US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9048

On October 24 2017 10:30 GoTuNk! wrote:


Trump might not be as elocuent as Obama, but he is yet to destroy the middle east or stagnate the U.S. economy for multiple years.

On October 24 2017 10:46 farvacola wrote:

Tsk tsk, he's only among the top 5 most morally repugnant Presidents in the last 150 years and is not a literal mass murdering head of a dictatorial fascist state. We're clearly being too hard on him.

On October 24 2017 10:30 GoTuNk! wrote:


Trump might not be as elocuent as Obama, but he is yet to destroy the middle east or stagnate the U.S. economy for multiple years.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Monday seized on the deadly ambush in Niger to call for a new congressional authorization for U.S. military operations overseas.

McCain told reporters Monday that he and the Armed Services panel’s top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, are working on a proposal to update the broad war powers Congress gave the commander in chief after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger earlier this month have stoked fresh interest in a new war powers vote, which the Trump administration has indicated it would not oppose — although it says it has all the legal authority it needs to conduct anti-terrorism operations under the existing 2001 authorization.

“We’re going to have to have” an updated authorization for the use of military force, said McCain, who has previously called for a new war powers resolution.

Still, the new momentum may not translate into floor time for a debate any time soon. Previous attempts this year to repeal or rewrite the law have fallen flat among congressional GOP leaders.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had already been scheduled to hold an Oct. 30 hearing on the president’s war powers, spurred on by Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), sponsors of a new war authorization proposal. Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) described the hearing as “excellent” timing Thursday, but he remains unsure about any practical movement on an updated war powers measure.

“I don’t know,” Corker told reporters. “I mean, there are so many bigger issues. I mean, it’s the beginning of a much larger conversation.”

Indeed, lawmakers as well as senior Pentagon officials are still getting up to speed on critical facts regarding the Oct. 4 attack that killed four members of the U.S. Army Special Forces. Armed Services panel members are set for a Thursday briefing on the ambush in Niger, where the Pentagon’s Africa Command has stepped up its efforts against militants affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group.

McCain told reporters Monday that “we expect more information” about the deadly battle. “We are getting some cooperation and information — which we were not getting before.”

Senior senators in both parties, including Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), said on Sunday that they were unaware of the size of the U.S. military presence in Niger, though the White House formally notified the Hill about troops in Niger in June.

Lawmakers are now pressing to know more about the events of Oct. 4, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford pledged on Monday to provide those details.

“We owe the families as much information as we can find out about what happened,” the four-star Marine general said.

“With regard to Congress and the criticism we’re not providing enough information, … if the Congress doesn’t believe that they’re not getting sufficient information, then I need to double my efforts to provide them with information,” Dunford added.

Defense Secretary James Mattis last week said the type of attack that occurred in Niger was “considered unlikely,” but he nonetheless promised to “rapidly” release the findings of an investigation into the incident.

The United States, Dunford said, has 800 troops in Niger, with most assisting local forces against the threat of ISIS. In all, he said, more than 6,000 U.S troops are in 53 nations in Africa.

Kaine acknowledged in a Monday interview that securing floor time for a war powers debate from Republican leaders will be difficult, noting that a military authorization “really needs some space on its own” rather than getting debated as part of Congress’ crowded year-end schedule.

“Time on the floor is tough — this isn’t something that has a year-end” deadline, said Kaine, a longtime advocate for a new war powers debate. Nevertheless, he added, the Niger ambush “ups the stakes for finally trying to get this right," and added in a statement that he and Flake "have seen an increase in interest among our colleagues" in having a new war powers debate after the Niger attack.

This year’s previous pitches to update the 2001 war authorization have been attached to other legislation, and have failed to come to fruition. A proposal to repeal the authorization by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was added to annual House defense spending legislation in June, but removed from the bill by House GOP leadership before it went to the floor.

And an attempt in September by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to add a repeal of the 2001 and 2002 war authorizations to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act was rebuffed by the Senate.

Lee, the only lawmaker to vote against the 2001 war authorization, called moves by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to derail her proposal “undemocratic.”

“People are asking, ‘Why are we in Niger?’ Rightfully so,” Lee said in an interview with Politico. “Well, a debate would provide information and answer a lot of questions and put Congress back in the mix in terms of us doing our job, because certainly we’re not.”

One of the Democratic senators who voted to table Paul’s repeal proposal, however, suggested on Monday that he is now open to a new war powers vote.

“This should be a debate on the Senate floor,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) told CNN. “At least for a couple of weeks or a number of days. And then have a vote at the end of it.”

On October 24 2017 11:38 farvacola wrote:

Neither is responding to claims of Trumpist love for Breitbart and Infowars with "but WaPo and CNN are just as bad!", but hey, what can ya do.

On October 24 2017 13:41 Danglars wrote:

You've got to laugh at politics more. He does absurd things and he'll do damage as a quasi-leader (more of a symbol) of a rebellious movement to politics. The movement's real and the problems are real. You're still stuck on the figurehead and not why he's up behind podiums. I don't consider taking the easy way out by blaming malicious moron voters or race is actually trying to find out the why.

On October 24 2017 14:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


When you build a country on the backs of exploited people, and you want to continue to enjoy that privilege, you eventually have to choose between exploiting more of the in-group and/or exploiting the out-group more ruthlessly.

