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.
"Young men feel abandoned by the Democratic party"With Governor Coach Sergeant Major White Guy Tim Walz on the ticket, the whole "There's no place for white men in the Democratic Party" line doesn't hold up anymore.
Its always been a false narrative anyway. There's always been a place for white men in the Democratic Party, you just have to accept that your needs and wants aren't going to be treated as holy doctrine and instead are considered along side of what everyone else needs/wants.
Rat Boy wrote:"Young men feel abandoned by the Democratic party"With Governor Coach Sergeant Major White Guy Tim Walz on the ticket, the whole "There's no place for white men in the Democratic Party" line doesn't hold up anymore.
Its always been a false narrative anyway. There's always been a place for white men in the Democratic Party, you just have to accept that your needs and wants aren't going to be treated as holy doctrine and instead are considered along side of what everyone else needs/wants.
I think that Progressives need to do a much better job of communicating how Feminism benefits men. The super fragile social construct of modern masculinity has created ontological despair among young men.
I can't believe the Russians are that stupid. If they really wanted to create discord and chaos, they would have funded leftist/liberal/Democratic influencers and then leaked that they had done so.
After 2 years of Russia invading Ukraine, surely you can believe the Russians are that stupid.
Although I saw a news article today with Putin sharing his very sincere support for Harris.
Problem is my conservative family are already sharing memes that the Russia bribes are a false operation and an excuse for Biden’s “KGB” to imprison dissenters.
Its just one crime though.
If you are convicted of 34, then you are immune.
Trump Media (Truth Social) stock price tanking in lead-up to the end of the lock-in period preventing Trump from selling (or borrowing against) his stake.
Trump can't sell until later this month, but all the "insiders" in the company are:
For instance, Phillip Juhan, Trump Media’s chief financial officer and treasurer, recently disclosed selling $1.9 million worth of stock. Trump Media’s general counsel Scott Glabe, chief operating officer Andrew Northwall and chief technology officer Vladimir Novachki made smaller sales last week too.
Even Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman who now serves as Trump Media’s CEO and president, dumped $632,000 worth of stock last week.
The article seems skeptical that Trump would mass sell-off and trigger a collapse of the stock price. I am less skeptical. I could easily see him tanking the stock price into oblivion and then blaming the "Biden economy" for it. Especially if he can't find a sucker that will take the shares as loan collateral.
I almost want to put this in the satirical political video thread, but sadly there's nothing satirical about this. This man is still statistically a coin-flip from becoming president again, and he's answering a policy question about the cost of child care like this...
Liberal San Francisco Is Deporting Migrants to Fight Fentanyl Crisis
San Francisco has long celebrated its progressive values and immigration sanctuary policies. A deadly fentanyl crisis is testing its commitment to those ideals.
Open-air drug markets dot a downtown already struggling to recover from the pandemic. A record number of people died from overdoses last year. Faced with a deepening emergency, city leaders have quietly embraced a controversial tactic to combat the epidemic: deportation.
More than 100 people, mostly undocumented immigrants, have been charged in a federal crackdown on San Francisco’s open-air drug markets since last year, according to a review of cases and data from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California. Those prosecuted under the program are often given a stark choice between risking lengthy prison sentences or pleading guilty, which avoids major prison time and frequently leads them to face deportation proceedings.
“For people who are willing to sell poison that is killing people, there’s no protection for you. There’s no sanctuary for you,” Mayor London Breed said in an interview. “Fentanyl is such a deadly drug. It requires that we take more extreme measures.”
The crackdown in a liberal bastion shows just how deeply fentanyl has entrenched itself in San Francisco and exacerbated some of the tech hub’s most vexing problems, from homelessness to downtown revival. It’s exposed a political liability both locally, with a mayoral election this year, and nationally, as Republicans point to the city where presidential candidate Kamala Harris rose to power as a symbol of failed Democratic leadership.
Fairly or not, San Francisco has emerged as one of the most visible examples of the US fentanyl emergency that’s now centered on the West Coast. From the Mexican border to Seattle, and into Canada, deaths from synthetic opioids soared last year while moderating in most other parts of the country.
