Republicans: continued

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Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Wed Mar 13, 2019 2:16 am

Mitch McConnel giving up on his noble libertarian mission to end entitlements forever?
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
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Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Thu Mar 14, 2019 12:28 am

Accepting the moron
The political phenomenon of conservative populism has created a demand for philosophical treatises to justify it. The conservative intelligentsia has been engaged in a comic process of backfilling in high-minded arguments to support the rise of Trump. The pro-Trump media is dominated by lowbrow right-wing infotainment, like Fox News and Breitbart — media that are simple and accessible enough for Trump himself to enjoy.

But the vast apparatus of conservative intellectuals also needs essays and lectures pitched at a higher level, in order to sustain its own sense of elitism. There’s no need to raise millions of dollars for think tanks and endowed chairs if the party’s thought process begins and ends with Sean Hannity’s sock-puppet routine. The Journal of American Greatness was founded in 2016 for this specific purpose — defining a populist conservatism that would resemble whatever it is Trump is trying to do.

The right has put its finest minds to the task of turning its irritable mental gestures into something resembling ideas. Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, delivered a lecture at the Manhattan Institute that was adapted for publication in the City Journal. Its theme, implicitly rebuking conservatives who might feel some discomfort with Trump’s vulgarity and open bigotry, was that conservatives have always made common cause with populists. Trump has declared, “I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Berkowitz restates Trump’s ethos more elegantly. “Conservatives have tended to recognize the unruliness of the passions and the limits of reason. They believe that recondite reflection and abstract theory tend to obscure practical matters; as a guide to politics, conservatives strongly prefer experience and practical wisdom,” he argues. “Burke allied with the people against ‘the political men of letters’ — the progressive public intellectuals of his day.”
Apparently this innate distrust of elites is why conservatives should accept and even welcome a leader of the free world who has been described in the following terms by his own appointees: “Fucking moron” (Rex Tillerson), an “idiot” (John Kelly, John Dowd), a “dope” (H.R. McMaster), “dumb as shit” (Gary Cohn) with the comprehension level of “a fifth- or sixth-grader” (James Mattis), or “an 11-year-old-child” (Steve Bannon). A president with an attention span so minuscule his aides have to use large-type placards festooned with brief slogans and colorful graphics, it seems, is the worthy heir to Sir Edmund Burke himself.

Berkowitz builds his essay on the premise that the working class has become disaffected with “an imperious ruling elite.” Yet he offers nothing in the way of substance to flesh it out, gesturing only at familiar bromides (“individual freedom, limited government, free markets, robust civil society, and a strong America in the international arena”) as the eternal course.

He fails to acknowledge Trump won these voters in large part by distancing himself from the right, promising universal health care, lower prescription-drug prices, cracking down on Wall Street, ending the carried-interest loophole, and other ideologically unorthodox moves. But he has abandoned all these ideas in favor of a rehash of George W. Bush’s domestic agenda. This has helped persuade Republican legislators to overlook his misconduct, but taken a toll on Trump’s popularity.

The populist promises that set Trump apart during both the primary and the general election have simply failed to materialize. Trump’s budget, which proposes cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that he had famously pledged to oppose, is the latest evidence that he has simply defaulted to traditional movement conservatism.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ ... ulism.html
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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L'Emmerdeur
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Fri Mar 15, 2019 6:38 am

Blithering dope:

Image

Months of investigation, not only by the FBI but by his fellow congresscritters, yet he says the matter should be examined once again. Lindsey Graham is a walking caricature of a partisan stooge of the lowest calibre.

'Lindsey Graham: Don’t Make Mueller Report Public Without Setting Up Special Counsel to Probe Hillary’s Emails'
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Thursday that he could not back a congressional effort to make special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report public unless lawmakers tasked an entirely new special counsel with probing the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, among other things.

On Thursday morning, the House passed—without a single no vote—a nonbinding resolution to make the Mueller report public.

Hours later, Graham went to the floor aiming to file an amendment to the version the Senate would take up. It called for Attorney General William Barr to appoint a new special counsel to investigate “misconduct” in the Department of Justice over the email investigation and the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page, a former aide to the Trump campaign.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Mar 15, 2019 7:01 am

Well the Russians are quite open about hacking. Might sound familiar to certain members here:

Russia-Trump troll suspect defends internet job
A Russian computer expert accused of meddling in the US 2016 presidential election says he simply did ordinary IT work, not political trolling.

