Big Bass

He forgets very easily. He's "lysdexic." He also believes that, if there are two of them, he'll be twice as clever. Something else he forgets, 2 X 0 = 0.

Big Bass

Only the filthy, disgusting shit eaters. Oh, there's only 2. Both here being their usual racist selves.

Big Bass

You are so correct about yourself. Very good to admit that.

Michael Rich Loc: Lapine Oregon

Yes these shit munching fools only have ghetto mentality too offer....I conveyed to one the other day how authentic they are.

Big Bass

They are everything that is wrong with America today.

Progressive One

do what you think you need to do because I damn sure will........

Progressive One

oh how nice....then you select who to see as n-ggers the same way I select inbred pink pale ass racist crackas......so now you understand the concept.......good for you!!

Michael Rich Loc: Lapine Oregon

You seem a little off today...Did you lose your crack pipe at the truck stop last night?

Big Bass

And, pray tell little person, am I worried??

Big Bass

Progressive One

did anyone say you were or are you thinking out loud?

Progressive One

nah....I hung out with the white conservative limbaugh-type opioid abusers.....no crack on Saturdays.............

Progressive One

Why we can’t back Gorsuch
A decade ago, The Times urged the Senate to confirm John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court even though he was a conservative judge nominated by a conservative president and was likely to pull the court to the right for decades to come. We backed him, despite our disagreements with his judicial philosophy, because we believe that presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — are entitled to significant deference when they nominate justices to the high court, so long as the nominees are well qualified and scandal-free, respect precedent and fall within the broad mainstream of judicial thinking.
Under normal circumstances, that same reasoning would lead us to support the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. Like Roberts, he is conservative but competent, with more than a decade of experience on the appellate bench and a “well qualified” rating from the American Bar Assn.
But these are not normal times.
Not after the outrageous obstruction of Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination for 10 full months by Senate Republicans. That debacle began in March 2016, when President Obama nominated Garland, a moderate and well-respected appeals court judge, to fill the seat on the court that had become vacant with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Instead of doing what the Constitution requires and offering their advice and, if merited, their consent, Senate Republicans refused even to engage in the process. They denied Garland a confirmation hearing and in some cases wouldn’t even meet with him — on the ludicrous pretext that a president in his final year of office shouldn’t be allowed to name a new justice because … well, it was never really clear what the supposed principle was behind this self-serving position.
They stonewalled the nomination until Obama was safely out of office and a Republican had been elected. Now, with Gorsuch subbed in for Garland, their cynical and dishonorable strategy is about to deliver its rewards.
Some people think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that the seat was “stolen.” But how else to describe it? Republicans took the opportunity to fill the vacancy away from Barack Obama without justification and delivered it up instead to Donald Trump. Gorsuch could now tilt the balance on the increasingly polarized Supreme Court for the next 30 or more years, influencing rulings on free speech, gay and transgender rights, campaign finance, abortion, and gun laws, among other subjects. He may not be outside the mainstream of judicial thinking, but he is a textualist, an originalist and a likely ally of the court’s conservative justices.
The Republicans’ underhanded ploy to subvert the Garland nomination has put the Democrats in an untenable position. They can now do what would ordinarily be the right thing to do — by going high after the Republicans went low. They could grumble a bit but then decline to filibuster, or they could even vote in favor of Gorsuch — effectively capitulating in the quixotic hope that an act of good faith would encourage the GOP to behave more honorably in the future.
Alternately, they can go down kicking and screaming. We say “go down” because no matter how hard they kick or how loud they scream, they seem unlikely to win this battle. The reality is that without filibustering, they don’t have the votes to defeat Gorsuch. And if they do mount a filibuster, Senate Republicans can vote to do away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees entirely. Under either scenario, Gorsuch gets the job.
To be clear, Democrats and Republicans share the blame for the long roll down the slippery slope of polarization and dysfunction in the judicial selection process. (Some Democrats have even suggested in the past that presidents shouldn’t fill Supreme Court seats in election years.) And as the process has become more politicized, the court has become more ideologically riven as well. Although there are differences between Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, for example, on some important 1st Amendment issues, it’s also true that in recent years, justices appointed by Democratic presidents have tended to vote for “liberal” outcomes and justices appointed by Republicans for “conservative” outcomes. That is a bad trend.
The judicial system works best when justices are neither rigidly ideological nor biased along partisan lines. To get there, we need a less highly politicized selection process, along with a measure of cooperation, compromise and civility in Congress.
For the moment, though, it is imperative to stay focused on what the GOP did. By all means, let’s hear a cri de coeur from the Democrats, even if it is in vain. The Republicans took partisan obstructionism to an extraordinary new level, and that must not be ignored as if it never happened. President Obama’s nominee was robbed of his right to a hearing, and Senate Democrats have no obligation to be complicit in the theft.