The powerful drug is made from precursor chemicals that are often shipped from China to Mexico, where they are turned into fentanyl and routinely trafficked into Los Angeles-area warehouses. From there the drug is often sent up the Interstate 5 highway, making its way to the streets of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, according to Brian Clark, the top Drug Enforcement Administration official in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, fentanyl overdoses killed an unprecedented 656 people last year, a 43% increase from 2022.
As the city tries to control the crisis, the deportations have sparked criticism from local advocates for circumventing San Francisco’s sanctuary policies, which prevent local law enforcement from coordinating with immigration authorities in most cases. Breed, running for reelection in November, said the deportations are a necessary correction to migrant protections, while still maintaining that the city is a safe haven.
“We want to make sure that those people are protected and they’re supported,” Breed, 50, said of the city’s immigrant community. “For those people who cross those lines and commit these crimes, we do everything we can to hold them accountable.”
For the mayor, a San Francisco native, the drug issue holds particular resonance. Her sister died of an overdose in 2006. Her brother, who is currently in prison, also struggles with addiction, she said.
“I grew up in the crack epidemic,” Breed said. “Fentanyl is different. And it’s almost a guarantee of a loss of life and no shot at a second chance or recovery.”
Economic Troubles
The effects of the drug crisis can be seen daily on San Francisco’s streets, where people in the throes of addiction huddle on sidewalks as dealers hawk pills and powder. That’s added to perceptions of blight and crime that have had a devastating effect on the downtown, where the office vacancy rate is a record 37% and retailers such as Nordstrom, Whole Foods and Uniqlo have shuttered their stores.
“Fifteen dealers will swarm you. It’s like an auction,” said Richard Rodrigues, who spent years on the streets surviving the worst of San Francisco’s opioid epidemic. He now lives in a residential treatment program run by HealthRIGHT 360, an addiction treatment provider.
“Death becomes normal,” he said of his time living on San Francisco’s streets. “You’re walking over people.”
Even an Ikea that opened last year as a would-be symbol of San Francisco’s resurgence has struggled with the problem. Ingka, the franchisee that runs the Market Street store, has complained to city officials about open-air drug markets, streets in disarray, and an assault on an employee, according to emails obtained through a public records request.
“Everyday people are using drugs,” Ricardo Tapia, an Ingka operations manager, wrote in a May email to San Francisco police and a nonprofit group. Some people clashed with customers or garbage trucks; others started fires or tried to “sneak into our dock while tenants receive their deliveries.” The road “smelled terrible” due to human waste on the building’s exit doors. The conditions were leading to revenue loss, Tapia said.
Ingka said it is actively working with Ikea and city leaders to address these issues. The company is “confident and optimistic about the potential of Market Street and are committed to contributing to its revitalization,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Taken together, the effects of fentanyl are shifting famously liberal San Francisco to the center. Beyond the immigration crackdown, Breed has moved more rightward on policing and pushed street sweeps of homeless encampments in the name of public safety.
Matt Dorsey, a San Francisco supervisor who is sober after struggling with his own drug addiction, said the city is seeing a “realignment of urban politics that is more centered and rooted in public order and public safety.”
“We can’t have disorder and unchecked drug markets going on because we’re adhering to some larger principle of ‘we don’t want to do something that Donald Trump is going to point to and say he likes,’” Dorsey said. “And if cities are to succeed, we Democrats have to be trusted to govern.”
Breed has embraced centrist policies as she fights for reelection against four other serious candidates, all of them Democrats. She supported a successful ballot measure to screen welfare recipients for drug usage. One of her rivals, Mark Farrell, has called for deploying the National Guard to patrol the city’s most troubled areas. (Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, has donated $1.2 million in support of Breed's reelection campaign.)
“There’s a perception that San Francisco’s crime is all fueled by drug addiction,” said Randy Shaw, who heads the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, one of the city’s largest low-income housing operators, while noting that the most high-profile retail thefts are tied to organized crime rings. “It’s the same for Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles. It’s dramatically reshaped politics.”
Leaders Intervene
The crisis was one of the most pressing issues for Ismail Ramsey when he took over as the Biden Administration's top prosecutor in Northern California in 2023. He said he met with community leaders including Breed and Nancy Pelosi, the former US House speaker and longtime San Francisco congresswoman, who asked him to intervene.
