Are we still pretending moderates and independents are a real thing?
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My Dad is a moderate conservative who dislikes Trump but will probably vote for him in 2024 over Biden after voting for Biden in 2020 and going back to a full-GOP ticket in 2022. But if they take Social Security and Medicare, theyâll lose him. Heâs retired and lives off those (and hilariously votes straight GOP).
My buddyâs father is the same way, votes third party in all presidentials, conservative everywhere else, says theyâll never cut Medicare and Social Security cause theyâre not crazy.
tldr; there are a lot of stupid people
Ok is this shit about Buttigieg somehow being at fault for this train derailment legit? Or is this more severe butthurt about the 2020 primary election? Because Iâm super reticent to take some of the more liberal people I follow on twitter seriously about him after what happened with their reactions for his kid stuff.
I suppose if you wanted to you could blame him for the track maintenance on that section of rail if that turns out to be the culprit, but Iâd start with whoever owned the track first. It will probably turn out that there isnât money in his budget to enforce maintenance standards because Congress kept cutting it back relying on industry to âpolice itselfâŚâ
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Obama admin put in new rule to go into full effect by 2021 regarding breaking power in hazardous chemical trains.
Shithead admin took it off the books in 2017.
Train lobby has been hugely successful getting safety stuff defeated.
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Going to Ukraine on President Day. Uncle Joe still has it
Extremely stupid question: how has Putin not killed Zelensky yet? Isnât Biden being there a massive security issue?
I think early on there were assassination schemes that cia warned Zelensky about to protect him but had even gotten to point of Russians battling his security at governmental building and Zelensky and aides were holed up with assault rifles. But I have to wonder now if Putin now thinks would make west intervene? Pretty sure Ukraine canât defend against the hypersonic missiles much so if they wanted to kill Zelensky now seems they would be shooting bunch of those at him?
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Here is the anecdote I remember from Time. Crazy
â-
As night fell that first evening, gunfights broke out around the government quarter. Guards inside the compound shut the lights and brought bulletproof vests and assault rifles for Zelensky and about a dozen of his aides. Only a few of them knew how to handle the weapons. One was Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of Ukraineâs military intelligence service. âIt was an absolute madhouse,â he told me. âAutomatics for everyone.â Russian troops, he says, made two attempts to storm the compound. Zelensky later told me that his wife and children were still there at the time.
putinâs assassin squads a year ago couldnât get to kyiv center. although if they did they would still have to go through more lines of defense. putin initially hesitated to launch missiles at the capital, and itâs still unlikely they could have killed zelensky like that, as there are warning systems and escape routes and bunkers. when the rocket waves started, kyiv got a modern tiered missile defense system and the odds of killing zelensky got even longer.
i think biden adm is very professional about this sort of thing. they probably have even more advance warnings, and multiple plans of how to get out of ukraine if a shell was fired in that direction.
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ukrainian system is described as being excellent at stopping sub-sonic missiles, and has the theoretical capability to intercept supersonic ballistic vehicles, but in practice it probably stopped approximately zero of those. it is likely hypersonic weapons would not be intercepted, but luckily they are a potemkin village like everything else. it is not the new modern silver bullet as touted by putin. the design for it is still late cold war era. the rocket production is in small quantities, and questions remain about how accurate it really is. it is not a weapon deployable to the same degree as the Iskander missiles. it doesnât reach hyper speeds unless it is fired from an aircraft traveling in transsonic range. i believe a sukhoi or mig can only carry one Kinzhal. so itâs somewhat hard to fire a whole wave of hypersonic missiles at the moment.
this might be true, there were firefights around the city, but i donât know if they happened outside the presidentâs compound at the time. Rada was extra protected as well, and i believe none of the special ops reached there.
Investigating: NTSB (not DOT)
Cleanup: EPA (not DOT)
Regulation-making: Congress (also not DOT!)
Regulation-enforcing: DOT
So the blaming Pete is all sour grapes about 2020. When oneâs taking points are the same as Tucker Carlsonâs, it might be time examine oneâs motives.
To expand on the other answers youâve gotten a little bit: itâs actually insanely hard to kill someone who is both popular AND fully protected by the security state. The best shot to kill him was when hostilities commenced and they absolutely tried hard to do that⌠but once that failed they probably had blown most of the options they had to get it done in the first big attempt, and after that it becomes incredibly difficult.
One of the major problems is that the kind of people who could theoretically pull it off probably see it as a suicide mission and theyâre generally people with stuff to lose. I know that movies and TV shows portray assassins as super heroes, but in real life theyâre just a guy with a gun/bomb/poison and 95% of the challenge is getting to the target and then getting out alive afterward. You donât find the motivation to become great at being an assassin because you have no personal goals or anything to live for. Thereâs no price someone with stuff to live for is going to take to go 100% get killed.
And yeah I know you can threaten their families and make them go on the suicide mission⌠but thatâs probably not going to work for a variety of reasons.
Yeah plus the GOP are the ones who allowed this to happen by relaxing those same regulations.
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yeah, and the other factor is that putinâs security apparatus couldnât even poison an unsuspecting person without revealing itself so obviously and so immediately. TWICE! at this point putin probably shouldnât trust them to put down a dog.
Mayo Pete still doesnât seem to think putting those regulations back is a priority
The railroads are in a very good position to ruin his career and he doesnât want to fight them. I wish I was kidding.
The reason the trucking industry was intentionally broken up (seriously there are 100k+ trucking companies active on any given day) was because of how toxic it got to have anyone with any semblance of control over trucking. Thatâs a lot harder to do with railroads unfortunately.