Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

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Well the four points you raise...

All presidents have pardoned convicted criminals. I have said before that I believe allowing a President to pardon anyone is absurd.

Failing to condemn Nazis. Didn't Obama find it impossible to say 'Radical Islam'. I dare say that Trump was neither the first nor last President to fail to condemn.

Contravening discrimination laws. On the face of it disgraceful and I cannot for the life of me understand who or what the driving force for this is. Did he really just want to pick a fight with his military or did they have any input, no idea myself.

Threatening to shut down government in order to build a wall. Well he was fairly open about building a wall, and a great many people voted for him to do so, so his threat is merely a way of achieving his election promise...


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Thanks for the answer, I was just curious to see why you'd see Trump as an idiot if you had no truck with his administration.

True on the pardon part, no conviction, no pardon. However, the choice and timing of Donnie's first could be seen as inflamatory by some.

Obama maybe didn't say 'Radical Islam' because, I assume, he didn't want to alienate, or more cynically maybe, upset the Muslim community by creting a link in the public consciousness between Islam and Terror. As a President I imagine he relises the need to choose his words carefully to protect all those under his mandate. Why, then, would Trump be afraid of linking Nazis with White Supremacists? So as not to alienate, or more cynically maybe, upset the White Supremacists? To not create a link in the public consciousness.

I even see your point regarding Preidents failing to condemn. But look at what they're failing to condemn. Armed Nazis in an urban American setting.

Lastly, ok, he's serious about that wall. So serious that he thinks shutting down government at a time when nuclear confrontation (I won't say war, I know how you feel about that) is on the cards, a storm is battering Texas, and there is open conflct and death on the streets is a good idea. Shouldn't the President of a country not be looking to steady the shipp and inspire confidence?

As always, just my opinion, and meant in the spirit of open debate, Don't take it as pitch-forks and torches as that's not the intention.

The pitchforks and torches bit was a joke btw......
 
in case anyone was wondering what the latest fuss what about...

Joe Arpaio’s reign was two decades of intimidation, cruelty, and abuses of power…
https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/wait-do-people-actually-know-just-how-evil-this-man-is

"If you are a Trump supporter, the president has just pardoned “America’s toughest sheriff,” a man who was willing to fight illegal immigration using any means at his disposal. If you are a liberal, Trump has pardoned a despicable racist, a man who spent decades casually violating the civil liberties of Latinos. And if you are a balanced and neutral news organization, Trump has pardoned a “controversial” sheriff who faced “accusations of abuse” and “defied a court order.” These are the terms on which the debate about Arpaio is had: is he a vindictive bigot who neglected his prisoners or a steely lawman who dared to enforce immigration policy when the Feds wouldn’t? (Perhaps we’ll just call him “polarizing.”)

But none of these perspectives actually capture the full truth about Joe Arpaio. And I am worried that even those who detest Trump and are appalled by this pardon do not entirely appreciate the depth of Arpaio’s evil, or understand quite how indefensible what Donald Trump just has done is. Frankly I think even Trump may not fully realize the extent of the wrongdoing that he has just signaled his approval of. And I think it’s very important to be clear: the things Joe Arpaio is nationally infamous for, the immigration crackdown and the tent city, these are only the beginning. The word “racist” isn’t enough. The word “abusive” isn’t enough. Joe Arpaio’s actions over the course of his time in office were monstrous and sickening. As Arpaio’s officers were harassing, detaining, and beating citizens and non-citizens alike, with jail employees routinely calling inmates “wetbacks” or leaving them to die on the floor, Arpaio let hundreds of serious sexual abuse cases go uninvestigated, in one case resulting in a child being continually raped. He was not just a “tough” sheriff, but a cruel and incompetent one, faking clearance reports for serious crimes while abusing the power of his office to arrest and intimidate journalists, judges, and county officials. Some of Arpaio’s acts bordered on the psychopathic: in a deranged re-election plot, Arpaio oversaw a scheme to pay someone to attempt to assassinate him, even supplying the man with bomb-making materials, so that he could entrap the fake “assassin” and send him to prison, ruining the hapless man’s life. Arpaio treated the Constitution with contempt, inflicting what the Mayor of Phoenix called a “reign of terror” upon the city’s Latino community. Anybody with a hint of a conscience should be revolted by both Arpaio’s record and Trump’s pardon."

Marty Atencio was a third-generation military veteran who had served in the Gulf War. Upon returning to civilian life, Atencio would struggle for years with schizophrenia and homelessness. In 2011, he was arrested for “aggressive” behavior outside a convenience store and taken to the Maricopa County Jail. The arresting officer noted that Atencio seemed to be suffering from a mental illness, and when he arrived at the jail he appeared “off his rocker.” Atencio informed jail staff that he was having suicidal thoughts and was placed in an isolation cell. Later, according to a lawsuit filed against the Sheriff’s office, officers began to make fun of Atencio’s mental state, and when he refused an order to take his shoes off, closed in on Atencio and began beating and tasering him. They dragged Atencio’s unconscious body back to his cell, where he was stripped naked and left on the floor. His body was found “covered with bruises, lacerations and puncture marks,” and would never regain consciousness. Atencio would be buried with full military honors, with Maricopa County having to cough up a large wrongful death settlement for his family.

