111–120 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MSNBC had a clear conflict of interest in the run-up to the Iraq war, with its parent company being a defense contractor I'd be grateful if you could elaborate - I'm having trouble following the ownership chain, since there was a merger with Comcast I think after the Iraq War.
General Electric owned what ultimately became NBCUniversal between 1986-2009, after which Comcast bought 51% of NBCUniversal and finally fully acquired it in 2013.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're claiming the leadership of both parties are right wing, and elites inside and outside of government are right wing. Why, then, has the right wing lost so much ground on those issues I listed over the past 50-100 years? Do you deny the issues I listed are issues where the right wing has lost ground in the past 50-100 years? If so, what do you even mean by "right wing"? If not, then your position is that the eli…
The perception that right wing has lost ground is an illusion. There is dramatically less dissent in America today than there was in the past, much less threat of any social movement that would endanger the status quo. To a large extent, the right wing policies of decades past have worked incredibly well to focus authoritarian force where it is most useful to right wing goals: - Suppression of the black population, t…
At the same time it was surprising to see for once, Trump and everyone else back the recent prison reform bill:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/18/trump-sign-p...
---
The package, which would immediately release 4,000 federal prisoners according to some advocates, passed the House judiciary committee last week and is likely to be brought up for a vote early next week. The bill would also expand compassionate release, giving elderly and terminally ill inmates a path home, and invest tens of millions in re-entry programs. It would also end the shackling of women giving birth behind bars and provide them with necessary hygiene items at no charge.
---
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obama was one of our better Republican presidents....
That's a pretty fatuous statement when you consider the goals of the GOP over the past 38 years. Did Obama work with the GOP to privatize entitlement programs? Did he pass a major tax cut? Did he appoint pro-life judges? Did he move towards transforming the Department of Education to state block grants?
> Did Obama work with the GOP to privatize entitlement programs?
No, but he often supported or considered cuts to Social Security and Medicare (including in the context of working with the GOP). For example, Obama's executive order 13531 established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform ("Simpson-Bowles"), which recommended cuts to Social Security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_... https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/us/social-programs-face-c...
> Did he pass a major tax cut?
Yes, of course!? The largest component of the stimulus bill was tax relief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Relief,_Unemployment_Insur... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Taxpayer_Relief_Act_o... https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19taxes.html
> Did he appoint pro-life judges?
Obama nominated a judge who failed to be confirmed in part because of Democratic opposition to his (purported) "votes in the legislature to retain Confederate insignia in the state flag of Georgia, restrict abortion, and ban same-sex marriage".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Boggs
It's a little unclear what Sonya Sotomayor's position on abortion is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/us/politics/28abortion.ht...
> Did he move towards transforming the Department of Education to state block grants?
No, but the Obama Administration supported funding for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund in the stimulus bill, a relatively significant block grant from the Department of Education.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/leg/recovery/factsheet/stabil...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're claiming the leadership of both parties are right wing, and elites inside and outside of government are right wing. Why, then, has the right wing lost so much ground on those issues I listed over the past 50-100 years? Do you deny the issues I listed are issues where the right wing has lost ground in the past 50-100 years? If so, what do you even mean by "right wing"? If not, then your position is that the eli…
The perception that right wing has lost ground is an illusion. There is dramatically less dissent in America today than there was in the past, much less threat of any social movement that would endanger the status quo. To a large extent, the right wing policies of decades past have worked incredibly well to focus authoritarian force where it is most useful to right wing goals: - Suppression of the black population, t…
A large influx of economic migrants is in the interest of the elites, not the bulk of the people who make up the right wing. It is the elites who have pushed for and benefited from those policies, and they have been wildly successful.
Equality among the sexes not a right wing goal, and that is the direction society has moved over the past 100 years.
Sexual liberation, and the related disappearance of Christianity from popular culture, is not a right wing goal.
Social inequality and corporate welfare are goals of the elite, not the right wing, which primarily consists of rural working class white men who are victims of the policies meant to bring about those goals as much as anyone else.
Military intervention is a project of the elite and transcends political parties in the US. Working class Republicans would never have dreamed up going to Iraq or Libya or Syria to oust a dictator, any more than working class Democrats would have. Either side can be made to support such a conflict as we have seen by taking advantage of in-group out-group tendencies, but they'd never come up with it themselves. They have no reason to. But the elites do, so it happened.
You're right that there is little real dissent in the US. The reason is that real dissent is suppressed by the elites, not protected by them. It's harassed and deliberately targeted by government officials. It's kicked off of platforms run by the elites. It's viciously attacked at every turn by the elite-owned corporate media. If you want to know where the real dissent is, look for the ideas that the elites actually try to stop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're claiming the leadership of both parties are right wing, and elites inside and outside of government are right wing. Why, then, has the right wing lost so much ground on those issues I listed over the past 50-100 years? Do you deny the issues I listed are issues where the right wing has lost ground in the past 50-100 years? If so, what do you even mean by "right wing"? If not, then your position is that the eli…
I'm not really sure what to say. I thought I was pretty clear in my previous post?