On October 24 2017 10:12 ticklishmusic wrote:


i haven't made any moral equivalence between trump and kim. since it seems necessary to state it for you, i obviously think work camps and executing people with anti aircraft guns are completely awful. nothing trump has done compares to that.

however, kim is acting in the long tradition of dictators. for a dictator, he is more or less normal, awful as that normal is. trump is not acting like a president.

this is not a complicated thing dude. i worry for you.

On October 24 2017 15:37 Furikawari wrote:
That's strange, because seen from here it's more like trumpets are all about white privilege/supremacy, not the other way round...

On October 24 2017 16:12 Biff The Understudy wrote:

I also struggle to understand why a party that is all about how white men are obviously victims, have their fringe march with swastikas and confederate flags to defend white supremacy and is traumatised by minorities and those horrible, horrible sjw and other feminists asking for equal right complains all day long about the left's "identity politics".

On October 24 2017 15:57 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Danglar apparently glitched and got stuck in a strawman loop where everyone says that Trump is worse than Kim even though everyone repeats him it makes no sense to compare the two because it's comparing apple and oranges.

Too complicated or something.

On October 24 2017 15:34 Danglars wrote:

Well, that’s the reductive and detestable opinion that did its part to elect Trump. Hate your country, think slavery is its original sin and life force? Sign up for the Democratic Party where it’s all in for white guilt and class and race warfare!

I had to double check the poster name to make sure it wasn’t a parody of sincerely held views.

On October 24 2017 15:34 Danglars wrote:

Well, that’s the reductive and detestable opinion that did its part to elect Trump. Hate your country, think slavery is its original sin and life force? Sign up for the Democratic Party where it’s all in for white guilt and class and race warfare!

I had to double check the poster name to make sure it wasn’t a parody of sincerely held views.

WASHINGTON — Fires, floods and hurricanes are already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year and climate change will drive those costs ever higher in coming years, a new federal study warns.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, urges the Trump administration to take climate change risks seriously and begin formulating a response.

The study, scheduled to be released Tuesday, says that different sectors of the economy and different parts of the country will be harmed in ways that are difficult to predict. But one estimate projects that rising temperatures could cause losses in labor productivity of as much as $150 billion by 2099, while changes in some crop yields could cost as much as $53 billion. The Southwest will suffer more costly wildfires, the Southeast will see more heat-related deaths and the Northwest must prepare for diminished shellfish harvests.

The report acknowledges that it is difficult to pinpoint the costs of disasters that can be directly attributed to climate change. And the projected fiscal burden remains less than 1 percent of the current $3.8 trillion federal budget.

But Senators Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who jointly requested the report, said between the lines of a conservative government audit was an urgent economic message that Washington should heed.

“The Government Accountability Office — if you will, the chief bean counter — is basically telling us that this is costing us a lot of money,” Ms. Cantwell said. “We need to understand that as stewards of the taxpayer that climate is a fiscal issue, and the fact that it’s having this big a fiscal impact on our federal budget needs to be dealt with.”

The report, two years in the making, comes as the Senate prepares to vote this week on a $36.5 billion disaster-relief package to fund hurricane relief, a flood insurance program and wildfire recovery efforts in the West.

Ms. Cantwell and Ms. Collins noted that the White House Office of Management and Budget had calculated that extreme weather events over the past decade cost the federal government $350 billion.

Both asserted that the study should help move Congress and the administration past partisan fights over the science of global warming and toward a search for solutions — something they said could be problematic given that the Trump administration is rolling back many of former President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.

“My hope is the administration will take a look at this report and realize there is an economic impact here that is significant,” Ms. Collins said. “We simply cannot afford the billions of dollars in additional funding that’s going to be needed if we do not take into account the consequences of climate change.”

The G.A.O. study draws on interviews with 26 scientific and economic experts and 30 studies, though it focuses most heavily on the only two national-scale studies analyzing the economic effects of climate change. One of them is an ongoing research project being produced by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the other is a study by several organizations led by the Rhodium Group that analyzed the potential costs associated with climate change in coastal property, health, agriculture, energy, labor productivity and crime.

Trevor Houser, a partner at the Rhodium Group, which led the American Climate Prospectus study, said the accounting was on the conservative side. The agriculture analysis, for example, looked only at how changes in temperature and precipitation would affect four commodity crops. It did not study the fiscal fallout of events like wildfires and did not take into account the costs of infectious diseases linked to climate change.

“Climate change is clear and present danger to the U.S. economy and the fiscal health of the U.S. government, and that risk is really unevenly spread,” Mr. Houser said. “It needs to be actively managed by the federal government.”

J. Alfredo Gomez, one of the lead authors of the G.A.O. study, said the federal government had identified climate change as a significant economic risk since 2013. This study, he said, asks the administration to use the detailed data to prepare for the inevitable.

Robert N. Stavins, an economist at Harvard University, said he doubted the study would convince either Republicans in Congress or the White House to act.

“The G.A.O. study is conservative, it’s not alarmist, it’s realistic and balanced and they go out of their way to point out all of the uncertainties involved,” Mr. Stavins said. “I don’t see any likelihood it’s going to be taken seriously.”