Cliff Varnell
-
Posts
8,627 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Store
Posts posted by Cliff Varnell
-
-
On 8/14/2020 at 4:29 PM, Chris Barnard said:
So, the use of marketing/propaganda isn't fair if your political party loses? That's very democratic of you.
You are adept at practicing amnesia, I see.
Allow me to remind you of what you wrote earlier:
Look at the news networks backing Hilary, you think the dems weren’t doing everything they could to smear Trump?
This baseless assertion is debunked by the fact that the networks clearly favored Trump — giving him billions of dollars in free air time, burying the Russian-hack and Steele Dossier stories, and harping relentlessly on Hillary’s e-mails. .Nice to see you acknowledge the fact that the networks conducted a pro-Trump marketing/propaganda campaign.
And you haven’t reverted to Obama-bashing, which was your original intent.
Good show, Chris.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 3:32 PM, Chris Barnard said:
You are way over-complicating this assuming the average voter is familiar with the political machinations of Washington DC.
Here’s exactly what the average voters were familiar with:
See the little “Russia” and “Russian” on the red side?
See the big blue E-MAIL?
Of course you do, you can’t miss it
QuoteForget some conspiracy stole the election from Hilary Clinton.
That’s not an argument. It’s an appeal for amnesia.
QuoteShe was a deplorable choice of candidate with a questionable track record. Blame the DNC, the party catastrophically failed.
So you’re done with blaming Obama.
Good.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 2:42 PM, Chris Barnard said:
It's fundamentally simple, the US public was dissatisfied after 8 years of Obama, they craved change and Trump offered it up, people voted.
But the US public wasn’t dissatisfied with Obama. He had great approval ratings. 3 million more people voted for Hillary and at least 3 million of her voters were disenfranchised.
QuoteWhat more evidence do you need than Trump being sat in the White House?
The evidence proves a rigged election. Do you endorse disenfranchising millions of voters? Or FBI interference? Or Russian meddling?
QuoteOk Cliff, so is Hilary a victim of Assange / WikiLeaks?
Of course! Here’s my list of Why Hillary Lost in order of importance:
1) GOP voter ID laws and the CrossCheck voter roll purge program spearheaded by Kris Kobach.
2) James Comey re-opening the Hillary e-mail nothingburger 11 days before the election.
3). Hillary was a deplorable candidate (nyuck nyuck).
4) Bill Clinton visiting AG Loretta Lynch for a half hour at the airport, causing her to recuse from the e-mail investigation, allowing Comey to do his dirty work.
5). Trump’s genius was to turn cable news into a reality TV show — The Donald J Trump Show starring Donald J Trump (featuring the lovely Ivanka). Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC loved the show and wanted it extended 4 more years. That’s why they buried both the Steele Dossier and the Russians-hacked-the-DNC stories...which brings us to...6). Putin and Assange. Without 1 thru 5 above the Wikileaks dump would have amounted to nothing more than a prank. It was like kids egging your house and the house falls down.
-
Just now, Robert Wheeler said:
FYI, many of us have Cliff on ignore. Whether you prefer Trump over Biden or Coors Light over Miller Light, he is going to call you Hitler.
How would Wheeler know what I write if he has me on ignore?
If people can’t handle the intellectual rough and tumble I’d call ‘em snowflakes.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 2:31 PM, Chris Barnard said:
I am not after your respect or recognition here, you're a stranger on a forum. If you are to be so partisan or tribal that you can't accept that there are two sides to this, there is not benefit of the conversation.
Chris, you have yet to present a side based on facts.
Quote
That does interest me your allegations in regard to Snowden, but, given the train of the conversation are you suggesting Hilary is the victim of that?Nope. You brought up Snowden.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 2:09 PM, Chris Barnard said:
The popular vote?!
All of the candidates know the system, they know what they need to do to get elected. They play by those rules. You can’t turn around after the event and cry that the game wasn’t fair.I’m only pointing out that “the electorate” favored Clinton, the polls were accurate.
What wasn’t kosher were the Voter purges and the interference of the FBI, Putin and Assange.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 2:02 PM, Chris Barnard said:
You’re the one losing your rag here and on the attack, not me, Cliff. Which really highlights the incapacity of many Dems to actually have a free and open discussion.
You have made a series of baseless assertions without any fact based argument. If you want respect, earn it.
QuoteIt’s very interesting you mention Assange, you may as well chuck Edward Snowden in there too for good measure.
Why? Without Snowden Obama wouldn’t have the USA Freedom Act passed.
QuoteThere is a lot of the world that thinks they were doing some good, obviously not through your looking glass though.
Atta boy! Go on the attack! See, now you have more of my respect. If you can’t throw down facts, throw shade.
Edward Snowden was a fast rising CIA agent who abruptly left a cushy assignment in Italy to go to work for an accounting firm owned by George Bush and others. When he leaked the secrets of NSA and the Five Eyes I said to myself— “I bet this has something to do with the NSA nosing around in the Bush sponsored CIA drug trade.”
6 months later it was revealed that bulk electronic communications collected by the NSA were given to the DEA, which has a file on every American.
