An alternative medicine conference has ended in chaos in Germany after dozens of delegates took a LSD-like drug and started suffering from hallucinations.
Broadcaster NDR described the 29 men and women “staggering around, rolling in a meadow, talking gibberish and suffering severe cramps”.
The group of “Heilpraktikers” was discovered at the hotel where they held their conference in the town of Handeloh, south of Hamburg, on Friday.
More than 150 medical staff, ambulances and police descended on the scene and took the raving delegates to hospital.
The patients, aged between 24 and 56, were found suffering from delusions, breathing problems, racing hearts and cramps, with some in a serious condition, Deutsche Welle reported.
Tests on their blood and urine revealed they had all taken hallucinogenic drug 2C-E, which is known as Aquarust in Germany and has been illegal there since the end of last year.
No one recovered sufficiently to be interviewed by police until Monday, a spokesperson said.
Torsten Passie, a member of the German government’s expert commission for narcotics, told NDR: “It must have been a multiple overdose. That does not support the view that the people concerned took the hallucinogen knowingly.
“One has to assume that people were not told about the substance, its effects and risks before taking it.”
Police are reportedly looking into possibilities including the drug being taken as a joint experiment, or it being furtively given to conference participants as a prank.
If it was a “prank” it was a particularly cruel one. If it was an “experiment” it was a very dumb one.
I have to admit, however, that sometimes I feel as I’ve accidentally dropped some Aquarust whenever I see Trump speak — or, lately, watch cable news.
So it looks like the Republicans are going to try some hanky panky on the Iran deal in order to keep it from going into effect. (They’re saying that because some details were worked out later, that the clock doesn’t start ticking until then.)
Yes, they are cheating. It’s what they do. Here’s a little reminder of how they have done it in the past when the stakes were very, very high:
In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.
Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.
At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.
That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)
Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, then 48, a widely respected jurist who in his leisure time played pickup basketball and wrote legal thrillers, rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27.
James Baker, the Bush team’s consigliere, issued a public threat after the Florida Supreme Court’s maddening decision. If necessary, he implied, Florida’s leading Republican legislator, incoming House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November 21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush—no matter what. Since both the state House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could pass a bill to do that.
In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”
On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers.
Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do with the protest, only with the realization that the job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline of November 26. Yet the board had seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred within hours of the protest.
Deadlines are sacrosanct unless they don’t want them to be. Intent is never relevant unless it is theirs.
These people just don’t play by any accepted rules. And they’re getting worse. Why wouldn’t they be? The media told everyone to “get over it” when Jeb Bush’s minions manipulated the system to ensure his brother’s victory and the partisan Supreme Court finally gave it to him. His brother got re-elected and now he’s running himself. Nobody ever pays.
“We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” Trump declared after taking the stage to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who preceded Trump, called the deal “catastrophic.”
“It is the single greatest national security threat facing America,” said Cruz, who took to the dais with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Who picked the music? Did they know that both of these guys are running for president?
The latest from the most overrated politician in America, via the DNC:
“I’m not president today, and I can’t be president today. Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical.” – Scott Walker in New Hampshire on Monday
Previously:
[I]f I’m honored to be elected by the people of this country, I will pull back on [the Iran deal] on January 20, 2017, because the last thing — not just for the region but for this world — we need is a nuclear-armed Iran. It leaves not only problems for Israel, because they want to annihilate Israel, it leaves the problems in the sense that the Saudis, the Jordanians and others are gonna want to have access to their own nuclear weapons…
“We need to repeal the executive actions the president took on illegal immigration on the very first day.”
“It starts out with the premise that on my very first day as President of the United States, I will send legislation to the Congress to once and for all repeal Obamacare entirely.”
Let’s just say that the idea of Scott Walker ever having a first day in the White House appears to an extremely unlikely hypothetical at this point. At least I hope so.
It’s hard to imagine that anything could be more exciting than the Kentucky rally yesterday celebrating the release of Christian martyr Kim Davis. Both Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz flew in for the event although, Cruz decidedly took a back seat to Huckabee by simply standing in the background as the former Arkansas governor begged the government to put him in jail instead of Davis. If it weren’t for the fact that Huckabee’s staff physically blocked him from participation, one might even think that Cruz was trying to preserve some semblance of mainstream credibility by avoiding center stage at yesterday’s circus (which featuredconfederate flags and references to the Holocaust). But that would only make sense if he weren’t willingly sharing the stage today with the clownish Donald Trump and some of the most rabid Islamophobes in America for a major rally against the Iran non-proliferation agreement.
That is not to say that there is no argument against the Iran agreement that isn’t based in religious and ethnic bigotry. There are people of good will who are not in favor on the merits and many others whose antagonism is based on a philosophy that says an aggressive military posture is the only legitimate form of foreign policy. But that is not exactly the case here. As one might expect, Cruz himself is taking the hard line — his opposition is based upon his affiliation with Christian conservatives and their blind assumption that Iran must be ostracized and marginalized, if not obliterated entirely, lest it destroy Israel. And, as a creature of the far right, Cruz undoubtedly also believes that a hawkish military posture is the default position in all circumstances (Unless a Democrat proposes it, of course.)
