US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7992

On July 04 2017 02:14 TheTenthDoc wrote:
I dunno, it seems the best way for Trump to convince people liberals are clowns for calling him a clown and deriding him would be to...not act like a clown and have a modicum of dignity rather than living up to any and all of their expectations? That would be far more of a victory for him than his bizarre tweetstorms.

On July 04 2017 02:13 brian wrote:


i think i might not understand what you're saying here. do you disagree with what he wrote? or are you just calling him a total fool for the lulz? as far as i can tell you agree with him that he's shooting himself and congressional GOP in th foot but wanted the opportunity to call him names. is it that his base thrives off memes that you disagree with? or that the left doesn't need to obstruct? i mean they are. but i have to agree that at this point they don't even have to.

i'm really lost. unless this is another case of me missing something from another quote train that i've not seen, in which case my apologies. i'm not great at reading everything here, in which case just ignore me.

On July 04 2017 02:14 TheTenthDoc wrote:
I dunno, it seems the best way for Trump to convince people liberals are clowns for calling him a clown and deriding him would be to...not act like a clown and have a modicum of dignity rather than living up to any and all of their expectations? That would be far more of a victory for him than his bizarre tweetstorms.

Gov. Chris Christie called in to a local Fox affiliate on Monday morning to defend his decision to stay at a state-owned residence on Island Beach State Park even as it was closed to the public due to the government shutdown.

On Sunday evening, The Star-Ledger published a series of aerial photographs showing the governor, his family and friends, as the lone beachgoers on the 10-mile barrier island over the July 4th holiday weekend. Shortly thereafter, Christie became a trending topic on Twitter nationally and internationally.

“What a great bit of journalism by the Star-Ledger. They actually caught a politician being where he said he was going to be with the people he said he was going to be with — his wife and his children and their friends,” Christie told FOX5NY on Monday morning.

“I’m sure they’re going to get a Pulitzer for this, they caught me,” he said.

Christie, whose voter approval rating is at 15 percent, brushed aside criticism that he was “out of touch with the people of New Jersey” who are being turned away by police at public beaches.

“If the Legislature would pass a budget then the park would be open,” Christie responded.

On July 04 2017 02:05 Danglars wrote:

Nice deflection. I mean if you don't read and learn, you'll be left with "... this?" I explain, you dot dot dot question mark. Very effective.

Let's see, the strategy seems to be behaving like a total fool in your manner of attacking him, and reminding people that the other side is stupid as hell. Incredibly effective. You want to leave people without good choices, you elect another Trump. If you want to yourself learn, read my examples, and cease only deflecting too "But his legislative agenda!" "But the congressional GOP agenda!" Newsflash: we already know his agenda is shot to hell. All that remains is behaving like clowns to remind others you are just as bad.

As part of its version of the 2018 Defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee voted late Wednesday night to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces: the U.S. Space Corps, which would absorb the Air Force’s current space missions.

You could be forgiven if you haven’t been closely following the debate about creating the nation’s first new military service since 1947. Several members of the panel said they themselves were blindsided by the proposal, and staged an unsuccessful effort to block the change until it could be studied further — or at least until the full committee had held at least one hearing on the subject.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said he only learned about the proposal last week, when it first came before the subcommittee on strategic forces.

“I chastised my staff and said, ‘How could I not know that this was happening?’ They said, ‘Well, they had a meeting about it and you missed it,’” Turner said. “A meeting is certainly not enough. Maybe we do need a space corps, but I think this bears more than just discussions in a subcommittee. We have not had Secretary Mattis come before us and tell us what this means. We have not heard from the secretary of the Air Force. There’s a whole lot of work we need to do before we go as far as creating a new service branch.”

Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), a retired Air Force colonel, was similarly surprised by the Space Corps proposal. She said she had not been aware of it until it appeared in the bill the full committee debated on Wednesday.

“This is honestly the first time I’ve heard about a major reorganization to our Air Force,” she said Wednesday evening. “This is sort of a shocking way to hear about a very major reorganization to our military, and I think it deserves at least a couple hearings and discussions on the matter at the full committee level.”

