Morally, I think Trump WOULD have no problem doing a Trail of Tears to Mexican-Americans.
To be fair, while Nixon spoke more about “The War on Drugs”, what Nixon did was simply give a name to the policies the country had already been pursuing. State governments’ laws, like the Rockefeller Drug Program, here in NY, did a lot more damage to drug users than the federal laws. My father was a drunkard and pill addict in the 1970s. Didn’t go to jail under any federal program, spent a good chunk of his young adult life in the Rockfeller program though.
Federal laws were actually in some cases less stringent than state ones:
“The Nixon Administration also repealed the federal 2–10-year mandatory minimum sentences for possession of marijuana and started federal demand reduction programs and drug-treatment programs.”
The present state of incarceration in the U.S. as a result of the war on drugs arrived in several stages. By 1971, different stops on drugs had been implemented for more than 50 years (for e.g. since 1914, 1937 etc.) with only a very small increase of inmates per 100,000 citizens. During the first 9 years after Nixon coined the expression “War on Drugs”, statistics showed only a minor increase in the total number of imprisoned.
[BA]fter 1980, the situation began to change. In the 1980s, while the number of arrests for all crimes had risen by 28%, the number of arrests for drug offenses rose 126%. **The result of increased demand was the development of privatization and the for-profit prison industry The US Department of Justice, reporting on the effects of state initiatives, has stated that, from 1990 through 2000, “the increasing number of drug offenses accounted for 27% of the total growth among black inmates, 7% of the total growth among Hispanic inmates, and 15% of the growth among white inmates.” In addition to prison or jail, the United States provides for the deportation of many non-citizens convicted of drug offenses.
In 1994, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the “War on Drugs” resulted in the incarceration of one million Americans each year.
In 2008, the Washington Post reported that of 1.5 million Americans arrested each year for drug offenses, half a million would be incarcerated. In addition, one in five black Americans would spend time behind bars due to drug laws.
**In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed laws that created a 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for the trafficking or possession of crack when compared to penalties for trafficking of powder cocaine, which had been widely criticized as discriminatory against minorities, mostly blacks, who were more likely to use crack than powder cocaine. This 100:1 ratio had been required under federal law since 1986. Persons convicted in federal court of possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine received a minimum mandatory sentence of 5 years in federal prison. **On the other hand, possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine carries the same sentence.
Congratulations, Mr. President. You are back in Richard Spencer’s and David Duke’s good graces! It was touch and go there for a while but today’s presser sealed the deal. Huzzah!
David Duke and Richard Spencer praise Trump for his courage and caring about the truth
It might, but the Wall Street republicans and republicans with more education have always been the most likely to be #neverTrump Republicans to begin with. He’s as popular as ever with the solid base of people who cheered him on at his rallies. And the other conservatives still can’t bring themselves to admit that it might be in their interests to be bipartisan. This is not at all unlike the political dynamics in Germany in the early 1930s. Conservatives didn’t want to work with economic liberals and feared the rise of socialism, but couldn’t figure out what to do with this rabid animal named Adolph Hitler, who at first seemed like a stooge but through populist energy and militarist impulses began seizing power from an impotent center-right that tried to cooperate and build a coalition who never had any intention to compromise with anyone. Trump is not Hitler and America, for all its current faults, is not Nazi Germany, but it’s no longer the America we grew up in – it’s unquestionably entering a new and dark phase and nobody knows where this ends up.
YES, APOSTROPHE! They’re called NAZI’s.
There is an apostrophe exception for acronyms.
Hell, I’d probably support President Snow. He was a bastard of the first water, but he seemed to have a certain amount of (admittedly perverse) integrity — certainly more than Il Douche.
To be fair to Jackson, despite what you may have heard, Martin Van Buren, was the president during the Trail of Tears.
Been humming this all day long… (with apologies to The Band for the bastardization):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jREUrbGGrgM
Back with my wife in Virgin-ny, When one day she called to me,
Said “Virgil, quick, come and see, there goes the Robert E. Lee!”
Now I don’t mind choppin’ wood, and I don’t care if the money’s no good.
Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest,
But they should never have taken the very best.
(fade out on a picture of Heather Heyer)
The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down…
This is the guy whose businesses rely on fraud, who allegedly raped a young girl, and can grab women’s pussies because he’s a star. And now there’s concern his base might finally turn against him?? What have you been smoking, OP? 
