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

Here is the reason I don't listen or watch Fox News: they don't do their basic homework to find out simple information.

This is too nuanced and too long. Try short catchy phrases:

Whites suffered and were oppressed for 8 years under Obama
Hillary created ISIS
Blacks, rapist mexicans, extremist muslims are taking over the country
Minorities are privileged, whites are discriminated
Obama passed a health care bill all by himself, like a communist dictator

Now look at the campaign promises.
Hillary had a 40 page long list of things she'll do with details on how she plans to do them. Who can even read that, it's all communist stuff anyway
Trump had 7 pages under the form
- I'll build a big wall
- I'll kill obamacare and replace it with something great
- we'll make america great again

Now that's simple, easy to grasp, and fixes everything that was wrong for so long.

Not even getting into the more extreme stuff like "Hillary was killing children while her husband was raping them and nobody did anything to stop them", let's assume for the sake of sanity that only a small minority believed that.

Get ready for war.

Get ready for war.

(a)Authority.— Under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense, a member described in subsection (b) may be ordered to active duty by the Secretary of the military department concerned at any time. (b)Covered Members.—Except as provided in subsection (d), subsection (a) applies to the following members of the armed forces: (1) A retired member of the Regular Army, Regular Navy, Regular Air Force, or Regular Marine Corps. (2) A member of the Retired Reserve who was retired under section 1293, 3911, 3914, 6323, 8911, or 8914 of this title. (3) A member of the Fleet Reserve or Fleet Marine Corps Reserve.

(a)General and Flag Officers.— Not more than 15 retired general officers of the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps, and not more than 15 retired flag officers of the Navy, may be on active duty at any one time. For the purposes of this subsection a retired officer ordered to active duty for a period of 60 days or less is not counted. (b)Limitation by Service.— (1) Not more than 25 officers of any one armed force may be serving on active duty concurrently pursuant to orders to active duty issued under section 688 of this title. (2) In the administration of paragraph (1), the following officers shall not be counted: (A) A chaplain who is assigned to duty as a chaplain for the period of active duty to which ordered. (B) A health care professional (as characterized by the Secretary concerned) who is assigned to duty as a health care professional for the period of the active duty to which ordered. © Any officer assigned to duty with the American Battle Monuments Commission for the period of active duty to which ordered. (D) Any member of the Retiree Council of the Army, Navy, or Air Force for the period on active duty to attend the annual meeting of the Retiree Council. (E) An officer who is assigned to duty as a defense attaché or service attaché for the period of active duty to which ordered.

You may want to consider why you treat every problem as requiring a binary blame - us or them. Resolving that tribal instinct may well resolve many of our problems with civics.

The idea for the name change, which will take effect next academic year, came from Farah Jaentschke, a former student at the school who is now in eighth grade. Four years ago, Farah chose a biography of Davis to fulfill a summer reading requirement, said her mother, Ercilla Hendrix.

It was only after reading the book that Farah realized its subject was the same Davis for which her school was named, Ms. Hendrix said.

“And she said: ‘Well, that doesn’t seem right. How can we get the name changed? I just don’t feel like that’s the right name for our school,’” Ms. Hendrix recalled.

Almost 98 percent of the students at Davis Magnet, as community members call the school, are black. It has been ranked as Mississippi’s top elementary school, according to the district’s website, and for the past several years has achieved an A grade from the state’s education department. The state superintendent also recognized the school’s students for achieving the highest reading proficiency in the state during the 2015-16 school year.

...

“We mirrored the national, state and local election process as closely as we could,” Kathleen Grigsby, the school’s principal, said. “They got a civics lesson on what it means to be able to vote. At the end of the day that is what matters: One student can make a difference.”

Parents said they recognized that the renaming might be seen as a political statement, especially after the summer’s violence in Charlottesville. And they acknowledged the symbolic power of naming the school for a man who they believe better embodies the school’s values and demographics. (At the school board meeting, Ms. Jefferson noted that Davis “would probably not be too happy about a diverse school, promoting the education of the very individuals he fought to keep enslaved, being named after him.”)

