DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... GOP convention in Cleveland

And you spew the words of every enemy of the human race.

Why would anyone even think about carrying a gun to such a volatile place if they were not looking for trouble.

I have guns. I will use them if I have to. But no way am I going to go out and look for trouble.

You extremists--on both sides--are killing our country. Your stupid false bravado and ingrained hatred of those who are not like you sickens me.

I mean..........seriously.........who in their right freaking mind would do this?

I don't believe the writers of the Constitution had anything like that in mind.

Vers.... You have to beat 40 with a stick and no mercy.

The only problem with that statement is that you need a man and that man must be capable of knowledge... Are you either?

You can't bring a water gun to protest the RNC, but you can bring an AK-47

Matt Pearce


If a single sentence could capture the madness about to hit Cleveland, it's this: You can't bring a water gun to demonstrate outside the Republican National Convention, but you can bring an AK-47.

As tens of thousands of Donald Trump supporters and opposing activists begin arriving for next week’s nominating convention, law enforcement officials say they are ready for anything. They’ll have to be.

Despite the city’s temporary bans on items as innocuous as tennis balls and bicycle locks in downtown Cleveland, Ohio state law will allow demonstrators with radically different viewpoints to legally open-carry handguns and rifles as they encounter each other outside the convention. And it’ll be up to a multi-agency police force of thousands of officers, and demonstrators themselves, to keep things from getting violent.


“This thing is like a woman in labor – that baby is coming no matter what, whether we think we’re ready or not,” said Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Assn. “We’re going to have two very, very passionate groups of people here, and I’m not judging one side or the other. … [But] I’m going to have what amounts to a handful of police officers standing between them.”

Republican National Conventions have often been heavily protested, sometimes leading to hundreds of arrests. The concern is that Trump’s presidential run this year has brought especially passionate opposition from left-wing groups and noticeably vocal support from far-right groups.


A group of white nationalists and skinheads who recently brawled with anti-fascist protesters in Sacramento have said they’ll attend so they can protect Trump supporters. The New Black Panther Party is also planning to come to Cleveland, though the group’s chairman has walked back a statement that his members would be armed.

That’s on top of the array of left-wing anarchists, right-wing Oath Keepers, antipoverty activists, antiabortion activists and Trump supporters who have signaled their intentions to join the eddy of political views expected to swirl together in the streets, sidewalks and parks outside Quicken Loans Arena. The inflammatory Westboro Baptist Church has also obtained a demonstration permit to join in stirring the pot.

In preparation, officials have been readying for anything, from a mass shooter to chemical or radiological attacks. Police have stocked up on riot gear, and airspace over the city will be restricted starting Sunday. FBI special agents have been knocking on the doors of activists around the country in search of information, or at least to let them know they’re watching. Journalists are bringing body armor.

Police departments from as far as Fort Worth, Texas are sending up to 2,500 officers to help beef up outdoor security provided primarily by the Cleveland Police Department – which itself has come under federal scrutiny for its repeated use of “unreasonable and unnecessary force,” in the words of a 2014 Justice Department investigation.

Cleveland’s municipal court system is prepared to keep staff on hand from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. during the convention, with a dozen judges available to process up to a 1,000 arrests a day, if necessary.


“Hopefully that will be enough,” court spokesman Ed Ferenc said, adding that jail officials were trying to free up space in case of mass arrests. Courtrooms may be so full that officials are planning to live-stream arraignments for protesters.

Hospitals have also prepared. The MetroHealth system, which has the city’s longest-serving trauma 1 center, sped up construction on a new critical-care facility when it learned the convention was coming to town, said spokeswoman Tina Shaerban-Arundel.

“We definitely saw the value of having those extra ICU beds available just in case something happened,” Shaerban-Arundel said.

If Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams is nervous, he isn’t showing it.

“We’ve done events in the past where people have presented themselves in an open-carry format and we’ve handled that,” Williams said at a televised press briefing Wednesday. “Assault rifles, handguns, you name it…. Our officers are used to it, we’ve handled it before.”

Open-carry laws have drawn extra scrutiny since last week’s ambush in Dallas, where a gunman angered by recent police shootings killed five officers and wounded others. Dallas police said they were confused by several protesters who were open-carrying, and at one point even wrongly identified a protester with an AR-15 as a suspected gunman.

