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1 hour ago, John Denver Fan said:

Well I heard on the news last night that the U.S. Secretary of Defense says terrorism is no longer a focus of security in the nation. It is stupid what if something like 9/11 happened again under their noses because of it. Terrorism is on the rise, but the U.S. Secretary of Defense saying it is no longer a focus of security is a recipe for disaster.

I'm not going to beat around the bush here, the most prolific form of terrorism in the US has always been radicalised, right-wing white men but I seriously doubt that's what you're referring to.

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3 hours ago, John Denver Fan said:

Well I heard on the news last night that the U.S. Secretary of Defense says terrorism is no longer a focus of security in the nation. It is stupid what if something like 9/11 happened again under their noses because of it.

Well, this is not accurate, because terror wasn't much of a focus before 911. 911, for all intents and purposes, was extremely sudden for good reason.

I see you are 16 years old, and you were born in the 3 months before 911. I can tell you, as a 25 year old who grew up on both sides of 911, that terror wasn't much of an issue before 911 (and it really still isn't, but people will still trick you into thinking so). Airport security checks were much different and less bureaucratic; as far as "terror" was concerned, there were a number of quagmires in the middle east that happened as a direct result of america's cold war politics and past alliances. So no, before 911 there was no threat of terror like there is today. If there was, then it was probably because you weren't white, which still kinda applies today.

Even today's terror threats are only a perceived threat and the number of victims in terror attacks are still eclipsed by just about everything else. It has been used in the past 16-17 years to manipulate people into giving up freedoms for security as well as manipulate people into voting for the hand that will shelter them (rather than protect).

Terror attacks in the US are almost always perpetrated by white men. Western Europe is the place that has more brown people committing terror (i'm assuming this is what you mean by terror attacks, islamic terror), but even that is something they could've avoided if they were better with integrating their immigrants.

3 hours ago, John Denver Fan said:

Terrorism is on the rise, but the U.S. Secretary of Defense saying it is no longer a focus of security is a recipe for disaster.

You got a source for the bolded part?

Edited by Lord Raven
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3 hours ago, John Denver Fan said:

Well I heard on the news last night that the U.S. Secretary of Defense says terrorism is no longer a focus of security in the nation. It is stupid what if something like 9/11 happened again under their noses because of it. Terrorism is on the rise, but the U.S. Secretary of Defense saying it is no longer a focus of security is a recipe for disaster.

As a 27 year old, I’m going to add to the voice that is saying that before 9/11. Seriously, people didn’t even know terrorism was a thing before this. And if they did, it seemed so far away, all the way in the east. Public safety really wasn’t a concern.

And changing the subject, apparently the USA government is at shutdown. This will be interesting to see. Who will they blame?

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The WH's sad attempt to blame the democrats really needs to have some repurcussions. It's flat-out propaganda if nobody calls it out. 

YOU CONTROL ALL BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT. MORE DEMOCRATS VOTED FOR THE BILL THAN REPUBLICANS AGAINST IT. YOUR SHITTY MEDDLING WITH THE BILL IS THE REASON THIS IS HAPPENING, YOU ORANGE BOWEL MOVEMENT. THE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS ALREADY REACHED AN AGREEMENT THAT YOU FUCKED WITH FOR NO GOOD REASON. 

Couldn't even get a month into 2018 without some major political* fuck up by the president. 

A domestic political fuck up, at least. 

At least the senate gets a nice paid vacation. 

Edited by Slumber
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7 hours ago, Lord Raven said:

but even that is something they could've avoided if they were better with integrating their immigrants.

The UK, France, Germany, Sweden, etc. have all been excellent at integrating their immigrants before the refugee crisis. Now, though, they're taking in a huge number; we can cut them some slack if their integration is going down.

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As a twenty-five year old who also remembers both sides of 911, I will second (or third) @Lord Raven's sentiment that terrorism wasn't a topic of much interest or really that great of a worry before that fateful day.  My family didn't really talk about terrorism except for the Waco incident and the Oklahoma city bombings.  

3 hours ago, Slumber said:

The WH's sad attempt to blame the democrats really needs to have some repurcussions. It's flat-out propaganda if nobody calls it out. 

YOU CONTROL ALL BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT. MORE DEMOCRATS VOTED FOR THE BILL THAN REPUBLICANS AGAINST IT. YOUR SHITTY MEDDLING WITH THE BILL IS THE REASON THIS IS HAPPENING, YOU ORANGE BOWEL MOVEMENT. THE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS ALREADY REACHED AN AGREEMENT THAT YOU FUCKED WITH FOR NO GOOD REASON. 

Couldn't even get a month into 2018 without some major political* fuck up by the president. 

A domestic political fuck up, at least. 

At least the senate gets a nice paid vacation. 

