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Poll Manager

Poll Results:  After the Debate Who Has Your Vote?

Former President Donald Trump?   81.0% 81.0 % (17)
President Joe Biden?   19.0% 19.0 % (4)


Total Votes: 21

Comments - Make a comment
The comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for its content. We value free speech but remember this is a public forum and we hope that people would use common sense and decency. If you see an offensive comment please email us at news@thepinetree.net
No Subject
Posted on: 2024-06-29 21:09:08   By: Anonymous
 
Not sure what the dems did in their 10 days of debate prep but it didn't work?

[Reply ]

    Re: How did Joe do? Still have your vote? Or are you on Drugs?
    Posted on: 2024-06-30 11:02:07   By: Anonymous
     


    So why did Trump win? Let's not confuse the left, we won't mention the slack jaw confusion Joe showed, or the stuttering mumbling, the blank stare, or Jill Biden right after the debate rushing forward, grasping Joe's arm so he could step down gingerly a step.



    What Biden said: “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this decade — that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like [Trump] did.”

    Truth: At least 16 troops have died in overseas attacks over his tenure, including, infamously, the 13 soldiers killed in an ISIS-K attack during the botched August 2021 US evacuation from Afghanistan.
    We beat Medicare
    What Biden said: ‘We finally beat Medicare.”

    Fact: Huh? It’s unclear if even the octogenarian president knew what he meant here, but the obvious verbal blunder occurred after he froze discussing his record on the economy.

    Trump, 78, sarcastically responded: “He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”



    Endorsed by Border Patrol
    What Biden said: The US Border Patrol union “endorsed me, endorsed my position.”

    Truth: The National Border Patrol Council refuted Biden’s claim — mid-debate. “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden,” the union posted on X.



    Which accord?
    What Biden said: “[Trump] pulled out of the Paris Peace Accords, uh, Climate Accord.”

    Fact: The president confused the Paris Climate Accords, the YEAR international pact aimed at tackling climate change, with the Paris Peace Accords that marked the end of the Vietnam War in 1973.

    Black unemployment
    What Biden said: “Black unemployment is the lowest level it’s been in a long, long time.”

    Truth: In April 2023 under Biden, black unemployment hit a record low of 4.8%, beating a previous low of 5.3% reached under Trump in 2019.

    However, the rate last month was 6.1%.

    Social Security
    What Biden said: “[Trump] wants to get rid of Social Security. … He’s wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

    Truth: The ex-president has repeatedly said he wants to protect Medicare and Social Security.

    Taxing the rich
    What Biden said: “We have a thousand millionaires in America, I mean billionaires. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2% taxes.”

    Truth: The top 1% of taxpayers (income of at least $548,000) paid an average tax rate of nearly 26% in 2020, while the top 0.001% — 1,475 taxpayers with at least $77 million in adjusted gross income – paid 23.7%, according to IRS data cited by the Washington Post.



    Trump’s unemployment rate
    What Biden said: “[The] unemployment rate rose to 15% [under Trump]; it was terrible.”

    Fact: The unemployment rate was 6.4% when Trump left the White House in 2021. Unemployment rose from 4.4% in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic to 14.8% in April 2020. The unprecedented global outbreak wreaked economic havoc worldwide.

    Border crossings
    What Biden said: “I’ve changed in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally. That’s better than when [Trump] left office.”

    Truth: He’s confusing data. The daily average of migrant apprehensions dropped more than 40% — to nearly 2,400 — since Biden issued an executive action that went into effect a month ago prohibiting asylum at Post Sports+



    [Reply ]

Imagine being Duped so easily?
Posted on: 2024-06-30 10:55:04   By: Anonymous
 

The only people who knew what would happen in this debate are the people who kept telling everyone that the Democrats are committing a felony, it's called Elder Abuse. Joe Biden is suffering from dementia, the Legacy Media, Jill Biden and all of the closest to the POTUS all know it.
Imagine how many of the left feel being duped so easily. It's actually a wake up call, maybe voters should have to take an IQ test to vote, and politicians one to campaign for office?

[Reply ]

    Re: Imagine being Duped so easily?
    Posted on: 2024-07-04 10:11:06   By: Anonymous
     
    On this July 4, please pause to remember that one of the colonists’ complaints in the Declaration was that the Crown was paying its judges.

