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

Jump to content

  • 1109 Pages +
  • « First
  • 970
  • 971
  • 972
  • 973
  • 974
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

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

#19421 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-05, 20:46

View Postkenberg, on 2022-February-05, 15:00, said:

With regards to the tax on ads:
It's a long article, let me ask a basic question. Ads are placed in the Washington Post. I assume those posting the ads pay WaPo, I assume that counts as corporate income for WaPo, I assume WaPo pays a tax on this. But I also assume that the tax is simply on the income as corporate income. So the question: Is this proposed tax to go beyond the tax on corporate income? I might be ok with it either way, I am just hoping to understand it.

The misinformation problem is different from the tax problem. I learned when I was 10 or so that you should not believe everything that someone tells you. I don't know what to do about people who never learned that.

According to Romer, Facebook and Google control 59% and 18% of digital political ad revenue respectively. His goal is to protect the public from "the unchecked power of digital platforms. The bigger they get and the more they know, the greater the threat to our social and political way of life."

Yes, the proposed tax goes beyond existing corporate income tax.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19422 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-05, 20:58

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said:

What happened on January 6, 2021 was an effort to overturn a lawful election resulting in violence and destruction at the Capitol. We must not legitimize those actions which resulted in loss of life and we must learn from that horrible event so history does not repeat itself.

As Americans we must acknowledge those tragic events, and we cannot allow a false narrative to be created. We cannot deny the truth—to suggest it was “legitimate political discourse” is just wrong.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19423 User is offline   pilowsky 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 3,786
  • Joined: 2019-October-04
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Poland

Posted 2022-February-05, 21:11

The first time I heard the term "fictional narrative" as an alternative to saying bullshit was when Dr Fiona Hill was trying to explain to republicans how Russia was interfering in the US election.
She didn't get very far.
I'm not sure why the term is now "false narrative" except that it has an appealing assonance.

Fortuna Fortis Felix
0

#19424 User is offline   kenberg 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 11,228
  • Joined: 2004-September-22
  • Location:Northern Maryland

Posted 2022-February-06, 07:04

View Posty66, on 2022-February-05, 20:46, said:

According to Romer, Facebook and Google control 59% and 18% of digital political ad revenue respectively. His goal is to protect the public from "the unchecked power of digital platforms. The bigger they get and the more they know, the greater the threat to our social and political way of life."

Yes, the proposed tax goes beyond existing corporate income tax.


Thanks.


I am then at least a bit skeptical. One purpose of taxing is to raise money. I am fine with that purpose. Another purpose, sometimes, of taxing is to influence behavior. This gets more iffy. If it is to influence economic behavior, IRAs for example, that's one thing. If it is to influence political behavior then I think that can seriously backfire. People do not want to be taxed for expressing a view that other people don't agree with. Of course the tax would be on FB, not on whoever buys the ad, but there is still a problem I think.

What to do about flat-out false statements? If they are libelous, then there can be a lawsuit. But vaccines will make you magnetic? I doubt that taxing this view is a solution. There have always been crazy opinions such as thinking that The Wild Bunch is a great movie. But taxing them won't change their minds.

Short version: The advocates for this have to base their advocacy on financial reasons.
Ken
0

#19425 User is online   awm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 8,417
  • Joined: 2005-February-09
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Zurich, Switzerland

Posted 2022-February-06, 16:05

Romer's argument seems a bit confused to me, or perhaps it's a bit of a bait-and-switch.

None of the major tech companies make significant amounts of money from political advertising. Each presidential campaign spends about a billion dollars on advertising (total, including TV spots, print, direct mail, and digital) every four years. This is nothing compared to the hundreds of billions in yearly revenue that companies like Google and Facebook bring in.

Further, there's no reason to think that splitting these companies up will damp the power of misleading political ads. There are already multiple social media platforms where false information can spread.

So while the "problem" that Romer cites in his article is about political advertising, the "solution" he suggests really has nothing to do with this.

He seems to think that forcing these companies to move to a subscription model will somehow make things better. This transfers the cost for service from advertisers to end users -- it means regular people who use Google or Facebook will have to pay real money for that service. Is it possible that they would? Sure, there are many subscription services that people pay for (Netflix is a great example). But I think a lot of voters would be very unhappy if their congressional representatives passed a bill that meant they had to pay for things that used to be "free", don't you?

