Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
You are correct, she did not title the Proposition; that title is in the Proposition's text. However, the information booklet's text is not necessarily the same as the text on the actual ballot.
Kamala set up a bail fund for rioters.
It's worse than that. When she was California AG, her office was responsible for writing the titles and summaries of ballot initiatives. She decided to title one of them - Proposition 47 - the "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" with an innocuous summary. What Prop 47 actually did was downgrade a whole host of significant offenses, including forgery, fraud, and theft or receiving of stolen items valued at less than $950, from felonies to misdemeanors. [EDIT: I was corrected by /u/sarker on this below] Her office also refused to seek the death penalty for a man who shot a cop in cold blood, and didn't bother to contact the man's widow at all.
She also has a track record, both as AG and as San Francisco DA, of things we would normally associate with hard-ass overzealous prosecutors; failing to disclose significant potentially-exculpatory evidence to opposing counsel in violations of rules requiring her to do so. Her office covered up a lying forensic technician in over 600 drug cases, letting a corrupt fire investigator create an illegal slush-fund and falsify records to pin a major wildfire on private landowners, and fighting to defend several blatantly false convictions.
The combination makes sense to me; I recognize her type from my time working in the guts of the administrative state. She's the worst kind of anarcho-tyrant. Someone who will use every trick in the book (and a few that aren't in it) to keep their budgets full, perquisites in place, authority unquestioned, and metrics good, while studiously avoiding anything that smacks of hard work even at the cost of significant injustice or community harm. Goodhart's law made flesh. "Progressive" when the incentives tell her to be progressive, pro-cop when the incentives line up that way instead. But almost always in the worst, most counterproductive way possible.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Seriously though why do Rs love this guy so much?
There is a small faction of largely jewish neoconservatives who really, really, really hate Iran. Bibi has been very focused on the Iranians, and so is very much simpatico with this neoconservative faction. I couldn't tell you who got the idea first, but the current state of play is clear; everyone is in lockstep and the neocons (think people like John Podhoretz and the Commentary Magazine crew, or Noah Rothman at the National Review, etc.) adore Bibi.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
We're public citizens, not defense lawyers.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
If the Right is smart, they’ll publicly agree that it was a bad shot regardless of their inner feelings, as that is probably the easiest way to defuse the situation. No controversy, no news; no news, no BLM reboot; no BLM reboot, no electoral benefits to the Democrats.
"Yes, we need to hold bad cops accountable. But you know who else we need to hold accountable? Killer criminals preying on the weakest among us insert long list of sympathetic victims of crime They deserved to live, but the Democrats don't care about them, otherwise they'd close the border and stop raising money to bail killers out of jail to kill again. There's only one party that's going to keep you safe from the real threats out there; vote Republican."
Or something like that. I don't know, I'm not a campaign strategist or a PR guy.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
The police are almost always justified in these cases.
In such cases, the bodycam footage is usually the most dispositive evidence. Here we have the bodycam, and it looks pretty damning. Bad shoots happen. Asshole cops happen.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Really if she chose any other option than lifting up the pot and throwing the boiling water toward the officers.
Do cops really have such shitty hand-eye coordination that they can't tell whether a mass of boiling water flung from a pot is going to hit them or not? It's a one-shot item; once she flung the water she was unarmed! What was the justification for not just leaving?
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
two well muscled physically fit men can't handle a tiny woman in her nightie
I'm baffled why anyone thought there was a need to handle her at all! She had called the cops to report a prowler; they were there, they had presumably seen that there was no prowler. What on earth was stopping them from going "right, lady, you're acting weird and we're not comfortable here. We don't see any one around your house and we're going to leave now. Have a good night"???
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
A bad shoot against this lady doesn't reflect a systemic issue against black women any more than Daniel Shaver getting shot for complying with police orders reflects a systemic issue against white men.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
A pot of boiling water is a one-shot item. Once she threw the water and missed, what was she going to do, refill it, wait 5 minutes for it to reboil, and then throw it again? Throw the pot itself? Okay, that's not fun, but not an imminent lethal threat. This wasn't a situation where someone was going to be harmed without officer involvement; there wasn't even a concern about passing fake money a la Floyd. There was nothing stopping the officers from just turning around and leaving the domicile of the crazy lady who thought she saw a non-existing prowler.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Yeah, that ranking is deceptive. Finland has 32.4 guns per 100 civilians. The U.S. has 120.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
I hope you're right.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Doesn't that just make people more sympathetic to her, and more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt?
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
If Mario Cuomo was "Hamlet on the Hudson" for forever waffling about throwing his hat in the ring, what does that make Manchin - the Farmington Fence-Sitter?
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
It is very "late-season West Wing," isn't it?
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
It's a shame that DeSantis flamed out so spectacularly against Trump - someone who can take a purple state and turn it blood red through competence and effective culture-warring, as DeSantis did in FL., would definitely belong on that list.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
the convict Donald Trump
Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.
Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.
Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.
The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.
If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.
There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
- Josh Shapiro won Pennsylvania handily and has great approval ratings.
- Jared Polis is a popular two-term libertarian-ish gay governor of Colorado who got Covid mostly right and is still only 49.
- Andy Beshear won re-election as governor of KY by 5 even while the GOP kept a supermajority of the legislature.
- Joe Manchin has an ego the size of the Appalachians, and a history as an effective legislator.
- Gavin Newsom has failed to actually fix anything in CA, but he certainly looks Presidential, has boatloads of money, and is quite glib.
- JB Pritzker has all the money in the universe and has run IL like his own personal fief for a while; he might have higher ambitions too.
- AOC will be eligible in 2028 and remains very vivid and high-profile (though I can't vouch for whether the progressive wing of the party still likes her)
- Gretchen Whitmer is also someone people still talk about, though I don't understand why.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
The Reagan experience in his second term suggests not
Not the same at all. Look at Reagan's press conferences in December of 1988...the dude obviously had command of himself and of detail.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I'm talking about his actual, literal policy positions that are considerably to the right of the median voter.
Except for the ones on labor and trade, which are to the left of some segments of the Democrats.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
and there's nothing about Joe Biden's health today that wasn't known six months ago--or even four years ago.
Au contraire; there were all sorts of things that weren't publicly known. Four years ago Biden was obviously on the downslope, but still capable of speaking in public for more than 15 minutes without garbling half his words or having his vocal timbre described as a "whisper." Just pull up the footage yourself: even at his bumbling worst 2020 Joe is worlds above 2024 Joe. Even six months ago he was still doing ok. Something really changed in the last 6-12 months; his "wandering" moments got a lot more frequent, and his speaking just dove off a cliff.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
No, that's Willie Brown, her then-boyfriend/political patron.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Brown unironically was just about the best mentor she could have gotten. The dude bestrode the state like a colossus, and even at 90 is still pretty sharp. And I admit this against interest, not being in favor of his political agenda.
Yes. The neocons are a notable exception to that trend, but as I said a small faction.
More options
Context Copy link