   | | Political discussion involving past and present political events, candidates and elections. Please read Msg #1 before posting. |
Msg #84042
0 replies | Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs As Unlawful | By SC/CA on 2/20/26 11:57am
From Forbes:
[Supreme Court] Justices ruled 6-3 against Trump’s tariffs, ruling the International Emergency Economic Powers Act... which Trump used to invoke the tariffs, does not authorize the president to impose sweeping tariffs.
While Trump has claimed his tariffs are a way to punish foreign countries, research shows its American consumers who are bearing the brunt of the cost. Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, found in a January study that foreign exporters only absorbed approximately 4% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs in 2025, while U.S. importers and American consumers bore 96% of the burden.
Companies have been betting on the Supreme Court overturning Trump’s tariffs, with more than 1,000 companies preemptively filing lawsuits seeking refunds if the tariffs were struck down. The court’s ruling Friday likely delivers a win for those firms as the court appeared to pave the way for tariff refunds.
Trump imposed his tariffs despite warnings from economists that doing so would raise prices for consumers and harm the economy, and small businesses filed suit against the policy, arguing the increased fees had substantially harmed their operations.
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| | Msg #84035
2 replies | "Anti-ICE protesters are following same nonviolent playbook | By SC/CA on 1/29/26 3:20pm
used by people in war zones across the world to fight threats to their communities"
http://theconversation.com/anti-ice-protesters-are-following-same-nonviolent-playbook-used-by-people-in-war-zones-across-the-world-to-fight-threats-to-their-communities-274498
I am not okay with the use of force and violence by ICE in our communities, cities and towns across the U.S.
I will be continuing to stand up and exercise my right to assemble and right to free speech as I protest in my town, as I have been doing for the past several months.
Our rallies have been substantially large for a small community, well-organized and peaceful. We’ve had music, speakers, and walks through town. The local police have been present, visible, and respectful, not at all intimating nor infringing on our right to assemble.
We have not been raided by Federal forces, and we feel safe, for now, but we’re aware that everything could change if our town gets put on the list. In preparation, we’ve asked the local law enforcement agencies how they might respond and assist us, should that occur as we wish to continue to be allowed to hold our rallies in peace – which is our Constitutional Right.
Attendees have ranged from young men, Mom’s carrying children, students, clergy, the elderly, to one man who was a 101 y/o WW2 Veteran, who, for the first time in his life attended a rally to oppose the Trump Administration - in his wheelchair, in full uniform, wearing his Congressional Medal of Freedom.
I have engaged in civic activities since I was High School, when my mom took me to my first non-partisan League of Women Voters meeting. I interned at non-partisan Common Cause in Boston. I helped organized two non-partisan environmental organizations to help save the Redwoods, along with far-Right and far-Left leaning community members – who to this day have remained good friends.
To me, human rights issues, environmental issues (and other issues) are not partisan, they are about respect for oneself, others, and the environment in which we live. What kind of Country do I want to live in? Do we want clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, to be able to hold rallies, to not fear the Federal government?
I am not jaded, and do not consider people as enemies. If we don’t agree, that’s okay. We all have the right to be treated with respect, and equally under our laws. And I will continue to stand up for that. I’m aware that not everyone can do that, for a variety of reasons, so I must be there for them too. If the 101 y/o WW2 Vet can protest, for the first time in his life, then I can surely get myself out there and do the same.
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| | Msg #84033
2 replies | “Repeated government lying, warned Hannah Arendt, makes it | By SC/CA on 1/27/26 3:03pm
impossible for citizens to think and to judge.”
http://theconversation.com/repeated-government-lying-warned-hannah-arendt-makes-it-impossible-for-citizens-to-think-and-to-judge-274340
Here are some excerpts:
When the public repeatedly experiences the same sequence – confident claims, partial disclosures, shifting explanations, delayed evidence, lies – the damage can outlast any single incident.
It teaches people that “the facts” are simply one more instrument of power, distributed strategically. And once that lesson sinks in, even truthful statements arrive under suspicion.
And when government stories keep changing, democracy pays the price.
Politics is not a seminar in absolute clarity, and competing claims are always part of the process. Democracies can survive spin, public relations and even occasional falsehoods.
This is not a novel problem…. But Arendt’s observations show that it is the normalization of blatant dishonesty and systematic withholding that threatens democracy. Those practices corrode the factual ground on which democratic consent is built.
