WideNine

We can agree to disagree. I find in practice it is more an established norm that the incumbent for the major two parties defends their seat and is not removed from the ballot via primaries. McConnell - Elected to the Senate in 1984. Has never left. Pelosi - Elected to the House in 1987. Pelosi has been reelected 16 times with no real opposition, much like McConnell. If these two do not merit consideration for the idea of draining Washington of its partisan swamp I am not sure who does. And yes, I agree that there are lucrative careers after politics so no worries they will not be able to support themselves

...for obstruction to avoid the precedent it set investigating Executive branch - putting the President above the law. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/527621-mueller-prosecutor-says-next-attorney-general-should-investigate

I honestly have to think about that a bit... I do like the stability of longer terms, but life terms does seem excessive. Really feel our House and Senate needs shorter terms and caps on successive terms if folks really want to drain the swamp of DC institutional swamp creatures. States tried to enact this individually, but in 95 the Supreme Court ruled such limits unconstitutional leaving a constitutional ammendment the only avenue open to citizens who widely support it. In the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stevens, writing for the five member majority, affirmed the decision of the Arkansas Supreme Court and held that: 1) The power granted to each House of Congress to judge the ``Qualifications of its own Members,'' art. I, Sec. 5, cl. 1, does not include the power to alter or add to the qualifications set forth in the Constitution's text; 2) the 10th amendment to the Constitution does not authorize States to add to the qualifications listed in the Constitution; 3) denying access to the ballot does not constitute a permissible exercise of State power under the elections clause of art. I, Sec. 4, cl. 1, to regulate the ``Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections;'' and 4) term limits for congressional service ``must come through a constitutional amendment properly passed under the procedures set forth in Article V.'' The dissent, written by Justice Thomas and joined by Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Scalia, argued that nothing in the Constitution deprives the people of each State the power to proscribe eligibility requirements for the candidates who seek to represent them in Congress. The Constitution is silent on this issue, and where it is silent, the 10th amendment reserves the power to the States or to the people. The Court's unequivocal finding that term limits may only be imposed through a constitutional amendment effectively renders unconstitutional the statutes of the 23 States that passed congressional term limits. The only avenue left by the Court is for term limit supporters to pursue passage of a constitutional amendment...

No. Rather an established pattern of criminal behavior, brushes with the law, accusations of sexual abuse, money laundering, bank fraud, public antics, messy divorces, mob ties, and bankrupsies that no one who grew up around NYC or Jersey found shocking when similar chaos and accusations followed him into his Presidency. There was no need for some liberal cabal, plot, or hoax to manufacture things that have followed that man around his whole life. Who would have thought this once great nation would be lead by a president getting shook down by some ambulance-chasing lawyer representing a porn star that had been paid off to shut her up. Stay proud Trump fans, you deserve him.

The Cult of Trump mental gymnastics connecting the dots.... For some reason the absurdity reminds me of the logic in Douglas Adams books..."There's an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Hate to see it, but agree with you. This is why partisan politics seems to be a pendulum that swings more and more to polar extremes. The oneupmanship each party takes to undermine the other keeps moving the established lines of precedent and norms further away from any middle ground.

True, and I would not ascribe any greatness to that feat.

Totally true. And I kept wondering how big the third book was going to have to be to wrap up the many plots subplots, and characters.

A argument of semantics. Rosevelt bypassed established norms and sought to obtain a majority amount of judges on the Supreme Court for his New Deal that kept getting struck down by adding seats to the existing court that did not have vacancies. This was referred to as "stacking" and later "packing" the court (to obtain a policy-backing majority). GOP leadership and Trump bypassed the very norms McConnel leveraged to justify the GOP Senate blocking Obama nominations for empty seats (proximity to presidential elections) to fast-track their nomination into vacancies to obtain a super majority just weeks prior to the election. Roberts a conservative was proving to be a less predictable moderate swing vote prior. Regardless of the exact mechanism they both bypass established norms to fill Supreme Court seats to obtain a majority to further party policy. Either way lauding that as a major Presidential accomplishment when the party has control of the Senate was the fallacy I was pointing out. It was nothing any other President couldn't do with empty seats and a willing Senate.

Now why would they do that I wonder, and so publicly during an election year? Duke did the same thing to Democrat Tulsi Gabbard...kind of stalked her actually The rest of this rant is kind of hard to follow, but I think you are saying Trump is a good President because he had a rubber-stamp Senate and could pack the Supreme Court as soon as there was vacancies? That's certainly nothing any old criminal serving as President could do, that took phenomenal leadership.

