Some people don't realize that none of these services sequence the full genome. They sequence a collection of different sites as best they can (from the spit that you send them in a tube). Some sites will be sequenced really well and some not at all; it is the random nature of the system. What happens if twin 1 is sequenced really well at site ABC123 and has some rare mutation there but twin 2 is not sequenced at that site at all? They will assume that twin does not have the mutation - they will sub in "wild type" sequence at that locus as they won't have any thing better to go on - and you'll end up identifying them as being different. Take this many times over thousands of gene loci that they sequence and pretty soon you see how two identical twins can end up looking very different.
If you want to see how similar they really are at the DNA level, you need Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) or at least you need to know what the coverage was at each locus for each twin. The former still costs thousands in most cases, the latter should be in the raw data (though they would need to convince the companies to release said raw data to them).
I don't recall the last time a summary on slashdot provided such generous spin to a company (happens all the time for politicians, of course). I'd ask how much Netflix paid for this but they're smart enough to realize that the dwindling audience on this failing website isn't worth investing in anyways.
It used to be seen primarily as a place for kids, and it is now again seen as primarily a place for kids. Arcades with games for us "old folks" are all but extinct while we have Chuck E Cheese locations all over the place. You can find skee ball and other ticket games all over the place but good luck finding a beat 'em up anywhere. Various iterations of "Flappy Bird" / "Crossy Road" / "Choppy Wood" are ubiquitous but fighting games are pretty well extinct. You might find a multi-game machine that has 6 old Atari games in one tiny monitor but not much else from the 80s or 90s is around except for various weird "new" giant versions of PacMan and Galaga. And forget about finding Lethal Enforcers, Terminator, or the Aerosmith Revolution game - though you can count on finding some version of Big Buck Hunter.
Fuck them sidways, upside down, and backwards. I started managing a website for a local nonprofit a while ago that was setup through godaddy (prior to my helping them) and it's been a disaster. A few weeks ago the website suddenly became only sporadically responsive, and only for certain types of connections. A lot of users (including me from some locations) were getting nothing when trying to connect (no 404, no error, just a blank page with no source).
I then spent 2 hours in their "support chat" where I was bumped through three different support people. They tried to blame the problem on me and made me jump through a bunch of arbitrary hoops to prove them wrong. Then they said it was due to "website plugins" and left it to me to figure out what plugins needed attention (even though all the plugins run through their fucking servers).
Then after that, they disconnected me; their chat system leaving me no transcript of the support session.
This is appalling. We're ready to move our domain and site elsewhere.
So you still haven't read my comment, then. Why are you hitting reply? The individual mandate was never something that any democrat ever expressed interest in including in reform. It came from the GOP and the Heritage Foundation; it was included because republicans said they could get behind a bill if it had that and it had no single payer option. Both of those requirements from the GOP were met and then they turned against it.
You can continue to attempt revisionist history if you want, but these are the simple facts. Why would the democrats have poisoned their own bill and provided something that was so much less than what they had campaigned to do?
Why are you jumping to that conclusion? I never once said I don't accept the results. I will say that I think the electoral college is obsolete and should go away for future elections, however there is no choice but to accept the results of the 2016 election. It is interesting though how only one party prefers the system that subverts the way our nation actually votes.
Getting his funding in a separate bill achieves exactly what he wants, so why not? All they'd need to do is put the funding in a separate bill first.
Except he has very plainly indicated that he will not sign the current bill unless it has the border wall money in it. Even if they promised it for a latter bill he would under his current threats and promises not sign the current budgetary proposal. Congress could potentially scrap or table the current budget and write up a new bill that is the border wall (and nothing but the border wall) but then he'd be going against what he has been saying for the past 4 weeks.
That's still being truthful.
For the reasons state above, it would not be.
I think you no longer understand the difference between a truth and a lie.
I understand just fine that the vast majority of what comes out of Trump's mouth and Trump's organizations is a lie.
It must be tough reading the minds of all those GOP folks all the time to determine that what they really think is the exact opposite of what they all said before, at the time and afterwards.
Feel free to turn down the hyperbole if you'd like to have a discussion here.
