Random Politics & Religion #07

There's also rumors that Trump wants set a precedent that hasn't been done under the Constitution. Which is winning the election then refuse to take office.

There's also rumors that Trump wants set a precedent that hasn't been done under the Constitution. Which is winning the election then refuse to take office.

All of these rumors, surprise no one. He could rip his face off revealing a green scale covered lizard head and Nobody would gasp in shock.

There's also rumors that Trump wants set a precedent that hasn't been done under the Constitution. Which is winning the election then refuse to take office.

Three Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) officers have been shot in downtown Dallas during a protest over shootings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, according to agency spokesman Morgan Lyons.
The shooting happened as protests were underway about two blocks from Dealey Plaza. Video showed the crowd suddenly sprinting away.
CNN affiliate KTVT reported that two Dallas officers were shot. CNN could not immediately confirm that information and it's not clear if they were referring to the DART officers.
Witness Clarissa Myles said she was eating at McDonalds when the chaos began.
"Everyone was screaming, people were running," she said. "I saw at least probably 30 shots go off."
"I was walking next to the officer who was helping with the protest, all of a sudden I saw six to eight shots," one witness told the station. "It looked like two officers went down."

Another witness who was at the protest told the station he heard multiple gunshots.
"Whoever was shooting had an assault rifle — and I know guns. The shots were in rapid succession," the witness said.
Video showed numerous police officers crouching behind vehicles. Others approached a location holding protective shields.

Obama might as well have just pulled the trigger himself. Democrats really need to stop the hateful rhetoric against police officers.

What possible motivation is there for that? It would torpedo his brand, which is the only thing he actually cares about.

Where would those rumors even come from? Absurd.

Four police officers were killed in downtown Dallas as crowds protested the fatal shootings of two African-American men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Dallas police said a total of 11 officers were short during the protests, including the four shot dead.
Here's what we know:
-- A total of 10 police officers were shot during the protests, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said. An 11th was shot during an exchange of gunfire with one of the suspects, and the officer was transported to the hospital, authorities said.
-- Brown said there could be more than two shooters. He said police had cornered a suspect in a commercial garage. "These suspects have threatened to plant a bomb in the downtown area," he said.

-- Two of the shooters were snipers, who shot from an "elevated position" and fired on officers "ambush-style," he said.
-- Officers killed included one DART officer and two Dallas police officers. DART, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency, operates buses and commuter rail in the city and surrounding suburbs.
-- The Dallas Police Department circulated a photo of a man they said was a suspect in the shooting, but later called him a person of interest and said he turned himself in.
-- A suspect is in custody, the Dallas Police Department tweeted.
-- A suspicious package was discovered near that suspect's location. The package is being secured by a bomb squad, the tweet said.

Maybe police should stop shooting so god damn many black people.

This is about what they have done, don't try and act like it is the words of any politician bringing this down on them.

What do you call it when you hate an entire group of people because of the actions of a very small few?

You mean like:

Muslims
Latinos
African Americans

?

Sure. Or police officers.

Just how low can you get this is disgusting.

What possible motivation is there for that? It would torpedo his brand, which is the only thing he actually cares about.

Where would those rumors even come from? Absurd.

The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.

Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.
Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.

“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said, minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race.

Early in the contest, his rivals, Republican operatives and many reporters questioned the seriousness of his candidacy. His knack for creating controversy out of thin air (this week’s edition: the Star of David Twitter post) and his inclination toward self-destructive comments did not instill confidence in a political culture that values on-message discipline in its candidates.
Those doubts dissipated after Mr. Trump vanquished his Republican opponents and locked up the nomination.

“I’ve actually done very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We beat 18 people, right?”

But as the race has turned toward the general election and a majority of polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton, speculation has again crept into political conversations in Washington, New York and elsewhere that Mr. Trump will seek an exit strategy before the election to avoid a humiliating loss.

Now he is refusing to rule out an even more dramatic departure, one that would let him avoid the grueling job of governing, return to his business and enjoy his now-permanent status as a media celebrity.

Told of Mr. Trump’s noncommittal comment, Stuart Stevens, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012 who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal critics, said that Mr. Trump was “a con man who is shocked his con hasn’t been called” and that he was looking for an emergency exit.

