US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4584

On July 30 2016 07:57 silynxer wrote:

Just to make sure I got you right: You believe no RNC mails were leaked because they are too uninteresting?

[EDIT] To LegalLord: apparently the RNC got hacked as well (someone mentioned it above, can't check right now).

On July 30 2016 05:19 Plansix wrote:
But the majority of the people who obtain those offices could make as much, if not more money doing anything else.

On July 30 2016 08:08 Cowboy24 wrote:

This post is a prime example of why Americans are sick of sending our soldiers to protect the rest of the world. They constantly blast us and our ways and our culture and sneer at us. The only thing they love is our blood. No matter what we do, it is the same story: hate on America and then scream and moan whenever anyone in America suggests that maybe we shouldn't be protecting people who hate us.

Also, I notice you didn't actually refute anything I said. We all know why you didn't. So go ahead and keep attacking, it's all you've got and it's all you'll ever have. And it's why your side is losing.

On July 30 2016 08:08 Cowboy24 wrote:

This post is a prime example of why Americans are sick of sending our soldiers to protect the rest of the world. They constantly blast us and our ways and our culture and sneer at us. The only thing they love is our blood. No matter what we do, it is the same story: hate on America and then scream and moan whenever anyone in America suggests that maybe we shouldn't be protecting people who hate us.

On July 30 2016 07:06 GreenHorizons wrote:
Unironically, the same people who want us to believe this is all the Russians, also want us to believe that they didn't access her server or messages overseas.

On July 30 2016 08:13 zlefin wrote:

what exactly is it that you believe their side is losing?

On July 30 2016 08:24 Stratos_speAr wrote:


Talk about living in Republican fantasyland.

Millenials are an incredibly liberal generation and people don't become conservative as they get older, they get more extreme and entrenched in whatever ideology they subscribe to. As millenials get older and become more reliable as a voting block (and the older generation continues to die off), it will only bolster the left. The only reason that Republicans have had so much influence over the last 10 years is because of intense partisanship and blatant gerrymandering.

On July 30 2016 08:24 WhiteDog wrote:
Don't be so sure of that tho. Millenials is a term used by tabloïd, it doesn't account for the fact that generations are not homogeneous - "youth is only but a word" wrote Bourdieu years ago. And more than that, the idéalistic nature of the "millenials" as captured in some pools could very well backfire if the institutionnal left find itself unable to live up to their desires. To say it in another manner : the global access to higher degree, but with lower return on diploma and higher debt could very well create years of resentment.

On July 30 2016 08:32 biology]major wrote:


Pretty sure as people get older they become conservative, when you actually have to sacrifice more of your paycheck

One of the ringleaders of the militia takeover of an Oregon nature preserve last winter is now hoping to avoid prison by convincing the courts that the United States is actually being run by a shadow government that enslaves children at birth.
Ryan Bundy faces multiple felony charges for his role in the week-long armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January, which armed anti-government radicals occupied for nearly six weeks. Bundy’s followers were out-of-towners drawn to the area by protests against the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers. One occupier named Lavoy Finicum was killed by police after attempting to run a roadblock nearby, and the remaining occupiers surrendered to authorities a few days later.
Ammon and Ryan Bundy are each charged with conspiring to lead the occupation, and with a string of other crimes in connection to the bizarre saga. But none of those charges can touch him, Ryan says, because he’s a sovereign citizen not subject to U.S. law.
“i; ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent; and;,” Bundy wrote in one legal filing submitted Thursday.

“i; ryan c, man, accept no offer of representation, as no man is qualified to represent i; and; i; ryan c, man, will hold any man liable, in his/her private capacity, for any burden, placed upon i, man, by any man, by way of representation of i; and;,” he wrote in another.
Bundy’s use of semicolons and insistence on referring to himself in lower-case letters are hallmarks of a crackpot legal theory favored by so-called “sovereign citizens.” These Americans believe that a nefarious cabal of secret authorities long ago usurped the true and legal government of the nation. The supposed infiltrators convert every American born into collateral for borrowing money from abroad, the theory goes.
Until a person goes through a process called “redemption” to abandon the all-caps version of their name printed on formal government documents, sovereigns believe, they remain a debt-slave to this shadow state. Once “redeemed,” sovereigns go to work defying the courts with documents like the ones Bundy has been submitting in recent months.
The anti-government radicals who promote this stuff say they are rooting their arguments in “common law,” and that U.S. courts operate on “admiralty law” that can’t be applied to people like Bundy. It’s a dangerous way to think, as reason magazine’s Jesse Walker told ThinkProgress in January, because it leads gullible people to put themselves in serious jeopardy.
“People are throwing their lives away thinking they can be protected by these magic arguments, and then ending up in jail,” Walker said. “To me it’s the equivalent of somebody giving shitty alternative health advice. This is alternative legal advice.”
Naturally, there are people out there trying to make money off of all this. Sovereign Filing Solutions will sell you a three-volume “Redemption Manual” for $330 plus shipping, fight to get you out of a child support agreement for $1,000, or take on your foreclosure case for $3,500.
The idea that there’s a special, secret legal code that can erase all your problems is especially enticing inside prisons, where “common law” kookery has spread especially fast. But the ideas are most often used to try to avoid paying taxes — most famously by the actor Wesley Snipes, who was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for not paying taxes because he believed he wasn’t subject to federal tax law.

But while most sovereign citizens’ “weapon of choice is paper,” as movement expert J.J. MacNab wrote in 2010, this corner of the American tapestry sees more than its share of bloodshed. The most high-profile followers of Bundy’s ideology have tended to be violent armed men.
Sovereign ideologues triggered two dozen separate incidents of violence around the country from 2010 to 2014, a sporadic rate of extremist violence that the Department of Homeland Security expects to continue. When sovereigns do become violent, they usually target law enforcement. Most recently, the man who killed three police in Baton Rouge this month shared Bundy’s beliefs.
Sovereign thinking undergirds the entire Bundy family’s string of showdowns with land management authorities around the west in recent years. The alternative legal theories of the movement were on particular display in Oregon, where Bundy’s occupiers wanted to arrest a local sheriff and try him for treason on the Malheur grounds.
Bundy’s gambit is unlikely to work any better in court than it did on the bird sanctuary. He is a leading suspect in a high-profile set of crimes that were documented online as they happened — leaving little room for dispute. Prosecutors and judges aren’t liable to let Bundy’s series of felony charges slide just because he throws piles of semicolons at them.

On July 30 2016 08:32 biology]major wrote:


Pretty sure as people get older they become conservative, when you actually have to sacrifice more of your paycheck

On July 30 2016 08:59 Dan HH wrote:
Pence: ''I believe we will see Roe versus Wade consigned to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.'' (last 10s in the video)

On July 30 2016 07:26 oBlade wrote:

There was also a consensus that Iraq still had WMDs in 2003.

On July 30 2016 08:19 Cowboy24 wrote:

Power. Influence. Social standing.

I believe what we are seeing right now is a semi-permanent backlash from the right-wing which will effectively destroy the Democrats as a legitimate party for the next 16-24 years. The Left will have to completely redefine itself, or wait for a whole new generation of voters without the bad experiences of being burned by them.

All that is predicated on Trump actually winning though, so we'll have to see. As of now, it looks pretty close.