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First they came . . . .

You're both pointing out the risks that multi-national companies with lots of competition are taking when they speak out politically. But it's a business risk, and I'm absolutely certain it's calculated.

Now, if a company like Coke were to receive legislative favoritism in exchange for political activism that would be problematic and perhaps dangerous. But personally I wouldn't care much more if Coke was contributing to preserve Stone Mountain. It's their choice, and I have lots of alternatives if I don't care to buy their product.
Agree with last sentence
 
I want everyone to just stay in their lane. Such is life
I really don't understand people because they look so short term. A lot of people would love to see a consolidation of power ....AS LONG AS IT WAS THEIR PARTY who had the power. Even though I am conservative I never want to see the Republicans be in a position where they can ram through anything they want to ram thru congress. IMO, they made a big mistake changing the rules for approving supreme court justices.... that will come back to bite them in the future. It's so refreshing to see a few politicians speak up for what is right (Cheney for one) and in this article Manchin and Simena. I don't like the filibuster but make them negotiate to get things rather than ramming it thru. Both sides speak of protecting the minority but then come in and want to pass laws and give the minority no input (and that applies to both parties).
 
I really don't understand people because they look so short term. A lot of people would love to see a consolidation of power ....AS LONG AS IT WAS THEIR PARTY who had the power. Even though I am conservative I never want to see the Republicans be in a position where they can ram through anything they want to ram thru congress. IMO, they made a big mistake changing the rules for approving supreme court justices.... that will come back to bite them in the future. It's so refreshing to see a few politicians speak up for what is right (Cheney for one) and in this article Manchin and Simena. I don't like the filibuster but make them negotiate to get things rather than ramming it thru. Both sides speak of protecting the minority but then come in and want to pass laws and give the minority no input (and that applies to both parties).
I want to see a return to majority rule. Senate leaders should not have carte blanche dictatorial power to block all proposals from the House and all judge nominations from a President from the opposing party. Advice and consent doesn't mean disregard or ignore.

And, no more "virtual filibusters." If those fools are going to permit the thwarting of all legislation in the senate by a "filibuster", they ought to require the participating senator(s) to actually stand at the podium, without eating or sleeping or peeing (in front of cameras!) for 12-18-24 hours in a row reading the phone book or Bartlett's Quotations or whatever. Now, it seems to be enough to just threaten a filibuster without actually doing it.


The present rules apparently allow the Senate to reject proposals from the House without even voting.
 
I want to see a return to majority rule. Senate leaders should not have carte blanche dictatorial power to block all proposals from the House and all judge nominations from a President from the opposing party. Advice and consent doesn't mean disregard or ignore.

And, no more "virtual filibusters." If those fools are going to permit the thwarting of all legislation in the senate by a "filibuster", they ought to require the participating senator(s) to actually stand at the podium, without eating or sleeping or peeing (in front of cameras!) for 12-18-24 hours in a row reading the phone book or Bartlett's Quotations or whatever. Now, it seems to be enough to just threaten a filibuster without actually doing it.


The present rules apparently allow the Senate to reject proposals from the House without even voting.
The ironic thing is that the filibuster was hardly brought up for the last 4 years and now it's all of a sudden in the news all the time.
 
The ironic thing is that the filibuster was hardly brought up for the last 4 years and now it's all of a sudden in the news all the time.
McConnell wasn't interested in legislating once the tax cuts were passed.
 
horrors of Nazism could take hold in a democratic and largely religious country

do these really reflect the same unlikelihood? Religion has been responsible for millions of historical deaths.

it also tends to have a profound influence over its followers
 
McConnell wasn't interested in legislating once the tax cuts were passed.
I still wonder why Trump never tried again to do anything about healthcare. Didn't he lose on healthcare by just one vote?

Just a few tweaks here and there in the proposal and maybe he would have picked up the needed vote. McCain died in August 2018, so four months remained with Trumpian control of both houses of Congress and no McCain (before the 2018 midterms could have changed the makeup of Congress). But Trump never tried again to pass a healthcare bill after making healthcare his main campaign point.

Must have been some third-dimension Romulan chess game he was playing (yeah, right).
 
You're both pointing out the risks that multi-national companies with lots of competition are taking when they speak out politically. But it's a business risk, and I'm absolutely certain it's calculated.

Now, if a company like Coke were to receive legislative favoritism in exchange for political activism that would be problematic and perhaps dangerous. But personally I wouldn't care much more if Coke was contributing to preserve Stone Mountain. It's their choice, and I have lots of alternatives if I don't care to buy their product.
Somehow I don’t believe that.
 
Politics is now almost 100% emotion. There was a time when emotion was mostly aimed at the voters, now the pols, pundits, intellectuals, elites and others aim it everywhere and at each other. We are now blanketed with a constant flow of emotion from the Oval Office, to media, to coffee shops to our households. The only refuge is our individual minds and that is under assault as education is substituting the questioning so necessary for critical thinking with conformity and obedience.
"It is evident then that it will be necessary for the speaker, by his eloquence, to put the hearers into the frame of mind of those who are inclined to anger, and to show that his opponents are responsible for things which rouse men to anger and are people of the kind with whom men are angry."

-Aristotle
 
The House doesn't have a filibuster.
Obviously. You’re dancing around the point.

