Liberal Forum

Armed protesters were on Portland rooftop in August, police now say.

Members of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer stationed themselves on a downtown Portland rooftop with a cache of guns prior to a summer protest, city officials announced for the first time Monday – the same day Mayor Ted Wheeler learned about it, his aides said.

That shocking revelation came Monday as Portland officials scrambled to find a way to end the repeated violent clashes between dueling political factions downtown.

Prior to the start of a scheduled Aug. 4 demonstration, "the Portland Police Bureau discovered individuals who positioned themselves on a rooftop parking structure in downtown Portland with a cache of firearms," Wheeler said during a City Hall press conference. Berk Nelson, a senior mayoral aide, later said the weapons included "long guns."

Republicans Are Adopting the Proud Boys

Nine members of the far-right Proud Boys group and three protesters are facing riot and assault charges after a street brawl between them Friday night in New York.

The fight wasn’t a random clash, though: The Proud Boys were in Manhattan thanks to an invite from the Metropolitan Republican Club.

In a speech at the club, which was vandalized before the event, Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes waved a sword at anti-fascist protesters and celebrated the assassination of a socialist Japanese politician. McInnes, a Vice co-founder, dressed up as the Japanese assassin who killed the politician, complete with glasses that made his eyes into a racist caricature of a Japanese person’s eyes.

It was a bizarre event to host at the GOP’s Manhattan clubhouse, but the Metropolitan Republican Club defended McInnes and the Proud Boys after the fight. In a statement released Sunday, the club said McInnes’ speech “was certainly not inciting violence.”

The Republican club’s role hosting the event highlights how the Proud Boys have managed to insinuate themselves with mainstream Republicans, even as they increasingly make the news for their violence. But the New York Republicans aren’t alone—the Proud Boys have already managed to make their way into other mainstream GOP campaign events and conservative media.

Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Devin Nunes have posed for pictures with Proud Boys on the campaign trail. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson posed in a Fox green room with two Proud Boys and Republican operative Roger Stone earlier this year.

Misty » 13 Oct 2018 3:40 pm » wrote:You mean like you calling me a virulent racist?

....thanks for revealing your virulent racism....

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Termin8tor » 17 Oct 2018 4:57 am » wrote:

Misty » 13 Oct 2018 3:40 pm » wrote:You mean like you calling me a virulent racist?

....thanks for revealing your virulent racism....

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Of course you're racist.
You played your ugly role in the Democrat Smear Machine, dishonestly labeling Kanye West's thoughts as crazy while ignoring the many common sense opinions he expressed.

“There’s a lot of things affecting our mental health that makes us do crazy things that puts us back into that trap door called the 13th Amendment,” West said, gesticulating wildly.

“I did say abolish with the hat on, because why would you keep something that’s a trap door?”

“If you’re building a floor — the Constitution is the base of our industry, of our country, of our company, right?” he said.

“Would you build a trap door that if you mess up, and you accidentally — something happens, you fall and you end up next to the Unabomber?

You gotta remove all that trap door out of the relationship.

The four gentleman that wrote the 13th Amendment — and I think the way the universe works, it’s perfect!

We don’t have 13 floors.”

Misty » 05 Oct 2018 8:57 pm » wrote:Chuck Grassley just said there are no GOP women on the judiciary committee because they're lazy.

"It's a lot of work --- maybe they don't want to do it" -- Chuck Grassley, when asked why there are no GOP women on the judiciary committee.

Are they purposely trying to lose even more women voters?
I guess they think they can win elections with only angry white men.

Ricky Tavy » 06 Oct 2018 12:01 am » wrote:
All women look alike to Deplorable little boys: confusing and scary.

Misty » 06 Oct 2018 4:30 am » wrote:F.B.I. Review of Kavanaugh Was Limited From the Start



Why would it have been disastrous?
What else were they hiding?

The fix was in from the start.
They withheld more than 100,000 documents.
Kavanaugh lied through his teeth both before Dr. Ford came forward and after.
The hearing with Dr. Ford was a sham.
And they lied about the FBI having free reign to investigate.

So basically they lied and cheated to ram through a hyperpartisan political hack who is a serial perjurer.
And the Deplorables are gloating over this as if it is some kind of a moral victory.

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 9:49 am » wrote:Why I’m Leaving the Republican Party
By Tom Nichols (professor at the U.S. Naval War College)

The Kavanaugh confirmation fight revealed the GOP to be the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs.

Unlike Senator Susan Collins, who took pages upon pages of text on national television to tell us something we already knew, I will cut right to the chase: I am out of the Republican Party.

I will also acknowledge right away what I assume will be the reaction of most of the remaining members of the GOP, ranging from “Good riddance” to “You were never a real Republican,” along with a smattering of “Who are you, anyway?”

