Above all else, just be calm and polite. Technically, you can also say “do not call this number again” and they have to stop calling, but I wouldn’t do this right off the bat. Its best if they are convinced that you aren’t the guy they’re looking for.
Calmness and politeness are traits that debtors usually lack, sometimes because they are just normal people overwhelmed with their situation, and sometimes because they are irrational loser (sorry, but its true). Either way, if you are consistently calm and unconcerned about their threats, they will either give up or realize you aren’t the guy.
The Supreme Court: The Nightmare Scenario
A year without a justice is the least of our worries. We could be in for a full-scale constitutional meltdown.
.. But suppose Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and the Republicans keep control of the Senate. There’s every reason to think that the Senate’s refusal to confirm a Democratic nominee would continue.
.. And if the Senate continues to refuse to act, that means that the President would have to play a card higher than the one the Senate is playing.
.. At some point, someone in the White House counsel’s office will notice that the Constitution doesn’t actually say that the Senate needs to vote to confirm a judicial nominee. The Constitution says that appointments shall be made “with the advice and consent” of the Senate. Traditionally, we have thought that the Senate’s “consent” is signaled by an affirmative vote. But voting on the nominee is just a convention—a shared understanding among the players in the game that we do things a certain way.
.. This is where the fragility of conventions comes into play. Just as there’s no rule that the Senate needs to consider the nominee quickly, there’s no clear reason why the Senate’s consent to a nomination must be signaled with an affirmative vote.
.. In many areas of the law, silence signifies consent. One could perfectly well read the Constitution to mean that the Senate has consented to a nominee if it remains silent for some reasonable period of time—in fact, it might make a lot of sense to read the consent requirement that way.
.. it’s important to realize that the history of judicial appointments over the last few decades is a history of one convention after another being tossed out. The political parties have been escalating their conflict over judicial personnel for years.
.. On January 20, 2017, she nominates a Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and three weeks later, when the Senate has done nothing, President Clinton mentions at a press briefing that if ninety days go by from the date of nomination and the Senate still hasn’t acted, she will take that to mean that the Senate has no objection and has consented to the appointment.
42 Trump Takes in 2000 Words
Supporters don’t have to believe Trump will get Mexico to pay for a wall, they can observe he’s building a coalition that is incapable of backtracking towards Hispanics in the general.
.. I do think those anxieties are worse now, but institutional breakdown is also important.
.. The chickens are coming home to roost. Trump is the culmination of three major GOP trends: the bubble mentality where outside opinions aren’t respected, much less engaged, the Southern Strategy of racial resentment, and the embrace of conservative economics. Trump is the symptom here, not the disease
.. Egged on by Fox News and other institutional players, those arguing that President Obama’s agenda was fundamentally radical, a hijacking of government designed to destroy the American way of life, were bound to see this explode in their faces when they then tried to run more respectable candidates.
.. For the past decade, the GOP has been responding that liberals and Democrats don’t have reasonable disagreements, but that they are instead committing treason and trying to destroy the country. If you toss both evidence and civility overboard in your politics, of course someone like Trump will show up
.. It’s also talk radio. If you are reading this, chances are you don’t listen to much conservative talk radio, even though it’s massive, an order of magnitude size larger than whatever “respectable” conservatives you read online. Trump’s scorched earth approach reflects the mindset and worldview talk radio creates much more than the DC consultant class
.. The Republican base doesn’t share elite ideological commitments to entitlement-slashing and low taxes. The Tea Party views these programs not through abstract ideological commitments but in terms of deservedness. That the GOP left 2012 thinking they didn’t need to back off an agenda of more immigration and cutting both taxes and entitlement had them walking right into this mess
.. neoconservatives used to get this. Their bread-and-butter was being for the New Deal but skeptical of the War on Poverty, and they were the perfect intellectuals to guide the Reagan Democrats into the GOP. Yet they quickly fell in line with the movement, trading any thoughts on economic policy to the libertarians in exchange for getting to run the foreign policy
.. ”Movement conservatism is a jobs program. Those who have the jobs in DC are happy. No one else is”
.. It’s also the media too. Their fake “objectivity” and “neutrality” has stopped their role as gatekeepers against an authoritarian political figure (Glenn Greenwald). Their desire for clicks and eyeballs have them giving Trump more coverage and credibility than he ever deserved (Eliana Johnson). Maybe, but the coverage is just as much a demand as a supply phenomenon, and the turnouts Trump is getting is bigger than what could be driven by CNN stories. Also Republicans have spent so much time saying the media is corrupt it’s rich to have them expect the media to bail them out here.
.. By forming a young, multiethnic coalition that is liberal on social issues, Obama has alienated blue-collar Democrats, forcing them into the GOP but the GOP doesn’t know what to do with them, so Trump
Who Sponsored the Hate?
The Kochs’ father, Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, the hugely profitable private oil-and-chemical company that his sons inherited, was one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the ultra-conservative group that accused political opponents of treason and was at its core segregationist. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating America’s public schools, in 1954, the Birchers launched a nationwide crusade to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1960, Fred Koch wrote a self-published book describing welfare programs as a secret government plot to lure rural blacks into cities so that they could foment “a vicious race war.”
.. in 1968, Fred Koch also supported an unsuccessful effort to recruit Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture and a leader of the Mormon Church, and Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator, to run on a platform calling for the restoration of segregation. The Birchers’ radicalism was so extreme, and delusional, they claimed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent.
.. Traditional town-hall meetings, at which local congressmen met with their constituents, were overtaken by angry mobs. Sean Noble, a Republican political operative who was on contract to the Kochs, later acknowledged, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing.” As he told National Review in 2014, “We knew we had to make that summer absolute hell.”