Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On April 25 2018 14:05 KwarK wrote: Trump on his non overnight stay in Moscow
I was in Moscow. And a lot of the people knew - they were there, and they had an amazing time. And they're terrific people, you know I was getting along with them so great. I really loved my weekend, I called it my 'weekend in Moscow'.
Where he "met oligarchs and other very high level government officials", as he said.
Edit: why can't I find this source now
It's just a bit ahead of here in the interview.
The thread is pretty quiet nowadays. It feels a lot like there's a consensus on what's happening, and I just come here to nod and say, yep, that's happening.
I figure Trump's got another few months - the leak have expanded to be a pretty big, continuous flow, and it's pretty clear now from almost every perspective that Trump is in someone's pockets - Probably Putin, but possibly others and his entire cabinet is full of people appointed because they paid a lot of money to be there.
The 'activity' in the old thread was a lot of arguments between people who didn't like each other, and the same here. Banning GreenHorizons and Danglars temporarily kind of revealed how much of the 'conversation' was really just arguments with them, for one reason or another.
Which isn't to say I'm 'blaming' them or anything, just that the thread is less active because people aren't snarkily insulting each other and angrily posting at one another anymore. Also, we don't have anyone trying to explain away the blatantly corrupt shit the Trump administration is up to and people getting angry about that either.
Still, hopeful things will start back up again when the banned folks are unbanned, hopefully with less anger. It isn't like Danglars and co. didn't have good discussions as well; just sometimes it felt like they came on here looking for a fight and people were very quick to give them one.
Yeah, this thread is doing a great job at banning dissent from neoliberalism.
It's typical of neoliberalism to do that, I suppose. Maybe it is even inherit to neoliberalism. It is like Dugin said: it infects everything around you and purges that which it cannot infect.
Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives and lobbyists on Tuesday that they should increase their campaign donations to influence lawmakers, revealing that he would meet only with lobbyists who contributed to his campaign when he served in the House.
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lobbyists at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
Mr. Mulvaney, who also runs the White House budget office, is a longtime critic of the Obama-era consumer bureau, including while serving in Congress. He was tapped by President Trump in November to temporarily run the bureau, in part because of his promise to sharply curtail its enforcement actions.
Since then, he has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring career employees to produce detailed justifications for their work and by sharply restricting the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created unnecessary online security risks. And he has scaled back the agency’s efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on vulnerable consumers.
But he wants Congress to go further and has urged it to wrest funding of the independent watchdog from the Federal Reserve, a move that would give lawmakers — and those with access to them — more influence on the bureau’s actions. On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested to diminish the bureau’s power by increasing campaign donations.
Mr. Mulvaney said that trying to sway legislators that way was one of the “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy. And you have to continue to do it.”
www.nytimes.com This just looks so indefensibly awful to me. He's explicitly talking about buying access to politicians by giving them campaign funds, and calling influencing lawmakers by throwing money at their re-election campaign one of the "fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy." I can't help but read this as "Citizens United didn't go far enough. Rather than money being an equal form of political speech, money needs to be the most important political speech."
Campaign finance reform is inarguably the biggest issue the US faces. It really doesn't matter who you vote for, it matters who sponsors who you vote for, which isn't transparently disclosed.
Is that guy not basically admitting to be utterly corrupt? How is that even something he can say without going to prison? "When i was a lawmaker, i only listened to people who gave me money". That is explicit corruption.
the supreme court recently changed the standards for proving corruption iirc. they set a very high bar which this does not appear to meet. yes he's corrupt; but that's what happens when people elect the swamp. and a lot of voters fail to differentiate between gradations of corruption sufficiently.
In case anyone was tracking the AZ special House election-which didn't have a Roy Moore or any real attention from Trump messing with expectations and overall seemed pretty standard-the R candidate won by 5 points in a district that historically is about an R +25 relative to the rest of the country. That's a big swing, bigger than the mean in the last special elections.
It's getting harder and harder to mesh these results with the generic congressional ballot, which is only like a +7 for Dems (which isn't enough to flip the House because reasons). I think the current voting blocks have probably shifted to the point where the historical partisan leans are poor reflections of the actual makeup, though.
On April 25 2018 22:16 farvacola wrote: I expect that the '18 elections will throw prediction pundits into a tizzy as they are shown unable to appropriately predict outcomes.
It'll be interesting to see how the models integrating expectations and the polls will perform versus just polls. Thus far none of the special elections with a few polls have actually been pretty on point with their averages from what I can remember (the AZ simple average was basically dead on).
Earlier this month, the non-profit Portland Equity in Action put up 25 billboards around the city with bold-lettered slogans like "Black Narrative," "De-Escalation Not Militarization," "Black Lives Matter," and "Where Was My Presumption of Innocence?"
The public ad campaign, according to the group's website, is aimed at "highlighting racial disparities in access to power structures and policy, as well as media coverage and representation within institutions throughout the Portland area."
And in a distinctly Portland brand of supportive but unhelpful vandalism, a "Portland…Is Your White Fragility Showing?" billboard on Southeast Belmont Street and 26th Avenue was defaced recently with a green spray-painted retort: "Yes it is. ACAB." (For those of you not up on your anarchist lingo, that's short for "All Cops Are Bastards.")
Worth pointing out: no, we are not all crazy. But we've got a lot more crazies than most places.
I live one block away from this heh.
