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

[aja_christopher]

You'd be wrong about that, as usual, but I'm not going to relitigate it with you yet again.

Also, every thing she brought up and pointed out has been born out with 100% accuracy. And you still don't consider that /maybe/ you should have voted against all of that. THe children in cages on the border thank you for your stand.

He's spent years attacking the Clintons and arguing with us on this board but he couldn't even take thirty minutes to a few hours -- depending on whether he lives in a black neighborhood or not -- to vote against someone like Trump becoming President.

You'd think someone who has read Spider-Man would understand the responsibility that comes with power, and more importantly that when your candidate loses by millions of votes in the primaries, it means your beliefs and values aren't necessarily shared by (at least) millions of other American citizens.

Doesn't mean you should sabotage and constantly complain about the other candidate(s) to make yours look better -- but here we are.

[numberthirty]

He's spent years attacking the Clintons and arguing with us on this board but he couldn't even take thirty minutes to a few hours -- depending on whether he lives in a black neighborhood or not -- to vote against someone like Trump taking power.

You'd think someone who has read Spider-Man would understand the responsibility that comes with power, and also that when your candidate loses by millions of votes in the primaries, it means your beliefs and values aren't necessarily shared by millions of other American citizens.

Doesn't mean you sabotage and constantly complain about the other candidate(s) to make yours look better -- but here we are.

No discussion of the person who won the nomination having a responsibility to at least make an attempt at reaching out to voters who clearly did not support her.

Never mind that there may have been a responsibility not to hope that votes against her opponent could secure a win.

Never mind that there might have been a responsibility to actually set foot inside of Wisconsin during a General Presidential Election.

[PaulBullion]

Put simply, that Harris has been a threat to the rights of the accused is the actual issue.

Harris started programs to keep first time offenders out of jail going back to 2005.

[PaulBullion]

It was what the entire end of HRC's campaign strategy was based on.

Pointing out the issues with her opponent, and crossing her fingers.

She had the most detailed policy suggestions of all the candidates running that year, primary and general. She gave people so many things to vote for. You are being ridiculous. Not sure you can be any other way, though.

[Tendrin]

You'd think someone who has read Spider-Man would understand the responsibility that comes with power, and more importantly that when your candidate loses by millions of votes in the primaries, it means your beliefs and values aren't necessarily shared by (at least) millions of other American citizens.

There seems to be a lot of people who never quite got the message baked in so much of it.

[aja_christopher]

She had the most detailed policy suggestions of all the candidates running that year, primary and general. She gave people so many things to vote for. You are being ridiculous. Not sure you can be any other way, though.

Might as well argue with a wall.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/

[numberthirty]

Harris started programs to keep first time offenders out of jail going back to 2005.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...n_2025456.html

Daniel Larsen, Found Innocent But Still In Prison, Not Getting Critical Health Care, Wife Says

[Saffron]

No discussion of the person who won the nomination having a responsibility to at least make an attempt at reaching out to voters who clearly did not support her.

Never mind that there may have been a responsibility not to hope that votes against her opponent could secure a win.

Never mind that there might have been a responsibility to actually set foot inside of Wisconsin during a General Presidential Election.

I can't believe we're still talking about Wisconsin, like she would have won the election if she'd have just shaking some hands at some little diner there, or like she did no campaigning there. Does no one remember she visited Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania extensively? How'd her stepping foot in those places work out?

[ed2962]

Pretty much. But look at how Richard Spencer's brand tanked after getting punched in the face. They can't recover from humiliation because of the baked in fragility of their manly images, you know?

I'd actually argue the opposite. Not that many people in the general public knew who Spenser was until that video went viral. Then his supporters were able to spin the narrative into "Oh, what about free speech! Oh, look how intolerant the left really is! Oh, look how calm and rational Spenser is!" Next thing you know is on all sorts platforms spreading his agenda.

[aja_christopher]

I can't believe we're still talking about Wisconsin, like she would have won the election if she'd have just shaking some hands at some little diner there, or like she did no campaigning there. Does no one remember she visited Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania extensively? How'd her stepping foot in those places work out?

