US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6994

On March 01 2017 04:30 Plansix wrote:

Democracy is an abstract concept, so let’s not act like they are entirely without merit. Winning is also pretty abstract if you think about it. And the media.

On March 01 2017 04:26 Sermokala wrote:

My argument is that the popular vote doesn't matter and the only arguments given against it are petty insults and abstract concepts that the media made up to make a story out of nothing.

Gee I feel real defeated on this.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday dodged responsibility for a botched mission he ordered in Yemen last month, placing the onus on the military and Barack Obama’s administration instead.

Bill Owens, the father of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL who died in the operation, demanded an investigation into his son’s death over the weekend. Owens further revealed he couldn’t bear to meet Trump at the airport as Ryan’s casket was carried off the military plane last month.

Asked about the matter during an interview with Fox News’ “Fox ‘n’ Friends,” Trump repeatedly said “they” were responsible for the outcome of the mission, in reference to the military.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do,” he said. “They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.

“I can understand people saying that. I’d feel ― ‘What’s worse?’ There’s nothing worse,” he added. “This was something that they were looking at for a long time doing, and according to [Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information.”

The raid yielded no significant intelligence, U.S. officials told NBC News on Monday. Earlier this month, however, Pentagon officials said it produced “actionable intelligence.” So, too, did White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who initially called the raid “highly successful.”

“I think anyone who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and [does] a disservice to the life of Chief Owens,” he said earlier this month. “The raid, the action that was taken in Yemen was a huge success.”

Presidents have traditionally accepted responsibility for their decisions, no matter the circumstances. President Harry Truman popularized the words, “The Buck Stops Here” and kept a sign of the phrase on his desk in the Oval Office. His successors took those words to heart, accepting ultimate responsibility in the wake of some of the nation’s biggest mishaps.

“I’m the president. And I’m always responsible,” President Barack Obama said in 2012 following an attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died.

“In case you were wondering, in any of your reporting, who’s responsible? I take responsibility,” he said again in 2010 after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf.

President George W. Bush in 2005 owned up to his administration’s failings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, admitting that “the federal government didn’t fully do its job right.” And he accepted responsibility for his costly decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003, despite faulty intelligence.

President Ronald Reagan in 1987 owned up to his administration’s dealings amid what is known as the Iran-Contra scandal, telling the nation in a prime-time address from the Oval Office that he took “full responsibility” for his administration.

“As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities,” he said. “As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds - well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.”

On March 01 2017 04:33 Sermokala wrote:

Democracy is a form of government. It's describing a specific system. If democracy is abstract then everything is and nothing is real.

Winning isn't abstract it's a binary state. You either win or lose. The media is abstract but is more a collective term then anything.

This whole argument came from the NYT having a wrong forcast. The popular vote is meaningless in this argument and in reality beacuse it doesn't decide anything real

On March 01 2017 04:38 farvacola wrote:
The point has been made numerous times and all you've done is make oblique references to some kind of media plot that is utterly irrelevant. Again, you said that the popular vote doesn't matter, and then in the face of a clear reference to the mechanisms through which the legislative and executive branches make and pass laws in acknowledgement of the extent to which the public supports particular agenda items, you've done little more than window dress an attempt at passing the buck. Both the Senate and House will hear a multitude of speeches given by legislators that make direct reference to legislative deal-making contingent on popular opinion as Congress considers Trump's budget, and if you think the Freedom Caucus isn't going to harp on the lack of a popular mandate with regard to Trump's proposed budget, I've got a nice turnpike in Kansas to sell you.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to bolster relations with historically black colleges and universities erupted in controversy Tuesday after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a statement equating the history of the schools — founded during an era of racial segregation — to “school choice” policies.

“HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” DeVos said in the statement, released Monday night in advance of Trump’s planned signing of an executive order giving the schools more clout. “They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”

The executive order, which Trump is scheduled to issue Tuesday afternoon, was supposed be an easy bit of outreach on the final day of Black History Month to the black community that soundly rejected Trump on Election Day. It is expected to move a federal initiative focused on the colleges from the Education Department to the White House and set an aspirational goal for government spending at the schools.

But the goodwill was quickly overshadowed by DeVos’ statement, which came on the heels of a Monday meeting between Trump and presidents of the schools that left some dissatisfied. Some experts on historically black institutions panned the statement as ignorant, while others said DeVos was inadvertently praising segregation.

DeVos later acknowledged racism as an important factor in the history of historically black colleges in an address to the school leaders on Tuesday, according to prepared remarks.

Marybeth Gasman, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Minority-Serving Institutions and an expert on historically black colleges and universities, told POLITICO the statement is "inaccurate and a whitewashing of U.S. history.”

“I’m floored,” Gasman said.

Robert Palmer, an education professor at Howard University, said the schools weren’t a matter of choice. They were mostly created in a segregated education system after the Civil War and were for decades the only choice for black students — especially in the South, he said.

