What I don't understand is, why nobody in conservative America is standing up to all of this bullshit. John McCain was, and now he's dead.
John McCain voted for the "Trump" position 83% of the time. That's not exactly "standing up" to much of anything.
His most famous opposition to Trumpland, his vote against the ACA repeal, was supposed to be about not following "regular order" in the Senate.....and then he voted for the tax bill that stripped the individual mandate despite that bill also not following "regular order".
McCain had excellent public relations, so he's being remembered as a "Maverick" and principled, when he didn't actually do all that much maverick-ey nor follow his principles that closely.
There has not been a principled conservative in power since Ike.
Take a moment to think about your claim. If your claim was true, Heller wouldn't have happened. Yet Heller happened. It's almost like your claim isn't actually true.
Also, read your own damn quote:
The Second Amendments [sic] means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.
That, at most, restricted Federal gun control laws, allowing the states to do what they wanted.....which they did....and they passed laws....in 1975....that were not invalidated until Heller.
Ta-da! You now have the actual progression of the interpretation of the 2nd amendment instead of the hand-waving desperately attempting to make you ignore a shitload of laws that somehow managed to withstand scrutiny until Heller.
Wow is your post a giant pile of trite oversimplifications that demonstrate you've never had to deal with difficulty in employment.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side
Ok, I'd like you to work 36 hours in the next day.
Hey, there's no limits, so you can do that, right?
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed.
People with STEM careers tend to be better employed. But we graduate 1.5 STEM students for every entry-level STEM job opening. If you get through that math problem, you will tend to be better employed. If you're in the 0.5, you don't get a STEM career and you get to "enjoy" life working retail (or similarly out of your degree's field).
So, how about you pretend you're one of that 0.5 and solve that problem. You need to increase entry-level STEM job openings by 50%, or people are going to notice that capitalism isn't working out all that well for anyone who isn't part of capital, because we spent the last 20 years pretending that a STEM degree is the same as a STEM career and people are starting to notice our fraud.
Or maybe it's not just an individual "solving problems" and overly-simplified equations.
No, Uber wins by receiving massive subsidies from the government. In the form of the roads Uber drives on, and the welfare programs Uber drivers can turn to when they make below a living wage.
So good news! You're paying Uber whether or not you use their service.
But please stop pretending that Uber is some sort of innovative capitalist success story. They're just yet another case of a pig at the government trough, just with better PR.
You're being modded down because you're an uniformed idiot.
The US graduates 1.5 STEM students for every STEM job opening. Simple math that even you can do will show that means a whole lot of people who "did the right thing", got a useful degree can't get a real job.
"Well, they shouldn't have done that!!". Well grandpa, you just spent the last 20 years saying they should do that. In fact, "go get a degree in CS or something useful" has been your mantra for anyone who is looking for a job. Since you turned out to be massively wrong, why the hell should they listen to your rants now?
The trend towards it being a personal right started in the 1980s, but until Heller it had not been concretely decided. That's why Heller is a precedent instead of "more of the same".
It's not possible to get rid of all psychopathic assholes, because new ones are born every day. But if it's a pain-in-the-ass to get a gun, fewer psychopathic assholes will have them and have to resort to less-deadly means of venting their rage.
To see how this works, let's go with your drug analogy. How many people regularly get a hold of heroin compared to the number of people who regularly get a hold of alcohol? A whole lot less people get heroin, since it takes some more effort to get.
Maybe if more people were carrying he wouldn't have been so quick to go on a rampage in the first place, or they could at least have defended themselves and ended it quicker.
Based on statistics from the military, about 1/3 to 2/3rds of the shots fired in a firefight like this do not hit their intended target. So, put a whole lot of armed people there and they'll shoot a lot of bystanders.
Add to this the confusion: One guy starts shooting. Three people start shooting him. The next three people draw and have to figure out who's the aggressor. Some are going to get it wrong and shoot some of your "good guys". Plus you've got that missing-1/3rd-of-the-shots thing taking out other bystanders, so they really do look like bad guys. Which will draw fire from other good guys, causing more people to drop and more firing.
Which is why an enormous amount of police training is when not to shoot at people....or at least it used to be.
A heavily-armed crowd is a fantastic way for a suicidal psychopath to cause a whole lot of death.
