THE OFFICIAL POLITICS THREAD

[glen a richter]

Have gate marshalls for all international flights. Make it impossible to check in without also getting on the plane. Domestic flights you check in before going on the jetway, how about checking in only after you've walked the jetway and are about to board?

[cardsfan04]

This recall stuff is kinda silly. I don't think Jill Stein is trying to scam like some people have suggested, but this isn't going anywhere. Trump won. It is what it is at this point.

What's especially dumb though is that pre-election the far right was spewing all thta nonsense about how our elections are rigged and the left was laughing at it. Now, the left is looking into the legitimacy of it (I say looking into it, because the claims from the left of it being rigged aren't really there at this point) while the right is telling the left how legit it is.

But the best (worst?) part is Trump on Twitter (paraphrasing):

Last night: Claims he would have won the popular vote if it weren't for the millions of illegal voters (presumably referring to Gregg Phillips' "study" in which he clams 3 millions non-citizens voted, but refuses to discuss how he arrived at that number).

This morning: Criticizes Hillary for the recount (which is valid, the recount is silly) because he won fair and square . . . besides the millions of illegal voters he mentioned 7 hours prior I guess.

Tonight: We need to look into voter fraud this election. Shame on the media for not doing so.

I've never heard of somebody winning an election and then questioning its legitimacy. But, apparently only he is allowed to question its legitimacy.

[glen a richter]

The sludge that Trump is pulling in as cabinet picks is truly frightening. Unfortunately, the Dems (as usual) are going to shoot themselves in the feet by screwing up every important intraparty decision over the next 4 years. They're going to focus on winning (or winning back) the wrong states, they're going to keep leaning heavily on promises to the minority voter, they're going to force-feed another unelectable candidate, they're going to literally do everything wrong because it's their way.

First step is to focus on getting back Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Virginia is ok for now, and Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina may turn blue on their own depending on how much of a complete cluster the Trump term is.

Second step is to recognize that, post Kennedy, no Dem except for Obama (unique circumstance) has won the White House unless he was from a southern state. McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry, no. Carter and Clinton, yes. Don't go racing further left to combat this gigantic shift to the right. Moderate. You don't necessarily need to go to a southern state to recruit a candidate, but you need to go to a red state. Dems who win in red states did it for a reason. Brian Schweitzer or Joe Manchin, for example. You keep nominating northerners, people don't like northerners. We're perceived as out of touch with the common American, elitist, etc... southern Dems are much more moderate and electable.

Both of those things being said, I guarantee in 2020 we nominate either Andrew Cuomo, who makes me want to vomit, or Kirsten Gillebrand because common sense doesn't seem to run deep among the party elites. The electoral blue will continue to get squeezed further into the northeast and more and more states will turn beet red. I honestly think I could run the DNC better than any of those boneheads in charge.

[Kerfuffle]

The media and left are really fueling the propaganda machine though. So they were outrage when Trump said he wouldn't accept the outcome and now Hilary is doing just that. They're doing a recount, trying to get electorals to vote Hiliary on 12/19, and when both those fail they are now saying they want to explore the 25th amendment and remove him for mental instability. And when that fails they will try to impeach him on everything. It's sad that when the left doesn't get their way they act like spoiled children throwing a tantrum. I honestly believe most left supporters are uninformed though on what the issues are and what this current President has done. I don't like Trump either but vote was based on policy and I want someone in there to be the wrecking ball of all the Obama overreaches of power and bad policies.

[cardsfan04]

The media and left are really fueling the propaganda machine though. So they were outrage when Trump said he wouldn't accept the outcome and now Hilary is doing just that. They're doing a recount, trying to get electorals to vote Hiliary on 12/19, and when both those fail they are now saying they want to explore the 25th amendment and remove him for mental instability. And when that fails they will try to impeach him on everything. It's sad that when the left doesn't get their way they act like spoiled children throwing a tantrum. I honestly believe most left supporters are uninformed though on what the issues are and what this current President has done. I don't like Trump either but vote was based on policy and I want someone in there to be the wrecking ball of all the Obama overreaches of power and bad policies.

I was with you until you said most of the left are uninformed.

