US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4093

Justice Clarence Thomas, a reliable conservative vote on the Supreme Court, is mulling retirement after the presidential election, according to court watchers.

Thomas, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush and approved by the Senate after a bitter confirmation, has been considering retirement for a while and never planned to stay until he died, they said. He likes to spend summers in his RV with his wife.

His retirement would have a substantial impact on control of the court. The next president is expected to immediately replace the seat opened by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, providing a one-vote edge in the court that is currently divided 4-4.

Should Thomas leave, that slight majority would continue if Donald Trump becomes president. If it's Hillary Clinton, then she would get the chance to flip two Republican seats, giving the liberals a 6-3 majority.

After an anxiety-inducing and divisive primary, Democrats are starting to breathe easier. Bernie Sanders, while not formally conceding to Hillary Clinton, has turned his fire on Donald Trump. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left before Sanders, has effusively endorsed Clinton. So at last the presumptive nominee can hope to gather in all those unhappy Bernie voters and lead a united Democratic Party in the fall, right?

Not if Dr. Jill Stein has anything to say about it.

The longtime Massachusetts environmental activist and presumptive Green Party nominee (the Green convention is not until August 4) is hungrily eyeing disgruntled Sanders voters—many of whom have been saying that even now, with the nomination all but locked up, they still won’t vote for Hillary. And Stein appears to know her audience, declaring on CNN right after the California primary that she represents “a plan B … to continue to fight that revolution.”

She is also undaunted by the Democratic coalescing around Clinton. Asked in an interview with Politico Magazine this week whether the Warren endorsement presents a problem for her, Stein suggested that the Massachusetts senator lacks the progressive credibility to sway Sanders voters: “Elizabeth Warren has very good proposals regarding Wall Street, but she really has not been leading the charge for single-payer health care … and is pretty much a war hawk in alignment with Hillary Clinton.” (Stein is not the first voice on the left to criticize Warren’s foreign policy record as militaristic.)

You may be wondering: The Green Party? What’s that—one of those European lefty outfits? And do they have a prayer of getting more than a fraction of the vote? As of today, Stein is but a blip. Eighty-seven percent of voters don’t know enough about her to register an opinion in a late May Quinnipiac poll. And Clinton’s lead over Trump appears big enough to weather a little left-wing erosion. But with a recent Bloomberg poll showing that only 55 percent of Sanders voters are ready for Hillary, the conditions exist for Stein to spark a larger exodus–if she can raise her profile and if Democrats can’t unify at next month’s convention.

And while the Greens have been under the radar in America for the past several years, they proudly claim at least 100 municipal officeholders, and from 2007 to 2015 they controlled the mayoralty of the 100,000-person city of Richmond, California. Now, like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party sees its moment in this season of widespread discontent, when both Clinton and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump begin the general election campaign with record-high unfavorables. Stein’s platform is nearly identical to Sanders’, only more pacifist (the two diverge on the use of military drones) and more ambitious (beyond providing free college, Stein would cancel all existing student debt).

And Stein may be making big strides toward being treated like a legitimate presidential candidate. In her 2012 Green Party run, she appeared on only 36 state ballots. But her campaign’s ballot access coordinator told Counterpunch last week that “we fully expect to get on the ballot in all but three states due to our petition drives” and will then litigate the “onerous” requirements in the three remaining states in hopes of hitting 50.

In an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that on Monday, the FBI will release edited transcripts of the 911 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter to the police during his rampage.

"What we're not going to do is further proclaim this man's pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda," Lynch said. "We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State]."

The Washington Post reported last week that the gunman made multiple phone calls while holding hostages: "The gunman who opened fire inside a nightclub here said he carried out the attack because he wanted 'Americans to stop bombing his country,' according to a witness who survived the rampage."

On June 20 2016 13:32 Danglars wrote:
RCP

You just can't make this stuff up.

On June 20 2016 13:06 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
eh... don't believe it:



Source

On June 20 2016 13:41 Plansix wrote:

It's pretty clear why they are doing it. Do you want his statements to be used as recruiting tools?

On June 20 2016 14:37 oBlade wrote:...
Being privy to this guy's lunacy would only help drive recruitment for civil society.
...

On June 20 2016 14:28 Aquanim wrote:
All the same, one has to ask oneself what benefits would accrue from parading this person's ISIS allegiances on a pedestal.

On June 20 2016 12:32 biology]major wrote:


women and men have different priorities when it comes to the job market. There should not be a fight to make everything 50/50, that is just going to create too much cognitive dissonance. Just accept that we are different and let people do what they want. These quotas are creating unfair environments to begin with. Wage gap is a complete myth, after all factors are controlled women might be at a very slight disadvantage, but the whole 70 cents on the dollar is feminist propaganda, that will not refuse to die. The left loves that line because it gets them so many free feminist points.

On June 20 2016 11:56 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
Okay you do that me and my girlfriend working on her STEM degree will continue not caring because there is no huge problem equality is better today than it ever has been and in some cases it has actually reversed in the opposite direction where women have inherent advantages in getting hired over men all other factors being equal.

On June 20 2016 11:56 GGTeMpLaR wrote:


Okay you do that me and my girlfriend working on her STEM degree will continue not caring because there is no huge problem equality is better today than it ever has been and in some cases it has actually reversed in the opposite direction where women have inherent advantages in getting hired over men all other factors being equal.

The 'wage gap' is a myth. It implies something it doesn't factually represent. What it represents is something far different and just goes to show what happens when common laypeople get a hold of scholarly data far above their education and run with their own interpretation of it.