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SkyDekker

The US is a Banana Republic

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6 hours ago, richravizza said:

Damn dude, why so glum, other than Saul Alinsky's disenfranchised we're doing pretty good.So when was the last time you were south of the US border?

I drive across the border to deliver freight in the midwest about 4 times a month. America is awesome. Don't let the Orange One mess it up for you. He is making it clear that nothing else matters but his pride and self esteem. He will set you against each other and light the nation on fire if he can in order to prevail. Your debt levels are now at a level not seen since the end of the Great Patriotic War. And I pay attention because you are so freaking heavy that when you roll over you will crush us.

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On 8/27/2020 at 10:08 PM, wmw999 said:

There’s that whole statute of limitations thing. Also the benefit-worth-the-cost thing. 
It’s kind of like saying you’ll spend whatever it takes to catch every lady welfare cheat. Program cost: 5 billion. Enforcement cost: 10 billion. But at least we punish people. 
Kanye is a musical and business genius, who is mentally ill and a political joke. 
Wendy P. 

There is no concept of benefit versus cost. Just look to all the individual freedom loving, pro small government "conservatives" that would love to enforce mandatory drug testing for state aid recipients.

They would gleefully spend millions to take a few 100k of benefits away from people. 

 

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12 hours ago, richravizza said:

It's a direct retort to the title of your thread. Canadian educated? 

Try taking it slow, digest one sentence at a time, it might help your condition of moral superiority. 

Here's some of that skin I was talking about, and the left owns it all.

 

 

You are showing images from Trump's America and blame it on the left.....American educated?

And I would love to go through your "statement" one sentence at a time. There is only one problem, there isn't really a normal sentence in the whole thing.

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8 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

You are showing images from Trump's America and blame it on the left.....American educated?

And I would love to go through your "statement" one sentence at a time. There is only one problem, there isn't really a normal sentence in the whole thing.

I think he may be another one of those special Americans who have a disregard for facts but an affinity for “feels”.

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11 hours ago, richravizza said:

Bill don't let emotions get the better of you, tit for tat and all that.

Given that I am answering a post that includes  "stink'n  think'n"  "intellectual dishonesty "aggro arrogance"  "mental masturbation" "your bitter"  "regressive Dictatorship"  "A fool and his money" - that's some funny stuff right there.

If you look at it objectively, right wing terrorism is a far bigger problem in the US than left wing rioters.  I suspect that even you would prefer your store to be vandalized than to be killed.

"Both are bad!" - Absolutely.  For the solution to that I refer to a guy who was a lot better at this than I could ever be:

"It is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention."

So there's your answer - if you want one.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/08/republicans-have-insufficient-evidence-call-elections-rigged-fraudulent/

September 8, 2020 at 5:12 p.m. CDT
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Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican,  practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice.

 

The only hitch is that the candidate is President Trump.

. . .

The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage. And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.

. . .

These are painful conclusions for me to reach. Before retiring from law practice last month, I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches. I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests. I served as counsel to all three Republican national party committees and represented four of the past six Republican presidential nominees (including, through my law firm, Trump 2020).

Each Election Day since 1984, I’ve been in precincts looking for voting violations, or in Washington helping run the nationwide GOP Election Day operations, overseeing the thousands of Republican lawyers and operatives each election on alert for voting fraud. In every election, Republicans have been in polling places and vote tabulation centers. Republican lawyers in every state have been able to examine mail-in/absentee ballot programs.

The president has said that “the only way we can lose … is if cheating goes on.” He has asserted that mail-in voting is “very dangerous” and that “there is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality.”

The lack of evidence renders these claims unsustainable. The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.

The Trump 2016 campaign, of which I was not a part, could produce no hard evidence of systemic fraud. Trump established a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to expose all the fraud he maintains permeates our elections. He named the most vociferous hunters of Democratic election fraud to run the commission. It disbanded without finding anything.

The Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database has compiled every instance of any kind of voter fraud it could find since 1982. It contains 1,296 incidents, a minuscule percentage of the votes cast. A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots, a practice at the apex of the president’s outrage, found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.

 

etc.

 

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22 hours ago, kallend said:

 

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/08/republicans-have-insufficient-evidence-call-elections-rigged-fraudulent/

September 8, 2020 at 5:12 p.m. CDT
Add to list

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican,  practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration.....

Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice.....

etc.

Facts, facts,facts. Never penetrate the consciousness of trump supporters.

Instead its lie... repeat lie, lie... repeat lie, lie... repeat lie.

spacer.png

lie becomes fact.

Edited by Phil1111

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5 hours ago, wmw999 said:

Interesting that the very term Banana Republic comes from US corporate/government exploitation of single-resource countries. It’s what made America great the first time 9_9

Wendy P. 

I know thats tongue and cheek. America was made great by the Marshall Plan, its foreign aid programs and contrary to trump. It will shed its banana skin once he's gone.

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17 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

I know thats tongue and cheek. America was made great by the Marshall Plan, its foreign aid programs and contrary to trump. It will shed its banana skin once he's gone.

Not really. The US has a LONG history of installing tyrannical despots in countries, and then supporting them despite those despots having zero respect for all of those 'liberties we hold dear'.

Some of those despots were installed and supported because we didn't like the party that was actually winning the elections (Iran in '53, Chile in '75).
Others were put in place and kept there because US corporations wanted them there.

The United Fruit Company got the US government to depose the democratically elected government in Guatemala to get a government more in line with it's wishes installed.

