US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7750

On June 04 2017 04:20 LegalLord wrote:

Good point. If we want to be sufficiently reductive we can simply dismiss all people who don't vote Democrat as irredeemable, deplorable racists.

On June 04 2017 03:49 KwarK wrote:

I take the view that anyone in America's working class who legitimately believes the Republican party means to do anything to help them, despite both the history of the Republican party and their stated policies, is pretty much an idiot. The Republicans are pretty much defined by class warfare at the moment, they've been cutting taxes on the rich, raising taxes on the poor, trying to privatize social security, trying to take away healthcare and sending the poor to die in a desert for thirty years. Nobody doesn't know what the Republicans do by now. But throw in enough fear and smart people do stupid things.

On June 04 2017 05:25 NewSunshine wrote:
This feels like the Paris Accord all over again. "Surely he's not that dumb. Right? Oh- ohhh, never mind, he just did it".

It doesn't really matter what Comey could say, it will guaranteed look worse if you go all out to shut him up.

US secretary of defense James Mattis has urged allies to “bear with us”, noting it would be a “crummy world” if Americans retreated into isolationism.

Mattis was responding to questions at a conference in Singapore about US leadership and commitment to a rules-based international order, in the wake of Donald Trump’s announcement that his administration will leave the Paris climate change accord, putting the country in the company of only Nicaragua and Syria.

“As far as the rules-based order, you know, obviously we have a new president in Washington DC,” Mattis said at the event organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “We’re all aware of that. And there is going to be fresh approaches taken.”

He defended Trump, pointing out that the president had just made his first foreign trip, “straight into the heart of one of the most bewildering and difficult challenges” in the Middle East. However, the defense secretary did acknowledge a historical “reluctance” among Americans to engage with the world.

“The 20th century took us out of that,” he said. “What a crummy world if we all retreat inside our own borders. How many people deprived of good lives during the Depression? How many tens of millions of people killed in WWII? Like it or not, we’re part of the world.”

Mattis said that though there was a sense among some Americans that the country was bearing “an inordinate burden”, global engagement was still “very deeply rooted in the American psyche”.

“Bear with us,” he said before going to paraphrase a quote from Winston Churchill: “Once we’ve exhausted all possible alternatives, the Americans will do the right thing.”

Kori Schake, a Stanford University defense expert who has co-edited a book with Mattis on the relationship between the US military and civilians, said he had given “a speech replete with the reassurances America’s Asian allies crave: the importance of a rules-based international order, America’s enduring commitment to its allies and willingness to run risks for our common security, centrality of values in our alliance relationships”.

“Yet despite the enormous admiration allies have for Mattis, every question was some version of, ‘How can we believe you when the president talks and acts so differently?’ added Schake, who was a senior defense official in the Bush administration.

Mattis did not directly address the decision to leave the Paris accord, but during the administration’s internal debate on the issue he said it was not really his job to intervene in the argument.

“Frankly, it’s not inside my portfolio, that aspect,” he told CBS News last weekend. “Obviously we deal with the aspects of a warming climate in the Department of Defense, and to us, that’s just another one of many factors we deal with which we call the physical environment.”

Past Pentagon and intelligence community assessments have presented climate change as a serious long term threat to national security.

A former senior official in the national security council, Loren DeJonge Schulman, said the White House debate did not seem to have been carried out in a very organised way, with no representations from the Pentagon and not much science.

“No one appeared to be in charge of running the debate,” Schulman, now at the Centre for a New American Security, said on Twitter.

“That matters for a few reasons: no one was ensuring that all perspectives were included. Mattis called this not his job jar, but [the defense department] and [intelligence community] have each commented, across admins, on costly and risky impacts of climate change ...

“But most importantly: we had no scientists with a real voice in the room.”

George Conway, whose wife, Kellyanne Conway, is a counselor to President Donald Trump, has withdrawn from consideration for a Justice Department post.

POLITICO reported in March that Conway was the front-runner to head DOJ’s Civil Division, but he was never formally nominated to the post.

Conway said in a statement Friday that he’s “profoundly grateful” to Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions “for selecting me to serve in the Department of Justice.”

“I have reluctantly concluded, however, that, for me and my family, this is not the right time for me to leave the private sector and take on a new role in the federal government,” he continued. “Kellyanne and I continue to support the President and his Administration, and I look forward to doing so in whatever way I can from outside the government.”

Conway is a partner at the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He was previously under consideration to serve as the Trump administration’s solicitor general, a role that went to Noel Francisco.

On June 04 2017 04:14 Nevuk wrote:
In the case of the coal counties in KY it wasn't that long ago at all that they used to be extremely heavily democratic. LBJ's war against poverty really made appalachia a democratic stronghold. The issue is that those benefits kept getting rolled back, the democrats didn't put up much of a fight (the welfare reform bill was Clinton's...) about it and then the only jobs in the region were coal and it seemed like the democrats were trying to get rid of the only jobs in the region. KY was one of like... 3 states that Clinton lost among millenials, and it's largely due to her asinine strategy of telling people in a WV town hall that coal was dead and they needed retrained. True, but pants on head idiotic in how she presented it. That's not even addressing that retraining is far more difficult than they made it sound.

So it's not so much that they trusted republicans as were very easy to persuade that the democratic party had flat out forgotten about them for the past 30 years.

After repeated dodges and non-answers from various members of the Trump administration, the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Saturday that the President believes “the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of the equation.”

At least five members of Trump’s administration — EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn and White House press secretary Sean Spicer — repeatedly declined to say in recent days whether the President believes the science supporting climate change.

“I just want to be clear on this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Haley in an interview set to air Sunday, but which CNN released a portion of Saturday. “You’re not willing to acknowledge that calling climate change a Chinese hoax is just a big box of crazy?”

“President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of that equation,” Haley responded. “So that is the fact. That is where we are. That’s where it stands. He knows that it’s changing, he knows that the U.S. has to be responsible with it. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

She defended the President’s decision to withdraw the United States from the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, the voluntary accord by which nearly every nation on Earth set voluntary emissions goals, by adding: “Just because we got out of a club doesn’t mean that we don’t care about the environment.”

The Trump administration has been aggressive in rolling back environmental protections, especially those instituted during the Obama administration.

On the campaign trail and as a private citizen, Trump repeatedly called climate change a hoax and said that other countries had invented the science supporting climate change in order to disadvantage the United States economically.

In his speech Thursday announcing he would withdraw the United States from the Paris accord, Trump struck a similar chord.

“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States,” he said. “The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement. They went wild. They were so happy, for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.”

As RollCall later pointed out, the President never used the term “climate change” itself in the speech.

On June 03 2017 09:47 LegalLord wrote:
I predict that in a few years, instead of gasoline, our cars will run on the power of hope. Sure is a lot of that stuff around, we could probably use it as a power source.