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

[InformationGeek]

And we had a news conference today with Theresa May and Donald Trump. Well...

Trump: "I don't take questions from CNN. Fake news. Let's go to John Roberts of Fox. A real network."

[Tami]

Canada Has Its Own Ways of Keeping Out Unwanted Immigrants

If you want to understand why Canada’s immigration system works, and why its immigration rate has generated so little political backlash despite being so much higher than America’s, take a look at the surprising nuances of Canada’s immigration policy. That policy may be softer-hearted than America’s, but it’s also harder-headed. Surrounding the Canadian welcome mat is a bed of nails.

[Mister Mets]

Looks like Crowley isn't trying to Sabotage Ocasio-Cortez after all.
https://amp.slate.com/news-and-polit...mpression=true

He is putting the Ocasio-Cortez in a weird situation.

The standard thing to do in this case is for the politician who lost the main primary but won on one of the minor lines to drop out by accepting the nomination for something else. It seems unlikely that a top House ranking Democrat who is chair of the Queens Democratic party is so beholden to the spirit of this particular rule as to be unwilling to compromise. But it does put the Ocasio-Cortez campaign in the weird spot of insisting that he play this particular game.

As opposed to your Party, who obviously don't care about such things, given the man who leads the GOP.

I didn't say Biden has no shot of winning the Democratic primary, just that there will be challenges he has currently been able to avoid as an elder statesman that would become issues if he runs for President as an alternative to all the other interested Democrats.

Trump did win the nomination without winning a majority of primary votes, so it does show one advantage of high name recognition in a crowded field. He may also have had good fortune in a strong lane (northeastern moderate) that was surprisingly empty (Petraeus would've also been a political outsider from New York but he had a sex scandal, Chris Christie had bridgegate, Scott Brown narrowly lost a Senate race in New Hampshire.)

[Coin Biter]

And we had a news conference today with Theresa May and Donald Trump. Well...

Trump's also just called his taped interview with the Sun newspaper, in which he denounced May's Brexit policy, as "fake news".

It's quite ironic for the Sun, not exactly traditionally a bastion of truthful reporting, to be criticised on an occasion where they didn't make things up.

But there'll be some other nonsense tomorrow which will distract us all from this.

[Jackmando7]

Tbf, I read HuffPost daily. It’s as partisan as Fox is. Always was, but their new editor made it worse. It’s not going to be received much more credibly than someone like me would take Hannity being quoted.

Wait, what? I don't know about all that, do you really think so?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump's also just called his taped interview with the Sun newspaper, in which he denounced May's Brexit policy, as "fake news".

It's quite ironic for the Sun, not exactly traditionally a bastion of truthful reporting, to be criticised on an occasion where they didn't make things up.

But there'll be some other nonsense tomorrow which will distract us all from this.

Stop me if I'm mistaken, but isn't the Sun owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox News (or as I like to call it, Faux News, a.k.a. The Trump Propaganda Network)?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

'Where are your manners?' British politicians outraged at Trump

"Where are your manners, Mr President?" tweeted universities minister Sam Gyimah.

"@realDonaldTrump determined to insult our PM," said Sarah Woollaston, a Conservative MP and chairwoman of parliament's health committee.

She attacked his "divisive, dog-whistle rhetoric" on migration, adding: "If signing up to the #Trump world view is the price of a deal, it's not worth paying."

While she noted May would probably keep silent, she said: "Many will be cheering if she tells @realDonaldTrump where he can stick his dog whistle".

Emily Thornberry, foreign affairs spokeswoman for the opposition Labour party who has herself called May's Brexit plan a "delusion", said Trump had been "extraordinarily rude".

"She is his host. What did his mother teach him? This is not the way you behave," she told ITV.

Oh, you silly British geese! Whatever gave you the idea that Trump HAD manners? Meanwhile, I'm of the opinion May would be making a YUGE mistake by getting into a pissing match with Trump since he has no problem hitting back at ANYONE who dares to argue with him. Hell, he'd insult the Pope if he said a contradictory word towards him, a head of state would be small potatoes.

[InformationGeek]

Yeeeeep.

[wano]

'Where are your manners?' British politicians outraged at Trump







Oh, you silly British geese! Whatever gave you the idea that Trump HAD manners? Meanwhile, I'm of the opinion May would be making a YUGE mistake by getting into a pissing match with Trump since he has no problem hitting back at ANYONE who dares to argue with him. Hell, he'd insult the Pope if he said a contradictory word towards him, a head of state would be small potatoes.

