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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Yang's approach is definitely misguided here.

He would smarter trying to change things within the Democratic party, recruiting candidates to run in primaries, or making nonpartisan moves, like going for legislation that makes ranked choice voting easier, or creating an institute that endorse candidates on both sides who follow some good government procedures.

A left-leaning third party is going to alienate too many people. If he couldn't get enough support among Democratic primary voters, he's not going to be able to win over the larger more right-leaning general election voters.

I could be wrong, but I suspect Yang's pride was hurt after he failed to gain any traction in 2020 or in the recent mayoral primary in New York, so he decided to take his ball and go the third party route instead of sticking it out and helping Democrats.

[worstblogever]

Kyrsten Sinema Wants to Cut $100 Billion in Proposed Climate Funds, Sources Say

As an Arizonan? F**K Sinema.

Like, the idea that she abandoned Green Party principles and has gone from being supposedly "left of center and left of the left" to "right of center"....

Over this issue. A former Green Party member. In ARIZONA. Do you know what this state could do if we invested in solar energy here, where it almost never f***ing rains? Arizona State University and the Phoenix VA put up solar bays and are now energy positive and independent of needing help outside the grid. Using the infrastructure plan to do MORE of that wouldn't just help the environment, it would help the economy.

She's a complete f***ing dunce and sellout to corporate interests.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Minnesota's 6th Congressional District, Tom Emmer, a man who looked to be on the fast track into Congress with a record as a state legislator where he attempted to nullify federal law, abolish the minimum wage, and drug test people on government assistance. He also tried to have a bill passed that explicitly had language written into it that “Minnesotans have no constitutional right to an abortion” which sort of contradicts a pretty important Supreme Court ruling you may have heard about, and actually tried to pass legislation to allow pharmacists to deny to sell people contraceptives based on their religious beliefs. Emmer denies evolution and climate change and once froze up during a debate when asked how old he thought the Earth was. Emmer is also vehemently in the anti-gay category, as he once sponsored a ban same sex marriage in Minnesota, chastised colleagues for discussing an AIDS outreach program by calling it “disgusting discourse”, and has frequently been seen in the company of Bradlee Dean, the head of the “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide” Ministry, which has been classified as an anti-gay hate group for its stance that murdering gay people is “moral”. He also took time in 2015 to call for the repeal of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, because apparently he'd like another chance to drive the American economy into a ditch, only eight years after the last time.

Rep. Emmer was surprised when he held a town hall back in February 2017, and hundreds of people showed up to fill a 150 seat venue, dwarfing the attendance from any previous town all in recent years. After it was over, he responded that if people have the nerve to show up and don’t like how he’s doing his job, he’ll just cancel the town hall altogether.

In June of 2018, as the Trump administration’s “family separation” policy was being executed, and migrant children were being torn away from their parents and kept locked in cages by immigration services… Tom Emmer defended that strategy on immigration, claiming that it was up to Congress to stop a policy that Trump could started, and could stop at any time with a stroke of his pen. Also, if Congress was supposed to do something about it, Emmer might want to inform members of his own party, since at the time they controlled the House and the Senate.

During his Emmer prioritized weakening the Endangered Species Act in July of 2018. His voting record has remained heinous.

• December 18th, 2019: Emmer ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Emmer votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• December 10th, 2020: Emmer signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Emmer votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Tom Emmer votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Emmer votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Emmer votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Tom Emmer votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Emmer votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Emmer votes 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).
• May 19th, 2021: Rep. Emmer votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.

While Minnesota’s 6th was once the district of Michelle Bachmann, and has a reported +10 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and with Emmer’s current role as the head of the NRCC would normally make that seem like a formula for him survive what looks to be a woeful blood bath at the polls for Republicans. What’s not helping? Tom Emmer faced scrutiny in 2020 for writing an anti-Semitic e-mail to donors complaining about “Bloomberg and Soros have bought control of Congress”, Because why not just cement the GOP’s current devolution into anti-Semitism? After all, under his leadership, the National Republican Congressional Committee began embracing the Qanon conspiracy theory.

And yet, Tom Emmer won re-election with 66% of the vote. We’re crossing our fingers that his reign of partisan hackery comes to an end in 2022.

[Kirby101]

Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are doing exactly what party leadership wants them to do: Preserve the status quo and protect the “Democratic” party’s corporate donors.

I hope that is not the case. It is very cynical to think that legislation supported by 96% of the Democrats, the President, and 70% of the American people is meant to fail.

[numberthirty]

I hope that is not the case. It is very cynical to think that legislation supported by 96% of the Democrats, the President, and 70% of the American people is meant to fail.

While "Meant To..." is a stretch, I don't really see any of the Democrats in question doing this -



If you make it more like "Won't lose much sleep..." over the status quo staying intact?

I'd buy that a lot of the "Business As Usual..." Dems are in that camp.