Outside of the fact that the President says whatever pleases him, the Shutdown is a glorified pissing contest.  Should the Congress come up with some sort of DACA bill?  Yeah, but President Trump campaigned against it and he won, reap what you sow and what not.  The government shutdown belongs just as much to the Dems as the GOP, the Democratic party shouldn't stoop to this stupid zero sum game that the GOP rose to during the stupid 2013 shutdown; the Dems have shown a willingness to govern to make decisions that benefit the country even if they don't benefit them politically.  It takes 60 votes in the Senate to go to a vote, the Dems actually believe government can do positive good.  Even if they think they can pin this mess on the Oompa-Loompa-in-chief, they should do the right thing and pass a funding bill.  The GOP may never cave on the DACA issue, but they are the duly elected leaders of the legislative and executive branch, for good or for ill they get to do what they want within the law.  If it's so bad and oppressive the Dems need to go campaign in the heartland (not just the coasts) and win, win big, show the GOP the consequences of their bad faith.  But if the Dems are going to play the GOP's pissing contest and make national politics a never ending race to the bottom, then they can forget my vote and I suspect the vote of many like me who just want a functioning government run by grownups.

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As someone who is way the hell older than 25, terrorism was an issue. . .but not in the US.  We had some scattered bombing incidents which weren't linked to Islam IIRC.  The first major one that I can think of before 9/11 was this.  However, it had nowhere near the amount of coverage 9/11 had.

Even when 9/11 hit, I didn't think much of it, because it was on the other side of the country.  That's how far down my priority list terrorism was.

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Yeah being in Maryland was way different for this because the Pentagon wasn't very far from where I was (the Pentagon was also attacked not just the towers) growing up and neither was DC. DC felt like it was "next" so to speak.

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Right, I really need to vent.

 

I wa pleased as punch with this government shutdown. I've said multiple times and I'll say it again: Government does too many things that we can simply leave to the free market. The fact that there are about 800k non-essential gov't employees in the USA makes me wonder how many there are here in Israel (and if the Ministry of Interior is anything to go on, it's far too many).

But anyway, I was pleased that this gov't shutdown happened in the first place. Then reality set in. I'll even quote myself from a conversation on Facebook with a friend when I realized what was really going on.

Quote

This is all just theatrics.

The Republican party pulled an under-handed move to get the Democratic Party to appear as if they care more about (technically by the rule of the law as of right now) illegal aliens than your average American.

It's completely underhanded. Hell, it's flat out disgusting because they 1) set this up intentionally by tying the two bills (gov't funding and immigration) together when they are unrelated and 2) have the audacity to claim that this is the Democratic Party's fault with straight faces. Anything that came out of Mitch McConnell's mouth in the last few days was so full of shit that his ears should be turning brown.

But goddamn, it was a brilliant move. Because it did what it was designed to, which is to fuck the Democratic Party even more. Hell, even the New York Times has run articles that basically accused the Democrats of having no spine after the Dems folded this morning.

It's politically brilliant and disgusting to watch. And especially since I actually backed the Democratic Party to hold firm because my political ideology comes before partisanship. But now I know that I can't even pretend to think that the Democrats will hold to their own proclaimed principles.

 

I know that I'm right because look at who voted against. The vote was 81-18, for the record.

On the Republican side was Rand Paul and Mike Lee. Those are the two libertarians (Paul much more than Lee but Lee actually voted against his own AHCA bill that he helped write) so that's an ideological stance on the economics of the bill.

As for the Democratic side, here are all the big names that voted no: Saunders, Gillibrant, Feinstein, Booker and Harris. Basically everyone else voted yes (we're talking about 33/48) so only the progressive wing of the Democrat party voted no.

Welcome to ideological civil war in the Democratic Party. The corporatists are now out in full view. And it's still more than half the party.

Take it for what you will.

Edited by Comrade
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Yeah, there's a... lot... like a lot alot... to be disappointed at with this shutdown.

The republicans played the political game. They got exactly what they wanted, and they have no intentions of listening to them when it comes to DACA over the next 3 weeks. They got rid of DACA funding, while also getting to blame the shutdown on the democrats.

It's sickening, but goddammit, the republicans knew what buttons to push to get the democrats to do their bidding. It's why the democrats will always come across as spineless and get taken advantage of. The republicans have absolutely no qualms with playing the bad guy to get what they want. It's basically their bread and butter at this point. The democrats are so goddamn focused on not ever looking as bad as republicans that they'll fold if there's even a question that they look like bad guys. The government shutdown wasn't even their goddamn fault, but they still put the blame on themselves and agreed to the Orange One's goddamn stupid terms that started this whole mess.

What was supposed to be a major bipartisan bill became a republican victory, and a total democratic loss.

For the love of God, we need to stop electing chickenshit democrats. Then we need to pass a goddamn bill that strips away congress' employment benefits during a shutdown so we stop seeing this kind of detrimental gaming of politics.

