The kid was a vegetable and his condition was irreversible. I understand it's a sad situation but what's the issue here?
Italian doctors thought otherwise. Why can’t it be the parent’s decision? Please let’s not turn this into a shitfest. I’m just trying to understand the rationale on this one.
There was an alternative that the parents wanted to explore and the government stopped it from happening. I’m not a “death panel” conspiracy theorist or anything but I don’t like the idea of government being involved with healthcare decisions.
You didn't read the article. The Italian doctors agreed there was no treatment after meeting with his father and reviewing records.
Is it your contention that doctors should be compelled to provide care that they all agree isn’t beneficial?
If you read anything about the situation you would’ve seen that their laws put the child’s rights above the rights of the parents, and the court ruled that Italian jurisdiction doesn’t overrule British- legally it didn’t matter what the Italian doctors said, the British doctors determined his brain was literally mush and that his rights allowed him to be allowed to die.
My mistake. I read the bbc article which I couldn’t get to link correctly and just posted the next one down.
The idea of patients being able to elect treatment against physician opinion is wildly out of bounds.
No, but if other doctors do want to provide it, who has the right to stop that? The BBC article said the Italian government gave him citizenship and hoped he would transfer immediately. Not sure what is true.
Aka divert those precious resources away from a situation they could actually make a positive effect on
We need this law here “British law states that parents “cannot demand a particular treatment to be continued where the burdens of the treatment clearly outweigh the benefits for the child,” according to Agence France-Presse. If an agreement cannot be reached between the parents and doctors, “a court should be asked to make a declaration about whether the provision of life-sustaining treatment would benefit the child.” In Alfie’s cases, judges sided with doctors each time.”
Like we have financial barriers keeping people from getting treatment, insurance companies keeping people from getting treatment, people that actually need it and would benefit And we're discussing a kid who everyone who reviewed his records said had no ethically viable treatment or ability to improve That's some shit
No one forced any doctors to do anything they didn’t want to. The family presumably, depending on which source you believe, had other options for care. I just hate the idea of government doctors and the government making these kinds of decisions for people. That family could have crowd sourced all the funding they needed in hours, yet they weren’t given the opportunity to even try.
Cite? Every article saying this explicitly is right wing propaganda. All real news sources say Italian medical professionals said he wasn't a candidate and shouldn't transport.
Yes, we absolutely need a fix to healthcare availability to everyone. No doubt about that and a single payer is something that bears consideration. We aren’t that far off on this issue at all. What I’m talking about is government having the ability to limit options and make decisions like this. I just can’t get behind that.
Making empirically sound and medically involved decisions is what we should move towards vs it being fee for service
They don’t. If the parents think they know more than the doctors then they should have to prove so in a court of law, which they failed to do 4 times
Perhaps you guys are right. I honestly don’t know for certain. Kind of a busy week and I hadn’t heard much about this until today. It’s a sad story and it tugs on my heartstrings as well as my natural opinion on small government. Healthcare is just one of those really sticky issues that test my views from multiple angles I gotta get going to my son’s lacrosse game. Thanks for the short chat.
You are getting some bad info. This is a very sad situation for those parents, I get that. They don’t want to believe that this outcome was inevitable, I get that. They want to blame someone, I get that. But none of that changes the fact that what they wanted to do was not of any benefit to their child. Life is a series of miseries briefly interrupted by bliss that ultimately ends in oblivion. The government and the doctors and the courts are not the bad guys here. The bad guy (if you believe in him) is God.
People say they understand their mortality, but they don’t. They think they are entitled to live to 110 with perfect mental status and then just go to sleep one night and not wake up. Anything short of that is somebody’s fault. No. Our mortality is at fault. We are fragile, decaying organism that break down and stop working completely for any number of reasons at pretty much any given moment. Nobody is guaranteed a tomorrow. Accepting that is accepting your mortality.
