Zoning regulations are entirely a local city council thing, not a statewide thing,
The EPA is "a local city council thing"?
not a democract-vs-republican thing, not a "health provision for all" thing, not a "more government regulation" thing.
It kind of looks that way, though.
the Muslim ban
"Muslim" isn't a race.
the child separation policy
"Crossed the border illegally" isn't a race.
the "China travel ban" that only functioned as a Chinese national ban
"Citizenship" isn't a race.
the massive anti-brown-people changes to the US' immigration policy
I can't tell you why you're wrong unless you're more specific.
Stephen Miler's long and publicly-documented record of white nationalism
Oh, something I don't know much about. This might take a whole ten minutes to make into a joke.
TPR: So in order to sell a book with a click-bait title we're playing telephone - these guys are racist, Miller may have listened to them, and Trump listens to Miller, so Trump must be racist. OK, so (per their Wikipedia pages) these guys are racist because...
Forbes: Some people in the White House don't like the 1619 Project (just like a fair number of historians), and some people Trump fired had been "linked" with someone else who's been accused on something. Such damning evidence!
I'm already tired of your fact-filled...
I'm sorry that facts hurt your feelings. If you don't want them from me, then don't hit "submit".
Trump basically said that the judge couldn't do his job because of his ethnicity
Did he say "Latinos are lazy", talk about skin color, or use a disparaging term? No. He said:
"Well, he's a member of a society, where -- you know, very pro-Mexico..."
He's probably referring to the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association (which the judge is a member of), but mixing in the views of the advocacy group called the National Council of La Raza like a lot of other people did since they both sometimes go by "La Raza" for short. (While they serve the same community and share members, they don't have any official ties.)
So what makes more sense - he's prejudiced against Hispanics but only lets it show when bashing a single judge, or he doesn't like the judge and you want to twist that into racism?
why is he so damn sure that these nonwhite boys exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession are guilty
Because they may well have been guilty of the other crimes that were committed?
"They had been in the park with a makeshift group of 30 other young people, some of them making trouble — hassling a homeless man for his food, forcing bike riders to run a gauntlet, badly hurting a man at the reservoir — while others watched. Unlike the accurate accounts they gave to police of those events, their confessions to the assault on the jogger were wrong about..."
while he pardons Rod Blagojevich and Roger Stone
1. He didn't pardon them, he commuted their sentences.
2. He commuted the sentences of 10 people so far in 2020, only two appear to be white, but they're the only two you know about. Clearly proof that he's racist and you're not.
While he defends the supposedly very fine people who marched alongside the N*zis in Charlottesville?
Again, you're saying he's racist because he condemned racists but didn't condemn other people that have a tenuous association with them?
Racism is an important issue to me because it's a particularly terrible intellectual defect
So is ranting about a judge on stage while actively litigating a case in front of him! Again, why ignore the indisputable character flaw clearly and repeatedly put on display in favor of one that's based on trying to interpret a few phrases in a particular way?
And what's much worse than saying racist things is doing racist things, which Trump does with glee
... Trump happily enacts his white nationalist agenda.
Then why the &@*! are we focusing on ambiguous, off-the-cuff comments???? Show the the policies and the agenda!
his statements on Gonzalo Curiel
He said that they guy was a "hater of Donald Trump", and he "happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that's fine" but might have a bias against a guy running on "build the wall". That might be a dumb rant, but how do you get from "his parents are from country X, so he might not like my opposition to some people immigrating from X" to racism?
Let me guess - if his parents came over from France just before he was born, and Trump was running on platform that many French people didn't like, the exact same statements wouldn't have been racist.
his campaign against the Central Park Five
The crime was so sensationalized that I heard about it as a kid more than a thousand miles away, so it's not surprising that he mentioned it in one of his attention-grabbing ads. But the only time he mentioned (or as far as I can see, implied) race in the ad was when he was deliberately stated that good people of all races were scared to come out at night.
If you mean that he hasn't accepted that they were innocent, that's pretty bad. But given first impression bias and the length of time before the revelations, the fact that he would have to admit making incorrect public statements, and the fact that I've had a recent experience with someone who flatly states "you cannot convince me", there seem to be plenty of alternative explanations.
So let me ask you this. You can show Trump ranting about a judge like a grounded teenager bashing his parents when telling his friends he can't go out. You can show Trump isn't willing to accept that some people are provably innocent of the crimes for which they were punished. Why don't you (and people like you) ever seem to point to those obvious character flaws, and instead insist on the more dubious charge of "racism"?
