EPTOn February 19 2017 20:59 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Is it normal in the US to hold rallies while in office and not campaining?
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6922
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Dan HH
Romania9188 Posts
Is it normal in the US to hold rallies while in office and not campaining? | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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thePunGun
598 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
On the evening Donald Trump announced his supreme court nominee, thousands of protesters gathered outside of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment. They chanted “Just vote no” and “Obstruct” while carrying signs – “Get a spine, Chuck” – and a prop skeleton to illustrate their point. The protesters are part of a sudden swell of liberal activism that has drawn millions to city streets and airport concourses across the US, in a startling show of resistance to Trump’s presidency. Emboldened by this groundswell, some progressives have started using the word “primary” as a verb – and as a threat. For Democrats in Washington, many of whom are still surprised by the scale and furiousness of backlash, the challenge is how to convert this energy into electoral success. Schumer has significantly slowed the pace of Trump’s cabinet confirmations and excoriated many of the president’s nominees. But the activists outside Schumer’s home on that January night were unimpressed by his votes in favor of Trump’s nominees to represent the US in the UN and to lead the Pentagon, CIA and Department of Homeland Security. “Our message to Democrats is simple: fight Trump or we’ll find someone who will,” said Waleed Shadid, a co-founder of the progressive group All of Us and a former organizer with the Bernie Sanders campaign. This week, the group launched the political action committee We Will Replace You, the latest in a series of projects to warn Democrats that failures to oppose Trump’s agenda will have consequences. The group argues that Democrats need exercise the little political power they still have. The activists have a long list of demands: votes against “all Trump appointees”, opposing his supreme court nominee, using congressional procedures to “bring all business to a crawl to block Trump’s agenda and demand Steve Bannon be fired”. Elected officials, they say, should “publicly support impeachment if Trump is found to have broken the law or violated the constitution”. The activists have already circled a number of Senate Democrats who have failed to meet their standards, including vulnerable and increasingly rare red-state Democrats, such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Both Democrats are up for re-election in 2018. “The Democratic party establishment wants the support of the Tea Party left but they don’t want to earn it,” Shadid said, alluding to the 2010 movement that mobilized rightwing activists, confronted moderate Republicans and helped the party take control of the House in a wave. “They say they love the grassroots activism, but they don’t want to take the next step and challenge the Democratic leadership.” Their demands puts leaders such as Schumer in a bind. Shut out of power in Washington, public shows of support are arguably his party’s most powerful weapon, but he must also worry about the lawmakers in his caucus facing elections in states where Trump won. Source | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45375 Posts
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Yurie
12074 Posts
On February 19 2017 22:58 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: So nothing bad actually happened last night/ two nights ago in Sweden that caused drama, just that Fox News negatively reported that Sweden welcomes refugees and Trump is just reporting Fox's biased report? http://www.thelocal.se/20170219/swedes-baffled-by-trumps-last-night-in-sweden-comment Correct. That is an English language Swedish (online) newspaper that reports on it. Biggest/second biggest news paper made an English article to satisfy people: http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vn17J/in-english-this-happened-in-sweden-friday-night-mr-president | ||
TheNewEra
Germany3128 Posts
On February 19 2017 23:14 Yurie wrote: http://www.thelocal.se/20170219/swedes-baffled-by-trumps-last-night-in-sweden-comment Correct. That is an English language Swedish (online) newspaper that reports on it. Biggest/second biggest news paper made an English article to satisfy people: http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vn17J/in-english-this-happened-in-sweden-friday-night-mr-president You guys don't think Trump was talking about the wooden moose lovestory? | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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Yurie