Edited by Slumber
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wait so life dislikes republicans for doing things they've been doing for a while? including spinning DACA/DREAM as helping illegals before our own (except that those illegals have been our own in all but name, but their parents broke the law) and they've been doing this for ages

i'm not sure i really see why anyone's disappointed on the republican side of things, but overall i'd say the fault lies squarely on the president for being a shit and the republicans helping them. i wonder if the democrats just took the L to move on and figure out some other shit rather than worrying about the gridlock, and the votes against were just political posturing. pretty sure there were a lot of talks of the nuclear option too, which is arguably much much worse for the democrats in the long-term

that's why ideology is not the only metric to judge a politician by at any rate

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29 minutes ago, Slumber said:

It's sickening, but goddammit, the republicans knew what buttons to push to get the democrats to do their bidding. It's why the democrats will always come across as spineless and get taken advantage of. The republicans have absolutely no qualms with playing the bad guy to get what they want. It's basically their bread and butter at this point. The democrats are so goddamn focused on not ever looking as bad as republicans that they'll fold if there's even a question that they look like bad guys. The government shutdown wasn't even their goddamn fault, but they still put the blame on themselves and agreed to the Orange One's goddamn stupid terms that started this whole mess.

What was supposed to be a major bipartisan bill became a republican victory, and a total democratic loss.

For the love of God, we need to stop electing chickenshit democrats. Then we need to pass a goddamn bill that strips away congress' employment benefits during a shutdown so we stop seeing this kind of detrimental gaming of politics.

Well a huge part of the problem is that, as an outsider-looking-in, it looks like the Democrats don't care to be anything other than 'the party you vote for because it's either them or the GOP'. If there was a proper third-party system in place or the Democrats cared to be more than just the lesser evil, things might be a bit different.

Edited by Phillius the Crestfallen
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45 minutes ago, Phillius the Crestfallen said:

Well a huge part of the problem is that, as an outsider-looking-in, it looks like the Democrats don't care to be anything other than 'the party you vote for because it's either them or the GOP'. If there was a proper third-party system in place or the Democrats cared to be more than just the lesser evil, things might be a bit different.

It's not that. We just don't have a parliamentary government that forces coalitions. Our GOP and Democrats are the result of effectively coalitions that already exist but got placed into one party. In fact, it was probably a bit closer to parliamentary when parties could work together not due to party but due to ideology (since both parties were varied) and it was during the implementation of the southern strategy that it became so dichotomous, which is the ultimate result of first past the post with our weird ass legislative system

A third party actually will not fix the problem, because even if we had multiple parties they, given the way our government and society inherently function, would form more or less 50/50 coalitions.

Edited by Lord Raven
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2 hours ago, Comrade said:

Right, I really need to vent.

 

I wa pleased as punch with this government shutdown. I've said multiple times and I'll say it again: Government does too many things that we can simply leave to the free market. The fact that there are about 800k non-essential gov't employees in the USA makes me wonder how many there are here in Israel (and if the Ministry of Interior is anything to go on, it's far too many).

But anyway, I was pleased that this gov't shutdown happened in the first place. Then reality set in. I'll even quote myself from a conversation on Facebook with a friend when I realized what was really going on.

'Non-essential' is such a loaded term; you know who doesn't get paid during the shutdowns is non-active duty military, researchers scientists employed by the DOD and the CDC and the like and diplomats posted around the world.  And you know what happens with a majority of these people, they work and they expected to be compensated afterwards because they generally are.  Most people who worked will be payed after all this is worked out.  These continuous CR's are a dumb way to run a government, both parties should actually pass the 8 appropriations bills that would give us a yearly budget.  If people really feel that we should fire federal employees, it's an argument that should me made publicly and in the halls of the Congress, this game of shutting the government down and not filling positions in the bureaucracy is a cowardly way to try to shrink the government; if that's what people want they should elect members who believe that and say so, so the rest of us can vet that belief. 

And in terms of the shutdown, the Democrats were never gonna get what they wanted, they don't control any aspect of the federal government, they hardly control any state governments for that matter.  If they feel their policies are right, they should campaign on them and win elections, right now they are in the minority , shutting down the government was never going to get them what they wanted.  This was such a futile effort, I know Senator McConnell said he would let an immigration bill come to the floor and I suspect he will keep his word because he said it in public, but he knows better than anyone how mercurial President Trump is.  I see no way that a bipartisan bill in the Senate that gets 30ish GOP votes and 40ish Dem votes, even comes to the floor of the House because Speaker Ryan has stuck religiously with the 'rule' of it requires the majority of the majority to pass laws, I don't see any 'moderate' immigration legislation that can get 115 GOP congressman behind it and President Trump signing it.  Minorities don't get what they want in our Republic, their job is to stop what they see as the most extreme part of the majorities agenda from being enacted and to rally behind positions that the country wants as a whole, then they angle themselves to win elections.