In fact if you rule out suicide (lets face it, take the gun away, they still kill themselves)
No, actually they don't.
The vast majority of non-gun suicides are not successful, and result in the person surviving the attempt and getting treatment, resulting in them not committing suicide later.
That happens because non-gun suicides take longer, allowing the person to change their mind. And most do change their mind when the reality of their death sets in.
So no, you can't blithely assume all gun suicides would still happen in a world where guns magically disappeared. Most likely they'd be like the non-gun suicides where a large portion did not end up killing themselves.
Sorry to pop your pompous little bubble there, but the fact of the matter is that shit happens
Sorry to pop your pompous little bubble there, but the fact of the matter is that shit happens. When you and your fellow well-armed citizens arrive at a gun battle, who you gonna shoot?
The first guy you see with a gun? Well, unfortunately he was a good guy with a gun, returning fire. So was the three other people you shot....of course, the four of them were shooting at each other, each mistaking a good guy with a gun for the bad guy with a gun. All they saw was someone firing and someone going down.
Then there's the little matter of accuracy. Given statistics from the military and police, it's unlikely the five of you will successfully hit what you are aiming at in roughly 1/3 to 2/3rds of your shots. Which means hitting bystanders and making you look like a bad guy with a gun and thus the target for your fellow well-armed individuals.
The actual bad guy with a gun? He's the one over there saying "The shooter went that way!" while pointing towards you. And since you're armed and shooting, you definitely look like a bad guy with a gun.
The fact is a crowd of armed people is utterly terrible at responding to a shooter. The chaos and confusion means the armed people in the crowd are going to fuck it up, and the only reason we don't have such mass casualty situations is most of us are not dumb enough to think everyone walking around with a gun is a good idea.
Then read what he originally proposed as the basis for the 2nd Amendment; I quoted it, and you can follow the link. It's that the right to keep and bear arms is unambiguous and explicit
Except it wasn't.
It took a Supreme Court decision in the 1980s to turn the 2nd amendment into an (almost) inalienable personal right. For the 200 years before that, including the time when the founders were actually running the country, it was understood that the government had the right to pass gun control.....including the gun control actually passed by the founders.
But the Constitution is a living document, and not a holy writ that is never open to reinterpretation. So now the 2nd Amendment is an (almost) inalienable personal right.
But, at least, there are several of those to choose from
Both a billionaire and a minimum-wage worker can buy any plan they want!
In reality, you have 1 to 3 plans your employer signed up for, all from the same insurance company with the same provider network. Your "choices" are to pay more per month, or pay more per time you use the insurance.
If that insurance company sucks, too bad. You should have bought better hookers and blow for HR so they'd pick a plan that's good for you.
Change jobs? Well, the company they contracted with is just as bad.
And there's little reason to expect an employer will stay with the same insurance company year-over-year, so it's shitty plan switch to new shitty plan....but they did a better job of bribing HR.
With a government-run plan, I at least have a say in electing who runs the plan.
Switching to the "single payer" — a dog-whistle for "government run" — would make it even worse.
Medicare is the only insurance program in the US with a >50% approval rating in polls....and it's in the 60s to 70s depending on the poll. Every private insurance company polls at 40% or less.
That's really odd if government-run is inherently worse......almost like it isn't actually inherently worse and it takes things like underfunding the VA or NHS for a couple decades to make them look bad.
Even Star had more restrictions and limited scope than Muller.
Are you seriously trying to claim that an investigation over a failed land deal in Arkansas that ended up charging over a blowjob in the White House decades later was restricted in scope?
WTF? A jury trial happened, the defendant was acquitted and you say that doesn't set precedent?
So, murder is now legal in California, because OJ was acquitted. Right?
Oh wait, that's not how it works.
So then what does set precedent if not a prior court case
What actually sets precedent is an appeals court (or higher) saying that a particular law is invalid or must be interpreted in a different way.
No other candidate has been charged since Edwards, whether there were incidence of "hush money" payments or not
If you have evidence of hush money being paid during a campaign, please file a complaint with the FEC.
Also, people have been charged and convicted after Edwards. They were not running for president.
but as soon as the next one is charged and goes to trial you can bet you bottom dollar the Edward's case will be cited as precedence.
