Canada seems sexist, making her title be "hon"

cereally though President Trump just has to get butthurt on twitter and the o2 immediately gets sucked from the room, lookin forward to 4 years of this ****ing **** crying about everything god damn this country is dumb

"I support Trump, I think."

Well, he's racist. Look at some of these racist things he's done.

"**** you. I am so sick of being called racist. I'm voting for him for sure now. Whenever a white public figure racist is called racist, I feel like the media is personally calling me a racist."

Hey, now he's appointing a white supremacist dream team.

"It's your fault. At least I'm not an *******."

I watched the US Senate for a little while once when I was a teenager, even got to see beet-red Ted Kennedy getting angry about something. It never even occurred to me to heckle it.

I watched Obama's speech from the 2004 DNC today. This is the speech that first brought him to national prominence, and I remember watching it when I was in college at the time. I remember my liberal friends at the time being really excited about him and saying they hoped he would be president someday. Since I considered the Republicans to be my team at the time, I remember being fearful of what a strong candidate he had the potential to be, but also deep down having a strong feeling of respect for him. In 2008 when most people my age voted for him, I voted for McCain even though I thought his campaign was horrible and Palin was a disaster, because the Republicans were still my team and I remembered liking McCain when he ran in 2000 and for his supposed bipartisanship. In 2012, I finally cast a vote for Obama. I no longer had a team, and I recognized that he had been a good leader for the past 4 years. Now in 2016, I spent the election wishing we could keep Obama for another term, even though I don't agree with him on everything because I recognize the leader that he is, his intelligence, and his ability to be open-minded. Over that 12 years of time my views and ideas have changed quite a bit, and my preference in candidate reflected that over time. Looking back at the 2004 DNC video, you can see that Obama has obviously changed some in the past 12 years too.

So what is it that makes for a strong politician, a strong candidate? While I believe our political discussion should focus on ideas, I will contradict that by saying it is not ideas alone that should determine your preference in a candidate. Rather, we need to look at the qualities to be a strong leader in their position, to have a high level of intelligence, to be open-minded and free thinking, to work with others in pursuit of progress and the solutions to problems we face, and to be able to take all of these qualities and communicate them clearly to the public. The problem we run into far too often is that no candidate exists that embodies these qualities, or we find one who does but they have a belief in a set of ideas that runs opposite of our beliefs.

First, we must accept that no person who we believe we agree with or is "on our team" will ever be someone who we agree with on the answer to 100% of questions in existence, and no one who we believe we disagree with or is not "on our team" will ever be someone who we agree with on the answer to 0% of questions in existence. So we ultimately need to balance the level of agreement we have with someone on ideas with the other qualities of a strong leader briefly discussed. For example, someone who we agree with on 80% of ideas, has shown qualities of being a strong leader and communicator, and has shown the ability to be open minded and work across the political spectrum is going to be a better candidate/leader than someone we agree with on 95% of ideas, but has a proven history of being close minded and uncooperative in their ways.

What makes this problematic is that often we don't have the ability to choose someone with the qualities that we should be seeking in a leader. When I voted in this election, most of the races were unopposed leaving no opportunity for a choice whatsoever. So the bigger step and what is far more difficult is that we need to put greater effort into pulling more people with the potential to be a great leader into politics at all levels. More work needs to be put into recruting and supporting these people where possible. We have to start by encouraging people in everyday life to have these open discussion of ideas and then carry that forward to being more active in the political process. Hopefully from there more natural leaders will step forward into public service and as a people we can have a greater choice in our politicians that will lead to greater results for everyone.

drain teh swamp

fight teh corruptions

mannnnnnnn

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-pois...935#.24fcx15cr

Good to see the PEOTUS has time to complain publicly about SNL. Must mean the transition is going super smooth.

The scrutiny of political candidates now ensures that the vast majority of people who would make good political leaders will never enter the fray.

5:22 AM on ****ing Day 3 and Trump is STILL tweeting about Hamilton.

http://nypost.com/2016/11/20/melania...e-white-house/

why wouldn't he? it's working, nobody is talking about anything actually significant. he probably will keep tweeting about this for four years.

This is my point from yesterday. This stuff is meaningless. Maintain focus on the real issues. These are not the battles worth fighting.

You guys are giving Trump way too much credit for being some mastermind who is doing this intentionally to carefully manipulate the public's attention

He's not. He's a petty reactionary child who woke up angry and has no self-control. However to be fair, the effect (distraction) that it has is the same.

Disagree. He is very good with this particular sphere. I strongly believe he is actively trying to cement his base by counter-propaganda and to try and influence supporters to limit their information sources to those he approves of.

His administration clearly isn't getting the memo then.



Seriously, you are giving him way too much credit. (And I'm definitely not saying that he isn't in fact dangerous, because like I said, the effect is the same)

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016...s-lecture.html

The third line was completely unnecessary, and is what will drive the outrage train for days.

They know this, of course.

Pence just straight up disagreeing with Donald on the reg is a fascinating dynamic.

My mom was outraged (of course) and said, "There's just no decorum anymore." Totally straight faced obviously.

She said Trump fans are organizing a boycott of three things: Pepsi, Starbucks, and Hamilton.

I said, "One of those isn't like the other. I doubt many Trump fans are going to see Hamilton."

No reply.

This reminds me of Dvault's "Stop pretending that Trump is some sort of next level political operator. Yes he just did the correct thing at every stage of the campaign, but that was the obvious thing to do. Just to the exact right thing every single time, easy!"

I mean he's consciously playing a character. He has been playing a character for the 40 years he has been in the public eye. That the character has many characteristics in common with a petty reactionary child isn't particularly relevant.

Trump has used this character to, against all odds, win the most important and scrutinized electoral contest in the world. Let's stop pretending that Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. Also fwiw it's actually less frightening in some ways once you accept this imo.

mr brexit stans are sticking it to starbucks by ordering coffee there and making them write "trump" as their name on the cup

that'll show em

Ya and Starbucks isn't letting them anymore so Trumpkins want to boycott them.

They mocked liberal boycotts in years past. But now it's cool.

yeah this is quality

it doesn't take a super genius to recognize that this pattern of SHINY OBJECTS kneejerk tweets has been distracting from actual issues for months now.