In the Dems defense, in the history of the country one party has basically been in the majority while the other party has basically been their foil of 'we aren't the majority, we are everyone else who isn't this'.  During the Antebellum era, you were basically either a Jacksonian Democrat who believed in a more democratic society, believed in Manifest Destiny, the expansion of the republic through expansion or war, and believed in states rights and letting states/individuals decide on slavery.  Basically everyone else were Whigs, they had their own ideas like Henry Clay, but mostly they were Jacksonian foils.  Then the Civil War happened, the GOP became the majority and they believed in high protective tariffs, the gold standard for money and laissez-faire economics, the  Dems were basically their foils.  Then the Depression happened, the New Deal coalition happened, the Dems dominated American politics for 60 years, the GOP was basically their foil and only won when people were pissed at the Dems and the Dems had full control of the Congress for basically 40 years, the GOP  only won the Presidency twice in-between Hoover and Reagan and both Eisenhower and Nixon were moderates who were either war heroes or were very fortunate in '68 when the Dems were divided.  Then the conservative revolution happened in the 80's and the country became more 'conservative' with basically 60% of the country leaning 'right' and now the GOP's agenda is well established and the Democratic party is basically a collection of everyone who isn't a Republican, which is lots of ideas really and when they are very successful lots of different ideologies.  I suspect the GOP will control most state governments and set the agenda for the next 10-20 years maybe a little quicker with how quickly the pendulum seems to swing.

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3 hours ago, Excellen Browning said:

No matter what y'all say, dems preserving CHIP for 6 years when the alternative was no CHIP, no DACA and govt shutdown is a win.

and they can threaten another government shutdown because the bill only funds the government until february

you guys are playing this like it's a total loss they were threatened with the nuclear option but they were also offered good faith on DACA/DREAMers

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...with the numbers they had, there really wasn't anything else they could do.

If you want dems to actually move progressive policy and not just make empty shows of opposition to  what the Republicans are putting on the table, you have to give them Congressional majorities.  

Midterms are just a few months away now. Make em' count. 

Edited by Shoblongoo
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16 hours ago, Lord Raven said:

It's not that. We just don't have a parliamentary government that forces coalitions. Our GOP and Democrats are the result of effectively coalitions that already exist but got placed into one party. In fact, it was probably a bit closer to parliamentary when parties could work together not due to party but due to ideology (since both parties were varied) and it was during the implementation of the southern strategy that it became so dichotomous, which is the ultimate result of first past the post with our weird ass legislative system

A third party actually will not fix the problem, because even if we had multiple parties they, given the way our government and society inherently function, would form more or less 50/50 coalitions.

I was referencing less to the Shutdown specifically and more towards the bit about the Democrats getting played and being spineless.

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5 hours ago, Lord Raven said:

but they were also offered good faith on DACA/DREAMers

Yeah, this will be the topic where the republicans finally follow up on good faith and promises. Not the million other times before this where they've gotten democrats to vote for them by doing the same thing that they never followed up on.

Edited by Slumber
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41 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Yeah, this will be the topic where the republicans finally follow up on good faith and promises. Not the million other times before this where they've gotten democrats to vote for them by doing the same thing that they never followed up on.

Then the democrats will shut things down in February. Its not like theyve lost all leverage.

I mean you are accusing them of being spineless while also saying that they are powerless. Which is it? What do you propose they do? They have one thing they want and future leverage, after all.

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33 minutes ago, Lord Raven said:

Then the democrats will shut things down in February. Its not like theyve lost all leverage.

I mean you are accusing them of being spineless while also saying that they are powerless. Which is it? What do you propose they do? They have one thing they want and future leverage, after all.

When did I say they were powerless?

They had the power to demand more concessions in this "bipartisan bill". They took the one thing republicans can and WILL go back on: their word.

Edited by Slumber
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12 minutes ago, Slumber said:

When did I say they were powerless?

They had the power to demand more concessions in this "bipartisan bill". They took the one thing republicans can and WILL go back on: their word.

True, but at the same time as has been said above, the GOP has already spun things to make it look like the Democrats are at fault for the shutdown, so I'm not really sure how much they stood to gain from continuing this one.

The GOP will almost certainly go back on their word, but as Lord Raven said, the Dems could try and shut things down again in February.

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2 hours ago, Slumber said:

When did I say they were powerless?

They had the power to demand more concessions in this "bipartisan bill". They took the one thing republicans can and WILL go back on: their word.

And they also have the power to shut things down in February

They didn't relinquish all bargaining tools

EDIT: And as Excellen Browning mentioned, they got children's health insurance. It's not a total loss by any stretch, and it's remarkable they got that in the first place.

Edited by Lord Raven
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