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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/04/2017 :  11:11:35   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
And now, Trump has decided to start quote mining.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/05/2017 :  19:40:00   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
The Toronto Star is keeping a sortable list of Trump lies, including the 19 he told during his speech about the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

And I forget who pointed it out first, but Trump called that accord "non-binding" and "draconian" in the very same sentence. Can't be both, dipwad.

Even worse have been his tweets about the latest London attacks, claiming they are the reason the US courts should approve his travel ban. By analogy, which is how Trump clearly wants us to think, because one attacker was a long-time resident of a London neighborhood, and another lived in Dublin, Ireland, Trump thinks his travel ban would prevent a guy from Adams Morgan and another from Dover, Delaware from driving a van into a crowd on the Mall in the middle of Washington, D.C. In other words, Trump wants us to think that his executive order would prevent U.S. citizens who are Muslims from freely traveling within the U.S. In still other words, Trump obviously thinks his EO bans Islam from the US. I'm not sure how it could happen legally, but this should dispel any idea that Trump's EOs were about anything other than banning a particular religion.

And that's taking Trump's Tweets at face value. If we look deeper, the reality is that he just doesn't give a rat's ass about where the London attackers were from, he just felt free to use the tragedy to whine and cry about how his political goals were being stymied.

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The Rat
SFN Regular

Canada
1370 Posts

Posted - 06/05/2017 :  19:57:24   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit The Rat's Homepage Send The Rat a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Dave W.
If we look deeper, the reality is that he just doesn't give a rat's ass about where the London attackers were from, he just felt free to use the tragedy to whine and cry about how his political goals were being stymied.


Because he doesn't give a rat's ass about anything but himself, and never has.


Bailey's second law; There is no relationship between the three virtues of intelligence, education, and wisdom.

You fiend! Never have I encountered such corrupt and foul-minded perversity! Have you ever considered a career in the Church? - The Bishop of Bath and Wells, Blackadder II

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/09/2017 :  10:58:58   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Meet President n00b.

Unfortunately, ignorance may be a positive defense against obstruction of justice.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/09/2017 :  20:28:48   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
And let us know how you really feel:
Trump does not remotely understand his role, status, and duties as President and Chief Executive, and this failure infects or undermines just about everything he does. It is an amazing state of affairs: A President of the United States who does not at all grasp the Office he occupies, and who thus entirely lacks the proper situation sense, or contextual knowledge, in which a President should exercise judgment or act. Let that sink in, and then imagine all of the decisions a President must make, all that he is responsible for. This reflection is the main reason why I have come to believe that the President does not deserve a presumption of regularity in his actions—not just by courts with respect to the immigration executive orders, but by the public more generally with respect to “everything the Executive does that touches, however lightly, the President.”
The "presumption of regularity" is an assumption that government officials act in good faith and that they think their actions are proper and legal. If you want to sue someone in the government, you have to refute this presumption - you need to show that they willfully and knowingly broke the law - or your lawsuit goes nowhere. What Jack Goldsmith and other lawyers all over the political spectrum are saying is that because Trump so often acts randomly and spitefully, seemingly in total ignorance of the gravitas of the Office he holds, we (and the courts) should NOT give him the presumption of regularity, thus erasing a ton of the burden from plaintiffs against him, and bringing normalcy to the skepticism that most of the rest of us have about his activities.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/10/2017 :  21:53:12   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Lack of Empathy Is Not the Problem:
In her fascinating recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the “empathy wall” and really try to understand the worldview of Trump voters—as she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in “Cancer Alley,” an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who don’t think they’re racist actually are so.

But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldn’t they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschild’s subjects complains that “liberal commentators” refer to people like him as a “redneck.” I’ve listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. “Feminazi” went straight from Rush Limbaugh’s mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschild’s most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preacher’s wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/28/2017 :  09:21:54   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Remember when Trump said he would renew America's standing in the world? Not so much:
A new poll from the Pew Research Center has found that Donald Trump's presidency is strongly and negatively impacting how the rest of the world views the United States.

