US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8774

On September 19 2017 23:33 Danglars wrote:
Secondly, this is the problem with fake news by omission. If politically motivated government sources leak something deliberately misleading, and journalists don't follow up, there's two culpable parties on the way to publication.

...but the best the thread can do is allege Saint Obama's justice department didn't mean anything by it!!! If the Trump administration had done this to Mook, the conflict of interest and implications would suddenly be crystal clear. But you all are so blinded by the specter of Trump that you can't see and admit to the lies (with journalistic incompetence if you presume good motives to journalists) or to how this damages media credibility.

I'll watch to see if any of the regular voices can have a clear nonpartisan sentence or two of admitting either. I do want to know if the admission street is still one-way.

On September 20 2017 01:00 LegalLord wrote:

www.yahoo.com

She really needs to know when to back off lest she reveal the Russia matter for the scapegoat-seeking farce that it is.

On September 20 2017 01:00 LegalLord wrote:

www.yahoo.com

She really needs to know when to back off lest she reveal the Russia matter for the scapegoat-seeking farce that it is.

ONE OF THE most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.”

The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To put that in further perspective: If the package becomes law, U.S. military spending would exceed the total spending of its next 10 rivals put together, going off of 2016 military spending estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Put another way, with a $700 billion military budget, the U.S. would be spending more than three times as much as China on its military, and 10 times as much as Russia. According to SIPRI, the U.S. already accounts for more than a third of all military spending.

Or with $80 billion a year, you could make public colleges and universities in the U.S. tuition-free. In fact, Sanders’s proposal was only estimated to cost the federal government $47 billion per year.

If the additional military spending over the next 10 years instead went to pay off student debt, it could come close to wiping it out entirely.

But proposals like that are written off as nonstarters, even by Democrats. In her new book, Hillary Clinton compares Sanders’s idea to him nonsensically saying “America should get a pony.” And while concerns about the cost of ponies abound, few Democrats are raising similar concerns about military spending, even when it is meant for a commander-in-chief they consider reckless and unstable.

The Senate voted 89-8, with three senators not voting, to approve the military money. Spendthrift Sanders joined only four other Democratic senators to vote against the bill: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden from Oregon. Republicans Bob Corker of Tennessee, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah also voted against it.

When Trump submitted a budget proposal in March, which cut social spending dramatically to fund a $54 billion increase in defense spending, Democrats criticized it as a nonstarter. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he “emphatically opposed” the blueprint, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the budget “throws billions of dollars at defense while ransacking” health and education funding.

Before the bill becomes law, it is has to be reconciled with the version the House already passed, which contains a similar $77 billion spending increase. It is likely to become law by the end of the year.

On September 19 2017 23:06 Aquanim wrote:
I do wish people (and there's more than one offender here) would stop making arguments about how X is bad, then when it is demonstrated that X wasn't bad at all they retreat to "oh but X has bad optics and that's what's important".

What X looks like is important - but by making the erroneous statement first, and then pretending that discussing the optics is in any way the same as discussing the reality, you confound discussion on both issues.

On September 20 2017 01:33 Simberto wrote:


It is kind of weird how there always seems to be enough money for the military to blow up other people, but never enought for anything social that would actually help people. Spending any money on science or education or social security is always pennypinched, but the military gets more than they ask for.

On September 20 2017 01:38 LegalLord wrote:

You really ought to cut down on the hyperbolic strawmen in pretty much all of your posts in recent history. It gets sort of stale after the 100th time you do it.

On September 20 2017 01:36 Sermokala wrote:

This is the Us politics thread. Optics matter more then reality in politics especially in US politics. I don't understand what you would want otherwise.

On September 19 2017 15:28 Sermokala wrote:...
Does it really matter why though? If Obama knew that Trumps campaign was being wiretapped indirectly thats a huge conflict of interest.
...

On September 20 2017 01:50 Stratos_speAr wrote:


Unfortunately, it still seems wasteful when incredible sums of money are spent inefficiently on things that are completely unnecessary or erroneously paid for in the military. Furthermore, the service members rarely see this money. It sure as hell isn't in our wages, It rarely turns into new benefits (I can't tell you how many times I've been told, "sorry, that benefit was cut recently, you can't get it anymore"), living conditions are routinely poor (I could tell you quite a few stories about the barracks that I just came from and the galleys I had to eat in), and the gear is substandard (during my recent training, my flak jacket didn't fit and my rifle couldn't fire more than a single round without jamming).

On September 20 2017 01:46 Aquanim wrote:

I didn't say "don't discuss the optics". I said "don't discuss the reality and then claim later you were discussing the optics".

This is clearly not discussing the optics.