09-25-2014, 03:01 PM | #251 |
Problematic Fave
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Small town politics gonna politic. There's really no cure, unfortunately, and it just causes problems for the rest of the US.
Right now it's a politics game for police officers all across the country. Can they prove that they are worthy of the badge? Can they provide enough good publicity to outweigh recent events in Ferguson and this shooting and a host of other incidents? Can they react correctly to possible incidents within their own town? The easy answer is "of course" but when it comes down to your best friend and that body he needs to hide, it is one of the most difficult problems anyone could ever face. Especially when it's just so easy. A few words to the judge and he'll let you take care of the punishment. A few words to the jury and they might change their minds about the evidence. I am constantly reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird in small-town incidents like these, where everyone is friends with everyone else and the deck was stacked from day 1. All we can really do is learn from it and seek to avoid similar issues elsewhere.
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10-02-2014, 08:28 AM | #252 |
時の彼方へ
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Philadelphia decriminalizes marijuana.
So ... since it was the city and not the state, does this mean city officers will be doing one thing while state officers will be doing another? Or will they all do the same thing so long as the marijuana is found within city limits?
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10-02-2014, 09:15 AM | #253 |
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Presumably the state has no jurisdiction in the city. Otherwise there wouldn't be a city police force.
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10-02-2014, 09:20 AM | #254 |
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I don't know about the UK but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works here. City police are confined to their city (and may stretch a bit out beyond it) while state police can go anywhere in the state, city or not. Normally, the chain of command works upwards, so like, city < state < federal (e.g. FBI). It's why in American film and television you'll often see a case begin with local police but then the FBI arrive and say that this is their case now.
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10-02-2014, 09:56 AM | #255 | |
Archbishop of Banterbury
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Would assume the law applies to the place, not the force. Would work the same as the FBI operating in multiple states despite those states having differing laws.
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10-02-2014, 12:54 PM | #256 |
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In the United States the State Police agencies have jurisdiction everywhere but mostly confined themselves to highways and other areas where no specific town or city police force has jurisdiction. State police can also assume jurisdiction from local police because legally, they are above the local police.
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10-02-2014, 05:20 PM | #257 |
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Yeah, legally the staties will be able to bust people for marijuana even within city limits, as the state law legally outranks the city one. But aside from a couple situations, I doubt it will happen much. I think a few years back we saw similar with San Francisco, if memory serves. While the state police can, nine times out of ten they won't. Especially since marijuana itself tends to be largely ignored anyway unless you're a dealer.
EDIT: Or an unlicensed grower. Although the growers with mass farms tend to have some cops on the payroll as insurance for that kind of thing. |
10-09-2014, 08:32 AM | #258 |
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John Oliver on civil forfeiture
As many in the comments have pointed out, 90%+ of these cases would be remedied were the law to require criminal charges (in order to confiscate) and criminal conviction (in order to liquidate or spend).
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11-04-2014, 11:04 PM | #259 |
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The insane horror story that is American politics is continuing to spiral out of control as the Republican Party looks poised to take the Senate, which leaves the President and his veto as the only things standing in their way, both of which are things that they can potentially either get rid of or work their way around.
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11-05-2014, 05:41 AM | #260 |
Primordial Fishbeast
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Man I can't understand why you'd vote someone from one party into power and then vote the other party into actual power two years later. What's the point of electing a president who can't actually do anything?
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11-05-2014, 05:57 AM | #261 |
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Americans are fond of doing that.
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11-05-2014, 07:40 AM | #262 |
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One thing to keep in mind is that senatorial terms last six years and that the fifty states aren't calibrated with each other. So for example, Indiana's two senators (each state has two) aren't up for re-election until 2016 and 2018 respectively.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many Americans will not bother to vote when they have no major offices to vote for. Again citing Indiana, we did not have any US Senators, the governor, or the President up for election this year. In fact, the highest office on the 2014 ballot for our state was the state-level Secretary of State. With these two thoughts in mind, realize that there is variance between party turnout every two years. If the majority of senators who were up for re-election and lost came from states that aren't strongly Democrat, and if they were Democrats to begin with, Democrats elected in 2008 right along with President Obama when dissatisfaction with the Republican Party was at its peak, then it's understandable that many of these voters were people with no especially strong love of the Democrat Party but who, in 2008, decided to give the Dems a chance; and who, in 2014, were fed up with the state of the economy and desperately switched back to the other party, believing that any change is better than the political gridlock of the last six years.
