All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Godzilla2099]

Ivanka Trump's Commencement Speech Was Canceled at WSU Tech's Graduation Ceremony

Looks like Trump University Students won't be able to transfer their credits to WSU

[Iron Maiden]

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to chip away at various laws meant to protect our environment, etc. Now it's birds and fish.....


The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to scale back a century-old law protecting most American wild birds despite warnings that billions of birds could die

Trump Administration opens Atlantic Sanctuary to Commercial Fishing

Someone posted here a while back that Biden (who will trounce Trump if the polls continue to drop for Trump) will need a special office to reinstate environmental laws and regulations,etc that Trump eliminated. No joke. This is looking like it will be a full time job.

[JackDaw]

A modest proposal for a new law..

Companies and public corporations that employ more than 200 people should be obliged to publish every year a breakdown of the race and sex profile of their work force.

And this should include a specific breakdown of the top three tiers of management (i.e. the board and the next two levels.)

That would..for example..allow concerned people to boycott some goods and services.

[Electricmastro]

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to chip away at various laws meant to protect our environment, etc. Now it's birds and fish.....


The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to scale back a century-old law protecting most American wild birds despite warnings that billions of birds could die

Trump Administration opens Atlantic Sanctuary to Commercial Fishing

Someone posted here a while back that Biden (who will trounce Trump if the polls continue to drop for Trump) will need a special office to reinstate environmental laws and regulations,etc that Trump eliminated. No joke. This is looking like it will be a full time job.

And so continues the Trump Administration in seemingly wanting to become known in the history books as the most hated Presidential Administration in history.

[CaptainEurope]

I believe that was the point of why it was posted. And why I didn't respond.

In defense of whoever posted it, maybe they weren't trying to stir up **** but just trying to start a circle-jerk?

That was my reason for not responding.

[CaptainEurope]

Wouldn't this thread be nicer if we got an espresso maker and some Belgian cookies?

[CaptainEurope]

Some news from my corner of the forest:

Trump announced a reduction in troop numbers in Germany:

Another own goal from the Trump team. They somehow thinks it hurts Merkel whom they want to punish for her “no” on the G7. In truth, this move hurts US interests and does more harm to a critical relationship.

https://twitter.com/Julie_C_Smith/st...887325698?s=20

I hope this does not affect my friend who works as a translator on a US base.


Video of Merkel calling George Floyd's killing a racist murder, while acknowledging that Germany has to look at its own racism as well.

[aja_christopher]

"'Officer Galen Hinshaw heard the call over the radio. One of his fellow officers was in trouble.

A crowd of protesters had surrounded a police cruiser at the base of the Clark Memorial Bridge. The officer inside radioed for help as protesters — strobed in blue and red patrol car lights — banged on the car’s hood and windshield.

Hinshaw, a Fourth Division patrol officer and part of Louisville Metro Police Department's Special Response Team, drove as close as he could to the scene. As he got out of his cruiser, he was immediately surrounded by protesters.

Some yelled profanities. Others balled their fists.

He made his way through the crowd wearing 40 extra pounds of safety gear — a baton, vest, helmet and body armor.

He was alone.

As the crowd grew, Hinshaw detoured to the front of Bearno’s pizzeria so he could keep his back to the wall. He needed a place to stop and reassess the situation — to be sure that nobody could get behind him. He also needed to keep an eye on his trapped colleague...

The Special Response Team trains once a month, but that hadn’t quite prepared Hinshaw for what was in front of him. If the protesters decided to attack him, there were just too many of them.

“Here we go,” he thought. “I’m preparing to be injured.”

Hinshaw kept his voice calm as he radioed in: “Charlie 12, this is a 10-30. We need help.” 10-30 is code for officer needs help.

He watched people's hands in the crowd, making sure nobody had a weapon and scanning for things thrown from protesters in the back...

It was at this moment that a man emerged from the crowd in a red University of Louisville mask covering the lower half of his face. He put himself between the closest protester and Hinshaw.

Local entrepreneur Darrin Lee Jr. spotted Hinshaw and the advancing crowd and linked arms with the stranger in the red mask.