At the end of Barack Obama's term, 64 percent of global respondents said they were confident in the U.S. president, compared to 22 percent now. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they have no confidence in Trump.

Compared to the final years of Obama's presidency, Trump received higher ratings in just two of the 37 countries surveyed – Russia and Israel.

Remember when Trump said that his replacement for Obamacare would include "insurance for everybody?" Apparently, Congress didn't get that message.

Speaking of the Republican health-care "plans," Vox has a cost comparison. Giving the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers the break that the Senate wants to give them will mean throwing 726 thousand people off Medicaid. Great job, Mitch!

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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular

Norway
1273 Posts

Posted - 06/30/2017 :  00:40:17   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send On fire for Christ a Private Message  Reply with Quote
I heard he complimented a woman on her smile the other day. This is worse than the holocaust.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/30/2017 :  17:53:46   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by On fire for Christ

I heard he complimented a woman on her smile the other day.
And since she wasn't getting paid to smile, it was inappropriate. When Trump interrupts a phone call with another head-of-state to compliment a male reporter for his smile, then you can claim it's not overtly sexist.

This is worse than the holocaust.
Said no feminist, ever.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/30/2017 :  17:58:15   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
I'm told that Alexandra Petri is a national treasure. I am ready to believe it:
I stand with my colleagues in Congress to say: The president’s tweet is beneath the dignity of the office.

This is not making America great.

The president has at last done the unthinkable: He has insulted a morning television personality in crude and ghastly terms and I must — in consequence of this hideous and vile breach of the dignity of the office — withdraw none of my support from his legislative agenda. (If you can call it a legislative agenda and not a ragtag collection of bad ideas quickly stapled together with a dead pigeon in the middle.)

His remark about Mika Brzezinski is absolutely shameful and I do not stand with him, except insofar as it is necessary to stand with him so that we can make sure infants get access to pesticides, as the Founders would have wished.

I am shocked and appalled by his behavior. And I am not afraid to say so. At a fundraiser. For him. Before asking for more donations.

Everything else the president has done is fine — the continued attacks on the media’s legitimacy, the carelessness toward history and diplomacy, the harmful rhetoric about Muslims, the — well, it is all fine. This is too much, though, and I am putting my foot down, here, on my way to vote against icebergs.

...

By God, this is not what George Washington would have wanted, and I am thus withdrawing my support for everything but the legislation Trump would like us to pass. His words are a shame, but it is too important that we end health insurance for indigent seniors in Ohio...
The rest is awesome, too.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 06/30/2017 :  21:33:28   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Oh, goody:
#65279; Four things happened yesterday that pose a grave danger to voting rights.

1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked...

2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them that “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act]” and asking how they plan to remove voters from the rolls. While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls. “Let’s be clear what this letter signals: DOJ Civil Rights is preparing to sue states to force them to trim their voting rolls,” tweeted Sam Bagenstos, the former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama administration. There’s a very long and recent history of Republican-controlled states’ purging their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways—for example, Florida’s disastrous purge of alleged ex-felons in 2000 could have cost Al Gore the election—and it’s especially serious when the Department of Justice forces them to do it.

3. The White House commission on election integrity, led by vice chair Kris Kobach, also sent a letter to 50 states asking them to provide sweeping voter data including... While Kobach asked for “publicly-available voter roll data,” much of this information, like someone’s Social Security number or military status, is, in fact, private. Never before has a White House asked for such broad data on voters, and it could be easily manipulated by Trump’s commission.

4. The Trump administration named Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the commission, who’s done more than anyone other than Kobach to spread the myth of voter fraud and enact suppressive policies. Von Spakovsky was special counsel to the Bush administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Brad Schlozman, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.”...

All four of these actions would be disturbing on their own, but taken together they represent an unprecedented attack on voting rights by the Trump administration and Republican Congress. The actions by Kobach, in particular, appear to mark the beginning of a nationwide voter-suppression campaign, based on spreading lies about voter fraud to justify enacting policies that purge the voter rolls, and make registration and voting more difficult.