History repeats itself.

Edit: ...when people don't learn from their mistakes.

-----
"I’ve Seen Civil War Destroy the Democrats Before. We Can’t Let it Happen Again"

"Maximalist ideology is a prescription for division and defeat.

I’ve lived through a Democratic Civil War before. In fact, I’ve been in the middle of two of them. The first was in 1968, when I was the research director for Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. The second was in 1980, when I was Jimmy Carter’s policy director.

Both times, I watched pressure from the party’s liberal wing tear the party apart and bring down a Democratic presidential candidate. Both times, the Republicans took the White House. Both times, liberal dreams were shattered.

Today, I fear it could all be happening again.

As President Donald Trump moved the Republican Party sharply to the populist right, early entrants to the Democratic Party presidential contest have veered sharply to the left, along with several energetic new Democratic members of the House. The left’s new avant-garde has properly identified the need to confront serious national challenges, from rising income inequality and inadequate health care coverage to climate change.

But successfully dealing with these problems demands pragmatic solutions that can gain support from a majority of Americans and do not play into Trump’s false narrative that Democrats are socialists. Speaking from experience, by demanding the moon, their proposals will crash on the launching pad and lead to nowhere good.

In 1968, I smelled the stink bombs that anti-war protesters tossed into the lobby of Humphrey’s convention headquarters. He forlornly watched from the window of his hotel suite as the Chicago police cracked down on the demonstrators with tear gas and clubs. Humphrey’s challenger from the left, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had castigated Humphrey for the Johnson administration’s handling of Vietnam, didn’t get the nomination that year. But McCarthy failed to reconcile with his fellow Minnesotan and led his supporters back into the fold only after it was too late. Richard Nixon exploited the divisions in the party and the country and was elected by the thinnest of margins in November. His election led to an extension of the war Humphrey would have ended; during the next four years another 21,000 American soldiers were killed.

In 1980, the Democratic chasm opened again. I had been Jimmy Carter’s policy director during his 1976 campaign and went on to serve as his domestic policy adviser in the White House. A former Georgia governor running as a moderate in the Democratic primaries, Carter nevertheless had decidedly progressive accomplishments as president. I worked under Carter’s leadership to develop all the major ethics legislation still in place, requiring disclosure of assets and potential conflicts of interest for senior officials coming into office, restricting gifts while in office and curbing lobbying when leaving, and creating the office of special counsel to investigate wrongdoing by high officials, among many other measures. Carter encouraged affirmative action and directed more government contracts to minority companies. He increased the minimum wage by the largest amount in a decade, doubled the number of public jobs and expanded youth employment programs. He reformed and greatly expanded funding for food stamps and education with a new Department of Education, saved New York City and Chrysler from bankruptcy, and appointed more women and minorities to senior positions and judgeships than all his predecessors combined.

Carter showed what moderates can accomplish. But, throughout his four years in office, Carter never got full credit for this record. He was criticized by women’s and civil rights groups, social welfare advocates and the party’s union leaders for not doing enough. Consumer groups failed to mobilize for him even though he appointed many of their leaders to regulate big business. The “greenest” president in American history got little credit from environmentalists even as he doubled the size of the national park system, made conservation a centerpiece of his energy policy and championed solar energy, even installing a solar panel on the White House roof.

But the big sticking point for the liberal wing of the party was health care. To obtain support from liberal labor unions in the primaries in 1976, Carter agreed to broad principles for national health insurance, but in office refused to accept Senator Ted Kennedy’s single-payer, government run bill at a time of raging inflation. Over many days of negotiations I had with the senator in his Capitol office, we came close to agreeing on a bill that would have substituted a government-run program for a privately managed program and full coverage phased in over many years. But in the end, Kennedy bowed to labor’s demands and refused to back Carter’s own bill, which looks much like Obamacare today: employer-mandated insurance, health care for children, catastrophic coverage for major illnesses and a major expansion of Medicaid.