A condemnation of evil, however luke-warm, would hurt him more among his base than any failure to condemn. He only needs [del]51%[/del] 49% to win an election; with the racists all supporting him, and a bump when he ups the NK crisis before an election, you’re stuck with the GOP for the foreseeable future.
Trump has plenty of “fellow travelers” looking for any excuse to vote for the GOP. Some will note the Wonderful First Daughter. Others will say that keeping the baby-killer Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court was worth any foreign war or environmental tragedy. As long as the federal government repeals Obamacare, defunds opera, lets corporations pollute our rivers the way the Good Lord intended and cuts taxes on the super-rich, no cost is too high.
The “good” news is that Trump will be 74 next election and ready for retirement. His wealth by then will be really huge; and Exxon and other American rulers will owe him big time. The bad news is that Pence will be a shoo-in. He’ll get the pro-evil vote from Trump’s endorsement and the anti-evil Christian vote from his peculiar behavior. Pence wins in a landslide. Smug comments from liberals suggest they aren’t learning anything soon.
The Democrats may have a chance in the 2028 Presidential election, if there is one. You’ll need a 65-35 popular majority to make up for the electoral suppression ploys in play by then.
Yes, expect WH tweets and deafening cries of “Killary and the Negro did it first” whenever any shit-storm springs up.
I don’t know if I’m being whooshed, but that is a profoundly inaccurate description of the issue. Obama didn’t use the term radical Islamic terrorism because he (and terrorism experts) felt that the term was counterproductive. It plays in to the hands of terrorists who claim to represent Islam because they argue that America’s war on terrorism is really a war on Islam. To use the term radical Islamic terrorism is to fight the war on their terms. It is why after 9-11, Bush went to great lengths to make it clear that we are not at war with Islam, it would make the mission harder.
I hope I’m being whooshed.
Also turn the idea around. Let’s say I am the bad guy and I am being condemned in Arabic. Since I know about three words of Arabic, what I am being called in that langauge is of little consquence to me. Say they are calling me “the infidel who makes a perversion of his so-called values”. Then one day they switch it up to “radical western infidel”. Well, oh shit, what am I to do now?
(Seriously, is this related to numerology? If you have the true name of something you have power over it or something like that? Let’s see how it works! Donald Jackwagon Trump, spontaneously combust as the power I wield over your true name commands! And… nothing.)
I straight up have no idea what your point is. Seriously, it’s like it’s word salad on the page.
Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban all have robust PR campaigns. Al Qaeda produces a slick magazine (that I will not link to) that is available in English as well as Arabic. There is a reason that they call the US troops crusaders, they are drawing a direct link from a time when the west did declare war on Islam itself to now. Our goal, before Trump, was to not inflame the entire Islamic faith, but to isolate the radical actors. Condemning an entire religion wins the ballots of low-information voters who don’t understand the complex nuances of the history of the conflict, but it also alienates allies that we will need to win the conflicts.
Yes that is one problem with tying some portion of your identity to a) a nation and b) some slob that manages to get elected to a quasi-religious position. The main problem is that doing so grants the government powers they would otherwise not have and often these powers are used for great evil.
At the risk of succumbing to a whoosh— “Nazi” is an abbreviation, not an acronym.
Acronyms are, by definition, words that were once just abbreviations. It is correctly styled “Nazi” in the singular, and “Nazis” in the plural.
If I pointed out two devices used to detect airplanes at a distance using radio waves, you wouldn’t call them RADAR’S, would you?
Nazi is not exactly a true acronym, since it’s a shortening of only one word, but as it is used as a word, the rules for acronyms are applied.
Campbell’s is still in for now, but 3M is out. So my “sources” (people I follow on Twitter!) are 1 for 2 so far.
In addition to the posts above, even if Nazi were stylized as NAZI, the preference by most style guides I’ve seen is still adding a small s without the apostrophe, e.g. IOUs, ATVs, WASPs, MIRVs, HUDs, etc. The apostrophe exception applies when talking about the plurals of a single letter, like “Dot your I’s, and cross your T’s” or “Mind your P’s and Q’s.”
But this will vary by style guide. My rule of thumb is not to use the apostrophe to indicate a plural unless it will cause confusion, like in the “I’s” example.
God, I so won this bet. With nobody, true, so my only winnings is this pathetic self-congratulatory post, but still.
Thanks, President Trump!
I agree with the Grammar Nazis.
And Campbell’s bailed right before Trump did. You can’t fire me, I quit!