Progressive One

Trump’s border wall folly
T he Trump administration is accepting proposals from contractors for designs and prototypes for the first sections of its ballyhooed wall along the border with Mexico. If it’s built, the project will be a boondoggle of legendary proportions and likely become the subject of historic ridicule. Why? Because Trump’s silly wall can’t possibly address much of the problem he seeks to fix.
The best estimates put the current U.S. population of undocumented immigrants at 11 million to 12 million people. The Pew Research Center reportshas shifted that a long growth trend in illegal immigration began around 1990, when the undocumented population was about 3.5 million, then rose steadily to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 and since has ebbed to a stable 11.7 million people. But those folks are already here — about three-quarters of them have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, and only 14% have been here for less than five years. Our undocumented neighbors are not newcomers.
Pew says net illegal immigration in recent years, with more Mexicans leaving the country than entering, a function of the U.S. economy’s slow recovery from the 2007-2009 recession and improved job opportunities in Mexico. The Border Patrol similarly has charted a decrease in apprehensions along the Mexican border, from an average of 1.16 million a year between 2000 and 2006, to 858,638 in 2007, bottoming out at 327,577 in 2011. Driven partly by an influx of Central American children and families, who tend to turn themselves in upon arrival to seek asylum, apprehensions rebounded to 408,870 last year. Given that diminished human flow, and the fact that more people are leaving than arriving, it hardly seems worth the expense of building a wall that the administration estimated would cost $21.6 billion (other estimates run much higher ).
Trump has milked the melodrama of a border wall, but he ignores the likelihood that it would be ineffectual at stopping people from entering the country without permission. Human migration routes are like rivers: If they hit an obstacle, the flow finds a way around it. So a wall will just lead smugglers to find new routes and methods — planes, boats and 31-foot ladders for a 30-foot wall — even as it is being built, further undercutting confidence in the barrier’s effectiveness. Nor would Trump’s wall address the growth in illegal immigration from Asia, which outpaces immigration from Latin America.
Perhaps most important, a wall could do nothing to halt the growing trend of people entering the country legally (often by plane) and then not leaving, which by some estimates accounts for as much as half of the undocumented immigration.
Granted, ending overstays is a tricky problem. The government already records who enters the country, including collecting fingerprints from non-citizens. But it has yet to figure out a way to know when those visitors leave. Congress ordered an “entry-exit” system in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and renewed the call after the 9/11 terror attacks — at least five of the terrorists had expired visas. But implementing it has proved vexingly difficult, and the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all failed to come up with a workable system despite spending $600 million on pilot projects.
While collecting biometric information might be relatively simple at international airport terminals, the challenges become monumental at ground-level crossings, where some 119 million people leave the country each year without any interaction with U.S. Border Patrol (travelers do get interviewed by Mexican and Canadian border agents as they enter those countries). So the U.S. would have to build checkpoints at each crossing, many of which lack the space for that kind of expansion, and would make authorized border-crossing even more time-consuming and frustrating. It also would be expensive — about $7 billion . Then the government would need to create or expand programs to match the departures against the entries, figure out who has overstayed and track them down.
At some point, the government needs to get honest about what is possible, and what is desirable, in addressing illegal immigration. And taxpayers need to decide how much they’re willing to spend for what result, and where the line between reasonable and ridiculous might lie.

Progressive One

Nor would Trump’s wall address the growth in illegal immigration from Asia, which outpaces immigration from Latin America.
Perhaps most important, a wall could do nothing to halt the growing trend of people entering the country legally (often by plane) and then not leaving, which by some estimates accounts for as much as half of the undocumented immigration.