Delaware

Friday Open Thread [1.2.15]

Matt Taibbi on the news that the fascist police state loving NYPD has begun a work slowdown/stoppage:

“My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they’re pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of ‘protest’ pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.”

“I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public. So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.”

Indeed.

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New Years Eve Open Thread [12.31.14]

Steve Benen counters the narrative that 2014 was a bad year for the country and President Obama specifically:

This was the year the economy improved to its strongest level in over a decade and the Affordable Care Act succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. It was the year the president scored foreign policy breakthroughs with Cuba and China, and advanced a landmark immigration policy.

This was the year Obama filled much of the federal judiciary with his nominees, deftly handled some important crises, freed American prisoners in North Korea, and sharply reduced the number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

It’s also the year the president saw his approval rating jump, bringing him in line with Reagan’s support at a comparable point in his presidency.

I don’t doubt that Obama wishes the midterm elections had gone the other way, but Beltway conventional wisdom notwithstanding, maybe 2014 wasn’t such a disaster for the president after all?

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Tuesday Open Thread [12.30.14]

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the No. 3 Republican in the House, addressed a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in 2002, the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Scalise made his remarks to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which was founded two years earlier by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana politician… It was unclear what the revelation means for Mr. Scalise’s future in the House leadership. Speaker John A. Boehner declined to comment on the reports.”

Uh. We knew who David Duke was in 2002, and if you didn’t know who he was, or you didn’t know that “European-American Unity and Rights Organization” is straight up code for the KKK, then you are too stupid to draw a salary at any level of government and you must be forced out immediately. The truth here is Scalise is a racist white supremacists, as are a lot of conservatives down in the South, most of home are now Republicans. So it was quite natural for him to speak to people with like minds.

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