12074 Posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Stockholm_bombings | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Donald Trump’s family’s trips have cost taxpayers nearly as much in a month as Barack Obama’s cost in an entire year. The US President’s three visits to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida since his presidential inauguration, combined with his sons’ business trips, reportedly cost $11.3m (£9.1m). Conservative watchdog Judicial Watch estimated Mr Obama’s travel expenses totalled an average $12.1m in each of his eight years in the White House. “This is an expensive way to conduct business, and the President should recognise that,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, speaking to the Washington Post. “The unique thing about President Trump is that he knows what it costs to run a plane. “Going down [to Mar-a-Lago] ain’t free.” The three Mar-a-Lago trips in Palm Beach cost the federal treasury around $10m, based on figures used in an October government report analysing White House travel. This includes cash for coast guards to patrol the exposed shoreline. Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw also says it has cost local taxpayers $360,000 in police overtime for his three weekends in Florida since 20 January. The Post also revealed it cost $88,320 to put secret service agents up in a hotel while son Eric Trump visited Uruguay to promote a Trump-brand condo tower. Records show it cost $5,470 to put up secret service officials at the AlSol Del Mar hotel in the Dominican Republic, as they scoped out the area, ahead of a similar visit by Eric Trump. The same records show more than $16,000 has been spent on secret service hotel bills for his two sons’ visit for a grand opening of a Trump-brand golf resort in Dubai. The 70-year-old leader of the free world repeatedly criticised Mr Obama for his taxpayer-funded travel during his tenure. He tweeted in January 2012: “President @BarackObama’s vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars----Unbelievable!” Source | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On February 19 2017 13:16 thePunGun wrote: Well to be fair, when Milo interrupted the guy, they insisted to let him finish. But they on the other hand interrupted Milo whenever he was trying to make a point. I'm neither a fan of Milo, republicans or liberals and some of their social justice zealots, because they don't live up to their own standards. Yeah, they didn't come out very good either in that segment. | ||
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Doodsmack
United States7224 Posts
On February 19 2017 22:58 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: So nothing bad actually happened last night/ two nights ago in Sweden that caused drama, just that Fox News negatively reported that Sweden welcomes refugees and Trump is just reporting Fox's biased report? You would think Trump's anti-media strategy would be better served if his own assertions were credible. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
On February 19 2017 19:10 farvacola wrote: This is why a focus on infrastructure is so compelling; not only would it straight up provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, time spent fixing all of our dilapidated shit can also be time spent figuring out how to retool our economy in a way that will stave off the inevitable tide of unemployment among low and no skill workers. Does infrastructure just mean roads, bridges, power lines, philone lines, sewage, etc.? Because that's another part I don't understand. I haven't seen the roads in middle America so maybe they suck, but I very much doubt they're why employers prefer to set up shop in population centers; truckers could probably still make it into and out of your town to ship your factory's goods, for instance. It seems much more likely that employers prefer population centers because of all the people; it's easier to find a bunch of people with the specific interests and qualifications you need. If I wanted to set up a chemistry lab and I set up shop in a small rural town, I have to either train the rando townsfolk to be chemists, or else I have to offer chemists from the city extra money to convince them to move to what they'll doubtless perceive as a shithole in the middle of nowhere. So sure, you can employ people for a bit with infrastructure and construction projects, but in any one area you're only employing people for a little while before you move on to fixing up the next town and people will have to move if they wanna keep working on your infrastructure project. If we're just doing this to help workers get by, it'd be cheaper to just pay for their expenses for a while, while maybe sending them to school of some sort. Because once you've built your bridges and roads, I still don't see why some big employer is gonna set up shop in this small town, even if the roads are nicer. | ||
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Chewbacca.
