The many things that the State Department's Inspector General and the FBI have pointed out were wrong about her avoiding public scrutiny of her official documents, regardless of the FBI director's conclusion that he would not expect a federal prosecutor working for Obama/Lynch to be certain they could convict on the more obviously criminal elements of that, have nothing to do with why Sanders called her unfit for office. He had his own reasons for that. As you well know.
The FBI didn't "clear" her of wrong doing, they simply chose not to suggest an indictment - even as they pointed out her long series of lies and carelessness throughout the entire thing - both as she (to be generous) skirted her responsibilities while Secretary, and while under oath later as she provided false answers about her conduct before congress. If anything, Sanders was hesitant to discuss her obvious lies about her time as SoS while the facts were still being discovered. The FBI just described the facts, which include direct, blow-by-blow refutations of her many direct, purposeful lies on the subject. But they weren't looking into whether or not she perjured herself, they were looking into whether or not there were things like classified material rattling around on her personal mail computer at her house. Which it turns out there was, and many other things she lied about.
So, Sanders' previous observation about her unfitness for office (which was all about her posture on voting for the war, her beholdeness to large financial industry campaign supporters, and her personally enriching her family from millions of dollars of foreign government donations to her family business while those countries had business before her as SoS), would only change if:
1) He never meant it in the first place, which makes him a liar. Or,
2) He suddenly thinks those things didn't happen. But he's not that confused, since of course they DID happen. Or,
3) These things were never really all that important to him, which makes him a hypocrite, and his assessment about her unfitness for office was him being a dishonest blowhard on the subject, and he actually likes her values, her decision to go to war in Iraq, and the way she raises money for campaigns and has become personally very wealthy. Which would make almost all of his speeches lies.
He didn't say, "I like her better than Trump," and he hasn't said, "I like her despite the fact we all know she's a corrupt liar." This is just him angling for more air time for his socialist agenda, that's all. He's willing to look hypocritical or even deceitful in exchange for that.
So, you're sticking with "has done nothing except bankrupt" "has done nothing except screw vendors" and the like? That's your actual assessment? That's how uninformed you're choosing to be? Or do you actually know better, but you're choosing to lie because you're more comfortable with Hillary's lying, incompetence, and official corruption than you are with your dislike for Trump? At least be honest, instead of lying about it.
What happened to "she's not fit" for the office? In the time since he said that about her, she's been shown to have been either wildly incompetent or ever more deceitful in her relationship with both her job and her supporters. What's she got on you, Bernie?
You must have missed the House Republican Benghazi report that cleared Hillary of any wrongdoing
You're confusing "wrongdoing" in terms of causing the deaths of our people there (nope, no legal wrongdoing there, just indifference and incompetence) with the parade of lies offered up by her and her boss and the rest of his team about what happened. The events there were a bad fit with the narrative he was using in those weeks right before an election (the terrorists are on the run!) so despite knowing exactly what happened merely hours after it happened - as made clear in Hillary's own words to her family and in communications with foreign governments - her and her boss still went for weeks spinning out their phony narrative about it being just a street protest out of control. They knew that was a blatant lie even as they said the words over and over again, and sent people out to repeat those lies to the media over and over again.
You know all of this, but you're deliberately trying to distract by changing the subject to legal/official culpability for the deaths, instead of the display of dishonesty and bus-throwing-under that Clinton and Obama both indulged in afterwards all in the name of holding onto political power. Your own knowing better, but none the less willingness to continue with that bit of deception makes you just as bad as them. But since you're shilling for them, you don't have a choice, I suppose.
But we've already seen a Clinton in the White House so we have a pretty good idea what that would look like.
Yes indeed. A non-stop parade of deep corruption, routine law breaking, blatant lying over things both huge and trivial, and sleazy personal drama at every turn. Yay! Let's have some more of that.
One doesn't have to like Trump to recognize that you're BSing.
1) Yes, some of his ventures have been failures. Just like MOST BUSINESSES, the majority of which fail. But more of his haven't. How are YOUR businesses doing? Your assertion that he's done nothing but bankrupt businesses is demonstrably false.
2) Screwed vendors? He runs large, sprawling businesses that buy goods and services from thousands of vendors and contractors. People line up to sell his businesses those things, and make money doing so. If he "screwed" more than a small number of them with which he was having disputes over the timing, quality, or delivery of those goods and services, he wouldn't be able to find anyone to sell his businesses what those businesses need to survive. There ARE businesses like that, or were... since such businesses cannot exist for long. Cherry pick away! But your assertion that he's done nothing but screw vendors is demonstrably false.
3) Squander his inheritance? So, that should leave him with less money than he got from his family, right? Which is demonstrably not true, or even close to true. So again, you're lying.
There are plenty of things about him to dislike. Why lie about stuff that's plainly not true?
