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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.
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Northern Ireland27230 Posts
On January 20 2025 13:15 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2025 12:38 WombaT wrote:On January 20 2025 11:01 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Donald Trump can smell the blood in the water. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/our-energy-policies-have-made-us-more-vulnerable-trumps-tariffsA year earlier in 2016, the Trudeau government cancelled the already-approved Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have connected Alberta oil production with the west coast and created significant export opportunities to Asian markets.
Canada is even more dependent on the U.S. for natural gas exports than oil exports. In 2023, Canada exported approximately 84 billion cubic metres of natural gas—all to the U.S.—via 39 pipelines, again leaving producers in Canada vulnerable to U.S. policy changes. Trump: "we don't need their cars. we can make those cars in Detroit" LOL. There is no Buzz Hargrove to save Canada this time. There’s a real chasm between the standards you hold Canadian politicians to to that you hold Trump to. Your overall political outlook is genuinely nonsensical to me if one considers predictability or consistency. Although I will say I do find myself hard agreeing or hard disagreeing on an almost 50:50 basis with little in the middle. not at all, IMO, the greatest Canadian PM in its history beat up his wife for decades. Pierre Trudeau was awesome. He also beat his wife. meh. His son turned out pretty good though. He'd make a fine back bench MP. Canadians knew Trudeau beat Maggie. They still voted for him. again, and again, and again. Pierre Trudeau shrugged off statements that the Canadian army threatened members of the CBC and Canadian press. He turned it into a joke. That day Trudeau-mania was born.
Pierre Trudeau for all his abilities as a politician never really had to contend with a historic ally and neighbour outright not giving a shit about that under certain leadership.
See also, many European countries.
Your posts here make zero sense, you seem to admire the world’s superpower throwing its weight around when they were previous reticent to in certain domains.
It’s part ‘might is right’, which in isolation is how it goes. Except you’re blaming the much weaker partner for the actions of their neighbour:
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Today, the United States celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the civil rights movement by <checks notes> inaugurating a man who first became politically popular for his thinly-veiled racist belief that Black people should not be allowed to be president.
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On January 20 2025 12:38 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2025 11:01 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Donald Trump can smell the blood in the water. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/our-energy-policies-have-made-us-more-vulnerable-trumps-tariffsA year earlier in 2016, the Trudeau government cancelled the already-approved Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have connected Alberta oil production with the west coast and created significant export opportunities to Asian markets.
Canada is even more dependent on the U.S. for natural gas exports than oil exports. In 2023, Canada exported approximately 84 billion cubic metres of natural gas—all to the U.S.—via 39 pipelines, again leaving producers in Canada vulnerable to U.S. policy changes. Trump: "we don't need their cars. we can make those cars in Detroit" LOL. There is no Buzz Hargrove to save Canada this time. There’s a real chasm between the standards you hold Canadian politicians to to that you hold Trump to. Your overall political outlook is genuinely nonsensical to me if one considers predictability or consistency. Although I will say I do find myself hard agreeing or hard disagreeing on an almost 50:50 basis with little in the middle. Jimmy left Canada for the US and now he must constantly talk himself into justifying his choice.
If you keep that in the back of your mind his responses make a lot more sense
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On January 20 2025 19:09 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2025 12:38 WombaT wrote:On January 20 2025 11:01 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Donald Trump can smell the blood in the water. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/our-energy-policies-have-made-us-more-vulnerable-trumps-tariffsA year earlier in 2016, the Trudeau government cancelled the already-approved Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have connected Alberta oil production with the west coast and created significant export opportunities to Asian markets.
