calimary
calimary's JournalNobody's gonna see me criticizing our President.
I think he's doing great. I think history will be far kinder to him than the haters are. He'll be a towering figure in American history. And they'll always be nobodies.
Besides, just stop and consider where we'd be under a President McCain (and VP palin !!! or President romney and VP paul ryan ). The very idea makes me nauseous!
The issue is - growing the drumbeat. MORE of this. More and more and MORE.
Maybe it'll lead to numerous investigations and trials and, hopefully, convictions around the world - even convictions in absentia. That may not drag these bastards off to prison, but it'll put it on the record. And the more we build that record, the worse it'll be for these accursed perps. They won't be able to travel. They won't be able to leave the continental U.S. without taking great personal risk. Because of the assholishness of the republi-CON Congress at the end of Bill Clinton's term - they don't have lifetime Secret Service protection anymore. That ended with the start of the bush/cheney regime.
I think it was the GOP's last gasp at "hurting" Bill Clinton, since their "impeachment" of him was a lox and a HUGE joke, they failed to try him and convict him and have him removed, it made them look tremendously piss-ant and small and unpopular, and they just wanted to find SOME way to smack him around once more. Problem? Their passing the bill that cut back Secret Service protection for past presidents and their spouses to a mere six years after leaving the White House - did NOT take effect until the presidential term AFTER Clinton. So they wound up giving that other President they hated lifetime Secret Service protection - and he's the last President who gets it! HA HA HA - their feeble, pathetic attempt to "hurt" President Clinton one more time - ended up hurting THEIR guy FIRST!!!
These war criminals are gonna spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders, and maybe reaching over for the Maalox bottle on their night stand before they even get up out of bed in the morning. There ARE people who want to make citizens arrests overseas already. If there are official-type entities ready to do that, too - because these ARE, after all, WAR CRIMINALS, then these bastards will not sleep easily for the rest of their days.
And the wolfies and libbys and rummys and the david addingtons and john yoos and the contradictas and alfredo gonzaleses will have to start coughing up extra money for security wherever they go, and that won't let them rest easy either. They're going to spend the rest of their miserable lives as hunted, wanted criminals. And they're always going to be looking over their shoulders - til the day they draw their last breath.
Because they could.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. (And a pretty good intoxicant, too, IMO.)
Fair enough. But to me, she was the poster child for what's been wrong with the Democratic Party's
"approach". Her campaign which seemed awfully flaccid to me, making excuses for the ACA when she should have been out there with teeth showing and the proverbial boxing gloves laced on and ready to fight for what she believed rather than embracing the enemy talking points and thereby reinforcing them (oh, okay then. I get it. I guess those guys across the aisle are right about "Obamacare." I guess the "Obamacare" thing really IS sucky then) and not asserting - "I'm DAMN PROUD..." of it and spelling out WHY, then all that's accomplished is to verify the lies and distortions of the GOP.
Our poor pathetic party has to STOP doing that!!! She didn't. She was guilty of reinforcing what's come to be perceived as truth about our Dems:
That they don't stand for anything,
That there's no difference between the two parties,
So why vote for the wishy-washy when you at least know where the other team stands and what you're gonna get. Even if it's a hose job. I think that's what happened to Mary Landrieu. A shame we lost a "D". But, really, how reliable a "D" was she? Could she be counted on to stand with what we believe? Most of the time she was problematic. I hate to relinquish a "D" seat to an "R". But in many cases we would have gotten the equivalent of more "R"-slanted voting out of her than reliable "D" votes. At least with an "R" in there, we know what we've got, without a doubt. And it can be counted on to be reliably that way. And it won't be wishy-washy. A solid reliable "R" will always beat a DINO. With both sides. Even the bad guys' side - because they'd rather go with a sure thing every time, too.
Anybody remember the campaign in 2004 - when dubya went around saying "you may not agree with me, but you know where I stand"? Anybody? That was VERY powerful, VERY shrewd, and VERY effective. People go for certitude. That telegraphs as "strength" and "guts" and "power." Why do you think he kept being hailed as a "decisive leader" over and over and over and over again - even when he was as wrong as sin? It worked. It resonated with the public - enough of 'em anyway. It telegraphed "strong" and "decisive." Even when it was just totally wrong and frankly more than a little fucked up. It got the bad guys close enough to steal it - AGAIN. Which, in my opinion, is exactly what they did.
And they'll do it again in two years if we stay wishy-washy and mealy-mouthed and we don't learn a damn thing from what got us to this point.
Totally. That's why we MUST have justice.
We MUST have some public sign - an outward sign as we Catholics would say - that yes, even the cops are subject to the same laws, obligations, responsibilities, and criminal penalties for crossing the limit. When you have a pile-on of police on ONE guy, whose instinct was apparently to resist what he thought was a clear and total over-reaction by the officers - and you get a frickin' DEATH because he was selling single cigarettes - W. T. F. ??? What are we supposed to think about that? What are we supposed to do about that? How are we supposed to react? What can the rest of us be expected to conclude from that?
