BootmanLA

FWIW, I have an excellent sense of humor. I just don't find Nazis, white supremacists, or racists funny. As for debate: far be it from me to question the debate tactics of someone who tries to make his point with pithy misquotes overlaid onto photographs as though they were, you know, actually reasoned arguments. And it's especially funny to watch such a person claim others are "defensive" when his entire schtick consists of defending a white supremacist president. But hey, what do I know?

Here's an eye-popping fact: Before Donald Trump became president, weekly first-time claims for unemployment (that is, newly unemployed people) had never exceeded one million. That has now happened SEVENTEEN weeks in a row. Seventeen weeks of more than a million people becoming newly unemployed and filing for unemployment. The current official unemployment rate exceeds 11%. It peaked at 10% early in Barack Obama's term and declined thereafter (slower than anyone would have liked, but still). The same folks who were calling for Obama's head then are strangely silent now, even though we currently have the highest unemployment rate since WWII. And this is before many of the bailouts received in the last few months, like the billions given to prop up airlines, expire. Meanwhile the death toll from CoViD is closing in on 140,000, is accelerating in most states, and is not likely to slow down over the next several months. But hey - buy Goya beans, because the Trumps think they're just swell. That's certainly a worthwhile use of time and the prestige of the presidency.

I realize this topic died out a while back, but in reviewing it, I noticed some things that perhaps some posters did not. It's true that the Declaration of Independence referred to "united" states - lower case. That's because as of the time of its signing, the thirteen original colonies were thirteen legally separate units with no legal connections to each other. Hence, there was nothing to capitalize, because there was no single nation in existence here. Contrary to some people's mistaken beliefs, the Declaration of Independence did not create a nation of any sort. It is thus expressly wrong that the Declaration "created" the U.S. It did not. It merely dissolved the bonds between thirteen colonies and their mother country. An actual separate nation only came into effect with the Articles of Confederation, more than a year later - the "first" iteration of a United States - which duly capitalized the "U". In fact, the very first article of the Articles of Confederation gave the country its name: 'The Stile of this confederacy shall be, “The United States of America.”' I wouldn't particularly worry about picking a state for when the country falls apart. But if anyone does feel so compelled, I'd advise looking carefully at which ones (ie the red states) depend on federal money to survive and which ones (ie the blue states) contribute more to federal coffers than they get back. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Carolinas, Missouri - all take far more from the feds than they give. When that money dries up, see how fast roads in those states go to hell, how many state universities shut down for lack of funding, how many people lose health care because there's no Medicare or Medicaid, etc.

Hint: liberals aren't crying. They're laughing at the Trumpanzees who can't see they're being hustled by a third-rate con man whose con is falling apart around them as they speak. I mean, who could really compete with the president's spokesperson who said that Trump has decreed that schools need to open and "science shouldn't stand in the way of that". Well. That'll show that pesky science who's boss.

NOTHING in the "lgbt agenda" calls for "telling little boys they could go into the girls locker room" for any purpose whatsoever. You clearly pay SOME attention to politics, contrary to your statement, because you're parroting right-wing nutcase nonsense here. For starters, how many "little boys" are going to be willing to go on the record claiming to be a girl - something they'll have to attest to, in some fashion, before school administrators - thinking they'll get into a girl's locker room? Anyone who's young enough to be called a "little boy" is certainly going to need parental permission and support to identify to the school as female, and that's going to stop about 99.999% of the fraudulent/pervert cases. The problem isn't doctors "misgendering" you. Based on your profile, it seems you identify as a transvestite (a male who dresses up in women's clothing). That's a very different thing from someone who's transgender (aka "gender identity") - when someone identifies as a particular gender although they were identified at birth as the opposite gender. The "rollback" wouldn't affect you, since you're not transgender at all; however, medical professionals no longer being required to treat transgender patients with respect and as their identified gender IS a huge rollback. It's not just calling them by the wrong name or pronoun. It can make differences in treatment plans or result in a misdiagnosis because the health care provider didn't consider all the relevant information. It's not just transwomen; it's trans men, as well. And while I'm sure what you MEANT to say is that some employees (regardless of gender or gender identity) deserve to get fired, the point is that many trans people (and for that matter, gay and bi people) have been fired simply because they're trans, gay, or bi. That, at least, is no longer legal thanks to a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court.