He already insulted the pope, and in the end the press department of Vatican sent an apology

ALso: Huge protests for trump visit

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile on Ron Paul, whose love for being the Libertarian wing of the GOP had him suggesting we defund almost every federal agency, cripple our economy by returning its standard to the Gold Standard, and who also ran a regular newsletter that had an odd frequency for printing unpleasant musings about Jews, gays, and African Americans, and would posit conspiracy theories about things like how the Israeli Mossad were really behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ron Paul also had an amazing tendency to speak ill of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., for whatever reason and was one of the last people to vote against a holiday to honor him. Among the elder Paul’s more inflammatory quotes included discussions of the L.A. Riots only ending because black people had to stop to go pick up their welfare checks, his belief in 9/11 Trutherism, how Social Security would one day be overturned because so was slavery, and that FEMA camps are being set up to lock away American citizens in concentration camps.

In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Steve Brunk, in spite of the fact that he also simultaneously worked for the conservative corporate interest group ALEC, who defended Gov. Sam Brownback's decision to write an executive order to allow businesses to fire LGBT employees based on their sexuality. During debate over an anti-abortion bill in 2010, and whether or not it would have exceptions for rape and incest, Brunk argued that a rape victim needing to show her police report that she reported her assault as a crime would be justified because, “You’d have to have a report that someone stole your car. This is kind of the same thing.” Then he was confused why women were upset that their bodies were being compared to automobiles, because of course he was. Brunk's anti-abortion extremism has led him to submit legislation to ban abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected (6 weeks), and to ban all D&E abortions (which was overturned by the courts). In 2013, Brunk started taking ideas from the John Birch Society's playbook, and falsely claimed that fluoridated water lowered the average IQ of children who drink it. He has submitted nullification legislation on more than one occasion, blocked the expansion of Medicaid in his state, and even tried passing a law to outlaw all strip joints in Kansas. In 2016, Brunk was forced to resign after he had the gall to actally join a lobbying firm, and then argue that it wasn’t a conflict of interest.



It was one year ago today that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled, Lori Saine, who has served as a member of the Colorado House of Representatives since first winning office in the 2012 elections. Now, the reason that we first became aware of Lori Saine, if you recall, was that her named popped up during our profile of Vicki Marble, one of her fellow members of the Colorado state legislature. Marble was the latest in a series of Republican legislators who read a parody web site, got outraged about an article on it (specifically a fake story about people on food stamps using their EBT cards at pot dispensaries), and then tried to legislate based off of their own hysteria. Now, as most were outraged over Marble blaming health problems African Americans face because of their genetics on her opinion that they “eat to much chicken” (which is super-racist), Lori Saine proved she isn’t worthy of the meaning of her surname, when she decided to give a show of solidarity to Marble by showing up at the next committee hearing with a box of Popeye’s chicken. She didn’t apologize, and claimed it was just a coincidence.0

Saine is against just about any kind of regulation you can think of, like after a methane explosion on a property that was once an oil and gas well was allowed to have a home built over it destroyed that house, and killed two people, there were calls to place some sort of regulation on the oil and gas industry to, y’know, keep the public informed where they might be leaving explosive oil and gas reserves behind. But again, Saine’s main interest is in allowing a big business lobby to operate unchecked, and shrug about it whenever bodies turn up as a result.

And those interests are downright fanatical at times, as you can see exhibited in this video, where in the middle of the legislature, Saine starts chanting “JESUS!” again and again after talking about a “spiritual battlefield” over her proposed abolition of abortion. If she really wanted to prevent abortions, you’d think she would have been all for supporting the rest of the Colorado legislature’s attempts to start a program to fund birth control or IUDs for those who can’t afford them… but no. She’s a fanatic. She actually argued against it by saying, “When subsidizing a commodity, you also reward the behavior surrounding the commodity. So in this scenario, the government is subsidizing sex.” And… that’s not how that works.

If you’re not getting the idea that she’s one of those die-hard Evangelical extremists just yet, we’ll point out that her record on LGBT rights including voting against a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy on minors, again, not just once, but twice. because she apparently feels Christians should be allowed to do whatever it takes to turn their kids straight.

Big surprise, she endorsed Ted Cruz for president. But you may have heard about the infighting at that convention between Cruz-aligned “Never Trumpers” and those who sold out their principles to Trump… well Lori Saine was in the middle of that, being caught on video feuding with fellow CSGOPOTD Jason Rapert of Arkansas. We don’t think that’s the worst crazy thing, we’re just entertained whenever two nutballs we’ve profiled go after each other, kind of like Ken Wantanabe advised in that last Godzilla flick.

