Al Franken is Gone, Sexual Harassment Allegations are Harming Democrats

So here is Tina (disregard our terminally ill governor and his growing speech impediment):



And her comes our new republican Lt. Governor (possible our new governor when ever Dayton dies)

 

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I'm sure you do, especially if your attitude and mannerism in the real world is anything like your posting style here. When people ask you direct questions, they tend to want direct answers... not whatever random spew happens across your mind.

Sadly, you don't get it. I don't think you even can - you appear to have a mental blockage preventing you from understanding the fundamental problem with the cancerous bullshit going on right now.

Oh, but it's alright - while everyone else is busy infighting, we'll just let the GOP throw a few million people off their insurance, and render the market so fucked that those who manage to keep it will find it covers nothing.

Another point lost by the moral high ground.

​

In other words, you don't like the fact that the situation we, as a country, are in is a shitty one with no "good" outcome, just the possibility of one that isn't quite as shitty, and so you are simply going to refuse to acknowledge it.

Consider your cowardice acknowledged and called out, Tiassa.

If there was a relevant question in your post, it got lost somewhere around your cheeks. After all, when you are looking down your nose at somebody that hard, things tend to get lost in translation.

Indeed it is - it explains rather succinctly why nobody seems to take you nor Bells seriously anymore - your posts are excrement.

The only vested interest I have is seeing that stupid assholes that would destroy decades of blood, sweat, and tears to enshrine the civil rights all Americans are supposed to enjoy into law aren't given the opportunity to do so.

Now, if you intend to argue in good faith (which would be a fucking surprise), then do so. Otherwise, you are just pissing into the wind once more, and one can only assume you enjoy it.

As it stands, the trolley example is still a perfect fit for the scenario, especially as this country continues to make a humongous jackass of itself in the world stage. When (if?) all is said and done, and reasonable heads prevail, I can only hope that the World can look upon America and accept us when we say "We tried our best"... but honestly, at this point, I wouldn't blame them if they didn't.

EDIT - to drive the point further (since I've no doubt it's flown over your head) - remember in 2010 how Republicans demanded that a vote on the ACA wait until Scott Brown (the winner of the Massachusetts special election) was seated? And the Democrats obliged?

And remember how in 2016, Senate Republicans refused to hold hearings on Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia died nine months before the presidential election, claiming that "the American people should have a say in who sits on the highest court in the land."

You remember those, right?

Yeah, guess what -

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...l-good-luck-with-that/?utm_term=.3be3237f06c4

The Hypocrisy Party strikes again! No doubt they will continue to exploit every possible advantage and loophole to score some sort of legislative victory, given that their corporate sponsors are pissed at the lack of return on investment so far...

Why is this relevant? Simple - it showcases why simply removing someone who is accused is a bad idea - we already have proof that Republicans aren't above paying people to make false claims - do you really think they won't use that to their advantage, knowing that Democrats will chop off their own head if enough shit is thrown their way?

Ah well, as I said - logic and reason is dead in here... the trolley was left untouched, it plowed into the group of children and, as an added bonus, the guy on the other track died of a heart attack after witnessing the kids get turned into a fine red paste.

GG America - this is your new "normal".

 

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So, when I count back posts ... so you say that in response to my post↑, which responds to your post↑, which in turn has precisely zero question marks in it.

See, the problem isn't necessarily the gaffe, except it's not really a gaffe. That is, your sentiments are pretty clear, and it's also evident you are not presently perceiving the problem. Thus:

Inquiry: What level of sexual harassment and sexual assault is acceptable to you that you are willing to leave them in place for the rest of their term, for the sake of politics? (Bells, #199↑)

Response: Depends on the politics. In this case, in this particular political situation and given the "level" established by the particular public accounts so far, Franken should in my opinion have been left in office until after the 2018 elections. You may morally and ethically disagree, after considering the matter. But only after considering the matter.

Failing to consider the matter, before acting, is not high moral ground. It is abandoning reason, and opening the door to the monsters already on the step. (Iceaura, #202↑)

Commentary: Sadly, reason was abandoned long ago in favor of knee-jerk reactions and emotional outbursts .... (Kittamaru, #203↑; bold-italic accent added)​

Like I said (#220↑), look what you called "reason".

