As expected, the White House had a political card it wanted to play when it invited the national champs for a celebration.
The kids did their best to ignore that and enjoyed themselves.
In the end, it didn’t matter because as usual somebody managed to step all over the message.
The tweet was taken down, but the damage was done.
Live by the tweet, die by the tweet. Better luck next time, POTUS.
And with that, the floor is yours, peeps.
**********************************************************************
UPDATE: Now this is how you troll.
Get The Picture 
I try and check my bias at the door anytime Twitter loses its collective shit on Trump, but this one is just so meta. Cold fast food (do you see any chafing dishes?), when there’s a 5 star hotel (with a high end steakhouse AND his name on it) three blocks away? I’m sure one of his kids not in the admin could have ‘donated’ the food. These kids deserved better, even if they won’t say it publicly (showing all the class that 45 does not possess).
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They deserve better because they went undefeated? Or do they deserve better because they rarely get good food? Just wondering. I’m sure the kids will be fine. I’m just glad he didn’t treat them to swordfish steak and ask me to help pay for it.
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1) This isn’t the first time these guys have eaten cold or room-temperature fast food. It won’t be the last.
2) This is, most assuredly, is the first time they’ve eaten soggy and tepid McDonald’s french fries out of little cups with the Presidential seal on them. So that’s cool.
3) Seriously, if there is a group designed to not be offended by platters full of fast food, it’s a bunch of gigantic college dudes who spent the last 6 or 7 months on an athletic-department instituted diet and nutrition program.
4) Serving room temperature Filet o’ Fish sandwiches is probably the most heinous thing any President has ever done.
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He could have done a number of things better than cold, shitty fast food but he chose not to because he was paying out of his pocket. He had to let everyone know that it came out of his pocket and he had to let everyone know that ITS THE DEMOCRATS FAULT! He embodies all the characteristics you teach your children to be better than, yet so many in America will defend his every move.
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He could have done a number of things worse, too. I’d rather have a room temp Quarter Pounder than the charred husk of what used to be a steak covered in gobs of ketchup.
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They deserve to not be fast-forwarded in the schedule such that we can talk of his great generosity in buying fast food himself (note he needs to have it both ways– he paid for so much! but he can only do so much!) …because his aim was to use them as a prop in his little shutdown drama.
They deserve better because they they are invited guests of the President of the United States. If they deserved an invitation, they deserved being served something of quality.
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Good points. Buying dinner for 50+ people using one’s own money is a greedy thing to do. It would have been much better to wait until he could use other people’s money to buy them much better food. I teach my children to always criticize free food unless it comes from a 3-star steakhouse. There’s nothing more American than ungratefulness. I also teach my children to believe that politicians are simply benevolent people who want to spend other people’s money to help other people. They don’t ever use people as political props. That would be unthinkable.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/10/17/heidi-heitkamp-continues-democrat-tradition-using-sexual-abuse-survivors-campaign-props/
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For someone who claims not to be a Trump fan, you sure spend a lot of time defending him here.
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Here comes the meme….
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As a non-liberal, I just can’t work up the outrage to criticize a guy for buying dinner for a bunch of college kids. But I’m sure you’re not going to let me rain on your parade. #OrangeManBad
Now, if you want to criticize him for something consequential, like unconstitutionally circumventing Congress to ban bump stocks, I’ll join right in. Care to discuss policies? Or are you more comfortable lobbing HuffPo bombs because he doesn’t have any transgender Muslim people of color in his entourage?
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You’ve confused snarky amusement with outrage.
And this isn’t your first Trump rodeo, either.
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You’re correct. I’ve defended him from charges that he’s a fascist dictator. And that he’s LITERALLY THE WORST PERSON EVER IN HISTORY!!1!111 It’s disappointing that pointing out that Trump isn’t, in fact, the worst person in the history of the world makes one a Trump apologist.
It’s also not your first liberal bomb throwing. So, I’ll wait patiently for a rational discussion in the playpen. At that point, I’ll be happy to contribute rational criticism against Trump’s tariff policy, his gun grabbing, or any other sane points. But as long as the playpen is focused on “snarky amusement” to Trump’s charity, or typos, or whatever other inconsequential nonsense, I’ll just post a few memes and express my snarky amusement toward the liberals and liberaltarians who can’t abide political incorrectness.
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T’aint a librul, man. But whatever…
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Liberaltarian
1) A person who claims to be a Libertarian, yet cannot seem to find a single thing wrong with ANY massive violation of Constitutional law proposed by a Leftist. 2) A self-described “Libertarian” who continues blaming the Bush administration for all the increasingly-Fascist activities of the current administration. See: Hypocrite.
Chris just used his blog entry for today to pen a twelve-paragraph screed about the evils of “Neocon Fascism”, then finished it by praising Obama’s attempts to censor his critics. He’s SUCH a Liberaltarian!
#hypocrite#libertarian#liberaltardian#libtardian#apologist#panderer#useful idiot
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I don’t claim to be a libertarian anymore. Too many assholes hijacked the label for other purposes.
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Not that I care, but I suspect you wouldn’t be lining up to defend Obama as vigorously as you do Trump over perceived nothing-burgers (pardon the pun). Given all the shit you lob at the Dereks and chilis of the world, let’s not pretend you don’t come to the door with an agenda.
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He’s happy to pretend. To be sane. But its not true.
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I don’t recall seeing the same level of hysteria over Obama that Trump inspires here. Again, I’m happy to criticize Obama for his wars, his power grabs on the economy, Obamacare, etc. But I won’t criticize him because his dog wasn’t a rescue.
https://tucson.com/news/is-obama-dog-bo-a-rescue-or-not/article_1bfe9169-1b50-5214-ae1c-83d84044f376.html
Sure. I have an agenda. I want politicians to cut government spending, end the wars, and leave us all alone. I don’t have an agenda to support one cult of personality over another. I’m not MAGA or “I’m with her!”
And I’m willing to rationally discuss my views and agenda with anyone. I have on this board frequently. But some people are incapable of rational discussion. Some people are so childish and rude that they can’t get through a discussion without resorting to ad hominem attacks and insults. So they get pictures because they can’t deal with words. And there’s a small chance that pictures will break through the wall of idiocy.
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If that’s the stance you’re going to take, there’s no point in continuing this conversation.
FWIW – I didn’t vote for either guy, but to pretend that the right didn’t go absolutely apeshit over every little nothing-ness from Obama over his 8 years (ending the world by wearing a tan suit, holding a Starbucks cup while half-assing a salute exiting AF1, or even the fact that current POTUS’s entire political brand is built on birther conspiracy nonsense) is being intellectually dishonest with yourself.
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In fairness – if your point is that there wasn’t the hysteria specifically “here” as in GTP, maybe you have a point. I honestly don’t remember what the comment sections were like pre-2016 and there wasn’t a Playpen format expressly for this purpose. I’ll certainly concede that, but I won’t for one second accept an argument that the sentiment you would refer to as Trump Derangement Syndrome wasn’t around and wasn’t widely expressed during 44’s two terms.
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To be fair the “terrorist fist bump” was fair comment, amirite?
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I don’t think so. The main issue was Obamacare. Which was a very significant law. And I acknowledge that there were a fringe that hated his every move, just as there is a left-wing fringe who hates Trump’s every move. I just didn’t see that on this board. Derek loses his shit every time Trump tweets. Was there a right-wing Derek who thought Obama was the anti-Christ? I don’t remember one. While some threads got side tracked with political arguments, we didn’t need a playpen until Trump was in office causing liberals to go insane.
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You can get pretty specific on your ODS actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspiracy_theories#Claim_that_Obama_is_the_Antichrist
https://www.compellingtruth.org/barack-obama-antichrist.html
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Who exactly is outraged here? Trump does something unusual, it gets in the news. Inviting people to the White House to celebrate a major accomplishment , then serving fast food with no chairs or tables is unusual and newsworthy for a president. It would be normal for my high school team to win state and have that sort of reception at the coach’s house or at they gym, but in this setting it is truly strange. It clearly isn’t a moral issue, but I would say that it reflects on Trump’s character and judgement. You may see it as a positive reflection. Qanon members thought it was a secret message and someone on this board said it showed Trump’s political genius. Maybe you can cut through your outrage and see why other people may see it differently.
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I don’t know how unusual it is. An Ohio State player said Bush didn’t serve food during OSU’s visit to the White House. Was that outrageous? Frankly, I don’t much care. I don’t think it’s a secret message or an example of 4D chess. Of course Trump is bashing Democrats every chance he gets. He’s a politician. Democratic leadership is doing exactly the same thing. That’s the game in Washington.
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OK, this is a test. I am generally a lurker, not a poster, so I’m not sure how to post images.
.
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“I don’t recall seeing the same level of hysteria over Obama that Trump inspires here.” It’s not hysteria as much as it is mockery and feeling sorry for the players who bothered to dress up and go. Anyway, here is a sampling of the right wing “hysteria” that you may have forgotten:
https://www.alternet.org/2014/09/6-dumbest-right-wing-attacks-against-obama/
I remember some other silly ones like his tan suit and the jade helm he is trying to take over the country thing. He was always a threat to take our guns. He used a teleprompter. He is a secret muslim, etc. etc.
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Nice meme. Welcome to the club.
As for the hysteria, I agree that there is a lunatic fringe on both sides. I was specifically referring to this board. Derek goes into a psychopathic rage every time Trump tweets something. While there are some Trump supporters and right wingers here, none exhibited that level of hostility toward Obama.
While some GTP threads were derailed with politics, we didn’t need the playpen until Derek had to live in a world where Trump was president.
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The truly ironic thing here is that every POTUS does that.
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Say what you want about free food, but these kids don’t eat McDonald’s and pizza on road trips. This isn’t junior college. Kirby buys 85 campus meal plans with tax payer money, plus gameday meals and meals during camp, and they ain’t eating burger king. Hell, even the cheerleaders get chick fil a at halftime of all the home games and that includes cheerleaders for the away teams. Feeding non cfa fast food to national champions is a complete joke.
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Isn’t he supposed to ‘be best’, though?
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Also note that he made the choice to invite them now rather than do the usual two-months-later scheduling. This was all a show.
Try to think of one time–just one– that Donald Trump has publicly done something without any reason other than to do something decent for someone else. Even from before he was president.
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Slow days in a lonely white house right now.
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You ain’t kiddin’ … MF’er needed some media juice and his ego stroked.
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To be fair, he probably wants the glory of doing something “Presidential” by holding up a jersey with his name on it and is desperate for sports teams to come by.
The Warriors are never coming and no one in the NBA is good enough to beat them for the right to reject the WH’s invitation.
Trump probably thinks women with muscles are disgusting, so he wouldn’t stoop so low as to honor the WNBA or women’s soccer
NFL teams have had vocal hold-outs. MLB less so.
I think he’s invited the Caps but I’m not sure if that’s happened.
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I think if you watch the statement he made to the press earlier in the day, it’s a little more apparent that he was trying to make a point about the shutdown. Why else did he say “it’s going to be interesting” with the face he made at that moment? There’s nothing interesting about these kind of events. What’s “interesting,” exactly, Mr. President?
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Donating his salary……
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While he whores out the Presidency with AT&T execs. and diplomats from Saudi Arabia staying at TRUMP branded hotels? Try to judge the reality, and use some proportionality to see the vast con-game unfolding here.
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I thought that was his action figure “wife”.
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Is this a political forum? Just asking because I didn’t know that.
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Yes. The ‘Playpen’ is a once a week political forum to keep political commentary contained to one posting, once a week.
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Welcome, CEPH. Here’s the intro to the Playpen.
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What if it is?
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It would suck every day all day as bad as the playpen does. IMHO. YMMV.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
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The Senator has kindly opened up his playpen so folks can pile on POTUS in one place, weekly. As you can see, POTUS is a bad man, and does nothing correct. Other than that, not much to see here.
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Plus, it’s a great venue for right-wing butthurt.
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That’s quite a projection.
Some of us aren’t tired of all the winning, and look forward to the weekly sky screaming “butt hurt” NPC play pen to relish the anguish of said “butt hurt.” #nohomo
Carry on with your latest installment of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Muh hamberders lol
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LMAO. Glad you’re happy, sport.
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I do hope this safe space you’ve created helps with the “butt burt”, Senator.
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My butt’s just fine, thanks.
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“The Senator has kindly opened up his playpen so folks can pile on POTUS in one place, weekly. As you can see, POTUS is a bad man, and does nothing correct.” Pretty much…even my frigging 401k is going down the tubes now. Would’ve thought I’d at least get some cash from the deal considering he’s a great businessman and all.
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I feel for the Senator as I am sure the number of visits to this site has dropped dramatically since the shutdown began.
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Not hurt, I just don’t really enjoy the political banter all that much myself.
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If only there were some way for you to avoid it. Hey Senator, is there a way to relegate all political conversation to a clearly labeled weekly post so people like PTC don’t have to see it if they don’t want to?
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Nah, it’s Clemson, that’s eating high-on-the-hog for them.
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Finally…a beacon of truth amidst all the rhetorical fog! The Commander in Burger Chef TROLLED Clempsun! I personally applaud the move and can only hope that if it had been Bama, he would have served 7-11 fare.
If we can’t truly come together on this in Dawgnation, then our future is indeed lost.
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Best comment I saw was that Hunter Renfroe said the food that Reagan served in after their 1981 title was better.
(Hunter Renfroe is Clemson’s player that has been on the team for about a dozen years. Every team has one.)
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Reminded me of Thanksgiving Dinner at Ricky Bobby’s house:
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Sweet little 6lb 8oz baby Jesus!
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Love ole 45.
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Obligatory:
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I’m a conservative. I truly despise that man, and yet he has an undeniable political genius to make every story first and foremost about himself.
He wants attention above all, and we give it to him. I’d suggest systematically ignoring him, but I am legitimately terrified of what he would do for attention if we tried.
In the meantime, can we all just turn off the TV? Without cable news, Donald Trump does not exist.
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It’s remarkable, I must admit that. And like in this case– he is smarter than he lets on. He’s willing to look like a complete idiot in order to keep the spotlight on himself.
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Being smart at narcissism and an idiot at everything else isn’t much to brag about.
He’s PT Barnum with the rubes but the circus king didn’t inherit it, cheat at literally everything and continually bankrupt his endeavors.
