US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

hell yeah, a contextless link to a two-and-a-half-year-old story, that's my kinda #content

― we gather in social groups and disorient ourselves (bizarro gazzara), Monday, March 26, 2018 3:13 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Valuable response. Your need for a reader's digest is noted.

makes me happy because there was also an excellent feature on Giannis Antetokounmpo who is quickly becoming my favorite NBA player ever

yeah idk bout y'all but i was watching 60 mins for Giannis

so apparently stormy daniels is suing cohen for defamation?

says who???

Well there's this

Here is amended complaint in Stormy Daniels v. Trump & Michael Cohen lawsuit https://t.co/vx190ESjEj

— Sam Levine (@srl) March 26, 2018

(And yes I got the joke etc.)

Here's a telling stat from today's brand new @CNN poll on Trump and 2018. This is Trump's approval rating among...

Voters somewhat/not enthusiastic to vote in 2018:
47% approve
47% disapprove

Voters extremely/very enthusiastic to vote in 2018:
38% approve
60% disapprove

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) March 26, 2018

Two more top attorneys have turned down Trump.

Tom Buchanan and Dan Webb confirmed to The Daily Beast that Trump reached out to them about representing him in the Russia probe, and that they couldn’t do it. https://t.co/7UTd3VrS9b

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 26, 2018

OT, but did Giannis bring his bell to the interview?

Valuable response. Your need for a reader's digest is noted.

tom

wait

s

for no man

is an island

in the stream

lolol

http://i64.tinypic.com/rm3fvc.jpg

^ that's just lovely

That guy’s podcast, by the way, is worth listening to. It’s called This Week in Atrocity.

wilbur ross just directed the census to include a citizenship question on the census form

Pay for play is alive and well.

For Elliott Broidy, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign represented an unparalleled political and business opportunity.

An investor and defense contractor, Mr. Broidy became a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaign when most elite Republican donors were keeping their distance, and Mr. Trump in turn overlooked the lingering whiff of scandal from Mr. Broidy’s 2009 guilty plea in a pension fund bribery case.

After Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Broidy quickly capitalized, marketing his Trump connections to politicians and governments around the world, including some with unsavory records, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Broidy suggested to clients and prospective customers of his Virginia-based defense contracting company, Circinus, that he could broker meetings with Mr. Trump, his administration and congressional allies.

Mr. Broidy’s ability to leverage his political connections to boost his business illuminates how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to governing has spawned a new breed of access peddling in the swamp he vowed to drain.

'unorthodox'

Robbing me at gunpoint, eh? I must say, that's quite an unorthodox way of making a buck! But I truly admire your chutzpah.

just feel bad for mr. trump. everyone's ganging up on him. it's so unfair

The late Monday move from the Commerce Department, which it said came in response a request by the Justice Department, would restore a question about citizenship that has not appeared on the census since the 1950s. The administration said the data was necessary to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The state of California immediately challenged the plan in federal court.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla trashed the move as anti-immigrant.

"The citizenship question is the latest attempt by President Trump to stoke the fires of anti-immigrant hostility," Padilla said in a statement. "Now, in one fell swoop, the US Commerce Department has ignored its own protocols and years of preparation in a concerted effort to suppress a fair and accurate census count from our diverse communities. The administration's claim that it is simply seeking to protect voting rights is not only laughable, but contemptible."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/27/politics/census-commerce-department-immigration-california/index.html

The administration said the data was necessary to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A particularly brazen flipping of the bird.

well it's not like anything matters anymore anyways

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/christopher-steele-mikhail-lesin-murder-putin-fbi?utm_term=.ow5mW3Pma#.sdpePqYeg

it is more likely that a camel can fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man will ever see justice

Pick an oligarch any oligarch, apparently. $28mil in properties is a couple, tho, wonder where those went.

Sarah Sanders said repeatedly today that every census since 1965 has included Q about immigration status, except 2010. That is false. The question hasn't been asked in a full census since 1950 out of fears of squirreling the results. For more: https://t.co/EFYI4JmTg3

— Cathleen Decker (@cathleendecker) March 27, 2018

is it just me or are the lies getting more and more brazen?

in that they don't care what the truth is, yes I'd say so.

idk, when you start with "biggest inauguration crowd ever"...

and apparently "Mexico" = us

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-privately-presses-for-military-to-pay-for-border-wall/ar-BBKMvlw

At least Trump hjas figured out that anything successfully tagged as a 'military expenditure' will always get support in Congress.

Except when DOD issues reports on how climate change will adversely affect American national security.

The US military has plans for a border "wall". Not on the border, and not a wall. A wide trench filled with antipersonnel mines, and monitored by cameras (vis/IR) on pylons, with remotely operated machine guns. This is the scenario presented in Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars (2010), for how the US military envisions preventing an influx of climate refugees in the mid-20th century and later. Some of this presented in Dyer's 2009 [CBC radio documentary](http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1475819433).

