methodical

While its easy to think of a CEO as a Mr. Peanut type, they aren't the only reason that wealth is sent to the top, its tax policy and tax loopholes. This is what happens when you cap taxes and then give tons of tax breaks to the super wealthy. Stuff still has to get funded, and that burden falls onto everyone below. So just like the Cash advance places in poor neighborhoods that will keep poor people that use them poor, voting for policymakers that promise tax cuts means we cut services for poor or those in actual need and shift the burden from the people that can afford to finance them onto ourselves. It's similar to the national debt argument, so few people are able to see big picture or understand how national debt actually works that it allows politicians to use it as an issue by making it seem like it's as simple as balancing your checkbook and not tapping into overdraft protection. Things don't function like that at as a country that makes it's own currency and sets it's own monetary policy, but because so few people can understand that to the US government (who prints it's own money) money is more of a tool than an account that needs to be balanced its easy to drum up support by railing against debt. Taxes are much the same. Everyone hates seeing money "lost" to taxes on their pay-stubs so its easy to drum up people to support tax cuts, when even with a cut they wont see the lion's share of the benefits, the ultra-wealthy who fund the politicians will, but they'll certainly see the reduction in services if they end up needing them. This is a problem that America as a whole is simply too stupid to fix because it's too easy to manipulate people based on their gut reaction (taxes bad, debt bad) and get them to vote against their own best interests. It can't be fixed with laws regulating a CEO pay-scale related to their employees. That's not how compound returns works, a policy like that ends up exactly the same. Sure earning millions of dollars or hundreds of millions looks bad when people under them are struggling to make ends meet and haven't seen real pay go up since the late 70s, but the amount of money just increases the jumping off point of the astronomical gains of compounding returns assuming the lower down employees even make enough to save. Compounding investment returns or interest is an exponential function. I'm not saying that CEO's don't deserve a pay cut, or the rest of us wage increase. The reality is though that isn't going to do much of anything when the deck is stacked against people in the middle class and poor through tax policy (because we pay a bigger percentage of our income/wealth to taxes). We're more productive as a nation than we've ever been and less and less of us see the benefits of that productivity, that means its tougher and tougher to move up. Restructuring pay doesn't change that, because wealth is gained exponentially and taxes on those gains are done at a flat rate. Similarly income is taxed up to a certain maximum percentage. So as you have more, you pay less as a percentage of that total to taxes.

It would be kinda amusing in a tragic way, if his ego and lust for power got him locked up and his family's assets seized. I know he wouldn't ever have the wherewithal to look back and point the thumbs at himself when diagnosing what went wrong, narcissist that he is, but at least the history books would. It would be the most poetic end to the baby-boomers running the country. Narcissism, willful ignorance, and hubris leading them into a hell of their own making.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/15/on-russian-state-tv-putin-has-already-won-the-summit-with-trump/?noredirect=on Pulled from reddit, but that's the reaction from Russa, "Trump is ours!" and joking about how the "republican lawmakers came to seek out their hackers for help rigging the midterms." So, you know, at least this whole fiasco plays well with our new allies Comrades.

My question to republicans would be, what values? because to me they seem to want to live in Russia, their policies have basically created an Oligopoly, they are fiercely socially conservative on issues like gay rights, they want to bend the political rules through things like gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement to make sure they are always in power even without being supported by the majority, they want state propaganda for the press. Ohh and how could I forget, they've been fine with things like torturing people. In a lot of ways it seems like Republicans want exactly what Russia has.

Problem is policy is going to create larger and larger problems before it swings back left. I view republican leadership and policy as being based on fear. Fear the others that aren't you, fear that businesses are going to make you jobless if government don't basically pay them to employ you by making them not pay taxes and letting them consolidate to monopolies, or don't require livable minimum wages or strip away your rights to fight for a better deal for yourself, fear that everyone else in the world is out to screw you out of your money and freedom through taxes and legislation, and fear god is being attacked. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where all those things take place for 'everyone else' besides the christian right (but who cares about those people, f#&% those people, it's my country and they are ruining it). It also becomes a race to the bottom for everyone who isn't wealthy. That's why these things are concerning to me. The pain we'll have to endure before it swings back looks to me like a giant "screw you, I got mine" to everyone else from the baby boomers as they have a foot out the door and won't have to deal with their mess. I guess all the old hippies died off.

I don't particularly care if a business owner decides a trump administration official isn't welcome. It gives them a taste of the agenda they push for others and the divisiveness they play to in order to rile up Trump's base. They should be held accountable for what they do and the policies they push.

That's not what I got from it. They said "deterrence measures", not defensive. There isn't really a defense, outside of notifying private industry about bugs that allow their products to be compromised, and getting ISPs to take compromised equipment offline until it's patched. Defense is a national game of whack-a-mole and not something that can be done internet-wide.

I don't think its a case of "let" but we have these capabilities and people in the CIA/NSA. The difference is, what do you really do that isn't a full blown act of war? You can't really effectively pump propaganda into their country, they are state media. They already stuff their own ballot boxes so what would messing with their elections do? You could support their anti-putin activists, but they'd just end up dead anyways, and you'd just give them evidence for any claims that they are working for the west. There isn't really a great "tit for tat" and as you use your capabilities you'd start to lose them.