United States3634 Posts
Wasn't Obama's African vacation trip alone reported to cost between like 70-100 million? Not that it justifies the amount Trump is spending, but it makes me question the $12.5 million average. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
On February 20 2017 00:24 Doodsmack wrote: You would think Trump's anti-media strategy would be better served if his own assertions were credible. You know what else is a common authoritarian propaganda tactic? Making up attacks to justify security measures. Martial law might seem extreme and unnecessary, but after what happened at Bowling Green, you can never be too safe. Not saying we're there yet, certainly, but if Trump makes a habit of inventing attacks that is a worrying trend. He's already been arguing the media intentionally doesn't cover a bunch of attacks, which as far as I can tell is just not true. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On February 19 2017 18:51 ChristianS wrote: Have you seen the 1-2 month training options out there? I mean, plenty of places exist that promise you a life-changing career with minimal effort, but the reality is usually that what they're teaching you just takes more than 1-2 months of night classes to learn. Take programming, for instance. It's been talked about as a good solution to the ailing rural America problem. It's portable, so you don't need to move to the city. It's growing, so there will be plenty of jobs in the foreseeable future. And it's an industry that's had quite a lot of college-less successes, so you might not need a degree in it to succeed. But are you really gonna take a bunch of miners in WV, put them in a room a couple nights a week learning C# or something, and then toss them into the job market competing with Palo Alto kids who grew up surrounded by tech people and learned their first programming language at 13? Programming takes aptitude, a lot kf technical familiarity, and a lot of interest in your work. You can take all of the boys in a town and send them into a coal mine, and they'll be able to more or less do the work. You can't put them all in front of computers and expect them all to be able to write programs or make websites or whatever. If they had the interest and aptitude, there are already all kinds of deals on websites like techspot.com that will sell you $946547 worth of educational materials for $.20, but a lot of them simply won't be cut out for that kind of work. Yes, I agree that many of the current "learn X in Y time" is complete unreliable trash. Part of it is that programmers have delusions of grandeur and think they can do whatever they please because software. Part of it is that we genuinely don't take education seriously below the university level. No, I wouldn't expect courses like that to be a career shift - that isn't very feasible - but it should be sufficient for lateral shifts to ease people into a related, but not fully analogous, line of semiskilled work. University work requires a university education, full stop. But semiskilled is more like assembling airplanes according to specifications provided by engineers, a more feasible skill to learn more quickly. The painful truth for a lot of things in the modern world is that we simply don't need all that many people to get things done. We just need a few people with deeper expertise. I'll give the military as my example. A lot of the reason why we simply don't use conscripts much anymore is because what really matters in modern warfare isn't lots of mildly trained meat shields, but rather a core force of well-trained career military folk who understand how to use the increasingly advanced weapons to their full potential. The draft didn't just go away because it was unpopular, it also just became less necessary. Like for all my earlier criticisms of drones, it's hard to argue that you need more foot soldiers when a lot of the hardware can just be robots operated from afar. Not in all circumstances of course, but in enough that you need fewer meatbags on the front. And the same thing goes for a lot of civilian occupations. There just simply isn't a need for a lot of people anymore. Sometimes they just have to compete on price with robots and foreign peasants, which is a losing battle. Often they're forced into minimum wage service occupations, which is a decline in the quality of life for sure. However, it's also important to think about where this leads, and I'm going to partially echo the argument of whitedoge (RIP) as to why this can't be just an "oh well, spoils of war" situation. Well of course there's the obvious reason that disenfranchised people will rebel and undermine the entire strength of the first world economy. It helps that the people most disaffected are disproportionately skilled at organizing for political gain and organized in militia groups relative to a more cityward population. Beyond that, we have that there is little point of production if no one buys stuff - which isn't great with wealth inequality. And another issue is a dependence on energy because, let's face it, machines don't run on the power of hope. And oil/gas/other energy supplies are some of the most complex and important issues of the modern world and will continue to be, probably forever. The Great Recession was, on the one hand, just a series of financial fuckups that hit the economy harder than before. On the surface at least, that's what it was, and that is a matter that has seen a resolution by now. But below the surface was a structural readjustment on the part of many companies. Truth is that their technology has outpaced their need for employing people for a while now (the 1980s or so are the start of this) and the recession gave the best excuse they ever needed to cull their workforce. So all the people left without a job continue to be left without a job. This, combined with certain poorly conceived forms of FP adventurism, are an existential crisis that genuinely threaten to compromise the nations that currently fall into the first world. