The Trump administration, and the advisors who work for Trump (mostly his family) truly do amaze me. I think that at this point, Trump has booted anyone who has dared to disagree with him, so anyone that is still left in the admin (or has had the privilege of making it from 2016-today) is a yes man. They don't really advise on their own views, they just say whatever Trump wants to hear.

Pretty much EVER SINGLE OTHER US PRESIDENTIAL ADIVSOR IN HISTORY would've told Trump that going on this interview with Woodward is a bad idea. Like -- what is the upside of sitting down with someone and talking about this stuff? I don't see what he was trying to accomplish here. Was he trying to outwit him or get a good piece out of him? After the first book from Woodward, there's no shot that this could've been good for him.

Sigh.

I agree with the fact that reducing the risks would've happened. Though what I don't agree with is saying 'Well if we had socialized medicine in the US, Covid would've been x times less bad' Covid was bad in places with and places without socialized medicine. This isn't really something that we experience that often.

But you're right on the whole employment and medical insurance being tied is a VERY BAD DUO. Economic downturns are usually just that, isolated economic downturns. We don't typically have a HEALTH CRISIS which causes an economic downturn which then causes people to lose their jobs, which are their only safety nets to making sure they (and their families) are healthy.

What's your proposed plan SuchMoon? Single Payer? Medicare for All? Government Option? etc?

+1 to some of that.

President can put pressure on the FDA, but that pressure can only go so far without setting off any whistle blower stuff. But even with that, the President can promise as much as they want but they can't speed up research and then later they can't just make logistics and distribution work out of thin air.

Making the vaccine is tough, but effectively and efficiently distribution to hundreds of millions of people is VERY HARD as well. Across a place as big and diverse of the US is tough and not a joke at all.

Jet Cash.... What in the flying fuck are you trying to prove here?

Like I truly don't know what you think is going on. There is no massive conspiracy that everyone is apart of. Do we have a billing problem in the US? Yes. But do we also have some of the best doctors and medicines in the world here in the US? Yes.

Fucking hell not everything is a conspiracy for profit. Vaccines are good, medication is good, not everything is going inside of you so the government can track you or a medical provider can make more money. Is money apart of the reason for making it? Yes. But people buy medicines BECAUSE they work.

The founders would've probably been okay with regular people having military weapons. But me personally, eh, no.

I get that argument though. As the founders WOULD'VE NEVER allowed for us to live in the current state that we live in. ICE operating near the borders pulling over private citizens everyday? That's a no. Police officers shouldn't have military grade equipment at their disposale. Shit imagine you went even further and talked about taxes, NSA, regulations and so on? The founders would be PISSED.

Passing on regulatory power to bureaucrats in Washington wouldn't make the founders happy as well. Then again though, did they imagine to see this sort of change within 250 years?

Not a fair reason to shoot down concerns. Just like Americans talk about other countries policies, I think it's TOTALLY fair for other people to comment on it.

If you were to sit here and say "well you're wrong and don't understand this as much as an American because x, y, z and you've never lived here" that's different. But just dismissing without showing any evidence isn't fair.

But to the point. This isn't something that could've been solved fully just by having a socialized healthcare system. Period. We had cultural problems with accepting the fact that a highly infectious disease was spreading. People here don't like listening to the government, so they weren't a fan of following guidelines. Further, we have HUGE cities in the US where it would make sense to spread so quickly.

While we have tons of deaths though, per capita we're NOT at the top. We just have a lot of people living in this county (360 or so m) compared to Europe. Infections we are not doing good in at the moment, but things are starting to slow.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-per-million-people

+1 to that.

I think I've really flip flopped a lot during this cycle. But I do think that we're going to end up with a VERY slight win from either side. As of right now I'm leaning on Trump being the person who is going to edge out Biden by a FEW electoral votes. When I mean a few I truly mean like 2-8 electoral votes to end all of this out.

The national polls are going to show Trump down by like 8 or so. Which may end up what the popular vote is at the end of this. But I think Trump will win by like 50k votes in those same swing states. Here's a good pic from 538 showing what polls are showing (and leaning towards in the future):

2nd amendment is one of those things that are VERY tough to debate about. You're totally right on it being a debate where both sides have some pretty good points. Though I do think the right has some of the better points when it comes to constitutionality and that sort of thing.

