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Author Topic:   The Awesome Republican Primary Thread
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(3)
Message 663 of 1485 (651377)
02-06-2012 6:55 PM
Reply to: Message 644 by Rahvin
02-03-2012 6:38 PM


No Dilemma Here
So here's the deal: I don't like Obama. He's managed to at best disappoint me on some matters, and on a plurality of others I find him to be reprehensible. He mishandled the healthcare debacle (while what we're getting is better than it was, it's still ridiculously awful compared to what we should have gotten with a Democrat House, Senate, AND Presidency). He took nearly his entire first term to get us out of Iraq, and that only happened because Iraq refused to continue to give Americans legal immunity, not because Obama decided it was time for us to leave. Guantanamo Bay is still open for business. Nobody who ordered or performed torture has or will be prosecuted. We violate the sovereignty of other nations and blow up their citizens with no due process (including innocent civilians, a drone cannot tell a Taliban member from a random Afghani citizen, and we've fired missiles at weddings) as a matter of course. The USA PATRIOT Act is still in force, and the executive branch under Obama continues to make massive power grabs. Obama signed a law that allows anyone to simply be imprisoned indefinitely without trial, in direct violation of the Constitution and basically all of American law since the beginning.
Come on, Rahvin. You have to know this is almost all bullshit.
1) There was only "democratic control of Congress" for a period of five months or so between the much-delayed seating of Sen. Al Franken and the death of Ted Kennedy. And that 60-vote skin-of-teeth supermajority only existed because the Independent, non-Democrat Joe Lieberman, who you'll recall, campaigned against Obama, decided to bow to the will of his constituents for once and caucus with the Democrats.
The most Democrats who have ever been in the Senate at one time during Obama's term was 58. There was never Democratic control of Congress. As you're aware, it now takes 60 votes to pass any legislation in the Senate.
2) We left Iraq exactly at the time we planned to leave Iraq. There was never any secret about the Iraq withdrawal timetable, and surely you can see the position we were in - anybody who ordered a withdrawal from Iraq would have been made to look like he was giving up.
3) Obama issued an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay in 2009, in the first months of his term. Is it his fault that his own party in Congress decided not to let that happen? You seem to forget that it's Congress, not the President, who are Constitutionally empowered to open and close military bases, as well as to determine the disposition of the prisoners located there.
4) You're right that nobody in the previous administration who ordered torture will be prosecuted for it, but that's because prosecution is impossible and would be illegal. Can't be done. And surely even you can understand the precedent set for Republicans of arresting and prosecuting the previous administration for entirely legitimate, if disputed, political activities. Republicans, after all, believe fervently (and, yes, wrongly) that authorizing torture was within the Constitutional power of the President.
5) The due process for the US Army to attack soldiers at arms against the United States in other countries is for the President to order them to do so, and Congress to allow it. That's it. That's the entirety of the legal process. Not in the history of the nation have there been trials, in absentia, for the citizens and soldiers of other nations who will be subject to military action. Maybe that's wrong, I dunno - it seems stupid, to me, to expect warfare to be exactly the same thing as a trial - but that's the historical standard. "Due process for blowing people up" seems particularly stupid since there's no court in the land that can sentence you to being blown up with a bomb.
6) Obama absolutely did not sign a law that " allows anyone to simply be imprisoned indefinitely without trial." That's not a provision of the NDAA (which is what you're referring to.) And if it somehow wasn't enough that the NDAA doesn't say that the President can detain any American indefinitely, Obama added a signing statement:
quote:
Section 1021 affirms the executive branch's authority to detain persons covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note). This section breaks no new ground and is unnecessary. The authority it describes was included in the 2001 AUMF, as recognized by the Supreme Court and confirmed through lower court decisions since then. Two critical limitations in section 1021 confirm that it solely codifies established authorities. First, under section 1021(d), the bill does not "limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force." Second, under section 1021(e), the bill may not be construed to affect any "existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States." My Administration strongly supported the inclusion of these limitations in order to make clear beyond doubt that the legislation does nothing more than confirm authorities that the Federal courts have recognized as lawful under the 2001 AUMF. Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.
Give me a viable 3rd party candidate. Hell, give me Dennis Kucinich!
Why? What problem would that have solved? Dennis Kusinich wouldn't have had any more than 58 Democrats in the Senate, either. Hillary, same deal. It never had anything to do with "spine". Our President is not Green Lantern who can make things happen just by willing them to occur. The Constitution offers the President no power to pass legislation simply on the basis of really, really wanting it and the notion that either Hillary or Kusinich could have produced a more progressive health care bill is absurd. We got the bill we got because that was the most progressive health care legislation that could have gotten the votes of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Mary Landrieu - you know, the conservative Democrats who opposed the public option.
Would the election of Clinton or Kusinich have made Mary Landrieu more likely to support public option health care? Would the election of Clinton or Kusinich have changed the fact that Ben Nelson's largest hometown industry were health insurance providers? How, exactly?
It has absolutely nothing to do with "third parties." That's the solution to a problem we don't have. The problem we do have, the singular constraint on Obama's ability to enact a progressive agenda, is the requirement in the Senate that legislation be subject to a supermajority requirement. The election of Clinton or Kusinich would not have changed that at all. The problem here is that you're so ignorant about US politics, you can't tell the difference between what the President does and what Congress does. If you don't like what's in the American Care Act - and I suspect you don't like it because you have no idea what's in it, only what isn't - blame your Senator, not your President. Congress is still the branch that legislates in the United States.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 644 by Rahvin, posted 02-03-2012 6:38 PM Rahvin has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 664 by saab93f, posted 02-07-2012 4:09 AM crashfrog has replied
 Message 669 by Rahvin, posted 02-07-2012 12:39 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 665 of 1485 (651399)
02-07-2012 11:20 AM
Reply to: Message 664 by saab93f
02-07-2012 4:09 AM


