2017: the year we become ungovernable

Or those of us who aren’t neo-confederates, too? Or the LBGQT communities? Or Latinos? Or Jews or Catholics? Or women?

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Nah, it’s The South, eff 'em. Florida too.

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You can apply for citizenship. There’ll also be an exchange scheme to encourage undesirables to self-deport.

We may also be open to allowing Atlanta to be an enclave.

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Maybe I don’t want to move, actually. I like Atlanta. I even like being in the rest of GA, often. It’s got a nice coastline, mountains, and some nice cities, outside of the ATL. And yes, some wonderful people, too. For now, at least, it’s my home as much as it is their home.

Dividing up the country is not a workable solution, as much as it might be amusing. There are plenty of reasons that people can’t or won’t leave where they are, for “greener” pastures, including family, responsibilities, and cost of living.

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“A core component of resistance is to get the class of civil servants, particularly on the federal but also the state level, to not comply with arbitrary laws and policies that are going to be created,” said Akuno.

I’m sure Kim Davis agrees with you.

No, leave those who have taken an oath to obey the law, out of this, or they are no better than her. If you don’t like the law, fight to change it. If you don’t like the laws being written, stop voting for the idiots who write them and start recall campaigns.

The usual reply to Kim was “Obey the law or quit”, and that applies everybody.

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You know this how?

You mean besides Trump appointing people opposed to the various missions of parts of the government as their new heads?

Perhaps you mean his repeated calls to curtail the rights of Muslim Americans, including making lists of them or deporting them (to where since they are Americans)?

His promises to roll back rights for various groups or to attack his “enemies?”

So, I already know this, but you aren’t a minority (racially) or queer or a Muslim. You’re a well to do white dude who works in a gun business. No, you don’t have anything to fear (besides possible economic depression) from Trump. Other folks have a lot to fear as their civil rights get kicked back 50 years.

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It is completely different. For starters, it was TRUMP HIMSELF who brought up all the fascist crap like religious registries for Muslims and revoking the citizenship of flag-burners and whatnot. The left doesn’t have to invent fanciful conspiracy theories about the horrors Trump would unleash on America, all we have to do is take his words at face value.

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[quote]Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.[/quote]

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Splitting up the country I live in has always been a terrible idea.

Make Oregon great again I say.

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We are not at war with Russia. The Russian people are not our enemies. (If you grew up during the Cold War like I did, you might need to repeat the previous 2 sentences a few times to let them sink in.) Being friendly with the head of state of a foreign nation whom we are currently not at war with, especially one that was a historical enemy and could potentially be a dangerous future enemy if we weren’t friendly, is diplomacy, not treason. I realize you’re alluding to the claims that Russia rigged the election, but while that is indeed a very serious matter, it is not aiding and abetting an enemy.

Yes, you most certainly can. We’re a republic, not a democracy - we vote people in, on the basis that we trust them to make the right decisions, so we don’t have to vote on all the decisions ourselves. If it turns out that they are making all the wrong decisions and we don’t agree, rejecting that is not wrong. Just because we elected them doesn’t make them infallible or somehow immaculate and beyond reproach, it doesn’t make them gods. Disagreeing with elected leaders does not invalidate democracy. If anything, the fact that we can do so validates it.

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Unfortunately, that’s almost half way towards the classic Nürnberg defense - “I was just following orders”.
When a law is clearly unconstitutional or against human rights etc. it stops being a law you have to comply with.

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54 40 or fight!

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Maybe. I too was one of those saying “Trump is not Hitler” a year ago, but today I see the GOP voted to scrap the independent ethics panel that keeps an eye on congress. They currently control all three houses of government, and they could make it difficult for the Democrats to ever get back in power (echoes of Rove’s “permanent majority” idea.) Plus about half of all Americans refuse to believe anything in “the liberal media” so whoever the DEMs put forth will be pilloried as a communist, and the GOP base will treat it like gospel (while praising Putin, naturally.) I don’t expect a dictatorship, I expect an oligarchy of the super-wealthy, and it sure is shaping up that way so far.

Most Americans are in a bind-- they are trying to make ends meet, pay bills, keep meager jobs, they don’t have time to march on Washington, let alone take a day off work to march on their own state capitols.

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I totally agree with you, truly, but have to add that what made the U.S. great was the millions of people who chose to leave their communities and even their families in order to emigrate to this country. We were an ideal worth giving up everything for.

It’s the complacency of the second generation on, who in most cases don’t have that same drive, that has brought us to where we are now.

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Some are saying we’re becoming a stan. Others are saying we’re declining into caudillismo or banana republic status. I also often point out the increasing similarities to the political-economic situation of the Gilded Age here in America. Whatever you want to call it, it’s an indication that American culture has been debased to the point where our own Know-Nothings have placed corrupt and power-hungry oligarchs and their cronies into positions of power.

It’s not history repeating itself exactly (that’s just another of Max’s many straw men), it’s just history rhyming. The ugly political and economic themes that have plagued the developing world, thought by the complacent to be long buried here in the West, are now playing out once again all over Europe and N. America.

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Excellent metaphor!

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It’s not mine – it’s attributed to Mark Twain as “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

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So that makes Trump… Playdolf Shitler? Spraydolf Twitler?

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I like Playgolf Twittler.

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Trump, 2015: "[Obama] played more golf last year than Tiger Woods,” Trump said suggestively. “We don’t have time for this. We have to work.”

He added, “I love golf, I think it’s one of the greats, but I don’t have time.”

Trump, 2016: [repeatedly ditches his press pool to play golf instead of taking security briefings]

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