When you can clearly see this glaring unfairness over and over and over and over: police overreach, and quite literally OVERKILL, and there are NO consequences? NONE? NOBODY facing any charges or disciplinary anything? There's NOTHING? Again and again they're let off the hook? Seriously? I mean, shit - the Eric Garner disaster sure looks like unreasonable and unwarranted overreach to me. And DEFINITELY overkill. I mean, the police reaction to that man looked completely ridiculous to me! They freakin' choked him to death? For selling single cigarettes? Are you KIDDING me??? That's thereby rendered a death-penalty offense?
I'm a 61-year-old white woman. But it was as glaringly clear to me as though it were a cream pie in the face. How could people not conclude what they have concluded from this? We ALL saw the video. How could one conclude anything different? How could there be any other takeaway from this?
Especially when it's happened again and again and again and again and ...
There's gonna be more trouble and more grief and more civil disruption if our justice system doesn't respond, and try to correct some of this increasingly frightening imbalance. It will lead us to pitchforks and torches and mobs in the streets (and I fear, a LOT worse) who've decided that enough is finally just ENOUGH. It won't be just one single rogue nutcase deciding he has to seek and impose "justice" when the system won't. Our whole social balance is at serious risk. And as Matt Taibbi puts it, rather succinctly - When that perception sinks in, it's not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders "ends today." It's going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that's going to be.
Crushed.
I heard it on the radio this morning and found myself YELLING - "NOOOO!!!!!!!!!" Just reflexively and immediately. It just came out.
Joe Cocker?!?!?!?! NO!!!!!!!! NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just hate losing another one. Remember when Belushi did this great impersonation of him, and it was like "Dueling Cockers" onstage there? It was WUNNNNderful! So bummed. Loved Joe Cocker!
Hey, watch 'em move Alex Sink up to New York. Or hey - Martha Coakley from MA!!!
Two STELLAR examples of stupid-ass useless Democratic LOSERS. But they sure keep picking them to run for office - and get their asses handed back to them by their GOP opponent.
NEITHER ONE of those women should EVER be allowed to run for office AGAIN!!!!!! Martha Coakley should consider early retirement. Because of her that idiot scott brown was able to gain a foothold. Not that he could keep it once he gained it, but still - she in her arrogance and her OWN idiocy handed him the keys to the Senate that he had NO BUSINESS even getting near to, unless as a Capitol Hill TOURIST. And Alex Sink - going around her Florida district mewling about how "Obamacare" was bad but... but... but... we'll fix it... SHIT!!!! You DO NOT CONCEDE DEFEAT BEFORE YOU EVEN GET TO THE FINISH LINE!!! DO NOT give the enemy a leg up! You do NOT do that!!!! She shoulda showed guts and stood tall and strong and said "I'M DAMN PROUD of the ACA! And how many people it's helped. And how many people who couldn't get insurance now can afford it. And how the rest of us save so much more money! And how it did away with pre-existing conditions so you can have insurance TOO. And how it allows you to keep your kid covered til he or she turns 26 and has a chance to get on their feet..." and so on and so on. But no. She couldn't possibly show backbone like that...
Stunning. That witness should have been totally voided.
Shouldn't have even been allowed to offer testimony. The FLAGRANT bias here is just really infuriating. And embarrassing!
THERE ARE SO MANY WRONG SIGNALS SPINNING OUT OF THIS STUFF!!!!!!!
AND IT'S BOUND TO END BADLY!!! Heck, ALMOST GUARANTEED to end badly.
For example, all the mouths yapping about how the protests spurred the murder of those two New York City cops? SHIT! The protests have NOTHING to do with that!!! For Pete's Sake! It's the widely-perceived INJUSTICE that's spurred it! Flagrant and repeated injustice unfortunately can be expected to spark something like this. It's gonna provoke someone feeling great grievance about this just to snap! You get enough of the repeated incidents where white-cop-kills-black-civilian-and-isn't-held-accountable - and invariably some hothead out there is gonna be very tempted to take matters into his/her own hands. All it's going to do is provoke more vigilante justice among those who feel that the system is so stacked against them and the game is so rigged that they have to go all Lone-Ranger-meets-Robin-Hood and "settle this" on their own. Somebody's gonna go rogue and do something really reckless in the name of seeking justice, or payback, or whatever one might want to call it.
It's just bad, and sad, all around. I wish more of our justice-system people could see and understand this. Don't they study human nature? Or is it just me? When I first heard about the ambush killing of those two cops, that's the first thing that popped into my mind. Somebody's trying to even the score, on their own, because those cops in the Eric Garner case didn't face any consequences for CLEAR and OBVIOUS police brutality.
It's NOT the protesters. It's NOT the protesters! They've been peaceful. Large in number but basically peaceful. They're holding signs instead of guns and ammo.
This is so damn sad. It just makes me feel disgusted and ashamed.
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Gender: FemaleHome country: USA
Current location: Oregon
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 81,267