If the real problem is that these companies have too much power or act as monopolies, why not address it directly by writing and enforcing stricter anti-trust laws? However, it does seem to me that making this argument just days after Facebook lost a quarter of its market value is a bit of poor timing.
Adam W. Meyerson
a.k.a. Appeal Without Merit
0

#19426 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-06, 20:57

If two firms control 77% of all digital adds then it seems likely they control ~77% of all political digital ads.

In the case of Facebook, one individual controls 58% of the voting shares. That's a lot of power.

I don't think Romer is confused or doing a bait and switch. As more companies get in the game, the concentration of power he worries about will become less of a problem. As for enforcing existing antitrust laws, Romer is not optimistic based on the Supreme Court's decision in Ohio v. American Express.

Romer first floated his proposal in May 2019.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19427 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,288
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2022-February-06, 23:33

View Postkenberg, on 2022-February-06, 07:04, said:

Thanks.


I am then at least a bit skeptical. One purpose of taxing is to raise money. I am fine with that purpose. Another purpose, sometimes, of taxing is to influence behavior. This gets more iffy. If it is to influence economic behavior, IRAs for example, that's one thing. If it is to influence political behavior then I think that can seriously backfire. People do not want to be taxed for expressing a view that other people don't agree with. Of course the tax would be on FB, not on whoever buys the ad, but there is still a problem I think.

What to do about flat-out false statements? If they are libelous, then there can be a lawsuit. But vaccines will make you magnetic? I doubt that taxing this view is a solution. There have always been crazy opinions such as thinking that The Wild Bunch is a great movie. But taxing them won't change their minds.

Short version: The advocates for this have to base their advocacy on financial reasons.

Congress can compel with a criminal statute or influence with taxation. Taxation has more flexibility
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#19428 User is offline   pilowsky 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 3,786
  • Joined: 2019-October-04
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Poland

Posted 2022-February-07, 01:29

View PostWinstonm, on 2022-February-06, 23:33, said:

Congress can compel with a criminal statute or influence with taxation. Taxation has more flexibility


Although with enough lawyers, guns and money you can avoid both. As Mr Zevon might say.
Fortuna Fortis Felix
0

#19429 User is online   awm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 8,417
  • Joined: 2005-February-09
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Zurich, Switzerland

Posted 2022-February-07, 01:37

View Posty66, on 2022-February-06, 20:57, said:

If two firms control 77% of all digital adds then it seems likely they control ~77% of all political digital ads.

In the case of Facebook, one individual controls 58% of the voting shares. That's a lot of power.

I don't think Romer is confused or doing a bait and switch. As more companies get in the game, the concentration of power he worries about will become less of a problem. As for enforcing existing antitrust laws, Romer is not optimistic based on the Supreme Court's decision in Ohio v. American Express.

Romer first floated his proposal in May 2019.


The share of political ads is actually quite different from digital ads in general. For example, Google has more ad revenue than Facebook despite a much smaller share of political ad revenue. Facebook is particularly appealing for political ads because it offers a lot of demographic-based targeting options and tends to show ads based on the interests of "friends" (which can be a good way to find new potential voters).

The thing is, Facebook (and Zuckerberg) don't "control" the ads and they certainly don't "control" the voters. What they do, is offer a platform where advertisers can micro-target people based on interests and characteristics, and allow the advertisers to show their targeted people virtually anything. While this makes Zuckerberg a lot of money (and maybe Zuckerberg having a lot of money is its own problem), the real issues here are the micro-targeting capability and the lack of any enforcement of "truth in advertising" standards.

Would these things get better if we had more social networks rather than Facebook being so dominant? This seems unlikely -- these networks would compete for advertisers, and two big ways to make their network more appealing are to offer better micro-targeting capabilities and less policing of ads content -- it seems likely that the problem would actually get worse!

Would a subscription model help? Well, it would reduce the number of ads, but it creates troubling barriers to entry (low income people might not be able to afford the service, while today they can just not buy anything from the ads) and would certainly be unpopular.

If we want to fix the problems with digital political ads, it seems like we could just ban them entirely, or enforce some standard whereby advertisers could be held legally accountable for false or misleading content. Having a few big companies control most of the market might actually be beneficial -- they have deep pockets and can afford to bear the burden of some additional regulation.

