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

[worstblogever]

Hey.

Hey WBE.

Guess what?

LePage is thinking about running for the Senate against ANgus King.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...for-the-Senate

He says while impeachment charges are being investigated...

[WestPhillyPunisher]

If I've got the cliches right the NRA will say something like, "If only Alison was allowed to carry a semi-automatic on the job, this tragedy would have been avoided!" Dude was too educated to be a "thug", so depending on the commentator FOX News will either paint him as radical extremist...or if they focus on the mental state, they'll claim that his insanity was fault of liberal policies run rampant.

Doesn't matter. Flanagan could be a Rhodes Scholar and a Nobel Prize winner and he'll STILL be labeled a thug in certain circles, a.k.a. Faux News. Terms like "radical extremist" are saved for white shooters.

I think one poster on another thread nailed it . The guy (Flanagan) constantly in his mind , everyone was against him. No idea what mental illness that is and all. But it could play a part in his decision making process. Because he had been at stations in Florida (he filed a complaint against them) and in Roanoke. Now in San Diego. It shows that he obviously had issues and not everyone was gonna be racist and homophobic to him at each place.

Clearly, in his twisted mind, whitey had it in for him everywhere he went. To paraphrase that old saying, you're not paranoid if they're really are out to get you. Predictably, that bastard took the coward's way out after killing two innocent people and destroying the lives of the survivors. May he roast in hell.

[worstblogever]

The National Journal takes a look at the GOP's impending doom in national elections... the shrinking white electorate, and how Donald Trump has dragged all of the major contenders for the nomination into calling for the repeal of the 14th Amendment. They were at a similar crossroads 20 years ago, and Sen. Bob Dole, running for president in 1996, was smart enough to realize what alienating minority immigrants would mean for his party, and stood firm:

Exactly 19 years ago this week Bob Dole, as the recently chosen 1996 Republican presidential nominee, faced the same question that Donald Trump has presented his rivals today: whether to support ending the Constitution's guarantee of automatic citizenship for all children born in the U.S.



At the national convention that nominated Dole and Jack Kemp that summer, the party's platform called for revoking the provision in the 14th Amendment that ensured citizenship for all U.S.-born children, regardless of their parents' immigration status. Dole had remained vague on that plank during the convention, but in an appearance with Kemp before the National Association of Black Journalists on Aug. 23, 1996, the new nominee briskly rejected the idea.

''For generations, white children of white immigrants, regardless of their status, enjoyed citizenship,'' one reporter said to him, according to The New York Times. ''Now that the new immigrants are black and brown, would you support a constitutional amendment denying them citizenship?'' Dole's reply was unequivocal: "No."

For Dole, the choice of defending the 14th Amendment's promise of birthright citizenship "was a no-brainer," recalled Scott Reed, his campaign manager. "There were a handful of issues Dole just didn't agree with [in the platform] and he wasn't going to roll along without saying something."

Trump is proposing more sweeping change than the 1996 platform Dole repudiated.

The businessman argues that the 14th Amendment does not, in fact, guarantee citizenship to the estimated 4.5 million U.S. children born of undocumented immigrants; if the courts agreed, that presumably would make those children subject to the deportation he pledges to pursue against all those here illegally.

But in responding to Trump, the 2016 Republicans have wavered far more than Dole did. About half of the GOP field (including Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson) has also endorsed ending birthright citizenship, at least prospectively. Scott Walker quickly embraced the idea before backpedaling to reject it. Even the two candidates who most forthrightly rejected Trump's call could not completely escape his gravitational pull.



Marco Rubio said he would not seek to change the Constitution, but would take unspecified steps to combat those "taking advantage of the 14th Amendment." Jeb Bush, while also rejecting constitutional change and praising America's "diversity," courted Trump's constituency by adopting his incendiary "anchor babies" language.

This rightward lurch—behind an almost certainly hopeless cause of constitutional change—captures the core GOP dilemma now unfolding in the party's nomination contest.

The Republican electoral coalition now relies on preponderant majorities from the groups most unsettled by demographic and cultural change: older, noncollege, and rural whites. There are no longer enough of those voters to guarantee Republicans a national majority; that's why Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Yet, as Trump's rise shows, many of those voters militantly oppose the policies (like immigration reform) that might help the party expand its coalition.