-hypocrisy over accepting election results, sure
-trying to get electors to vote against the will of their state, that's a bad plan and worthy of criticism
-25th amendment stuff is pretty hilarious, dumb and unrealistic

I think saying that most on the left are uninformed is unfair though. Disagreeing over what a policy should be doesn't require being uninformed. It just requires a different opinion. I'll use Obama's use of executive orders as an example.

Obama hasn't used more executive orders than other presidents (actually used less per 4 years than anybody in like 70 years or something), but he has used them in a different way than many presidents have. When he couldn't push his agenda through Congress, he used executive orders to bypass them. In a vacuum, that's a really bad precedent. There's a process of checks and balances and how he has used executive orders flies in the face of that.

But, for many people including myself, there's a second layer to it. The GOP has tried to obstruct Obama at pretty much every step for 8 years. I'm not saying that he couldn't have done a better job trying to compromise. But, the GOP strategy for 8 years seems to have been to filibuster (at record levels) and threaten to shut the government down instead of trying to accomplish anything. Again, I'm not putting that all on the GOP, but it did create an odd dynamic. One of the president's jobs is to make sure that the government operates effectively. If one arm of the government refuses to do anything at all, his two choices are to let nothing get accomplished or to use his executive authority.

My point to all of that isn't that Obama acted completely properly. I already acknowledged that some of his use of executive orders is contrary to checks and balances which is worthy of criticism. My point is just that there are opposing opinions to things that don't require somebody to be uninformed.

[Kerfuffle]

My point to all of that isn't that Obama acted completely properly. I already acknowledged that some of his use of executive orders is contrary to checks and balances which is worthy of criticism. My point is just that there are opposing opinions to things that don't require somebody to be uninformed.

Difference of opinion is fine if you're on the right, but from the left if someone disagrees with you they're an abnormality - i.e. the CEO who told his workers the day after the election that if they supported Trump they should resign immediately.

It's not the quantity of executive orders, it's what they do. Obama using executive orders to push through his agenda that he can't get through Congress is against the Constitution - his "I have a phone and a pen" thing was infuriating. Passing his version of immigration policy this way was illegal. Conducting a $1.7 Billion ransom deal with Iran and then first denying it and then later only saying it was $400 million. There are many others. We have a Constitution and therefore we need a President who takes his oath seriously and abides by it.

The left likes to say the GOP obstructed him - well if everything Obama did was wrong why would they support any of it? So I don't see it as obstruction - I see it as checks and balances. Obama was never able to pull people together - instead he divided the nation and would double-down on his agenda to remake America into his vision. So of course the GOP said no. I honestly cannot think of a single accomplishment he ever had in office. And I do believe that in time history will show him as our worst president ever - even worse than Jimmy Carter.

[glen a richter]

When a member of congress says their goal is to make the president a 1 termer, when Rush Limbaugh says on his radio show that he hopes Obama fails, that is the most unAmerican thing anyone can say. They're all a bunch of scum and now they'll expect dems to work with Trump? Hypocritical bullshit is all that is. If these fools had been cooperative and worked with instead of against the POTUS then maybe they would have results everyone could be happy with instead of executive orders that they despise. Now they'll just be in a cycle of tit for tat and we lose.

[cardsfan04]

When a member of congress says their goal is to make the president a 1 termer, when Rush Limbaugh says on his radio show that he hopes Obama fails, that is the most unAmerican thing anyone can say. They're all a bunch of scum and now they'll expect dems to work with Trump? Hypocritical bullshit is all that is. If these fools had been cooperative and worked with instead of against the POTUS then maybe they would have results everyone could be happy with instead of executive orders that they despise. Now they'll just be in a cycle of tit for tat and we lose.

Pretty much this. This wasn't a matter of Obama having tons of bad ideas, so they had no choice but to fight him. Some were bad, but many were good. Their goal was to fight him for the sake of fighting him. He promised the world in 2008, so they made it their goal to prevent him from delivering for the sake of preventing him from delivering and little more. It was politics-motivated, not policy-motivated.

That said, and while I agree there is a level of hypocrisy on display by the GOP demanding that the dems work with Trump, I hope the dems do work with Trump on his less asinine policy ideas. The rallying cry since the convention has been, "When they go low, we go high." Well, they went low for 8 years. Don't follow that by also going low. I went from voting for McCain in 2008 to voting for Hillary in 2016 and the 2 driving forces for me moving toward the dems were the social ideas of the GOP and their obstructionism of Obama. If the dems do the same thing to Trump just for the sake of doing it, it'll push me back in the opposite direction.