But they said empowering their children to realize how far their voices could reach was the most important, and most gratifying, impetus behind the name change.

Here is a real-life civics lesson: The Smartest Grade Schoolers In Missippi Have Spoken: Out With Jefferson Davis, In With Obama


Always hope for the future, even though the forces of irresponsibility have gained complete control of the US government--and plan to saddle these kids with a crushing national debt to pay for the irresponsibility of that government.

You may want to consider why you treat every problem as requiring a binary blame - us or them. Resolving that tribal instinct may well resolve many of our problems with civics.

Bill Browder, the banker turned human-rights activist who spearheaded the Magnitsky Act in 2012, says his authorization to travel to the US via an ESTA has been revoked.
Browder was effectively banned from the US on the same day that Russia managed, on the fifth attempt, to place him on Interpol's wanted list.

I once read something about this in a book on psychology (maybe "Thinking Fast or Slow") or behavior economics. This type of thinking is extremely common, and explains why so many opinions are correlated (e.g. Republican = conservative + religious + pro-life + pro-gun). The mind is not designed to be able to juggle many different variables, we need to simplify or we won't be able to make decisions in useful timeframes. Lumping things together and viewing things as dichotomies rather than continuous spectrums are how we do this.

And the "us vs. them" instinct is an ancient adaptation.

I agree, but like any adaptation it can be neutralized when it is not helpful by utilization of our cognizance.

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he will not seek re-election in 2018, saying he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.

Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary, 17-minute speech on the Senate floor, in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership. He deplored “the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said has become so prevalent in American politics.

The remarkable moment came just hours after Mr. Trump had renewed his attacks on another critic in the Republican Party, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, saying he “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” Mr. Corker, appearing more weary than angry, said the president “is debasing our country.”

Mr. Flake’s dramatic decision and the back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Mr. Corker appeared to mark a moment of decision for the Republican Party. A week ago, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, decrying the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he sees overtaking American politics. Former President George W. Bush, in yet another speech, lamented, “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

But Mr. Flake, choosing the Senate floor for his fierce denunciation, appeared to issue a direct challenge to his party. Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. He had already touched on these themes in a book he published in August that was highly critical of the president.

“We must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

“It is often said that children are watching,” he continued. “Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?”

As he spoke, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, Mr. McCain and Mr. Corker sat listening on the Senate floor. The speech was delivered less than an hour after Mr. Trump met with Republican senators for lunch, amiably discussing the party’s push for tax cuts.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said she had not spoken with President Trump about the senator’s announcement, but she was not lamenting Mr. Flake’s decision.

“Based on previous statements and certainly based on the lack of support that he has from the people of Arizona it’s probably a good move,” she said.

Mr. Flake’s decision to step down was, in a sense, a tacit admission that crossing the president had put him in political peril. But in an interview in Phoenix earlier this month, he said he had no regrets, and always knew that crossing the president would be dangerous politically. He reiterated that sentiment on the Senate floor Tuesday.

“We’re not here to simply mark time,” the senator said. “Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office, and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”

In 1911, in the midst of a debate about whether Britain’s House of Lords should willingly give up its veto power over legislation or fight a doomed battle to retain its privileges, a British peer, Lord Selborne, framed the debate for his fellow lords this way: “The question is, shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies?”

A similar question has confronted Republican politicians throughout the age of Trump, and again and again they have chosen to die in the dark.

This was true of Trump’s strongest primary-season rivals, who fought him directly and concertedly during exactly one of the umpteen debates and then, finding open war hard going, chose to lose and bow out as though Trump were a normal rival rather than the fundamentally unfit figure they had described just a few short weeks before.

It was true of the party functionaries, the hapless Reince Priebus above all, who denied the residual Republican forces resisting Trump the chance to fight him one last time in the light of the convention floor.

