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  1. #76
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    Funny how nobody from MSM is questioning the Campaign finance laws anymore. It's like the "Citizens United" case never existed.

    Citizens United v. FEC - Wikipedia

    You will only ever remain an Oligarchy until they are reformed.
    It's called the supreme court you moron.

    What are they supposed to do?

    Assassinate the Republican members?

  2. #77
    Guest Member S Landreth's Avatar
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    If he runs, he wins




    Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on Wednesday that he expects President Biden to run for reelection in 2024 and warned fellow Democrats against challenging him.

    “I’m all in for President Biden,” Clyburn told CBS News’ Robert Costa in an interview on Wednesday. “I think he’s demonstrated in these two years … that he is deserving of reelection. And I do believe he will be reelected irrespective of who the Republicans put up.”

    Clyburn, who was a key Biden ally in the 2020 election, praised him for “passing more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

    The South Carolina congressman also issued a warning to potential Democratic challengers, pointing to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s primary against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

    Carter beat Kennedy for the Democratic nomination but ultimately lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election — a defeat that many blamed on Kennedy’s challenge.

    “The history is very clear on what happens when you challenge a sitting president like this,” Clyburn said.

    Biden has yet to officially announce his reelection campaign but has repeatedly suggested that he intends to run again.
    Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

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    Well, I think the opposite.

  4. #79
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    Quote Originally Posted by HuangLao View Post
    Yet....the only candidates that are allowed to emerge are those of the ruling oligarchical class. Part and parcel of the arrangement that the dumbed down accept.
    These romantic ideals that elections are open and free to all is more than a bit of a fantasy.
    Though I agree with you that the game is rigged. I was only commenting why this "rigged" process take so long.
    Many non Americans don't understand the process and the vastness of the country.
    Oregon: about 98,466 square miles, in comparison the UK is about 93,278 square miles
    If a candidate was to spend an average of one week in each state, there goes almost a year.
    I am not defending the proses , simply trying to explain it.
    The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

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    68 Days of Silence: Why the White House Stayed Mum on Classified Documents

    The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.



    Advisers to President Biden calculated that the Justice Department would view possession of the documents as little more than a good-faith mistake.


    Michael D. Shear, Peter Baker and Katie Rogers


    Jan. 20, 2023

    The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.

    The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate.

    In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.

    In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Mr. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Mr. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.


    WASHINGTON — The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.

    The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate.

    In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.

    In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Mr. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Mr. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.


    Still, officials have said there was no hesitation when it came to quickly informing officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, which is responsible for securing such documents. The president’s legal responsibility was clear, and his lawyers had no intention of fighting with the archivists the way Mr. Trump and his advisers had done for months after leaving office in 2021.


    Informing the public was a different matter, with different risks. Mr. Biden had long promised that he would never politicize the Justice Department like his predecessor had done repeatedly. In recent days, White House officials have said they have resisted the urge to provide more information about the documents because they do not want to look like they are putting their thumb on the scale in an investigation centered on the president and his top aides.

    “We understand that there’s a tension between the need to be cooperative with an ongoing D.O.J. investigation, and rightful demands for additional public information,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office. “And so we’re trying to strike that balance and being as clear as we can.”

    But the result has been ugly sessions in the White House briefing room as Ms. Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, has been pummeled day after day for refusing to provide answers. All of which has led to second-guessing among Democrats and even within the West Wing. Some in the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the disciplined way that the president and his inner circle withhold information, sharing it only on a need-to-know basis in almost all cases, has hurt Mr. Biden in a situation where officials had the option to be proactive.

    The choice to keep silent for so long exacerbated the political damage when the news finally leaked out on Jan. 9. The days that followed, with a series of rolling disclosures and misstatements by the president’s public relations team, cemented the impression that Mr. Biden had not been forthcoming.




    Quiet Cooperation

    Since the Biden documents were found last fall, there has been no lack of private communication between the White House and the Justice Department.



    Starting on Nov. 10, just one day after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to look into the matter, the president’s counselors were in “regular contact,” as Mr. Bauer said in a statement, with their counterparts at the Justice Department.

    In a letter to Mr. Bauer in mid-November, a senior Justice Department official outlined next steps: They would need permission to review the documents found at the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located just minutes from the Capitol and the White House. The letter, first revealed by The Washington Post this week, also indicated the need to search other locations where similar documents might be found.

    The quiet cooperation continued for weeks, even up to the moment that Mr. Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate the matter last week. Moments before Mr. Garland spoke, Mr. Bauer called the department to inform them that another page of classified information had been found.