Is this the case from months ago where the American doctor tried to sell the parents snake oil that he had financial stakes in that would have had no effect on the kid at all after he claimed to review the kid's med files but actually didnt
the HuffPost Fringe newsletter This is HUFFPOST FRINGE, your weekly postcard from the political wilderness, with reporters Luke O'Brien and Christopher Mathias. Spoiler The antifa boogeyman in Georgia One year ago, most Americans had no idea what the hell antifa meant. Then Charlottesville happened, and suddenly people had opinions about An-TEE-fa. “Yes, Antifa Is the Moral Equivalent of Neo-Nazis,” read the headline of a Washington Post op-ed, published in the days following the deadly white supremacist rally. “Trump Is Right—Violent Extremists on Both Sides Are a Threat,” was the headline in USA Today. “The Hard Right and Hard Left Pose Different Dangers,” was The Wall Street Journal’s. Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting looked at how six major newspapers covered antifa in the month after the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville: Between August 12 and September 12, these papers ran 28 op-eds or editorials condemning the anti-fascist movement known as antifa, or calling on politicians to do so, and 27 condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or calling on politicians—namely Donald Trump—to do so….. Johnson was eloquent about how this created a false equivalency: A month after a leftist protester was killed by a self-professed neo-Nazi, it’s notable that a slim majority of opinion in major newspapers focused on those devoted to combating racism rather than to those advancing it. Bear in mind that one side kills more people than any other ideology in the country and openly promotes genocide, while the other supports aggressive tactics to prevent the promotion of genocide, and hasn’t killed anyone. This past weekend in Newnan, Georgia, HuffPost found a city as derisive and scared of antifa as it was of the neo-Nazis coming to town to hold a rally. Jeff Nelms, who camped out in his friend’s gun shop to protect it from vandals, said antifa and neo-Nazis were both “scum.” “Neither one of these groups represent who we are and what we stand for,” Newnan Police Chief D.L. “Buster” Meadows told a local paper. Meadows somehow believed up to 12,000 antifa members were going to show up to protest the Nazis. This was a wildly, wildly high estimate, which Meadows used to justify the veritable army of some 700 officers who were summoned to police the event. (Ultimately, only a couple hundred anti-fascist protesters and about 30 Nazis turned up.) Many of the officers wore military fatigues, bulletproof vests and helmets, and carried semi-automatic rifles. They drove around in armored vehicles as helicopters and drones circled overhead. Newnan looked like it was under military occupation. Militarized officers approached a group of anti-fascist protesters before the rally started, demanding they remove their masks or be arrested. Anti-fascists often wear masks to protect their identities from both neo-Nazis and law enforcement. When HuffPost asked a lead officer if it was illegal to wear masks, he said yes, it was in Georgia, referring to a 1951 law aimed at combating hooded Ku Klux Klan members. The irony of using that law to arrest anti-racist protesters seemed lost on him. More officers arrived in armored vehicles, cornering the anti-fascists, some of whom the officers then tossed to the ground and arrested. Your Fringe correspondent has been to a lot of big protests (in Charlottesville, New York, Baltimore, Berkeley, California and Shelbyville, Tennessee) but had never seen policing this aggressive. At one point, an officer pointed his gun at the protesters, none of whom appeared to be armed. HuffPost managed to take this photo: The anti-fascists — some of whom, sure, probably wanted to punch a Nazi that day — were never really a threat, though. They were standing on a sidewalk waiting to march to a counter-protest, where they’d get to scream at some Nazis from behind a fence. Police, perhaps learning from Charlottesville, had done a good job at making sure the two sides would be separated all day. This week, MuckRock dug up some documents showing that Newnan, a city of less than 40,000 people, had received nearly 1 million dollars in military equipment from the Pentagon. What Huffpost witnessed in Newnan was a scary confluence of two different trends: the continued vilification of anti-fascists and the militarization of police. Who knows what could happen at the next rally. As for the neo-Nazis who turned up in Newnan, they were pathetic. Led by “commander” Jeff Schoep, the National Socialist Movement members and a small continent from League of the South arrived an hour late to their own rally. Schoep gave a rambling speech as his NSM subordinates threw up Nazi salutes. When HuffPost asked Schoep about these Nazis salutes, he claimed they were actually “Roman salutes.” (NSM has been trying this PR maneuver for years.) HuffPost told him that was BS, and Schoep got huffy and threatened to kick HuffPost out of the park for being “disrespectful.” He didn’t, the coward. Later that night, NSM members built a burning swastika in the Georgia countryside. READ MORE Pathways to hate At the end of March, commenters in the forum of the white nationalist website The Right Stuff asked themselves a question that people who follow extremism are always trying to answer: What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem? Understanding