Canada is even more dependent on the U.S. for natural gas exports than oil exports. In 2023, Canada exported approximately 84 billion cubic metres of natural gas—all to the U.S.—via 39 pipelines, again leaving producers in Canada vulnerable to U.S. policy changes. Trump: "we don't need their cars. we can make those cars in Detroit" LOL. There is no Buzz Hargrove to save Canada this time. There’s a real chasm between the standards you hold Canadian politicians to to that you hold Trump to. Your overall political outlook is genuinely nonsensical to me if one considers predictability or consistency. Although I will say I do find myself hard agreeing or hard disagreeing on an almost 50:50 basis with little in the middle. Jimmy left Canada for the US and now he must constantly talk himself into justifying his choice. If you keep that in the back of your mind his responses make a lot more sense
It also makes more sense if you believe in the core tenet of radical objectivism, which states that radical selfishness leads to the greatest good for all members of society. It stems from a fundamental belief that the world is dog eat dog and can only be dog eat dog. Working together or for the benefit of others is a self-serving happenstance and not in and of itself valuable or even meaningful. If you're not selfish, you're being exploited. If you're not selfish, you can't be productive.
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As the last act of the lame duck period, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci and Milley, thereby confirming for all of us that they have crimes for which to be pardoned.
Another interesting fact I ran into was that during his lame duck presidency, Biden paused LNG exports to Europe by executive order without knowing it - either having forgotten or been puppeted/tricked into doing it, as according to Speaker Johnson, Biden said he hadn't done it.
Johnson also removed Mike Turner, noted Ukraine supporter at odds with Blumpf, from chairing the House Intelligence Committee. Rep. Massie also left the powerful Rules Committee. He was one of the few to object to Johnson in the new Speaker election, which had followed similar objections to how Johnson handled the continuing resolution and spending bill in December.
That bill, the American Relief Act, was passed with wide bipartisan support after a faction clash inside the Republican caucus among people rightly sick of the business-as-usual massive omnibus spending and brinkmanship continuing resolution ways of funding the government. One of the other most vocal/noteworthy of the 34 GOP no votes was Chip Roy, who gave an impassioned speech but also seemed to either 1) intentionally misunderstand the debt limit or 2) just be taking the opportunity to pontificate about the real spending issues which I listed above. In 2023 the debt limit was suspended. The American Relief Act reinstated it, but also raised it from the $31 trillion it was at in 2023 to $36 trillion, and funded the government until March of this year.
While reducing spending is a great goal, Chip Roy seemed to conflate (intentionally or not) raising the debt ceiling with authorizing spending, which it is not, as anyone who has a credit card knows if you have a $500 limit that doesn't mean you spent $500, it just means you can. Those not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good at least recognize a $36 trillion debt limit seems to be better than a suspended (= unlimited) one, and in this case money had been spent anyway so there was no choice but to set the debt limit higher than it had been before.
Due to the debt approaching the ceiling nonetheless, Yellen announced extraordinary measures from the treasury last week.
Despite these issues there's also other good news - it seems Hegseth and especially Rubio will sail through. Rubio is night and day compared to Tillerson, Kirby, Kerry, and hopefully Pompeo. Making most of them look like fools.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States was, in the words of then and Secretary of State, tasked with creating an order, a world order, a free half as he, in his quote, out of chaos, without blowing the whole of the world into pieces in the process, and in the decades that followed that global order served us quite well: Americans' incomes rose and communities flourished. Alliances emerged in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe that led to the emergence of stability and democracy and prosperity in these regions.
But it also prevented a cataclysmic world war, and ultimately a wall in Berlin came down, and with it an evil empire. Out of the triumphalism of the end of the long Cold War emerged the bipartisan consensus; and this consensus was: that we had reached the end of history, that all of the nations of the world would now become members of the democratic Western community; that a foreign policy that served the national interest could now be replaced by one that served the liberal world order; and that all mankind was now destined to abandon national sovereignty and national identity, and would instead become one human family and citizens of the world.
This wasn't just a fantasy; we now know it was a dangerous delusion. Here in America, and in many of the advanced economies across the world, an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade (at the expense of our national economy) shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed our industrial capacity, and has pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and of rivals. An irrational zeal for maximum freedom of movement of people has resulted in a historic mass migration crisis here in America, but also around the world. It's one that threatens the stability of societies and of governments across the West. Governments now censor and even prosecute domestic political opponents; meanwhile, radical jihadists openly march in the streets and sadly drive vehicles into to our people.
While America far too often continued to prioritize the global order above our core national interests, other nations continue to act the way countries always acted, and always will: in what they perceive to be their best interest, and instead of folding into the post Cold War global order, they have manipulated it to serve their interests at the expense of ours.