No mind reading is required, when we can look at what has been written by the Heritage Foundation and what has been written in various "ACA Replacement" bills that have been proposed by elected members of the GOP.
No democrat ever campaigned on writing a mandate into health care reform. Many democrats campaigned on making a single payer option a part of it, but the GOP members were very loud and clear about their opposition to anything resembling single payer. The Heritage Foundation showed they wanted a mandate, and many GOP members supported them. The mandate was written in to give the GOP something that it wanted out of the bill; if the GOP doesn't want the mandate then why haven't they dropped it from any of the proposed replacements they have suggested (and no, simply striking the bill down completely does not count as replacing it if nothing is offered in replacement)?
And if you look at any replacement plan that was proposed by an elected official, you will find they are well over 90% identical to the ACA. They might drop some of the least profitable parts (such as coverage for pre-existing conditions) but they retain the vast majority of the bill.
If you want to disregard the will of the people, you are free to do so. However the simple fact is that more people voted for Clinton than Trump. I am not contesting the fact that the electoral college did not reflect on that, I am merely stating the simple fact that more individual voters voted for Clinton than Trump.
It is interesting how we went over 100 years without a discrepancy between the total vote count and the result of the electoral college, and now we've seen it twice in the past five presidential elections. Both of those times we ended up with republicans who were nowhere near as intelligent or qualified as they believed themselves to be, and both those times we ended up with republicans who enthusiastically crapped all over the people who did not vote for them. Some "uniters", there...
I'm really, really, curious to know where you got that number from. 56% of what vote? He won more than 56% of the electoral college but a lot less than 56% of the votes cast and far far less than 56% of the eligible voting public.
There is only ONE vote for the President,
Yes, and it is neither a reflection of the will of the people nor a good reflection of how a democracy should work. He was able to take advantage of both to win the office as a result.
Trump cleaned up convincingly
Only when you view the electoral college results. By any metric that would be used in a modern democracy he lost.
And not because it didn't have what they demanded. They voted against it because they didn't want a Democratic president to sign his name to the bill that finally attempted to reform a badly broken health care system.
It was lock, stock, and barrel exactly what the Democrats wanted
No, it was not. Numerous candidates - including Presidential candidate Barack Obama - asked for a single payer option. It was dropped entirely because GOP congressmen stated they would support reform that dropped single payer. The mandate came directly from what was written by The Heritage Foundation and was supported by numerous GOP representatives right up until they realized it had a chance of going to a vote.
If there's something in there that strikes you as "Republican" it's because Barack, Nancy, and Chuck wanted it.
Read what the Heritage Foundation asked for. Compare it to what was in the ACA. Then read all the "Obamacare replacement" proposals that the GOP has attempted to push through, and compare them to the ACA as well. The only reason the GOP had to oppose the ACA was the fact that it was going to be signed by a Democrat. If any republican president since 1900 had been in office that day - including Trump - they would have happily signed it into law and we would know it by their name. Hell this was more profit-centric and market-based than anything that Reagan and his administration ever would have dreamed of proposing.
Wrong. The democrats voted in favor of a fence. Trump himself does not consider that to be a wall, he has attacked it repeatedly as being not a wall. It was also part of a bill that had other measures for border security.
Democrats built a partial wall - Accepted
Wrong. A fence was built. It was explicitly called a fence and it continues to be a fence. Very different from a wall, even Trump acknowledges that fact.
Republicans are in favor of a wall - Accepted
Congrats, you found a fact. Was that intentional or just a happy accident?
Democrats are NOW opposed to a wall - Accepted
They never previously voted in support of a wall. Furthermore the secure fence act was over 10 years ago, and there has been significant turnover in elected democrats since then - which makes it at best dubious to claim that they are the "democrats" who opposed or supported something before.
Democrats are doing it just to be assholes - "You can't prove why we're being assholes, just that we are assholes... so take that"
Obviously, clearly, not a fact. You are entitled to your own opinions - and clearly you won't be bothered with supporting them with facts or even small shreds of reality if such things impede their creation - but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Though I don't understand why you think Trump is dishonest.
Aside from the fact that pretty much every important "fact" of his existence is a lie...
He told Congresscritters ahead of time to either pass funding for the wall or he'd refuse to sign.