Why does he want to do this? By making voter fraud seem rampant, he can build support for policies like requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which has blocked one in seven Kansans from registering since 2013. Nearly half of them are under 30...

Luckily, election officials from states including California, Kentucky, and Virginia have said they’ll refuse to comply with Kobach’s request, calling the commission “an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country” (Kentucky), “a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today” (California), and “a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts” (Virginia).

Let’s be clear what’s happening: Republicans have no desire to prevent another hack from Moscow, but they are dead set on limiting voting rights at home.
The bolded part is important. It's easy to come up with examples of 90-year-olds born out in the woods who don't have birth certificates and thus cannot perform the "easy" task of registering to vote under the unconstitutional voter-id laws, it's more difficult to get people to believe that a 25-year-old U.S. citizen can't come up with the proper documentation. Apparently, someone's done that work for us.

It is, of course, massively hypocritical for these asswads to wrap themselves in the flag, proclaim their love of the Constitution, and then work - and work hard - to deny U.S. citizens their right to vote.

But her emails...

By the way, here is one state's response to the request from point #3, above:
In the event I were to receive correspondence from the Commission requesting the following,
‘if publicly available under the laws of the state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information,’
My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.

Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our State’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”
You go, Mississippi!

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Kil
Evil Skeptic

USA
13476 Posts

Posted - 06/30/2017 :  22:16:02   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Kil's Homepage  Send Kil an AOL message  Send Kil a Yahoo! Message Send Kil a Private Message  Reply with Quote
States refuse Trump commission request for U.S. voter data

The request from commission Vice Chairman Kris Kobach caused a backlash in states including Virginia, Kentucky, California, New York and Massachusetts, where election officials said they would not provide all the data.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said on Thursday that handing over information would only serve to legitimize debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.

More than 20 states said they would not or could not provide some or all of the information requested, according to statements from election officials and media reports.

Some said certain data such as social security numbers were not publicly available and that they would turn over only public information. Others raised privacy concerns or questioned the need to examine voter fraud.


I suspect many more states will not comply.

Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 07/01/2017 :  07:55:26   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Kil

I suspect many more states will not comply.
As of yesterday afternoon, there were 27:
27 states now opposing Kobach: AZ, CA, CT, IN, KY, MA, MN, MS, MT, NC, NM, ND, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI
However, it's a little misleading. Arizona, Connecticut, Texas and Utah are sending data, but not including private info like Social Security numbers; they're just sending info that's already public.

Oh, and Muriel Bowser herself jumped in on that Twitter thread to say DC won't be sending any private data, either.

And Georgia won't send PII.

Of course, with states that voted for him now betraying him, Trump thinks they're guilty of something:
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
The man is clearly a fascist.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 07/01/2017 :  20:19:34   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
As of three hours ago:
16 states undecided on Kobach request according to @washingtonpost. ID, AZ, WY, NE, IA, IL, MI, LA, AL, FL, WV, NJ, DE, MD, HI, ME

24 states giving only limited public data to Kobach. WA OR NV CO UT MT ND TX OK KS AR MO WI IN OH PA NC SC GA NH VT RI CT AK

11 states, representing 97 million people, won't comply at all with Kobach voter data request. CA, NM, MN, NY, VA, MA, DC, SD, KY, TN, MS
Adds up to 51 because he includes DC, but I think DC is in the wrong category. According to Mayor Bowser's earlier Tweet, it should be in the "giving only limited public data" group.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 07/05/2017 :  09:34:08   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Seems that some Trump supporters think the reading of the Declaration of Independence is a symptom of NPR's bias:
But I guess this is where we’re at as a country. The nation’s most treasured texts are being interpreted as protests against the president. Which really makes you wonder what Trump supporters stand for. If the Declaration of Independence is now anti-American, what counts as patriotic?

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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