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

Another viewpoint:

https://i.redd.it/qruvog93cet11.jpg

I actually asked that very question on the Politics Stack Exchange a few days ago:

Why is Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry a political issue?

I have been participating here for quite a while and I am coming to think it is best for me to pull back, at least a bit. There is always more to say, but the world will continue to turn if I just decide not to say it.

Best wishes to all.
Ken

I hate to see you slow down your posting. You're a good man, Charlie Brown.

Twitter Agog At Dennison Whopper That Californians Are ‘Rioting’ Over Sanctuary Cities

There is no lie to big, too small, or too irrevelant for Dennison. He's a one man lying machine who is completely divorced from reality. Maybe there were some posts by alt-right bloggers complaining about sanctuary cities. How this translates to rioting is something only Dennison seems to know.

The United States is on a steep learning curve. Because truth, factuality, and our very public sphere are under attack, our democracy (and republic) is in danger. The attack is devastatingly effective, partly because we have never experienced anything like this and thus are largely unprepared.

BROOKINGS, S.D. — First came the Republicans, all smiles and matching blue T-shirts as they marched in this college town’s annual Hobo Day homecoming parade. Then the tractor team rolled past, and the dairy club, and the Corn Palace Shriners.

Finally, at the end of the line: the Democrats. Behind as usual.

Farmers and ranchers from this rural state once sent liberal icons like George McGovern to Congress, but these days, Democrats have all but vanished into the plains, a stark example of how far the party has tumbled in rural America. They hold no statewide elected offices in South Dakota. They make up less than 20 percent of the State Legislature. Their numbers are shrinking so fast that they rank below registered independents in a dozen counties.

But on a sunny Saturday, shaking hands and nudging his wheelchair up the parade route, came Billie Sutton, a 34-year-old state senator and onetime rodeo rider who is making a surprisingly competitive run for governor against South Dakota’s four-term Republican congresswoman, Kristi Noem.

Mr. Sutton is running as an anti-abortion conservative Democrat with cowboy cred and a stirring life story. His supporters think he can show Democrats how to start rebuilding the party in socially conservative states where the ag-heavy economy rises and falls with rain cycles and soybean prices.

At 23, Mr. Sutton was one of the world’s top saddle bronco riders when the horse he’d drawn in a circuit event in North Dakota reared up and smashed him into the chute in October 2007. He still remembers the horse’s name: Ruby. In an instant, Mr. Sutton was paralyzed from the waist down and his rodeo career was over.

“He’s a South Dakota boy,” said Tara Vanderwal, who slapped on a blue Sutton sticker at Image

“He doesn’t act like a politician,” said her husband, Phil, a Republican who said he is leaning toward Mr. Sutton.

But to have any shot in this conservative-dominated state, Mr. Sutton will need to persuade thousands more Phil Vanderwals.

Democrats in South Dakota have not won a governor’s race in 44 years. They have 95,000 fewer registered voters than Republicans — a huge and widening gap in a state of just 870,000 people. And Ms. Noem has a powerful supporter campaigning for her: President Trump, who won South Dakota by 30 points in 2016, and raised more than $518,000 for her at an event last month.

One afternoon, on the Sutton family’s ranch overlooking the Missouri River, the candidate’s father, Bill, summed up his son’s problem: “He’s going to need a lot of Trump supporters to win.”

In campaign ads shot on the family ranch, Mr. Sutton tells and tells the story of how his rodeo injury propelled him toward public service. He gives speeches denouncing corruption scandals and secrecy in the Republican-led state government, and pledges to give a voice to struggling farmers and ranchers.

To South Dakota’s handful of liberals, it sometimes feels like he is running as an anti-Democrat. He is pro-gun, anti-abortion and says he opposes a state income tax. He has a Republican running mate. He deflects when asked about social issues that divide Democrats from most South Dakotans, like whether he would have voted to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“The national party hasn’t been engaged with a good message,” Mr. Sutton said. “They haven’t been relating to people in the Midwest. It used to be fighting for the little guy.”

In a normal year, this would all be fodder for a Nice Try campaign that ended with a 20-point loss. But Democrats here are starved for a win, and a bitter Republican primary has left some conservatives angry with Ms. Noem’s campaign. A handful of Republicans who supported the South Dakota attorney general, Marty Jackley, in the Republican primary have now publicly signed on with Mr. Sutton.

The Cook Political Report recently declared the race a “toss-up” — rather than a Republican layup. Assessing the true state of the race in a thinly populated rural state like South Dakota is difficult. Partisan surveys from Democrats have showed a tight race, but there have not been any independent public polls of the race so far.

After four decades there’s this perception that a Democrat just can’t win,” said Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota who lost his seat in 2004. “This year that’s changing.”

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms! So unfair to those who come in legally.

7:49 AM - Oct 22, 2018

Republicans control every center of power in Washington. They have the White House. They control the House. They control the Senate. They have the courts, to boot. So how is it that despite their complete lack of power, Democrats are managing to stop Trump from implementing his terrific immigration plan?

