Poseidon

Slightly left of center patriot and voter, who does not take being called woke or Christian as an insult.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

I can't imagine being as stupid as @realDonaldTrump That’s not how NATO works.

NATO is a defensive alliance, not a blank check to support whatever war the United States decides to start. Article 5 applies when a member is attacked.

The only time Article 5 has ever been invoked was after the United States was attacked on 9/11, and our allies stood with us.

So no, they’re not obligated to join an offensive war of choice. They are obligated to help defend us if we are attacked, exactly as they did after 9/11.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

The $1.7 billion was not part of the JCPOA.

That payment came from a completely separate legal settlement involving a decades-old dispute before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran paid approximately $400 million into a U.S. trust fund for military equipment that was never delivered.

The settlement returned the original $400 million plus roughly $1.3 billion in negotiated interest, for a total of about $1.7 billion.

The JCPOA was a separate agreement. It capped uranium enrichment at 3.67%, reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by about 98%, restricted centrifuges, and subjected Iran’s nuclear program to international inspections.

The $1.7 billion was a legal settlement over money Iran had already paid decades earlier for weapons the United States never delivered. It was not payment for the JCPOA.

[Poseidon @369Neptune]

@caringguy1957 @Milajoy I love how precisely and systematically you use logic and facts to refute these liars. I'm just not that patient.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

If that’s what happened, then the letter is actually proof the verification system caught something it wanted reviewed.

You’ve been voting for 20 years, but that doesn’t mean your signature today is identical to the one on file from years ago. Signatures change. Mine certainly has.

The important part is that the letter doesn’t simply reject your ballot. It gives you an opportunity to verify your identity and cure the issue so your vote can be counted.

That’s exactly why California has a curing period. Election officials have to balance two competing goals: preventing someone else from casting a ballot in your name and making sure legitimate voters aren’t disenfranchised because of a signature discrepancy.

If the county had simply rejected your ballot without contacting you, I’d understand the complaint. But this letter is literally the process designed to make sure legitimate votes still count when a signature raises a question.

The fact that they contacted you instead of blindly accepting the signature or blindly rejecting the ballot is evidence the system is doing what it is supposed to do.

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

Republicans want you to be angrier about men eating vegetables than you are about them raping kids.

[Poseidon @369Neptune]

@magachrchpastr @iamMermandy Perhaps since you're endorsing from the pulpit this Sunday, your church should lose its tax exempt status and be registered as a PAC! My Christian church NEVER tells me who to vote for or who to support financially. The USA was founded on the separation of church and state.

[Poseidon @369Neptune]

@MsAnnaBaxter @Acyn In fact the amount of documentation required actually becomes an obstacle to receiving any help at all, leaving people in need without!

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Apparently, you and the convicted felon both received your education in Arkansas.

That is literally how education has primarily worked in the United States for generations.

States and local governments already control curriculum, school boards, graduation requirements, teacher certification, and the overwhelming majority of K-12 funding decisions. The federal government generally provides funding, civil-rights enforcement, student-loan programs, and nationwide standards tied to federal money.

About 90% of K-12 education funding and operational control already comes from state and local levels.

So when politicians say they want to “bring education back to the states,” they are mostly repackaging something that is already largely true into a campaign slogan, as if Washington has been directly running your local school district this whole time.

The Department of Education does not write your child’s algebra homework or decide your school mascot. States already run education. The debate has always been about how much federal oversight should exist for funding, disability protections, civil rights, and accountability.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

No, that is not true.

The Capitol is a public building, but it is not a building where anyone can go anywhere they want, whenever they want. Access is controlled by security rules, police orders, restricted areas, and federal law.

More importantly, Vice President Pence was inside the Capitol on January 6 presiding over the Electoral College certification. Under federal law, buildings and grounds where the Vice President or other Secret Service protectees are present can be designated as restricted areas. That is exactly why prosecutors used the federal restricted-grounds statute in hundreds of January 6 cases.

