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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#17961 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 10:48

 Chas_P, on 2021-March-06, 21:22, said:

Did you see him the other day say, "I'm happy to answer questions if that's what I'm supposed to do"? Then his handlers cut off the feed. If he's truly carrying out "his" agenda that's fine with me. He's the duly-elected POTUS;I have no qualms with that and truly want him to be successful. But when he says, "if that's what I'm supposed to do" it makes me wonder whose agenda it truly is. It just makes me a little nervous to think that the leader of the free world has to wait for instructions

I had not heard about that, so I used our friend Google: Biden did answer questions from House Democrats at virtual event

Quote

CLAIM: The White House cut President Joe Biden’s feed at a virtual event with top House Democrats because they did not have confidence in him answering questions.

THE FACTS: Posts online are falsely suggesting that a video clip of Biden’s introductory remarks at the House Democratic Caucus Virtual Issues Conference shows that the White House is limiting the president’s talking time.

The 15-second clip was taken from comments Biden made praising Democratic leaders for their support and addressed the need to tackle issues related to racial injustice, confidence in the American government and the climate.

During the conference, Biden praised House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Conservative accounts shared the clip of Biden with captions meant to further propel a narrative pushed during the election that he is unfit for office.

“The White House doesn’t even have enough confidence in Joe Biden to answer questions? Wow,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, tweeted.

“BIDEN APPEARS TO BE NOTHING MORE THAN A PUPPET PRESIDENT,” another post said.

In the clip, viewed more than 1.6 million times on Twitter, Biden says he would be happy to take questions. “And I’m happy to take questions if that’s what you — I’m supposed to do, Nance,” he says before the feed ends. “Whatever you want me to do.”

The video feed of Biden then ends. But comments circulating with the clip misrepresent what was behind the cut.

On Wednesday, pool reporters were allowed to attend the introductory remarks made by Biden, but the session was then closed to the press for the president to take questions from House Democrats.

The AP confirmed that Biden did take questions from House Democrats including one on systemic racism and another on the child tax credit.

His answers there seem to have been to democrats only, so I looked for a transcript of Biden's actual answers to some real questions, and found this from January 25, 2021:
Remarks by President Biden at Signing of Executive Order on Strengthening American Manufacturing

Quote

I’ll stop here and sign the executive order, and then come back and take some of your questions.

This executive order is entitled “Ensuring the Future Is Made in America, by Americans — All of American Workers.”

(The executive order is signed).

There you go. Now I’d now be happy to take your questions.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Jonathan Lemire with the Associated Press. Two topics, if I may. The first: You have made reopening schools a central part of your first 100 Days agenda, and you’ve long portrayed yourself as an ally to the teachers and the unions. Right now, the Chicago Teachers Union has refused. They defied an order to return to in-person classing — for in-person classrooms because of a lack of vaccinations. Do you believe, sir, that teachers should return to schools now?

THE PRESIDENT: I believe we should make school classrooms safe and secure for the students, for the teachers, and for the help that’s in those schools maintaining the facilities. We need new ventilation systems in those schools. We need testing for people coming in and out of the classes. We need testing for teachers, as well as students. And we need the capacity — the capacity to know that, in fact, the cic- [sic] — or the circumstance in the school is safe and secure for everyone.

For example, there is no reason why the clear guidance will be that every school should be thoroughly sanitized, from the lavatories to the hallways. And so this is about making — and none of the school districts that I’m aware of — there may be some, of public school districts — have insisted that all of those pieces be in place.

And, I might add, it’s the same kind of thing I hope we can do with small businesses and businesses, making sure they have the capacity to test their workers when they come in; to make sure they have plastic dividers between their booths in their — in their restaurants, et cetera; to make sure they can sanitize.

So it’s not so much about the idea that teachers aren’t going to work. The teachers I know, they want to work. They just want to work in a safe environment and as safe as we can rationally make it. And we can do that, and we should be able to open up every — every school, kindergarten through eighth grade, if, in fact, we administer these tests.

And it’ll have the added advantage, I might add, of putting millions of people back to work – all those mothers and fathers that are home taking care of their children, rather than go to work. Even when they can work, they’re not able to do it unless they have the luxury of working distance-wise, like many of us do. They’re not able to do it. And so this is about generating economic growth overall as well.

...

Q Thank you, Mr. President, Annie Linskey with the Washington Post.

THE PRESIDENT: Hi, Annie.

Q I wanted to ask you a little bit about one of the, sort of, major themes of your campaign, and how you sort of intend to measure and enact it — and that is the idea of unity. If you could talk a little bit about what you see unity as being? There are some people who are defining it as being bipartisan. Others are saying it is what most of the people in the country, defined by some poll, might believe, or any sort of number of other — or perhaps it’s 50 plus 1, or 50 plus 2, or 75 percent.

So, given that it is such a key part of your message and your promise, can you talk and reflect a little bit more about what is unity when you see it and as you define it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Annie, I think it makes up several of the issues — the points you made. One is: Unity requires you to take away — eliminate the vitriol, make anything that you disagree with about the other person’s personality or their lack of integrity or they’re not decent legislators and the like — so we have to get rid of that. And I think that’s already beginning to change, but God knows where things go, number one.