These Republican manufactured scandals never result in jail time.
You google up a list of people that did do jail time on behalf of the Clintons, as a result of their various scandals getting some investigation. Or the people who have had their lives or liberty altered for doing far less than she and her husband have.
Regardless, do you really think that the Republicans are so clever that they can secretly mind-control Hillary Clinton into disregarding the pleading of State Department IT and security people who tried to get her to use appropriate tools for her job? Do you really think she's so weak-willed that she allowed the Republicans to somehow cause her to lie, repeatedly, about what she did, when, how, and why she did it? Was it the Republicans that somehow tricked her into stonewalling FOIA requests, or somehow fooled her into deciding not to turn over her public records as she was supposed to when she left office?
Are you saying you really support a candidate that is so unable to think for herself that she's willing to act, and direct her staff to act, for years on end, in ways that if exposed would show her to be a foolish, lying, reckless, incompetent person unconcerned with the classified information she handled, and willing to destroy official documents for political reasons? That's your candidate? No wonder you're also willing to lie to support her: it's what she does, and thus what her supporters are forced to do if they're going to cheer for her and pretend they like her. No choice, really. If she's going to assert an alternate reality, you have to go along with it when you sign up to be her shill.
Hey, look! Another fine example of a Hillary supporter, showing their true colors and their inability to articulate any support, whatsoever, for their favorite lying, corrupt candidate. So nice to see consistency from the liberal camp. Nothing if not predictable, especially in their hatred of guys. Would be funny if they weren't so toxic.
The same Trump that you're alleging that about, yes. I'd be curious about your thoughts on Hillary Clinton's deliberate and sustained campaign to destroy the reputations of women who allege - in good numbers, and with lots of other people chiming in - that her husband is a serial abuser of women (and his official power in the process) and rapist. Do you inject your defense, or offense, at Hillary's role in preserving her own prospects of political power by smearing the women her husband assaulted... into other threads here on/.? No? Why not?
If political parties are not the government, how come airforce1 was used in killary's campaign?
Because she was receiving political support from the head of her party (the president). He happens to be in office right now. And the person in that office doesn't fly commercial airlines, he flies in the aircraft that's equipped to protect that office-holder, and which allows that person to conduct the duties of that office while in flight and perhaps under newly developing threats. That might be Marine One or Air Force One. You're not really confused about this, are you?
in other words, it is OK when someone like you kills a minority because other people like you are more than willing to insult everyone's intelligence by pretending that they can justify these murders.
What, out of curiosity, do you think you're accomplishing in the way of some sort of rhetorical victory, by simply making up some BS in direct contradiction of what you just read, pretending something else was said? I get it, you're lazy, and would rather claim a righteous victory over a straw man of your own creation than actually address what was said. But you should understand how much of a tool that makes you, and transparently so to anybody watching. Stop embarrassing yourself.
You're (deliberately, I assume) pretending to misunderstand this. But let's clear up some stuff for you:
1) The DNC is not a political party. It's the committee formed by members of that party to run certain activities (like the events where the party's candidates try to muster more support - as campaign donations, more volunteering, more press coverage, etc) on behalf of the party's members.
2) Political parties are not the government. The Democrats, the Republicans, the Greens, the Communist Party USA... they are all private associations that have nothing to do with the government. The government doesn't charter them, doesn't run them, doesn't tell them how to choose their candidates, or anything else. The government does, of course, tell them (and everyone else) how they're allowed to spend money if they want to maintain their non-profit status and stay out of legal trouble surrounding federal election law. But when one of these private associations, just like the local Boy Scouts troop or the local Save The Whales or Greenpeace groups wants to raise some money, they are perfectly free to...
3) Sell tickets to an event. It might be for a seminar, for an appearance by a popular musical act, a panel discussion with a documentary film director, or an appearance by any attraction, including a celebrity. Which brings us to...
4) The president is a celebrity. If he wants to throw his personal high profile public presence behind a movement or event or cause that he thinks it makes sense to support, he's welcome to. That's not the same as making a policy decision by vetoing a bill, issuing executive orders, choosing which laws to enforce or not, etc. A president showing up at an alumni event held at his school, because he likes and supports his alma mater, is perfectly reasonable - he knows that will increase the odds that alumni interest and donations will go up. It's the same reason that all celebrities appear at such events - their fame and popularity help to attract interest, buzz, and press coverage of something they want to see promoted. Political parties are no different than any other non-profit association of people that have some common goal. They all want and can use more attention and support. And the First Amendment guarantees that the government can't infringe on the rights of people to form such associations, and any citizen - including the commander in chief or Kim Kardashian - as the right to throw their visibility and support behind an association's promotional and fund raising efforts.