On the other hand, if the problem is that these companies are "too big" and people like Zuckerberg have too much money, there are other solutions for this (higher taxes on billionaires, taxing companies based on where they raise revenue instead of where they incorporate, or enforcement of anti-trust laws).
Adam W. Meyerson
a.k.a. Appeal Without Merit
0

#19430 User is offline   pilowsky 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 3,786
  • Joined: 2019-October-04
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Poland

Posted 2022-February-07, 03:57

View Postawm, on 2022-February-07, 01:37, said:

...if the problem is that these companies are "too big" and people like Zuckerberg have too much money, there are other solutions for this (higher taxes on billionaires, taxing companies based on where they raise revenue instead of where they incorporate, or enforcement of anti-trust laws).


This is the real issue.
As I noted above there is a difference between the "Company" and individual shareholders that have varying amounts of taxable income.
Given that 100+ years of governments attempting to regulate corporate governance has totally failed to have any discernible effect on the obscene concentration of wealth, it seems that the original premise of this thread "has US democracy been trumped" is misguided.
It was fubar long before Trump - he simply crystallised the resentment that poor people felt towards the concentration of wealth in the US economy.

Ironic considering he's Trump.

There's a reason why poor people get exploited, while the rich take whatever they want.
They know something is not quite right but they can't do anything about it.
It's the same sensation I get when I play Bridge most of the time but at least Bridge is a game I can walk away from.
My children won't starve, I won't be homeless and I can still get medical care.
Fortuna Fortis Felix
0

#19431 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,288
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2022-February-07, 10:11

View Postpilowsky, on 2022-February-07, 03:57, said:

This is the real issue.
As I noted above there is a difference between the "Company" and individual shareholders that have varying amounts of taxable income.
Given that 100+ years of governments attempting to regulate corporate governance has totally failed to have any discernible effect on the obscene concentration of wealth, it seems that the original premise of this thread "has US democracy been trumped" is misguided.
It was fubar long before Trump - he simply crystallised the resentment that poor people felt towards the concentration of wealth in the US economy.

Ironic considering he's Trump.

There's a reason way poor people get exploited, while the rich take whatever they want.
They know something is not quite right but they can't do anything about it.
It's the same sensation I get when I play Bridge most of the time but at least Bridge is a game I can walk away from.
My children won't starve, I won't be homeless and I can still get medical care.


Yes, but then you won’t have one of those cool ‘MAGA’ hats or a felony conviction for January 6.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#19432 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,288
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2022-February-07, 10:14

View Postpilowsky, on 2022-February-07, 01:29, said:

Although with enough lawyers, guns and money you can avoid both. As Mr Zevon might say.

+1
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#19433 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,288
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2022-February-07, 13:59

I’m really tired of all the “Oh, My” reporting about Trump and his gang. Just let me know when the DOJ pulls out its nutcracker because it has them all by the balls.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#19434 User is offline   thepossum 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 2,606
  • Joined: 2018-July-04
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Australia

Posted 2022-February-07, 15:23

Seemingly it just requires a boycott by a few high profile artists to seriously damage individuals wealth (not just CEOs but ordinary Joes and their pensions)
0

#19435 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,288
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2022-February-08, 08:29

What’s next for this SCOTUS, a re-affirmation of Plessy v Ferguson?

Q: What happens when the law becomes a political tool and those affected refuse to accept its validity?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#19436 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-08, 10:18

From Peter Thiel to Exit Meta’s Board to Support Trump-Aligned Candidates by Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac at NYT:

Quote

Mr. Thiel first met Mr. Zuckerberg 18 years ago when he provided the entrepreneur with $500,000 in capital for Facebook, valuing the company at $4.9 million. That gave Mr. Thiel, who with his venture firm Founders Fund controlled a 10 percent stake in the social network, a seat on its board of directors.

Since then, Mr. Thiel has become a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg. He counseled the company through its early years of rapid user growth, and through its difficulties shifting its business to mobile phones around the time of its 2012 initial public offering.

He has also been seen as the contrarian who has Mr. Zuckerberg’s ear, championing unfettered speech across digital platforms when it suited him. His conservative views also gave Facebook’s board what Mr. Zuckerberg saw as ideological diversity.

In 2019 and 2020, as Facebook grappled with how to deal with political speech and claims made in political advertising, Mr. Thiel urged Mr. Zuckerberg to withstand the public pressure to take down those ads, even as other executives and board members thought the company should change its position. Mr. Zuckerberg sided with Mr. Thiel.

