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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Renowned expert on the American far-right, author David Neiwert who wrote on the Japanese interment in 'Strawberry Days', had this to say on the 'concentration camp debate'.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...es-then-or-now

Clearly whites in positions of power don't like being called out on their racism and brutal mistreatment of minorities which literally goes back long before America became a country. Mistreatment which blatantly continues today, given the nightmare of the immigrant CONCENTRATION CAMPS at the border, not to mention the economic hell blacks and Latinos face daily in American inner cities.

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DISTURBING: Photo Of Drowned Father And Daughter Highlights Migrants’ Tragic Struggles

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and daughter Valeria drowned on the bank of the Rio Grande. Jesus! Meanwhile....

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House Approves $4.5 Billion Emergency Border Aid Bill To Address Humanitarian Crisis

The bill’s future is uncertain, however, with the White House and GOP lawmakers opposing its restrictions calling for more humane treatment of migrant children. In other words, Republicans want to continue mistreating those kids. Mighty Christian of those bastards.

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Robert Mueller To Testify Before House Judiciary And Intelligence Committees

The special counsel is set to testify in open session before Congress on July 17 about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Well now, THIS figures to be interesting.

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Democratic Senators Consider Filibuster To Force Vote On Iran

Senators may block a key defense bill to force President Trump to get congressional approval for a war on Iran. GOOD! No way Trump should be allowed to send our brave servicemen and servicewomen to die without just cause, or proper approval.

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Why Asian Immigrants Are Uniquely Vulnerable To Trump’s Looming ICE Raids

The president has briefly delayed a plan to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to raid homes of undocumented immigrants in several cities. And, if Asian immigrants are at risk of being deported, so too will black immigrants.

[worstblogever]

Even among Republicans....he may be the worst.

Steve King is still a white supremacist, so... as awful as Duncan Hunter is, I think Steve King is re-posting Neo-Nazis too much to not give him the nod for that title.

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in 2015 that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Paul Blair, a radical anti-gay pastor from Oklahoma, and a big ally of State Rep. Sally Kern, who proudly spoke of her political credentials (i.e. her dedication to oppressing the LGBT community) at the “Rally for Sally” back in 2008. You see, he was all lathered up after she said that gays represent a bigger threat to America than terrorism (since gay rights made people like Blair and Kern victims). Blair is a former player for the Chicago Bears (and could easily be operating under the effects of long term head injuries), the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, the founder of Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ, head of the Reclaiming America For Christ organization. He's also appeared at an anti-hate crimes “Rally for Religious Freedom” where he and anti-gay activists vowed never to stop fighting homosexuality and challenged the Justice Department to prosecute them. Blair was the driving force behind a video called “The Criminalization of Christianity” in which he warns that hate crimes legislation is actually a “Pedophile Protection Act”, would “make it possible for a pastor to be prosecuted for doing nothing more than preaching a Biblical sermon on Sunday”. Which would be breaking a commandment about bearing false witness, because hate crime legislation does nothing to criminalize free speech (because that would be an unconstitutional violation of the 1st Amendment now, wouldn't it?) But it would seem that lying is a frequent habit of Pastor Blair, who claims he receives death threats from the gay community over his stance (that are repeatedly unfounded). And that's when Blair tried saying the unsubstantiated death threats were his motivation for making himself a 2012 candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate (endorsed by that anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council), where he lost in the Republican Primary, earning a shockingly impressive 43% of the vote. Some of the more disturbing and/or homophobic quotes from Paul Blair's most bats*** speeches include that "The Devil is behind gay rights and gay culture", before whining how America has gone from "Ozzie and Harriet to Desperate Housewives" and "from True Grit to Brokeback Mountain", claiming that the “communists” are trying to “inculcate homosexual values, or lack of values, into the American culture” in order “to destroy the family” and create “a global utopia", adding that "Satan is the source and ultimate conspirator” behind “the force of communism, the force of the radical homosexual agenda, the secularist movement in America", and of course, comparing his battle against gay marriage to be similar to “the fight against slavery and Nazi Germany”.


