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[scriver]

Wouldn't an erection cause blood to flow from the rest of the body to the penis? Wouldn't that mean that either you bleed out or not get an erection?

The blood flows to the penis, storing it, thereby keeping it from bleeding out through the wound. Handjobs is the best way to treat stab wounds and cuts.

[Kagus]

In the OR:

"Nurse! We need suction!"

"Um."

[smjjames]

Lol.....

[misko27]

I thought I'd read that it was Mark Meadows who had said "With all due respect, no way, I like it where I am"? Not neccesarily verbatim, but probably the gist of his reasoning.

Other contenders are Mick Mulvaney, Steve Mnuchin, and Robert Lighthizer. Chris Christie is apparently a strong contender, and I've heard acting AG Whitaker be mentioned a bunch of times.

Given what happened with Sessions and what happens in general to anybody who works for Trump, Meadows would probably be leery about leaving a pretty safe House seat since unlike Sessions, he isn't doing it at the end of a long career in Congress.

Meadows is apparently still in the running, actually.

Part of the issue is that Chief of Staff is a bit of a joke under Trump, so no one wants to position anymore. If you can't actually control anything, why bother being in charge?

[PTTG??]

I believe that in previous eras, the answer was, "out of a sense of duty to the people of the United States."

So hey, maybe this will be a good way to find someone willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. Too bad their career will be ruined afterwards.

[Trekkin]

I believe that in previous eras, the answer was, "out of a sense of duty to the people of the United States."

So hey, maybe this will be a good way to find someone willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. Too bad their career will be ruined afterwards.

Don't believe the propaganda; the founding fathers didn't explicitly design a system to check ambition with ambition in anticipation of dutiful selflessness on the part of our elected officials, let alone their staff.

[smjjames]

I thought I'd read that it was Mark Meadows who had said "With all due respect, no way, I like it where I am"? Not neccesarily verbatim, but probably the gist of his reasoning.

Other contenders are Mick Mulvaney, Steve Mnuchin, and Robert Lighthizer. Chris Christie is apparently a strong contender, and I've heard acting AG Whitaker be mentioned a bunch of times.

Given what happened with Sessions and what happens in general to anybody who works for Trump, Meadows would probably be leery about leaving a pretty safe House seat since unlike Sessions, he isn't doing it at the end of a long career in Congress.

Meadows is apparently still in the running, actually.

Part of the issue is that Chief of Staff is a bit of a joke under Trump, so no one wants to position anymore. If you can't actually control anything, why bother being in charge?

If he wants to potentially destroy his political career, that's up to him. Also, I think I've heard that it was closer to a manager type position, though it's always a bit different for each President.

I believe that in previous eras, the answer was, "out of a sense of duty to the people of the United States."

So hey, maybe this will be a good way to find someone willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. Too bad their career will be ruined afterwards.

Don't believe the propaganda; the founding fathers didn't explicitly design a system to check ambition with ambition in anticipation of dutiful selflessness on the part of our elected officials, let alone their staff.

That's the ideal anyway. However, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly have predicted someone as brazen as Trump or how America evolved the way it did. Yes, they warned against things like political parties (which happened anyway, because human nature) and tyrants, but they had an Age of (scientific and philosophical) Enlightenment view on things and thought things would stay Enlightened or something.

[Trekkin]

That's the ideal anyway. However, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly have predicted someone as brazen as Trump or how America evolved the way it did. Yes, they warned against things like political parties (which happened anyway, because human nature) and tyrants, but they had an Age of (scientific and philosophical) Enlightenment view on things and thought things would stay Enlightened or something.

They did, yes, which is why Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. " His opposition to parties was also because they represented an alternative route to greater personal power, disrupting what would otherwise have theoretically been a stable distribution of powers operating via tug-of-war between the three branches. Their ideal judges and Congresspeople and Presidents and so forth were out for all the power they could get for themselves, and therefore all the powers assigned whatever offices they held, and so were held in check by the equally power-mad people in the offices whose power they were trying to usurp.

That's their Enlightenment views at work: not in the assumption that people were fundamentally civic-minded but in the idea that a system of laws could be constructed to reason functional government out of people without its best interests at heart.

Yes, Trump is unexpected; part of the idea behind a large republic was to smother factions of passion in the delays between when the 1780s version of angry tweets went out via horseback and when the sender finally got a response, leaving only factions operating on more enduring desires of the people. (The other was to provide a bigger pool of people from whom to elect representatives, on the theory that a bigger sample size is more likely to contain a more precisely representative person.) My point was not that the system is working as intended but rather that the reason it's not working is not because ･ﾟ: *✧ The Founders ✧･ﾟ: * were amazing people with an inviolable sense of duty to the Republic operating only on civic virtue, et cetera, and we poor modern-day slobs cannot hope to hold a candle to them. That kind of nostalgia for fake history is how we got MAGA in the first place, and it's toxic to the idea of respect for the institutions they built precisely because they were so ambitious they could only safely be pointed at each other.

