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The Republican Utopia


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8 hours ago, Moiraine said:

 

 

Some people are saying she missed the point. I think she's just ignoring it and making another one (that even (most) rich NFL players would not be affected by the proposal).

Doesn’t there have to “be a point” for it to be missed?  Crenshaw’s Tweet was nonsense.

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15 minutes ago, knapplc said:

Trump is going to use his speech to berate the Democrats for not working together, not practicing comity.

 

Here's Trump practicing what he preaches.

 

 

 

Here's my bet: Trump has one of his less stupid people draft a serviceable state-of-the-union address that uses Trump's historically low bar to make him sound Presidential. Fox will hail the speech, the Democratic response will be partisan boilerplate, and the onus of unity will be dropped on the Democrats. Mainstream media will be denied their "gotcha" moment, and will be forced to replay Trump's coherently crafted plea for the country to work together to solve problems we can all agree on. This "new dawn" for Trump will last perhaps as long as 3 am. Thursday morning, when the President tosses an off-message Tweet baiting an adversary.  

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1 hour ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

The SOTU will also contain a s#!tload of outright lies, but the base bought into them ages ago and will consider any follow-up fact-checking to be sour grapes nitpicking. 

 

As is the case, since facts are a liberal conspiracy against conservatives. 

 

5 hours ago, funhusker said:

Doesn’t there have to “be a point” for it to be missed?  Crenshaw’s Tweet was nonsense.

 

I'm just worried that at the rate Crenshaw has to open his mouth and insert his foot on Twitter and elsewhere, he's going to miss his mouth and accidentally blind himself. 

 

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On 1/31/2019 at 12:53 PM, knapplc said:

This Pelosi woman is growing on me.  She's been running circles around Trump & the Republicans these past several weeks.

 

 

I may need to come up wt another name besides San Fran Nan - but I guess it is ok.  Yes she is teaching trump boy what politics is all about.

Regarding the Turtle:

McConnell's quote just runs contrary to every hanging chad complaint ever leveled by the Repubs.  Who leads the call to investigate double voting, illegal's voting,  faulty voting machines (remotely run by George Sorus's own hand :o).  It is the republicans.  They had a whole team together ready to fix the 'rigged' election in 2016. Funny thing - it wasn't rigged and Trump still won. 

 

 

Regarding HR 1 here is a Vox article that examines the bill.  I find little to fault with it. Much is common sense and ethical. But the Turtle wants to keep his political machine in place and he knows his time, the time of the current style of republicanism is coming to a close.  Maybe this is needed so a healthier republican party can be borned. 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/30/18118158/house-democrats-anti-corruption-bill-hr-1-pelosi

 

Regarding the campaign finance provisions -

The 6-1 public funding seems to be pretty expensive.  Has any one seen any projected #s on this.  I'm ok wt the concept as it rewards grass roots fund raising.  But it seems like it could

bankrupt the govt even more than what it is. 

I'm fine wt ending Citizens United.

The Disclose Act should also be applied to Unions as well - if you want an even playing field, apply the same rules to NEA, AFL-CIO, the govt workers union, etc.  I think we have Citizens United because the Unions were given such a free hand in supporting the Dem party.

 

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Campaign finance

  • Public financing of campaigns, powered by small donations. Under Sarbanes’s vision, the federal government would provide a voluntary 6-1 match for candidates for president and Congress, which means for every dollar a candidate raises from small donations, the federal government would match it six times over. The maximum small donation that could be matched would be capped at $200. “If you give $100 to a candidate that’s meeting those requirements, then that candidate would get another $600 coming in behind them,” Sarbanes told Vox this summer. “The evidence and the modeling is that most candidates can do as well or better in terms of the dollars they raise if they step into this new system.”
  • Support for a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United.
  • Passing the DISCLOSE Act, pushed by Rep. David Cicilline and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, both Democrats from Rhode Island. This would require Super PACs and “dark money” political organizations to make their donors public.
  • Passing the Honest Ads Act, championed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA) and introduced by Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) in the House, which would require Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of money for political ads on their platforms and share how much money was spent.
  • Disclosing any political spending by government contractors and slowing the flow of foreign money into the elections by targeting shell companies.
  • Restructuring the Federal Election Commission to have five commissioners instead of the current four, in order to break political gridlock.
  • Prohibiting any coordination between candidates and Super PACs.

 

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If a person is against these ethics provisions, than that person is hiding something in my opinion.  Not one thing wrong here.

 

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Ethics

  • Requiring the president and vice president to disclose 10 years of his or her tax returns. Candidates for president and vice president must also do the same.
  • Stopping members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment or discrimination cases.
  • Giving the Office of Government Ethics the power to do more oversight and enforcement and put in stricter lobbying registration requirements. These include more oversight into foreign agents by the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
  • Creating a new ethical code for the US Supreme Court, ensuring all branches of government are impacted by the new law.