So, are you really thinking that when someone buys a ticket to an event (you know, the sort of thing that a group has to spend money to run (have you ever personally organized a large gathering... rented a facility, catered meals, provided everything from janitorial services to security to transportation), that that means the politician who makes an appearance at that event (and event he or she publicly supports), that suddenly that same politician is going to change their view on, say... whether or not to leave more troops in Iraq, whether to sign a budget bill, or whether to name a new person to run the IRS? People are buying tickets to a political party's fund raising event because they already like and agree with the person they're looking forward to seeing there.
So, you're saying that The Police all kill people before they see any threats...
No, just the black ones.
Really. So in millions of police interactions with people every year, The Police kill all the black people they encounter without there being any threat. That explains why good old fashioned murder of black men by other black men is a vanishingly small occurrence by comparison. Woops! That's exactly backwards, isn't it. Yup.
The point is, there is no such thing as "The Police Killing The Black People" - it's a fantasy. There is such a thing as a police officer shooting someone. Police use lethal force more often on white people than they do black people, of course, not to take any of the fun out of the rant for you. Police also work in some very high crime areas that happen to have much larger black populations, and that much higher rate of interacting with black people while also dealing with a more dangerous, higher-crime area of course changes how often force intersects with a given skin color.
We can talk all day long about how places where one cop or two respond to something should probably be four cops or six, so that a given officer isn't wound up nearly so tight, or as likely to fear for his life like that way-out-of-his-league cop in MN that was a jumpy nervous wreck and shot that driver the other day because he misinterpreted the guy's going for his ID. You solve those nerves with more and better backup, and if that doesn't work, you get rid of an incurably nervous cop, and prosecute the ones who should have known/done batter. But you don't say "The Police Kill Black People" like it's some sort of across the board feature of being a cop, or happens everyday. Idiots repeating claims like that are part of the problem, not the solution. It's no different than people who say "computer hackers are pedophiles."
So, you're saying that The Police all kill people before they see any threats. Which cartoon fantasy are you living in, exactly? Are there super spiders, and radiation mutant super crime bosses, too?
You're not using the word "threat" in the same way that someone who has to actually face them learns, by experience, to use that word. Your absurdly broad-brushed painting of what "the police" do is ridiculous.
They are taught to shoot before there is any threat
They wouldn't even have BEEN at the scene in Baton Rouge if the guy in question hadn't been waving a gun around and threatening. That's why they were called. When the arrived, he refused to do as asked. Likewise after being tased, and again after another attempt to subdue him that way. And all 6'-4" and 300 pounds of him, with a gun on him, was not giving up his fighting as they tried doing it the old fashioned way, trying to pin him down. Yeah, there should have been four people on a guy that big who didn't want to go back to jail where he'd spent so much time for his other crimes. But you're really going with "no threat" at all before they had to resort to their fourth way of trying to deal with him?
The Sterling and Castile incidents: brutality or not?
Castile: a very nervous, out-of-his-element cop who misinterpreted the driver reaching for his ID. I'd call that a lethal mistake, possibly rising to the level of manslaughter. But not brutality in the sense that word is usually used.
Sterling: self defense against a 6'-4" 300 pound career criminal who was refusing to do what the police said as they approached him because of a call that he'd been threatening people and waving a gun around. Combative, tased twice to no effect, and continuing to fight on the ground with his hands free while they knew he was armed (which he was, illegally of course). We'll know more as time passes. They weren't beating the guy for fun, they were trying to get him under control, and he was huge enough to make that seem like a very dangerous task, especially after the taser hits were ineffective and he continued to try to fight. I suppose, if the dispatch call said, "Man, brandishing gun and threatening people, and he appears to be taser-proof and way bigger than you'd want to try to tackle while armed with only two cops," they might have rolled up with backup and things may have gone better.
If the guy had simply done what they'd asked right away, or done it after the first attempt to tase him when refused, or after the second attempt to tase him when he refused, or after they tried to pin him down and he refused, then he'd be very alive, and of course very much going right back to prison where he'd spent quite a bit of time already - which is probably why he was so inclined to fight the police in the first place. Brutality? That was his thing, not the cops' thing. No way that's how either officer would have wanted it to play out. But they also don't want to be dead from trying to do their jobs.
We all know what the 2nd Amendment says, and it means exactly what I said it does. If you had the intellectual courage and honesty and weren't too lazy to bother reading the letters, speeches, and writings surrounding the drafting, debate, and voting around that amendment, you'd know that. The founders had just lived through having the crown do things like station troops in people's houses, take away their personal weapons, and worse. Most of them (the founders) were opposed to there being any sort of standing military at all, but - given the inevitable conflicts that would arise - understood that there was likely going to be standing force at least at the local militia level, if not at the federal level.