Unity also is: trying to reflect what the majority of the American people — Democrat, Republican, and independent — think is within the fulcrum of what needs to be done to make their lives and the lives of Americans better. For example, if you look at the data — and I’m not claiming the polling data to be exact, but if you look at the data, you have — I think it’s — I hope I’m saying this correct –- you may correct me if I get the number wrong, I think it’s 57, 58 percent of the American people — including Republicans, Democrats, and independents — think that we have to do something about the COVID vaccine; we have to do something about making sure that people who are hurting badly, can’t eat, don’t have food, are in a position where they’re about to be thrown out of their apartments, et cetera, being able to have an opportunity to get a job — that they all think we should be acting, we should be doing more.

Unity also is trying to get, at a minimum — if you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines but it gets passed, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t unity; it just means it wasn’t bipartisan. I’d prefer these things to be bipartisan, because I’m trying to generate some consensus and take sort of the — how can I say it? — the vitriol out of all of this. Because I’m confident — I’m confident, from my discussions, there are a number of Republicans who know we have to do something about the food insecurity for people in this pandemic. I’m confident they know we have to do something about figuring out how to get children back in school.

...

In a related event, I walked into the pantry the other day and wondered for a few seconds why I had gone in there. Then I remembered it was for a new pack of coffee filters for the pot I'd started to make.

When I told my handler about that, she laughed and said, "Don't forget to push the start button!"
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#17962 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 12:33

Propaganda is most effective when used in conjunction with biased targets
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#17963 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 14:22

Being economical with the truth (lying) is a long-standing tradition in American politics.
The Cherry tree story is known to be rubbish. Maybe that's where the term "cherry-picking" comes from. If it doesn't, it should.

As Mark Twain did not say:

"SIN MO SCÉAL DÍOBH, AGUS MÁ TÁ BRÉAG ANN, FÁ É,
MAR NÍ MISE A CHUM NÁ A CHEAP."

Lying is embedded in political discourse in all countries.

It should not be tolerated. There are no alternative facts. The tooth fairy does not exist and the former occupant of the White House wasn't funny.
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#17964 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 18:24

Please don't feed the trolls.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#17965 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 19:17

 y66, on 2021-March-07, 18:24, said:

Please don't feed the trolls.

Heavens no! Only copy and paste stuff from the punditocracy with which you agree! And we'll all live happily ever after.
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#17966 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 20:13

Posted Image
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#17967 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-March-07, 20:16

Matt yglesias said:

Do conservatives ever wonder why they didn’t just cave to Pelosi on relief last fall and win the election?

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#17968 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 04:14

 PassedOut, on 2021-March-07, 10:48, said:

I had not heard about that, so I used our friend Google: Biden did answer questions from House Democrats at virtual event

Quote

CLAIM: The White House cut President Joe Biden’s feed at a virtual event with top House Democrats because they did not have confidence in him answering questions.



The obvious problem is that Fox Propaganda Channel and other ultra right fringe political mouthpieces are not interested in any facts. They are interested in throwing sh*t against the wall and hoping something sticks so they can rile up their base and get some legitimate news coverage from legitimate news organizations that are too busy or not interested in researching all the facts.

Otherwise, they will have to cover for the n'th time the Black Lives Matter demonstrations this summer, the removal of Confederate statues movement, Antifa, everybody else attacking them for being racists and white supremacists, kneeling during the Star-Spangled Banner before sporting events, illegal voting and miscounting ballots by non-white, non-Republican voters. They need to dial up FAKE OUTRAGE to keep those donations and advertising dollars coming in.
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#17969 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 04:54

 Chas_P, on 2021-March-07, 19:17, said:

Heavens no! Only copy and paste stuff from the punditocracy with which you agree! And we'll all live happily ever after.


This applies to both sides and is one of the biggest issues atm
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#17970 User is offline   awm 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 05:52

As far as protests go, it seems important to ask a few questions:

1. Is there a real problem that's being protested, or just a bunch of made up conspiracies? In the case of Black Lives Matter it seems quite clear there is a real problem -- lots of Black people are being killed by police in situations where they committed at most minor crimes and were unarmed and not a threat. We have this on video in cases like George Floyd -- he's lying on the ground saying "I can't breathe" as the officer chokes him to death. In the case of the insurrection on January 6, they have all kinds of claims about how the election was stolen but there is no real evidence for this at all, and the quite crazy QAnon conspiracy theory was front and center among the protestors.

2. When criminal activity occurs during the protests, was this the purpose of the protest or the action of a small minority? Black Lives Matter isn't about rioting or looting, and a lot of the protests were completely peaceful. There was a small minority that took advantage of the confusion to commit some crimes, but a lot of the violence was actually initiated by police forces! For the insurrection, an awful lot of people decided to storm a federal building (whether violently or not, this is illegal) and a lot of the rhetoric around the protest ("take our country back") seemed encouraging of this behaviour.

