All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[mathew101281]

Twice in the last week I've seen posts on Facebook by people I've never heard of before, dredging up incidents of blatant racism by Democrats from 50 to 200 years ago. Is this a coordinated campaign?

It's true that the Democrats were the party of the Confederate sympathizers for a long time, and blacks all voted for Mr. Lincoln's party, but things started to change with Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act. Nowadays the parties have largely traded places on race, but these people on Facebook are trying to convince people that they didn't.

Next time they try and do that ask them why their isn’t any white nationalists running for the Democrat’s nomination? Why isn’t David Duke or the Neo Nazis stumping for Democrats? They won’t have much of an answer for that.

[Malvolio]

Cable news talking head Nomiki Konst is running for political office, which leads Politico to ask:

Who is Nomiki Konst?

Reading this makes me think she should have stuck to tv gigs. She might not enjoy being vetted.




Yikes.

If Nomiki Konst ever becomes nationally known, SNL has to ask Anna Faris to host so she can play Konst. The resemblance is uncanny.

[Malvolio]

Next time they try and do that ask them why their isn’t any white nationalists running for the Democrat’s nomination? Why isn’t David Duke or the Neo Nazis stumping for Democrats? They won’t have much of an answer for that.

Excellent point. And remind them that it has to be a current or at least recent Democrat. It can't be someone from 50 or 60 years ago.

[Tendrin]

They argue it because bad faith propagandists like D'nesh D"souza, Rush, and Jonah Goldberg have been arguing it for decades while ensuring there party remains a safe haven for the racists themselves.

[PwrdOn]

Cable news talking head Nomiki Konst is running for political office, which leads Politico to ask:

Who is Nomiki Konst?

Reading this makes me think she should have stuck to tv gigs. She might not enjoy being vetted.




Yikes.

Because genuine leftist politics has been shunned by the mainstream for so long, there will naturally be a shortage of respectable and qualified people pushing those ideas and a preponderance of cranks and loonies, but now that more and more of the country is coming around to progressive ideas, that should start to change.

[Tuck]

Excellent point. And remind them that it has to be a current or at least recent Democrat. It can't be someone from 50 or 60 years ago.

In fairness, Duke was a Democrat into the late 80s.

[Tazirai]

Dianne Feinstein Fumbles in Meeting With Young Climate Activists Over Green New Deal

Young activist one: Senator, if this doesn’t get turned around in 10 years you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with the consequences.



Young activist two: The government is supposed to be for the people, and by the people, and all for the people.



Dianne Feinstein: You know what’s interesting about this group, is I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that. I’ve gotten elected, I just ran. I was elected by a million vote plurality. And I know what I’m doing. So maybe, you should listen a little bit.

Yes, let's wipe out Trump. But take neoliberal Democrats with him, too

Laws enacted in these locales can set national and global standards, and in the process, concretely illustrate a popular progressive agenda. Such an agenda in liberal America could rebrand the Democratic party as an entity that is actually serious about challenging the greed of the 1%, fighting corruption, and making day-to-day life better for the 99%.

Instead, though, liberal America has often produced something much different and less appealing: Democratic politicians who constantly echo courageous populist themes in speeches, news releases and election ads, and then often uses the party’s governmental power to protect the status quo and serve corporate donors in their interminable class war.

Take California: a state where Democrats control the governorship, every state constitutional office and a legislative supermajority. With healthcare premiums rising, polls show 70% of Americans support the creation of a government-sponsored healthcare system. Considering that Canada’s healthcare system first began in its provinces, California would seem a perfect place to create the first such system in the United States. There is just one problem: Democrats are using their power to shut down single-payer legislation as they rake in big money from private insurance and drug companies.

Democrats Are Afraid Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Too. And That’s A Good Thing.

That’s because turning the Democratic Party into a truly progressive force will require turning “primary” into a verb. The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats because they’re out of step with constituents. And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them. Otherwise, the leverage of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex will continue to hold sway.

[Tazirai]

Claim: Nomiki Konst got money “from Washington insiders who were connected to Steve Bannon.”

Debate response: Konst said she didn’t know what donation City Councilman Rafael Espinal, who made the accusation, was talking about. Espinal also said that Konst “ran for Congress in Tucson, Arizona, a few years ago,” to which Konst said “I was never on the ballot. I did not run.”

