Liberal Forum

RichClem » 14 Nov 2014 1:44 pm » wrote: Your utter lack of integrity is obvious in almost every post you write.
As well as your deeply ugly character.

Talk about ugly character and lack of integrity.
What a sad, pathetic, bitter little man you are.
Don't take this the wrong way Kitten, but your opinion of me holds no value at all.
I know exactly who I am, and I know what's in my heart, and there are no words that you can use that will ever make me think any less of myself.
I don't hate you. I feel sorry for you.
It must be awful to live a life consumed by such anger and hatred.

Misty » 14 Nov 2014 2:33 pm » wrote: Talk about ugly character and lack of integrity.
What a sad, pathetic, bitter little man you are.
Don't take this the wrong way Kitten, but your opinion of me holds no value at all.
I know exactly who I am, and I know what's in my heart, and there are no words that you can use that will ever make me think any less of myself.
I don't hate you. I feel sorry for you.
It must be awful to live a life consumed by such anger and hatred.

Oh, you mean hate like:

(Misty Blue) Didn't John Fund molest his girlfriend's daughter?

Or how about smearing one of Clinton's rape victims?

(Misty Blue) ....Miss Broaddrick and her so-called witnesses were likely on Richard Mellon Scaife's payroll

Or the obligatory Nazi comparison:

(Misty Blue) What was it your mentor Joseph Goebbels said, Puss? That if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it?

Yeah, it's not working for you.

You do need to be in therapy.

Democrats Fume in Caucus as Duckworth Denied Vote


House Democrats are continuing to criticize Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to allow Rep. Tammy Duckworth — a double amputee Iraq War veteran whose pregnancy has made her unable to travel — to vote by proxy in leadership elections this week.

Pelosi and her allies have been saying since Nov. 13, when the issue first came up, that House Democratic Caucus rules prohibit proxy votes, and that allowing exceptions for the Illinois Democrat would create a slippery-slope scenario.

Members and aides are privately seething over what they see as Pelosi’s latest attempt to stack the deck against Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., who is running for ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee against Pelosi’s closest friend and fellow Californian, Rep. Anna G. Eshoo.

And many members are concerned about the optics of not allowing Duckworth a proxy vote when Democrats are supposed to be the party that fights for women.

Shame on Nancy Pelosi.

House Republicans have selected white men to chair all but one of their standing committees next year.

The secretive Republican Steering Committee announced its recommendations late Tuesday after an all-day meeting to pick the heads of 17 committees, with all of those slots going to white men. Rep. Candice Miller, who was previously reappointed by Speaker John Boehner to lead the House Administration Committee, will remain the only woman to wield a gavel.

The House Administration Committee, by the way, is responsible for overseeing the administrative tasks associated with the Capitol itself – the cafeteria, office supplies, etc. It’s not, in other words, one of the powerful, sought-after gigs members of Congress are eager to get.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... -diversity

Way to reach out to women and minorities.

RichClem » 14 Nov 2014 3:31 pm » wrote:You do need to be in therapy.

You are in no position to judge who is in need of therapy.

Squirrel

crimsongulf » 20 Nov 2014 3:49 pm » wrote:Squirrel

Are you hallucinating again?


Now you sound just like Clem, thinking that you have the right to dictate what is important and what we should be discussing.
In case you haven't noticed this thread does not have a fixed topic, and if you read the OP you will see that this is where I post stuff that is of interest to me.

Misty » 11 Mar 2011 1:42 pm » wrote:This thread is kind of like a blog, where I post the stuff that's of interest to me and vent about it.

So, if you don't have any interest in what I choose to post here, you are always free to stay out of this thread.

Misty » 20 Nov 2014 4:08 pm » wrote: Are you hallucinating again?


Now you sound just like Clem, thinking that you have the right to dictate what is important and what we should be discussing.
In case you haven't noticed this thread does not have a fixed topic, and if you read the OP you will see that this is where I post stuff that is of interest to me.

So, if you don't have any interest in what I choose to post here, you are always free to stay out of this thread.

Did you have good day gathering nuts?

Misty » 20 Nov 2014 3:45 pm » wrote:


Way to reach out to women and minorities.

They don't trust anyone but angry white men. It's their base and it's who they are.

Obama Has the Law—and Reagan—on His Side on Immigration

November 18th, 2014

President Obama is soon expected to take a step toward fixing our broken immigration system by issuing an executive order to halt deportations of undocumented immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens. Republicans, including Speaker of the House John Boehner and new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have threatened reprisals against such an order. But one thing is clear: The president has the constitutional authority to decide to not proceed with deportations. It has always been within the president’s discretion to decide whether to have the Department of Justice enforce a particular law. As the Supreme Court declared in United States v. Nixon, “the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.”