In anticipation of that, they went out of their way in the Bill of Rights to make sure that citizens were protected from exactly the sort of military tyranny (even at the village level) that they'd all experienced so recently. They expressly prohibited the government from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms, even though a well regulated militia might encourage some people, like the sponsor/financier of such a militia or people like you, from proclaiming that since there WAS such a thing in the town/county/city/state that it was reasonable to prevent private citizens from being armed. The entire amendment is written in anticipation of people just like you. Just like the rest of the Bill of Rights, including things like the 1st Amendment. is written to PREVENT government from infringing on liberties.
You're the one making unsustainable claims about it, when the actual words are not even coming close to your notion.
It's sustainable because the language is plain, and more importantly, the people who wrote it explained themselves and their reasoning in a large body of supporting federalist papers, correspondence and more even though you're trying to wish it away.
The rest of your holier-than-thou fake condescension is as craven as usual, because you know all of this and you're simply hoping that some other part of the audience here will be as uninformed as you're pretending to be. You're not nearly as crafty and clever as you think you are, but what really matters is that you're exactly as disingenuous as you appear to be.
When people unjustifiably kill someone, use existing laws to punish them. When police have to work in areas that are completely overrun with a local crime problem, give them the support and tools and respect they need to do it without having to fear for their lives every time they answer a call. When the actual problem that results in the vast majority of black men being killed is other black men killing them, actually say that out loud so that when things go wrong in a tiny fraction of the inevitable (in a high crime area) frequent interactions between the local police and those with whom they have to interact, there's some perspective on why the police are understandably always on edge. Those that can't handle working eight or twelve hours a day under a constant threat to their lives should get a different job. Those that can't understand what it means to work under that constant threat should shut up until they do. Go on a ride-along. Sit down for a few hours and actually get to know someone who has to deal with a non-stop parade of domestic violence, people's lives wrecked, drug-addled and combative idiots taking swings at them, and so on.
If a cop acts unreasonably and hurts or kills someone, we have well established reasonable means to prosecute them. Many have lost their jobs and even their liberty for exactly that reason. If hundreds of career criminals are responsible for hundreds of deaths in a handful of specific urban areas, and movements that want to blame the police for that atmosphere are given credibility in the press, be a voice that points out reality, instead of being a phony that blames the police for brutality when it's one group of thugs killing another group of thugs day in, day out, and the cops have to wade in and deal with both parties and the surrounding population that supports and hides the people doing the killing.
now size is a measure of guilt and punishable by death
No, size is a factor in trying to decide if you are at risk while fighting with someone who has demonstrated that he will not stop fighting with police, even after being tazed twice. Do you consider all acts of self defense to be "punishment?" If I break into your house and come at you with a kitchen knife, and you kill me because you're defending yourself, do you consider that punishment because I'm 6'-2"? No? I see.
Okay then...guess we don't have to change anything. Carry on.
See? Even more juvenile, lazy, false dichotomy intellectual dishonesty. A sure sign that the actual underlying problems that drive anything approaching a statistically meaningful issue to address are just too far outside of your paralyzing infection of acute political correctness to even say out loud. Typical: either all cops are evil people out to kill blacks, or there's nothing to talk about. Thanks for that insight.
The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation.
No. The Second Amendment was written to remind the government that citizens have the natural right to defend themselves. The amendment says, in essence, "We know we're going to need some sort of standing military, but the existence of that doesn't give the government the power to infringe on the personal right to keep and bear arms.
As for the rest of your rant: millions (millions!) of new people have been buying guns over the last years out of concern that nanny state types will act in some way to prevent them from doing so. Despite the unprecedentedly huge number of guns being sold, violent crimes of ALL types, including crimes committed with guns (even illegally possessed ones) have been going steadily DOWN for the last 30 years. Your entire premise is flawed. What you're seeing is social media and the 24 hour news cycle making things look worse than they are. Do you have any idea what the murder and violence of, say, the 1970's and 80's would have looked like if amplified non-stop in your awareness they way it is now?
The only reason you're saying the 2nd Amendment is "failing" is because you're (deliberately, I suspect) completely misunderstanding its meaning.
If you don't remove the stimulus, it will just keep happening.
For some people, the "stimulus" to committing murder is that they're crazy. Or that they're unhappy that they don't have a Mercedes. Or that someone woman got mad about being stalked and harassed. Or that someone else is selling meth on their turf, and they want to kill that person and all his friends. Or that a kid won't join MS13, and they're going to teach him and his family a lesson. When people without their heads screwed on straight, or who have adopted a twisted moral code, decide that they're going to get and stay violent, lethal force sometimes plays a necessary role in ending an immediate or ongoing threat to life.
Cops show up under all sorts of unknown circumstances, putting their lives on the line while dealing everything from FALSE reports of someone else's violence, to actual for-real crazies bent on and in the middle of destroying other people's lives. Your delight in painting "them" with a single, broad brush shows your deliberate intellectual dishonesty on the entire topic.