I realized it was internecine warfare in the US intelligence community — CIA vs. DEA with the NSA caught in the crossfire.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 1:55 PM, Chris Barnard said:
On the day of the election the aggregate polls predicted Hillary would win by 3.9%.
Clinton won the popular vote by 2%.There were at least 3 million Hillary voters disenfranchised, another 2%.
The polls were balls-to -the-wall accurate.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 1:10 PM, Chris Barnard said:
This is all par for the course though, Cliff.
Disenfranchising millions of voters is “par for the course” for the GOP, sure.
The intervention of the FBI in a Presidential election is “par for the course”?
Soliciting foreign intervention in an election IS par for the course for the GOP since Nixon recruited the South Vietnamese government to turn down the 11th Hour peace deal in 1968; the Reagan campaign in 1980 solicited the Iranian government to hold on to the US Embassy hostages until Reagan was inaugurated; an Australian who owned a US network prematurely called the election for Dubya Bush in 2000 — the other networks followed suit, which allowed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to prematurely certify Bush’s victory in Florida, subsequently held up by the Supreme Court.
Then there’s Putin and Assange helping Trump in 2016. Par for the course.
QuoteCuts both ways. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
The Democrats disenfranchise GOP voters how?
The Democrats solicit foreign intervention when?
The FBI intercedes on behalf of the Democrats where?
QuoteLook at the news networks backing Hilary, you think the dems weren’t doing everything they could to smear Trump?
The news networks loved Trump! They broadcast every speech, gave him billions of dollars in free advertising.
How many times did the Russians-hack-the-DNC story make the 24-hour cable news cycle? Twice. June 14/15 and July 24/25. Nothing over the last 70 days of the election, not even when the Obama Administration on Oct. 7 publicly accused the Russians of interference — that item was buried by the Access Hollywood tape.
The New York Times devoted four times the space to Hillary’s e-mails than her policy positions.
How many times did the Steele Dossier make the cable news shows over the last two months of the campaign? ZERO.
QuoteIt’s a very dirty corrupt business to get in that White House. This is Obama’s first secretary of state pick we are talking about. The election loss for the dems was actually far more simple.
With all due respect, Chris, you don’t know wtf you’re talking about.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 12:21 PM, Chris Barnard said:
Am I alone in thinking that, Cliff? To me it looked like vast swathes of the population that voted to elect Obama were that disenfranchised and sick of his party’s governance by 2016, that they turned around voted for an unstatesman like egotist to run the country, who for all intensive purpose is the polar opposite. So really, if you’re disagreeing with me, you’re disagreeing with the electorate.Not at all. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes in the face of a multifaceted voter suppression campaign which included:
1) The disenfranchisement of millions of non-white voters thru GOP voter ID laws and voter roll purge programs.
2) The intervention of FBI Director James Comey, who re-opened the bogus Clinton e-mail investigation which turned the last 11 days of the campaign into non-stop Hillary bashing on all the cable news channels.
3) The proven collusion between the Trump campaign, Russian military intelligence, and Wikileaks in the well-timed release of the DNC and Podesta e-mails.
Was it Obama’s fault Hillary ran a poor campaign on top of all that? Or his fault that Bill Clinton visited AG Loretta Lynch which caused her to recuse herself from the Clinton e-mail investigation?
QuoteIf the public perceived him to have been a good thing, they’d have opted for a Dem in 2016 and continuity of Obama policies. Instead here we are ...
On the morning of October 28, 2016 there were 3 stories in the news cycle on CNN and MSNBC: 1) the continued controversy over the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing tape, 2) the continued controversy over Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, and 3) a new poll showing Clinton with a 10 point lead.
By early that afternoon until Election Day there was only one story on cable news — Hillary’s e-mails on the computer of a sex pervert.
-
On 8/14/2020 at 11:02 AM, Chris Barnard said:
Obama just represented continuity, especially in terms of US foreign policy. An unremarkable presidency.
So the opening to Cuba “represented continuity” — of what?
The Iran nuclear deal represented a continuity of what?
When Obama and Putin negotiated the removal of chemical weapon stockpiles from Syria whose policy was that a continuation of?
Unremarkable critiques from DiEugenio and whoever this guy is.
-
10 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:
Sandy, these are good points eh?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/politics/us-troops-afghanistan/index.html
Obama actually committed more troops to Afghanistan, about 17, 000.
That fact was never in dispute. What I took issue with was this:
Did he get us out of Afghanistan? Its pretty bad when Trump does the things that Obama should have done.
But Trump hasn’t got us out of Afghanistan!
Out of what orifice does DiEugenio pull this stuff?
10 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:Second, 2013 precedes 2014. Greenwald first started writing about Snowden in 2013
So what? That wasn’t the issue DiEugenio raised when he wrote:
In foreign policy, did Obama, on his own, stop any of the NSA surveillance programs W started?
The answer is yes, Obama pushed for the 2015 Freedom Act which ended bulk collection of electronic communication by the NSA.
10 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:This is why i see no point in reading anything Varnell writes.