It was originally in July of 2014, and then on this date in both 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the sitting U.S. House Representative from Wyoming’s At-Large Congressional District, Liz Cheney, the carpet-bagging daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney who after spending several years during President Obama’s first term as a Fox News Correspondent fomenting fear and anger towards Muslims to try and justify bigotry towards Muslim Americans, the use of torture in the War on Terror, and to keep our troops in combat in the Middle East, even if it means going to war into completely new quagmires there. She has defended the paranoid ramblings of Birther conspiracy theorists, rallied against the “Ground Zero Mosque” (that was actually an Islamic cultural center located blocks away), and had said that Republican obstructionism of any Democratic effort to do anything was “patriotism”. But the real comedy started once Liz Cheney challenged Senator Mike Enzi, where her campaign took one disastrous turn after another, from being caught falsifying information on her Wyoming hunting license application (to try and make it look like she was a resident for longer than she was), having her husband caught on voter rolls in both Virginia and Wyoming, when she attacked the print media for investigating her carpet-bagging by saying, “newspapers are dying, and that’s not a bad thing”, to ending up feuding with her own sister-in-law on Facebook after she reversed her stance on gay marriage. It was a comedy of errors. When we first created our Liz Cheney entry, back around July of 2014, we wondered if she would ever re-emerge to try for another run in politics. A year passed, and we had no new updates in 2015… but now, in 2016, she is in fact running for Congress in Wyoming again, to replace the retiring Cynthia Lummis. Liz learned so much from her first run for office that she managed to send out a Facebook post to announce her run for office, it was listed from… Alexandria, Virginia, in the home she supposedly left to go back and live in Wyoming and totally not be a carpet-bagger.

Name recognition helped Liz Cheney get a victory over EIGHT other Republicans in the GOP Primary for her House seat, and in a state that leans as far right as Wyoming, she coasted to victory in November of 2016. Afterwards, she also hasn’t hesitated in making some headlines for being an awful human being. Whether it’s her eagerness in killing endangered wolves, URL="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/liz-cheneys-scathing-statement-on-obamas-legacy/article/2612158"]her completely partisan insults directed at Barack Obama while he was leaving office[/URL], or her desire to get the Trump administration the ability to start torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cheney still has still demonstrated that she’s a hollow puppet being used by her father to continue his twisted policies in the world. However, Liz also shows that she’s not smart enough to pick the right horse, as she excitedly posted to Twitter her support for Donald Trump when he fired the FBI Director James Comey, writing, “Best. Termination. Letter. Ever.” Considering it was this move that those who could see the basics of cause and effect in Washington, D.C. knew could be a potential impeachment charge for Trump because of how obstruction of justice works. Liz hurridly rushed to delete her own post once the media reported on her reaction, but it’s far too late for her to pretend it didn’t happen now, and it just became her latest political misstep. But she still isn’t above friendly fire with members of her party, as she is willing to accuse even fellow Republicans like Rand Paul of “sympathizing with terrorists” for opposing Haspel.

[worstblogever]

We know that Wyoming has a +25 Republican lean, meaning that all Liz Cheney has to do to win, practically, is advance out of the GOP Primary for her seat, and she can do things like this:

• December 4th, 2018: Fresh off the GOP getting shellacked in the 2018 elections, word begins to come out over leadership posts of both parties in Congress. The GOP look to having a caucus sworn into office in a month that will see its already anemic numbers of women dwindle from 23 members to 13. And one of them is Liz Cheney, who they elevate in the party’s leadership to conference chair. In a Fox News interview, when asked about what the GOP can do in terms of policy to win back female voters, Cheney scoffed and said she finds the idea of producing legislation to appeal to female voters “offensive to women”.
  (Future’s bright for you, Republican Party!)
• January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Cheney voted against HR 648, because she was gleeully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
• February 28th, 2019: Liz Cheney votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 7th, 2019: Cheney votes against HR 183, a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism as a hateful extension of intolerance.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Cheney votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
• April 4th, 2019: Liz Cheney is one of 158 Republicans who choose to vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• June 4th, 2019: Cheney votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.

Now, we didn’t include this in the above timeline, because it’s a sign of how much the GOP have made Donald Trump the anchor around their neck as they fall overboard into a stormy sea these days… on May 26th of 2019, Liz Cheney was a guest on ABC’s This Week, and told host Martha Raddatz that text conversations between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page amounted to “treason” and that it was proof that there was “a coup” against Donald Trump staged before he ever took office. She then also began to insinuate further against other supposed members of what conservative kooks label “the Deep State” by complaining about James Comey and Andrew McCabe.


