Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

Conservatives hailed Trump’s “buy American” executive order back when he first signed it.

The problem? It was toothless. It provided almost 0 real changes to how the federal government purchased materials. And it gave federal oversight committees very few ways to enforce what weak changes it had.

Biden is signing an enhanced version today. Upping the required amount of American made materials, closing loopholes that allowed certain materials to be “supplemented” by foreign ones, tightening what is considered American made so that companies that are mostly outside the US cannot claim to be so just for government dosh, and establishing a direct oversight position to ensure that it gets done. Also, unlike Trump, who put no formal time requirements. Bidens order requires the changes to be made in 180 days.

Now, we wait and see how many conservatives chastise him for this. Because when their sugar daddy paid lip service to US manufacturers, it was the best thing since sliced bread. When a dem does something to actually help, then its “going against the free market”.

It will join a raft of projected infrastructure investments aimed an revitalizing US manufacturing and updating our crumbling systems.

The following is a true story, or as true of a story as I can make it, considering that most of it is cribbed from my own patchy memories of the events in question, and the stories told by my parents well after the fact.

Anyway….

I live in Delaware, and apart from a few odd times here and there when I moved elsewhere for job-related reasons, I’ve mostly always lived here. There was that time I spent six weeks living in an apartment on South Street in Philadelphia for that printing job, for example. Or that time I spent a month in Coatesville, on the mistaken assumption that it was closer to my job than just living here, In Delaware. I also had a place in Asbury Park, at the height of its abandonment and decay for yet another job.

But mostly, i’ve lived here in Delaware. It keeps pulling me back.

I was born in 1970. It’s a bit crazy to think that for the first four years of my life, I was living in Richard Nixon’s America. I lived through Watergate and was blissfully unaware of it, the entire time.

Joe Biden also lived in Delaware.

In 1972, some things happened to him: He won an election to become Delaware’s newest Senator. He also lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, while his family were out campaigning for him. His two boys, Beau and Hunter also sustained injuries during the crash.

That’s where I come into the picture.

Beau Biden ended up with a broken leg. And as it happens, around that same time so did I. I won’t go into the specific details, but suffice to say it was my older brother’s fault.

Was so.

And the two of us, Beau and I, we ended up sharing the same Hospital ward. And as we had similar injuries, we ended up right next to each other. And because of this, my parents would run into Joe when they came to visit me, and he came to visit Beau.

I don’t remember too much about those days. I was only two at the time. I remember being in bed with my leg up in a cast. I remember family members leaning down over the bed when they came to visit. I remember being annoyed that my brother got to run around the Hospital while I was stuck in bed. And I remember the nurse feeding me Kellogg’s Corn Pops, which I had never had before, and which is where this story takes it’s next swerve.

The nurse fed me with a spoon that hadn’t been properly sanitized. and as a result, I got a staph infection.

In my mouth.

A quick Google will reveal the following information: “Staph can be spread person-to-person and is very contagious.
Common symptoms include boils and oozing blisters. Staph can also cause food poisoning resulting in nausea, vomiting, and stomach ache. In rare cases, staph infections can turn deadly if the bacteria invade deeper into the body or enters the bloodstream resulting in fever, joint, and muscle pain.”

And I had that in my mouth, and it was growing.

And the medical staff, for whatever reason, weren’t listening to my parents about it. Like i said, I don’t remember too much about those days, but my parents say that at one point, when they came to visit me, they discovered I hadn’t eaten anything for three days. And when they looked in my mouth, I had white fur growing everywhere.

There is still, to this day, a thin line on the surface of my tongue marking where the edge of that infection lay. As a result, I have had somewhat sensitive taste-buds my entire life. Oddly, while this has resulted in some foods being physically painful for me to eat, it also resulted in an ability to easily consume food so hot that it can damage metal cookware. (It’s also partially the reason I never consume alcohol, though that’s another story for another time.)

It was, at this point, when my parents were frantically trying to get the hospital staff to even admit there was a problem that Joe arrived to see Beau. And seeing what a state my parents were in, he asked them what was wrong, and they showed him.

To hear my parents tell it, Joe Biden went absolutely viking on the hospital staff. Having a newly minted state Senator breathing fire on your behalf tends to get things done.

No, let’s put that in all caps: Get Things Done.

And get done, things did. From that day forward, I was being treated by the same medics as Beau, at the same time as Beau, with Joe watching over both of us to make damned sure of it.

I guess the point I’m making is this: If not for Joe Biden, there is a very real possibility I would be dead right now.

That I would, in fact, have actually died back in the 1970s, long before anyone had even conceived of this fandom. Long before I picked up a pencil for the first time. I might not have even survived to see Star Wars.

You would never have known that I even existed.

So, it is somewhat gratifying to see that Joe has gone on to bigger and better things. The man who once stood watch over my bedside is now standing watch over the entire country.

And it’s also in a sorry state - one big mess for him to fix, caused by someone else’s carelessness.

I believe that I can trust him, to help it heal, too.

Anyway, that’s my Joe Biden story. I’ve told a few people that I’d tell it after the election was over.

And so, here it is.

And it’s as true as I can make it.

That’s the fact, jack.

Initially, the Buffalo police insisted that the man “tripped and fell” during “a skirmish involving protesters,” a description implying that the officers had been physically threatened by the elderly protester and had acted to protect themselves. In the absence of a video proving that story false, it seems likely they would have stuck to that story.

The reaction of Buffalo’s police union helps explain why such abuses remain a stubborn problem. One core purpose of unions is to advocate for their members and protect their jobs as best they can. But in the context of policing, that often means protecting officers who abuse their authority. As Reason’s Peter Suderman writes, “In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement,” even when officers violate department policies in a way that leads to someone’s death.

That not only reinforces a culture in which officers are wary of reporting abuse; it ensures that even if they do report it, risking the disapproval and anger of their colleagues, the person they report is unlikely to be punished.

Police officers themselves know this. According to a 2000 survey published by the National Institute of Justice, 67 percent of police officers believe that “an officer who reports another officer’s misconduct is likely to be given the cold shoulder by his or her fellow officers.” Fifty-two percent believe that “it is not unusual for a police officer to turn a blind eye to improper conduct by other officers.” Just 39 percent agreed with the statement that “police officers always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers.” A more recent 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of police officers believed most officers in their department would not report a colleague whom they caught drunk driving. And this is the view of the police themselves.

An encounter in Buffalo last Thursday — in which two police officers shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground and left lying him there while blood poured out of his ear — was troubling partly because of the original police account.

The account claimed that the man “was injured when he tripped and fell.” If a video hadn’t existed, the truth might never have come out.

That’s a widespread problem:

In Philadelphia last week, the police said that a man had pushed an officer off his bike; a video instead showed an officer striking the man with a baton. 

In a suburb of Sacramento in April, a police officer punched a 14-year-old boy multiple times while arresting him; the officer’s report didn’t mention the punches. 

The Minneapolis police’s account of George Floyd’s death initially left out the most important details, like the knee pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes. 

Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, who has analyzed thousands of police reports, told CNN that lies like these were fairly common.

False police reports are not a new problem. What’s new are the videos that have caused people to realize how common they are. “When I was a reporter, it was the police officer’s word against the victim’s or suspect’s,” Jamie Stockwell, a deputy national editor at The Times, told me. “Cellphone video has changed the debate over policing.”

, it makes them human beings doing their job.

Muh Nazis