Outside his 11th floor office window, Ramsey would watch a daily scene of people suffering from drug addiction cleared from an alleyway so schoolchildren could pass by. “It was just people splayed out on the floor,” he said. “And then the yellow buses come in, and the kids go out and they play. It was just a very strange scene.”
He crafted San Francisco’s fentanyl crackdown soon after his confirmation, embarking on an unusual prosecution strategy, backed by surging law enforcement raids on drug dealers.
US attorney offices typically target drug kingpins or corporate wrongdoing. Now, his office would focus on the low-level dealers often arrested with a few hundred dollars in their pocket. The strategy was meant to overcome the “revolving door” of dealers at San Francisco’s superior court, Ramsey said. “The same people being arrested and then coming right back and feeling like there was no accountability, no significant consequence.”
A central part of his strategy involves adopting low-level fentanyl or methamphetamine dealing cases that are first filed by the San Francisco district attorney, then offering these defendants a plea deal that sentences them to time served, plus a single extra day in custody. That additional day is used to hand the person over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings.
Since its inception, the fast track program has included a 26-year-old mother of two from Honduras arrested by San Francisco police for selling $800 in fentanyl to undercover law enforcement, and a man arrested with 36 grams of fentanyl. A 50-year-old man arrested in July admitted to selling $5 worth of methamphetamine and had two small baggies of drugs in an Altoids container, San Francisco police said. He accepted a fast-track plea deal on Aug. 28 and was expected to be deported to Honduras, according to court filings.
Ramsey's office said in a statement that the plea deals are focused on deterrence rather than deportations. Under the agreements, drug dealers face a three-year stay-away order from San Francisco's embattled Tenderloin neighborhood, where drug dealing is concentrated. If they return and are caught dealing again they could could face years of jail time.
“It is not immigration consequences, but the threat of a potentially long federal sentence,” that deters repeat drug dealing, Ramsey's office said. “This is a real consequence to drug dealers that changes the calculus regarding whether they want to return.”
Still, the program has been controversial. “It’s all immigrants that they’ve been arresting, in the cases I’ve seen,” said Angela Chan, an assistant chief attorney with the San Francisco public defender’s office. “And their focus hasn’t been on the prosecution, but handing these individuals over to ICE.”
Hillary Ronen, a San Francisco supervisor representing the immigrant-heavy Mission District, called the deportations an “end run” over the city’s sanctuary policies. “Demonizing migrants is the oldest trick in the book,” she said.
But it’s not only the city’s staunch progressives who have opposed the program. Federal Judge William Alsup, who has overseen some of the fentanyl cases, dismissed a plea agreement — saying convicted dealers should serve prison time.
“It’s a not just lenient, but extremely lenient policy to skip over prison and go straight to deportation with a mere promise not to return,” Alsup said during a court hearing last year.
Harm Reduction
Ramsey’s strategy isn’t operating in a vacuum. San Francisco has increasingly turned to law enforcement after promoting a more compassionate approach to drug users. The city has long championed a strategy known as harm reduction meant to reduce deaths by providing people with clean syringes and safer spaces to use drugs, among other tactics.
The centerpiece was a city-sponsored overdose prevention site called the Tenderloin Center. It was a place where people could come for a shower, a meal and to smoke fentanyl under supervision. In 2022, staff at the Tenderloin Center reversed more than 300 overdoses. For Vitka Eisen, who heads HealthRIGHT 360, it was a resounding success. “We have to first stop people from dying,” said Eisen. “We can’t go back to doing things that we did 10 or 15 years ago.”
Breed has helped funnel tens of millions of dollars toward overdose and drug addiction treatment. But she shuttered the Tenderloin Center, saying it had failed to connect people with addiction treatment and other services. As overdose deaths continued to rise in 2023, she told the board of supervisors that “compassion is killing people.” It was time for “tough love to change what’s happening on the streets of San Francisco.”
Now, Breed has touted the arrest of more than 3,500 drug dealers and users. The city’s jail has swelled to capacity in what Chan, the local public defender, called a “War on Drugs 2.0.”
But San Francisco is also seeing signs that the fentanyl epidemic is easing. In July, there were 39 drug overdose deaths, the lowest count since the city started keeping a monthly tally in 2020.
“This is my home,” Breed said. “And I care about people living.”