But the measure, which would also establish a new U.S. Space Command and make the new chief of the Space Corps the eighth member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has the support of both Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the full committee, and its ranking Democrat, Adam Smith (D-Wash.) The bill language was developed by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the top Republican and Democrat on the strategic forces subcommittee.

All of them argued Wednesday that the creation of a dedicated service for space had been studied for years, and that the idea’s time had come.

“There’s been nothing shortsighted about this,” Rogers said. “We started working on it vigorously in September, and we’ve had countless meetings with a number of experts who have advised us as to how this should be construed. In fact, this idea for a space corps as one of the solutions to Air Force space came from the Rumsfeld Commission in 2001. GAO has done three studies on this, all of which tell us that you cannot maintain the current organizational construct of the Air Force and solve the acquisition problems and the operational problems that we have. The Air Force is like any other bureaucracy. They don’t want to change.”

Cooper agreed, saying the creation of the new service would properly reflect space’s importance as a new warfighting domain, “whether we like it or not.”

“And space has not been given adequate priority by our friends in the Air Force,” he said. “They do many things wonderfully well, but this is a new area, a new responsibility that a corps would help us address more effectively. We could wake up one morning and be blinded and deafened by adversary powers, because so many of our most precious assets are up in space. The chairman has had countless meetings about this over 10 months. I don’t know where my friend from Ohio has been.”

The bill would order the Defense Department to establish the new corps by January 2019. It would be a distinct military service within the Department of the Air Force, in much the same way the Marine Corps operates as a service within the Department of the Navy. The Secretary of the Air Force would oversee both the Air Force and the Space Corps, but the new chief of staff of the Space Corps would be a new four-star position, co-equal with the chief of staff of the Air Force. DoD would have to deliver reports to Congress in both March and August of next year on the details of how it plans to set up the new service.

Smith, the full committee’s top Democrat, said that schedule left plenty of time to iron out any unanswered questions about the plan.

“I think it’s being done in a deliberate and intelligent manner,” he said. “Space has changed. We’ve already taken for granted for too long that we dominate space, and we don’t anymore. We need to be ready to confront this, and yes, buried deeply within the Air Force, you could do that, but it doesn’t get the priority it deserves, given how important it is and how it impacts everything that we do.”

Although the Air Force’s top leadership has not testified before the House on the proposed reorganization, the service’s secretary and chief of staff have both expressed opposition.

“My sense is that we have an opportunity being placed in front of us right now to take a look at what is the way we fight in the air, on land, at sea, and we take those processes, procedures, tactics, techniques, and actually apply them across the space domain,” Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “And so right now, to get focused on a large organizational change would actually slow us down. I think it would actually move us in the wrong direction.”

But Thornberry said opposition from the Air Force is no reason for delay, pointing out that the Pentagon has a long history of fighting changes to its own organizational structures.

“It was Congress that created the Air Force and the Department of Defense in 1947 when it became time to force the Army and the Navy together, it was Congress that did Goldwater-Nichols,” he said. “There are times when an issue becomes ripe and it is our responsibility to act. I believe this is the time for us to act.”

On July 04 2017 03:33 Slaughter wrote:


What on earth are you rambling about. Deflecting from what exactly? I don't exactly see how critiquing the presidents twitter behavior as "behaving like a total fool". Are you talking about the few nobodies who are talking about inciting violence? Dear lord you really do like to take some stupid shit randoms say then apply that to everyone on that side. Its like if I took all the stupid shit on Info wars and made you accountable for them.

The European court of human rights has rejected an appeal by the parents of a critically ill baby that he should be allowed to undergo experimental treatment in the US.

The decision by the Strasbourg court closes off the last legal avenue of appeal for the family of Charlie Gard and follows a similar ruling by the UK’s supreme court.

The judgment also lifts a court order under which doctors at Great Ormond Street hospital in London had been required to maintain life support treatment for the 10-month-old child who has brain damage and a rare genetic condition.

The hospital said it would not “rush .... to change Charlie’s care” and that any alteration to his current treatment would “involve careful planning and discussion”.

In a statement, the ECHR said it had, by a majority of the seven judges who considered the written arguments, declared the application inadmissible. It “endorsed in substance the approach” taken by the British courts and declared “the decision is final”.

