BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I have told this story before but I think it has relevance.

When I was 21 my wife and I were going out to a movie. The car was about to die but it had not yet done so. A cop didn't like what he saw of the car and stopped me and really laid into me, although only verbally, about my irresponsibility. That was until I mentioned that my wife and I were going to a movie. That had the effect of a magic wand transforming Cinderella. I was no longer a young irresponsible punk, I was a young struggling family man. No ticket, just a suggestion that I get some things fixed. I junked it, as I had already decided to do.

Cops, at least some of them, put people into categories. i suppose all of us do to some extent. I could change categories bt saying"wife". A black person can not change categories so easily.

I am sure that in predominantly black neighborhoods, just as in predominantly white neighborhoods, the police have an essential role to play in controlling crime. This has to be done without treating people as trash. In particular without choking them, but I hope we can do better than that.

The article is simple minded.

If you read ***** like this then I understand where your views come from. As has been pointed out above, the writer has already decided his conclusions and is distorting the facts massively to fit.

Almost everybody who considers a foetus to be a human being is doing so on the basis of religion and forcing their beliefs on people who don't share them, all credibility gone instantly with me.

Pretty sure that Chas knows that the link is to a satirical piece and that he's trolling us with it.

I recall you once mentioning a cop saying to you at an impressionable age "Aren't you getting a little old to be doing stuff like this?" and that his words were not wasted on you. I can imagine how interactions like that vs, say, a choke hold, might alter a person's path for the better.

Pretty sure that Chas knows that the link is to a satirical piece and that he's trolling us with it.

What makes you believe that this is satire?

No one hates black life more than the Democrat leadership, in my humble opinion...

Aren’t the looters supposed to be with the working class? Why didn’t they loot JCPenney or stores that sold work boots?

Who is missing? Asians. They don’t loot. They don’t riot. They study and they work. And they get ahead, and they live in nice houses and buy at the stores the looters steal from.

My favorite TV commentator is Tucker Carlson. He’s a genius.

There is nothing systemically wrong with the USA. Not racial injustice. That was gone long ago. Not class warfare. That’s ancient history.

Sure, as a comedian, Ben Stein knows that some folks believe stuff like this (the beliefs he is satirizing) and that those folks help to boost his bottom line, but he surely doesn't believe this stuff himself and neither does Chas.

With President Donald Trump now clearly behind in the polls, there’s been a wave of speculation about what the Republican Party might look like after losing the election. Probably the best thing to say about this is that it’s massively premature: Trump could well narrowly win a second term, or former Vice President Joe Biden could get more than 400 electoral votes — or anything could happen between those two possibilities. And even if the president loses, presumably the party’s reaction would differ depending on the margin of defeat and other variables.

But I’ll foolishly play along a little bit. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar has a nice item summarizing the speculation and adding some of his own. Kraushaar comes down in the middle — he suspects “the most likely scenario is that an out-of-power Trump will still be viewed favorably by most Republicans, but will no longer be the political force that can handpick primary winners and dictate the party’s legislative strategy.” Plausible! But so is George Will’s guess that the day after the election Republicans will all abandon Trump and claim they never supported him in the first place. And so is speculation that Trump could still run for and win the nomination in 2024 if he loses in November.

The thing is, I don’t think it has much to do with Trump after all. Kraushaar says that Trump will still be active “on Twitter and beyond,” but it’s the beyond that really matters here — specifically, whether Republican-aligned media will still treat him as the leader of the party. I’m fairly sure that most Republican politicians will be happy to see him gone, and the same is true of almost all of the party’s campaign and governing professionals. But of course if it were up to them, Trump wouldn’t have come anywhere close to the nomination in 2016.

The truth is that Republican-aligned media outlets have a great deal of influence within the party, and if they choose to treat Trump as the Rightful President throughout a Biden administration then there’s not much that Republican politicians and other party actors can do about it.

That’s a big problem. Kraushaar says that Republicans are “not suicidal” and therefore will evolve as needed in order to win elections. Politicians, campaign and governing professionals, and most party-aligned interest groups certainly have strong incentives to try to do so. But Fox News, talk radio shows, and the rest of the conservative marketplace may be better off if Democrats are in the White House. That’s not to say that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity actively want Republicans to lose or would try to make that happen. Only that incentives are important, and when they don’t point in the correct direction people’s behavior tends to follow.

What this means for Trump’s influence post-presidency is unclear. I have no idea how Republican-aligned media outlets will judge their own markets: Is it better to stick with the proven product, or to start rolling out new ones? What I do know is that election results are always easy to explain away, and if it’s in their interests to stick with Trump, talk-show hosts will be able to convince themselves that a Biden victory was despite Trump, not because of him.