Conservatives Could Undo More Than Just Abortion Rights, Elena Kagan Warns
Justice Elena Kagan thinks the Supreme Court’s conservative majority may not stop at abortion rights, she told a crowd at the New York University School of Law on Monday, warning that the logic used to overturn Roe v. Wade could be broadly applied elsewhere.“I don’t think you’re overreading the bigger question,” Kagan said in a conversation with Melissa Murray, a law professor and podcast host who’d asked about the implications of Roe’s reversal, according to The New York Times.
With its landmark 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the high court dismantled the right to abortion based on the argument that it is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” as Justice Samuel Alito wrote at the time.
“That’s the entirety of the majority’s reasoning,” Kagan said.
If you extend that argument elsewhere, said Kagan, it’s possible to strike down what would otherwise be firm constitutional protections.
“Then you say the same thing for contraception,” she warned. “Then you can say the same thing for interracial marriage. Then you could say the same thing for gay marriage.”
Kagan also addressed the ongoing ethics scandal that’s embroiled the court, with bombshell stories about Alito and Clarence Thomas, another conservative justice, accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires like Paul Singer, who’s repeatedly had business before the court.
Kagan has been a leading voice for an enforceable code of ethics at the Supreme Court, despite pushback from the right.
“It seems like a good idea in terms of ensuring that we comply with our own code of conduct going forward in the future,” she said at the NYU School of Law. “It seems like a good idea in terms of ensuring that people have confidence that we’re doing exactly that. So it seems like a salutary thing for the court.”
Last week, ProPublica reported that Thomas’ wife has privately lauded efforts to oppose court reform, with Ginni Thomas praising a group run by conservative activist Kelly Shackelford, who called Kagan’s ethics push “treasonous” and “disloyal.”
Kagan on Monday declined to address Shackelford’s “treasonous” comment, telling the NYU School of Law crowd that she didn’t “want to dignify it any further.”
Father of Ohio boy, 11, tells Trump and Vance to stop using son’s death for ‘political gain’
The father of an 11-year-old boy who was killed last year when a minivan driven by an immigrant from Haiti collided with his school bus has asked Donald Trump and JD Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.
During a city commission meeting on Tuesday in Springfield, Ohio, Nathan Clark, the father of Aiden Clark, addressed the forum alongside his wife, Danielle. Speaking at the meeting, Clark said: “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the Springfield News-Sun reports.
Clark went on to list politicians including Donald Trump and JD Vance who he said have been using his son’s name for “political gain”.
“Bernie Moreno [the Ohio Republican senate candidate], Chip Roy [the Texas Republican representative], JD Vance and Donald Trump … have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis, and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio,” said Clark.
“I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies. To clear the air, my son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. This tragedy has been all over this community, the state and even the nation. But don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued.
Clark went on to say: “Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can’t protect his memory when he’s gone. Please stop the hate.”
Clark’s comments come after the Trump campaign and Vance mentioned Aiden Clark’s death earlier this week amid hateful and baseless rumors surrounding the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Vance alluded to Clark’s death by saying a “child was murdered by a Haitian migrant” on X. In the same post, Vance also repeated the falsehoods surrounding Haitian immigrants eating local pets – a rumor brought up again by Trump during Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris.
Meanwhile, the Trump War Room, an X account used by the Trump campaign, also mentioned Aiden Clark, accusing Harris of refusing to say his name.
Aiden Clark died last August when the school bus he was riding in collided with a minivan driven by 36-year old Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian father of four children. More than 20 other students were injured in the collision and Joseph was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide. In May, Joseph was sentenced to 9 to 13.5 years in prison.
In a statement to NBC on Clark’s remarks, a spokesperson for Vance said that people should hold Harris “and her open border policies accountable for the deaths of their children”, adding: “The Clark family is in senator Vance’s prayers.”
A lot of people are acting like Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, etc are unwitting victims of the Tenet media Russian propaganda operation, but today’s episode of It Could Happen Here goes into detail on the DOJ indictment and there are apparently multiple examples in the indictment where these “unwitting victims” do things like constantly referring to their paymasters as “the Russians” in private messages or trying to figure out the current time in Moscow while discussing when a payment will go through.
I can only imagine that father's grief.
At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found. This is one of their stories.
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