Originally posted by Parihaka
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The US 2020 Presidential Election & Attempts To Overturn It
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“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
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Trump is in so many ways manifestly unfit for the office he holds. If he was the head of a public corporation or an institution he would have long since have been removed by the board of the directors and perhaps even been facing legal action for his behavior and actions. Prior to 2016, I would never have thought a person so flawed could have been elected in a democratic election, especially in the one of the wealthiest and most stable countries of the world. In hindsight, one may have realized that political passions would overcome something like vetting a candidate for basic standards of decency and normal behavior, that one might expect when selecting a leader for any other major organization or institution.
Looking ahead to 2020, one must expect that he is atleast even odds for re-election. Leaving aside the stupid talk on trade wars, trashing alliances, cozying up to dictators, he has been prudent enough to not do anything that would cause real damage. Besides presiding over continued economic growth and stock market highs, he has done things to please most conservatives, judges, tough action on immigration, deregulation.
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Originally posted by InExile View PostPrior to 2016, I would never have thought a person so flawed could have been elected in a democratic election, especially in the one of the wealthiest and most stable countries of the world.
gunnut said a year before the election that people wanted an outsider and were tired of insiders they consider bought, liars and just not representative of their interests.
I didn't buy it at the time because i thought an experienced hand would eventually win out. Former Secstate, former first lady. Of course she had a chance. Still, it was a close run affair. He didn't win convincingly more like he snuck in.
The system is working perfectly and running smoothly from what i can see : )
Originally posted by InExile View PostLooking ahead to 2020, one must expect that he is atleast even odds for re-election.
At this point of time i would say definitely in
I'd go further and say more than even odds he gets a second term.Last edited by Double Edge; 01 Jan 20,, 11:24.
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Originally posted by Double Edge View PostBecause of the quality of his opposition. People hated Hillary more. Course going against anti-incumbency and expecting a third democrat term is pushing it.
gunnut said a year before the election that people wanted an outsider and were tired of insiders they consider bought, liars and just not representative of their interests.
I didn't buy it at the time because i thought an experienced hand would eventually win out. Former Secstate, former first lady. Of course she had a chance. Still, it was a close run affair. He didn't win convincingly more like he snuck in.
The system is working perfectly and running smoothly from what i can see : )
A system that elects a person as unfit as Trump is obviously not healthy. Factors probably include extreme partisanship, distrust of media, rampant misleading news and propaganda on social networks.
Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
I'd go further and say more than even odds he gets a second term.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...eaking/591607/
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Originally posted by InExile View PostA system that elects a person as unfit as Trump is obviously not healthy. Factors probably include extreme partisanship, distrust of media, rampant misleading news and propaganda on social networks.
Given the nonsense the leading US dailies have said about my country i do not trust what they say about their own. Trump has been helpful in exposing their blatant agenda. Made me realise that my media ain't so bad after all. It can go head to head with any media. The result is I do not rely on western sources as often as i did in the past.
Social media has been helpful in pointing this bias out. Leaders will also have to contend with social media. Anything that isn't above board is going to get called out quickly. I'm surprised how well Trump adapted to social media, you'd think some one of his age would want nothing to do with it and be more traditional. Not true. Trump is a natural on social media.
Will be extremely close run again and will come down to a handful of states, mostly in the mid-west. At the moment Wisconsin seems to look good for Trump which may make him a slight favorite, but democrats have other paths to victory through perhaps Arizona and maybe even Florida, while I don't see an alternate path for the Republicans if they lose Wisconsin. Given the high emotions on both sides, it will probably come down to turnout which some are predicting will be 15 million higher than 2016.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...eaking/591607/
the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms.
51% is still low. When things are bad as people who hate Trump will have you believe then i expect at least close to 70% turnout. Those are the figures you see in countries when people are worried about the future.
The effect of the growing number of eligible Millennials and minorities (particularly Latinos) has been blunted because their turnout has lagged behind that of older voters and white people—a dynamic that has especially affected Democrats in the diversifying Sun Belt states, where they have struggled to overturn years of Republican dominance.
In 2016, the Census calculated that almost two-thirds of eligible white voters cast a ballot. By contrast, African American turnout fell to 59 percent—a sharp decline from both of Barack Obama’s elections—and Latino turnout remained at typically modest levels, just below 48 percent. Young people stayed home, too: Only about 46 percent of eligible voters under 30 turned out, far below the participation among those 45 and older.
