Forum Replies Created
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Government employees not in military service are private citizens. Same for contractors and subcontractors to the federal government. The numerous laws Hildabeast broke most certainly do apply to those private citizens. Comey ended his infamous speech by threatening other employees not to expect to get away with what Hildabeast did.
Its clear to me you do not know the first thing about this topic. You seem to be equating these employees with members of the press or the butcher shop owner or w’s infamous dry cleaner. Don’t.
We’ve been through this before. Yes, I know the topic, very, very well, and stop with the personal shots.
When I say “private citizens,” I’m not talking about government employees, at all. Any of them, in any capacity. I’m referring to workers outside the government, in the private sector. No one outside government would be subjected to what Clinton faced, if they had done the same, exact thing.
And Comey said she didn’t break any laws, in this case. He would have indicted her if she had.
If you want to discuss what she did in other realms, like wars, the surveillance state, economic imperialism and so on, that’s more than fine. Very few right-wingers will go there, because they tend to approve of the above, and they also likely know their own party is at least equally complicit.
The email server thing is nothing more than a faux-scandal, a tempest in a teacup, dredged up out of nothing to avoid the really tough investigations that would expose both parties.
I Getting “the church” to go along with this work-shaming was a major stroke of genius, of course, and much more effective than the original attempts at work-shaming.
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Yeah, the Major-Superstition, and the Education-indoctrination systems
work hand in hand. As well as the other corporotacracy-sub-systems.…there’s a reason the anarchists and commies burned the churches
during the Spanish civil war. Turned out to be bad strategy though.
I think Cornell West knows that. He brings the anti-capitalist message along with a liberation-theology… Thats probly necessary given the religious-facts-on-the-ground…I heard Obama on my car radio saying “there are no black Americans or white Americans..there’s only Americunz…”
I thot to myself, well he’s sellin that to white people. Cuz, thats
a hard sell to non-whites, given the history of racism…w
vWV, that’s a really concise way of putting it. Something I have trouble with meself.
;>)
Cornel West is one of a kind. I like the way he brings up the “Black Prophetic Tradition” and makes that work. He’s answering the right’s ugly exploitation of religion with his own, actually positive form. To be overly reductive for a moment: The right concentrates on the heavily authoritarian aspects of religious texts — which do dominate — while West and others like him concentrate on love and the empathic portions. I think he has the tougher job of it, because love can be much harder to sell than power, revenge and obedience. But, as you say, it may be one of the most effective ways to get the anti-capitalist message out there and make it stick.
And we need that more than ever.
So, again . . . the perfect storm. Anger, frustration, fear of losing their own jobs to black and brown people . . . poor whites, extremely vulnerable to the new economic realities . . . must of have looked around for someone to blame and someone to feel superior to. The ruling class felt superior to all of them, of course — white, brown and black, along with women.
This all eventually became institutionalized, naturalized, into a virtual caste system which was also supported by church and state.
We are still trying to break free from this, but the forces of white backlash and religious backlash are fighting like wounded animals to prevent any emancipation from these old caste fictions.
I wish I could live long enough to see us break free, but I don’t think there is even the remotest chance of that. Hopefully the millennials will finish the “job.”
I’m just hoping that we don’t end up with a third party alternative that will draw enough votes away from Hillary to give The Donald the election a la Ralph “unsafe at any speed” Nader.
TSRF,
I agree with so much of what you say on the Huddle. And I greatly respect your passion. But I think you should research Nader’s impact on the election a bit further.
From my own research, it’s more than clear that he had nothing whatsoever to do with Bush winning. And our election process just doesn’t work that way, anyway. There is no decisive state. There can’t be. Because the electoral college works on a collective basis. Gore only won 20 states; Bush 30. The electoral college ended up being 271 to 266. Take any of the states Bush won and flip them, Gore wins. He can keep Florida and he (Bush) still loses.
Beyond that, Nader, based on exit polls in Florida, took away, perhaps, 24,000 potential Gore voters, but 308,000 Dems voted for Bush. If just 250 had switched their votes from Bush to Gore, Gore would have won Florida.
As in, if we play the counterfactual game, we can’t cherry pick. We would have to look at every state Gore lost, every state Bush won, and look for things that could have flipped the results. To me, blaming Nader is just all too convenient for Dem partisans — not saying you are one — because it takes their own voting patterns off the hook, their own poor campaigning, their own inability to close the deal.