 

 

 

I'm all for the Voting rights section.  Except I question the part about roll purging.  There has to be a method of purging people who have moved out of a district or have died.   What other method could they use besides the n'on-forwardable mail??:dunno - maybe some address data base that checks that the voter is registered in just one place as a primary residence.  Otherwise we have a bloated list  & if we don't update it occasionally it could be ripe for corruption. 

 

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Voting rights

  • Creating new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out, rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Early voting, same-day voter registration, and online voter registration would also be promoted.
  • Making Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encouraging private sector businesses to do the same, requiring poll workers to provide a week’s notice if poll sites are changed, and making colleges and universities a voter registration agency (in addition to the DMV, etc), among other updates.
  • Ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections and prohibiting voter roll purging. The bill would stop the use of non-forwardable mail being used as a way to remove voters from rolls.
  • Beefing up elections security, including requiring the director of national intelligence to do regular checks on foreign threats.
  • Recruiting and training more poll workers ahead of the 2020 election to cut down on long lines at the polls.

 

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Didn’t want to make a new topic. But I wanted to post about the “You just hate Trump” crowd.

 

 

This argument gets used a lot by his defenders, including in this forum. Although some of those claim to not like him. It’s amazing how many people don’t like him but defend him. Their sentiment is that because there are a lot of criticisms of Trump, it must be because people hate him. And this is used as an attempt to nullify all arguments against his fitness to be president.

 

Sarah Sanders:

 

“I think the common thread is a hysteria over the fact that this president became president,” she said. “The common thread is that there is so much hatred out there that they will look for anything to try to create and tie problems to this president.”

 

 

This has to be the s#!ttiest and dumbest defense of a politician I’ve heard on my lifetime. People are critical of Trump more often than of any previous presidents because he does and says more things that are worthy of criticism than any other president before him.

 

People are trying to treat it like it all started with people hating him, as if nothing Trump does or says actually causes the criticism. It’s idiotic. It’s also crazy the things people will do to shut their brains off so they can continue supporting him.

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50 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Regarding the campaign finance provisions -

The 6-1 public funding seems to be pretty expensive.  Has any one seen any projected #s on this.  I'm ok wt the concept as it rewards grass roots fund raising.  But it seems like it could

bankrupt the govt even more than what it is. 

Small dollar donations (which are all that's covered by the 6-1) for the Presidential race were $260 million in 2012 and $191 million in 2016. Sanders raised an additional $100 million in the Dem primary race. The Dems raised about $1 billion in small dollar donations for 2018.

 

Taking all of that then I'd put a very rough educated guess of around $2 billion in small dollar donations raised in mid-term elections and around $3 billion in Presidential election years, which would mean that the 6-1 match would be about $30 billion over the 4 year cycle or $7.5 billion/year.

 

That doesn't seem too expensive if we're talking about fixing the inequality in our democracy, but it seems like too much when we could just outlaw large dollar donations.

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6 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

Small dollar donations (which are all that's covered by the 6-1) for the Presidential race were $260 million in 2012 and $191 million in 2016. Sanders raised an additional $100 million in the Dem primary race. The Dems raised about $1 billion in small dollar donations for 2018.

 

Taking all of that then I'd put a very rough educated guess of around $2 billion in small dollar donations raised in mid-term elections and around $3 billion in Presidential election years, which would mean that the 6-1 match would be about $30 billion over the 4 year cycle or $7.5 billion/year.

 

That doesn't seem too expensive if we're talking about fixing the inequality in our democracy, but it seems like too much when we could just outlaw large dollar donations.

agree -outlaw the problem and you won't have need of the other.  But I think both parties want the large dollar donations to remain. 

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Just now, TGHusker said:

agree -outlaw the problem and you won't have need of the other.  But I think both parties want the large dollar donations to remain. 

Yep, which is why we the people are going to have to force the change. Given the Supreme Court rulings, I think we'll have to create an Amendment, which is why I support wolf-pac.

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18 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

Yep, which is why we the people are going to have to force the change. Given the Supreme Court rulings, I think we'll have to create an Amendment, which is why I support wolf-pac.

Red this looks pretty good.   I couldn't find a 'draft' of what they propose the 28th amendment to look like.  Have you seen one ?

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18 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Red this looks pretty good.   I couldn't find a 'draft' of what they propose the 28th amendment to look like.  Have you seen one ?

They deliberately don't have a draft as they want to get more input as additional states sign on and have a draft for the Constitutional Convention.

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