US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9693

On January 16 2018 07:46 Plansix wrote:

And the break down in discussions revolves around the Republican president dropping the racist bombs when the deal is presented to him. Bombs that no one else in the room disputes were dropped.

On January 16 2018 07:53 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:

Hey now, do we know for sure if he said shithole or shithouse yet? Dicky Durbin might have majorly misrepresented those 2 letters.

On January 16 2018 08:01 ticklishmusic wrote:


I would argue that a shithouse > a shithole. A shit hole is only a hole in the ground for poop. A shithouse is an outhouse, which implies some sort of structure in addition to the poop hole. It is important we judge Trump fairly based on what he actually said.

On January 16 2018 07:45 farvacola wrote:
Yeah that's why it's not "just like Boehner-Obama"; it is something rather different.

On January 16 2018 08:52 Danglars wrote:

You bring up one of the reasons why I completed the sentence saying what is repeated here. Did you miss the part when I said it won't work?

On January 16 2018 09:21 Adreme wrote:



I dont think he was arguing so much as he was agreeing and saying it was a stupid strategy. It failed when they DIDNT have the white house why would it work when they now do.

On January 16 2018 11:12 pmh wrote:
The whole shithole drama,it is only helping trump lol.
He is saying what maybe 90% of americans must be thinking,people on this forum included. And then try to make a joke of it. At this rate the republicans wont even lose congress but even if they do it wouldn't matter. The important job has already been done.

Have said it before and will say again,democrats should stop focusing on trump. Trump being such a strong candidate is not the main reason they lost. They have to look at themselves and stop making a drama about mostly irrelevant quotes from trump like this one. Yes its bad to say it but that is how trump is. The people who voted for him don't mind it. All democrats seem to do is trying to hold on to their own voters,instead of giving a good alternative for the people who did vote for trump.

Centrist Dems Launch Smear Campaign Against Young Trans Woman, All to Keep an Old Straight White Man in Power

OVER THE WEEKEND, Chelsea Manning announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate by posting a video outlining the broad themes of her campaign. Manning, a whistleblower who served seven years in a U.S. military brig for exposing systemic U.S. war crimes, was held under prison conditions so brutal that the U.N. formally denounced them as “inhumane.”

While her whistleblowing made her a hero around the world, Manning has also now become an icon of LGBT equality and trans rights with an act of profound bravery that at least matches, if not surpasses, her whistleblowing. She announced her transition, and demanded the dignity and treatment to which she was entitled, while she was imprisoned in the middle of a sprawling U.S. military base, in a brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Since her release from prison, she has become a visible and outspoken advocate for the rights of trans people. She has used her position as a Guardian columnist to stake out a wide range of positions, including drafting a proposed law to provide protections for whistleblowers. She certainly has more political experience and activism than many other Senate candidates previously supported by the Democratic establishment (Al Franken comes to mind as one example). If elected, Manning would become the first trans woman ever, and the youngest woman ever, to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party primary is one of the most standard, banal, typical, privileged and mediocre politicians in the U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old white, straight man who is seeking his third six-year Senate term. Cardin’s decades-long career as a politician from the start has been steeped in unearned privilege: he first won elective office back in 1966, when his uncle, Maurice Cardin, gave up his seat in order to bequeath it to his nephew Benjamin. With this dynastic privilege as his base, he has spent the last 50 years climbing the political ladder in Maryland.

Cardin has remarkably few achievements for being in Congress for so many years. One of his few distinctions is that he has become one of the Senate’s most reliable and loyal supporters of AIPAC’s agenda and the Israeli government, if not the single most loyal. In 2015, he joined with Lindsey Graham in kicking off the annual AIPAC conference, causing neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin to gush about how identical they sounded.

But Cardin’s crowning achievement came last year when he authored a bill that would have made it a felony to support a boycott of Israel – a bill that was such a profound assault on basic First Amendment freedoms that the ACLU instantly denounced it and multiple Senators who had co-sponsored Cardin’s bill (such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand) announced that they were withdrawing their support.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, establishment Democrats wasted no time in mocking and denouncing Manning’s bid to become the first ever trans woman in the Senate, instead quickly lining up in support behind the straight white male who has wielded power for decades. To demean Manning, many of these establishment Democrats invoked the primary tactic they now reflexively use against anyone they view as a political adversary: they depicted her as a tool of the Kremlin, whose candidacy is really just a disguised plot engineered by Moscow.

Leading the way in spreading this obviously deranged but acceptable-in-DC conspiracy theory was Neera Tanden, the president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington. Last night, Tanden spread a viral tweet that strongly implied – without even pretending to have a shred of evidence – that the Kremlin had engineered Manning’s candidacy as punishment for Cardin’s hard-line position on Russia.

This conspiracy theory mocks itself. The idea that Vladimir Putin sat in the Kremlin, steaming over Benjamin Cardin’s report on Russia, and thus developed a dastardly plot to rid himself of his daunting Maryland nemesis – “I know how to get rid of Cardin: I’ll have a trans woman who was convicted of felony leaking run against him!” – is too inane to merit any additional ridicule. But this is the climate in Washington: no conspiracy theory is too moronic, too demented, too self-evidently laughable to disqualify its advocates from being taken seriously – as long as it involves accusations that someone is a covert tool of the Kremlin. That’s why the president of the leading Democratic think tank feels free to spread this slanderous trash.

On January 16 2018 12:00 zlefin wrote:
the tone of that article makes it extremely suspect; sounds like standard bs, claiming the "other" side (which in this case would be the centrist dems) did something bad, usually by inaccurately twisting things, or any of the numerous other standard rhetorical deceits.

On January 16 2018 12:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


Sounds like you're just saying what you think without having any idea about the information relevant to what you're talking about.