how and where and why (mostly) young men turn to hate -- and often, it is violent hate -- is critical if we hope to address the problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center collected the responses of 74 TRS commenters who described how they were radicalized. While the threads on the forum dealt specifically with how people arrive at TRS and Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer, which are among the most hardcore and openly neo-Nazi sites in the alt-right, what’s interesting are the pathways to getting there. The two influences cited most by commenters were Jared Taylor and /pol/, which show how the “alt-right” has combined an old-school white supremacist ideology with the memeing and social media skills of digital natives. Taylor is one of the intellectual godfathers of today’s white power movement, whereas /pol/ is a no-holds-barred 4chan imageboard teeming with rabid trolls. More revealing is that three of the top 10 influences TRS commenters cited were figures in the “alt-lite” movement, a cabal of nativist propagandists who call themselves “civic nationalists” and disdain public sieg heiling, but nevertheless share much of the racist and fascist ideology of the alt-right. Stefan Molyneux, a glib and popular YouTuber who pushes racist pseudoscience, was the most important alt-lite stepping stone to far-right extremism, followed by Gavin McInnes, the irony-slinging founder of the Proud Boys, a violent white gang that attracts racists and outright white supremacists. The third was Milo Yiannopoulos, the racist huckster and former Breitbart editor. And this is why the alt-lite is so dangerous — maybe even more dangerous than the outright Nazis. Without it — and the TRS commenters admit this — it’s far more difficult to make the leap from being a “normie” to a hard-boiled Daily Stormer Nazi. The alt-lite radicalizers are the easy alternative at first, the safe entry point to an echo chamber of hate where susceptible minds can then be drenched with in-group propaganda and sent on their way. After a few months, they’ve moved further right and are talking about about race war and gassing Jews. Not many come back. READ MORE Blood and soiled To understand the dangers posed by today’s far-right extremists we need to listen to them. Each week, the Angry White Men blog highlights a snippet of conversation from an “alt-right” podcast to show you how fascists and racists really think. Don't say we didn't warn you, America…. Last Friday was April 20. Or 4/20. For many people, it’s a day for jazz cigarettes. For the alt-right, neo-Nazis and other racist crackpots, it’s a different holiday. Adolf Hitler, you see, was born on April 20, 1889. Hitler is now 129 years old, his cryogenically preserved body stored in a Nazi moonbase awaiting the Fourth Reich, when der Führer will be thawed and given the keys to 8chan. Haha! Just kidding. Hitler offed himself, and his body was dumped in a bomb crater and burned. Almost everyone is glad for his going. But a handful of fiends still celebrate his arrival. On Twitter, that meant dozens of people with Groyper avatars praising “Uncle” Adolf and tweeting photos of their idol on his birthday last Friday. On Truth Will Out Radio, a podcast hosted by Sven Longshanks and Dennis Wise, it meant a mawkish retrospective of the dictator’s life. Not much is known about Wise, aside from the fact that he produced Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story NEVER Told, a ham-fisted attempt at Nazi propaganda. Suffice it to say, Wise is a huge fan of the megalomaniacal mass murderer. Together the pair engaged in breathtaking historical revisionism, putting a positive spin on Nazi Germany’s most draconian policies and outright ignoring inconvenient facts about genocide, forced labor camps, militarism abroad and a brutal crackdown on civil liberties at home. Even trying to understand the mental gymnastics white supremacists go through to cling to their unfounded ideas can be exhausting. According to Longshanks, Hitler “gave children rights” through programs designed to weed out the sick and disabled. “He did his very best to prevent children [from] being born with limbs missing, or mentally deficient,” he said. Wise mumbled something about how German courts needed to sign off on sterilizing someone and that this wasn’t done “on a whim.” Besides, Longshanks added, this “improved the racial hygiene” of Germany. Guys, that’s called eugenics. Hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized, and tens of thousands were given the designation “Lebensunwertes Leben” (“life unworthy of life”) and murdered under Hitler’s Action T4 euthanasia program. But the whitewashing wasn’t over. When the hosts discussed the treatment of Jewish people, particularly after the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which barred Jews from all civil service positions, Longshanks complimented Hitler for “removing the Jews from power,” but not in a “nasty way.” By that, he meant they were “asked to leave their positions” and “given full pensions.” He omitted the fact that Jews who had not worked in civil service for 10 years wouldn’t have received anything, but that’s beside the point. By that time, the Nazi regime had already launched a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses and would go on to limit the number of Jewish children in public schools and strip Jews of their citizenship. Hitler was not a man motivated by a desire to protect human rights. And 4/20 ain’t for Nazis. It’s for chiefing a fatty of sticky-icky.