    It was a classic legal strategy by Mr. Biden and his top aides — cooperate fully with investigators in the hopes of giving them no reason to suspect ill intent. But it laid bare a common challenge for people working in the West Wing: The advice offered by a president’s lawyers often does not make for the best public relations strategy.

    Such tensions are common in politically charged investigations. Former President Bill Clinton’s political and communications advisers regularly lashed out at his lawyers for withholding information from them about Mr. Clinton’s relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, the former White House intern.
    Mr. Trump often begged him not to tweet about the legal cases against him, for fear of antagonizing prosecutors.

    In Mr. Biden’s case, advisers thought that the very act of publicizing the discovery of the documents would create a political furor that would make the appointment of a special counsel unavoidable. They reasoned that the discovery of documents long after leaving office was not that unusual and, as long as there was no intent to violate rules on classified papers, was generally handled without conflict, so the only thing that would create legal exposure would be drawing public attention to it.
    As Mr. Bauer later said in a statement, the lawyers worried that anything said publicly could end up being wrong after further investigation. “Regular ongoing public disclosures also pose the risk that, as further information develops, answers provided on this periodic basis may be incomplete,” he wrote last week.

    An Information Trickle

    That has proved true. Details about the documents — where they were found, what they are about, where they came from — remain elusive more than 10 days after their existence was first made public by CBS News. The White House has refused to explain why it took nearly six weeks after the initial discovery of documents to search the president’s home in Wilmington, Del., where a second batch was found on Dec. 20. And it has not said why personal lawyers for the president who do not have security clearances were the ones conducting the searches, but people close to the case said that was done with the approval of the Justice Department.

    Advisers have said there was no sense of urgency at first to search the Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes because the Secret Service guards both of them and therefore any sensitive documents that might be there would be safe. They did not think they would find any documents in either place, an assumption that turned out to be right about the beach house and wrong about the Wilmington one, where papers were found in the garage and a nearby room.


    Once the discovery of the original batch of documents was
    revealed, Ms. Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Mr. Biden’s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor, according to people familiar with the discussions. Ms. Dunn also stressed the need to underscore the differences between Mr. Biden’s cooperation with the archives and Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s defiance.


    White House officials are suspicious of the leaks that made the case public, thinking that it was meant to drive the very outcome that has taken place. But they also have concluded that the public sees Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump very differently. They say Mr. Biden draws on a decades-long reputation for integrity and honesty while Mr. Trump is seen by many as having lied frequently throughout his tenure in office.

    Still, current and former White House officials said Mr. Biden’s aides focused too much on making that comparison and not enough on ensuring that all the relevant facts were revealed all at once.

    Senior Justice Department officials were surprised the White House had not released a detailed timeline of the discovery of the caches before Mr. Garland announced Mr. Hur’s appointment last week, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

    In announcing Mr. Hur’s selection, Mr. Garland, who seldom discusses prosecutorial moves not previously disclosed in court filings, offered his own detailed timeline of the department’s involvement in the case, revealing for the first time that the second batch of classified material had been discovered by Mr. Biden’s team on Dec. 20, weeks after the first.

    That left the Justice Department in the position of appearing more transparent about the matter than the White House. For the president’s team, that brought immediate blowback as reporters pressed for more answers and Republicans accused the White House of a cover-up.


    But to Mr. Biden’s lawyers, the gamble is not over yet. If their strategy ultimately leads to the case being resolved without charges, they reason, then the short-term pain will be worth it — a bet with a lot riding on it.


    Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.



    By Michael D. Shear, Peter Baker and Katie Rogers


    Jan. 20, 2023
    Last edited by CalEden; 24-01-2023 at 03:38 AM.

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    ^ A bit of an Edit would not go astray there Cal.

  7. #82
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CalEden View Post
    Advisers to President Biden calculated that the Justice Department would view possession of the documents as little more than a good-faith mistake
    Nah, no need Sab. That's enough.

  8. #83
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    Quote Originally Posted by Buckaroo Banzai View Post
    Though I agree with you that the game is rigged. I was only commenting why this "rigged" process take so long.
    Many non Americans don't understand the process and the vastness of the country.
    Oregon: about 98,466 square miles, in comparison the UK is about 93,278 square miles
    If a candidate was to spend an average of one week in each state, there goes almost a year.
    I am not defending the proses , simply trying to explain it.
    I understand the geography of it, including the concentration of population centres, but the current process encourages longevity.
    Reform of such an engrained system would take too long. It makes political expediency benefit too many people to make reform possible.