Except that before he opted to shut down the government he had said that they could put the border wall funding in a separate bill and that he would sign this budget to keep the government open while they prepare a bill for the border wall. I know he does flop around a lot (as mentally ill people sometimes do) but this is not what he promised just a month or two ago.
If anything, he's being too truthful.
I know he doesn't like to use words the way that intelligent people use them, but this is a blatant attack on the idea of "truthful" here. He is such a pathological liar that he makes career politicians look honest.
As pointed out, the amount he's asking for really is a tiny fraction of the budget
That is completely and utterly irrelevant. A budget bill was written that could have passed both houses of congress. Trump even said he would sign it. Then all of a sudden he decided that he would not sign anything that did not have wall funding in it. He sunk the whole process on his own. It doesn't matter whether he was asking for $5, $5,000, $5M, $5B, or $5T. If there is such great support for the wall he could have asked for the next bill from congress to address it directly so it could have any up or down vote and it could be abundantly clear which way each member of congress voted on it. Instead we have a giant spending bill that has tons of other moving parts, and ultimately obfuscates where people stand on this issue.
The argument is that Democrats, once in favor of border barriers, are now only opposing the wall in an attempt to embarrass the president.
If Trump had the slightest sense of humility his earlier embarrassments - indeed his self-inflicted wounds on the world stage - would have likely driven him to resign. There is no point in trying to embarrass him, and no need to make him look like a total idiot on the world stage. The former has no effect and the latter has been done many many times already.
"We still don't understand why the Democrats are so wholeheartedly against [the wall]. They voted for it in 2006. Then-Senator Obama voted for it. Senator Schumer voted for it. Senator Clinton voted for it. So we don't understand why Democrats are now playing politics just because Donald Trump is in office," White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said in 2017.
And Mulvaney's statement was rated half-true at politifact. Notably, the bill he is referring to - which George W Bush signed into law - was called The Secure Fence Act of 2006. It was built, and then Trump himself trashed it by calling it "such a little wall, it was such a nothing wall". So if the administration wants to claim that the democrats are opposed to the wall simply because Trump is pushing it so desperately, they need better evidence than a very different bill that produced something that even Trump himself sees as very different from a wall.
Brush it off if you want. It's easy to do that when your guys are the ones who have won the electoral college without winning the majority of cast votes. Keep patting yourself on the back over the staggeringly successful voter suppression campaigns and gerrymandering efforts you have rolled out as well.
It's no wonder the republicans put so much effort into suppressing the popular vote, they can't win it on ideas when the majority of their ideas are harmful to the majority of Americans.
Democrats have protested every presidential election they didn't win for decades now.
For certain definitions of win, sure. It's only happened twice in the past 130 years, and both times it was a republican who couldn't win the majority.
The election of the President in the US has always been, for 200+ years, by electoral college
Which was necessary when calculating the national vote was not a practical thing to do in a short amount of time (days, even). We can tally the national vote in hours or less now. Results don't have to be transported on foot, by horse, or even by rail.
a massive Democrat campaign to overturn the results by trying to force the electors to not vote for him
Nice conspiracy you have, there. Care to provide support for it?
It was also NOT an "appalling low turnout" as it was statistically above the average turnout for all elections and had the largest RAW count of votes EVER.
That represents barely 60% of the population of people who are eligible to vote. Any other democracy would consider that an appalling failure - especially if you include the citizens who are uniquely ineligible in this country who would be able to vote in almost every other democracy.
Our country has the distinction of being one of the only "democracies" where politicians can pick their voters as much as the voters can pick their politicians.
But go ahead and keep slinging silly insults at me and attacking me instead of actually presenting facts. That seems to pass as dialogue for a certain portion of our country now.
Nobody is better at caving in to demands than the democrats.
Then how is it that Boston and Seattle get boatloads of federal money for downtown highway expansion while midwest cities get zippo?
The Big Dig started in the 90s (with funding from the 80s) and was done over 10 years ago now. How many large projects have the democrats pulled off since then?
How is your health insurance doing?
The democrats wanted single payer. Democratic voters wanted single payer. The GOP wrote the fucking bill based on what the Heritage Foundation wanted, and we ended up with ACA as a direct result of GOP demands. The GOP walked away from the discussions because they didn't want reforms to be signed by a democrat.
