Politics Discussion

[tampa24]

Here's the little bruhahah stirred up over Melania's personal renovation of the Rose Garden. She is taking some heat right now because she chopped down or otherwise removed several trees planted by First Lady, Jackie Kennedy in the early 60's. Here are some before and after pics so you can get an idea.

Before



After

 

[tampa24]

 

[tampa24]

Umm. I'd say Melania's renovations took all of the skill, vision and imagination of a new hire employee at the Walmart garden section. It also looks like it was really done on the cheap.

I'm not a fan of the artistic vision behind this one.

 

[Repareur]

Umm. I'd say Melania's renovations took all of the skill, vision and imagination of a new hire employee at the Walmart garden section. It also looks like it was really done on the cheap.

I'm not a fan of the artistic vision behind this one.

She got rid of Jackie’s cherry trees. That was not a smart move. The Obamas messed up the state dining room making it less formal. Sometimes change is not good.

 

[Repareur]

Tampa, you know how the Trumpers try to say Democrat’s are socialist and then they drag that one step farther and say that’s practically communism. This is what I always thought they would especially do to Bernie Sanders. ( they went really light on him during the primaries because they were sure they could beat him and I’m not sure they couldn’t have. ) Anyway I made the familiar argument that what you get on the far right is Nazism. To which my Trumper friend replied no it’s not they were socialist also, Lol. I had to look it up I had no idea these right wingers were actually using that argument because the term national socialist appears in the formal name for the Nazi partly. It’s a scam similar to what Trump would use. Taking it from two previous German party names. The fact that many religious Jews buy into Trump is just mind boggling to me. But I know they do. What is it they say, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The ignorance flying around these days is mind boggling.

 

[tampa24]

Tampa, you know how the Trumpers try to say Democrat’s are socialist and then they drag that one step farther and say that’s practically communism. This is what I always thought they would especially do to Bernie Sanders. ( they went really light on him during the primaries because they were sure they could beat him and I’m not sure they couldn’t have. ) Anyway I made the familiar argument that what you get on the far right is Nazism. To which my Trumper friend replied no it’s not they were socialist also, Lol. I had to look it up I had no idea these right wingers were actually using that argument because the term national socialist appears in the formal name for the Nazi partly. It’s a scam similar to what Trump would use. Taking it from two previous German party names. The fact that many religious Jews buy into Trump is just mind boggling to me. But I know they do. What is it they say, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The ignorance flying around these days is mind boggling.

Well look at a guy like Steven Miller. I consider him to be a Jewish Nazi. He's a racist, a white supremacist, a xenophobe and a very willing tool of the far right. He sees minorities in our society as easy scapegoats to blame for all the nation's problems. He thinks all foreigners and refugees (except a few white people) should be kept out. And without the significant difference of having no ovens nor mass genocide...he is a fierce advocate for setting up semi-permanent concentration camps on U.S. soil where brown skinned children are ripped out of their parents' arms and kept in cages indefinitely. I also think he would really prefer to just gun people down at the border if he thought he could get away with it.

He's a real prize.

 

[Repareur]

Well look at a guy like Steven Miller. I consider him to be a Jewish Nazi. He's a racist, a white supremacist, a xenophobe and a very willing tool of the far right. He sees minorities in our society as easy scapegoats to blame for all the nation's problems. He thinks all foreigners and refugees (except a few white people) should be kept out. And without the significant difference of having no ovens nor mass genocide...he is a fierce advocate for setting up semi-permanent concentration camps on U.S. soil where brown skinned children are ripped out of their parents' arms and kept in cages indefinitely. I also think he would really prefer to just gun people down at the border if he thought he could get away with it.

He's a real prize.

I agree. We often wonder how did the Nazis get the support of the country. Look around we have examples everywhere today. The Jewish Trumpers to me are the most unbelievable. How could they not see it.

 

[tampa24]

I agree. We often wonder how did the Nazis get the support of the country. Look around we have examples everywhere today. The Jewish Trumpers to me are the most unbelievable. How could they not see it.