By asking for too much, health care reform stalled for decades..."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...vil-war-225811

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinto...e_plan_of_1993

[aja_christopher]

Cont'd

"Americans of color still face systemic discrimination in education, employment and housing. And millions of Americans white, black and brown, still have no health care coverage, which virtually every other industrial democracy in the world provides to all of their citizens. It would be better to focus on policies that can gain broad public support: Expand health care under the framework of Obamacare, encourage more investment in low-income neighborhoods, endorse affirmative action based on socioeconomic need, offer more government contracts to minority companies, repair the shredded social safety net, increase funding of Head Start for poor children and elementary and secondary education in poverty-stricken districts, and broaden Pell Grants to help make college affordable.

It is a misreading of last November’s midterm elections to believe the House was flipped to Democratic control by the election of a few arch-liberals, most of whom displaced centrist Democrats. The greatest gains were made by moderate Democrats capturing Republican districts. A successful Democratic presidential candidate might take a leaf from Carter’s playbook, even more successfully accomplished by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to appeal to both sides of the party’s coalition to attract and hold moderate Americans tired of partisanship—Americans who want the highest ethical standards in the White House, who will respect and strengthen the institutions that represent our values—from the FBI to the press to our public schools. A successful candidate will eschew identity politics and want to unite Americans rather than divide the country into warring tribes, will strengthen, not weaken, our worldwide network of alliances, and will recognize there is a big country with its own problems that must be addressed between the two coasts.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a liberal pragmatist and a political master at herding cats, has readied programs that can lay the foundation for a presidential candidate who can articulate a clear and acceptable message on health care, economic equality and a positive role for government that has wide appeal in the country, while simultaneously capturing the energy of the newcomers of the liberal left — if the liberal left will only listen. The Democrats must iron out their differences and present a united front against Trump, who will have the advantages of incumbency, a positive economy and the support of a united Republican Party. If these progressives keep their eye on winning in 2020, they can be part of a broad coalition to shape their politics into laws which tackle the problems they have identified — which is why they took up arms and won their way to Washington in the first place.

Otherwise, we could witness another divided Democratic Party leading to another Republican victory. And the progressive left will have accomplished nothing."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...vil-war-225811

[Tendrin]

I'd actually argue the opposite. Not that many people in the general public knew who Spenser was until that video went viral. Then his supporters were able to spin the narrative into "Oh, what about free speech! Oh, look how intolerant the left really is! Oh, look how calm and rational Spenser is!" Next thing you know is on all sorts platforms spreading his agenda.

He was already receiving glowing pieces in the NYT's as the 'dapper white nationalist'. His profile was out there, and I think you underestimate how far it'd spread already.

The thing is, him getting punched made him look weak in front of the audience that mattered to him. /That's/ what he can't tolerate. And that's similarlly why Annig attacked the kid. That's why small scale humilations like an egg or one sucker punch have such impacts.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Clifton Johnson, a candidate for U.S. Senate from Nebraska in the 2014 elections. Johnson’s best, and possibly only qualification for elected office was the fact that he bore a striking resemblance to our first president, George Washington. He tried to parlay that uncanny likeness into framing himself to be the candidate in the race who would best serve the principles of our Founding Fathers (like his idea to abolish the IRS and establish a “consumption tax”, where you would be taxed not on what you earn, but what you spend), and thus ride to victory on the strength of the Tea Party movement. Unfortunately, Johnson’s actual message was an incoherent mess, including an immigration policy that would have 8 U.S. Soldiers placed at every mile marker along the U.S./Mexico border. He refused to do press interviews, which is understandable because the recurring statements he would make seemed to only be that “George Washington is back, and he’s upset.” Johnson only won 2% of the Republican vote in the primary in that election and has disappeared from the political scene since.

