Lurker > red sox 777

Jakyl25 posted...

So you dont think it will evolve into Im not impeached even after the Senate starts the trial

If the Senate dismisses the charges on the ground that they do not allege any impeachable offenses, then yes it will.

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Jakyl25 posted...

I dont understand how demanding a fair trial looks like shit optically

I get that the actual article of impeachment do, but not this part

If they dont care, then why would he even bother to try to put forward the narrative that hes not impeached

Demanding that the court accept your conditions before you file the charges does not look like demanding a fair trial. Looks like you want a rigged trial.

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I'm not sure about this line of reasoning but I think a extended delay in delivering the charges to the Senate is good reason for the Senate to dismiss this impeachment for lack of due process without considering the merits.

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How is assassinating American citizens without due process not impeachable?

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So people seem to be taking the position that it was okay for Joe Biden to engage in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government based on massive pressure (withholding a billion dollars of aid) because it was done to fight corruption.

If that's the case, the Donald Trump is definitely innocent, because that's exactly what he did.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

That investigation had been shelved for a year at the time of Joe Biden's involvement and it was widely agreed upon by both parties in the US and our allies in Europe that Shokin was corrupt and needed to go if Ukraine had any hope of reforming. In fact, because Shokin was ignoring corruption, replacing him put Burisma in more danger if they had done anything illegal.

Which parties in the US and Europe agreed on that? The people opposing Russia?

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Please. If Ivanka was being paid a million dollars a year by Russia you guys would all think she was colluding with her father.

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xp1337 posted...

Are you saying Joe Biden did anything wrong? How did he use his position of power to "garner wealth for his son."

He had the prosecutor fired. It was a classic quid pro quo.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

Just a PSA: people from Ukraine find the phrase "the Ukraine" offensive because it dates back to when they were a part of the USSR. They've requested that the rest of the world use "Ukraine" since gaining independence.

That's from the USSR era? I always thought it was weird.

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If Hunter was a consulting attorney, why did they put him on the board? And was Burisma his only client? Unless he was spending most of his time working for Burisma 600k a year is rather high a rate.....unless of course he brought special expertise of connections to the table....like being the vice president's son.

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Putin is also talking about putting back the lifetime 2 term limit for Russian presidents. Maybe he's running for US President in 2024?

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Forceful_Dragon posted...

It's still absurd that in the quote she says "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic Islamophobic you name it." and people's reaction is "OMG! SHE IS CALLING ME DEPLORABLE!".

If you are self identifying as a racist, sexist, homophobic, etc... then yeah you ARE deplorable. If you aren't those things then she wasn't talking about you.

So if we're going to bring "reading comprehension" up maybe address that.

No, she said half. That means she thinks if you meet one other Trump supporter on average, she thinks one of you is a racist, sexist, etc. That's very offensive and insulting.

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

i don't really get the difference. if hillary had said "well obviously i'm exaggerating a ton" instead of "i'm being grossly generalistic," you would have been fine with her comments? i always interpreted the "grossly generalistic" part as "well obviously it's not actually 50% but the point is that it's still a lot of people and it's a huge problem in american society."

also, given all the different types of "deplorables" she described (racists, sexists, etc), the number is probably much higher than 5%. you shouldn't underestimate how many crappy people exist.

If she had a history of using "half" to mean "less than 20%" it would work for her. When Trump says "people are saying" we all know it means "Donald Trump, who is a person" is saying.

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

damn these topics move so fast

but then you're applying mental gymnastics to say that the letter is "completely reasonable." you can state that what trump is trying to say with the letter is reasonable or whatever but the letter itself is still filled with insane statements.

also, i'll never for the life of me understand that with every single insane thing trump states, you always point out "what he ACTUALLY meant." but you demand that hillary apologizes for her "deplorables" comments, even though she literally stated that she was being grossly generalistic. perhaps corrik was right about "people in this topic always taking things out of context" after all - he's just accusing the wrong people of doing this!

To me it's just good reading comprehension. I think at this point, taking Trump literally is just abdicating one's ability to read and comprehend meaning. Trump has made it absolutely clear that any statement he makes cannot be relied upon for its literal truth.

Of course Hillary was being grossly generalistic. Her statement itself was generalistic (one-half of Trump supporters is a very vague and general figure) but removing the generalism doesn't change the meaning and doesn't remove the insult. Whether it was 50% or 52% or 48.796% really doesn't change the meaning. It's still insulting a very large portion of the American electorate.

Now, if Hillary had been exaggerating rather than generalizing - say, she multiplied all her statements by a factor of 10 - then the statement would need to be read as saying 5% of Trump supporters are deplorable - which sounds reasonable. But Hillary does not have a history of exaggerating, gave no sign that she was exaggerating, and didn't even say so after the fact. So I think it's fair to say that Hillary meant a number somewhere more in the ballpark of 50% than 5%.