“Once I saw the guy with the red mask step up, I said, 'I gotta step up,'” said Lee, who also runs a child care center. “It was reactive. I just went.”

He had no idea what would happen next.

“I really thought at that moment, 'Protect him. It really isn’t his fault.'" Lee said.

Lee was also worried that Hinshaw would react and hit him from behind, so he turned to reassure the officer that they were going to protect him.

“He was looking nervous and scared,” Lee said. “If he panicked, then there was gonna be a war out there...”

Ultimately, five men formed a human shield to protect Hinshaw. All of them strangers to one another. Nobody knew the name of the man to his left or to his right. Three were black, one white, one Dominican — all linking arms to keep harm away from Hinshaw, himself half-Pakistani.

“A human was in trouble, and right is right," said Ricky McClellan, a factory worker from Old Louisville who was locked onto Lee’s left arm.

After reaching the bridge and watching some protesters throwing rocks at police cars, McClellan spotted Hinshaw as he walked around the group and thought, "Whoa, you're by yourself?"

McClellan watched as the crowd around Hinshaw grew larger and louder. Then he heard Lee yell, “Lock arms! Lock arms!”

That's when Julian De La Cruz saw the men locking arms and jumped in.

“I saw the guys link up and I saw a weak spot,” De La Cruz said, and took up a position on the end of the line.

For De La Cruz, a local businessman, the moment was about accountability.



“If I can hold my brothers accountable, if I can march with my brothers and turn against them to say, 'This isn’t right,' that’s where the accountability comes in,” he said.

“In the end, that’s all that we are asking for," said De La Cruz, whose uncle is a police officer. "What we need is for those great cops to hold their brothers and sisters accountable at all times.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...er/3166914001/

[worstblogever]

Hey WBE! I got another jackass for you to profile! Meet Errol Webber, fighting for CA-37. He's going after the greatest enemy right now.... SESAME STREET!!!!!



He's also a huge prick elsewhere.

And this is just from his Twitter within the past 24 hours. I doubt he has a chance at winning but wow is he something.

I checked on Errol Webber's chances... in a 3 way primary in CA-37, Rep. Karen Bass took 88% of the vote. Webber was 2nd, with 7.6%. Third place was Larry Thompson, and indepedent with 4.3%. Bass is going to absolutely pummel the s*** out of him at the polls.

[aja_christopher]

"Not Just George Floyd: Police Departments Have 400-year History of Anti-Black Racism"

"“Too often people look at the contemporary issue, the issue that is going on right now but not understanding that all that is happening is seeped in 400 years of legacy of injustice,” she says, adding, “These past grievances, past harms by law enforcement, need to be addressed before even attempting to move forward.”

Dating back to the 1600s, the U.S., then a British colony, used a watchmen system, where citizens of towns and cities would patrol their communities to prevent burglaries, arson and maintain order. As the slave population increased in the U.S., slave patrols were formed in South Carolina and expanded to other southern states, according to Sally Hadden, a history professor at Western Michigan University who researches slave patrols. Slave patrols were tasked with hunting down runaways and suppressing rebellions amid fear of enslaved people rising up against their white owners, who were often outnumbered. The patrol was a volunteer force consisting of white men who surveyed and attacked black people and anyone who tried to help them escape.

“Everything that you can think of that a police officer can do today, they did it,” says Hadden. “The biggest thing is that they were race-focused as opposed to the police today, who should be race neutral in their enforcement of law.”

Slave patrols were not designed to protect public safety in the broadest sense but, rather, to protect white wealth, says Seth Soughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer in Tallahassee, Florida, whose research has focused on excessive police force. After the abolition of slavery in 1865 with the passing of the 13th Amendment toward the end of the Civil War, slave patrols were done away with and modern police departments become more common. African Americans, however, were still heavily policed by law enforcement officials, especially in areas that passed black codes, or laws that restricted property ownership, employment and other behaviors.

The Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups terrorized black communities, carrying out lynchings and destroying black schools. Some law enforcement and other government officials became KKK members, especially in the South.

“The Ku Klux Klan could often count on empathy or active assistance at the time,” says Soughton. "The best that can be said for a lot of policing at the time is that they didn’t do anything to stop that. But often there is far worse to say because not only did they not do anything to stop it, they actively assisted it.”