Those Republicans will have a point. I am not a prominent Republican nor do I play a major role in Republican politics. What I write here are my views alone.

I joined the party in the twilight of Jimmy Carter’s administration, cut my teeth in politics as an aide to a working class, Catholic Democrat in the Massachusetts House, and later served for a year on the personal staff of a senior Republican U.S. senator. Not exactly the profile of a conservative warrior.

I even quit the party once before, briefly, during what I thought was the bottom for the GOP: the 2012 primaries. I didn’t want to be associated with a party that took Newt Gingrich seriously as presidential timber, or with people whose callousness managed to shock even Ron Paul.

It was an estrangement, not a break, and I came back when the danger of a Trump victory loomed. I was too late, but as a moderate conservative (among the few left), the pre-2016 GOP was the only party I could call home.

Small things sometimes matter, and Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally to accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not even for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.

I have written on social media and elsewhere how I feel about Kavanaugh’s nomination. I initially viewed his nomination positively, as a standard GOP judicial appointment; then grew concerned about whether he should continue on as a nominee with the accusations against him; and finally, was appalled by his behavior in front of the Senate.

It was Collins, however, who made me realize that there would be no moderates to lead conservatives out of the rubble of the Trump era.

Senator Jeff Flake is retiring and took a pass, and with all due respect to Senator Lisa Murkowski—who at least admitted that her “no” vote on cloture meant “no” rather than drag out the drama—she will not be the focus of a rejuvenated party.

When Collins spoke, she took the floor of the Senate to calm an anxious and divided nation by giving us all an extended soliloquy on… the severability of a clause.

The severability of a clause? Seriously?

It took almost half an hour before Collins got to the accusations against Kavanaugh, but the rest of what she said was irrelevant. She had clearly made up her mind weeks earlier, and she completely ignored Kavanaugh’s volcanic and bizarre performance in front of the Senate.

As an aside, let me say that I have no love for the Democratic Party, which is torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other.

As a newly minted independent, I will vote for Democrats and Republicans I think are decent and well-meaning people; if I move back home to Massachusetts, I could cast a ballot for Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Democratic Representative Joe Kennedy and not think twice about it.

But during the Kavanaugh dumpster fire, the performance of the Democratic Party—with some honorable exceptions like Senators Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar—was execrable.

From the moment they leaked the Ford letter, they were a Keystone Cops operation, with Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono willing to wave away the Constitution and get right to a presumption of guilt, and Senator Dianne Feinstein looking incompetent and outflanked instead of like the ranking member of one of the most important committees in America.

The Republicans, however, have now eclipsed the Democrats as a threat to the rule of law and to the constitutional norms of American society.

They have become all about winning. Winning means not losing, and so instead of acting like a co-equal branch of government responsible for advice and consent, congressional Republicans now act like a parliamentary party facing the constant threat of a vote of no-confidence.

That it is necessary to place limitations, including self-limitations, on the exercise of power is—or was—a core belief among conservatives. No longer. Raw power, wielded so deftly by Senator Mitch McConnell, is exercised for its own sake, and by that I mean for the sake of fleecing gullible voters on hot-button social issues so that Republicans may stay in power.

Of course, the institutional GOP will say that it countenances all of Trump’s many sins, and its own straying from principle, for good reason (including, of course, the holy grail of ending legal abortion).

Politics is about the exercise of power. But the new Trumpist GOP is not exercising power in the pursuit of anything resembling principle, and certainly not for conservative or Republican principles.

Free trade? Republicans are suddenly in love with tariffs, and now sound like bad imitations of early 1980s protectionist Democrats.

A robust foreign policy? Not only have Republicans abandoned their claim to being the national-security party, they have managed to convince the party faithful that Russia—an avowed enemy that directly attacked our political institutions—is less of a threat than their neighbors who might be voting for Democrats.

Respect for law enforcement? The GOP is backing Trump in attacks on the FBI and the entire intelligence community as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the web of lies, financial arrangements, and Russian entanglements known collectively as the Trump campaign.

And most important, on the rule of law, congressional Republicans have utterly collapsed. They have sold their souls, purely at Trump’s behest, living in fear of the dreaded primary challenges that would take them away from the Forbidden City and send them back home to the provinces.

Yes, an anti-constitutional senator like Hirono is unnerving, but she’s a piker next to her Republican colleagues, who have completely reversed themselves on everything from the limits of executive power to the independence of the judiciary, all to serve their leader in a way that would make the most devoted cult follower of Kim Jong Un blush.

Maybe it’s me. I’m not a Republican anymore, but am I still a conservative?

Limited government: check. Strong national defense: check. Respect for tradition and deep distrust of sudden, dramatic change: check.

Belief that people spend their money more wisely than government? That America is an exceptional nation with a global mission? That we are, in fact, a shining city on a hill and an example to others?