[JackDaw]

While "Meant To..." is a stretch, I don't really see any of the Democrats in question doing this -



If you make it more like "Won't lose much sleep..." over the status quo staying intact?

I'd buy that a lot of the "Business As Usual..." Dems are in that camp.

Towards the end of the interview…having established that Joe Manchin is effectively taking a position against views of large majority of American people, and against very majority of his own party…Bernie says something like “He deserves some compromises….”

Why?? (I can see how he’s cynically acting in a way to extract “compromises”…but not why he deserves them. If he consistently acts like this, better to make some one else the official Democrat candidate, next time elections come up in his area.)

[numberthirty]

While I'm not about to pretend that I have a window into exactly what Sanders meant?

I'd guess that he is suggesting that some minor compromises might be in order because Manchin actually is the elected representative of a group of Americans.

As for making Manchin's political life miserable?

While I think I actually might have called for doing just that? The effort might be better spent attempting to pick up the seat elsewhere.

Just effectively take the guy out of the equation.

[Tendrin]

Making the House larger would probably result in adding more ultra-right wing QAnon nut cases to it. There are already too many of those. ("Any" is too many.)

Sure, but they'd be drowned out by a much larger House, with much more diverse representation. That's more important, here. 435 is an untenable place to stay and is bad for our democracy. I mean, heck, the UK has 650 reps for 67 million people. We have 435 for 329 million. This is not okay.

[Malvolio]

Towards the end of the interview…having established that Joe Manchin is effectively taking a position against views of large majority of American people, and against very majority of his own party…Bernie says something like “He deserves some compromises….”

Why?? (I can see how he’s cynically acting in a way to extract “compromises”…but not why he deserves them. If he consistently acts like this, better to make some one else the official Democrat candidate, next time elections come up in his area.)

The problem with setting up a more liberal candidate to defeat Manchin in a primary is that West Virginia is a very conservative state, and any Democrat to the left of Manchin could lose to almost any Republican.

[numberthirty]

The problem with setting up a more liberal candidate to defeat Manchin in a primary is that West Virginia is a very conservative state, and any Democrat to the left of Manchin could lose to almost any Republican.

That said...

What, exactly, is a winner who kneecaps getting anything worthwhile done worth?

[JackDaw]

Sure, but they'd be drowned out by a much larger House, with much more diverse representation. That's more important, here. 435 is an untenable place to stay and is bad for our democracy. I mean, heck, the UK has 650 reps for 67 million people. We have 435 for 329 million. This is not okay.

I wouldn’t put forward UK model as perfect…

But in this one instance my gut feeling is that our ratio (for reps to thousands of people) is about right…it allows a close connection between the rep and the people they represent.

But…Would increasing number of US Reps to say 3000 be remotely practical?

[Tendrin]

I wouldn’t put forward UK model as perfect…

But in this one instance my gut feeling is that our ratio (for reps to thousands of people) is about right…it allows a close connection between the rep and the people they represent.

But…Would increasing number of US Reps to say 3000 be remotely practical?

Yeah, I wasn't holding it out as perfect, just pointing out that they do fine with a larger house of commons than we have house of representatives. We absolutely can not go from 435 to 3000, but I certainly think we could increase the size of the House over time and develop practices and experience along the way to making it again a more truly representative body. Increase the size of every incoming class of the House and they'll make it work. The country would be better for it.

[CaptainEurope]

Just got an alert that a federal judge ordered Texas to suspend their insanely restrictive abortion law.

Sadly, that did not last long.

This back and forth must be torture for women.

[CSTowle]

That said...

What, exactly, is a winner who kneecaps getting anything worthwhile done worth?

When Congress is always close in the numbers, that one member is enough to swing the balance from D-controlled to R-. Even if it's like pulling teeth to get anything done, at least it's not a struggle to stop the other side from doing what they'd like to do (which is making things even more difficult on the Biden Administration and likely weakening things like Covid restrictions).

[Tami]

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
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Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.

A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.

The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J.

The confusion at Hobgood — one officer saying this, another saying that — could be traced in part to absence. A police officer regularly assigned to Hobgood, who knew the students and staff, had bailed that morning after learning about the planned arrests. The thought of arresting these children caused him such stress that he feared he might cry in front of them. Or have a heart attack. He wanted nothing to do with it, so he complained of chest pains and went home, with no warning to his fill-in about what was in store.

Also absent was the police officer who had investigated the video and instigated these arrests, Chrystal Templeton. She had assured the principal she would be there. She had also told Garrett there would be no handcuffs, that police would be discreet. But Templeton was a no-show. Garrett even texted her — “How’s timing?” — but got no answer.

Instead of going to Hobgood, Templeton had spent the afternoon gathering the petitions, then heading to the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center, a two-tiered jail for children with dozens of surveillance cameras, 48 cells and 64 beds. There, she waited for the kids to be brought to her.

In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.

The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.

Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.

In Rutherford County, it was 48%.