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I guess one man’s political genius is another man’s personality disorder. I strongly doubt that there is anything that will affect Trump’s base support. No matter what is found out about him, it will be attributed to the deep state’s unfair persecution of him. No matter how much he screws up, it’s because he is a super genius playing 4 dimensional chess that we just can’t understand. It’s all circular logic. Nixon’s approval rating when he resigned was over 20% and that was before our current level of politicization. I would guess that there is a relatively unshakable 20-30% on either side.
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That Nixon approval number is why Ailes founded Fox News. The entire point was frustration at the fact that Nixon could have gotten away with it and stayed in office had there been media supporting him at the time.
Can’t argue with the fact that it’s worked so far. You can impeach a democrat for lies about blow jobs while a Republican brags confidently that he can shoot someone in public and be insulated. The propaganda machine works.
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Rupert Murdoch founded fox news, not Ailes. He moved here from australia and immediately lobbied the Reagan administration to roll back the fairness doctrine which basically said that you couldn’t call yourself a news organization unless you were presenting important news in an unbiased way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/04/05/the-truth-about-the-fairness-doctrine/4b55a493-db7c-40a5-84c8-1d9f26ff486e/?utm_term=.73d328cb0cf7
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sorry for the pic in the link…I didn’t know it would do that >_<
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Roger was the one pulling the strings. Roger was the one who was in charge of the news. It was Rupert’s money. It was Roger’s brainchild and it was born in the Nixon White House.
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I even saw it in “Vice”!
Yes, spot on in all of your points, Derek.
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That’s interesting, I’ll educate myself about it 🙂
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For over 800,000 federal employees, it doesn’t matter whether we turn the TV off or not – they’re still not getting paid.
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That’s a good start
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There’s just never enough malice and indifference in the world. What would we do without remorseless morons like yourself?
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The swamp aint gonna drain itself. Plenty of fat still on that pig left to trim.
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Just lie about what you’re doing. That’s whats important. Don’t ever say that the goal is to eliminate Social Security and Medicare by breaking the treasury rather than via electoral consent. That would be the moral approach. And we know, as we just addressed, that’s your weak spot.
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Just curious about your grasp of economics, kiddo. Exactly how many tens, or hundreds, of trillions of dollars in the red can a government program be before it’s considered unsuccessful and unsustainable?
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Question restated: Exactly how many tens, or hundreds, of trillions of dollars in the red can a government program be before it’s considered reckless to give a tax break to the richest individuals and corporations?
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I reject your premise. In order to make Social Security and Medicare solvent, the federal government would have to confiscate every piece of private property in the country (land, vehicles, checking and investment accounts, the clothing off our backs, etc.) and sell it all TWICE. So when discussion a tax cut that would amount to a rounding error on the entitlement debt, why not let the earners keep their own dough? They can obviously spend it more productively than the politicians can.
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And I reject your premise. Like Corporal Bonespurs you spouting untruth – be careful, do it enough and you’ll start believing it like he does.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicare-is-not-bankrupt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-make-medicare-and-social-security-solvent/2018/03/22/3a501a8a-2d41-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html?utm_term=.507a42bda602
“For 30 years, the government has spent excess Social Security funds and left IOUs behind, in the form of Treasury securities. The annual Social Security Trustees report for 2017 showed that these securities, with interest, amounted to $2.8 trillion that the government owed Social Security. In recent years the government has had to start paying back those debts because incoming Social Security taxes are beginning to fall short of outgoing Social Security benefits. Time to pay the piper, so to speak.
The Social Security Trustees report shows that the government will be able to pay full Social Security benefits until 2034, and thereafter, about 75 percent of current benefits through 2091.”
But, then again, facts don’t seem to resonate with the republican base.
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Your own source supports my point. The government has taken the money from social security and medicare and spent it, giving over IOUs. That’s simply an accounting gimmick. The money is gone. The government will be able to pay full benefits for 20+ more years. At that point, it won’t. Why? Because the program is bankrupt. That’s what it’s called when your expenses are considerably higher than your income.
But the news is worse than that. Because those entitlement programs aren’t just pay as you go systems. The government is making promises to workers as we speak. Every year, we get mailings from the SSA showing what our retirement benefits will be. So the government is accruing liabilities without setting aside funds to meet them. That’s called an unfunded liability. And, as of a few years ago (the last time I looked), the government’s actuaries estimated that the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare were $114 trillion. That number has twelve zeroes.
And that number goes up over time. So don’t just take Nancy Pelosi’s word that everything is fine. The experts have quantified the problem. The problem is that nobody (especially Democrats) gives a shit. Hopefully, those programs can limp along on a cash flow basis through my retirement and then my kids and grandkids will get screwed. Hooray!
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Senator, you’ve reached a new echelon at GTP – people are rejecting premises left and right. Well done, sir.
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Obama’s explanation about cash to Iran was the truth?
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Yes, and not only is it the truth, it’s easily verified by anyone with a brain cell and a smartphone.
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Yeah, because you only find truth online. Doesn’t take a brain cell to read “the internet”. Just suspend belief and you’re fine
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Should have served some Krystal’s
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Yep…and hope they all didn’t need to go at the same time. You could serve Krystal burgers as a prep for colonoscopies instead of that nasty stuff you have to drink. They’ll clean you out 😉
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Personally love Krystals. Best road trip food imo.
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Agreed.
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Sure, as long as it’s a short one. Do they still serve chili pups? 4 Krystals and three chili pups? Volatile is the best way to describe it.
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Or, you know… White Castle. Wait for it…
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YANKEE CARPETBAGGING FOOL! Interestingly, you can buy WC in the grocery stores in much of the country but have not seen Krystal.
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Those are for the 3 AM meal.
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via Twitter…
Dustin Fox
@DustinFox37
Ohio State Buckeyes Nat’l Champs 2002
Bush didn’t give us any food when we visited the White House..
would have killed for a Big Mac.
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This is closer to the truth than anything I’ve seen yet.
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I had a tutoring program for underprivileged children in Riverdale during the time the county lost it’s accreditation. I had around 50 kids per day in the program from the grades of k-12. We we’re open Monday through Thursday. I supplied snacks and dinner for each kid each of those days. Sometimes hamburgers, and pizzas and things of that nature. A lot of the time besides school lunch this was the only meal these kids would have. This wasn’t the 40s, 50s or 60s. This was only a few years ago! I never once bragged or took a photo of the spread of food we served. I did it because I cared.
I volunteer to feed the homeless. I volunteer to help children in need. I worked for the United Way. I worked with the Salvation Army giving out stipends to families in need during the Obama era. He authorized up to $3000 dollars to help families pay utilities and mortgages and rent that were at least 30 days behind. Trust me every city we went to had every nationality in line waiting to get those funds. The lines were litterally wrapped around the block, twice!
My wife is a war veteran who suffers from every thing you can think of. She was apart of the ammunition team that supplied guns to the front line soldiers. Her van blew up twice. I’ve seen the way the VA operates and how this country treats veterans. It’s sickening. The wait for any assistance is astronomical.
I’m saying all of this to say, real, dedicated ,caring people don’t need photo ops. We don’t need admiration or our ego stroked. We need more people to empathize and understand that people are hurting and a lot of the time it’s not their fault. It’s ours.
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Thank you for your service. Thanks to your wife for hers.
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Thank you so much!
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Thank you for all you and your family do, Durtydawg.
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(And thanks for your compassionate statement re: photo ops and credit. Couldn’t agree more, and I believe humility and compassion are bipartisan traits we need from our representatives as well as each other.)
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Thank you! It’s our pleasure for real.
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Thanks! I appreciate that. Go Dawgs!
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The question is simple: why couldn’t this wait until the “national emergency requiring a govt shutdown” was resolved?
Players deserved to NOT be used as props. And yeah, if you’re going cold fast food, at least order some pizza from Cosmic.
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Players have been used as props for decades.
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WTF is Cosmic?
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Maybe he’s referring to Comet Ping Pong, the (pretty good) pizza place in DC that, according to Trump’s supporters, operates a child sex ring for Democratic politicians in the basement (note: the restaurant doesn’t actually have a basement).
I think it’s a meta-commentary on the NCAA system, another case of kids getting screwed and finding no financial compensation.
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So, remind me again why this is on the Democrats when Republicans controlled Congress for two years and didn’t get the Wall funded?
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Gave away 1000 walls to billionaires. Maybe that club can pass the hat since they were so busy celebrating their massive tax cuts they forgot to pass the wall.
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The Pubs have nothing to bitch about. They’ve had their chance but chose the path of less resistance…only to complain behind the camera.
Of course you can say that about the administrations many years throughout the change of power. Truly, I believe they mostly serve themselves (Republicans and Democrats alike) and just spout what the people want to hear to get votes…so they can just continue to serve themselves.
It’s interesting that the people doing the negotiating have the luxury of continuing to receive their paychecks. Me thinks things would faster if the right people were depending on their salaries.
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You’ve haven’t paid enough attention to how many millionaires serve in Congress.
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Good reminder. I’m sure many of them could go a while without a check. I don’t think they spend their own money anyway.
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Up front, I’m a conservative. That said, which is better for America – the wall or the government running?
Also, during the Reagan administration, weren’t we trying to tear down a wall?
Both parties need a serious reality check.
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While you’re right that both parties need a reality check, I ask this as a serious question because I don’t know the answer. Why was the funding not passed when the republicans controlled congress?
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Personal opinion: exactly what we are seeing now.
Much easier for Dems to rail about the waste of a wall being built that got rammed down their throats than to oppose the idea of one. Lot of Republicans think that fight is good for motivating their base, fund raising, and driving their opponents to apoplexy.
So, they passed their tax cuts (deficit spending rocketing back up to record levels after years of heading in the right direction) and pushed the wall off to 2019, knowing they were likely to lose the House.
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Neither parties cronies want a wall. It’s that simple. Drain the swamp. Term limits for all. Good enough for POTUS, good enough for all in Washington.
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The government consists of Democrats arguing that we should pay $4 trillion a year to dig holes and fill them back in on the left side of the road and Republicans arguing that we should do it on the right side of the road. It’s a waste of time and money.
Build the wall and keep the government shut down. It’s the best of both worlds.
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^ stupidity like this is why we have a reality-TV President.
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Don’t insult stupid people with that comparison.
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I don’t think you know what the term anarchy means, homie.
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“Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency.” – Noam Chomsky
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What’s sad is these progressives today don’t even realize they are just pawns of the same Marxist post-modernism ideology today that was responsible for 100s of millions of deaths in the 20th century.
Scary.
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Prooftext fallacy for the win. Who will you quote next, Barbara Jordan? I’m sure you were right there with Chomsky in the Occupy Wall Street Movement…
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sigh
Do you even understand your own argument? A prooftext fallacy requires an implied endorsement from the author. I did no such thing. Spottie asked for a definition of anarchy and I think Chomsky provided a good one.
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I like and appreciate the quote. I think it is succinct and well-put. It is party neutral as both sides have members who are motivated by skepticism. One side trusts the government over private business and the other the opposite. Skepticism plays a role in this dichotomy and support can be produced for either side. Like most things, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Believing with certainty that you know the answer is the only guaranteed falsity.
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A wall that was trying to keep people in unless you go by GDR propaganda. Bernie and AOC probably do
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Regarding walls, that line about tearing down walls always reminds me of Buckley’s, “…to say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
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Fast food was totally acceptable in this case. Everyone knows that items like forks and knives and proper culinary etiquette are foreign concepts to Clemson folk. The President was just trying to make them feel comfortable and at home.
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Maybe Ocasio-Cortez will fix it all, if we can get her up to speed on how government, taxes and economics work.
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A rookie rep living rent-free in Republican heads right now. Pretty hilarious.
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Yeah, and assuming you are a democrat, that rookie is well on her way to speaking for you. Good luck with that.
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Yeah, the representative from the Bronx usually ends up running the whole deal. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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We could let Steve King (W-IA) handle it.
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One of the 435 House members is a nationalist. Let’s elect a monarch to save us from King’s influence!
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One of 435 House members is a 29-year old who supports European-style democratic socialism. Let’s totally overhype the amount of pull and relevance she has!
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And not note that one third of the government is headed by a self proclaimed “nationalist.”
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Good thing he’s getting impeached any day now, eh? 😉
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The histrionic right-wing conspiracy rag, The New York Times, thinks AOC is pushing the whole Democratic party leftward.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ocasio-cortez-pushes-democrats-to-the-left-whether-they-like-it-or-not/ar-BBSbkCl?li=BBnbcA1&srcref=rss
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I almost forgot:
and misdirect when it’s pointed out that you’re FOS.
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Uh oh…I see a boycott of Burger King by all the outraged people that never eat at Burger King.
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Along those lines, I can’t figure out why they didn’t serve Chick-fil-A. It’s good and it would have owned the libs, right?
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Good point. Plus, CFA sandwiches have a longer half life than your average fast food burger.
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Only fast food sandwich I’ve saved for breakfast
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Immortal McHorror burger is 6 month old, looks just like new…
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LOL!
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The Donald called them on Sunday. No one answered.
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Heh.
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He probably figured since they’re “from The South,” they wanted something other than fried chicken.
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Too bad “guest chef Fuzzy Zoeller” fell through.
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Or the bojangles down the street from the whitehouse.
a couple of easy wins that they totally whiffed on.
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On the contrary, I don’t like Burger King but that Tweet was fantastic. I’ll probably eat there one day soon as a result. If you don’t have a sense of humor and you can’t laugh at yourself then life is pretty miserable don;t you think?
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If they’re REALLY smart Burger King will come up with limited time only menu item: Hamberders!
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Well if the kids didn’t like I’m glad ’cause it’s Clemson. Down with all orange teams. The only orange I want to see is on my president! Lol.
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Oh, no. A typo in a tweet? The horror!
Give us a break, Senator.
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How do you know it was a typo? 😉
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Because I’m not an idiot.
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Scott Free wants a smocking hamberder with confeve.
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Well when you are someone of power and you are using this as a means of communication to the people, yeah I have expectations of you spelling hamburger correctly. I mean it is an entire 180 character max, you can spend the 10 extra seconds to proof read it.
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the Washington Post “fact checked” the claim of a) a thousand hamberders claim and found Trumped lied(probably more like 300) and he also lied about b)that the burgers were piled a mile high because a burger is only two inches tall and even if there were a thousand that would only be 2000 inches which wold only be 17 feet tall so once again Trump lied. Really…. I understand that Trump derangement syndrome is real but now what use to be a respected newspaper is suffering from TDS too. I guess Mr Bezos has prohibited either a sense of humor and all use of hyperbole at the Post since he purchased it. As far a dismissing the fare ,I as someone who goes on Atkins almost every year to lose the 20 lbs I gain during the holidays, I head immediately to Krystal or Burger King when I’ve reached my goal. I hope everyone can at least consider the fact that POTUS was damned it he did and damned if he didn’t. Personally I wish the Post would do some more “fact checking ” about who paid for the Democratic Congressional junket to Puerto Rico and more importantly who that chick Senator Menendez was talking to on the beach down there.