Check, check, check.

But I can’t deny that I’ve strayed from the party. I believe abortion should remain legal. I am against the death penalty in all its forms outside of killing in war. I don’t think what’s good for massive corporations is always good for America.

In foreign affairs, I am an institutionalist, a supporter of working through international bodies and agreements. I think our defense budget is too big, too centered on expensive toys, and that we are still too entranced by nuclear weapons.

I believe in the importance of diversity and toleration. I would like a shorter tax code. I would also like people to exhibit some public decorum and keep their shoes on in public.

Does this make me a liberal? No. I do not believe that human nature is malleable clay to be reshaped by wise government policy. Many of my views, which flow from that basic conservative idea, are not welcome in a Democratic tribe in the grip of the madness of identity politics.

But whatever my concerns about liberals, the true authoritarian muscle is now being flexed by the GOP, in a kind of buzzy, steroidal McCarthyism that lacks even anti-communism as a central organizing principle.

The Republican Party, which controls all three branches of government and yet is addicted to whining about its own victimhood, is now the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs.

So, I’m out. The Trumpers and the hucksters and the consultants and the hangers-on, like a colony of bees who exist only to sting and die, have swarmed together in a dangerous but suicidal cloud, and when that mindless hive finally extinguishes itself in a blaze of venom, there will be nothing left.

I’m a divorced man who is remarried. But love, in some ways, is easier than politics.

I spent nearly 40 years as a Republican, a relationship that began when I joined a revitalized GOP that saw itself not as a victim, but as the vehicle for lifting America out of the wreckage of the 1970s, defeating the Soviet Union, and extending human freedom at home and abroad.

I stayed during the turbulence of the Tea Party tomfoolery. I moved out briefly during the abusive 2012 primaries. But now I’m filing for divorce, and I am taking nothing with me when I go.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ty/572419/

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 10:01 am » wrote: Until you run out of angry white men which is basically all you have left.

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 10:18 am » wrote: You're right.
I am making no predictions for November.
Because even though Democrats get more votes than Republicans, it's still an uphill battle for them to take over Congress due to Republican gerrymandering and voter supression.

Were I you, I would not gloat so much about 'winning' because it's a hollow victory when you have to win by cheating.

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 10:31 am » wrote:I watched this segment this morning.

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 12:16 pm » wrote: I'm not talking about the 2016 presidential election.
Democrats get more votes than Republicans in congressional elections.
And several states including my own have been forced by the courts to redraw their congressional districts because of partisan gerrymandering.

And BTW, she did get 3 million more votes than 45.

Racetex (RSIG) » 08 Oct 2018 3:36 pm » wrote:
How do dems get more votes when they have lost so many seats these past 10 yrs? How about telling us what the Dem's message is?

Misty » 09 Oct 2018 10:10 am » wrote: You tell me.

Aside from winning the popular vote in the presidential election in 2016, Democrats also got more votes for the U.S. Senate than Republicans, and yet Republicans maintained their majority on Capitol Hill.

The Congressional Map Has A Record-Setting Bias Against Democrats

The message varies depending on the state or the individual district.
Nationally, healthcare is a big issue.

Misty » 09 Oct 2018 7:03 pm » wrote:Here's the Heart-Wrenching Story of a Two-Year-Old Kid Facing an Immigration Judge



Fernanda Jacqueline Davila was taken from her grandmother when they approached the U.S. border in late July.

Just two years old, Davila has spent the past two months communicating with a caseworker and translators before finally being brought before a judge.

The New York Times offered a heartbreaker this morning, publishing a profile of Davila’s journey through the makeshift judicial system that’s become the U.S. immigration courts.

Davila was the 26th child Judge Randa Zagzoug ruled on that day; she was followed by four more to round out the afternoon. She was still the youngest ever to pass through the courtroom, according to the paper.

In the time between the American government entering her into its steadily growing stable of migrant children and her court date, Davila stayed at Cayuga Centers in New York City.

The Times notes that “many” children were allowed to spend the night with foster families but that they had to remain in custody during the day.

What this belies is the increasing number of cases in which the parents and extended family of detained children are being denied in their attempts to reconnect their families.

As MSNBC reported in August, those reunification efforts are made even more difficult by the fact that, of the hundreds of undocumented children still detained after being separated from their families, most of their parents have already been deported.

Take a recent report from the Associated Press, which similarly focused on the drama surrounding two-year-old Alexa.

Her mother, Araceli Ramos Bonilla, had applied for a U.S. visa in an attempt to bring her daughter to America and escape an abusive relationship with Alexa’s father.

But the visa process dragged on, leading Ramos to pack up with Alexa and travel to the Texas border in 2015, before Trump’s ghoulish policy had set in.

