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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I suppose we'll agree to disagree on that point. And no, I don't just apply that logic to me, before anybody gets snitty.
Tiredness and paranoia may relate.
I'm trying to figure what the hell that means. In my defence it's late and I have a brain fog thing going.
edited 12th Jun '18 10:50:44 PM by TroperOnAStickV2
Hopefully I'll feel confident to change my avatar off this scumbag soon. Apologies to any scumbags I insulted.The main issue with stuff leaving Canada to the US is illicit drugs, coming in on the West Coast from Asia and moving south. Its a huge border, crap is going to get past on both sides. However, the idea the terrorists have used Canada to enter the US has been a falsehood that has refused to die since 9/11; recently re-fueled by the racist idea that Trudeau has brought in too many Muslims/immigrants/refugees (numbers have gone up, but plenty entered entered under the last 3 Prime Ministers as well).
Its absolute bunk, and the only way to secure such a massive border (across rather nasty terrain at some points I might add....) is cooperation. Which Trump doesn't do. I suspect that the higher ups at DHS are just doing symbolic stuff to keep pretending to follow whatever his disruptive impulses are this week.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Double post/page topper; but I just saw that the ballot initiative to split California into 3 states passed muster (~400,000 petitioned for it) and will be on the ballot in November. Its a long shot, especially in a Democrat leaning year in a Blue state, but keep in mind that every vote counts and that misinformation must be fought.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/us/california-three-states-initiative-ballot/index.html
edited 13th Jun '18 2:17:03 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Some more primary news: In Virginia, the Republican who will challenge sitting Senator Tim Kaine is Corey Stewart, who Bannon called "the head of the Trump movement in Virginia", and who narrowly lost a Republican primary to become governor in 2017. The same year he called a White Supremacist that was challenging Paul Ryan his personal hero
, (shortly before said White Supremacist went on a twitter meltdown so extreme and so stupid it made Bannon cut ties with the guy and got the dude kicked off twitter) has ties to Charlottesville organizers, (discussed in the prior link) repeatedly used MS-13 as a campaign issue and called for the end of sanctuary cities in Virginia
, (which doesn't really have sanctuary cities) and has vigorously defended Confederate monuments while claiming that black people don't want them taken down
.
That Stewart won the nomination essentially made former (Republican) Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling do M84's signature. Bolling on Twitter:
In Wisconsin special elections, (two of the special elections Governor Scott Walker had tried to refuse to have until forced by the courts), Republicans and Democrats went 1-1
, Democrats won a Senate District that went for Trump by 17 points and had been held by Republicans for 40 years, but failed to take another. In both cases a regular election will be held in those districts come November.
And on a more humorous note: the Maine Republican who won the primary to challenge Independent US Senator Angus King, (who has been pretty solidly aligned with Democrats in the Senate) had an online video from his past come out. Apparently he likes to do the Harlem Shake in his underwear. Who knew?
In non-primary news:
A professor who specializes in North Korean issues noticed that the extremely vague and feel good promises Trump and Kim made are virtually identical to those made by Bill Clinton and Kim's father
25 years ago. For me at least, this adds onto the suspicion that Kim flattered Trump a little bit, dragged out virtually the same documents, got Trump to make concessions with little to no effort because Trump thought it would look like a win to the voters back home.
Meanwhile, reports are that Kim is heavily playing up the concessions that Trump made to his people at home
, so as predicted Kim is very much using this as a point of legitimacy with his own people and casting it as a victory over the US.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted Kim as saying that if the United States were to take “genuine measures for building trust,” the North, too, could “continue to take additional good-will measures … commensurate with them.” The statement made clear that Pyongyang was expecting U.S. concessions before any moves by the North.
At a news conference Tuesday following the summit, Trump said that as long as talks with the North were continuing, the U.S. would not carry out the joint exercises — which he called “war games,” labeling them “provocative” and saying that the decision would save “a tremendous amount of money.”
The seemingly off-the-cuff remarks, which were not written into the joint document signed by Kim and Trump at their summit, stunned South Korea and even came as a surprise to the military organization most directly affected: U.S. Forces Korea.
That U.S. command said it had “received no updated guidance on the execution or cessation of training exercises,” including joint drills scheduled for August.