Slashdot Mirror
The many things that the State Department's Inspector General and the FBI have pointed out were wrong about her avoiding public scrutiny of her official documents, regardless of the FBI director's conclusion that he would not expect a federal prosecutor working for Obama/Lynch to be certain they could convict on the more obviously criminal elements of that, have nothing to do with why Sanders called her unfit for office. He had his own reasons for that. As you well know.
The FBI didn't "clear" her of wrong doing, they simply chose not to suggest an indictment - even as they pointed out her long series of lies and carelessness throughout the entire thing - both as she (to be generous) skirted her responsibilities while Secretary, and while under oath later as she provided false answers about her conduct before congress. If anything, Sanders was hesitant to discuss her obvious lies about her time as SoS while the facts were still being discovered. The FBI just described the facts, which include direct, blow-by-blow refutations of her many direct, purposeful lies on the subject. But they weren't looking into whether or not she perjured herself, they were looking into whether or not there were things like classified material rattling around on her personal mail computer at her house. Which it turns out there was, and many other things she lied about.
So, Sanders' previous observation about her unfitness for office (which was all about her posture on voting for the war, her beholdeness to large financial industry campaign supporters, and her personally enriching her family from millions of dollars of foreign government donations to her family business while those countries had business before her as SoS), would only change if:
1) He never meant it in the first place, which makes him a liar. Or,
2) He suddenly thinks those things didn't happen. But he's not that confused, since of course they DID happen. Or,
3) These things were never really all that important to him, which makes him a hypocrite, and his assessment about her unfitness for office was him being a dishonest blowhard on the subject, and he actually likes her values, her decision to go to war in Iraq, and the way she raises money for campaigns and has become personally very wealthy. Which would make almost all of his speeches lies.
He didn't say, "I like her better than Trump," and he hasn't said, "I like her despite the fact we all know she's a corrupt liar." This is just him angling for more air time for his socialist agenda, that's all. He's willing to look hypocritical or even deceitful in exchange for that.
So, you're sticking with "has done nothing except bankrupt" "has done nothing except screw vendors" and the like? That's your actual assessment? That's how uninformed you're choosing to be? Or do you actually know better, but you're choosing to lie because you're more comfortable with Hillary's lying, incompetence, and official corruption than you are with your dislike for Trump? At least be honest, instead of lying about it.
What happened to "she's not fit" for the office? In the time since he said that about her, she's been shown to have been either wildly incompetent or ever more deceitful in her relationship with both her job and her supporters. What's she got on you, Bernie?
You must have missed the House Republican Benghazi report that cleared Hillary of any wrongdoing
You're confusing "wrongdoing" in terms of causing the deaths of our people there (nope, no legal wrongdoing there, just indifference and incompetence) with the parade of lies offered up by her and her boss and the rest of his team about what happened. The events there were a bad fit with the narrative he was using in those weeks right before an election (the terrorists are on the run!) so despite knowing exactly what happened merely hours after it happened - as made clear in Hillary's own words to her family and in communications with foreign governments - her and her boss still went for weeks spinning out their phony narrative about it being just a street protest out of control. They knew that was a blatant lie even as they said the words over and over again, and sent people out to repeat those lies to the media over and over again.
You know all of this, but you're deliberately trying to distract by changing the subject to legal/official culpability for the deaths, instead of the display of dishonesty and bus-throwing-under that Clinton and Obama both indulged in afterwards all in the name of holding onto political power. Your own knowing better, but none the less willingness to continue with that bit of deception makes you just as bad as them. But since you're shilling for them, you don't have a choice, I suppose.
But we've already seen a Clinton in the White House so we have a pretty good idea what that would look like.
Yes indeed. A non-stop parade of deep corruption, routine law breaking, blatant lying over things both huge and trivial, and sleazy personal drama at every turn. Yay! Let's have some more of that.
One doesn't have to like Trump to recognize that you're BSing.
... since such businesses cannot exist for long. Cherry pick away! But your assertion that he's done nothing but screw vendors is demonstrably false.
1) Yes, some of his ventures have been failures. Just like MOST BUSINESSES, the majority of which fail. But more of his haven't. How are YOUR businesses doing? Your assertion that he's done nothing but bankrupt businesses is demonstrably false.
2) Screwed vendors? He runs large, sprawling businesses that buy goods and services from thousands of vendors and contractors. People line up to sell his businesses those things, and make money doing so. If he "screwed" more than a small number of them with which he was having disputes over the timing, quality, or delivery of those goods and services, he wouldn't be able to find anyone to sell his businesses what those businesses need to survive. There ARE businesses like that, or were
3) Squander his inheritance? So, that should leave him with less money than he got from his family, right? Which is demonstrably not true, or even close to true. So again, you're lying.
