The New and Improved Sam Spade Good Post Gallery.

[Santander]

Well, if old Sam Spade thread was locked, then wouldn't it be better to use Virginia thread, that already had some more content?

It wasn't locked for any reason that has to do with the ToS.....just someone having a lil tantrum.

[Santander]

The Clintons have done plenty of make the Democratic party be an absolute cesspool in 2016. Democrats need to talk about the issues that affect people: jobs, healthcare, the environment, and not pretending to give a rats ass about some identity group when the same terrible Clintons scored political points bashing those groups in the 1990s. Their divide and conquer identity politics needs to die.

Damn, jfern is good.

[Santander]

If the KKK has nothing to do with Christianity, could you also say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam? Could you say that NK has nothing to do with atheism? I think that you get my point.

The KKK are Christian terrorists, but Neo-Nazis generally aren't Christians and misc. alt righters religious views are varied.

Trying to create an equivalency between violence perpetrated by Muslims and violence perpetrated by Christians is dicey because, for reasons not necessarily related to the religions themselves, weaponized Christianity has generally been used as a means to other ends, whereas weaponized Islam has almost always been carried out for Islam's sake.

Maybe if Jesus - like Mohammed - had been a military leader who created an empire and forcibly converted all in his path, that would have been different. But he wasn't. There was never a "Christian empire." Even things like the Inquisition were more about earthly monarchs wanting to consolidate power. When Europeans engaged in imperial conquest, they sometimes said they were doing so "for God" but in practice, they were far more interested in getting land, natural resources and forced labor.

When right-wingers use Christianity as a weapon, it's because they view Christianity as just one of many things that make "the Volk" what it is. When Orthodox Serbs slaughtered Muslim Bosniaks, they weren't doing so "in the name of Christ." They were doing so because they were Serbs, and being Christian was merely a part of what made Serbs, Serbs (and being Muslim was merely part of why Bosniaks could never be Serbs and never be permitted to exist in their nation-state).

Christians do not feel any particular "kinship" with Christians as a whole, in the way that Muslims do with the "ummah" - the community of believers. A white Southern Baptist could care less about Christians getting killed or persecuted in Nigeria or Iraq. Those Christians aren't "their people" (Western white people) so it doesn't bother them.

[Santander]

Yeah, I don't have the attention span for that, lol.

[Santander]

That post doesn't belong in this thread named after the utter creep that it is that is properly only used by fellow sexist creep Grumps most of the time instead of the proper thread that Grumps can't handle due to being named after a woman.

I use it too. Plead guilty on the sexist creep part, though.

[Santander]

That post doesn't belong in this thread named after the utter creep that it is that is properly only used by fellow sexist creep Grumps most of the time instead of the proper thread that Grumps can't handle due to being named after a woman.

I use it too. Plead guilty on the sexist creep part, though.

Will I become BRTD's next obsession?  WooHoo!

For once he'd be obsessed with a poster who is of voting age.

[Santander]

I think all of us who supported Sam Spade from the leftist assaults have now been vindicated.

[Santander]

Badger, RINO Tom, PNM, TheSaint250, Santander, Mortimer

Excuse me, but I'm probably more ideologically in line with more of the GOP's policy stances (abortion, death penalty, quasi-stricter immigration) than any of these other delusional RINOs, even if I'm the only one who is not lying to myself in that I should not be a Republican.

Perhaps, yet the others maintain a pretense of support for the GOP insomuch as they want to fix its problems and improve it, whereas your signature appears to flaunt a wish for its destruction and disingenuous primary voting.

The GOP is beyond repair, and thankfully it appears you are self-aware enough to realize that, as evidenced by your "Conservative" (or is it "Constitution"?) party avatar.

So yes, I am actively rooting for the party's demise. We need a healthy alternative to the Democratic Party. Not a party for resentful degenerates who pride themselves on ignorance and being the "true Americans" party while unironically flying the Confederate flag on their vehicles.

Until then, I will vote for Democrats in every single general election and for the most unelectable Republican in the primary. It's not like there's much of a difference between someone like Joe Arpaio and Martha McSally anyhow from a policy standpoint.

[Santander]

Mitt Romney is exactly the kind of woke conservative we need today in Washington, to bridge the divide between people of all backgrounds and political ideologies.  Indeed, by standing up to our divisive president on some occasions, Governor Romney demonstrated a kind of political courage unmatched by most other politicians in this current age of spite and polarization, and in doing so, fully embodied Michelle Obama's message of, "When they go low, we go high."  And, his commitment to getting stuff done is lit AF!

Welcome to the Resistance, Mitt.  This new era of love and tolerance, toward ALL Americans, begins with you. #inspiring #lovetrumpshate #unity #straightbutnotnarrow #alllivesmatter #makeamericawholeagain #nolabels #diversity #inclusivity

Wrong thread.

[Santander]

Ah yes, I’m sure this is the party of Lincoln that RINO Tom likes to remind us of!

Though credit where it’s due to ChairmanSanchez for being the only Republican to face the music in this thread, no matter how much his posts make one want to vomit.

[Santander]

A kind of caricature of the "fiscally conservative socially liberal" politician whose supporters think slashing public employees' pension funds and enacting taxpayer funding for abortion makes someone "moderate". HP.

[Santander]

Your last president's first action after leaving office was to sign a $65 million book deal. He's now working on an online television series. The last Democratic nominee, in concert with the previous Democratic president, used their decades of "public service" to build a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions.