Federal appeals courts have upheld those charges and specifically rejected the argument that defendants needed to know Pence was the reason the area was restricted.

You do not get to push through barricades, ignore police orders, enter secured areas, and then claim, “But it’s a public building.”

A courthouse is a public building. An airport is a public facility. That does not mean you can walk past security, enter restricted areas, or ignore lawful orders.

Public building does not mean unlimited access. It never has.

Cool story though

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Congress is not going to create a protected class for January 6 defendants, and it shouldn’t.

Protected classes exist because of immutable characteristics such as race, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or other characteristics historically subjected to discrimination. Committing crimes at the Capitol on January 6 is not an immutable characteristic.

You were not prosecuted because of your political beliefs. You were prosecuted because prosecutors alleged specific criminal conduct and then had to prove it in court. Many defendants pleaded guilty. Others were convicted by juries after receiving attorneys, discovery, motions, appeals, and the full protections of due process.

And let’s be realistic. Even if someone introduced such a bill, it would never get 60 votes in the Senate. There is no serious bipartisan support for creating a special legal status for people convicted of crimes arising from January 6.

As for the claim that nobody was charged with insurrection, that is a talking point, not a legal defense. People were charged and convicted of offenses including seditious conspiracy, assaulting police officers, obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, destruction of property, and unlawful entry into restricted federal grounds.

The bigger wake-up call may be realizing that being held accountable for criminal conduct is not political persecution, and taxpayers are not going to fund compensation checks for people who received due process, legal representation, trials, plea agreements, and appeals.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Hey cool story.

You should probably actually learn a bit of history before you try to reference it.

Yes, many Democrats in the 1990s, including Bill Clinton, supported stronger border enforcement. That’s not controversial. What is controversial is your leap from that fact to a conspiracy theory that Democrats later adopted “open borders” to import future voters.

President Obama is the easiest example of why that theory doesn’t work. During Obama’s presidency, removals reached record levels by the standards used at the time. He was criticized by many immigration advocates and was nicknamed “Deporter-in-Chief” by some on the left because of the large number of deportations carried out under his administration.

The difference is that Obama generally relied on immigration courts, established legal procedures, hearings, and due process. The goal was to identify people, determine their legal status, adjudicate claims, and then remove those who lacked legal authorization to remain. You can support or oppose those policies, but they were not “open borders.”

And there is still no evidence that Democrats imported immigrants to create future voters. Non-citizens cannot legally vote in federal elections. Lawful permanent residents cannot vote in federal elections. People seeking asylum cannot vote in federal elections. To become eligible to vote generally requires naturalization, which is a lengthy legal process governed by federal law.

The broader claim also ignores political reality. If Democrats truly believed immigration automatically created Democratic voters, they got a strange return on investment. Hispanic and working-class voters have become more competitive for Republicans over the last decade, and in many areas Republicans have significantly improved their performance with those groups.

As for “intersectionality” and “politics of grievance,” those are academic and political concepts, not evidence of a plot to replace voters. You are connecting unrelated topics and presenting speculation as fact.

So the historical record is straightforward: Clinton enforced immigration laws. Obama enforced immigration laws and deported large numbers of people. Neither administration had open borders. The evidence supports policy disagreements. It does not support a theory that Democrats deliberately imported illegal immigrants to manufacture voters and seize power.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Memorial Day is for honoring Americans who died in service to this country. It is not for honoring domestic terrorists. In agreement.

Ashli Babbitt did not die in service to the country. She died on January 6 while participating in an attack on the U.S. Capitol and trying to breach a restricted area as elected officials were being evacuated.

Her prior military service does not magically convert criminal political violence into military sacrifice.

Veterans Day honors veterans. Memorial Day honors those who died in service. January 6 was not service. It was an attack on the country she once swore an oath to defend.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Actually, idiot, those are not “two simple truths.”

The second statement is a historical fact. Millions of Americans served, fought, were wounded, and died in wars on behalf of the United States. Whether every war was justified is debatable, but the fact that Americans died in military service is not.

