I Guess it's TIme to Talk About the Debate Tonight.

[Chuck Naill]

Who here is watching and what are you hoping to discover, or what questions are you hoping to have answered?

[dneal]

You know I'm watching Trump and Tucker instead!

lol

Seriously though, it's disappointing they won't let Larry Elder on the stage. Vivek and DeSantis are the only ones truly in the running if something happens to Trump, but Larry Elder would have a higher probability than someone like Asa Hutchinson.

I wish they let Perry Johnson in just for the lulz.

[dneal]

What a waste of time, mainly because of the hosts asking stupid questions.

[calamus]

It was disappointing, although I was surprised at how much energy and clarity Vivek Ramaswamy brought to the debate. He and DeSantis and Tim Scott (who seemed to be getting suppressed by the hosts) sounded sane, at least. I found the rest of the field pathetic.

[Chuck Naill]

"During the debate, the eight candidates on stage were asked if they would support Trump as the GOP nominee if he is convicted in any of the four separate cases against him. Six of the candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, raised their hands. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were the only two who did not. "

For me, Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Christy have sealed the deal for me. I would never support the others now. Pence is just pathetic. He tries to act like he is serious about morals and Jesus, but consistently favors going along to get along. The dictionary should begin to show his mug shot within the definition of sycophant.

[dneal]

You clearly don’t understand the state of the party. I’m sorry your media did that to you.

[Chuck Naill]

I do understand the state of the party and that’s why I am an independent.

There is a higher party, I’d you will.

[calamus]

I'd support someone convicted of trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court if I thought they deserved my support.
(And FWIW, I hope to God Trump doesn't become the GOP candidate. I like many of his policies, but his personality and his baggage make him a liability.)

[Chuck Naill]

I'd support someone convicted of trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court if I thought they deserved my support.
(And FWIW, I hope to God Trump doesn't become the GOP candidate. I like many of his policies, but his personality and his baggage make him a liability.)

I read the January 6 speech transcript and his call to Raffensperger. Are there actually trumped-up charges that I am unaware?

[dneal]

You read them while under the influence of your Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Listen to Alan Dershowitz.

[724Seney]

I'd support someone convicted of trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court if I thought they deserved my support.
(And FWIW, I hope to God Trump doesn't become the GOP candidate. I like many of his policies, but his personality and his baggage make him a liability.)

I read the January 6 speech transcript and his call to Raffensperger. Are there actually trumped-up charges that I am unaware?

Uh, yes.
Here, Matt Kim will explain it to you Chuck.........
https://twitter.com/MattAttack009_/s...85043338743808

[Chuck Naill]

I'd support someone convicted of trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court if I thought they deserved my support.
(And FWIW, I hope to God Trump doesn't become the GOP candidate. I like many of his policies, but his personality and his baggage make him a liability.)

I read the January 6 speech transcript and his call to Raffensperger. Are there actually trumped-up charges that I am unaware?

Uh, yes.
Here, Matt Kim will explain it to you Chuck.........
https://twitter.com/MattAttack009_/s...85043338743808

Are you not able to explain? I understand if you can't.

[724Seney]

I'd support someone convicted of trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court if I thought they deserved my support.
(And FWIW, I hope to God Trump doesn't become the GOP candidate. I like many of his policies, but his personality and his baggage make him a liability.)

I read the January 6 speech transcript and his call to Raffensperger. Are there actually trumped-up charges that I am unaware?

Uh, yes.
Here, Matt Kim will explain it to you Chuck.........
https://twitter.com/MattAttack009_/s...85043338743808

Are you not able to explain? I understand if you can't.

Of course I can explain.......
Whether or not you can understand is an entirely different matter.

[calamus]

Can't we discuss issues civilly instead of pissing on each other?

[dneal]

How many campaigns survived the debate?

Vivek excelled, DeSantis and Haley scored some points but took some serious hits, Tim Scott maintained his status quo, Pence and Christie tanked. Asa Hutchinson and Burgum remain uninteresting.

Burgum did give the right answer on abortion. “Read the constitution. The 10th amendment leaves that to the states”.

[Chuck Naill]

Can't we discuss issues civilly instead of pissing on each other?

Not with two members you can't if you decide to disagree or if you find information that refutes their opinions.

Whether you believe Trump is guilty or not, or that he can be convicted, as Chris Christy stated, “Here’s the bottom line. Someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct, OK? … Now, whether or not — whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States,” It has been Trump's conduct that has been normalized by the Trumpian movement. These people include white supremist as well as Evangelicals leaders and members.

