Day: June 26, 2019

Reparations?

Closing Thought–26Jun19 (Happy Birthday To Me)……

We are having a debate about the possibility of reparations for savagery of slavery…..this debate in Congress was a big thing in the media…..for a couple of weeks and then it died down as the Dem debates came around.

The hearings in Congress on the reparations thingy…..

The topic of reparations for slavery is headed to Capitol Hill for its first hearing in more than a decade, with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Danny Glover set to testify before a House panel next Wednesday. The hearing’s stated purpose: “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community, and the path to restorative justice.” The June 19 date of the hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties coincides with Juneteenth, a cultural holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved blacks in America, per the AP. Ex-Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the longtime sponsor of House Resolution 40, first proposed the measure calling for a study of reparations in 1989. Conyers reintroduced the bill every session until his resignation in 2017.

Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the resolution’s new sponsor, introduced it earlier this year and pushed for the hearing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in February she supports a reparations study, a topic that hasn’t been the subject of a House hearing since 2007. Reparations had been a fringe issue until Coates’ 2014 essay in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” thrust the topic back into the national discourse. Lethal Weapon star Glover has spoken in favor of the issue for years. The reparations debate became part of the 2020 presidential race early, as several Democratic primary candidates signaled their support for compensating slaves’ descendants, though not in a traditional sense of direct payouts to black Americans. Most have been vague on specifics, offering policies addressing economic inequality that could disproportionately benefit blacks .

Now reparations are not the focal point of this post just a little background…..what I want to show is just how out of damn touch the GOP truly has become……and to do that all I need is for the Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell to open his mouth…..

When asked about reparations for slavery on the eve of a House hearing on the issue, McConnell said reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible,” were not a good idea. Besides, he suggested acts, such as electing Barack Obama president, could be considered a form of compensation.

“We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, elected an African American president,” McConnell said. “I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be hard to figure out whom to compensate.”

(USA Today)

If you have nothing intelligent to say or to add then throw Obama into the conversation…..(pathetic political BS)……

Do I need to add anything?

That was probably the most moronic statement uttered by a GOP leader.

Yes, We Hate Debates

But unfortunately it is the only way we will thin out the herd of Dem candidates….tonight we begin that process to be continued Thursday night as well…..

I appears that the polls are starting to move….Biden has been in control of the polls for over a month and now he is losing votes and others are started to inch up…..

A poll out of South Carolina reflects what’s going on nationally: Joe Biden’s numbers are dipping while Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg are gaining ground—but not enough to take his place, the Post and Courier reports. Biden still holds a 20-point lead in the upcoming South Carolina primary, but his support has fallen from 46% in May to 37% now, while Warren has risen from 8% to 17% and Buttigieg from 8% to 11%, pushing Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris from the top three. Composites by Real Clear Politics show similar national trends over the past month. The South Carolina Democratic presidential primary will be held Feb. 29

These debates should help some candidates and hurt others chances of ever getting to the next stage of this election…..

I offered my thoughts shortly after the candidates that made the cut…….https://lobotero.com/2019/06/14/debate-night-is-set/

The line up for the debates is as follows…..

Look for a few to drop out as soon as the debates are over…..money will start getting tight…..donors will be looking for the best person to support.

A Primer for the debates…..

With 20 candidates vying for attention—a number more suited to wrestling’s Royal Rumble than a traditional debate—Democrats have split the field into two groups for debates in Miami on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Republicans who took part in their party’s 10 and 11-person 2016 debates, however, say Democrats could still find it a struggle. “A 10-person debate is a mess,” Sen. Ted Cruz tells the New York Times. “It’s a cacophony.” Chris Christie adds: “With 10 people on the stage, you know, you’ll get seven to nine minutes, usually, of time to talk. So it’s very difficult to break through.” More:

  • No “undercard.” NPR, which profiles all 20 candidates, reports that the Democratic National Committee and NBC wanted to avoid the “undercard” debates that the GOP had for low-polling candidates. Instead, they divided them into those polling above 2% and below 2%, then split them evenly between the two nights through random drawing.
  • The moderators. NBC, which will air the debates starting at 9pm Eastern, says it will have the same five moderators both nights: Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Jose Diaz-Balart.
  • The candidates. Wednesday night’s debate will feature Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, and Tulsi Gabbard.
  • The frontrunners. Warren is the only one of the candidates who is polling in the top five. The other four—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris—will be onstage Thursday.
  • The format. Don’t expect many long-winded speeches: Wired reports that each candidate will get 60 seconds to answer questions and 30 seconds for follow-ups. They will also be allowed to make closing remarks, but not opening ones.
  • The issues. The Washington Post predicts that there will be broad agreement on issues like health care and climate change—but it could get messy when it comes to more controversial questions like socialism, how civil to be to Republicans, how best to defeat President Trump, and whether frontrunner Joe Biden is out of touch.

