Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[pbrower2a]

(12-11-2018, 12:57 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-11-2018, 12:07 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Obama was known as the deporter-in-chief, which I would have thought made you happy, considering your usual statements. But Trump has made it worse, without any cause for doing so; separating families, taking men away from their families off the streets, holding immigrants in detention centers, issuing a no-tolerance policy, threatening them with violence, etc. The Obama immigration policy regarding Muslims was very strict, and I don't think your charge against Obama regarding them is correct. Obama and Bush before him and their administrations were good at finding terrorists and stopping them before they could do anything, and at attacking them abroad as well.

Well, it didn't upset me anymore than those pictures upset me and didn't seem to upset the Mexican American voters who voted for Hilary or the liberal news chief or members of the liberal who most likely saw those pictures either. I don't mind if an American president ( any American President) responds to a potential border crisis by sending US troops to back up/reinforce the border patrol as a means to stop 5,000 illegal immigrants who are approaching our southern border in mass who could clash with and overwhelm border security forces in areas.

Cruelty is itself evil, even if it arises from bureaucratic incompetence or insensitivity.

Quote:Would you prefer they're dealt with by trained professionals or an angry mob of Americans?

Is there any way in which to identify illegal aliens by appearance? The illegal aliens at the border are hard to distinguish from many Americans in border areas from San Diego to Brownsville. We already have a large Hispanic population, and we have had a large one in America since the incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States.

Many illegal immigrants end up marrying Americans, the attraction being similarity of culture. Just ask yourself a question: if you were single and dating, would your first question be about citizenship? Compatibility matters far more. I would be more concerned about her (whoops! I have exposed that I am a straight male!) political and religious values and her musical tastes than what sort of citizenship she has.

Quote:I'm glad someone sunk some sense into Obama's head & reminded him which country he was elected to be the President of and who he was suppose to serve before American citizens began taking the law the into their own hands.

I have never had any question about the loyalty of Barack Obama to the United States. His legal education has left no doubt in his mind. He may be more loyal to the rule of law than to any chest-pounding nationalism. Besides, his legal education has surely left no doubt that exercise of legal process is for the experts in specific roles. As an attorney he knows what his role is in that legal system.

He certainly knows better than Michael Cohen did, or at least practiced! Donald Trump's personal lawyer is going to be disbarred (if he has not yet been), and he has been convicted of participating in the criminal misdeeds of his client -- a clear breach of legal ethics. An attorney's response to knowledge of a client's illegal or even suspect legal activities is to steer his client away from committing crimes. The only imaginable exception to such a prohibition is civil disobedience, and that is as a rule more for showing that a law is fundamentally unjust than to try to get away with something.

Quote: Now that the blues have regained the House that they lost and the blue Queen seems to have regained the seat that she lost, the blues are going to have to be careful and learn how to submit to the will of the American people because that's what the blues are going to be judged on now.

That is incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She is not royalty. But we did not elect someone with any right to act as a despot as Donald Trump has tried to do. Note well that the Constitution of the United States has a genius in weakening the sort of President who tries to act as a dictator  if a soulless creep like Donald Trump and empowers a President like Washington, Lincoln, or FDR in a crisis involving the survival of the United States.

Politics in a democracy must have a strong nexus with service to the People; should that nexus be broken, then it is the right and indeed duty to seek a restitution of that nexus. Maybe a parliamentary system would work better in America than our Founding Fathers thought (the Declaration of Independence excoriates the largely-picked parliament beholden to George III) due to the vote of no confidence that can remove a Prime Minister for incompetence as well as malfeasance (Presidents can be impeached only for malfeasance, whether committing a war crime, taking or soliciting a bribe, or lying about oral sex -- and the case for impeachment of Donald Trump exists already). Nancy Pelosi would not have a chance to be Speaker of the House had President Trump been more competent and more respectful of the sensibilities of the American people, the majority of which voters voted for Hillary Clinton. It was up to President Trump to win some of us over. He has failed badly at that,  and America is in a foul mood for that.

The Crisis of 2020 may have Donald Trump as its focus for his incompetence, cruelty, and lack of respect for American institutions.

Quote:As I've mentioned before, I've never associated the blues with America. I never viewed blues as being American in their views or their values.  I associate the older Democrats like my father in law and their kids as Americans but not the blues.

