I’d like to know how the hell someone the FBI thought was suspicious and whom had mental issues was allowed to legally buy guns.
This is how.
But it helps if you completely disregard the whole “well-regulated” clause which implies some sort of… well, regulation. With that part carefully excised, what you’ve got remaining is the current Supreme Court interpretation.
They should get this guy to query Bannon.
Q: What… is your name?
A: Steve Bannon.
Q: What… is your quest?
A: To stay out of prison.
Q: What… is your favorite color?
A: Red. No… White! aaaaaaargh
So Steve Bannon came before the House Intelligence Committee for the first time since he refused to answer any questions the first time, and… he presented the committee with a list of 25 questions he would answer, but only if they were asked verbatim exactly as written. The answer to all of these pre-approved questions was a simple one-word answer: No. He refused to answer any other questions, including follow-ups on the 25, or variations on the 25 with slightly different wording. (i.e. if the answer to “did you meet with X” was No, the answer to “did you talk with X” was invoking Executive Privilege). And of course, as before, the claim of Executive Privilege was invoked for events for which there was no Executive Privilege to invoke.
Usually I admire chutzpah, but I don’t really think it qualifies as chutzpah when you know the committee chair has your back.
Two words: time capsule.
Australia’s homicide rate was already so low (see chart above) it would have been difficult to pull a statistically significant reduction out of any policy, due to small sample size alone. However, their suicide rate, while ALSO miles better than ours, was a big enough sample size to analyze. Yes, I realize mass shootings and other rare events* trigger such laws, but suicide & domestic violence are the most affected by them, simply because the numbers are higher. (And I support most of the restrictions I’ve seen suggested, and some I haven’t seen suggested).
* “Rare” is relative. In the US, there’s currently one shooting at or near a school every 60 hours. Sometimes rare in a statistical sense is still not rare enough.
Yep. It’s an American problem.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
I think it’s wrong to generalize such a huge country with very varying local legistlation and people. Would be nice to see a state by state comparison.
Last major state-by-state analysis (Household Gun Ownership Gun Death Rate Per 100,000) gives these top five and bottom five states (first number is gun ownership percent, second is death rate, they are ranked by the latter):
1 Louisiana 45.6 percent 18.91
2 Mississippi 54.3 percent 17.80
3 Alaska 60.6 percent 17.41
4 Wyoming 62.8 percent 16.92
5 Montana 61.4 percent 16.74
50 Rhode Island 13.3 percent 3.14
49 Hawaii 9.7 percent 3.56
48 Massachusetts 12.8 percent 3.84
47 New York 18.1 percent 5.11
46 New Jersey 11.3 percent 5.46
The problem with doing per-state analysis in the US is that while each state sets its own laws, all states have open borders with each other. So gun availability in California is directly affected by laws in Nevada, etc. Not to mention city ordinances, where the restrictions are so localized that there can’t be any significant effect. Alaska and Hawaii may be the only two states without this issue clouding the stats. But then all of these statistics include suicides (which I think is appropriate, but you have to be aware of this), and Alaska and Wyoming have rather obscene suicide rates (27 and 28 per 100,000, while the national average is 12.6).
EDIT: Finland, with the highest suicide rate of all those listed countries, sits at 14.2, Sweden is at 12.7, and the rest have lower suicide rates than the US. The US is really not so great in the suicide department.
Many of these cops even when found not guilty can never return to their jobs
You can lose your job over acts that, while not illegal, violate rules of professional conduct or reflect badly on the employer – and that’s the employer’s prerogative. I guess I should tier that. Courts matter most. Employers matter secondary. Public opinion could make you have to live with unflattering memes for the rest of your life, so that matters a little less.
well it is the truth. Whenever these things happen, the cops are automatically presumed to be in the wrong.
That’s why they are all in jail, gotcha.
I should have said “with the exception of the courts”.
“Except where it matters” would have worked fine as well.
Okay, so this is turning very weird very fast (Yay Ohio! Stay weird!). What with Rep. Issa’s history of multiple car thefts, arson, and weapons-related crimes, it’s refreshing to finally see some signs of completely legal behavior on his part.
I don’t think anyone is that desperate to win a reality show. Morgan hates Star Wars, so nuts to him anyway. 😛
I thought reality shows are based on shameless desperation.
It would be nice if reality shows were actually based on reality.
Those are known as “documentaries.”
Marlin Perkins allegedly had a foot in both worlds.
How about no one until we have proof?
You’ve missed the point.
which is?
It’s like the two doors puzzle, where one door always tells the truth, and the other door always tells lies. Except both doors always tell lies.
He’s leaving himself open for campaign donations. I believe it was Willie Brown who said “If you can’t take people’s money and then turn around a screw them, you’ve got no business being in this business.”
He actually said “Competitive Elections Are Bad for America”?