    [Reply ]

How Joe won the presidency sure is a mystery now
Posted on: 2024-06-30 12:09:28   By: Anonymous
 

The debate was pretty bad for Biden. What was with his voice, his blank look, saying his son died overseas, he died in a hospital bed in the USA and no soldiers died while he's been President? Even I know Trump said he'd protect SS and Medicare, sadly Democrats say that every year, it gets harder and harder to just listen to them, like democracy is at stake. That seems to be truer thou everyday when I see Trump in court over everything, while Hunter and Joe's family seem protected.

[Reply ]

    No Subject
    Posted on: 2024-07-01 09:22:37   By: Anonymous
     
    The only person that should be disqualified. Donald J Trump

    [Reply ]

No Subject
Posted on: 2024-07-01 09:21:38   By: Anonymous
 
whoever votes for Biden literally hates their children and doesn't care about their future

[Reply ]

    Re:
    Posted on: 2024-07-01 09:26:53   By: Anonymous
     
    The Supreme Court. Thinks it helped Trump. Good luck trying to tell America. This criminal insurrectionist is above the law.

    [Reply ]

      Re:
      Posted on: 2024-07-01 09:29:09   By: Anonymous
       
      75 % of Americans. Absolutely hate trump. Think he should never be allowed in any public office.

      [Reply ]

        Re:
        Posted on: 2024-07-01 09:34:50   By: Anonymous
         
        These clowns in the right wing are making America look like suckers and losers. Vote out every republican. The people actually hold the power. Thomas and the supreme court’s decision actually will push Americans to get rid off Trump permanently.

        [Reply ]

No Subject
Posted on: 2024-07-02 06:45:08   By: Anonymous
 
I'm still voting for TRUMP!

[Reply ]

No Subject
Posted on: 2024-07-04 08:09:32   By: Anonymous
 
Constitutional fetish worship has been a feature of American politics from practically the moment it was enacted. This document, entirely by accident, serves as a core source of government legitimacy, despite the fact that it was hurriedly slapped together over a few months and never worked as intended, not even at the beginning.

It would be a good thing if we had less reverence for the Constitution, allowing us to go about perfecting it democratically, through a deliberative process of representatives of the people. Instead, we get the worst of all possible worlds: a culture of Constitution worship that resists change, yet also massive alterations to the founding document, entirely from unelected men and women in robes.

In short, if you want to change the Constitution, you get the Supreme Court to rewrite it for you. That only requires five justices to exercise the rule-by-decree powers they have arrogated to themselves, instead of the incredibly cumbersome amendment process requiring two-thirds of the Senate and House, and three-quarters of the states, which is impossible in our hyper-polarized times. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, under judicial review, the Constitution “is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Now, one of the central arguments in favor of judicial review is that it is necessary to protect individual constitutional rights from being eroded by the legislature. So let’s look at both sides of the equation, read through the Constitution, and compile a non-exhaustive list of the ragged holes the Supreme Court has blasted in it, through action or inaction.

Article I, Section 1: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States…” The Court has gradually stolen this power from Congress over the years. The recent decisions Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Court seized control of the entire administrative state, are just the capstones.

Article I, Section 2: “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States…” In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Court has signed off on egregious gerrymandering so “the People” in an increasing number of Republican states have little or nothing to do with who is elected to the House.

Article I, Section 3: The last paragraph in this section makes clear that the formal punishment for impeachment is only removal from office and prohibition from holding office again, but also that “the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” This language obviously takes for granted that presidents can be prosecuted for criminal acts, which the Roberts Court has recently forbidden (see below).

Article I, Section 4: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…” Sorry Congress, no election regulations if John Roberts doesn’t like them. In Shelby County v. Holder, which removed most of the strictures preventing southern states from engaging in Jim Crow-era voter suppression, Roberts didn’t even bother to cite the Constitution. Afterwards, of course, southern Republicans immediately started disenfranchising minorities once more.

Article I, Section 7: This grants the House the famous power of the purse, stipulating that “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” Except not anymore, at least if you’re President Donald Trump, in which case the Roberts Court will kindly let you steal $6 billion from the military to build random sections of border wall.

Article I, Section 8: This enumerates Congress’s powers that, once again, are now possessed by the judiciary. The legislature can make rules if and only if they don’t run afoul of the Court’s political views.