  9. #84
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Switch View Post
    I understand the geography of it, including the concentration of population centres, but the current process encourages longevity.
    Reform of such an engrained system would take too long. It makes political expediency benefit too many people to make reform possible.
    All US politicians do is fundraising.

    Which means they are totally at the behest of those who fund them.

    And of course no-one will vote against that system, because the people who pay for it won't let them.

  10. #85
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    Sorry couldn't copy NYT Banner heading the article.

    This is a New York Times article below:

    Quote Originally Posted by CalEden View Post
    68 Days of Silence: Why the White House Stayed Mum on Classified Documents

    The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.



    Advisers to President Biden calculated that the Justice Department would view possession of the documents as little more than a good-faith mistake.


    Michael D. Shear, Peter Baker and Katie Rogers


    Jan. 20, 2023

    The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.

    The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate.

    In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.

    In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Mr. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Mr. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.


    WASHINGTON — The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.

    The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate.

    In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.

    In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Mr. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Mr. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.


    Still, officials have said there was no hesitation when it came to quickly informing officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, which is responsible for securing such documents. The president’s legal responsibility was clear, and his lawyers had no intention of fighting with the archivists the way Mr. Trump and his advisers had done for months after leaving office in 2021.


    Informing the public was a different matter, with different risks. Mr. Biden had long promised that he would never politicize the Justice Department like his predecessor had done repeatedly. In recent days, White House officials have said they have resisted the urge to provide more information about the documents because they do not want to look like they are putting their thumb on the scale in an investigation centered on the president and his top aides.

    “We understand that there’s a tension between the need to be cooperative with an ongoing D.O.J. investigation, and rightful demands for additional public information,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office. “And so we’re trying to strike that balance and being as clear as we can.”

    But the result has been ugly sessions in the White House briefing room as Ms. Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, has been pummeled day after day for refusing to provide answers. All of which has led to second-guessing among Democrats and even within the West Wing. Some in the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the disciplined way that the president and his inner circle withhold information, sharing it only on a need-to-know basis in almost all cases, has hurt Mr. Biden in a situation where officials had the option to be proactive.

    The choice to keep silent for so long exacerbated the political damage when the news finally leaked out on Jan. 9. The days that followed, with a series of rolling disclosures and misstatements by the president’s public relations team, cemented the impression that Mr. Biden had not been forthcoming.




    Quiet Cooperation

    Since the Biden documents were found last fall, there has been no lack of private communication between the White House and the Justice Department.



    Starting on Nov. 10, just one day after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to look into the matter, the president’s counselors were in “regular contact,” as Mr. Bauer said in a statement, with their counterparts at the Justice Department.

    In a letter to Mr. Bauer in mid-November, a senior Justice Department official outlined next steps: They would need permission to review the documents found at the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located just minutes from the Capitol and the White House. The letter, first revealed by The Washington Post this week, also indicated the need to search other locations where similar documents might be found.

    The quiet cooperation continued for weeks, even up to the moment that Mr. Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate the matter last week. Moments before Mr. Garland spoke, Mr. Bauer called the department to inform them that another page of classified information had been found.

    It was a classic legal strategy by Mr. Biden and his top aides — cooperate fully with investigators in the hopes of giving them no reason to suspect ill intent. But it laid bare a common challenge for people working in the West Wing: The advice offered by a president’s lawyers often does not make for the best public relations strategy.

    Such tensions are common in politically charged investigations. Former President Bill Clinton’s political and communications advisers regularly lashed out at his lawyers for withholding information from them about Mr. Clinton’s relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, the former White House intern.
    Mr. Trump often begged him not to tweet about the legal cases against him, for fear of antagonizing prosecutors.

    In Mr. Biden’s case, advisers thought that the very act of publicizing the discovery of the documents would create a political furor that would make the appointment of a special counsel unavoidable. They reasoned that the discovery of documents long after leaving office was not that unusual and, as long as there was no intent to violate rules on classified papers, was generally handled without conflict, so the only thing that would create legal exposure would be drawing public attention to it.
    As Mr. Bauer later said in a statement, the lawyers worried that anything said publicly could end up being wrong after further investigation. “Regular ongoing public disclosures also pose the risk that, as further information develops, answers provided on this periodic basis may be incomplete,” he wrote last week.