'Insane': America's 3 Largest Psychiatric Facilities Are Jails By Ailsa Chang • Apr 25, 2018 All Things Considered By some estimates, nearly half of the people confined in U.S. jails and prisons have a mental illness, notes Alisa Roth, author of Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness. Darrin Klimek / Getty Images Spoiler Originally published on April 30, 2018 5:01 pm In jails and prisons across the United States, mental illness is prevalent and psychiatric disorders often worsen because inmates don't get the treatment they need, says journalist Alisa Roth. In her new book Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, Roth investigates the widespread incarceration of the mentally ill in the U.S., and what she sees as impossible burdens placed on correctional officers to act as mental health providers when they're not adequately trained. "It's unpleasant, it's loud, it's claustrophobic," she tells NPR's All Things Considered. "You see people who are desperately sick. I mean, desperately sick. One time when I was [at the Los Angeles County jail], corrections officers came out with a man who had been strapped into a wheelchair and was bleeding from his arm because he had scratched out a piece of his own flesh." Another day she accompanied officers as they tried to get inmates to come out for recreation time or for a shower. "And they opened the little door in the cell where you hand food trays through, and there was this almost overpowering smell of feces," Roth says, "because this man had smeared the walls of his cell." By some counts, Roth says, as many as half of all inmates suffer from some sort of psychiatric disorder; jails in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are now the three largest institutions providing psychiatric care in the U.S. Some correctional institutions refused Roth's requests when she was researching her book to see their facilities. Others, including L.A. County's jail, allowed her inside — to see firsthand what happens there. Interview Highlights On what Roth learned about mental health care in the criminal justice system It's easy to portray these people as monsters or otherworldly, and I think we need to remember they're real people who are just not getting the treatment they need. The officers, too, are legitimately concerned about having things thrown at them or being attacked. ... Another thing that struck me there was this sense of people cycling through. We talk about the civilian mental health care system and the criminal justice system as two separate entities; [but] really, in a lot of cases, the patients in both of them are going back and forth between the two. One day when I was there, there was a man who acted up in court and was sent back to the jail. He was strapped into a restraint chair for transport from the court to the jail, and I went with the officers to retrieve him and bring him back to a cell. And they kept talking to him because they knew him. He had been there a bunch of times before, and they kept saying, "Hey, what happened? What's going on?" And the man didn't say anything until we were getting off the elevator, and then he started asking if he could be sent back to his old cell. On the scarcity of mental health treatment It is astonishing to me how difficult it can be to access mental health care in this country. In Oklahoma, I visited community clinics – outpatient clinics in the community. What happens in Oklahoma is that if you come in with symptoms of mental illness, or somebody brings you in for symptoms of mental illness, you're given a score from one to four. And basically, if you are not actively suicidal or actively psychotic, you're going to be diverted to some other form of treatment. You're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist — or you're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist for months, and months and months. Even figuring out where to go for treatment can be difficult. At one point, I was following somebody here in New York who had been in and out of the mental health care system, and in and out of jail and prison. And I wanted to see how many people — how many psychiatrists — in New York City alone accept Medicaid and how many of those would be accepting new patients at any given time. I spent probably two days making phone calls. I should add that I made those calls without worrying about losing time from my job; I wasn't worried about running out of money on my cellphone; I wasn't worried about where I was going to sleep that night; I wasn't worried about getting my medication; I wasn't worried about where my next meal was coming from. And I finally gave up – I went to one of the public hospitals here in the city. I went to the Medicaid office; I explained to the very nice clerk what I wanted to do. She handed me a sheet of paper. She said, "Well, it really depends which Medicaid plan you're on." And there were, I forget, five or six different options. She said "You need to go online and look up the psychiatrist, and then you need to call the office, and see if they're accepting patients." It's just, it's so – who's going to do that? Who has the time or the wherewithal or even just the brainpower to do that? On how she sees these issues improving One of the heartening things I've found in all this very upsetting reporting is that there is a consensus that what we're doing is wrong. Whether we're talking about the people who are locked up and their families, or the corrections officers, or the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the doctors — you name it. They're in agreement that what we're doing is not working, that it's counterproductive, that we need to change. We need to figure out how to come to a consensus about what that change looks like, but at least we're all on the same page – that this is not the way it should be and that nobody is benefiting from this situation. Noah Caldwell and Renita Jablonski produced and edited the audio of this story. Sydnee Monday adapted it for the Web. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. AILSA CHANG, HOST: To get a picture of the horrors of this country's psychiatric institutions in the mid-20th century, you can read or watch "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST") SYDNEY LASSICK: (As Charlie Cheswick) I ain't no little kid. LOUISE FLETCHER: (As Nurse Ratched) You sit down. LASSICK: (As Charlie Cheswick) I ain't no little kid. CHANG: Or you can do what Alisa Roth did - spend time in our present-day jails and prisons. ALISA ROTH: We have recreated those asylums almost point-by-point. CHANG: The journalist says that includes the brutality, the cruelty and the filth. ROTH: Understaffing on the security side, understaffing on the medical side, under-trained mental health care workers, overmedication - it's like we've just rebuilt them and call them something else, but it's all the same problems. CHANG: Alisa Roth investigates the widespread incarceration of the mentally ill in her new book "Insane: America's Criminal Treatment Of Mental Illness". By some counts, she writes, as many as half of all inmates suffer from a psychiatric disorder. Some correctional institutions turned her away. Others, including the LA County jail, allowed her to see firsthand what goes on inside. ROTH: What you see in Los Angeles County is a jail which is scary. It's unpleasant. It's loud. It's claustrophobic. You see people who are desperately sick - I mean, desperately sick. So one time when I was there, corrections officers came out with a man who had been strapped into a wheelchair and was bleeding from his arm because he had scratched out a piece of his own flesh. I was walking around with officers one day, trying to get people to come out for recreation time or for a shower, what have you, and they opened the little door in the cell where you hand food trays through, and there was this almost overpowering smell of feces because this man had smeared the walls of his cell with feces like plaster. CHANG: Wow. I was also struck by the attitude of some of the officers you talked to. I remember the nonchalant way one of the officers showed you his special knife for cutting down people trying to hang themselves. It was just like, yeah, this is just part of my uniform. ROTH: Yeah, and it was just part of his job. Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails. And it was part of his job the same way as taking people out of their cells and bringing them for out-of-cell time. CHANG: Yeah. ROTH: At the same time, you know, it's easy to portray these people as monsters or otherworldly. And I think we need to remember that they are real people who are just not getting the treatment that they need. The officers, too, are legitimately concerned about having things thrown at them or being attacked. You know, the officers post signs on the cells saying, this man is a spitter or this one is will hold his door open when you try to put him back. CHANG: Or throw feces at you. ROTH: Or throw feces at you. I mean, another thing that struck me there was this sense of people cycling through. So we talk about the civilian mental health care system and the criminal justice system as two separate entities. And really, in a lot of cases, the patients in both of them are going back and forth between the two. One day when I was there, there was a man who had acted up in court and was sent back to the jail. He was strapped into a restraint chair for transport from the court to the jail, and I went with the officers to retrieve him, bring him back to a cell. And they kept talking to him because they knew him. He'd been there a bunch of times before, and they kept saying, hey, what happened; what's going on? And the man didn't say anything until we were getting off the elevator, and then he started asking if he could be sent back to his old cell. And it sounded for all the world like somebody, you know, a businessman coming back to his favorite hotel in some city, saying, can I have... CHANG: Right. ROTH: ...You know, this room? CHANG: The room, the penthouse, yeah. ROTH: Exactly, exactly. CHANG: You have this very amazing statistic that LA, New York and Chicago - the jails in those three cities are the three largest providers of mental health care now in the country. ROTH: It's ridiculous, but it's true in just about every jurisdiction in the country. So LA and Chicago and New York are enormous, but it's true if you go to Rochester. It's true if you go to Albuquerque. This is truly a national crisis that's playing out at a very