I don't do it to debate him so much as to make it clear to others that his arguments are silly. Too many people are unwilling to challenge insanity when they encounter it, either out of fear of confrontation, excessive politeness, or the mistaken idea that because everyone can have an opinion, all opinions are equal and worthy of respect. I call BS on that. People need to see that normalizing a malignant narcissistic sociopath is a bad thing.

Trump is not a capitalist. He took tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars from his father and ran most of his business ventures into bankruptcy. In the process, by stiffing hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of contractors who did work for him, he caused many of them to go into bankruptcy as well. He was so notorious for defaulting not only on vendor payments but on loans that starting more than twenty years ago, no American bank would lend him anything for even the smallest business venture. He was saved from yet additional bankruptcies by (a) laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for the Russian mob, mostly through Deutsche Bank, (b) hiring out his name to every two-bit fraudulent scammer of a foreign developer who used Trump's name to steal millions (or more) in local money, with Trump always getting his cut, and (c) pretending to be a billionaire developer on TV by being the kind of sociopathic asshole everyone in the business world already knew him to be. As has been noted by analyst after analyst, his so-called wealth has been vastly overstated for decades. At one point, in a deposition, he admitted over half his "wealth" was what he - and nobody else - considered his "brand" worth, and that it varied depending on how he felt that day. Of course, this is nothing new for a developer who builds a 58-story building and declares it to be 68 stories tall because he skipped ten numbers when it came to numbering floors. Everything about him is a con job, a scam, outright theft, or simply false. But hey, if that's the kind of business dealings you think are admirable, that's great - it tells us a lot about you. As for your comments on socialism: leaving aside your conflation of various and sundry kinds of socialism and non-socialism as all essentially the same thing - while ignoring that much of Europe's modern governance has socialist underpinnings - I'll just comment that I'm glad to hear you are so vehemently against socialism. Of course, it has made some inroads here in the U.S. - most prominently in the form of Social Security and Medicare - so I'm especially glad to know you're planning to reject any and all benefits under those systems - as surely you wouldn't want to be labeled a hypocrite for benefiting from socialist programs.

When you get right down to it, there are only two types of people who support Donald Trump. White supremacists, and people who are comfortable joining forces with white supremacists to vote for a white supremacist. That covers 100% of his voters.

I realize that many of today's Republicans still think that their party is the same as that of Abraham Lincoln. They have a hard time dealing with the fact that Republicans are now the party of segregation, discrimination, and white supremacy, but facts are facts.

So anyone who disagrees with you has no sense of humor? Are you saying that everything you post is a joke, then? Inquiring minds want to know.

Put another way: we need to take the General Sherman and his March to the Sea approach with respect to the Republican party as it currently stands. Burn the fucking GOP to the ground. We certainly could use a conservative (actually conservative, instead of the radical/populist/anti-intellectual/Christianist mess that defines the current Republican party). But we won't get that as long as any marginally significant number of Trumpeadors continue to serve in Congress. Maybe when they learn that throwing all-in with a racist demagogue who thinks it's more important to protect his buddy Putin than to confront the man paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers is a really bad career move, we can purge the remnants of Trumpism from DC.

Bless your heart.

I will vote for Joe Biden, assuming that as expected he gets the official Democratic nomination this summer. If the Democratic nominee is the reanimated zombie corpse of Adlai Stevenson, I will vote for the Democratic nominee. If the Democratic nominee is a can of baked beans, sold on the "dented/damaged" aisle at the discount dollar store , I will vote for the Democratic nominee. NO candidate the Democrats could nominate could possibly be a worse president than the one we have now.

Unfortunately, "the other side" isn't proposing much of anything. The Senate GOP bill on "reform" was absolutely toothless, which is what Republicans want - they're dead set against actually tackling the problem of out-of-control cops and their enablers, because those people, and their extended families, vote Republican very heavily. And there were very few riots - and some of the ones that DID occur, occurred because police went apeshit and started tear-gassing peaceful protestors and shooting them with rubber bullets (and then lying about it until they were exposed on video and people collected the rubber bullets in the street. Democrats are (by and large) demanding more radical change because very little else is proven to work. Defund is not the same thing as abolish. I agree defund is a crappy slogan, because it doesn't capture the real goal, which is: stop trying to make the police responsible for dealing with problems like homelessness and other social issues, and use the money that would go for police to patrol and lock those people up for social workers instead, to actually solve the problems those people have. It also means stopping equipping them with military-grade weapons that, if they have, they're going to use. When police dress and behave like an occupying army, people are going to TREAT them like an occupying army. Conservatives want to get rid of police unions ONLY because they want more direct control over the police and the ability to hire favorites, fire anyone who speaks up, and pay them all less than what a union can get. The problem isn't unions per se; it's giving unions too much power over the disciplinary process. That's the fault of the government officials who negotiate the union contracts with the police; if they stood their ground more about discipline during contract time, they'd have more authority to deal with discipline when it becomes necessary. And that discipline needs to be handled by outside boards, not politicos and police officers. Bless your heart.

