President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Yeah. And that's not a good thing.

Celebrating the emptying out of most land masses of America into cities is a bizarre thing to cheer. The land itself isn't Republican. Anybody can live there. Hell, anybody should live there, if broadband improves considerably. You don't need to be in farming.

And then, on top of it, the weird "yeah, well, what about Flint, Michigan, that rural enclave of 81,000 that voted for Biden" line was particularly odd.

 

Republicans aren't grifting enough from their base, so now they have to get it from their own candidates.

The state Executive Committee of the Tennessee Republican Party voted Saturday to begin levying fees on candidates running in their party’s primaries for federal, state and local offices.
The filing fees, which will be charged on a sliding scale based on the office the candidate is seeking, comes as Tennessee prepares for a busy mid-term election next year. At the lower end of the scale, candidates for county commission and constable must pay $25 to run as a Republican.
At the top, a candidate for governor will have to pay $5,000 to be placed on the GOP ballot.
Other fees for Republican candidates are:
• $100 for countywide offices, such as county mayor, sheriff or Sessions Court judge.
• $500 for state judicial court offices, including Criminal Court judge, district attorney general and public defender.
• $500 for the state House of Representatives.
• $1,000 for the state Senate.
• $2,500 for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives
• $5,000 for the U.S. Senate.

 

Vladimir Putin plans to win Russia's parliamentary election no matter how unpopular his party is

 

The bicentennial was big!

 

I don't know, I would put him with trump. The other 2 were bad but they don't seem like hateful people. Hearing some of the nixon tapes was quite a shock to me. Lordy, where are those secretly recorded trump tapes? Must be some out there. It would be pretty shocking to the majority of his supporters to find out what he thinks of them on a personal, physical level.

Lonesome Rhodes...To those morons out there? Shucks, I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to 'em for caviar. I can make 'em eat dog food, and they'll think it's steak. Sure, I got 'em like this. You know what the public's like? A cage full of guinea pigs. Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss 'em a dead fish, and they'll flap their flippers.

 

Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England!

 

Obama's "tent-ure" as president was longer than I thought.

 

Nixon was an ugly, disgusting person, but at least he was a person. Trump seems completely soulless and devoid of happiness. I think I mentioned it in the last political thread at some point, but the fucker seems to have no hobbies, except golf, which isn't really a hobby because its usually in pursuit of his business interests and he cheats the entire time anyway. Nixon and Trump are bottom of the barrel, as far as presidents go, but at least people like Hunter Thompson could spend time with Nixon and not be completely dismayed by the guy.

 

I think that the Taliban’s almost-instant takeover of Afghanistan is a disaster. But the mess is far from over. Presidents sometimes define themselves by whether or not they handle thorny situations well.

Hopefully President Biden will find a way to somewhat mitigate the failures that were decades in the making. There are political pitfalls on the Left (high expectations of empowering Afghani women) and the Right (general loathing of anything Biden does and a not-so-secret hope he fails, no mater the cost).

I hope he succeeds better than most hope.

 

The fact that the government and its military melted away likely saved a lot of bloodshed that would have occurred as the Taliban slogged though city after city. Moreover, it may leave them more charitably disposed toward those they have conquered. I understand they're offering government officials an amnesty ... whether that offer is honest remains to be seen.

On the other hand we have the example of Cambodia, where the military junta held out for four or five years with the help of US carpet bombing.