Trump gets away with that because on the one hand he can bring several tenets of Nazi ideology to the U.S. on the one hand, but he also pursues a very pro-Israel, pro-Netanyahu foreign policy. He moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which is something the Israeli right and some in the wider Israeli political spectrum have wanted for decades. So many Jewish voters here in the U.S. can support him on that much at least.

What that has done though is all but assured that no serious peace negotiations will go anywhere with the Palestinians for years to come. The peace process is dead in the water on the Palestinian side. In the past the U.S. positioned itself carefully so that it could be seen as a somewhat honest broker in negotiations between the two sides. While the U.S. was obviously an Israeli ally, the Palestinians could at least hope that the U.S. had the clout and willingness to get some concessions from Israel at the negotiating table. And the Israelis always felt reasonably sure that the U.S. could also seek concessions from the Palestinians and would never unreasonably ask Israel to give away the store.

By moving the embassy to Jerusalem the U.S. has signaled that it is only an ally of Israel. Period. And the Palestinians will not have an honest, evenhanded broker in any 3-way negotiations involving the U.S. for a lasting peace agreement. The fact that other Arab countries are willing to sign or are considering signing separate peace treaties with Israel, does not negate the veracity of my previous statement. Other Arab countries farther from Israel's border and farther East especially, are being driven in their foreign policy primarily by the real and justified fear of Iran. So they are seeking out any allies that have credible diplomatic and significant military deterrents to Iranian expansionism. The Middle East can and has created strange bedfellows when desperation leads you to seek out what in the past would have been considered distasteful alliances at best, based on the adage of, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

 

[Repareur]

Very well said and I agree

 

[joninliverton]

Guess you guys don't like Trump lol. Isn't it a better the devil you know situation ?

 

[mikeyank]

Guess you guys don't like Trump lol. Isn't it a better the devil you know situation ?

No way!!!! I know Joe Biden. He was Obama's VP for eight years and a United States Senator for 36 years. Joe is a decent man who has been a public servant his entire life. Donald Trump is a charlatan, with absolutely no qualification for being President. He is a failed businessman with failures at almost every business he tried. He is also a liar, with no knowledge of history and no sense of what the presidency means. He is far and away the very worst president of my lifetime and quite possibly in the history of the US.

Joe Biden is not the best possible candidate, but so far, far better than what we have and will return a sense of normalcy to the United States of America. To me there is no question as to how evil, ignorant and unqualified Donald Trump is. To me this is a no brainer!!!!

 

[joninliverton]

Tell it how it is Mike lol

 

[juanjo]

Now that it has been confirmed by multiple sources, including Fox News, that the statements in the Atlantic attributed to Trump are accurate, I am pretty much furious. His hardcore supporters, of course, are claiming it is all untrue but the Republican leadership has not said a thing about this. My family has a tradition of service in the Navy, with the exception of two misguided children who strayed into the USMC. I grew up as a Navy brat on or outside Navy bases in Norfolk, San Diego, San Francisco, Pearl, Guam, Great Lakes, and a few others. The fact is that given Trump's previous statements about McCain, the family of Captain Humayun Khan, and his comment about prisoners of war being losers it is not hard to believe this attack.

Trump's words as reported concerning the dead in Vietnam and in Europe are a disgrace to our country and our honor. But the comments are very much line with his view of life. His comments concerning those who went to Viet Nam instead of dodging as he did, betrays his mindset - to him there was no benefit to serving [i.e. to him]. In Trump's world, it is only what is of benefit to him, not anyone or anything else.

This man is a disgrace and in incompetent to continue as president. If he had any honor at all he would apologize for his comments, resign and withdraw from the race. Since has has no honor, it is up to the American people to vote him from office on November 3rd.

 

[elyot1]

I'm doing everything I can to 'Get Out te Vote' to rid our country of this despicable white supremacist.

 

[tampa24]

Guess you guys don't like Trump lol. Isn't it a better the devil you know situation ?

Hey Jon,

The short answer is no. I'm not saying that the government was running perfectly before Trump came to power. And I'm not saying that the streets will be paved with gold if or when Biden wins. They won't. But we will still be better off.