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He lies about important shit. He lies about unimportant shit. He just lies. Constantly. Uncontrollably. He lied to McConnell about signing the spending bill that he passed in the senate, hence the shutdown. The idea of him being placed under oath makes his lawyers quit or wish for death.
But it’s all tds. Got it.
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So he has become a skilled politician?
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He’s the same self promoting narcissist vaccuous scumbag failure that he’s always been.
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Only the ‘haters and losers’ would call someone who won the presidency a failure. All your other adjectives could be applied to most politicians.
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stole the presidency.
FIFY.
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You mean like actually showing up and campaigning in electoral battle ground states? Like stealing candy from an old decrepit hack.
But it was HER turn!!!!!!
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There are some other facts if you take your citizenship seriously that you ought consider:
https://mobile.twitter.com/selectedwisdom/status/1084498964114821120
None other than Steve Bannon says that taking a meeting with the Russian Government for oppo research is “fucking treason.” But who can trust that liberal source?
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Muh Russia lol
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Treason is hilarious!!
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Only treason I see is coming from the DOJ and FBI Obama Admin. FISA Declas is coming.
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Willful blindness isn’t much of a defense.
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There you go. But he’s worse than just a politician. He’s a Republican. Elizabeth Warren (D) is just a kind-hearted, blond haired, blue eyed, affirmative action receiving, Native American who wants nothing more than to help you. Sure, she lies. But her lies serve a purpose. To gain her the power she needs to force you to live your life the way you should. See the difference?
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Got any proof for the position that Warren benefited from affirmative action? Maybe there’s some meme you can pull out of the “Re:Re:Re:Fwd:Re:Re:RE:RE:Re: YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS OBUMMR OWNED BY BEN SHAPIRO Pls FWD!!!” email chain.
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“Warren first publicly identified herself as “Native American” in 1986 in the directory of the Association of American Law Schools. She was thirty-seven years old at the time and had been a law professor for eight years. By that point in life, and having been not just a professor, but a law professor, she must have known that publicly identifying as a minority scholar could have a dramatic impact on her career prospects. Only the most disingenuous or dimwitted academic could claim to be ignorant of this, and Elizabeth Warren is certainly not dimwitted.”
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/academic-affirmative-action-really-bad-idea-heres-why-34157
There is no official letter filed with the EEOC stating that Fauxcahontas was hired because she was a minority. But she knew exactly what she was doing when she began identifying as a minority.
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Republicans have standards of conduct!
You can brag about grabbing women’s genitalia, ride a porn star, date a playmate while your infant son is at home, bankrupt everything, run scam after scam, sue everyone you owe money to, insist on NDA’s for everyone, be a Russian pawn, be dumber than a sack of hammers on anything important while claiming to be an expert on everything, but what you may not do is repeat in a resume something your parents told you about your heritage.
Because standards.
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If you had morals, you could convince me you care about any of those. But you don’t. Clinton and Kennedy grabbed women against their wills. Trump was bragging about having permission. Every politician in Washington is adulterous. You love half of them. Somehow, you’ve convinced yourself that Trump’s private business deals and negotiations with his creditors are more important than corrupt politicians enriching themselves on the backs of taxpayers. Not surprising.
And finally, Russia, Russia, Russia. Russians approaching Trump with opposition research is treason (even though there’s no public evidence that he dealt with them). Hillary paying foreign spies to conduct opposition research is fine. Hillary selling access to the State Department through her foundation is just savvy business.
Because Democrats.
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Ha. Dad, Is that you?
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If you’re my son, you should get off your phone and pay attention to your teacher!
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Warren had a great reputation before she was perceived as a potential candidate and the mud slinging began. The only thing that seems to have stuck is the native american thing. It was family lore, she believed it enough to claim it and, recently, enough to get genetic testing to prove it. Of course, once she had proven that she did have a native american ancestor, the goalposts were moved. I’m not sure why you think this is some crazy egregious lie and I can’t find a pattern of her lying. I enjoy hearing her speak and find her to be intelligent and articulate…these are qualities that are important to me in a president and that I see Trump as lacking. Please give me examples of her purposeful lying. Anything other that this native american tripe that the right is currently peddling.
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I agree that her race isn’t really material. It’s just a fun way to point out her hypocrisy and that of her party. Race is crucially important, unless it’s not.
And she is intelligent. Mostly, she’s guilty of the same things most national politicians are. She’s a smarmy millionaire claiming to be “one of us” so we think she’ll fight for the common man. In reality, she takes money from the multi-national corporations she regulates and her proposals will only make problems worse.
I think the biggest LIE of hers of much consequence may be practicing law in Massachusetts while unlicensed.
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Again, I like Warren and have not been presented with any pattern of lying or hypocrisy from her. She was born into a middle class family, so she at least closer to identifying with “us” than Trump. That seems like an odd nit to pick. Her voting record is definitely for consumer protections. I don’t understand the rules of licensing enough to know about the law issue and would be interested to hear an explanation. This is such an esoteric issue, I find it hard to use as a means of painting her with a broad brush. Maybe the Senator has some thoughts on this. Here are a couple of links in case anyone wants to read about it. The one that is a rebuttal has a lot of opinions in the comments section that say she did wrong. It seems like a grey area to me, but maybe it’s more clear to lawyers.
https://elizabethwarrenwiki.org/massachusetts-bar-controversy/
https://masslawyersweekly.com/2012/09/24/warren-law-license-matter-called-non-issue/
Further, if this was a big deal, I would expect some sort of response from the state bar. I would guess that the absence of censure is just more evidence of the deep state to some. Again, I don’t see this as indicative of some sort of difficulty with the truth and I strongly disagree with your characterization of her as a corporatist.
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Warren is a statist who wants to increase the size and scope of government. In Massachusetts, one needs a license from the state to be a florist, a hairdresser, a doctor, a lawyer, and countless other occupations. Warren provided legal services without a license. And she was doing this while championing for increased government oversight and regulation into every conceivable aspect of our lives. So it’s just another example of rules and regulations being good for thee, but not for me. That’s the definition of hypocrisy.
As for the state bar not responding strongly, I expect nothing less when dealing with well connected people. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I fully expect that if she were an average Jane Doe who didn’t teach at Harvard and/or was a U.S. Senator, the bar would take a harsher view of her activities.
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When it boils down to nothing happened because of the deep state, I stop listening. The whole deep state thing is impossible to disprove if it doesn’t exist and it certainly hasn’t been proven. This logical fallacy is known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or argument from ignorance.
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Who said anything about the deep state? I’m simply arguing that it’s entirely plausible that a U.S. Senator gets special treatment from bureaucrats. If you earnestly believe that a U.S. Senator is treated exactly the same as some random schmoe with no connections, we’ll just agree to disagree.
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I can’t tell the difference between deep state and well-connected. They seem interchangeable and similarly deployed to me. I hope you can see why that might be the case for me.
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If that was intended as edgy or sardonic or something like “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” it was a Fail.
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As evidenced above, politics can bait people into arguing about literally anything, no matter how utterly stupid.
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This is literally a nothing burger.
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Hamberders taste much better with covfefe.
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The Donald should’ve at least ordered up some pizaa from Comet Ping Pong.
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It’s never too late to order up some Choo Choo.
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Looking forward to seeing the Dawgs feast on Mexican food.
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Trump literally even lied about the number of hamburgers. Earlier in the day it was said that it was 300 hamurgers. Then he tweeted out that he bought 1000 of them.
You people who support Trump support a man who literally cannot stop lying. And somehow you believe him. Do you just not want to admit how naive and stupid you were or do you just not care because it makes people angry whom you don’t like?
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As long as they think he embodies their fears of a browner America he can do literally whatever he wants as far as they are concerned. He’s said as much with the shooting on Fifth Avenue thing.
He had them at Mexican rapists and banning Muslims.
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Muh hamberders.
Orange man bad.
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Sockpuppetry from Napoleon. Nothing new. How many different handles are you using now?
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You are literally a meme, stop and think about that for a second.
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Sorry to disappoint. But it ain’t me. I’ve occasionally used an alias, but it’s always been something obvious like “Mark Emmert”. When I post memes, I use my standard handle.
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Hmm, that didn’t work…I haven’t pwned the interwebs yet 😦 Gonna try again.
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https://me.me/i/leave-trump-alone-snowflakes-be-like-ef353bad1234429fb77addd23a7734d9
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Failed again 😦 😦
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Last try…
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Congrats!
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https://me.me/i/ef3543331e814c31a56f7ef6561155d4
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Liberal logic: Trump exaggerated the number of hamburgers he bought, which proves he’s a pathological narcissist who can’t be trusted to judge policy. Obama stated that there were 57 states, which only proves that sometimes people get tired and misspeak. We can still trust that guy. Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred because he perjured himself. But it was just about sex, so it’s all good. If he had lied about hamburgers, then all bets are off.
Seems legit.
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Slow day watching Fox News at your parents house huh
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Moron logic: Trump has lied over 7,000 times (documented) since he took office without ever attempting to correct or acknowledge his lies, but it’s no worse than Obama who once accidentally said there were 57 states which was obviously a mistake and he corrected himself on.
You literally couldn’t grow a bigger idiot than Napoleon in a test tube if you tried.
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Would you actually say something like this to a person’s face? You must be really strong.
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I would, and have. Are you under the impression that you’re intimidating or something?
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Certainly not, nor could any sane person take that as my intention. I’m just trying to differentiate your reactionary belligerent narcissism from Trump’s. It’s like you’re the same person.
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And Chili, you’re actually expecting me to believe that you have stood in front of man’s face and told him (something like) a test tube could not produce something as stupid as him? You’re accusing Trump of being a liar, and I agree. But you’re a liar. You’ve never done that. You’ve typed that. And in a parallel universe where you have done that, how are you different from the people you claim to despise?
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Cool, you can think whatever you want. You clearly don’t know me.
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True. I can only observe your behavior. And a person who claims not to care what others think of his thoughts deceives himself by his own eagerness to share them.
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Politicians tend to be psychopaths. Those are the kind of people who believe they should be able to rule over people. What intrigues me are the folks like Chili who beg to be ruled over.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-startling-accuracy-of-referring-to-politicians-as-psychopaths/260517/
“… Prime Minister Tony Blair was a “plausible psychopath” who was ruthlessly ambitious, egocentric, and manipulative. … Lyndon Johnson exemplified this syndrome. He was relatively fearless, shameless, abusive of his wife and underlings, and willing to do or say almost anything required to attain his ends.”
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“Politicians tend to be psychopaths.” There is truth to this, but it’s a bit of an overgeneralization…there are also people who go into civil service because they want to good for fellow citizens or fix perceived problems. Corporations act like psychopaths as well which is why I believe that the accountability that government provides is the lesser of two evils.
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Do we need to insult the idiots?
Pseudo-intellectual, psychotic, meme-machine with a complete inability to tether his “belief system” to any known reality is more accurate.
He’s a right wing, unlettered, Noam Chomsky in need of serious medicinal intervention.
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Oh please, son. You’re part of the new generation who believes insults are arguments. I’m old school. I believe in facts and logic. I have morals beyond “might makes right.”
I earnestly hope that when you’re an adult, you can jettison your childish ways and embrace a more stoic, reasoned approach to the world. The world needs people to do so. But until that day, you’re just static in the land of Antifa nonsense. #OrangeManBad #INeedAKing
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ChiliDerek, I see very little difference between your behavior and that of Trump and his online base. A tiny smidgeon of self awareness does everyone good. If following and debating politics caused me to dehumanize my fellow man, I’d re-evaluate my interests. But that’s me. I mean, dehumanizing our fellow men COULD lead to self contentment and a harmonious society, but some would argue history condradicts that.
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Some people that look human lack some essential characteristics of one.
If you find my behavior unacceptable, then never ever vote for Trump, period. If you can’t tolerate it here where it’s meaningless, you shouldn’t unleash it on your country.
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I’d never attempt by any means to unleash my worldview through violent governmental force on any person. Can you say the same? And whether I did vote for either Trump or you, I can’t see by your behavior, how I’d get one bit of difference.
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…but I do appreciate you acknowledging that your worldview has caused you to see some humans as less than human. That is the mindset that underlies every single atrocity man has committed against man. It’s a big step to admit that mindset.
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Not exactly. I do it in the spirit of MLK.
It’s entirely on the basis of the content of one’s character. I have no ill will towards any “group” of people.
I have ill will towards dumb people who have, but fail to use, the capacity to not be so fucking stupid. That characteristic knows no demographic.
I have no desire to root them out for extermination as such would be impossible, albeit desirable. I will however point my finger in their face and proudly say: stupid!
Why? Because it’s fun and they deserve it.
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“I have no desire to root them out for extermination as such would be impossible, albeit desirable.”
The party of tolerance people, the party of tolerance.
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Derek represents Derek. I am not a member of anything. Nor do I want to be.
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You mean like what George Patton did?
Douglas MacArthur?
The Enola Gay?
Not only will I defend violent governmental force. I’ll defend violent private force. It’s due to it that I don’t have a fucking Queen. And now we’ve come full circle as I’ve realized there’s actually something worse than Il Douche: royalty.
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I hope the “meme machine” doesn’t promote his right wing pacifism stupidity by comparing US generals and the founding fathers to hipsters with a socialist bent. That would be an obscene display of mental disability even for that guy.
Oops. Too late.
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I hope Derek doesn’t try to mask his moral failings by insisting that his penchant for violence is rooted in some kind of noble struggle against tyranny, while simultaneously arguing for increased tyranny via the ballot box.
Oops. Too late.
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“Right wing pacifism.” I’ve never seen such a nonsensical phrase. Translation: “I advocate leftist force.”
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Okay, I’ll bite. Do you think people should have a license to drive a car or motorized vehicle?
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No.
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Well, I suppose it would depend. I would prefer private ownership of roads. So if a road owner wanted drivers with some kind of qualification on his road, then that’s fine.
But I don’t think there’s much benefit to licensing drivers on government roads.
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No. Now I’ll ask you one: Do you think it’s moral to use or threaten violence against a person who has not harmed another person?