Source: https://www.bloomber...p?sref=UHfKDqx7

Ben Stein's public statements and Chas's posting history sure as hell paint them as outright racists.

Perhaps they might want to steer clear of "satire" around this sort of topic

I find Ben Stein's edgy brand of 'humor' appalling. He knows full well that the racist folks he's making fun of accept at face value his most over-the-top statements while those in on the joke join in with his laughter. But playing both sides this way has made him a lot of money.

I see the same sort of thing with Trump. During Romney's campaign against Obama, Trump advised Romney to get on the 'birther' bandwagon because the voters Romney needed were too stupid to know that the whole thing was bull. And then, of course, Trump's claim that his own voters were so stupid that they'd stick with him even if he shot someone on 5th avenue.

Playing folks for suckers like Ben Stein and Donald Trump do can backfire. I hope it does.

I thought this was a very good article about the press in the era of Trump.

I thought this was a very good article about the press in the era of Trump.

Perhaps I should be focused on the larger themes of Donald Trump’s presidency, but today I just can’t get over the little stuff.

Item:

The Secret Service reportedly told Trump to head down to a secure space in the White House on May 29 because protesters across the street were getting unruly. Seems to me he had several options:

• Defy the Secret Service, stay put and then have it leaked out that he heroically stood his ground.
  
• Go down to the bunker, and then when the press reports it just ignore the whole thing.
  
• Go down to the bunker, and then use the incident to bash the protesters (whom the president is portraying as violent).
  
• Or go down the bunker, make up something about doing an “inspection,” fight it out with the media for a week and then be completely embarrassed when your attorney general lets out the truth.

Item:

Trump’s had a lousy run of polls, capped off by a CNN survey released Monday showing him down 14 percentage points to former Vice President Joe Biden. Options included highlighting the best poll out there, ignoring the polls and focusing on governing, or at least claiming to be ignoring the polls and focused on governing. Instead, Trump had a pollster draft a risible memo accusing the other pollsters of being out to get him and tweeted it out, thus confirming reporting that he’s obsessed with the polls, implying that similar reporting about bad internal polls is true, and drawing attention to the worst of all the recent public surveys.

Item:

Anti-Trump Republicans have been taking out attack ads on Washington TV during Trump’s favorite cable news shows. Apparently the president is so upset about this that his own campaign has spent almost half a million dollars to counter-advertise on the same programs, mainly to cheer him up and convince him that his staffers are hard at work. Granted, presidential campaigns generally have more money than they know what to do with, so it’s not as if swing-state advertising will suffer, but it’s still an interesting comment about what the campaign professionals think of their candidate.

All of those are from Monday’s news. I could easily go further. There’s also Trump’s continuing feud with Senator Mitt Romney, complete with more easily disproved statements. The president seems perfectly pleased to go forward without Romney or Senator Lisa Murkowski on his side. It’s worth remembering that Trump won narrowly in 2016, and can’t afford to lose any significant faction of Republicans.

There’s also Trump’s decision to begin his rallies again, regardless of best practices to control the coronavirus. Will it help him? He’s been holding those rallies since early in his presidency and they don’t appear to have done him much good, but he likes doing them and has no one around him to tell him otherwise.

And while the story about the attack on protesters has centered on Attorney General William Barr more than on Trump personally, Monday marked a week into increasingly dubious administration claims about the event, including semantic arguments about what counts as using tear gas and evidence-free accusations of protester violence. The Washington Post has probably now debunked those claims for good. Again, even given the original events, there was simply no reason for the White House to stretch out the bad publicity for a week.

None of these items makes all that much difference on its own, but that’s a lot of missteps, easily exposed falsehoods and wasted effort, all from one day’s headlines. Have enough days like that and it adds up to a weak, unpopular president who seems to be flailing like no one since Jimmy Carter. We’ll see what Tuesday brings.

I find Ben Stein's edgy brand of 'humor' appalling. He knows full well that the racist folks he's making fun of accept at face value his most over-the-top statements while those in on the joke join in with his laughter. But playing both sides this way has made him a lot of money.

I see the same sort of thing with Trump. During Romney's campaign against Obama, Trump advised Romney to get on the 'birther' bandwagon because the voters Romney needed were too stupid to know that the whole thing was bull. And then, of course, Trump's claim that his own voters were so stupid that they'd stick with him even if he shot someone on 5th avenue.

Playing folks for suckers like Ben Stein and Donald Trump do can backfire. I hope it does.

Oh sweet baby Jesus let this be true.

Amy McGrath Takes Narrow Lead Over Mitch McConnell in Kentucky Senate Race, Poll Shows

"What this shows is that after 35 years of Mitch McConnell's partisanship and dysfunction, Kentuckians are ready for change," a representative for McGrath's campaign told Newsweek.