It confounds me that two members here think otherwise. They have supported this man for as long as I have participated here. I can only assume they are listening to someone who is swaying their minds in a different direction, because otherwise they seem like intelligent members.

[Chuck Naill]

I enjoy reading an historians perspective on the news. She is teaching me things about the Republicans that I never knew. I was raised by Roosevelt Democrats who endured Hoover Days. I remember my great grandmother telling me I "had to vote straight ticket...LOL!!

From HCR:
"In the 1960s, Republicans made a devil’s bargain, courting the racists and social traditionalists who began to turn from the Democratic Party when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to make inroads on racial discrimination. Those same reactionaries jumped from the Democrats to create their own party when Democratic president Harry S. Truman strengthened his party’s turn toward civil rights by creating a presidential commission on civil rights in 1946 and then ordering the military to desegregate in 1948. Reactionaries rushed to abandon the Democrats permanently after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, joining the Republicans at least temporarily to vote for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who promised to roll back civil rights laws and court decisions.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the final straw for many of those reactionaries, and they began to move to the Republicans as a group when Richard Nixon promised not to use the federal government to enforce civil rights in the states. This so-called southern strategy pulled the Republican Party rightward.

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 for their work registering Black Mississippians to vote, and said, “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan tied government defense of civil rights to socialism, insisting that the government was using tax dollars from hardworking Americans to give handouts to lazy people, often using code words to mean “Black.”

Since then, as their economic policies have become more and more unpopular, the Republicans have kept voters behind them by insisting that anyone calling for federal action is advocating socialism and by drawing deep divisions between those who vote Republican, whom they define as true Americans, and anyone who does not vote Republican and thus, in their ideology, is anti-American.

From there it has been a short step to arguing that those who do not support Republican candidates should not vote or are voting illegally (although voter fraud is vanishingly rare). And from there, it appears to have been a short step to trying to overturn the results of an election where 7 million more Americans voted for Joe Biden, a Democrat, than voted for Trump and where the Electoral College vote for Biden was 306 to 232, the same margin Trump called a landslide in 2016 when it was in his favor.

The Republicans on stage last night have abandoned democracy, and in that they accurately represent their party. It is no accident that in addition to the Georgia party chair indicted for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republican Party chair Brian Schimming was also mentioned in the Georgia indictment as part of the conspiracy for his role in the scheme to use false electors to steal the election for Trump, though he was not charged; former Arizona Republican chair Kelli Ward is in the crosshairs for her own participation in the scheme in Arizona; and in a different case, former Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddoch has pleaded not guilty to eight felony charges for her part in the attempt to steal the White House.

State leaders have taken their cue from the top: Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel also apparently participated in Trump’s fake elector scheme to steal the presidency.

It is quite a thing to see leading Republicans—including a former president—in mugshots for their assault on our democracy and to know that party leadership supports their actions. Indeed, it is unprecedented, and for those who remember what a grand party the Republicans have been at times in their history—Lincoln, after all, was a Republican, and so were Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower—it is a sad end."

[Chip]

More lies and poses.

‘He’s an insider’: Ramaswamy’s deep ties to rightwing kingpins revealed

Republican candidate brands himself as an ‘outsider’ but has close links to prominent figures Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel

Martin Pengelly
25 Aug 2023 06.00 EDT

Vivek Ramaswamy has described himself as an “outsider”, accusing rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of being “bought and paid for” by donors and special interests. But the 38-year-old Ohio-based venture capitalist, whose sharp-elbowed and angry display stood out in the first Republican debate this week, has his own close ties to influential figures from both sides of the political aisle.

Prominent among such connections are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of tech giants PayPal and Palantir and a rightwing megadonor, and Leonard Leo, the activist who has marshaled unprecedented sums in his push to stock federal courts with conservative judges. Ramaswamy is a Yale Law School friend of JD Vance, the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy who enjoyed success in finance before entering politics. At Yale, Vance and Ramaswamy attended what the New Yorker called an “intimate lunch seminar for select students” that was hosted by Thiel. Last year, backed by Thiel and espousing hard-right Trumpist views, Vance won a US Senate seat in Ohio.