I mean, even if you manage to show that Trump is somewhat more racist than the average septuagenarian (say Joe Biden, for example), that's not nearly as bad as throwing temper tantrums or not getting that people falsely confess to crimes. So what makes this such an important issue to you?
Everyone can hear dog whistles except the colorblind.
... You cannot convince me that Trump is not a racist...
Well, ususally when I hear people saying things like or "foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see"
Just to appriciate what a grotesque smear job it is, here are the first three paragraphs:
President Donald Trump refused to explicitly condemn white supremacist groups during the first 2020 presidential debate on Tuesday, instead opting to issue a rallying cry to a far-right extremist group with a history of engaging in street violence.
"Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down?" debate moderator Chris Wallace asked.
"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by! But I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left," Trump said, after additional prompting from former Vice President Joe Biden.
And here's what was actually said, which you can hear by playing the Twitter video further down the very same article:
Wallace: You have repeatedly criticized the Vice President for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing groups. But are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
Trump: Sure...
Wallace: And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha, as we've seen in Portland? Are you prepared specifically to do that?
Trump: Sure, I’m prepared to do it. I would say- I would say, almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right wing-
This is followed by all three participants making two additional statements each, ending with Biden suggesting "Proud Boys", and then Trump telling them to "stand back and stand by" rather than "stand down", which I'm willing to take as minor a misstatement.
So, where in all of that is a "refusal" to do anything? I might like a stronger statement, but that wasn't any form of "no".
Just to summarize, you're so certain that the President is a racist that no amount of evidence would convice you otherwise, but the best two pieces of evidence you have are him condemning white supremacists "totally", and him agreeing, twice, to condemn them, but also swinging the focus back on his debate opponent's weak point that was also mentioned in the question?
Trump only makes token, reluctant condemnations of white nationalist groups momentarily when the public pressure for him to do so becomes too great
And yet your only example is him flatly saying that they should be "condemned totally". What more do you want?
everything from dog whistles to tweeting people yelling "white power"
So things only you can hear, and out of the thousands of things he's retweeted, one moron in one video of a lot of people shouting at each other? Come on, man!
Historically inconsistent and legally wrong, this is not how the US government is supposed to work, this is a recipe for a banana republic's creeping authoritarianism:
Ah, so you didn't mean Separation of Powers, you just meant that you agree with this one lawyer's opinion about making AGs more independent. I do to some extent as well.
Trump himself, in his own words, marks his involvement in the quid-pro-quo
This sounds like selective memory of Sondland, who said "The President has been clear no quid pro quos of any kind." before testifying that there definitely was one, then that he only inferred that there was one.
Biden's overall anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine had actually started before Hunter and Burisma spoke.
Which is irrelevant - even if I take every statement of fact you've made as completely true, he still took an action that may have affected the course of investigations that his son was tied to - even if the only possible bad effect was to intimidate other prosecutors. Keep in mind that this is a country that's already fired another Prosecutor General for alleged corruption, and is reviewing ~15 cases related to Burisma - so scaring people off is a bit of a concern.
Again, I'm not saying that it proves anything, but is enough to warrant some kind of investigation, even if just to confirm all of the facts, and pave the way for clearer conflict of interest rules to be set up.
So, either Joe Biden was touching this with a pole that reaches over the horizon, or the Bidens are criminal supergeniuses who had planned everything out in advance to pull off white-collar crimes in Ukraine and keep their secret arch-nemeis Viktor Shokin at bay, despite both of them taking publicly-visible actions that appear to show opposite motivations the entire time, and maybe Hillary was the Bidens' fifth horseman for good measure?
I don't know how to respond to a strawman.
In the interest of time, I'm going to skip over the things I partly agree with you on and the things where I disagree but understand your reasoning, and just focus on the things that I'm just not understanding.
What Trump is doing here is beyond dog-whistling, it wouldn't fool me, and shouldn't fool anyone. And it's part of a pattern, not an accident.
So when someone says there are good people on "both sides" of a statue removing issue, and he goes on to say a group should be "condemned totally", that's tacit support for that group? Because just after the event he didn't want to issue blanket condemnation of everyone who showed up supporting the statue, perhaps people who didn't know how many racists would show up?