How about your social security benefits?
It would be doing fine if the GOP wasn't raiding Social Security every chance they get.
Thank Democrats for having a spine.
If I find one I'll try. I'm not holding my breath, I expect them to cave soon.
Actually, no. Fewer people voted for Trump than voted for Hillary, period. Even with a seemingly historic election we still had a rather appallingly low voter turnout in 2016 (less than 2/3 of eligible voters), hence more people who could have voted didn't bother voting than turned out to vote for Trump.
in part to fix immigration
As has been shown before, Trump has held almost every position on almost every issue at one time or another. Consistency is not his strength (one can debate what his strength actually is...).
72% of Americans believe illegal immigration is a problem.
Do you have a source for that? I found a study that basically said the opposite of that, where 72% said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay if certain conditions are met. That's a long ways from your claim.
globalists who want cheap slave labor
Considering the millions of dollars that Trump has refused to pay to people working for him over the years, it would seem that Trump himself should be in that camp. Or is it not "cheap slave labor" when it is money that is refused to American skilled workers?
leftists who want cheap votes
Going with that conspiracy again? Just because Trump says it is so doesn't make it the case.
If Mexican illegal immigrants voted majority Republican, they'd treat them the same way they treat Cuban refugees (who vote 80% Republican).
Keep peddling that conspiracy if you want...
You lost.
You do know there was an election in November 2018 as well, right?
America First
Tens of thousands of unpaid workers would like to challenge you on what that means.
Traitors get the rope.
Careful what you wish for there. The number of constitutional amendments that Trump has not openly spoken in opposition to grows shorter every month.
If they pay for his wall because he has a tantrum, what's next?
Nobody is better at caving in to demands than the democrats. Even some of Trump's base is opposed to maintaining the government shutdown just to fund the border wall. But the Democratic Party over the past 15-20 years has shown itself to be generally quite gutless, even for the two years of that time when they had the White House and both houses of congress. Really their new party slogan should be "snatching failure from the jaws of victory".
He'll be shutting down the government for every last little thing until he gets his way.
If there was a single spine anywhere in the Democratic Party, Trump would lose miserably on this. As no spines are to be found, we will likely see wall funding come signed off on before the end of the month. Then the wall will be a massive debacle (and ultimately an outright failure) and it will be blamed on the democrats for having not stopped Trump's terrible idea.
Often it seems that one of Trump's top motivations is to piss on the democrats, without concern for what it does to anyone who is not a hard core supporter of his. If we could get someone on Fox & Friends to say that the most dramatic thing he could do to piss off the democrats at this point would be to resign - leaving Pence in charge - he just might do it. Pence is not a great guy either but he's at least reasonably intelligent and honest enough to not stare into a camera and lie his ass off (yet). Just tell trump about the sweetheart deal Nixon got when he resigned and Trump might go for it. Hell if he goes out willingly he could still get lifetime secret service protection for him and his family for the rest of all their lives, saving him many millions of dollars.
The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified.
Nothing about leaving voicemail requires leaving a valid callback number.
True, though it isn't very useful for the person who left the message to not leave a valid callback number. I have yet to get a voicemail that asked me to visit a website, send an email, send a text to a number that is not standard for my county, visit a physical location, etc (though I'm sure some exist).
Perhaps the callers who do this do, I don't know. It's usually Chinese gibberish.
I have been getting the Chinese singing spam at my phone at work. When I get them they come from a Chicago number (in my case right time zone wrong state). One time I answered one and started mashing buttons on the keypad and eventually got a live person who then asked me a question in Chinese. I said hello and he hung up. The correlation might not be meaningful but I haven't had the call since.
Why do you want to waste time listening to spam voicemail?
From my experience the spam calls almost never leave voicemail, if they are leaving a voicemail it's because I actually gave them my number at some point. The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified. After all, the vast majority of them - as mentioned in the summary - are spoofing numbers to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people don't realize that none of these services sequence the full genome. They sequence a collection of different sites as best they can (from the spit that you send them in a tube). Some sites will be sequenced really well and some not at all; it is the random nature of the system. What happens if twin 1 is sequenced really well at site ABC123 and has some rare mutation there but twin 2 is not sequenced at that site at all? They will assume that twin does not have the mutation - they will sub in "wild type" sequence at that locus as they won't have any thing better to go on - and you'll end up identifying them as being different. Take this many times over thousands of gene loci that they sequence and pretty soon you see how two identical twins can end up looking very different.
