All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[JCAll]

Oh god. We can only hope...





http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...lenn-beck-iran

Of course, since the Iran deal won't be 'passed', this is an empty threat... but we can hope.

Good. Good! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Police Chief Accused Of Comparing Black People To Monkeys

But, according to the GOP, racism is deader than the proverbial doornail in this country. No, seriously!

[Tendrin]

Police Chief Accused Of Comparing Black People To Monkeys

But, according to the GOP, racism is deader than the proverbial doornail in this country. No, seriously!

I was going to post that since it's from my own state. you beat me to it.

[worstblogever]

Around oh… 365 days ago, CSGOPOTD profiled Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, a Christian theocrat who has somehow, in her mad quest to allow religion to be allowed in state schools and government buildings (including having a pastor brought in to anoint furniture in the state legislature with holy oil), opened a loophole that allowed a Satanic Temple to build a statue of Baphomet, just to prove a point to her about the separation of church and state. Fallin also oversaw a botched double-execution from the comforts of an Oklahoma City Thunder game, not wanting to answer her cell phone while a man died in agony on her watch. She’s also infamous for trying to shut down all the abortion clinics in her state, signing a ban on minimum wage increases during our greatest time of economic inequality in almost a century, and trying to do away with the entire state Supreme Court for not granting her absolute domain to do as she pleases.

And no, she has not calmed down after winning re-election in 2014, where she was only “challenged” in the primary, but won it with 75% of the vote. She’s still making headlines like these:

• On January 29th, 2015, Mary Fallin was asked by a reporter about a bill submitted by CSGOPOTD alumni Sally Kern, which would allow discrimination by businesses towards gays based on religious grounds. Fallin refused to answer if she supported it or not.
• Gov. Fallin has a hostile relationship with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, for having the nerve to remind her that the Constitution is a thing she has to follow, and on July 7th, 2015, that battle was renewed when Fallin began to defy their ruling to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from state property.
• On July 11th, 2015, Fallin tried to further defend her resistance to the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision, trying to argue that the justices’ decision was not in line with Oklahoma’s “with three co-equal branches of government.” By the time she was done talking, it was clear Gov. Fallin needed a serious civics lesson:
  

  “You know, there are three branches of our government. You have the Supreme Court, the legislative branch and the people, the people and their ability to vote. So I’m hoping that we can address this issue in the legislative session and let the people of Oklahoma decide.”

• In late July 2015, reports surfaced that Mary Fallin’s controversial 28 year old daughter, Christina, had parked a trailer at the governor’s mansion, and was living rent-free and siphoning utilities as well at taxpayer expense. Once the media got word of it, the governor had to shoo her daughter away before much more was made of it. (Critics obviously got some laughs out of making trailer trash jokes.)

Oklahoma is a very red state at the moment, perhaps the reddest in the nation. And with Mary Fallin in office until 2018, don’t expect news stories coming out of there to be any less ridiculous in the near future.

[7thangel]

in annals of 'Whaaaat!?!???', i bring you palinese via trump rally for 'murica and hate

[Double 0]

Seriously, what was that?

[Malvolio]

Around oh… 365 days ago, CSGOPOTD profiled Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, a Christian theocrat who has somehow, in her mad quest to allow religion to be allowed in state schools and government buildings (including having a pastor brought in to anoint furniture in the state legislature with holy oil), opened a loophole that allowed a Satanic Temple to build a statue of Baphomet, just to prove a point to her about the separation of church and state. Fallin also oversaw a botched double-execution from the comforts of an Oklahoma City Thunder game, not wanting to answer her cell phone while a man died in agony on her watch. She’s also infamous for trying to shut down all the abortion clinics in her state, signing a ban on minimum wage increases during our greatest time of economic inequality in almost a century, and trying to do away with the entire state Supreme Court for not granting her absolute domain to do as she pleases.

