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

[sammy_hansen]

You absolutely can do that, the police already suck up a disproportionate share of most city budgets, the NYPD alone costs a whopping $6 billion per year which is more than most countries spend on their militaries. How on earth could giving them MORE money possible help matters?

Isn’t it obvious?

More money to law enforcement = problems solved.

More money to social services/health/education = doesn’t help/gravy train for public sector unions.


And what did you expect them to do with all that surplus military equipment? Blow up another Middle Eastern country?

[Steel Inquisitor]

Isn’t it obvious?

More money to law enforcement = problems solved.

More money to social services/health/education = doesn’t help/gravy train for public sector unions.

Not the argument being made, that's part of how to solve the incredibly difficult tasks of reforming the police, the protests about "defunding the police" are about reform not defunding them out of existence. This won't be solved by simply taking away the funding.

And what did you expect them to do with all that surplus military equipment? Blow up another Middle Eastern country?

Defunding the police won't stop that, the military gives their equipment to the police at a discount. Obama originally made restrictions on this, which Trump reversed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...military-units

But these are just a small taste of the military-grade arsenal that law enforcement officers have at their disposal – with the military handing them hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, from mine-resistant vehicles and airplanes, to grenade launchers and rifles.

Since 1997, the US Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2bn in military equipment to law enforcement agencies.

This is through the 1033 programme, which funnels excess military equipment to police forces for a fraction of the original cost.

What required is a complete overhaul, preferably on a national level, and purging and replacing the toxic racist culture which makes them think they're soldiers in enemy territory. George Floyd wasn't murdered by a gun, that's the power police wield that they shouldn't have. The guns and militarisation are just another layer of how terrible they are.

[BeastieRunner]

I'd like to point out that Trump's first rally that is being heralded around racism and unity, is in Tulsa.

It's being held at the location where the Tulsa Race Riots began, the largest act of racial violence in American history.

It's also being held on June 19th.

Also know as the holiday Juneteenth, celebrating the emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African Americans.

THIS ADMINISTRATION IS TONE DEAF OR FULL OF WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

W.T.F.

Really!?

I can't even ...

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It’s fascinating that the response to a deadly shooting in USA is to get more and bigger guns whereas in my country (Australia) the solution was to eliminate most firearms.

Australia doesn't have the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association which is dug into Washington politics like an Alabama tick (to paraphrase Jesse Ventura from Predator) and a warped culture where guns are worshiped by the American public to an insane degree, neither of which can be excised or even regulated, and god knows we've tried.

====================

Statues Linked To Racist Past Toppled And Vandalized Around The U.S.

Monuments honoring Confederate figures or Christopher Columbus have been vandalized, set on fire and thrown in lakes this week.

**********

Trump Won’t ‘Even Consider’ Renaming Bases Named For Confederate Generals

The president engages in a battle that even the Army isn’t fully behind. No surprise there, given that the sort of mouthbreathers who worship the Confederacy are among Trump's most fervent supporters.

**********

Trump Campaign Demands CNN Apologize For Poll That Shows Him Losing To Biden

The president’s team was miffed that the network’s poll showed Joe Biden with a 14-point lead. President Snowflake got his panties in a pinch over that. GOOD!

**********

LeBron James Is Fighting For Black Voting Rights With ‘More Than A Vote’ Initiative

The NBA star has assembled a group of Black athletes and celebs to help him inspire African-Americans to vote. How long before some pissed off cretin on Faux News says that Lebron should "shut up and dribble"?

**********

More Than 1,250 Ex-DOJ Workers Demand Probe Of AG Barr Over Protesters’ Removal

The Department of Justice alumni slammed Barr’s reported role in last week’s violence near the White House, calling it “disturbing” and potentially politically motivated.

**********

Donald Trump Is Acting Like The Coronavirus Is Gone. It Isn’t.

The president is planning rallies and retreating from the fight against COVID-19 just as many states are experiencing their worst outbreaks yet.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I'd like to point out that Trump's first rally that is being heralded around racism and unity, is in Tulsa.

It's being held at the location where the Tulsa Race Riots began, the largest act of racial violence in American history.

It's also being held on June 19th.

Also know as the holiday Juneteenth, celebrating the emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African Americans.

THIS ADMINISTRATION IS TONE DEAF OR FULL OF WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

W.T.F.

