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 What a wonderful production the wise leaders of the conservative movement have prepared for us! I’m sure it’ll be a smashing hit! With Trump and Republican governors leading us down the path towards war and xenophobia, shooting up abortion clinics and Black Lives Matter protesters, and shutting down the government over all of the above. Yes, what a Grand Old Time we have here in America with the Grand Old Party! And so it should be no surprise that a good time will be had for all here in the USPOL thread for December 2015!  114th Congress Bingo Card So how is House Speaker Paul D. Ryan doing after his first month in office? Let’s take a look, shall we?
 Other News, featuring the Clinton Corner Did you know that one of Hillary’s hired goons collaborated with CNN to smear poor, innocent Rand Paul? Clearly this means you shouldn’t vote for Hillary! In other news…
Talk to other goons (why would you want to do that?) Remember that we have an IRC channel at synirc in #poligoon for livesteaming stuff.  Goon Recommendations Documentaries
Talks Long pieces
Books
Twitter feeds
Related threads "US Politics" is an incredibly broad topic, as A) the country is freaking huge and B) given our role in international events pretty much everything impacts us. So there are other subthreads 2016 Presidential Primary 2016 US Senate Elections SCOTUS thread Right Wing Media There are also regional subthreads that are usually pretty slow, but sometimes cross-pollinate with this thread when something important is happening. Pacific Northwest Illinois Texas California Lifted the rest of the above from FriedChicken. As before post suggestions for adding to the above and I'll edit them in if I see them. And remember folks, drink chat goes in D&D chat thread. Drink responsibly. Your liver will thank you. 
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Dec 1, 2015 09:00
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Grouchio posted:Should we be expecting a new patriot act this month? Or will the lesser crisis compared to 9/11 allow cooler heads to prevail? For as much hand-wringing I made it out to be in the OP, I think what will happen is that they will talk big, but nothing will happen. Next year, some people will put out new proposals (including Tom Cotton who has vowed to reinstate the NSA's authority to collect phone metadata) but they won't be approved. However, one of those proposals that we see come out in the next year will be revived right after the next major terrorist attack and passed without comment.
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Dec 1, 2015 21:21
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John Fleming wants to become Cruz's full-fledged ally in the Senate.
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Dec 1, 2015 21:56
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Fried Chicken posted:Found it: Man, I wish I could get a guaranteed 6% return.
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Dec 1, 2015 22:01
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SalTheBard posted:I know this was a few pages back, I'm stupid when it comes to stocks. Could you please explain in lay terms what Short Selling is? I looked it up online but everything I found was a little over my head. Basically from what I gathered it was: Short selling is a sort of accounting trick that allows people to make money when a stock goes down. To be more specific, a short seller borrows shares of stock from someone who has a "long" position (i.e. is holding the stock so it goes up). The seller may then sell this borrowed stock, with the understanding that they are on the hook to buy back the same number of shares to eventually return to the original owner. If the stock goes down, the seller can buy back that number of shares at a lower price before returning them, and can pocket the difference in price between when they sold the borrowed shares and when they bought them back. Short selling is dangerous, however, because stock prices can go up an unlimited amount. Thus, in order to guarantee that the person lending the shares will actually get them back, there is usually a minimum amount of money an investor must have in their account to act as collateral should they not be able to buy them back. If the price of the stock goes up a certain amount, this minimum amount of money goes up, and if the amount is not met, a broker may make what is called a "margin call", requiring the investor to pony up and bring their account up back to that "minimum margin requirement." Worse still, in order to get out of the position, that investor still has to make good and buy back that number of shares that they originally borrowed, which can be exceedingly pricey if the price has gone up too much. Generally speaking, a mix of short sellers and long sellers is good, because they have opposite intentions. Long sellers buy low and sell high, while short sellers will "buy" high and "sell" low, helping to keep a stock's price in check. If a stock is likely to do poorly, short sellers will be taking positions and helping to drive the price down (because they want to buy at a lower price than whatever the current going price is to buy back their shares and lock in profits). If a stock is doing well, long sellers will be taking positions and helping to drive the price up (because they want to sell at a higher price than whatever the current price is to lock in their profits) What Shkreli did was to screw up this natural balance for his own ends. Shkreli bought 70% of the shares of a company that was going out of business (which meant that a lot of people had borrowed