If you want to see how similar they really are at the DNA level, you need Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) or at least you need to know what the coverage was at each locus for each twin. The former still costs thousands in most cases, the latter should be in the raw data (though they would need to convince the companies to release said raw data to them).
I don't recall the last time a summary on slashdot provided such generous spin to a company (happens all the time for politicians, of course). I'd ask how much Netflix paid for this but they're smart enough to realize that the dwindling audience on this failing website isn't worth investing in anyways.
though you can count on finding some version of Big Buck Hunter.
Every arcade has big buck hunter LOL.
Indeed you just repeated what I said. Were you trying to say something else?
It used to be seen primarily as a place for kids, and it is now again seen as primarily a place for kids. Arcades with games for us "old folks" are all but extinct while we have Chuck E Cheese locations all over the place. You can find skee ball and other ticket games all over the place but good luck finding a beat 'em up anywhere. Various iterations of "Flappy Bird" / "Crossy Road" / "Choppy Wood" are ubiquitous but fighting games are pretty well extinct. You might find a multi-game machine that has 6 old Atari games in one tiny monitor but not much else from the 80s or 90s is around except for various weird "new" giant versions of PacMan and Galaga. And forget about finding Lethal Enforcers, Terminator, or the Aerosmith Revolution game - though you can count on finding some version of Big Buck Hunter.
Fuck them sidways, upside down, and backwards. I started managing a website for a local nonprofit a while ago that was setup through godaddy (prior to my helping them) and it's been a disaster. A few weeks ago the website suddenly became only sporadically responsive, and only for certain types of connections. A lot of users (including me from some locations) were getting nothing when trying to connect (no 404, no error, just a blank page with no source).
I then spent 2 hours in their "support chat" where I was bumped through three different support people. They tried to blame the problem on me and made me jump through a bunch of arbitrary hoops to prove them wrong. Then they said it was due to "website plugins" and left it to me to figure out what plugins needed attention (even though all the plugins run through their fucking servers).
Then after that, they disconnected me; their chat system leaving me no transcript of the support session.
This is appalling. We're ready to move our domain and site elsewhere.
So you still haven't read my comment, then. Why are you hitting reply? The individual mandate was never something that any democrat ever expressed interest in including in reform. It came from the GOP and the Heritage Foundation; it was included because republicans said they could get behind a bill if it had that and it had no single payer option. Both of those requirements from the GOP were met and then they turned against it.
You can continue to attempt revisionist history if you want, but these are the simple facts. Why would the democrats have poisoned their own bill and provided something that was so much less than what they had campaigned to do?
Will you not accept the results of the election?
Why are you jumping to that conclusion? I never once said I don't accept the results. I will say that I think the electoral college is obsolete and should go away for future elections, however there is no choice but to accept the results of the 2016 election. It is interesting though how only one party prefers the system that subverts the way our nation actually votes.
Getting his funding in a separate bill achieves exactly what he wants, so why not? All they'd need to do is put the funding in a separate bill first.
Except he has very plainly indicated that he will not sign the current bill unless it has the border wall money in it. Even if they promised it for a latter bill he would under his current threats and promises not sign the current budgetary proposal. Congress could potentially scrap or table the current budget and write up a new bill that is the border wall (and nothing but the border wall) but then he'd be going against what he has been saying for the past 4 weeks.
That's still being truthful.
For the reasons state above, it would not be.
I think you no longer understand the difference between a truth and a lie.
I understand just fine that the vast majority of what comes out of Trump's mouth and Trump's organizations is a lie.
It must be tough reading the minds of all those GOP folks all the time to determine that what they really think is the exact opposite of what they all said before, at the time and afterwards.
Feel free to turn down the hyperbole if you'd like to have a discussion here.
