The only points he made were "keep America great" and "don't replace a coach when you're winning superbowls." Bob, what specifically has Trump been doing well, that you'd like to see more of? Actual specifics please, not vagaries. Are you a big fan of the 2017 tax reforms? The boondoggle border wall that's been paid for by redirecting funds meant for the military, and definitely NOT by Mexico? Breaking faith with our historic allies while promoting authoritarians like Kim, Putin, and Erdogan? I really am honestly curious: what has Trump done, specifically, that you feel has been a positive for the US?

Don't forget this Tim Scott police reform bill Pence attacked her for denouncing was the proverbial nothing burger.
It made no effort at all to regulate or remove immunity from criminal police, instead shielding them from criminal or civil prosecution even when they break the law, it didn't outlaw deadly choke holds, it didn't ban criminal police from just moving to the next precinct, it did nothing of substance. That's why Democrats didn't vote for it, it was red herring legislation pretending to address a problem but really making it worse and walking away shouting "job done, nothing else needed."

Kamala, as a prosecutor, saw through the ploy and walked away, as she should.

It bears mentioning that for actual convicts, studies have shown that the harsher the treatment in prison, the more likely they'll offend again, and I expect statistics would show an escalation in the violence levels too.
Prisons that treat prisoners like the human beings they want them to be upon release have infinitely better results at reforming convicts into productive citizens.
This sheriff is advocating returning to dungeons.

You must be joking.
He may have more support among those still calling themselves Republicans, but there are insanely fewer of those today, #walkaway, and his approval among independents has tanked from it's low starting point, and among democrats it's non existent. Also, he's the incumbent, can't get none of that there reform when you're the incumbent, and that was his ONLY selling point. Also, you don't have Biden cheating the election process like Clinton, so fewer turning away from the Democrats.
All these anti Trump commercials are produced by Republicans, Bobby, not Democrats, not Russia, not China, Republicans. I've lost count of the number of anti Trump Republican groups they're popping up so fast.

Democrats fed up with Joe stuttering or flubbing words (but not concepts) will go with Trump, who lost his mental grip before 2016, and finger bangs his daughters, rapes women, cheats on every wife, has a child with his daughter, and has failed at every leadership metric?!? Wow. That will be a sight to see. If they do, we will get the president we deserve, and it will end this great experiment in democracy.

You know what you complain about ALL happened under Trump's leadership, not during Biden's. Same leadership in cities, the only change was Trump that made civility and law fall apart.
Covid is only a non issue to idiots who believe Trump over literally anyone else, no matter their credentials or evidence. Above 85 IQ people understand they live in the real world where 160000 are dead and likely 500000 permanently disabled.
>160000 dead, >5 times the rate of deaths and infections than the global average including third world nations, they aren't just elderly, they do include thousands of children dead and tens of thousands brain damaged. Republicans were prepared to shut down over Benghazzi, 4 deaths...but not over 160000, even knowing not shutting down will extend the pandemic, extend the shutdowns, extend the national isolation, extend the depression, and cost the U.S. trillions upon trillions more in excess costs and losses, all of which could have been avoided by shutting down two weeks earlier and mandating masks, but Trump didn't, so we are the worst effected nation on earth in nearly every way.

Why are you still getting information from the Don the con? He's steered you wrong at every single turn.

Crime stems from poverty and deprivation (and greed, but those aren't the sorts of criminals Rand McRandface is talking about).

Poverty and deprivation can be addressed through social services.

Republicans typically gut social services.

I know in my state we'd be much better off with more useful social services and better-funded schools, but every damn time republicans get control of the Governor's office or the legislature, they cut social services statewide. So the areas that most need those services suffer regardless of who they may have elected to local leadership. When dems manage to get back into control they reform things a bit to provide extra funding to social services, and things improve for a bit. Then republicans get back in, etc yadda wash rinse repeat.

So yeah, democrats tend to be elected in population centers, because for the most part they seem to actually want to help people. The current Republican philosophy seems to be "lol shutup poor people are stupid figure it out fuckers." I'm perfectly happy to examine any evidence to the contrary (by which I mean policy positions advanced by republicans that actually help improve the lives of most people).

Three words....campaign finance reform.

Remove the billionaires ability to buy officials through legalized bribery, remove their ability to become anonymously funded one step removed from candidates campaigns, give every citizen an equal "voice" by strictly limiting total contributions to a few thousands per election, one thousand to any one candidate per citizen with no loopholes, and strictly enforce ethics laws already on the books....I think things will turn so fast your head will spin.
As long as it's in representatives' best interest to sell out, with huge potential personal gains and zero downside, of course most will sell out. Dump trucks of cash are hard to turn down.

To be fair, no party is innocent of selling out for cash, but one party has made it their only modus operandi.

Would have been delighted. When Democrats let criminals run amuck I would gladly cheer for Obama for sending in Fed Police to restore Law and order.

Then again He did nothing for the black community. or criminal reform.

I find the argument that a good apple shouldn't even be in the policing business (i.e. guilt by association) problematic. My argument would be: If I'm a good apple, I'd be all for reforming and fumigating out all the bad apples! Bad apples don't deserve to tarnish my good reputation nor my silence (i.e. as good as complicity), ESPECIALLY since there are -- ahem -- "only 0.01%" of them in the force! Isn't that the logical and moral sentiment?

My concern about focusing the debate on the ratio of "Good apples vs. bad apples" is that it's fraught with pitfalls. Without "big data" (because the System won't ever allows such transparency), that "ratio" is subjective. It's just an excuse for politicians and legislators to wiggle out doing anything.

The argument should be that a fair, just and functioning society should punish each and every bad apples to protect the good apples and its citizens. We shouldn't tolerate any bad apples, no matter the "ratio"... police depts & judges SHOULD be exemplary in their knowledge and adherent to the law, NOT the other way around. How else should a people trust its government?

