UnSpecified Chatter

OK online debate warriors today we will discuss the one of the most tired and almost always useless observation that the US Government is not a Democracy; it's a Republic. Yes, it is true that the United States government is not a direct democracy. But it's also not a pure Republic either.  Specifically, we have a form of government that is best described as a representative democracy. There are two kinds of democracies, representative and direct. As for republics, the only feature you really need to qualify as one is that the representatives make the political decisions in the government. The electors could be the whole of the body politic (with some restrictions on age and registration requirements), as in the US (except for president as many of us were shocked to learn in 2000 and 2016), or they can be a specific group of people appointed, elected, by right of inheritance or by lot for that matter.

In case you run across someone who knows all about the Nenues memo from watching Fox news. The dossier has never been established to be "fake", there are parts if it that cannot be verified, but nothing has been definitively proven to be "fake". Some parts have been established in the public record. Some items have been corroborated by a second dossier and other intelligence provided by intelligence agencies from other partner countries such as Australia. The Clinton campaign never gave the dossier to the FBI, the creator of the dossier did. The FBI received it directly from Steel a British MI-6 agent, and they were fully aware that the research had been started by the conservative free beacon and then was continued by the Clinton campaign. The dossier was not in anyway part of the FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter page. The wire tape was never on Trump. While aspects of the dossier were included in subsequent FISA applications, the warrant could ne...