The only breakdowns I see happening are Trump's, when he goes to pieces because he thinks people are being "so unfair" to him. Trump is one huge gaping maw of emotional need. It's why he needs his rallies, because he gets cranky when he doesn't have people fawning over him like he shits gold eggs. It seems to me your own response here is pretty much emotion-based, too. What you call "Deep State" is what ordinary, non-delusional human beings call a "functioning government". It's largely non-partisan. It believes in upholding the law, not tossing aside anything that's inconvenient for a malignant narcissist who wants things his way all the time, no matter what. And it's sad that he's so incompetent that even a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives repeatedly have to strike down his initiatives because he didn't follow proper procedure in trying to impose them. Politician: Someone who holds or runs for political office. He both holds one and is running for re-election. Please explain how that makes him not a politician. Is that something like the Virgin Birth? The only politicians who've been exposed for lining their own pockets in the last four years have been Republicans. Including Trump, who's soaking the RNC, RSCC, RCCC, the Secret Service, and the US military (among others) for astronomical prices for housing at his own properties. Trump's conservatively pocketed about $25 million in income from his properties from the government and politicians that he'd never have seen if he were just Donald Trump, obnoxious fat New Yorker. Two words: Bunker Bitch. A few more: Terrified of confronting U.S. adversaries. Bully. (Bullies aren't fearless; they're cowards hoping to dominate others through extortion.) One person's "political correctness" is another person's "rude asshole". Telling that you think Trump being a nasty, obnoxious, rude asshole is a good thing because he's speaking for an "unpopular" point of view. Hint: being an obnoxious rude asshole is unpopular for good reason. We were already great. Where we've become greater: the highest levels of debt in American history; the highest per-capita rate of infection from SARS-CoV2; the highest death rates from CoViD-19; pariah status among nations that will not allow Americans to fly there now given our out-of-control infection rates; I could go on. As for patriotism: tell some of the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan by bounty hunters paid by Trump's pal Putin how patriotic Trump was to ignore the intelligence briefings provided on those payments. As for socialism: when you learn what it is, consider coming back. Until then, bless your heart.

Foot was British, speaking about the British court system, so bringing him up with respect to American politics is rather pointless. In this country, we have a long history in which all three branches of government - legislative, executive, judicial - have at one time or another both pushed forward on civil rights and pushed back against them. For the latter third of the 20th century and well into the 21st, virtually all advances in Americans' freedoms and rights have come from the courts. That's simply a fact. I agree that in contrast to Trump, almost any politician might (at first glance) seem good or decent. That's a mirage. You need only look to how closely the members of his party in Congress support everything he does to realize that a decent person wouldn't. A decent person would speak out and tell their president when he's wrong. But the Republicans in Congress live in fear that if they cross Trump, he'll not only attack them on Twitter (thus riling up his base against them) but encourage an even farther-right-wing challenger to try to defeat them in the primary races. The only way to get rid of Trump is to also get rid of enough of his supporters in Congress that legislatively, no one like him can ever try so much garbage again.

Factually, this is severely wrong in most areas and marginally almost correct in very little. He entered office NOT pro-LGBT; he made a few generic comments suggesting he wouldn't be as bad as some might fear, and that's about it. With respect to same-sex marriage, he appointed two justices to SCOTUS who have openly questioned the prior ruling itself as well as suggesting that it may not be as extensive as one would expect (for instance, that states could provide different benefits to same-sex and opposite-sex couples). Two of the right-wing justices (Alito and Thomas) have publicly shown in other opinions they have no compunctions whatsoever about overturning precedent if it gets them the result they want, so if Trump gets another appointment or two, you can pretty much assume same-sex marriage is toast. His "campaign" about decriminalizing homosexuality is a joke, given the way he coddles the people who make those laws (see, for instance, his pal Putin, Jared's BFF Mohammed bin Salman, Jair Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, and more). He couldn't name Gilead if you gave him a lineup of drug manufacturers, and anything they're doing is to benefit themselves, not the people or the administration. HIV funding inside the US has only increased because DEMOCRATS in Congress have forced the issue; if you look at the budgets Trump proposed for the last three years, every one of them had deep cuts to health spending. Moreover, his administration is still trying to overturn the ACA, which is how most people with pre-existing conditions (including HIV) can get insurance if they're not covered by an employer (which is a huge number of people). It's true that Gorsuch wrote the opinion in favor of protecting LGBT people in employment. But to do it, he employed reasoning that will almost certainly end affirmative action even by private employers once a case is brought where the same argument is made. As for refugee status: you're right about Christians, not about LGBT people. His goons in DHS - ICE and CBP - routinely disallow refugee status for LGBT people coming from central America, and there's only a tiny trickle of them coming from anywhere else in the world.

