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

[BeastieRunner]

My wife just proposed changing the name of schools to Abortion-Free Christian Military Uteri.

[BeastieRunner]

Seen more articles like this now.

Their racist shouts were so bad, a coach took his team off the floor.

[SuperiorIronman]

I understand people are enthusiasts for weapons. But what do you need a military styled rifle for? Even if we don't take away all guns across the country, what does anyone need an automatic or semi-automatic rifle for? Hunting? What are you hunting that requires that kind of firing?
Perhaps you just like guns? Why can't you just go to a range and keep it there?
Home defense? What kind of hellhole are you in that it requires that hardware?

People are dead. Mental illness, ease of access, blame game aside, people. are. dead. 17 people are just gone. Mental health checks are out the window, people are using loopholes to get firearms into the hands of those who don't respect life, and military style weapons are ending up on American streets (or should I say schools). People need to do their jobs and report this activity (as a citizen you have to protect your fellows), military style firearms need to stay out of civilian hands, gun kits need a blanket ban. I don't have kids, but someday I want to, but I don't want them to be afraid to go to school. Continuing as we are is putting people's lives at considerable risk. It doesn't matter who started it, it needs to all go away. If not, that could damn well be your kid as the shooter or one of the victims, and nobody wants that.

[JCAll]

Well they won't think that the moment TEACHERS get guns in class and the WRONG child gets blown away by a scared teacher.

If someone's mind isn't changed by now, I can't imagine that mattering.
Nobody cares when kids are blown away by cops or parents. Why should teachers be special.

[Malvolio]

The sad fact is that these tragedies are good for business. The anti-firearm uproar following each incident creates confiscation paranoia in the pro-firearm community which is then reinforced by the NRA creating a purchasing rush of ammo and weapons.
And we all know who bankrolls the NRA.

And this is why I said that the only way we will solve this is to make gun control more profitable than no gun control. Perhaps encourage gun shops to sell more guns that are used to shoot at targets, and have no lethal capacity.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

And this is why I said that the only way we will solve this is to make gun control more profitable than no gun control. Perhaps encourage gun shops to sell more guns that are used to shoot at targets, and have no lethal capacity.

People aren’t going to buy BB guns to replace real guns. This is what I mean when I say people are looking for too many compromise measures. None of this would solve the problem. Take out automatic weapons and assault rifles? Good you still have 85% of gun deaths to figure out.

You know what a gun nut is going to say? That idea won’t work and won’t solve anything. And they would be right.

Some of you just have to deal with the fact that the 2nd Amendment probably needs to be repealed or at the very least a massive and comprehensive gun reform that would risk being ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. You have to either ban guns or make it incredibly difficult and unappealing to own one. I’m talking massive fines and mandatory minimums.

[worstblogever]

The optics just got worse for the NRA.

Nikolas Cruz, before he got expelled from school, was on a rifle team that the NRA gave a grant to fund.

Their "responsible gun ownership" helped train and indoctrinate a mass murderer.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert, serving District 35 there. We noted in our profiles that while Rapert is a member of the Holy Ghost Ministry that does missionary work in Ghana and Uganda, the darker side of that group is that it has pushed for Uganda’s draconian laws to criminals homosexuality with a death sentence, and Rapert himself has praised Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for the attempt purge on Uganda’s LGBT citizens. However, that’s not his only theocratic action… Jason Rapert has also tried passing bans on same sex marriage in Arkansas, as well as tried to pass an unconstitutional ban on abortion as early as when a fetal heartbeat is detected, at 12 weeks, and uses the Book of John to justify dropping nuclear weapons on all of Iraq and Syria to rid us of the “barbarians” in the region, while lamenting that the United States can’t be more like Saudi Arabia and handle gays more harshly. Rapert has also outed himself as a Birther, complaining about “minorities running the country” and suggested that President Obama had committed treason by allowing Ebola victims to be treated inside the United States under quarantine. His legislative stances also include support for Voter ID, drug testing welfare recipients, and putting concealed firearms in both churches and on college campuses. Rapert also declared war on Wikipedia in the past few months, publicly declaring any and all negative stories in the media listed against him as “false and libelous”, and responded to a constituent meeting him in public and asking him by policy by refusing to answer to a “smartypants” like them and fleeing in his truck. Rapert then got on social media and posted a vague threat for no constituent to ever approach him again, threatening, “Not smart to come up and harass somebody in a parking lot who’s carrying a handgun. Better be glad you decided to walk away.”