Thiel has since said he has stepped back from political donations. But he has backed Ramaswamy’s business career, supporting what the New Yorker called “a venture helping senior citizens access Medicare” and, last year, backing Strive Asset Management, a fund launched by Ramaswamy to attack environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies among corporate investors. Vance was also a backer. Ramaswamy’s primary vehicle to success has been Roivant, an investment company focused on the pharmaceuticals industry founded in 2014. The Roivant advisory board includes figures from both the Republican and Democratic establishments: Kathleen Sebelius, US health secretary under Barack Obama; Tom Daschle of South Dakota, formerly Democratic leader in the US Senate; and Olympia Snowe, formerly a Republican senator from Maine.

Ramaswamy’s links to Leo – recently the recipient of a $1.6bn donation from the industrialist Barre Seid, believed to be the biggest ever such gift, but now reportedly the subject an investigation by the attorney general of Washington DC – are many. As reported by ProPublica and Documented, Ramaswamy has spoken at retreats staged by Teneo, a group Leo chairs and which aims to connect high-powered conservatives, to “crush liberal dominance” in American life. Other Teneo speakers have reportedly included Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor polling ahead of Ramaswamy in the Republican primary, and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who trails Ramaswamy and clashed with him on stage in Milwaukee. ProPublica also linked Thiel to the genesis of the Teneo group. According to a document seen by the Guardian, Ramaswamy became a Teneo member in 2021.

Elsewhere, Ramaswamy is a board member of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group with ties to Leo, and a member of the Federalist Society, the Leo-driven group which works to stock the courts with conservatives. Ramaswamy has also spoken to and received an award from the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a group of Republican state treasurers. In June, in South Carolina, the Post and Courier newspaper reported that last year, before launching his presidential bid, Ramaswamy attempted “to leverage his [Republican] connections to gain access [for Strive] to lucrative contracts to manage pension funds … [with] total assets of $39.6bn”.

Similar pushes were mounted in Missouri and Indiana, the paper said. Curtis Loftis, the South Carolina state treasurer, told the Post and Courier there was “nothing improper” about such approaches. Asked about Ramaswamy’s claims to be an outsider in light of his links to rightwing donors, activists and establishment figures, a campaign spokesperson told the Guardian: “Vivek has lived the American dream and has had tremendous success in business. There’s a colossal difference between someone who has friendships and business relationships with wealthy individuals and politicians who change their policies and positions to please their Super Pac donors,” they added.

In the Wisconsin debate, Ramaswamy flourished in the absence of Donald Trump, the former US president who faces 91 criminal charges but nonetheless leads Republican polling by huge margins.

Amid speculation that Ramaswamy might end up Trump’s running mate, Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Ramaswamy “a classic 2020s America tech bro bullshit artist … Trump for the 21st century”. Ramaswamy’s claim to be an outsider, Galen said, was part of his “fundamental understanding … that Maga [the pro-Trump Republican base] wants him to show that the rest of these people [in the primary] are politicians. He’s willing to be the showman … the outsider. Anti-establishment. ‘If anything is there, I dislike it because it’s there.’ You know, ‘I’m going to have fun with this. I’m not going to take it seriously because you’re a bunch of hacks and goons.’”

But in another sense, regarding Ramaswamy’s ties to the likes of Leo and Thiel, Galen said: “I think that he’s an insider. He walks into a room with Leonard Leo and says, ‘What do you need me to do?’ … And they’re like, ‘Here’s what we want you to do. Here’s what we need you to do.’ Right?”

“Do I think [Ramaswamy] cares about [issues like restricting] abortion? No, not particularly. I don’t think he has a firmly held belief on it. But if he thinks that it will help him, and in exchange for that Leonard Leo will throw a little chicken feed of the $1.6bn that old man gave him, to help him? Sure, what the hell? He didn’t ever think he get this far. So now he’s just gonna push it as far as he can.”

Ramaswamy, Galen said, is closely tied to a world of donors and non-profits in which Leo is “certainly at the center. And this movement only moves in one direction, and it’s toward the darkness. It’s towards authoritarianism. And it’s because it finds people like Ramaswamy. And the more that all these other candidates will now attack him, they will drive him further and further into the arms of those people.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...e_iOSApp_Other

[dneal]

Peddling conspiracy theories again, about the brown guy.

Racism.

[calamus]

Can't we discuss issues civilly instead of pissing on each other?

Not with two members you can't if you decide to disagree or if you find information that refutes their opinions.

It sounds as if you are saying that if someone refutes (or attempts to refute) a point someone else made, the appropriate response would not be to address their facts or alleged facts in a logical manner, but to launch an ad hominem attack in response. Is that in fact what you maintain? If so, and if that's a widespread position among others here, that would go a long way toward explaining why this subforum smells so strongly of urine.