In response, Cleveland police “have sort of tweaked our policy a bit, our tactics, to ensure everybody is safe, including that person open-carrying,” Williams said, declining to elaborate further.

Loomis, the head of the patrolman’s association, was more skeptical, and he urged demonstrators not to bring guns.

“While it’s your legal right to guns in an open-carry type of situation, you have a moral obligation to not make things more difficult,” Loomis said in an interview. “I’m here to tell you that this is very irresponsible ideology – to think that you’re going to bring guns in here and it’s going to make things better. It’s not. We saw that in Dallas.”

Police officers, Loomis added, are looking forward to getting the convention over with. “You’re going to have a lot of people going on vacation the week afterward, I’ll tell you that.”

matt.pearce@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-cleveland-republican-protests-20160714-snap-story.html

]You can't bring a water gun to protest the RNC, but you can bring an AK-47

Its probably because lots of water guns look like real guns.

So you can open-carry real guns, but not water guns?

You probably wont be pointing real guns at people, but with water guns you will. Squirting people is kind of the point. Pointing real guns at people is a problem. If they look the same how will the cops know the difference.

So they made the rule to fix that dilemma.

The only problem with that statement is that you need a man and that man must be capable of knowledge... Are you either?

In Cleveland, a dazed GOP marches toward a Trump nomination

Jon Ward
Senior Political Correspondent
July 16, 2016

CLEVELAND – It is hard to settle on a proper metaphor for the last several days of preparations for the Republican convention, which begins here Monday.

A forced march?

Invasion of the body snatchers?

A few thousand members of the Republican Party will gather over the next few days for an event ostensibly devoted to celebrating a man whom large numbers of them don’t like and didn’t support for most of the primary process.

Many of them are taking part in the Republican convention and helping to nominate Donald Trump only out of concern for their party or because they dislike presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton so intensely.

This process began to play out this week, as a rebellion against Trump was put down by the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign in a meeting to settle on the rules for the convention.

One person who helped Trump crush the uprising admitted that he wasn’t even sure if he’d vote for Trump this fall. Many others in the pro-Trump faction of this week’s fight evinced no enthusiasm for the work, signaling with their body language or with facial expressions — a roll of the eyes here, a shaking of the head there — that they were not happy about their task.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus rallied the 168 members of his national committee on Wednesday with exhortations to stop Clinton, with barely a mention of Trump.

“If we don’t stick together as a party and stop her, then the only alternative is to get comfortable with the phrase ‘President Hillary Clinton,’” Priebus said, as a low murmur of agreement rippled across the ballroom.

Those who talk to Priebus say that he has stopped commiserating with them in private about Trump and his transformation into a loyal, albeit zombified, field general is complete.

Even the man picked by Trump to be his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, reportedly told people privately earlier this year that Trump was “unacceptable.” Pence had supported Sen. Ted Cruz in the primary.

“It’s disorienting to have had commiserated w/someone re: Trump — about how he was unacceptable, & then to see that someone become Trump’s VP,” tweeted Dan Senor, who advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, is a friend and associate of Wall Street financier Paul Singer, and remains close to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc.

“It’s been a disorienting year in many, many ways,” responded Michael Steel, who advised former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

That word — disorienting — described what it was like for me to see Republicans here who four months ago were sending me emails saying, “I hope he has a bad day” in Super Tuesday voting, and were now making sure that the Rules Committee revolt went nowhere.

Another committee member who voted with the Trump forces nevertheless described an existential sense of drift, a loss of purpose that made it harder to get out of bed in the morning, since Trump began to dominate the primary.

An estimate by Trump’s own campaign found that only about 900 delegates out of the 2,472 who’ll gather starting Monday for the full convention are personally loyal to the New York businessman and reality TV personality. But most are bound by the results of their state primaries, so his majority is probably safe.

So why and how does this happen? There is a herd mentality to much of it. People do not want to be ostracized, or to lose their jobs in politics, or to anger grassroots activists who might be key to their own future campaigns.

And there are some who fear that Republicans running for offices other than president — for Congress or for state legislature seats — would be hurt if the GOP were thrown into chaos by a convention fight.

