US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5073

Protesters took to the streets in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday night, clashing with police after the fatal police shooting of a black man earlier in the day.

Keith Scott, 43, was shot and killed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer Brentley Vinson, who is also black, after being mistaken for a wanted man.

Police said officers went to a Charlotte apartment complex around 4pm looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they encountered Scott, who was not the suspect they were looking for, inside a car.

According to department spokesman Keith Trietley, officers saw the man get out the car with a gun and then get back in. When officers approached the car, the man got out of the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said. A weapon was recovered by detectives at the scene.

According to police, officers immediately began rendering aid after the shots were fired. Scott, a father of seven, was pronounced dead at Carolinas Medical Center.

The police version is at odds with that of Scott’s family who have insisted that he was disabled, sitting in his car reading a book, and had no gun. “He sits in the shade, reads his book and waits on his kid to get off the bus,” Scott’s sister told reporters. “He didn’t have no gun, he wasn’t messing with nobody.”

In a video posted to Facebook Live from the scene, Scott’s daughter Lyric can be heard yelling at investigators on the scene not to plant a weapon in Scott’s car. “Because that’s what the fuck y’all do,” she said.

As protests swelled on Tuesday night, police used teargas in an attempt to disperse crowds heard yelling “Black lives matter,” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!” One person held up a sign saying “Stop killing us”; another sign said: “It was a book”.

In statements the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department distinguished between “agitators” and “demonstrators”, blaming the former for damaging police vehicles and causing injuries to at least a dozen officers. One officer was reportedly struck in the face with a rock.

The Donald Trump campaign on Tuesday night blasted the Washington Post over the paper's latest report on the Trump Foundation and how Trump used his charity's funds for personal matters, but the campaign did not address the specifics of the report.

"In typical Washington Post fashion, they’ve gotten their facts wrong. It is the Clinton Foundation that is set up to make sure the Clintons personally enrich themselves by selling access and trading political favors. The Trump Foundation has no paid board, no management fees, no rent or overhead, and no family members on its payroll," Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement.

"There was not, and could not be, any intent or motive for the Trump Foundation to make improper payments. All contributions are reported to the IRS, and all Foundation donations are publicly disclosed," Miller continued. "Mr. Trump is generous both with his money and with his time. He has provided millions of dollars to fund his Foundation and a multitude of other charitable causes."

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Trump used a total of $258,000 from his foundation to settle personal legal issues. For example, when Trump was fined in 2006 by the town of Palm Beach over the height of the flag pole at Mar-a-Lago, Trump settled the issue by donating to a charity of the town's choice. However, Trump wrote a check with funds from his foundation. This follows Washington Post reporting showing that Trump's Foundation has largely used other people's money in the past few years.

Responding to the Washington Post report on Tuesday night, the Trump campaign did not address the specific checks highlighted by the Post, and instead tried to turn focus on Hillary Clinton's family charity.

"The Post’s reporting is peppered with inaccuracies and omissions from a biased reporter who is clearly intent on distracting attention away from the corrupt Clinton Foundation, a vehicle for the Clintons to peddle influence at the expense of the American people," Miller said in the statement. "Mr. Trump personally and the Trump Foundation, however, are staying focused on their charitable giving to veterans, the police, children and other deserving recipients."

On September 21 2016 17:49 Shingi11 wrote:
So lets compare charities

Clinton Foundation-
High rated charitable foundation, probably one of the best in the US gets Clinton chewed out and grilled to no end cause so and so donated and then tried to get a meeting with Hillary.

Trump Foundation
For all regards seems like a very poor charitable foundation that trump has been using as a glorified slush fund gets a mehhhh

Why are the Republicans not jumping on this, the Clinton Foundation so much as puts a wrong piece of punctuation on legal document you know there would be at least 4 investigation into it by at least 2 house committees.

On September 21 2016 18:19 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

I'm not here to defend Bush so I'm not sure why you're getting partisan but did you even read the article?
This is the weakest post WW2 recovery ie weaker than the recovery under Bush from the dot com bubble/ 9/11 recession.
Obama is the first president since Hoover not to oversee at least one year of 3% GDP growth - fact.Go look it up.

And i agree that any recovery/expansion under Trump would be weaker than it is now under Obama.That has been the trend since the late 1970's.The guy i replied to was arguing the economy is strong, I am saying it's weak now and will be weaker whoever gets elected, I've been saying that for months.

And the other guy who mentioned China - point about China is they are buying up hard assets all over the globe.Farmland, mining companies, ports, huge investments in Africa, factories.Try invest in Chinese owned companies and see how far you get.Meanwhile five trillion of the US debt is due to the Afghan and Iraq wars.

On September 21 2016 22:37 Doodsmack wrote:


Judge a man by the company he keeps. Started with Roy Cohn, and still continues...

On September 21 2016 22:33 On_Slaught wrote:


Only one of the two candidates is being judged as a possible president of the United states. The other is being judged like a reality TV star.

This is coming up just in time for the debates though. Takes the Clinton Foundation line of attack off the table for Trump, else he will get hammered on this by Hillary and the moderator.

This only gets worse when antiwar protestors “bringing the war home” flood the streets of Chicago outside of the convention hall. The nation watches on television as the Chicago police force flies out of control, riots, and beats anyone and everyone that they perceive as possibly “other,” everyone possibly with the protestors. It doesn’t matter; journalists, delegates, family of delegates, younger Congress members — they all are attacked by the rampaging cops with many a score to settle, urged on and unleashed by the profane mayor, Boss Daley, kingmaker, Democrat.

We are disgusted. The Democratic Party is torn apart. Humphrey becomes the nominee.

