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

[Tendrin]

So in the past 72 hours, two hate crimes in California from domestic terrorists based on religious bigotry. A white Islamophobe drove into a crowd hoping to hit Muslims, and little anti-Semitic twit went to shoot up a synagogue.

As much as Trump has been tweeting, he hasn't commented on either tragedy, because of course he wouldn't. He's busy spreading hate against both groups so these sorts of tragedies happen. (We all know his anti-Islamic history, but he resumed spreading George Soros conspiracies yesterday.)

In fact, conservatives are blaming Ilhan Omar because of course they are.

[worstblogever]

In fact, conservatives are blaming Ilhan Omar because of course they are.

They're blaming Rep. Omar for a guy driving a car into a crowd hoping to kill Muslims? Was she in the crowd and ran before he got the car there?

Because even that wouldn't make sense.

[Tendrin]

They're blaming Rep. Omar for a guy driving a car into a crowd hoping to kill Muslims? Was she in the crowd and ran before he got the car there?

Because even that wouldn't make sense.

They're blaming for the anti-semitic shooting. And I'll sure they'll blame her for the islamaphobic attack too.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of George Cleveland, from the North Carolina House of Representatives who we still think looks like Carl from Pixar’s “Up”, but is decidedly far less lovable, in our eyes. Cleveland has been allowed to run for office virtually unopposed in every election since 2002, and while he has missed a large percentage of the votes in the North Carolina House, he has turned up for some of the most notorious pieces of legislation to cross the desk of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory the past few years. Cleveland has supported the state constitution having a ban on same sex marriage, blocked minimum wage increases, restricted early voting, blocked the Medicaid Expansion in the Tar Heel State, and voted for the notorious “motorcycle safety” bill that through amendments put forth by Republicans, became one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the country. Cleveland also has gone to the floor of the North Carolina House to pitch ideas for illegal immigration, like profiling potential undocumented immigrants based on what they’re wearing, tried forcing the owner of the North Carolina State Fair to allow people to carry guns at the event, against his wishes, and once argued that there aren’t actually any people who are extremely poor in North Carolina, it’s just an illusion created by statisticians who redefine what poverty is (for the record, 8% of North Carolina lives in extreme poverty, and 17.5% live below the poverty line, in total). George Cleveland was one of several North Carolina Republicans who reacted to South Carolina’s state legislature removing the Confederate flag from state grounds by instead voting for SB 22, to make it HARDER to remove Confederate iconography from around the state. Cleveland also supported two pieces of legislation that were created by the North Carolina GOP to stick it to the LGBT community, voting for SB 2, a bill aimed at allowing for state officials to refuse to perform marriage duties based on their “sincerely held religious beliefs” and sponsoring the now-infamous disaster that is HB 2, which isn’t just written to force people to use bathrooms according to the sex they were born as, but it was written to specifically allow people of “religious faith” to use it as a justification to discriminate against the gay community in North Carolina. He was, of course, one of many North Carolina Republicans who responded to the loss in the governor’s race by Republican incumbent Pat McCrory by trying to supplant democracy by stripping many of the main powers of governance away from incoming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Cleveland followed that up by co-sponsoring a bill with fellow CSGOPOTD Michael Speciale and Larry Pittman of the North Carolina state legislature to attempt to eliminate the prohibition on seceding from the United States that was written into the North Carolina state constitution after the Civil War to reiterate the fact that the Tar Heel State should totally not do something that stupid ever again. Well, George Cleveland wants the option to start another American Civil War back on the table, apparently.

Cleveland won re-election in 2018 after surviving the GOP Primary with but 52% of the vote, and then won with 58% of the vote in the general election. For those keeping track, George Cleveland is now 81 years old, and has used his current term in office to co-sponsor legislation to ban abortion at not just 20… but 13 weeks, and the completely over-the-top anti-choice bill known as the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act”.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

They're blaming Rep. Omar for a guy driving a car into a crowd hoping to kill Muslims? Was she in the crowd and ran before he got the car there?

Because even that wouldn't make sense.

Conservatives don’t make sense anyway. Haven’t made sense in years, maybe decades.

[Mister Mets]

Most people don't understand what happens for a third term abortion either. It usually isn't the mother deciding she doesn't want a child after 6 or more months of pregnancy - it's when a doctor tells them that there are serious complications that make them look for one.

Slate had an article written by a woman who had one, and it wasn't regret that made her do it - she was actively trying to have a baby. But when the doctor told her that an unusual condition was detected in the womb (and these things are typically unable to be seen until the third trimester) that increased her risk of dying in childbirth, and that the child would almost certainly be dead before his second birthday after a life of drowning in his own saliva - with an outside chance of making it to about 6, if they were very unlucky. Even then, they would never develop enough to even speak, and the only memory they would likely take to the grave would be pain, then things start to look different. Her own words were that the two most important gifts a mother can give to her child are life and peace, and she was forced to pick just one - because having either prevented them from having the other.

