U.S. Politics

[maqroll]

Andrew Cuomo with a strong speech just now. He's sounding like he has higher aspirations than Governor of New York.

[Xann]

13 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

She's full on racist but it's the truth. She complained the other week about working with a load of people who couldn't speak English. She was the only English speaking person in that group so they moved her to a different part.

Ruge, you think an employer is going to want to promote a full on racist? Or someone that tries to get on with the people that are working around them?

[StefanAVFC]

13 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

What the **** tv and papers are you using?

Self-confessed Mail reader says that nothing is ever said about that side of the world.

The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Edited January 29, 2017 by StefanAVFC

[Davkaus]

 

8 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

Did I say bring back hanging of blacks etc? So the 50s wasn't a good time economically for American people? 

Is there an echo in here? It was good for white American people. Not so much the folk having crosses burned on their lawn and being told they have to sit at the back on the bus.

[Keyblade]

Just now, Davkaus said:

 

Is there an echo in here? It was good for white American people. Not so much the folk having crosses burned on their lawn and being told they have to sit at the back on the bus.

Make America Great Again was the most transparent slogan ever. That a good portion of Americans bought into it is telling. How did the saying go, equality feels like oppression to the privileged or something to that effect.

[Davkaus]

To think that a few days ago the media coverage was all about him and his batshit advisers lying about the size of a crowd.

Now he's preventing permanent US residents from returning home, and removing the intelligence services from the NSC.

A few weeks after Putin took power, with his popularity incredibly low, there were terrorist attacks that killed a few hundred people. There are plenty of people, including prominent politicians, and people inside the FSB (Litvinenko...remember him?) who claim it was an FSB false flag operation to justify the war in Chechnya, and boost Putin's popularity. If it was, it worked.

I can't help but feel that Trump will be rubbing his hands together, delighted with the things he'll be able to do when there's next an act of terrorism in the states.

[Genie]

Has anyone else seen this film? Not Will Farells finest work but in the context of how Trump won the election it's quite funny.

[StefanAVFC]

5 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

A few weeks after Putin took power, with his popularity incredibly low, there were terrorist attacks that killed a few hundred people. There are plenty of people, including prominent politicians, and people inside the FSB (Litvinenko...remember him?) who claim it was an FSB false flag operation to justify the war in Chechnya, and boost Putin's popularity. If it was, it worked.

I can't help but feel that Trump will be rubbing his hands together, delighted with the things he'll be able to do when there's next an act of terrorism in the states.

This is my biggest concern. I fear a populist backlash to a 'terrorist attack' than I do an attack itself.

[darrenm]

I'm not sure he has the control to pull something like that off. Lots of people have the knives out. He won't stay long.

[Davkaus]

Terrorism was used in the early 2000s to justify wars we didn't want. This time I worry it'll be used by an egomaniac to consolidate his own power. Every non-white voter is someone he doesn't want to vote.

The rhetoric about millions of illegal voters, and having additional voter checks. Keeping out refugees. Keeping out permanent US residents if they were born in the wrong place. Attempting to intimidate and discredit the media. It has all the hallmarks of a man already thinking about being able to manipulate the results in 4 years. He'll do everything he can to disenfranchise minorities and bully anyone who speaks out against him. 

Edited January 29, 2017 by Davkaus

[Davkaus]

1 minute ago, darrenm said:

I'm not sure he has the control to pull something like that off. Lots of people have the knives out. He won't stay long.

For everyone's sake, I hope you're right!

[OutByEaster?]

12 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Terrorism was used in the early 2000s to justify wars we didn't want. This time I worry it'll be used by an egomaniac to consolidate his own power. Every non-white voter is someone he doesn't want to vote.

I don't agree - this time around Donald is the terrorism; he's the great distraction that we're all looking at while a handful of people carve up a nation for profit.

 

[Keyblade]

Watch there be a 9/11 type attack this year and Trump capitalizing on it. I really hope I'm wrong, but it's so obvious.

[Chindie]

Quote

I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.

We were right. And friends who urged us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we could “this is abnormal,” to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong. In an epic week beginning with a dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he has lived down to expectations.

Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.

The question is, what should Americans do about it? To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense Mattis or Secretary-designate Tillerson in his disastrous policy salvos this week, in favor of his White House advisers, tells you all you need to know about who is really in charge. To be associated with these people is going to be, for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction.

For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.

Rifts are opening up among friends that will not be healed. The conservative movement of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, of William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol, was always heterogeneous, but it more or less hung together. No more. New currents of thought, new alliances, new political configurations will emerge. The biggest split will be between those who draw a line and the power-sick—whose longing to have access to power, or influence it, or indeed to wield it themselves—causes them to fatally compromise their values. For many more it will be a split between those obsessed with anxiety, hatred, and resentment, and those who can hear Lincoln’s call to the better angels of our nature, whose America is not replete with carnage, but a city on a hill.