The answer is that they aren’t. The reason Trump hasn’t signed immigration legislation is that he can’t get Republicans themselves to agree on a set of reforms. As my colleague Greg Sargent noted last week, “the bigger package of ‘tough’ measures Trump favors to ‘solve’ the larger immigration problem — a border wall, deep cuts to legal immigration — got the fewest of any votes in the Senate, meaning his solutions don’t have enough Republican support to pass Congress.”

Trump can’t even get Republicans to agree to fund a border wall, the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

It is apparent that nothing this president has done or said thus far has been horrible enough for his supporters to turn against him. I once asked a specific WC poster who supported the president if there he has a personal line-in-the-sand and he answered, no. So now I am once again wondering and will increase the target audience to all supporters of this president and ask if there is anything he could do or say that would turn you against him?

Winston, I will answer this question by asking a question….not nice I know….but here goes: When will you, your fellow democrats, congresspeople, and senators accept the fact that Donald J. Trump is the duly elected President of the United States of America and start working to try to help him be successful? All I’ve seen you do so far is bitch and moan and try to undo the results of the 2016 election because your girl lost. As I have previously stated, I am not a Trump fan. I think he is an immoral loudmouth narcissist. I do not plan to invite him and Melania over for single-malt Scotch and ribeyes on Saturday night. But, regardless of his shortcomings, I do think he is working to improve the lives of average Americans and that’s all that is important to me. As the saying goes, “A lot more would be accomplished if it didn’t matter who got the credit.” With that said, I think I will follow Ken’s lead and exit this forum. I’m not going to change your mind and you aren’t going to change mine. And when you get right down to where the rubber meets the road nothing that either of us says on an internet message board will have any more effect on the great scheme of things than a fart has on a tornado. So I bid you adieu and wish you well with your future endeavors.

I think that I will focus more on bridge discussions

You know how, after you watch a movie with a surprise ending, you sometimes replay the plot in your head to find the clues you missed the first time around? That’s what I’ve been doing lately with the history of conservatism — a movement I had been part of since my teenage days as a conservative columnist at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1990s. In the decades since, I have written for numerous conservative publications and served as a foreign policy adviser to three Republican presidential candidates. It would be nice to think that Donald Trump is an anomaly who came out of nowhere to take over an otherwise sane and sober movement. But it just isn’t so.

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over — and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right. A telling moment came in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited an aged Barry Goldwater. Once upon a time, Dole and Goldwater had defined the Republican right, but by 1996, Dole joked, “Barry and I — we’ve sort of become the liberals.” “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater agreed. “Can you imagine that?”

The ascendance of extreme views, abetted in recent years by Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the tea party movement, increasingly made the House Republican caucus ungovernable. The far-right Freedom Caucus drove House Speaker John A. Boehner into retirement in 2015. His successor, Paul D. Ryan, lasted only three years. Ryan’s retirement signals the final repudiation of an optimistic, inclusive brand of Reaganesque conservatism focused on enhancing economic opportunity at home and promoting democracy and free trade abroad. The Republican Party will now be defined by Trump’s dark, divisive vision, with his depiction of Democrats as America-hating, criminal-coddling traitors, his vilification of the press as the “enemy of the people,” and his ugly invective against Mexicans and Muslims. The extremism that many Republicans of goodwill had been trying to push to the fringe of their party is now its governing ideology.

That’s why I can no longer be a Republican, and in fact wish ill fortune on my former party. I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats beginning in November. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as it is currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right party out of the ashes. But that will require undoing the work of decades, not just of the past two years.

Winston, I will answer this question by asking a question….not nice I know….but here goes: When will you, your fellow democrats, congresspeople, and senators accept the fact that Donald J. Trump is the duly elected President of the United States of America and start working to try to help him be successful?

Paul Volcker, wearing a blue sweatsuit and black dress socks, stretched out on a recliner in the den of his Upper East Side apartment on a Sunday afternoon. His lanky 6-foot-7 frame extended beyond the end of the chair’s leg rest. He added an ottoman to rest his feet.

“I’m not good,” said Mr. Volcker, 91, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who came to prominence after he used shockingly high interest rates to help end the runaway inflation of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Long one of finance’s wise men, he has been sick for several months.

But he would rather not talk about himself. Instead, Mr. Volcker wants to talk about the country, the economy and the government. And if he had seemed lethargic when I arrived, he turned lively in his laments: “We’re in a hell of a mess in every direction,” he said.

Hundreds of books surrounded Mr. Volcker — filling shelves and piled high on virtually every flat surface — as did pink pages of The Financial Times, folded into origami. “Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone,” he said. “Even respect for the Federal Reserve.

“And it’s really bad. At least the military still has all the respect. But I don’t know, how can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?”

Before Mr. Volcker fell ill, he finished his memoir, “Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government.” The book was supposed to be published in late November, but given Mr. Volcker’s health, its publisher, PublicAffairs, a unit of Hachette, moved its release up to Oct. 30.

“I had no intention of writing a book, but there was something that kind of was irritating me,” he said. “I’m really worried about this governance thing.”

“I can’t help but ask, one day many years later, when you find your previous awareness, cognition and choices are all wrong, will you keep going along the wrong path or reject yourself?” — Gu Li, a 9-dan Go champion, after losing to AlphaGo, Google’s nigh-unbeatable deep learning AI.