But Mr. Thiel’s views on speech were at times contradictory. He funded a secret war against the media website Gawker, eventually resulting in the site’s bankruptcy.

Mr. Thiel’s political influence and ties to key Republicans and conservatives have also offered a crucial gateway into Washington for Mr. Zuckerberg, especially during the Trump administration. In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Thiel had a private dinner with President Trump.

Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have long taken heat for Mr. Thiel’s presence on the board. In 2016, Mr. Thiel was one of the few tech titans in largely liberal Silicon Valley to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

In 2020, when Mr. Trump’s incendiary Facebook posts were put under the microscope, critics cited Mr. Thiel’s board seat as a reason for Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Mr. Trump’s posts be left standing.

Facebook banned Mr. Trump’s account last year after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, saying his messages incited violence. The episode became a key rallying point for conservatives who say mainstream social platforms have censored them.

Mr. Vance, who used to work at one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds, and Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s family office, have railed against Facebook. In October, the two Senate candidates argued in an opinion piece in The New York Post that Mr. Zuckerberg’s $400 million in donations to local election offices in 2020 amounted to “election meddling” that should be investigated.

Recently, Mr. Thiel has publicly voiced his disagreement with content moderation decisions at Facebook and other major social media platforms. In October at a Miami event organized by a conservative technology association, he said he would “take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth.”

Mr. Thiel’s investing has also clashed with his membership on Meta’s board. He invested in the company that became Clearview AI, a facial recognition start-up that scraped billions of photos from Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms in violation of their terms of service. Founders Fund also invested in Boldend, a cyberweapons company that claimed it had found a way to hack WhatsApp, the Meta-owned messaging platform.

Meta declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s investments.

In the past year, Mr. Thiel, who also is chairman of the software company Palantir, has increased his political giving to Republican candidates. Ahead of the midterms, he is backing four Senate candidates and 12 House candidates. Among those House candidates are three people running primary challenges to Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for the events of Jan. 6.

From The Making of Peter Thiel’s Networks by Moira Weigel at The New Republic:

Quote

In the late 1960s, Republicans began to mainstream what had formerly been a far-right talking point about “liberal bias.” And donors working through think tanks and nonprofits funded a network of college clubs, newspapers, and conferences, inspired by their New Left counterparts, to counteract the liberal influence on campus and to break the monopoly of colleges on knowledge production and credentialing.

These structures helped Thiel build the first part of his network. In 1987, Thiel co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative campus paper, with grants from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which supported papers like it across the country—Dinesh D’Souza’s Dartmouth Review, for instance, and Ann Coulter’s Cornell Review. (Coulter and Thiel would become close friends.) Complaining about liberalism on elite college campuses was emerging as a recognizable career path: After Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind became a blockbuster success in 1987, various foundation-funded books like Roger Kimball’s 1990 Tenured Radicals and D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education would follow. In this moment, minor adjustments to the “Western Civ” curriculum at Stanford, specifically, attracted national media attention. In addition to running on ISI grants, The Stanford Review would scare up donations by sending letters to wealthy alumni about the scandal of new classes being offered on subjects like Black hair.

If Thiel hated Stanford, he loved hating it. He stayed for law school, and well into his third year was still hanging out with undergraduates and writing for The Stanford Review. After a few years away—during which time he worked at the prestigious corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and interviewed for, but failed to secure, clerkships with Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia—he returned to Palo Alto. By the time he got back, he was already at work on a culture war screed, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which he co-wrote with fellow Stanford Review alum David O. Sacks.

A conservative Bay Area think tank called the Independent Institute published the book in 1995. The John M. Olin Foundation, the conservative nonprofit dedicated to nurturing a “counter-intelligentsia,” which had also supported D’Souza, gave the Independent Institute a $40,000 grant to publicize it. The Young America’s Foundation, the conservative youth movement that groomed Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, among others, promoted the book, as did Thiel himself—he handed out copies from a giant stack to anyone who wanted one as they walked by the Stanford student union. The Independent Institute helped Thiel and Sacks find a national platform: They placed op-eds in National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and on right-wing radio networks that were rapidly growing in the wake of Reagan-era deregulation.