I can understand that the back-and-forth between the President and the reporter wasn't the most eloquent of converstations, but how on Earth is the best evidence of his "pattern" of support for a particular group a converstation where he explicitly calls that group out by name for condemnation?
he would normally want to not touch the investigation with a 30-foot pole - he'd want it done entirely by AGs and investigators who appear as independent as possible
Just for the record, that wouldn't "maintain separation of powers" - the AGs literally work for the President. It would, however, be a good idea, even if just for appearances.
What I don't get is how a couple of sentences in a conversation, mentioning perfectly valid cooperation between Judicial branches that the other party will find out about soon enough, turns into a "turbaconducken of corruption with sparklers stuck in it".
And just to move it from surprising to absurd, you're doing this at the same time that you're defending someone else who demanded action, directly and in person where the result could affect his own son's bottom line. Shouldn't that trigger a demand for at least a 3-foot pole?
Right, the guy who opened an investigation (on top of the existing ones), raided the CEO's house, and caused said CEO to flee the country gets fired, and the new investigator "just happens" to find no wrongdoing. Clearly Joe made things worse for his son, and there's nothing to see here.
/s This is just factually wrong, trying to twist the facts into anything resembling this would involve some blatant anachronisms:
OK, first, what facts are you disputing?
Second, why should I trust a journalist telling me that they know for a fact that Joe Biden's conflict of interest didn't affect how things played out (or that somehow that conflict didn't exist)? Keep in mind that I'm only suggesting that an investigation/bringing more transparency to the situation makes sense, not that I know that any of the Bidens did something wrong.
Your mistake was thinking that there was a blatant falsehood involved.
... He said they were "very fine people"
He did not. He said "you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." and then went on to say "I’m not talking about the neo-N***s and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally.".
Let's not forget that Trump is $0.4B in personal debt to unknown entities, he needs that money.
Do you mean that companies he owns owe mortgages? Ones that can, at worst, easily be covered by selling a few properties?
The emoluments clause was quickly put in place to regulate the receipt of those gifts, and Trump's continuing family ownership of those businesses makes a mockery of it.
I might prefer it if Presidents (and other politicians) were willing to distance themselves from their businesses, but if a diplomat paying a hotel bill to a company that the President is a part owner of is "making a mockery of it", then surely Qatar giving a million dollars directly to the Clinton Foundation, which went unreported to the State Department (as Clinton promised gifts would be) should be even more alarming.
I could start with the fact that if anyone should be making law enforcement requests of a foreign government, it should be the AG, not the president
And the President can't say "the Justice Department is going to call, I'd appriciate it if you'd work with them"?
Next there's the fact that defense-related foreign aid was being used as a bargaining chip
Right, "we're giving you even more money, please work with us" is horrible, but "fire this guy, or you don't get the money" isn't? Just because the first is defense-related? Keep in mind that this was money Obama/Biden wasn't willing to give at all, so saying it was a "risk [to] defense issues" is a bit hyperbolic.
If Hunter Biden was doing anything sketchy at Burisma, for which the best evidence we have is his standard-issue ridiculous board-level paycheck for inexperienced but privileged people,
It doesn't matter if Hunter Biden himself did anything wrong, it's still in his best interest for investigations into Burisma to be dropped.
Then there's the fact that the supposed crime was basically evidence-free and completely illogical.
... Joe Biden's actions only put his son in more legal danger, by pushing for the firing of the officials stonewalling the investigation into Burisma.
Right, the guy who opened an investigation (on top of the existing ones), raided the CEO's house, and caused said CEO to flee the country gets fired, and the new investigator "just happens" to find no wrongdoing. Clearly Joe made things worse for his son, and there's nothing to see here.
Then there's the fact that a political opponent was involved.
So we can't investigate Joe Biden, who wasn't in office or running at the time, but people who were literally running against Trump got to both investigate and vote during his impeachment hearings? Can you seriously be presenting this as an argument?
Does this stuffed turbaconducken of corruption with sparklers stuck in it not raise any red flags to you?
Yes. We clearly need a thorough investigation of Joe Biden, to keep an eye on Trump, and seriously rethink how impeachment works.
Sorry to spoil your idea.
And I'm sorry that you don't understand the idea that was being expressed.
Have a nice day.
The emoluments clause violations are also legally very straightforward
We'll see how the court cases go, but since George Washington (and every president after) has accepted and kept physical gifts from foreign officials, not to mention food, press attention, etc, , it's hard to see how a paying market rates for a lease to a company that's partly owned by someone would count as a "present" or an "office" or "employment".