And this is my rebuttal to anyone who wants to claim that a miracle might happen...

One - God does not provide miracles according to our designs, but his own.

Two - If a miracle is indeed called for, we aren't stopping it.

To think otherwise strikes me as a toxic mixture of hubris and faithlessness, at least in someone who professes to believe.

The available studies suggest the majority of third trimester abortions are not due to reasons of fetal health/ the health of the mother.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...0.1363/4521013

Limiting the discussion to stories about serious medical complications allows abortion opponents to agree to carefully established medical exceptions while pushing for a ban in other situations.

Check out the skin color of the San Diego synagogue shooting:



What are the chances Trump will explode in fury at this scumbag and what he had done? Slim to none I'd say. Meanwhile THIS happened....

**********

White Nationalists Storm Washington Bookstore Reading: ‘This Land Is Our Land’

The group protested the author Jonathan Metzl’s book reading on the same day a white supremacist gunned down a synagogue. More of those "nice people" Trump fawns over.

**********

New York Times Apologizes For Anti-Semitic Cartoon In International Edition

The cartoon showed Donald Trump holding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, depicted as a dog, on a leash.



Short and sweet: What the flaming **** were those idiots thinking?

**********

Trump Calls FBI ‘Scum,’ Takes Credit For ‘Sick’ Immigrant Plan In Off-The-Wall Rally

President Donald Trump ranted for nearly one and a half hours in Wisconsin on the same night as the White House Correspondents Dinner. I'm sure the brave, hardworking men and women at the Bureau got a kick out of being called scum by their Commander-in-Chief. Don't hold your breath waiting for cowardly ass Republicans to rebuke Trump for what he said.

**********

New York Investigating National Rifle Association’s Finances

The state Attorney General issued subpoenas as part of the investigation. GOOD! Follow the money and string those bastards up by the balls!

The Times cartoon is even worse when you consider the depiction of Trump as a Jewish blind man. So he’s being led by dog Netanyahu.

[PaulBullion]

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...0.1363/4521013

It looks like the study you provided lists as alternate reasons to fetal anomaly or life endangerment:

• Not knowing where to go for an abortion
• Difficulty getting to the abortion facility
• Raising money for procedure and related costs
• Difficulty securing insurance coverage

Basically all things that are results of GOP policy.

Tell me again how your party is pro-life.

[JCAll]

So in the past 72 hours, two hate crimes in California from domestic terrorists based on religious bigotry. A white Islamophobe drove into a crowd hoping to hit Muslims, and little anti-Semitic twit went to shoot up a synagogue.

As much as Trump has been tweeting, he hasn't commented on either tragedy, because of course he wouldn't. He's busy spreading hate against both groups so these sorts of tragedies happen. (We all know his anti-Islamic history, but he resumed spreading George Soros conspiracies yesterday.)

The moron literally sent a "thoughts and prayers" tweet. "Thoughts and prayers" literally just means "**** you, I'm glad you're dead" and has for a long time. Anyone tweeting that line needs to either educate themselves or be run out of office.

[Mister Mets]

It looks like the study you provided lists as alternate reasons to fetal anomaly or life endangerment:

• Not knowing where to go for an abortion
• Difficulty getting to the abortion facility
• Raising money for procedure and related costs
• Difficulty securing insurance coverage

Basically all things that are results of GOP policy.

Tell me again how your party is pro-life.

Greater access to abortion wouldn't be pro-life, as there is the understanding for most Republicans that the fetus has value.

You may have mixed up the section about the difficulties women have obtaining late-term abortions, and the section on the reasons, which notes that the three most common causes for delays are difficulty women had recognizing that they were pregnant (43% of respondents), trouble deciding about whether to get an abortion, and conflicts with the male partners.

[Tendrin]

Greater access to abortion wouldn't be pro-life, as there is the understanding for most Republicans that the fetus has value.

You may have mixed up the section about the difficulties women have obtaining late-term abortions, and the section on the reasons, which notes that the three most common causes for delays are difficulty women had recognizing that they were pregnant (43% of respondents), trouble deciding about whether to get an abortion, and conflicts with the male partners.

So, basically. 'Make it harder for women to access an abortion when they need one, then blame women for not getting one earlier, and increasingly restrict their ability ot get it earlier'.

Great policy, Mets.

Your party sucks and is a misogynistic crapfest. It has never been further from being 'pro-life'.