This has been one of his most glaring short-comings as a QB - he is a big baby and a sore loser. Suck it up buttercup and admit that someone was better than you that game, or they had a better game plan. Glad he is out of our division, but it would have been hugely satisfying to see a better Bills team make him cry in Belicheat's arms every game.

That saying that "Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die." There is a glaring gap in the polar perceptions of the GOP and Democrat camps and their devotees that revolve around campaign buzz words and phrases like "government spending", and "waste", "regulations", "global", "social".... they call up images that do not have a lot of value in the real and practical sense. Government spending over the Trump administration increased dramatically, yet GOP party hardliners running for the Senate still used "reduce government spending" as tag-lines in their campaigns. I could simply use government spending as a catch-phrase to damn this administration, but I use it as a rebuttal because with Covid-19 and a myriad of other issues a government has minimal options but to borrow to keep the economy afloat and of course the situation effects GDP. When candidates use those tag lines people need to ask, how will you reduce spending? Will reducing spending increase revenue and GDP? Are there things we should be borrowing and investing in as a government to better secure our economic long-term health? There is a kind of lexicon that has arisen around extremist conspiracies that uses phrases like "Deep State" that have grown up in the fertile soil of social media echo-chambers - and I get suspicious when folks use Q-Anon-speak or talking points - even more disturbing is actually voting Q-Anon believers into congressional office. Such additions of potentially like-minded conspiracy enthusiasts could usher in a whole new level of empty, absurd, and intellectually irresponsible additions to political speech and posturing that can lead to nothing good.

That is some sneaky GOP business....interesting to see where the legality of this goes. I've always said that "The thief has the most locks on their doors", and here we see the GOP shouting election fraud and stealing from the rooftops - go figure.

That's a tough one.....I would have to take the Bills. Ol' George does not strike me as the healthiest dude.... Sanderson will end up finishing another epic book series for an author who can't. I think George is stuck. A few years back he went on a rant about how much he hated fan-fiction sites - that they steal ideas and whatnot. I think someone wrote an plausible ending that he had in mind and his pride and ego wont accept using the same idea. It's a theory and BTW added a gratuitous Cylon pic to my OP. They certainly improved from the original series tin cans marching around.

The actual George R. R. Martin Game of Thrones books are good. I read the first few books in his series back in 1998 when he was still claiming it was heading for a trilogy. Years later before he had his $$$$$$$ gig with HBO, the wife and I went to a book signing he had in this crappy hole in the wall comicon in SD that I think had the actor who had played Baltar in the Battle Star Galactica TV series (the original one not the one with hot Cylons) as a headliner. It was a real crap hole and there he was - this drunk little foul-mouthed bearded troll who was pissed that he was there and swearing at everyone - yep, the legendary image of the amazing author that the wife and I had built up in our minds had a head on collision with reality It had to be around 2009 because most everyone there including us got the Swine Flu too. Good times. Improved Cylon tech

Agreed. Seward looked like a genius in hindsight. A firmer stance on China was long overdue too, but torpedoing the TPP just because Obama's fingerprints were on it was prideful and dumb IMO. We could have used the leverage of those partnerships to better position ourselves in lieu of a trade war with China .

I am a conservative and actually pro-life, my wife is more liberal and we debate topics all the time. Trump for me is a danger for this democracy because the Senate and the DOJ do not and will not check his abuse of power. I am comfortable saying I am a conservative leaning moderate, but Trump is a bridge too far for me.

So the myth of the friendly and reasonable MAGA enthusiast....the Voting Systems Manager for the Georgia Secretary of State's office

This administration knows how to do "crazy" like none other. When I worked for a large global company I was talking to a bunch of guys in India. These guys earn half of what we do, live just above the poverty line there, and were sharing hotel rooms so they could afford to work many miles from where their families lived. All that, and they were watching the news and pitying me, saying they would pray for the US that we would endure this administration - they were very polite and circumspect about it. It just struck me that dirt-poor people in other countries were "praying for us"... Make America Great Again?

