Steely_D wrote:

Tip O'Neill said it best: "Politics is the art of compromise." Sadly there's too much grandstanding and not enough negotiating among politicians. 

Kurtster wrote: 

"Well with all the drama going on with your side of the aisle regarding the DNC trying to get rid of the old folks with primary challengers, isn't it about time some adults starting talking about term limits ?? Again ? That would have prevented most of the shit we are all dealing with."

I think you're right, that term limits could help make our politics more effective, but Steely_D and I are talking about voters focusing too much on one or two issues to the detriment of other goals they have. 

Hey, it's hard to get elected officials to go along with term limits. Remember, Newt Gingrich came to power with a bunch of Republicans who took an oath before their elections that they would honor a self-imposed term limit (two terms in the House, I think). IIRC most of them "forgot" that oath when it came time to act on it. Power and status are addictive; I think that's what drove Joe Biden to think he could last a second term. 

How do you get politicians to vote/act against their own best interests? I've daydreamed that you could get people in Congress to set term limits and block their own insider trading/investments by letting them pass laws that go into effect AFTER they leave office. 

So, in daydream paradise, the House and Senate would block insider investment by making it illegal after a certain date, with sitting officials in Congress getting an exception until they leave office. 

The ban would gradually take place as incumbents left office until everyone is a newcomer, blocked from insider investment.  

You could do this with term limits and (perhaps) imposing limits on campaign funding sources and spending limits.  

Moody's downgrade intensifies investor worry about US fiscal path

Thanks, Donnie!

 kurtster wrote:

Well, that was unexpected. 
My point was not about term limits at all, but that one of the blunders leading to the voting catastrophe that let Felon Trump into office was people picking a single topic, and ignoring all the other horrific outcomes. 
E.g., focusing on “borders.” But they didn’t expect to lose their small business, health care, retirement, or home.

Grown up politics, in contrast, is a multilayered, really 5-D chess scenario that requires, at times, holding one’s nose and compromising. However, a lot of politicians have lost that talent, and media loves to look at compromising as a fault, ginning up headlines. 

 Steely_D wrote: 
Well with all the drama going on with your side of the aisle regarding the DNC trying to get rid of the old folks with primary challengers, isn't it about time some adults starting talking about term limits ?????   Again ????  That would have prevented most of the shit we are all dealing with.

And don't try and patronize me with BS about this cuz every time I bring this up, unrealistic pearl clutching happens about losing the good ones.  Everyone of you still here.

Term limits or we all go to Hell.

No term limits is the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

You all are demonstrably, INSANE.
.

 kcar wrote:

That seems to be the element missing in contemporary politics: compromise while holding one’s nose. Religion is likely the genesis of that (see what I did?) where there is no moving of the line, no compromise. God said it, and that’s it.
And that moves into other worlds, so that politicians who are comfortable with that sort of rigidity are incapable of governing such a large, diverse area (city, state, nation). Pick a litmus and DO. NOT. BUDGE.

So you get folks who refuse to vote for Harris (e.g.) and think that anyone gives an aeronautic intercourse that they didn’t bother to show up. That’s adolescent thinking: â€I’m not gonna clean the room and that’ll show my parents!” Kids, you’re all grown up now. The world does NOT revolve around you and refusing to cast a vote 1) won’t get you attention to your topic-of-the-week and 2) gets you a result you might not want. 

 R_P wrote:
Government dictating what retailers can charge?  Sounds like Radical Communism/Marxism/Socialism!

 R_P wrote:
Thanks for (indirectly) proving my point: 

Yes, the Democratic party and Harris supported Israel's war in Palestinian territories for far too long. Yes, "the party of human rights and 'rules-based order' " failed to live up to its principles. 

Yes, this led to an erosion of support among Arab-Americans (and others) for the Democrats. 

But this fine act of non-support/sitting on hands/voting for Trump helped usher in Trump again. Trump, who doesn't give a fvck about "human rights and 'rules-based order' ."

It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face. It rarely has a good outcome. 

Had those people whose anger over Palestine helped turn them away from Harris instead held their nose and voted for her, they still would have had a chance to push her away from Israel after the election. Now they have Trump who won't do anything for the Palestinians because they can't do anything for him. 

In terms of something like game theory, those people voted according to the philosophy of their principles and in doing so actually worsened the chances of those principles existing in the reality of today's world. 

Boy that ear looks like nothing ever happened. That’s right nothing really happened. Cut me Mick!  

 Steely_D wrote:

ikr?

 kcar wrote:
FYT. Nothing changed. Still complicit and in denial about it.

A predictable scapegoat too (even though more people disagreed) for the party of human rights and the "rules-based order."

And likely not the biggest reason people didn't vote (for Democrats.)

 Steely_D wrote:

Isabeau's quote of Heather Cox Richardson was absolutely spot on. Hitler and Mussolini used the same non-stop firehose of rumor, scandal, outrage and misdirection to confuse and numb people into submission. 

I agree with you, Steely_D about the message. I think that message largely has to focus on jobs, the cost of living, and the economy in general. Show how Trump's actions have made life more expensive (killing the $35/month cap on insulin, the increased cost of groceries, housing) and will slash government benefits (Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP). 

At this point I don't know if Americans are so vigilant about the loss of their rights and freedoms. But the party should openly fight for them as pillars of the American way of life. 


"...- maybe those idiots who thought that sitting on their hands would be a "vote" like someone cared if they didn't come out of their room."

The Arab-Americans who didn't vote for Kamala Harris because she didn't speak out enough against Israel's conduct of the war. Congrats, folks, you got Trump who wouldn't mind if Israel pushed the Palestinian's out of their areas so he could develop them. Trump Gaza!  

You won't get dessert if you don't eat the tariffs

 Isabeau wrote:
Which is why it's frustrating/annoying/time-wasting to chase down every stupid thing (Gulf of Mexico, etc) or waste time on every Republican echo chamber. Dems, focus, please. 
Step one: accurate elections for the midterms
Step two: pick the right people to be elected, folks that can stand up with a resonant message to show how the GOP betrayed and steals from their base. The Dems don't need convincing (most of the time - maybe those idiots who thought that sitting on their hands would be a "vote" like someone cared if they didn't come out of their room).

In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.
In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream.
In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”
Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out. The administration has clearly adopted this plan.
As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on expansionist approach to presidential power.” The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines. “We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.”

The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government.
Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”
The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.
Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.
As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track.”
In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.
The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.

— Heather Cox Richardson 5/17/25

 buddy wrote:

Step Number One:

We are not at war. That requires an act of Congress, which has not happened. Invoking war rules is, dare I say it, wrong.

Supreme Court Rejects Trump Bid To Resume Quick Deportations Of Venezuelans Under 18th Century Law

 buddy wrote: Grateful for that at least  

As of today, my retirement portfolio has regained the $25k loss as of April 8th (Big Beautiful Tariff Week). Thanks Donnie, for listening to your billionaire buddies who took you to the woodshed & the global meltdown so that you finally blinked like an idiot schoolboy and pulled back on the mess you created. You’re a genius, what an amazing victory!

 VV wrote:
The man who's fascinated by the word 'groceries' and shower heads? Who lately "doesn't know" fundamental things? Not exactly what you'd call a policy wonk or a serious thinker.

There's (homegrown) staff for taking care of business like immigration (below) or a genius-level tariffs plan.