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Post Election Thread: Democracy Dies In Darkness And You Can Help


T___A

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Took over 2 weeks of my spare time to get through this thread, but it was worth it :) fun read. 

 

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Also, the entire legislative, executive, and judiciary branches (along with the FBI/NSA/other alphabet soup agencies) need a good purging; its been to long. 

Spoiler

Image result for stalin

 

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1 hour ago, Lord_James said:

Took over 2 weeks of my spare time to get through this thread, but it was worth it :) fun read. 

We all tracked your progress via the likes you were giving us.

 

56 minutes ago, Belesarius said:

 

The state department is mostly independent of Trump at this point in time.

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5 minutes ago, T___A said:

We all tracked your progress via the likes you were giving us.

 

 

The state department is mostly independent of Trump at this point in time.

 

Considering that the State Department is part of the Executive Branch, and Trump is the head of the Executive Branch, I find this argument to be somewhat unconvincing.  

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8 minutes ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

Considering that the State Department is part of the Executive Branch, and Trump is the head of the Executive Branch, I find this argument to be somewhat unconvincing.  

 

The State department is covered by the Pendleton Service Act. Most of its employees cannot be hired and fired at will; this creates an entrenched bureaucracy that mostly does what it wants and sometimes has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the will of the Executive.

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1 hour ago, T___A said:

 

The State department is covered by the Pendleton Service Act. Most of its employees cannot be hired and fired at will; this creates an entrenched bureaucracy that mostly does what it wants and sometimes has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the will of the Executive.

 

Either Trump is in charge, or he isn't.  To quote Harry Truman...

 

16-truman.w710.h473.jpg

 

Anyhow, I have a hard time imagining that issues pertaining to UN resolutions are left to people below the "serve at the pleasure of the President" level.  

 

Also, the NYT's article notes that "The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding."  If foreign diplomats are noting that this marks a change in policy, then it is clearly a directive from the Trump administration and not some lasting legacy from the previous administration.

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23 minutes ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

Either Trump is in charge, or he isn't. 

 

What?  No, that's a ridiculous oversimplification.  Real power structures are filled with ambiguity, intrigue, and realities that don't line up with paper org structures.

So, sure, on paper the President is in charge of the Executive Branch and therefore everyone in the US Department of State should click their heels and do exactly what he says all the time because that's what the org chart says.  

Meanwhile, in the real world, it hasn't worked that way since 1883.  Or maybe even 1867.

Ask yourself this; if the President has absolute power over all Executive departments, then why hasn't Trump fired absolutely everyone and replaced them all with his toadies?  The US government did work that way at one point.  It was a terrible way for the government to work because every election cycle that a new party took power, every government employee was replaced with some toady of the new president.  So the Republican Party changed it in 1883 to make the vast majority of Executive departmental workers untouchable by politicians with the conspicuous exception of the cabinet-level heads of the departments, who are a vestigial remnant of the old spoils system.

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10 hours ago, Collimatrix said:

 

What?  No, that's a ridiculous oversimplification.  Real power structures are filled with ambiguity, intrigue, and realities that don't line up with paper org structures.

So, sure, on paper the President is in charge of the Executive Branch and therefore everyone in the US Department of State should click their heels and do exactly what he says all the time because that's what the org chart says.  

Meanwhile, in the real world, it hasn't worked that way since 1883.  Or maybe even 1867.

Ask yourself this; if the President has absolute power over all Executive departments, then why hasn't Trump fired absolutely everyone and replaced them all with his toadies?  The US government did work that way at one point.  It was a terrible way for the government to work because every election cycle that a new party took power, every government employee was replaced with some toady of the new president.  So the Republican Party changed it in 1883 to make the vast majority of Executive departmental workers untouchable by politicians with the conspicuous exception of the cabinet-level heads of the departments, who are a vestigial remnant of the old spoils system.

 

So you are trying to say that a UN delegation made up of State Department and Health and Human resources representatives suddenly shifted policy completely on their own with no input from the President or his appointed Cabinet heads?  By that logic, nothing is Trump's fault if you don't want it to be.  Just blame it all on "deep state."

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1 hour ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

So you are trying to say that a UN delegation made up of State Department and Health and Human resources representatives suddenly shifted policy completely on their own with no input from the President or his appointed Cabinet heads?  By that logic, nothing is Trump's fault if you don't want it to be.  Just blame it all on "deep state."

 

That sounds pretty disingenuous to me.

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2 hours ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

So you are trying to say that a UN delegation made up of State Department and Health and Human resources representatives suddenly shifted policy completely on their own with no input from the President or his appointed Cabinet heads?  By that logic, nothing is Trump's fault if you don't want it to be.  Just blame it all on "deep state."