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I can tell you this, if I ran an auto insurance business, there’s no way I’d insure someone who didn’t demonstrate competency behind the wheel. It would be more involved than a few multiple choice questions and a ride around the block, too. Lol. As if drivers licenses do a damn thing to guarantee one molecule of safety.
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Having a nice country is expensive. Privatization just continues the steady growth of power and wealth at the top of the food chain. I really don’t think that increasing the power of american oligarchs is a good idea. Did you see what happened to a privatized road in indiana?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/indiana-highway-gives-black-eye-to-private-investment-in-infrastructure-1502271003
And if roads are privatized, they will have tolls. Tolls will slow things down and act as a tax for those living near the road anyway. With government, we can have some accountability and control over what happens. If we don’t exercise said control, that is on us as voters. With a company, they do whatever they want with little transparency or repercussion. Noone is going to build a second road to compete with the first one, so it’s not exactly a market solution as much as a monopoly exploitation.
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How does voluntary exchange increase the wealth of the powerful more than the current system of crony capitalism? And even if it were true, I have no problems with a man gaining wealth through voluntary exchange.
And yes, some roads would have tolls. Of course, some government roads have tolls and things haven’t gone crazy on those roads. And most government roads are paid for using hidden tolls called taxes. The difference is, they’re involuntary tolls collected by everyone regardless of whether they use the road or not. At least tolls are paid directly by the people who use the service. Others aren’t forced to subsidize the road.
And you are correct that some private roads will run into construction delays and cost overruns. Do you think that government projects don’t face those same concerns? I can’t recall the last time I learned of any government construction project that was finished early and under budget. Do you know of one? At least with a private project, the investors are the ones to take the hit, rather than everyone else.
I think your notion of transparency and accountability is exactly backwards. Private companies are orders of magnitude more accountable to the public than government is.
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Because the rich control the modes of production and tie paying others not to productivity/profitability, but to the lowest amount they can possibly pay. These same actors also actively fight to destroy unions, bargaining rights, worker protections, and suppress a national minimum wage in order to maximize their profits earned off of the work of others. To a large extent, being wealthy is a matter of luck (right time, right place) or inheritance. The government is chosen by and accountable to its people. I disagree with your assertion that private companies are more accountable. Do you think that Vanderbilt would respond to your FOIA requests? UGA has to.
Undermining confidence in the government is a key goal of conservatives. I think it is to consolidate power to better control our country. There is always an undercurrent of this in any given society…like I said before, it is intrinsic to humanity.
https://onlinempadegree.usfca.edu/news-resources/news/5-key-differences-between-organizations-in-the-public-and-private-sectors/
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The nice thing about wages is that there is a competitive market for labor. If you’re a cashier and WalMart won’t pay you the $10 an hour you think you deserve, you can always go to Kroger or Home Depot. You can work for whatever company offers you the best salary package.
So, even if you’re correct that Jeff Bezos is conspiring to drive the world into poverty by reducing wages, there’s nothing stopping one of his competitors offering higher wages in order to draw away the best workers.
And accountability works directly in the private market. If you spend $1,000 a year at WalMart and you decide you don’t like one of their practices, you can immediately withdraw your support and cost them $1,000 of revenue all by yourself. You are no longer supporting the practice. In govrenment, if you don’t like something, you can change your vote. And then you have to hope that the person you voted for shares your view on the subject. And then you have to hope that your representative can do something about it. Maybe in a few years, enough representatives will gain enough power to scale back the practice slightly. In the meantime, your taxes continue supporting everything you don’t like. And if you stop paying your taxes on moral grounds that you don’t want to support drone strikes in Yemen, or corporate welfare in California, you get put in jail. The accountability is many times removed.
As for the FOIA, no I don’t expect Vanderbilt to respond to my request any more than I expect you to respond to one. If I send you a request for your tax returns, do you think you should be compelled to provide them to me? Of course not.
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I think he lied about hamberders, not hamburgers.
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If it was a rare occurrence, then this may apply, but it is a very clear and predictable behavioral pattern. Instead of making up viewpoint, labeling it liberal, then attacking it, why not just say what you think about this whole thing. It’s no big deal. Shameful, yes. Scandalous, no. Funny, yes. Infuriating, no.
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You are correct. I consider lying, narcissistic politician to be a redundancy in terms. And lying about hamberders is just about the least consequential lie I can think of. So my post was poking fun at the liberals here who retire to the fainting couch because Trump lied about food, and admittedly many other dumb things, yet found nothing objectionable about Hillary (and other leftists) lying.
Now obviously I can understand Hillary lying to investigators or Congress about crimes. The reason you destroy phones and emails being sought by investigators is that you don’t want them finding evidence of wrongdoing. So I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about lying about being under sniper fire in Bosnia, or being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, or that all her grandparents were immigrants, etc. Why lie about that? Would being named after a mountain climber win her votes? It’s evidence of a pathology. But she’s a politician, so I expect it.
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But it’s the only lie ever Chili!! The rest of the time you can take his word to the bank!!
This guy was making hundreds of dollars an hour to make these observations:
“He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Trump’s retained attorney John Dowd said.
Dowd warned Trump, “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jump suit,” before resigning when Trump insisted that he would be a good witness in his own defense. Dowd, who reportedly feared perjury charges, left Trump’s legal team in late March, after nearly a year.
The reason: “You’re a fucking liar,” said Dowd.
He’ll testify “over my dead body” says Giuliani.
These aren’t the “alternative facts” tho.
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The Donald better hurry up and fix this shutdown! The Red Sox are gonna want lobstah.
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The Orioles want crab cakes.
Looks like the shutdown will be here for a while.
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Pelosi with the ultimate power move.
There’s a reason Republicans hate her. She’s savvy AF and she’s better at this game than Trump.
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She would never inflate hamberder numbers.
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How about? https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/30-dems-in-puerto-rico-with-109-lobbyists-for-weekend-despite-shutdown
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I know you Fox news troglodytes never noticed, but there was a disaster in Puerto Rico (which is, believe it or not, part of the United States) and the federal government at Trump’s direction was almost criminal in their non-response to the crisis. Thousands of people died as a result of inaction, and a trip to PR to assess the aftermath is not a vacation on the beach.
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“…a rate of 3.6 lobbyists for every member.” I’m sure that while they will be well fed and well boozed, they will only have the best interests of the American taxpayers at heart.
Reps or Dems, they’re all self-serving bastards.
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Lobbyists are not paid by the government. They’re paid by private entities. That’s the whole point.
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Check out the pic of Menendez on the beech and guess again
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Unless you’ve ever made a post here lamenting Trump’s weekly golf trips to Florida during which NO business is conducted, shut the fuck up.
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But Chili, that’s the main problem many of us have with you and Derek. When is the last time you made a post in any way critical of left-wingers/Dems/progressives/whatever the F you want to call them (yourselves)?
There are far more of us with a conservative bent who can’t stand Trump and will say so and will be critical of the right when warranted. You dudes are 100% Rules for Radicals — never admit to being wrong, never show weakness, hold the party line.
You never compromise and scream like hell that the other side won’t compromise. OK.
Have a great day.
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Well I would tell the “many of us” that you are lumping yourself in with that you haven’t been paying attention or haven’t been here long enough.
And I feel like I’ve pointed this out on more than one occasion but y’all either ignore it or know it and just keep choosing not to acknowledge it – I voted Republican in every election in my lifetime up until 2016. I voted for Gary Johnson, not Hilary, in 2016. I grew up in a deeply conservative household. I am not the radical progressive you guys keep trying to pin me as.
Here’s the difference between you and I – I recognize the “both sides” argument to be an exercise in false equivalence and a weak cover for just how unquestionably awful the Trumplican party is. There is no equivalence. There is no “Dems are just as bad.” That’s not true. And I’m way past entertaining that discussion. You know it’s true, and I know it’s true. There IS NO “conservative” party in America, and there’s never going to be one until American “conservatives” put a bullet in the party of Trump.
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I’m honestly interested in your response here. So you think Trump has destroyed the Republican party. But exactly how? By withdrawing from the Middle East? By cutting taxes? With misguided trade policies? Or is this simply about his personality? He’s just not “presidential” enough?
I suspect you’re going to latch onto the Russia allegations, but I think you’re misguided there. This point isn’t exactly “both sides,” it’s more like “one side.” But you tell me where you disagree. Hillary hired foreign agents to do opposition research on Trump. Trump was approached by foreign agents with opposition research on Hillary, but we don’t know that he took it. And Trump’s guilty of crimes? Do you honestly think Reagan or Goldwater would agree?
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I don’t think that he has destroyed the republican party, but I think he has stripped some of the veneer of plausible deniability from it. As far as your Hillary whataboutism: she hired an American firm to do research. The company was originally hired by Cruz and Clinton picked up the contract after he dropped out. Hiring an American firm to do opposition research is legal. Meeting with a foreign government to explicitly gain an advantage over your opponent in an election is not. Clinton was not beholden to anyone for any information produced as it was an upfront, fiduciary agreement. Trump’s campaign taking an open-ended meeting with an agent of a foreign power (a hostile one no less) under the premise of gaining an advantage in the election is conspiracy. Whoever was involved opened the candidate up to foreign influence. Who is liable for this is debatable, but they are not even close to the same thing.
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I hate Bernie. People who think the free market is the enemy scare the fuck out of me.
Bill shouldn’t have let that girl blow him no matter how bad his options were.
The entire messaging apparatus of the left is fucktarded. The fact that they struggle to win in a messaging war with their evil and malicious opponents is a continual frustration.
The fact that the reaction to the right cedeing the middle is to go leftward makes me want to bang my head into a brick wall.
People who protest army recruitment centers should be kicked in the pussy.
Like me now?
I’m not a leftist or really much of a democrat. What animates me is how evil the GOP is. Voting until November 2016 was mostly a choice of a lesser of 2 evils.
Now I wouldn’t vote for a party that would nominate Mein Fürhgrabber for president ever. And won’t as long as I live. You associate with that guy and you’re dead to me.
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What’s curious is that you claim not to like Bernie, yet consider Trump and his party evil. Bernie, and several other prominent Democrats in positions of party leadership, espouse the policy that what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is also mine. But you consider acting like a jerk and having a spray tan to be more evil than outright theft and promotion of an ideology that has killed over a hundred million people.
The only possibilities for why you believe that is that you’re either morally reprehensible, or you’re criminally stupid.
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People with function cerebrums know that Bernie became a first became a emocrat when he ran for president in the 2016 race. Those who sniff glue for sustenance, because of the pleasant smell and because they like the colors they see in the hallucinations don’t.
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So you discount the policies of prominent Democrats because one of them used to technically be an Independent who only caucused with Democrats 100% of the time? Wow. You really thought that through all the way, didn’t you?
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“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” – Charles Krauthammer
Liberalism is truly a mental disorder. I pray you get help before you hurt yourself or others.
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They’re both right. The left can’t win easy arguments and the right is inherently evil.
This is what I mean by “evil.”
The right has consistently used both military force and racial divides to achieve political power. That is evil on its face.
Second, it purposefully hides its policy goals and lies about what it is up to. The right has spent the last 38 years shifting wealth from the middle class to the upper 1%. This is by design.
The Forbes 400 are 25 times wealthier today than they were in 1981. Meanwhile lower and middle class incomes have stagnated.
The design of this long term is to make Medicare and Social Security unsustainable and to keep any additional social welfare programs unaffordable. We know this because they’ve said it.
All the while they have made a point that they do not want everyone to vote. They only want their voters to vote. We know this because they’ve said it.
If you want the quotes, say I’m wrong.
That is not to say that conservativism is inherently evil. I think all ideologies are wrong in the long term but they each can be instructive as to certain policies.
We need conservatives to remind us that the market creates wealth and that without selfish incentives we tend not to produce any. That is very true and we need to be reminded of that very healthy observation.
What we don’t need is a bunch of retrograde, highly armed, religious zealots and bigots trying to unwittingly destroy both the New Deal and the Great Society.
They know if they ran on that platform, they’d lose every state. So they lie and manipulate and cause fear in the people described above. We know that because they’ve said so. I got that quote if you want it too.
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Stupid people believe in the free market and the New Deal and Great Society programs.
Stupid people believe that the party who doesn’t practice identity politics is using racial divides for political purposes.
Stupid people believe the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.
Congratulations. You hit the trifecta in one post.
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Stupid people believe in the free market and the New Deal and Great Society programs.
In what way? There isn’t a free market, but globalization is most certainly happening. If you’re saying the market needs regulations, I agree with that. I like the idea that a great country takes care of its weakest members.
Stupid people believe that the party who doesn’t practice identity politics is using racial divides for political purposes.
From the dictionary: Identity politics – a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics.
These divides naturally occur, it’s a feature of humanity. I think the silly part is denying that such factions exist in the GOP. This is talking point trash.
Stupid people believe the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.
What? It is most certainly a problem. If the argument is that poor folks aren’t getting poorer, they just aren’t gaining wealth as quickly, then that is true at times. It is a fact that we are close to if not already at the largest gap in wealth between the richest and poorest that we have had in this country. And we just decided to redistribute more money from the middle to the wealthy. Trickle down economics doesn’t work as well as making sure everyone has money in their pocket to spend. I believe that that spending is the engine that drives our economy which necessitates a living wage.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts
https://www.hudson.org/research/13095-the-distribution-of-wealth-in-america-1983-2013
Lastly, I think that Derek presented his argument well and I share his perception of the current GOP. Earlier this thread you were insulting him for hysterics, but your reply was insulting and failed to address his concerns.
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If you’re saying the market needs regulations, I agree with that. I like the idea that a great country takes care of its weakest members.
I’m saying the opposite of that. I’m saying that voluntary exchange should remain voluntary without a government bureaucrat appointed to make sure things don’t get TOO voluntary. That’s why it’s foolish to support a free market while simultaneously supporting the socialist policies of the New Deal and Great Society. They pull the economy in opposite directions.
And yes, a great country should take care of people. But coercion isn’t charity. If I rob you for a noble purpose, it’s still robbery.
These divides naturally occur, it’s a feature of humanity. I think the silly part is denying that such factions exist in the GOP. This is talking point trash.
The divides do naturally occur. But they occur most in the Democratic party. 90% of blacks vote Democrat. 69% of Hispanics and 77% of Asians voted Democrat. The most solidly Republican demographic of white men only voted Republican at 60%. Yet Derek insists that Republicans are the party of race baiters. As usual, the evidence proves the opposite.
It is most certainly a problem.