On July 04 2017 04:31 Danglars wrote:
Quite a disturbing case of the state in loco parentis, when courts decide in the child's best interest in a case when they aren't being pressed to foot the bill.

On July 04 2017 04:31 Danglars wrote:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881875263700783104
Trump wades into the sad case of CharlieGard


The Guardian

Some of the more outlandish aspects of this case, which limits its scope of applicability to generalized critique of socialized medicine:
The parents of this sick baby privately raised money for a treatment program in the US. The state has said that he must die with dignity, not that they won't pay for the treatment. Courts blocked Gard's trip to America. Which leads to some very sickening dialogue on the hospital allowing the family more time before they switch off his life-support, after denying the parents the right to bring the child home or seek care on their own dime elsewhere. The Court ruled that experimental treatment was not in the child's best interests, of course ending by thanking the parents for their brave campaign to raise money for the treatment they denied. Quite a disturbing case of the state in loco parentis, when courts decide in the child's best interest in a case when they aren't being pressed to foot the bill.

On July 04 2017 04:56 nojok wrote:

They've not even started experimenting on mouses and you would like to let them try on a human who does not even have a say in the matter... Like £1.3 million would lead to anything, try £1.3 billion and the medicine would probably not even be close to ready for a human. Besides, we know the pharmaceutic industry would gladly experiment on humans if there were not laws preventing them to prey on people in dire situations.

And more importantly, why does the POTUS even speak about this stuff?

For a minute there, things were looking up for President Donald Trump. By late last week, his approval rating was hovering around 40 percent, which isn't great but marked an improvement for the former reality TV star. But then Trump spent the holiday weekend railing against the press and blasting off tweetstorms—and the president's approval rating took a plunge.

Gallup's tracking poll pegged Trump's approval at just 37 percent to start off July, while disapproval stood at 57 percent. Last week, Gallup found the president's approval rating had briefly climbed to 40 percent before the fall-off back into the 30s.

The Gallup poll interviewed 1,500 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Trump's 37 percent approval rating is dismal, especially for a president so early in his tenure, when the American people typically afford the office a grace period of sorts. Around this point in his first term, for instance, former President Barack Obama had a 60 percent approval rating.

Things have gotten so bad for Trump that far more people support impeaching him than support the job he's doing in the Oval Office. A survey in recent weeks from Public Policy Polling—a firm that does public surveys as well as polling for Democratic candidates—found that 47 percent of voters supported impeaching Trump. Americans could, perhaps, feel that way because 49 percent believed the president had obstructed justice in the ongoing investigation into his ties to Russia, according to the Public Policy Polling survey.

Even Trump's average approval rating is a long ways off from the support for his impeachment. The weighted average from data-focused website FiveThirtyEight pegged his approval rating at just 39.5 percent Monday, while 54.4 percent disapproved. The FiveThirtyEight average adjusts for polls' quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean.

Despite a dismal approval rating, it was more of the same from Trump Monday morning. He redoubled his efforts to trash the press, tweeting, "At some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!" This followed numerous anti-press tweets over the weekend, including a bizarre post with a video of him wrestling a person with a CNN logo instead of a head. (This doctored video was harvested from a Trump pro wrestling appearance.)

Meanwhile, calls for Trump's impeachment have surged. Dozens of marches against the president took place in towns across the country over the weekend, including one in Los Angeles. California Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat who has drafted articles of impeachment against the president, delivered remarks at the end of the march.

"We have to act now to protect our country from abuse of power and impulsive, ignorant incompetence," Sherman said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"Lock him up," the crowd chanted in response.

On July 04 2017 04:13 Danglars wrote:

If you're perpetually unable to address the primary topic without immediate turn to ancillary subjects, continue in like manner. You responded to my post on the humorous nature of the president's tweet by saying it was sad, not funny, and CNN gets rich.

I subsequently responded that both sides profit. It's the nature of the reaction and I still don't have convincing proof you even read my evidence that I used to support my case. The proof of "I don't think both Trump and CNN profit from the tweet + reaction" is certainly not "Haha his base is shit and his agenda is gone." For crying out loud, it's not even a deep philosophical position, but you can't even swing and even make contact with the baseball. Pause and reconsider: both sides profit for the other, and both sides lose in different ways from the criticism. It's not a hard point to grasp.