This thread is 325 pages long containing 16220 posts. Roughly 1/2 of them* are side discussions, hijacks and jokes. Bringing up Alex Jones wasn’t even that far off topic, since the discussion at the time was of the train wreck.
And I’d just like to add that I really never knew anything about Alex Jones before but Christ, what a nutball. He and reality have almost nothing in common.
*I didn’t actually re-read through all 325 pages to see what percentage is not about the Trump Administration. It’s just a joke.
But I suppose we could go back to talking about percentage of people who watch superhero movies and vote Republican, since that had so much to do with the Trump Administration
Don’t mind manson1972 tonight. The weed he’s been smoking must have some weird mold on it. He’s got all :smack: in the #MeToo backlash thread too tonight. See posts #98 through #112 there, specifically the strange dialogue between him and Chimera :dubious:
Mueller’s findings? (if they come out before Nov.) (and if Republiscums manage to twist and contort such findings in a way to facilitate postponing/shutting down the midterms.)
Maybe he should take his time with his investigation?
For some reason always got the “u” and “e” mixed up in Mueller, and just now came up with the brilliant mnemonic device of the 70s song “Louie, Louie, Louie” to remember which came first.
It ain’t happening. Even if they could find some way to do it without amendment, even if every single Republican MC was in lockstep, they’d still need to convince nine Democratic senators that ending democracy was in their best interest.
They could end the filibuster if they were desperate enough. The question is whether the entire republican party could stick to the script without any shred of guilt, and I’ve seen no evidence to date that they can’t.
But the thing is, they don’t necessarily have to postpone the elections; they could cast doubt on them. Complicit Republicans in some states could refuse to certify the election results.
There are any number of scenarios that could disrupt the usual process of turning over the congress, and that’s the ultimate concern. Just as it is by now obvious that Russia and American conservatives (not just Trump) have collaborated to leverage power away from Democratic (and democratic) interests already, the Republicans, with the aid of Russian interests, could collaborate to do that again in 2018.
Chaos is bad for democracy, but it represents an opportunity for those who want to sidestep democracy. If antidemocrats can contaminate perceptions of truth, if they can disrupt the ability of people to reach a consensus on who won the elections, then we have political chaos. The billionaire class has no problem sidestepping or rigging democracy in 2018, in much the same way that Roman senators did 2000 years ago. The Republicans who take their money and serve as their governmental proxies in exchange for political power likewise share that same desire. And Putin wants to make the United States essentially impotent on the world stage so that the American public and political interests can no longer use their power to put pressure on him.
We could wake up the morning after the elections in 2018 and find that the results are in dispute. This, in turn, could lead to serious allegations on both sides of fraud and tampering, and a refusal to accept the outcome. If people take to the streets, if law and order begin to break down, then the military comes into play. And Trump and the GOP control the military. I doubt that the United States could ever become a full-on dictatorship like Nazi Germany, because our political culture is historically decentralized, with much of the power resting at the local level. But we’re already a flawed democracy, and the risk going forward is that much of the country suffers under the misrule of plutocratic and antidemocratic forces.
As I’ve been saying, the risk of war with North Korea is much higher than people realize. And Trump has completely misread North Korea’s outreach to South Korea during the Olympics. Yes, the regime is under pressure and to a degree, they are desperate, but they’ve been somewhat desperate for a while now. Yes, Kim’s North Korea is afraid of the US, but they’re not going to be deterred. The fear of Trump’s America isn’t going to lead to North Korea looking for a way out until they feel confident they can come to the bargaining table with a few chips of their own - right now they don’t have much more than they’ve had the last few decades, but an arsenal of ICBMs changes that equation. What Trump and the Pentagon view as weakness - an overture to South Korea - is not. It’s a delay tactic, and a tactic to put a human face on North Korea. The message is aimed at South Korea, many of whom still have sympathy for North Koreans as ethnic Koreans. It’s an attempt to put a little temporary wedge between South Korea and the US, just long enough to keep testing missiles.
What I see on this side of the Pacific is that, increasingly, the Pentagon (and Trump) has decided that 1) a North Korea with ICBMs is an unacceptable threat, and 2) more pressure is the only way to get them to stop developing that threat. We have two sides that don’t appear to be backing down anytime soon. But the circumstances won’t remain static, which means that the tensions will likely increase, with both sides determined not to give in. This is a serious problem.
Congress has the power to seat its members, which it does presumably based on the results of elections that are administered at the state level. As part of the administration of elections, states typically have some way of declaring the results valid, at which time they send an elected representative to be seated. If the results are not declared valid by, say, a republican elections board or a republican secretary of state, then Congress could refuse to seat them. This was actually a regular occurrence in the years after the Civil War, when Republicans, dubious of Southern Democratic winners, refused to seat them, declaring that their elections had been tainted by fraud, coercion, violence, and the like. Other members of congress have been unseated or refused a seat for various reasons over the years.
If anyone thinks this is bizarro conspiracy theory talk, just look at today’s front page news. Explain to me how a Republican party that knowingly tries to quash an investigation and is willing to deconstruct the FBI and Department of Justice is not capable of doing everything I have described above. Again, we’re talking about a majority party that has actively recruited the help of a foreign adversary to influence the outcome of an election. There’s just too much evidence to suggest that this is happened to ignore it, and if it happened in 2016, we’d have to be infantile naive to believe that it won’t happen again – but to an even worse extreme.
My image of asahi is that of a chain smoker, constantly covered in sweat, a daily uniform of a holey undershirt and cargo pants, never sleeping (maybe an hour or two at random times during the day), always on the phone with various lawn enforcement agencies or government offices (or anxiously awaiting a call back), constantly pacing, eyes red, three old TVs on in the background with a different cable news network running on each, surrounded by hundreds of fast food bags and Diet Mountain Dew cans full of old cigarettes, stacks of old encyclopedias and newspapers covering practically every flat surface in the house, always pounding on a laptop covered in sticky pop stains and ash. And I say this with all due respect. But that’s my image of you. Your vision for our nation is so dystopian and hopeless, I don’t know how you function. I know we’re in a bad spot, I think most of us do, and vigilance is needed, but man alive…I hope you can get some sleep at night.
Yeah, that really pissed me off. Fucking asshole decides that my fear was irrational and then just keeps poking the bear. It was all I could do not to get myself banned.
