What if I told you that pointing out a single instance of corruption that took place during a Democratic administration doesn't change the fact that massive, government-wide corruption occurs under every GOP administration, dating all the way back to Reagan, and that throw stones from your glass house is severely eroding your credibility
heralded by conservatives as an advance for free speech
Er... What? I don't see how freedom of speech is remotely relevant here.
Whataboutism is one of the classic goto arguments for someone who can't actually argue a point and just wants to dig their feet in anyways.
Because, dun dun da dun DAAA!!!
Corporations are people, and corporations speak with dollars, therefore dollars are speech, and protected by freedom of speech.
And then Citizens United took the muzzle off.
I can only imagine that the conservatives are basically saying "I should be able to donate to who I want without being exposed by funding transparency laws", because protecting their freedom of speech means avoiding even being held accountable for their exercising of that speech. Hey wait a minute
For a second, I thought this might be about protecting victims of racism, or something, due the it cutting out after the word dark. I really shouldn't be this optimistic.
Corporations are immortal and can donate infinite money to every candidate.
Except when they murder people, then they're only 7 years old.
Literally a what-about-ist answer to "Hey you guys suck".
Admitting "oh yeah I guess we do" is asking too much, but the guy you brought this up to actually dealt with it, accepted it, and moved forward.
God that's gotta feel terrifying for you to watch, someone with the confidence in their own views and factual basis in reality to actually dispute something while accepting the facts.
I actually hadn't heard of it before, but after looking it up on Wikipedia Obama's AG ordered the FBI to investigate, and that the IRS targeted both liberal and conservative groups.
Trump's DOJ actually declined to reopen the case about one of the figures in the scandal, Lois Learner. Democrats have corruption as well, Leland Yee for example, but they don't fill the agencies with heads
that want to shut down the fucking agency.
Dollars to donuts, he's already seen it. He's seen everything.
At least I was able to point out a single example. I'd like to see an example of one of these terrible GOP regulatory captures that was mentioned by the original poster. My guess is that it probably falls into the same general magnitude as the IRS scandal (my guess is that it will be similarly "shady" but "not that bad")
If your policy platform revolves around reducing regulation though or that government shouldn't be regulating something to begin with wouldn't you put a head in that wants to limit that agency's power? If someone like Cortez were to become president and put someone in charge of ICE that wants to "shut down the fucking agency", would you hold them to that same criticism?
Not really, he seemed to suggest that this is something that only
happens with the GOP and I thought I'd mention the IRS thing. And I'd
still like to see an example. Because honestly, I don't remember a time
when the GOP was doing something unacceptable with some regulatory
agency.
Well, I don't know if it is terrifying. I'll let you know as soon as I see it.
The IRS scandal isn't an instance of regulatory capture.
ICE is not a regulatory agency.
Scott Pruitt's EPA is the most recent and obvious example but his Wiki link (which you presumably just ignored) includes several other examples.
It's largely Republicans doing it because they are the ones that run an anti-regulation platform. When they can't legislate away regulation, they just capture it. Trump's cabinet picks are the most brazen examples of this, seemingly choosing people to head agencies that they have criticized or worked against their entire professional and political lives.
Siding with Russia on the issue of election meddling. Trump's DoJ indicted 12 Russians but when he met Putin he said that it wasn't true because Putin said so.
Scott Pruitt, a former oil lobbyist, systematically dismantled the EPA's ability to combat climate change by withholding funds for scientific research and threatening staff via internal memos that the mere mention of climate change in any official EPA press releases would be grounds for disciplinary action or termination. He even describes himself as "a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda" in his own LinkedIn profile.
Just yesterday Donald Trump intentionally undermined our intelligence agencies and advocated for a hostile foreign power led by a murderous oligarch. He is completely unwilling to uphold his oath of office, which holds him responsible for protecting the United States Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. This is in itself a treasonous act.
He has engaged in an obvious pattern of sabotage and obstruction of justice, ranging from ordering the firing of an independent special counsel investigation, to multiple lies about his own actions and whereabouts, those of his campaign staff and administration, and those of foreign political operatives from Russia, China, and the United Arab Emirates.
well, okay if you say so.
fair enough. but wouldn't what I described still be comparable to:
?
Well like I said before, if your political aims think that something shouldn't be regulated or that regulation of an area should be reduced, wouldn't you appoint leaders who want to lighten regulations to those particular agencies? This doesn't really seem like an objectionable thing. I completely acknowledge that Republicans run on deregulation platforms so this only makes sense to me. What I was looking for was examples analogous to the IRS thing where regulatory agencies have in some capacity or another been rigged to target particular groups or individuals for some unfair reason, although after reading the stuff underneath the description it seems that I've misunderstood the concept, so thanks for pointing that out.
