Showing posts with label riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label riots. Show all posts

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Trump Looms Large as GOP Slouches Towards Cleveland

photo a48aea7e-38e9-4ce2-b9ed-9efe618228b9.jpg

Previous Related Posts:
Nazi Trump Demands Sieg Heil from Crowd - But Not Racist Of Course
Trump and the Klan on Super Tuesday Eve
Trump Triumphant So Far
Trump Jumps the Shark With Facist Ideas
Ted Cruz Dreams of a Jesse Helms Army
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This week several Republican pundits have expressed real fear about a possible Trump Presidency, for instance David Brooks of the New York Times



Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.
Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.
~ Brooks in his NYT Op-Ed

Next, from Erick Erickson and other members of "Conservatives Against Trump"

Source Here
This morning I participated in a meeting of grassroots conservative activists from around the country who are committed to opposing Donald Trump. We have agreed to release the statement below:

We are a group of grassroots conservative activists from all over the country and from various backgrounds, including supporters of many of the other campaigns. We are committed to ensuring a real conservative candidate is elected. We believe that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump, a Hillary Clinton donor, is that person.

We believe that the issue of Donald Trump is greater than an issue of party. It is an issue of morals and character that all Americans, not just those of us in the conservative movement, must confront.

We call for a unity ticket that unites the Republican Party. If that unity ticket is unable to get 1,237 delegates prior to the convention, we recognize that it took Abraham Lincoln three ballots at the Republican convention in 1860 to become the party’s nominee and if it is good enough for Lincoln, that process should be good enough for all the candidates without threats of riots.

We encourage all former Republican candidates not currently supporting Trump to unite against him and encourage all candidates to hold their delegates on the first ballot.

Lastly, we intend to keep our options open as to other avenues to oppose Donald Trump. Our multiple decades of work in the conservative movement for free markets, limited government, national defense, religious liberty, life, and marriage are about ideas, not necessarily parties.

Then there is Stuart Stevens, seasoned political consultant, who can't stop ranting about the disaster of Trumpism for his party:












The GOP is hoping that in the next few weeks Ted Cruz and John Kasich can win enough votes and delegates away from Donald Trump to keep him from becoming the Republican nominee for President. But what happens if he is still the delegate leader when they get to the convention floor?

Just the phrase "brokered convention" instills real fear, and yet somebody has to do something:

Ted Cruz: "It would be a disaster"












Stephen Colbert poked fun at Republicans for using the ephemism "Open Convention": "Honey, we don't have an broken marriage, we have an open marriage instead!" He also said:

"See when a candidate wins a primary, he really wins delegates who are committed to him at the convention, but only for the first ballot . . . So if Donald Trump doesn't get 1,237 delegates in the first round of voting, they're all free to vote for whoever, which is great news. The Republican campaign could start all over again. But this time it's all one week: You can binge-watch the death of the GOP."










Trump sent a clear message to all those praying for an open, broken, borked, or brokered convention:

"I think you'd have riots. I think you'd have riots ...I'm representing a tremendous many, many millions of people."
~~ Trump on CNN's New Day

Later he rolled back that answer, saying through surrogate Chris Christie that he didn't mean literal riots:

Via The Hill
“I don’t think he meant literal riots,” Christie said during a press conference in New Jersey, according to The Wall Street Journal. "I think he meant political riots."
Still, Christie, who has endorsed Trump and appeared with him at campaign rallies, predicted that a contested convention selecting the Republican nominee would generate outrage.
“If someone goes in with the most delegates, the most votes, and then they are denied the nomination by what they consider to be political insiders, I think there would be real upset at that convention,” he said. The Republican National Convention will be held in Cleveland in July.



Ex-nominee in 2012 Mitt Romney has been leading the charge to a brokered convention as part of the "Stop Trump" movement, and just yesterday he pledged support to Ted Cruz, even though they are rather strange bedfellows - an Evangelical firebrand and a moderate Mormon.



Trump was not amused, of course, and wasted no time lambasting Romney, joking in Utah that he loved Mormons because they were so hard-working, but he wasn't sure Romney was really a Mormon.





Trump also tweeted at Cruz and Romney:









Back to Stuart Stevens, GOP pundit:



Protesters outside his Utah rally minced no words:











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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Baltimore Burning Over Death of Freddie Gray

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Here we go again. On April 19, 2015, a group of policemen in Baltimore, Maryland, took custody of a man named Freddie Gray and after he was injured during the scuffle, they dragged him to an ambulance where later he died a mysterious death. Somehow he was killed inside an ambulance, completely severing his spinal cord. You cannot make up a horror story worse than the plight of African Americans in the hands of white cops these days.

From The Atlantic: The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray
According to the city, an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he'd had scrapes with the law before, there's no indication he was wanted at the time. And though he was found with a switchblade, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime.”

The police say Gray didn't resist arrest and that officers didn't use force, which seems to be mostly corroborated by video shot by bystanders. Gray seems to shout in pain, and his leg seems injured as officers drag him to a police van. (Someone off camera shouts, "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!") Gray also had asthma and requested his inhaler, but didn't get it. Yet it's not the leg or the asthma that killed him. Instead, it was a grave injury to his spinal cord. Gray's family said he was treated for three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, the sorts of injuries that doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents. The van made at least two stops before reaching the police station, but there's no footage to say what happened during the journey or at those stops.

It's a baffling conundrum. "None of the officers describe any use of force," Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. "None of the officers describe using any force against Mr. Gray." And yet somehow Gray was fatally hurt while in police custody.

Baffling conundrum, indeed.

So what has happened since Gray's death? Protest marches have sometimes turned into riots, with looting and fires, and the Governor called in the National Guard. Hashtag Baltimore is turning into another Ferguson, Missouri. Or maybe EVERYWHERE is Ferguson these days, and the country has got to get this under control! The good news is that recently sworn-in Attorney General Loretta Lynch has already sent a team to Baltimore to investigate the circumstances. Which is fine, but at some point there has to be justice for black Americans who are scared for their lives and for their children.















































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