And So It Begins!!

[Hope6]

I'm just sick at all the stuff that's been going on under this administration it's just to much to keep up with but the mess that was made of the withdrawal from Afghanistan blows my mind. Honestly I don't have the words to express my horror at the road my country is going down with this president, all I know is if this was president Trump they would be trying to impeach him already.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... my/619764/

Trump had already set the date for the Withdrawal (although I very much doubt he would have gone through with it, knowing his record of telling the truth). All Biden has done has been to keep to that commitment. I do, however, feel the Evacuation was poorly administered.
What is ironic now is that America doesn't want responsibility for any of the Refugees.

I think Biden should have changed that date, he is President, and I would have made sure all the American citizens and the Afghans who helped us were out then I would pull the troops out.

Well, he DID change the date. Trump set a date of May 31, 2021. Biden was forced to extend the date until August.

And, FourPart, We are accepting a lot of the refugees, but we certainly haven't room for 30 million of them.

And, yes, I know, we should have never gone there to begin with.

I think us going there kept us from having another attack here. Now I'll always be wondering when the next attack will be coming.

[spot]

The civilians I'm talking about are those people who worked closely with the military as translators and guides and that sort of thing, who we promised not to leave behind as well as any Americans citizens who were living there.

Of those in your category who had authentic US visas, 98% were evacuated. I expect this figure will be recognized by the Washington committees when they come to conclusions.

There are also 100-200 people with US passports, a different group who didn't need to apply for visas, who want to leave Afghanistan. There are also more dual-nationals with both US and Afghan passports who chose to stay in Afghanistan for family reasons.

Several thousand, perhaps 5000-6000 close-workers, failed to get US visas, either because their visa applications were rejected or they ran out of time. Some of those are still trying to leave the country on foot without assistance or full paperwork. My impression is that they didn't work for the US military or a US government agency, they worked for contract companies in Afghanistan, and their visa process was a lot harsher. That's the same situation for UK contract companies. Each government decided it had no liability toward them. Contractors' sniffer dogs weren't evacuated either, mainly because it proved so difficult to get any country to permit them to land by private charter flight. All US military dogs were taken out of the country on military transports.

So, you have around 125,000 non-military people successfully evacuated and no US military citizens left behind of whom I'm aware.

Can we agree that this is all true as far as either of us knows, or do we start out with alternative facts that need reconciling?

[spot]

I think us going there kept us from having another attack here. Now I'll always be wondering when the next attack will be coming.

You just saw fourteen thousand American deaths this week to Covid-19 and that's going to continue for years, but you worry instead about another Al Qaeda attack?

Why??

Why on earth is another Al Qaeda attack anything other than a criminal matter? You have intelligence agencies to handle that sort of thing. Why would you want the armed forces involved? It's a policing issue, it relates to arrestable offenses. Whenever your armed forces kill people they make your security problem worse.

America spent 650 million dollars a day, week in week out for twenty years, on those stupid little backwater wars in Asia. That's $15,000 for every man, every woman and every child in America. In exchange America lost credibility, dignity and respect every day, week in week out for twenty years. You paid to belittle yourselves, which was an unfortunate choice. It was a kneejerk brainless choice. You allowed a hundred powerless criminals to trick you into making that kneejerk brainless choice. It's shameful that your decision makers are so incompetent, and I exclude none of them.

[LarsMac]

I think us going there kept us from having another attack here. Now I'll always be wondering when the next attack will be coming.

You just saw fourteen thousand American deaths this week to Covid-19 and that's going to continue for years, but you worry instead about another Al Qaeda attack?

Why??

Why on earth is another Al Qaeda attack anything other than a criminal matter? You have intelligence agencies to handle that sort of thing. Why would you want the armed forces involved? It's a policing issue, it relates to arrestable offenses. Whenever your armed forces kill people they make your security problem worse.

America spent 650 million dollars a day, week in week out for twenty years, on those stupid little backwater wars in Asia. That's $15,000 for every man, every woman and every child in America. In exchange America lost credibility, dignity and respect every day, week in week out for twenty years. You paid to belittle yourselves, which was an unfortunate choice. It was a kneejerk brainless choice. You allowed a hundred powerless criminals to trick you into making that kneejerk brainless choice. It's shameful that your decision makers are so incompetent, and I exclude none of them.

And there you have it. The average American Right-wing mindset in a nutshell.

[Bryn Mawr]

I think us going there kept us from having another attack here. Now I'll always be wondering when the next attack will be coming.

Sorry but I totally disagree.

At the point at which you invaded America had the moral high ground, the invasion threw that away. Not only that but it caused a backlash that grew the terrorist forces a thousand percent and made further terrorist action far more likely.