My last immigrant ancestor was born in 1833, so it is safe to say that my politics do not define me as an American or a non-American. It is arrogance on your part to define people as un-American for holding opinions common to a near-majority of American voters in the 2016 Presidential election and a majority of American voters in the 2018 elections overall.

I am not going to deny that you are an American. I did not deny the American citizenship of the late Timothy McVeigh even if I thought that his mass murder by bombing a federal building an extreme abomination. You are stuck with people like me who believe that America is something other than your ideal.

Quote:My Democratic friends and casual acquaintance aren't blues which is why I view them as friends and casual acquaintances and don't view them or treat them as adversaries or the enemy so to speak. This is also the reason why, I don't blame them for the stupid shit the blues tend to do and the way the blues tend to act and behave and so forth.

They know you and are onto you. I know how to play the game against someone with your beliefs. I know how to apply traditional conservative values, including tradition and patriotism, against you.  That is an old trick called reductio ad absurdum that Euclid used in proving topics of geometry and number theory over two millennia ago.

Is proposition A possible with conclusion C? Prove that proposition A necessitates proposition B, and that B makes C impossible. Such proves that A and C cannot both be true. As an example, ask whether there is a largest prime number P. Then the multiple of all primes (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, and 29  up to P) is a whole number W. But W+1 is also a whole number, and it cannot be divided by any prime as large as P. Thus W+1 is divisible by some combination of primes each greater than P or is itself prime, and either way establishes that the condition that there is a last prime P is impossible.

You may believe the slogan "Make America Great Again", but I must ask you what would bring America to its alleged lost greatness.

Let's see: would abolition of same-sex marriage make America better? Nope. Some men can love men but not women and some women love women but cannot love men. Letting such people enjoy a benign and wholesome love in a marital situation does not harm the marriage of heterosexual couples.

Aid to disabled people? That may be exactly what they need for survival, let alone having a chance to fully participate in the American consumer society (whether of material goodies or of experience). Besides, many of the disabled have been war veterans who deserve better than to be left out in the cold, so to speak. Welfare? Likewise. The parents may be lazy, good-for-nothing bums, but their children deserve better.

Banning abortion? There are cases in which it is a necessity. Technically the removal of an ectopic pregnancy (pre-born is stuck in the Fallopian tube) is an abortion. That is the easiest choice.

Banning contraception? Sex enhances a marriage, and it is no longer necessary that families have more than two children just to keep their genetic heritage alive.

Banning interracial marriage and sex? If it is only black and white, then there are white people who get excited about black people as sexual and marital partners but can't get excited by white sexual or marital partners. Love is a good thing.

Gender equity? Fascism is largely a male club, which alone expresses the need for women to have political power.

Letting polluters pollute with impunity? Yeah, sure -- if you want to die young of air pollution and have lead ravaging your brain.

White-only voting? Mississippi, the state that most mistreated black people, was a political and economic cesspool under white-only voting -- even having a secret police analogous to the Gestapo or KGB. No thanks!

No Interstate highway system? Have you ever driven to Kansas City and back on Interstate 35? It is much safer than old US 65 and US 69. I do not miss any of the local Blood Alleys, and I would like to see such highways as US 6 between Hartford and Providence replaced (from what I hear, as I have never been on that road) with safer highways. Interstate highways, with their separate lanes of traffic and no direct intersections, are far safer than the two-lane death-traps that they supplanted. They have paid for themselves in lower numbers of deaths and crippling injuries from traffic collisions.

No right to form labor unions? If redress against an unresponsive government is an enumerated right in the Constitution, then why should workers have no means of getting redress of grievance against employers who combine to overwork and underpay them?

Free education for children instead of consigning them to early starts in mines and factories? Let children be children so that they can be competent, prosperous adults.

Can anyone imagine bringing back slavery? Sure -- if one wants a war over its abolition, whether against the Confederacy or the Third Reich.

Divine Right of Kings? Letting the Inquisition torture and execute people for being of the wrong religion?

Now what was so great that you wanted to bring back? Maybe in some respect life was easier in the past -- most obviously not having
to spend half one's income on property rent for a flat less spacious than a cabin-in-the-woods motel room on US 40 in the 1930s. Maybe  there was opportunity to pioneer a business or technology that did not then exist. On the other hand, I am glad to have missed out on smallpox or being burned at the stake in an auto-da-fe.