It was true of the party’s leaders in Washington, both the men of savvy and the men of honor, who came up with endless excuses for why they couldn’t take on Trump directly before he won the nomination and put party over conviction thereafter. It was true of Paul Ryan; it was true even of John McCain.

It was not true of everyone. Mitt Romney and John Kasich declined to fall on the sword of party unity; so did George W. Bush and his father; so did some governors and a few junior senators, Mike Lee and Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake.

But what was notable about these holdouts was that while they refused to make the quietus, to strangle their own convictions in Trump’s ample shadow, they declined many chances to keep up the fight openly as well.

The nomination of a figure like Trump, a clear threat to both the professed beliefs of his party’s leaders and to basic competence in presidential government, is the sort of shattering event that in the past would have prompted a real schism or independent candidacy. But Romney couldn’t talk Kasich into being that independent candidate, all the other possibilities demurred — and then as a group, the Republican resisters declined to endorse anyone, neither Hillary Clinton nor the Libertarian ticket nor Evan McMullin, making their opposition a private matter rather than a public challenge to the nominee.

Now, almost a year into the Trump presidency, a similar dynamic is playing out. There is a small but significant Republican opposition to Trump, but its leading figures still don’t want to go to war with him directly, preferring philosophical attacks and tactical withdrawal to confrontation and probable defeat.

Bob Corker, part of the dying-in-the-dark-isn’t-so-bad caucus during the primary campaign (and when he seemed to hope for a cabinet appointment), has become a fierce Trump critic — but only after deciding to retire from the Senate. George W. Bush and John McCain have each given speeches that read like broadsides against Trump — but very general critiques of his worldview, not political attacks on the man himself. And now Jeff Flake of Arizona has delivered a barnburner of a Senate address about the civic costs of the Trump presidency — while simultaneously declaring that because he can’t win his primary in a Trumpified party, he won’t even stay and fight it out.

To the extent that there’s a plausible theory behind all of these halfhearted efforts, it’s that resisting Trump too vigorously only strengthens his hold on the party’s base, by vindicating his claim to have all the establishment arrayed against him.

But the problem with this logic is that it offers a permanent excuse for doing nothing, no matter how bad Trump’s reign becomes. (“I’d criticize him for accidentally nuking Manila, but you know, then Fox News would just make it all about me …”) In the end, if you want Republican voters to reject Trumpism, you need to give them clear electoral opportunities to do so — even if you expect defeat, even if it’s all but certain. And an anti-Trump movement that gives high-minded speeches but never mounts candidates confirms Trump’s claim to face establishment opposition while also confirming his judgment of the establishment’s guts and stamina — proving that they’re all low-energy, all “liddle” men, all unwilling to fight him man to man.

If Corker really means what he keeps saying about the danger posed by Trump’s effective incapacity, he should call openly for impeachment or for 25th Amendment proceedings — and other anti-Trump Republicans should join him. If Flake really means what he said in his impassioned speech, and he doesn’t want to waste time and energy on a foredoomed Senate primary campaign, then he should choose a different hopeless-seeming cause and primary Trump in 2020. George W. Bush should endorse him. So should McCain, and Corker, and Romney, and Kasich, and Sasse, and the rest of the anti-Trump list. They should expect to lose, and badly, but they should make Trump actually defeat them, instead of just clearing the field for his second nomination.

And not only for the sake of their honor. The president’s G.O.P. critics should engage in electoral battle because the act of campaigning, the work of actually trying to persuade voters, is the only way anti-Trump Republicans will come to grips with the legitimate reasons that their ideas had become so unpopular that voters opted for demagoguery instead.

A speechifying anti-Trumpism, distant from the fray, will always be self-regarding and self-deceiving — unwilling to see how the Iraq War discredited both the Bushist and McCainian styles of right-wing internationalism, incapable of addressing the economic disappointments that turned voters against Flake’s Goldwaterite libertarianism and Romney’s “trust me, I’m a businessman” promises. Only in actual political competition can the Republican elite reckon with why it lost its party, and how it might win again without succumbing to Trumpian indecency.