Income inequality isn’t a problem. It’s a way for envious people to present a pseudo-intellectual case for a simple case of envy. If you believe that you’re somehow worse off because your neighbor has two boats and you only have one, that’s a personal issue. The last thing we need is the government getting involved to make sure the nobody has any boats.
Finally, I insult Derek because it’s fun and because it’s fully warranted. Like most liberals, he accuses Republicans of sins Democrats are guilty of. He’s a statist bootlicker who wants the world subjugated under the heels of his masters. The fact that he spins off into psychotic rages on a regular basis is just a nice reminder that he’s not a serious and influential enough person to help ensure his preferred policies get implemented. So that’s nice.
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Income inequality isn’t as simple “he has an extra boat and I’m jealous.” In this country, the wealthy have used their money to accumulate power and even more money. We aren’t talking about buying boats, we are talking about large scale campaigns to promote the big guy having control over the little guy.
Identity politics – a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background. What about evangelicals and the southern strategy? Those are identity politics too. Fundamentally, “identity politics” as a buzz term is just a right wing talking point that I think is a dog whistle for minority voting/erosion of the majority race’s power.
Saying that we shouldn’t regulate businesses is part of what led to the 2008 recession. As we roll back environmental regulations, who ends up paying for the health problems and clean up efforts? We do, with taxes unless there are regulations preventing the pollution. If we have to pay for cleanup, then it is a form of corporate welfare.
Going 100% in either direction, capitalism versus socialism would be foolish. This is not a black and white world. the difficult part is striking a balance. Fundamentally, it seems to me that your belief is that we should not have a social safety net. I believe that our country benefits from pooling our money with taxes to insure some basic minimal subsistence and lifestyle.
My taxes are going up by 15-20k this year. I wouldn’t mind it if it was going to help those in need or building infrastructure. I do mind because it is primarily going toward further consolidation of the power of the wealthy. Greed is out of control in this country.
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We aren’t talking about buying boats, we are talking about large scale campaigns to promote the big guy having control over the little guy.
OK. And how does the big guy run this campaign? Through government. I fail to see how giving government more power will cure the abuses it has been guilty of in the past.
Identity politics – a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background. What about evangelicals and the southern strategy? Those are identity politics too.
OK. You could make a case that both parties do it. But you can’t make the case that only Republicans do it.
Saying that we shouldn’t regulate businesses is part of what led to the 2008 recession.
False. Banking is one of the more regulated sectors of the economy. In 2008, there were 115 state and federal regulatory agencies overseeing the financial sector. You think we just need a few more?
Fundamentally, it seems to me that your belief is that we should not have a social safety net.
No. I believe in the Golden Rule. I believe nobody has the right to hurt other people or take their stuff. Even if you have a government costume or claim that you want to do something nice with the ill-gotten gains.
I believe there should be a social safety net. But I believe it should be run by private parties on a voluntary basis. Government is obviously inefficient at combating poverty. $15 trillion spent on the War on Poverty has done nothing other than waste $15 trillion. It’s quite probable that private parties could have accomplished much more with a fraction of the money wasted by government.
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I just can’t believe in the magnanimity of the wealthy and their corporations. Specifically because of all the taking they already had to do to be wealthy implies greediness to me. Anyway, the war on poverty has done a lot to improve quality of life and health of those who are poor, elderly, or disabled. Simply looking at the poverty rate and calling it a day is inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the gains made by the poor.
(open the link in incognito/private mode if you hit paywall)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-war-on-poverty/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0c8264fe4206
Your talking points are part of the attacks on our safety net that the GOP continues to mount. Medicare works great. Social security works well, but its funds were consistently raided by both parties and we didn’t punish the politicians who did so adequately.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/391602-blame-democrats-and-republicans-for-disastrous-social-security-fund
I think that your policies would end up with the US being a third world country…that’s where they rely on the generosity of the wealthy and corporations to take care of the poor instead of mandating it.
Companies have a choice of whether or not to operate here and they seem to like our educated workforce, infrastructure, and the stability that our government provides.
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What amazes me is that you dismiss the coercive nature of government and instead denigrate private parties for it. How, exactly, do you think wealthy parties obtained their wealth? Through robbery or through providing a service that the public desires?
Jeff Bezos revolutionized e-commerce to the point that practically any product on Earth can be delivered to your door in two days. And you consider him the bad guy.
And you’re correct in one respect. If you look at the money people have, then spending $15 trillion to take money away from some people and give it to others does, indeed, result in some people having more money. But I wouldn’t consider that a success. I would consider an anti-poverty program to be a success by increasing the independence of the poor. By helping them become employable so that they no longer need government handouts. By that measure, the War on Poverty has failed. It did precisely what it was designed to do. Make generations of poor people dependent on government.
And Social Security and Medicare have certainly been popular. Handing out free stuff always is. But the programs are a little more than $100 trillion in the hole. So these “successful” programs are simply withering on the vine until whatever party is unlucky enough to be in power when it’s no longer possible to kick the can farther down the road gets blamed for the collapse.
Your preferred policies of increasing the population’s dependence on government while simultaneously bankrupting the taxpayers and burdening the productive sector of the economy is what may ultimately lead to the downfall of the United States.
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I don’t dismiss it at all. I just believe that the government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and that it is less likely to be actively wielded when power is spread out as opposed to concentrated among an elite few. I also believe that spreading this money out results in more money spent in general which fuels the economy and benefits businesses, everyone. This makes much more sense to me than concentrating wealth, giving it the opportunity to amass power, abandoning a reliable safety net, and trusting this power to act on the behalf of the masses without an incentive or requirement to do so. We are supposed to control the government, not the other way around. If we, as a people give all the power to the wealthy, then we risk controlling neither.
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Hard at work.
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I don’t normally read through these. Is this worse than usual because of Berdergate, or are they always like this?
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Nah. This is pretty much SOP.
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This is pretty typical. If it’s a slow news week, Russia Russia Russia is a solid go-to.
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Truth is, illegal aliens were likely involved at several points in the food chain that resulted in this lavish spread. I guess I’m supposed to be impressed with a dinner that set a billionaire back maybe $1,000. I’d rather he just pay his fricken taxes and STFU, like most folks do. I strongly doubt he tipped anyone or it would’ve been tweeted out for the sheep to swoon about.
Here’s a novel idea for the law & order crowd – check businesses for illegals. If one is found, take the business owner out in handcuffs and prosecute him/her to the fullest extent of the law You’re gonna find a lot of folks, like Trump himself, with cuffs on. A wall is assinine. Only a fool would believe it’ll be effective.
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Ok, here’s how effective political/policy discourse should happen, IMHO.
I disagree on a wall’s effectiveness. Unless you’re calling some senior Border Patrol officers fools, then a wall will make a difference, in their informed opinion, which I feel confident is more informed than mine or yours.
Yet I TOTALLY AGREE that until some business owners are perp walked we really won’t get a handle on the real problem. This, in my opinion, and yours obviously, is just as important if not more so than a wall.
Thing is, you don’t have to call a wall ineffective — when experts don’t — to make your point about the need to crack down on illegal employment practices
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I didn’t call border agents fools. But I also wouldn’t consider them by any means “experts”. I have little doubt one can find an agent who is against a wall just as easily as one can find an agent who is pro wall. I’m sure if one looks hard enough you’ll find people who dream of a Berlin wall situation with machine guns and land mines. But it still wouldn’t address the underlying reasons for the migration we’ve experienced.
It’s my understanding a plurality of citizens who live closest to the border are actually very much against a wall, particularly the property owners who would have to cede their land. That’s why we don’t see Texas or Arizona building fences or walls with their own tax dollars.
Finally, why would you only police “some” business owners for hiring illegals? Sure, more selective or non-enforcement will do the trick. We have a president railing against illegal (and legal) immigration who actually has illegals working at his private businesses. Illegal workers have come forward with documented years-long work histories and details only employees would know. Yet one doesn’t hear a peep about this from the pro-wall anti-immigration crowd. So get back to me about a wall after y’all actually punish somebody of stature who hires illegals.
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The “some” was about getting the process started figuring you can’t arrest everyone at the same time, not selective enforcement. Bring the hammer and others start getting in line.
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Whether you support the wall or not, or whether you are a democrat or a republican, please find the time to call your congressman or senators and ask them to work to end this government shutdown.
At this point, I don’t care if someone has to sacrifice a live chicken in the oval office and pray to some voodoo god to help them find a resolution. It never should have happened and has gone on long enough. Millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars are being needlessly wasted. Lives everywhere are being affected. This is no way to run a country. But you all know that.
By the way, there seems to be some confusion over what is “essential” or “non-essential” in regards to who is needed and who is not in the federal workforce. Non-essential doesn’t mean that your job is not needed. It just means that you can miss work for a period while not causing a sudden and complete collapse in government services such as air traffic controlled by the FAA or weather forecasting by NOAA – you know, things that would bring the country to its knees. The idea that some have floated here that non-essential employees are not needed is about the dumbest fucking thing I have ever seen posted here. Those who wrote them can quietly go fuck themselves in a corner somewhere while the adults are speaking. Thanks.
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At least 1/3rd of the federal government is a bloated waste. Non essential = Non essential, and we aren’t even talking about the egregious overreach of the federal government in our federal republic. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money is wasted everyday on the bloated bureaucracy that is the Swamp, but when non-essentials are getting a delay in pay the sky screamers come out to play.
And you can not so quietly go fuck yourself in public for all I care.
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Oh yeah, food inspectors, customs agents, TSA agents, NASA flight controllers, museum personnel, agricultural researcher and economists, national economics analysts, national park rangers, and their ilk are all “the swamp”. Got it.
By all means, though, let’s keep all the fine people in Washington.
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How are we surviving without economists and park rangers?
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Fuck Yosemite and Yellowstone and the smithsonian.
Fuck the whole lot of them. Americans don’t need to be going on vacation or learning. They need to be slaves to a corporation 365 days a year.
Priorities:
1) money
2) see #1
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Exactly! How can citizens view nature without a professional bureaucrat to guide them through it? “Are the clouds the white things in the sky, Mr. Park Ranger?” Why, if people started thinking that park rangers are unnecessary, what’s next? Farmers thinking they can plant crops without the oversight of the Department of Agriculture? Businesses operating without oversight of the Department of Commerce? Teachers educating without guidance from the Department of Education? Perish the thought!
We can’t have people being slaves to a corporation when there’s a perfectly good government capable of enslaving them.
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God I hope short flatulent hard-on doesn’t post something so GD dumb that he proves my point entirely.
Ooops. Too late….
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Just be sure to stay out from under your bed until the mattress inspectors are back on the job, Derek.
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We can survive fine without park rangers. We would just need to eventually close the parks is all. I mean, who needs national parks right? You probably don’t like to visit them with your family anyway amiright? Otherwise, if they stay open for much longer, every park will be full of squatters and criminals. Lumberjacks will be back there harvesting trees, prospectors digging for gold, homeless will be building shanty villages next to waterfalls. Shit, they are already cutting down Joshua trees in California. No big deal but fuck it right? The next generation doesn’t deserve to enjoy the national parks like Teddy Roosevelt intended.
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Well, we might not have to close the parks. We could simply sell them to private companies capable of running them in productive ways. Just because we’ve socialized national parks for the last hundred years doesn’t mean that’s the only way it could possibly be done. I mean, nature lovers won’t cease to exist if the government stops running parks. A demand will exist and markets are usually pretty good about meeting demand.
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The parks belong to the people. Private companies would strip them of resources, cover the holes, and charge unreasonable fees to enter what’s left. How dumb are you?
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I guess I’m dumb enough that I don’t understand how the incentives of socialism fail for cars, tractors, toilet paper, food, housing, and most other goods, yet succeed spectacularly for parks. Care to educate me without the baseless speculation about how everything would collapse due to private ownership?
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Cars, tractors, toilet paper, food, housing…all things you listed are throw away items and can be replaced in the short term – days, months. The national parks cannot. It would take decades, hundreds of years….in many cases millennia to replace those resources. You are a moron.
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That’s simply logical fallacies masquerading as an argument. It’s far too easy to simply say, “If something changes, the national parks will all collapse into black holes and nature will cease to exist.” But it’s a stupid argument.
You really think that the best allocation of property in national parks is decided by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington who have never stepped foot in, or even seen, the parks in question? You really think that New York City residents should subsidize campers in Yellowstone? You really think that charging usage fees that cover the costs of operating the parks, by parties incentivized to keep those costs and fees low, would immediately end the world as we know it?
That’s dumb. Voluntary exchange works. Even for things besides toilet paper.
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He proves it every PlayPen with his Soviet-era meme storms.
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Obviously economic facts and logic is wasted on some of you folks. So you get the pretty pictures.
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TSA keeping us safe.
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BTW, all the “essential” employees aren’t being paid, either. There are no “non essential” employees to process their payroll.
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and you know that because you said it.
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Chris, I’m pretty sure I gave instructions on what the children should do while the adults are talking. You should go get in the corner.
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Much like the federal government affected by the shutdown, your opinion is very much non essential.
Muh Park Rangers!
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OK guy (or girl…I don’t know since both males and females go by Chris) let me explain if for you in simple terms like I used to explain things to my 5-year old. Let’s just say that General Motors has to operate with no funding…but have a lawfully required need for for their product…like a government shutdown. They would send home all but the few managers who would only remain to ensure people show up on time/oversee operations, the workers on the factory floor, and a few maintenance mechanics who keep the machines running. Things run OK for a while. But…there would be no people in the front office, i.e accountants, HR, engineers, training coordinators, etc. As each machine breaks down, there would not be logistics staff to price, bid and order replacement parts or machines. No money to replace the parts anyway – nobody to let them know if they did have money. Line becomes slow and inefficient? No engineer to figure out why. As each worker retires/quits/is fired, no human resources staff is there to advertise opening/interview/hire a replacement. No training staff to help increase worker competency and safety. Workplace accident? – no safety staff to figure out what happened and prevent another incident. No cleaning crew – half the toilets are broken. No security – anybody gets in. These are non-essential employees (actually, the government does not use that term anymore because of stupid people like you who don’t know shit about how organizations operate…the terms are now “affected”” and “non-affected”). When the non-essential or non-affected are not there, the line runs, but only for a short period, and then it eventually falls to shit. Just wait and see how this turns out if this keeps going.
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Your analogy comparing government to General Motors fails in one key aspect. General Motors is motivated to meet public demand as efficiently as possible. The government isn’t.