No mind reading is required, when we can look at what has been written by the Heritage Foundation and what has been written in various "ACA Replacement" bills that have been proposed by elected members of the GOP.
No democrat ever campaigned on writing a mandate into health care reform. Many democrats campaigned on making a single payer option a part of it, but the GOP members were very loud and clear about their opposition to anything resembling single payer. The Heritage Foundation showed they wanted a mandate, and many GOP members supported them. The mandate was written in to give the GOP something that it wanted out of the bill; if the GOP doesn't want the mandate then why haven't they dropped it from any of the proposed replacements they have suggested (and no, simply striking the bill down completely does not count as replacing it if nothing is offered in replacement)?
And if you look at any replacement plan that was proposed by an elected official, you will find they are well over 90% identical to the ACA. They might drop some of the least profitable parts (such as coverage for pre-existing conditions) but they retain the vast majority of the bill.
It appears you hit reply without reading the comment you were replying to
So I have provided a link back to it so you can easily try reading it. I highly encourage you to do so. Feel free to ask questions afterwards.
If you want to disregard the will of the people, you are free to do so. However the simple fact is that more people voted for Clinton than Trump. I am not contesting the fact that the electoral college did not reflect on that, I am merely stating the simple fact that more individual voters voted for Clinton than Trump.
...
It is interesting how we went over 100 years without a discrepancy between the total vote count and the result of the electoral college, and now we've seen it twice in the past five presidential elections. Both of those times we ended up with republicans who were nowhere near as intelligent or qualified as they believed themselves to be, and both those times we ended up with republicans who enthusiastically crapped all over the people who did not vote for them. Some "uniters", there
Trump won about 56% of the vote;
I'm really, really, curious to know where you got that number from. 56% of what vote? He won more than 56% of the electoral college but a lot less than 56% of the votes cast and far far less than 56% of the eligible voting public.
There is only ONE vote for the President,
Yes, and it is neither a reflection of the will of the people nor a good reflection of how a democracy should work. He was able to take advantage of both to win the office as a result.
Trump cleaned up convincingly
Only when you view the electoral college results. By any metric that would be used in a modern democracy he lost.
Not a single Republican voted for the ACA
And not because it didn't have what they demanded. They voted against it because they didn't want a Democratic president to sign his name to the bill that finally attempted to reform a badly broken health care system.
It was lock, stock, and barrel exactly what the Democrats wanted
No, it was not. Numerous candidates - including Presidential candidate Barack Obama - asked for a single payer option. It was dropped entirely because GOP congressmen stated they would support reform that dropped single payer. The mandate came directly from what was written by The Heritage Foundation and was supported by numerous GOP representatives right up until they realized it had a chance of going to a vote.
If there's something in there that strikes you as "Republican" it's because Barack, Nancy, and Chuck wanted it.
Read what the Heritage Foundation asked for. Compare it to what was in the ACA. Then read all the "Obamacare replacement" proposals that the GOP has attempted to push through, and compare them to the ACA as well. The only reason the GOP had to oppose the ACA was the fact that it was going to be signed by a Democrat. If any republican president since 1900 had been in office that day - including Trump - they would have happily signed it into law and we would know it by their name. Hell this was more profit-centric and market-based than anything that Reagan and his administration ever would have dreamed of proposing.
Democrats were in favor of a wall - Accepted
Wrong. The democrats voted in favor of a fence. Trump himself does not consider that to be a wall, he has attacked it repeatedly as being not a wall. It was also part of a bill that had other measures for border security.
Democrats built a partial wall - Accepted
Wrong. A fence was built. It was explicitly called a fence and it continues to be a fence. Very different from a wall, even Trump acknowledges that fact.
Republicans are in favor of a wall - Accepted
Congrats, you found a fact. Was that intentional or just a happy accident?
Democrats are NOW opposed to a wall - Accepted
They never previously voted in support of a wall. Furthermore the secure fence act was over 10 years ago, and there has been significant turnover in elected democrats since then - which makes it at best dubious to claim that they are the "democrats" who opposed or supported something before.
Democrats are doing it just to be assholes - "You can't prove why we're being assholes, just that we are assholes... so take that"
Obviously, clearly, not a fact. You are entitled to your own opinions - and clearly you won't be bothered with supporting them with facts or even small shreds of reality if such things impede their creation - but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Though I don't understand why you think Trump is dishonest.