I don’t expect this to happen; indeed I think the G.O.P. is more likely to be renewed by someone who currently supports Trump or someone not yet active in politics than it is by the men resisting the president today. The Republican establishment, like the House of Lords a century back, has the feel of a fated and superannuated institution that no stratagem can save. In the end the Lords chose to perish in the dark, to vote themselves into irrelevance. Defiant retirements no less than craven collaboration are likely to carry the G.O.P.’s present leaders to the same unhappy destination, the same ultimate irrelevance.

But they are not there yet. And men like Flake and Corker, who right now have the not-quite-admirable courage of men abandoning the fray, still have time enough and light enough in which to stand and fight.

I can understand putting Breitbart out there as a very conservative, far out site. I wouldn't read it either.

Fox News does have a more conservative viewpoint, but in their news shows presents contributors from both sides of the political spectrum to discuss news stories. If you want to dismiss the "opinion" shows, such as Sean Hannity, I can understand that. Shepard Smith, I think, is especially good in the afternoon. Also, Special Report with Bret Baier offers a lot of insightful analysis albeit with a conservative slant. But there's no way that you should equate Fox News with Breitbart.

All these sources have a definite strong progressive/liberal bias. Most of their news or comments could be press releases from the DNC. If you want to present them as "mainstream", then I would counter by saying its only fair and proper to say Fox News is equally "mainstream" only with a conservative bias. The objectively neutral newspaper of any these days is US Today.

I can't comment as I haven't watched PBS News in a long time. However, I have listened to our NPR station on a regular basis and yet to hear a single conservative guess or viewpoint ever aired. That's not public radio, it's propaganda radio when it blows off about half the population..

Vox, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and MSNBC are certainly the left wing equivalents of Breitbart.

And how much time do you spend listening to the other side?

And how much time do you spend listening to the other side?

Fox News does have a more conservative viewpoint, but in their news shows presents contributors from both sides of the political spectrum to discuss news stories. If you want to dismiss the "opinion" shows, such as Sean Hannity, I can understand that. Shepard Smith, I think, is especially good in the afternoon. Also, Special Report with Bret Baier offers a lot of insightful analysis albeit with a conservative slant. But there's no way that you should equate Fox News with Breitbart.

All these sources have a definite strong progressive/liberal bias. Most of their news or comments could be press releases from the DNC. If you want to present them as "mainstream", then I would counter by saying its only fair and proper to say Fox News is equally "mainstream" only with a conservative bias. The objectively neutral newspaper of any these days is US Today.

I have listened to our NPR station on a regular basis and yet to hear a single conservative guess or viewpoint ever aired.

OK. I am back and even (vaguely) adjusted to the time zone. Lets give this a try...



I don't spend any time listening to Fox. Then again, I don't spend any time watching most any TV news show. I get most of my information from reading.

The two conservative sources that I read the most are

1. The Wall Street Journal
2. The Frankfurter And how much time do you spend listening to the other side? Zeitung


I've heard lots of people making this same claim: "Fox is has real hard news. Look at Shep Smith. You just need to ignore all their opinion programming".

For someone who isn't in the know, how am I expected to underdstand which shows are deliberately introducing false narratives.

Does Fox and Friends or Hannity or O'Reilly start with some kind of disclaimer stating: "We're going to be lying for the next 60 minutes?". Indeed, as I understand matters, Murdock runs a very tight ship. Each morning he identifies a set of themes are stories that will be covered across both the news programming and the opinion programming. For example, today's theme is Hillary + uranium.



I certain agree that these sources are much more liberal than Fox. I would hardly call them leftist.

At the end of the day, I think that the proof is in the pudding.
What percentage of the news that they introduce is accurate and consistent with objective reality.

You might now like what these sources have to say, but they have a damn good track record.



What shows do you listen to?

I listen to all of the following

Diana Reims
On Point
1A
The Newshour
Politics
The Political Junkie
Morning Edition

all frequently have conservative guests and commentators. I'd go so far as to say that they have conservatives them on multiple times per week....