Just how exactly do you think that works? "Your honor, this other guy was found not guilty, so you have to dismiss this unrelated case too!!". You better let every murderer in California know to use this strategy.
Then why did Trump make the payments? If buying silence was so routine, why'd he wait more than a decade to do so?
The only reason to pay at that time was to influence the election. Which is why there's laws against paying at that time. Pay the mistresses off in 2014, and it's completely legal.
That's what I don't understand, though. This payment is consistent with what I'd expect from Trump, campaigning for office or no
If Trump had made the exact same payments in 2014, it would be legal. It is only the fact that he was running for office that triggers campaign finance laws that make it illegal.
But by that logic, were Trump's breakfast costs also campaign expenses?
They can be declared as campaign expenses and paid for using campaign funds. But it's unlikely that one specific breakfast in itself is intended to influence the election. So it would also be legal to pay for breakfast out-of-pocket.
There isn't some tenuous "he had to eat so he could go campaign therefore eating was influencing the election" bullshit that you are trying to create.
It sounds easy, but it's very slow and painstaking.
So unless you are shredding documents that will end up in a national security investigation or similar, no one will expend the effort to reassemble your shredded documents. For example, identity thieves will just go next door to an easier target.
Or shred it and burn the shreds. Increased surface area makes it more likely the paper will burn completely, and reconstructing the shredded pages requires too much handling for the ashes to stay in former-paper-shape.
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What I don't understand is, why nobody in conservative America is standing up to all of this bullshit. John McCain was, and now he's dead.
John McCain voted for the "Trump" position 83% of the time. That's not exactly "standing up" to much of anything.
His most famous opposition to Trumpland, his vote against the ACA repeal, was supposed to be about not following "regular order" in the Senate.....and then he voted for the tax bill that stripped the individual mandate despite that bill also not following "regular order".
McCain had excellent public relations, so he's being remembered as a "Maverick" and principled, when he didn't actually do all that much maverick-ey nor follow his principles that closely.
There has not been a principled conservative in power since Ike.
Take a moment to think about your claim. If your claim was true, Heller wouldn't have happened. Yet Heller happened. It's almost like your claim isn't actually true.
Also, read your own damn quote:
The Second Amendments [sic] means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.
That, at most, restricted Federal gun control laws, allowing the states to do what they wanted.....which they did....and they passed laws....in 1975....that were not invalidated until Heller.
Ta-da! You now have the actual progression of the interpretation of the 2nd amendment instead of the hand-waving desperately attempting to make you ignore a shitload of laws that somehow managed to withstand scrutiny until Heller.
Wow is your post a giant pile of trite oversimplifications that demonstrate you've never had to deal with difficulty in employment.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side
Ok, I'd like you to work 36 hours in the next day.
Hey, there's no limits, so you can do that, right?
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed.
People with STEM careers tend to be better employed. But we graduate 1.5 STEM students for every entry-level STEM job opening. If you get through that math problem, you will tend to be better employed. If you're in the 0.5, you don't get a STEM career and you get to "enjoy" life working retail (or similarly out of your degree's field).
So, how about you pretend you're one of that 0.5 and solve that problem. You need to increase entry-level STEM job openings by 50%, or people are going to notice that capitalism isn't working out all that well for anyone who isn't part of capital, because we spent the last 20 years pretending that a STEM degree is the same as a STEM career and people are starting to notice our fraud.
Or maybe it's not just an individual "solving problems" and overly-simplified equations.
That's why Uber wins — by serving the public.
No, Uber wins by receiving massive subsidies from the government. In the form of the roads Uber drives on, and the welfare programs Uber drivers can turn to when they make below a living wage.
So good news! You're paying Uber whether or not you use their service.
But please stop pretending that Uber is some sort of innovative capitalist success story. They're just yet another case of a pig at the government trough, just with better PR.
Note how you don't care about the public at all.
Note how you do not realize that the qasi-employees are members of "the public" that you are so concerned about.
If you want to say "customers", say "customers". "The public" has interest far beyond any single business.
You're being modded down because you're an uniformed idiot.
The US graduates 1.5 STEM students for every STEM job opening. Simple math that even you can do will show that means a whole lot of people who "did the right thing", got a useful degree can't get a real job.
