Proboscis

What I don't get is the following: according to the report on the BBC, the teacher who was sensitive to the feelings of Muslims, invited the Muslim students to leave the class when the cartoons were being shown. So it could not have been blasphemy if no Muslim students did not see it.

But the part that I really do not get is that none of these jihadists and even countries that are run my Islamic theocratic governments seem to be bothered by the treatment of Uighurs, forcing them to recant Allah. Surely that is much much worse than a mere cartoon, no matter how blasphemous!

16 hours ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

I think we're flogging a dead horse here.

 

Up to the Thais who they let in at the end of the day as harsh as it is for those trapped overseas.

 

Perhaps a wake up call to those of use that think they have any sort of permanence here.

What about Australia? THe UN has castigated that country for reducing the number of people per day entering the country so that thousands of Australian citizens are abandonned abroad. Despite what the Australian authorities say about supporting them, there are plenty of reports on the BBC and elsewhere of Australians being told by their embassy to go to the local agencies and beg for help there. While I do not agree with Thailand excluding the spouses of citizens in this way, at least they do not exclude citizens.

I wonder if anyone has done a study on just how far a candidate can sink in the popular vote and yet win the presential election. Trump managed it by over 2 million votes last time.

Another part about the USA that I don't understand is how fragile their democracy is, given that it has been around for a few hundred years. It seems to be so easy to gerrymander (have you seen the shape of some of those counties!); even the members of the electoral college do not have to vote for the candidate that the majority in the state voted for! There seems to be no effective control on money in politics - the government of the USA works for the lobby, not for the people. Even the Supreme Court is subject to dark money in the form of "friends of the court," namely attorneys who address the court on one side or the other. Unfortunately, the general public do not get to see who is paying some of those attorneys who squirrel away looking for some hook in a law which could be used to declare it unconstitutional, thereby taking away anything like medical cover for someone, a woman's right to choose whether to continue with a pregnancy or your rights as a consumer. Apparently the dark money spent on these "friends of the court" amounted to $250million - not peanuts. And what about the power of Governors to reduce the number of drop ballot boxes so that people in certain countries have to drive hundreds of miles to vote! And the long, nasty and shameful history that is still being played out of voter supression. Where is the legislation for these sins against democracy?

Stop talking about what could be and should be and just fix these basic features of your democractic system and then other countries might respect you more!

3 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

They boast how they will do the wet work Democrats are too genteel to do. 

 

Are you advocating for physical violence against the president?

 

https://www.definitions.net/definition/wetwork

Wetwork or wet work is a euphemism for murder or assassination, alluding to spilling blood.

The people who are saying these things belong to the Lincoln Project. They are Republicans. Please take it up with them.

I can understand why Republicans are so angry with their leadership. The party that so proudly led the fight against slavery is now up to its neck in gerrymandering, voter supression and lying about the pandemic. Not to mention the number of dead people, the vast numbers losing their jobs and businesses while the swamp got bigger under Trump.

Even the words used by the DoJ, "fiduciary and contractual," belong to civil law, not criminal law. If the so-called wronged party sues, and in this case it is the USA, the USA has to show how it has been damaged by the contents of the book. My guess is that this is a political stroke by the Trump influenced DoJ and the case has no legs. It will be very difficult to establish harm to the USA or the Federal Government from this book. I mean, the book has been published - so show us the harm between before the book was published and after it was published.

The fact that the DoJ draws a parallel between this book and that of Bolton's book says it all. Bolton was the subject of a breach of contract based on an allegation that he had not received the result of the security review. Given that at least one review had been done and another subsequently started by the White House, the Texas judge agreed that the book could proceed. The declaration by Trump that every conversation with him is by definition classified was not taken on board.

Having lost the breach of contract case, the DoJ empanneled a Grand Jury, said to have started in September 15th, to investigate whether there are indeed instances of classified information in Bolton's book. Given that the first review did not find any, that is indeed a bit of a reach. Given that the law on classified information is as creaky as hell and some of it is probably unconstitutional, there is little chance that this procedure is anything more than a 'hail mary' and probably just a way of punishing Bolton and keeping Trump happy.

So, using the Bolton case as a parallel gets the Melania book nowhere. Even if the book demonstrably damages Melania, the case brought by the Feds cannot appeal to that. They have to show actual damage to the country. A significant reach, to say the least.

1 hour ago, thaibeachlovers said:

I watched a couple of hours of the committee hearings. She is cool, calm, knowledgeable and unflappable, IMO. She dealt with the attacks on her about Roe vs Wade, and the ACA very well. Quite rightly she refused to answer questions that tried to make her say how she'd vote on a theoretical case.

An impressive person that would make an excellent justice IMO.

 

One of the Democrats on the committee spent almost her entire time talking and allowed Barrett very little time to answer. Not an impressive use of her time IMO.

 

The entire uproar from the Dems seems to be about abortion and the ACA, but she will not be the only justice and in any event the SCOTUS isn't just about abortion and health care.

Assuming that you are not a Troll, it is an absolute given that any person put up for the supreme court of the USA has to be qualified. To be qualified, they have to be highly experienced and highly intelligent and, to use your word, impressive. Otherwise they would not have reached even the previous levels in the judiciary.

And yes, I would agree that she is probably, by her own standards, a good person. She has adopted two black children and understands the issues about race well. But here is a problem that many feminists do not really grasp, which is that middle-class women with good access to health care and good education do not need as much access to abortion as poor, uneducated and underpriveleged women. Middle-class women will have better access to the "morning-after" pill (which this Supreme Court candidate is also against) and reliable contraception. Middle class women will have more stable home lives, will be able to live independently etc, all of which plays into their choices when having sex.