Article II: This entire article, which outlines the fairly modest explicit powers of the president, is dead, dead, dead. In Trump v. United States, Roberts has anointed the president as a king formally above the law, immune from prosecution for everything he does as president, and who can therefore imprison or murder his political opponents with impunity. Roberts may as well have dug up James Madison’s corpse and micturated directly into the eye sockets.

That said, it’s still worth emphasizing that the Court has also deleted both of the Constitution’s anti-bribery clauses for the president. Article I, Section 1 says the president “shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” while Article II, Section 9 says that no one holding federal office can “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

In office, Trump funneled unknown but vast quantities of federal money, as well as that of foreign governments, into his own pockets through his various properties. The Roberts Court deliberately ran out the clock on a case invoking the Emoluments Clause on Trump and then dismissed it, making it clear that it’s fine and dandy for the president to loot the government, or take massive bribes from foreign powers.

Article III: It’s worth noting there is no explicit mention of judicial review in the Constitution anywhere.

Article IV, Section 4: This says the “United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” but again, the Court has not only stood aside as Republicans set up flagrantly rigged, authoritarian state election systems, but also helped them out.

The total abolition of Article II is certainly the worst thing the Roberts Court has done by a wide margin.

On to the Bill of Rights! First Amendment protections for freedom of worship, speech, and the press are under an all-out assault from right-wing state legislatures. The “ten commandments” (not the actual ones, incidentally) are being set up on government property across several states. Bigoted restraints on the speech rights of teachers and professors have swept the country. Mississippi is persecuting reporters for uncovering flagrant welfare fraud on the part of the state Republican regime. The Court is doing nothing about any of this.

The Second Amendment is not so much dead so much as metastasized in the Roberts Court petri dish, cancer-like, into a sweeping grant of gun rights that every one of the founding fathers would have regarded with slack-jawed horror. It obviously does not protect, and was not intended to protect, an individual right to own as many fully automatic weapons as you like in preparation for your upcoming workplace massacre. But under the Roberts Court that’s what it has become.

The Fourth Amendment’s protection of unreasonable searches and seizures has been steadily eroded by the Court. Any savvy law enforcement officer can easily search your property or read your private communications.

The Fifth Amendment’s requirement that no one be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law does not apply to growing categories of citizens. President Obama set up a drone assassination program that killed American citizens, while Trump sent a straight-up death squad to summarily execute the leftist Michael Reinoehl after he shot and killed a far-right activist during an altercation, and Trump repeatedly boasted about it. Again, the Court did nothing in either case.

The right guaranteed in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to fair jury trials for accused criminals is a dead letter. More than 95 percent of criminal cases end in a plea bargain. The Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment is a dead letter too, especially if you happen to be homeless. Right-wing states can torture people to death with the Court’s blessing.

The Fourteenth Amendment is mostly toast. As to Section 1, states are abridging the “privileges and immunities” of citizens right and left, due process protections are increasingly abridged, and numerous groups, from transgender people to pregnant women and others, are suffering explicit legal discrimination without so much as a peep from the Court. Section 2, which requires that states which disenfranchise their citizens lose representation in the House, has never been enforced. The Roberts Court recently deleted Section 3, which forbids traitors and rebels from serving in the government, once again to protect Donald Trump from accountability.

The Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against disenfranchising people based on race is gone. Not only will the court happily allow GOP states to gerrymander their Black citizens into permanent electoral irrelevance, as noted above the Court also prohibits Congress from doing anything about it.

I could go on, but the point is made.

The total abolition of Article II is certainly the worst thing the Roberts Court has done by a wide margin. It is the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson or perhaps even Dred Scott v. Stanford. The intention, obviously, is to pave the way for a Trump dictatorship, like some Enabling Act passed before Hitler actually took power. But it’s in keeping with the thrust of Roberts’ jurisprudence since the moment he was confirmed.

It all calls to mind Alexander Hamilton’s famous argument in Federalist #78 that the judiciary “will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them,” in that it controls neither the military nor the budget. The “general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter,” he concluded.

Standing hip-deep in the shreds of constitutional rights that John Roberts and his corrupt, illegitimate cronies have torn up, we can conclude that Hamilton was utterly, completely wrong. But he was right that the Court only has power insofar as Congress and the president agree they do. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider that state of affairs.


[Reply ]


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