Or, you know, I mean, really:

If others should understand your juxtaposition of "reason" with "knee-jerk reactions and emotional outbursts", then it would certainly be helpful that you might give some good faith consideration to the question of what degree of sexual violence is acceptable under which circumstances according to whose political argument. That is to say, what are the reasonable boundaries of acceptable sexual violence?

(#216↑)​

Now, then, something about direct questions, relevant questions, tend to want direct answers, fucking surprise, and all that?

So, yeah, no wonder you need to tell me what I think in order to justify your judgment made in the comfort of vested interest that decides who gets run over for the sake of your priorities.

Think it through:

• Proposition and response: What level of sexual harassment and sexual assault is acceptable? Depends on the politics.

• You called this "reason", contrasted against "knee jerk reactions and emotional outbursts".

↳ It is not unnoticed that you still don't want to explain that contrast or address the direct question derived therefrom.​

Did you think it through before you threw in for a moralistic perch to cluck from?

Probably not, and that is what it is, but fuck, dude, you're so fucking blithering angry you attempt to correct and scold me while demonstrating my point:

That second paragraph? The one that starts, "Oh, but it's alright"? Like I said, a matter of priorities. So when you tell me I don't get it, or what I think, or your only vested interest, you're making the point: You consider these ideas of greater priority.

And that is what it is.

Quite clearly, though, you would prefer not consider the implications.

What are the reasonable boundaries of acceptable sexual violence?

 

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The reasonable boundary is lack of charges by a court of law or ethic committee or impeachment hearing, etc. Once the evidence that someone has committed sexual violence* that a committee or hearing determines guilt, then and only then is the politician a "sex offender" and can no longer hold office. Assuming republicans won't allow such at thing at a federal level to their side: any women can go to a local court and prosecutor to demand arrest and prosecution and a local court can detain the politician.

What are the reasonable boundaries for acceptable murder? Same thing. This is why OJ Simpson is free (the juice is loose).

*I notice you two keep amping up the framing: it was sexual harassment, then sexual assault, then sex offender, then sexual violence, when is it rape?

 

I appreciate your point, EF, but would you similarly go on record saying that Moore should have been given all benefit of the doubt in the special election, due to lack of charges?

 

Oh certainly! And had any of the women gone to the police decades ago, charged him in a court of law, he would never had run for senator or legally could. The lesson from all of this is for women today to go to the police or at the very least to a lawyer IMMEDIATELY and get charges on a harasser's record, like this guy did:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article189931514.html

“If anyone is guilty of sexual harassment or sexual assault, that person should not hold public office,” said committee spokeswoman Meredith Kelly.

Emily’s List said in a statement on Friday that the group supported Ramsey’s decision to drop out of the race and wished her well.

Ramsey was not a party to the lawsuit or the settlement, although she’s referred to throughout the complaint as Andrea Thomas, her name before she married her husband in late 2006. She denied the allegations to the Star in two interviews over the last two weeks and said the lawsuit is surfacing now for political purposes.

Ramsey repeatedly said that she was not aware of any settlement in the case, but said that if she had been a party to the case she would have opposed settling.

“Had those allegations, those false allegations, been brought against me directly instead of the company I would have fought to exonerate my name. I never would’ve settled,” Ramsey said in an interview on Thursday. “And I would have sued the disgruntled, vindictive employee for defamation.”

In the EEOC complaint, which alleged sex discrimination and retaliation by LabOne, Funkhouser accused Ramsey of subjecting him to “unwelcome and inappropriate sexual comments and innuendos” beginning in September 2004, when he was a LabOne human resources manager.

In late March 2005, Ramsey made sexual advances toward him on a business trip, Funkhouser alleged in the complaint.

“After I told her I was not interested in having a sexual relationship with her, she stopped talking to me,” he wrote. “In the office she completely ignored me and avoided having any contact with me.”

Ramsey even moved him out of his office into a cubicle far from her office, Funkhouser wrote.

Before he rejected her advances, Ramsey “repeatedly told me she heard great things from others about my performance,” Funkhouser wrote. “After I rejected her, she told me she now was hearing bad things about my performance and on June 13, 2005, terminated my employment.”