[FourPart]

I think us going there kept us from having another attack here. Now I'll always be wondering when the next attack will be coming.

Sorry but I totally disagree.

At the point at which you invaded America had the moral high ground, the invasion threw that away. Not only that but it caused a backlash that grew the terrorist forces a thousand percent and made further terrorist action far more likely.

I f anything it would be the other way round. If they want to maintain their despotic regime in Afghanistan, the last thing they want is to incite the Americans into sending their troops back in by giving them an excuse to do so.

[spot]

I f anything it would be the other way round. If they want to maintain their despotic regime in Afghanistan, the last thing they want is to incite the Americans into sending their troops back in by giving them an excuse to do so.

No.

Let's switch this about a bit. I'm tired of all this mud-slinging at what are decent, reasonable and religiously observant patriots who have been resisting a murderous better-armed foreign occupation for the last two decades.

What Afghanistan - not just the Taliban component of Afghanistan, but the whole of Afghanistan - has is a different culture to Western societies. They've had it for a thousand years. The idea that American culture is superior to Afghan culture is nauseating foolishness. I'd start with bloody Disneyland, Hollywood, the obscene wealth gap between rich and poor, the all-pervading racism, the legal system, the penal system, the weapons obsession, the spectacular degree of selfishness and smug unjustifiable self-congratulation, the avoidance of self-criticism, I'd go on at length except I don't need to. Not one aspect of American life is better than Afghan life, it's just different. Given the choice of living in America or living in Afghanistan, most Afghans would think you were mad. Of course they'd prefer to stay living in Afghanistan.

All that this ridiculous exercise of naked power has achieved - the foreign occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2021 - is to confirm all these ideas in the minds of the Afghan people. Most Afghan people are more repelled now by Americans than they were when it started, and with good cause. So am I if it comes to that. And the idea that any American government is going to send another army of occupation into any other country on earth during the rest of your lifetime is equally nonsensical. That inability to field another army of occupation is what the patriotic self-sacrifice of the Taliban has achieved by making America, and particularly its army, a laughing stock worldwide. The only way America is going to send forces abroad again is if they send an army of military robots and even then I doubt it would succeed. What the Afghan and Iraq occupations demonstrated is that America and Britain can't field American and British troops any longer, because American and British troops have become too valuable to risk near any front line.

What you need is to be able to see both sides of an argument like I do. I'm quite happy to applaud America's achievements when the discussion isn't so blatantly prejudiced in their direction as that last post was. Of course America isn't going to re-invade Afghanistan or Iraq, and neither are we British going to either. We had no mandate, we have no mandate, we never will have such a mandate. It's about time America and Britain were ejected from the United Nations too instead of dominating it with Security Council vetos, we cause too much damage to the world.

[Hope6]

I feel so bad for the women there. There are girls who have been born in the last 20 years that have not experienced the way things used to be and now they are being forced into arranged marriages with strangers. The Afghan woman had been able to have jobs, drive cars, go to school, go out of their house without a male escort but all that is gone now.

[Hope6]

On to another subject. Biden's approval rating dropping like a rock!

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/critica ... d=80290520

[spot]

On to another subject. Biden's approval rating dropping like a rock!

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/critica ... d=80290520

That's neither surprising nor a matter of concern, he should never have run in the primaries much less become President. We could have had someone interesting like Bernie Sanders instead. I admire President Biden as little as you do.

Last month, just 43% of survey respondents approved of how he was doing his job and a majority — 51% — disapproved. Since then, Biden has gained back some of that, drawing to about even, with 45% approving and 46% disapproving.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/10416028 ... poll-finds

That's today's news article.

For comparison, President Trump's day by day approval for his four years presidency is shown at https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/pre ... trump.aspx - he never once reached as high as 50%. The days when Trump reached even 46% were pitifully few. Take a look. Check the graph.

President Trump 2017-2021 term average: 41%

Nasty slack little stinker.

[FourPart]

On to another subject. Biden's approval rating dropping like a rock!

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/critica ... d=80290520

That's neither surprising nor a matter of concern, he should never have run in the primaries much less become President. We could have had someone interesting like Bernie Sanders instead. I admire President Biden as little as you do.

Last month, just 43% of survey respondents approved of how he was doing his job and a majority — 51% — disapproved. Since then, Biden has gained back some of that, drawing to about even, with 45% approving and 46% disapproving.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/10416028 ... poll-finds

That's today's news article.

For comparison, President Trump's day by day approval for his four years presidency is shown at https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/pre ... trump.aspx - he never once reached as high as 50%. The days when Trump reached even 46% were pitifully few. Take a look. Check the graph.

