smjjames

How exactly would a fence through the middle of a nation... surrounded by WATER..... help immigration....? Seems like something to trip up those who have absolutely no clue about geography or Australia.

I'd like to see the evidence exonerating Trump before declaring it a failure. Also, this all came about because Trump fired Comey, so, it's all on him for getting the ball rolling on what you say was a waste of money. Plus, it was a Republican who selected Mueller, himself a Republican, so, don't pin it all on the Democrats. If the Democrats somehow manage to nominate someone dumb like that Oprah spritual advisor, then perhaps I'd consider voting Libertarian or Green or whatever. Also, there are those who would say voting Libertarian means you need to have your head examined, just saying.

Sounds like an extremely sophisticated expresso machine to me.

Sharebluers? Anyways, the Democrats are asking for the full report along with the evidence (i'd certainly like to see what evidence exonerates Trump from willfully/wittingly cooperating with Russia or any other campaign staff and family members doing that), so....

It doesn't help that Trump keeps screaming NO COLLUSION as if it were a legal definition. @Bartimaeus: I can certainly believe that the Trump campaign blundered into Russias hands without some sort of agreement or pact, but as you said, theres still too many unanswered questions.

If only we could have US politicians (on both sides!) apply that to the gun control issue.... Republicans also need a good smack upside the head with a realitybat as far as that quote goes as far as Climate Change.

Isn't he the guy that said stuff like Youtube shouldn't exist? Every government has it's nutters politicians, so, that's understandable in and of itself. Nor does Germany have a monopoly on politicians not understanding the internet.

The dumpster needs to be on fire for it to be funny, IMO.

Mueller has now finished the Russia probe and delivered his report to the AG. Needs to be leaked already....

There would be plenty of people studying stuff that their current civilization doesn't know or pursuing their own projects of interest. Also, with 10s of thousands of years of galactic history, archaeology would still be interesting if you gave it the right spin or some awesome artifact, so, I think you gave that idea a bad pass, but do as you will.

I am very much a fan of ranked choice voting. But it will never happen so long as the D & R have an absolute monopoly on the political process. If we are ever going to see 3rd & 4th parties in this country we are going to have to force them down their throats by actually VOTING for them and getting over this stupid notion that by refusing two terrible choices we are somehow "wasting" our vote. Setting aside the Democrat dream of popular vote elections the thing they are talking about that concerns me the most as adding six more Supreme Court Justices. That is much ore do-able and is nothing less than a naked grab for power. I have concerns myself on adding more SCOTUS justices since court stuffing is something you usually see in dictatorships/illiberal-democracies, but other than that, it's also ripe for tit-for-tat since what's going to stop the Republicans from doing the same thing? Or un-stuffing it even.

And on that note... Guard Dog, how do you feel about (the mostly Democrat-led) effort to eliminate the electoral college in favor of using the popular vote to elect the president instead? IMO though, it'd be easier to reform it rather than constitutional amendment remove it due to how hard it is to get an amendment through and the red states definetly won't go through with outright removing it.

I could have sworn Justin Amash is Republican, or at least former Republican. edit: He apparently self identifies as Libertarian Republican, like Rand Paul I guess.

Yep... Also reminds me a bit of a CKII event where your character has a heart attack while having sex.

Come on GD, I wouldn't even put any of the candidates on the same level of terribleness as Trump, though I suspect you mean the re-election of Trump here.

AR 10/15 = the ultimate modular firearm? heh. I'm sure firearms would be even more modular or someone would invent a truly modular firearm (probably when 3D printing becomes more ubiquitious) without all the regulations. At the core, all you really need to make a gun is a tube, propellant+projectile, and a trigger, everything else is fancy dressing.

To be honest, I'm not even sure what makes a gun 'semi-automatic', people (politicians mostly) use the term so broadly and the fact that it's such a trigger (or maybe ' gun experts groan and facepalm at') word makes me think a significant majority of guns are semi-autos. Or maybe that's what the NRA would like to have liberals think so that the NRA can 'own the libs'.