There are plenty of things about him to dislike. Why lie about stuff that's plainly not true?
These Republican manufactured scandals never result in jail time.
You google up a list of people that did do jail time on behalf of the Clintons, as a result of their various scandals getting some investigation. Or the people who have had their lives or liberty altered for doing far less than she and her husband have.
Regardless, do you really think that the Republicans are so clever that they can secretly mind-control Hillary Clinton into disregarding the pleading of State Department IT and security people who tried to get her to use appropriate tools for her job? Do you really think she's so weak-willed that she allowed the Republicans to somehow cause her to lie, repeatedly, about what she did, when, how, and why she did it? Was it the Republicans that somehow tricked her into stonewalling FOIA requests, or somehow fooled her into deciding not to turn over her public records as she was supposed to when she left office?
Are you saying you really support a candidate that is so unable to think for herself that she's willing to act, and direct her staff to act, for years on end, in ways that if exposed would show her to be a foolish, lying, reckless, incompetent person unconcerned with the classified information she handled, and willing to destroy official documents for political reasons? That's your candidate? No wonder you're also willing to lie to support her: it's what she does, and thus what her supporters are forced to do if they're going to cheer for her and pretend they like her. No choice, really. If she's going to assert an alternate reality, you have to go along with it when you sign up to be her shill.
Hey, look! Another fine example of a Hillary supporter, showing their true colors and their inability to articulate any support, whatsoever, for their favorite lying, corrupt candidate. So nice to see consistency from the liberal camp. Nothing if not predictable, especially in their hatred of guys. Would be funny if they weren't so toxic.
But the law he broke is wrong, unconstitutional, and should be overturned.
Laws against conspiracy to harass and intimidate are unconstitutional? Do tell.
The same Trump that you're alleging that about, yes. I'd be curious about your thoughts on Hillary Clinton's deliberate and sustained campaign to destroy the reputations of women who allege - in good numbers, and with lots of other people chiming in - that her husband is a serial abuser of women (and his official power in the process) and rapist. Do you inject your defense, or offense, at Hillary's role in preserving her own prospects of political power by smearing the women her husband assaulted ... into other threads here on /.? No? Why not?
If political parties are not the government, how come airforce1 was used in killary's campaign?
Because she was receiving political support from the head of her party (the president). He happens to be in office right now. And the person in that office doesn't fly commercial airlines, he flies in the aircraft that's equipped to protect that office-holder, and which allows that person to conduct the duties of that office while in flight and perhaps under newly developing threats. That might be Marine One or Air Force One. You're not really confused about this, are you?
in other words, it is OK when someone like you kills a minority because other people like you are more than willing to insult everyone's intelligence by pretending that they can justify these murders.
What, out of curiosity, do you think you're accomplishing in the way of some sort of rhetorical victory, by simply making up some BS in direct contradiction of what you just read, pretending something else was said? I get it, you're lazy, and would rather claim a righteous victory over a straw man of your own creation than actually address what was said. But you should understand how much of a tool that makes you, and transparently so to anybody watching. Stop embarrassing yourself.
You're (deliberately, I assume) pretending to misunderstand this. But let's clear up some stuff for you:
... they are all private associations that have nothing to do with the government. The government doesn't charter them, doesn't run them, doesn't tell them how to choose their candidates, or anything else. The government does, of course, tell them (and everyone else) how they're allowed to spend money if they want to maintain their non-profit status and stay out of legal trouble surrounding federal election law. But when one of these private associations, just like the local Boy Scouts troop or the local Save The Whales or Greenpeace groups wants to raise some money, they are perfectly free to...
... rented a facility, catered meals, provided everything from janitorial services to security to transportation), that that means the politician who makes an appearance at that event (and event he or she publicly supports), that suddenly that same politician is going to change their view on, say ... whether or not to leave more troops in Iraq, whether to sign a budget bill, or whether to name a new person to run the IRS? People are buying tickets to a political party's fund raising event because they already like and agree with the person they're looking forward to seeing there.
1) The DNC is not a political party. It's the committee formed by members of that party to run certain activities (like the events where the party's candidates try to muster more support - as campaign donations, more volunteering, more press coverage, etc) on behalf of the party's members.
2) Political parties are not the government. The Democrats, the Republicans, the Greens, the Communist Party USA
3) Sell tickets to an event. It might be for a seminar, for an appearance by a popular musical act, a panel discussion with a documentary film director, or an appearance by any attraction, including a celebrity. Which brings us to...
