US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7328

On April 13 2017 03:43 Plansix wrote:
Trump is being told that the House and Senate are not taking up tax reform and are only interested in healthcare so they don’t get slapped in 2018.

On April 13 2017 04:21 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:


Russia says hello...

On April 13 2017 02:44 Plansix wrote:
You are totally correct. Marie Antoinette sort of became the punching bag of history when it come to the French Revolution. But it hard to pass up a good cake joke.

On April 13 2017 04:30 LegalLord wrote:
The last of the monarchs were not particularly bad, by monarch standards. Perhaps unlucky - Louis XVI happened to be at the helm of France when its luck in war was... middling at best - but there were certainly worse monarchs than him. The last Russian czars were among the most popular. They just had the misfortune to exist in a time period when their standard brand of royal excess and disregard for the peasant class started to be seen as a problem worthy of overthrowing them for.

Her aides took the browbeating — one of several she delivered in person and on the phone that day — in silence. They had a lot of their own thoughts on what went wrong, some of which echoed Hillary’s assessment: her message was off for Michigan, and she had refused to go hard against trade; Mook had pinched pennies and failed to put organizers on the ground; the polling and analytics were a touch too rosy, meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead; she had set up an ambiguous decisionmaking structure on the campaign; and she’d focused too heavily on black and brown voters at the expense of competing for the whites who had formed her base in 2008. The list went on and on.

The underlying truth — the one that many didn’t want to admit to themselves — was the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her.

On April 13 2017 04:30 LegalLord wrote:
The last of the monarchs were not particularly bad, by monarch standards. Perhaps unlucky - Louis XVI happened to be at the helm of France when its luck in war was... middling at best - but there were certainly worse monarchs than him. The last Russian czars were among the most popular. They just had the misfortune to exist in a time period when their standard brand of royal excess and disregard for the peasant class started to be seen as a problem worthy of overthrowing them for.

On April 13 2017 04:32 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:


Tsar Nicholas II was the absolute worst of the Tsar's in Russia History put him alongside with his paranoid and spiritually obsessed wife you had disaster in the making.

If only Alexander II never got out of the Carriage and kept going to the Winter Palace

On April 13 2017 04:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:


So they have no strategy unless some hail Mary passes they agree with the Freedom Caucasus which would be deeply unpopular with moderate constituents.

On April 13 2017 04:57 Mohdoo wrote:


My rough estimation of the healthcare fight is this: Which ever bill you pass, you either lose the senate or you lose congress, as the GOP. As a result, the GOP is best served by doing nothing. Anything the HFC agrees to will lose purple senators their job.

On April 13 2017 04:59 zlefin wrote:

that seems rather consistent with what the GOP has done so far.
That said, I would like to seek some solutions to the inaction bias (just the trend toward taking no action rather than some action, different from the thing formally described as inaction bias) that occurs in government; as it applies even in cases wherein a change would be beneficial. while some level of inertia is good for stability, imho the level of resistance to change is too high. though given the underpinning in basic human psychology, I don't see how that could be done ina democracy.

On April 13 2017 05:27 Mohdoo wrote:


Its hard to fix this when the voters are creating the problem. This is a cultural problem, not an institutional problem. In my eyes at least. There are poor, rural voters who are at risk of bankruptcy as a result of removing pre-existing conditions. These people insist on a 100% repeat of Obamacare. They will accept nothing less. If their representative votes against a full repeal, he will be replaced.

On April 13 2017 05:41 GreenHorizons wrote:
Are we close enough to another cold war for Democrats to drop the Trump is Russia's stooge stuff?

"No, it's not too late," Trump said when Maria Bartiromo asked if it was too late to fire Comey. "But you know I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be interesting."

On April 13 2017 04:57 Mohdoo wrote:


My rough estimation of the healthcare fight is this: Which ever bill you pass, you either lose the senate or you lose congress, as the GOP. As a result, the GOP is best served by doing nothing. Anything the HFC agrees to will lose purple senators their job.

The Campaign Legal Center, a non partisan watchdog group, has filed new evidence with the Federal Election Commission, which they say shows that a Trump supporting super PAC illegally compensated Steve Bannon, Trump’s current White House Chief Strategist, during the campaign.

The group also alleges that the same super PAC, Make America Number 1, engaged in unlawful coordination by using a common vendor. The PAC was initially founded to fight Hillary Clinton, and most of the donations came from conservative high-dollar donor Robert Mercer, the billionaire. Mercer was initially a Ted Cruz supporter, but threw his support behind Trump after Cruz was out of the race.

The FEC letter that the Campaign Legal Center sent to the commission alleges that Make America Number 1 appeared to have paid Bannon through two “cover” firms, Glittering Steel LLC, and Cambridge Analytics. The letter contends that those companies are incorporated at the same address as Bannon’s consulting firm, Bannon Strategic advisors. Federal law prohibits super PACs from coordinating with official campaigns.
“The evidence suggests that the Mercer-backed super PAC secretly subsidized Bannon’s work for the Trump campaign by payments to ‘Glittering Steel,’ which we now know has been chaired and is owned by Bannon and which paid him a monthly consulting fee,” Brendan Fischer, director of the federal and FEC reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement obtained by LawNewz.com.

The letter filed Wednesday was a supplement to an original complaint that the organization first filed with commission back in October.

The watchdog group also sent a letter to California’s Attorney General asking for an investigation into whether the firms that received Bannon’s payments are complying with state law. Specifically, the group contends that Glittering LLC is registered in Delaware but engages in a practice of intrastate practice in California.

“Bannon’s company appears to have dodged the California disclosure requirements that would provide more public information that could inform whether it broke federal campaign finance law,” said Fischer.

LawNewz.com has emailed the White House for comment on this story.