Aside from the fact that pretty much every important "fact" of his existence is a lie ...
He told Congresscritters ahead of time to either pass funding for the wall or he'd refuse to sign.
Except that before he opted to shut down the government he had said that they could put the border wall funding in a separate bill and that he would sign this budget to keep the government open while they prepare a bill for the border wall. I know he does flop around a lot (as mentally ill people sometimes do) but this is not what he promised just a month or two ago.
If anything, he's being too truthful.
I know he doesn't like to use words the way that intelligent people use them, but this is a blatant attack on the idea of "truthful" here. He is such a pathological liar that he makes career politicians look honest.
As pointed out, the amount he's asking for really is a tiny fraction of the budget
That is completely and utterly irrelevant. A budget bill was written that could have passed both houses of congress. Trump even said he would sign it. Then all of a sudden he decided that he would not sign anything that did not have wall funding in it. He sunk the whole process on his own. It doesn't matter whether he was asking for $5, $5,000, $5M, $5B, or $5T. If there is such great support for the wall he could have asked for the next bill from congress to address it directly so it could have any up or down vote and it could be abundantly clear which way each member of congress voted on it. Instead we have a giant spending bill that has tons of other moving parts, and ultimately obfuscates where people stand on this issue.
The argument is that Democrats, once in favor of border barriers, are now only opposing the wall in an attempt to embarrass the president.
If Trump had the slightest sense of humility his earlier embarrassments - indeed his self-inflicted wounds on the world stage - would have likely driven him to resign. There is no point in trying to embarrass him, and no need to make him look like a total idiot on the world stage. The former has no effect and the latter has been done many many times already.
"We still don't understand why the Democrats are so wholeheartedly against [the wall]. They voted for it in 2006. Then-Senator Obama voted for it. Senator Schumer voted for it. Senator Clinton voted for it. So we don't understand why Democrats are now playing politics just because Donald Trump is in office," White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said in 2017.
And Mulvaney's statement was rated half-true at politifact . Notably, the bill he is referring to - which George W Bush signed into law - was called The Secure Fence Act of 2006. It was built, and then Trump himself trashed it by calling it "such a little wall, it was such a nothing wall". So if the administration wants to claim that the democrats are opposed to the wall simply because Trump is pushing it so desperately, they need better evidence than a very different bill that produced something that even Trump himself sees as very different from a wall.
It's no wonder the republicans put so much effort into suppressing the popular vote, they can't win it on ideas when the majority of their ideas are harmful to the majority of Americans.
Democrats have protested every presidential election they didn't win for decades now.
For certain definitions of win, sure. It's only happened twice in the past 130 years, and both times it was a republican who couldn't win the majority.
The election of the President in the US has always been, for 200+ years, by electoral college
Which was necessary when calculating the national vote was not a practical thing to do in a short amount of time (days, even). We can tally the national vote in hours or less now. Results don't have to be transported on foot, by horse, or even by rail.
a massive Democrat campaign to overturn the results by trying to force the electors to not vote for him
Nice conspiracy you have, there. Care to provide support for it?
It was also NOT an "appalling low turnout" as it was statistically above the average turnout for all elections and had the largest RAW count of votes EVER.
That represents barely 60% of the population of people who are eligible to vote. Any other democracy would consider that an appalling failure - especially if you include the citizens who are uniquely ineligible in this country who would be able to vote in almost every other democracy.
Our country has the distinction of being one of the only "democracies" where politicians can pick their voters as much as the voters can pick their politicians.
But go ahead and keep slinging silly insults at me and attacking me instead of actually presenting facts. That seems to pass as dialogue for a certain portion of our country now.
Nobody is better at caving in to demands than the democrats.
Then how is it that Boston and Seattle get boatloads of federal money for downtown highway expansion while midwest cities get zippo?
The Big Dig started in the 90s (with funding from the 80s) and was done over 10 years ago now. How many large projects have the democrats pulled off since then?
How is your health insurance doing?
