Lawyer versus Businessman; Presidential styles.

LOL

 

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Seriously....?

Well, this gets down to the core of the Republican argument, everybody who hasn't drunk the Republican Kool-Aid just is smart enough to understand Republican stupidity and ignorance. The Republican argument as inferred by Wellwisher goes like this; Hispanics, blacks, et al are just not smart enough to know Republicans are great. They have been confused by "dem damn Democrats and the free press". Unfortunately for Republicans, that just isn't the case. The problem with Republican base is everyone else is much smarter than they, and much better informed than they. There are good reasons why Hispanic Republicans have and continue to leave the Republican Party. There are good reasons why 99% of registered black voters aren't Republicans whether Republicans can be honest about it or not.

Except that's not true.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2015/10/22/violent-crime-statistics-for-every-city-in-america/

Well here is the problem with that, after an extensive investigation FBI Director Comey, a Republican, said he found that there was no evidence she committed crimes....oops. But, hey, you're a Republican you don't need little things like facts or reason.

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Republicans in congress conducted extensive investigations of Hillary's actions during Benghazi and found nothing upon which to indict Hillary. They found no evidence of wrong doing. But that didn't stop them from making these wild assertions. There is no evidence of hidden anything. I find it ironic and hypocritical for Republicans to accuse others of doing the things they do. There's a word for that, it's called scapegoating. Unfortunately, Republicans are one of the most immoral groups of people I have ever known. They lie about virtually everything. Their dishonesty is overwhelming. They have repeatedly sacrificed the national interest in order to further their political interests. They have repeatedly risked the health and well-being of the nation in order to advance their political interests.

Republicans control Congress, why haven't they done anything to fix it? They have controlled Congress for years now. Why haven't Republicans done anything to fix it?

I doubt it. If Trump will dismantle the "lawyer scam" why has he said nothing about it? Why isn't it in the Republican platform? Where is Trump's policy to eliminate the "lawyer scam"? It's nowhere because it doesn't exist. Trump is heavily reliant upon his lawyers. He has been a party to more than 4,000 law suits. Trump likes lawyers. He has and continues to employ many lawyers.

Except it hasn't been shown. There is no evidence to support your assertion Obama has used the IRS to "manhandle enemies". Unfortunately for you and your Republican cohorts, facts do matter Wellwisher. When you are so reckless with the truth as you are, it damages your credibility with anyone who hasn't drunk the Republican kool-aid? Do you not understand that?

As others have repeatedly pointed out, there is no legitimate reason for Trump to not disclose his tax returns. It's not like the IRS doesn't know what's on his tax returns. The IRS knows what's on his tax returns. He swore to them and he submitted them and the IRS has them. So if Trump were to release his tax returns he wouldn't be disclosing something he hasn't already disclosed to the IRS. Do you not understand that?

Companies are routinely audited by tax authorities. It's the norm. But it doesn't stop companies from disclosing their financial information to investors and others. It happens all the time. Trump is asking the American people to invest in him. He should be willing to disclose his tax returns. But he isn't. That should send up some major red flags. I would never invest in anything without a financial disclosure. And Trump is refusing to provide that disclosure. He wants Hillary to disclose her emails, which she has. He wants Hillary to disclose her schedules. He wants Hillary to disclose information about the Clinton Foundation which she has. But Trump doesn't want to disclose anything. Trump doesn't want to disclose his relationships with foreign businesses and banks. That's a bit of a double standard. If Trump wants to be POTUS he should be at least as transparent as Hillary has been, and he hasn't been. That's a problem.

 

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Non sequitur.

Quit changing the subject.

 

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It only seems a non sequitur if you don't remember posts 128.130,133, and 134.

 

Has Trump spoken against the over 1 trillion dollars wasted on the "war on drugs"?

I am posting against hawkish sellouts to the mic and wall street bankers and for freedom and against supporting idiotic government laws that enrich criminals and harm our southern neighbor.

I dislike the tyranny of the 2 party system of rampant tweedism.

So, the lesser of 2 evils is a shifting target.

Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism.
Vote no to the hawk.

 

If Trump has so many negative things to say about his country, if things are that bad and there are all these "horrible, horrible" people, why doesn't he find another country to live in?

 

bleached blondes with brown roots?

 

Thanx Bells.

 

Whatever you say. Keep complaining if that's what gets your buzz on. Your post at #134↑ is what I was responding to, so, you know, kind of hard to forget that one.