Fact check: Espinal’s campaign told City & State that he was referring to a $2,000 donation to Konst’s campaign from Patrick Caddell. Caddell, who died on Saturday, was a longtime Democratic strategist, but aligned himself with President Donald Trump in recent years. He reportedly became a good friend to Bannon, the controversial former Trump campaign strategist. Konst received the donation on Jan. 9, then quickly refunded half of it, $1,000.

As for her previous candidacy, Konst announced that she was running for Congress in Tucson in February 2012. She was born there, and attended college at the University of Arizona. She dropped out of the race at the end of May, well before the August primary.

Trump pollster donated max amount to left-wing NYC public advocate candidate before dying- Nomiki Konst

A longtime political pollster who worked as a Democratic operative for decades until flipping to the right to support Donald Trump returned to his roots just before his death — pumping $1,000 into the war chest of a self-professed socialist dem.

Pat Caddell — whose polling work helped put both Jimmy Carter and Trump in the White House — made the donation in early January to Nomiki Konst, who is running for public advocate in the city. The South Carolina-based pollster died Feb. 16 of complications from a stroke at age 68, just a few weeks after he forked over the maximum donation amount allowed to Konst.

Caddell’s mysterious late-in-life political maneuver stunned even some of his close friends.

Caddell tended to stay away from political fund-raising and preferred working behind the scenes on polling, she added.

After working with Democrats for decades, Caddell tacked right during the 2016 campaign when he began advising President Trump on an unofficial basis about polling. Stewart said Caddell and Trump became “friends.”

Caddell’s connection to Trump landed him in more right-wing company.

[Tazirai]

[Tazirai]

[Mister Mets]

Even if the video were not deceptively edited, it is shady for adults to try to put kids on camera to score political points. Supporting this kind of behavior sets a bad precedent.

But the video is also deceptively edited. Mediaite Writer/ Editor Tommy MMXIXtopher links to fuller video.

https://twitter.com/tommyxtopher/sta...37889043140609

This suggests that the original group is trying to mislead and misinform. Anyone who spread the video without making a correction afterwards should be considered wildly suspect as a news source.

[Mister Mets]

Probably more what Obama did (no kids died in custody) than what Trump has been doing (multiple kids died in custody). That’d be a start at least. When you broke it and it wasn’t broken before, fix it. Simple.

This is still vague since you're not saying what should be done.

Clearly the system is broke if children are travelling thousands of miles to get to the US.

Just take a look at the administrations of Clinton then Bush then Obama and then Trump -- we all know that's not the Republican way.

They break things and then ask others to fix them -- which is why Mets has to continually ask questions, since he can't defend the actions of his party.

More relevantly, even if you came up with a reasonable -- and humane -- solution, we know the Republicans wouldn't implement it because this isn't about solving a problem: it's about "hurting" brown people.

Meanwhile, record deficits grow, climate change goes uncontested, and our allies no longer trust our leadership.

------
"Presidential candidate Donald Trump said ending "catch and release" was the second of his two priorities for immigration reform, after walling off Mexico.[29][30] When the administration began separating families, pro-Trump pundits argued that the administration was implementing the same policy as the Obama administration.[23] According to PolitiFact, the assertion that Trump was implementing the same policy as Obama is "false", noting "Obama's immigration policy specifically sought to avoid breaking up families. While some children were separated from their parents under Obama, this was relatively rare and families were quickly reunited even if that meant the release of a parent from detention."[23] The Obama Administration did consider separating families, but decided against it.[31]

Proposals of family separation as a means to deter immigration

Two weeks after President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the administration reviewed the idea of separating immigrant children from their mothers as a way to deter asylum-seekers.[28][39] In March 2017, it was first reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was considering a proposal to separate parents from their children if they were caught attempting to cross the border into the United States.[28][27] John Kelly, then Secretary of Homeland Security, confirmed that the policy was under consideration,[37][40] but later denied it.[41][42] Speaking on Democracy Now! the director of the National Immigration Law Center said that the policy, if implemented, would amount "to state-sanctioned violence against children, against families that are coming to the United States to seek safety" and that the administration did not act with transparency in explaining what was being proposed.[43]

In June, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal spoke with recently arrived detainees at the Federal Detention Center, SeaTac facility located near Seattle. The facility housed 206 immigrants, 174 of them were women. Many of the women spoke of "fleeing threats of rape, gang violence and political persecution".[13] She said more than half of the women were mothers who had forcibly been separated from their children, some as young as 12 months old, and said that many did not know where their children were being detained. Commenting on her visit of the facility, Jayapal called the women's stories "heartbreaking", saying, "I've been doing immigration-rights work for almost two decades. I am not new to these stories. I will tell you there was not a dry eye in the house. ... Some of them heard their children screaming for them in the next room. Not a single one of them had been allowed to say goodbye or explain to them what was happening.