We’ll also note that gun control is a hot button issue in Colorado over the past few years, who in the wake of the mass shooting in Aurora at a movie theatre showing The Dark Knight Rises, passed a ban on large-canister magazines like the ones James Holmes used to try to rack up a huge body count. Well, not once, but twice, Lori Saine has sponsored an attempt to repeal that ban, because she’ a 2nd Amendment fanatic and would rather help the gun lobby get rich rather than try to prevent whatever psychopath goes on a rampage from racking up more kills. Maybe that’s part of the reason that in December of 2017, Lori Saine managed to exercise her 2nd Amendment rights to the fullest she thinks they should apply, and got herself arrested for trying to carry a semi-automatic pistol on her person through TSA checkpoints at the Denver International Airport. Charges weren’t filed in the incident, and Saine insisted she wasn’t trying to “test” security. Which means she either forgot she was packing heat, or she knew and wanted to sneak it through for some other purpose. Where was she headed, though? To an annual conference by the conservative group ALEC, who was so put off by her arrest for violating a completely reasonable firearms law that they chose to give her an award for being a hyperpartisan twit.

Again, we’re not sure how long Lori Saine’s career will last, as she represents Weld, Colorado, one of the more conservative parts of the state. In November, she’s up for re-election against Brian Bobian, a father of two who is campaigning alongside several Colorado Democrats up and down the ballot, and who seems like a loyal friend to everyone across Team Blue. The American public are supposedly wanting to return to normal, sane politics after seeing how far they have devolved on the GOP side the past few years… hopefully, Colorado’s District 63 does their part to prove that true.

[Tami]

'Where are your manners?' British politicians outraged at Trump







Oh, you silly British geese! Whatever gave you the idea that Trump HAD manners? Meanwhile, I'm of the opinion May would be making a YUGE mistake by getting into a pissing match with Trump since he has no problem hitting back at ANYONE who dares to argue with him. Hell, he'd insult the Pope if he said a contradictory word towards him, a head of state would be small potatoes.

Trump has been 'campaigning' against Teresa May and in favor of Boris Johnson:

Trump hails Boris Johnson as future PM and attacks Sadiq Khan

Teresa May is going to have a long Political career since praise from Trump is a Political Kiss of Death.

Donald Trump cannot stop endorsing losers

[Tami]

If you ar etird of watching Trump make a fool of himself in England:



Watch Live: Deputy AG Rosenstein makes law enforcement announcement

A lot of speculation, but no one knows for sure what he si going to talk about. It would be cool if it involved the Muller investigation and Trump.

Follow up:

Mueller probe indicts 12 Russians for hacking Democrats in 2016

A dozen Russian intelligence officers have been charged with conspiring to hack Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a new indictment in the probe led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The 12 were members of Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, and are accused of engaging in a sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein detailed the new charges at a mid-day press conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, did not attend the announcement. Court records show a grand jury Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.

Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine if any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. His work had already led to charges against 20 people on crimes ranging from money laundering to lying to the FBI. Fourteen of those charged earlier are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.

[Darkspellmaster]

Where is the list of legitimate "Left" candidates that prove this?

While I don't entirely disagree, it's not like we have a set of Southern Ocasio-Cortez equivalents whose losses point to this actually being the case. I'd say the reality is probably more "It's just not a option folks have been given."

Watch any documentary about the deep South, even those that are considered dems or far left have deep ties to religion. I know a young woman from southern Georgia, nicest person, left thinking progressive type, pro choice, thinks certain drugs should be legal, high on various social views, etc. Did not vote, and wasn't going to vote for Bernie, why? Because he wasn't religious enough. He didn't talk about the role religion should play in the American spiritual experience, didn't vote Hilary because of the same reason.

This is what I'm talking about.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump has been 'campaigning' against Teresa May and in favor of Boris Johnson:

Trump hails Boris Johnson as future PM and attacks Sadiq Khan

No surprise on either score. Johnson is said to be every bit as much a boorish, lowbrow buffoon as Trump is. As for Khan, well, he's Muslim, no other reason needed for the Burnt Sienna Bigot to dump on him.

[Malvolio]

Yes. Bernie would not win in the South. That doesn't mean that we should never run progressive liberal candidates in the South. It just means we should accept the fact that we'll probably lose a few times with those candidates before any of them win.