President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Why did you veto the resolution against rape?

Trump administration forces UN to water down anti-rape resolution

 

You keep thinking the Republicans care about how they look. They don’t.

Look how often their hypocrisy is pointed out where they say one thing when Clinton or Obama was president then say the opposite when Trump is president. They don’t care.

Either we’re being triggered by their hypocrisy, or we’re living in the past, or it’s the media’s fault for bringing up the past, or it’s alternate facts and they didn’t actually say it despite it being on tape, the Republicans don’t care. They just go on Fox News or Rush and just pretend the past never happened.

 

I'm surprised how much he leaned into Charlottesville. Many announcement videos don't even mention Trump.

2020: Joe Biden vs. Joe Collusion?

 

Biden went straight to the point. He said we are in a battle for the soul of America. I like the video.

 

Scrub off the shitstain.

 

It’s a pretty big stretch to argue that someone has “rejected the system” in a case of, say, selling weed, which has landed an awful lot of people in prison. But there are plenty of other reasons to support the vote for prisoners. (In case it’s not clear from the following, I think at the very least, voting rights should be restored immediately upon the completion of a sentence.)

First and foremost, we don't always get it right. A not-insubstantial amount of those people are innocent. Second, they have knowledge a lot of people don’t have regarding particular policy issues. Prison reform quickly comes to mind. Third, the prison population is disproportionately black and those same individuals are disproportionately given longer sentences for similar crimes when controlling for all other factors, so taking away voting rights also disproportionately affects them. There are other arguments as well, but those are some of what I consider to be reasonable concerns with disenfranchisement of the prison population.

I understand it's not necessarily a popular policy position, but I don't think the politicians who support it are being outlandish either.

 

More like Joe Collusion vs. Donald Trump.

 

Re: Prisoners voting

Are prison populations used in census records to determine representation? If so - and we don't want them to be voting - shouldn't that be changed?

 

Yes, they are. They are counted as residents of wherever their prison is.And since most prisons are in rural areas, it helps those areas with both representation and federal money distribution (as well as the prison often being the only thing keeping the local economy afloat). Census calls for "all persons" to be counted, so it doesn't matter if they cannot vote.

 

You might think it is a stretch, but it's the operating logic of the majority of voters, and of the vast majority of the bloc that decides presidential elections (independent/ambivalent/etc). I don't necessarily mean that they've worked it out in their head this way. But most voters take a practical view of the world. And in a lot of cases the only argument the Left has against it is an argument from empathy or moral superiority. Like, yeah, if I was a prisoner, of course I'd want the right to vote. Of course I'd be just as human as the next guy, and would like to retain my agency. But the simple truth is that nobody would want to live in a society where the people who break the laws are the people who make the laws. And the only way to argue that all prisoners should have the right to vote is to agree that such a scenario is acceptable. Because if the ability to vote is a basic human right even for prisoners, then it would not be acceptable for us to strip them of it even in a world in which prisoners made up a substantial enough portion of the population to swing elections.

I'm not saying this is a legitimate danger if we give prisoners the right to vote. It's not, given that prisoners currently make up less than one percent of the nation's population. I'm saying that the argument that the Left is making is fundamentally flawed.

 

“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” --- Mike Pompeo, speaking at Texas A&M on April 15

But how dare we question anything our intelligence agencies say.