stock to make a profit by buying it back when it dropped). This (plus the fact that Shkreli pretended he was going to revive the company) suddenly drove the price up, which means that those investors start getting margin calls. In order to avoid that, those investors need to buy the stock back, even at a loss. Some investors caught on to this as the stock manipulation it was, and began shorting when Shkreli's power play began to fade, expecting that the price would again go down (which it did because of the balancing act I just mentioned)... But of course they only did so by borrowing Shkreli's stock. This was fine... Until Shkreli stopped lending it out. When he did so, the push to drive the price down evaporated again, since the short sellers could no longer get stock to short, and drove the price up even further, hurting the remaining short sellers. As mentioned, these changes in price did not happen due to changes in KaloBios's fundamentals (the company is still basically defunct, even if Shkreli basically has control of the company) and were based purely in speculation to make Shkreli some money. Shkreli stands to win so long as the price doesn't go down below the ridiculous price he bought at, which is pretty easy to do given how much he drove the price up. Meanwhile, innocent investors get screwed because they tried to short things based on the fundamentals, but were forced to take losses due to Shkreli driving the price up for no reason other than his speculation. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Dec 2, 2015 |
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Dec 2, 2015 05:47
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Just a reminder: Don't be black and live in rural Alabama.
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Dec 2, 2015 05:58
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:When is the government shutdown supposed to happen this month? December 11.
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Dec 2, 2015 08:09
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Cythereal posted:And there have been proposals at the state level to do exactly this. The rabbit hole on punishing women here can go as deep as you want. There's a paper published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law back in 2013 about no fewer than 413 forced interventions and coercion applied to pregnant women between 1973 and 2005, including details on 5 such cases. And this was before the 2009 case which ordered a woman to be confined to her bed and obey all of her doctor's orders (including giving up smoking) to preserve the life of her unborn child. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Dec 2, 2015 |
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Dec 2, 2015 08:34
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Epic High Five posted:But what if I BELIEVE they cause abortions? Then you're perfectly allowed to ban their use if it violates your personal beliefs to let them be used.
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Dec 2, 2015 09:03
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Doesn't matter if it's true or not, because it's hit the right-wing media at this point, so it must be true.
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Dec 2, 2015 17:48
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Meg From Family Guy posted:Police spokeswoman now claiming multiple shooters, dressed in "military style" equipment Watch as it turns out that these are actual ISIS terrorists. And then the country loses its mind.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:12
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haveblue posted:Maybe this would finally be the motivation to make guns harder to obtain. Never ever.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:16
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zoux posted:Please don't summon them here. I'm sorry, but by law, every weapon which fires more than 5 times in a row is required by law to connect to the cell phone network and notify them to post in D&D.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:18
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:Scanner says witness identified one shooter as a Middle Eastern man with a long beard. If this is true, hello President Trump.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:22
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zoux posted:It's not. Hopefully not. We don't know right now, and won't until they find these guys.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:23
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zoux posted:Why would radical Muslim terrorists attack a disabled services center? Why would any group of more than one person do so? The entire attack is a black swan event because, at least so far as we know, no one was expecting something like this to happen, ever. At this point, any explanation is game.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:28
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zoux posted:Well then maybe it was loving Hitler alien dinosaurs. Point. I'll hold off on further speculation on the subject.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:31
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:So we're televising mass shootings weekly now. When do we get to televise mass shootings daily? Or on a 24/7 pay-per-view channel? It's called CNN.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:40
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This will probably get lost in the GUN GUN GUN, but a Colorado Representative has finally delivered the hot take we've all been waiting for.