We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order. And they took advantage of all of its benefits and they ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have repressed and lied and cheated and hacked and stolen their way into global superpower status, and they have done so at our expense and at the expense of the people of their own country. In our very own hemisphere, narco terrorists and dictators and despots take advantage of open borders to drive mass migration, to traffic in women and children and to flood our communities with deadly fentanyl and violent criminals. In Moscow and Tehran and Pyongyang, dictators, rogue states now sow chaos and instability and align with and they fund radical terror groups - then they hide behind their veto power at the United Nations Security Council or threats of nuclear war!
The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us. And all this has led to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and of generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive and in this room today.
Eight decades later we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos. And this will not be easy - and it will be impossible without a strong and a confident America, that engages in the world, putting our core national interests once again above all else.
+ Show Spoiler +
In his hearing he put more eloquently than most I've seen try, why the US corporate/state apparatus opposed Blumpf so strongly, and how it's transpired that Blumpf has pulled the GOP to where they are today, and why despite the weather wherever you are, the sun is bright this morning in America. 
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United States24784 Posts
On January 20 2025 23:12 oBlade wrote:
As the last act of the lame duck period, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci and Milley, thereby confirming for all of us that they have crimes for which to be pardoned.
I stopped reading here. I don't agree with the underlined. You can disagree with the action, sure, but your conclusion isn't true.
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On January 20 2025 23:12 oBlade wrote:As the last act of the lame duck period, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci and Milley, thereby confirming for all of us that they have crimes for which to be pardoned. Another interesting fact I ran into was that during his lame duck presidency, Biden paused LNG exports to Europe by executive order without knowing it - either having forgotten or been puppeted/tricked into doing it, as according to Speaker Johnson, Biden said he hadn't done it. Johnson also removed Mike Turner, noted Ukraine supporter at odds with Blumpf, from chairing the House Intelligence Committee. Rep. Massie also left the powerful Rules Committee. He was one of the few to object to Johnson in the new Speaker election, which had followed similar objections to how Johnson handled the continuing resolution and spending bill in December. That bill, the American Relief Act, was passed with wide bipartisan support after a faction clash inside the Republican caucus among people rightly sick of the business-as-usual massive omnibus spending and brinkmanship continuing resolution ways of funding the government. One of the other most vocal/noteworthy of the 34 GOP no votes was Chip Roy, who gave an impassioned speech but also seemed to either 1) intentionally misunderstand the debt limit or 2) just be taking the opportunity to pontificate about the real spending issues which I listed above. In 2023 the debt limit was suspended. The American Relief Act reinstated it, but also raised it from the $31 trillion it was at in 2023 to $36 trillion, and funded the government until March of this year. While reducing spending is a great goal, Chip Roy seemed to conflate (intentionally or not) raising the debt ceiling with authorizing spending, which it is not, as anyone who has a credit card knows if you have a $500 limit that doesn't mean you spent $500, it just means you can. Those not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good at least recognize a $36 trillion debt limit seems to be better than a suspended (= unlimited) one, and in this case money had been spent anyway so there was no choice but to set the debt limit higher than it had been before. Due to the debt approaching the ceiling nonetheless, Yellen announced extraordinary measures from the treasury last week. Despite these issues there's also other good news - it seems Hegseth and especially Rubio will sail through. Rubio is night and day compared to Tillerson, Kirby, Kerry, and hopefully Pompeo. Making most of them look like fools. Show nested quote +At the end of the Second World War, the United States was, in the words of then and Secretary of State, tasked with creating an order, a world order, a free half as he in his quote without blowing the whole of the world into pieces in the process, and in the decades that followed that global order served us quite well: Americans' incomes rose and communities flourished. Alliances emerged in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe that led to the emergence of stability and democracy and prosperity in these regions.
But it also prevented a cataclysmic world war, and ultimately a wall in Berlin came down, and with it an evil empire. Out of the triumphalism of the end of the long Cold War emerged the bipartisan consensus; and this consensus was: that we had reached the end of history, that all of the nations of the world would now become members of the democratic Western community; that a foreign policy that served the national interest could now be replaced by one that served the liberal world order; and that all mankind was now destined to abandon national sovereignty and national identity, and would instead become one human family and citizens of the world.