President Trump 2017-2021 term average: 41%

Nasty slack little stinker.

I think the Biden link there is also quite telling. It shows Trump's ratings to be the worst in history.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329384/pre ... biden.aspx

[spot]

I think the Biden link there is also quite telling. It shows Trump's ratings to be the worst in history.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329384/pre ... biden.aspx

Trump's ratings being the worst in history doesn't make his Presidential decisions worse, it just means he was less popular during his term than Biden is at the moment.

The group being polled isn't the world population, the group is entirely American. Americans in general aren't isolationist. President Trump was entirely and consistently isolationist, hence his low ratings among Americans.

I would tend to vote for people that most of the American electorate has nightmares about but that's just my way, and in the case of a Presidential election that would obviously be the nasty slack little isolationist stinker with the risible orange fluff-cushion on his head. Because he's an isolationist.

It says a lot about Americans that the only Democrat he could have beaten in 2016 was female. Most American voters are still glued to their prejudices.

[Hope6]

And now they want to make banks report any activity on our bank accounts to the IRS if it's $600.00 or more. What the heck is going on here!


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/busi ... ounts.html

[LarsMac]

And now they want to make banks report any activity on our bank accounts to the IRS if it's $600.00 or more. What the heck is going on here!


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/busi ... ounts.html

I've been following that, a bit.
From what I can see, it really isn't relevant to the average consumer.
As hard as the big banks are pushing, and rattling cages over this, I suspect it's not making the big money folks happy, at all. IF Wells Fargo doesn't like it, it's probably not a really bad thing.

[spot]

I'd ask myself a couple of questions.

Who loses? Not the account holders, it's completely transparent, they don't have to do a thing.

Who wins? The public purse, by deterring fraudulent tax returns.

As for the banks claiming "This would require a massive amount of infrastructure", that's clearly bogus. Of course it wouldn't.

And even if it were fully implemented it would bring in trivial extra government revenue, I've no idea why the IRS would bother. At best it's $50bn a year which is loose change.

[LarsMac]

The bill is over all, a good plan. This one item is the choke point. If the banks can convince enough people that it is bad, because of one line maybe they can avoid it's passing.
But the one line could simply be edited to change the minimum transaction value

[Hope6]

All these bills Biden is trying to get through Congress sound horrible to me. I don't want a electric car! We already have got businesses closing down or shortening their hours because they can't find anyone who wants to work because they are getting to much money given to them. All these bills want to do is give even more stuff. How is a country supposed to function if everybody is sitting at home drawing money and doing nothing?

[spot]

How is a country supposed to function if nobody can afford to buy its produce? Having lots of poor people doesn't lead to a strong economy, it leads to a third world economy.

[Betty Boop]

All these bills Biden is trying to get through Congress sound horrible to me. I don't want a electric car! We already have got businesses closing down or shortening their hours because they can't find anyone who wants to work because they are getting to much money given to them. All these bills want to do is give even more stuff. How is a country supposed to function if everybody is sitting at home drawing money and doing nothing?

When everything is so overpriced from housing, food, heating, cars and with low wages and when work contracts/employee rights are so bad, that's when you get people sat at home on their backsides living the life of riley Hope.
When a 40 hour week doesn't cover your basic housing needs, when you have to choose between paying the rent/mortgage or feeding the kids, when you have to choose between fuel to put in the car to get to work or fuel to heat the house.
Do you know those people are so happy to not have a job, to not have any self respect, to have no other option but to sit at home drawing money and feeling like a piece of shite with no self worth and all the while knowing that people like you look down upon them like that.
Our countries are broken, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. (It was broken when trumpet was in power too, its not something you can conveniently blame on Biden)

[spot]

And - perhaps a minor point - the military keeps on spending.

Canada's in the same place, for defensive purposes, as America?

How about a simple one-line bill that American military and intelligence spending is capped at whatever Canada spent the previous year. Plus five percent for contingencies? That might help reduce taxes, you never know.

Of course, you'd have to explain to your military that it's been reconfigured to actually genuinely just defend instead of straddling the planet waving its colossal equipment at everyone.

[FourPart]

The revised level appears to be $10,000 in any given year and, contrary to anything Fox might be telling you, this doesn't relate to ALL Transactions, but limited to Foreign Deposits & Transfers to Accounts with the same name, as these are indicative of Money Laundering. It would, of course, also mean that it would make it more difficult for anyone to cheat on their Taxes & not pay their fair share. Furthermore, Salary & Wage Transactions are not included in those monitored.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-bank-a ... 0-dollars/