Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Lord Liaden]

Thank you. That was careless of me. Corrected.

[csyphrett]

2 hours ago, Simon said:

Might want to correct that - they voted to authorize an impeachment inquiry.

This is the second one. right? I remember they already tried once and it collapsed, but I could be wrong.

CES 

[unclevlad]

8 minutes ago, csyphrett said:

This is the second one. right? I remember they already tried once and it collapsed, but I could be wrong.

CES 

 

I make a point to not clutter my brain with useless trivia, like House Republican Stunts.  They're just too common to bother tracking.

 

And let's face it, if they have?  So what?  Like that would slow them down even a little?

[csyphrett]

According to the Meidas Touch, Judge Kaplan has ruled that Trump's Presidential Immunity claim won't fly in Carrol's second defamation suit. Since he has already been found guilty by summary judgement, he is still expected to sit through the penalty part of his trial and then pay whatever the jury tells him to pay.

CES  

[Cygnia]

The GOP has Adopted Orbán as their Official Role Model - Here's Why That's Scary...
 

Quote

Want to know what Republicans have in mind for America’s future? Just visit Hungary.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was meeting with President Biden this week to ask our help defending his democracy against the brutal, violent aggression of Russia, Republican lawmakers in DC were meeting behind closed doors at a Heritage Foundation event with representatives of Hungary’s strongman president Viktor Orbán. It got almost no press coverage at all, other than The Guardian.

Orbán has been cozying up to Putin for years and is now blocking EU aid to Ukraine on Putin’s behalf (the EU is meeting today about the crisis he’s provoking); his representatives were reportedly trying this week to get Republicans in Congress to join them so, together, they can hand Europe’s largest country over to Russia.

At the same time, Orbán himself was overseeing a new round of laws in Hungary criminalizing any sort of free press in that nation. Under the rubric of “defense of national sovereignty,” Orbán’s new law, as Barron’s reported Tuesday, “could be used to crack down on dissent against nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government.”

Reporting for Barron’s, Géza Molnar wrote:
 

“The Council of Europe in November called on Hungary to abandon the bill, which ‘poses a significant risk to human rights.’

“Prominent rights groups, including Amnesty International Hungary, have said the package of laws ‘serves to protect the arbitrary exercise of power.’

“They fear the new authority could target rights groups, journalists, companies, churches, trade unions and municipalities, who lack legal recourse against any investigation or procedure against them.

“America’s envoy to Budapest David Pressman said the law ‘made Moscow's foreign agent law look mild and meek’.”

— Orbán has now gerrymandered Hungary so thoroughly that he’ll never lose an election.

— He’s shut down the free press, replacing it with a toady-type media landscape that would make Fox “News” blush.

— He attacks religious, gender, and racial minorities, bans books, oppresses women, and throws his opponents into jail or denies them the ability to make a living.

And Republicans are loving it. They appear to have adopted Orbán as their official role model; CPAC recently held a conference in Budapest, and Orbán was a featured speaker at CPAC and a private GOP event in Texas this year, as well as this week’s DC meeting.

When Orbán’s spoke at CPAC in Budapest last year, the Hungarian “soft fascism” strongman president told the audience, to a standing ovation:
 

“Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”

Orbán’s Fidesz Party and the GOP in most Red States have become virtually indistinguishable, from cronies owning the media, to packing the courts, to rigging elections through purging voters and gerrymanders, to putting polluting businesses in charge of regulatory agencies.

Now both have their sights set on the American federal government.

 

[tkdguy]

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/gop-rep-gives-unhinged-floor-rant-on-allowing-whole-milk-in-school-because-of-santa

[Lord Liaden]

I'm sure many of Foxx's constituents are lapping this up (pun intended).

[unclevlad]

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy............

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/rudy-giuliani-hit-148m-verdict-defaming-two-georgia-election-workers-rcna129807

 

Obviously he's appealing and the total damages may not stand up.  Still...

[DShomshak]

4 hours ago, tkdguy said:

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/gop-rep-gives-unhinged-floor-rant-on-allowing-whole-milk-in-school-because-of-santa

"Have a Snickers bar, Rep. Foxx."

 

Dean Shomshak

[tkdguy]

Judge in Trump Fraud Trial Evacuated as Testimony Concludes (msn.com)

[csyphrett]

12 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I'm sure many of Foxx's constituents are lapping this up (pun intended).

I'm not. I have hated her guts for a long time. I wish her section wasn't so gerrymandered she could be voted out. Mayor Joines thought about running against her but couldn't raise the backing he wanted

CES

[Pattern Ghost]

On 12/15/2023 at 7:53 AM, Cygnia said:

so, together, they can hand Europe’s largest country over to Russia.

 

Technically, this says they want to hand Russia over to Russia. 🤔

 

As someone who served during the Cold War, I find all this cozying up to Russia by one of our political parties disgusting.

[Cygnia]

Hell, I remember when that particular political party was very anti-Russia/Soviet

The X Files: Leaked documents reveal how staff were stripped of power to remove toxic content

Quote

Under the new rules implemented over the last six months, unsolicited sexual posts sent to another user are no longer subject to the same level of enforcement, and are not removed from X.

Neither are certain posts that deny violent events such as the Holocaust, or posts that refer to specific slurs for black, white and gay people or harass someone by sending a picture of Adolf Hitler performing a Nazi salute.

Posts that reference mass murder or violent events, or which incite fear about a protected category – meaning on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender – are today publicly labelled as violative of X’s policies and have their reach restricted.

But these types of posts, which used to carry a penalty for the author, no longer result in any action being taken against an account.