Ah, good democracy, where our elected leaders answer to simple questions from the populace by threatening to put a bullet in them. Wonderful. That’s exactly the sort of lesson I’m sure Holy Ghost Ministries has taught him to express fine Christian values. Speaking of that, you really have to wonder considering after all Jesus spoke about being kind to refugees (and growing up as one, himself), how Jason Rapert could ignore that message and call for all Muslims from being banned entry into the United States in November 2015. He justified that reaction by falsely claiming Islam calls for the death of anyone who refuses to be converted to their religion. Oh, but Rapert also voted for Arkansas’ HB 1228, their own “religious freedom law” to allow for his fellow Christians to legally discriminate against LGBT citizens, and chalk it up to their faith telling them to be intolerant, and their deeply held beliefs supposedly cannot be violated.

And Rapert’s still an all-around bigot, as he proved when he called for the removal of a black Arkansas judge who disagreed with the judge working on the Tamir Rice case, who felt that charges were not necessary against the law enforcement that gunned him down in two seconds. Rapert insisted Judge Wendell Griffin was not just writing “racially motivated hatred and anti-law enforcement remarks”, but imagined somehow that his comments were also “inappropriate sexual references” that he imagined where in Griffin’s comments. Of course, Rapert’s grudge with Griffin goes back some time, asking the church to also strip the judge of his title as a minister, and when former Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel weighed in to defend Griffin, Jason Rapert made the level-headed decision to tell McDonald he is an “abortion pimp”. And since we last discussed Jason Rapert here at CSGOPOTD, he has not mellowed out much. Heck, we even missed the time he got on Facebook and advocated for using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State. Sure, there are only a few thousand of those Jihadists left, and it's not like millions wouldn't also die in the fallout if we just nuked them, right? Or that the multiple countries like Syria and Iraq that they're operating in, or their allies wouldn't be pissed at us for that?

Look, we've pretty well established that Jason Rapert is a fanatical ***hole in our previous posts about him. But just when you think you've seen the worst he has to offer, he proves you wrong. Rapert was at the 2016 RNC to support Donald Trump, because of course he was. And Jason Rapert was really mad at the "Never Trump" Republicans present, who were rallying behind Sen. Ted Cruz for refusing to endorse Trump. And so it was that Jason Rapert clashed with fellow CSGOPOTD Lori Saine, accusing her of not being a "good Christian" because she would not support Trump.

We repeat, he attacked her for not being a "good Christian" because she would not support a racist, sexist, thrice married billionaire willing to have affairs with porn stars, boasts about committing sexual assault, denies feeling the need to ask God for forgivenesss for anything, lies about his charitable giving, covets wealth above all else and has not just appeared on the cover of pornographic magazines, but in multiple pornographic films. But hey, Trump having an affair? No big deal. But Bill Clinton having an affair? That’s SERIOUS BUSINESS to Jason Rapert, who wasted the public’s time and money when filed legislation in Arkansas aimed at renaming the Little Rock airport after anything that isn’t the former president, and citing his affair as the reason why.

That isn’t even the craziest thing Jason Rapert did in the past year since we updated his profile. Over the summer of 2017, he got on the bandwagon started by notable pedophile Roy Moore, and had a monument of the Ten Commandments built in the state capitol. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to have it removed (which they will obviously win based on precedents set with Roy Moore), but it wasn’t even up for 24 hours when a man with a history of mental illness turned up to crash into it and destroy it anyway.

