monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

This one move would’ve prevented most of our mass shootings.

...you missed the years when I was a manual laborer, drove a truck and was a member of the Teamsters.

This is perhaps the most foolish comment you have ever made.

The phony CNN "townhall" was a shameful farce. I've lost all respect for Jake Tapper.

A federal grand jury unveiled new charges on Thursday against Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates, accusing them of a broader range of financial crimes.

The 32-count indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia includes numerous tax and bank fraud charges. Manafort and Gates already faced money laundering and other charges in federal court in Washington, D.C.

They have pleaded not guilty.

The charges unsealed Thursday compound both men's already immense legal challenges, and may be an attempt by special counsel Robert Mueller's team to squeeze them further.

Sources have told NPR in recent weeks that Gates, who is struggling to pay his mounting legal fees, may be in the process of negotiating a guilty plea.

The charges Manafort and Gates face, on the other hand, stem from political consulting work they did for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine — and allegedly attempting to shield their earnings from that work from U.S. authorities. They do not include allegations that either man colluded with a foreign attack on the election.

In its court filing, the special counsel's office said it brought the new charges before the grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia because "our current evidence venue for these charges does not exist in the district of Columbia."

Quote:

...you missed the years when I was a manual laborer, drove a truck and was a member of the Teamsters.

I thought I remembered you saying something like that years ago. It's not uncommon for people to have had experience doing manual labor at an early stage of their work history. Some of us stick with it over our whole working career.

And that marginalizes the experience of those who have "moved on?" My experience during those days was very important to my worldview. I realized that there was a great number of people who didn't share my intellectual bent or even my middle-class socio-economic status who were, nevertheless sensible and wise. Are you suggesting that because I did not wish to remain in that milieu that I am somehow "out of touch?" You drove a truck all your life and so you are somehow more authentic than me?

I suppose I could tell you this in a PM but that seems a bit too familiar. But there's something about your style when you go into attack mode that I find irritating. It's how quickly you turn an argument into a personality clash rather than just critique the argument based on a factual or logical analysis. I know, we all do this at times, but you seem to do it with such unprovoked sarcasm and vehemence.

I can say the same about you, so spare me.

Yesterday, for instance, I said that the 2nd Amendment was an anachronism. Your immediate response was not to ask me "in what way?" or state your reasons for thinking that it remains as relevant today as it was in the late 18th Century. Instead you insult me right off the bat:

Quote:

This is perhaps the most foolish comment you have ever made.

Some comments are ridiculous on their face. Yours was.

Or you call me a "pompous elitist" for continuing my discussion with nimh using the same term he did. Even my use of "opioid-eater" is interpreted as a blanket condemnation of the working class when in reality it refers only to those people of any background who have chosen to dilute their effectiveness and dull their resentment with narcotics — I don't admire those people but I'm not without empathy for them either. Their presence among us in such great numbers is an indictment of our society. And even oralloy caught my reference to layman's use of the term "cheese-eater". If it hadn't been for layman I'd have probably labeled them as "pharma-junkies" or "small-town addicts" or something.

I read what you've written and I don't buy your excuses.

Yeah, I know, I'm sure you can accuse me of being just as nasty and find some posts of mine where you think I've been a jerk. But I try to avoid doing this on a regular basis as it just seems so unnecessary. We're not making policy here. We're not sitting across from each other seething with rage. We simply have differences of opinion. I don't dislike you for being a conservative. But I think you're smart enough to outline our disagreement without exhibiting personal animosity and I don't know what I've done to warrant such obvious disdain.

If you acknowledge that I can find posts of yours that resemble those of mine to which you object then "game over." Stop whining. You, as I am, are an anonymous figure in a political forum. I'm not here to make friends.

So let's see...an 18 year old kid can join the military, get sent to a war zone to kill and possibly be killed but if he makes it back alive before he turns 21, he can't buy a gun or a beer?

If you read the indictment, it’s clear that Mueller’s team knows in granular detail virtually everything that went on during the 2016 election, and is steadily laying out the criminality one step at a time.

Trump defenders who keep saying there’s no there there now have to see (whether they acknowledge it or not) that there was a huge there there: what even Trump’s national security adviser H. R. McMaster felt compelled to describe as “incontrovertible” evidence of the Russian effort to sabotage American democracy at its heart, the ballot box.

By proving that crime, the indictment lays the groundwork for charging those who attempted to obstruct the investigation of the crime.

Meanwhile, Mueller keeps dealing out new cards, including a reported plea deal for Paul Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates and a reported investigation of a Chicago banker who may have been promised a White House job by Manafort in exchange for $16 million in loans.

Manafort may soon have to decide whether he wants to spend the rest of his life in prison or start squealing on Trump.

Still to come: the fruits of Mueller’s investigation into the Russian hacking of Clinton and DNC emails.

And that marginalizes the experience of those who have "moved on?"

Oralboy

so if it never happened to you or your Mom, your sister or daughter or niece, shut the fu&k up.

If it can be done, confidently effectively, in five minutes, I wouldn’t be a stickler for a day, but safety is prioritized over a quick sale. And if NRA proponents are down with that-good.

I have a gun. We’re a gun family, but we all support reasonable safety measures.

Who is on s prohibited list that shouldn’t be?

And, this whole registry can be thwarted by any private gun transfer. Everybody-even father to son-should file documentation on the transfer of a gun. Every recipient of a gun should go through a background check and be registered in possession of that weapon.
That’s not too bad, is it?