Arendt did not wonder why officials lie. Instead, she worried about what happens to a public when political life trains citizens to stop insisting on a shared, factual world.
The greatest danger of organized, official lying, Arendt warned, is not that people will believe something that is false. It is that repeated, strategic distortions make it impossible for citizens to orient themselves in reality.
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie,” she wrote, “but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world … [gets] destroyed.”
She sharpened the point further in a line that feels especially poignant in today’s fragmented, rapid and adversarial information environment:
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” she wrote. “A lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history … depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.”
When officials lie time and again, the point isn’t that a single lie becomes accepted truth, but that the story keeps shifting until people don’t know what to trust. And when this happens, citizens cannot deliberate, approve or dissent coherently, because a shared world no longer exists.
The U.S. Constitution assumes a people capable of what Arendt called judgment – citizens who can weigh evidence, assign responsibility and act through law and politics.
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| | | | | | | | | Msg #83998
1 replies | A lame congresswoman. | By Mike Goodey on 11/20/25 9:47pm
Poor Jasmine Crockett, she put her foot in her mouth again!
She was talking about donations from Jeffrey Epstein going to republicans and sticking it to them that they should be called out for it.
Mitt Romney and George Bush were some of the names she mentioned. She was calling for it to be looked into.
On a later podcast she recalled mentioning A Jeffrey Epstein, not the infamous sex predator. REALLY? She called these people out after being given the info 20 minutes before her speech by her staffers and forgot to ask if they verified the info! Lo and behold it was a dr. Jeffrey Epstein who donated to these politicians' campaigns!
If she was trying to back step what she had said by saying 'A' Jeffrey Epstein then why even bring it up his name in the first place? For a lawyer to make such an insinuation and then backtrack because she screwed up you really have to wonder what kind of people are voted into congress.
She reminds me of a contestant on a reality show who just wants viewers to recognize her.
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| Msg #83997
0 replies | SB 357 | By Mike Goodey on 10/31/25 3:56pm
Back in 2022 Representative Scott Weiner of California, pushed our governor to sign this bill that would repeal police officers from rounding up groups of women they felt were about to conduct prostitution. The bill did not allow police to profile black, brown or transgenders because of how they dressed.
This impeded the officers from finding minors used for prostitution, especially because of the heavy makeup and wigs that were worn. This is happening on Figueroa street in Los Angeles.
According to Sargent Navarro, a 20 year veteran, drug dealers could make as much as $12,000 a night but they sell drugs and buyers are gone but with girls there are always those who come back to get more.
New York Times magazine reporter Emily Baum Gaertner Nunn did a piece on this ever increasing problem and reported that, with the budget cuts from the governor's and mayor's offices, sex trafficking officers have diminished from six to one. That is certainly too much for one officer to be accomplish such a large criminal endeavor.
Navarro says that many of these sex workers are 12 and 13 years old. She works out of the 77t street division. Don't forget Joe Biden allowed open borders which brought sex traffickers into our country.
The ACLU backed this bill because they didn't want profiling of certain groups of women.
Looks like the extreme left are not concerned with child prostitution.
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| Msg #83988
6 replies | Prop 50 | By Mike Goodey on 10/26/25 5:18pm
Please understand what prop 50 is for. It's the liberal left's idea to grow their seats in congress by redesigning territories in their favor.
Talk about rigging elections: Newsom and Obama have told lie after lie in their campaign to get voters to pass prop 50. Why would AOC and senator Warren get involved in this that concerns California voters? It's the radical left's wish to rig an election.
VOTE "NO" ON PROP 50!!!!!
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| Msg #83986
4 replies | Nearly 300 FBI agents mixed in the Jan 6 crowd, encouraging | By Moneyman/TX on 10/23/25 1:07pm
... people to enter the capital through broken doors and windows. One agent is on video ripping out the glass from a window then stands back trying to get people to enter the building (entrapment?). When no one right around him would take him up on his offer to get in the building that way, and he noticed someone had a camera recording him, he then starts claiming that someone else broke the window and starts telling people "don't go in there, it's against the law". That POS didn't realize that the camera had been on him for a while. That is some of the video that Dems refused to release to the public after Jan 6. It took Republicans gaining control before we could see it for ourselves.