[Tami]

YouTube recommended a Russian media site thousands of times for analysis of Mueller’s report, a watchdog group says

When the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III came out last week, offering the most authoritative account yet of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, YouTube recommended one video source hundreds of thousands of times to viewers seeking information, a watchdog says: RT, the global media operation funded by the Russian government.

AlgoTransparency, founded by former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, analyzed the recommendations made by the 1,000 YouTube channels it tracks daily. The group found that 236 of those collectively recommended RT’s “On Contact: Russiagate & Mueller Report w/ Aaron Mate” more than 400,000 times.

“So YouTube’s algorithm massively recommends Russia’s take on the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election,” Chaslot tweeted Thursday night.

In Chaslot’s analysis, some Mueller-related videos got recommended more often overall. “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was recommended more than 5 million times. Some other channels, such as Fox and PBS NewsHour, got hundreds of thousands of recommendations for their Mueller videos. But no other video tracked by AlgoTransparency received recommendations from as many different channels as the RT one did.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The Times cartoon is even worse when you consider the depiction of Trump as a Jewish blind man. So he’s being led by dog Netanyahu.

Damn, that hadn’t occurred to me, but yeah, you’re right, that DOES make things worse.

[Mister Mets]

So, basically. 'Make it harder for women to access an abortion when they need one, then blame women for not getting one earlier, and increasingly restrict their ability ot get it earlier'.

Great policy, Mets.

Your party sucks and is a misogynistic crapfest. It has never been further from being 'pro-life'.

You seem to be responding to some points I haven't made.

Gary Lensman suggested the usual reason for third-term abortions is medical (conditions which cause the life of the mother to be at stake, and which would guarantee low life expectancy/ quality of life for the infant.)

I looked at a study from a pro-choice organization that suggested reasons outside of medical concerns for women to seek later abortions, and noted the problem with focusing on medical issues is that the complaint would be resolved if there's a medical exception.

PaulBullion made a claim about the main causes for later abortions based on the study and implied that making abortion easier to obtain is pro-life.

I noted that the study listed three most common reasons for late-term abortions, and that these aren't based on Republican policies. I did also note why a pro-life party wouldn't like abortion.

'Make it harder for women to access an abortion when they need one, then blame women for not getting one earlier, and increasingly restrict their ability to get it earlier'. wasn't anything I endorsed. My only comment on that line of thought is that Paul may have misunderstood what the article said if he thought it suggested the main reason women get abortions later is restrictions.

Late term abortion came up in this thread due to comments the President made that were inaccurate. So to have the discussion on why what Trump said was false, we need to get the facts right.

Well that was disturbing. They almost had a news discussion. Poor Joel.

Joel says it was a legitimate commercial break, and that he was on after the break.

https://twitter.com/JoelMartinRubin/...19617412730880

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Defeating the Iraqi army militarily is hardly some great accomplishment to hang our hats on given the massive disparity in quality of the forces and firepower involved, the hard part was always going to be how to rebuild the country afterwards. Realistically though, there weren't any good options to fill the power vacuum that Saddam's downfall would leave, his main opponents had always been the pro-Iranian fundamentalists and they were hardly steady hands to steer the ship of state. The idea that there was somehow this massive silent majority of pro-Western liberal thinkers yearning to be free of oppressive rule but who would gladly sign up to serve American corporate interests was a pipe dream, just like it was in every other country we've fought in.

Exactly. We were always going to roll over the Iraq army. The difficult part was that after you start a war you have to finish it, and we have yet to finish it. If you have a strong enough army you can go in and kill anyone. We completely fucked the entire region, were never able to install a successful government in Saddam's absence, an insurgent faction rose up and caused more death and destruction in the reason, power vacuum's were created, more enemy's rose up, Iraqi and American's alike continue to die over there.

It was a costly war that ultimately did nothing for us and we didn't make Iraq better for it. They were better off without US involvement.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

So, basically. 'Make it harder for women to access an abortion when they need one, then blame women for not getting one earlier, and increasingly restrict their ability ot get it earlier'.

Great policy, Mets.

Your party sucks and is a misogynistic crapfest. It has never been further from being 'pro-life'.

The thing is you are both right. If you take the Religious Right's point of view then Mets has a point, to them abortion is killing babies and then there really shouldn't be tolerance for it except in extreme situations where more than one life is at stake. If you take what I'm assuming is your point of view (and mine) that abortion is a very different thing than what Mets thinks it is, then limiting it the way Mets says becomes very problematic.

The problem ultimately is that both sides have fundamentally different beliefs on what it actually is and you can't compromise on either. And because the right has stronger beliefs on it because of the severity of what they think it is.... they tend to vote on it more.

I've never really seen the point in debating the abortion issue because it's such a clear and distinct difference of opinion that is the root of the debate that you either believe it or you don't and you aren't going to convince people