Richard Nixon becomes the Republican nominee. He promises he has a plan to end the war but will not announce it. He and Henry Kissinger secretly commit treason by interfering with the peace talks in Paris between America and the Vietnamese, making sure there is no breakthrough for peace. Nixon, even before entering the White House, subverts the law, prolongs the agony of the war.

In the wake of the civil rights successes, Nixon adopts the first “Southern strategy,” which will reshape the Republican Party, wipe out the once dominant Southern white Democrats, and alter the direction of American politics for decades.

...

Those of us in the student antiwar movement see Humphrey as profoundly corrupt, profoundly tainted by his support for the war. We hate Nixon, but in truth we have not experienced what a right-wing government can do. We have come of age and to activism in the years since 1960 — so we only know Kennedy and Johnson as presidents, we have only experienced a liberal domination of national politics, and, more often than not, the policies we are protesting are the policies of liberal Democrats.

...

We think it doesn’t matter if Nixon or Humphrey wins. We think the war will keep going the same no matter who wins. We cannot imagine that it will expand, that there will be a simultaneous policy of “Vietnamization,” so that the American body count decreases, and escalation that will claim another million more Asian lives. We cannot imagine the disaster that will befall Cambodia because of Nixon and Kissinger and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. We do not see what is coming — at home as well as internationally.

...

Looking back, we young idealists and activists were not so much wrong in our assessments of Humphrey as we were totally wrong in our assessment of whether it matters if a corporate center liberal is elected over an insecure, unstable, right-wing candidate who does not respect the Constitution.

...

The toll of the Nixon administration is long and heartrending. Internationally, more than a million Cambodian lives lost and a million additional Vietnamese and Laotians killed . . . Domestically there was a cost, too, as Nixon started the counter-reformation to the ’60s, flouted the Constitution, created enemy lists, launched the war on drugs that would eventually lead to mass incarceration, and cynically did everything he could to destroy the leadership of the black community and the antiwar movement.

...

I only hope that our peculiarly American penchant for historical amnesia will not stop our new young leaders from learning from the mistakes of those of us who have gone before.

On September 21 2016 22:53 Mohdoo wrote:


Honestly, I don't see how something like that isn't embarassing. People with this weird admiration for guns should feel weird about it. It isn't becoming and it is a pretty transparent situation.

On September 21 2016 22:55 Mercy13 wrote:
I can't say whether the parallels between this election and the election of 1968 are truly as close as this author portrays them, but it's an interesting account nonetheless:



Source

On September 20, 2016, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates, published an open letter to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change. The letter warns that the consequences of opting out of the Paris agreement would be severe and long-lasting for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

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An Open Letter Regarding Climate Change From Concerned Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy. It is a physical reality. Fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution. But the burning of oil, coal, and gas also caused most of the historical increase in atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This increase in greenhouse gases is changing Earth’s climate.

Our fingerprints on the climate system are visible everywhere. They are seen in warming of the oceans, the land surface, and the lower atmosphere. They are identifiable in sea level rise, altered rainfall patterns, retreat of Arctic sea ice, ocean acidification, and many other aspects of the climate system. Human-caused climate change is not something far removed from our day-to-day experience, affecting only the remote Arctic. It is present here and now, in our own country, in our own states, and in our own communities.

During the Presidential primary campaign, claims were made that the Earth is not warming, or that warming is due to purely natural causes outside of human control. Such claims are inconsistent with reality.

Others argued that no action is warranted until we have absolute certainty about human impacts on climate. Absolute certainty is unattainable. We are certain beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that the problem of human-caused climate change is real, serious, and immediate, and that this problem poses significant risks: to our ability to thrive and build a better future, to national security, to human health and food production, and to the interconnected web of living systems.

The basic science of how greenhouse gases trap heat is clear, and has been for over a century. Ultimately, the strength of that basic science brought the governments of the world to Paris in December 2015. They went to Paris despite pronounced differences in systems of government, in national self-interest, in culpability for past emissions of greenhouse gases, and in vulnerability to future climate change. The leaders of over 190 countries recognized that the problem of human-caused climate change is a danger to present and future citizens of our planet. They made national commitments to address this problem. It was a small but historic and vital first step towards more enlightened stewardship of Earth’s climate system.

From studies of changes in temperature and sea level over the last million years, we know that the climate system has tipping points. Our proximity to these tipping points is uncertain. We know, however, that rapid warming of the planet increases the risk of crossing climatic points of no return, possibly setting in motion large-scale ocean circulation changes, the loss of major ice sheets, and species extinctions. The climatic consequences of exceeding such thresholds are not confined to the next one or two electoral cycles. They have lifetimes of many thousands of years.

The political system also has tipping points. Thus it is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord. A “Parexit” would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: "The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own." Such a decision would make it far more difficult to develop effective global strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change. The consequences of opting out of the global community would be severe and long-lasting – for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

The United States can and must be a major player in developing innovative solutions to the problem of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Nations that find innovative ways of decarbonizing energy systems and sequestering CO2 will be the economic leaders of the 21st century. Walking away from Paris makes it less likely that the U.S. will have a global leadership role, politically, economically, or morally. We cannot afford to cross that tipping point.

On September 21 2016 23:03 Acrofales wrote:

I don't really see the problem. I also think the main problem with gun ownership is not those 3%, but the gun owners among the other 97%. Presumably if you have a gun fetish, you also have a clue on proper maintenance and safety precautions. These are not the people shooting their wife/child/neighbour in the middle of the night by mistake. These are also not the gangsters shooting each other in Chicago/Baltimore/St Louis.