3. How does the political establishment react to the criminal elements of the protest? Biden and many other democrats have condemned the violence in Black Lives Matter protests, while still supporting the main theme that Black people should not be killed by police in situations where they pose no threat to the officers involved. The reaction to the insurrection among republicans has been less clear-cut -- Mitch McConnell condemned it pretty directly, but others like Josh Hawley seem generally supportive. Certainly a lot of republicans in congress were not deterred from continuing baseless challenges to the election results after the insurrection. As for Trump, he fired up the crowd and told them they were "wonderful people" and while he told them to "be peaceful" (after also telling them to "fight") he never said that storming the capitol was a crime or ordered them to leave.

Much as the republicans would like to "both sides" this, I think there are pretty significant differences.
Adam W. Meyerson
a.k.a. Appeal Without Merit
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#17971 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 06:46

 y66, on 2021-March-07, 18:24, said:

Please don't feed the trolls.

Right. Forgot where I was for a bit.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#17972 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 07:45

 Chas_P, on 2021-March-07, 19:17, said:

Heavens no! Only copy and paste stuff from the punditocracy with which you agree! And we'll all live happily ever after.


Chas, no one is suggesting that it is wrong to paste divergent viewpoints

Rather, people are noting that

1. You personally are not a trustworthy source of information. You persistently post false claims.

2. You are either too stupid or too lazy to self correct. Or, alternatively, you are deliberately introducing false claims

3. Regardless of why this is happening, you don't deserve respect and your postings should be mocked
Alderaan delenda est
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#17973 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 13:09

We're up to page 600 - 3NT= vulnerable - Is this some kind of record?
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#17974 User is offline   awm 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 16:18

 pilowsky, on 2021-March-08, 13:09, said:

We're up to page 600 - 3NT= vulnerable - Is this some kind of record?


It's page 899 for me, I think the page numbers depend somehow on your screen size.
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#17975 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 16:51

 awm, on 2021-March-08, 16:18, said:

It's page 899 for me, I think the page numbers depend somehow on your screen size.


FAKE NEWS!!!
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#17976 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 19:13

 PassedOut, on 2021-March-07, 10:48, said:


In a related event, I walked into the pantry the other day and wondered for a few seconds why I had gone in there. Then I remembered it was for a new pack of coffee filters for the pot I'd started to make.

When I told my handler about that, she laughed and said, "Don't forget to push the start button!"


I've got it my friend. Been there, done that. Perhaps we should both leave running the government to the heavyweights and you and I stick to what we do best....squabbling on an internet message board. ;)
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#17977 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 19:20

 hrothgar, on 2021-March-08, 07:45, said:

Chas, no one is suggesting that it is wrong to paste divergent viewpoints

Rather, people are noting that

1. You personally are not a trustworthy source of information. You persistently post false claims.

2. You are either too stupid or too lazy to self correct. Or, alternatively, you are deliberately introducing false claims

3. Regardless of why this is happening, you don't deserve respect and your postings should be mocked


Thank you so much for your observations Richard. But I must tell you, at the risk of bruising your overinflated ego, that after long and careful consideration I have been unable to come up with one thing on Earth that I consider less significant than your opinion. You are perfectly entitled to it. But please don't get your panties in a wad if I don't share it.
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#17978 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 20:39

You see what happens when you put two people in a room and both of them believe they know everything about everything all the time?

Is the collective noun for such people "a Bridge Club"?
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#17979 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-March-08, 20:45

Matt Yglesias said:

Democrats have become the party of affluent suburbanites while the GOP stands tall for working class interests.

Posted Image


Howard Gleckman at Brookings said:

According to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the Senate version of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) would reduce federal taxes in 2021 by an average of $3,000 and raise after-tax incomes by 3.8 percent. Families with children would get an average tax cut of more than $6,000 under the bill, which now goes to the House for final approval.

Simply in terms of whose taxes are cut, the bill is in stark contrast to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In 2021, low- and moderate-income households (those making $91,000 or less) would receive nearly 70 percent of the tax benefits from the Senate measure. Among families with children, those low- and middle-income households would get nearly three-quarters of the benefit. By contrast, nearly half of the TCJA’s 2018 tax cuts went to households in the top 5 percent of the income distribution (who made about $308,000 that year).

https://www.taxpolic...come-households

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#17980 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2021-March-09, 04:29

 Chas_P, on 2021-March-08, 19:20, said:

Thank you so much for your observations Richard. But I must tell you, at the risk of bruising your overinflated ego, that after long and careful consideration I have been unable to come up with one thing on Earth that I consider less significant than your opinion. You are perfectly entitled to it. But please don't get your panties in a wad if I don't share it.


Here's the thing Chas, its not "my" opinion
I wouldn't quite refer this to this as consensus, but this seems to be pretty standard opinion here on the forum.

FFS, people use "Chas is a racist" as their sig file.

You'd be nothing but a sad joke if it weren't for the fact that modern American society is plagued by your sort of ignorant racist assholes...

As is, you're a reminder of part of American society that needs to die
Alderaan delenda est
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