By demonstrating that dynamic so viscerally, Trump's ascent has further weakened the Republicans who contend the party must bend to, rather than resist, demographic change.

After Mitt Romney lost decisively in 2012 despite winning a greater share of white voters than Ronald Reagan did in 1980, the Republican National Committee's official postelection review concluded that the party "will lose future elections" without attracting a larger share of the growing minority vote. That impulse peaked in June 2013, when 14 Senate Republicans (led by Rubio and 2008 nominee John McCain) helped pass sweeping immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

But with conservatives in revolt, the GOP current has since reversed. The House refused to consider the Senate bill, and instead repeatedly passed legislation to block President Obama's executive orders providing legal status for some of the undocumented. Most Republican-led states sued to stop Obama's executive action as well. Rubio repudiated his own bill. Now the 2016 Republican contenders are collectively offering an even harsher approach on immigration than Romney did when he embraced the "self-deportation" policy that discredited him with many Latinos and Asian Americans.

In summer 2013, conservative electoral analyst Sean Trende provided the rickety political theory that underpinned this reversal when he wrote that Romney lost not because he ran poorly with people of color but because he failed to motivate enough right-leaning whites to vote. Though Trende didn't endorse a specific policy agenda, conservatives embraced his theory as the justification for reviving a hard-line immigration approach meant to excite the GOP's nearly all-white base. Trump himself recently declared that Romney lost because "he didn't do well with the Republicans—they didn't go out and vote."

Trump's rise behind his belligerent immigration agenda has horrified many conservative thinkers. Perceptive conservative essayist Ben Domenech recently warned that Trump is leading the GOP "toward a coalition that is reduced to the narrow interests of identity politics for white people."

[worstblogever]

A year ago on this date, we had our original profile on the U.S. Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, a career military reservist and lawyer who is always spoiling for a war that he never seems to give much thought as to the why or how it will be fought, just that we should ABSOLUTELY fight it. Sen. Graham also is prolifically paranoid, worrying about terror threats both foreign and domestic, from roaming gangs after a hurricane that would require the citizenry to be armed with automatic weapons, or that every nation in the Middle East from Iran, to Iraq, to Syria has developed a nuclear weapon. He also justifies the permanent detainment of people at Guantanamo Bay based off the precedent set by internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, which is a pretty dark chapter of American history to use as a guideline, while claiming that Hilary Clinton “got away with murder” during the Benghazi attacks, acting like she was in on the attack on her own friend, Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Now, since we last left Sen. Graham, he managed to win re-election in the 2014 elections, in spite of having one of the lowest approval ratings of any senator in the country, and for whatever reason, then also decided to throw his hat into the already cluttered field of candidates in the 2016 primary battling it out for the GOP Presidential nomination. Graham's year has been filled with the usual theatrics, interspersed with some terrible campaigning:

• On January 7th, 2015, Graham seeks to politicize the shootings in Paris at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, and looked at things in the most stark and reactionary way:
  

  "Our way of life doesn’t fit into their scheme of how the world should be. If you stopped talking about radical Islam, if you never did a cartoon again, that’s not enough. What people need to get is they can’t be accommodated. They can’t be negotiated with. They have to be eventually destroyed. We’re in a religious war. These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted."