As usual, one has to dig at least one-level deeper than the shallow end of the pool in regards to media reports: Actually read Elizabeth Warren's letter: https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/H.I.G. McCarthy, & Staple Street letters.pdf It is not as long as the usual reports I reference AND the specific issue cited by Warren was the 2018 voting machine issues in South Carolina where they use ES&S voting systems. Warren's missive (if you read it) was not directed specifically at Dominion, but at the potential risks of the consolidation of all the major companies providing voting equipment to now 3 primary vendors that serve over 90% of our election demand and in regards to those companies being purchased by large Wall Street fund(s) and stresses the need to safe-guard our elections and both maintain and test these systems. She cites some examples of vote tabulation errors and corrective actions vendors should take. Some excerpts: "We are writing to request information regarding H.I.G. Capital's (H.1.G.) investment in Hart InterCivic Inc. (Hart InterCivic) one of three election technology vendors responsible for developing, manufacturing and maintaining the vast majority of voting machines and software in the United States, and to request information about your firm's structure and finances as it relates to this company. Some private equity funds operate under a model where they purchase controlling interests in companies and implement drastic cost-cutting measures at the expense of consumers, workers, communities, and taxpayers. Recent examples include Toys "R" Us and Shopko. 1 For that reason, we have concerns about the spread and effect of private equity investment in many sectors of the economy, including the election technology industry-an integral part of our nation's democratic process. We are particularly concerned that secretive and ''trouble-plagued companies,"2 owned by private equity firms and responsible for manufacturing and maintaining voting machines and other election administration equipment, "have long skimped on security in favor of convenience," leaving voting systems across the country "prone to security problems."3 In light of these concerns, we request that you provide information about your firm, the portfolio companies in which it has invested, the performance of those investments, and the ownership and financial structure of your funds.... ...and I will leave the rest to those who are driven to pursue the truth.

If folks dig hard enough they will either come to an insurmountable truth, or something they can disagree on in principle. Cutting through the junk information to the source information makes the journey worth it for some. It is fine to agree to disagree. I do find it concerning that so many Trump supporters are willing to go so far out on a conspiratorial limb to either defend or promote his self-interests. As we have seen in the courtroom these past few weeks this propensity has splattered against the windshield of reality. Tweets, youtube videos, Fox News pundits, and political opinion pieces are not reality, they are not facts, and amazingly they are not admissible as evidence. I read a liberal article the other day lamenting a conservative court nominee that stressed how she was rated "unqualified" by the BAR. I dug one level deeper and checked out the BAR website and the candidate in particular and found that according to her peers and any who had worked with her, she was a rock star - a prodigy. The BAR qualified their "unqualified" rating by saying she simply had not fulfilled the requisite number of years arguing before the bench as a trial lawyer, but she had ample experience litigating elsewhere. Like anyone else I miss a few, but this is how I "try" to approach most information I digest from venues that have a known political/social slant.

Some folks really work at perfecting stupidity - publicly. That Twain adage comes to mind, "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”.

Let's see if Trump stays true to form and tweets how this normal rubber-stamp process has been usurped, with a bunch of capital letters about FRAUD and STEALING because using all caps means you are being honest.

I hope the GOP folks are not just going through the motions. Shinkle's wife Mary was a Republican poll challenger at the TCF Center in Detroit and signed an affidavit used by the Trump campaign in a federal lawsuit that has since been withdrawn. The other - Van Langevelde, is an attorney and former assistant prosecutor in Branch County, and works for state House Republicans, whose leader, Speaker Lee Chatfield, flew to Washington, D.C. on Friday with a handful of other GOP lawmakers to meet at the White House with Trump. We will see - my point was that even if they did do the deadlock thing, it would just be foot-dragging a certification that will happen regardless in a few weeks.

I would say the stupidity is disturbing. We need to commit far more resources to education because clearly it has been deficient over the past few decades. The scope of the voting masses that can be easily swayed by a man who is a case-study in demagoguery and the ease by which they can be taken in by far-fetched conspiracies and unfounded rumors as well as being diverted from incriminating, self-serving, and autocratic actions by such a leader just floors me. Trump supporters often cling to any flotsam that supports the man; embracing illogical Rube Goldberg explanations where more rational ones easily connect the dots - aka Trump lost because of grand schemes involving other nations, the CIA, and other clandestine organizations subverting the varied state-by-state voting safe-guards and oversight rather than the simple straight-forward rationale that more citizens voted for the other guy...... responsibly and legally. It reminds me of how there was a rash of frivolous lawsuits years ago where warning labels needed to be slapped on everything from hot drinks at McDonald's, to stacking glassware too high, to griddles that may be hot after use, it seems we now need to label electronic media content because the masses are incapable of even a modicum of critical thinking or reason to filter the facts from the torrent of fiction out there. It is a truly sad and embarrassing reflection of the state of our country. We have a lot of work to do, but the work is underway: 1. Vote that orange disaster out of office (check)