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

[numberthirty]

I know most cops are rubbish, but do you mean to say there aren't any good guys left among the police?

Put into the simplest terms I can come up with.

The assertion here was essentially "Why didn't the concealed carry crowd shoot this guy before the police even factored into the equation?"

If we know that the entire thing started during a traffic stop, what is the idiotic scenario that whoever is taking a shot at concealed carry folks believes should have resulted in someone with a legal firearm saving the day?

- Should they have fired some sort of a magical bullet around the cop who was in the midst of pulling the guy over, and killed the guy being pulled before the stop could happen?

- Should they have just opened up on the squad car and the guy's vehicle to take the cop out of the equation?

- Should they have used extra sensory perception to see that the guy was a future threat, and killed him before the stop?

Put simply, there is no version of a cop pulling someone over leading to a shootout where you can reasonably take folks with a concealed carry permit for not having stopped it before the police were involved.

[Mister Mets]

Put into the simplest terms I can come up with.

The assertion here was essentially "Why didn't the concealed carry crowd shoot this guy before the police even factored into the equation?"

If we know that the entire thing started during a traffic stop, what is the idiotic scenario that whoever is taking a shot at concealed carry folks believes should have resulted in someone with a legal firearm saving the day?

- Should they have fired some sort of a magical bullet around the cop who was in the midst of pulling the guy over, and killed the guy being pulled before the stop could happen?

- Should they have just opened up on the squad car and the guy's vehicle to take the cop out of the equation?

- Should they have used extra sensory perception to see that the guy was a future threat, and killed him before the stop?

Put simply, there is no version of a cop pulling someone over leading to a shootout where you can reasonably take folks with a concealed carry permit for not having stopped it before the police were involved.

This would however fit the argument that because the good guy with a gun scenario is so rare, it's not a reason to make it easier for anyone to have guns.

[Tami]

Driver charged in missing toddler case says child was sold for $10,000, police in Pennsylvania say

(CNN)A woman is in custody and a toddler is missing from Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, after the child's father said a rideshare driver abducted his daughter on Saturday evening, according to police documents and a news release.

Paul Johnson said he was riding in a car with Lyft and Uber stickers with his daughter and a friend, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Allegheny County police.

Johnson said that when he got out of the car and went to get his daughter out of the car seat, the driver drove away with the toddler, the complaint said. The complaint didn't identify the child, but a police news release said she is named Nalani.

Police arrested driver Sharena Nancy, 25, in the vehicle during a traffic stop around 7:30 p.m. ET, but did not find the child inside, the complaint said.

According to the complaint, Nancy told detectives that Johnson sold the child to an individual for $10,000 and asked her to complete the dropoff.

Nancy said he showed her a photo of a black woman she was supposed to meet and asked her to drive the toddler "20 minutes" from a gas station in Monroeville along US Route 22 to meet the woman, the complaint says.

[worstblogever]

Someone with an apparently anti-Labor mindset laid 6 small explosive devices along a Labor Day parade route in New Jersey.

55 year old Thomas Kaiser is in custody. His family insists that the placed explosives along the governor's parade route were "just fireworks". Uh huh. Homemade fireworks are illegal in New Jersey. Prosecutors are finding more devices in Kaiser's home (he also has a mental health history), and are going to wait until they've finished an investigation before they decide on final charges.

[4saken1]

It's also a cowardly lion image lifted from the anti-immigrant, white nationalist hate group VDARE's website.

vdare.jpg

How has this not gotten bigger coverage? They are literally the same image!!!

[Mister Mets]

There seems to be a spate of articles about the difficult working conditions and poor salaries of home care aides. With the growing elder population, this problem is not going to go away. A wrinkle in the discussion is that 1:1 care for elderly people is not going to be a job the economy will value. So, what should be done about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/n...alth-aide.html

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/20...des-elder-care

[Electricmastro]

How has this not gotten bigger coverage?

Because the idea of "the invading immigrants are the bad people" runs that deep.

If only some people would take the time and think more...

[Tendrin]

There seems to be a spat of articles about the difficult working conditions and poor salaries of home care aides. With the growing elder population, this problem is not going to go away. A wrinkle in the discussion is that 1:1 care for elderly people is not going to be a job the economy will value. So, what should be done about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/n...alth-aide.html

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/20...des-elder-care

Gasp. You mean to say that the free market economy won't necessarily recognize what a public good and necessary service for its appropriate value to human life and dignity when it can get away with exploiting them and paying them less than then value of their labor?

NO WAY.

What should happen is unionization and improved labor laws alongside with wholesale reform of medicaid long term care. Right now, the rules for medicaid are systemically racist and a giant wealth-sucking machine from the middle class, specifically the estate-recovery clause.

For example, my parents are not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but by and large people were able to at least transfer the home. If your parents wound up on long-term care, the government can and will seize the home and sell it to recover the cost of providing long term care based on what was put into the cost of the care over the years once both your parents are gone or are no longer living in the home. This was mandated as part of reform in the 1990s and it was a dreadful idea then and an even worse one now with the ballooning costs of care. Now, white people tend to have more resources to avoid this than poor, imoverished people of color, who tend to have lower life expectancy I imagine this contributes to gentrification, as well.

It's a very understudied issue and speaking from personal experience, a dreadful one. Much of this issue could be resolved as part of structured and expanded universeal health care, of which long-term care coverage *must* be a significant part of it.

[numberthirty]

There seems to be a spat of articles about the difficult working conditions and poor salaries of home care aides. With the growing elder population, this problem is not going to go away. A wrinkle in the discussion is that 1:1 care for elderly people is not going to be a job the economy will value. So, what should be done about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/n...alth-aide.html

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/20...des-elder-care

For starters, just start to at least acknowledge some basic realities.