Ladies and gents, the spawn of Dick Cheney has been mainlining conservative ideology so long that she might actually fanatically believe her own bulls*** and choke on it with the rest of her party before all is said and done. Meanwhile, they’re talking about elevating her in the House again to avoid having her run for U.S. Senate to try yet again to replace Mike Enzi, who’s finally retiring.

Psst… hey, Wyoming? We know you’re a red state, but… you do know the family history of national malfeasance, right? You don’t have to do this…

[InformationGeek]

Thoughts and prayers.

BREAKING: Both NRATV and @NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch are over.

“While the @NRA may continue to air past content, its live broadcasting has ended and its on-air personalities — including Dana Loesch — will no longer be the public faces of the NRA.”

[Tendrin]

Steve King is still a white supremacist, so... as awful as Duncan Hunter is, I think Steve King is re-posting Neo-Nazis too much to not give him the nod for that title.

I dunno, man. Hunter's admitted to war crimes while Steve King just whines on twitter. I mean, I lean towards King being worse but 'Admitted war criminal' is a thing.

[worstblogever]

Reuters got an aerial shot over a migrant detainee center's "humane" conditions in McAllen, Texas:



That doesn't look like a concentration camp or other dystopian nightmare at all, does it? (It does.)

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Reuters got an aerial shot over a migrant detainee center's "humane" conditions in McAllen, Texas:



That doesn't look like a concentration camp or other dystopian nightmare at all, does it? (It does.)

Look for the administration to find ways to control the airspace over the camps. If that picture was shot with a drone, expect sniper rifle toting guards to shoot them down in the future.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Perhaps Mayor Pete isn't the golden boy everyone paints him as being:

Pete Buttigieg’s record on race should have been scrutinized earlier

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is viewed favorably by around 40 percent of liberals and white Democrats, according to CNN polling. But as of last week, he was embroiled in the national wave of racial tensions over policing, after a white policeman shot and killed a black man in South Bend, Ind., where Buttigieg is mayor.

Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, the cop who shot 54-year-old Eric Jack Logan outside an apartment complex after claiming Logan pulled a knife, didn’t turn on his bodycam during the confrontation. Much of the black community there doesn’t believe the officer’s account. But O’Neill, who was investigated in 2008 over his alleged use of racist remarks, including referring to an African American woman as “black meat,” is not at the center of the controversy.

This is about Buttigieg. It is about his handling of a police force that is almost 90 percent white in a town that is 40 percent black and brown. It is about a black community whose deep mistrust of Buttigieg goes back at least eight years, and it is about media coverage that lavished praise on Buttigieg while largely ignoring his strained relationship with people of color — particularly when it comes to policing.

That’s especially galling after Philadelphians, including myself, fought to get 72 police officers assigned to desk duty pending an investigation of racist posts the officers allegedly published to Facebook. It’s insulting when black people continue to fight racism in policing in cities across the country. And it’s baffling because, in all the coverage I’ve seen about Buttigieg, much of it has centered on the fact that, if elected, he would be the first openly gay president. More important to me is his relationship with people of color in South Bend, the city where, as mayor, Buttigieg has appointed only white police chiefs (two total).

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Perhaps Mayor Pete isn't the golden boy everyone paints him as being:

Pete Buttigieg’s record on race should have been scrutinized earlier

His entire appeal was being a good looking white dude from a midwestern area that was well spoken. Nobody knew enough about him for him to have s bad track record besides the fact that he avoids serious issues like the plague. He really was just another Beto

[Surf]

Reuters got an aerial shot over a migrant detainee center's "humane" conditions in McAllen, Texas:



That doesn't look like a concentration camp or other dystopian nightmare at all, does it? (It does.)

I've got two kids, a five and a soon to be three year old. It's a pain in the rear if ONE of them has to go to the pot at the fuckin' Target or Meijers on a Saturday. This here... have mercy. Mind you this is POST a hike through the dessert terrain of the US Southern border. With children. Nuff respect to the conditions during Katrina in the Superdome and what those people went through and they were citizens mind you. Here... Lord have mercy.