If GM neglects its equipment, it has to buy new equipment earlier, which increases its costs, which increases the prices of new cars for consumers. If government neglects its equipment, it doesn’t matter. It brings in the same amount of income in taxes regardless of its efficiency of its services.
When a private company must cut costs, it looks for the least important things to do without. Maybe the position of vice president in charge of pencil sharpening can be eliminated. The overall operation of the company won’t suffer. GM would never respond to financial difficulties by announcing that it won’t be selling anymore Silverados until its budget is increased.
When a government agency must cut costs, it does the opposite. It looks for the most important and key things to cut. That’s why the parks get closed. Because tourists will complain loudly. The government won’t sell off any obsolete equipment or look for some waste to cut. It will simply shut down visible and popular agencies/facilities to pressure politicians to increase funding again.
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You are right. The government is not GM. That is true. The government has incentives other than profit. Hey, if you want your national air space system run by Wal-Mart…then all means.
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I would like everything to be run by private parties concerned about efficiently serving customers. The great thing about Wal-Mart is that you can opt out. You don’t have to buy from or sell to them. There are competitors that will try to meet your preferences and you can voluntarily exchange with those companies. It really is a great system.
Meanwhile, government has a monopoly on force. There is no opting out. If you try, they will come and put you in a cage. And you have almost no recourse.
Do you think if the airlines ran airport security, rather than the TSA, they would spend their time molesting toddlers and elderly cripples in the name of security? I doubt it. People would take their business elsewhere. But we’re conditioned to just accept whatever abuses the government decides to heap on us. Questioning is bad.
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Private companies did run airport security. What happened?
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The government was an opportunity to expand. And the government rarely misses an opportunity to expand. So now, we spend $74 billion a year on the Department of Homeland Security, which was redundant when it was created. And the TSA wing of the DHS, has caught a grand total of zero terrorists over the last 17 years. But at least we all get to take off our shoes and belts and get felt up when we fly. Because safety.
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Except that companies aren’t concerned about serving customers, they are concerned about making profit. The garbage about liberals being socialists is right wing exaggeration. Noone wants to end capitalism…the market works well provided that it is regulated. That being said, all countries struggle with the question of how to take care of the sick, poor, elderly, homeless, and disabled members of their societies. This is where aspects of socialism come into play. The extent to which one may feel compelled to treat others with dignity and provide for those unable to provide for themselves varies greatly. I can certainly see being resentful of people who can’t work living lives with less stress and nearly the same comfort level you enjoy. I just don’t see the profit incentive for companies to address the ills of society and it is part of my value system to acknowledge and address these problems.
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Companies are concerned about profit. But companies make profit by serving customers.
Private companies contribute great amounts to charity all the time. And that’s at a time when the government has been pursuing a War on Poverty for decades. If the government ceased its ineffectual programs to fight poverty, let private parties keep the money being confiscated for the purpose, and let private charity take care of the problem, we would see better results.
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Ok, how much did charitable donations go up with the huge tax cut last year? You really but a lot of blind trust in corporations with little to no evidence for your claims. How much extra charity did the Kansas trickle down experiment provide? What evidence do you have to support this cornerstone of your beliefs about privatization? Companies were much better to their workers when the top tax rates disincentivized greed. If there was a maximum salary based on the lowest paid worker, that would force them to do something with the money and it would benefit them publicly to do so. However, that would require those pesky regulations that you think are unnecessary. Again, I would like to know where you get this belief that privatizing everything would somehow solve our country’s social needs as opposed to consolidating an oligarchy? What would make companies start focusing on anything other than profit?
https://preview.redd.it/7erluxy9hva21.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=c420a4bfb8261a51a69f94a2b7467ba24b46e00f
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still working through this image posting thing…
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In 2017, charitable giving increased by 5.2%. Giving by corporations increased by 8.0%. I haven’t seen any 2018 stats yet.
Giving may go down in 2019 due to the increased standard deduction making itemizing less common, and therefore charity more expensive. But we’ll have to see.
My argument against government power is two-fold. My main argument is that it’s immoral to use violent coercion to accomplish goals. If you want every citizen to donate 15% of his income to charity, that’s fine with me. If you want to force every citizen to donate, then I have a problem.
Second, it’s inarguable that government is less efficient and more wasteful than private industry. Whatever the project. Normal economic incentives just don’t apply to government. Government agencies benefit by being wasteful. Private industry doesn’t. So most of my “proof” is simply common sense and logic.
Do you have any evidence that government force is the best way to reduce poverty and provide dignity for disenfranchised?
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“It’s inarguable that government is less efficient and more wasteful than private industry” I’ll take a crack at it 🙂
Argument 1: Businesses fail all the time to the extent that being an efficient business is not the norm. Not at the 90% rate Rand Paul claimed, but they fail frequently:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/27/do-9-out-of-10-new-businesses-fail-as-rand-paul-claims/?utm_term=.02a8e072bc15
Argument 2: Companies rarely roll out initiatives/products at the scale that the government does and the government frequently relies on contracts with private companies to execute new initiatives.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2015/11/30/dont-just-blame-the-government-private-companies-also-struggle-with-it-technologies/#34e2acdc391e
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The fact that some businesses fail would simply prove my point. Amazon is an incredibly efficient retailer. That doesn’t mean that every bookstore can match them. It’s the nature of the competitive market private companies face that drive most businesses under.
Conversely, government faces no competition. And no government programs ever shut down. I’m sure there’s a Federal Department of Buggy Whip Inspectors in Washington somewhere spending a few million a year to do nothing much. Does that mean all government programs are necessary and maximally efficient? Of course not. As I pointed out before, government incentives encourage waste. When the end of the fiscal year comes, every federal agency rushes to spend everything it has left so that it can ask for an increased budget next year.
Second, it’s true that companies will take corporate welfare just as readily as individuals will accept private welfare. Why not? Why hire a team of research scientists if the government is willing to foot the bill? That’s just rational.
https://mises.org/library/science-technology-and-government-0
And yes, the government will contract with private companies. But that doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the business at hand. If the government employs its own trash collectors, or appoints a monopoly trash collection service, competition isn’t allowed and consumers don’t get the benefit of it. That’s a bug, not a feature.
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I was just making a point about its arguability. I’ve said it before, I don’t have an issue with your views, but I disagree with your explicitly stated certainty. I have an issue with you presenting them as “inarguable” absolute truths. There are other ways I could go after that argument as well, but I was only making a point here. Government and businesses serve different purposes and masters and comparing the two is, in many ways, apples to oranges.
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Dudemankind, there is a push to get ATC privatized. It even has the support of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
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Another slight flaw with the GM/ automobile industry example: https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chrysler-3305670
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3.3 Hamberders = 1 Hamburger. Don’t you people know your conversion tables? Sheesh!
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Trump is notorious for having the palate of a child. People are trying to make Trump look cheap by catering fast food, but I wonder if he just ordered the crap he likes to eat.
A+ work by Pelosi and her staff. I don’t think she is trying to troll Trump, but that is a very smart political move. Also, no one wants to hear him bitch about the shutdown for half of the SOTU address. She needs to get to the negotiation table though. The longer she waits, the less she can get out of Trump.
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There’s no negotiating to do here. There’s nothing to “get out” of Trump, this isn’t about making a deal for him, it’s about dragging out a fight for as long as he can because he thinks it plays well with his base.
This shutdown ends once enough GOP Senators pressure McConnell into letting the already-passed legislation come to the floor to fund the government and override Trump’s veto. They’ll do so because 22 of them are up for re-election in 2020 and this isn’t helping any of them. They already know they’re losing the WH, they’ll cave on the shutdown when it becomes evident they could lose the Senate, too.
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I write here frequency about the concept of ascribing intentions to the actions of others. I have decided that I am going to start referring to the practice as “mind reading”. Have you ever noticed that you do not ever actually engage in a discussion of ideas and the you instead engage in mind reading? Sure, you can read Trumps mind and know that this is all just theater, but I see things happening like the meeting with the Problem Solvers Caucus (AKA the Adults of Congress).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown-trump-lawmakers/trump-meeting-with-lawmaker-group-was-constructive-white-house-idUSKCN1PA2IJ?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29
What would you say if they actually reach a deal and the shutdown ends?
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And yet here again is the deference. The President is not inviting the Clemson team there so HE can have his dream dinner. How do you not recognize that!
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In the post entitled “Today, in stick to sports”, I wrote the following:
The only thing more stressful than money issues in a family is medical issues. “Money problems” is the second most common reason for divorce after infidelity. Please do yourself a favor and get your financial house in order. Here is the path that is generally recommended by the personal finance community after cutting your budget to the bare minimum:
Save 3-6 months expenses in a savings account or some other account where you can access the money immediately. This is a buffer for if your transmission explodes or if you get laid off.
Next is to make sure you are at least contributing enough to your 401K to get your company match. For most companies, this is a 3% match on a 6% contribution. That is an instant 50% return on your money.
Pay off your non-mortgage debt. Make the minimum payments on each bill except for the one with the highest interest rate. Put all extra money into paying it off. Keep this going until all non-mortgage debt is released.
Now start investing a minimum of 15% of your income into retirement savings via your 401K, IRA, or brokerage account. Now is the time you can start to add some luxuries back into your life.
Pay off your mortgage and start saving for college for your kids.
When your house is paid off and your investment accounts hold 25 times your annual expenses, you can quit your job and retire.
It seems as if most of you are religious. Dave Ramsey has a similar path he calls his Seven Baby Steps. It is part of his “Financial Peace University” course. It has scriptural backings and the like for those of you that would be helped with something like that (especially if it would help get the spouse on board).
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That’s obviously good advice. I don’t think anyone will argue with that. But I also think we all know that many, many people don’t follow that advice. Trying to apply it retroactively just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t really help the discussion on the current situation.
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It’s a gross bordering on criminal omission that we don’t teach this shit in school.
I know I never heard about it at home. Learning it the hard way is a bitch.
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It’s a gross bordering on criminal omission that we don’t teach this shit in our welfare programs either. The primary goal of any welfare program should be to make itself unnecessary.
This is a large part of why Classical Liberals / Libertarians hold much of the Democratic establishment in such contempt. They brag about / harp on how many people are enrolled in such programs. In fact, the “success” of a program is always couched in terms of how many people are enrolled. There is never any talk about how to use those programs in a way to make the programs themselves unnecessary or how the beneficiaries have learned the life skills necessary to take care of themselves.
A perfect example of this is SNAP aka “Food Stamps”. Just once, I would like to see someone at the checkout counter using their EBT card to pay for a 10 lb bag of potatoes, a 20 lb bag of rice, a 10 lb bag of chicken quarters, bags of dried beans / legumes, bulk dried pasta, seasonal and frozen vegetables, frozen tilapia filets, a few dozen eggs, etc. That would show that they at least learned about the nutritional density of food and how to feed a family on a budget.
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I agree. I watched a family of 4 at my local Zippy Mart buying a “full meal” for dad, mom and the two kids. Lots of candy, frozen Hot Pockets (to be nuked there), some chicken wings from the “bakery” and soft drinks. It rang up to $57. Seriously.
We as a country need to teach a lot more individual responsibility (the “how to’s”) and hold people more accountable. Shutting down the government is not the proper way to do it.
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I do not think that the left is your problem. The problem is that the more programs do, the more they cost.
The right insists on minimal investment and then complains about the limited results their cost cutting baked in the cake.
Its like the idea that welfare programs break up families.
Do you think its the left that says male head of households shouldn’t qualify for support? Nope. Its the right who take the position that if the mom and dad are there, someone can go make a living. Seems totally rationale but at what cost?
The disagreement at the political level isn’t the design/goals of the programs. The disagreement is in the very existence of the programs. The give and take results in minimal assistance often with unfortunate results
Meanwhile, the right is more than happy to spend 38k a year to warehouse the child of this clusterfuck as part of the war on drugs.
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You are trying to deflect legitimate criticism by trying to blame other people for having bad intentions. You might find those on the right more amenable to funding programs that were designed to make their services unnecessary. The “Welfare Cliff” is a real thing whether it is intentional or not.
The poverty rate was steadily dropping in this country until LBJ launched the War on Poverty in 1964. Since then, we have spent $15 trillion dollars fighting poverty and the poverty rate stopped dropping.
The idea that $15 trillion has not been enough of an investment is ludicrous. We have nothing to show for that except cyclical dependency.
Sadly, the wars on Poverty and Drugs been won by Poverty and Drugs respectively. The government is the wrong tool for fighting these things.
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You’re wrong: https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-179.pdf
See Fig. 19
You also forgot to mention what demographic was the poorest in 1960 and what demographic is the wealthiest now.
People over 60. Medicare was part of the war on poverty and its worked quite well.
This is evil:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
There are people worthy of blame. And get your facts straight.
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Please check the data in the document you posted. Figure 18 confirms that overall poverty rates have remained flat since 1964 after having been on the decline previously. Figure 19 shows that poverty among the elderly has dropped, but there was a correlating increase in poverty among those under 65 and especially with those under 18. All Medicare / Social Security have done is shift poverty from elderly assholes to innocent children. Bravo. That is exactly what we want.
I am really uninterested in third hand “quotes” about Richard Nixon. Claiming that others have bad intentions really says nothing about whether policy is effective or efficient. If you want to get into a contest of who was the most racist politician of the 1960s, LBJ is the easy winner, and his Great Society program is the progenitor of many of the welfare programs we are discussing. Not to mention, Nixon implemented the first Affirmative Action program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Philadelphia_Plan
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I posted a reply about half an hour ago, but it has not shown up, so I will reply again.
Again, you post data that demonstrates that I am correct. If you check your data, specifically figure 18, it shows that the overall poverty rate has not declined since the mid 1960s. If you look at figure 19 as you suggest, you will see that with the decrease in poverty for those over 65, there is a corresponding increase in poverty for those under 65 especially for those under 18. Your data show that the result of $15 trillion dollars in spend has been to shift poverty from elderly assholes to innocent children. Bravo. That is exactly what we want.
If you would have noticed, the data I posted (which ended up as a small link instead of an embedded picture like I wanted), was from the same type of report from the Census bureau except from 2017:
Click to access p60-263.pdf
Figures 4 and 6 correlate to 18 and 19 from your document.
You post that quote about RIchard Nixon on a regular basis as if it is germane to the topic at hand. I can start with the LBJ quotes. All it would show is that politicians said racist stuff in the 1960s. Claiming that Nixon or anyone else has bad intentions has nothing to do with whether or not welfare programs are effective or efficient. The data show that they are not. A simple analysis of what they do shows that they are not even intended to reduce poverty.