4) The president is a celebrity. If he wants to throw his personal high profile public presence behind a movement or event or cause that he thinks it makes sense to support, he's welcome to. That's not the same as making a policy decision by vetoing a bill, issuing executive orders, choosing which laws to enforce or not, etc. A president showing up at an alumni event held at his school, because he likes and supports his alma mater, is perfectly reasonable - he knows that will increase the odds that alumni interest and donations will go up. It's the same reason that all celebrities appear at such events - their fame and popularity help to attract interest, buzz, and press coverage of something they want to see promoted. Political parties are no different than any other non-profit association of people that have some common goal. They all want and can use more attention and support. And the First Amendment guarantees that the government can't infringe on the rights of people to form such associations, and any citizen - including the commander in chief or Kim Kardashian - as the right to throw their visibility and support behind an association's promotional and fund raising efforts.
So, are you really thinking that when someone buys a ticket to an event (you know, the sort of thing that a group has to spend money to run (have you ever personally organized a large gathering
By people you mean the property owners leaving their property in a state of disarray not suitable for proper Pokemon chasing, right?!
This is the only logical conclusion I can come to from your comment.
If that's the only way you can see it - that everything is always someone else's fault - then you're part of the problem.
So, you're saying that The Police all kill people before they see any threats...
No, just the black ones.
Really. So in millions of police interactions with people every year, The Police kill all the black people they encounter without there being any threat. That explains why good old fashioned murder of black men by other black men is a vanishingly small occurrence by comparison. Woops! That's exactly backwards, isn't it. Yup.
The point is, there is no such thing as "The Police Killing The Black People" - it's a fantasy. There is such a thing as a police officer shooting someone. Police use lethal force more often on white people than they do black people, of course, not to take any of the fun out of the rant for you. Police also work in some very high crime areas that happen to have much larger black populations, and that much higher rate of interacting with black people while also dealing with a more dangerous, higher-crime area of course changes how often force intersects with a given skin color.
We can talk all day long about how places where one cop or two respond to something should probably be four cops or six, so that a given officer isn't wound up nearly so tight, or as likely to fear for his life like that way-out-of-his-league cop in MN that was a jumpy nervous wreck and shot that driver the other day because he misinterpreted the guy's going for his ID. You solve those nerves with more and better backup, and if that doesn't work, you get rid of an incurably nervous cop, and prosecute the ones who should have known/done batter. But you don't say "The Police Kill Black People" like it's some sort of across the board feature of being a cop, or happens everyday. Idiots repeating claims like that are part of the problem, not the solution. It's no different than people who say "computer hackers are pedophiles."
So, you're saying that The Police all kill people before they see any threats. Which cartoon fantasy are you living in, exactly? Are there super spiders, and radiation mutant super crime bosses, too?
You're not using the word "threat" in the same way that someone who has to actually face them learns, by experience, to use that word. Your absurdly broad-brushed painting of what "the police" do is ridiculous.
They are taught to shoot before there is any threat
They wouldn't even have BEEN at the scene in Baton Rouge if the guy in question hadn't been waving a gun around and threatening. That's why they were called. When the arrived, he refused to do as asked. Likewise after being tased, and again after another attempt to subdue him that way. And all 6'-4" and 300 pounds of him, with a gun on him, was not giving up his fighting as they tried doing it the old fashioned way, trying to pin him down. Yeah, there should have been four people on a guy that big who didn't want to go back to jail where he'd spent so much time for his other crimes. But you're really going with "no threat" at all before they had to resort to their fourth way of trying to deal with him?
The Sterling and Castile incidents: brutality or not?
Castile: a very nervous, out-of-his-element cop who misinterpreted the driver reaching for his ID. I'd call that a lethal mistake, possibly rising to the level of manslaughter. But not brutality in the sense that word is usually used.
Sterling: self defense against a 6'-4" 300 pound career criminal who was refusing to do what the police said as they approached him because of a call that he'd been threatening people and waving a gun around. Combative, tased twice to no effect, and continuing to fight on the ground with his hands free while they knew he was armed (which he was, illegally of course). We'll know more as time passes. They weren't beating the guy for fun, they were trying to get him under control, and he was huge enough to make that seem like a very dangerous task, especially after the taser hits were ineffective and he continued to try to fight. I suppose, if the dispatch call said, "Man, brandishing gun and threatening people, and he appears to be taser-proof and way bigger than you'd want to try to tackle while armed with only two cops," they might have rolled up with backup and things may have gone better.
If the guy had simply done what they'd asked right away, or done it after the first attempt to tase him when refused, or after the second attempt to tase him when he refused, or after they tried to pin him down and he refused, then he'd be very alive, and of course very much going right back to prison where he'd spent quite a bit of time already - which is probably why he was so inclined to fight the police in the first place. Brutality? That was his thing, not the cops' thing. No way that's how either officer would have wanted it to play out. But they also don't want to be dead from trying to do their jobs.