This is one of those clarifying moments in American history, and like most such, it came upon us unawares, although historians in later years will be able to trace the deep and the contingent causes that brought us to this day. There is nothing to fear in this fact; rather, patriots should embrace it. The story of the United States is, as Lincoln put it, a perpetual story of “a rebirth of freedom” and not just its inheritance from the founding generation.

Some Americans can fight abuses of power and disastrous policies directly—in courts, in congressional offices, in the press. But all can dedicate themselves to restoring the qualities upon which this republic, like all republics depends: on reverence for the truth; on a sober patriotism grounded in duty, moderation, respect for law, commitment to tradition, knowledge of our history, and open-mindedness. These are all the opposites of the qualities exhibited by this president and his advisers. Trump, in one spectacular week, has already shown himself one of the worst of our presidents, who has no regard for the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose patriotism is a belligerent nationalism, whose prior public service lay in avoiding both the draft and taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not read and therefore does not understand our history, and who, at his moment of greatest success, obsesses about approval ratings, how many people listened to him on the Mall, and enemies.

He will do much more damage before he departs the scene, to become a subject of horrified wonder in our grandchildren’s history books. To repair the damage he will have done Americans must give particular care to how they educate their children, not only in love of country but in fair-mindedness; not only in democratic processes but democratic values. Americans, in their own communities, can find common ground with those whom they have been accustomed to think of as political opponents. They can attempt to renew a political culture damaged by their decayed systems of civic education, and by the cynicism of their popular culture.

There is in this week’s events the foretaste of things to come. We have yet to see what happens when Trump tries to use the Internal Revenue Service or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to destroy his opponents. He thinks he has succeeded in bullying companies, and he has no compunction about bullying individuals, including those with infinitely less power than himself. His advisers are already calling for journalists critical of the administration to be fired: Expect more efforts at personal retribution. He has demonstrated that he intends to govern by executive orders that will replace the laws passed by the people’s representatives.

In the end, however, he will fail. He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible—The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

There was nothing unanticipated in this first disturbing week of the Trump administration. It will not get better. Americans should therefore steel themselves, and hold their representatives to account. Those in a position to take a stand should do so, and those who are not should lay the groundwork for a better day. There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.

Eliot Cohen, former advisor to Condoleeza Rice

[Davkaus]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

I agree protests can work, when they're focused, have a clear aim and are widely seen as having a "just cause".

Sorry, but women (or men, or people who don't care to define themselves by gender..) in the UK going on a march to "protest" about Trump being elected doesn't meet those criteria for me. He's not their Pres. the UK isn't the US, he was fairly elected under the US system, yes he's horrible and ignorant and all that, but in this instance there's no "point" to the protests IMO.

As much as I detest the bloke. I agree.

Half a million signatures on a petition, and thousands of people talking about protesting in towns and cities across the UK, against a man elected in another country, who won't even know the protests are occuring, nevermind care.

It might send a message to our government. But how about protesting against our government for the shit they're doing, not what's going on in America. Today there's news that NHS funding per head is dropping, despite us already running out of beds and people dying in corridors. Not to mention indiscriminate bulk surveillance of our internet traffic. May and her cronies must be pissing themselves that people care more about what's going on in America than in our own country.

[darrenm]

1 minute ago, Davkaus said:

As much as I detest the bloke. I agree.

Half a million signatures on a petition, and thousands of people talking about protesting in towns and cities across the UK, against a man elected in another country, who won't even know the protests are occuring, nevermind care.

It might send a message to our government. But how about protesting against our government for the shit they're doing, not what's going on in America. Today there's news that NHS funding per head is dropping, despite us already running out of beds and people dying in corridors. Not to mention indiscriminate bulk surveillance of our internet traffic. May and her cronies must be pissing themselves that people care more about what's going on in America than in our own country.

You can protest more than one thing at a time. He's not our president but he's still causing global problems.

[Davkaus]

You can. People aren't though, are they.

I mean, I'm not out on the streets with a placard, so who am I to complain, I just wish people cared more about our own problems and let Americans fight their own battle. 

[maqroll]

4 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

You can. People aren't though, are they.

I mean, I'm not out on the streets with a placard, so who am I to complain, I just wish people cared more about our own problems and let Americans fight their own battle. 

We need you

[Genie]

8 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Half a million signatures on a petition.

Over 2/3 of a million now, probably over a million by the morning.

It ain't gonna bother Trump much but it gives our MP's something to think about.

[Davkaus]

If everyone concerned just had a whipround, we could help fund a Trump hotel in each of those 7 countries and the problem would be solved.