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11-05-2014, 12:03 PM | #263 |
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Also there is literally no point in voting for many offices in many states. Turnout is justifiably low.
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11-05-2014, 02:15 PM | #264 |
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Maryland had a voter turnout of 35%. When people dont vote, the system goes bad because its easier to sway the smaller voter base. If youre given the right to choose your leaders, exercise it.
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11-05-2014, 06:02 PM | #265 |
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Another reason for the Democrats poor showing this election is the fact that young people and minorities are far less likely to vote in a midterm election than they would be if it were a Presidential election, which is why we have the recent trend where the Democrats pick up seats in Presidential election years only to lose them in the midterms because their base fails to turn out in large enough numbers to win the midterm.
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11-09-2014, 06:19 PM | #266 |
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At least in Maryland there are more Democrats than Republicans but the Republican governor won because compared to the presidential election half as many people voted for Democratic candidate while about the same amount voted for Republican. I mean part of it was likely that the democratic candidate had a fairly poor record but still that's a pretty big difference.
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11-10-2014, 12:05 PM | #267 |
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You see, Roto, what you said is also somewhat true for Massachusetts, which also elected a Republican. But Charlie Baker's victory can also be blamed on the fact that Martha Coakley was an absolute shit candidate. I mean, the woman lost Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to Scott Brown back in 2010 for crying out loud. His victory may also have had something to do with the fact that Charlie Baker is a Massachusetts Republican, otherwise known as a Liberal Republican or a RINO, this means that they're actually more similar to the moderate Democrats than to say the Tea Party. A Massachusetts Republican is generally fairly progressive on social issues like abortion and tends to focus on economic issues when running for office. Charlie Baker is an example of this and Mitt Romney and Scott Brown used to be before they went into national politics and that's how all of them got elected. Maryland may either have something similar going on or it could just be that the Eastern Shore and Appalachians outweighed Baltimore for once.
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12-10-2014, 11:09 PM | #268 |
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Well the United States is about 24 hours away from its seemingly annual government shutdown. I feel like it's a bad thing that government shutdowns are becoming nothing but business as usual for people in my generation, when that is not the way a functioning country should be run.
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12-11-2014, 01:53 PM | #269 |
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You mean the US is actually run by a government?
All joking aside, this IS starting to become how foreign nations view the US. To me personally it appears to be run by a seemingly sane man (Obama), who is hindered severly by little children all because they didn't get in the oval office and do this just to spite him. |
12-11-2014, 02:42 PM | #270 |
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It's really not that far off, unfortunately
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12-12-2014, 09:51 AM | #271 |
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The saddest thing is that that's actually already fairly accurate. Although some of the opposition to the current budget is actually by the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party led by Elizabeth Warren and is based on actual logic and opposition to tea party add-ons to the budget involving things like bank regulations and abortion. So I'm actually fine with a shutdown if it means that these things are prevented from passing by the Senate.
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12-12-2014, 10:01 AM | #272 | |
Archbishop of Banterbury
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Your country elected Republican run houses, the Democrats have to make compromises to get budgets through. Forcing a shutdown by blocking the budget would be no more excusable than when the Republicans did the same thing last year.
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12-12-2014, 01:21 PM | #273 |
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I saw someone comment on the whole debt ceiling debacle the other day on Facebook and I thought he put it best:
"It's like your friend is threatening suicide unless you let them borrow your credit card." |
12-12-2014, 07:42 PM | #274 |
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I feel like the Progressive Democrats are justified in doing this since this budget significantly damages pretty much everything that they've worked for for the past few years such as campaign finance reform and healthcare reform. For example, how do you think Labour and pretty much everybody else would act if the Tories were insane enough to try and kill or significantly shrink the NHS?
Also, the recent elections may have given the Republicans the Senate, but the Democrats still hold the Senate for the next month and until then they have every right to stop this if they choose to do so, as they do with every other piece of legislation that comes before them. Also, Jeri, this isn't about the debt ceiling. What it's about is the budget for the coming year.
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12-12-2014, 08:00 PM | #275 |
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Really all I'm getting out of this is that it seems like Elizabeth Warren is probably gonna run for POTUS after all.
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