And yeah, if DJT made the exact same statement, you can apply the 90% rule and assume he means 5%. Because if it was really 50% he would have said 100%.


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The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova left the Soviet Union. Is it time for the United States to leave the United Nations?

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Oh and we definitely need to bring back the Court of Star Chamber. What a cool name for a court.

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xp1337 posted...

You would, of course, in the process of abolishing the Senate (to do so we're already talking Constitutional Amendment) delegate all its powers to the House (or elsewhere if appropriate) to avoid that deadlock. Heck, you could handle the VP issue there too. Really the only hang-up is that literally the one and only thing the Constitution says you can't amend is equal representation in the Senate - which I've called Air Bud on.

I think we may be able to compromise on renaming the Senate as the House of Lords, giving the President the right to dissolve Congress at will and to call elections at will (with no obligation to call an election after a dissolution), giving lifetime tenure to the President, giving the President absolute immunity from impeachment or any other prosecution, and criminalizing imagining removing the President from his office.

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xp1337 posted...

...Damn, you're right.

Okay, without checking the text I'm going to also under the air bud rule invoke that technically speaking it gives the VP power to break ties only when the Senators are equally divided. But with no one there there is no division. That implies a presence and a conflict. One that does not exist in an empty chamber!

In that case the Senate would never be able to pass any bills and our laws would never be able to be changed. The President would probably end up taking on more and more powers of the King.

Also, the President could never be removed from office by impeachment without a court empowered to try him.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

This would just make the Vice President dictator of the Senate...!

Good point.

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xp1337 posted...

Or admit new states to the union, which in many cases we should absolutely be doing anyway. DC and Puerto Rico being the most obvious (and the easiest sells), but I think this extends to the other territories the US holds. Also only requires a simple majority in Congress + President so isn't an insurmountable task like abolishing the senate.

i would also note that all states would be equally represented in the senate if we abolished it. we'd simply be changing the number of senators per state from 2 to 0. i'm calling the air bud rule on this.

Mathematically I agree with you but I feel like English common law places a rather unnatural distinction between existing and not existing and it is the language known to the founders and the people of the time. So having no representation at all would probably not qualify as having equal representation because while it would be equal, it would not be representation.

I think the easiest way to add states is to divide Texas into 5 gerrymandered states as decided by the Texas Legislature. Congress already gave consent for this in the original treaty annexing Texas to the US so Texas should theoretically be able to do it unilaterally with no further federal action.

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Jakyl25 posted...

So youre saying the only solution is to redraw the states.

Sorry everyone from the Rockies east to the Mississippi, youre now only one state and you get two Senators

From a purely political point of view, the Compromise of 1850 was a terrible idea for the South. They gave up their having an equal number of seats in the Senate to the North, and all they got in return was a federal law, the Fugitive Slave Act, that everyone galvanized opposition to them in the North. So they both angered the North and gave them the tools needed to act on that anger.

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Also, the founders in their wisdom provided that the equal representation of the states in the Senate cannot be changed even by constitutional amendment. The Senate is thus the highest organ of the American state. And if we look back to the Roman Senate, upon which the founding fathers based our Senate, remember the phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus - SPQR - the Senate and People of Rome. Notice how the word order shows that the Senate is independently sovereign and in fact comes before the People.

Long live the Senate!

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xp1337 posted...

cuz they were already powerless but their continued existence provided the illusion of representation and a role in government to the people. the "replacement plan" was the death star and just openly ruling by fear.

so it just wasn't a priority

The Roman Empire took more than 500 years to abolish the Senate. In fact, the Roman Senate was not abolished until after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

And by the time it finally disappeared, we were so far in the Dark Ages that there is no historical record of the Roman Senate's dissolution. It just doesn't appear in the records we have anymore, and then after the recovery there was no more Senate.

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Xeybozn posted...

I wonder how many Republican voters would support Senate reform if they were prompted with examples of small blue states and bigger red states. For example, would they say it's a good thing that Vermont has as many Senate votes as Texas even though Texas has 45 times as many people?

Vermont elected Bernie Sanders, so I say that's just fine. The people of Vermont clearly deserve every bit of the representation they've earned.

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The ACA is really the culmination of supply-side economics- where it got to the point where they completely ignored the demand side and tried to blame everything on mostly imaginary free riders.

Every other 1st world country has MORE free riders than the US on healthcare and they all spend LESS of national GDP. So blaming the US healthcare problem on free riders is ridiculous and is just demonizing the poor because they are defenseless.