In anticipation of that, they went out of their way in the Bill of Rights to make sure that citizens were protected from exactly the sort of military tyranny (even at the village level) that they'd all experienced so recently. They expressly prohibited the government from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms, even though a well regulated militia might encourage some people, like the sponsor/financier of such a militia or people like you, from proclaiming that since there WAS such a thing in the town/county/city/state that it was reasonable to prevent private citizens from being armed. The entire amendment is written in anticipation of people just like you. Just like the rest of the Bill of Rights, including things like the 1st Amendment. is written to PREVENT government from infringing on liberties.
You're the one making unsustainable claims about it, when the actual words are not even coming close to your notion.
It's sustainable because the language is plain, and more importantly, the people who wrote it explained themselves and their reasoning in a large body of supporting federalist papers, correspondence and more even though you're trying to wish it away.
The rest of your holier-than-thou fake condescension is as craven as usual, because you know all of this and you're simply hoping that some other part of the audience here will be as uninformed as you're pretending to be. You're not nearly as crafty and clever as you think you are, but what really matters is that you're exactly as disingenuous as you appear to be.
When people unjustifiably kill someone, use existing laws to punish them. When police have to work in areas that are completely overrun with a local crime problem, give them the support and tools and respect they need to do it without having to fear for their lives every time they answer a call. When the actual problem that results in the vast majority of black men being killed is other black men killing them, actually say that out loud so that when things go wrong in a tiny fraction of the inevitable (in a high crime area) frequent interactions between the local police and those with whom they have to interact, there's some perspective on why the police are understandably always on edge. Those that can't handle working eight or twelve hours a day under a constant threat to their lives should get a different job. Those that can't understand what it means to work under that constant threat should shut up until they do. Go on a ride-along. Sit down for a few hours and actually get to know someone who has to deal with a non-stop parade of domestic violence, people's lives wrecked, drug-addled and combative idiots taking swings at them, and so on.
If a cop acts unreasonably and hurts or kills someone, we have well established reasonable means to prosecute them. Many have lost their jobs and even their liberty for exactly that reason. If hundreds of career criminals are responsible for hundreds of deaths in a handful of specific urban areas, and movements that want to blame the police for that atmosphere are given credibility in the press, be a voice that points out reality, instead of being a phony that blames the police for brutality when it's one group of thugs killing another group of thugs day in, day out, and the cops have to wade in and deal with both parties and the surrounding population that supports and hides the people doing the killing.
There's a few things. Want more?
now size is a measure of guilt and punishable by death
No, size is a factor in trying to decide if you are at risk while fighting with someone who has demonstrated that he will not stop fighting with police, even after being tazed twice. Do you consider all acts of self defense to be "punishment?" If I break into your house and come at you with a kitchen knife, and you kill me because you're defending yourself, do you consider that punishment because I'm 6'-2"? No? I see.
Okay then...guess we don't have to change anything. Carry on.
See? Even more juvenile, lazy, false dichotomy intellectual dishonesty. A sure sign that the actual underlying problems that drive anything approaching a statistically meaningful issue to address are just too far outside of your paralyzing infection of acute political correctness to even say out loud. Typical: either all cops are evil people out to kill blacks, or there's nothing to talk about. Thanks for that insight.
The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation.
No. The Second Amendment was written to remind the government that citizens have the natural right to defend themselves. The amendment says, in essence, "We know we're going to need some sort of standing military, but the existence of that doesn't give the government the power to infringe on the personal right to keep and bear arms.
As for the rest of your rant: millions (millions!) of new people have been buying guns over the last years out of concern that nanny state types will act in some way to prevent them from doing so. Despite the unprecedentedly huge number of guns being sold, violent crimes of ALL types, including crimes committed with guns (even illegally possessed ones) have been going steadily DOWN for the last 30 years. Your entire premise is flawed. What you're seeing is social media and the 24 hour news cycle making things look worse than they are. Do you have any idea what the murder and violence of, say, the 1970's and 80's would have looked like if amplified non-stop in your awareness they way it is now?
The only reason you're saying the 2nd Amendment is "failing" is because you're (deliberately, I suspect) completely misunderstanding its meaning.
If you don't remove the stimulus, it will just keep happening.
For some people, the "stimulus" to committing murder is that they're crazy. Or that they're unhappy that they don't have a Mercedes. Or that someone woman got mad about being stalked and harassed. Or that someone else is selling meth on their turf, and they want to kill that person and all his friends. Or that a kid won't join MS13, and they're going to teach him and his family a lesson. When people without their heads screwed on straight, or who have adopted a twisted moral code, decide that they're going to get and stay violent, lethal force sometimes plays a necessary role in ending an immediate or ongoing threat to life.
Cops show up under all sorts of unknown circumstances, putting their lives on the line while dealing everything from FALSE reports of someone else's violence, to actual for-real crazies bent on and in the middle of destroying other people's lives. Your delight in painting "them" with a single, broad brush shows your deliberate intellectual dishonesty on the entire topic.