local level. CHANG: The enormous numbers of mentally ill people you see in jails and prisons - for them, the story begins actually outside of jail or prison - right? - much earlier in a community where they just weren't given enough access to mental health care and then went along and did things that got them arrested. And the story goes on for them. ROTH: It's astonishing to me how difficult it can be to access mental health care in this country. In Oklahoma, I visited community clinics - so, you know, outpatient clinics in the community. So what happens in Oklahoma is that if you come in with symptoms of mental illness or somebody brings you in with symptoms of mental illness, you're given a score. And basically if you are not actively suicidal or actively psychotic, you're going to be diverted to some other form of treatment. You're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist, or you're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist for months and months and months. Even figuring out where to go for treatment can be difficult. At one point, I was following somebody here in New York who had been in and out of the mental health care system and in and out of jail and prison. And I wanted to see how many psychiatrists in New York City alone accept Medicaid and how many of those would be accepting new patients. CHANG: And what did you find? ROTH: I spent probably two days making phone calls. I should add that I made those calls without worrying about losing time from my job. I wasn't worried about running out of money on my cellphone. I wasn't worried about where I was going to sleep that night. I wasn't worried about getting my medication. I wasn't worried about where my next meal was coming from. And I finally gave up. I went to one of the public hospitals here in the city. I went to the Medicaid office. I explained to the very nice clerk what I wanted to do. She handed me a sheet of paper. She said, well, it really depends which Medicaid plan you're on. And there were - I forget - five or six different options. She said, you need to go online and look up the psychiatrists, and then you need to call the office and see if they're accepting patients. CHANG: Oy. ROTH: It's just - it's so - who's going to do that? CHANG: Right. ROTH: Who has the time or the wherewithal or even just the brainpower to do that? CHANG: Right - and persistence and focus to see it all through. ROTH: Exactly. CHANG: So who's paying attention to all of this? How is this all going to change? ROTH: One of the heartening things I found in all this very upsetting reporting is that there is a consensus that what we're doing is wrong. Whether we're talking about the people who are locked up and their families or the corrections officers or the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the doctors - you name it - we are in agreement that what we're doing is not working, that it's counterproductive, that we need to change. We need to figure out how to come to a consensus about what that change looks like. But at least we're all on the same page that this is not the way it should be and that nobody is benefiting from this situation. CHANG: Alisa Roth is author of "Insane: America's Criminal Treatment Of Mental Illness." Thank you very much for joining us. ROTH: Thank you for having me.
Arkansas Supreme Court allows voter ID check to go forward Talk Politics by Talk Business & Politics staff ([email protected]) 10 hours ago 92 views Today, the Arkansas Supreme Court stayed a ruling from a lower court judge last week that struck down the state’s voter ID law. On Wednesday (May 2), the state’s highest court ruled that election officials can enforce a law passed in 2017 that requires voters to show their identification at the polls in the upcoming May 22nd primaries. Last week, Pulaski County Judge Alice Gray ruled the law was unconstitutional and said it could not be enforced. Gray ruled any changes made to the state voter rules must be germane to Amendment 51 of 1964, which abolished the unconstitutional Arkansas poll tax requirement previously found in Article 3, Section 1 of the Arkansas Constitution. In her order, she explained that Act 633, passed by the General Assembly by a three-fourths majority in the 2017 regular session, was unconstitutional because it imposed additional requirements to vote that are not found in the state constitution. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case, but it did place on hold Judge Gray’s ruling that blocked the law’s enforcement before the May 22 primary. Early voting for the primary begins Monday, May 7th. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who asked the court for an expedited hearing, said, “I am very pleased that the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed with the arguments we made on behalf of the State Board of Election Commissioners that the requirement that a voter show photographic identification or sign a statement affirming his or her identity as a registered voter is not burdensome and helps ensure free and fair elections. The stay issued this afternoon provides needed clarity for Arkansas voters and election officials.”
the World War II part is certainly an interesting question worthy of discussion in this slower moving thread.
