[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

What are the odds the police start treating these militias like crazy people with guns rather than bffs?

2% chance of that or lower?

Stealthpizza wrote:

What are the odds the police start treating these militias like crazy people with guns rather than bffs?

2% chance of that or lower?

#notallcops ??

Stealthpizza wrote:

What are the odds the police start treating these militias like crazy people with guns rather than bffs?

2% chance of that or lower?

Why would they treat their fellow officers like crazy people?

Stealthpizza wrote:

What are the odds the police start treating these militias like crazy people with guns rather than bffs?

2% chance of that or lower?

About 1:15 into the video a Michigan sheriff who shared a stage with some of the domestic terrorists back in May calmly explains that these guys have only been charged with kidnapping and the dirty media shouldn't try to convict them in the court of opinion. And it's not even clear that they were going to kidnap the governor because they talked about arresting her and citizen arrests are totes a thing especially if they involve a non-specified "felony." Besides, the terrorists were always nice and respectful to him, a crazy idiot with a badge.

I'm sure that sheriff would be fine with me arresting him because I'm fairly certain he's committed a crime or two.

HELL yes.

[Arizona Daily] Star Opinion: Prop. 207 would change Arizona forever. Vote 'yes'
It is time to legalize marijuana in Arizona

Cities and other small localities have occasionally decriminalized small amounts or enacted policies of benign neglect toward marijuana users. But nationally, federal prohibition has reigned supreme for decades.

The results have been disastrous, especially for people of color and poor communities. Here in Arizona, a Black person is three times as likely as a white person to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to the ACLU. [...]

According to a fiscal analysis by the Arizona Legislature, the tax, along with licensing and fees, is expected to raise $166 million once the program is fully established in the next few years. [...]

Most importantly, the proposition opens a potential pathway to hope for those charged in the past for certain marijuana-related offenses by allowing a petition of expungement of their criminal records.[...]

DO IT!!

Then you can start retroactively rescinding all convictions on felons who got three strikes for having a small amount of marijuana in their pocket.

Arizona's three strikes law excludes drug offenses.

Wait, what? Arizona has a sane three strikes policy? Inconceivable!

BadKen wrote:

Arizona's three strikes law excludes drug offenses.

Wait, what? Arizona has a sane three strikes policy? Inconceivable!

The new avatar is good!!

Hah! It's funny how just yesterday I read a local news article that we need to be on the watch for roaming black (particularly male) bears, and if we see any, just let them alone as they are likely just passing through the area i search of a mate before hibernation season begins.

OB-viously their noble experiment was thrown off-kilter by ursine cronyism.

Supreme Court nominees refusing to express an opinion about Roe v Wade during hearings is such an absurd bit of theater. You want to sit on the highest court and you don't have an opinion on the best-known court ruling of the last half century? Really?

I can understand not having an opinion on other issues and feeling that they need to be properly argued before you could opine on them, but that one? Nah. Get the f*ck outta here if you can't answer that question.

She knows she doesn't have to answer any questions. Republicans will confirm her anyway. She could spend the whole time ignoring questions and reading a magazine and they'd still confirm her.

I still can't believe this is really happening, after Garland.

Sigh.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

She knows she doesn't have to answer any questions. Republicans will confirm her anyway. She could spend the whole time ignoring questions and reading a magazine and they'd still confirm her.

It's not just Coney Barrett. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch did the same thing. It's absurd.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

She knows she doesn't have to answer any questions. Republicans will confirm her anyway. She could spend the whole time ignoring questions and reading a magazine and they'd still confirm her.

It's not just Coney Barrett. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch did the same thing. It's absurd.

The best people.

BadKen wrote:

I still can't believe this is really happening, after Garland.

Sigh.

I hate having my cynicism proven right, but frankly this is absolutely what I expected after Garland.

You guys are upset now? Just wait until we have to watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell refuse to confirm a single judge during the entire Biden administration.

gewy wrote:

You guys are upset now? Just wait until we have to watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell refuse to confirm a single judge during the entire Biden administration.

Democrats now have about an 85% chance of winning control of the Senate. McConnell just might have to spend his days watching DC and PR become states and have all his hard work jamming through unqualified judges be undone by an expanded SCOTUS (or one could hope).

OG_slinger wrote:
gewy wrote:

You guys are upset now? Just wait until we have to watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell refuse to confirm a single judge during the entire Biden administration.

Democrats now have about an 85% chance of winning control of the Senate. McConnell just might have to spend his days watching DC and PR become states and have all his hard work jamming through unqualified judges be undone by an expanded SCOTUS (or one could hope).

Is there any empirical evidence that Biden admin and Dem-controlled Senate/Congress would be some kind of revolutionary turning point?
Im kind of failing to see that.
At best, next four years will be Dems trying to undo third of Trumps mess while apologizing profusely to Republican minority every step of the way.
Just my 2 outsider cents.

It depends a lot on the makeup of Congress. The president by himself can't do much. Even with big wins in Congress, though, the courts are stacked against change. Undoing Trump's mess will be an uphill battle all the way.

And we have to get through the pandemic as well...

fangblackbone wrote:

And we have to get through the pandemic as well...

Once a Democratic president becomes elected every death will become a tragedy. It will be Bengazi style investigations forever.

