US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6936

On February 22 2017 03:08 Plansix wrote:
Personally, I want those working class voters to get everything they are asking for from the Republicans. As quickly as possible.

For years, Gorka had labored on the fringes of Washington and the far edge of acceptable debate as defined by the city’s Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite. Today, the former national security editor for the conservative Breitbart News outlet occupies a senior job in the White House.

...

Only days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush insisted the terror strikes had “violated the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.”

“Islam is peace,” he told a nation still reeling from grief.

President Barack Obama sounded the same theme routinely during two terms in office.

Gorka has relentlessly championed the opposite view.

For him, the terrorism problem has nothing to do with repression, alienation, torture, tribalism, poverty, or America’s foreign policy blunders and a messy and complex Middle East.

“This is the famous approach that says it is all so nuanced and complicated,” Gorka said in an interview. “This is what I completely jettison.”

For him, the terror threat is rooted in Islam and “martial” parts of the Koran that he says predispose some Muslims to acts of terror.

...

Most counterterrorism experts dismiss Gorka’s ideas as a dangerous oversimplification that could alienate Muslim allies and boost support for terrorist groups.

“He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts,” said Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst who developed the agency models that trace the path from religious zealotry to violence.

Religious scholars are equally withering. “I can’t overstate how profoundly dangerous this is,” said Omid Safi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Duke University. “This is music to the ears of [the Islamic State]. This is what they seek.”

...

Many of the ideas in Trump’s terrorism speeches had their origins in Gorka’s work. Other elements traced back to Frank Gaffney Jr., a senior Reagan-era Pentagon official who founded the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank.

Gaffney has long been politically radioactive in Washington. He drew widespread condemnation for suggesting that Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax stalwart, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a much-derided piece in Breitbart, he suggested that the logo for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency “bore a disconcerting resemblance to an amalgamation of the Obama campaign’s logo and the symbols of Islam.”

...

There were nods and quiet applause as Gorka fished around in the pocket of his yellow blazer, searching for his remote.

“I am going to show a picture I am not meant to show usually,” he said.

He paused to draw out the suspense before pressing the remote’s button.

Up popped a photograph of a dead, bloodied brown-skinned man, lying on the ground next to an AK-47 assault rifle. The audience began to cheer — first hesitantly and then with gusto. Gorka’s booming voice filled the room.

“We can win now,” he thundered. “We can win!”

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Maine has once again asked the federal government to ban the purchase of sugary drinks and candy with food stamps.

Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew says the nutritional value of candy and soda doesn’t require further debate and that Maine faces rising obesity.

A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study found soft drinks accounted for 5 percent of food stamp purchases.

The study examined the $70 billion food stamp program by looking at a leading grocery retailer’s 2011 data. Households not on food stamps spent about 4 percent of expenditures on soft drinks.

Mayhew says $700 million is spent on obesity-related medical expenditures in Maine.

The department also asked to shift $4 million in federal funding for nutrition education to food banks, schools and community organizations.

On February 22 2017 03:23 Gorsameth wrote:

Certainly. Whoever can deliver on the promises to rural Americans to bring back their jobs and restore the middle class deserves a Nobel price for Economics.

On February 22 2017 03:24 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Why isn't this enforced at a Federal level, would increase the consumption of fruit and vegetables as well:



Source

On February 22 2017 03:25 Plansix wrote:

And I want them to get that Wall. All 32 billion dollars of it over god knows how many years. Bring me that ASAP.

On February 22 2017 03:27 LegalLord wrote:

I mean, when her record looks like one of failure after failure, blunder after blunder, and for each of those blunders there is someone there to explain it away (it was the Russians/Republicans/this is normal/she had no choice because the election season was just so uncooperative/no one except everyone could have predicted this is how it would go/etc) it starts to be a rather reasonable blanket dismissal.