Maybe its not so latent, this racism. This "movement" is fueled by psychological warfare used to dupe the narcissistic, gullible and stupid. You'll get all this lunacy debunked again and just slink off to recharge your outrage meter on whatever ultra right-wing propaganda outlet it is that fuels your delusion for a few months and return to spout the same nonsense over and over.

It makes me wonder if republicans support the villains in super hero movies... except in the real world they don't have cool super powers or any actual genius to speak of, just an astounding lack of empathy for their fellow humans and narcissistic tendencies.

Trump is screwing Great Britain, France, Canada and the EU with sanctions and trying to get Russia back in the G#. Putin must really have him by the balls.

I mean considering he defined "fake" news for us as news he doesn't like or doesn't grovel to his greatness, I'm going to go ahead and say no.

both sort of I guess. I voted for Clinton, because she was an actual adult human with the experience to lead the country well enough, I don't buy into all the made up conspiracies, but I would have preferred Sanders. Trump is what he's been since the 80s, a national disgrace who is hurting the US's position in the world and has no Ideal's just wants power. He fits into the party he's "leading" very well. I also voted against him. Edit: but yeah living in Nebraska so that vote didn't count anyways.

If you pick up that tells scammers call systems there is a person to actually reach on the other end and you'll see an increase not a decrease in calls. These aren't people following the laws on telemarketing to begin with. Another one is "Should I Answer?" it sort of crowd sources these things, enough reports on a number will get it to auto-reject, and you can add things to a personal block-list if its not something the app has enough reports on.

They already know, it's 75 year old technology at this point. You can find blueprints for early nuclear bombs online. The bomb's the relatively easy part (take a critical mass of uranium, fire another bunch of uranium at it really fast). The enrichment is the slower process, but even that isn't a secret at least at a high level on how it's done. Like many other things the devil is in the details. Leadership in Iran isn't stupid, they'll likely keep the deal in place with Europe, which in turn isolates the US and Israel as untrustworthy and irrational around the world and weakens us in any future foreign deals.

This is how you cede leadership in the world to France and Germany. But at least Bibi's probably ecstatic..

I'm willing to bet it would be, some of it was started before the election. The Russian operation to influence the election would have been investigated just as much. You'd also have an angry mob of GOP leadership that would want to make sure Trump never had any sway in their party again after losing to Clinton and would be happy to kick him when he's down to keep him there. So I'm of the opinion that while maybe no special council would have been appointed, we'd still be hearing about things like the affairs as well.

It's like distilled Tiger's blood strait from Charlie Sheen himself... So mostly a cocktail of as of yet undiscovered STDs , Cocaine, and methamphetamine. Also stupid flocks together, not surprising in the least.

The only real way to get money out of politics at this point is to publicly fund all elections and basically outlaw outside groups running political ads. That still doesn't fix the trump style media coverage though, where through spouting complete bulls#!t 100% of the time you can saturate the airwaves for effectively free ads. The system we have now of campaign contributions by large business and billionaires where it's not a bribe *wink wink, nudge nudge* is ridiculous. The other nice side effect of that is it would probably mean a better class of candidate, since now to get elected and stay elected they're basically a high profile telemarketer. Problem is neither D or R would go for it because their overlords love money. I'd be fine with everything on BRB's list as well.

When it's only fascists to the right of you then 90% may seem like an accurate number. People with only communists to the left of them will have the opposite perception that almost all news is conservative biased. It's a bell curve though, most people are in the middle. Most moderate conservatives in the media are basically not conservative enough for their party anymore and are thus labeled "liberal." That's not a problem with the media, that's a problem with the republican swing to hard line far right ideology. Most sensible people wont follow as far as Fox news, et al. want to swing the party. That doesn't mean they became liberal. That means the republican propaganda machine and ultimately the republican voters who follow it are moving the goalposts.

Vilifying a 17 year old high school kid and victim of a mass shooting isn't exactly a good look for a party that basically couldn't be doing worse with young voters. It's going to be amusing watching elections in the future.

I agree.

Age MAY have something to do with it because the dems have a huge backing of younger voters. However, they have an even larger backing of young women voters, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't Pelosi. Ultimately it won't really matter much who it is, it'd be impossible to have less of a spine than Ryan, so its going to be a net gain for the country.

I mean that's kinda the thing with the right media, they use facts or doubts towards their claims as a sort of confirmation bias for their persecution complex thus proving 90% of the media are commie liberal scum. The ones doing it are smart enough to know better (I'd assume anyways) but they know that their viewers aren't going to figure out that their self reinforcing logical fallacies aren't actual fact of anything besides them being wrong in the first place and ultimately it reinforces their whole spiel which is "we're the only ones you can trust, only we know what's really going on so don't believe/watch/read anything else!" It's actually quite amazing.

I'd like to add that, because of the stance that the NRA and the far right take on this (digging their heels in) it's going to go a lot more towards gun bans then it is middle ground reforms. The NRA could have taken any one of these mass shootings as an opportunity to help craft legislation to close loopholes and increase background checks which are reasonable reforms, but my guess is they know from their own data or something that will not be enough to stop many attacks and they enjoy rolling around in money Scrooge McDuck style being thrown at them by "outraged" gun owners and foreign governments that think "we don't have to kill american's they'll do it for us, cheaper."