However, Wednesday’s report — the North’s first official account of the landmark summit in Singapore — suggested that Trump had directly conveyed the same commitment to Kim after the North Korean dictator had called on Trump to quickly address “irritating and hostile military actions,” a longtime grievance of the Kim regime.
It quoted Kim as saying during his talks with Trump that “in order to achieve peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and realize its denuclearization, the two countries should commit themselves to refraining from antagonizing with each other … and take legal and institutional steps to guarantee it.” Trump, it added, had expressed his “understanding” of the stance and had conveyed “his intention to halt” the exercises.
North Korea has long criticized the joint drills as rehearsals for invasion and used them to justify the building-up of its nuclear weapons program.
News of the decision to halt the drills stoked concern in Japan, with Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera calling joint exercises and the U.S. military presence in South Korea “vital” to East Asian security.
“We would like to seek an understanding of this between Japan, the U.S. and South Korea,” Onodera was quoted as saying.
The defense chief added that Japan would continue its own joint exercises with the U.S. and would stick to plans to boost its defense against the ballistic missile threat from the North.
In Seoul, the presidential Blue House said that there is a need to seek measures that will help improve engagement with North Korea but that it is also necessary to confirm exactly what Trump had meant, media reports said. South Korean President Moon Jae-in was scheduled to chair a national security meeting early Thursday to discuss the outcome of Tuesday’s summit.
The KCNA report also said Trump would lift sanctions against the North — a claim that contradicted comments from the president Tuesday that the measures would “come off when we are sure that the nukes are no longer a factor.”
The brief mention did not include a timeline for the easing of sanctions, but Trump said earlier this month that he would no longer be using the term “maximum pressure” amid improving ties.
Well, looks like Kaine should have an easier time this November, he's already favored and Virginia is pretty moderate as far as state-wide races go IIRC.
Crazy times we live in, when a candidate for office dancing in his underwear is practically mundane. Do we know if he agreed to be filmed, if not I'd say he is a victim in that regard, if he was in private.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Judging by the short section of the video I saw, he was very much in on it. Most likely it was him filming himself for most of it.
The latest "tough on immigration" action: the same department that oversees immigration applications is launching an office to investigate cases that may be decades old to catch people who "cheated" to get their citizenship or residency and look at bring charges against them and/or stripping their citizenship
.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.
Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.
Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.
The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.
The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.
In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.
Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.
Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.
Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.
Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.
For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.
Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.
The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.
“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.
edited 13th Jun '18 5:05:52 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |The only primary results I'm seeing about Nevada are all crowing about how Tarkaniannote won his primary for the House seat after Trump asked him to switch races. Not sure who won all the primaries on the Democrat side, but regardless they'll have my votes.
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - SilaswBecause I've developed an honest fascination with Scott Pruitt's blatantness:
Scott Pruitt had a top aide contact Republican donors to see if they could help get his wife a job at a conservative political group that has backed Pruitt for years. Pruitt approached wealthy party supporters and conservative figures with ties to the Trump administration and enlisted the help of the associate administrator of the EPA's Office of Policy in order to find a job for Pruitt's wife.
More relevant:
The Federal Reserve is preparing to raise interest rates today to the highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Officials have indicated that they will raise the target rate by a quarter of a percent to a range of 1.75 to 2 percent. The rate increase will be the second one this year, and the seventh since the end of the Great Recession.
edited 13th Jun '18 8:09:05 AM by sgamer82
Probably Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah too. Hope that they all dotted every i and crossed every t as they went through the process.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Good point, I already mentioned that's he far in The Tyson Zone already. So chances are likely he'll just go ahead without any attempt justification beyond "I Can't Take Criticism, ban them!"
edited 13th Jun '18 8:41:59 AM by MorningStar1337
For fun and curiosity I checked on all 3 and Sam is the only one with US citizenship, Oliver is a permanent resident and his citizenship is presumably pending. Trevor’s Wikipedia didn’t go into much detail on the subject, but he’s been living in the States since 2011, so he may well have permanent residency.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Trump is an insecure petty manchild, like so many of his base. Of course he'd push for a way to boot out critics. He wants to make the entire USA into his Yes-Man.
She's from Canada.
edited 13th Jun '18 8:51:51 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised

I've taken calling the Republican party the "Reactionary Party" as of recent.