Really!?

I can't even ...

No, the Trump White House wasn't being tone deaf, not even close. THIS. WAS. DELIBERATE.

Remember who's part of that administration, Stephen Miller (a.k.a. Kid Jackboot), an abominable racist shitstain. I'll bet a month's pay Miller cooked up the idea of holding the Tulsa rally on that specific day as Trump wouldn't have known a damn thing about Juneteenth.

[Tendrin]

No, the Trump White House wasn't being tone deaf, not even close. THIS. WAS. DELIBERATE.

Remember who's part of that administration, Stephen Miller (a.k.a. Kid Jackboot), an abominable racist shitstain. I'll bet a month's pay Miller cooked up the idea of holding the Tulsa rally on that specific day as Trump wouldn't have known a damn thing about Juneteenth.

They're no doubt thinkijng back to Regan's 'I believe in state's rights' comments at Phialdelphia, Mississipi.

They always know what they're doing.

[PaulBullion]

Never underestimate the Democratic capacity for self-sabotage:

https://www.mic.com/p/defund-the-pol...raise-22971883

Of course, mic.com (a website run by mostly white people trying very hard to look black) is leaving out this part from Biden's essay:

Every single police department should have the money it needs to institute real reforms like adopting a national use of force standard, buying body cameras and recruiting more diverse police officers.

While I agree that it is more than a bit tone deaf to not simply suggest the money police already has needs to be re-allocated to those things, he is not just suggesting buying more tanks for police.

[Mister Mets]

It's... going to be a long haul to prevent her from winning, too. Georgia's 14th Congressional District has a +27 Republican lean. She's likely headed to DC to become a true Lady Gohmert.

And she'll likely be re-elected unless the GOP run a real candidate to primary her, or that redistricting after 2020 makes the partisan lean of this district a little less ridiculous.

She does still have to win the runoff primary in August.

I'd like to point out that Trump's first rally that is being heralded around racism and unity, is in Tulsa.

It's being held at the location where the Tulsa Race Riots began, the largest act of racial violence in American history.

It's also being held on June 19th.

Also know as the holiday Juneteenth, celebrating the emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African Americans.

THIS ADMINISTRATION IS TONE DEAF OR FULL OF WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

W.T.F.

Really!?

I can't even ...

There are two main possibilities.

The first is that it's just a coincidence, especially since there are various restrictions on where to hold rallies due to COVID-19, and it's a Friday after restrictions are loosened.

The second possibility is that it's deliberate, although that still raises the question of why. Is it a dog whistle to racists familiar with Juneteenth and the black wall street massacre? It would seem more likely that if they were selecting the date and location intentionally, he's going to give some tone-deaf speech about how the Trump administration has helped African Americans.

[MiddleMan]

this is all Stephen Miller, he knows what he's doing

[Tendrin]

She does still have to win the runoff primary in August.

There are two main possibilities.

The first is that it's just a coincidence, especially since there are various restrictions on where to hold rallies due to COVID-19, and it's a Friday after restrictions are loosened.

The second possibility is that it's deliberate, although that still raises the question of why. Is it a dog whistle to racists familiar with Juneteenth and the black wall street massacre? It would seem more likely that if they were selecting the date and location intentionally, he's going to give some tone-deaf speech about how the Trump administration has helped African Americans.

It doesn't really raise the question when we all already know the answer.

[Steel Inquisitor]

Australia doesn't have the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association which is dug into Washington politics like an Alabama tick (to paraphrase Jesse Ventura from Predator) and a warped culture where guns are worshiped by the American public to an insane degree, neither of which can be excised or even regulated, and god knows we've tried.

Another difference is that American conservatives won't buckle under gun control, in Australia a strong proponent from that change was the Prime Minister. Who was John Howard, from the Liberal Party, the equivalent of the GOP! It's like having President George W Bush take all the guns away while he was in power, and Howard was a close ally to W Bush himself!

[Tami]

I Spent 3 Months Locked Down in DC. Then I Went to a Mall in Utah.

