All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Tami]

Trump stuck El Paso with a $470,000 bill. Local lawmakers don’t want him coming back.

The last time President Donald Trump went to El Paso, Texas, he left the city with an unpaid, $470,000 bill. And some local officials aren’t happy about the prospect of another visit in the wake of Saturday’s mass shooting.

“I call our governor, I call on our senators to send a message to our president and ask him not to set foot in El Paso,” David Stout, a Democratic commissioner in the border city, told VICE News. “It would just put salt on this wound.” He represents Precinct 2, where Trump spoke in February — and where the massacre took place.

[shooshoomanjoe]

It’s funny (in a sad way) that we see all those right wing lunatics raging about “The Deep State”, a secret liberal cabal trying to undermine democracy. When in fact it’s republicans who have the powerful secretive organization dedicated to undermining democracy and leading the country to ruin.

The GOP know that using fear mongering as a weapon is a good way to control their constituents.

[Tendrin]

UBBOCK, TX — A Texas grandmother helped thwart a mass shooting when she learned her grandson bought an AK-47 rifle and was plotting to “shoot up” a local hotel and then commit suicide by police, officials said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/gr...cid=spartanntp

Sensing 19-year-old William Patrick Williams, of Lubbock, was both homicidal and suicidal, the unidentified grandmother convinced him to allow her to take him to a hospital, Erin Nealy Cox, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a news release.

“This was a tragedy averted,” Nealy Cox said in a news release. “I want to praise the defendant’s grandmother, who saved lives by interrupting this plot, as well as the Lubbock police officers and federal agents who investigated his unlawful acquisition of a deadly weapon.”

But I thought gun laws couldn't stop a mass shooting.

[JCAll]

(I dunno why vBulletin won't let us normally post GIFs)

So you're saying black people should separate from each other... but what, pray tell, defines whom should be separated from the masses? The ignorant luddites who vote Democratic who supposedly bang rocks all day due to them being rendered ignorant as a result of their Democratic overlords keeping them stupid, or the superior conservative blacks whose value isn't appreciated enough that we need to be reminded every single day? And where, oh, where, would they move? Alaska? Rural Wyoming?

Here's a scary fact for you; Chicago's a big city. Criminals don't give a **** what skin color they're going after. The more you talk, the less you sound like a man trying to sound witty and urbane and more like a bozo who bought a "Word of the Day" calendar and is trying to use the word he got as many times as possible that day, and the word just happened to be "anaerobe" or something.

I like seeing rants like this, for the same reason I read Ben Garrison cartoons every week. It reminds me that's I'm sane. Some days I feel like I'm going crazy, but seeing this it reminds me that it's not me, the world really has gone mad.

[Gray Lensman]

I can't link it from my phone, but I just read that MoscowMitch, Dr. Don't Know, and some Gingrich fellow are all using private email servers physically located in......I'm sure you already know the answer to this one.





It's just to the east of Europe.

[aja_christopher]

"Utah State Student Killed Herself After Eight Months of Racist Attacks"

"I'm going to leave my lab because I can’t take it anymore,” Sanjeevi told a friend, according to the lawsuit. “She knew that I’ve been struggling with the fear of getting deported since the election. She knew that I have no power here as a foreign student. And she did this to me on top of all of that. I don’t understand how a person can be so cruel.”

In an essay assignment, Sanjeevi wrote that “[e]ncountering racism even in graduate school in psychology reinforced a powerful lesson that I learned my entire life: that I can put a nice suit on, but I can never take my skin off.”

By December, Sanjeevi had a meeting with the head of the department to report that she felt bullied and was “afraid” of at least one member of her cohort. But the department head labeled the issue as “a conflict between students” and declined to investigate the multiple reports of bullying and racism by specific students, even after Sanjeevi’s death, according to the lawsuit.

Eventually, other students began describing Sanjeevi as “despondent,” “withdrawn,” and “defeated and tired,” the complaint states.

Over those eight months, Sanjeevi reported the alleged bullying to at least five faculty members, in addition to a member of the school’s counseling center, a representative of the student conduct office, and another individual at the affirmative action department, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

Just days before she killed herself, Sanjeevi told a friend that she was overwhelmed by the department’s apparent apathy, the complaint states.

“I just don’t understand why I matter so little to them,” she said. “I haven’t been feeling like living and this just confirms that I don’t want this life anymore.”

On April 22, 2017, she died of acute carbon monoxide poisoning. Her body was found two days later.

“When something like this happens, people ask why,” Sanjeevi wrote in a note before her death. “So I’m about to tell you why, and spare you the wondering.”

“I have lived with depression for over half my life, and somehow survived each episode. But each wave of sadness grew darker and longer,” she wrote. “I looked and looked for a lifeline. Until I realized that I didn’t deserve one. Because [the Department] succeeded at teaching me what poverty, violence, rape, and hunger somehow never did… When you dismissed the bullying report, you provided a final confirmation that I did, in fact, not matter.”