This wasn't just a fantasy; we now know it was a dangerous delusion. Here in America, and in many of the advanced economies across the world, an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade (at the expense of our national economy) shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed our industrial capacity, and has pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and of rivals. An irrational zeal for maximum freedom of movement of people has resulted in a historic mass migration crisis here in America, but also around the world. It's one that threatens the stability of societies and of governments across the West. Governments now censor and even prosecute domestic political opponents; meanwhile, radical jihadists openly march in the streets and sadly drive vehicles into to our people.
While America far too often continued to prioritize the global order above our core national interests, other nations continue to act the way countries always acted, and always will: in what they perceive to be their best interest, and instead of folding into the post Cold War global order, they have manipulated it to serve their interests at the expense of ours.
We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order. And they took advantage of all of its benefits and they ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have repressed and lied and cheated and hacked and stolen their way into global superpower status, and they have done so at our expense and at the expense of the people of their own country. In our very own hemisphere, narco terrorists and dictators and despots take advantage of open borders to drive mass migration, to traffic in women and children and to flood our communities with deadly fentanyl and violent criminals. In Moscow and Tehran and Pyongyang, dictators, rogue states now sow chaos and instability and align with and they fund radical terror groups - then they hide behind their veto power at the United Nations Security Council or threats of nuclear war!
The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us. And all this has led to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and of generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive and in this room today.
Eight decades later we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos. And this will not be easy - and it will be impossible without a strong and a confident America, that engages in the world, putting our core national interests once again above all else. + Show Spoiler +https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqW4g-5Tvqs In his hearing he put more eloquently than most I've seen try, why the US corporate/state apparatus opposed Blumpf so strongly, and how it's transpired that Blumpf has pulled the GOP to where they are today, and why despite the weather wherever you are, the sun is bright this morning in America.
Heres my problem with that diatribe. Parts of it are true imo, however, the republican party themselves has been the party of being anti union for decades. They were also the party of free trade for decades. Is there an ounce of self reflection here? Is Trump and are his supporters suddenly going to be pro workers rights and pro union? What about healthcare?
This is scary doublethink territory imo
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On January 20 2025 23:13 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2025 23:12 oBlade wrote:
As the last act of the lame duck period, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci and Milley, thereby confirming for all of us that they have crimes for which to be pardoned. I stopped reading here. I don't agree with the underlined. You can disagree with the action, sure, but your conclusion isn't true.
Yup. Given how regularly Trump threatens anyone he doesn't like with legal action, Biden probably should have preemptively pardoned even more people, to be honest.
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On January 20 2025 23:13 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2025 23:12 oBlade wrote:
As the last act of the lame duck period, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci and Milley, thereby confirming for all of us that they have crimes for which to be pardoned. I stopped reading here. I don't agree with the underlined. You can disagree with the action, sure, but your conclusion isn't true.
Maybe you can explain to help me understand why he again hypocritically broke from his own promise, like when he said he wouldn't pardon his son and then did it anyway, and issued more pardons than anyone else except Carter, after saying he wouldn't use pardons the way Blumpf did, and that he wouldn't do policy by tweeting, another promise he broke when he announced a constitutional amendment on X a few days ago.
TAPPER: President Trump is reportedly considering a wave of preemptive pardons for his adult children and for Rudy Giuliani.
He's also floated the idea in private conversations, according to our reporting, of possibly pardoning himself, which he insists he has the power to do, though that has never been litigated.
Does this concern you, all these preemptive pardons?
BIDEN: Well, it's -- it concerns me, in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice.
But, look, our Justice Department is going to operate independently on those issues, that -- how to respond to any of that. I'm not going to be telling them what they have to do and don't have to do. I'm not going to be saying, go prosecute A, B, or C. I'm not going to be telling them.
That's not the role -- it's not my Justice Department. It's the people's Justice Department.
So, the person or persons I pick to run that department are going to be people who are going to have the independent capacity to decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn't.
