StrangeSox

Yep, the first letter about nothing hurt her support but that mostly recovered. The second one saying that there wasn't anything there rallied trump supporters and did her in.

Seems increasingly likely the Exxon Mobil CEO is going to be Secretary of state. This makes sense because

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 10, 2016 -> 02:29 PM) So this really is rather amazing. We have a foreign intelligence industry successfully intervening in a U.S. Election on behalf of one candidate with the tacit approval of that candidate and other top level officials in his party, including one whose wife is now a cabinet level nominee. At this point, the United States system does not have any way to deal with this. if someone successfully intervenes in the U.S. election using foreign resources, a faulty election still stands because there's no mechanism by which we could do anything about the intervention. It is at least partially on the media for how they covered it, exhibit a http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/1...torial-judgment

Reading The Worst Hard Time, the book about the Dust Bowl that the Ken Burns documentary was based on, and this quote from the report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee stand out "This situation is so serious that the Nation, for its own sake, cannot afford to allow the farmer to fail. We endanger our democracy if we allow the Great Plains, or any other section of our country, to become an economic desert."

That's already the law, SS deductions are capped around there. In order to boost the solvency of the program, you can lift that cap or cut benefits. Gop has decided to cut benefits and sneak in additional tax cuts for the wealthy. Their Obamacare repeal bill does the same. Enrich the rich, cat food for everyone else.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Dec 10, 2016 -> 05:38 AM) http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/...l-security.html Is the GOP crazy enough to go after Social Security? Wanted to get that back up before Russian hackers protecting Trump attack SoxTalk servers again. Green. I hope. Here's a pretty good summary of the bill that the House GOP is proposing to gut social security. https://twitter.com/MichaelSLinden/status/8...src=twsrc%5Etfw

Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

bmags already put it best imo

There's a pretty big disconnect between "someone who was possibly (or even 'probably' to be generous) a Clinton supporter, firebombed a random GOP election office" and "Donald Trump attacked a specific individual on a mass media platform who had dared to question him, and his supporters have carried on a year-long campaign of harassment against that individual" This is what happens when Trump attacks private citizens who question him. He had power before, and now he has enormous power. He's responsible for how he wields it.

REPORT: Trump Only Receiving One Intelligence Briefing Per Week; Pence Receiving Six gotta focus on the important stuff, the cult-like rallies!

Trump transition wants names of Energy Department staff who worked on climate We can imagine who's getting purged first.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Dec 9, 2016 -> 12:27 PM) Hold up, there are s***ty people on the internet? NO WAY. Just today a dude that got a Cowboys Superbowl Champs tattoo got death threats over the internet. People are awful when given an anonymous platform. We've known this for years. She's being attacked, even a year later, because she questioned Trump. Whatever other dumb stuff happens on the internet is irrelevant. The only reason she gets the threats and harassment that she did is because she asked him a question and he cried like a baby about it on twitter. The only reason that the local union president from Carrier is getting death threats and having his children threatened is because Trump cried like a baby about him on twitter. This is not something that happened with Obama. Obama didn't whine on any form of media about individual private citizens who dared criticize him or even just asked him a question, his media director didn't doxx their social media accounts, his supporters didn't regularly send those people threats. This isn't something I'd expect would happen under a Jeb! or Kasich or Rubio administration, either. This is a uniquely Trump phenomenon, and people need to stop making excuses for it. Don' try to justify it with "he's not allowed to respond to critics?" or "other people also get harassed for non-Trump reasons".

Oil drilling advocate expected be Trump's pick to head Interior Department: sources Almost finished building his Captain Planet Supervillains team edit: of course she's yet another climate "skeptic" would not be surprised to see a decent amount of our public lands sold off to the highest bidders for resource exploitation.

This is what happens when Donald Trump attacks a private citizen on Twitter

spot the difference http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/polit...l?smid=tw-share

Women’s March on Washington Barred From Lincoln Memorial

QUOTE (bmags @ Dec 9, 2016 -> 11:12 AM) There is no way in hell Anthony Kennedy would allow that, let alone Justice Roberts. Supreme court isn't seriously in trouble unless RBG dies. I'm honestly not sure if Thomas would, either. He takes some radical positions on a lot of issues, but he's also the most likely to ignore precedent if he thinks its wrong (Korematsu). Assuming RBG hangs on until the next Democratic President, Kennedy is also why I don't think we'll get a full-blown Roe reversal or getting garbage TRAPP laws like what Texas tried upheld. Kennedy may have taken far too long since Casey to find something that rose to his standard of "undue burden," but he's still there to hold at least that line. Still pissed at RBG for not retiring when the Dems held the Senate. If she dies while a Republican holds the Presidency (and I guess isn't within the newly discovered 1-year-to-election exclusion period!), decades of progress in the courts will be undone.

One reason our Presidential system has remained robust while most others have failed is adherence to longstanding political norms. Those have been breaking down in Congress for a little while now, and now we've set a blowtorch to the ones for the Executive branch.

f*** you Trump for making me agree with this

Honestly, a President even openly musing or trying to pre-justify prison camps for Muslims in the year 2016 should be grounds for impeachment. eta: or when he calls for the execution of people who were exonerated by DNA evidence years after their exoneration, which got surprisingly less coverage than EMAILS OMG EMAILS this year.

That is horrifying. That is what you need to keep in mind and compound with his attacks on private citizens for criticizing him. That's why I'm legitimately fearful of authoritarianism coming to this country--it can't happen here, until it does. Pence would just set up camps to electroshock your LGBT friends and relatives, though.

QUOTE (Ezio Auditore @ Dec 9, 2016 -> 10:02 AM) It's the exact reason we have civilian control of the armed forces and things like that. Which it should be noted that Trump is staffing traditionally civilian positions like Sec. Defense with former generals, though Mattis does appear to be one of the few non-crazy/awful picks so far.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Dec 9, 2016 -> 09:43 AM) You're saying it COULD happen and then pointing to what history has shown us about authoritarian regimes. You're implicitly saying Trump is following that same path, not that he COULD. If it's not a legitimate fear of yours there's little reason to point it out. It is a legitimate fear of mine, and I do think Trump presented himself and behaves as an authoritarian. That is still not the "freaking out" position you keep trying to ascribe to me where I've said that Trump will "freeze speech" or that he'll control NBC's news coverage of him or that he's inevitably the next Hitler. But if I'm right about him being an authoritarian, everyone who continually makes excuses for his actions only makes it that much easier for him to grab and hold on to power. Have a little bit of nuance in your world view. It's about influence and pressures, not binary yes/no positions. edit: ezio with a solid way of putting it: QUOTE (Ezio Auditore @ Dec 9, 2016 -> 09:46 AM) I see the argument you're making here, and it's not really without merit, but here's the thing - this even being a discussion with Trump is itself unprecedented, at least for modern presidents. This isn't normal and we are pushing back against normalizing it.

What's Q's value this year compared to next (or at the deadline), assuming he keeps pitching to form?