As Tendrin just mentioned, the design that created the current state of affairs is from the nineties.

- Has anyone looked at "Three Strikes" and mass incarceration, and just said "No biggie. Let's just stick with the ninties-era plan that created all of this."?

Never mind that life expectancy has increased while things like Alzheimer's Disease/Diabetes/Parkinson's Disease have not been wiped out. Even if you could magically take them out of the equation, you would still have a lot to deal with when it comes to the care of folk who could realistically make it into their mid-eighties.

That's before you even get to the current state of private long-term care insurance.

[PaulBullion]

That won't wind up anything like "Rehabilitated..." or credible.

Michael Avenatti being the obvious example of that whatever you are on about most likely not being the case.

Bad example, because Avenatti is a Democrat, and very different rules apply to those.

[SquirrelMan]

Put into the simplest terms I can come up with.

The assertion here was essentially "Why didn't the concealed carry crowd shoot this guy before the police even factored into the equation?"

If we know that the entire thing started during a traffic stop, what is the idiotic scenario that whoever is taking a shot at concealed carry folks believes should have resulted in someone with a legal firearm saving the day?

- Should they have fired some sort of a magical bullet around the cop who was in the midst of pulling the guy over, and killed the guy being pulled before the stop could happen?

- Should they have just opened up on the squad car and the guy's vehicle to take the cop out of the equation?

- Should they have used extra sensory perception to see that the guy was a future threat, and killed him before the stop?

Put simply, there is no version of a cop pulling someone over leading to a shootout where you can reasonably take folks with a concealed carry permit for not having stopped it before the police were involved.

No, the point that you missed even though I used small words, too: "good guy with a gun" could refer to both concealed carry folks and cops. Massacre still ensues.

[worstblogever]

Bad example, because Avenatti is a Democrat, and very different rules apply to those.

Like the rule that someone would obsessively bring them up as an example of a Democrat unfit for office when he never filed to run for one, and there was never really any support for him to do so.

And compare him to some of the very real candidates that I present every day.

Dare I say, it's a less-than-subtle attempt at setting up a false equivalency, and the argument that "both parties are just as bad".

[numberthirty]

No, the point that you missed even though I used small words, too: "good guy with a gun" could refer to both concealed carry folks and cops. Massacre still ensues.

Let's go on ahead, and roll the tape...

SMH. But this is Texas. Where are all the good guys with guns to stop these shooters before the police even get there?

While you might believe that it could refer to concealed carry folks or cops, it obviously does not in that post.

If the "Good Guys With Guns" are stopping a shooter before the "Police" even get there, "Who..." the phrase is about is not in question. "Good Guys With Guns" are clearly "Concealed Carry Folks" and not "Cops".

[worstblogever]

Let's go on ahead, and roll the tape...



While you might believe that it could refer to concealed carry folks or cops, it obviously does not in that post.

If the "Good Guys With Guns" are stopping a shooter before the "Police" even get there, "Who..." the phrase is about is not in question. "Good Guys With Guns" are clearly "Concealed Carry Folks" and not "Cops".

The same folks that the police, and all security experts say would only confuse matters and get themselves killed by pulling their guns out to try to "help" during an active shooter drill, for being mistaken for the actual shooter.

[numberthirty]

The same folks that the police, and all security experts say would only confuse matters and get themselves killed by pulling their guns out to try to "help" during an active shooter drill, for being mistaken for the actual shooter.

While this is a separate issue, you seem like you might be looking for a disagreement where there really isn't one. Nine times out of ten, it's only going to make a complicated situation ever more so.

That said, I do know that this was a part of the local news a while back...

- https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...914-story.html

Concealed carry licensee called hero for intervening when man fires on police, but 'it could have gone the other way'

A licensed concealed carry gun holder who shot at a man suspected of wounding a Cicero police officer on Thursday is being lauded as a hero by town officials.

But proponents of concealed carry say the lines between what is justified and what isn’t often can be blurred when citizens open fire. And a leading gun control advocate cautioned against using the outcome of the incident as proof that concealed carry is the answer to combat violent crime.

The suspect was hit by gunfire after he shot a weapon at police. It wasn’t clear if it was police or the private citizen who shot the suspect at the end of the incident, which began when Cicero police tried to stop a car the suspect was driving. Police said the concealed gun holder was stuck in traffic when he witnessed the police activity, decided to intervene, and got out his car and fired at the man.

David Lombardo is a concealed carry instructor who has trained more than 7,000 people to get their state licenses. Based on media accounts, Lombardo said that since the concealed carry holder wasn’t being shot at, “technically, he should not have been engaged.”

“But,” Lombardo added, “speaking as a former part-time deputy and an ex-military guy, the (citizen) was an angel. He knew what he was doing, he got involved when he didn’t have to and he saved the cop’s life. The bad guy could have hit somebody else too. So who knows how many lives (the citizen) saved?”



Cicero police and town leaders credited the citizen, whose name they did not release, with helping to end the wild shootout during the Thursday evening rush hour.

“We were lucky enough to have a citizen on the street there who is a conceal carry holder, and he engaged in gunfire with the suspect," Cicero police Superintendent Jerry Chlada Jr. said outside Mount Sinai Hospital, where Officer Luis Duarte was listed in good condition after undergoing surgery for four bullet wounds to the arm, leg and side. The suspect also was in good condition, police said.

Cicero Town President Larry Dominick, speaking to reporters outside the hospital, added his thanks to the concealed carry holder.

"I want to applaud the citizen, a civilian, who risked his life to help in apprehending this armed suspect," he said.