The Right Side of the News

The predictable response. However, you know perfectly well that people have been looking for evidence - and nothing more than weak circumstantial evidence has been produced.You certainly ought to know about Republican gerrymandering and efforts at voter suppression by now.You ought to know that rumours aren’t reliable, and that prosecuting people on the basis of rumours is silly.And you admitted that you would dismiss contrary evidence out of hand.

Type this: And you'll get this: For the instruction page for all dBCodes see: --Percy

Deceptive alt-right denial.

Reading an article about Trump does this and then a different article about Trump does that only gives a fragmented picture of the extent of the problems he's created for himself. Here's a brief summary that draws upon the Washington Post analysis piece ”A watershed moment’: Trump faces crossroads amid mounting threats on all sides.

• Democrats control the House and will soon be conducting oversight. The White House is preparing for a blizzard of subpoenas.
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• Trump has received the bulk of the blame for the 35-day government shutdown.
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• Trump's efforts to hold the government hostage until Congress capitulated and gave him his wall failed and Trump was forced to capitulate and reopen the government.
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• His intelligence chiefs contradicted him on a number of topics:
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  • The Russians did interference in the 2016 election.
  • The Russians continue to interfere in our elections.
  • ISIS is still a threat.
  • Withdrawing from Afghanistan would further destabilize the region and give the upper hand to the Taliban, which provides support for terrorists.
  • Iran is abiding by the nuclear agreement they signed with the US and its allies but that Trump abandoned.
  • North Korea will not give up their nuclear capabilities.
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• Mike Mulvaney as the new White House chief of staff has not brought order to the White House and has no intention to. Jared Kushner is the de facto chief of staff, effectively leaving Trump to run the White House like a family business.
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• Trump's support in the polls has dropped.
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• Trump continues to tweet craziness and error at a high rate.
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• Trump has threatened the country with a renewed government shutdown if Congress doesn't give him his wall.
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• Alternatively, Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency to build the wall, a move that would likely be met with many legal challenges, primary among them the factual challenge that the only significant emergency on our southern border is humanitarian. We need additional shelters, judges and border patrol staff to handle the many applicants for entry and asylum.
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• Senate Republicans have warned Trump that declaring a national emergency might divide the GOP.
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• Trump has left many top government positions either unstaffed or filled by acting staff, leaving him unprepared for dealing effectively with Congressional oversight.
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• Former White House aide Cliff Sims wrote a "tell-all book" (Team of Vipers) that "depicts dysfunction and disloyalty in the West Wing.
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• Former presidential candidate Chris Christie's also wrote a book, Let Me Finish, that has also created problems for Trump by writing scathingly about Jared Kushner and other members of the president's staff, though he wrote "sympathetically about the president."
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• Congress, or at least the House, seems prepared to reassert itself as the first and most important branch of government. Except for the offices of president and vice president, the rest of the offices of the executive branch were brought into existence by acts of Congress, hence congressional oversight responsibility. The executive branch enforces the laws. The judicial branch interprets the laws. But it is Congress that makes the laws.

Interesting times for our president.--Percy

'Willful Ignorance.' Inside President Trump's Troubled Intelligence Briefings Time There are more examples in the article.But let’s note that repeating Trump’s name and title are necessary to keep his attention in important intelligence briefings.He gets angry when reality contradicts his opinions.He doesn’t really have a grasp of important issues. Which is a major problem in a President of what is still, probably, the most powerful nation on Earth.

As usual, no basis in reality. Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

No, of course not, oh cynical one. I want the legislative and executive branches to work together to develop legislation that is in the best interests of the country. I don't want the executive branch to threaten the country with government shutdowns and national emergencies if Congress doesn't knuckle under and yield to Trump's demands. Walling ourselves off from the Rio Grande is just a bad idea all round. The river is already a physical barrier.--Percy

But, you know, those little brown people can swim. Even the kids.This portion of the wall needs to be more of a moat type thing ... with piranhas, backstopped by high barbed-wire fencing and gun towers. Maybe some land mines.

Not true, therefore a lie. Not true, therefore a lie. Didn't happen. If it were true you would have evidence.

More trolling

The density of error, misconception, mischaracterization and paranoia is great in this one, this will take some time. No. I don't know why you would think that given that I had just presented an electoral map clearly illustrating the huge extent of rural America, here it is again: In area probably over 90% of American territory is rural and small towns, and they haven't participated in the economic expansion of the urban and suburban regions. Even large expanses of population dense regions have been suffering because of the decline of American manufacturing, receiving the appellation of the rust belt. Dissatisfaction with their plight was the primary force behind formation of the Tea Party. This is clearly false. The financial crisis of 2008 happened on George W. Bush's watch. It was the Obama administration that had to clean up the mess, and the economy started growing again shortly thereafter, here's a chart. There's the dip beginning in 2008 under Bush that extended until the middle of 2009, and then the economy grew every year thereafter under Obama: Shortly after his inauguration the Obama administration proposed helping homeowners who were victimized by unscrupulous mortgage companies like Countrywide that had offered low-doc and no-doc loans. The Tea Party, funded by the Koch brothers, arose as a reaction. But this was only the final straw that provided the impetus for the Tea Party. As described above, the forces behind it had been building for many years. Our standing in the world has never been lower than under Trump. When Trump bragged at the United Nations about how much his administration had accomplished, he was laughed at. Who is it that wants to take away a woman's right to an abortion? The meaning of the Constitution is decided by the Supreme Court, not the executive branch. Most of America is religious, including the left. Obama is a Protestant Christian who believes in the redemptive power of Lord and Savior Jesus Christ - he's been quoted saying as much. Atheists have almost no political power. Pew says 3.1% of Americans are atheists, and 4% agnostic. I don't think there are any atheists serving in Congress. This paragraph boils down to, "We're not the ideologues, you're the ideologues." The left as represented in Congress and state legislatures is not Marxist nor Marx-inspired. Cultural Marxism is just a conspiracy theory of the alt-right and white nationalists that points to such "evidence" as efforts for rights for gays, women and blacks. Kavanaugh as a youth abused woman while drunk. This your latest post is also a tirade, completely empty of facts, just an accusatory screed. I am, as I have told you many times, a social liberal and a financial conservative. I am for free trade. I am for a strong national defense. I am for working closely with our allies to make sure we're safe from threats like Russian aggression and adventurism. I am for putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on a solid financial footing. I am for lowering the annual deficit to be a smaller percentage of GDP. I am for reducing the national debt to a smaller multiple of GDP. I am for programs that help people be healthy and successful as long as we first establish how they will be paid for. I believe in a fair deal where the vast majority of American wealth isn't reserved to a tiny percentage of people. I believe we have to get money out of politics so that elections cannot be bought by the rich. I believe we should be a beacon of freedom and hope for the world and a refuge for the hopeless, desperate and destitute.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typos.