Welcome to America, where a single wealthy man can bankroll extremist candidates across the nation Daily Kos Staff Spoiler Saturday May 05, 2018 · 3:00 PM CDT You have chosen ... poorly. If you don't know Richard Uihlein, that's by design. While the Koch brothers and even the Robert Mercers of the world have gained notoriety from the sheer scope of their archconservative efforts to reshape American democracy into something more to their liking, Uilhein, founder of the omnipresent business supply company Uline, has only recently become a big spender on the conservative political scene. And what a spender he is. For years, Uihlein has given money to isolated races in the service of his anti-union, free-market and small-government views. But he has dramatically increased his giving this cycle, pouring $21 million into races from Montana to West Virginia to ensure more conservative victories in the upcoming midterm elections, Federal Election Commission records show. The beneficiaries of Uihlein’s largesse include upstart candidates such as Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who has made preserving the Confederate symbol in the state flag a centerpiece of his campaign for U.S. Senate. Uihlein gave tens of thousands of dollars to support failed Senate hopeful Roy Moore (R) in Alabama, doubling down even after multiple women accused Moore of unwanted sexual advances toward them when they were in their teens, FEC records show. He supports neo-Confederates and child molesters? What a broad coalition he has assembled. But what Uihlein's "largesse" demonstrates, more than any single ideology other than an obsessive effort to cripple American labor unions, is the extent to which the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling has reshaped the political landscape into something distinctly ominous and bad. Uihlein is a product of that ruling; his model of election interference would not exist without it: Uihlein’s checks come in amounts once unheard of for individual donations to a single race. In addition to giving direct contributions to candidates’ campaigns, he donates to super PACs working to boost their candidacies and edge out primary opponents by blanketing local TV markets with advertising. What that means is that in numerous races throughout America, this election season, you are hearing from certain candidates almost entirely because a single wealthy man willed it into happening. He is able to pump enough money into any single local campaign to insert his preferred candidate, regardless of whether that candidate had any constituency other than himself. A single wealthy man can swing whichever election he wants, anywhere in America, based entirely on his own whim. That's the model we're now following. And it's not just Uihlein, of course, but other wealthy Americans as well; from Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum to, say, Wisconsin's Kevin Nicholson, becoming an American billionaire's personal project is an attainable path to "public" office. No need to bother with retail politics, or building a constituency, or any of the rest of it; find a single man to write a sufficiently large check (albeit to a super PAC, to keep our thin veneer of dignity intact) and you can ride to instant contention in any race. This is all made possible if a single wealthy benefactor, a single corporate or banking or fuckabout titan, can be found who prefers your positions to those of the other candidates. And, as anyone not a member of the United States Supreme Court can quickly glean, it provides rich potential rewards to any ambitious politician willing to change their ideological stances to best court their very own sugar daddy. There is no need to bribe a politician once in office; simply choose the politician most willing to interpret America through your own lens, and buy him. That is precisely what America's wealthy ideologues are doing. Perhaps they believe they are doing the nation a favor; perhaps they merely want to ensure that whatever the government does stays well clear of their own businesses and pocketbooks. But they are doing it, either way. How in the fuck do we fix this shit? The courts are packed and Congress isn't going to do anything
Deeply troubling... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/13/denver-post-profits-newspaper-industry-218360
how old are u? 18 ? did you know tv , rich people fund the democratic party ? always have . these guys are basically idiots . I am the guy who has been around long enough to have voted for john f kennedy . did you know he was considered the greatest democratic president ? he was rich . now talk .
these people - bruce is good the rest ? bye the way say stupid stuff outside the punk zone . tsk , tsk !
You literally can't without changing the constitution or bathing in the blood of the Uihlein types and redistributing their wealth.
the democratic party lost because they are stupid like you apartently . the rich fund the democratic left . you did not know that dweeb ? who do you think is fundng it ? you ? and them on here . your dreaming ?
bill gates mark zuckenberge ect , ect . movie stars ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????