US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2470

On October 30 2015 12:38 notesfromunderground wrote:


Yes, this was precisely the point I was making. Thank you for clarifying.



Oh yes I can! I watch them and listen to them speak and maybe I ask them a question and then I can tell how smart they are. It's sort of a professional skill.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will in the coming days outline what her campaign describes as an "extensive agenda" of criminal justice system reforms, starting with suggested sentencing changes and a racial profiling law.

Clinton will be in Atlanta on Friday to launch "African Americans for Hillary." At the event, she will begin rolling out her criminal justice proposals, which will focus on policing, incarceration and re-entry to society. She will then travel to Charleston, South Carolina, for a dinner hosted by the African American rights group NAACP.

Clinton's proposals will focus on ending what she has called the "era of mass incarceration" that has disproportionately affected communities of color.

In Atlanta, Clinton will call for equal prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine offenders and legislation that bans federal, state and local law enforcement from relying on ethnicity when initiating routine investigations, her campaign said.

The U.S. Congress in 2010 passed a law, signed by President Barack Obama, that reduced the sentencing-length disparity for crack versus powder cocaine offenses from a ratio of 100-1 to 18-1. Clinton will call for equal sentences.

On October 31 2015 00:21 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Called it. You can set you watch to what Sanders says in a stump speech and what Clinton will mimic. Also noteworthy that she is calling for a reform setup in part by her husband.



Source

On October 31 2015 00:47 xDaunt wrote:
Hasn't Hillary also touted in the past that she likes to be tough on crime?

On October 31 2015 01:31 Danglars wrote:
I don't really see that as inspired by Sanders. Both Clintons have always drifted to align with the NAACP and mainstream leftist thought on black America. It's as new as '92.

On October 31 2015 02:37 frazzle wrote:

So mainstream rightist thought is we need more blacks in prison?

On October 31 2015 02:28 Mercy13 wrote:
I'm kind of surprised they did though... What energizes the base more then watching the "MSM" launch petty attacks against the candidates?

A lot of the questions were actually pretty good, but were ruined by unnecessary insults.

On October 31 2015 02:45 ragz_gt wrote:


More that they don't think there is a need to be less Black people in prison.

On October 31 2015 02:45 ragz_gt wrote:


More that they don't think there is a need to be less Black people in prison.

Leading US environmental campaigners have joined a diverse line-up of pressure groups to demand a federal investigation into allegations that the oil giant ExxonMobil illegally covered up the truth about climate change.

Earlier in the week, first Bernie Sanders and then Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, called for the US government to announce an official investigation.

On Friday morning, 350.org, an environmental movement, issued a letter signed by climate campaigners, civil rights organizations, indigenous people’s groups and others, calling on US attorney general Loretta Lynch to investigate.

The letter cited “revelations that the company knew about climate change as early as the 1970s, but chose to mislead the public about the crisis in order to maximize their profits from fossil fuels”.

The letter was signed by groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, as well as bodies such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, which promotes environmental and economic justice issues affecting indigenous communities.

The Foundation of Women in Hip Hop, which has a stated goal of “sharing a love of the arts” and influencing perceptions about the roles of women involved with hip-hop music, also signed the letter. So did the National Audubon Society, which seeks to protect birds and their habitats, and the Ecumenical Poverty Initiative, which aims to “mobilise the faith community to end the scandal of poverty in the US”.

Leaders of the 49 campaign groups signed the letter, which charged: “The corporation knew about the dangers of climate change even as it funded efforts at climate denial and systematically misled the public.”

The appeal for action was lent extra weight by the signature of James Hansen, now the director of the climate science awareness and solutions programme at the Columbia University Earth Institute in New York but previously a climate researcher for Nasa for more than 30 years. There, he raised the alarm about climate change and became one of the world’s most renowned scientists in the field.

The letter also cites an investigation by Inside Climate News and further revelations by the Los Angeles Times which accused ExxonMobil of deception over global warming and the influence of humankind and fossil fuels.

On October 31 2015 02:37 frazzle wrote:

So mainstream rightist thought is we need more blacks in prison?

On October 31 2015 01:31 Danglars wrote:
We're not exactly expecting her proposals on policing to encourage more stop and frisk to protect black neighborhoods from gang violence. Same goes for black on black murder. Baltimore's response to their recent troubles should be enough to show two different approaches or lines of thought on the bag of issues.

Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.

Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.

On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.

The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.

Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”

Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.

Jindal, who polls better in Iowa than he does nationally, has argued that criteria for determining who qualifies for debates should be based on early state polling, not just national surveys.

Jeb Bush went straight to New Hampshire after Wednesday night's Republican debate. That's where the former Florida governor needs a strong showing if he is to remain a contender for his party's nomination and where he's now working to reignite a campaign seen as sputtering.

The large sign that hung above Jeb Bush's head during his New Hampshire campaign stops read "Jeb Can Fix it." It was intended to refer to Washington, but to GOP voters like Larry Eller, who turned out to see Bush at a Geno's Chowder Shop in Portsmouth, the first thing Bush needs to fix is how he's campaigned.

"I'm just not sure he really wants it. I think it's a job you've got to really want, not just being talked into it by all the family members — 'Oh, yeah, you should run.' If you don't want it, you are not going to do a good job," he said.

Bush's trip to Geno's was something of a homecoming. "I told you I was going to come back," he told the crowd.

The Bush family has visited this lunch spot for years; a picture of Barbara Bush even hangs behind the counter. But on this day, Jeb Bush spoke outside, on a small pier lined with hay bales gone soggy from repelling the year's highest tide.

Bush brought re-enforcements: former Sen. Judd Gregg and the president of the New Hampshire state senate. The candidate himself spoke briefly, saying he was a doer, not a talker, and that the job of president is about more than standing out during televised debates.

"It's not about the big personalities on the stage. It's not about performance. It's about leadership. And the leader today in this country needs to be a unifier," Bush said.

Bush then faced the media. He said his immediate strategy is to spend a lot of time in New Hampshire. And he also denied, strenuously, that his campaign is failing.