While the candidate for the Supreme Court is correct when she says that Congress legislates and that the Court does not make law, the truth is that the Court can and does find laws that were passed by Congress as unconstitutional and are thrown out. Often this is because of a part of the law, not because of the intent of the law. And in this way, we end up with the court changing the legal landscape. If you don't believe it, tell it to all those people who will no longer have medical insurance when the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. They will know

8 hours ago, TopDeadSenter said:

The narrative here is still very fluid.

 

"Breonna Taylor's boyfriend said SHE opened fire on cops during no-knock warrant before changing his story"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8799423/Breonna-Taylor-cops-knocked-three-times-grand-jury-testimony-reveals.html

 

 I believe the police's account of events. And the surefire takeaway from these events is to co-operate when encountering police. Wherever and whenever. 

ALL the witnesses say there was no knock. You are talking about what would have appeared to those sleeping inside, in effect, a home invasion by several armed men. What were they supposed to do?

This whole thing stinks but is simply an example of what goes on in local law enforcement in the USA. Policemen talking about only realizing after the fact that they had started firing their guns. That indicates complete lack of training. There is a world of difference between giving a security guard a gun to wear on his holster in case someone comes at him/her with a gun and the sort of training required for a night-time raid on a drug house in a high crime area.

If it was what they said it was, a drug den with armed drug-dealers inside, it should have been a SWAT team, highly training for such a raid. If it was a knock on the door to deliver a warrant, it should have been that, a knock on the door, announcing the police and waiting until someone answered the door and presenting the warrant. The whole thing was ill-conceived from the start, seemed to be spur of the moment, led by an inexperienced person, carried out by untrained personnel.

The fact that the prosecutors steered the Grand Jury away from obvious charges (and by steered I mean ensured such charges were unavailable) says it all. Law Enforcement is being run by police unions in the USA. They fund the elections of states attorneys, some judges (thats the way it runs in some jurisdictions), local mayors etc. Money does not go into training. You have guys with psychological issues who, in police uniform, are carrying around highly dangerous equipment that they are either ill-trained to use or ill-suited for it. It is almost impossible to indict they for anything as long as they were on duty at the time because their buddies will stand up for them (no matter what they did!), they control much if not all of the evidence (in the form of camera footage etc and can just say they "forgot" to switch on or it malfunctioned) and city/county administrations and prosecutors just fall into line and corruptly say they did nothing wrong. The whole thing is a mess and very corrupt. And that is before you begin to discuss matters of race.

11 hours ago, CG1 Blue said:

To me it sounds like Gove is simply warning companies to prepare, make sure paperwork is in order and make any necessary procedural changes. If companies ignore the advice there will be hold ups. Why anti-Brexiters have to be such drama queens over simple advisory announcements I'll never know. 

Do you include the Conservative government as drama queens too? They are the ones who have bought a huge plot and changed the local planning laws so as to have a huge truck park at Ashford.

7 hours ago, nauseus said:

The fact the Thatcher manged to get a rebate proves that we were being ripped off from the start.

 

Blair manged to give some of this back and if we had stayed in then it would have disappeared entirely. 

 

Your rebate figure is wrong, as is your so-called "shortfall" theory - if we pay no contributions we will keep about 13 billion straight away.

Not quite. Although you will keep the 13 billion, you will either have to pay out for all the programs that the EU provides in the UK or not provide those programs. The programs include regional aid, agricultural subsidies, educational programs and much much more. But the really huge loss will be in trade, including the loss of jobs in exporting industries and the hike in costs of imports. Far more than the miserable 13 billion that you worry about will be wiped off the GDP of the country in 2021 if there is a no deal Brexit. Good luck with that.

14 hours ago, 3NUMBAS said:

the eu pigs are spewing even more bile as they near the cutoff date and their cash cow UK is gone forever.. the germans will have to make up the shortfall and they dont like it

I thing you might be mistaken. You must remember that the EU (which means the other member states tax payers) have had to pay just one country, the UK, a rebate ever since Mrs Thatcher demanded it and got it based on the negotiation tactics that were available at the time. Yes, that is a rebate, in 2018 of 6.6billion Euros. After leaving, there will be no rebate money going from the EU to the UK. THe British taxpayers will have to make up that shortfall themselves. Britain had an excellent deal that other countries were envious of. Now they have a shortfall.

Look, no one is absolutly delighted with their government and there are plenty of complaints against each member state government and the EU commission too. But member state citizens do know where their bread is buttered. Of course, post Brexit the French may have to pay more for their shrimp and the Dutch for their white fish. But the cars can be made elsewhere and Europeans will console themselves with craft beer and sharp cheese that is not made in the UK if the UK product is not available or too expensive. The Irish will suffer most as they will have to either face enormous delays when sending their products out of the EU (into the UK) and then back into the EU (when they leave the UK) due to geography but I hear that they have already purchased large "RoRo" ships to bring trucks straight from the Republic to mainland Europe. Besides the Irish still remember the export cartels that drove down agricultural prices they faced from independence until they joined the EEC - on joining the EEC the price of cattle doubled, doubled again within 6 months and jumped again soon afterwards.

And so life, post-Brexit, will go on. The approx 450 million people of the EU will carry on while the 65 million of the UK will probably get poorer. I say probably but with Covid-19 this is so close to certainty that you would be hard pressed to get a bookie to give you odds. But remember, not a single person left in the EU wanted the UK to leave and no one outside the UK pressured you into it.