And no, she has not calmed down after winning re-election in 2014, where she was only “challenged” in the primary, but won it with 75% of the vote. She’s still making headlines like these:

• On January 29th, 2015, Mary Fallin was asked by a reporter about a bill submitted by CSGOPOTD alumni Sally Kern, which would allow discrimination by businesses towards gays based on religious grounds. Fallin refused to answer if she supported it or not.
• Gov. Fallin has a hostile relationship with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, for having the nerve to remind her that the Constitution is a thing she has to follow, and on July 7th, 2015, that battle was renewed when Fallin began to defy their ruling to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from state property.
• On July 11th, 2015, Fallin tried to further defend her resistance to the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision, trying to argue that the justices’ decision was not in line with Oklahoma’s “with three co-equal branches of government.” By the time she was done talking, it was clear Gov. Fallin needed a serious civics lesson:
  
• In late July 2015, reports surfaced that Mary Fallin’s controversial 28 year old daughter, Christina, had parked a trailer at the governor’s mansion, and was living rent-free and siphoning utilities as well at taxpayer expense. Once the media got word of it, the governor had to shoo her daughter away before much more was made of it. (Critics obviously got some laughs out of making trailer trash jokes.)

Oklahoma is a very red state at the moment, perhaps the reddest in the nation. And with Mary Fallin in office until 2018, don’t expect news stories coming out of there to be any less ridiculous in the near future.

Reddest state? That's ironic, considering that until Oklahoma was made a state in 1907, it was considered "Indian Territory."

[WAKANDA FOREVER!]

That Palin. Anyhoo, http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/55f0927ee4b002d5c077d492

[InformationGeek]

It's been awhile, but let's update with a Walker Watch.

Scotty boy has decided to tap dance around the issue on migrant crisis going on in Europe currently.

As Europe grapples with the mass migration of more than 300,000 refugees fleeing war in Syria, Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker won’t say whether the United States should open its doors to absorb more of the migrants.

Walker’s reason for not taking a stand is that he says it would be hypothetical for him to do so since he is not currently the president.

“I'm not president today and I can't be president today,” the Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin governor said when asked by ABC News during a press gaggle on Monday what he would to address the current refugee crisis if he were president currently. “Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical.”

Of course, his inability to answer any question led to this amusing article:

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who has previously declined to have stances on birthright citizenship, evolution, whether being gay is a choice, and whether he would meet with Black Lives Matter organizers, discussed the philosophical underpinnings of his political apathy when announcing that he has no opinion on the migrant crisis in Europe.

ABC News asked Walker how he would respond to the massive influx of refugees from Syria if he were president today. He explained that the query was flawed. As he is obviously not president, Walker argued, there is no way that he would be able to answer that question. “I'm not president today and I can't be president today,” he said. "Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical" — a sentence that probably would have moved Socrates to set Walker's pants on fire himself.

Walker has avoided answering questions with similar evasions before — although "I'm not president, so I can't answer that" is the closest he has come to finding the secret cheat code that will allow him to advance to the convention without having to provide much insight into how he might deal with the types of difficult decisions a president has to make.

When asked if he would have done the same thing as Obama during the auto crisis in May, he replied, “That’s a hypothetical question in the past. We’re going to talk about the future" — logic that sounds similar to Colonel Sandurz's statement in Spaceballs that "we passed then" and "everything that happens now is happening now."

Walker does not only decline to answer questions that require flights of fancy that send him to dreams within dreams where he is and has always been president; the presidential candidate also refuses to answer questions that do not follow Scott Walker's Book of Political Manners. In February, when asked about ISIS after a speech on trade in London, he said, “I don’t think it’s polite to respond on policy in the United States when you’re in a foreign country. That’s certainly something I’ll answer in the future.”

During his interview with ABC News on Monday, Walker was much happier to talk about the Islamic State — in fact, he declared it the antidote to the impasse he and the reporter had reached after his answer broke through the space-time continuum, sending them to a place where Walker might be president and hypotheticals could once again be answered.

“I'm talking about what I would do as president, that'll be a year and a half from now." He hypothesized that he will "take on ISIS as president."

[KOSLOX]

in annals of 'Whaaaat!?!???', i bring you palinese via trump rally for 'murica and hate

I'm not joking at all when I say this; did she have a stroke or something earlier this year? Between her speech in January and the multiple times shes seemingly appeared drunk, or something, on her you tube channel I really think something happened. I don't think she was ever brilliant, or even average as far as intelligence goes but... come on.

[Mister Mets]

Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) believes that even if there is an 80 percent chance that a college student accused of rape is innocent, that student should be expelled.

Dem Rep. on Campus Rape: Better to Expel More Students, Even if 80% Are Innocent

During a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Democratic Congressman Jared Polis said that even if a whopping 80% of accused campus rapists are innocent, it was still better to kick them all out of school.