You could start with answering the questions that I asked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the implication is clearly that there existed a government survalence dragnet and that the source was well placed enough to have unfettered access to it. However, it strikes me that there are a number of other possibilities: perhaps his own computer had been specifically compromised; maybe they targeted his hotel room or WiFi network; or, one which I find really compelling, it was simply a well timed ruse int…
[edit] Ok, so I actually read the whole article now. I still have a small amount of skepticism but two things sway me towards thinking this is real: 1) the author got called to the White House to sit down with the CIA director and Condoleezza Rice to shut down an earlier story, so clearly there are high-up people watching him and trying to shut him up at all costs. 2) there are a surprising amount of people in the CI…
It would be pretty negligent toward both the individual agent and the organizational mission as a whole not to detect these events.
Since they are supposedly relatively frequent however (the web of lies gets ever more complicated, and different people pay attention to different details) those red flags would usually be ignored by other agents or datasharing allies, but as the person in question you would still prefer your journalist not to generate these red flags nonetheless..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a pretty fatuous statement when you consider the goals of the GOP over the past 38 years. Did Obama work with the GOP to privatize entitlement programs? Did he pass a major tax cut? Did he appoint pro-life judges? Did he move towards transforming the Department of Education to state block grants?
That's a strangely specific list of questions, but here is an attempt to address them: > Did Obama work with the GOP to privatize entitlement programs? No, but he often supported or considered cuts to Social Security and Medicare (including in the context of working with the GOP). For example, Obama's executive order 13531 established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform ("Simpson-Bowles"), whi…
1. Reduce taxes and simplify the tax code
2. Appoint federalist pro-life judges
3. Privatize federal programs that can be privatized
4. Devolve funding and authority to the states through block grants
5. Oppose gun control
6. Require a balanced budget, and cut spending to do it
7. Subsidize school choice
8. Reform and cut welfare
9. Reduce the influence of unions
10. Increase defense spending
I didn't make those up; I literally went to the UCSB Presidency Project for each of those 11 cycles and made a text file capturing the policy objectives of the GOP (several months ago, not just as a freaky obsessive response to your comment).
There are other policy items that come and go; for instance, in the 80s and early 90s, the GOP was the party of term limits. Starting in the 90s, they became the party of tort, liability, and malpractice reform. For a brief, sparkling moment, they were the party of guaranteed-issue private health insurance. But those 10 items are basically unchanged, and none of them are Democratic goals.
To your specific arguments:
1. Obama opposed privatization and expanded federal entitlements dramatically.
2. Obama increased several taxes, and increased the tax burden on upper-income families and in support of the ACA; those increases would have been starker had he not been held hostage by a united GOP legislature that, for instance, required him to extend some of the Bush tax cats in exchange for funding the government. Not to mention: his biggest cuts were part of the ARRA, which prevented a potential second Great Depression.
3. Obama did not appoint pro-life or federalist judges of any sort.
4. Obama presided over the implementation of Common Core, which dramatically increased the federal influence over K-12 education and made him the bête noire of conservative educational wonks.
So, no, President Obama was not a "good Republican President". Respectfully, I think you might basically have to not know what the Republican party has stood for for the last ~40 years to believe that.
The major takeaway is that one can't count on the NYT to challenge powerful interests. This makes the NYT a powerful conservative force in US culture. It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force. It's no accident that the paper ran the Ju…
I don't think that's the takeaway the author means to convey. The picture he paints of the Times is that they've become much more resilient to political pressure as a result of his ordeal. In fact the article closes: Since then, the Times has been much more willing to stand up to the government and refuse to go along with White House demands to hold or kill stories. I think the major takeaway is really the erosion of…
Not really though. One has to look at the articles and values espoused by the newspaper and not an individual's assertions to determine where the newspaper stands. A news paper that espoused the establishment's line of Saddam Hussien possessing weapons of mass destruction which factually was wrong cannot claim to be resilient to political pressure. Look at its coverage on plethora of issues from labour movements, civil rights, Cuban missile crisis, interventions in South America, financing of Contras , coverage of China, and middle east. It has always supported and validated the establishment's position even though now we know that the establishment was wrong in every single of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big papers (New York Times, Washington Post) have always been the voice of the establishment. I remember reading their editorials broadly condemning the labor movement while it was fighting for basic rights (and being slaughtered by public and privatized law enforcement) in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps at times more humanist than others, but nevertheless. I also think it is really obvious that…
Washington Post seems to be a lot better about being a neutral outlet with quality journalism. Although... being owned by Bezos makes me wonder how long they can remain that way.
> Obama was determined to extend and even expand many of Bush’s national security policies, including a crackdown on whistleblowers and the press. Ignoring the possible consequences to American democracy, the Obama administration began aggressively conducting surveillance of the digital communications of journalists and potential sources, leading to more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined. I…
Obama was CIA from birth or was at least born to a family of assets: - his parents met in a Russian language class in Hawaii - father graduated from Harvard - father worked for oil companies and government in Kenya - mother moved to Jakarta and Pakistan working for NGOs, funded by development banks - paternal grandfather worked for British colonial forces in Europe, India, and Africa - maternal grandmother worked for…
Given the way you've presented your argument, you can't lose:
1. If the number is extremely low, it supports your claim in your last sentence that moving to Hawaii during the Cold War to take Russian language classes is conspicious behavior that reveals his parents as CIA.
2. If the number is extremely large, it supports your initial claim that moving to Hawaii and taking Russian language classes "are pretty typical covers and paths."
It appears you have yourself a contradiction there.