“The innocence of blonde hair and blue eyes could deny, with toxic ease, the ‘crazy’ ramblings of this dirty brown skin,” Sanjeevi continued. “Watching the department not only choose to not enact consequences, but to give an award to the sick person who bullied me, was the last nail in my coffin. My heart was broken.”

https://news.yahoo.com/utah-state-st...172438374.html

[worstblogever]

I can't link it from my phone, but I just read that MoscowMitch, Dr. Don't Know, and some Gingrich fellow are all using private email servers physically located in......I'm sure you already know the answer to this one.

It's just to the east of Europe.

Please, please link to that when you can.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

What is the most evil fictional secret organization you can think of?

SPECTRE (James Bond)
Hydra (Marvel Comics)
Kobra (DC Comics)

I can't link it from my phone, but I just read that MoscowMitch, Dr. Don't Know, and some Gingrich fellow are all using private email servers physically located in......I'm sure you already know the answer to this one.





It's just to the east of Europe.

Hmmm! Could it be that place where vodka comes from?

[Gray Lensman]

Please, please link to that when you can.

Politics tab on Fark.com has the link. I'm at work for 5.more hours

[worstblogever]

What is the most evil fictional secret organization you can think of?

The organization WCKD from the Maze Runner novels and movies. They lock up children and torment them in medical experiments in the hopes of finding a cure to a disease they created and that they released at an attempt at population control that got out of control. At the least, they're trying to agitate the kids enough to make them produce hormones to make a vaccine. I mean, if that level of evil towards the globe, and then exploiting children after that... they made the acronym of their name "wicked".

[worstblogever]

Politics tab on Fark.com has the link. I'm at work for 5.more hours

https://twitter.com/VickerySec/statu...55886509035520

Waiting for some followup, but this guy has folks retweeting the FBI, the press, and anyone else. He points out that Ted Cruz and Ben Carson are clients of the company offering this "service", which is advertised as "subpoena-proof e-mail".

[InformationGeek]

The only time I can say a Democrat whiffed worse than Trump was Joe Biden mistakenly saying the shootings occurred in Houston and Michigan, but then again, I'll take Biden's senile ass over Trump's corrupt ass any day of the week.

And even then, Biden later apologized for the mess. Has Trump done so? Of course not. He refuses to do so.

[Tami]

When Hate Came to El Paso

EL PASO, Tex. — The older man next to me on the metal bench, dressed so dignified in his peach dress shirt, dark pants and dress shoes, touches me gently on the elbow.

It is Saturday late afternoon, and we are both in front of MacArthur Middle School, where the flags already droop in the desert heat, approaching 100 degrees, at half-mast. Police officers, Red Cross workers and firefighters of all kinds come and go. This little school is where the living come to look for the missing and the dead after a white male from the Dallas suburbs named Patrick Crusius, 21, allegedly came to my hometown to commit the largest massacre of Hispanics in American history. The handwritten sign over the schoolhouse door says it all: “Looking for Family and Friends.”

Behind his glasses, tears welled up in the eyes of my bench mate, Charles Almanzan, 70. Wordlessly, he shows me his phone: There is a picture of two small children, a girl of 2 and a boy of 5. The little boy is in the hospital. The little girl is still missing, the subject of a frantic search by Mr. Almanzan’s brother-in-law. Their mother, Jordan Kay Jamrowski Anchondo, at just 25, is dead, killed by Mr. Crusius, along with at least 19 others, at a Walmart not far from downtown El Paso.

[Mister Mets]

It's not paranoia if it's real and verified by every single American intelligence agency, including the recent Mueller investigation.

Mets, you really should just stop: all you do is damage your credibility, and the credibility of every other Republican, every time you make these kinds of posts.

------
"Along with a team of experienced prosecutors and attorneys, the former FBI director has indicted, convicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies, including top advisers to President Trump, Russian spies and hackers with ties to the Kremlin. The charges, which Mueller referenced during his opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee on July 24, range from interfering with the 2016 election and hacking emails to lying to investigators and tampering with witnesses."

https://time.com/5556331/mueller-inv...-guilty-pleas/

You seem to be arguing with a point I haven't made. It is simultaneously possible for Russia and Putin to have engaged in wrongdoing in the 2016 election and for various individuals to have an exaggerated sense of their impact, which plays into Putin's hands since it results in a more divided United States, and creates the sense that the country with either the 11th or 12th highest GDP (the IMF says it's #11; the UN and World Bank think it's in 12th place behind South Korea) is the mastermind of all these global events.

Keep in mind I was responding to someone who suggested Russians may have a long-term plan of causing unrest in the United States by backing politicians who want lax gun laws in the lead-up to a race war.

[obatalla]

Please, please link to that when you can.

https://twitter.com/VickerySec/statu...55886509035520