When people stay stuff like - Well the founders never could've known what we were going to produce 250 years later. Yeah that's true, but they also never knew much of what anything would translate to. 250 years later freedom of speech is allowed online as well. Freedom of assembly is protected in our age of terrorism and such. Religion is still heavily protected, even after the changes we've seen over the centuries.

I don't think the founders using different weapons then us now is not a reason to ban particular weapons like 'assault rifles' (I put these in quotes cause ya know, that's a debated term) The guns the founders used were the most deadly of their time. I personally draw the line at automatic, not sure why that's needed, but regular rifles are fine to me.

First time I've seen it as well. Few decades probably, even with proper maintenance of the weapon. I'll just put a little research I found regarding who can purchase and own these firearms:


Not exactly sure why you'd actually want this gun. Sounds like rich people who can get through the paperwork of owning a gun range / gun store can own it, though I don't think you'd be able to get away with killing someone in self defense with this thing in your home. Not sure how stringent that regulation is / if there is any precedent on it.

But this question wasn't for me, I'll see myself out for now, lol.

I'm going to put the blame on either the FEDS being ultra tight lipped about what they do, or they're just not doing anything (I guess those are the only two possibilities).

LVL 3 offender, from my small amount of google searching, is having sexual intercourse with a minor with some threat of violence (or violence actually caused to the individual) This person in question is a real piece of shit. I'm assuming you've already done this, but have you got in contact with politicians in the OR area to see if they can help expedite this? They usually have contacts there that can push things along a bit faster.

Fully Automatic though they need a license for, buying the gun isn't enough - unless I'm misinformed.

But for the sake of this thread, do you want to move this to another thread so we don't bog down the 2020 DEMS thread?

Yeah, I think that everything relating to handling sex offenders (once they've been convicted) is up to the states. No federal control unless something has crossed state lines, though -- you seem to contest that the federal government is helping at all, even when people are crossing state lines. Probably many reasons behind them not helping, but COVID is throwing a monkey wrench in a lot of everyones business right now.

But yes, the lists are created to ensure that people know who live around them. It's a smart thing to do and keeps people informed. That information being provided has probably saved countless children / others from sexual assaults.

Curious on your source for the 15k for getting a legal automatic weapon? Sounds ugh -- well interesting to say the least. I know those are HEAVILY regulated, though they are still allowed.

O LORD. Not the defense that I would've used.

Do I think that President Trump said these things? No.

Is it plausible to think that he did? Yes. Based on his past actions it would be understandable

General John Kelly can end all of this right now and come out and say if Trump said anything about his dead son when they were visiting him at Arlington (pretty sure this was the situation) Not sure if he has a NDA from Trump on a personal level, but if he does not (and even if he does, not sure on enforceability) then he should just say if it was said or not.

If it is true, then Trump should lose to Biden. Publicly making fun of veterans, and dead ones isn't something that is looked at favorably, for obvious reasons.

If it isn't true, well then fuck the fake news for spreading this shit.

Haven't seen anything in the news regarding a new bill about Anti-Scam / Robocall bill, but there was one back in January that was signed by the Trump admin -- which was also pretty bipartisan when it was going through Congress.

Link to story about the bill from ABC - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/law-robocalls/story?id=68008423 - To explain the bill a bit, it gives the FCC more power to combat robocalls. Who knows what has happened with this iniative given the whole coronavirus. Highly doubt this is high priority issue that the admin is pushing for in campaign season. And ya know, American politics works with the executive actually enforcing the laws that Congress pushes out. So if the admin doesn't care to do much enforcement, then yeah, nothing of substantial value happens.

I know your question may not be relating to the western world, but it is something that I will delve into and people here can tell me if what I'm talking about makes sense.

In the United States our education system is antiquated. I think this is something that is very common all around the western world. It'd be fair to say that the western world's idea of 'education', at least at the High School and above level, is simply throwing tons of ideas at you and forcing you to remember then. Nothing is TRULY about higher knowledge, it's about being able to regurgiate information that is thrown at you. As many know, memorizing is the lowest form of learning (Source). It'll never make sense to teach people to memorize for a test.