Re: No Dilemma Here
Living in a multi-party country I cannot help but wonder whether two-party system necessarily twists everything into black/white when in reality neither of those really exist.
Our two-party system exists because we have "supermajority rule" in our legislature. With a requirement that it takes 60/100 Senate votes to pass legislation, we can only support two parties. Further, our Senate isn't representational, so it biases towards Republicans because the Republican population is spread out throughout the country, while the Democratic population lives mostly in the under-represented cities in a small number of states. Simply based on demographic trends, if you had a Senate election in the US where the votes were 55% for the Democrat and 45% were for the Republican, that would result in a Senate that was 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.
It's hard enough, in the US, to form a ruling coalition in a single party and the reason that Republicans seem better at it is because the structure of the Senate itself is biased both towards their representation and their agenda. How on Earth would third parties make that any better? It's a systematic problem with the rules of Congress, specifically the Senate.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 664 by saab93f, posted 02-07-2012 4:09 AM saab93f has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 666 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 11:25 AM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 667 of 1485 (651401)
02-07-2012 11:34 AM
Reply to: Message 666 by Perdition
02-07-2012 11:25 AM


Re: No Dilemma Here
They never anticipated political parties
I don't see how that can be true, since they already had political parties.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 666 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 11:25 AM Perdition has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 668 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 12:34 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(1)
Message 671 of 1485 (651434)
02-07-2012 1:24 PM
Reply to: Message 669 by Rahvin
02-07-2012 12:39 PM