When black Americans protested against segregation and other racist laws, law enforcement officials were often called in. During the civil rights era, images of police brutally suppressing peaceful activists, including with the use of dogs and fire hoses, in part helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and sex.

But as black Americans gained more rights, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle looked for ways to criminalize the black community.

In 1971, the Nixon administration launched the war on drugs, resulting in increased arrests and harsher prison sentences largely aimed at black people. Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Enhrlichman later confirmed that the effort was designed to hurt black families...

After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the Justice Department curtailed programs to investigate local police departments for racism and excessive force. But the recent deaths of Floyd, as well as of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky, killed at her home in March by police searching for a suspect in a drug case, have sparked renewed protests over law enforcement actions and policies...

“What’s becoming very apparent is that black people aren't the only group in this country that is concerned about the levels of police brutality in the United States,” says Lionel Kimble, a history professor at the University of Iowa whose research focuses on black civil rights. “The country is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and talk about how we police people, in what role the police play in supporting inequality in our society.”"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...sm/3128167001/

----
"Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses." -- Rage Against the Machine

[aja_christopher]

Well, the thing to remember is that in his earlier appearances he was portrayed as the antagonist in contrast to the more "wholesome" characters such as Spidey, DD or Cap. He wasn't the hero. Bill Mantlo even did a story that suggested Frank was mentally ill. However, since the mid-80's Marvel moved him into a more anti-hero role. Around then, they decided that he wouldn't fight the police ( even to the point of him getting captured a couple of times). I don't know if that's still part of his gimmick, but it's not hard to see how he would attract a number of conservative fans despite him being a killer...he's a manly man, ex-military, hard on crime, respects the police...

He doesn't attack any non-criminal cops in the new show as far as I can remember.

----

"'THE PUNISHER' STAR JON BERNTHAL FRICKIN' HATES THE ALT-RIGHT"



"The Punisher is a popular character, but sometimes that can be a little uncomfortable, as people can be fans for Marvel’s violent, gun-toting anti-hero for all the wrong reasons. White nationalists and neo-Nazis have embraced the Punisher’s skull logo, and a few were seen wearing the logo at the fatal white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year. What does the Punisher himself think of his white nationalist friends?

“**** them,” actor Jon Bernthal told Esquire when asked about the alt-right’s embrace of the skull logo.

Bernthal, who played the Punisher in the Netflix series and in Daredevil’s sophomore season, is hardly alone in hating some of the character’s worst fans. The Punisher’s original creator, comics writer Gerry Conway, also detests Nazis and neo-Nazis of all sorts.

“They’re despicable human beings, and Frank Castle would have all of them in his crosshairs,” Conway told Inverse last year. “The fact that white nationalists and Nazis embrace it is a tragic misunderstanding. It’s a misappropriation of the character and a blatant disregarding of reality.”

“They literally do not know what they are fucking talking about,” he continued.

It’s pretty easy to tell white supremacists to **** off, but it becomes a little more complicated with some other groups which have embraced the skull logo, like certain police and military organizations. There should be something unsettling about public servants identifying with a violent vigilante.

For his part, Bernthal told Esquire that he was “honored to play a guy who people putting their life on the line identify with,” which is both a fair answer and also a bit of a dodge...”

https://www.inverse.com/article/3990...lt-right-skull

[PaulBullion]

"Not Just George Floyd: Police Departments Have 400-year History of Anti-Black Racism"

"“Too often people look at the contemporary issue, the issue that is going on right now but not understanding that all that is happening is seeped in 400 years of legacy of injustice,” she says, adding, “These past grievances, past harms by law enforcement, need to be addressed before even attempting to move forward.”

Dating back to the 1600s, the U.S., then a British colony, used a watchmen system, where citizens of towns and cities would patrol their communities to prevent burglaries, arson and maintain order. As the slave population increased in the U.S., slave patrols were formed in South Carolina and expanded to other southern states, according to Sally Hadden, a history professor at Western Michigan University who researches slave patrols. Slave patrols were tasked with hunting down runaways and suppressing rebellions amid fear of enslaved people rising up against their white owners, who were often outnumbered. The patrol was a volunteer force consisting of white men who surveyed and attacked black people and anyone who tried to help them escape.