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Jakyl25 posted...

Not really though? They dont really win popular votes nationwide

The nation expresses itself through the Electoral College.

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DoomTheGyarados posted...

I don't care if anyone else takes him seriously, he just pisses me off. Tony, Red sox, you, anyone else is free to have your own opinion of him. Notice how I didn't go after red sox or tony or you for thinking he isn't bad faith acting.

Red Sox, old article but:

https://healthpayerintelligence.com/features/how-the-affordable-care-act-changed-the-face-of-health-insurance

Basically like you said - based on age. They price out most people and then play the odds factor.

I think it was pretty predictable that premiums would rise with the ACA if you ignored the thousands of pages of policy papers its proponents put out to cover up the common sense reality - increasing demand by forcing people to buy a product without increasing supply will inevitably lead to an increase in price.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Most of the country is in credit card debt, so no I don't mean "they have bills to pay for services that they received." Cry me a fucking river about that.

I mean how many people are not able to sustain themselves because of medical debt. And of those, how many are in that position because of a risk they willingly took (ie, not paying for insurance [through their employer or otherwise] or not applying for Medicaid if they qualified) vs how many earn too much to get Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance? I am guessing that this number is negligible and thus I don't even see how this is a problem in the US.

Yeah, it's slim to nonexistent. It's not like medical debt has a higher priority than credit card debt. They can get in line with all the other creditors.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

How many people are actually bankrupted by medical debt in the US? How many of those are bankrupted because they could not afford to pay for private insurance vs willfully choosing not to pay for private insurance? How many in the former were not eligible for Medicaid?

I honestly would like to see that breakdown, because that segment of the population is (in my mind) the only group where a solution is needed. And I would be shocked to learn that this amounts to more than .1% of the population.

By bankrupted, do you mean "has a negative net worth" or "filed bankruptcy?" Because the only reason to file for bankruptcy is if you have assets to protect. If it's having a negative net worth, then loads of Americans are in that situation, maybe 30-40% of the country?

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DoomTheGyarados posted...

Do they, though? What's going to enforce that? What is the objective standard? What are the penalties for disobeying this?

I've applied for healthcare as an individual within the past 4 years and can confirm that they do not ask about your health and you are quoted a flat rate based on age.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

China apparently

I will join you in a call to go to war with China, don't worry

I think there's no need for war if we have strong, intelligent, leaders like President Trump and President Nixon negotiating for us.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

The same could be said for any kind of insurance. Unfortunately, there is no natural solution for that. Whenever you have a valuable item (a home, a car, yourself), you have to pay a premium to protect it.

But if I have more to lose I will pay more to protect it. If I have a Ferrari I'll be willing to pay much more in premiums than I would for a 1990 Honda civic. With healthcare, no one dies because they can't pay - they are just stuck with a bill. Which if you can't pay, you don't. So those who can pay more have more to lose if they aren't insured, they get more value from their insurance, and they should pay higher premiums.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

What do you say to the US having the highest cancer survival rates in the world? People living under socialized medicine are often denied those oncology medicines because the governments make the choice for their people that an extra X months of life isn't worth the price of treatment. I find that to be borderline dystopian, which is why I never want to see that system come here.

The problem with the US system isn't the cancer treatment. It's that people pay thousands or tens of thousands yearly into a plan that will not cover a dime unless you get cancer and have massive medical bills. This isn't healthcare, it is a regressive head tax.

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LOTM, I think we disagree on almost every policy issue but I don't think you are arguing in bad faith.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

I know that's what they did for alcohol and I guess it's vaguely justifiable from a drunk driving perspective, but is that same tactic used for smoking? It makes no sense to me why any local government would feel the need to raise it beyond age 19.

I wish the Supreme Court would be more aggressive on stopping the abuse of the Commerce Clause to pass everything under the sun. They've only held 3 things violated the Commerce Clause since FDR stacked the Court:

1. A federal law against guns in schools.
2. The original Violence Against Women Act.
3. The individual mandate in Obamacare.

#1 relates to a fundamental right, has nothing to do with commerce, and is squarely within a traditional area of state regulation.

#3 protects the most fundamental right in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence - the inalienable right to do nothing.

#2 is the farthest the Supreme Court has gone in limiting the Commerce Clause in that it's harder to handwaive it away since it doesn't really relate to fundamental rights going back hundreds of years.

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LOTM believes that you can have a regulated market where you keep both the benefits of a free market and the benefits of regulation. I think most centrists share this belief.

People on both the left and the right do not believe that you can get this best of both worlds result. And I believe that at least on healthcare, we are currently in a worst of both worlds place. Hence I will support less government in healthcare, more government in healthcare, whatever, as long as it gets us away from the worst of both worlds result.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

How in the world does the federal government have authority to raise the smoking age?