We went to Fashion Place trying to remedy an unexpected problem created by the lockdowns in DC. When our home town shut down all non-essential businesses back in mid-March, it was 40 degrees out. By the time we left for Utah in June, Washington’s summer weather had appeared, and it was 90 degrees. Plus, my daughter had grown three inches since last summer. She desperately needed some shorts, but our attempts to order clothes online had failed. So when we got to Utah, where stores have been open since May 5, we naïvely thought we could don our KN95 masks, zip into H&M, and grab some essentials in much the same way we bought milk at Whole Foods.

The packed parking lot should have been our first clue that this was a terrible idea. We hadn’t eaten in a restaurant or shopped in a store that wasn’t a supermarket since March. We had become accustomed to waiting outside on designated spots painted on the sidewalk six feet apart, with security guards at the door limiting admission and insuring everyone was wearing a mask. Physical barriers ensured that one-way shopping cart traffic was strictly enforced.

Which is all to say, we were utterly unprepared for the free-for-all at a mall two thousand miles away.

The scene at Sunglass Hut was just one of many indications that we’d moved from what felt like the mainstream to an alien spot along the continuum of America’s coronavirus consciousness. After three months of being locked down in DC because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, I had come to Utah with my daughter to escape a summer of ennui. We were trading online summer camp and Zoom visits for big sky country and socially-distanced walks with my parents. We thought the flight out would be the scariest part of our trip to a state that, at the time we bought our tickets, had very few cases of COVID-19. But by the time we left DC, where the infection rate was falling, Utah was in the midst of a sustained spike in infections after largely allowing the economy to reopen without restrictions in early May. The day we headed to the mall, the state reported 546 new cases, a Utah record. Our shopping trip made it clear why.

Some stores were still closed, like the jewelry store and the Build-a-Bear (sorry kids). Others were wide open, with people coming and going freely and milling around inside. At Victoria’s Secret, there must have been 40 people lined up shoulder to shoulder at the entrance waiting to peruse panties and try on bustiers. The store was limiting occupancy inside, an attempt at enforcing social distancing that was all but defeated by the crowd assembled in the mall corridor. We found a similar scene at H&M, which had closed off all the entrances but one, inside the mall, forcing customers into another bottleneck.

But first, we made a quick loop through the food court to see if we might be able to score a lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick, an outpost of the fast-food joint I’d worked for in high school. A California chain, it was closed. But lots of other eateries were open and doing booming business. The food court tables had been set a few feet farther apart than usual, but customers had pushed some together, and large, carefree families were happily noshing on Chik-fil-A. We dashed outside and relished the fresh air—and a squirt of hand sanitizer. “I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable doing that for about three years,” my daughter said.

The cavalier attitude of Utah residents about social distancing was on display early on during the pandemic. At the end of March, as other countries started to close their borders and the US contemplated more travel restrictions, the LDS church chartered five Boeing 777s to bring 1,600 Mormon missionaries back from the Philippines. Nine hundred of them arrived at the Salt Lake airport. In a state where more than 60 percent of residents are LDS, the arrival of returned missionaries is a huge deal. Before 9/11, large Mormon families would descend upon the airport en masse, crowding right up to the airline gates with balloons and signs, welcoming home their loved ones. After 9/11, security requirements put an end to the gate festivities, so the welcome wagon just moved to the baggage claim downstairs.

[JackDaw]

No, the Trump White House wasn't being tone deaf, not even close. THIS. WAS. DELIBERATE.

Remember who's part of that administration, Stephen Miller (a.k.a. Kid Jackboot), an abominable racist shitstain. I'll bet a month's pay Miller cooked up the idea of holding the Tulsa rally on that specific day as Trump wouldn't have known a damn thing about Juneteenth.

With a completely different leader wouldn’t it potentially be a good choice of day and venue??