He didn’t just say it, he wrote a book with that title. He’s pro-gerrymandering, thinks there should be more of it and courts should get out of the way and let the parties go crazy on the maps, drawing themselves into safe districts so that they always win regardless of how the overall vote goes. Because one-person-one-vote is socialism or something. So, he was at the top of Trump’s list to run the US freaking Census, given that he was the worst imaginable candidate for the job.
Good News: Thomas “Competitive Elections Are Bad for America” Brunell is no longer being considered to head the 2020 Census.
The bad news: there are plenty of other nuts on that tree, the 2020 Census is already underfunded and behind schedule, and will feature questions that will skew data by discouraging minority participation.
There are precedents for this. Lebanon essentially stopped doing a census after 1932, as any new even vaguely credible census data would overturn the political order there. Allocations are still done today using that 1932 data.
Polish collaborated in the holocaust, but how many collaborated in the actual conquering of Poland itself?
A decent percentage of the population of Szczuczyn, for example. Jews were Polish citizens just as much as non-Jewish Poles. So Poles who killed their fellow Polish citizens not at the urging of the Nazis, but because they wanted to achieve the same political aims as the Nazis, very much assisted in the invasion. The Nazis could focus their military energy elsewhere because of the ample assistance provided by some Poles, although it should be noted that the small number of Nazis still present in the town during the massacre actually stepped in to put an end to it, before following the lead of the Poles and murdering the rest of the Jews a few months later.
If a group of Americans went around killing a few hundred thousand independence-minded Americans during the Revolutionary War, it would be safe to say they were helping the British. As with the Poles who killed Polish Jews when the Germans invaded.
the Germans let Hitler come to power
…except for those who fought him.
the Polish people were conquered
…except for those who collaborated.
And yet it’s not illegal to own up to their complicity in Germany, while it is in Poland.
It does sound like Poland’s hands are not clean in this. However, it should be remember that some Polish people felt they had to cooperate with the Nazis or be killed themselves and maybe their family too.
No defense that couldn’t be made for Germans as well. But the Germans own up to it.
Well, the larger point about EU membership is all about how one of the EU’s central principles is the respect for and promotion of human rights. It’s that exact issue that was always cited as such a sticking point preventing Turkish membership (albeit with a healthy dose of racism and Islamophobia, but concern for human rights was also a legitimate grievance). If a country applying for membership was anything like Poland or Hungary today, they’d be rejected out of hand, no doubt about it at all. But now the EU is stuck with them, having accepted them during saner years, and the legitimacy of the EU’s commitment to human rights suffers for it. And both of these countries are rotting fast – this will not be the end of it. This is not an aberration or a one-off “every country passes a stupid law every now and then” moment – this Holocaust law is a continuation of a prolonged multi-year erosion of democracy and human rights in Poland, and shouldn’t have been unexpected at all.
Meanwhile, the EU needs to figure out a way to simply expel Poland with or without Hungary’s support. Whether that’s dissolving the EU and immediately re-forming something identical to the EU but without Poland (and Hungary) or not, Poland is now the sort of country the EU would bend over backwards to avoid having as a member state, and it’s going to get worse as long as the EU fails to deal with it. Yes, the EU charter is designed to make handling this sort of thing difficult (especially when two members are bad actors at the same time). Time to start thinking difficult.
Just how responsible is Poland for the holocaust? I mean they were a conquered country during WWII and were under Nazi control, weren’t they?
For the portion that took place within their borders, the most apt word for their involvement is “complicit”. Virulent anti-Semitism was endemic in Poland without any prompting from the Germans, and apparently it still is.
Meanwhile, the EU needs to figure out a way to simply expel Poland with or without Hungary’s support. Whether that’s dissolving the EU and immediately re-forming something identical to the EU but without Poland (and Hungary) or not, Poland is now the sort of country the EU would bend over backwards to avoid having as a member state, and it’s going to get worse as long as the EU fails to deal with it. Yes, the EU charter is designed to make handling this sort of thing difficult (especially when two members are bad actors at the same time). Time to start thinking difficult.
No censorship, no melon farmers. Know censorship, know melon farmers.
What is the point of a debt ceiling if it’s raised every time it’s reached?
The point is to extract a second round of concessions in addition to the concessions you already got for approving the spending in the first place.
Looks like the shutdown is over, using the slightly slower old-fashioned steam-powered votes.
Then I felt like most of the posters here were jerks. Then I became one.
Indefinite antecedents are the best.
I want to agree with you. But I have to be honest, I don’t understand what you said. 😉. Me no love english class.
Example: “After my dog and my husband had a bad day together, he took it out on me by pooping in my shoes every morning.”
Thanks. My guess was correct. And I did intentionally make my post that way. 😄
Congratulations! You win a pair of shoes!
Then I felt like most of the posters here were jerks. Then I became one.
Indefinite antecedents are the best.
I want to agree with you. But I have to be honest, I don’t understand what you said. 😉. Me no love english class.
Example: “After my dog and my husband had a bad day together, he took it out on me by pooping in my shoes every morning.”
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