Posts that misgender or “deadname” individuals – meaning referring to a trans person by a name they used before transitioning – are no longer subject to action by contracted content moderators under X’s new policies, though “outing” an LGBTQ person for their sexual orientation or gender is still a violation and will lead to a post being removed.

Staff working for X are told to not suspend users that publish certain posts wishing physical harm on an identifiable group of people, or accounts that post “unreciprocated sexual content and graphic objectification”.

One document tells moderators “do not suspend” accounts that are “wishing, hoping, prompting, or calling for physical harm, death or disease targeting an individual”.

It also says not to suspend accounts that reference, “with the intent to harass, mass murders, types of violence, and/or violent events in which protected categories have been the primary victims”.

And workers have been told not to suspend accounts posting “content that incites fear about a protected category”.

And content moderators who work as contractors at the company are no longer allowed to take enforcement action against users whose accounts are “dedicated to abusive behaviour” or to “unreciprocated sexual content” – but instead must now “escalate” the issue to a team directly employed by X.

 

[tkdguy]

 

[unclevlad]

Well, we all know anything Trump says, particularly at a rally of his, is factual only by coincidence.

[Lord Liaden]

Moms for Liberty founder Rachel Ziegler gets absolutely roasted by a former Florida student now at Harvard... and not for what you might think she'd be roasted for.

 

 

[DShomshak]

Actually... In this case Jimmy Kimmel and Mr Farron are wrong. I remember that press conference. Donald Trump did not say "Drink bleach!" or "Inject bleach or Lysal!" When the medical/scientific people said Lysol, bleach and sunlight destroyed the Covid virus, he asked if they could be injected to destroy the virus inside peoples' bodies. The experts quickly responded, "NO!!!"

 

Not the brightest question, but it was a question, not a recommendation. In this case, I am willing to grant Donald Trump some extremely dubious credit as genuinely channeling the voice of ignorant and bewildered Americans.

 

OTOH Trump has this rhetorical trick of saying outrageous things in the form of asking a question. So it could be easy for people to get confused. And politically, framing Trump as "The deranged idiot who told you to drink bleach" may be useful. It's no worse a slander than Trump and his admirers spout daily, so I'm okay with it in the public arena. Sauce for the goose, and all that.

 

Dean Shomshak

[unclevlad]

Well, that didn't take long...

 

Texas passes a law allowing police to arrest immigrants yesterday.  El Paso County sues the state today to block it, and have the entire measure declared unconstitutional, on grounds that immigration policy is a Federal matter.

[tkdguy]

On a more positive note, here's Robert Reich with a message for everyone. Too optimistic? Maybe a bit, but it's a reminder that not everything is terrible out there.

 

 

[unclevlad]

Next stop, US Supreme Court, but still......

 

https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2

 

It's a start!

[DShomshak]

I just heard the story about this on All Things Considered:

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220504444/colorado-supreme-court-bars-trump-from-the-states-primary-ballot

 

Related: ATC has a weekly discussion of Trump's legal issues, campaign, and (this week) the escalating violence and authoritarianism of his rhetoric, not that this is a new subject for most of us here...

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220443867/trump-s-rhetoric-is-drawing-alarming-comparisons-to-autocratic-leaders-and-dicta

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

Trump's cultists relish this kind of venom. He's a salesman, he's just telling them what they want to hear. I'm not convinced that Donnie has worked all this out as a deliberate objective in his own mind, but I'm certain there are people whose advice he listens to who most definitely have.

[Lectryk]

11 hours ago, unclevlad said:

Next stop, US Supreme Court, but still......

 

https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2

 

It's a start!

 

It'll die at the Supreme - it's bad law/decision.

 

This is another example the Right will use to pillory liberal judges making law.

 

A State can't rule on Federal issues - the supremacy clause handles that.  Who sits in Federal office is up to the constitution.

Has Trump been found guilty of insurrecion in a Federal court?  Has he even been charged in Federal court?

 

The states run the elections, yes, but has Trump been found guilty of insurrection against the state of Colorado?  That's the only jurisdiction this court has.  If Colorado has some language in their state constituion, they should have settled on that.  The Colorado Supreme can eject him from the process under any legal (Colorado) pretext they like, just not one he is legally (currently) innocent (Federal level) of, involving Federal standing (the clause).

If he is found guilty in Federal court of insurrection then as an officer of the United States when his crime was commtted, he can't take office under this clause.  But nothing in the clause pohibits him from running (from my reading, anyway), or Republcans from electing him.  He just can't serve.

 

Let the party waste their time and money.

 

The questions above are serious - I have deliberately stopped following news of the sh*tshow that is Trump, the Republican party, the clowns and dimwits scrabbleling for some form of personal aggrandizement in Trumps shadow.  I don't think anything that Smith has charged rises to the level of Insurection, but I don't know.  I haven't heard *any* word of guilty finding in court as to insurrection, though.

[Lord Liaden]

With respect, from all the commentary that I've read the issue is much more open to interpretation than what you assert.

 

Colorado's Supreme Court did not rule on who sits in Federal office. It ruled on who can be on the ballot in their state. That can be argued to be state jurisdiction.

 

The wording of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require that a person be convicted or even charged with insurrection, merely that they have "engaged" in that activity. "Insurrection" and "engaged" are not defined, but the CSC ruled that there are grounds to hold that Trump did indeed do that, in which case it can be argued that his exclusion as a candidate should be automatic, since he would be barred from holding office even if he did run. Congress can make an exception with a two-thirds majority vote, but it should be noted that after Jan. 6 prominent Republican lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell, publicly stated that Trump was unquestionably responsible for the events of that day.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[Old Man]

Note also that none of the previous people barred from office due to Section 3 were charged with, or stood trial for, insurrection.