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Dec 3, 2015 04:18
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Winkie01 posted:Meanwhile in San Fransico today.... The crisis actors are among us. nicholas.y.harpso posted:is this a good video edit or is there a video of this man being executed? it looks fisher when an officer's gun crosses in front of the light post, we never see him get shot, a round goes off with no visible impact, etc. there is no pretense as to why this happened either. I've seen student video work like this before. give the details. 
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Dec 3, 2015 04:24
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Slate Action posted:Update: he is dead. Better link. Also, let's start debating about Daesh again.
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Dec 3, 2015 04:40
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Rhesus Pieces posted:Do we know the names of the other two shooters? No. Rhesus Pieces posted:Any concrete theories on a motive yet? No. Rhesus Pieces posted:I have a bad feeling that the longer that Muslim-sounding name hangs in the air with no further info, the more likely it is that some goober who's way too wound-up over ISIS will do something stupid and violent. Yep. The Islamophobia is already gearing up. So yeah, I would say the chances of that are starting to look better and better. EDIT: CAIR is planning on holding a press conference in 30 minutes with the guy's dad, so yeah, expect the screaming white hot ball of Islamophobia to get even louder. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 04:59
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Grouchio posted:If these shooters worked for ISIS, would this doom the Democrats election? It's not going to help, I'll put it that way.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:04
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Luigi Thirty posted:A Trump presidency just became marginally more likely and Islamophobia is going to reach even higher levels now. Someone please tell me something nice happened somewhere today Uh... Samurai Jack is coming back?
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Dec 3, 2015 05:06
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site posted:Don't worry, this will be forgotten about within the next month or so. As if Fox News and the Republican Party will ever let it be forgotten. We're still talking about Benghazi for chrissakes.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:08
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Remember when everyone in this thread was saying "yeah, you guys are crazy for even entertaining the idea that it's ISIS-related" Well that doesn't matter now, because the right wing is going to believe it whether or not it's true (and if it is true, well...)
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Dec 3, 2015 05:11
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Black Baby Goku posted:Well what? Where we'll be going, Muslims won't need eyes to see.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:13
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Luigi Thirty posted:A Trump presidency just became marginally more likely and Islamophobia is going to reach even higher levels now. Someone please tell me something nice happened somewhere today Some elementary school kids were arrested for allegedly trying to blow up a school oh wait that's not good at all
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Dec 3, 2015 05:14
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Farook and his compatriots reportedly began firing without saying a word.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:19
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As if you couldn't stoke Islamophobia even hotter, Farook was "very quiet" and "flew under the radar", and recently returned from paternity leave. ( : If some normal unassuming Muslim can do this then they must all be evil!)EDIT: My Imaginary GF posted:Why doesn't Obama issue an executive order creating a "no gun list" for terrorists? As if that wouldn't get overturned by the courts within a month as violating that holiest of amendments, the 2nd Amendment.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:25
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ratbert90 posted:Clearly they were all yelling Allah Akbar Muhammad Jihad then. Actually, it's even more likely to draw analogies with Paris, because they also "calmly and quietly" executed their victims as well.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:28
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Dapper_Swindler posted:but don't alot of those fit the definition of most mass shooters. Of course. But that doesn't really matter to the media when the guy is a devout Muslim.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:30
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Just a reminder that even before this, 57% of Americans and 83% of Republicans said that Muslims should be barred from the presidency. And 30% of Republicans think Islam should be outright banned. So yeah.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:34
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Senf posted:Yeah, that was pretty heavily reported. I am not sure if you are facetiously playing at something, because that is definitely not true.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:37
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Bullfrog posted:So how do you guys deal with Islamophobic friends, acquaintances (or even worse) family? I feel like we need to start pushing back HARD on people like that, even on the internet. Honestly I don't think there's much you can do other than have them make Islamic friends. Challenging people traditionally only makes them cling to their opinions harder.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:42
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The NAACP has filed suit against Alabama's voter ID law.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:43
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CAIR conference is starting, for real now.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:52
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