Higher knowledge is learned by exposing people to new ideas and figuring out ways to remove them from the learning side of things and get people to learn about life through learning, and learn why it is important for them to know this information. For example, I shouldn't be forced to learn something like Calc 1 if I have no intention of going into a math heavy field (engineering). I had one teacher throughout school that taught a science class, but for him the class was more about teaching us about life and why the things that he was showing us is important. He told us stories about his life, tips for the future, he touched on current events, and so on. He didn't make the class seem like a normal class, he made it seem like we were all having fun.

The thing was : In the meantime he was ALSO teaching us science, and we all absorbed more of the information because he integrated it much better then tossing a textbook at us.

Learning has to be changed from just assigning textbook readings and forcing people to memorize shit.

Nice update and good to hear. Will probably be in his best interest to stay out of Russia, and keep his opposition online. There will totally be more attempts for his life though, hopefully the western countries of the world will protect him in some way.

Sadly though, this entire poisoning by the Russian government and all that did everything that they wanted to do with this attempted assassination. They stoke fear in the eyes of all of those that are publicly against the Putin administration in Russia, and ensure that they know the consequences of being against the authoritarian government of Russia.

Hm. Not sure that the EU requires unanimous voting for accepting and mandating countries take in refugees. I highly doubt that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (all members of the EU) signed off on taking in Syrian (and other) refugees and then said that they wouldn't. Sounds like a pretty dumb political thing to do.

For anyone that doesn't know, those 3 nations listed above were nations that the EU said illegally refused to take in their share (set quota by the EU) - https://www.politico.eu/article/3-eu-countries-broke-law-by-refusing-to-take-in-refugees-says-court-lawyer/

Got any info on that? You'd know more then me in regards to EU stuff.

A cap could work, but once you introduce the idea for a gap I think we're all expecting for this cap to be lessened or increased based on politics by those in charge instead of changing the number based on economics and caring about the people who are working in the economy at this current point.

I don't like the EU style of government b/c of the fact that it can force countries do certain things that they don't want to do. For example - Taking in refugees. That was a major problem over the last few years.

But that's how the EU works, you either work in as a team and get the benefits of it or you leave and that's that.

Totally not trying to be rude at all or anything, I'm just not sure if you fully understand what I'm trying to say.

If all of these countries took in the refugees they'd totally be able to make their lives better. Can't disagree there, you'd be entering a society that has jobs that you can work in and live a normal life. Totally nothing to disagree with.

But here's the problem for people who already have jobs in the areas where refugees would flood in -- there would be a lot more workers competing for the same amount of jobs, at least initially. So with the same amount of jobs present and tons of more people who want those jobs, employers are beyond happy -- they're able to pay the workers less and less as there is more supply for the same amount of demand. Employees are not happy though, as they're being paid less for the same amount of work b/c of supply and demand.

That's one of the reasons that people oppose this large scale refugee acceptance. I know certain countries, like Germany, did really need the people as they were going to fall into a population related issues (see Japan) if people didn't come there and start growing their families in Germany.

Stock market is flying high right now due to a massive amount of FED money coming into the economy, pretty much directly bailing out struggling companies through buying their bond offerings that people wouldn't have bought due to their situation. The stock market is also forward looking, a lot of information is 'priced in' meaning that people have already accepted the effects of Corona but how while the next few years look?

You have that money, then you have congressional money that came in from awhile ago, market will probably go even higher if the Congress decides on MORE money for companies (and maybe even some legislation giving them protection from being sued)

Big Blow to Trump? Well, yes. But all he has to do is convince enough of his own base and enough moderates that he is doing every thing he can do to try to save the economy. If he begins to tick up a bit more, maybe some vaccine news comes out, he could easily win. I know people hate him though, nothing wrong with that.

60 or so days until the election, still a LOT of time for things to change.

+1 to this.

If Bitcoin ever got to the point where it could potentially be a threat though, governments would SWIFTLY move to fuck up Bitcoin. I know everyone says "GOVERNMENT CANT STOP BITCOIN ITS DECENTRALIZED...." Well yes, but only in theory is this still the case.

If the US financial regulators (and the rest of the Western world) came out and said that Bitcoin is now banned and that any that are on an exchange will be sold and be exchanged for USD effective IMMEDEDIATETLY.

That would kinda cripple the price of Bitcoin, usage of it, and so on.