As Thiel moved up in the world, he never outgrew the campus culture wars; he kept many allies from that era close. And throughout his career, Thiel would be drawn to figures who deployed culture war tactics like those he’d learned at Stanford. In 2007 and 2011, he donated to Ron Paul’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination—supporting a fringe libertarian figure known, before the Tea Party movement, for his newsletters, which used Stanford or Dartmouth Review–esque strategies to whip up controversy. Among other things, the newsletters referred to MLK Day as “annual Hate Whitey day” and called the end of South African apartheid the “destruction of civilization.” At a conference at the conservative Clare­mont Institute in 2010, Thiel ran into Chuck Johnson—then a student at Claremont McKenna College, who was already making a name for himself in conservative circles.

Johnson, who would go on to write for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller and Breit­bart, connected Thiel to key figures in the emerging alt-right. In 2016, Johnson introduced Thiel to Milo Yiannopoulos, then the tech editor of Breitbart, and to the Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That. After Google employee James Damore wrote a memo decrying the “ideological echo chamber” among his colleagues in July 2017, Johnson hosted him and other disaffected Google employees at Thiel’s house. And, when Thiel decided to attend the RNC in 2016, he asked Johnson to secure him a place as a Trump delegate.

Thiel was cultivating connections with a rising faction in the Republican Party. He was impressed by an ambitious young lawyer, who would later be a fellow enemy of Google: Josh Hawley, who happened to be a former contributor to The Stanford Review. He gave $300,000 to Hawley’s 2016 campaign for attorney general of Missouri and donated to his 2018 campaign for U.S. Senate. And in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Thiel moved in the orbit of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who, according to Chafkin, would become Thiel’s main link to the Trump White House.

Quote

The tech backlash has created an appetite for new kinds of questioning and critical narratives about the industry—and that is a good thing. But replacing heroes with anti-heroes does little to alter the narrative about how a handful of geniuses have changed the world through their insuperable intelligence; the genre continues to trade on a deep desire to make myths about the men behind the machines. And in the case of Thiel, specifically, to focus too much on him as an individual precludes understanding, much less contesting, the nature of his power.

Thiel is not Jobs or Musk, a charismatic CEO associated with a particular invention. He is not an inventor but an investor, and, for the most part, he prefers to stay behind the scenes. He leverages his network—or, more precisely, his status as a node between several networks that were not previously densely connected. To understand his influence, we have to track how his ideas and his practices have traveled and, where they have become a kind of social glue, the people they join together. To do that, we will need to look at the PayPal Mafia and the machines their money has built from outside, below, within.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19437 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-08, 14:16

From The Republican Party Can’t Be Saved by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

Quote

Posted Image“Normal political discourse,” per the Republican National Committee Credit: Brent Stirton/Getty Images

It’s now official: The Republican Party is no longer a political party in any known American sense. Honestly, it hasn’t been for a quite some time, but with last week’s resolution condemning Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the party made it official. We don’t always grasp the historic importance of events in real time, but rest assured that future historians, assuming the United States remains enough of a democracy to have honest ones, will point to Friday, February 4 as a pivotal day in the party’s war on democracy.

Why? What makes the statement, passed by the Republican National Committee at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, so special? There are many factors. It was passed by voice vote, without debate or discussion; the decision was made in about one minute’s time. This is about how Cold War–era Albania passed resolutions favored by Enver Hoxha. As near as I can tell, it looks like two RNC members have gone on the record saying they shouted “no”: Bill Palatucci of New Jersey and Henry Barbour of Mississippi. Remember those names. I wonder what fate awaits them.

In addition, the resolution was accompanied by the passage of a change to Rule 11, which stipulates that the party can’t take sides in a competitive GOP primary. That rule was changed specifically so that the party could officially endorse, and provide money and other support to, Harriet Hageman, one of several challengers Cheney will face in the Wyoming primary—and the one who has Donald Trump’s backing. So a long-standing party rule has been changed specifically to destroy the career of one person. That, too, has a very Eastern bloc ring to it.

There’s so much more that could be said, but the money quote in this episode is the line in the resolution that condemns Cheney and Kinzinger for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” This is right out of 1984. When The New York Times reported that this meant that the RNC was referring to the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse,” RNC gauleiter Ronna McDaniel howled that of course she has condemned violence, and the legit discourse business referred to other stuff.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19438 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2022-February-08, 16:58

From McConnell Says RNC Shouldn’t Have Censured Cheney and Kinzinger by Lindsay Wise at WSJ:

Quote

WASHINGTON—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) criticized the Republican National Committee’s censure of two Republican lawmakers who sit on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying the RNC shouldn’t single them out for holding differing views from the majority of the party.

