US Presidential Debate: Page 57 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

US Presidential Debate

flobaba

I call him Turtle face

Bold Tone

"According to recent reports, Trump has picked long-time climate denier and spokesperson for the fossil fuel industry Myron Ebell to head the Environmental Protection Agency transition."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/nov/17/trump-begins-filling-environmental-posts-with-clowns?

mags

Bannon, Strategist, hate monger
Sessions, Attorny General, racist
Flynn, National Security Advisor, loose cannon, how bad is this?
Pompeo, CIA Director, Tea Party bang on the drums

Sessions will have to be approved by the Senate. Battle royal I hope.
The others I don't know, Bannon definitely not.

The living nightmare of Trumpism.
The hard right becomes the hardest right, domestically and internationally.

Leonard: Send us the light through the crack.

Klaus

Ebell as head of EPA is probably the worst appointment yet in terms of potential repercussions. He has the opportunity to trash every single climate effort the world has been making in the last 20 years, which is absolutely maddening to think about. A twitter egg with no scientific education, who thinks global warming is a hoax and claims that pesticides aren't bad for humans, literally has the future of the whole planet in his hands.

Coombs

Don't think we have any need of a sliding scale, here. This is Blighttown (before they fixed the framerate).

mags

Klaus wrote:
Ebell as head of EPA is probably the worst appointment yet in terms of potential repercussions. He has the opportunity to trash every single climate effort the world has been making in the last 20 years, which is absolutely maddening to think about. A twitter egg with no scientific education, who thinks global warming is a hoax and claims that pesticides aren't bad for humans, literally has the future of the whole planet in his hands.

He will have to be approved by the Senate by a majority vote.
Another long and hard battle that is quite possibly winnable.
I just don't see anyone else Trump may be considering as much of an improvement on Ebell.
It's very difficult to get my head around all of this.

y va marquer

They'll be fecked out of that office in four years, once the decent majority see what they've done or tried to do in their first two years, once it's pretty obvious that the poor and miserable are no better off and that Trumps lining his own and his buddies pockets they'll lose out on the mid term elections too.

This article almost made me weep, but it spoke to my hopeful soul and I'm with him in believing that this is not the apocalypse.
Obama is one decent, thoughtful man.

This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said.
History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward.
A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.

Look, by dint of biography, by dint of experience, the basic optimism that I articulate and present publicly as President is real,” he told me. “It’s what I teach my daughters. It is how I interact with my friends and with strangers. I genuinely do not assume the worst, because I’ve seen the best so often. So it is a mistake that I think people have sometimes made to think that I’m just constantly biting my tongue and there’s this sort of roiling anger underneath the calm Hawaiian exterior. I’m not that good of an actor. I was born to a white mother, raised by a white mom and grandparents who loved me deeply. I’ve had extraordinarily close relationships with friends that have lasted decades. I was elected twice by the majority of the American people. Every day, I interact with people of good will everywhere.”

Obama is a patriot and an optimist of a particular kind. He hoped to be the liberal Reagan, a progressive of consequence, but there are crucial differences. For one thing, Obama does not believe in the simplistic form of American exceptionalism which insists that Americans are more talented and virtuous than everyone else, that they are blessed by a patriotic God with a special mission. America is a country that was established on the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers and improved upon not merely by legislation but also by social movements: this, to Obama, is the real nature of its exceptionalism. Last year, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, he stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and defined American exceptionalism as embodied by its heroes, its freedom fighters: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, John Lewis, the “gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York”; its Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo code-talkers, its 9/11 volunteers and G.I.s, and its immigrants—Holocaust survivors, Lost Boys of Sudan, and the “hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency

Bold Tone

As the out-going president, who has to remain statesman-like for the hand-over, it must be killing him as these are the guys who sabotaged his last six years in office.
As a non-American, i've tried (and probably failed)* to limit my comment on their domestic issues and can only hope that a mature democracy will correct itself before too much damage is done.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/steven-bannon-trump-chief-strategist-breitbart-white-house-dangerous
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/donald-trump-presidency.html?_r=1
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/18/ron-wyden-senator-donald-trump-administration-privacy-civil-liberties

Qwiss

Klaus wrote:
Ebell as head of EPA is probably the worst appointment yet in terms of potential repercussions. He has the opportunity to trash every single climate effort the world has been making in the last 20 years, which is absolutely maddening to think about. A twitter egg with no scientific education, who thinks global warming is a hoax and claims that pesticides aren't bad for humans, literally has the future of the whole planet in his hands.

If America goes back on its agreements on global warming the rest of the world need to impose trade penalties. Only way to deal with it.

Got his quote on pesticides?

Klaus

Qwiss! wrote:
Got his quote on pesticides?

He's got a whole website devoted to the subject: http://www.safechemicalpolicy.org/

Its sole purpose is basically to downplay the health risks of various chemicals by outright lying about their effects. It's run by Competitive Enterprise Institute where Ebell is the director: https://cei.org/expert/myron-ebell

The amount of misinformation on those sites is pretty scary. It's lobbyism masquerading as science. CEI don't reveal their funding resources, but a reporter looked into one of their fundraising dinners and people from the petroleum, AgChem and auto industries were throwing money at them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/06/20/anatomy-of-a-washington-dinner-who-funds-the-competitive-enterprise-institute/

I think that's what makes Ebell so scary. It's not just that he's an ideological idiot - he's got an economic incentive too for doing as much damage as possible to environmental regulations.

y va marquer

Qwiss

#boycotthamilton was trending on twitter because Pence went to see it and the cast made a really respectful and fair plea to him. I guess those Trump supporters need a safe space where they can hide from different opinions.

Klaus

I love how they're boycotting a musical that has already been sold out until 2018 too. This is going to be as big as success as that time the vegans decided to boycott McDonalds.

Qwiss

And a lot of the people boycotting are complaining that they shouldn't have gotten political 😆

There was also a standing ovation on the night for the line "immigrants, we get the job done" 😆

Rex

And idiot Trump took to twitter about it and, of course, got it wrong.

Klaus

I think he was mostly deflecting. Everyone's making headlines out of the Hamilton story now instead of the bigger, much more serious news that Trump had to settle in court by paying $25 million for defrauding people with Trump University.

This is where traditional media unfortunately fails us. Publications like New York Times are just as hungry for clicks as the fake Facebook news. It's been built into the advertising model they rely on.

Mirth

Or this: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/us/politics/donald-trump-pauses-transition-work-to-meet-with-indian-business-partners.amp.html

arsedocmd

what is their advertising model and what else should they rely on?

the trump university settlement was the lead news everywhere from what i remember. That pic seems to be from the 19th and i just did a small search and the fraud story was from the 18th of nov. Not sure if khanoisseur got it right. I do hate today's media as iirc it was only john oliver who first broke these stories in trying to debunk the trump band before anyone else but these newspapers have been on trump since then without a break. They've done enough hitpieces over the last few months, washingtonpost was almost similar to huffingtonpost. NYT risked lawsuits in releasing trump's tax returns. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/18/the-stark-contrast-between-the-gops-self-criticism-in-2012-and-the-democrats-blame-everyone-else-posture-now/

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ lengthy, but a case against the trump voter critics- not trump critics.

Btw, trump tweeting on snl again today.

Rex

Trump can afford to settle all his cases now. There is no evidence that he is a billionaire today, but he sure will be in 4 years!

Qwiss

arsedoc md wrote:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ lengthy, but a case against the trump voter critics- not trump critics.

There is some really good points in there, especially about his voter base but there is also a lot of nonsense. Like saying its not racist to want to put Muslims on a list because they're lighter skinned than Kenyans.

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