In September 2018 it was reported that 12,800 children were being held in federal custody, and that federal shelters housing migrant children were filled to around 90% since May 2018.[98]

A report by Amnesty International, published in 2018, found that the statistics on the separated children did not include children who had been separated from non-parental relationships, for example from grandparents, or those who were separated due to their documentation being insufficient.[99][100] In January 2019, auditors from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services stated that the practice of separating migrant children from their families started earlier and involved thousands more children than previously known, and that in the summer of 2017 a "steep increase in the number of children who had been separated from a parent or guardian" occurred.[101][102]

A followup government report released in January 2019, revealed that while HHS had previously said that the total number of children separated from their parents was 2,737, a new investigation suggested the true number of children to be thousands more, with the exact number unknown.

Government data of arrests by border agents suggest that the family separation policy did little to deter migrants from crossing the US border illegally.[118]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_...aration_policy

There's a lot to disagree with in the post.

The claim that Republicans just want to hurt brown people is ridiculous. It's close to a conservative saying Democrats want to hold back economic progress, and punish the successful, although a bit worse since there will be some nuts on the left who actually make these arguments.

No one is doing anything to actively cause harm. Most policies are done because of the hope it makes things better in the long run (even if just as a meaningless salve to create the impression of a solution so the activists take a breather for a moment.

I ask these questions so you guys would consider the implications of your policy suggestions. If someone is blaming the Trump administration for a problem without being able to articulate what specific policies they disagree with and why the benefits exceed the costs, that suggests the problem isn't on my end.

If there's a reasonable and humane alternative, by all means, mention it. But releasing people who brought their children with them across the border isn't a reasonable alternative, since it rewards people who take risks with their kids.

[aja_christopher]

The claim that Republicans just want to hurt brown people is ridiculous.

Let's just agree to disagree here -- all the evidence is there; it just depends on how you decide to view (or ignore) it.

With regards to discussion, again, even if you are arguing here in good faith, the vast majority of your party -- who elected a habitual liar into office and continues to protect him daily as he carries out their agenda -- is not, which makes discussing this with you largely a waste of time.

I have to add that it's kind of sickening that you would try to argue that forcibly separating mothers from their children as a deterrent, sometimes permanently, isn't "doing anything to actively cause harm" -- we both know better, but only one of us is trying to pretend otherwise.

Net immigration was already decreasing sharply under Obama -- the only thing "ridiculous" here is you still acting as if Democrats want open borders in order to justify your party's blatantly racist policies.

[aja_christopher]

No one is doing anything to actively cause harm. Most policies are done because of the hope it makes things better in the long run.

That it makes things better for Republicans -- usually at the expense of "minorities".

------
"Why Republicans Are Suppressing Black Votes"

"Not long after losing its second presidential election to Barack Obama, the GOP, so the story goes, operated on itself. Like a lung-cancer patient declaring that it’s time to quit smoking, the Republican National Committee declared in a 2013 “autopsy” report that “the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African-American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.”

A few months later, Republicans cheered a Supreme Court decision that maimed the Voting Rights Act. Three years after that — in the wake of more than a dozen states pushing through fresh new laws to make it more difficult for African-American and Hispanic people to vote — the party crossed another Rubicon by nominating Donald Trump for president, a birther with an unquestioned record of racial discrimination and bigoted rhetoric. This was not so much hypocritical as it was suicidal.

“An aging, nearly 90 percent white GOP cannot carry its candidates to electoral victory on a platform that revels in the consequences of unvarnished racism — such as Charlottesville — or the terror of family separation and placing babies in cages,” Emory University professor Carol Anderson tells Rolling Stone. How does one maintain such a model for electoral success in a browning America? For those Republicans who indulge in it or silently benefit from it, voter suppression provides the leeway....

...only one party has told us, explicitly, that their only hope for maintaining power is to cheat scores of black and Hispanic-Americans out of their ability to make a choice as to who governs them. They have said it with all the confidence of a boxer who has rigged the fight. When politicians choose the people who choose them, they get a mistaken idea about who works for whom.

Remind them who does the hiring here."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-votes-738059/

[aja_christopher]

[Deleted.]