"Well, they shouldn't have done that!!". Well grandpa, you just spent the last 20 years saying they should do that. In fact, "go get a degree in CS or something useful" has been your mantra for anyone who is looking for a job. Since you turned out to be massively wrong, why the hell should they listen to your rants now?
The Supreme Court has been quite clear - the right to keep and bear arms is a personal right, it does not need justification
Only after the Heller case. Before Heller, that was not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The trend towards it being a personal right started in the 1980s, but until Heller it had not been concretely decided. That's why Heller is a precedent instead of "more of the same".
It's a damage mitigation strategy.
It's not possible to get rid of all psychopathic assholes, because new ones are born every day. But if it's a pain-in-the-ass to get a gun, fewer psychopathic assholes will have them and have to resort to less-deadly means of venting their rage.
To see how this works, let's go with your drug analogy. How many people regularly get a hold of heroin compared to the number of people who regularly get a hold of alcohol? A whole lot less people get heroin, since it takes some more effort to get.
Maybe if more people were carrying he wouldn't have been so quick to go on a rampage in the first place, or they could at least have defended themselves and ended it quicker.
Based on statistics from the military, about 1/3 to 2/3rds of the shots fired in a firefight like this do not hit their intended target. So, put a whole lot of armed people there and they'll shoot a lot of bystanders.
Add to this the confusion: One guy starts shooting. Three people start shooting him. The next three people draw and have to figure out who's the aggressor. Some are going to get it wrong and shoot some of your "good guys". Plus you've got that missing-1/3rd-of-the-shots thing taking out other bystanders, so they really do look like bad guys. Which will draw fire from other good guys, causing more people to drop and more firing.
Which is why an enormous amount of police training is when not to shoot at people....or at least it used to be.
A heavily-armed crowd is a fantastic way for a suicidal psychopath to cause a whole lot of death.
Build the wall and he can't get from Baltimore to Florida, and then there's no mass shooting.
(Insert meme of guy tapping his head here)
How is it in the 70s anybody could buy every form of weapon, including fully automatic, and the homicide rate is much higher now than its ever been
The homicide rate in the US peaked in 1980. The current homicide rate is about the same as 1950.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/...
So, the homicide rate was about double the current homicide rate when that M16 was available "side by side".
In fact if you rule out suicide (lets face it, take the gun away, they still kill themselves)
No, actually they don't.
The vast majority of non-gun suicides are not successful, and result in the person surviving the attempt and getting treatment, resulting in them not committing suicide later.
That happens because non-gun suicides take longer, allowing the person to change their mind. And most do change their mind when the reality of their death sets in.
So no, you can't blithely assume all gun suicides would still happen in a world where guns magically disappeared. Most likely they'd be like the non-gun suicides where a large portion did not end up killing themselves.
Sorry to pop your pompous little bubble there, but the fact of the matter is that shit happens
Sorry to pop your pompous little bubble there, but the fact of the matter is that shit happens. When you and your fellow well-armed citizens arrive at a gun battle, who you gonna shoot?
The first guy you see with a gun? Well, unfortunately he was a good guy with a gun, returning fire. So was the three other people you shot....of course, the four of them were shooting at each other, each mistaking a good guy with a gun for the bad guy with a gun. All they saw was someone firing and someone going down.
Then there's the little matter of accuracy. Given statistics from the military and police, it's unlikely the five of you will successfully hit what you are aiming at in roughly 1/3 to 2/3rds of your shots. Which means hitting bystanders and making you look like a bad guy with a gun and thus the target for your fellow well-armed individuals.
The actual bad guy with a gun? He's the one over there saying "The shooter went that way!" while pointing towards you. And since you're armed and shooting, you definitely look like a bad guy with a gun.
The fact is a crowd of armed people is utterly terrible at responding to a shooter. The chaos and confusion means the armed people in the crowd are going to fuck it up, and the only reason we don't have such mass casualty situations is most of us are not dumb enough to think everyone walking around with a gun is a good idea.
Then read what he originally proposed as the basis for the 2nd Amendment; I quoted it, and you can follow the link. It's that the right to keep and bear arms is unambiguous and explicit
Except it wasn't.
It took a Supreme Court decision in the 1980s to turn the 2nd amendment into an (almost) inalienable personal right. For the 200 years before that, including the time when the founders were actually running the country, it was understood that the government had the right to pass gun control.....including the gun control actually passed by the founders.