I'm enough of a student of history to know that Trump's plan for a second term is to try to become a variant of a neo-fascist dictator. He will go after the journalists and try to get them fined, fired, jailed, and worse if possible. He will try to go after individual judges who give him rulings he doesn't like. He will take a cue from Erdogan of Turkey and go after the Supreme Court and try to fire and dismiss the judges he doesn't like. He will probably try to fill those vacancies with cronies he can try to put in using some bogus emergency presidential authorities that he may have to make up...assuming Republicans lose control of the Senate.

He will continue to try to set up his own private armies to send into the streets. All this under the slogans and guise of "restoring Law and Order". And on a larger scale of course than what happened in Portland. Little green or camouflaged men with no name tags or insignia randomly dragging protesters off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vans. No reading them their Miranda rights. No formalities of placing them under official arrest. Just physically kidnapping them off of the streets. Not very much different from what we are seeing play out in real time in Belarus.

That's the kind of leader that Trump aspires to be. His fascination, adoration and adulation of other ruthless dictators on the world stage is just further evidence of the kind of leader he would like to become himself. He's not well. He's a very disturbed individual. And that's putting it charitably when describing his state of mind.

Of course what happened in Portland is almost a mirror image of what far right dictatorships in South America were doing in the 70's. Pinochet in Chile for instance. And the military junta thugs in Argentina. Because of the Pinochet tactics and those copycatted in other parts of South America, we had a whole new verb introduced in the English language to describe the process. That verb being "to be disappeared". You go into someone's home in Chile and see the owner of the home in an old photo of a couple guys in their early 20's from around the mid 1970's and you ask, "Juan. Who's that in the photo with you?" Juan says, "That's my cousin Carlos. He was disappeared. We were very close. He went to an anti-government student demonstration on campus in September of 1975 and we never saw him again."

People in South America refer to the people murdered and lost in the 70's and early 80's as, "Los desaparecidos". "The disappeared ones." Or, "The ones who disappeared." In the moment when it was happening they would say that the youth, the intellectuals, the journalists who don't toe the party line, the communists, etc..."are being disappeared". Often they were taken off the streets by uniformed but unidentifiable government thugs, thrown into unmarked cars or vans (with no license plates) and then taken to torture centers where they were brutally tortured until death. Then they were buried in secret mass unmarked graves with no identities ever recorded of who was buried where.

That's the road you go down and exactly what it can escalate to when you see exactly what was being attempted in Portland. If Trump is allowed to start sending his own personal armies onto the streets in a second term...God help us all. We won't have a democracy anymore.

 

[tampa24]

Something else I thought I would add since Jon opened the door to the question of why not stick with the devil we already know... And that is that Trump is a tool of Russia. I'm not prepared to say that he is an actual Russian agent. I think that would be taking it too far and would be hyperbolic. I do however think Trump is a Russian asset. Meaning I think he is compromised by the Russians and Putin personally. Putin has financial and blackmail leverage over him. Trump owes them and is beholden to them. It's the only thing that makes sense and explains some of of his more dangerous and bizarre choices. As Nancy Pelosi famously said to Trump's face in a moment of exasperation, "With you Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin."

If Trump is given a choice between a decision that is in the best interest of the U.S., NATO, the E.U. or Russia... Trump inevitably decides on something that is much more favorable to Russian interests than our own. That makes Trump very dangerous. Especially if gets another 4 years.

 

[tampa24]

The situation in Belarus, rather than getting better or staying at a slow boil...may actually be about to get much worse.

*************************************************************************


Belarus crowds defy heavy military presence to demand end to Lukashenko's rule

The Telegraph September 6, 2020, 5:05 PM EDT




Protesters in Minsk - Marina Serebryakova/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Huge crowds of protesters on Sunday flooded the Belarusian capital of Minsk, braving a massive deployment of forces to urge strongman Alexander Lukashenko to quit power.

More than 100,000 people are estimated to have taken to the streets over the past three weekends and Sunday's event may have been larger still.