Now, in terms of the pardons, you're not going to see, in our administration, that kind of approach to pardons, nor are you going to see in our administration the approach to making policy by tweets.
What could have motivated this change? Have people been going after political opponents or something?
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The claim that Biden had forgotten what he had signed, or had no idea that he had signed something to begin with, comes from Mike Johnson in a Fox News interview. I can't find any unbiased sources confirming his claim.
Mike Johnson is Republican. With Trump assuming office, he's now coming out with a wild and unconfirmed claim that would very clearly appease Trump.
Not trustworthy.
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Finland964 Posts
Rubio struggles even when drinking water, looking forward to his tenure.
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United States24784 Posts
I don't agree with everything Biden has done in recent months, or necessarily even the pardons that were announced today. My only point was that Trump very well may "find" crimes that didn't actually happen for those folks and attempt to imprison them unjustly, so Biden pre-emptively pardoning them could be a way to prevent that even without it demonstrating that they actually committed crimes.
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The difference is really simple. Trump has threatened to prosecute his political opponents without any evidence of crimes.
Trump himself is being prosecuted because there are mountains of evidence pointed towards him.
Notice the difference between the 2.
Evidence!
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Some final disgraces for Biden and forced crap-eating for his defenders and "norm" defenders. Well earned, however, as actually believing any of that garbage they've been going on for years was transparently self-serving and more importantly a lie. Good riddance to the worst president since Carter, heck, maybe even worse than Carter. How appropriate for them both to be in the news one last time.
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On January 21 2025 00:05 Introvert wrote:
Some final disgraces for Biden and forced crap-eating for his defenders and "norm" defenders. Well earned, however, as actually believing any of that garbage they've been going on for years was transparently self-serving and more importantly a lie. Good riddance to the worst president since Carter, heck, maybe even worse than Carter. How appropriate for them both to be in the news one last time.
Actually, he just got inaugurated again today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
In no universe is Biden a worse president than Trump, and it's not even close lmao.
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Imagine crying about norms because someone put an obstacle in the way of your fascist daddy engaging in the political persecution that he promised to engage in.
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On January 20 2025 23:54 micronesia wrote:
I don't agree with everything Biden has done in recent months, or necessarily even the pardons that were announced today. My only point was that Trump very well may "find" crimes that didn't actually happen for those folks and attempt to imprison them unjustly, so Biden pre-emptively pardoning them could be a way to prevent that even without it demonstrating that they actually committed crimes.
Accepting a pardon functions as an admission of guilt. In Milley's case we have a lot of evidence from insubordination to treason, as well as gross incompetence in whatever form that can be charged if any. Even Vindman, whose wife is complaining he didn't get a pardon today, thought Milley did wrong. A preemptive pardon, while protecting him from punishment from courts that are *checks notes* notoriously biased against Washington insider career generals with ostensibly no political affiliation, such a pardon also blocks the hammer of justice from striking the nail of his plump overdecorated uniform, which is a problem in the case that he committed crimes. You can say oh but it's not a real guilt, it's a pretend admission of guilt, just to get away from potential punishments, that the person doesn't really believe, it's a paper guilt only, in which case I again point to that this whole fiasco makes a mockery of democratic norms that I have fatigue from watching Democrats pretend to uphold.
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United States24784 Posts
So you don't disagree with my point, but you disagree with the action itself, which I said right up front is not what I objected to.
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On January 21 2025 00:05 Introvert wrote:
Some final disgraces for Biden and forced crap-eating for his defenders and "norm" defenders. Well earned, however, as actually believing any of that garbage they've been going on for years was transparently self-serving and more importantly a lie. Good riddance to the worst president since Carter, heck, maybe even worse than Carter. How appropriate for them both to be in the news one last time.
Bush, who started a tiny little war - which cost 4500 US soldiers their lives, that is 50% more than the people killed on 9/11 - over a tiny little lie, was better than Biden? That's amazing.
I mean if killing thousands of one's own citizens (not even considering the 460 000 foreign deaths) raises a president in overall quality, then you'd certainly be right. It's certainly a metric.
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EPT
