during the Bush2 administration, after he walked away from all the deals the Clinton administration had set up.

On May 19 2016 04:05 oBlade wrote:

That would be a really sharp observation if George W. Bush had gotten a Nobel Peace Prize for nuclear nonproliferation just after being elected.

The Clinton administration is actually the reason we're in this shit to begin with because the US allowed Pakistan to develop nukes in the 90s which is where all our nuclear problems now come from. Anyway, it's been the Obama administration that has seen 1) the collapse of six-party talks 2) three DPRK nuclear tests and 3) slow buildup of warheads and ICBM technology.

On May 19 2016 04:05 oBlade wrote:

That would be a really sharp observation if George W. Bush had gotten a Nobel Peace Prize for nuclear nonproliferation just after being elected.

The Clinton administration is actually the reason we're in this shit to begin with because the US allowed Pakistan to develop nukes in the 90s which is where all our nuclear problems now come from. Anyway, it's been the Obama administration that has seen 1) the collapse of six-party talks 2) three DPRK nuclear tests and 3) slow buildup of warheads and ICBM technology.