Sergei Polozov is among 13 Russians named in the Mueller indictment, which alleges a systematic Russian state effort to influence US voters.

Mr Polozov told BBC Russian he knew nothing about a Russian "troll farm" called the Internet Research Agency.

The agency's alleged location, he said, was a business centre he had visited.

"My job was typical of co-operation between an IT company and any subcontractor: you are set a task, for example, to create a website, a visiting card, a web page."

None of those tasks, he stressed, involved use of the English language or targets in the US.

'Active patriot'

He said he had collaborated with workers at Savushkina 55, the St Petersburg address alleged to have been the nerve centre of Russian cyber-meddling in the US election, ahead of Donald Trump's victory.


Mr Polozov admitted having done tasks for Mikhail Burchik, another name on US Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment.

But he did not give details of his help for the St Petersburg "business centre". None of the other named Russian suspects has spoken to the BBC at length.
Nice one.
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Mar 15, 2019 7:05 am

The tactics of a Russian troll farm
The indictment of 13 Russians charged with attempting to manipulate American voters using social media shines a fascinating light on a sophisticated, relentless operation to exploit the internet for political gain. Here's how US investigators say the Russians did it.

It was 2014, and in a building in St Petersburg, the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) was already hard at work building its arsenal to take on US politics.

According to US prosecutors, the IRA had gathered stolen identities of real Americans, and a formidable encyclopaedia of what "works" on social media when it comes to riling up Americans talking about politics. Two members of the agency were said to have travelled to the US to gather more intelligence, a fact-finding tour taking in nine states, according to investigators.

Back on Russian soil, the IRA began posing online as US volunteers in order to gather tips on how to effectively target voters. One real volunteer, based in Texas, told the Russians to aim for the "purple states" - those where the race was going to be tighter. And so they did, prosecutors say.

By 2016, operations had ramped up as the presidential election drew near. The IRA is alleged to have had a budget of more than a million dollars, and the US now claims they used it to buy advertising on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

In the process, the IRA is said to have built up a list of more than 100 real Americans who it had contacted for help in organising these real-world efforts - none of them aware they were puppets in a most audacious Russian campaign. A campaign that, as far as we know, is very much ongoing.
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Fri Mar 15, 2019 5:18 pm

https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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L'Emmerdeur
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Tue Mar 19, 2019 3:42 am

Steve King keeping his hand in.

'GOP congressman fantasizes about killing liberals in new civil war'
Just days after a white supremacist murdered 50 Muslims in New Zealand with a gun, the openly white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) decided it would be a good time to share a meme celebrating gun violence and fantasizing about a second civil war in America.

On Saturday, King posted an image to his Facebook page depicting U.S. “red states” and “blue states” arranged into the form of two human figures fighting each other (with the red one punching the blue one in the gut).

“Folks keep talking about another civil war,” the caption read. “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

King posted the meme with his own comment: “Wonder which side would win….” and added a winking emoji. (King seems not to have noticed that his own state of Iowa was included in the losing “blue state” part of the meme.)



...

King has repeatedly expressed sympathy with neo-Nazis and white supremacist movements in Europe, yet he remained a member of the GOP caucus in good standing for many years.

It wasn’t until recently — when King made his bigotry too obvious to ignore by telling the New York Times that he didn’t understand why white nationalism or white supremacy are controversial — that his party reluctantly took action against him by stripping him of his House committee assignments.

You might think that after this rebuke, King might lay low for a while and avoid inciting violence or reminding people of his racist hatred.

You would be wrong.
The Facebook post was subsequently taken down, perhaps after it was pointed out to King that his state was on the losing side in the meme.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by JimC » Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:16 am

I'm sure he'd love to chat with our politician arsehole, Fraser Anning...
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Tue Mar 19, 2019 11:56 am

voting is socialist.jpg
voting is socialist.jpg (60.07 KiB) Viewed 2191 times
Voting is socialist! the same people resist a national ID such as a social security card with a picture. because the government will come after your guns.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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L'Emmerdeur
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:04 am

Elsewhere, Tero mentioned the idiotic lawsuit brought by Representative Devin Nunes against Twitter for allowing two parody accounts (@DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow) to mock him. He's managed to get Devin Nunes Cow from around 2,000 followers to over 500,000--far more than his own account has.