Re: No Dilemma Here
t's really, really not.
It really, really is, and this post is more of it, piled higher and deeper.
The 60-vote requirement is only a requirement to defeat a filibuster, which the Republicans simply threaten left and right.
No, they don't "simply threaten" it. They invoke cloture on every bill. And the rules of the Senate allow them to invoke cloture on every bill except those that can be passed by reconciliation, which the Affordable Care Act was not.
The filibuster isn't "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"-type shit where a guy stands up there in an adult diaper and orates for hours and hours. The filibuster is the act of invoking cloture and it requires 60 votes for the Senate to pass cloture. If cloture doesn't pass but the Senate elects not to take up debate again, the bill is dead. Kaput. And that's the filibuster. That happened more than 100 times in the 111th Congress.
There hasn't been a requirement that cloture actually be accompanied by debate for almost 50 years, Ravhin. Jesus, learn something about how legislation gets passed in this country.
I don't give two shits, we shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Then no timetable for withdrawal would have pleased you. Nice of you to admit it. But recall, if you will, that Obama opposed the war in Iraq; Hillary voted in favor of it.
If the Agreement had been extended by Iraqi parliament, Obama would have left troops in Iraq longer.
Well, right. Because withdrawal of the troops was always going to result in massive civilian deaths in Iraq. (It already has.) That was always going to happen. It's defensible politics, at least, to rip that bandaid off according to the timetable that everybody had already agreed on. I would have liked the war to be over sooner as well, but this was the soonest that it realistically could have ended. Remember what happened when Obama tried to close Guantanamo? Even his own party stood up to ensure that he could not.
The President is Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Congress decides funding for bases and the military in general, but Congress does not tell soldiers what to do.
And neither does the President tell prisons what to do. Closing Guantanamo was always contingent on not simply leaving the prisoners there, and every single member of Congress stood up to prevent Obama from moving the prisoners anywhere else.
You're just being unrealistic if you think that Obama had some kind of power to sidestep Congress on this. Is that really what you want? Obama to set a precedent for violating the separation of powers, checks and balances of the Federal government? How do you think that plays out when a Republican is in power? I don't see how you can sit there and criticize the President for not doing enough to roll back Bush's enormous expansion of Presidential power and then criticize the President for not doing enough to expand Presidential power.
Strawman. US drone strikes, even the assassination of Osama bin Laden, constitute illegal violations of foreign sovereignty.
We have agreements with nations like Pakistan that regulate our deployment of weapons within their territory. No violation of sovereignty has occurred because our troops and equipment deploy in Pakistan by the invitation of that nation. And, of course, when nations violate our sovereignty by attacking us, a state of war is created that allows us to legally respond. Again, the "due process" for a military strike against a target is for the President to obtain an authorization of the use of force from Congress - which was passed on Sept 14th 2001 - and then order the military to attack that target.
I'm outraged that people are sentenced to die within hours by a drone controller and his superiors with no evidence and no defense in violation of his home nation's own laws.
Fine. War is outrageous. I think most adults understand that, but most adults also understand that different laws govern different situations, and that a situation of civil order enforced by the police is a different situation, legally, than the chaotic situation of the battlefield. The legal process due someone who is going to be executed by the state is a much different process than that due someone about to be attacked by a soldier. They've never - in the history of the world - been subject to the same laws.
Drone controllers aren't passing down "sentences", they're attacking military targets consistent with their orders and the AUMF passed by Congress. That's all the due process that is required.
What would happen, do you think, if a foreign nation started flying drones over American airspace and firing air-to-ground missiles at US citizens, claiming they were "terrorists?"
I think that would be an act of war, if the government of the US hadn't agreed to such a thing. Whether the US government could legally agree to that, I'm not sure, and I don't know anything about Pakistani law so I can't tell you if their agreement to authorize the use of force within their country is legal inside Pakistan or not. But neither can you.
The actual text of the law, crash, is this
Your cited text proves my correct, because as you can see the law affirms - it does not create, it affirms - provisions of other laws. Specifically, the 2001 AUMF. Whether or not the provisions of the AUMF apply to US citizens is a function of the text of the AUMF, not of the NDAA. Whether or not the NDAA refers to the citizenship status of detainees is irrelevant. The AUMF is the controlling legislation on detainment of terrorism suspects, and Obama has unambiguously stated that the AUMF, properly interpreted, doesn't allow for indefinite detainment of US citizens or the suspension of habeas corpus.
So it's an absolute lie to say that Obama has signed a law that allows for indefinite detainment of US citizens. You know that's bullshit, 100% bullshit. All the NDAA says is "2001 AUMF? Still in effect."
Signing statements are not legally binding.
Of course not, because that would be Obama writing legislation instead of following it - something, by the way, you keep insisting you want Obama to do. But signing statements show how the administration interprets law, and the NDAA statement pretty incontrovertibly demonstrates that Obama signed a bill that doesn't allow for indefinite detention of US citizens.
I believe he would have ordered the Guantanamo detainees released.
Dennis Kucinich would not have had the power or the authority to do so, nor the political consensus to get 60 votes for anything. In year three of an Kucinich administration you would have been complaining about the do-nothing, spineless fecklessness of the Kucinich leadership, and boy wouldn't things have been different if they'd ran that Obama guy instead, now that guy was a real barn-burner!
Like most of us liberals you're envious of the Republican ability to demand uncompromising adherence to the party line, but you don't know about the psychological and systematic mechanisms that have that result in the Republican party. For instance, leaderships and committee positions in the Democrat party are assigned based on seniority, which is why Leiberman was able to retain his chairs even after he so betrayed Democrats in the 2008 election. Of course, liberals like you called for his head and faulted "no-drama Obama" for not putting the knife in; come March 2009, though, and there would have gone your five months of filibuster-proof supermajority all because you had a fit of pique and a case of jihadist-envy when you should have been marshalling the allies you needed in the face of years of racist Republican intransigence. Thank God Obama is so, so much smarter than you, Rahvin.
As I very specifically said, crash, Obamacare is better than what we had. It's just not good enough.
The Affordable Care Act is the best health care legislation that could have gotten 60 votes in the Senate. If you want something better, get more Democrats in the Senate. Get better Democrats in the Senate so that the 60th-most progressive senator is someone who supports the public option.
But you didn't do any of that. You sent Obama to the White House with 55 Senate Democrats and thought you were done, because you thought Republicans wouldn't take advantage of all of their options in the Senate, for some reason, and allow Democrats to win on things.
He didn't submit his own plan, he didn't veto plans that didn't go far enough.
Jesus Christ, why would he veto a plan that didn't go far enough? That makes no fucking sense unless your goal, like Dronester, isn't to actually do anything in government to help people's lives, it's to live out a fantasy of proxy martyrdom watching the President die on hill after hill.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 669 by Rahvin, posted 02-07-2012 12:39 PM Rahvin has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 672 of 1485 (651437)
02-07-2012 1:37 PM
Reply to: Message 670 by Perdition
02-07-2012 1:21 PM