Also worth pointing out, some of us here don’t agree with your view of Portland.
I’m not even sure how this article is related to us politics.
Donald Trump thinks he's a genius, so sometimes introspection fails us. I'm a proud Portlander and love many things about the city and it's inhabitants. Doesn't mean I can't poke fun at it sometimes there's a reason I'd never consider leaving this wonderful area.
The issue of police vs people of color and the overall condition of people of color is something I consider relevant to US politics. Have you not seen this topic in the news lately? Since Portland is in Oregon and Oregon is in the United States, social activism in Portland felt like an example of "US politics".
A friend shared me with this, though it was interesting. Bunch of school and district level data with ethnic breakdowns - you can look at college readiness, discipline, etc.
A friend shared me with this, though it was interesting. Bunch of school and district level data with ethnic breakdowns - you can look at college readiness, discipline, etc.
Someone throw this in JMP and give me some charts to look at.
On April 25 2018 14:05 KwarK wrote: Trump on his non overnight stay in Moscow
I was in Moscow. And a lot of the people knew - they were there, and they had an amazing time. And they're terrific people, you know I was getting along with them so great. I really loved my weekend, I called it my 'weekend in Moscow'.
Where he "met oligarchs and other very high level government officials", as he said.
Edit: why can't I find this source now
The thread is pretty quiet nowadays. It feels a lot like there's a consensus on what's happening, and I just come here to nod and say, yep, that's happening.
Well I think it's also because posting news just for the news itself can get you banned now. So there's just a lot less input of talking points to discuss.
On April 25 2018 14:05 KwarK wrote: Trump on his non overnight stay in Moscow
I was in Moscow. And a lot of the people knew - they were there, and they had an amazing time. And they're terrific people, you know I was getting along with them so great. I really loved my weekend, I called it my 'weekend in Moscow'.
Where he "met oligarchs and other very high level government officials", as he said.
Edit: why can't I find this source now
The thread is pretty quiet nowadays. It feels a lot like there's a consensus on what's happening, and I just come here to nod and say, yep, that's happening.
Well I think it's also because posting news just for the news itself can get you banned now. So there's just a lot less input of talking points to discuss.
it should be noted that that rule applies to posts that are mostly just an article; but if you instead simply describe a bit of news in your own words in just a couple of lines without linking to an article it's fine.
at any rate; there are indeed several factors that resulted in the thread being quiet.
Well, if you link the article and provide a blurb which is your own thoughts on the article, that is fine also.
Linking just the article or linking the article and just quoting a section without any input from yourself seems to be what this new thread wants to prohibit.
On April 25 2018 14:05 KwarK wrote: Trump on his non overnight stay in Moscow
I was in Moscow. And a lot of the people knew - they were there, and they had an amazing time. And they're terrific people, you know I was getting along with them so great. I really loved my weekend, I called it my 'weekend in Moscow'.
Where he "met oligarchs and other very high level government officials", as he said.
Edit: why can't I find this source now
The thread is pretty quiet nowadays. It feels a lot like there's a consensus on what's happening, and I just come here to nod and say, yep, that's happening.
Well I think it's also because posting news just for the news itself can get you banned now. So there's just a lot less input of talking points to discuss.
I think quietness in the Mueller investigation, and the relative importance of the Mueller investigation, has made other things feel less significant. Who gives a fuck about another DACA loss for Trump when Kushner might end up in prison?
In many ways, we have become desensitized to actual news.
On April 26 2018 00:46 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
On April 25 2018 15:32 Lmui wrote:
On April 25 2018 14:37 Mohdoo wrote:
On April 25 2018 14:05 KwarK wrote: Trump on his non overnight stay in Moscow
I was in Moscow. And a lot of the people knew - they were there, and they had an amazing time. And they're terrific people, you know I was getting along with them so great. I really loved my weekend, I called it my 'weekend in Moscow'.
Where he "met oligarchs and other very high level government officials", as he said.
Edit: why can't I find this source now
The thread is pretty quiet nowadays. It feels a lot like there's a consensus on what's happening, and I just come here to nod and say, yep, that's happening.
Well I think it's also because posting news just for the news itself can get you banned now. So there's just a lot less input of talking points to discuss.
it should be noted that that rule applies to posts that are mostly just an article; but if you instead simply describe a bit of news in your own words in just a couple of lines without linking to an article it's fine.
at any rate; there are indeed several factors that resulted in the thread being quiet.
Now you mention that... Stealthblue actually was a big motivator in introducing talking points into the thread.
It's why I thought it was a bad idea to ban people for doing that. Sure, he wasn't adding much himself, but I never took that as the point. In fact, when I first came to the thread I assumed he was staff, just posting random news bits he saw to keep the discussion going. I think of all the threadbans his was the most nonsensical, and the reason for it likewise.
I don't recall him ever being rude or really getting into arguments with anybody, and I don't think anyone wanted him gone, either.
I hope that peace returns to Syria, North Korea signs a peace agreement with the South, and that Mueller gives Trump the same treatment as the FBI did Clinton ("he did some questionable things, but we're letting him off"). Trump getting a second term as a result of all that would be brilliant.
Seems like SCOTUS is going to uphold the Travel Ban based on who asked what. When that happens, I'm curious if they make the ban more extreme given their new freedom/cover.
Audio of the hearing was just released for those curious.
EPT
there's a reason I'd never consider leaving this wonderful area.