A president may choose to not enforce particular laws when deciding how to allocate scarce resources or based on his view of the best public policy. Few object, for example, when the Department of Justice does not prosecute those who possess small amounts of marijuana, even though they violated the federal Controlled Substance Act. There are countless federal laws that go unenforced. In 1800, then congressman and later Chief Justice John Marshall stated, the president may “direct that the criminal be prosecuted no further” because it is “the exercise of an indubitable and constitutional power.”

The president’s broad prosecutorial discretion has been repeatedly recognized by the courts. In 2013, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit, appointed by George W. Bush, offered a strong defense: “The president may decline to prosecute certain violators of federal law just as the president may pardon certain violators of federal law,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote. “The president may decline to prosecute or may pardon because of the president’s own constitutional concerns about a law or because of policy objections to the law, among other reasons.”

This prosecutorial discretion is even greater in immigration because the treatment of foreign citizens is inextricably intertwined with the nation’s foreign affairs, an area especially under the president’s control. For example, the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 to overturn large parts of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law, SB1070, was premised on the executive branch’s need for discretion in the immigration context. “A principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials,” the Court wrote, adding that “[t]he dynamic nature of relations with other countries requires the Exec­utive Branch to ensure that enforcement policies are con­sistent with this Nation’s foreign policy with respect to these and other realities.” In a similar 1941 case, Hines v. Davidowitz, the Supreme Court voided a Pennsylvania system of alien registration because “experience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.”

Indeed, presidents of both parties have tailored immigration policy to their own goals. In 1987, the Reagan administration took executive action to limit deportations for 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles, even those who had been turned down for asylum. Similarly, President George H.W. Bush in 1990 limited deportations of Chinese students and in 1991 kept hundreds of Kuwait citizens from being deported. President Bill Clinton regularly used his power of prosecutorial discretion to limit deportations; in 1993 he gave 18-month extensions to Salvadoran residents, in 1997 he limited deportations for Haitians, and in 1998 he limited deportations to Central American counties that had been devastated by hurricanes.

President George W. Bush also took major steps to limit deportations on humanitarian grounds. In 2001, he limited deportation of Salvadorian citizens at the request of the Salvadorian president who said that their remittances were a key part of their nation’s economy. The Bush administration embraced prosecutorial discretion and ordered the consideration of factors such as whether a mom was nursing a child or whether an undocumented person was a U.S. military veteran in making the determination on whether to order a deportation.

The Bush administration explicitly recognized that humanitarian factors must play into the deportation decision. The 2005 Howard memorandum issued by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stated that “Prosecutorial discretion is a very significant tool ...to deal with the difficult, complex and contradictory provisions of the immigration laws and cases involving human suffering and hardship.” Today, the Obama administration can build on that to stop deportations that separate parents from their children. The breaking up of families due to deportations undoubtedly causes human suffering and hardship: The Applied Research Center in its “Shattered Families” report found that over 5,000 children live in U.S. foster homes because their parents were deported.

The federal courts, too, have recognized that presidents inherently have the power to choose not to enforce immigration laws in a particular instance and thus to not initiate deportation proceedings even when a person is not lawfully in the country. In a famous case involving John Lennon, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that the president could issue an “an informal administrative stay of deportation” to allow Lennon to remain in the country. The case,INS v. Lennon, allowed the executive branch to halt the deportation of Lennon and expressly recognized president’s constitutional power to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the immigration context.

The president clearly has the power to limit deportation of an individual or a group of individuals, even a large group. Such action does not grant citizenship to the undocumented; it merely is a temporary measure that halts deportations. It is not a permanent fix to the intractable challenge of how to deal with undocumented immigration, but it is increasingly looking like the only solution that the president has in facing an intransigent Congress that is unwilling to act.

Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Sam Kleiner is a fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project.

The hypocrisy is blinding.
More about Dr. Ben Carson:

1. Raised by a single mother
2. Raised in public housing
3. Fed with food stamps.
4. Supported with welfare
5. Kept healthy with medicaid
6. Educated in public schools
7. Got eyeglasses from state agency
8. Benefited from affirmative action to enter college
9. Used federal loans and Pell grants in undergrad school
10. Benefited from affirmative action to enter medical school
11. Med school paid for with grant from USPHS*
12. Said: “The disintegration of the family unit and the welfare state are enslaving African-Americans and ruining their futures.”