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On February 20 2017 00:31 ChristianS wrote: Does infrastructure just mean roads, bridges, power lines, philone lines, sewage, etc.? Because that's another part I don't understand. I haven't seen the roads in middle America so maybe they suck, but I very much doubt they're why employers prefer to set up shop in population centers; truckers could probably still make it into and out of your town to ship your factory's goods, for instance. It seems much more likely that employers prefer population centers because of all the people; it's easier to find a bunch of people with the specific interests and qualifications you need. If I wanted to set up a chemistry lab and I set up shop in a small rural town, I have to either train the rando townsfolk to be chemists, or else I have to offer chemists from the city extra money to convince them to move to what they'll doubtless perceive as a shithole in the middle of nowhere. So sure, you can employ people for a bit with infrastructure and construction projects, but in any one area you're only employing people for a little while before you move on to fixing up the next town and people will have to move if they wanna keep working on your infrastructure project. If we're just doing this to help workers get by, it'd be cheaper to just pay for their expenses for a while, while maybe sending them to school of some sort. Because once you've built your bridges and roads, I still don't see why some big employer is gonna set up shop in this small town, even if the roads are nicer. It can be a lot of things. Transportation, utilities, schools, healthcare, basic/professional important services (e.g. lawyers), internet and phones. A lot of this stuff genuinely sucks in middle America, a common reality for a lot of massive countries. Even if you wanted to set up shop in Shitville, it wouldn't be very feasible without having utilities, roads, professional services, schools to recruit from, etc. And those are things that only the government can provide. Hence, a need for infrastructure development. | ||
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Dan HH
Romania9188 Posts
On February 20 2017 00:36 ChristianS wrote: You know what else is a common authoritarian propaganda tactic? Making up attacks to justify security measures. Martial law might seem extreme and unnecessary, but after what happened at Bowling Green, you can never be too safe. Not saying we're there yet, certainly, but if Trump makes a habit of inventing attacks that is a worrying trend. He's already been arguing the media intentionally doesn't cover a bunch of attacks, which as far as I can tell is just not true. No, he's not making this up as a means to a political end, he doesn't even know it's made up. He just reads/watches shitty news sources and lacks discernment. The guy claimed that thousands of muslims celebrated 9/11 in New Jersey and when confronted about it he held up a fucking Breitbart article, baffled about how anyone could possibly dispute that. Many times when he cites a bogus statistic or incident, it can be traced back to some blog or other claiming so. | ||
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TheTenthDoc
United States9561 Posts
On February 20 2017 00:24 Doodsmack wrote: You would think Trump's anti-media strategy would be better served if his own assertions were credible. Not really. Generally, the less credible his assertions the more brutally the media counters and the worse they look in the eyes of his supporters. I mean, there are people out there that believe pointing out he lies about stupid shit (e.g. crowd size) makes a media outlook look bad. It's not like he has a snowball's chance in hell of changing the mind of any of the people who didn't vote for him in 2016. | ||
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
On February 20 2017 00:31 ChristianS wrote: Does infrastructure just mean roads, bridges, power lines, philone lines, sewage, etc.? Because that's another part I don't understand. I haven't seen the roads in middle America so maybe they suck, but I very much doubt they're why employers prefer to set up shop in population centers; truckers could probably still make it into and out of your town to ship your factory's goods, for instance. It seems much more likely that employers prefer population centers because of all the people; it's easier to find a bunch of people with the specific interests and qualifications you need. If I wanted to set up a chemistry lab and I set up shop in a small rural town, I have to either train the rando townsfolk to be chemists, or else I have to offer chemists from the city extra money to convince them to move to what they'll doubtless perceive as a shithole in the middle of nowhere. So sure, you can employ people for a bit with infrastructure and construction projects, but in any one area you're only employing people for a little while before you move on to fixing up the next town and people will have to move if they wanna keep working on your infrastructure project. If we're just doing this to help workers get by, it'd be cheaper to just pay for their expenses for a while, while maybe sending them to school of some sort. Because once you've built your bridges and roads, I still don't see why some big employer is gonna set up shop in this small town, even if the roads are nicer. The value of a focus on infrastructure goes far beyond the short-term game of attracting employers to otherwise unattractive medium-small Midwestern and Plain State towns, though there's evidence that it does work on that front in the form of the success of Google Fiber in invigorating the business landscapes of otherwise forlorn cities like St. Louis and Charlotte. That stuff is nice, but the real value comes from less tangible things like an increased exchange of local populations among themselves. At the end of the day, anything we can do to get folks out of their hometowns and experiencing the rest of the country is gonna yield benefits. And yeah, as to the "can the roads really be that bad" question, please, come to Michigan and find out  | ||
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