StrangeSox

Fair enough, and that's a heck of a lot better of an explanation than "people should be free to be gouged on commissions and fees they might not understand!" the administration has put forward.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Feb 3, 2017 -> 08:03 AM) He did just tweet about the attempted attack at the Louvre. Then why isn't France included in the ban? it is a mystery

Trump is set to repeal the recent "fiduciary rule" that would have forced investment advisers to provide advice that would benefit the customer the most rather than 'suitable' advice that isn't necessarily bad but it more profitable for the adviser than other potential options. Their reasoning is, uh, Anyway, good lesson to everyone to make sure you know exactly what sorts of fees you're paying on your accounts, what the expense ratios of the funds you're invested in are, and if you use a financial adviser of some sort, what their fees are and how they actually make their money. My wife and I are going with the fee-for-a-service option once we find a suitable adviser in the near future who'll set down and review everything for us, but won't actually handle the money. Don't have to worry about conflicts of interest regarding commissions that way or a perpetual 1-3% vampire sucking away your funds. old Frontline episode on the looming retirement crisis http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/retirement-gamble/

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Feb 3, 2017 -> 06:18 AM) Thoughts and prayers to all the victims of the Bowling Green massacre. So far, the two major things they've used to justify their Muslim Ban are 1) A Canadian Trump supporter murdering 5 Muslims at a mosque in Quebec City 2) A thing that didn't actually happen

Actual leftists are at least as far to the left as Bernie Sanders and more often than not even more so. Outright communists, left anarchists, social Democrats like Sanders who support mixed economies, and Democratic socialists who support liberal democracies but not a mixed capitalistic economy (someone like Noam Chomsky might qualify here?)

why is everyone so excited about getting Jared Allen back?

It definitely reads as edgelord teenage stupidity, but there's a line somewhere where even "ironic" support of something or calling yourself something goes too far.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:54 PM) founded a "Fascism Forever Club"

I immediately check out of any and all #BernieWouldHaveWon re-litigation of the primaries.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:08 PM) Even if it was an accident, I think it has provided an interesting mechanism to try and stop the majority. Ultimately this type of stuff is personal opinion. I think that there is some benefit to a govt that has a high threshold to institute change. While sometimes it is frustrating because change may not happen as quickly as we want, but that also slows change we may dislike. At the end of the day the country is better off when it doesnt drastically change course in short periods of time. Instability is bad for everyone, which is why status quo is sometimes okay, even if its not exactly what I want. Historically, the biggest uses of the filibuster have been to halt civil rights legislation. It was a pretty rare thing until the 2000's.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:07 PM) But of course you know that the Senate system isn't supposed to create equal representation. I know and thought I was acknowledging that there, and I think it's a garbage relic from a political system that predates the industrial revolution, but that's an argument for a different thread.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:06 PM) They literally did not. They bent over backwards and refused to use the power of the purse. The color of the sky in my world is blue, and yours? guys keep in mind that brett has also said in the past that he thinks the Supreme Court has been liberal for years/decades. Anything short of 100% of his policies is not considered conservative, anything short of 100% obstruction is not considered obstruction (when Republicans are doing it).

QUOTE (bmags @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:03 PM) I think the tea party tactics handwringing is overrated. This groundswell isn't to pull party left in policy (though it will) as much as pull it from accommodation politics. The dems wanted to focus on a few appointees to try to spotlight them and use that focus to pull repub support. The base rightly realized that's stupid and won't work and instead was forcing the party to not have their name on any of the bad candidates, to fight against the crazy policies and fight a president they find to be dangerous. If the dems actually tried to prevent a debt limit raising and destroy the country to make Trump look bad I'd be furious. But to play nice and act like this is any other president is wrong. Republican defections need to happen and it won't happen any sooner if you give them bipartisan cover for their initiatives. Look how well that same tactic has worked for the GOP and their deliberate strategy to deny Obama even a single Republican vote on the ACA no matter how many outreaches to Snowe and Grassley they made.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 02:01 PM) Oh and after a lot of thought, I think that the Democrats should force the nuclear option. It may lose this battle, but it could start a war between congress and Trump, and that is really what we need. In the short term, losing the filibuster would obviously suck. But I've said for years that it's another unnecessary veto point in a system full of veto points, is a historical accident rather than something that was intentionally created, and ultimately should be abolished.