The US supported Batista in Cuba, Somosa in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philipines, the list is pretty long. One reason the Soviets & communists did so well in expanding their influence in the 60s & 70s was because they pretended to offer a better deal than the US. Of course, Castro in Cuba and Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua weren't any better.
And this wasn't exclusive to the US. The Soviets did well in post colonial Africa and eastern Asia for the exact same reasons.

And while it's not a huge part of what 'made America great', it is one reason American companies have such worldwide presence.

I hope you are right that we'll return to things like the rule of law, and that sort of thing once Trump is gone. But I'm not sure. Trump didn't create the rampant racism and xenophobia we're seeing now. He just tapped into it. He didn't create the blatant abuses of power we see McConnell and the R Senate employing. He just gave them more latitude.

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1 hour ago, wolfriverjoe said:

Not really. The US has a LONG history of installing tyrannical despots in countries, and then supporting them despite those despots having zero respect for all of those 'liberties we hold dear'.

Some of those despots were installed and supported because we didn't like the party that was actually winning the elections (Iran in '53, Chile in '75).
Others were put in place and kept there because US corporations wanted them there.

The United Fruit Company got the US government to depose the democratically elected government in Guatemala to get a government more in line with it's wishes installed.

The US supported Batista in Cuba, Somosa in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philipines, the list is pretty long. One reason the Soviets & communists did so well in expanding their influence in the 60s & 70s was because they pretended to offer a better deal than the US. Of course, Castro in Cuba and Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua weren't any better.
And this wasn't exclusive to the US. The Soviets did well in post colonial Africa and eastern Asia for the exact same reasons.

And while it's not a huge part of what 'made America great', it is one reason American companies have such worldwide presence.

I hope you are right that we'll return to things like the rule of law, and that sort of thing once Trump is gone. But I'm not sure. Trump didn't create the rampant racism and xenophobia we're seeing now. He just tapped into it. He didn't create the blatant abuses of power we see McConnell and the R Senate employing. He just gave them more latitude.

The old colonial powers, France, UK... Britain, Spain, then later China, the USSR-then Russia also did that.

The latest, blessed by trump of course: Trump held off sanctioning Chinese over Uighurs to pursue trade deal

Trump backed Xi over concentration camps for Uighur Muslims, ex-aide Bolton claims

"Donald Trump told the Chinese president Xi Jinping that building concentration camps to "re-educate" Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang was the right thing to do," For which I'd say which is worse the Chinese communist party or the trump/GOP party.

Dis i say latest, my mistake:

Trump’s Israel-Palestine “peace plan” is a con. The proposal destroys the prospects for any real deal and brings Israel meaningfully closer to “apartheid.”

"So if the “peace plan” isn’t a peace plan, then what is it?

First, it’s an effort to help Netanyahu, a staunch Trump ally, in advance of tightly contested March elections in Israel. The release of a plan so tilted to Israeli priorities helps the right-wing prime minister sell himself as the man best positioned to handle the vital US-Israel relationship. And it doesn’t seem like an accident that the plan was released on the same day that Israel’s attorney general formally indicted Netanyahu on bribery and corruption charges."

 

Edited by Phil1111

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On 9/10/2020 at 6:51 PM, wolfriverjoe said:

Not really. ...

I hope you are right that we'll return to things like the rule of law, and that sort of thing once Trump is gone. But I'm not sure. Trump didn't create the rampant racism and xenophobia we're seeing now. He just tapped into it. He didn't create the blatant abuses of power we see McConnell and the R Senate employing. He just gave them more latitude.

‘Donald Trump's Day Is Coming And The Courts Got His Number’

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1 hour ago, turtlespeed said:

You do realize that Pelosi does the same things Mcconnell does, right?

Do you give that a pass, while condemning the other?

Just for fun, tell us the number of bills passed by the House this session that have been taken up by McConnell.

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2 hours ago, jakee said:

I can't see any other way to interpret this post other than you are saying everything McConnell does is right. But you claim to be a centreist. WTF, bro?

Lots of bogus, absurd  claims come from that side.  It's all they have.
 

 

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On 9/12/2020 at 1:10 PM, jakee said:

I can't see any other way to interpret this post other than you are saying everything McConnell does is right. But you claim to be a centreist. WTF, bro?

and he's not voting for trump either! IMO trump's barrage of lies has had some sort of hypnotic effect on his clan. At least Ron is honest about voting for trump.

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From CNN: "

While many Americans were looking ahead to the final presidential debate earlier this week, President Donald Trump was signing an executive order the likes of which has never been seen in a democracy. It is an edict expected under a dictatorship, a banana republic or a military regime. And it appears to stifle the President's opponents within the government, posing a particular danger should it affect policymakers who are working tirelessly to fight the Covid-19 epidemic

Under the order, which undermines the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act — a law that came into effect in 1883 to ensure government employees were hired based on merit and protected from political retribution — an estimated 100,000 or more will see their jobs reclassified from "competitive service" to "excepted service."
 
One really hopes that this election , while it may not prevent the above, is won by such a landslide by Biden, that he can quickly undo some of the damage that Trump has done, without being hamstrung by Congress.
 
(Bolding mine)

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The discussion about whether government employment should be based on a spoils system or a civil service was a huge topic of debate in the US in the late 19th century. We've had a strong civil service pretty much since then. I hadn't heard this, and am not happy with it, but unfortunately other than voting there's not much I can do. Just being pissed off about it doesn't help a lot. Unfortunately

Wendy P.

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13 minutes ago, tonyhays said:

Back on topic, Esper fired and Barr announces DOJ probe into voter fraud.  

I think we all know where this is headed

I think I gave skydekker a blast of shit over his being overly assertive with the US is a banana republic thing. I'm beginning to regret the opinion after today.

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