A better map for contrasting city and rural would break the votes down by county, which can be found here for the 2016 presidential results: https://en.wikipedia.org/...tates_presidential_election#Maps. That section of the Wikipedia article has a dozen maps which analyze the data, including maps by county.While the electoral map turns each state into pure red and pure blue, the maps by county show that to not be true. The pattern that we see is that major cities tend to be blue while the countryside tends to be red -- there are several exceptions in that pattern, but it still holds. For example, we clearly see that pattern in WA, OR, Calif, Nevada, and New York, while only two counties in North Dakota went blue, neither of which has any of the state's big towns.

As long as we're going medieval (which is what Trump's Wall is supposed to be anyway), let's review the subject of medieval walls.Moats weren't intended to be much of a barrier in themselves, but rather part of the defense of the wall. Similar to a glacis, a moat would present an open "field" which the enemy would need to traverse without cover against defensive fire from the wall's defenders. Stocking the moat with critters akin to piranhas would not do much good with the enemy crossing in boats. And once across the moat, the enemy could still scale the walls (eg, with ladders or grappling hooks) -- the only advantage of a moat over an empty field would be to block siege towers, which is also why a glacis would be sloped, usually steeply sloped.So why go through all that trouble with a moat? It was to defend against the real danger to your medieval wall: tunneling. Sappers would tunnel to the wall and dig out a cavern under the wall shored up with timbers like in any mine. Then they'd set fire to that cavern, burn out the shoring timbers, and the wall would collapse providing the enemy a breach to enter the fortress. The purpose of the moat was to prevent that initial tunneling -- it is very difficult to shore up against water.One striking common factor is necessity of defenders on the walls, lots of them, in order to defend the wall. Any section of a wall that is left unmanned or which cannot be defended will fall. The purpose of the star-like layout of a bastion fort (AKA "star fort") is to eliminate all defensive shadows enabling mutual defense of adjacent sections of wall.So for Trump's medieval wall to work, it would have to be heavily manned along its entire length at an even greater cost than for the wall itself, a cost that would never end.

14174dm asked you to provide evidence, he didn't ask you to prove it. Obviously you have no evidence. First, nothing turned "a Republican victory into a Democratic victory." In case you didn't hear, a Republican won the presidency.Second, there is no evidence of ballots magically appearing after the polls were closed.Third, Trump's voter fraud commission, which he disbanded in January of last year, presented no evidence of voter fraud. This makes no sense no matter how you interpret it. If by "ballots were accepted" you mean people voting after the polls were closed, there's no evidence of polls being kept open past deadlines. But if by "ballots were accepted" you mean counting the ballots, the deadlines to count ballots are lengthy, usually at least a week, because sometimes elections can be very close and require recounts.What was it you were actually trying to say? What other red flags? This has two problems. First, ballots aren't tabulated instantaneously, so except in cases of substantial margins no one's victory can be "established at poll closing time."Second, what Republican victory are you talking about that was overturned? Neither you nor 14174dm mention any specific race, so what are you talking about? In the post 14174dm replied to you were talking about the electoral college, and Trump won the electoral college. You still haven't said what "Leftist" you're talking about. Are you referring to the fact that Nevada went into the Democratic column? Please tell us what "fake Democrat ballots" you're talking about. Evidence please. Please tell us what shenanigans you're talking about. Evidence please. What looks like voter fraud? What evidence could you possibly be looking it since you've described no evidence. Well of course we want something more than stuff you or somebody from your right-wing echo chamber made up. The reason none of this stuff is prosecuted is because none of it happened. None of the rumors the right-wing made up panned out. Illegal aliens didn't vote, dead people didn't vote, and people didn't vote more than once. We can't prove you wrong. All we can do is point to the complete failure to find any instances of significant voter fraud. Even Trump's commission couldn't find any.--Percy

The map changes with every election so I'm not sure what you think you are proving. Most of the red could be blue in a particular election.Social liberalism is the core of Leftist/Marxist politics, the economic stuff of your fiscal conservatism isn't very relevant.yes the Tea Party was originally concerned with economics but I for one and many others took it as a broad representation of our political interests.Abortion is murder.Enough.