“Everything that you can think of that a police officer can do today, they did it,” says Hadden. “The biggest thing is that they were race-focused as opposed to the police today, who should be race neutral in their enforcement of law.”

Slave patrols were not designed to protect public safety in the broadest sense but, rather, to protect white wealth, says Seth Soughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer in Tallahassee, Florida, whose research has focused on excessive police force. After the abolition of slavery in 1865 with the passing of the 13th Amendment toward the end of the Civil War, slave patrols were done away with and modern police departments become more common. African Americans, however, were still heavily policed by law enforcement officials, especially in areas that passed black codes, or laws that restricted property ownership, employment and other behaviors.

The Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups terrorized black communities, carrying out lynchings and destroying black schools. Some law enforcement and other government officials became KKK members, especially in the South.

“The Ku Klux Klan could often count on empathy or active assistance at the time,” says Soughton. "The best that can be said for a lot of policing at the time is that they didn’t do anything to stop that. But often there is far worse to say because not only did they not do anything to stop it, they actively assisted it.”

When black Americans protested against segregation and other racist laws, law enforcement officials were often called in. During the civil rights era, images of police brutally suppressing peaceful activists, including with the use of dogs and fire hoses, in part helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and sex.

But as black Americans gained more rights, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle looked for ways to criminalize the black community.

In 1971, the Nixon administration launched the war on drugs, resulting in increased arrests and harsher prison sentences largely aimed at black people. Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Enhrlichman later confirmed that the effort was designed to hurt black families...

After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the Justice Department curtailed programs to investigate local police departments for racism and excessive force. But the recent deaths of Floyd, as well as of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky, killed at her home in March by police searching for a suspect in a drug case, have sparked renewed protests over law enforcement actions and policies...

“What’s becoming very apparent is that black people aren't the only group in this country that is concerned about the levels of police brutality in the United States,” says Lionel Kimble, a history professor at the University of Iowa whose research focuses on black civil rights. “The country is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and talk about how we police people, in what role the police play in supporting inequality in our society.”"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...sm/3128167001/

----
"Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses." -- Rage Against the Machine

Anybody who is AWARE of this, anyone who sees the police beating up and arresting reporters, anyone who sees the cops escalating the situation day after day and still considers the property damage the most pressing issue ...

(content redacted to avoid banning)

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, as well as 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Jacqueline Schaffer, a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives who won two terms in office without ever being challenged by a Democrat in both 2012 and 2014. She first gained some notoriety for sponsoring a sex-selective abortion ban (in spite of the practice not existing), and then after co-sponsoring an anti-Sharia Law bill a few months later, decided it wasn’t conservative enough and amended the legislation to include the sex-selective abortion ban again. In her first term in office, she also voted for North Carolina’s rigid Voter ID Law, the “motorcycle safety/anti-abortion” law, and voted to drug test welfare recipients. In her second, she sponsored North Carolina’s first attempt at a “religious freedom” law, HB 348, to allow for the discrimination of LGBT citizens based on one’s supposed deeply held faith, and was a co-sponsor of the state’s highly discriminatory HB 2 law. But perhaps her most outrageous moment came after she sponsored HB 465, a bill to stretch the medically unnecessary waiting period for an abortion in North Carolina from 24 to 72 hours, where she advocated for the measure by comparing women’s bodies to real estate. She did not run for re-election in 2016, and decided to resign because of “business responsibilities” she was having trouble staying on top of.


In both 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of Mississippi State Senator Jenifer Branning, emerging from a 4 candidate Republican primary by touting her involvement in her Pentecostal Church, winning with 43% of the vote, and then facing no Democratic challengers in the general election. She very quickly made an impression upon the state, taking LGBT bigotry to a new level by filing HB 1523, a “religious freedom” law that makes North Carolina’s HB 2 look like an invitation to a gay pride parade. Not only would it allow legalized discrimination towards the gay and transgendered communities, but it also stated that marriage should be recognized as the union between one man and one woman, and that sexual relations should be reserved for marriage only (!), and that someone’s gender is limited to whatever it is listed at the time of their birth. In spite of the obvious amount of legal discrimination in the bill, Branning had the unmitigated lack of conscience to claim it wasn’t discriminatory at all:

"It gives protection to those in the state who cannot in a good conscience provide services for a same-sex marriage. I don't think this bill is discriminatory — It takes no rights away from anyone."