I wouldn't exactly say that is treason.
And remember, we still don't have any hard evidence that says that the Trump campaign knowingly worked with Russian agents to change the outcome of the election with hacking and the like. The best we have is that apparently some Russian met with a campaign worker on Trump's team, but the Russian he met with was actually just some FBI informant (who apparently wouldn't typically be able to enter the country due to his history of physical violence) who didn't even have anything to give him.
The other thing I've been hearing about is apparently we have electronic evidence that makes US intel believe that Kremlin hackers were actually the ones responsible for hacking the DNC hardware, well I'd like to see this evidence. Who knows, it might be true? But it doesn't seem like we have any solid connection here.
Trump was more or less saying that all of this stuff being pushed to the forefront even though a lot of it was smoke and mirrors (and still as at time of writing) was negatively impacting US-Russian relations, which was true. He's obviously not going to be particularly flattering of US intel especially when it's come to light that we had an FBI investigator who obviously is pretty biased against Trump engaged in an affair with a judge on the FISA court overseeing the Flynn case.
He didn't. He said that Putin was "strong in his denial" that he wasn't involved, but didn't actually say himself if this was true.
Putin also offered to make the 12 Russians in question available for the investigation, so we'll see if the probe takes him up on that offer and maybe they'll find something.
jfc if you seriously haven't pieced together the fact that president McChucklefuck is in bed with the Russia.
You're delusional...
Again though this isn't regulatory capture. You don't even have to click the Wiki link, it's right there in the embed
Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
If you don't find this objectionalbe then I'm not really sure what to say.
I don't know why you are seeking examples of a thing that isn't the thing being talked about. He didn't say "corruption" or "government workers doing a bad" was a Republican thing, he said specifically regulatory capture.
I'm not going to touch the rest of this post because people much smarter than me have made much better posts about the Trump-Russia situation (Orpheus in this thread in particular about covers it) but it's pretty telling that you think US-Russia relations being impacted should at all be prioritized over the truth.
Well if they can produce the damning evidence they claim to have then I'll believe it but until then this all just seems like a wild conspiracy theory to anyone who's been paying attention to the full story.
I really feel like this political technicality is incorrectly referenced a lot.
Corporations are 'people' insofar as they have the same rights as individuals; rights like freedom of speech, and protection from arbitrary government action that specifically targets them.
Corporations "being people" is a good thing, because it prevents the government from arbitrarily destroying a corporation even if they have done nothing wrong, which prevents it from unfairly dismantling corporations, forcing them to instead go through legal channels.
Without that, Donald Trump and/or his buds would have the power to snap his their and make CNN/Amazon/any other company disappear.
Robert Mueller is paying attention to the full story :)
THERE HAS BEEN FUCKING EVIDENCE
THERE HAS BEEN INDICTMENTS
THERE HAS BEEN FUCKING ARRESTS
THERE HAS BEEN FBI RAIDS
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?
I get my current events info from a combination of CNN, r/politics, and buzzfeed. Can you point me to some places where I can learn "the full story"?
There is? Give me the evidence that Trump's campaign worked with Russian operatives to hack the DNC.
Indictment
a formal charge or accusation of a serious crime
we will see who gets convicted and what those convictions are based on. If it's something like Pappadopolous who was literally entrapped, or Flynn's lie plea which isn't even relevant to Russia colluding with the Trump campaign because it's just him pleading guilty to telling the FBI that he asked a Russian diplomat to do something on a UN issue when he didn't actually. Yeah that's a smoking gun right?
I mean for Christ's sake I'm sitting here with the charge right in front of me and the campaign isn't even mentioned except as background information to describe Michael Flynn.
You seem to think that suspicion == confirmation.
There have been guilty pleas complete with full confessions.
Well for starters you should read opposition media just so you can see how the other side views things. Sometimes I see a CNN headline pop up on my notification center (I have a MacBook so it automatically subscribed me to that crap) and I'll click it just to see how it's being reported by the other side.
I learned from listening to Pappadopalous's own testimony on the radio such information like the Russian agent he's charged with meeting with actually being an FBI plant, and this guy basically didn't have a clue that he was actively being set up until after the fact.
I also like to use the Knife. https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/12-russians-indicted-in-mueller-investigation-accused-of-hacking-clinton-campaign/
Just an example of what kind of coverage they do.
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