Most wrote:

Is there any empirical evidence that Biden admin and Dem-controlled Senate/Congress would be some kind of revolutionary turning point?
Im kind of failing to see that.
At best, next four years will be Dems trying to undo third of Trumps mess while apologizing profusely to Republican minority every step of the way.
Just my 2 outsider cents.

Barring Republican ratf*cking and outright voter disenfranchisement there's a pretty decent chance that this election could been seen as a kind of revolutionary turning point.

First, it's relatively rare for a sitting president to not win a second term. The last time it happened was in the late 80s/early 90s with Bush Sr. When it does happen it's generally taken as a sign that the American public is openly rejecting whichever party the president represents.

Next, the Democrats won a massive 41 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2018 election and the current models shows them adding anywhere from a handful to over ten seats more this election. Those numbers are similar to the numbers the Republicans posted in 1994 and in 2010 when they claimed the elections gave them a mandate to go after Clinton and Obama (which they did).

And then there's the Senate. The fact that there's a much better than even money chance that the Democrats can win back the Senate is an earth-shatteringly massive political change from where things stood after the 2018 midterms when the pollsters and pundits universally predicted that Republicans would easily hold on to the Senate this year. Heck, those same pollsters and pundits thought the same thing at the beginning of this year which shows you just how much the political landscape has changed.

Focusing on the voters Democrats have managed to rack up sizable leads in new voter registrations, especially in battleground states. Numerous polls show Democrats are very highly motivated to vote (slightly more so than Republicans) and that's been partially validated by early voting and mail-in-voting numbers that have been jaw dropping. Experts predict this year's turnout to be large, perhaps the largest in a century.

So what does all of this mean? It means the Democrats could walk away with the Presidency, more seats in the House, and control of the Senate. The projected Electoral College vote will be suitably large enough for the people that matters to (Trump can cry over his map) and, most importantly, the popular vote will likely show that millions--perhaps over ten million--more Americans voted for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.

Then there's the wild card, which will be the damage that Trump does to every down ballot Republican candidate. So Republicans could end up being absolutely bloodied at the state and local levels because they hitched their horses to a divisive idiot. And this will happen during a Census year when every Congressional district gets reallocated, something that will impact the next decade of elections.

It will be very hard for all of that to happen without walking away with the perception that the Democrats have an overwhelming mandate from the American public to do whatever it takes to put the country back on track. It will be difficult for the Democratic leadership to duck that narrative or to feel like they need to hide from it or apologize for exercising the power voters gave them.

There will be large amounts of political pressure to take advantage of the two-year window of Democrats controlling the executive and legislature. And then there'll be the political reality that SCOTUS will have to be expanded and stacked if there's any hope of any Democratic policy surviving judicial review over the next 50 years.

That pressure will be all the greater if younger voters turnout because that'll mean they'll finally be a voting bloc that has to be paid attention to and younger Americans weren't raised in a political environment that pushed or praised bipartisanship. They were raised in an era of Republicans ruthlessly using any and all political power they were given and they will want the Democrats to do the same.

There's going to be an absolutely amazing number of difficult problems Biden and the Democrats will have to tackle. But we all knew that was going to be the case.

And we all know that Republicans will immediately shift over to screaming about all the things they didn't give a f*ck about for the last four years, like the debt and deficit. But the Republicans are also going to be a party that has to deal with massive electoral losses, several bulwark red states turning blue, and acknowledging they lost even with a very popular (among Republicans) populist candidate. That alone is going to make it much harder for Republicans to ignore the need to reform their party and make it less reliant on a shrinking pool of angry white people.

So far, Amy Coney Barrett has refused to answer:

  • Is voter intimidation illegal?
  • Can the President unilaterally delay an election?
  • Can the President deny someone the right to vote based on their race?
  • Should the President commit to a peaceful transfer of power?
  • Whether Griswold vs Connecticut was decided correctly (Griswold was about the right of married couples to purchase and use contraceptives)
  • Whether Obergefell vs Hodges was decided correctly (Obergefell was about the right of same sex couples to marry)
  • Is climate change real?

Yikes.

OG_slinger wrote:

Barring Republican ratf*cking

I mean, barring the effects of gravity, I could fly to the moon.

Well, on a slightly positive note:

LA City Council approves plan to revamp LAPD with unarmed crisis response team

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The Los Angeles City Council has voted unanimously to approve a plan in an effort to reimagine public safety and form an unarmed crisis response team that would respond to nonviolent 911 calls.

The motion here in Los Angeles was introduced by several council members in June at the height of our civil unrest.

This follows the nationwide movement by civil rights activists to defund the police.

It’s a step in the right direction, but it smacks of appeasement. If this is the first step in a grand plan to make Southern California a safer place for black and brown Americans, then GREAT! I’m not optimistic. This, to me, is the equivalent of, “Don’t defund me, bro.” I think we should still defund the LAPD and it’s too powerful union.

I’m saying this as a pro-union union member and worker. The union’s purpose is to create a fair workplace for the workers, not to create an environment of absolute power and authority over the citizens to whom you have pledged an oath to protect and serve.

How about "what's Trump's plan to go get @realosamabinladen then, beyond a retweet?"