[cardsfan04]

My point to all of that isn't that Obama acted completely properly. I already acknowledged that some of his use of executive orders is contrary to checks and balances which is worthy of criticism. My point is just that there are opposing opinions to things that don't require somebody to be uninformed.

Difference of opinion is fine if you're on the right, but from the left if someone disagrees with you they're an abnormality - i.e. the CEO who told his workers the day after the election that if they supported Trump they should resign immediately.

It's not the quantity of executive orders, it's what they do. Obama using executive orders to push through his agenda that he can't get through Congress is against the Constitution - his "I have a phone and a pen" thing was infuriating. Passing his version of immigration policy this way was illegal. Conducting a $1.7 Billion ransom deal with Iran and then first denying it and then later only saying it was $400 million. There are many others. We have a Constitution and therefore we need a President who takes his oath seriously and abides by it.

The left likes to say the GOP obstructed him - well if everything Obama did was wrong why would they support any of it? So I don't see it as obstruction - I see it as checks and balances. Obama was never able to pull people together - instead he divided the nation and would double-down on his agenda to remake America into his vision. So of course the GOP said no. I honestly cannot think of a single accomplishment he ever had in office. And I do believe that in time history will show him as our worst president ever - even worse than Jimmy Carter.

-The CEO thing wasn't great, but it sounds worse than what it was. He wasn't saying that if you support Trump, you should look for another job. He was saying if you support misogyny, bigotry, etc., that you should look for another job. He could and should have expressed that idea apolitically though.

-I think calling his executive orders illegal is little more than rhetoric, but I agree with you in principle about his executive orders. I just think it goes deeper than that. Congress has an obligation to try to work with the president and that is a part of the equation.

-And they didn't just not work with him because all of his ideas are bad. Some of his accomplishments need improvement For example, Obamacare, for as great as much of it is, is funded in short-sighted ways. But, nobody in the GOP wants to talk about the 15 million new private sector jobs that have been created since he took office or that unemployment is below 5% or that the Dow and NASDAQ are at record highs. Nobody wants to talk about how health costs per capita have risen at a slower rate for the last 8 years than they had in any of the previous 30 years (I probably butchered the specifics of that some, but the idea is true).

[glen a richter]

The truth is Obamacare has been an unmitigated disaster for me. I have co-pays I never had before and my health plan now limits me to 5 chiropractic visits every 3 months which doesn't work because I have the back of a 90 year old in a 35 year old body. But, it also does work for a lot of people, those with pre-existing conditions and under 26's especially. It doesn't need repeal and replace, it needs tweaking so those who were fine before continue to be fine. All you really have to do is make it illegal for insurers to discriminate against people who are already sick or who are still living at home. Instead, we're going to get privatized health which will make rates absolutely skyrocket. Can't wait to see my co-pay that used to be $0 but is now $10 end up being $50. That's real swell for families with young children. Groovy.

[cardsfan04]

Obamacare has been ok for me. I was under 26 and without insurance when it rolled out. And, my premium has never gone over $100 in a month. Even next year it is staying exactly the same as it was this year.

My biggest thing with Obamacare isn't that I think it's working great. It needs improvement on the way it generates revenue to run. But, we're one of the most advanced and prosperous societies in the history of the world. If we can't find a way to make sure everybody has healthcare, that's a really big failure of our society. That's not to say that we should ignore the shortcomings of Obamacare. But, instead of, "Obamacare sucks, that's pie in the sky thinking," I wish we would hear more, "This is a good idea, but I think we can accomplish it better by ________." I'm not absolutely opposed to repealing and replacing it. If somebody comes up with a better system, I'm all ears. But, when I hear people talk about repealing and replacing it, I always envision it being replaced by a healthcare system that doesn't try to accomplish some of the things that I think our healthcare system should.

[glen a richter]

The problem was that the GOP was sending strictly repeal bills that they knew would never be signed, it was totally symbolic and totally a waste of time. The GOP is guilty of wasting an immense amount of time on nonsense that would never ever be signed by Obama. If you don't like something, propose alternatives and negotiate.