Filibuster - not like the movies
The Democrats should absolutely have forced the Republicans to carry through with their threats.
They did, over 100 times in the 111th Congress alone.
The "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" vision of the filibuster that goes along with a requirement of actual debate isn't how the filibuster works, guys. You need a better picture of this Senate bylaw than Hollywood movies, don't you think?
Here's how the filibuster works - if you want to take a bill out of debate and vote on it, you have to make a motion for cloture. The Senate can either allow the motion to pass or put it to a vote. Anybody in the Senate can say "I want to vote on this", waiving cloture requires unanimity. In order to pass cloture with a vote, you need a 60 vote supermajority regardless of how many Senators there are so the fact, in early 2009, that Al Franken was legally prevented from taking his Senate seat meant that the Republicans had basically an extra vote in the Senate on cloture.
If cloture passes, a vote on the bill can be scheduled two days later. If cloture doesn't pass, the bill goes back into "debate" status but that doesn't require that the bill be debated. There is, in fact, no requirement that the Senate ever actually debate anything. If the Senate never again schedules debate on the bill, it's dead forever. And, of course, even getting to the point where you debate the bill requires unanimous approval of the Senate, because any individual Senator can place an infinite, anonymous hold on the debate of any bill, by "gentleman's agreement" of the Senate.
Republicans don't "threaten" to filibuster, they are actually filibustering when they vote against cloture on a bill. That's the filibuster, not the "stand there and talk for hours" stuff you guys know from old movies. It hasn't worked like that in decades. Back then you needed 86 votes to pass cloture; the 60 vote requirement was part of the compromise, and the other side of that was that you didn't need to actually debate a bill that failed cloture. It would just be done.
At best, it puts the Republicans on actual record, showing exactly who is doing the filibuster, which is slowing down the work of Congress, and carrying on a filibuster indefinitely is hard.
Think this through. Currently, we have a system where each time Republicans want to block a bill, they have to assemble 41 votes for either doing so or doing nothing (because not voting is the same as a vote against cloture.) You'd rather replace that with a system where Republicans can get 41 votes or nonvotes together once and use that to block all further Senate business? That's fucking crazy. Why on Earth would that be better? Jesus!
Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 670 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 1:21 PM Perdition has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 674 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 3:12 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 675 of 1485 (651453)
02-07-2012 3:28 PM
Reply to: Message 674 by Perdition
02-07-2012 3:12 PM