Pay attention, next time.

The simple fact is that #134 is a change of subject:

"I have never argued nor ever will argue in favor of racism, sexism, clanism, nor xenophobia."​

It's a clumsy distraction, which is why I called it out.

Just like #130↑:

"Bringing claims of racism into the discussion bespeaks desperation."​

As Iceaura and Bells have reminded you, now, there isn't any real question of "claims". Donald Trump's racism is pretty well established.

Thus, as I said↑, it's a little late; we're not returning to vague "claims"―this is pretty straightforward.

So you then turn to make this about yourself in #134 in order to go on, a minute later, in #135↑ with some bizarre notion about, "Why is it that racist seem to need to call others racist?"

What the hell? Why are you sticking that distraction into the discussion?

So, yeah, non sequitur.

And, see, that's the thing; there's nothing original about what you're doing. And that's why I'm calling it out.

 

As always:
Context matters!

 

It was quite serious - give up oversight over conflicts of interest in such a job, and your only protection is elimination of them.

 

History and Habit

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Click to settle.​

Maddow↱ is working one of her theses again; the unmooring of American military power was easy enough to perceive in general, but Drift, for instance, was a striking testament to some of the details―it is unclear at this time whether or not the book will actually last as "important", or whether it will require rediscovery in a half-century, or perhaps it will die an infamously lonely and forgotten failed thesis.

I doubt that latter, but hey, only time will tell.

The present thesis is interesting because she clearly has a point, at least superficially; there is some appearance of coincidence 'twixt instability within our two-party tendency and the emergence of nativism.

And the thing about our history of nativism and nationalism is that it's all reactionary; the harder part is figuring out just what people are reacting to and just how in order to create whatever effect the society witnesses.

To this day I recall early 2009, and a fiftysomething white woman in New Hampshire quite literally bawling on camera, "I want my co-oun-oun-ountry ba-a-a-ack!" Jon Stewart took the setup and knocked her down: What country? Back from whom?

And I think it's interesting because part of what would have destabilized the two-party system is the fact of the first black president combined with a quarter-century Republicans spent pitching harder lines appealing to supremacists.

As Frank Rich↱ noted in 2010:

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House―topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman―would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver―none of them major Democratic players in the health care push―received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.​

And things have only been getting worse; Republicans have not, in Maddow's terms, been holding their weight in argument, and this emboldened bigotry is what happens when the two-party system comes apart.

Or so goes the argument. There is considerable merit in the proposition, but neither is the history so conclusive; that is to say, we can easily perceive gray areas about the boundaries of the argument―to wit, how do we measure the failure or a party to hold its proper weight in the discourse?

Tweedism is an inherent tendency, one of those things we must guard against as part of our eternal vigilance. Americans, though, really are rather quite accustomed to their two-party system; it will take us a while to figure out how to work a multiparty plurality as early coalition building fails in the most obvious of ways.

Account for the prisoner's dilemma; most Americans will settle on slightly lesser things instead of risk it all for Utopia.
___________________

Notes:

Maddow, Rachel. "Trump anti-immigrant speech follows dark pattern of US history". The Rachel Maddow Show. msnbc. 1 September 2016. msnbc.com. 1 September 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2bJoMil

Rich, Frank. "The Rage Is Not About Health Care". The New York Times. 27 March 2010. NYTimes.cm. 1 September 2016. http://nyti.ms/1HH6NRf

 

Consider globalism and nativism as a pendulum. Push it far enough in one direction, and the kinetic tendency to swing back in the other direction increases.

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ill-change-clinton-or-trump-supporters-minds/

Being rational is a lot harder than most people credit.

Also see: http://hpmor.com

 

If , Hilton, becomes in, will all the Trump supporters becalm terrorists?

 

Penduroboros

I think we put too much faith in the pendula theses; my father used to use it as his explanation for Congressional and local elections. The thing is that it seems a wise enough observation, as such, but nobody can explain how it works or why it works the way it does.

The American people frequently display a non sequitur politic, like our insistent "both sides" standard that customarily replaces actual facts when we need to restore some "fairness" and "balance" to the difference between the parties; it is, in the end, part of how we absolve ourselves.

Such as it is, nativism and globalism seems a false dichotomy. To wit, if I give you two badly-planned and traditionally poorly-executed plans as options, at what point are you going to say, "Well, can we shore up these plans before we decide?"

