Someone correct me if I'm wrong ... it seems me that the overall tone of this thread is the only good republican is a dead one.

I have thought this for a long time.  Finally decided to say it out loud ...

 oldviolin wrote:

This reminds me of a French friend of mine, Anne-Marie, who married an American and kept in touch with her husband's family after he died. The AM was left-leaning (voted Democrat religiously after becoming an American citizen) while her in-laws were stridently Republican.

AM would practically lose her mind debating politics with the her in-laws, especially when she thought about how heavily they leaned on federal government programs like Medicare. They seemed to think access to those programs were their birthright but should be limited or restricted for Americans they didn't like. And they hated the federal government!

It'd be interesting to have a talk show or reality show that would bring together Americans on the right and left to talk to each other, share experiences and opinions and challenge "the other side" to consider the consequences of their policy preferences. We need to find and expand a middle ground...

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
 Miles and miles and miles and miles and miles 

 oldviolin wrote:

ymmv

 Red_Dragon wrote: 

from wiki/
According to the 2010 census reports, Owsley County has the second-highest level of child poverty of any county in the United States.^[4] In terms of income per household, the county is the poorest in the nation.^[5] Between 1980 and 2014, the rate of death from cancer in the county increased by 45.6 percent, the largest such increase of any county in the United States.^[6]

I mean, are you bored? What? Garbage like this? It's pointless. Empty self perpetrating calories of hate, burning holes in a vacuous and smelly corner of the internet. Oh look! Over there is Twitter! Must be an entertainment bomb. Kind of like a stink bomb without a point...

How Far Are Republicans Willing to Go? They’re Already Gone.

Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities. (...)

The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t. (...)

A longstanding finding in political science is that it is elites who preserve democracy, and elites who destroy democracy. Overwhelming majorities of voters support democracy in the abstract, but if they are told by elites that “the other party is trying to destroy democracy and these emergency measures are needed to preserve democracy by keeping the other side out of power,” most partisan voters are going to follow their leaders and support anti-democratic changes. This is especially the case in a highly polarized binary political system in which the thought of the opposing party taking power seems especially odious and even existential. (...)

These Republican-controlled state governments have become, in the words of Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding,” the title of his April paper.

Grumbach developed 61 indicators of the level of adherence to democratic procedures and practices — what he calls a “State Democracy Index” — and tracked those measures in the states over the period from 2000 to 2018. The indicators include registration and absentee voting requirements, restrictions on voter registration drives and gerrymandering practices.

Grumbach’s conclusion: “Republican control of state government, however, consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.” (...)

From 2020 to 2036, the authors project that the percentage of eligible voters who identify as nonwhite in Texas will grow from 50 to 60 percent, in Georgia from 43 to 50 percent, in Arizona from 38 to 48 percent.

As these percentages grow, Republicans will be under constant pressure to enact state legislation to further restrict registration and voting. The question will become: How far are they willing to go?

I posed that question to Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford. His reply:

As for whether this electoral manipulation will “devolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law,” I would say that the Republican Party has already crossed the Rubicon. For four years during the Trump presidency, they defended or ignored his blatant abuses of power, his violations of democratic norms, and his attacks on our democratic institutions, and they routinely circled the wagons to protect him. They had countless opportunities to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and they consistently failed to do so.

 westslope wrote:

The USA did NOT funnel weapons and money through ObL to mujahideen in Afghanistan:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Under CIA's Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahideen and Afghan Arabs from forty Muslim countries through Pakistan's ISI.^<98> British journalist Jason Burke wrote that "He did not receive any direct funding or training from the US during the 1980s. Nor did his followers. The Afghan mujahideen, via Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, received large amounts of both. Some bled to the Arabs fighting the Soviets but nothing significant."^<99> Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-star general in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI.^<100> According to some CIA officers, beginning in early 1980, bin Laden acted as a liaison between the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) and Afghan warlords, but no evidence of contact between the CIA and Bin Laden exists in the CIA archives.


"The smart, cost-effective strategy would have been to let the Soviets do their thing in Afghanistan."


Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to play armchair quarterback to military action taking place 40+  years ago. There was no guarantee that the Soviets would have tired of occupying Afghanistan or changed their strategy in the region to relinquish Afghanistan. The US did make the mistake of ignoring Afghanistan after the USSR left but as I think we can both agree, even a non-military American presence in that country might not have prevented it from becoming a safe haven for ObL.  

 kcar wrote:
Let me clarify.  I actually wrote:  "Did the US help kick out the Russian soldiers from Afghanistan so Osama Bin Laden could bomb New York City and then Americans could celebrate an orgy of terrorist killings?"