In the long run, it almost certainly will. Any discrimination protection that protects on the basis of sex, without any other limiting language, would almost certainly be found to cover gay/trans people by the same logic. One problem is that US anti-discrimination laws are fragmented, meaning separate laws with potentially different wording protecting in cases of employment, public accommodations, housing, voting, and so forth. As a result, such provisions may not uniformly protect us if they lack the same wording. Remember that the decision turned on the explicit ban on discrimination "on account of sex", which is what got 2 of the conservative justices on our side.

That's not always accurate. For instance: a doctor might believe that, in the best interest of his patient, an abortion is necessary to protect the health of a pregnant patient. But if that doctor is working as a staff physician (say, an ER doctor) in a Catholic hospital, the hospital can (and almost always does) forbid the procedure from taking place. Additionally: doctors may take an oath for the practice of medicine, but that doesn't mean (under the law) that they can't discriminate against gay or trans patients, and it doesn't mean (under the law) that those discriminated-against patients can get damages if those doctors (or nurses, or any other health care provider) discriminates against the patient. And that's my point: making the care free (which would take insurers out of the loop) doesn't change *provider* discrimination, which can and does occur.

Even if this were the case, the policy change would still be an issue. It doesnt matter if care is free or effectively so as long as providers are free to deny you care if you're trans (or gay, or black, or whatever). And that's what Mango Mussolini has done to trans people with this rule change.

I liked the above post, not because I like what happened, but because I am also tired of the drug-using crowd co-opting perfectly good words and giving them a covert meaning that then gets flashed everywhere like a badge of honor. And FWIW, I'm very much pro-legalization of pretty much everything for adults. I figure if you're dumb enough to shoot up with whatever the latest chemical du jour is, knock yourselves out, just do it somewhere far away from me, keep it away from the kids, and don't operate a motorized vehicle (car, truck, plane, boat, snowmobile) off your own property while you're using. I'm just tired of finding out perfectly good words with useful meanings in the non-drug world are being ruined by appropriation.

To be fair, I think most white cis gay men are supportive "in general" and "in concept" of trans people, but many - I'm not going to attempt to quantify it beyond that - aren't willing to go out on a limb and protest to support them. But all the Trumpanzees need to understand that Trump's people are picking off the most vulnerable, those who have the least support in society, just as they focused on illegal immigrants who committed violent crimes, even though their actual policies swept up a lot more people than that. They go after the people who have the least support because once they're out of the way, the hard-core rightists make up a bigger share of the overall population. And after enough rounds of "First they came for...." the people who were counting on their cis privilege or white privilege or male privilege to protect them will find that without the support of all the other silenced groups, there's no one left to stand up for them when the time comes.

Not necessarily. In many states, as long as one party in a conversation consents to recording, that's all that is required (at least, for telephone and similar transmissions). The law is construed as of the place the recording is made, even if one of the parties to the conversation is in a state that requires all parties to consent. That, of course, doesn't necessarily affect spy cam type things. But even then, a person's expectation of privacy is dependent on the circumstances. If I put a spycam in my own home, I don't need the consent of anyone who comes into my house to record them, either video or audio. I may need their consent to share that video or audio, especially if it involves activities (like sex) that have a heightened expectation of privacy. But otherwise, for instance, it would be illegal for people to share security footage from home cameras without the consent of the person breaking in. A warrant is only required when someone *not* a party to the conversation or activity wants to make a recording - ie the police setting up a camera or bug to do surveillance. You never need a warrant to record in your own house (though again, as noted, you may need express consent to distribute a recording made in a situation with an expectation of privacy.

I am not "terrified". Please do not put words in my mouth that I did not use. As for the rest of your ignorant screed - I shudder to think about where you get whatever it is you call "news".

Significantly. But if you stay on it, within a few weeks you should be protected again.