• On January 28th, 2015, Graham turned some heads during the confirmation hearings for new Attorney General Loretta Lynch, when he asked, "Why is gay marriage OK, but polygamy isn't?"
• On March 8th, 2015, Sen. Graham boasts that he has never sent an e-mail while discussing Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server. In the digital age, that's a pretty staggering claim.
• The next day on March 9th, 2015, Graham joins 46 other Republican senators who sign a letter sent to the leaders or Iran, trying to undermine foreign policy during nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, and earning them the sobriquet of "47 traitors", as the move may have been a violation of the Logan Act.
• On June 1st, 2015, Lindsey Graham announces he is running for president.
• On June 9th, 2015, talk of a potential President Graham gets awkward when folks note it could be the first time we have a bachelor as president since James Buchanan. Graham jokes that he'll have "rotating first ladies", which might not have been so weird, if he hadn't named his sister as one of the potential ladies in rotation.
• On June 11th, 2015, in a move almost certainly made to improve his standing in the GOP Primary with Evangelicals, Sen. Graham tries to re-introduce a bill for a 20-week abortion ban in the Senate. It doesn't even get a vote.
• On July 1st, 2015, Lindsey Graham made his first criticisms against fellow candidate Donald Trump. He should not have engaged the troll. Perhaps he should have remembered that he gave his personal cell phone number to Trump a few years ago, as Trump, at a press conference, scored points with a crowd loaded with anti-government sentiment by giving out Graham's phone number. Graham's attempt at saving face on July 22nd, where he made a video of himself destroying his cell phone did not go as viral as he'd hoped to get him the momentum he needed.
• On July 12th, 2015, Graham tries to invoke the memory of 9/11 to argue about immigration policy, saying that "all of the hijackers who attacked us on 9/11 were visa overstays." That's actually a lie, as only 2 of the 19 hijackers had overstayed visas. It is not the first time Graham was caught lying about this, either, as he was back in 2013.
• On July 21st, 2015, Sen. Graham comments on the Iran nuclear deal, and goes "Godwin's Law", saying that President Obama is the "Neville Chamberlain of our time".
• On August 3rd, 2015, Graham decides that maybe he should provide a healthy criticism on the policies and record of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton... NAH, I'm just kidding. Graham actually took a potshot by comparing the mock "scandal" about her private e-mail account to Bill Clinton having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Classy, Senator.
• Lindsay Graham was doing poorly enough in polls going into the first GOP Primary debate on August 6th, 2015, that he ended up in the "kids table" debate of candidates outside the top ten in polling. As someone as raving and paranoid about terror threats as Graham is, he took this affectation to unprecedented levels, segueing each question about domestic or foreign policy into a mention about the terror group ISIS.
• On August 23rd, 2015, Sen. Graham gives the not-at-all-alarming assessment in the War on Terror that, "The world is a battlefield and radical Islam is everywhere." Good luck sleeping at night now, fellow Americans.

Let’s just say with how the past year has gone for Senator Graham, that we shouldn’t be too worried about him sizing the floor plan in the Oval Office to see if he can fit his fainting couch in there. He consistently has been polling 1% or less in all GOP Presidential Primary polls, and even in his home state of South Carolina, he can’t do better than 4%, much to the delight of Donald Trump, who’s thrown the number in his face. At this point, Graham should just let “the vapors” have him faint his way gracefully out of the race for the presidency.

[PretenderNX01]

Well, today I'm driving from the Lake Michigan side to a suburb outside Detroit. Here's hoping I don't get shot along the way.

The Calhoun County Major Crimes Task Force is investigating a series of incidents in which vehicles on I-94 and I-69 appear to have been hit by gunfire.

The incidents happened on I-94 between 11 Mile Road and I-69 between Battle Creek and Marshall, and also on I-69 between M-60 and Jonesville Road, south of Tekonsha and in Branch County. No injuries have been reported.

Saxton said that damage to the cars does not make it clear whether the shooter or shooters were in a vehicle or on the side of the road.

“Some are from the side, some are from the front end, so it’s different angles. Some of them had vehicles by them, some of them there was no vehicles in front of them or behind them or on the other side of the highway,” Saxton said.

[Tendrin]

Fox News stays classy!

Fox's Jesse Watters joined "The Five" on Wednesday, where he compared Univision host to an "illegal alien" after the journalist was temporarily kicked out of a Donald Trump press conference in Iowa.

"I think Ramos acted like an illegal alien and got treated like one," Watters said. "He cut the line, was disruptive, and then was deported and then Trump let him back in. Isn’t that his policy?"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...-illegal-alien

[7thangel]

Fox News stays classy!



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...-illegal-alien

Media Attacks Jorge Ramos For Asking Trump Real Questions About Immigration

i didn't see the WHPC denounce it. maybe to busy cupping trump's ball sack as they fluff, fluff away

[7thangel]

on another note, this father is willing to be the target, like many of the survivors and the families of mass shooting victims

Father Of Murdered Journalist Blasts NRA, Promises Tireless Fight For Gun Control

The father of slain journalist Alison Parker, who was killed in a tragic shooting on live television Wednesday, is calling on politicians to stop being “cowards in the pockets of the NRA” and pass meaningful gun violence legislation.