On this date in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted a profile of Elbert Guillory, who in the 2015 elections, gave up his seat in the Louisiana State Senate to make a run for Governor of Louisiana, finishing a distant fourth, with only about 8% of the vote. Guillory likes to work on behalf of Republicans to perpetuate the myth that Republican policies actually do better by African Americans, by declaring that he was “leaving the plantation”, and that Democrats are the “Party of Jim Crow”. This, of course, fails to recognize the fact that the Southern Democrats who favored Jim Crow left the Democratic Party over the passage of the Civil Rights Act and switched to the same Republican Party that Guillory finds himself in. Y’know, the one whose party platform advocates for strict Voter ID Laws that serve as a 21st Century Jim Crow. But anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg with Guillory. In May 2015, he actually argued in defense of a law on the books in Louisiana that allows teachers to promote Creationism or other unscientific theories as an alternative to teaching evolution by claiming there was a time when scientists thought the world was flat, and when religious people tried telling them it was round, it was the religious people who were burned at the stake for their heretical stance against science. Unless Elbert Guillory was born on Bizarro World, I have no idea what his problem is. Maybe it’s just that he’s worried what the voodoo houngans might think. (No, we’re serious. When that law for teaching Creationism popped up originally he argued in favor of it by referencing voodoo.) But back to Elbert Guillory commenting on race… When you’re talking about political discourse in this country being at its most polarized point… Guillory sure does his part. Take his starring in a campaign ad in North Carolina in the 2014 elections to take shots at Sen. Kay Hagan in her bid for re-election where he said that Democrats were “limousine liberals who have become our new overseers”. Or how prior to the 2015 election in Louisiana, when he ran an ad to campaign against Kip Holden, a Democrat running for lieutenant governor, by running an ad where he just straight up looked in the camera and used the N-Word. Guillory’s inflammatory racial rhetoric is far from his only controversial issue, as one of his biggest legislative efforts since taking office was to push hard for the legalization of “chicken boxing”, which he insists should not be cast aside because it’s a whole different, classy sport and unrelated cockfighting (the non-sport that’s actually animal abuse). And his passion for chicken boxing got Guillory noticed by Steven Colbert, who ran a segment on him in April of 2014. As recently as January of 2016, Guillory was still putting out videos to attack Democrats that were mired in conservative fantasy-land, including one about how, in Guillory’s warped mind, President Obama is tougher on American gun owners than he is ISIS (last I checked, Wayne LaPierre wasn’t the target of a drone strike, so…) n the 2016 elections, Guillory tried to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District, but managed to finish a distant fifth in the primary, earning about 8% of the vote.



On this date in 2017, as well as 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Bob McDermott, who has served in the Hawaii House of Representatives since winning office since 2012 (after several years away), who moved to the Aloha State from Pennsylvania and quickly rose in the ranks of the GOP there for his brazen opposition to LGBTQ rights. Bob McDermott was trying to ban gay marriage in Hawaii as far back as 1998, when he served two taerms in office before disappearing from the Hawaiian political scene for a decade. In 2014, was trying to still filibuster attempts at legalizing same sex marriage in the state, and falsely claim that Hawaiian citizens voted to ban same sex marriage in ’98. Among the bills he’s introduced include an amendment to the state constitution to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples” (that would be immediately overturned as unconstitutional via the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling), a bill to redefine the term “place of public accommodation” to allow religiously-affiliated organizations including hotels, restaurants, movie theatres, hospitals (!), retail stores, and mortuaries to deny services to LGBT people. How self-righteously stupid is it to try something like that in Hawaii? Let’s put it this way…Neither of those McDermott bills has even a single co-sponsor. McDermott has also proposed a bill focused on limiting the Department of Education’s ability to implement sexual health education programs which he hopes will eliminate all mention of LGBT people in public classrooms, and is also currently at the forefront of the Hawaii’s GOP’s attempts to prevent their Democratic counterparts from a bill to ban public school teachers from promoting ‘gay conversion therapy,’ a practice discredited by all leading national medical and psychological authorities because it is ineffective, risky, and can be harmful. If you ask McDermott, though, it’s the “gay cure”, which would then mean yes, he views homosexuality as a disease. The bigoted rhetoric for him knows no boundaries for taste, either. In January of 2014, Bob McDermott hosted a press conference where he decried gay sex in a long rant, that featured a big focus on anuses. No, really, he spoke, “The anus is presented as genitalia, just another sex organ. This is another example of forced ‘equality’ by ignoring the natural function of the rectum and anus. Therefore ‘political’ correctness dictates that the male rectum and the female vagina are ‘equal’ in terms of being sexual organs. This totally ignores the obvious facts of human biology and reproduction.”

