All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[JCAll]

I live there now in one of the most conservative districs in Iowa. It's so red here it's infrared.
These are people who don't like to admit when they're wrong. They hated Democrats before the trade war and aren't about to vote for one now because of it. The best we could hope for is that they stay home.

Yeah, I'm gonna add that Democrats need to just write off Missouri in their election plans. The bits of this state that votes R will never vote D.
Multiple times I've seen people ranting in the checkout line of the grocery store that Democrats need to all disappear so they won't be in the way.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The god damn Log Cabin Republicans just endorsed Trump for re-election... The same week as Pence brought new anti LGBTQ regulations on the way.

No surprise. At the end of the day, those clowns are Republicans first, LGBTQ last, meaning they’re selfish shitstains who put party ahead of EVERYTHING.

[Tami]

Trump's large union crowd at Shell was given the option of not showing up — and not getting paid

The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County was to either spend Tuesday standing in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak, or to take the day off with no pay.

“Your attendance is not mandatory,” read the rules that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those that showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” the rules said.

Those that decided to sit out the event would have an excused absence, the company said, and would not qualify for overtime pay on Friday. The company has a 56-hour workweek with 16 hours of overtime. That means those workers who attended Mr. Trump’s speech and showed up for work on Friday meeting the overtime threshold are being paid at a rate of time and a half, while those that didn’t go to hear the president are being paid the regular rate, despite the fact that both groups did not do work on the site on Tuesday.

[Tami]

NRA: We shouldn't take rifles away from '10-year-old little girls' on their birthdays

The NRA's top lobbyist in Florida argued against a proposed assault weapons ban, complaining that if the law passes, young children might not get rifles for their birthdays.

"How do you tell a 10-year-old little girl who got a Ruger 10/22 with a pink stock for her birthday that her rifle is an assault weapon and she has to turn it over to government or be arrested for felony possession?" asked Marion Hammer at a Friday meeting of Florida economists to oppose the proposed ban.

The NRA and other pro-gun advocates in the state have complained that the proposal, which would be voted on in a referendum in 2020, is too broad, even though a recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 59% of Florida voters support an assault weapons ban in the state.

Hammer's description of the gun as a weapon for a child runs counter to the NRA itself.

"It was designed as a quality rimfire gun for adults," the NRA's blog noted of the Ruger 10/22 in a 2016 posting.

Hammer's lament also did not address the danger in giving a deadly weapon to a child. In 2014, for example, a shooting range instructor in Arizona was accidentally shot and killed by a 9-year-old girl learning to fire an Uzi.

[David Walton]

NRA: We shouldn't take rifles away from '10-year-old little girls' on their birthdays

Yeah, I don't think the NRA gets to play the 'won't somebody please think of the children!' card.

[InformationGeek]

White supremacist Steve King speaks.

Hey @JulianCastro You think it’s NOT embarrassing when you declare that men can get pregnant and then you promote federal funding to abort men’s babies? Genius! A Democrat proposal that will have a CBO score of ZERO! And a bizarre score of 100!!

Castro has a good response.

Hey @Jack, I thought @Twitter was working to remove white supremacists from the platform?

[SuperiorIronman]

NRA: We shouldn't take rifles away from '10-year-old little girls' on their birthdays

I genuinely don't get them.

Theirs a simple solution; Don't buy it for them.
Nobody says they can't have firearms, but their is a clear danger in automatic weaponry and it's misuse is clearly apparent. We wouldn't be having the discussions if guns had been safer to have among the public. We don't care that it's got a pink stock, we don't even care that some inbred hick thought that a rifle was a far more tangible gift for child (a minor) than toys or clothes. We care that it can be fired multiple times before reloading. In the hands of a mass shooter too many end up dead or wounded before it's over.

[Theleviathan]

Northwest Iowa is a trip. I'm from the eastern side of the state, and it's like going to another world for me. I've had some really weird and unnerving social interactions up near Okoboji and Albert City.

The people were super racist but "Midwest nice".

Here's an uncomfortable truth: yes, I would agree there are a lot of "nice" racists as you describe, I also think many of them would vote Democrat.

I eagerly await the days of their thinking dying out, but until then they can be useful idiots (or scumbags?). That's not to say we pander to them, but there are a lot of people in the midwest and rust belt that you can get to vote blue just by not ostracizing them. Speaking to "kitchen table" issues, about disasterous Trump policies, etc. These folks show up to vote and they can vote blue if they aren't scared away.

Sad as it may be, to win national elections, wrest control of the Senate away, and maintain the house.....we may need those racist assholes. At least for now. (Just to say it clearly, the Dems should still run on fixing social injustice, about the needs of minorities for a fair shake, etc. But there are ways to do that without hurting your voting coalition. In the meantime, working on getting black and brown men to register and come to the polls and get young people to stop being such fucks about voting. Then we won't need them anymore)

[JCAll]

Here's an uncomfortable truth: yes, I would agree there are a lot of "nice" racists as you describe, I also think many of them would vote Democrat.

I eagerly await the days of their thinking dying out, but until then they can be useful idiots (or scumbags?). That's not to say we pander to them, but there are a lot of people in the midwest and rust belt that you can get to vote blue just by not ostracizing them. Speaking to "kitchen table" issues, about disasterous Trump policies, etc. These folks show up to vote and they can vote blue if they aren't scared away.

