If you take a closer look, your comment should be directed to midwestroadie. Yes, I got a headache trying to reply to his nonsense.

1/10

He's busy searching Brietbart.

Why go personal and refer to me as a snowflake when you do not know me? If it was my bringing your folks into the post, you offered them up. I was only curious as to their influence on your thinking. If offense taken, I apologize. Your concern for my welfare in a " good safe place" while touching, only leaves me with more questions only you can answer. Try as I might, you do confound me. If you can come up with some compelling testimony in future posts, I might see and agree with the points you try to make.

I assume you are not going to engage in debate on current Pa congressional district maps. I can be influenced toward your direction, but you need to bring a better game.

You just wasted 6 paragraphs on someone who will digest none of them.

It would be awesome if someone would draw a political spectrum chart for the Lavender Room so we could gauge the value of attempting a persuasive argument.

Ha! You're 100% correct. On the whole, I think there are most folks here in the LR who are pretty good at hearing and articulating nuanced positions & discussing them. I disagree with JSA quite often, but can at least see where he's coming from & why (except those times when he's in a pissy mood and is an ass...); I think it's Perseus with whom I've disagreed about faith issues many times, but he's usually respectful and has discourse. And then there are those who only shit all over the board and declare victory. Maybe I wasted the paragraphs on someone shitting on boards, but maybe Gphin will have discourse for once and show the best he's capable of.

You just wasted 6 paragraphs on someone who will digest none of them.

i felt like an idiot last night, because that's what happened to me. i hope i learned from that.

He is a hard nut, but he has an interesting perspective to some of our politics. Somewhere back in the thread he said that he was an Obama voter in 2008. There is constructive thinking in him at some level. I suspect the communication frustration is felt by him more so than us. My learning curve is steeper or I am more hard headed, but I'll keep trying. Cause that's what us snowflakes do.

Not exactly. It's still an insignificant number in the scheme of things. If your number is correct, do you really think that roughly 320,000 people spread across the nation is going to be the thing that turns the country to pure hell -- if 100% of them were to vote, moreso if 100% of them were to vote Democratic (unlikely given that a chunk of that population is going to be of the Republican variety)?

It's interesting how you make the assumptions by categorizing the entire prison population as your political enemy. There's not a whole lot of nuance in your thought process here.

What might it look like if you started at the point of an idea and discussed possibilities around that rather than starting at the point of an enemy (in your case the Democrats and "liberals")? You come on here and spew absolute generalizations and make broad stroke categorizations but I've yet to see you post something actually attempting to open discourse to resolve a problem through consensus.

Let's start here with a few facts: In approximately 25% of states (12), felons indefinitely lose their voting rights. In Maine and Vermont, felons don't lose voting rights, even while incarcerated, and in neither state has this been an issue. Felons lose their voting rights for a period of time post-incarceration in about 40% of states, until those rights might be later restored, in some cases only through an exception process by the governor. Approximately 22% of felons in this country are in for non-violent drug offenses. Incarceration rates have increased fivefold during the last 40 years. Black men are seven times more likely to be incarcerated for drug possession than a white man possessing the same drug. We have a bail and a incarceration system that disproportionately impacts the poor negatively, keeping many low level offenders locked up simply because they cannot come up with the bail. Crime rates have not increased with the rise in incarceration; policies have changed to keep people locked up and for longer lengths of time.

So with that, I would start by saying this: I agree with you that the most violent offenders should be behind bars, and I might even go so far as to agree that those people should not have voting rights restored while incarcerated. But I would also say this -- we have far too many people locked up and people who have committed victimless crimes. If we believe people deserve the kind of second chance that lets them out of jail/prison, I believe everyone should have voting rights restored the moment they're no longer locked up. I'd go farther, those not serving life sentences should not have voting rights stripped away even while incarcerated; they're serving time for their crime, still have rights as individuals, and I believe voting rights should stand. I'd give you this -- perhaps a very narrow set of violent crimes would be the exception to this right to vote while incarcerated.

But if we really believe incarceration has an end-point and the goal of incarceration is to restore people back to being productive members of society, anything that makes them out to be something less than a capable of being a contributing member of society needs to be changed, so the reform of incarceration needs to start with the recognition that they will one day be back out on the streets and we need to equip them for that, treating them as human. Voting is part of the human experience we've based this country on and if people are going to be back in society I think it's only right that they be a part of that since voting has nothing to do with their crime. Surely this is better than your all or nothing approach. But it requires challenging a reactionary posture and having discourse, a rigor that seems lacking in our current climate.

I don't care if you agree with my opinions. What I'm saying is that when people offer information outside your little conservative news bubble, you basically ignore it.

The fact that you don't see Breitbart as propaganda just demonstrates the futility of even discussing a political topic with you.

I think even most of the conservatives on this board would acknowledge what Breitbart is / does. Except you.

Gofigure: I have no animosity towards "snowflakes". Actually feel sorry for them since crying "offended" every time something happens that they don't agree with won't solve the issue.

Ha! You're 100% correct. On the whole, I think there are most folks here in the LR who are pretty good at hearing and articulating nuanced positions & discussing them. I disagree with JSA quite often, but can at least see where he's coming from & why (except those times when he's in a pissy mood and is an ass...); I think it's Perseus with whom I've disagreed about faith issues many times, but he's usually respectful and has discourse. And then there are those who only shit all over the board and declare victory. Maybe I wasted the paragraphs on someone shitting on boards, but maybe Gphin will have discourse for once and show the best he's capable of.

The core issue, certainly as expressed by Sen Sanders, is whether or not you believe a fundamental core right of citizens in a democratic society is the right to have a vote in your representation.

Which also is informed on how you view criminal justice. Is the point rehabilitation, or is punishment and removal from society?

If you think criminal justice is to punish the criminal, why don't we just execute every criminal? Why don't we take a page from our history and send every criminal to a moon colony or space station or Georgia?

Ignoring the political hackery going on in this thread, I'd say the core issue here is not about whether felons should be allowed to vote in prison, or whether a rapist should not be allowed to vote but a drug offender should, or any of that.

The core issue, certainly as expressed by Sen Sanders, is whether or not you believe a fundamental core right of citizens in a democratic society is the right to have a vote in your representation. If you view that as a fundamental right, then the discussion ends there. Felons are still citizens. Congressmen, Presidents, Governors, etc all represent the entirety of their citizen base, which includes those felons sitting in prison. They vote and decide on issues of pardons, prison reform, the laws that put people in jail, prison sentencing, and any number of no prison related issues that impact the lives of felons both in and out of jail. So if having a voice in your government (you know, the whole,..."no taxation without representation" theme, as executed by democratic vote, is a fundamental concept of our country, then it's difficult to justify taking that right away from people, especially as it's not a right that poses imminent physical harm to other citizens, like the right to bear arms.

If you don't think voting is a fundamental right, then there's room for the rest of the discussion on what offenses should result in loss of that right, how long people should lose it, etc.

I don't have a problem with Sen Sanders' position, because it appears consistent. His stance is that everyone should be able to vote on who represents them in government, even if they broke the law. There are, as we all know, some pretty horrible people who were never convicted of crimes or who never spent a day in jail, who have the right to vote, and that doesn't seem to be leading to the death of our democracy.

Of course, it's an easy and cheap tactic to paint that as "Sen Sanders wants the Boston Bomber to have a vote." Sells airtime and generates clicks online.

Convicts are counted toward the census and counted when deciding how many representatives you get in the house so why can’t they vote.[/quote]

Why? Really? Do you think Dylann Roof or Nikolas Cruz should have the right to vote? Yes or no.