I don’t suppose for a milli-second that Trump will...but another leader, aware of the events, might speak about the history, saying how unaccceptable it was, and how things need to improve.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Texas State Senator Charles Perry, who we noted that immediately after being sworn in as a state senator, talked of a "spiritual battle" being fought over abortion and same sex marriage that he likened to stopping the Holocaust. He has tried to pass same sex marriage bans based on "state's rights", voted for "trap laws" to close down the majority, if not all abortion clinics in Texas, pushed for unnecessary Voter ID bills to combat the statistically non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud, and voted to drug test welfare recipients (still always a failed conservative experiment). While this might make him sound like a Fundamentalist Baptist pillar, there's also word that Perry frequents gentleman's clubs and has had exotic dancers accuse him of stalking them. So, add some hypocrisy to the mix. In April of 2015, Perry co-sponsored SB 2065, a "religious freedom" bill that was written to allow people to use their faith to refuse marriage services to same sex couples. But believe it or not, that isn't the worst issue position Perry took, as in July of 2015, he appeared at a "Homeland Terrorism Conference" hosted by the dodgy Christian Reporter News. (At the event, ISIS was referred to as "true Islam", to give you an idea of how intolerant their ideas are.) Oddly, their discussion of Islamic terror also delved into theories that Muslims keep male sex slaves, or have sex with donkeys. So... that's some healthy rhetoric. And it wasn't a one-off, as Charles Perry freaked right the hell out after the Paris terror attacks, where he wrote to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to ask if there were any way that the state could refuse to admit Syrian refugees.He reiterated his paranoid fears on local conservative talk radio thereafter, insisting that Texas was a target for Islamic terror, especially if they took in Syrian refugees.

But it's not like Charles Perry had to face any consequences of hanging out with hatemongers, and demonizing a whole religion in 2016, as he was allowed to run for re-election completely unopposed. Because Texas, that's why.

So then it should come as little surprise that Charles Perry has not dialed back his Fundamentalist insanity. He was a sponsor of SB 892, a religious freedom bill of sorts aimed at deferring to the “deeply held faith” of Christian adoption agencies, hoping that they might turn away prospective same sex couples looking to adopt. Perry insisted that the legislation must exist, or Christian religious organizations would ignore the various things Jesus spoke of helping children if it didn’t get passed, saying:

“This bill is not a license to discriminate. Rather, it is a license to participate.”

Based off of a lot of his other quotes and actions, we’re calling bulls***.

Now, where Charles Perry has definitely stepped up his game is in his anti-immigrant fervor. One of the bigger state level battles over the past few years was Texas’ anti-immigrant law SB 4, which would ban sanctuary cities from existing within the state.

Perry has not only voted for this xenophobic nightmare of a piece of legislation (using the word “legislation” loosely), but he has defended it by claiming it “upholds the rule of law”. Considering the constitutionality of the bill has been questioned because of how it empowers Texas law enforcement to racially profile people to enforce it, that’s a really interesting perspective. That does not mean, however, that he isn’t still an anti-abortion zealot, because he responded to the news of three Planned Parenthood centers opening in Texas by starting what amounted to a symbolic petition on his Facebook page, writing that “The abortion industry has officially targeted West Texas. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, has multi-million dollar plans to re-open clinics in our communities, and they must be stopped.” (For the sake of facts, Planned Parenthood does not profit in any way from providing abortions, which is only 3% of their budget anyway, none of which comes from government funding, and it definitely is not an “abortion industry”.)

Charles Perry has been re-elected through 2020, and currently seems like he’s dedicated his focus on discriminating against the LGBTQ community, sponsoring a “religious freedom” bill, SB 17, that would allow homophobic bigots to use their faith as an excuse for hating gay people. And regrettably… no one filed to run against him in November, so he’s going to continue to crusade against minorities in his own twisted view of what Jesus wants until the year 2024.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

With a completely different leader wouldn’t it potentially be a good choice of day and venue??

I don’t suppose for a milli-second that Trump will...but another leader, aware of the events, might speak about the history, saying how unaccceptable it was, and how things need to improve.

I'm sure someone else would have used Juneteenth to address the ever growing racial divide and call for peace and unity. Whether or not such a speech would've been given in Tulsa itself is anybody's guess, though I tend to think that out of respect for the sanctity of the anniversary, the better option would've been a televised speech from the Oval Office or the Rose Garden.

In the case of Trump however, this figures to be nothing more than another repugnant "ME! ME! LOOK AT ME! LISTEN TO ME!" diatribe posing as a rally where he boasts about how great he is, takes shots at the media, Joe Biden, Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, antifa, Black Lives Matter, basically anyone he considers an enemy while doing all he can to ramp up racial tensions, not tamp them down. Trump doesn't give even half a **** about unity, far from it, stoking hate keeps his knuckledragging base good and fired up, and with his poll numbers said to be plummeting, he's bound to pull out all the stops with his already incendiary rhetoric. That's why this visit figures to be ugly as hell.