US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6468

On December 23 2016 07:34 Thieving Magpie wrote:


The DNC is an amalgamation of different belief systems, parties, and missions. It is more "liberal" than its antithesis the GOP, but I would not label the DNC as one type of person or belief system.

There are liberals in the DNC, there are also Moderates, conservatives, and all variances in between.

So statements like "The DNC is not liberal" is fairly meaningless since the DNC is also "Not unliberal."

However, of the demographics of 2016, the one that seemed least willing to help people have been the liberals. It was 2009 all over again with Democrats having the supermajority, Obama with healthcare on the table, and suddenly Democrats having to fight and bribe senators like Bernie Sanders who would rather slow down the process than get healthcare passed.

Sometimes it feels like the biggest opponents of progressive policies are liberals who feel things aren't morally pure enough.

A handful of conservative Democrats, led by Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, made clear that if there was a public option, they would filibuster the final bill.

But among the Democratic base, the public option was extraordinarily popular. Many liberals turned on the entire bill when that element was cast aside. And it wasn't just liberals. The option commanded substantial public support. Poll after poll showed it to be one of the more popular elements of health-care reform.

On December 23 2016 07:39 GreenHorizons wrote:



Uhh you skipped the part about why he was "slowing the process"

You realize it was Democrats that killed the public option right?



Then...



Source

You've been on a revisionist rampage lately.

On December 23 2016 07:47 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I am not revisioning anything. As I said, the DNC is a mix of different opinions, creeds, and beliefs. The goal should have been to find a compromise and to put the law into the books. Instead it was months of inaction followed by the conservative spin machine using it as an example of incompetence by the Dem majority. Then come the election cycle in 2010 the Dem majority was lost.

Why? Because something that should have passed without a hitch as an example of the new beginnings that a democrat white house had promised transformed into months of compromises and never ending parades of bullshit.

On December 23 2016 07:50 GreenHorizons wrote:


The people standing in the way of helping people were the Democrats, yet you've found a way to make Bernie not wanting to give up helping those people with a public option the problem, instead of the Democrats who threatened to filibuster the bill if they didn't get their way of expressly NOT helping people.

On December 23 2016 08:08 Thieving Magpie wrote:


If only facts supported your claim, but during the negotiation process there just wasn't enough votes supporting the public option: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/obama-never-secretly-killed-the-public-option-its-a-myth/2011/11/17/gIQAZQt0UN_blog.html

Had the process not been slowed down then it would have been much easier to pass amendments to it after the fact like H.R.261 - Public Option Deficit Reduction Act a bill that would have had better support had it not been released after Dems lost the majority. Instead the dilly-dally from people having a no-compromise stance lead to the ACA being a stain on the political process instead of a triumph.

It was simple, show up with a big plan, conservative democrats asks for compromise, compromise made and then you bolster the law after its released and you get people hooked on it. Its called politics.

On December 23 2016 08:14 GreenHorizons wrote:


See, when Democrats don't want to help people you call it "just not enough votes" then when Bernie and others don't want to vote for something lacking the public option, you call it a problem of obstinately standing in the way of helping people.

Had Democrats just backed the public option, there would have been no hiccup at all.

On December 23 2016 08:15 ticklishmusic wrote:


if people had just gone my way instead of the highway!

On December 23 2016 08:49 LegalLord wrote:
In all likelihood Trump just did his usual stream-of-consciousness thing. But I wouldn't object to improving land-based strike capabilities for our nuclear arsenal; an upgrade is long overdue.

On December 23 2016 09:01 zlefin wrote:
Trump's been talking about improving the military and upgrading things for a long time, so it doesn't really seem like new policy. And he's the kind of fool to like nukes with no understanding of how to use them.
Had I been asked, I would've assumed he planned to upgrade the nukes, as people have been talking about it for awhile due to how old they are, and he's generally in favor of wasteful military spending (my own editorializing).

On December 23 2016 09:13 Thieving Magpie wrote:


My issue with trump over the past few months is that I can't really predict him.

Like crazy folks like Bush will follow through when they say something crazy, so I know to brace for it/protest/etc... if he said anything weird.

Folks like Obama makes everything he wants to push for sound like the best idea at the time while he's saying it, so when something sounds luke warm I know not to believe him when he says it.

But Trump?

He could tell you that he's going to rape your wife, to your face, while holding a dildo, with you're wife tied up in the other room--and you still won't be sure if he's just saying shit to get under your skin, or if he's lashing out because something got under his skin, or if he actually intends to fuck your wife. Every single time I think I've figured him out he proves me wrong. Every time.

When he was in prison, Lorenzo Palma strongly suspected he was an American citizen. He had spent his whole life in the United States, and he knew his grandfather was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1914.

Palma had served five years on an assault conviction and was about to be released on parole, but immigration officials had stopped his release because they wanted to deport him. They said he wasn't a U.S. citizen.

So in the summer of 2014, Palma found himself among dozens of inmates about to face an immigration judge in Huntsville, Texas. "They would sit us by groups of 10 and they would start deporting left and right," he said.

Getting the paperwork to prove his citizenship was hard: He didn't have money to call his mother in El Paso, Texas, so he was forced to send letters asking her to find the documents.

When it was Palma's turn in court, Judge Richard Walton was short. Palma tried to explain that he was an American. But Walton simply asked Palma if he wanted time to get a lawyer; Palma said yes. Court recordings obtained by NPR show that Palma then softly asked Walton what his chances were of staying in the country.

"Are you a gambling man?" Walton asked. "If I told you [that] you had a 91 percent chance to stay, do you think that would be good? Because you still might fall into that 9 percent chance."

***

It's illegal for U.S. immigration authorities to hold Americans in detention.

However, an NPR analysis of data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request shows that hundreds of American citizens each year find themselves in a situation similar to Palma's. That data show that from 2007 through July of last year, 693 U.S. citizens were held in local jails on federal detainers — in other words, at the request of immigration officials. And 818 more Americans were held in immigration detention centers during that same time frame, according to data obtained through a separate FOIA request by Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens and analyzed by NPR.