Typical Tea Partier; he got his... the rest of us are on our own.

Broken Windows Policing Doesn’t Work-It also may have killed Eric Garner.
By Justin Peters

On July 17, 2014, an unarmed 43-year-old black man named Eric Garner was standing near the Staten Island Ferry dock when he was approached by several police officers. The cops suspected that Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes. A struggle ensued, and an officer named Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold. Garner died, and the New York City medical examiner eventually ruled it a homicide. But on Wednesday afternoon, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.

Why was Garner approached at all? Because of the emphasis on “broken windows policing” under NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner in the 1990s, Bratton presided over a surge in petty-crime law enforcement, on the theory that vigorously enforcing the small laws in some way dissuades or prevents people from breaking the big ones.

There’s little evidence that theory is correct. Nevertheless, mayor-elect Bill de Blasio brought Bratton back as New York’s police commissioner last December. Bratton’s return meant the return of broken windows policing. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” Bratton said in March, spouting the broken windows gospel. It’s that philosophy as much as anything else is to blame for Eric Garner’s death.

Bratton was a popular figure during the Giuliani era because crime rates fell on his watch. While observers were quick to credit his policies for that decline, there’s no reason to think the drop in violent crime had anything to do with broken windows or Bratton’s vaunted Compstat, a computer program that tracks crime statistics citywide.

The drop in New York’s violent crime rate, then and now, is consistent with a broader nationwide trend. Rates of violent crime have steadily declined nationwide over the past two decades[/url], and nobody is really sure why. The best argument I’ve seen suggests that violent crime began to fall around the same time that the crack boom started to wane in the early 1990s. The rates have been dropping across the country since then.

We do know that the declines in violent crime in New York have been comparable to declines in cities that didn’t use Compstat or broken windows. As criminologist Richard Rosenfeld put it in a 2002 paper, “homicide rates also have decreased sharply in cities that did not noticeably alter their policing policies, such as Los Angeles, or that instituted very different changes from those in New York, such as San Diego.” The takeaway: Crime just keeps going down everywhere. Nobody is sure why.

In New York, broken windows has replaced stop-and-frisk as the controversial police tactic du jour. During his 2012 campaign, de Blasio pledged to rein in the ineffective and racist stop-and-frisk policies of Michael Bloomberg, and he has followed through on that promise. Meanwhile, de Blasio’s Republican mayoral opponent, Joseph Lhota, made the supposed glories of stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his own doomed campaign. Lhota blasted de Blasio’s “recklessly dangerous agenda on crime,” and predicted that abandoning stop-and-frisk would turn New York City into something like the hellscape depicted in The Warriors, with gangs and street punks running roughshod over police officers.

This hasn’t happened. In a recent press conference, de Blasio and Bratton announced that violent crime rates are poised for historic lows in 2014. The New York Times reports that robberies and grand larcenies have both declined since 2013. The city’s homicide count sits at 290 as of Dec. 1, which puts New York on pace to beat last year’s record low homicide count of 335. And all this in a year when the New York Police Department is poised to log fewer than 50,000 stop-and-frisk incidents—a figure nearly 10 times lower than it was at New York’s stopping-and-frisking peak. Take that, Joe Lhota!

But this shouldn’t be surprising. Under the Bloomberg administration, hundreds of thousands of people were detained by police each year via the department’s stop-and-frisk program. Close to 90 percent of those people were released without charges after the stopping officers found nothing illegal. Whatever effect stop-and-frisk may have had as a deterrent was likely offset by the fact that it taught innocent people to fear and avoid the police. Stopping people who are doing nothing wrong on the grounds that they look vaguely suspicious only serves to alienate cops from the communities they’re supposed to serve.

With the decline of stop-and-frisk and the return of broken windows, the NYPD has traded one dubious tactic for another. When Bratton was appointed in December 2013, de Blasio positioned him as the opposite of his predecessor as police commissioner, Ray Kelly, saying in a press conference that “public safety and respect for the public aren’t contradictory ideas.” Bratton, for his part, promised policies of “mutual respect and mutual trust,” and vowed that “I will get it right in this city once more”—implying, of course, that he had gotten it right the first time. Three months later, the New York Times reported that arrests of subway panhandlers had tripled since Bratton took over, and that there had been “a noticeable spike in arrests for low-level violations in public housing developments.”

This renewed emphasis on misdemeanor “quality of life” arrests has sparked renewed criticisms from community members who are tired of being hassled. These criticisms spiked after Garner’s death in July. Six members of New York’s congressional delegation sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter noting that “Mr. Garner’s death has taken place in the context of a broken windows policing strategy that appears to target communities of color for the enforcement of minor violations and low-level offenses.”