“I mean, we’re talking about a private institution,” he said. “If I was running one, I might say, ‘Well you know even if there’s a 20-30% chance that this happened, I would want to remove this individual.”

Freedom for Individual Rights in Education policy director Joseph Cohn responded by telling Polis that the sort of standard he was discussing would be highly unlikely to pass the due process requirements that public universities must legally abide by.

“It seems like we ought to provide more of a legal framework then that allows a reasonable likelihood standard or preponderance of evidence standard,” the Colorado Democrat responded. “If there’s ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people.”

“We’re not talking about depriving them of life and liberty,” he laughed. “We’re talking about them transferred to another university.” That line earned him a smatter of applause.

“Let’s be clear about this,” Cohn said angrily. “That is not what we’re talking about.” But Polis cut him off and began questioning another witness.

This probably isn't going to make anyone happy. If you think colleges are screwing up by not going after enough accused rapists, it's not a good thing to have someone on your side talking about situation in which the accused is much more likely to be innocent than not. If you're concerned about the effects of false accusations/ overreactions on campus, a congressman saying that the likelihood that someone is innocent shouldn't matter is a big problem.

Polis responded to followup questions for the libertarian magazine Reason.

I emailed Polis some follow-up questions, and he graciously answered them.

“We aren't talking about depriving someone of their liberty here, we're talking about the ability of an institution to decide who can pay them to enroll in their courses,” he wrote in an email to Reason. “I associate "due process" with a conviction of criminal penalty; what affirmative right do I have to pay a university and make them deliver courses to me? They deny students the ability to enroll for all sorts of reasons.”

But what if Polis’s own son was among a pool of students accused of sexual assault? Would Polis really want his student expelled under such a jarringly low standard?

“If my son had a baseless accusation made against him at a university and it was making his life there miserable, I would suggest he transfer or take courses online,” wrote Polis. “It can be a living hell to go through endless campus investigations. I've seen this go down, and there really is no winning once the accusation is made even if the process provides formal vindication. Someone who is wrongfully accused needs to do their best to put it behind them and move on. Trying to re-enroll in the same institution would be a constant reminder of the traumatic experience of being the subject of a baseless accusation.

If a university were to implement a ‘reasonable likelihood’ standard, it is important that they give the student the ability to withdraw so that their record isn't tainted, nor should a mere reasonable likelihood standard hurt their prospects elsewhere.”

I then asserted that this arrangement cedes way, way, way too much power to accusers (yes, I wrote way three times):

“I think these matters should be up to Universities to decide,” he replied. “University of Colorado (CU) has an elected board of Regents. They should decide if they want to have a reasonable likelihood or preponderance of the evidence standard. If a University errs too far on the side of giving ‘way, way, way too much power to accusers’ then that will hurt their competitive standing in the marketplace. There is room for all sorts of standards in the marketplace and prospective students will choose the right balance based on their preferences and the reputations of the various universities.”

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It's been awhile, but let's update with a Walker Watch.

Scotty boy has decided to tap dance around the issue on migrant crisis going on in Europe currently.





Of course, his inability to answer any question led to this amusing article:

To quote the esteemed Bugs Bunny, "Wotta maroon!" Of course Walker doesn't want to put out an opinion on anything save for perhaps the weather because he's scared to death soundbites will come back to bite him in the ass. Clearly he subscribes to that old saying, "Better to remain silent and be thought of as foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". But, in Walker's case, we already know he's a first class dope.

I'm not joking at all when I say this; did she have a stroke or something earlier this year? Between her speech in January and the multiple times shes seemingly appeared drunk, or something, on her you tube channel I really think something happened. I don't think she was ever brilliant, or even average as far as intelligence goes but... come on.

I'll tell you what happened, Palin must've discovered crack cocaine. I can't think of any other rational explanation for why she's acted like a lunatic of late.

[7thangel]

of course. you knew these assholes would show up eventually

Oath Keepers put ‘boots on the ground’ to guard oath-breaking Kim Davis from ‘dictator’ judge

anyways, this whole affair is a prime example why voting, locally and beyond, is important

[WAKANDA FOREVER!]

of course. you knew these assholes would show up eventually

Oath Keepers put ‘boots on the ground’ to guard oath-breaking Kim Davis from ‘dictator’ judge

anyways, this whole affair is a prime example why voting, locally and beyond, is important

The privilege is real

[Michael P]

So Huckabee somehow thinks the Dred Scott decision is still in effect.