During the more than two decades that Joe Arpaio served as sheriff of Maricopa County, overseeing the jail system, millions of dollars would be paid out in lawsuits over the deaths of inmates. In 1996, Scott Norberg died after being suffocated in one of Arpaio’s “restraint chairs,” after being descended on by “fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating [him].” They were, said an eyewitness inmate, “like a pack of dogs.” After the Sheriff’s Office was accused of discarding evidence in the case, including the deceased’s crushed larynx, his family received an $8 million settlement. In 2015, Felix Torres was pulled over on his bicycle for riding the wrong way up the street, and found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. While in jail awaiting trial, he was taken to the County Medical Center for severe stomach pain. Though Torres said he had a history of ulcers, doctors decided he had a hernia, and gave him a drug not recommended for people with ulcers. After being returned to jail, Torres, “spent the next few days crying, writhing in pain, and begging guards to help him or take him to the hospital.” Torres began “banging on his cell door and asking for help,” but an officer told him “You’re bullshitting… go to sleep.” On the night he died, Torres asked multiple officers for help, telling them he was dying. “You’re [Poor language removed] faking it,” one replied. Torres’s family would receive $1 million. (And while it should make no difference, we might bear in mind that at the time of his death, Felix Torres was an innocent man.)

Felix Torres was the latest in what the Phoenix New-Times had begun calling Joe Arpaio’s “parade of corpses,” with “endless” numbers of court cases over “needless deaths and injuries in the jails.” Arpaio refused to disclose the number of deaths in his facility, despite evidence that inmates were committing suicide at a rate that “dwarfed” other county jails.

But it was not just those who died in Arpaio’s jails that suffered. Everyone did, because Arpaio made clear he wanted them to. Even though most of the inmates were legally innocent, Arpaio called them “criminals” and thought up ever-more sadistic treatments for them. First, of course, were the infamous tents: inmates would be forced to live without air conditioning in the Arizona heat, which reached well above 110 degrees. (At one point it reached 145 within the tents, causing the inmates’ shoes to melt.) Even the showers provided no relief; they were kept near boiling temperature. Winter was somehow even worse: the tents were unheated, but Arpaio would not permit warm clothing, not even a jacket. A former inmate wrote in the Washington Post that it was “freezing, achingly cold,” and that detainees wrapped their extremities with plastic bags. “I was in so much pain,” he said, that even now he cannot be cold without being reminded of it.

Arpaio instituted chain gangs, and boasted that he had the first all-female chain gangs, soon to be followed by juvenile chain gangs. He took away every small comfort that could possibly make life in such conditions tolerable: no coffee, no cigarettes, no newspapers, no television. (Sometimes he permitted The Weather Channel “so these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”) He fed inmates meals that cost as little as 15 cents each, and was proud of the fact that the food was rotten and contaminated. Only two meals were provided per day, leading some inmates to lose unhealthy amounts of weight (a federal court eventually ordered Arpaio to meet USDA requirements), and Arpaio imposed a bread-and-water diet on any detainee found committing an “unpatriotic act.”

Medical care for those who suffered from mental illness was “dangerously inadequate.” Arpaio “tortured inmates who were on psychotropic medication by locking them in unbearably hot solitary confinement cells.” Those with physical vulnerabilities were mistreated, too; a paraplegic had his neck broken by guards and a pregnant woman lost her baby after officers left her in her cell instead of taking her to the hospital. It even took a federal court order to ensure “functional and sanitary toilets and sinks, with toilet paper and soap.” (Take a moment to visualize what happens when an overcrowded group of people does not have access to any of these things.) Arpaio introduced a policy that only those who could prove they were U.S. citizens could visit family in jail, meaning detained immigrants could not see their spouses or children. (At one point, an interpreter and U.S. citizen who worked for the county was also prohibited from entering the facility, because he was a Latino who could not instantly produce paperwork showing his citizenship.)

None of this served any purpose other than furthering Arpaio’s attempts to build a brand out of callousness. “Jails are intended to be punishment,” Arpaio said (although jail aren’t intended to be punishment, because most people in them haven’t been convicted of a crime yet), and he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp,” dismissing all concerns as “civil rights crap.”

There is more detail in the article, which is worth reading in full.

No country that allows people like this to be rewarded, let alone hold power in the first place, is entitled to any sort of pride in itself.
 
I honestly think that some of you guys have lost the plot. There is no two sides to anything, no thought from another opinion, just raw hatred. I've always liked Americans and their intellectual rigour, but this thread stands testament to your undoing......
 
I honestly think that some of you guys have lost the plot. There is no two sides to anything, no thought from another opinion, just raw hatred. I've always liked Americans and their intellectual rigour, but this thread stands testament to your undoing......
The Secretary of State just went on Fox tv and essentially said that the president doesn't represent US values, and his own economic director has publicly rebuked him for his Charlottesville response - not sure you can "two sides" or "other opinion" that into being good Pete.
 
The Juggalo March on Washington, a protest against the government’s classification of Juggalos as a gang, will take place at the National Mall on Sept. 16, the same day as the pro-Trump “Mother of All Rallies.” There’s no love lost between the two sides.

“Let’s make sure we make more noise than those b- Neo-Nazies, am I right? whoop whoop,” one poster wrote on the Juggalo March event page, which is full of communist and working-class Juggalo memes. It’s possible that internet socialists are the ones pushing the meme that Juggalos are the new communist vanguard, but the response on the page is mostly positive.

 
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