The first statement is a matter of religious faith. Christians believe Jesus died for humanity’s sins. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and many others do not share that belief. A belief held by billions of people can be sincere, meaningful, and deeply important without becoming an objectively verifiable fact.

The difference between faith and fact is something most adults learn early. One requires belief. The other can be independently verified regardless of what anyone believes.

Every time you post, you somehow find a new way to demonstrate that you don’t understand the difference.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

I can’t imagine being this confident while missing the entire point.

“Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow” is not a rebuttal to climate change. Kilimanjaro has lost more than 85% of its ice since 1912. Saying “some is still there” is like saying your house is fine because one wall is still standing.

Same with Glacier National Park. Yes, it still has glaciers. That does not change the fact that they have been shrinking for decades, with some losing as much as 85% of their area since 1966.

The stupid part is pretending climate science is disproven unless every single glacier vanishes on a meme-approved deadline. That is not how science works. The question is not whether one patch of snow still exists. The question is whether the long-term trend is warming, ice loss, sea-level rise, and more extreme climate impacts.

And the answer is yes.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

@POTUS you were president on January 6. It was your FBI.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

@realDonaldTrump No, that’s not how fentanyl trafficking works.

Fentanyl doesn’t primarily enter the United States by boats crossing the ocean. The major trafficking routes have long been through land ports of entry, commercial cargo, vehicles, and other established smuggling channels.

And the part where you stopped to explain that drugs were coming by ocean and sea and then explain it to us that that means , wasn’t exactly reassuring. The rest of us learned that oceans and seas are bodies of water sometime around grade school. Explaining it like you’ve just made a groundbreaking discovery doesn’t make the claim more credible, it just shows your ignorance.

As for the 97% figure, where’s the evidence? Show the data, the baseline, and the source. Until then, it’s just another unsupported number attached to a problem that clearly hasn’t disappeared.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Dummy, Congressman Gill, that’s not how the Constitution works.

The Fifth Amendment says no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law. It does not say “citizen.” It says “person.”

If someone is here illegally, the government may very well be able to deport them. But it still has to prove who they are, determine their legal status, consider any asylum or other lawful claims, and follow the procedures established by Congress and the courts.

Without due process, the government can deport the wrong person, deport a legal resident, deport an asylum seeker, or even detain a U.S. citizen by mistake. Those aren’t hypothetical concerns, they’ve happened.

The only process someone is “due” is not deportation. The process they are due is the one required by the Constitution. After that process, deportation may be the outcome. That’s called the rule of law.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Nobody says it never happens.

What people actually say is that it happens rarely, is already illegal, and there is no evidence it occurs on a scale that changes election outcomes.

The fact that someone was caught is evidence that the system worked. Election officials identified the problem, law enforcement investigated it, and prosecutors filed charges under laws that already exist.

It’s amazing that after years of claiming widespread noncitizen voting, the evidence is still a handful of individual cases instead of proof of a massive problem. If there were widespread noncitizen voting, you’d be presenting widespread evidence, not the same isolated examples over and over again.

[Purzzzzz @shawn_pursley]

@TheTNHoller Our government poisoned our soldiers and their families. Less than 1% of cases currently settled.
And current Administration getting J6-ers set up to be paid before our veterans?
Just wrong.

[Caring Guy💙🇺🇸🌈✌🏻 @caringguy1957]

Everyone brace yourselves.

We’re about to be flooded with videos from January 6 defendants recasting themselves as innocent victims of a system that supposedly wronged them.

Missing from many of these stories will be the guilty pleas, the convictions, the evidence, the court proceedings, and the fact that thousands of criminal defendants every year face the same pretrial restrictions, detention, probation requirements, and sentencing process.

Now that the convicted felon has handed out pardons and created financial incentives for these narratives, don’t be surprised when every defendant suddenly becomes a heroic patriot who did nothing wrong and deserves compensation from the taxpayer.

The court records haven’t changed. The marketing campaign has.