Two weeks after Garner’s death, de Blasio held a press conference to address these criticisms and defend broken windows. “Breaking a law is breaking a law, and it has to be addressed,” said de Blasio.

That’s nonsense. The cornerstone of effective policing is discretion. If the cops enforced every single law on the books in every single precinct at all hours of the day, New York City would become a police state. Is that what de Blasio and Bratton want?

For mayors and police commissioners, being “tough on crime” means actively implementing some specific policy. But given that violent crime seems to be declining on its own regardless of what they do, there’s a case to be made that de Blasio and Bratton are only making things worse. Here’s a suggestion for a new policing policy for New York City: First, do no harm.

Misty » 04 Dec 2014 12:04 am » wrote:

The hypocrisy is blinding.
More about Dr. Ben Carson:

1. Raised by a single mother
2. Raised in public housing
3. Fed with food stamps.
4. Supported with welfare
5. Kept healthy with medicaid
6. Educated in public schools
7. Got eyeglasses from state agency
8. Benefited from affirmative action to enter college
9. Used federal loans and Pell grants in undergrad school
10. Benefited from affirmative action to enter medical school
11. Med school paid for with grant from USPHS*
12. Said: “The disintegration of the family unit and the welfare state are enslaving African-Americans and ruining their futures.”

Typical Tea Partier; he got his... the rest of us are on our own.

.

That's pretty freaking stupid. He was supposed to reject various types of welfare when he was a kid?

Further, as he matured he learned the net damage these programs do.

The Welfare State is bankrupting the country while degrading long-time recipients.

RichClem » 04 Dec 2014 3:20 pm » wrote: That's pretty freaking stupid. He was supposed to reject various types of welfare when he was a kid?

He was not a 'kid' when he benefited from numbers 8 through 11 was he?
Like I said, "Typical Tea Partier; he got his... the rest of us are on our own."

Misty » 04 Dec 2014 3:30 pm » wrote: He was not a 'kid' when he benefited from numbers 8 through 11 was he?
Like I said, "Typical Tea Partier; he got his... the rest of us are on our own."

He was in his early 20's, moonbat.

As he matured and gained wisdom, he learned better. The Welfare State is threatening to bankrupt the entire country, while corrupting recipients.

RichClem » 04 Dec 2014 6:53 pm » wrote: He was in his early 20's, moonbat.

Right, therefore NOT a kid, just like I said.

Misty » 04 Dec 2014 8:41 pm » wrote: Right, therefore NOT a kid, just like I said.

He was a kid for most of the time you complained about, and even in one's early 20's, one has yet to gain wisdom.

Now he knows how disastrous Liberalism is.

Captives held by ISIS were waterboarded.
At least four hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State, including an American journalist who was recently executed by the group, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, according to people familiar with the treatment of the kidnapped Westerners.

James Foley was among the four who were waterboarded several times by Islamic State militants who appeared to model the technique on the CIA’s use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

So was that torture?

How The CIA Got Conservative Author Ronald Kessler To Spin For Them On Torture

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture reveals that conservative author Ronald Kessler was "blessed" by the CIA, receiving background information from the agency which he used to push false claims about the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and publishing classified information without triggering a leak investigation.

Earlier today the committee released the executive summary of its report, the result of a five-year investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. According to The Washington Post, the document "renders a strikingly bleak verdict of a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish."

Kessler was once a reporter for mainstream publications but over the past few decades became a right-wing journalist known for his gossipy style. This past year, he authored The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of Presidents, one of a number of right-wing books that sought to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The newly released torture report cites Kessler's willingness to promote false claims about the effectiveness of torture as an example of how the CIA's Office of Public Affairs (OPA) "provided unattributed background information on the program to journalists for books, articles, and broadcasts, including when the existence of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program was still classified."

Kessler included such classified information in his book The CIA at War, but internal CIA emails cited by the report reveal that an investigation was never made into these leaks of classified information because OPA "provided assistance with the book" and it "contained no first time disclosure." The agency made the decision to pass on an investigation because CIA cooperation with Kessler had been "blessed" by then-Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet.

The report states that Kessler's book "included inaccurate claims about the effectiveness of CIA interrogations, much of it consistent with the inaccurate information being provided by the CIA to policymakers at that time." According to the report, claims in the book about the effectiveness of CIA interrogations that used torture techniques were false.

Read more at link in title.