*24% of the public and more people voted for Dem Senators than Rep Senators. Yeah, that's the undemocratic system we have, but if you're going to make appeals to "the public" they aren't as strong when you routinely receive fewer actual votes but win through an archaic system.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 01:34 PM) After all, when the Democrats nominated an agreed-upon moderate, a guy Orrin Hatch said Obama wouldn't nominate because he'd be confirmed easily and wasn't left wing enough, and the Republicans didn't even meet with the guy...that totally cost them in the following election. For whatever extremely stupid reasons they chose, Democrats didn't seem to push this at all and just assumed the electorate would take it into consideration.

QUOTE (KagakuOtoko @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 01:24 PM) Want to make a gentlemen's bet that the Repubs get crushed if Trump keeps this up? The 2018 Senate races are pretty brutal for the Democrats. The Republicans are defending 8 total seats with 2 of them only really being considered a possibility of flipping. The Democrats are defending 24 with as many as 13 being contestable. Who knows what'll happen in the House, but even just holding where they are now in the Senate (48 seats) isn't really likely. 2020 is realistically the earliest they could hope to take it back.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 12:17 PM) Right, but again, to me that just screams that the DoD screwed up. That's their area of expertise. You can't fault a President for relying on his generals. If it came out that the generals kept advising Trump the plan wasn't going to work and they needed better intel, fine, but we don't really have that yet. I mean yes, to SB's point, at the end of the day the guy that gives the order is responsible. But it's not some negligence on his part that the operation didn't go off without a hitch, which seems to be the implication in the article. I would imagine that there are all sorts of plans on the table/in the works all the time, and that ultimately it's the President's decision on if and when to execute them. For example, I know with the Bin Laden raid, there were some who thought the planned operation was too high of a risk at that time, and others who thought that the risk levels were acceptable. Maybe we're just seeing the disgruntled side who said "this plan isn't ready yet" or "this plan is a dumb idea" and were proven right, but it's also possible that the operation wasn't fully ready yet but could have been improved via more intelligence. edit: I think what's unstated but clearly visible in the way it was phrased was that Trump didn't actually spend any time thinking about or evaluating this, either. Which, honestly, would anyone be surprised to learn he glanced it it once and then approved it before going off to watch cable news for hours?

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 12:00 PM) http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/...-lands-backlash Some good news today on Public Lands. This is definitely one of those rare areas where voters on the right and left of aisle can see eye to eye. :usa :usa :usa :usa

Complete breakdowns of the norms that allow our Constitution to function is not a good thing regardless of who said what when. Our system really isn't flexible enough to handle situations where Congress just flat-out refuses to do its job. Imagine the chaos if the Democrats controlled the Senate and just flatly refused to confirm any and all appointments made by Trump regardless of who the candidates were, or refused to ever pass any bills whatsoever.

I really want to know what the justification behind denying a President his powers of appointment for at least 25% of his term is. Our "election season" started in early/mid 2015--should he have been denied those powers for as much as 50% of his term if Scalia had died back then? And how does it even make sense to withhold these powers from President Obama because two other people are running to replace him and he has no possible way of maintaining the Presidency? It was rightfully his choice, not Trump's or Clinton's.

We stopped here on our way up to Acadia/Bar Harbor. http://www.maine.gov/ifw/education/wildlifepark/ Lots of rescue animals, so you get a chance to see some brown bears, foxes, moose etc. up close. Like a mini-zoo and worth the quick stop.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Feb 2, 2017 -> 09:19 AM) From the NYT front page. Not sure how Trump (or Obama) are to blame for this. At some point some general had to tell either or both of them, "this is the plan, it's going to work." I won't pretend to know exactly how these sorts of raids get planned, vetted and approved, but this is from the Reuters article posted earlier:

Trump is taking white terrorism out of DHS counterterrorism programs: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trum...v-idUSKBN15G5VO

The legal justification way that Al-Awlaki himself was killed is pretty questionable as well.