On February 22 2017 03:38 KwarK wrote:
Legal, Bernie couldn't even win a popularity contest in his own party of leftists. He was too unpopular with his own core supporters to even get on the ticket and yet you seem to believe he had more appeal to the swing centrist voters in the middle than an extremely centrist candidate. You need to get the fuck over his loss in the primary. He lost the primary because left leaning centrists didn't support him, how the hell you think he'd have won the right leaning centrists is beyond me. He lost an election to Hillary, ergo he is less electable than she is.

On February 22 2017 03:34 LegalLord wrote:

She makes it too easy. Not by being a woman, as she would probably insinuate, but by being genuinely terrible and having zero self-awareness of why exactly it is that people aren't so enamored with her. The record on her pet projects isn't really so impressive. She certainly represents an important faction within the government but not really a good one.

On February 22 2017 03:42 LegalLord wrote:
Guess there was just no choice for the Democrats, no possible outcome that could have happened other than Trump being elected president. If Trump>Hillary and Hillary>Bernie then Trump>Bernie by transitivity. There was just no hope of winning and we should resign to our fate. There was no choice but to lose.

On February 22 2017 03:27 LegalLord wrote:

I mean, when her record looks like one of failure after failure, blunder after blunder, and for each of those blunders there is someone there to explain it away (it was the Russians/Republicans/this is normal/she had no choice because the election season was just so uncooperative/no one except everyone could have predicted this is how it would go/etc) it starts to be a rather reasonable blanket dismissal.

Accomplishments before reaching the White House may have little connection with a president’s success—hi, President Truman!—but as a matter of politics, this line of questioning can’t be so easily dismissed. Lincoln and FDR each had the advantage of running for office against the status quo at a time of national crisis. (And they did have accomplishments.) The U.S., despite the many citizens who say the nation is on the wrong track, isn’t facing a new Civil War or Great Depression at the moment.

And Clinton’s entire campaign is built on the premise that experience and accomplishments matter. Unlike charismatic candidates who have campaigned on promises of change—Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan—Clinton mostly stresses her long track record and her steady competence. (Not to mention that she used Obama’s short record in the Senate against him in 2008.) That makes articulating her accomplishments all the more pressing, and her struggles to do so all the more glaring.

Another complaint is that the question is out of line, as Elias Isquith suggests. This argument can’t go very far—how does a campaign expect to run on its record without talking about its record?—but there’s an intriguing gender component to the question. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum reported this summer, Senator Amy Klobuchar argues that female candidates are more likely to run on emphasizing their own record and specific goals they want to accomplish. One reason for this may be that women, facing a more challenging path through the political process thanks to gender bias, feel that their best bet is to use specifics, which male candidates can sometimes get away with omitting. Many other women simply self-select out of electoral politics.

Clinton’s own track record in some ways conforms to this template, but with a twist. Some ambitious legislators aim to pass plenty of impressive-sounding but ultimately low-impact bills, thus giving them a nice record to brag about. Clinton has tended to privilege process over discrete items. Her colleagues in the Senate—many of whom were initially skeptical, viewing her as a celebrity politician on the make—tended to come away impressed with her commitment to low-profile but important issues and to keeping her head down and working with colleagues. At the State Department, she focused on improving management and coordination, which was by many accounts badly needed.

But even as competent management may be an essential skill for a successful president, it’s hard to convey to voters, which is likely why she seized on the mileage she traveled as secretary: It’s a concrete figure. (One reason the controversy over her emails and the general disarray of her campaign are so potent is not just that they place her on the defensive, but they undermine her efforts to to make an affirmative case for her managerial competence.)

On February 22 2017 03:45 WolfintheSheep wrote:

She could have won by running a better campaign.

On February 22 2017 03:51 LegalLord wrote:

Dang, never thought of that.

Are we talking specific improvements, or a vague "she made unspecified mistakes but here is why every single specific criticism of her is wrong" dismissal?

On February 22 2017 03:51 LegalLord wrote:

Dang, never thought of that.

Are we talking specific improvements, or a vague "she made unspecified mistakes but here is why every single specific criticism of her is wrong" dismissal?