Arkansas’ District 35 might want to avoid re-electing Rapert when his second term in office is up here in 2018. Unless they like an insane hack who threatens them with violence and wastes their hard earned tax dollars on deranged, extremist bills that the courts can toss out like a NERF Football.

[PaulBullion]

Like in my edit, read page 17 of the Indictment. To be honest, considering how good a job the Russians did in getting Trump elected, if Bernie Sanders was also getting the same support, as the indictment mentions, he had to have been a really really poor candidate not to have benefited from it.

In both cases the Russians supported the more extreme, divisive to his party candidate. Their main aim was weakening the political institutions. The fact that Trump actually won is probably more than they had hoped for. It's breathtaking how, right after the election, they actually started manipulating pro-Trump and anti-Trump groups to go up against each other, whipping the country into more of a frenzy even.

[PaulBullion]

Or the DNC was better at rigging the election they were running than the Russians were. That's assuming the Russian efforts had a tangible effect at all.

1. Bernie had as much a shot against Hillary as Obama did. He lost by a landslide. He did not lose because of anything the DNC did, he would have lost anyway. You are still running with talking points spread by Kremlin sources.

2. The GOP actually SHOULD have rigged the primaries against Trump to save their party and prevent damage from happening to this country.

[PaulBullion]

Folks are quite happily ignoring that they said it did not.

They did not. They said it's not proven (at this point, I'll add) that they changed the outcome of the election.

[PaulBullion]

Whoaaaa whoa. Let's cool it a second. You're claiming that a Russian attempt at interference that was so ineffective that Trump barely won a national election and didn't even get the popular vote was strong enough that it's enough to indict Bernie Sanders as a candidate because he couldn't win an election that was clearly slanted by the people running it?

The logic there is poor I don't know where to start.

So just like Jones' win against the odds inn Alabama, Trump's win against an experience stateswoman in spite of his sex scandals, his corruption scandals, his charity fraud scandals, his poor showing at the debates, his elitism was really a loss because he did not win in a landslide?

I am really not quite sure what your point is.

It took a perfect storm to get him elected: Voter disfranchisement, Comey being quiet about the investigation against him while making the one against Hillary a big deal days before the election, Bernie's anti-Establishment, anti-Hillary campaign, Jill Stein, racist voters being a by activated he first openly racist candidate in decades, and yes: an unprecedented fake news, propaganda and social media manipulation campaign by the Kremlin. A campaign that, we now have in black on white, spared Sanders and Trump on purpose.

You take out any one of those factors and Trump would not have won. None of those factors was normal, none of them was without consequence.

[PaulBullion]

TRUMP’S FIRST YEAR AS PRESIDENT SAW ZERO STATES IMPROVE WELL-BEING FOR FIRST TIME ON RECORD

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-presid...ericans-805376

At least the people who voted for Trump because they just wanted to see the world burn got what they wanted.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

1. Bernie had as much as hot against Hillary as Obama did. He lost by a landslide. He did not lose because of anything the DNC did, he would have lost anyway. You are still running with talking points spread by Kremlin sources.

2. The GOP actually SHOULD have rigged the primaries against Trump to save their party and prevent damage from happening to this country.

1. Something you can’t quantify in any meaningful fashion.

2. So democracy doesn’t matter as long as you get the result you want. A have a list of a few dictatorships you can move to.

Ugh

[PaulBullion]

1. Something you can’t quantify in any meaningful fashion.

2. So democracy doesn’t matter as long as you get the result you want. A have a list of a few dictatorships you can move to.

Ugh

Putting a non-nazi sympathizer up as their candidate in the general election would not exactly have diminished democracy in my view. Their should be checks in place against the richest candidates and the ones with the most free media airtime because of their celebrity having such an unfair advantage as Trump did.