Sad as it may be, to win national elections, wrest control of the Senate away, and maintain the house.....we may need those racist assholes. At least for now. (Just to say it clearly, the Dems should still run on fixing social injustice, about the needs of minorities for a fair shake, etc. But there are ways to do that without hurting your voting coalition. In the meantime, working on getting black and brown men to register and come to the polls and get young people to stop being such fucks about voting. Then we won't need them anymore)

Racism hasn't died out in thousands of years, it's not really a problem you can wait out without confronting.

[Theleviathan]

Racism hasn't died out in thousands of years, it's not really a problem you can wait out without confronting.

Absolutely! But these racists are, deliberately or not, unaware of their own racism.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in both 2014, as well as in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled former New York Congressman Michael Grimm, who was sentenced to eight months in prison for 20 separate charges of fraud in running the New York health food restaurant Healthalicious, which was a decidedly sore subject considering when asked about it by a reporter in Washington, at one point, Rep. Grimm threatened to throw the guy off a balcony and “break him like a boy”. With those two factors alone (not that there weren't others), Grimm's political career seemed like it was over. But alas, Michael Grimm decided upon being released from prison to try and reclaim his old Congressional seat from Daniel Donovan. Grimm went right back to his old tricks, being slapped with an ethics complaint for having a former Trump campaign staffer working on his election campaign for free (that’s a no-no), trying to claim Dan Donovan offered to speak to Donald Trump and get him a presidential pardon if he dropped out of the race, and that baseless desperation meant he would go on to lose to Donovan by about a 2 to 1 margin. We think (and hope) this time he’s really gone for good, but he seems to keep coming back like a bad case of herpes.




In both 2016, 2017, and in 2018, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented our original profile of the U.S. House Representative for New York’s 11th Congressional District, Dan Donovan, which is pretty remarkable considering Dan Donovan ditched out on the debates for the election in 2014, and was the district attorney who dragged his feet when tasked with bringing charges against the police officers who were caught on camera using a banned chokehold to attempt to subdue Eric Garner for the crime of selling loose cigarettes, and managed to choke him to death. In spite of digging in for police brutality, and going with the cowardly choice to let the death of Garner stand uncharged, Donovan earned the right to fulfill the role of being Staten Island's newest douchebag in Congress.

Of course, looking the other way is something Donovan developed a bit of a reputation for, what with discussions as far back as 2010 in the Village Voice documented how he often failed to act against members of the Genovese crime family, when they operated illegal enterprises virtually right under his nose. And wouldn't you know it? Once he got to Washington, D.C., Donovan racked up a completely partisan record, spending two years doing things like trying to defund Planned Parenthood, pass 20-week abortion bans, restrict the relocation of refugees fleeing Syria, and a few attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act.

New York's 11th District only has a +2 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index and pundits wondered how Democrats have not managed to wrest the last bastion Republicans hold in New York City away from the GOP. Especially because critics were hitting Donovan hard for not disavowing Donald Trump, who most New Yorkers are quite familiar with. Then he had Michael Grimm, fresh out of prison, challenging him in the GOP Primary for his seat in the U.S. Congress in 2018, because he wasn’t “Trump enough” because he didn’t vote for the GOP’s final attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.. Grimm went with a strategy you won’t see used in many political races, because people who went to prison usually don’t mount comebacks. Grimm started put by pointing out that Donovan got his domestic partner’s son out of going to jail on heroin charges, and then when that still didn’t help him enough in the polls, started trying to claim Dan Donovan offered to speak to Donald Trump and get him a presidential pardon if he dropped out of the race. That baseless desperation meant he would go on to lose to Donovan by about a 2 to 1 margin. However, any primary challenge still means that an incumbent has to spend effort, energy, and campaign cash in a primary…

That softened Dan Donovan up enough that Max Rose, a veteran of Afghanistan who during his service earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, upset him and flipped a Republican-leaning district blue in 2018, as Donovan only got 46.6% of the vote. We now would like to wish Donovan the finest “good riddance” greeting we can muster.
 

[PwrdOn]

Absolutely! But these racists are, deliberately or not, unaware of their own racism.

Well then the solution is to call them out on that so that they can fix their behavior and start acting like decent human beings, not to keep coddling and enabling them for votes, especially when they've proven to be a most disloyal bloc in recent elections.

[Jack Dracula]

Northwest Iowa is a trip. I'm from the eastern side of the state, and it's like going to another world for me. I've had some really weird and unnerving social interactions up near Okoboji and Albert City.

The people were super racist but "Midwest nice".

It's changing very slowly. The meat processing plants in this region draw large numbers of Latino, Somali, Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants.
The older white people who grew up here aren't super happy about it.

[Spike-X]

It's changing very slowly. The meat processing plants in this region draw large numbers of Latino, Somali, Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants.
The older white people who grew up here aren't super happy about it.

Guess they're gonna die mad about it, then.

[Jack Dracula]

Guess they're gonna die mad about it, then.

Yeah, but in the meantime they'll keep voting for politicians like Steve King and Trump who make them feel justified in their racism.