The democrats wanted single payer. Democratic voters wanted single payer. The GOP wrote the fucking bill based on what the Heritage Foundation wanted, and we ended up with ACA as a direct result of GOP demands. The GOP walked away from the discussions because they didn't want reforms to be signed by a democrat.
How about your social security benefits?
It would be doing fine if the GOP wasn't raiding Social Security every chance they get.
Thank Democrats for having a spine.
If I find one I'll try. I'm not holding my breath, I expect them to cave soon.
America elected Trump
Actually, no. Fewer people voted for Trump than voted for Hillary, period. Even with a seemingly historic election we still had a rather appallingly low voter turnout in 2016 (less than 2/3 of eligible voters), hence more people who could have voted didn't bother voting than turned out to vote for Trump.
in part to fix immigration
As has been shown before, Trump has held almost every position on almost every issue at one time or another. Consistency is not his strength (one can debate what his strength actually is...).
72% of Americans believe illegal immigration is a problem.
Do you have a source for that? I found a study that basically said the opposite of that, where 72% said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay if certain conditions are met. That's a long ways from your claim.
globalists who want cheap slave labor
Considering the millions of dollars that Trump has refused to pay to people working for him over the years, it would seem that Trump himself should be in that camp. Or is it not "cheap slave labor" when it is money that is refused to American skilled workers?
leftists who want cheap votes
Going with that conspiracy again? Just because Trump says it is so doesn't make it the case.
If Mexican illegal immigrants voted majority Republican, they'd treat them the same way they treat Cuban refugees (who vote 80% Republican).
Keep peddling that conspiracy if you want...
You lost.
You do know there was an election in November 2018 as well, right?
America First
Tens of thousands of unpaid workers would like to challenge you on what that means.
Traitors get the rope.
Careful what you wish for there. The number of constitutional amendments that Trump has not openly spoken in opposition to grows shorter every month.
If they pay for his wall because he has a tantrum, what's next?
Nobody is better at caving in to demands than the democrats. Even some of Trump's base is opposed to maintaining the government shutdown just to fund the border wall. But the Democratic Party over the past 15-20 years has shown itself to be generally quite gutless, even for the two years of that time when they had the White House and both houses of congress. Really their new party slogan should be "snatching failure from the jaws of victory".
He'll be shutting down the government for every last little thing until he gets his way.
If there was a single spine anywhere in the Democratic Party, Trump would lose miserably on this. As no spines are to be found, we will likely see wall funding come signed off on before the end of the month. Then the wall will be a massive debacle (and ultimately an outright failure) and it will be blamed on the democrats for having not stopped Trump's terrible idea.
PS: Wasn't Mexico going to pay for this?
Trump's words don't mean shit.
Often it seems that one of Trump's top motivations is to piss on the democrats, without concern for what it does to anyone who is not a hard core supporter of his. If we could get someone on Fox & Friends to say that the most dramatic thing he could do to piss off the democrats at this point would be to resign - leaving Pence in charge - he just might do it. Pence is not a great guy either but he's at least reasonably intelligent and honest enough to not stare into a camera and lie his ass off (yet). Just tell trump about the sweetheart deal Nixon got when he resigned and Trump might go for it. Hell if he goes out willingly he could still get lifetime secret service protection for him and his family for the rest of all their lives, saving him many millions of dollars.
The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified.
Nothing about leaving voicemail requires leaving a valid callback number.
True, though it isn't very useful for the person who left the message to not leave a valid callback number. I have yet to get a voicemail that asked me to visit a website, send an email, send a text to a number that is not standard for my county, visit a physical location, etc (though I'm sure some exist).
Perhaps the callers who do this do, I don't know. It's usually Chinese gibberish.
I have been getting the Chinese singing spam at my phone at work. When I get them they come from a Chicago number (in my case right time zone wrong state). One time I answered one and started mashing buttons on the keypad and eventually got a live person who then asked me a question in Chinese. I said hello and he hung up. The correlation might not be meaningful but I haven't had the call since.
or sends straight to voicemail.
Why do you want to waste time listening to spam voicemail?
From my experience the spam calls almost never leave voicemail, if they are leaving a voicemail it's because I actually gave them my number at some point. The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified. After all, the vast majority of them - as mentioned in the summary - are spoofing numbers to begin with.