But the Constitution is a living document, and not a holy writ that is never open to reinterpretation. So now the 2nd Amendment is an (almost) inalienable personal right.
But, at least, there are several of those to choose from
Both a billionaire and a minimum-wage worker can buy any plan they want!
In reality, you have 1 to 3 plans your employer signed up for, all from the same insurance company with the same provider network. Your "choices" are to pay more per month, or pay more per time you use the insurance.
If that insurance company sucks, too bad. You should have bought better hookers and blow for HR so they'd pick a plan that's good for you.
Change jobs? Well, the company they contracted with is just as bad.
And there's little reason to expect an employer will stay with the same insurance company year-over-year, so it's shitty plan switch to new shitty plan....but they did a better job of bribing HR.
With a government-run plan, I at least have a say in electing who runs the plan.
Switching to the "single payer" — a dog-whistle for "government run" — would make it even worse.
Medicare is the only insurance program in the US with a >50% approval rating in polls....and it's in the 60s to 70s depending on the poll. Every private insurance company polls at 40% or less.
That's really odd if government-run is inherently worse......almost like it isn't actually inherently worse and it takes things like underfunding the VA or NHS for a couple decades to make them look bad.
The second a service-provider is deprived of a legitimate interest in getting paid by the service-buyer
Do you realize we already have this situation in the US?
You are not the one paying the hospital. Your health insurance is. And their interests are not at all aligned with yours.
Even Star had more restrictions and limited scope than Muller.
Are you seriously trying to claim that an investigation over a failed land deal in Arkansas that ended up charging over a blowjob in the White House decades later was restricted in scope?
WTF? A jury trial happened, the defendant was acquitted and you say that doesn't set precedent?
So, murder is now legal in California, because OJ was acquitted. Right?
Oh wait, that's not how it works.
So then what does set precedent if not a prior court case
What actually sets precedent is an appeals court (or higher) saying that a particular law is invalid or must be interpreted in a different way.
No other candidate has been charged since Edwards, whether there were incidence of "hush money" payments or not
If you have evidence of hush money being paid during a campaign, please file a complaint with the FEC.
Also, people have been charged and convicted after Edwards. They were not running for president.
but as soon as the next one is charged and goes to trial you can bet you bottom dollar the Edward's case will be cited as precedence.
Just how exactly do you think that works? "Your honor, this other guy was found not guilty, so you have to dismiss this unrelated case too!!". You better let every murderer in California know to use this strategy.
Are you trying to argue that murder is now legal in California because OJ was acquitted?
Then why did Trump make the payments? If buying silence was so routine, why'd he wait more than a decade to do so?
The only reason to pay at that time was to influence the election. Which is why there's laws against paying at that time. Pay the mistresses off in 2014, and it's completely legal.
You could if you were desperately trying to misapply federal election laws in order to excuse violation of those laws.
Wrong. If one can argue the payments would have happened regardless of the election, they aren't campaign finance violations
This is completely and utterly false. And you'll get to see proof of that as people are sentenced to prison for it.
That's what I don't understand, though. This payment is consistent with what I'd expect from Trump, campaigning for office or no
If Trump had made the exact same payments in 2014, it would be legal. It is only the fact that he was running for office that triggers campaign finance laws that make it illegal.
But by that logic, were Trump's breakfast costs also campaign expenses?
They can be declared as campaign expenses and paid for using campaign funds. But it's unlikely that one specific breakfast in itself is intended to influence the election. So it would also be legal to pay for breakfast out-of-pocket.
There isn't some tenuous "he had to eat so he could go campaign therefore eating was influencing the election" bullshit that you are trying to create.
Google what Alan Dershowitz, a very liberal lawyer
You mean the guy who wrote an op-ed in the NY Times about how all the liberals stopped inviting him to parties because of his devotion to Trump?
Why, that gentlemen sounds completely unbiased in this situation!
It sounds easy, but it's very slow and painstaking.
So unless you are shredding documents that will end up in a national security investigation or similar, no one will expend the effort to reassemble your shredded documents. For example, identity thieves will just go next door to an easier target.
Or shred it and burn the shreds. Increased surface area makes it more likely the paper will burn completely, and reconstructing the shredded pages requires too much handling for the ashes to stay in former-paper-shape.