“He has no sense of how to govern,” Mr. Stevens said. “He can’t even put together a campaign.”

Even Mr. Trump’s supporters acknowledge that his past campaigns had the air of a vanity tour. That impression lingers. A recent Trump news release promising “a speech regarding the election” prompted many reporters and political fortunetellers to predict a declaration of his departure. But just the fact that a routine news release prompted paroxysms of conjecture throughout the political universe suggested that, as Mr. Trump might say, “there’s something going on.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign and his supporters dismiss the talk as the fantasizing of frightened liberals or frustrated establishment figures.

“He’s not going to pull out,” said Thomas Barrack Jr., a financier and real estate investor who is a close friend of Mr. Trump’s. He compared Mr. Trump’s candidacy to an innovative start-up company:

“You never see disruption when it’s happening.”

In Mr. Trump’s case, the disruption is everywhere. Last fall, he said in television interviews that if his standing collapsed in the Republican primary polls, he could very well return to his business. In mid-June, amid an onslaught of negative news coverage, he joked to a crowd that he would consider leaving the race for $5 billion.

On the off chance he actually is planning to back out, what would happen?

Alexander Keyssar, a historian at Harvard who is working on a book about the Electoral College, said the process of succession would depend on “the precise moment at which he said, ‘Nah, never mind.’ ”

The party representatives who make up the Electoral College would suddenly have real power rather than a rubber stamp. If Mr. Trump bowed out after winning on Nov. 8 but before the electors met in each state to cast their ballots on Dec. 19, then the electors could have the opportunity to vote for another candidate, Professor Keyssar said.

A majority of the 538 electors would be Republicans, but they might not agree on the best alternative candidate. If no one won a majority of the electors, the contest between the top three vote-getters — one of whom would presumably be Mrs. Clinton — would go to the House of Representatives, where each state would be given one vote, while the Senate would select the vice president. House Republicans hold 33 states to the Democrats’ 14, with three evenly split. It is unclear whether the vote would take place before or after newly elected representatives were seated.

It is also unclear what would happen, Professor Keyssar said, if Mr. Trump bid adieu after the electoral votes were cast but before they were officially counted, per the 12th Amendment, by the president of the Senate before a joint session of Congress in January. And if Mr. Trump left after the votes were counted in Congress but before he was sworn in on Jan. 20, Professor Keyssar said the closest guidance would probably come from Section Three of the 20th Amendment: “If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the president, the president-elect shall have died, the vice president-elect shall become president.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” Mr. Keyssar said.

And nothing like it will this year, Mr. Trump’s supporters say.

“It’s going to be too late by then,” Roger Stone, Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser, said of the go-out-on-top theory. “If he got elected president, he’d certainly serve. I’m fairly certain about that. You think he’d resign? I don’t see that happening. There is only one star in the Donald Trump show, and that’s Donald Trump.”

Russell Verney, a former top strategist for Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who abruptly pulled out of the 1992 election, only to re-enter and win 19 percent of the vote, said that outsider candidates were more vulnerable to questions about their resolve.

“It never would be a subject raised with Romney and others, because the presidency is the ultimate goal of their entire professional career,” said Mr. Verney, who conferred with Mr. Trump during his exploration of a presidential run in 2000, during which, he said, Mr. Trump expressed reservations about selling his casinos to fund his campaign. “Donald Trump has not worked toward being president every day of his professional career.”

Mr. Trump’s supporters point out that he has begun adopting the more traditional trappings of a presidential campaign: a fund-raising operation, policy ideas, prepared speeches.
“This is silly,” said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, which has tried hard to make the Trump campaign more professional. “He’s in it to win it.”
But the only person who could truly put any doubts to rest seemed instead to relish the idea of keeping everyone guessing, concluding the recent conversation with a you’re-on-to-something grin and handshake across his cluttered desk.

“We’ll do plenty of stories,” Mr. Trump promised enigmatically.

“O.K.?”

Well, nothing changes the hearts of people like violence against the innocent.

That's how we got to this point. A group feels that way and has decided to reciprocate.

A group?

What do you call it when you hate an entire group of people because of the actions of a very small few?