In short, if we're ever going to get out of this, it's not going to be by electing "the best people." It's going to be by fixing the offices they hold.

[sluissa]

Time for some Jeopardy:

The topic is "Lines in the Sand".

"For $400"

17 minutes.

*Beep beep*

"What is the limit of Donald Trump's Patience."

[Folly]

You want to know something? I’ll tell you what: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. I will take the mantle, I will be the one to shut it down — I’m not going to blame you for it.

I feel like Trump really shot himself in the foot today.
The only hope he had of salvaging something from the impending government shutdown is if he could point at the Dems and say it's all their fault, because they refuse to do their job of funding national security. But now, every time he tries to make that argument, they have a perfect sound byte to play back to him. Trump has preemptively claimed ownership of this steaming pile.

[SalmonGod]

Pence squirming uncomfortably the whole time was great.

[Karnewarrior]

Pence moved?!

[sluissa]

You want to know something? I’ll tell you what: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. I will take the mantle, I will be the one to shut it down — I’m not going to blame you for it.

I feel like Trump really shot himself in the foot today.
The only hope he had of salvaging something from the impending government shutdown is if he could point at the Dems and say it's all their fault, because they refuse to do their job of funding national security. But now, every time he tries to make that argument, they have a perfect sound byte to play back to him. Trump has preemptively claimed ownership of this steaming pile.

The sad part is that his base won't wane noticeably because of it. At least not at first. It'd have to be an extended shutdown with massive noticable effects. We'd need to see social security checks not go out. We'd need to see soldiers not getting paid. Remember with airport personnel were doing their jobs without pay during one a few years ago? Yeah, that'd just be the start. And if it went on for weeks like that there's plenty of time for it to be spun in a different direction.

The examples in peoples minds are relatively minor. The one from earlier this term that only lasted a couple of days and was quickly cleaned up. Nobody's going to care at first and he might even uptick a few points for "making a bold move like that." He's got to be dumb enough to let it last and the dems have to be smart enough to keep it from being blamed on them, and if there's an out that's a reasonable compromise where they don't have to sell the farm, then they need to take it so that he can't spin it back in their direction.

[smjjames]

You want to know something? I’ll tell you what: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. I will take the mantle, I will be the one to shut it down — I’m not going to blame you for it.

I feel like Trump really shot himself in the foot today.
The only hope he had of salvaging something from the impending government shutdown is if he could point at the Dems and say it's all their fault, because they refuse to do their job of funding national security. But now, every time he tries to make that argument, they have a perfect sound byte to play back to him. Trump has preemptively claimed ownership of this steaming pile.

He's going to try his very best to deny his way out of it. Pretty sure he's said before that he is willing to take the heat for a government shutdown, but nothing like the way he did it here where he said he'd be willing to shut down the government and the cause is undeiably Trump trying to use leverage.

Course, his base would probably cheer it on and Fox News Trump News would likely try to minimize it by not even talking about it.

You want to know something? I’ll tell you what: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. I will take the mantle, I will be the one to shut it down — I’m not going to blame you for it.

I feel like Trump really shot himself in the foot today.
The only hope he had of salvaging something from the impending government shutdown is if he could point at the Dems and say it's all their fault, because they refuse to do their job of funding national security. But now, every time he tries to make that argument, they have a perfect sound byte to play back to him. Trump has preemptively claimed ownership of this steaming pile.

The sad part is that his base won't wane noticeably because of it. At least not at first. It'd have to be an extended shutdown with massive noticable effects. We'd need to see social security checks not go out. We'd need to see soldiers not getting paid. Remember with airport personnel were doing their jobs without pay during one a few years ago? Yeah, that'd just be the start. And if it went on for weeks like that there's plenty of time for it to be spun in a different direction.

The examples in peoples minds are relatively minor. The one from earlier this term that only lasted a couple of days and was quickly cleaned up. Nobody's going to care at first and he might even uptick a few points for "making a bold move like that." He's got to be dumb enough to let it last and the dems have to be smart enough to keep it from being blamed on them, and if there's an out that's a reasonable compromise where they don't have to sell the farm, then they need to take it so that he can't spin it back in their direction.

Yeah, its the big long ones that people start caring about, like the one in 2013 or so.

[nenjin]

High stakes game of chicken. Who is gonna blink first? Who can afford to let it go on? I'm not sure Trump can. You can't hold the entire Federal government hostage over a pet project for very long before even your allies turn on you. Also have to wonder what else is going in to the budget amidst all this, that gets a pass because of the "big compromise" this eventually resolves to.