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So your issue isn’t that they worked it’s that they didn’t continue to work better? Seriously? During that precipitous drop you had high marginal tax rates and lots of social programs and civil rights.
Then Nixon and we haven’t made much progress. Agreed, but we haven’t backed up to where we were before the New Deal and Great Society. Which in my view is a good thing.
The point of the Nixon quote is that you’re real quick to point fingers in the wrong direction without evidence. When the evidence smacks you right in the face? You act like it’s not important.
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The precipitous drop was occurring before the “War on Poverty” started in 1964. That precipitous drop stops around 1966 as the Great Society programs get implemented. Sure, Nixon comes along, (and so does Jimmy Carter) but the pause happens before Nixon comes into office in 1969. With these policies in place, which do nothing to teach the recipients the life skills needed to escape poverty, no administration since has been able to reduce the poverty rate. Nixon being an asshole doesn’t cause what was a continuous trend to stop for 44 years after he leaves office. This is especially true considering that LBJ was FAR more racist than Nixon (who oddly supported gay rights).
High marginal tax rates are a red herring. Federal revenue has remained fairly constant in terms of percent of gdp regardless of the top marginal tax rate. In fact, many times revenue was demonstrably lower when top rates were higher. This is due to the fact that higher rates make it worth while to bribe politicians for special tax privileges or to pay to shelter money from taxes. When the top marginal rate is 70%, it is worth 50 cents on the dollar to bribe or hide.
Social programs are higher now than they were when we were having the precipitous drop in poverty rates. If the number of social programs was the key, poverty rates would continue to drop. I am a devoted civil libertarian. You aren’t going to hear me say anything bad about increasing civil liberties.
IMHO, the federal government is simply the wrong tool for solving the problem. I think that in the same way that government intervention in the world of drugs has lead to huge problems, I think the war on poverty is suffering from the same fate.
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I will note that the one place where the Right has been a hindrance to lowering poverty has been in their fight against Family Planning. I understand their opposition to abortion, but one cannot help but notice that there are a number of qualities that highly correlate with poverty. Chief among them is hyper-sexuality and really poor decision making.
We really need a charity that provides free birth control (the injection so that you know they are taking it) along with a stipend as an incentive. Birth control is infinitely cheaper than welfare, public education, and prison.
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Why not just implant a probe in these hyper-sexual citizens’ brains that will control their every impulse? Bist du Deutsche?
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because i don’t give a shit that they are fucking. I just don’t want people that are not prepared to raise children having them, especially when the people in question are children themselves. No one is going to accuse me of being a bleeding heart, but I don’t like seeing children being raised in the social dysfunction that is so common among those in poverty. I consider it a form of child abuse.
and, no. I am not German, but I am somewhere in the range of 1/4th to 3/8th Jewish. I am mostly Irish.
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You also might have missed the part where I recommend for a private charity to offer free birth control via consent. I’m not advocating force sterilization like the Progressives did (and implemented) at the turn of the 20th Century.
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Preparing meals requires effort. That’s crazy talk.
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Too late for this guy:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/catch-predator-host-chris-hansen-arrested-over-13-000-bounced-n959471
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Dayum! Pelosi pulled out the big stick, huh?
For fucks sake, the so called leaders of this country of both sides are nothing more than self serving egomaniacs with no morals or scruples who will use whatever weapon is at their disposal to wound their opponent no matter how insignificantly without regard to collateral damage. It doesn’t matter to them whether its a million federal employees and contractors furloughed without pay or a championship sports team humiliated with fast food. To chose left or right politically over the other is moral and intellectual hypocrisy for that reason. No one in Washington is acting on the best interest of the American people and their slander of values that I hold personally is an affront to my character and intelligence. I’m glad I abstained and will do so again if this is the product we as a nation will accept. The United States has without question the most successful type of government in history, but the lack of character in those currently holding office under BOTH political parties are a disgrace to those who founded, fought for, paid for, and died for this country.
A fucking disgrace and I’m embarrassed by it.
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Well said, Got. It’s all a fight now to see who’s dick is bigger (or who’s the bigger dick, more likely). Fuck ’em all.
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Hard to argue against any of you points
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So we are concerned about the security for a speech but not concerned for the security of those that live near the border. No mention of those affected by the crime, drugs and human trafficking due to illegal aliens and narco gangs. The country is essentially broke and yet we spend billions every year in benefits and costs to the system for illegals while Americans get sent to a foreign land for someone else’s benefit then come home to a shit VA system and potentially end up on the street. Good thing we are focused on rich politicians and who “won” the last twitter round. FFS.
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So, when that big scary migrant caravan got here, where exactly did they go? To the middle of nowhere to climb over the non-existent wall? No, they went to the border station at Tijuana. Building a $5.7B wall is a waste of time. That noted liberal George Patton said fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man. Take the $5.7B (or more) and fix the problem with faster checks, better tracking while in this country, quick/fair trials to send the criminals back home. You know, actually address the real problem.
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But but CARAVAN!!
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Now hold on a minute, Podnuh. Are you telling me that the United States Government version of Governor William J. Lepetomane’s toll booth thwarted the entire migrant invasion?
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Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shitload of dimes!
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Thanks! Now if we can get Derek to post the Southpark clip of “City Wok’s Great Wall” we’ll have this whole thing wrapped up!
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I hate Mongorians!!
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The migrant caravan went to the border station for news coverage and publicity. Whether you think it was the left or right that organized it, it was strictly for the media. Coyotes are bringing them across the desert all the time where many die to AVOID places like Tijuana where resources are more plentiful.
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Don’t Border Patrol Statistics show illegal immigration declining rapidly and has been since 2005? Does anyone know what happened around ’05 that would discourage low wage earners from coming to America?
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Shhhh! Don’t cloud the issue with facts.
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I’ll take border fence/wall construction for $1000 Alex
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Aaaand… This is the crux of my issue. For roughly halving the value of my income with taxation I have the privilege of helping to pay the salaries of a top heavy and incompetent leadership mechanism that has convinced many of my fellow taxpayers its a good Idea to turn the Mexican border into a DMZ at the bargain basement price of 5.7 billion dollars or so (less maintenance and staff of course) because illegal immigrants are scary. I’ll take what is “Fear Mongering” for $1200, Alex.
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@ Texas Dawg, I’m sure the issue is much worse where you are. I live in an area of North Georgia that historically had a high (and growing) Hispanic population due to readily available low wage jobs in poultry plants and construction in the Metro Atlanta. In the early 2000’s the poultry industry mechanized it’s processing, and in the mid 2000’s construction basically stopped. Growth in the Latino Community has also stopped, or slowed to a crawl. We can tell by looking at school enrollment, among other things. When there is no means available to earn, there is no reason for them to come. At least that is how it has played out in our area.
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Americans cross-subsidize health care for illegal immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year (Forbes Magazine Feb 2018) . Before someone who does not know what they are talking about spouts off about how illegal immigrants are not eligible for benefits, read the article. It does not matter what your legal status is, you show up at the ER and you are treated (or in some cases triaged to a lower level of acuity that does not require and ER visit) REGARDLESS of your ability to pay. Guess who then subsidizes that? You and me the tax payer (federal, state, and local subsidies). Border states are inundated in the ER (how do I know, I have been a practicing physician for >25 years). That does not even begin to touch on the anchor babies.
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Did you read the paper asserting that $18.5B number. Federal dollars do not go to reimburse the costs of providing care to people who can’t prove their residency status. The gist of the paper was that lots of hospitals are non-profits or are owned by local governments, and non-profits and local governments benefit from a tax exemption. Since people who cannot prove their residency status use non-profit hospitals for emergency care, a portion of the federal tax savings counts as a subsidy for illegals.
The author then casually suggests that, if we enact laws to prevent the tax savings (presumably by charging non-profit hospitals a special tax on care provided to people who can’t prove residency status), then hospitals will find ways to avoid providing emergency care to illegal aliens. Any thoughts on how hospitals would do that? Is there a country in the world (1st or 3rd world) where a person in need of emergency care has to prove his or her residency status to receive care? What if the person is not conscious or able to communicate?
Reminded me of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
.
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I have written on here for quite a while about how dumb the whole Trump / Russian Collusion conspiracy is. I have also written about how dumb the “Clinton Orchestrated Deep State With Hunt” conspiracy is.
In those posts, I write about cognitive bias and ascribing non-factual intention to the actions of others. Jonathan Turley wrote a piece for The Hill that matches what I have been saying for a while, but he does it with better wording than I have managed. I especially like the juxtaposition of the phrasing “Witch Hunt” vs “Mole Hunt”. I wish I had thought of that.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/425033-witch-hunt-or-mole-hunt-times-bombshell-blows-up-all-theories
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I am really disappointed that no one commented on this post. I hope some of y’all at least read the linked article.
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I read it and it’s an interesting angle. But it hardly absolves Orange.
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My point wasn’t about absolving Trump. My interest is in how cognitive bias allows people to believe the absurd
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Unfortunately this will be buried, but this EDSBS post was pretty danged funny.
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/1/14/18181915/jalen-hurts-heres-how-to-maximize-your-steakhouse-trip
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For as dumb as everyone says Trump is, it’s amazing how artfully (pun intended) he’s entrapped Pelosi and Schumer here.
The shutdown. In four days, Trump’s admin is going to begin RIF procedures to cut the departments with non-essential personnel to the bone, thus, thanks to Democratic leadership, living up to his campaign promise of draining the swamp. All of these unelected bureaucrats who literally do no work every day and can’t be fired will finally be let go and have to go exist in the real world instead of living fat off of taxpayers. Amazing how easy this turned out to be. I thought this was just gonna be another President lying about campaign promises. Have to admit, this is impressive. He used the wall as the impetus to get done what actually needs to be done to make government smaller and more efficient. Classic trojan horse. And the DNC didn’t see it coming.
The State of the Union. By disinviting Trump, the DNC thinks it’s a win for them. Instead, he’s going to rent out an arena, likely in the South, but it really should be a midwestern state like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, or Wisconsin, one of those states that voted for Obama and voted for him, and then invite 20K supporters to what will be his SOTU speech Taking it to the people and out of DC, and thus starting a new precedent. Of course, the event will be covered by all the stations. Pelosi actually thought this would hurt Trump, but they couldn’t have handed him a bigger possible victory if he takes advantage, and knowing how much of a media whore Trump is, of course he will.
Seriously, for the dumbest guy in the room, Trump has taken a DNC getting high from smelling their own farts, and completely turned the tables on them since the election. When those of us in the middle say stuff like, “This is why you got Trump,” well… THIS is why you got Trump.
We told you, don’t make Pelosi Speaker. Get a Democrat from the midwest who isn’t a far-leftist. Bring in a centrist who can actually speak to the people and will want to make the country continue to work so they can take credit for those victories heading into the 2020 election. Instead, the DNC is led by Dumb (Schumer) and Dumber (Pelosi) and their Trump Derangement Syndrome is literally why we’re gonna get Trump again.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so predictable, sad, and frightening.
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Fortunately we live in a democracy and you’re losing badly:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo
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Not a Trump guy, Derek. Definitely not on your side. Don’t have a side.
You’re such a simple-minded person, always thinking binary. There are other options. You’re a big believer in that ridiculous identity politics b.s. That should be part of your belief system, right? So why such the blindspot when it comes to diversity of ideas?
Seems like a big, huge blindspot for y’all on the far left. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Yeah. Because Nate did such a GREAT job predicting the 2016 election.
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How far off was he?
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One president.
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https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
His projection on the day before the election.
If you’d like (which I am sure you have no interest in) I could also point you to his reason(s) for being wrong.
I’d say he was pretty far off. Nate should stick to sports. He was great before he was hired by the NYT and ABC News.
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Life on Earth-2 sounds pretty cool, man.
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What did I say that was wrong, Senator?
They’ve already announced RIF procedures will begin. They sent a memo to all departments. It’s happening. It’s almost like this was the plan from the beginning. Because it was. It’s actually very elegant. It’s a classic feint. The wall was the feint. The real goal was having a legal way to cut the bureaucracy that otherwise is un-fireable.
Also, again, Trump is an acknowledged media whore. We all know this. It’s who he is. Not presenting the SOTU to Congress affords him a precedent-setting opportunity to have one of his rallies and present the SOTU there.
Tell me where these points I made, right up there, are wrong. We know department heads have been told to be prepared for a RIF. So you can’t dispute that. We also know Trump is a media whore who would likely champ at the bit to do a SOTU in front of a sold-out crowd chanting his name. It’s a narcissist’s dream!
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It’s hilarious (and sad) that you think “the swamp” is some air traffic controller in Atlanta, or a health inspector in St. Louis, or an agricultural inspector in south Georgia, or a flight controller in Houston, or a park ranger in Wyoming, or a customs agent in Arizona.
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It’s sad that you can’t see that, while the government employees may be wonderful people, they are taking money out of the private market (by force) and mis-allocating these resources.
Sure, it’s great that a customs agent in Arizona will be able to feed his family. But if the people from whom his salary was extorted could have formed a company that could grow into the next Google, or Ford, or whatever, wouldn’t that be better?
I realize you’re a contractor and thus, emotional about the issue. But on a macro level, entrepreneurs are better at allocating resources in the economy than politicians are. The bigger the government gets, the bigger the burden on the productive economy to pay for it and the larger the handicap in terms of limited resources.
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Entrepreneurs/corporations are also adept at gouging the buying public. So if you think you are getting what you pay for then, my dawg, you’re the mark.
The bigger the corporation gets, the bigger the burden on freedom of choice and buying power.
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It’s still voluntary. If a business overcharges, the good news is that you’re not forced to trade with that business. The solution isn’t to create a government monopoly and then force people to deal with the monopoly.
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What about the monopoly utilities you defended in our previous discussion about energy policy?
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I don’t recall much of the discussion on monopoly. And I’m too lazy to look for it. I’ll state here that the only monopoly I have a moral objection to is the government monopoly on force. By extension, I would object to a utility monopoly enforced by government. Other than that, let producers and consumers work things out amongst themselves.
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It’s also an authoritarian’s wet dream.
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But seriously though, your ad hominem is showing.
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Oy.
Seriously, there are many, many topics I enjoy debating here.
Donald Trump, three-dimension chess grandmaster, isn’t one of them.