Besides, if what they say is true -- that the "bad apples are few and far between" -- there shouldn't be much consequence to prosecute them all right? It must be worth reforming to salvage the far-to-damaged reputation right? It would be a moral booster for BOTH the police & community IMO.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

Thank you....accepted.

The "no good cop" part is right...it's not guilt by association though, it's guilt by being complicit, not turning them in, turning a blind eye, lying to protect the "bad apples"...being accessories after the fact is criminal. Yes, failure to clean their own house makes them bad cops. That's fixable, but only if they clean house...the best, easiest, most thorough way would be fire them all and only reinstate those with clean records, those with complaints need retraining at the least before being police again, many need to be fired. Not perfect, but better than most suggestions imo.
Edit: I do like the suggestion to make it the law that they must intervene if another cop is out of control, and must report it. I also support body cams that can't be turned off, but I want covering them or taking them off to be a felony.

I did say fire them all....but also said to hire them back. That gives us an opportunity to say 'this guy has 27 complaints and 3 multi-million dollar settlements paid out, he's not cop material'. Union rules won't let cops be fired even for cause most times, and absolutely won't allow a national registry of criminal cops. Those facts need to change if the culture is to change.

I agree, there are those few out there advocating no police....I'm just not one of them.

I'm of the opinion that if we keep any of the bad apples, nothing else matters, they'll corrupt the rest. The best way to save the bunch is remove any apples that even LOOK bad....that may leave us with a massive shortage, but that's FAR better than the criminal force we have today, no? One bad apple spoils the bunch...I wish those crying about a just few bad apples understood the phrase they're parsing.

Nothing will satisfy EVERYONE, but it actually takes very little to placate most mobs, just the suggestion that they've been heard is often enough, and why things got so bad. Too often "we hear you" is the only reform, and even that is forgotten as soon as the streets are cleared. I hope this time is different, but I'm not holding my breath.

Apologies, didn't mean to misrepresent you. We've debated things before and you seemed to lean to no cop is a good cop because there are so many bad ones guilt be association and failure to clean things up makes them all bad. You'd also said up thread to fire all active officers.

I'll cease trying to word how you feel on it, I just wanted to demonstrate by counter example that not everybody means 'reform' when they say "defund". At a minimum , the degree of 'reform' varies from change some laws and regulations to fire them and start over from scratch.

My comment of being ruled by our 'betters' was meant as a sarcastic dig on them and their abject failure in letting things rot this far and doing nothing.

Finally, my comment on public opinion on solutions being non-uniform was mostly to emphasize that as just normal, and the current status quo is just so unacceptable that it is unifying people from varied points of view to stand up against it. The most important point being that declaring, see nothing will satisfy the mob because they can't agree what to do is a twisted deception and the truth is people want things to be better than they are, and there is as you pointed out tonnes of common sense ways to go about that,

The cause isn't united either.

Another part of the problem is you have a lot of people like @newtboy who really DO mean defund the police by the dictionary definition. Those folks are mixed in with the protesters who mean 'reform' when they say 'defund'.

That's all to be expected though when you see the systematic failure of the national police force that is out there. When the number of bad actors in the force becomes too many, includes sheriffs and their deputies, and sees various police chiefs and police union leaders(not toe mention Presidents) defending the bad actors, the people that rise up in anger aren't going to be a uniform centrally organized entity.

As Dave Chapelle refers to it, these are the streets speaking for themselves. The public can't be expected to hold a single, uniform and documented solution that they are marching for. It is unfair to the point of dishonesty to try and discredit the protestors as a 'mob' because their calls for reform aren't consistent enough or well messaged enough. The presumably better educated, smarter professionals running the country(from the bottom to the top) are the one's whose job it is to find a good solution. More importantly, it's also their fault for failing to enact solutions to the problem before the public outrage hit the levels it has.

How about:
“De-Uniform the Police”

The message will never get through, though. We are what we eat, media-wise, and the majority of us consumes our daily-doses from sources only possible from “elites” money/influence. To be sure, that media does not stray from the path, to or fro, so if it’s not in their lexicon, it’s less likely to be in ours as well.

But if one can assume for a moment that there is indeed a rational thought to “Defund the Police”, one may then begin to identify alternatives not previously considered.

Is too much money going unchecked to the Police? Are too many tasks being relegated to police action? Are certain villains entrenched within the ranks? Is reform ever really going to work? Is it just that damned Uniform (play on word “un-informed”)? Or those boots? All of these are valid questions we should each have answers to, and more, if we can just start talking about it finally.

My gripe is about the Police Union, that keep the secrets and perpetuate the misdeeds of “bad apples”, kinda like the clergy has done with their pedos. And the Boy Scouts?

Badly run institution and stupid/uninformed public.

Reform doesnt say enough.

Restart?

Reboot?

Retrain or rehire would help.

Switch it off and back on again. Best fix ever.

The problem with "Defund the Police" is right there in the name, and its name only. It's understandable that those who lost hope on reforms felt the need to escalate into using the term "Defund."

But uninformed people that don't understand nuance nor care about policies and enforcement would likely judge that's extreme and leads to anarchy immediately, and dismiss its merits. And let's be honest, would you bet there're more informed people in the USA or uninformed ones? If there's ONE thing that USA does better than any other countries, it's politicizing the hell out of complex issues into sound bites. Pushing people into all-or-nothing For or Against camps. In the end, little gets done, but even more divisions & hate.

I watched on the news here in Canada (with its fair share of racial injustices in its policing not that far behind the USA, ) that the mayor of Toronto (our largest city in the country) picked up and used the term "Detask the Police"... I think that's a much better term to advance the cause.