R’s controlled the senate for four years and never once tried to blow up the filibuster. Dems don’t even really control the Senate and if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema they would cast it in the dust bin.

Maybe irony isn’t the best word, but you’re being purposely dense and it’s unbecoming.
 
Obviously. You’re dancing around the point.

R’s controlled the senate for four years and never once tried to blow up the filibuster. Dems don’t even really control the Senate and if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema they would cast it in the dust bin.

Maybe irony isn’t the best word, but you’re being purposely dense and it’s unbecoming.
Irony isn't even an appropriate word, much less the best one. I'm not dancing around any point. NPT had no point.
 
I would grant you trumps last two years when they didn’t control the house. But you don’t see the irony in Republicans never raising the filibuster in his first two years.
Priorities. McConnell got his tax cut in 2017 (through reconciliation), did away with filibuster of Supreme Court nominees so was able to seat his picks with impunity, and already was able to seat all the lower court picks. He was content with getting nothing accomplished beyond that, and could always blame the Dems if there was any political heat brought to bear.
 
Martin Niemoller spoke the “First they came” words in post WWII Germany as an explanation of how the horrors of Nazism could take hold in a democratic and largely religious country. He used the frog in the pot argument to explain how bad things happen in small increments until the bad thing is large and uncontrollable.

I’m combining the Andrew Sullivan and Thousand Cuts threads here.

The founding fathers bequeathed us a system of governance and a resulting economic and social structure that was largely based on distrust of power and authority. Our federal government had a robust system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. The federal government was based on federalism where the states, using their own unique and processes ran their own affairs, selected their own leaders and their own representatives to congress. Education, business, media, entertainment, religion, and more were sources of independent and maybe even competing roles in various functions. The Europeans gave us an entrenched system of slavery and servitude that was almost exclusively race based. We also were faced with conflict and questions about native people caused by the inevitable and unstoppable rush of settlement and development.

With this background, we built the most vibrant, free, and open society on earth. The proof is in the pudding. Peoples of all beliefs, ethnicities, and goals have decided this is the place to be.

But we are metamorphosing at a rapidly increasing pace. Gone is a functioning congress as we see thousand-page bills passed on party-line votes with little to no public process, little to no debate, and little to no amendments. Secret negotiations by staff and lobbyists take the place of openness among our representatives. Gone is the strong emphasis on federalism as we see more and more efforts to subject state authority to federal rules. The feds coming for control of state elections is scary. Gone is an independent and observant media as it blatantly chooses sides in the great issues of the day instead of holding all to account. Gone is the independent power centers of business, entertainment, and even religion as all prostrate themselves to ideology.

Getting back to Niemoller‘s time. He witnessed the onslaught of government, business, media, finance, education, and law combining to a single force. His warming pot boiled over. We are seeing government, business, media, tech, entertainment, coalescing in a similar fashion. COVID provided the opportunity to turn up the heat in the pot while telling us that was in our best interest. We still might distrust power and authority, but power and authority seems to be winning.

They came for our history.
They came for our arts.
They came for our business.
They came for our speech.

What do they want?

Our obedience.


If you allow govt to be bought, 100% chance it will be.

the supremes and the legislators allowed it to be, so it was.

and again, once allowed, it's purchase by the moneyed interests wasn't just a possibility, it was guaranteed as an absolute.

no other possibility could ever happen, once that option was available.

and funny how you and others here who complain loudest about the govt you got once said govt got bought, defend vigorously all that allowed for it's purchase in the first place.

once allowed, and once bought, wtf did you expect.

it wasn't personal. it was just business.
 
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If you allow govt to be bought, 100% chance it will be.

the supremes and the legislators allowed it to be, so it was.

and again, once allowed, it's purchase by the moneyed interests wasn't just a possibility, it was guaranteed as an absolute.

no other possibility could ever happen, once that option was available.

and funny how you and others here who complain loudest about the govt you got once said govt got bought, (what the hell did you expect), defend vigorously all that allowed for it's purchase in the first place.

it wasn't personal. it was just business.
I like how you change the tense sometimes.
 
The House doesn't have a filibuster.
The house doesn’t need a filibuster. The speaker controls all of it. A notion that the House is more democratic than the senate because it doesn’t have that F word is a mistake. All of congress is a politburo, not a congress of our representatives representing us. “First they came. . . “ is applicable to all of the federal government except for the courts.
 
The house doesn’t need a filibuster. The speaker controls all of it. A notion that the House is more democratic than the senate because it doesn’t have that F word is a mistake. All of congress is a politburo, not a congress of our representatives representing us. “First they came. . . “ is applicable to all of the federal government except for the courts.
No one suggested the House is more democratic.
 
No one suggested the House is more democratic.

then they should, because it's far more democratic than the body governed by legislators representing massively disproportionate numbers of citizens.

that's not to say the House hasn't deliberately been manipulated/perverted for purely anti democratic reasons.

just that it's still more democratic than the senate, even despite said anti democratic perversion/manipulation.
 
What do you mean? Thought folks were finally catching on to these geopolitical concepts. Why is it the US is never really successful in exporting Democracy?

because too often when the US is successful, the success results in that country electing the "wrong" person, so the US has to blow up the successful democracy and re-install a dictator they consider the "right" person.
 
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