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I don’t think he’s playing third dimensional chess. Just giving him credit for putting Dumb and Dumber in an elegant bind. They cannot win. Either they end the shutdown and he gets his wall or they don’t and he gets to RIF at least a good quarter of the bloated bureaucracy. Either way, he keeps a campaign promise and strengthens his 2020 run because of it.
And they walked right into it. Credit where credit is due.
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Nobody walked right into anything. Trump and the GOP made a conscious decision to create this problem. Any sitting president can declare that they won’t sign legislation to try to leverage changes in it. Most presidents would care about hurting people on a massive scale and most congresses would check the attempted power grab. If democrats were to give Trump his wall with nothing to show for it, then we would see a whole lot more of this hostage-taking over the next two years. To me, this is just another poorly thought out knee-jerk action in which Trump has painted himself into a corner. I would love for there to be some sort of deal to end this bs.
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I don’t think he is that far off. Trump could end the shutdown and get his wall anytime he wants. Why hasn’t he done it?
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I keep saying this: Trump doesn’t want a wall. He wants a fight over a wall because it energizes his base.
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His base is already energized and it isn’t growing in a shutdown over a wall. Why shut down the government to fire up a base 2 years before an election? He could just go on an arena tour. You are right that most politicians do not want to fix problems, they just want a fight to motivate the base, but Trump is not most politicians. Checkmate Trump.
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I think Trump’s given up on growing his support, but that makes feeding the base even more important. Fear of his base is what keeps the rest of the Republican Party in check (see, for instance, Mitch McConnell).
Trump’s problem is that he has no clue how to deal with the party that now controls the House. Dems won it back ignoring Trump’s base, so all the stunts he pulls to keep his party in line are falling on deaf ears. Art of the deal depends on leverage and right now he has none with the Dems. All the arena tours in the world won’t change that.
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Do you think we make it out of this, Senator, without having to learn to speak Sputnik? I’m starting to think we won’t
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Nothing to see here:
Trump told the journalist that Putin had said, “If we did [hack the election], we wouldn’t have gotten caught because we’re professionals,” the Times reported on Wednesday. “I thought that was a good point because they are some of the best in the world.”
What a traitor. Shameful.
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I can’t find anything about Schiff or Warner being accused of anything except by Hannity and this meme on a message board with no linked article. I think this meme is disinformation and not even funny. Most of your memes get a chuckle out of me. As far as I can tell, this is you spreading propaganda. Please link me to something to convince me otherwise…google wasn’t helpful.
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Queue the logical fallacy accusation, wait for it…
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https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/report-schiff-fell-for-russian-prank-call
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-sen-mark-warner-texted-with-russian-oligarch-lobbyist-in-effort-to-contact-dossier-author-christopher-steele
There’s not really any proof of wrongdoing. It’s more embarrassing than damaging. Especially for Schiff. But by the Democratic standard of any contact with anybody remotely connected to Russia being de facto evidence of treason, these guys would be in trouble.
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Wow, so the people investigating the Russian interference reached out to Russians to gather information? Smocking gun or nothingberder?
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It’s at least as scandalous as the president-elect’s transition team contacting foreign diplomats.
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Context matters. One was an investigation into a foreign country’s interference in our election. The other involved a clandestine meeting that was repeatedly lied about with a representative of a foreign government in order to gain an advantage in the presidential election while also attempting to make a real estate deal with said foreign power while also lying about that. They don’t seem the same to me.
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Any chance that little farty turgid pecker completely abandons his citizenship and deflects?
I’m betting that there’s a very high chance of it.
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You really are abusing your thesaurus today, aren’t you. If nothing else, you’ve tripled your vocabulary. So you’ve got that going for you, which is nice.
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Clemson is going to football jail…
What is an impermissible benefit?
NCAA legislation specifically defines and categorizes different types of impermissible benefits (e.g., extra benefits, recruiting inducements, and preferential treatment). Regardless of the type of impermissible benefit, however, the prohibition is generally the same: under most circumstances, prospective and enrolled student-athletes (along with their friends and families) cannot receive goods or services based on their status as athletes. The following are categories of benefits that NCAA legislation prohibits boosters and other athletics stakeholders from providing:
Cash and cost-free goods and services; Example is 1000 Big Macs
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Derek….I owe you an apology. I thought you were the biggest asshole here, but boy was I wrong. You are Mother Teresa compared to that asshole who has a short man – flatulence complex and keeps posting stupid memes.
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The fact that statists don’t like me is one of my points of pride.
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apology accepted…
Bitter disputes and name calling and letting one’s passions get the best of you are perhaps not ideal, but I am at least willing to engage in an honest debate rather than deflecting, dissembling or responding with random memes rather than actual thought.
And then you peel back the onion and its some amalgam of right-wing, libertarian, hippy-fied, pacifism wishing for a pastoral setting in a century long ago past.
“Why can’t we just not have rules or roads, dude and let everyone just be free, man without like violence and stuff but we’ll be armed, you know, to the teeth??” Its like if Tommy Chong read Mein Kampf, adopted it, but didn’t really understand the words.
I just don’t talk to the guy. I repeatedly found it to be entirely useless so I gave up. Mockery is all that I have left to give.
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He’s such a fucking punk I have just decided to bail on anything he’s involved in.
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You will be missed. Thankfully, other statists are willing to pick up the flag of violent coercion and forge ahead without you. Worry not. Voluntary actions won’t be allowed with folks like Derek, chilli, lonestranger, and dude on the case.
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Mockery is all you’ve ever had, son. Hopefully, you’ll become educated beyond the level of a middle school bully when you grow up. At that point, I’m hopeful you’ll develop a coherent world view that doesn’t rely on violence and logical fallacies. But that day is far in the future, if it ever comes at all.
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The only times he ever emerges are to populate the Playpen with his BOLD “thought” posters.
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The irony is that you discussed a few issues with me. I disagreed with you. Have you some economic evidence for my point of view. You responded with logical fallacies and insults, and now I’m the asshole. I guess some people react especially violently to being presented with information that conflicts with their childhood conditioning. You’ve still got a ways to go to match Derek, though. But you just might get there if your belief in the almighty state stays strong.
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There you go again with the “logical fallacies” bullshit. It’s a pseudo-intellectual response by lazy and stupid people:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bias-fundamentals/201807/logical-fallacies-in-politics-and-beyond
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Defending logical fallacies? And then following that up with an ad hominem attack (logical fallacy)? Bold choice, Cotton.
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You misunderstand Grasshopper. I was pointing out to the board that your use of logical fallacy accusation is a pattern. It is a common tactic mentioned on many right wing websites. Rather than respond with substance and good faith to facts reason logic, you counter with “logical fallacy” (laziness), and it allows you to maintain you vain belief in your intellectual and moral superiority (hence pseudo-intellectual). Indeed, in this context your repeated use of this strategy is in itself a logical fallacy. Have a nice day.
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No, I understand your argument. I just disagree. I agree that I have a pattern of pointing out logical fallacies. But I only do it where logical fallacies exist. Why respond in good faith to an argument that is obviously logically flawed?
Dude’s arguments were fallacious. He gave no evidence for his beliefs. He simply assumed that government ownership and operation of parks is better than private ownership and operation. When I replied that private markets work well for other goods, he fallaciously claimed that parks are special exceptions to the increased efficiency of private markets. And he threw in a few ad hominem attacks for good measure. That’s not a serious discussion.
As for my superiority, I will certainly argue that I’m morally superior to socialists because they’re arguing in favor of violence against innocent people while I’m arguing against it. According to my moral code based on Judeo-Christian principles, my position is more righteous.
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Since you’ve got “God” on your side who can argue?
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One mans freedom fighter is another mans terrorist. Or in this case, one mans fact-based argument is another mans logical fallacy.
I don’t have an opinion on your national park debate other than I think national parks should remain public property. We the people decided as such lawfully and peacefully, you know to promote that General Welfare thing. If anyone here thinks national parks should be privately owned, that’s fine. I recommend they run for office and make privatization of our National Parks their campaign centerpiece issue. Good luck with that!
The claim that socialists are violent (or encourage violence) is a false right wing meme. Who was it that said if you repeat the Big Lie enough times, people will believe it. Ah yes, Joseph Goebbels. The only violent socialists I know are old, (mostly) male, and pale MAGA people who love their Social Security and Medicare. There are numerous (too many to count) documented and verifiable examples online of them committing acts of violence against the “other”.
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Now this is an argument on the parks I can get along with, even if I can’t agree with it. Ldawg simply states that he’s in favor of government-run parks. He doesn’t argue that private ownership of property would lead to cesspools where forests used to be.
However, socialism is, by definition, a violent philosophy. Forcing people to “share the wealth” through violent coercion isn’t peaceful. Even if people peacefully comply, the threat of violence is still hanging over them. Every law and regulation is enforced and supported by the threat of violence. I don’t drive the speed limit because the government has persuaded me that 55mph is the optimum speed for a vehicle and 56mph is dangerous. I drive the speed limit because I don’t want to be fined. And if I am fined, I pay the fine because I don’t want to be imprisoned.
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I said I was in favor of government owned parks, not necessarily government run parks. That said, I don’t doubt we get the best result having the government run the park system.
It doesn’t surprise me one bit that you could give two shits about the health & safety of your fellow citizen drivers you share the road with.
So, according to your logic our system of government in the United States is Socialist, because it forces citizens to pay taxes by violent coercion?!
Violence is a criminal act done with INTENT to harm, injure, maim, a person or group of people. Government action to arrest and incarcerate a person because they commit a criminal offense, including tax fraud/avoidance, is not violence. The accused have rights.
State sponsored violence is what the Trump administration is doing to kids at the border.
Dear Libertarian, your liberty and freedom are not absolute under our law and cannot encroach on mine and others right to the same. We have laws and regulation that protect everyone’s right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. If you don’t like paying taxes or laws that We the People require you to comply with, then become an activist, run for office, change the law, peacefully. It’s the American Way.
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Posts like this continue to keep the wedges and barriers between us.
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Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya!!
There. That’s better.
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“I never said there was no collusion (with Russia) between the campaign, or people in the campaign,” Giuliani said.
I feel better.
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MAGA!!
“A Marine veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder was held for three days for possible deportation before federal authorities learned that he was a U.S. citizen born in Michigan.”
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You psychotic fucktard. Get a job.
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Hey Russ, ask Nappy how he feels about your service?
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How you doing,man? I feel like I fell out of an aircraft and couldn’t see that I had a partial opening because it was dark. Who needs an alarm clock,right?
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Aside from the lacunar stroke I had I’m great. Still working and swimming at 69, I hurt when I get up @5 but it goes away on that 2 mile pre-dawn walk with the wife and dogs.
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Seems like you found the right therapy. I wish you well. On another note one of my employees hates when I shorten his name to Dick.
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Especially since his name is Vince.
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Lima Charlie. . . Dawg.
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Decreased blow flow to the brain. Explains a lot. Sorry to hear it.
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Go fuck yourself punk.
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Easy old man. You don’t want to blow a gasket.
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Besides obnoxiously drumming your fingers with the perpetually debunked trickle-down economic BS, you’re just a mean bastard. May this small forum provide the pressure valve you clearly seek.
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Opposition to both genocide and forceful coercion to compel people to do things one was unable to persuade them to do makes me mean? That’s a curious standard you have there.
I suppose nice people proudly chant USA, USA while the drones drop bombs on schools and hospitals in foreign lands and Christian business owners lose their life savings for declining to bake a birthday cake for a 10 year-old transgender drag queen boy/girl? Agree to disagree.
As for illini personally, fuck him. Weeks ago he made it personal by implying violence against me. Saying he planned to come get me and such. He’s obviously a bitter old man and the brain damage, while unfortunate, doesn’t excuse his behavior. His family should consider increased supervision until he can recover enough that these violent tendencies pass.
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If you have issues with discerning sarcasm, that’s what it was. Locking up citizens on “suspicion of Mexican” is horrific. Doing it to Marine vets with PTSD is unforgivable. But this is the racial cleansing policy some desire.
If on the other hand you think this is all fine, then gfy.
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Supporters of Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party shocked – “I didn’t think the Leopard would eat MY face!
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All that hate is gonna eat you up, boy. You need to get outside more. Go fishing or squirrel hunting. Step away from that keyboard. Don’t read so much news.
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“Anger is an energy.”
John Lydon
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Just close your eyes and pretend that, instead of a Republican administration suspecting that he wasn’t a citizen and holding him for three days, a Democratic administration knew his citizenship, but put him in an internment camp for years based solely on his race. Doesn’t that feel better?
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Has anyone discussed what Elizabeth Warren is going to serve the Dawgs in a few years? Perhaps sushi and red wine?
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Bison, maze, and pumpkin pie? I keed, I keed.
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This is how you troll harder!
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-denies-pelosi-aircraft-for-foreign-trip-in-response-to-call-for-state-of-the-union-delay
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Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
Snark aside, this blog is awesome, the community is incredible, and the playpen was genius. I appreciate having a football blog with members that can engage like this, have it out for a bit, and put it back away until next week. I wonder whether any other teams have a forum like this. I think it reflects well on our fanbase. Go Dawgs!
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Was he trying to troll himself? Seems like that’s what he did. Grounding a plane taking an unannounced congressional delegation to visit the troops in Syria while his wife rode a military plane to Florida for vacation. If you think Nancy Pelosi didn’t game this out ahead of time, you’re kidding yourself. Now she gets credit for trying to visit the troops in a war zone the President has never been willing to go to, without actually going.
I guess rubes are easily impressed.
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That was epic
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That’s ballgame, folks.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation?ref=hpsplash
We’ve now blown past the Nixon standard.
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… aaaaaand it was a Canary Trap designed to find internal leakers that the activists pretending to be journalists at BuzzFeed bought hook, line, and sinker. And then that the activists pretending to be journalists parroted for about 16 hours before Mueller shut them down.
It must be so very disappointing to have all your hopes and dreams built on this ridiculous Trump-Russia thing to the point that you’ll literally believe anything.
What’s that disappointment like, ChiliDawg? LOL.
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“The information provided by Cohen about the Moscow Project in these proffer sessions is consistent with and corroborated by other information obtained in the course of the SCO’s investigation”
https://heavy.com/news/2018/12/mueller-sentencing-memo-michael-cohen/
Trump lied to the American people about the Moscow project, Cohen lied to Congress to protect Trump. The SCO has corroborating evidence to prove the above. The news over the last 24 hours does not prove whether or not Trump suborned perjury (a felony) by directing Cohen to lie to Congress.
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When will UGA Fire this POS?
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/18/university-georgia-ta-some-white-people-may-have-d/
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