I realized that in previous eras presidents were careful to avoid the appearance of impropriety, but this feels like Clinton's Lincoln Bedroom scandal.
I like how you brush off arguably his most spectacular abuse of power - and that's really saying something - the Ukraine aid scandal, as "usual anti-Trump whinging."
It's been gone over to death, so I don't think it will change many people's minds - if you hated Trump before the call it's proof that he's corrupt, if you like the guy he was just doing his job (coordinating an investigation between two countries), and if you just thinks he's a jackass it looks a bit sleazy, but with the usual pro-forma excuses.
But if you really want to rehash this, could you explain how "you ran on an anti-corruption platform, there's a story going around about potential corruption, could you look into it" is a "spectacular abuse of power", especially when the person being pressured/coerced/whatever keeps saying that he wasn't? And wouldn't it have been better to hash how the whole "Joe Biden is corrupt" thing before the primary instead of during an election?
Comey's firing was as blatant an obstruction of justice as possible
See, that one sounds like it's might be an actual problem. I'm not saying I agree, but I can't dismiss it immediately with what I currently know.
You cherry-pick some of the weaker cases and ignore reams of abuses of power...
You linked to a list of things, one of which I already know is a blatant falsehood and several others seem rather dubious. Why should I trust that the rest are reliable? It starts to feel like the author just spewed out as many smears as possible, hoping that one would stick.
Imagine that I made a list of attacks on Obama, including that he was born in Kenya and was a mass murderer because of his extrajudicial killings, wouldn't including the first claim make you somewhat suspicious of how objective I am about the second?
Just take a look there - the first is just the usual anti-Trump whinging, but the second looks like it might be amusing:
"every time a foreign official stays at a Trump hotel, or a foreign government approves a new Trump Organization project, or grants a trademark, Trump is in violation of the Constitution." - I'm sure the lawyers are all over this one. LOL
Oh, this will be fun - "When Trump gave cover to the neo-N***s who rioted in Charlottesville and murdered a protester, he violated his obligation to protect the citizenry against domestic violence." And what does that link to? A story in the Atlantic that starts with the provably false statement "President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday..."
And this is the reason that Trump still has a shot at re-election - none of the people opposing him just calmly state their case, they seem compelled to go with tortured misunderstandings of how certain legal principles work and outright lies.
Antifa is a figment of RWNJs' imagination.
I didn't know Jerry Nadler had a slashdot account! Hi, Jerry!
Also, Wikipedia is apparently right wing now.
You put the news industry at the bottom of the list, below scammers, snake oil salesmen, tele-evangelists, drug cartels, etc?
Pretty much. They all lie exactly as much as they think they can get away with, tell the full truth only when they must, and never change how they work even after they get caught.
Take the handling of emails - when it's damaging to one side they'll definitively state that it was sent on the 4th and not the 14th without any corroboration (then retract when they have to), but when it's damaging to the other side at first they're fake, after it's clear that they're real it's dismissed as Russian disinformation, when that's no longer tenable it's a non-story, then it's not conclusive proof, then...
Don't let your TDS make you forget that these are the same people that sold the public on the Iraq war, not just the conspiracy theory that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.
Sorry, in Europe food is more expensive than ever.
Again, price for the end customer in a particular market is not the same subject. Imagine this:
Someone: Wow, gas prices have been below $3/gal for six years now. Who would have expected that in 2008?
You: But I've been paying more than that for most of the last six years!
Me: That's because you live in California, where they now have a 50/gal tax, as well as other regulations - that's what you're paying for, the gas itself is still <$3/gal.
You: Gas is more expensive than ever!
Me: For you, but we're talking about the price of the commodity, not the total price for your own personal situation.
You: Here's a picture of sign outside my local gas station...
Me: What exactly are you missing here?
No, it is the farmers like to have a living. And we do not have farms that are as big as a small country here.
And that bottom line food is cheap enough it does not matter in your monthly bill.
Exactly. But you don't counter "food is cheaper than ever" with "Yes, but no, because after subsidies for all of this other stuff added onto it...".
Soy beans hardly have any effect on any food prices.
You're literally saying that the cost of food (as a commodity) has hardly any effect on the price of food (as consumers/governments choose to buy it), but don't get that we're talking about the first and not the second?
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