'Devin Nunes’ Cow Clocks 500K Twitter Followers, Stampeding Congressman, After $250M Lawsuit'
Two days after California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes sued Twitter and two parody accounts for $250 million for being mean to him, the number of people following one of those accounts, Devin Nunes’ Cow, skyrocketed, hitting 500K Wednesday night, stomping on the congressman’s own Twitter account.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Joe » Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:11 am

L'Emmerdeur wrote:
Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:04 am
Elsewhere, Tero mentioned the idiotic lawsuit brought by Representative Devin Nunes against Twitter for allowing two parody accounts (@DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow) to mock him. He's managed to get Devin Nunes Cow from around 2,000 followers to over 500,000--far more than his own account has.

'Devin Nunes’ Cow Clocks 500K Twitter Followers, Stampeding Congressman, After $250M Lawsuit'
Two days after California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes sued Twitter and two parody accounts for $250 million for being mean to him, the number of people following one of those accounts, Devin Nunes’ Cow, skyrocketed, hitting 500K Wednesday night, stomping on the congressman’s own Twitter account.
It's ridiculous, but slightly ominous that a congressman would abuse the legal system in this way. I hope a judge tosses the suit and orders him to pay all of the defendant's legal costs.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
"Wisdom requires a flexible mind." - Dan Carlin
"If you vote for idiots, idiots will run the country." - Dr. Kori Schake

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:02 am

Nunes is a gibbering goober of the first order, and this lawsuit could be seen as his homage to the habitually litigious Trump. Twitter can afford to defend itself and will almost certainly succeed in having the case summarily dismissed, but I expect that Nunes already sees himself as covered in glory for his brave stand against the evil libtards.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Joe » Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:18 am

L'Emmerdeur wrote:
Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:02 am
Nunes is a gibbering goober of the first order, and this lawsuit could be seen as his homage to the habitually litigious Trump. Twitter can afford to defend itself and will almost certainly succeed in having the case summarily dismissed, but I expect that Nunes already sees himself as covered in glory for his brave stand against the evil libtards.
Yes, Twitter is big and can afford lawyers, but not everybody can. Nunes is a joke, but SLAPP suits aren't, and this has the aroma of one..
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
"Wisdom requires a flexible mind." - Dan Carlin
"If you vote for idiots, idiots will run the country." - Dr. Kori Schake

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Mar 21, 2019 5:13 am

I think that it's been obvious for at least the last few years that Nunes doesn't give much of a shit about ethics or respecting the rule of law: His toadying for Trump by interfering with a congressional committee investigation from which he had supposedly withdrawn, as well as his attempting to stick his nose into the Mueller investigation are only a couple of the more blatant examples.

Virginia (the jurisdiction in which Nunes filed his suit) has an anti-SLAPP law, one of the provisions of which is that defendants can recover attorney fees if the suit in question is dismissed under the law. I expect that Twitter and the private defendants will be availing themselves of that provision. It seems possible, even likely that Nunes will end up forking over some cash for this stunt, and the bill may be expensive because Virginia's anti-SLAPP law doesn't provide a route for immediate dismissal. There's a long article about the suit on techdirt.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Joe » Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:09 pm

Yes, I'm aware of anti-SLAPP laws, after all I read the article I linked to.

However, with having to respond to filings and motions, the cost is immediate whereas recompense is uncertain and somewhere down the road. It's stressful and intimidating to be sued by someone with deep pockets and access to the best lawyers, and the plaintiff being a Congressman doesn't help.

Moreover, I don't see eventually having to pay defendant legal costs as much of a deterrent to someone who is backed by conservative donors.

Look, I take your point that Nunes is a capering fool, and likely a useful idiot for the Russians, but can you see my concern that this might set a precedent for more serious retaliation by our elected officials?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
"Wisdom requires a flexible mind." - Dan Carlin
"If you vote for idiots, idiots will run the country." - Dr. Kori Schake

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