When Branning’s bit of extremism was criticized widely online, she deleted her Facebook page rather than answer for what she was trying to do. And of course, after its passage, the bill was almost immediately blocked by the courts, because large portions of it are obviously contradictory to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. That may have had something to do with the fact that the state tried defending the law with the logic that Christians have a right to challenge the freedoms of gay people. So there’s that.

What kind of bigotry will Jenifer Branning stand against? Will you believe that she voted for a bill to classify attacking law enforcement as a hate crime?

You heard that right, people are born gay, but they don’t have rights… but people who choose to be a cop, they do, based off of their jobs.

Anyway, we’re not just going to chalk up Branning’s obsession with LGBT rights as our only complaint with her, as she also has already voted to try and block state funding of Planned Parenthood, and for someone who’s so adamant that she’s pro-life, she also voted not just to maintain capital punishment in Mississippi, but allow the state to bring back the electric chair and firing squads as lethal methods of execution. No hypocrisy there, either, no sir. She furthered that disconnect about what “pro-life” means this year as she co-sponsored legislation that if passed, would have Mississippi to ban abortion at 15 weeks, and followed that up by voting for a fetal heartbeat bill that would effectively ban abortion a 6 weeks, flying in the face of the Roe v. Wade ruling.

Branning was up for re-election in 2019, but no candidates filed to run against her, guaranteeing that she’ll be in office to continue her social crusade for another four years. She immediately went to work
sponsoring a bill that would make it easier for parents to use their “religious beliefs” to opt out of immunizing their children. Branning did this during the Covid-19 pandemic’s early stages, and there’s no way that could have long term effects that could kill anyone. Nope. Not at all.

She still insists she’s “pro-life”, because there is no irony. 

[XPac]

He doesn't attack any non-criminal cops in the new show as far as I can remember.

----

"'THE PUNISHER' STAR JON BERNTHAL FRICKIN' HATES THE ALT-RIGHT"



"The Punisher is a popular character, but sometimes that can be a little uncomfortable, as people can be fans for Marvel’s violent, gun-toting anti-hero for all the wrong reasons. White nationalists and neo-Nazis have embraced the Punisher’s skull logo, and a few were seen wearing the logo at the fatal white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year. What does the Punisher himself think of his white nationalist friends?

“Fuck them,” actor Jon Bernthal told Esquire when asked about the alt-right’s embrace of the skull logo.

Bernthal, who played the Punisher in the Netflix series and in Daredevil’s sophomore season, is hardly alone in hating some of the character’s worst fans. The Punisher’s original creator, comics writer Gerry Conway, also detests Nazis and neo-Nazis of all sorts.

“They’re despicable human beings, and Frank Castle would have all of them in his crosshairs,” Conway told Inverse last year. “The fact that white nationalists and Nazis embrace it is a tragic misunderstanding. It’s a misappropriation of the character and a blatant disregarding of reality.”

“They literally do not know what they are fucking talking about,” he continued.

It’s pretty easy to tell white supremacists to **** off, but it becomes a little more complicated with some other groups which have embraced the skull logo, like certain police and military organizations. There should be something unsettling about public servants identifying with a violent vigilante.

For his part, Bernthal told Esquire that he was “honored to play a guy who people putting their life on the line identify with,” which is both a fair answer and also a bit of a dodge...”

https://www.inverse.com/article/3990...lt-right-skull

He does attack non criminal soldiers in order to escape at one point or another ... but its non lethally and he legitimately feels bad about it. In that regard Captain America has done the same.

[aja_christopher]

He does attack non criminal soldiers in order to escape at one point or another ... but its non lethally and he legitimately feels bad about it. In that regard Captain America has done the same.

I saw and still see that as self-defense -- but point taken.