Gore lost his own state of Tennessee. If he had won that state, he would have had enough electoral points to win the election. But, again, it’s the total accumulation. No one state can be decisive. So no third party run can be, either.
Trump’s plan removes over 50% of the households from paying the tax. That helps working people a great deal.
Trump’s tax plan helps Trump and people like him a hell of a lot more than it helps working people. As in, millions of dollars more per person in the millionaire and billionaire class. Why not just cut taxes on people in the working class? Why extend that to millionaires and billionaires? They’ve already gobbled up the vast majority of all tax cuts since 1964.
That’s a drop of 91% down to 25%, since that time. Working people have seen a tiny fraction of that drop and, obviously, since they don’t make but a tiny fraction as much to begin with, any tax cut for them is a fraction of a fraction as much in total dollars.
Trump is lying to his supporters and scamming them for his own personal benefit.
Well, I have to take some of that back. I’m doing the test right now, and it must not be the same one I remember. Might not have clicked on the correct link. Or they may have changed it recently.
It’s still okay, but a lot shorter, and doesn’t seem to have any extended options. The one I remember did.
Anyway, no biggie.
You are using material that was deliberately misconstrued for political gain. I’m not saying you did the work. I’m saying your sources did.
Okay. I appreciate the clarification. Thanks.
But my sources show full video and audio, plus complete transcripts. Sometimes those sources are just the TV networks. As in, I watched him say these things, live, and then saw them again on news broadcasts. These are just his own words, from his own mouth. From his own speeches and rallies. Are you saying that the video and audio and transcripts of those speeches and rallies, delivered in full, are somehow altered before we see them on the TV, or hear them on the radio, etc?
Or that his proposals on his own website, like this one for taxation, are altered for political gain:
If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each.
All other Americans will get a simpler tax code with four brackets – 0%, 10%, 20% and 25% – instead of the current seven. This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II.No business of any size, from a Fortune 500 to a mom and pop shop to a freelancer living job to job, will pay more than 15% of their business income in taxes. This lower rate makes corporate inversions unnecessary by making America’s tax rate one of the best in the world.
No family will have to pay the death tax. You earned and saved that money for your family, not the government. You paid taxes on it when you earned it.
Look closely at his tax proposal. That massive cut in the top rate — from 39.6% to 25% — will add tens of millions to his own bank account, as will the end of the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates larger than 5.4 million.
And the part I bolded and italicized about business taxes? That is, at best, disingenuous. Businesses aren’t taxed on their income. They’re taxed on their profits. A huge difference.
Also, with his massive tax cuts for businesses, huge estates, capital gains, and so on, how on earth will he balance the budget as promised in eight years? Every credible economist says he will actually blow up the deficit and add at least 10 trillion more to the debt, from his tax plan alone.
I’ve now completed the first two seasons, and am well into Season Three. The ability to watch back to back episodes is addictive — and really bad for my time management.
Just finished an episode with one of the best dialogues between Littlefinger and Varys. Video of scene follows. Trigger warning, just in case: One of the images especially is very graphic and unsettling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRS8a8HjqFs
Lord Varys: I did what I did for the good of the realm.
Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It’s the thousand blades of Aegon’s enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it’s a lie.
Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.
Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish: Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
I know those are just estimates, and that the political figures cited didn’t actually take the test . . . But Sanders and Stein seem off to me.
I base that on several factors. But, perhaps the biggest tell: I’ve frequented another political forum for years. Most of its regulars are “liberals,” and I’ve been jousting with them — and with conservatives there — for awhile. Not long ago I managed to persuade about a dozen to take the political compass test. The basic range for liberals there was/is in the minus 4s and 5s, up into the minus 6s. In recent weeks, many of same posters who scored as high as the minus 6 range have come down fairly hard against Sanders, and for Clinton, and mostly because they see Sanders as “extreme” — and complain endlessly about his supporters, too. They see Stein as even more “extreme.” A few of them see me as far more extreme than either of them, of course.
;>)
Anyway . . . to make a long story short. If mainstream liberals chart roughly halfway over and halfway down (within the left-bottom quadrant), then I think it’s fair to assume Sanders and Stein would score at least as well, if not better — with Stein further left and further down than Sanders. Sanders, while advocating for Social Democratic or FDR-New-dealish policies, does identify as “democratic socialist.” I’d say Stein is a bit to his left. But that’s really a guess.
No way to know for sure, until they actually take the test, which is doubtful — and we’d never know about it anyway. But I don’t think that’s a good charting for them.