Any wall, or minefield, not backed by lethal force, is rather feeble. The military scenarios are greatly concerned with revolts of US Hispanics against such a scheme.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the US military taking steps towards acquiring required land for this, perhaps set back as much as 100 km from the border proper. A contingency. Climate change won't be kind to food production in America, but by late century will reduce human carrying capacity in Mexico and Central America to perhaps half current populations.

I doubt you intended to say this, but doesn't a border barrier "backed by lethal force" as a "contingency" against Mexico being unable to feed half its population, functionally equal being OK with killing people rather than sharing resources?

There is no us and them, borders are arbitrary, citizenship is arbitrary, mining a fucking border is a crime against humanity

It's critical we waste epic amounts of money making a minefield that spans the entire US/Mexico border to ensure that when the climate goes to hell, we are killed by fellow Americans with guns instead of foreigners.

Absolutely.

Practically unsaid in the climate change discourse is that it will effect crop yields through heat stress and drought, long before many are left homeless from sea level rise. A useful rule of thumb is that every °C is -10% in crop yields, but the response of crops is highly non-linear and it could be a lot worse:

Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average yields are predicted to decrease by 30–46% before the end of the century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by 63–82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI)

Tropical areas could lose up to 200 suitable plant growing days per year.

Grain yields decreased from 84 to 100%.

Our children will kill the children of other nations seeking to enter, simply to ensure their own survival. The major question is just how long humanity will continue to burn fossil fuels, and how many the countries of the North will have to kill, simply to preserve their own carrying capacity.

This is why I hate the focus of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth films. They treat the issue as one of whether weather wealthy people will have their coastal properties. The reality is far, far worse.

Ie, I intended to say this: Due to climate change, citizens of the U.S. will kill climate migrants from Mexico and Central America, and citizen of Europe will kill climate migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The niceties of multiculturalism have no influence on hungry people.

Personally, I've chosen to not have children. The future will be ugly.

u know the children of america could just kill other americans

Didn't realize I would have no choice but to murder people in the future. That's a bummer.

Lotsa that will happen.

Those of us on the Left, who believe that all humans are created equal, that all cultures have something to teach us, need to get ahead of the cultural consequences of the climate crisis.

Humanity has a history of murdering people with the wrong religion or surname. Even when famine was only a recent memory (a half-million German civilians starved during WWI, and this inspired Hitler. See Tim Snyder's Black Earth).

The 2016 election should serve as a wake-up call. It taught many of you that you weren't targeting the right demographics. It taught me that the Bottleneck Century would bring universal fascism.

We could just wait to die, I think that’s fine.

Yeah, I’m just kinda waiting around. I’m 46 and diabetic, so I don’t really expect to see 60 anyhow.

Didn't realize I would have no choice but to murder people in the future. That's a bummer.

consider how much control you have over whether or not your nation conducts wars you disapprove of

I’m 46 and diabetic, so I don’t really expect to see 60

Don't give up! My older bro became Type I diabetic at age 12. Now he's 65. Yes, he's had health issues: two heart attacks, chronic angina for several years, a stent, a bypass surgery, but he's doing reasonably well overall, stays fairly happy with being alive, and should have another decade at least, if he continues to take good care of himself. There's hope.

Tiny little detail that's emerged today.

Mueller's office says FBI agents determined that a person who worked with Manafort and Gates "has ties to a Russian intelligence service." He told Van Der Zwaan that he was a former GRU intelligence officer. pic.twitter.com/IuYvuKcSsq

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) March 28, 2018

I really think the Left needs to think through the Bottleneck Century.

We're stuck with the nation state. We're stuck for many years to come with with fossil fuel driven economies. We're stuck with ineluctable biotic responses to climate change.

Consider, if you're in the UK, and you know that the human carrying capacity of the UK has already been exceeded. Ie, if there were any interruption of food imports, such as in WWi and WWII, some would starve. How do you serve your population? Do you invite in refugees, knowing that they would endanger those present?

The racial and cultural arguments for fascism are easily defeated. The physical arguments resist our best efforts.

Ideally, each nation pursues population policies that will leave itself with a population that can be supported domestically, even in duress.

Duress is coming.

I expect the major political issue for the 21st century will be how the rest of the world deals with Africa, a continent with a population already well beyond human carrying capacity now, which will double in population in 30 years. This isn't their fault: the benefits of antibiotics and malarial control just outpaced demographic shifts to replacement birthrates. They're no less intelligent than the diaspora which we all inhabit. But we're already seeing the collapse of states [spreading from the Sahel](https://i.redd.it/07rc8gidlco01.png).

The Italian government is already paying Libyan nationalists to deter immigration.

For those of us who believe in human equality, in the validity of all cultures, we are in a horrible place. Pressures for immigration to the developed North will increase dramatically. The developed North won't be able to support even its own population. The public will naturally gravitate towards ever more fascist responses.

Trumpism isn't the end to Republican corporatism. It the beginning of Bottleneck Century fascism.