The way they do it for alcohol is to cut off federal highway funding to states that don't set their drinking age at 21. A heavy-handed big government tactic of questionably constitutionality that no Republican should be bragging about!

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Jakyl25 posted...

Lol who, Haley?

You know who.

Tulsi!

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Ashethan posted...

I want to see a female President before I'm 40. So of course i'm supporting her. I supported Bernie in 2016 because we didn't have a progressive woman running. But for once, we do. I'm also a little uncomfortable with how Bernie's campaign was run in 2016. They paid women less then men (at lower positions!) and there were problems with sexual harassment. I don't think Bernie is the problem, except in that he often surrounds himself with the wrong people. I mean I have four daughters. So that's a pretty big deal for me.

Don't get me wrong. If Warren is essentially out by the time the primary comes here I'll jump on the Bernie Bandwagon. (Barring a constitutional amendment to lower the age requirement for president, and AOC jumps in the race. In which case she has my vote, my time, my money, and whatever she needs) But until we see some primary results and she stands no realistic shot, she has my support.

Are those allegations about the Bernie campaign true? They sound like smears to me.

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Free tuition at public colleges - For me this depends heavily on how exactly this is done. If it involves simply giving taxpayer money to the colleges at whatever rate they want to charge, then I would vote no on this. All that would achieve is to get the colleges to raise their tuition ever higher and bankrupt the country. It's welfare for the rich in the worst sense.

New tax on extremely wealthy - Oppose on the grounds that this reeks of a majority oppressing a minority simply because they have more votes. Would support higher taxes on the upper middle class for purposes of punishment.

Reparations - Support, although this would be mostly symbolic as there is no way to make people whole for centuries of slavery.

Medicare for All - Support. Would also support a straight repeal of Obamacare. Will support virtually any healthcare policy as long as it repeals Obamacare.

Green New Deal - Support as a concept but have not yet seen any workable details. Will consider when there are enough specifics to actually be able to evaluate them.


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The Democratic Party is finished. They have gotten so deep into identity politics that they cannot escape.

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Muffin, what do you think about my MAGA hat example?

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And the way I see it is, if society or one's peer group will punish a criminal for their offense, the government really doesn't need to do much more. If a faction of society will celebrate the crime on the other hand - then the government needs to step in to defend the rest of society. And that is the case with liberals now who feel empowered to attack conservatives - if they break the law - lock them up!

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SmartMuffin posted...

In general, justice should be about compensation more than anything else.

If you wanted to make it something like "You pay double, once to compensate for the item and once again as punishment" I'd be fine with that.

But in no sane universe should the fine for stealing a $20 item be anything more than like $100.

Remember, in progressive San Francisco, if you steal anything <I>less than $1,000</i> they <i>won't even bother to charge you</i>.

$950 Smuffin. $950 is a felony.

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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

He literally went to a church, stole their LGBT flag, took it to a gay club and burnt it outside while yelling about gay people, and it wasn't the first time he had criminally harassed gay people.

Is it the charge that is appalling to you or the act?

Both. Imagine if someone stole a MAGA hat off of the head of a vulnerable conservative student on a college campus and burned it in front of them. I think we do need a severe sentence to punish the perpetrator for that crime, because their peers won't. 16 years is rather extreme though. Give them 10 with parole after 5.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1207786289371734017?s=21

Very cool that the president of the United States drinks up propaganda straight from our biggest adversaries

I think you mean allies.


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But yes, the sentence is extreme, cruel, and unusual and should be overturned. Hopefully the appellate court will do that.

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SmartMuffin posted...

You think 16 years in prison is an appropriate punishment for stealing an item that costs <$20?

We used to have the death penalty for stealing things worth more than 40 shillings.

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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Why do you not know what Liberals or Independents are?

Liberals are bad and independents are good.

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Runemistress posted...

The class counsel's attorneys waived their fees for the class action suit, working pro bono. Former students have been able to get up to 90% of the money back from what they spent on courses.

Donald Trump is particularly good at conning people -- he seems to have conned you, for example, into thinking he's a good businessman capable of winning lawsuits easily. But a lot of his image is nothing more than, like his college, a fraud.

So the students were largely reimbursed because their attorneys were willing to work for free? That has nothing to do really with Trump's skill in defending lawsuits. As for getting back 90% after a decade - that's not being made whole. That doesn't cover the time spent, the expectation the students were promised of riches, and most importantly, a decade of investment returns. If Trump put that tuition money into an index fund he probably ended up with a profit of around 100% of the original tuition.

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