Yeah, that's the guy in the top spot, not the congress. The House and Senate do one stupid thing after another. How much time did they waste on show votes to appeal the Affordable Health Care act?
Too damn much. They should have realized that the only way to sway public opinion against Obamacare was to let it inevitably fail. Their opposition was on record. There was no purpose in pushing the issue beyond grandstanding to people who already agreed with them.
Yeah. That's why I'm currently registered Green. ... Gonna need to fix that. Jill Stein is bat*squee!* crazy.
Those opportunists did an about-face on this after facing backlash: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38499284
Sounds good, but I think people should be prepared for things like this being the norm. Just like with the Net Neutrality and Surveillance (SOPA, PIPA etc) bills, they'll keep trying to get things their way.
They played a historically progressive role by smashing the Confederacy in 1865. But that was an entirely different era. The truth of the matter is that bourgeois oligarchs will usually find a way to get away with corruption regardless if an "Independent Ethics Office" exists or not. Hell, lobbying in itself is legalized corruption. Opportunistic pandering will also continue across the board, given that the Republicans have no mandate (2016 had the lowest voter turnout since 1996, Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of around 2.8 million ballots...in spite of the DNC's corruption, most of those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, etc.).
If we went by the popular vote, the election would be decided solely by densely-populated urban areas. Entire regions would find their votes cancelled out by a single county in California. That's why the electoral college exists.
We are dealing with artless, self-serving hypocrisy here. Previously in this thread, you were complaining about how the actions of the Supreme Court violated the "civil rights of the majority". Essentially, not subjecting things to a popular vote was decried as "wrong," and it was implied that America wasn't supposed to work that way. Yet, when the "civil rights of the majority" are arrayed against you, we see an apologia offered for an entirely contradictory stance. There's no principled stance on whether a majority decides or not. We are simply dealing with thinly veiled interests.
The majority I was talking about then was the 83% of Americans who are Christian, and are being overlooked in favor of a single digit minority. Like I said before, that isn't how America is supposed to work. In this situation, the electoral college IS how America is supposed to work. It was put into place by men a lot smarter than you or me, to ensure that every citizen has a say in the election, not just those in big cities. Oh, and my interests aren't thinly-veiled. They're actually pretty obvious.
And once again, we are dealing with the same crass hypocrisy. Appeals to something like majority rule (Trump has the lowest approval rating of any incoming president in decades) or the "letter of the law" (this contention about "83% of Americans" is in flagrant violation of US law) are only made when they suit your interests (anti-intellectualism, keeping workers at rock bottom wages/benefits, xenophobia, racism, etc.). Contradicting yourself and "backing" it with crass anti-intellectualism is on the order of the day. Your interests have always been obvious to me, but you do have a history of trying to veil them with special pleading, logical inconsistencies, argumentum ad hominem, etc. I don't see you openly stating such interests point blank. Of course, Donald Trump himself derided the Electoral College (a remnant of slavery that gives disproportionate electoral representation to more sparsely populated areas of the United States) in 2012. Now he sings paeans to it, as it suits his interests. Of course, if Hillary Clinton ended up winning the electoral vote and losing the popular vote by around 2.8 million, both of you would be singing a very different tune! Every person having a say in a presidential election? That could only be guaranteed by the principle of "one person, one vote," not an antiquated system with its roots in American slavery deliberately set up to give disproportionate electoral clout to sparsely populated areas (and the 538 electors aren't even legally bound to vote for the candidate that ostensibly won their support; no president in US history has been directly elected by the population).
Trump trusts a man who is wanted hiding from facing rape and sexual assault charges more than he trusts the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. We are doomed. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ump-julian-assange-russia-wikileaks/96146350/ What Julian Assange is accused of: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange-sweden
I'm gonna need you ignorant mother*squee!*ers to stop calling me a racist before this gets *squee!*ing ugly.
Come now, this is no place for name calling, or threats. I'm sorry for initialising the political discussion in here. I would. The three letter agencies have lying as a job description basically. I do think Assange is being big-headed, having quite the ego. Like the time he announced he'd livestream some crippling info on the election, but if I recall correctly, it didn't lead to much.
It should be no problem to refute what has been said if it has no basis in fact (you even admit to "struggling" with racism in the "Speak What's On Your Mind" thread). Perhaps you should stop using ad hominem fallacies against us, in addition to denigrating Mexicans, Muslims, and such (and this often effectively goes hand-in-hand with resentment against Arabs, Somalis). Fears of being extradited to the US in the event of facing the charges probably play a key role in this hiding. And regardless of how accurate any findings of the CIA may be, that organization has a long history of interfering in the affairs of foreign countries (such people have a history of propping up right-wing dictators). The accusations of Russian interference in the US electoral process are hypocritical, to put it mildly. And we still have the thorny issue of the DNC being caught red-handed rigging a primary.