The USA funnelled weapons and money through Osama bin Laden to the Mujahideen forces fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in late 1970s and early 1980s.  

The smart, cost-effective strategy would have been to let the Soviets do their thing in Afghanistan.  Afghanis would have eventually worn them down just like they have worn down every other invader and occupier.    It is unlikely that the Soviets would have had more success 'civilizing' the Afghanis than the Americans have had during the never-ending occupation.  

Although the Afghan theatre did demoralize and wear down the Soviets, it was the domestic rot that finally took the empire down.  In other words, the Americans got lucky.   

Did RNC Video Depict Rioting in ‘Biden’s America’ Using Barcelona Footage?

Meanwhile, Greg Abbott of Texas has:
50,000+ Covid Deaths
187 unreliable Electric Grid Deaths
refuses Medicaid expansion
but claims to be 'pro-life.'
Passes bills allowing drive-thru cocktail/beer sales and
Unlicensed Gun carrying.
Insists on keeping $5 BILLION in Federal covid funds meant to keep Teachers and Students safe.
...While passing a Fetal heartbeat/anti-abortion bill at six weeks into pregnancy.
There is Nothing FETAL about a six week pregnancy. Its embryonic until the 3rd month. 

Now the Big Lie extends to allowing 'poll watchers' take photos of voters if 'suspected of possible voter fraud.

Without the filibuster,  this Tyranny will be in stone in Texas.
Matt Dillon wanna-be's with tiny peckers are in charge. 

Feel free to make "Split Hair, Word Salad" with that.

 cc_rider wrote:
The history of a 2 party system is for each party to find and promote a candidate who can win their respective elections. It's produced a lot of very similar candidates over the years and eventually leads to the notion that abortion, guns, and deficits were the way to measure alignment with your political preferences.

Enter Trump, who has twisted the notion of alignment to be binary...Trump or never Trumpers.  In a world where tribal outguns logic, Trump can pull more people to his side than rational Republicans (see Liz Chaney).   Republicans now see that to get through a primary, they have to embrace the person...platforms don't matter.   When Trump candidates get to the general election, they generally lose, unless the state is so Red that any Republican candidate will win.   It's a recipe for disaster.  You can't count on crazy to carry the day.

So what do you do if you've been in politics for a while?  You have to get through the primary, so you embrace the crazy and avoid being called names by Trump.  When you get to the general election, you then have to walk a fine line between pissing of the Right while not allowing the Democrat running against you to prove you're nuts.  Those with some history might get through (see Cruz, Rubio, Jordan...), but those with no history will likely go down as insane.

Trump is going to kill Republican politics for a decade or two. It might take another election or two, but eventually, he's going to drag them all down with him....dead or alive.

 R_P wrote:
That's pretty funny, since the right wing has used ballot initiatives in Democrat-controlled states for things like limiting taxes. It sounds to me like the Republicans are going all-in on setting up a one party system.

Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy
Through ballot initiatives, voters in red states have defied legislators’ wishes and produced liberal outcomes in recent years. Republicans want to make the practice harder, or even eliminate it.

So far in 2021, Republicans have introduced 144 bills to restrict the ballot initiative processes in 32 states, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a liberal group that tracks and assists citizen-driven referendums. Of those bills, 19 have been signed into law by nine Republican governors. In three states, Republican lawmakers have asked voters to approve ballot initiatives that in fact limit their own right to bring and pass future ballot initiatives.

Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country
“We did it quickly and we did it quietly,” said the executive director of Heritage Action.

 westslope wrote:

I have no idea what you're talking about in the third paragraph. No, the US did not kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter might have been re-elected if anything remotely like that occurred.

I never did follow the story claiming the Russians paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US soldiers. But to shrug off Trump's 30,000 lies during his presidency as "American as apple pie" is (with all due respect) utter lunacy.

I don't see how any reasonable and informed American can regard Trump's presidency as anything but a disaster. The GOP still can't come to grips with reality. It's still dancing to Trump's tune. You know you're in Bizarro World when Liz Cheney is the party's moral standard just because she doesn't think the election was rigged.

Remind us again.   How much in the way of bounties did the Russians pay Taliban fighters to kill Americans?   

Lying is apparently a bi-partisan passion.   American as Apple Pie.


Another reminder?  Did the US help kick out the Russian soldiers from Afghanistan so Osama Bin Laden could bomb New York City and then Americans could celebrate an orgy of terrorist killings?  

Did I get that right?