FBI Director and top officials, at the time, lied to Congress about even having any agents in the crowd. People have been seeing video of some people whipping up the crowd, encouraging them to damage federal property and other illegal actions; in several of the private citizens' videos, every single person seen in the video BESIDES the person promoting the riot (illegal) behavior was found by the FBI and charged. Remember how the FBI eagerly announced it used facial recognition to find them? The agitators, some in clear view on a few of the videos I have seen, were never "found" by the FBI, nor were they charged, and their names have never been made public by the FBI (because, as we now know, they were government agents).
So, our government, under the Biden Administration, places undercover (or "plain clothes" -- FBI's own term it used to hide the fact they were even there) agents in the crowd for the purpose of promoting the crowd to riot and preform illegal acts, lie to Congress and the American public about what really happened. When their actions are made public, earlier this year, NOT A SINGLE WORD FROM ANY DEMOCRATS? To be honest, not nearly enough from Republicans either, although, at least many of them did acknowledge the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the agents, the FBI, Biden DOJ and many government agents.
Then there are the reports of some Dems, on record, who were hiding and would not even come out for capital police when they were clearing the building prior to there even being a single sign that protesters would become violent. They claimed that they thought the capital police who came to their office to clear them out were the rioters looking for them. Only, the capital police were clearing the building at least an HOUR BEFORE any rioters had even gotten near the building due supposedly to another safety threat that had nothing to do with the peaceful protest going on outside. Interesting that these certain Democratic elected officials somehow knew that there would be a "riot" and people would be in the capital going into elected officials offices -- for at least an hour before -- there was even a sign that the crowd might turn violent.
AOC is just one who is on record, by her own words & by her own timeline, which shows that she somehow knew "rioters would breach the capital and be in the hallways" at least an hour before the government says the rioters even pushed passed the OUTTER barricades police established (not even on the steps of the capital at this point). At least an hour before anyone, an FBI agent ? or the firsts rioter ?, even tried to breach the actual capital building, AOC claimed she was hiding because she was afraid of the "rioters" and what they might do to her. Again, at that specific time, there was not a single rioter, only protesters, some of who turned into rioters at a later time.
I am a little surprised that no one mentioned anything about it when this scandal came to light about a month or two ago.
With so much apathy, and the fact that it was the FBI, I'm not holding my breath that anyone will actually be held accountable or that such blatant abuse of power and illegal actions by our government agents would actually lead to either deserved jail time and the total restructuring of the FBI.
I am sure that much more will be brought out to the public over time. However, just as with cops, lawyers, DA's, and politicians, when it comes to right and wrong, they all seem to cover for other bad actors in their profession (because as soon as they cover for them, they too are just as guilty). I would be surprised if anyone who should, actually goes to prison for what they have done, and are still doing, to our country. It's amazing, if the scandal is large enough and must be hidden from the public, that is one of the rare times that we can count on our elected officials to set party issues aside and work together to cover each others A$$. They all know that if they protect their bad acting co-workers today, then, later when they need covering, the others will protect them as well; as long as what they did "is too big for the American public to know about".
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| | Msg #83974
0 replies | Awesome | By Mike Goodey on 10/14/25 4:50pm
What a wonderful and whole hearted acceptance speech Erika gave for the medal of freedom award given to her husband, posthumously, Charlie Kirk.
As usual Donald Trump gave credit for his own many accomplishments, but his peace deal with Israel and Hamas is beyond reproach. Even as a Trump supporter I get tired of him continuing to bring up what he has accomplished. This was about Charlie Kirk and his fearless devotion to advocate for Jesus and for freedom and truth.
I believe like others that Charlie had no idea how much larger Turning Point USA would become after his death.
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| Msg #83972
4 replies | She thinks it is political | By Moneyman/TX on 10/14/25 5:44am
... in 2025, but in 2019 it couldn't possibly have been just political (even when the politicians made up new "laws" & new statute of limitations; and everyone involved told the court under oath no one defrauded anyone, no one received any "unfair advantage" unlike what,clearly, the publicly available fraudulent paperwork already shows, so far, happened under the current laws on the books in this 2025 case).
(about 50 seconds long) http://youtube.com/shorts/9yzDDphMz3w?si=VTgqa81Wly9WRUHq
And she still does her show with a straight face expecting people to trust her and her network to be "the honest" media outlet.
When your "outrage", "facts", and/or if something is right or wrong depend only on * who * rather than * what * someone actually did, or did not do, you, and the company that hires you can't be trusted to have the ability to tell the truth about what day of the week it is.
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