As the AP reported, she was stopped by Border Patrol and Alexa was taken from her custody.

The agents told Ramos she would never see her daughter again and deemed Alexa an “unaccompanied minor.”

Fast forward 15 months and Ramos was deported after having her case assigned to a Louisiana immigration court that had denied 95 percent of all asylum requests (compared to a national average of 50), according to the report.

Alexa was handed over to a pair of foster parents by a rural Michigan judge, who granted two American adults temporary guardianship.

In total, it took 15 months, during which Ramos starting an online campaign in which she posted videos of her weeping and begging for a reunion with Alexa, before the U.S. legal system corrected its mistake.

Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told the Times that until the last year, cases like Alexa’s and Davila’s were rare.

Before the adherence to the current fear-based immigration policy of family separation, she said the courts almost never saw cases concerning children under the age of six.

As of September, there were at least 12,800 kids in U.S. custody, roughly five times the number the were being held in the spring of 2017.

They’re kids like Davila, no different from any other would-be American kid.

Per the Times:

The youngest child to come before the bench in federal immigration courtroom No. 14 was so small she had to be lifted into the chair.

Even the judge in her black robes breathed a soft “aww” as her latest case perched on the brown leather.

Her feet stuck out from the seat in small gray sneakers, her legs too short to dangle.

Her fists were stuffed under her knees.

As soon as the caseworker who had sat her there turned to go, she let out a whimper that rose to a thin howl, her crumpled face a bursting dam.

You shouldn’t need a reporter, or anyone, to wax poetic about two-year-olds losing months of their young lives to the **** that is the U.S. immigration system to understand that what’s happening to Alexa, Davila, and thousands of other kids is **** up.

Ultimately, the more distressing fact is that Davila, currently lost in the system, is not a cute, shy young girl with emotions and fears.

There, away from her family, she is just child No. 26 in courtroom 14.

Misty » 10 Oct 2018 11:29 am » wrote:The latest Trumplican talking point?
It's mob rule.

They are not running on their accomplishments.
They are running on defending you from angry mobs of Democrats.


Listen to these idiots, mostly on FOX News TRUMP TV parrot the Liar-In-chief.

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/gop-w ... 15?v=railb&

Ricky Tavy » 10 Oct 2018 11:33 am » wrote:
Nothing to sell but fear itself.

Ricky Tavy » 10 Oct 2018 11:46 am » wrote:
Selling fear to trembling sissies is profitable,

Black seniors kicked off bus going to polls because Georgia officials were ‘uncomfortable’

Dozens of black senior citizens were asked to leave a bus that was taking them to the polls Monday in Jefferson County, GA., the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The bus was owned by Black Votes Matter, a non-partisan group that visited a senior center in Louisville, Ga., to encourage people to vote.

But when folks got on the bus to go vote, a call came in for them to get off, according to the group.

“Someone had passed by and saw the seniors getting on the bus, and called the county commissioners’ office to tell them that we can’t do that,” Brown said in the video.

The video shows the organizers telling the seniors on the bus that they have to get off, but that it was okay because they were still going to get out and vote later.

“We are still going to vote! Can’t stop us!” some of the seniors say.

“There’s not a candidate on this bus, there’s not a party symbol on this bus, but I’m going to tell you what is on this bus: a whole bunch of black fists in the air with the word power underneath it. That’s what scared them ... “ Albright said later in the video.

Voters in North Dakota may find when they go to the polls in November that the voter ID that they used in the primary just a few months earlier is no longer accepted because it does not include their current residential address.

In this case, Native American voters will be especially affected because they often lack residential street addresses because their homes do not have addresses on them by no fault of their own.

North Dakota is able to enact a voter identification law that will take away the opportunity to vote for thousands of Native American United States citizens.

https://www.narf.org/nd-voting-rights/

North Dakota is one of the least densely populated in the country, meaning that a couple hundred votes could decide an election.

And Native Americans disproportionately vote Democrat, which could be bad news for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, the state’s Democrat incumbent who is struggling to hold off her Republican opponent.

Heitkamp, who decided to break from her state and vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation last week, won her last race by just 3,000 votes.

http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/supreme-c ... r-id-laws/

Cannonpointer » 17 Oct 2018 1:17 pm » wrote:

Misty » 08 Oct 2018 12:16 pm » wrote:I'm not talking about the 2016 presidential election.
Democrats get more votes than Republicans in congressional elections.
And several states including my own have been forced by the courts to redraw their congressional districts because of partisan gerrymandering.
And BTW, she did get 3 million more votes than 45.

Not if you disqualify california, where rampant cheating was engaged in by the state itself. Without california, whose votes should not have been counted due to the state allowing and encouraging nazi mobs in the streets top attack peaceful trump rally-goers, hitlery LOSES the popular vote.