Troops, water cannon, armoured personnel carriers and armoured reconnaissance vehicles were deployed to the city centre but protesters from all walks of life - from parents with children to students and even priests - rallied in a show of defiance.

Authorities said at least 100 protesters were detained.

Unprecedented demonstrations broke out after Lukashenko, who has ruled the ex-Soviet state for 26 years, claimed re-election with 80 per cent of the vote on August 9.

Opposition rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says she won the vote but Lukashenko's security forces have detained thousands of protesters, many of whom accuse police of beatings and torture. Several people have died in the crackdown.

Buoyed by a show of support from Russia, Lukashenko has rejected calls for new elections.

Western countries fear a loud show of support for protesters could provoke a Russian military intervention at a moment when Europe is also weighing how to respond to the suspected poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Lithuania's foreign minister urged the European Union to impose sanctions on Belarus and counter Russia's influence. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have imposed travel bans on Lukashenko and 29 other Belarusian officials without waiting for the rest of the EU to act, signalling impatience with the bloc's cautious approach.

On Sunday, the protesters marched towards Lukashenko's residence at the Independence Palace where they chanted "Tribunal" and "How much are you getting paid?" Many say they will keep taking to the streets until he quits.

"Lukashenko must go," said Nikolai Dyatlov, a 32-year-old protester. "Why is our legitimately elected president located in a different country?" he asked, referring to Tikhanovskaya.

Another protester, 40-year-old Anastasia Bazarevich, said: "Half of the village where my grandma lives comes out and protests every night."

Russia has said it will respond to any Western attempts to "sway the situation". Putin is keen to unify Russia and Belarus, and Moscow has accompanied its recent offers of military aid with calls for tighter integration.

Lukashenko has in the past ruled out outright unification and sought to play Moscow off against the West but his options are now limited.

On Thursday, Lukashenko hosted Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and said the two countries had managed to agree on issues they "could not agree earlier," and that he planned to "dot all the i's" with Putin in Moscow in the next few weeks.


Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/belarus-crowds-defy-heavy-military-210558283.html

 

[juanjo]

Hey Jon,

The short answer is no. I'm not saying that the government was running perfectly before Trump came to power. And I'm not saying that the streets will be paved with gold if or when Biden wins. They won't. But we will still be better off.

I'm enough of a student of history to know that Trump's plan for a second term is to try to become a variant of a neo-fascist dictator. He will go after the journalists and try to get them fined, fired, jailed, and worse if possible. He will try to go after individual judges who give him rulings he doesn't like. He will take a cue from Erdogan of Turkey and go after the Supreme Court and try to fire and dismiss the judges he doesn't like. He will probably try to fill those vacancies with cronies he can try to put in using some bogus emergency presidential authorities that he may have to make up...assuming Republicans lose control of the Senate.

He will continue to try to set up his own private armies to send into the streets. All this under the slogans and guise of "restoring Law and Order". And on a larger scale of course than what happened in Portland. Little green or camouflaged men with no name tags or insignia randomly dragging protesters off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vans. No reading them their Miranda rights. No formalities of placing them under official arrest. Just physically kidnapping them off of the streets. Not very much different from what we are seeing play out in real time in Belarus.

That's the kind of leader that Trump aspires to be. His fascination, adoration and adulation of other ruthless dictators on the world stage is just further evidence of the kind of leader he would like to become himself. He's not well. He's a very disturbed individual. And that's putting it charitably when describing his state of mind.

Of course what happened in Portland is almost a mirror image of what far right dictatorships in South America were doing in the 70's. Pinochet in Chile for instance. And the military junta thugs in Argentina. Because of the Pinochet tactics and those copycatted in other parts of South America, we had a whole new verb introduced in the English language to describe the process. That verb being "to be disappeared". You go into someone's home in Chile and see the owner of the home in an old photo of a couple guys in their early 20's from around the mid 1970's and you ask, "Juan. Who's that in the photo with you?" Juan says, "That's my cousin Carlos. He was disappeared. We were very close. He went to an anti-government student demonstration on campus in September of 1975 and we never saw him again."

