Might want to read it again:
Stack told us he had the option to send the weapons his store removed back to the manufacturer for a refund between 80% and 85%. Another possibility would be to quickly liquidate the merchandise through discounts. Neither choice aligned with the company’s intentions. […]
“I said, ‘The only thing we can do with them is destroy them,’” Stack said. “So that’s what we did. We destroyed them all.”
good catch, my bad.
Amend to “without extensive government service”, perhaps. Ike was certainly alright.
Just don’t ask the Iranians or the Guatemalans or …
Just watched Meryl Streep’s and Steven Soderbergh’s “The Laundromat” on Netflix last night.
Full on Indictment of off-shore tax havens being the source of political lobbying/funding, without a mention of Citizens United.
Missed opportunity.
The only way a third party candidate helps us is if it is David Duke or his equivalent. That might siphon off some Trumpers. A clear-headed Republican will only take never-Trumpers away from the Democratic nominee.
Yes, there are. The longer and more deeply involved I am in the parliamentary systems in Germany and England, the more I wish we had that rather than the “winner takes all” system in the US. For all their warts (no system is perfect). If for nothing else, the parties generally have to work on coalitions for a majority to head the government, so they have to really and truly sit down with one another and hammer out a middle ground.
Unrelated but true story: my mom was looking for a gift for my sister’s husband. He is an avid golfer so she thought she’d get him something golf-ish. So she googled “Dicks”.
The results were predicable…
Ahahahahahahaaaaaa! Thanks for the laugh! I really needed that!!
Once upon a time in America such things used to happen, not any more.
And, you’re right, no system is perfect and our current dictatorship is really imperfect.
What’s also obvious is that Ed Stack is promoting a book and it’s not selling well. Just like the candidate for 15 minutes Howard Schultz was promoting a book.
ONe of the things I like about the parliamentary system is that there are (generally) a number of smaller, special interest parties (like, say, a green agenda, or climate change). Because the big parties seldom get the 50%+ to be able to be the reigning group, they have to dicker with these special focus parties. So, say, BigParty A gets 46% and the Green Agenda Party has 5%, they have to find a way to merge their platforms to form a 51% coalition. At some point, then, PartyA may figure out it is really to their advantage to take on Green Agenda planks on their own. In other words, they are mainstreaming some of the special interests. Sometimes the coalitions are composed of 3 or 4 parties, all of whom work together.
Again, building a coalition can be problematic (look at Netanyahu’s inability to find coalition partners to build a majority coalition – on the other hand, Gantz can now give it a try, so old Bennie may be SOL…)
I think we have enough Dicks in the field already.
Like x 1000! 
Nope, they were destroyed as per the article.
Like Schultz, maybe bored and looking for a new hobby and POTUS is the obvious ticket.
Stack is a hardcore right winger. He’d take votes from the GOP.
He will simply take enough anti-Trump vote and insure Trumps re-election.
We have reached a point in the program where all the independent libertarians, DINOs (I’m lookin’ at you Gabbard and Steyer), and oligarch-lite folks are seeing the writing on the wall. Most of them have egos or they wouldn’t be where they are. Most of them genuinely believe they have the answers and most of them believe they can keep Trump from getting re-elected while saving capitalism. They live in different, delusional, magical-thinking bubbles than Trump-world, but they are still delusional, magical thinkers.
Trump has a rock-solid 38-40%. No amount of magical thinking on our side will change that. We cannot afford any centrist, republican-lite, third-party candidates, in part, because, if Russia has hacked the election process in places like Florida, they will be flipping votes to those less conspicuous third-party spots.
The way the message would be sent in this case is via people selling their shares and the price therefore tanking, which would be a rational outcome based on the fact that him running would be bad for business.