The Democrats job is to start tying Trump to the Republicans. Every stupid thing he says needs to be countered with "President Comacho, with the support of Republicans in the House and Senate, have done X. Republican policy is Y and it is counter to Z, basic American values. Republicans are damaging our country and making the US a laughing stock to our allies and partners. America is appearing weak around the globe because of Republican policy and administration support of a big business first agenda." Tie them together and you take down the Republicans with Trump.
There is certainly merit to this line of thinking. However, it may also be flawed. The reason the tea party holds a ton of power despite having a limited amount of actual representatives is that they have shown that they can take down republicans in primaries. So when you factor the gerrymandering that makes republicans so safe in the general election, their biggest threat comes from the far right not the left.
I just don't know if even this giant s%&t show of an administration is bad enough to make republicans abandon their base. As long as they can deflect onto their core messages about abortion and guns, they can keep their people happy. While going centrist and talking about jobs worked for Trump in the presidential election, these congressmen don't have the same worries about actually having to deliver on what was promised.
I still worry that until the fundamental flaws in the American electoral system are fixed (gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance, lobbyists, etc) that there is no hope for either party to act in their constituents best interest.
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There is certainly merit to this line of thinking. However, it may also be flawed. The reason the tea party holds a ton of power despite having a limited amount of actual representatives is that they have shown that they can take down republicans in primaries. So when you factor the gerrymandering that makes republicans so safe in the general election, their biggest threat comes from the far right not the left.
I just don't know if even this giant s%&t show of an administration is bad enough to make republicans abandon their base. As long as they can deflect onto their core messages about abortion and guns, they can keep their people happy. While going centrist and talking about jobs worked for Trump in the presidential election, these congressmen don't have the same worries about actually having to deliver on what was promised.
I still worry that until the fundamental flaws in the American electoral system are fixed (gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance, lobbyists, etc) that there is no hope for either party to act in their constituents best interest.
Any democrats in Gerry meandered districts should join the Republican Party just to participate in the primary process. Getting mainstream republicans into office and creating primary pressure from the centre is the only way to limit the tea party power
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Any democrats in Gerry meandered districts should join the Republican Party just to participate in the primary process. Getting mainstream republicans into office and creating primary pressure from the centre is the only way to limit the tea party power
Quoted because I found this funny. Sounds like a review for the film Gerry:
The database of publicly available data was originally put up by the Obama Administration in 2013, but on Tuesday, it became a digital boneyard.
...
It’s currently unclear precisely when the data was removed, as the most recent snapshot by the Wayback Machine comes from all the way back in the simpler, more innocent days of a few weeks ago.
...
The Obama Administration opened the resource as a means to help researchers understand the nation and, more importantly, get the best bang for every research buck. Researchers could upload their data in easily searched (“pulled”) databases. With the White House Open Data Initiative, research can be used more than once, and generate far more value for Americans.
It’s unclear what utility there could be to separating this data across multiple databases based on Presidential administration. The whole idea of open.whitehouse.gov was that it would be a centralized repository for information, not one of an ever-growing number of four- or eight-year repositories.
I have a friend who works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and apparently there are dozens of people working to basically grab every scrap of publicly available government data and back it up as fast as possible.
How's trump going to react to his best bud Putin when Russian planes are dropping bombs near American ground forces?
One side (America) trying to stop the flow of migrants from Syria into the West, and the other side (Russia) facilitating the mass human migration by chasing civilians out as a way to undermine Europe.
Maybe Putin and Trump got together and decided that a good ol' proxy war was the best way to kick start the economy.
__________________
"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
I have a friend who works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and apparently there are dozens of people working to basically grab every scrap of publicly available government data and back it up as fast as possible.
Quote:
Under former prime minister Stephen Harper, the federal government made it progressively more difficult for Canadian government scientists to communicate their findings to the public.
Efforts by journalists to communicate directly with scientists to obtain information about something as benign as "rock snot" ran into roadblocks. Funding was cut to various scientific agencies, including Environment Canada, and thousands of scientists were laid off.
The scientists' counterparts in the United States quickly rallied to their defence. Op-eds were penned in major scientific publications lamenting the lack of independence for Canada's science community. Petitions were signed.
Today, it's the Canadian government scientists — now free to speak directly to the press without pre-approval by intermediaries after changes implemented by the Trudeau government — battling on behalf of American scientists.
...
"This feels very familiar, but it also feels somewhat scarier than what happened in Canada," shark researcher Steve Campana said of the U.S. developments.
A Canadian scientist who once worked for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Campana said he became exasperated by the limitations on publicly sharing his research that were imposed under the Harper government and now works in Iceland.
"The situation in Canada is that we had increasing restrictions through time and it was perhaps more insidious ... but it wasn't implemented all at once like what just happened down in the United States," he said. "I tell you, I'm pretty concerned for American scientists right now."
ON SATURDAY MORNING, the white stone buildings on UC Berkeley’s campus radiated with unfiltered sunshine. The sky was blue, the campanile was chiming. But instead of enjoying the beautiful day, 200 adults had willingly sardined themselves into a fluorescent-lit room in the bowels of Doe Library to rescue federal climate data.