People in South America refer to the people murdered and lost in the 70's and early 80's as, "Los desaparecidos". "The disappeared ones." Or, "The ones who disappeared." In the moment when it was happening they would say that the youth, the intellectuals, the journalists who don't toe the party line, the communists, etc..."are being disappeared". Often they were taken off the streets by uniformed but unidentifiable government thugs, thrown into unmarked cars or vans (with no license plates) and then taken to torture centers where they were brutally tortured until death. Then they were buried in secret mass unmarked graves with no identities ever recorded of who was buried where.

That's the road you go down and exactly what it can escalate to when you see exactly what was being attempted in Portland. If Trump is allowed to start sending his own personal armies onto the streets in a second term...God help us all. We won't have a democracy anymore.

I agree with you completely. The husband is Italian but he grew up in Argentine until he was around 22. In 1976 he was 16-years old. His older brother was a law student at the university in Buenos Aires. His brother disappeared along with many of his classmates and professors. Marco was arrested during the Noche de Los Lapices and held for 6 months during which he was questioned about "Marxist" guerillas. He did not know any guerillas, Marxist, or otherwise but he can give you a very specific description of what it feels like to have electrodes attached to your testicles and electricity sent through them. He also has some scars on the back of his head.

Marco took a contract job working in the UK just prior to the 2016 election. He has stayed there and refuses to return to the US because he firmly believes that given the present state of affairs, we will have our own Guerra Sucia in the not too distant future. He has been begging me to leave the US and frankly, where before I might have thought him a bit overly dramatic, I don't feel that way any longer. My grandparents left Europe after WWI to get away from the fascists. Now I fear I may have to permanently leave my own country for the same reason.

 

[joninliverton]

Why is this thread talking about different subjects ? So confusing

 

[tampa24]

I agree with you completely. The husband is Italian but he grew up in Argentine until he was around 22. In 1976 he was 16-years old. His older brother was a law student at the university in Buenos Aires. His brother disappeared along with many of his classmates and professors. Marco was arrested during the Noche de Los Lapices and held for 6 months during which he was questioned about "Marxist" guerillas. He did not know any guerillas, Marxist, or otherwise but he can give you a very specific description of what it feels like to have electrodes attached to your testicles and electricity sent through them. He also has some scars on the back of his head.

Marco took a contract job working in the UK just prior to the 2016 election. He has stayed there and refuses to return to the US because he firmly believes that given the present state of affairs, we will have our own Guerra Sucia in the not too distant future. He has been begging me to leave the US and frankly, where before I might have thought him a bit overly dramatic, I don't feel that way any longer. My grandparents left Europe after WWI to get away from the fascists. Now I fear I may have to permanently leave my own country for the same reason.

Gosh Juanjo. That's some heavy sh**. For those who lived through La Guerra Sucia in Latin America (or who are merely well studied in world history) the concerns they have about staying and living in the U.S. under another 4 years of Trump are not just hypothetical and intellectual exercises of possible or probable outcomes. There is genuine (and justified) fear of how far things could slide into far right neo-fascism and dictatorship. When people hear fascism many often think that the only example is Hitler. But that's not true. It doesn't always have to go to that grotesque extreme of mass genocide. It can be "only" an undeclared civil war using weapons, soldiers and resources of the government in power waged against unarmed civilians.

There were other brutally oppressive far-right fascist dictators who were cruel and murderous before and after Hitler's rise and fall. Trump could become some variation of Franco of Spain, Mussolini of Italy, Pinochet of Chile or the military dictator of any given year in 1970's-1980's Argentina. But of course we know that Putin is Trump's true heartthrob and idol. And he has great fondness for Xi of China and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, as well as Erdogan of Turkey.

I don't know if the U.S. could truly face its own version of a Dirty War where people are illegally kidnapped, incarcerated without charges or secretly tortured. Certainly I hope not. But the fact that we even have to consider the possibilities of it is chilling. I'm very sorry for what your husband went through Juanjo. Thank God he lived.