DeVos’ statement “was a bit crazy,” Palmer said.

Austin Lane, the president of Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, said he was “puzzled” by the analogy. Lane is one of dozens of HBCU presidents who visited the White House and met with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and DeVos on Monday.

“HBCUs were created for African-Americans because they had no choice and were unable to attend schools due to segregation laws,” Lane said.

DeVos, who was confirmed by the Senate only after Pence cast a tie-breaking vote, has for weeks been a target of the political left. Her comments cap off a rocky Black History Month for the administration, which started with Trump saying Frederick Douglass has “done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more” and included the Education Department misspelling W.E.B. Du Bois’ name on Twitter.

DeVos’ HBCU statement quickly spread online, where it was called “totally nuts” by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and “embarrassingly ignorant” by Donald Heller, the provost of the University of San Francisco.

A spokesman for the Education Department said DeVos’ comments were taken out of context because the statement does address the history of the schools. He said DeVos “certainly understands and respects” the founding of the schools in the face of racism and segregation.

In her remarks to school leaders on Tuesday, DeVos said that "the traditional school systemically failed to provide African-Americans access to a quality education — or, sadly, more often to any education at all."

"Your history was born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War," DeVos told the leaders Tuesday, according to the prepared text of her speech.

DeVos’ initial statement was released Monday night after the White House meeting. The leaders are in Washington for two days of events where they’re making pitches for more funding, among other things.

On March 01 2017 04:44 Plansix wrote:

Governments are abstract concepts too. In fact, they are multi generational social contracts. Democracy is a form of government that grew out of centuries of trial and error.

The concept of victory is also abstract contact created by humans. You can’t hold “winning” in your hands. You are victorious only if everyone else agrees that you won. And the rules that dictated that you won are, again, a social contract.

You are attempting to prove that the popular vote does not matter in any way. That is has no impact on how the government operates going forward. But you don’t even have the tools necessary to measure if that is true. Or if it is completely subjectively. You are attempting to pass off an opinion as provable fact and then claiming the concept of a mandate is an abstract creation. But no one ever argued that a mandate was a physical object.

On March 01 2017 05:04 Sermokala wrote:

The social contract is an abstract concept governments on the other hand are very real and specific systems that are ment to tell people what they are. There is a difference between a federalist and parliamentary system even if they are both representative republics.

You are trying to create abstraction out of preportion. There is an election. One side gets more votes and wins, the other gets less votes and loses. This isn't abstract and the only way people don't agree you won is if the rules aren't defined beforehand. The rules that the popular vote means nothing in deciding who wins in america was decided before hand.

I can count votes. I can measure sucsess and failure. This isn't opinion but real observable fact. Noone is arguing that a mandate is a physical object. We are arguing that it is in anyway a meaningful concept.

I've made arguments supporting my side with examples you're doing none of this and trying to cobble together weird abstraction to confuse and muddle the subject.

On March 01 2017 05:43 LegalLord wrote:

Source

An assessment I found interesting.

“States can pass whatever laws they choose,” Sessions told a crowd of attorneys general at the National Association of Attorneys General Winter Meeting. “But I’m not sure we’re going to be a better, healthier nation if we have marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store.”

Sessions then appeared to criticize a column The Washington Post published Tuesday by Sam Kamin, professor of marijuana law and policy at the University of Denver. In the op-ed, Kamin argues that the opioid crisis is “a reason to expand access to marijuana rather than to contract it.” A 2016 study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found “adverse consequences of opioid use” decreased over time in states where marijuana is legalized as individuals substituted marijuana for opioids to treat pain.

But Sessions scoffed at Kamin’s reasoning.

“Give me a break,” Sessions said. “This is the kind of argument that has been out there. [It’s] almost a desperate attempt to defend the harmlessness of marijuana or even benefits. I doubt that’s true. Maybe science will prove me wrong. ... My best view is that we don’t need to be legalizing marijuana.”


Tom Angell, chairman of drug policy reform group Marijuana Majority, called Sessions’ opiate comments “ridiculous.”

“Several studies have already shown that states with legal marijuana access see reduced opioid problems,” Angell said in a statement Tuesday. “If the attorney general really cares about public health and safety, he’ll stop relying on ‘alternative facts’ ... This administration should respect science and, at the very least, needs to uphold the president’s repeated campaign pledges to respect state cannabis laws.”

Nationwide support for marijuana legalization is at a record high. A survey from Quinnipiac University released last week found 71 percent of American voters want the federal government to respect state marijuana laws.

Still, the White House appears to be preparing for a crackdown on recreational cannabis. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said last week that states with legalized marijuana legislation will see “greater enforcement” of federal laws surrounding the plant ― a move that could shatter President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to honor state marijuana laws.

On Monday, Sessions decried marijuana legalization to reporters at the Justice Department, claiming “real violence” can be attributed to the “current levels of THC in marijuana.”