The EEOC closed its file on Funkhouser’s charges of discrimination and retaliation in October 2005, noting that an investigation was unable to conclude whether any statutes had been violated. The document did not certify that LabOne was in compliance with employment law, however, and informed Funkhouser that he had a right to sue the company.

Funkhouser then sued LabOne in federal court.

LabOne denied the allegations and said Funkhouser’s termination was “non-discriminatory and non-retaliatory.”

Ramsey told The Star she made the decision to eliminate Funkhouser’s job in conjunction with LabOne management.

“It became clear to me that he wasn’t managing his subordinates adequately,” she said. “... He didn’t have open lines of communication with his subordinates and furthermore there was this additional layer of management.”

She also said in a second interview that she has no memory of the business trip, noting that 12 years had passed.

The lawsuit was still pending in April 2006 when Ramsey retired from LabOne. At the time, LabOne was being acquired by Quest Diagnostics, a company Ramsey had worked for until 2004. She told the Star she had no interest in working for such a large company again, and she wanted to spend more time with her children, who were 8 and 10 at the time.

Later that month, Ramsey took a part-time job as senior counsel for Black & Veatch, an international engineering firm based in Overland Park. She said she did not disclose the lawsuit to Black & Veatch because she was not a party to the case.

Now Ramsey would need to sue for defamation and win in order to have her named cleared and be able to run for office.

 

If there's seminal fluid involved, don't wash yourself, go to hospital to retrieve DNA evidence and write down everything about the event?

However, call 911 first.

 

Dishonest.
As noted from the very first time you tried that, misrepresenting and reframing and then presenting some irrelevancy as an "answer" is dishonest of you.

Everything following that is irrelevant to my posting - just you trying to reframe, over and over and over.

Nope. Not my issue.
No tantrums either - and no whining, screeching, crying, pouting, sulking, fit pitching, none of the Kellyanne vocabulary you can't post without (so familiar to us all from the wingnut Republicans) applies.
At least, not to my posts. This poster, on the other hand: "Aww now you're being the sulky sookie na na.."
Pages of that kind of rhetoric from them, on a science forum.

You simply cannot post honestly, in good faith, with integrity.
Not even if you wanted to.

Hmm. I have to rethink this: Maybe it's not a lack of integrity and good faith, maybe you're just very stupid.
Seemed like a simple enough point to me - it's a matter of historical record that a fairly high proportion of politicians, both bad and good, including several of notable accomplishments in good causes, rightly credited with them, have been discovered (even posthumously, got away with it their whole lives) to have been sex offenders. Franken appears to be another: although found out too early in his career for great accomplishment, nevertheless generally held to have been a politician of better than average ability and in good causes.

It's strange to find that it's actually a moral failing to take that into consideration when deciding what to do and when to do it - or anything else about the political situation in which he is, or was, embedded. With pilots, doctors, it's automatic to do that - as you note, absurd to suggest otherwise.

So here's a question you've been ducking:

As you have been informed three times now:
Abetted, concealed, and abused the victims of, sexual assault by her husband, as accused by several women, fully as credible as a couple of Franken's accusers - or even some of Moore's. That's the criterion, right? The recommended response is automatic, by the enlightened and morally high-grounded: immediate resignation and permanent exclusion from any position of power, to begin with, regardless of circumstances. Or did I miss some nuance there?

Note that these accusations, although downplayed by the media and insignificant in comparison with other attacks (downplaying that kind of abuse of women was and remains common media practice), probably did her and the Democrats some harm. That would appear to be thread relevant.

There's this possibility and aspect, for example: had the Democrats as a Party stood up for abused women, sent the right message by pilloring and excluding Clinton from all positions of power within the Democratic Party, they might have avoided much future trouble. Almost as if there were a karmic dimension to this.

 

that's not the point. the point is to set a precedent and a standard for society's leaders so that type of behavior is not considered acceptable. people in the past do not matter on this subject or what they got away with. there will be others who have talent and ability that can take their place.

 

Sure, but what's that got to do with my post?