Of late, Bob McDermott’s fanaticism has begun to even carry over to what few colleagues he has in the state legislature. In early February 2017, the Hawaii GOP voted to oust their own House Minority Leader, Beth Fukumoto, for the grievous offense of having attended a women’s march to protest the presidency of Donald Trump the day after his inauguration. McDermott chastised her for this on the floor of the Hawaii House, saying, “You are speaking not for yourself anymore. It is a high-level responsibility.” At that point, Fukumoto took stock of her party, rallying around a misogynistic orange bigot, and with her main ally being a deranged wild-eyed homophobe obsessed with anuses only slightly less than the mad scientist from the film Human Centipede and opted to switch to the Democratic Party.

Bob McDermott continued in his anti-LGBTQ extremism in 2018, voting against a ban on gay conversion therapy on minors, and yet, he still won re-election in 2018 with 55% of the vote, a slightly worse showing than only two years earlier, but sadly not enough to buy him another two years in office.

[Mister Mets]

Sure, Mets.

Have a nice day -- let me know when you have some actual facts about the majority of Democrats passing "open border" policies.

I don't recall every claiming that a majority of Democrats have passed "open border" policies.

re: the Death Penalty (and justice, in general)

There are two types of justice we can seek: punitive and restorative.

Punitive Justice asks us to ask the following:
- What rule has been broken?
- Who is responsible/to blame/at fault?
- What should the punishment be?

It's goals are to isolate the alleged criminal, separate him from society and from any support system, and punish him to the fullest legal extent possible.

Restorative Justice ask us the following:

- Why was this rule broken?
- Who was harmed/impacted/affected and how?
- What can be done to make things right?

It's goals are to provide rehabilitation, to provide for the common good, and to ensure that all parties have a strong support system both before and after commission of a crime.

Both have their value and their place, and both sets of questions together provide a more full picture of the crime. But to rely SOLELY on Punitive Justice, the way proponents of the Death Penalty do, is the way of tyrants. It is rule through fear, fetishization of punishment and death, and it allows us to hand wave away acts of abuse and dehumanization of prisoners. Restorative Justice allows us to look at motivation. Did the alleged criminal kill in self defense, or was it premeditated? Did the 'killer' feel threatened, and if so, why? What events and experiences came together to provoke the killing, and what can be done about those experiences and events to prevent FUTURE killings?

The death penalty has no value, other than fear, and it has been proven to have no effect on the rate of crime. It is barbaric, unfairly sought and handed out, poorly executed, and woefully mismanaged at every step. It does nothing for victims or their families other than feed a sense that death is a thing some people just deserve (often the imagined mindset of the man they want to see killed, because hypocrisy knows no shame).

These are facts. These are, and likely more besides, reasons for why Gavin Newsome did what he did, and I support him.

Punitive justice also makes sure there are less incentives to commit crime.

One can support the death penalty and other forms of punitive justice without being against restorative justice in all cases. If a career criminal already on trial for murder orders a hit on two witnesses and has two bystanders killed, we can't blame events and circumstances for provoking the killing.

Or hoping to land a position (Attorney General perhaps) in the Abominable Administration.

Why would he want to be Attorney General for a guy who could lose in 2020, and treated his first attorney general like **** for a morally correct stand?

In news unrelated to tragedy, facism, or treasonous presidents, here's some possible good news!

https://deadline.com/2019/03/james-g...es-1202576444/

Great news.

With the Tucker Carlson mess, this was probably a good time to make the announcement, as many conservatives were politically motivated to argue against these kinds of tactics at getting people fired.

I'll note that I always thought firing Gunn was a dumb idea, and said so.

https://community.cbr.com/search.php?searchid=7514571

[Dalak]

I feel like someone should start a 'Let's Relitigate the 2016 Election!' thread so we can stop wasting so much space on this thread...

+1 The same posters going over the same arguments refusing to learn from the past gets beyond old. Especially when they insist on hypocritically attacking others in the same way they complain Sanders is unfairly attacked.