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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
And you also can't count on armed "good guys" to be able to hit the bad guys and ONLY the bad guys, or to not be mistaken for bad guys themselves (whether by other "good guys" or by the actual fucking cops), or...
Someone did tell me life was going to be this way.At Trump Tower, Michael Cohen and Oligarch Discussed Russian Relations
In Mr. Cohen’s office on the 26th floor, he and the oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, discussed a mutual desire to strengthen Russia’s relations with the United States under President Trump, according to Andrew Intrater, an American businessman who attended the meeting and invests money for Mr. Vekselberg. The men also arranged to see one another at the inauguration, the second of their three meetings, Mr. Intrater said.
Days after the inauguration, Mr. Intrater’s private equity firm, Columbus Nova, awarded Mr. Cohen a $1 million consulting contract, a deal that has drawn the attention of federal authorities investigating Mr. Cohen, according to people briefed on the inquiry.
Mr. Intrater said in an interview that Mr. Vekselberg, his cousin and biggest client, had no role in Columbus Nova’s decision to hire Mr. Cohen as a consultant. When asked about the meeting at Trump Tower during the presidential transition, Mr. Intrater described it as a brief and impromptu discussion, and said that Mr. Vekselberg had not originally planned to attend.
“Obviously, if I’d known in January 2017 that I was about to hire this high-profile guy who’d wind up in this big mess, I wouldn’t have introduced him to my biggest client, and wouldn’t have hired him at all,” Mr. Intrater said, adding that he had agreed to be interviewed about his dealings with Mr. Cohen because he had not done anything wrong.
The disclosure of the meeting sheds additional light on the intersection between Mr. Trump’s inner-circle and Russians with ties to the Kremlin.
The meeting came after Mr. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., met at Trump Tower during the campaign with a Kremlin-linked lawyer claiming to have damaging information on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and a former campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, met with Russian intermediaries in Europe. During the campaign, Mr. Cohen was pursuing a deal to build a Trump high-rise in Moscow, which did not come to fruition.
Lawyers for Mr. Vekselberg and Mr. Cohen did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, our illustrious Secretary of Education is more concerned with booting out undocumented immigrant children from schools.
edited 25th May '18 9:40:37 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Do you even have many illegal immigrant children in schools? This seems very much like a non-problem even if you ARE a maybot-style immigration zealot, although admittedly De Vos seems genuinely nuts.
There's likely some truth the to the idea of Criminals infiltrating ICE. It's widely known that organized smuggling group have infiltrated the Border Patrol .
What I would like to see happen, is a massive public corruption investigation into both agencies, and heavily increased vetting of applicants.
edited 25th May '18 11:52:02 AM by megaeliz
I already knew the Republican Party doesn't like brown people, but it feels like every part of this Administration is doubling down on kicking immigrants out of the country recently. Are they getting desperate or something? It's not like efforts to protect and grant citizenship to illegal immigrants have been ramping up as of late. What do they think they're gonna get out of this besides a whiter America and a thorough slaughtering in November?
i'm tired, my friendI think the shootings are just becoming so normalized that people who aren't looking for a flashy suicide are starting to jump on the bandwagon.
Some agenda-driven shooters (read: terrorist white dudes) may also be realizing that there's so much press and publicity around these shootings now, and it's easier to get your agenda across in an interview on CNN than from posthumous police reports about your blog.
But those are just my thoughts.
edited 25th May '18 12:01:09 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Considering all that was just recently revealed and said, I do not necessarily feel my comparison of ICE to the SS has been rendered less apt.
...albeit, they lack many of the efficient sociopath types that let the SS be as dangerous as it was.
Instead I think it can easily be said ICE is nothing but a group of criminal thugs at this point, with aspirations for more, who need to be dismantled.
A lot of the problems that keep happening in these agencies would be solved if we are
A. Honest about what these jobs entail:
- a lot of the advertising in media gives people a completely unrealistic expectation of what they will actually be doing, and at worst attracts the absolute last people you'd want doing the job. John Oliver sums it up nicely for the border patrol here.
B. Increased vetting and training of people looking to get a job
- These are jobs not everyone is suited for, and in the rush to hire more people, the standards for hiring, and training have been lowered immensely.
edited 25th May '18 1:17:32 PM by megaeliz
ICE is a racist institution by design and since inception, much like the American Police system.
Being racist and cruel is a feature, so any notions of replacing the people that run or support these institutions with "good people" with "good intentions" is a little naïve.
Like thinking the NRA could be used for good if it was run by good people.
Rawr.
Most of the stuff ICE does is fairly mundane, even necessary. They're the agency that handles human trafficking and such, for example They exist because the old set of agencies that handled these tasks was wildly, unbelievably inefficient. After 9/11 they were fused together into new organizations under DHS, which has proven to work a lot better.
The problems rest in one division, ERO, which was set up specifically to go after undocumented people. I honestly question the need for a division like that at all, but the institutional culture there needs to change or be changed on short notice.
They should have sent a poet.In fairness to DeVos (A Rare Sentence from me) - her exact comments were that it should be a school decision
, which means those in "Sanctuary Cities" would likely be safe, whereas those in Red districts would be at risk.
It's not a mountain out of a molehill, but it's making Everest out of Denali.
Alternatively, she might be trying to shield those poor children from potential school shootings!
...yeah, Too Soon.
edited 25th May '18 1:45:18 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

Armed citizens stopping shooters is t an impossibility it’s just very unlikely and more people would be saved by stricter gun control.