How many toilets do you think they have to share?

[kidfresh512]

I've got two kids, a five and a soon to be three year old. It's a pain in the rear if ONE of them has to go to the pot at the fuckin' Target or Meijers on a Saturday. This here... have mercy. Mind you this is POST a hike through the dessert terrain of the US Southern border. With children. Nuff respect to the conditions during Katrina in the Superdome and what those people went through and they were citizens mind you. Here... Lord have mercy.

How many toilets do you think they have to share?

What pisses me off is people can understand the fact that maybe they are overwhelmed right now. Regardless of whether the administration caused it by separating kids in the first place and keeping them separated. Why the **** isn't there more organization in terms of allowing aid from aid groups and concerned citizens who want to help alleviate the strain?

They want these scenes they want the conditions to be so bad so awful it deters more from coming. They just don't want any of it being reported. How long has it been now since the policy was first brought to light? These camps are still here, they still haven reunited all the kids, and there STILL isn't transparency into how they are being kept and treated. we get these trickle out reports and pictures like this from the few lawyers or lawmakers that can force their way in and start getting the truth out.

And it cannot be said enough how bad it is to have so much chaos and shifting of the heads of the agencies responsible. There is no one with any permanence to be responsible for the longer term directions. So many acting individuals who don't know if they will be there in 4 months what plans and policies can they get in place and carry out with that little job security or support?


In other news

Eric Trump says a cocktail bar worker in Chicago spit on him

How these guys eat in public now is beyond me. I mean they know decent people cant stand them. I would have to send a paid minion in every kitchen to make sure all the staff in the back that cant stand my family and know what an ******* I am don't spit, piss, or **** in my food.

[Kirby101]

What pisses me off is people can understand the fact that maybe they are overwhelmed right now. Regardless of whether the administration caused it by separating kids in the first place and keeping them separated. Why the **** isn't there more organization in terms of allowing aid from aid groups and concerned citizens who want to help alleviate the strain?

They want these scenes they want the conditions to be so bad so awful it deters more from coming. They just don't want any of it being reported. How long has it been now since the policy was first brought to light? These camps are still here, they still haven reunited all the kids, and there STILL isn't transparency into how they are being kept and treated. we get these trickle out reports and pictures like this from the few lawyers or lawmakers that can force their way in and start getting the truth out.

Because they are not allowed to. Access to these camps is restricted, even to reporters. They are not allowing any outside aid, and they certainly aren't letting outside organizations take any of the children. Four women where just convicted in Arizona for leaving water for migrants. They are forcefully stopping people from helping.
The whole point, as you say, is to make conditions so bad, people will not try to come here.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Because they are not allowed to. Access to these camps is restricted, even to reporters. They are not allowing any outside aid, and they certainly aren't letting outside organizations take any of the children. Four women where just convicted in Arizona for leaving water for migrants. They are forcefully stopping people from helping.
The whole point, as you say, is to make conditions so bad, people will not try to come here.

That's EXACTLY the plan, and, as I've already said, IT'S. NOT. WORKING. The nightmarish situations those immigrants fled from are a dozen times worse than what they're facing in the camps: indescribable, mindnumbing poverty, rampant starvation and the constant threat of violence at the hands of thugs and goons and god only knows who all else. These people are beyond desperate, literally fleeing hell itself, they had no choice but to take their chances crossing the border, knowing full well that to stay home, or return there would almost certainly be a death sentence. The only thing worse than the administration being unaware of that horrific reality for those immigrants is that they do, and just plain don't give a ****.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: With Trump threatening to cut off aid to South American countries (if he hasn't done so already) in some ill-conceived notion that will force governments to curtail, if not stop people from leaving will only ramp up the poverty, the hopelessness and the helplessness which, in turn, will have the exact opposite effect, causing more and more people to flee, thus making an already hideous situation at the border all the more worse.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Reuters got an aerial shot over a migrant detainee center's "humane" conditions in McAllen, Texas:



That doesn't look like a concentration camp or other dystopian nightmare at all, does it? (It does.)

What pisses me off about this is that Fox is blaming Obama's administration for this because their viewers will just believe Fox.