They can't. Their [the people complaining, to be specific] response with respect to most things including Twitter and Facebook is, basically, outrage or sadness porn with a dollop of authoritarianism for good measure, and I loathe Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. But, there are literally people here who are quite earnest in their belief that not only should Twitter/ Facebook/ Youtube be prosecuted- when we can't even get them to pay taxes but they seem to think we can throw Zuck in jail or something- but many of them also think anyone who got the guy's video autostreamed to them should be prosecuted for receiving it (!) and that isn't being helped by the police making pointless threats that judges and prosecutors will throw out of court/ never prosecute in the first place. I'd have a decent amount of hope that cooler heads will prevail eventually. Some suggestions are plain impractical. Ban all semi autos and how do farmers control 50,000 rabbits a year? With a semi auto .22. OK, how about feral pigs or deer or goats or thar or moose that you cannot reliably take down with a bunny buster? Well OK, but we still want to ban ***weeoo weeoo trigger warning weeoo weeoo*** semi autos that look like an AK or AR-15. Besides, aren't seni-autos like, 60% or 70% (or maybe 80%) of all guns in the world and 90%+ of every gun ever invented (due to full autos being a relatively recent development)? The earliest guns where you have to manually prime the powder and c0ck the gun would be closest to a completely manual gun since the firing would still be automatic because gunpowder. The thing is that the semi-auto category is so broad as to be useless for legislating.

OSC?

I don't think shes ignorant about the causes of the Great Recession, just seems like she didn't put a whole lot of thought into how to answer that particular question. There may have been a bit further detail in what she said last night, but the 'build more houses!' part is all I remember of that particular answer. As for the cause of the Great Recession itself, I knew it was loans, just mixed up that with a housing construction bubble I swear I'd heard of somewhere, China maybe.

The housing bubble wasn't a construction bubble, it was a lending bubble. Lenders were giving loans to everyone that could breathe which drove up prices, which drove up the loaned amounts, which drove up the premiums, which house owners couldn't play, which crashed the economy. This may have driven up construction as well, but if so, that was a consequence of the bubble, not a cause. Right, right, lending, not construction. I could have sworn I'd heard of a housing construction bubble somewhere. Either way, 'Build more houses!' doesn't seem like an acceptable answer to lowering rents. As Gromnir said, it's not so simple as 'needing more houses', it's the type of housing that is available.

@ GD and Gromnir: Speaking of housing, in last nights CNN town hall, Elizabeth Warren in response to a question about lowering rents basically went 'lets build five million new houses' (there wasn't much detail put into it). My first thought on that was 'um, housing bubble? Wasn't a housing bubble partly the reason for the 'great recession'?' Plus, it doesn't seem like just building 5 million more will help lower rents, you can build as many houses as you want, but it's not really going to change local conditions all that much. The town halls are fine for airing ideas, but they don't get debated and contested.

A case could certainly be made for being CEO of a large successfull company (like Howard Schultz for example) vs what Trump did since a large company would still be held accountable to shareholders, etc while Trump was only accountable to himself. Trump is certainly A businessman, but he isn't an example of a great one, no matter how much he brags. However, given Rex Tillersons performance (though with a silver lining in that he kept things from absolutely imploding) as Secretary of State, it shows that the skills don't neccesarily transfer. If said CEO had stints in other elected office, perhaps.

Yup. Add Euro 2020 to that and you'll have yourself one hell of a summer. Which Europe elections are in summer of 2020? Or are you talking about eurovision?

Beto O'Rourke maybe? Since he all but announced he's jumping in with announcing that he'll announce tomorrow morning sometime. I don't think he's trying to make any analogy, just putting up a joke because everybody and their <pick a close relative> is jumping in. There may still be some GoT reference that me and injurai are missing though.