Authoritarian personalities hate getting shown up.
10 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:Thanks to you I had to read this.
Also, WIlson, Ike and Truman all preceded Kennedy. There were only two of the five that came after.
-
OG Antifa...
-
1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:
As everyone knows, I am not a big fan of Harris. But its really unfair to trace her heritage back to Hamilton Brown, even if that is true.
Unlike your friends, you cannot pick your ancestors. It is fine to hold a politician responsible for actions he or she took in office. But something like that is simply a smear.
But this will not stop Tucker or Alex from using it. That is the kind of culture we live in.
Excellent clarification.👏
-
1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:
BTW, wait until Jones gets a load of this from Donald Harris, her father:
My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me).
Does history teacher James DiEugenio know how many American blacks are descendants of slave owners?
-
2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:
Dave, its not just article 2, but also the 14th amendment. Larry Tribe also answered this during the primaries.
I wonder, is Trump going to start saying this stuff too?
The NY Times just did an article about how QAnon is making headway on FB by infiltrating other groups. Plus this nutcase QAnon follower from Georgia, Greene, defeated her opponent in the GOP primary for congress.
Its crazy, QAnon is pure and utter baloney. But this is how schizoid our culture has become. Thank Alex Jones.
But what ever you do, *don’t* blame Donald Trump — right Jim?
-
11 minutes ago, Kathy Beckett said:
Jared didn't keep trump from getting elected.
The Trumpers just want something to howl about. Anything will do. The playbook is to gin up bad optics and then scream and yell incessantly. If they can get Durham to cast aspersions on Hunter Biden they can crank up the Fox News outrage machine and try to dominate the news cycle, get people talking about it.
Hillary e-mails, the classic example.
-
-
20 minutes ago, Kathy Beckett said:
But Hunter's not running.
It gives Trump’s band of Merry Fascists something to howl about.
Meanwhile...
-
36 minutes ago, Kathy Beckett said:
Biden/Harris is a Democrat dream ticket, too..
Anyone care to enlighten what the October Surprise is? For my money, it can't be any worse that ANYTHING trump has done.
The Fascists are counting on a report from John Durham damning Hunter Biden.
-
DiEugenio only quotes Krugman’s criticism of Obama but not the praise.
-
The Obama Recovery
By Paul Krugman December 28, 2014
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.
Let’s start with a tale from overseas: austerity policy in Britain. As you may know, back in 2010 Britain’s newly installed Conservative government declared that a sharp reduction in budget deficits was needed to keep Britain from turning into Greece. Over the next two years growth in the British economy, which had been recovering fairly well from the financial crisis, more or less stalled. In 2013, however, growth picked up again — and the British government claimed vindication for its policies. Was this claim justified?
No, not at all. What actually happened was that the Tories stopped tightening the screws — they didn’t reverse the austerity that had already occurred, but they effectively put a hold on further cuts. So they stopped hitting Britain in the head with that baseball bat. And sure enough, the nation started feeling better.
To claim that this bounceback vindicated austerity is silly. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University likes to point out, if rapid growth after a gratuitous slump counts as success, the government should just close down half the economy for a year; the next year’s growth would be fantastic. Or as I’d put it, you shouldn’t conclude that hitting yourself in the head is smart because it feels so good when you stop. Unfortunately, the silliness of the claim hasn’t prevented its widespread acceptance by what Mr. Wren-Lewis calls “mediamacro.”
Meanwhile, back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.
What’s the important lesson from this late Obama bounce? Mainly, I’d suggest, that everything you’ve heard about President Obama’s economic policies is wrong.
You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.
This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.
And what this bounce tells you is that the alleged faults of Obamanomics had nothing to do with the pain we were feeling. We weren’t hurting because we were sick; we were hurting because we kept hitting ourselves with that baseball bat, and we’re feeling a lot better now that we’ve stopped.
Will this improvement in our condition continue? Britain’s government has declared its intention to pick up the baseball bat again — to engage in further austerity, which does not bode well. But here the picture looks brighter. Households are in much better financial shape than they were a few years ago; there’s probably still a lot of pent-up demand, especially for housing. And falling oil prices will be good for most of the country, although some regions — especially Texas — may take a hit.
So I’m fairly optimistic about 2015, and probably beyond, as long as we avoid any more self-inflicted damage. Let’s just leave that baseball bat lying on the ground, O.K.?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/opinion/paul-krugman-the-obama-recovery.html
-
3 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:
Household incomes have resumed growing following the Great Recession
Note the periods when household incomes grew the fastest: Clinton and Obama.
-
Household incomes have resumed growing following the Great Recession
Kamala Harris and the RFK assassination
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
But that’s not what you claimed. You claimed the networks were for Hillary, when they were clearly for Trump.
You claimed that people were tired of Obama, but as Sandy showed Obama had a 59% approval rating.
You seem baffled by your own baseless assertions.
Amnesia again. You claimed pro-Clinton bias where the opposite held sway.
Now you are discussing the Trump occupation of the White House. We *were* discussing the 2016 campaign, remember?
Living happily ever after with Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.