The American collective, however, never does that. We blame the politicians in part because we send them out to fail. There is plenty amiss about the politicians, but that doesn't mean the rest of society is clean.

As a general proposition, I'm kind of tired of the people pretending they are blameless. To the one, politicians vote for plenty of bad ides because that's what the people want. To the other, we blame the politicians for trying to give us what we want. And the whole point of it is to absolve ourselves. And I know damn well why I vote for intsitutional Demcorats; most Democratic voters do, too. Here's a count for you: Two Scalias and no Kennedy. The godawful Democratic voters and politiicans Bernie Sanders and his wrecking crew just spent over a year denouncing as corrupt are the reason we don't have a Christian nationalist theocracy. You saw the Gay Fray. You saw the kind of judges American conservatives want. The strange thing about voter dissatisfaction is that we've had generations to address some of what reportedly troubles people, but voters have instructed their governments otherwise. We always say we're voting on taxes, or patriotism, or the economy, or whatever, but that also means we're accepting everything else that comes with.

I remember Randy Tate; he won his first election to the state legislature by falsely accusing his opponent of molesting children; he reached Congress in the '94 Revolution, the only Republican to hold that district. The man he defeated remains in public service as the Washinton state Insurance Commissioner; the man who defeated Tate in '96, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA09), holds the office to this day.

Tate? He was just part of the revolving door. Elected as a part of a protest against such behavior, he went on to become a lobbyist. And not just any lobbyist; he succeeded Ralph Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition. In 2008 he turned up in Romney's failed nomination bid; these days, he sits on the board of an astroturf lobbying firm. His story is a reminder of what these populist cycles bring: The only Republicans I know who remember or will acknowledge Mr. Tate will hold him up as an example of a problem that "both sides" have, though none can name a Democratic equivalent. We saw a similar phenomenon with the 2010 Tea Party debacle: They elect exactly what they claim to loathe: corrupt, inefficient hacks.

I suppose I should write the unfortunately requisite disclaimer, here, that it's not that Democrats are without their problems; it's just that not all problems are the same, and there are days the "both sides" argument just doesn't apply.

Still, though, I remain dubious about these outbursts of voter dissatisfaction; passion is as passion does, but it seems to me that when it was liberal passion for justice and equality we were expected to have unassailable plans capable of guaranteeing success. I don't know what to tell you about an effective range of plans looking forward, but the conservative argument has often eschewed such plans of its own, preferring instead to believe that if we just leave things the way they are everything will work out just fine.

The sum effect of it all is that the pendulum effect remains undefined; in some ways it is a reasonable description, but in others it is simply inadequate. The Gay Fray, for instance, was not a specific pendulum outcome. As a pendulum thesis, the idea is that a bunch of people climbed into the chamber, caught hold of the pendulum, and then tried to push it as far in one direction as they could; they couldn't push it very far, but built up so much potential energy that when they lost their grip the pendulum swung from about four o'clock or a little later to spinning 'round past midnight and into a tomorrow where the pendulum just clocked them again on behalf of our transgender neighbors.

Globalism can be good or bad or simply there; if I say nativism is virtually never good or simply there, I'm only holding a sliver of space for wome insanely fantastic circumstance I could never predict, like Christian evangelists arriving at some new world inhabited by a sentient and communicative population that would serve itself best simply eradicating the pathogen. In an evolutionary context, I suppose, one can at least try to justify such responses. But those aren't in effect here and now.

Nativism and globalism is simply the latest iteration of the historical dualism―self and other.

The nativists push hard enough, we might see the pendulum swing over the top again when they finally lose their grip entirely.

And if we absolutely must go through this exercise in stupidity, I'll take that outcome. But it would also mean we probably need a new metaphor instead of pendula. Watching the various conservative movements―purity cult (male supremacist), white supremacist, Christian supremacist, nationalist, &c.―repeatedly bash themselves in the head like Ren Höek, the notion of a ninnyhammer thesis starts to sound like a reasonable candidate. And it sure as hell looks and sounds better than penduroboros.

 

This would be stupid. The major danger of Clinton - WW III - would become even more probable if they would become terrorists.

There is, of course, the general danger of every totalitarian state - and the US moves in this direction - that all the enemies of the leader will be declared terrorist, enemies of the people or so.