 

Just because they changed their minds doesn’t mean they were forced to. Perhaps they agree with Trump and were looking for an opportunity to change their policies. Of course, papa Trump could have “influenced” or “inspired” them to change, but you can’t rule out that this might have been voluntary. 

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44 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

 

Just because they changed their minds doesn’t mean they were forced to. Perhaps they agree with Trump and were looking for an opportunity to change their policies. Of course, papa Trump could have “influenced” or “inspired” them to change, but you can’t rule out that this might have been voluntary. 

 

A public health organization don't just "happen" to change their mind on a topic where there is a worldwide consensus.

Breastfeeding is better for both the infant and the mother's health, pretty much everybody agree on this.

 

This is on the same level of stupidity than his tweet on climate change being a Chinese conspiracy

 

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/265895292191248385

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2 hours ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

So you are trying to say that a UN delegation made up of State Department and Health and Human resources representatives suddenly shifted policy completely on their own with no input from the President or his appointed Cabinet heads?  By that logic, nothing is Trump's fault if you don't want it to be.  Just blame it all on "deep state."

 

Yes!  What's so hard to believe about this?  Ever since 1883 the President can only fire the Secretary of State, the rest of the employees of that department are practically untouchable to him.  In fact, it's very difficult for government employees to be fired even by their own departments.  The end result of that is State employees are free to ignore the President.  The only thing keeping this from being obvious is a certain desire to present a veneer of professional normalcy.  The President and the State Department will attempt to make it look like they agree and that they're part of a team even when that isn't true.  Usually this involves the newly-elected President conceding most of their campaign promises.  Remember how G.W. Bush promised a "more humble" foreign policy?  Remember how Obama was going to close Guantanamo Bay?

 

Trump is different because he is willing to feud with the State Department.  And he does.  This is particularly well-documented.

Trump has been trying to get control over the State Department ever since he had Tillerson in charge.  Note the panic and over-reaction.  It's a bloodbath!  Oh the humanity!  Wait, how many employees did Tillerson actually fire?

 

Quote

 

Four top officials were cleared out of the building at the end of January.

 

...

More recently, State Department officials got caught planning to host an event that would have undermined Trump's Cuba policy.  The result?  The event was "postponed."
 

These sorts of reprisals by Trump and his goons seem utterly inconsequential to State, which employs something like 70K people.  And, in an absolute sense, they are.  But what makes Trump different is that he is willing to push back at all.  This is not business as usual.

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14 hours ago, T___A said:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/trump-picks-brett-kavanaugh-for-supreme-court.html

 

He was a clerk for Kennedy which I suspect clinched it. 

 

According to one story, Kennedy actually negotiated with Trump to get his former clerck named as the nominee.  No idea if the story is true of course.

 

https://www.alternet.org/bombshell-supreme-court-justice-anthony-kennedy-agreed-retire-if-trump-promised-replace-him-brett

 

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18 hours ago, Collimatrix said:

 

  Remember how G.W. Bush promised a "more humble" foreign policy?  Remember how Obama was going to close Guantanamo Bay?

 

 

Colli, these are what we call "lies."  Politicians make them all the time to appeal to their base for the sake of winning election.  Do you really think W was all like "I want a humble foreign policy" and the state department was like, "NO!, you must invade the axis of evil!"  Or perhaps W got his dander up after that whole 9/11 thing and then listened too much to the likes of Dick Cheney and John Bolton.  As to Obama and Guantanamo Bay, he made lots of promises to his progressive base back in 2008.  And once he was in office, he showed that he was a pretty typical politician in that he shit-canned most of his promises if they appeared to be too costly politically. 

 

I do not doubt that the State Department is a giant bureaucracy that has a very great deal of institutional inertia built into it.  Which actually proves my point in regards to this whole UN delegation on breastfeeding.  If policy under the previous administration was to vote in favor of the resolution, then it stands to reason that the bureaucratic inertia would continue on in that direction.  The fact that an abrupt change in policy was made would indicate that those in charge of the institution decided to change course.  And since I haven't seen any statements from the current administration denouncing their own delegation to the UN for voting in this manner, I am going to, like a rational person, assume that the current administration is cool with this idiotic stance against breast feeding.  

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22 minutes ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

According to one story, Kennedy actually negotiated with Trump to get his former clerck named as the nominee.  No idea if the story is true of course.

 

https://www.alternet.org/bombshell-supreme-court-justice-anthony-kennedy-agreed-retire-if-trump-promised-replace-him-brett

 

 

I wouldn't be surprized if this was true and was the norm.

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