 

Of course, when you limit the scope to a few posts you can make the claim as you see fit, Tiassa. Then again, I wouldn't expect you to answer honestly.

So you disagree, then - a knee-jerk reaction is, in your mind, the best course of action, regardless of the long term implications for who we are allowing to re-write and re-interpret the rules.
Got it.

I don't have to tell anyone what you think - you've made your predispositions quite apparent for anyone that wishes to take so much as a cursory glance.

Ironic that a desire for properly followed legal process is suddenly a bad thing.

If only you could see the bigger picture.

Ah, now we're moving from "harassment" to "violence". Almost subtle, Tiassa... almost. You should be careful, lest you give the impression that you think an off colour joke is in the same realm as rape. We are already in a situation where unproven and unsubstantiated claims can be made with no solid evidence and still end a persons career. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not live in a "guilty until proven innocent" world, thank you very much.

Of course, you already know all this... you're just arguing for the sake of argument, rather than to accomplish anything. It's almost as though you don't want a solution... like you enjoy getting to throw out the victim card, regardless of how many more victims are created in the meantime.

I'm sorry, but it's dishonest, disgraceful, and quite frankly makes me wonder just what kind of person you really are. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one, Tiassa... as much as it sucks that we can't save everyone at this exact moment, we have to start somewhere, or nothing will be done. If you think you have some way of accomplishing that, then by all means - put it forth and start enacting it. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke.

 

Yeah, should be common sense.

 

Start with the new, and flagrant:

See: That's a lie. A deliberately dishonest pretension. That's what I'm talking about. You cannot post honestly in this thread.
You don't even know how, any more.
- - - -
Back up, and trace through:

You were and are dishonest, as revealed by your repeated refusal to correct what could have been a mistake, initially. You can't "point out" any more, you've carried it too far - you can only correct, with an apology.

You're dishonest, and I will repeat that as often as you attempt the deception.

I don't "disagree". I label a dishonesty.
But efficiencies are possible:

Dishonest. All four, collectively and individually.
More complicated:

As illustrated, right there - the exact same question one is forced to by the wingnut righties: are they lying, or are they stupid?
And a beauty:

Is it now. Gotta love the irony.
See, I didn't accuse her. Those women did. I didn't claim all "credible" accusations by such women should be given the same weight and responded to the same way, you did. And I didn't lump all this stuff into one category as if the distinctions of circumstance and behavior made no significant difference, you did.
The question is how you deal with the situation you have created for yourself here, with Hillary Clinton.

You didn't. See the first paragraph here in this post, for your typical response then and since.
Or look at this:

Of course. So: Sometimes it's ok to install a credibly accused abuser in a powerful office. It depends on the circumstances, the politics, what happened, and what the current situation is.
I voted for Clinton myself, see - knowing what she had been accused of, by women I am not supposed to disbelieve. But I didn't have to fool myself to do it. Just like I will vote for the Minnesota Senate candidates most likely to beat the Republican nominees in ten months, unless they have done something worse than what the Republicans will do in office in my judgment (genuine, menacing, fascism) - probably the two Democrats, authoritarian leaning wimps though they may be, but third Parties have a decent track record in Minnesota, and the Dems are making themselves a lot weaker than management seems to realize. Lesser of two weevils, as they say.

That risk - the third Party run skimming Dem votes instead of Rep votes - we add to the list of harms done by the handling of Franken.

 

Lol, as before - good luck getting her to engage you honestly Ice. It just won't happen.

 

Yeah that your strawman, I'm interested in protecting EVERYONES right to due process, and not to be punished via social media powered lynch mobs. What your asking for is the right to hound any man you want based on mere accusation, out of politics, a right only liberals are calling for and having a majority of success on other liberals, for which the republicans will use (if not have already used like in the case of franken) to kicked out democrats while they remain largely immune.

Anyways Bells committed murder, yeah she killed several children and ate them, I heard some anonymous accusation of it, Bells is a murderer.

 

I guess now the onus is on her to prove it never happened. After all, that's what she seems to be advocating for.

 

Oh no there is no proving it never happend, all she can do is apologize for her crimes that she must have committed, and burn at the stake. The harder it trends the more she must burn.