Re: Filibuster - not like the movies
Well, they already do this. They filibuster any and all legislation they have even minor disagreements with.
Except some stuff is making it through. The creation of the Consumer Protection Bureau. Appointment of Executive Branch positions. National debt reauthorization.
Remember under your system nothing can happen - not even the stuff that can't be filibustered because under your system, a filibuster stops all Senate business. You can't even do majority-rule reconciliation under your system. You couldn't have the Senate approve new officers of the US military. You couldn't even elect a President, because the Senate could never schedule a ratification of the election.
As it stands, legislation just kind of disappears and the voters have little to no idea why or who is to blame.
Cloture votes are on the record, and I don't see how your system gets any more voter attention. CNN isn't going to cover hours and hours of pointless oratory; voters are going to be just as confused about who's responsible for what under your system as they are now.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 674 by Perdition, posted 02-07-2012 3:12 PM Perdition has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 676 by AdminModulous, posted 02-07-2012 3:40 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(4)
Message 679 of 1485 (651556)
02-08-2012 9:37 AM
Reply to: Message 678 by saab93f
02-08-2012 6:16 AM


Re: In Late News ...
Ive just read a few comments from cbsnews website regarding Sanitoriums victories and Im...baffled.
Let me help you put it in context. In Minnesota, where I'm from, 50,000 of the state's 5 million people participated in the primary (actually I think it was a caucus, I'm not sure). In 2008, Minnesota gave 1.2 million votes to McCain, which means that something on the order of about 5% of Minnesota's Republicans bothered to participate in the primary. It doesn't actually count for anything because it doesn't allocate any delegates.
So you're looking at an election whose sole participants were the Republican party's most motivated voters. Everybody else stayed home because it was a completely meaningless exercise. Is it as surprising, now, that the most motivated voters turn out to be the ones who have the most extreme ideology?
Id venture a guess that not one mainstream politician in Europe is as far right as your Dems yet rhetorics like marxist, communist etc. fly all over.
Sure, but in America, comparing the state of our politics to that of other nations (as in Europe, etc) is something only Democrats do. Republicans, in general, think you European types are all Draculas or some shit, I don't even know.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 678 by saab93f, posted 02-08-2012 6:16 AM saab93f has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 682 by saab93f, posted 02-08-2012 11:45 AM crashfrog has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 702 of 1485 (653148)
02-18-2012 4:59 PM
Reply to: Message 701 by Dr Adequate
02-17-2012 11:33 PM


Re: Things Mitt Romney Likes
Tree height. Apparently.
They remind him of his home planet, you see.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 701 by Dr Adequate, posted 02-17-2012 11:33 PM Dr Adequate has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1497 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(9)
Message 714 of 1485 (654037)
02-26-2012 9:32 AM
Reply to: Message 712 by Buzsaw
02-26-2012 7:57 AM


Re: Santorum Backers Say the Darndest Things!
Transgender, homosexuality and abortion have been considered deviant lifestyles throughout American history up until the gays came out of their closets in the 1960s.
I'm not sure abortion has ever been a "lifestyle", as opposed to a medical procedure women get to terminate pregnancies, but regardless - abortion was a legal procedure in the United States until 1920, when New York, the last state where it was legal, banned the practice. The bans, of course, never had anything to do with "morality" but with suppressing the practice of midwifery to the benefit of (male) obstetricians. No society, not even ours, has ever considered the beginning of life to be anything but birth.
Don't believe me? Pull out your driver's license. You'll find that it calculates your age from the date of your birth, not from the date of your conception. Birth has always been universally recognized as the beginning of life in our society, even by those who pretend to believe otherwise.
Throughout the history of mankind, these lifestyles have been prevalent in civilized cultures.
Because tolerance and protection of those who are nonetheless "different" is the mark of civilization. The mark of barbarism is legal persecution of diversity.
Boys who decide to claim a 'transgender' life-style are permitted to become a member of a Girl Scout troop, performing crafts with the girls and participate in overnight and camping activities — just like any real girl.
I don't get it. Does this guy think that Girl Scouts do macrame with their vaginas?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 712 by Buzsaw, posted 02-26-2012 7:57 AM Buzsaw has not replied

  
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