    An Information Trickle

    That has proved true. Details about the documents — where they were found, what they are about, where they came from — remain elusive more than 10 days after their existence was first made public by CBS News. The White House has refused to explain why it took nearly six weeks after the initial discovery of documents to search the president’s home in Wilmington, Del., where a second batch was found on Dec. 20. And it has not said why personal lawyers for the president who do not have security clearances were the ones conducting the searches, but people close to the case said that was done with the approval of the Justice Department.

    Advisers have said there was no sense of urgency at first to search the Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes because the Secret Service guards both of them and therefore any sensitive documents that might be there would be safe. They did not think they would find any documents in either place, an assumption that turned out to be right about the beach house and wrong about the Wilmington one, where papers were found in the garage and a nearby room.


    Once the discovery of the original batch of documents was
    revealed, Ms. Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Mr. Biden’s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor, according to people familiar with the discussions. Ms. Dunn also stressed the need to underscore the differences between Mr. Biden’s cooperation with the archives and Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s defiance.


    White House officials are suspicious of the leaks that made the case public, thinking that it was meant to drive the very outcome that has taken place. But they also have concluded that the public sees Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump very differently. They say Mr. Biden draws on a decades-long reputation for integrity and honesty while Mr. Trump is seen by many as having lied frequently throughout his tenure in office.

    Still, current and former White House officials said Mr. Biden’s aides focused too much on making that comparison and not enough on ensuring that all the relevant facts were revealed all at once.

    Senior Justice Department officials were surprised the White House had not released a detailed timeline of the discovery of the caches before Mr. Garland announced Mr. Hur’s appointment last week, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

    In announcing Mr. Hur’s selection, Mr. Garland, who seldom discusses prosecutorial moves not previously disclosed in court filings, offered his own detailed timeline of the department’s involvement in the case, revealing for the first time that the second batch of classified material had been discovered by Mr. Biden’s team on Dec. 20, weeks after the first.

    That left the Justice Department in the position of appearing more transparent about the matter than the White House. For the president’s team, that brought immediate blowback as reporters pressed for more answers and Republicans accused the White House of a cover-up.


    But to Mr. Biden’s lawyers, the gamble is not over yet. If their strategy ultimately leads to the case being resolved without charges, they reason, then the short-term pain will be worth it — a bet with a lot riding on it.


    Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.



    By Michael D. Shear, Peter Baker and Katie Rogers


    Jan. 20, 2023

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    The White House on Monday pledged to “accommodate legitimate oversight interests” in response to House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R-Ky.) request for materials related to classified documents found at President Biden’s old office and Delaware home.

    White House counsel Stuart Delery wrote to Comer that the administration does not have possession of the documents the National Archives and Department of Justice (DOJ) have taken as part of the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials.

    Delery noted any cooperation with House Republican oversight requests would have to be balanced with disclosures that could affect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.

    “The Biden Administration takes seriously the security and protection of government records, particularly classified information,” Delery wrote. “We look forward to engaging in good faith with you and your staff regarding your requests. To that end, White House staff will reach out to Committee staff to arrange a time to discuss this matter.”

    __________

    If he runs, he wins

    Biden won't announce re-election plans before State of the Union

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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    All US politicians do is fundraising.

    Which means they are totally at the behest of those who fund them.

    And of course no-one will vote against that system, because the people who pay for it won't let them.
    All that you say is true,
    but given the political system that exists , I don't see how it could possible be modified to address length of process given the primary/general election system and geographical constraints. If you have some ideas I would love to hear them.
    Perhaps what needs to be addressed is campaign finance and term limits.
    Campaign finance for obvious reasons, and Term limit (two terms) for two main reasons . One is that a term limited politician would not need to raise funds for their second half of the term, thus cutting their fundraising in half. Second reason being that the value to special interest of that individual will diminish and thus their investment to it, and would instead need to concentrate on the next mark. Also diminishing the special interests' influence on the system.
    But good luck, politicians voting to limit their access to the trough, and have to go back to the general population and get a real jobs.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Buckaroo Banzai View Post
    All that you say is true,
    but given the political system that exists , I don't see how it could possible be modified to address length of process given the primary/general election system and geographical constraints. If you have some ideas I would love to hear them.
    Perhaps what needs to be addressed is campaign finance and term limits.
    Campaign finance for obvious reasons, and Term limit (two terms) for two main reasons . One is that a term limited politician would not need to raise funds for their second half of the term, thus cutting their fundraising in half. Second reason being that the value to special interest of that individual will diminish and thus their investment to it, and would instead need to concentrate on the next mark. Also diminishing the special interests' influence on the system.
    But good luck, politicians voting to limit their access to the trough, and have to go back to the general population and get a real jobs.
    It absolutely doesn't matter what suggestions you propose. As I said:

    And of course no-one will vote against that system, because the people who pay for it won't let them.