But largely, it’s because many Republicans fear the consequences — for their party and for themselves professionally and personally — of going against the will of the 14 million voters who supported Trump in the primary.

And that sounds reasonable enough, until you consider that when the contested phase of the primary essentially ended in early May, Trump had roughly 11 million votes compared to 17 million votes for other candidates who had run against him in all the other primary states.

Trump was not the first choice of the majority of Republican primary voters. That much is indisputable, but it is equally true that Trump won the primary fair and square, according to the rules.

But he has not yet won the nomination, and will not until his name is placed in nomination Wednesday night and then supported by at least 1,237 delegates on the convention floor.

And one of the more remarkable elements of this past week was the emergence of a U.S. Senator, Mike Lee of Utah, who stuck his neck out to make an argument for “unbinding” the delegates. He contended that when the leading candidate receives a plurality of support in a crowded field but not the majority of votes, the state of play is muddled enough that the delegates to the convention should have a say in deciding who the nominee ought to be.

“The fact that we have a convention in addition to a primary has to mean something,” Lee said. “If we really are to a point as a party where we just want to call the convention a formality, I think we ought to make a conscious, deliberate choice to make it that. But I think in doing that we lose something. We lose an opportunity to really unite the party.”

But the problem for Lee’s argument is that the “will of the people” is now seen as inviolate.

For decades, voters have been conditioned to think that the primary votes they cast will be decisive in choosing a nominee, although strictly speaking the party is within its rights to let the delegates make the choice. The possibility of a backlash is what has scared delegates, Rules Committee members, RNC operatives and others into going along with Trump’s nomination so far.

“That’s one of the reasons why I think this debate is important,” Lee told me this week, because he thinks there needs to be a conversation about the way that our political system is supposed to be a mixed system.

A mixed system combines both democratic votes and intermediary representatives like delegates who can settle disputes or serve as a safety valve if a confluence of events — like a splintered 17-candidate Republican field — leads to the emergence of a candidate like Trump.

Lee and others have vowed that there will be a backlash this week during the convention over the way that the RNC and Trump campaign shut down efforts to allow delegates to vote their conscience and to open up the RNC to more grassroots input.

“If you extinguish, try to shut out dissenting voices at the convention, you’re nullifying the convention,” Lee said.

And the RNC’s strong-arm tactics on the Rules Committee — which were fully within the rules and simply a part of hardball politics — have nonetheless enraged others who were not part of the effort to allow a conscience vote, such as former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Lee and Cuccinelli met all afternoon on Friday with a group of fellow delegates to review the lessons of their defeat the night before in the Rules Committee and to talk about next steps, which might include forcing a vote on the floor on whether to hold closed primaries in the first four primary states, as well as an effort to throw out the rules passed by the Rules Committee.

They met again throughout the day Saturday, this time with representatives from Delegates Unbound, a group led by Wisconsin operative Eric O’Keefe and Dane Waters, founder of the Initiative & Referendum Institute.

Waters said their group will likely seek to throw out the rules package passed by the committee on Thursday night, which will require them to get signatures from the majority of at least seven state delegations.

Waters agreed with Lee that while their effort faced an almost impossible uphill climb, part of the reason to fight their rear-guard action was to force a discussion about why parties have a convention in the first place. In other words, even if delegates don’t get to weigh in at this convention, Waters thinks the public should expect them to in the future.

“I don’t see how we can educate and change the narrative in this generation without the political parties making that distinction,” Waters said.

And the prospect of a demonstration on the floor during the process of placing Trump’s name into nomination — and an attempt to force a roll call vote of the states rather than have the convention vote by acclamation — is something that Cuccinelli said he was considering.

“I’m thinking about it, and I wasn’t before,” he said.

RNC forces are confident that they can repel the insurgents on every front, just as they rightly were ahead of the Rules Committee vote on Thursday.

But a key player to watch in all this is Paul Ryan, who presides over the convention as its chairman, and will decide whether he holds the gavel during the nomination vote and — if he does — whether dissenting voices from the floor will be heard and counted.

I was about to head out but it was raining last night. So i gotta get my hoodie. Hopefully they don't do me like Trayvon.

There will be violence. Like a month ago there was white power rally in Atlanta and black groups protested against them and fights broke out. These same people will be in Cleveland only now they will have guns. Its not safe.