It remains to be seen who the Democrats choose to run against him. Somebody younger & charismatic could unseat him. But if the candidate is older then there is no advantage. Imagine if Obama was running for his first term now. I think he'd beat Trump.
Whether Democrats can rein in their far left loudmouths that are damaging their image. Otherwise Democrats will go the way of Labour in the UK.
Schwerin, from Priorities USA, says his group also forecasts greater Millennial improvement in 2020 compared with older generations. But he warns that such an increase is hardly guaranteed, even under Trump. “We expect young people will be the group that grows the most,” he says. “But Trump does not solve the problem. It is important that Democrats are investing in time and resources in talking to communities we need to turn out. It’s not going to happen on its own; Trump alone is not going to do it.”
In relying as heavily on working-class white people as he does, Trump is pushing against a demographic current that has steadily run in the opposite direction for many years.
Data from States of Change show that over the past quarter-century, white voters without a college education have typically declined as a share of actual voters little by little over each four-year presidential cycle: They fell from 61 percent of voters in 1992 to 44 percent in 2016. Minority voters, meanwhile, have increased over those seven election cycles from 15 percent in 1992 to 26 percent in 2016. And college-educated whites have drifted up, from 24 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2016.
The 2016 election, however, was something of an anomaly for blue-collar white people. Partly because Trump inspired so many non-college-educated white voters to turn out—and partly because African American turnout skidded so badly—white working-class voters declined less than usual in 2016 as a share of the electorate, States of Change concluded.
Ruy Teixeira, a veteran liberal analyst and a co-founder of States of Change, believes it’s likely that in 2020 the decline in blue-collar white people’s share of the total vote could again push toward the high end of recent experience, shrinking by as much as 3 percentage points, to just over 40 percent. “I think if we do have a high-turnout election that builds on the trends we saw in 2018, you might see the white non-college share decline significantly more than it did in 2016,” Teixeira says.
Those changes pose obvious problems for Trump in winning the national popular vote.
Wonder what more conservative leaning researchers have to say. The opposite i expect : )Last edited by Double Edge; 01 Jan 20,, 13:18.
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Originally posted by Parihaka View PostNah, I'm a big boy. Enjoy your trump derangement syndrome.
I did forget to ask one thing though: You claim that you were making a "simple a statement of fact, as regards the enquiry" regarding Trump's total obstruction of justice, and not defending it.
So why you tell us all exactly how you feel about it. You've repeatedly trumpeted (heh) the findings of the Mueller Report and Impeachment testimonies but you've repeatedly ignored Trump's violations of 2 U.S. Code § 192, “Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers"
Being a defender of the rule of law, does that bother you at all?“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
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I Know What’s Wrong With Trump
Let me introduce myself.
I am a retired speech/language pathologist. For more than two decades, I spent every workday diagnosing and treating language disorders. I have helped people with a wide variety of communication deficits. I was very good at my job.
That’s why, in spite of the fact that I’ve been out of the field for several years, I am completely confident when I write that Donald Trump is exhibiting a serious language disorder.
Let me explain.
A deficit in expressing and/or understanding language is called aphasia. The term is most often used in diagnosing people who were not born with the disorder, but who acquire it later in life. Aphasia can be caused by a head injury, a stroke or as a part of a more significant cognitive decline in older adults.
The American Speech/Language and Hearing Association describes aphasia as a deficit in a patient’s ability to communicate effectively in everyday life. It can be variable in its severity, but it always involves a diminished ability to communicate.
One aspect of aphasia impacts a person’s expressive language. This is the kind of language disorder that is more obvious to those who interact with the affected patient. The person struggles to say what they mean. They may have difficulties in expressing ideas logically and specifically They might be seen to be searching for the right word as they speak. Many aphasic people develop an overreliance on empty words and phrases. I have known patients who included a favorite phrase or two into nearly every sentence spoken, as the rote language makes it easier to get out a full thought.
Some aphasic people make up words when they can’t find the one they need. The new word might or might not sound similar to the one that is missing.
People with expressive aphasia sometimes substitute one word or phrase for a similar one (ie, saying “chicken” when they mean “duck” or saying, “off the book” instead of “off the hook.”) Their conversations may seem rambling, with rapid jumps from one topic to another without any explanation. A story can go off on any number of tangents, leaving the listener confused.