If you do watch the debate then watch for Warren on Wednesday…she is the only front runner on the stage and should have a commanding spot.  But will she stand out?

I will reserve my analysis until after the last debate on Thursday…..analysis to be posted on Friday.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

VOTE!

Love–Duncan Hunter Style

There are times that politicians show their human side and succumb to the primal needs….Gary Hart comes to mind….. even those accusations against our current standing president……and then there is California’s Duncan Hunter…..seems he got caught with his fingers in the campaign pie to pay for his love travels…..

US Rep. Duncan Hunter of California illegally used campaign money to finance romantic flings with lobbyists and congressional aides, spending thousands of dollars on meals, cocktails, and vacations, federal prosecutors say. A government court filing Monday detailed allegations about the married Republican congressman’s affairs with five women following an indictment last year charging Hunter and his wife with misspending more than $200,000 in campaign funds on trips and other personal expenses, the AP reports. Margaret Hunter, who served as the six-term congressman’s campaign chairwoman, pleaded guilty this month to one count of corruption and agreed to testify against her husband.

In the new motion, prosecutors reconstructed Rep. Hunter’s alleged clandestine lifestyle, providing times when he arrived for and left liaisons and listing a range of expenses he represented as campaign-related activity, such as paying for dates with a woman who had become his lover shortly after she started working in his office. He used his campaign treasury for even seemingly incidental purchases—a $7 beer at a hotel bar while on a ski trip with one of the women, and an Uber ride after a liaison with another lobbyist in October 2015. The government’s filing suggested that Hunter tapped into campaign funds because he had no other money to finance his romantic relationships. During a weekend ski trip with a lobbyist, his personal bank account had a negative balance and he had been hit with $33 fees six times for overdrawing the account, prosecutors said

Yet another turn…..it is rumored that his attorneys will ask for the trial to be moved to a district that voted for Trump.  This guy even threw his son under the bus and accused him of taking money (not for sex like his father but for vid games)…looks like his wife threw him under the bus…..what a great loving family.

It is bad enough that the GOP wants to pick who their voters are with gerrymandering and now they want to decide who gets justice and who does not.

What a pathetic party that allows this sort of crime to continue in its ranks.

Time To Re-Think This War Thing

2020 is around the corner and maybe it is time to find a candidate that is willing to re-think the war thing.

I think the days of massive armies meeting on the field of battle are gone……at least that is the way of thinking that the US masters of war are thinking……their lopsided wins over Saddam on two occasions has them settled into this superiority complex that will defeat us eventually.

For instance while the US is laser focused on defeating non-state entities (and losing the high ground) our super power adversaries have been looking at ways to get around the US.

For the first time in decades, it is possible to imagine the United States fighting—and possibly losing—a large-scale war with a great power. For generations of Americans accustomed to U.S. military superiority and its ability to deter major wars, the idea of armed conflict between great powers may seem highly improbable. The idea that the United States—with the most expensive armed forces in the world by a wide margin—might lose such a war would seem absolutely preposterous. Nevertheless, the possibility of war and U.S. defeat are real and growing.

Given that U.S. armed forces’ last major conventional combat operations were the massively lopsided victories against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003, many Americans might be wondering how this could come to pass. This report makes the case that one salient issue is that the American way of war—the implicit and explicit mental framework for U.S. military strategy and operations—that coalesced after the Gulf War is no longer valid.

China and Russia have spent almost two decades studying the current American way of war. While the Department of Defense (DoD) has taken its military superiority for granted and focused on defeating nonstate adversaries, China and Russia have been devising strategies and developing new concepts and weapons to defeat the United States in a war should the need arise. They have offset their relative weakness versus the United States by using time and geography to their advantage and by focusing their weapons- and concept-development efforts on finding ways to attack vulnerable nodes in U.S. military operations. The goal of these strategies and concepts is to create a plausible theory of victory whereby China or Russia avoid a “fair fight” with the Joint Force and could therefore defeat the United States and its allies and partners in a regional war. These Chinese and Russian strategies, which once seemed implausible or far in the future, are beginning to pay off. They are shifting military balances in key regions and pushing allies and partners to reconsider U.S. security guarantees.

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/anawow
 
All aspects of war should be studied and practiced…for the US never knows from where the next “major” threat will be presented to us.