Like similar groups across the country—in more than 20 cities—they believe that the Trump administration might want to disappear this data down a memory hole. So these hackers, scientists, and students are collecting it to save outside government servers.
But now they’re going even further. Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA’s earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving. Diehard coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to government websites. And they’re keeping track of what’s been removed—to learn exactly when the pruning began.
Wintemute, epidemiologist and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, was prepared. After seeing that climate scientists were systematically downloading crucial information from federal databases, he had drawn up a spreadsheet of the gun-related datasets he uses every day: lists of gun licensees, retailers, and manufacturers; gun tracing data; firearm-related death and injury numbers sorted by categories like race, location, or age. “I basically walked around the building saying, ‘Get it done now,'” Wintemute says. So on inauguration day, as Cerdá says, the Violence Prevention Research Program was less of a lab and more of a “little downloading bootcamp.”
This wasn’t just alarmism. “I’ve been through it before,” says Wintemute. During the Clinton years and early in George W. Bush’s presidency, he worked with a group of academics who partnered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to study the inner working of criminal gun markets. “We had the reports ready for 2001 and 2002, but their publication was suppressed,” says Wintemute. “We were ordered to destroy our copies of the documents.”
Wintemute wasn’t hankering to repeat that experience, so he instructed his team—barely 10 people, which isn’t surprising in this notoriously under–funded field—to create a compendium of gun-related data as a failsafe. “Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered around a big table in the center of the office,” says Aaron Shev, the team’s senior statistician. “We had Dr. Wintemute’s list, and wrote things up on a whiteboard, assigning jobs. Then we sat there for a day, through lunch, in this frenzy of downloading.”
It’s not as if they were hacking, or even using some secret scientists-only login. “Everything we downloaded by definition is public information,” says Wintemute. “We didn’t go behind any firewalls.” So the fact that scientists are worried they’ll lose access should probably give you pause.
In many cases, federal information is vital to research in these fields. “I was scared,” says Veronica Pear, a data analyst at the Violence Prevention Research Center. She’s using federal data for a paper on firearm mortality—tracking hotspots in California between 1999 and 2015—and her work is almost complete. Since the federal query system makes it easy to search the data but cumbersome to download, Pear had never bothered to save the information to her computer. To catch up, “I had to enter around 50 different queries,” she says. “I felt frantic.”
^ I really have no idea how anyone in Canada lived through Harper and is still a Tory.
However, almost double the population of Canada just voted for Donald Trump, so maybe it's not that surprising.
I think the best choice is probably not to "be" any political thing, and just vote (in ways and) for people who you think will do the best job out of all the candidates, ignoring party lines.
As we saw in this election, the people who just held their nose and voted Trump because they "had" to vote Republican look like enormous idiots. Yuge idiots. Everyone says so.
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Trump declines to fill out a tournament bracket. Apparently, the Russians havent hacked the NCAA...yet.
He's going to fill it out as the tournament goes on and will be the first person ever with a perfect bracket. Video of him filling out the bracket will be talked about but never released.
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He's going to fill it out as the tournament goes on and will be the first person ever with a perfect bracket. Video of him filling out the bracket will be talked about but never released.
Ooh, a Kim Jong-Un vs Donald Trump golf match could be epic. Obviously they'd both destroy Kim Jong Il's 34, but would either dare to card a 17?
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Interesting interview with Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran of the CIA and a former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council in regards to Trump's feud with the Intelligence community.
"I think the talk of a "shadow war" diverts from the real issue because it focuses attention on some coherent, organized bureaucratic or institutional campaign to oppose the president. But none of that's the case. The issue is that Trump and his entourage, for a long period of time, have been associating with, meeting with, involved with, or working somehow with Russian intelligence.
Now, I've been aware of this for about a year. I've been jumping up and down, and I'm not the only one. And if I can figure it out as a professional intelligence officer who's no longer in service, then obviously active intelligence officers can figure it out too."
Quote:
"We are facing the gravest threat to our institutions and our government since 1861, since the country broke in half. This is a graver crisis than Watergate, which was about corruption, not the usurpation of our laws and our checks and balances. It's graver than World War II, when Hitler never actually threatened our institutions or occupation of Washington.
So this goes back to 1861. It's a huge societal and institutional crisis. We're dealing with a man in Trump who doesn't accept a fact-based reality, who only acts for his own self-aggrandizement, and who views any action that does not serve him as a threat that must be destroyed. And, on top of that, his team appears to have been colluding with Russian intelligence services.
This is a massive crisis for our norms and our Constitution, and we have to say so."
Quote:
"We all should know this man very well at this point: If something seems to create an issue for him, he will denounce, denigrate, and attempt to destroy the person or the entity responsible for creating it. That's it. The law doesn't count for Donald Trump. Social convention doesn't count for Donald Trump. Institutional practices don't count for Donald Trump. Only Donald Trump counts for Donald Trump. Nothing else matters.
So no, we should not — and cannot — trust this man."
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