Many people with what we call “fluent aphasia” can string together a long series of words that seem to make sense until you realize that there isn’t much content there. There are lots of pronouns and adjectives, but not enough nouns to make the meaning clear.
Aphasia can impact receptive language, or comprehension, as well. Aphasic people may struggle to follow complex conversations. They often misunderstand directions or fail to grasp the meaning of a question they’ve been asked. They find it confusing when more than one person is speaking at a time, or when the topic shifts in mid-conversation.
Some people with aphasia have problems with reading and writing. They may struggle to read anything other than the simplest of texts. Their writing can contain mistakes in syntax, word order or spelling that weren’t seen in the past.
Does this sound familiar to you? It certainly should.
The President of the United States is showing every one of these symptoms.
I’ll give you some examples.
Expressive Aphasia.
The following exchange was part of Mr. Trump’s remarks to the press on August 21.
“Mr. President, are you demanding that the fed chairman lower interest rates?”
“No, I don’t demand it but if he used his head he’d lower ’em. In Germany, they have a zero interest rate and we do compete. Much stronger than Germany but we do compete with Germany. In Germany, they have a zero interest rate. And when they borrow money, when you look at what happens, look at what’s going on over there. They borrow money, they actually get paid to borrow money. And we have to compete with that. So, ah, if you look at what’s happening around the world, Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve have totally missed the call, I was right and just about everybody admits that. I was right. He did quantitative tightening, he shouldn’t have done that. He raised interest rates too fast, too furious. And we have a normalized rate, I, we call it that. And now we have to go the other direction. We’ll see if he does that. If he does it, you’ll see a rocket ship, you’ll see….. And if he doesn’t, we have a very strong economy.”
“But we could have. We could be, we could be in a place that this nation was seldom at if we had interest rates cut by the federal reserve. The Federal Reserve has let us down. They missed the call. They raised it too fast and they raised it too high and they did quantitative tightening and they shouldn’t have done the tightening and they shouldn’t have raised them to the extent that they did. We could have had some raising but nothing like what they did.”
“Mr. President, what happened to your strong appetite for background checks?”
“Oh, I have an appetite for background checks, we’re gonnna be doing background checks. We’re working with Democrats, we’re working with Republicans. We already have very strong background checks but we’re gonna be filling in some of the loopholes, as we call them at the border, and speaking about at the border, it would be really nice if the Democrats would indeed fix the loopholes because it would be really nice. But despite that, I want to thank Mexico. They have 26,000 soldiers at our border and they’re really stopping people from coming in.”
“But what does that have to do with background checks and guns?”
“So what happens is….with background checks….we’re dealing with Republicans, we’re dealing with Democrats, we’re dealing with the NRA, we’re dealing with gun owners, we’re dealing with everybody. And I think we’re gonna have something hopefully that’s meaningful.”
Note the repetition of phrases in this small sample. “We’re dealing with” and “we’re working with” were used over and over, with no description or clarification. Does he mean that he is meeting with those groups, or that he is making deals with them or something else? My impression is the President relies heavily on memorized phrases, which are easy to pull out and use.
Watch any of Trump’s unscripted remarks and try to count how many times he says, “We’ll see what happens.”
Note the word “raising” in the phrase “We could have had some raising.” The meaning is clear, but the word choice is troubling to this language specialist. We would expect the President of the US to say, “We could have had an increase.”
I’m sure you also noticed the rapid and inexplicable jump from the topic of background checks to that of the Mexican army at the border. It’s as if the word “loopholes” triggered a thought of the border crisis for some reason and that thought made Trump jump completely off the track of the question.
Look at the discussion of Germany. Trump says,
“In Germany, they have a zero interest rate and we do compete. Much stronger than Germany but we do compete with Germany.”
What’s much stronger than Germany? We can make a guess that he’s referring to our economy, but the language of the sentence is clearly abnormal. In English, we don’t use a comparative like “much stronger” without including the referent.
Then there is the repeated phrase “missed the call”. We have a few idioms that are close to this one (“missed the boat” or “missed the mark” come to mind.) But we don’t say “missed the call” unless we mean a phone call. Or we’re referring to a sports referee.
Receptive Aphasia
Do you recall when the President recently met with religious refugees in the Oval Office? The following exchange happened between Trump and a young Yazidi woman.
“All this happened to me. They killed my Mum, my six brothers, they left behind them… “
“Where are they now?”
“They killed them.”
She told him that her family had been killed. He asked “Where are they now?”