“That’s not the job of the RNC,” Mr. McConnell said.

“Traditionally the view of the national party committee is that we support all members of our party regardless of their positions on some issues,” he said.

Quote

Mr. McConnell, who has accused Mr. Trump of provoking the mob that attacked the Capitol, said Tuesday that he has confidence in Ms. McDaniel. But he reiterated his position that what happened on Jan. 6 was “a violent insurrection” that was intended to “prevent the peaceful transfer of power after legitimately certified elections, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

In a separate development last Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence rejected Mr. Trump’s repeated claims that Mr. Pence could have overturned the 2020 election outcome during the session of Congress that was interrupted by pro-Trump rioters. He also said the party should be focused on coming elections rather than continuing to make false claims that the 2020 result was fraudulent.

The rival stances within the party highlight the continued divisions over Mr. Trump’s legacy and continued influence. A January poll by NBC News shows the share of Republicans who consider themselves more supporters of Mr. Trump than supporters of the GOP has declined, with 56% calling themselves backers of the party to 36% of Mr. Trump. Back in October 2020, those numbers were 54% for Mr. Trump and 38% for the party.

On Capitol Hill, some Republican lawmakers distanced themselves this week from the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse” language, and warned that censuring Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger and re-litigating the events of Jan. 6 could distract from the party’s efforts to win back control of Congress.

“Those who assaulted police officers, broke windows and breached the Capitol were not engaged in legitimate political discourse, and to say otherwise is absurd,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine).

A year after pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers and Americans remain divided over what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, and who is to blame. WSJ journalists look at changes in Congress since then, and what it could mean for the 2022 midterm elections. Photos: Getty Images
Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said he disapproved of the decision by Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger to join the panel, which he called a partisan effort, but also criticized the RNC censure.

“They said in the resolution that they wanted Republicans to be unified. That was not a unifying action,” he said of the censure resolution.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah), a former Republican presidential nominee who voted twice to convict Mr. Trump on impeachment counts, said the RNC action undercut the party.

“One, to sanction two people of character as they did. But number two, to suggest that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is ‘legitimate political discourse’ is so far from accurate as to shock and make people wonder what we’re thinking,” Mr. Romney said.

Mr. Romney said he and Ms. McDaniel, his niece, exchanged texts about the censure resolution, and he expressed his point of view.

“Anything that my party does that comes across as being stupid is not going to help us,” he said.

The nine-member Jan. 6 committee was created last year in a largely party line vote, after Mr. McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) appointed Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger to the committee after rejecting two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks to serve on the panel: Reps. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), both close Trump allies.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) wouldn’t say what he personally thought about the censure resolution, but he said most of his GOP constituents in his home state agree with it.

“Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters,” Mr. Hawley said.

Some House Republicans have pushed to remove Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger from their conference for participating in the Jan. 6 committee. At a press conference, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), a member of House GOP leadership, said the matter didn’t come up at a conference meeting Tuesday. Ms. Stefanik replaced Ms. Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican after party lawmakers voted to oust Ms. Cheney from her leadership post in May.

Ms. Stefanik added that the RNC has “every right to take any action.”

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#19439 User is offline   Chas_P 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 1,513
  • Joined: 2008-September-03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Gainesville, GA USA

Posted 2022-February-08, 19:05

View PostWinstonm, on 2022-February-07, 13:59, said:

I’m really tired of all the “Oh, My” reporting about Trump and his gang. Just let me know when the DOJ pulls out its nutcracker because it has them all by the balls.

And in the meantime Durham has Hillary's balls in a nutcracker just as large. The game goes on. And I agree. It's tiring.
0

#19440 User is offline   pilowsky 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 3,786
  • Joined: 2019-October-04
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Poland

Posted 2022-February-09, 19:53

Greg Gutfeld said:

We've all seen the homeless situation, we've seen it up close. We don't need to pretend there are 2 million children down on their luck. These are men: many are criminals, many are mentally ill many are drug addicts.
If you do not contribute to society through work. Housing has to be free.

Another Fox factoid.
So, my question is, what is the "work" that Greg Gutfeld contributes to society that allows him to be entitled to food and shelter while 2 million men get nothing?
Fortuna Fortis Felix
0

  • 1109 Pages +
  • « First
  • 970
  • 971
  • 972
  • 973
  • 974
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

52 User(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 52 guests, 0 anonymous users

  1. Google