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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    It absolutely doesn't matter what suggestions you propose. As I said:

    And of course no-one will vote against that system, because the people who pay for it won't let them.
    Sad but true

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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    It's certainly given the GOP a useful poison pill against trumpgate, presumably.
    Not up to me, but Dems should shed Biden (too old, too many mistakes, didn't deliver on his campaign rhetoric) and Rep should shed Trump (sleazy idiot).
    Apart from your first sentence encouraging bad practice, we are largely in agreement for a change. Trumps exclusion requires no explanation, and there are better reasons for sidelining Biden.

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    If he runs, he wins.

    Biden working his way to a second term.


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    President Biden is expected to lean into an economic message as he and his campaign team conduct a soft launch of his reelection campaign in the coming weeks, sources familiar with his plans say.

    A strong report on the economy this week that showed the nation is adding jobs even as inflation cools is stoking confidence among Democrats that the economy can bolster Biden in 2024, after many feared it was a hindrance in the 2022 midterm message for the party.

    With the State of the Union address on Feb. 7, Biden is likely to give an upbeat tone on the economy that will roll into a campaign message that Democrats expect will highlight strong job numbers and rising wages.

    “The economy can and will be a winning issue for Biden,” said Gabriel Horowitz, senior vice president of the economic program at centrist think tank Third Way. “When you look at the top-line stats, they’re incredibly impressive. These are massive accomplishments.”

    If an expected message at the State of the Union is that this union is strong, the projected message Biden wants to tout in 2024 is that the nation is stronger under his leadership and is emerging in good shape after the coronavirus pandemic.

    “Are we better off than we were two years ago? Yes,” said Robert Wolf, a prominent Democratic fundraiser and the former chairman and CEO of UBS Americas, said of Biden’s message. “We have a strong jobs market with wages going up. And inflation has peaked and is coming down.”

    Biden is eager to claim credit for a record-breaking recovery from the COVID-19 recession — powered in part by the stimulus he and Democrats deployed soon after he took office.

    Under Biden, the U.S. economy gained 11.2 million jobs, and gross domestic product bounced back rapidly from the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The U.S. has replaced all of the jobs and GDP lost during the recession, all while a record-strong labor market lifted wages for millions of American workers. The December jobless rate of 3.5 percent is also even with the unemployment rate in February 2020, which was then the lowest in more than 50 years.

    Inflation also appears to be firmly on its way down after several months of cooling price growth.

    The annual inflation rate fell to 5 percent in December, according to personal consumption expenditures price index data released Friday, down from 5.5 percent in November and a peak of nearly 7 percent in June. That steady decline will likely let the Federal Reserve slow down its interest rate hikes, which may also give consumers relief.

    “I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is all evidence that the Biden economic plan, because of you all, is actually working,” Biden said Thursday in a speech to union workers in Springfield, Va.

  18. #93
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    ^^ . . . but it won't be Trump who will be the opponent

  19. #94
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    ^^ . . . but it won't be Trump who will be the opponent
    Way early and a bunch of what if's but for what it's worth.

    DeSantis Is Polling Well Against Trump — As Long As No One Else Runs | FiveThirtyEight

  20. #95
    Guest Member S Landreth's Avatar
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    I should say........the 23 missing electoral college votes below come from two states. Minnesota (10) and Virginia (13) which Trump lost. So, it looks like Biden will win 308 electoral college votes this time around.

    Trump (the 2024 republican presidential nominee) will be a fat loser again.




    Quote Originally Posted by S Landreth View Post

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  22. #97
    กงเกวียนกำเกวียน HuangLao's Avatar
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    And yet, nothing different for the 2024 campaigns.

    Imagine my surprise.
    The dumbing down continues on.

  23. #98
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    Quote Originally Posted by HuangLao View Post
    The dumbing down continues on.
    I thought it was successfully completed

  24. #99
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    Quote Originally Posted by Buckaroo Banzai View Post
    I thought it was successfully completed
    Give Jeff a chance, he can go lower.

  25. #100
    Guest Member S Landreth's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    but it won't be Trump who will be the opponent
    Sure it will, but if not DeSantis will be an easier opponent to defeat.

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