He did not have the slightest understanding of what she’d said.
We saw the same lack of comprehension this week when Trump was asked about having second thoughts on his trade war with China.
“Mr. President, do you have any second thoughts about escalating the trade war with China?”
“Yeah. Sure. Why not? Might as well, might as well.”
Once again, he completely failed to understand the question. A question which was then repeated by a different journalist, to which he replied,
“I have second thoughts about everything.”
Did he even understand the meaning of “second thoughts”? I am not at all sure.
Reading and Writing
Donald Trump is well known for his aversion to the written word.
When Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, spoke about his time at the White House, he said that Trump didn’t like to read. Tillerson was told that the President would not be reading the usual briefing notebook each morning, but instead would only accept bullet points or charts.
Mr. Trump himself has stated that he doesn’t like to read. In an interview with Axios shortly after his inauguration, Trump said that he doesn’t like to read, preferring bullet points to full essays.
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”
Although he is the author of several books, we know that each had a ghostwriter. Trump claims to have attended the best of schools, but has never let his school records be made public.
So.
I say all of this because it brings up the diagnostic question of whether or not the man has always struggled with reading and writing, or whether this is a new phenomenon.
Whether or not Trump’s language disorder is progressive is difficult to say, but when I analyze his conversations from years ago, I believe that it is. His past interviews were far more coherent and much more linguistically sophisticated than what we hear now.
Whether or not the language disorder is developing as part of some type of dementia is up to a neurologist to diagnose.
I am not qualified to say whether or not Donald Trump has a personality disorder or a mental illness. But I am qualified to say that when I listen to him speak, I am increasingly convinced that he has significant aphasia.
What I know is this. Something is most assuredly amiss in the brain of the President of the United States. And he is the one with the nuclear codes. Link
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A long read, and the formatting is wonky, but worth it. But, tldr, Donald Trump is a fucking idiot....and he's getting worse.“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
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Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
So why you tell us all exactly how you feel about it. You've repeatedly trumpeted (heh) the findings of the Mueller Report and Impeachment testimonies but you've repeatedly ignored Trump's violations of 2 U.S. Code § 192, “Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers"
Being a defender of the rule of law, does that bother you at all?In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Leibniz
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Originally posted by Parihaka View PostNo trial or conviction was forthcoming. Bad luck, better luck next time boo hoo. Oh and it's called the Presumption of Innocence, since you don't understand the Rule of Law
So, having dodged the question yet again, I'll ask it yet again because holy shit I can't wait to see kind of bullshit deflection you ladle out this time: To recap, Donald Trump clearly violated the law with his 'blockade' of witnesses and documents, that were lawfully subpoenaed by Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution and the Rules of Congress.
How do you feel about that, as a defender of the Rule of Law?“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
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Originally posted by TopHatter View PostLOL, nice deflection, about what I expected, but we're not talking about Presumption of Innocence. If you are subpoenaed by the U.S. Congress, it has zero to do with your guilt, innocence or the price of fish in Tierra Del Fuego. It has everything to do with you complying with a lawful summons to appear before Congress, because that's the LAW
So, having dodged the question yet again, I'll ask it yet again because holy shit I can't wait to see kind of bullshit deflection you ladle out this time: To recap, Donald Trump clearly violated the law with his 'blockade' of witnesses and documents, that were lawfully subpoenaed by Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution and the Rules of Congress.
How do you feel about that, as a defender of the Rule of Law?
Mueller was unable to come to a conviction despite taking his best shot.
Trumps lawyers were better than Muellers lawyers.
Thus Trump wasn't charged.
Welcome to the rule of law.Last edited by Parihaka; 01 Jan 20,, 21:57.In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Leibniz
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Mueller was unable to proceed to prosecution because he was employed by the Department of Justice who have a dictum saying no sitting President can be prosecuted. He basically concluded that impeachment was the legal remedy required.
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Originally posted by Parihaka View PostWell I am talking about the rule of law, as linked and as I have been doing from the get go, and the right to presumption of innocence as part of that rule of law. which of course did answer your question.
Mueller was unable to come to a conviction despite taking his best shot.
Trumps lawyers were better than Muellers lawyers.
Thus Trump wasn't charged.
Welcome to the rule of law.
My question was regarding Congressional Subpoenas. Can you read that now? Is it prominent enough for you?
Have you heard of them? Do you care about them? They are, after all, part of the law. The U.S. Constitution even.“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
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