Stein's grifting off of the desperation of #resistance libs who couldn't accept HRC's loss is trivial by the standards of American politics. It's also hilarious.

[Santander]

Germany has arguably dealt with its past in an unhealthy way, not only doing away with the Nazi history (rightly so) but also with the pre-Nazi history which definitely included good things as well. The response to this should be to move towards a more healthy view of history, respecting the good things in the past and building on them while clearly disavowing the bad things. But it appears as if many Germans are still not ready to do so. The trivialization of Nazism and Nazi crimes is just as unhealthy a response to Germany's past as Merkels' "refugees welcome". The latter may be more harmful to Germany, but the former is arguably more tasteless and vile.

AfD are truly a case where the inmates have taken over the asylum. Very sad, because Germany really needs a party like them.

[Santander]

Why on Earth are people still using this garbage thread named after a racist troll that was started by a mysoginistic moron poster only because he was angry about the current thread being named after a woman?

Well, just name the thread after me and all those problems will be solved.

[Santander]

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of the worst laws passed in this country within our lifetimes. It is historically bad.

If you took away the Medicaid expansion, it would be even worse. But even that was botched as a consequence of how poorly this abomination was written.

Consider the consequences of this legislation, now with almost a decade of hindsight: It did not reduce health care costs, it did not improve health outcomes, it did not make health care more accessible, and it has been a political catastrophe.

The best that can be said of it: Preventing at least some medical bankruptcies, delaying a few dozen hospital closures, and (arguably) reducing cost growth for about five years.

Oh, there's also been a massive amount of make-work employment in health care administration, if you're an unreformed New Dealer and into that sort of thing.  I would have preferred a new Civilian Conservation Corps to a bunch of electronic medical record systems that doctors and patients hate, but that's just me.

But that's not what we were promised. Listen to Obama's promises in 2008: Universal coverage, lower costs, "if you like your plan, you can keep it." Listen to any Democrat from that period. This has not been worth the costs. It is only the demands of partisan orthodoxy, and the sheer derangement of the opposition, that lead so many to insist that it has been.

One final thought: It has become fashionable among both the policy-illiterate left and the conspiracy-obsessed right to call the ACA a "gateway to single payer." Even some of the technocrats and centrists behind the law, eager to keep up with changing political moods and conceal their obvious failure, have hinted at this.

Whatever health care system you prefer, this is nonsense. No one passed this law thinking that it would lead us toward a single payer system, or any kind of system that would achieve actual universal coverage. It does not bring us closer except in the accelerationist sense of heightening the contradictions of a system that pretends to be the best in the world rather than merely the most expensive, that pretends to be driven by markets rather than top-down decrees from established interests, and that pretends to serve the interests of the entire country rather than the few who can afford to access all that it offers and those skimming their wealth off of it.

[Santander]

Nix always drops bombs. No idea if they’re true, but they work.

He is one of the posters I respect most, even if he probably doesn't like my open deplorability.

[Santander]

On the level of rhetoric, few notions are so antithetical to democracy as the idea that no ill must be spoken of retired military officers who wade into politics.

It's amazing. We're told that liberal democracy is under threat because of Trump's buffoonery by the same very serious people who, in their next breath, imply that certain figures are "heroes" with judgment beyond reproach.

These people don't care about democracy or human rights. What did McRaven do when the Bush administration of which he is "a big fan" was not just "normalizing" torture, but actually torturing people? Their problem with Trump is that he's a fat, illiterate, obnoxious lower-class slob. It's not about what he does, it's that he makes them feel bad.

[Santander]

G. Maybe if someone actually went and saw what a OC, you know, actually said, rather than accepting the Washington examiner taking less than 10 words in Her speech completely and grossly out of context? Or did you cretins get the equally dishonest Fox News version?

Whole point of her speech was that Trump and his rich boy interests trying to privatize the VA need to be fought. To quote her, if anyone in this country deserves Cadillac level medical service, it's our veterans. She said that the Trump Administration says they're trying to fix the VA, but who were they actually trying to fix it for. They are trying to fix it for big Pharma, they're trying to fix it 4 big health insurance, and they are above all trying to fix it for a for-profit health insurance industry that does not have the veterans best interests at heart. Again, this was near Verbatim what she said. Go spend three seconds on Google and watch her speech on YouTube.

The closest thing that she can be blamed for is not even a gaffe. But rather that a tiny fragment, a single sentence, out of her speech would be taken out by right-wing haters and used in a deliberately dishonest way. This was so ancillary to the point of her speech that literally she would never be able to give a speech again if equal levels of dishonesty applied to anything she said. But then again, I assume that's kind of a plant here.

You people who just criticize her in this thread just proved yourself utterly incapable of independent critical thinking. Nice job, doofuses.

[Santander]

She is the epitome of a gold digging underwear model bimbo who snared an elderly billionaire and locked him in with a child. The fact that she is married to one of literally the worst human beings on Earth doesn't make me feel much of any sympathy for her. She knew damn well who and what she was getting into by marrying the bastard, and willingly made the choice for her lifetime Economic Security.

The only thing nice I can say about her is that she apparently has made a conscious decision to raise Baron largely away from his father which, judging by what complete POS Eric and Don Jr turned into, is quite frankly the best possible thing that could happen to him.

[Santander]

Pros
- witty and ingenious use of irony and self-deprecating humor
- charisma & "great grandpa" vibes even when he had Alzheimer's

Cons
- mass murderer
- war criminal

Tilt FF on balance.