Speaking Thursday morning on CNN, Parker reiterated a message he voiced last night on Fox news, when he said the murder of his daughter and cameraman Adam Ward should inspire action on gun control. But in addition to declaring plans to be a “crusader” against gun violence, he also blasted the influence of the National Rifle Association.
“Look, I’m for the Second Amendment,” he said. “But there has to be a way to force politicians, who are cowards in the pockets of the NRA, to come to grips and have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns. It can’t be that hard. And yet politicians from the local level, to the state level, to the national level — they sidestep the issue, they kick the can down the road. This can’t happen anymore.”

[...]

[Mister Mets]

Media Attacks Jorge Ramos For Asking Trump Real Questions About Immigration

i didn't see the WHPC denounce it. maybe to busy cupping trump's ball sack as they fluff, fluff away

Ramos was out of line. The issue isn't the questions he asked, but how he asked it/ yelled it.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

on another note, this father is willing to be the target, like many of the survivors and the families of mass shooting victims

Father Of Murdered Journalist Blasts NRA, Promises Tireless Fight For Gun Control

God bless Mr. Parker for wanting to fight the monster that's the NRA on behalf of his murdered daughter, but he's started a monumental battle that'll make the twelve labors of Hercules look like an afternoon spent cleaning out the garage. It's going to be an uphill fight for him against the NRA, it's legions of lobbyists, the scores of politicians in their back pockets and it's media publicity arm, a.k.a. Faux News. What can one man do against all that? Hell, if Sandy Hook or Aurora couldn't move the needle on enacting meaningful gun control legislation, how can the deaths of two adults change things, even if it had happened on live television? I hope Mr. Parker can pull off the miracle, but I'm doubtful.

[TheInvisibleMan]

Ramos was out of line. The issue isn't the questions he asked, but how he asked it/ yelled it.

out of line yes, but Trump didn't need to have him thrown out

if you're going to toss a reporter, make it some no name from the local fishwrapper

not a guy who was won awards in both English and Spanish journalism

[JCAll]

God bless Mr. Parker for wanting to fight the monster that's the NRA on behalf of his murdered daughter, but he's started a monumental battle that'll make the twelve labors of Hercules look like an afternoon spent cleaning out the garage. It's going to be an uphill fight for him against the NRA, it's legions of lobbyists, the scores of politicians in their back pockets and it's media publicity arm, a.k.a. Faux News. What can one man do against all that? Hell, if Sandy Hook or Aurora couldn't move the needle on enacting meaningful gun control legislation, how can the deaths of two adults change things, even if it had happened on live television? I hope Mr. Parker can pull off the miracle, but I'm doubtful.

At the rate it's growing, how long until we all know someone killed by gun violence?

[Shawn Hopkins]

Media Attacks Jorge Ramos For Asking Trump Real Questions About Immigration

i didn't see the WHPC denounce it. maybe to busy cupping trump's ball sack as they fluff, fluff away

The rest of those reporters should have walked out in protest and solidarity when Ramos was kicked out. Cowards all.

[Shawn Hopkins]

Ramos was out of line. The issue isn't the questions he asked, but how he asked it/ yelled it.

Speaking as a former ink-stained wretch, reporters should be out of line. They should ask the uncomfortable questions. They shouldn't always wait quietly to be called on, especially when it's likely that call will never come, and they should never take whatever is given without thought. Otherwise they're nothing more than stenographers for those in power. Unfortunately Fox News and CNN have conditioned us to see this kind of toadying as normal.

[JCAll]

Speaking as a former ink-stained wretch, reporters should be out of line. They should ask the uncomfortable questions. They shouldn't always wait quietly to be called on, especially when it's likely that call will never come, and they should never take whatever is given without thought. Otherwise they're nothing more than stenographers for those in power. Unfortunately Fox News and CNN have conditioned us to see this kind of toadying as normal.

I got the impression of a teacher telling a student to sit down and raise their hand and ask permission if they want to go to the bathroom, and then not calling on them just to punish them for disrupting the lesson. Then forcing them to sit in the hall when the get up anyway.