Trump is a more interesting case, a man whose “foreign policy” mostly consists of declaring that in any given situation he will do the right thing (details to be named later) “so fast it will make your head spin.” He does say that he will be “very, very good” for the military, so there’s that. But Iran is a special case for him, because the current controversy is based upon a non-proliferation agreement that’s been hammered out over a long period of time between several parties. That means it’s a “contract,” and while he may not know much about foreign policy and national security, The Donald knows him some contracts. He spoke with The Daily Callerabout his complaints about the deal:
TheDC: What would you do the first day in office with the Iran deal?
Trump: Well, it’s going to be a signed contract, number one. And number two, and it’s going to be signed, sealed, and, unfortunately, done. Don’t forget, that’s going to be in a year and a half, right? So it’s going to be a signed contract, and that means a lot when you have it. But I would police that contract — you know, I’ve taken over plenty of bad contracts where I’ve bought things where deals have gone bad because the people doing it didn’t know what they were doing. I’ve made a lot of money by dealing with people that didn’t know what they were doing, like the president. And frankly, I would scrutinize that — I’m very good at scrutinizing bad contracts — and I would scrutinize that contract like nobody would ever scrutinize it.
TheDC: It sounds like what you’re saying is that you would be looking for a violation, and if Iran did violate any aspect of the deal, you would consider the contract null and void.
Trump: Exactly correct, exactly correct. I will scrutinize that — I’ve been very good at scrutinizing contracts. I’ve taken over contracts knowingly that the people that did them, you know, went out of business because of bad contracts that I’ve bought for tiny amounts of money.
TheDC: So I guess my question is, once you discover a violation — and presumably you don’t think it would be too hard to find one — what would you do after deeming the deal null and void?
Trump: I would come after them like you would not believe. They will be very respectful of the United States. They will not go around screaming “Death to the United States, Death to Israel,” that I can tell you.
It’s unclear if he’s actually read “the contract” or if he is even remotely qualified to understand it, but he’s quite sure that he’ll be able to scrutinize it, find the loophole and extricate us from it — just like that time he exercised a loophole in a contract with an 87-year-old grandma who foolishly thought he was going to share some of his profits. (He sure showed her.)
It’s hard to know what he means by “I would come after them like you would not believe” but it sounds very, very tough, since it will not only end the nuclear agreement it will actually stop people in Iran from saying things he doesn’t like.
And wait until you get a load of the sponsors of the rally …
Oh, by the way, Beck and Palin will be there too adding to the crazy.
The cure for anything that ails you. Even Trumpitis.
by digby
One of my running jokes (everybody on the left’s running jokes, actually) is that Republicans believe that tax cuts are the cure-all for whatever ails you. No matter what the problem, it’s nothing that inglower taxes on rich people can’t solve.
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush convened an hour-long gathering in Manhattan on Tuesday morning with three longtime advocates for sweeping tax cuts, seeking their counsel at the office of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and sharing the details of his campaign’s economic plan, which will be formally unveiled Wednesday in Raleigh, N.C.
The trio of supply-side conservatives — Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore, publishing executive Steve Forbes and CNBC contributor Larry Kudlow — met with Bush alongside Johnson, Bush’s national finance chairman, according to two Republicans familiar with Bush’s schedule.
Those Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private session and the Bush campaign’s outlook, said the former Florida governor hopes his tax offering will jump-start his candidacy, which has lagged behind GOP front-runner Donald Trump for months, by proposing lower corporate and personal tax rates while also eliminating a number of deductions that favor Wall Street investors.
As you likely know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote an op-ed recently in which he discussed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Here’s part of what he said (my occasional emphasis):
Ernest Hemingway once said that courage was “grace under pressure.” Two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have recently tested this proposition. And how each man responded revealed the type of person he is and the type of president he would make: Trump authored his own doom, and Sanders opened immense new possibilities as a compassionate person and serious candidate for president.
Here’s where it went fatally wrong for Trump. During the GOP debate on Fox, when Megyn Kelly famously queried him about his attitude toward women (whom he has called “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” and “animals”) he hit back by threatening the questioner: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”
Bad enough to alienate women in this way, but there’s even more insidious political crime here: attacking the First Amendment’s protection of a free press by menacing journalists. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said coyly. If you wouldn’t do it, why bring up that you could? For no other reason than to stifle other journalists who might want to ask tough but reasonable questions. If Americans learned that a leader in another country was threatening reporters, we would be outraged. Yet here it is. Right here. Right now.
Later, after Trump had blamed her attitude on her menstrual cycle, Kelly went on what Fox says was a planned vacation. Nevertheless, Trump suggested he may have been the cause. What kind of candidate takes credit for bullying the media? And last week, Trump allowed Univision reporter Jorge Ramos to be ejected from a press conference for asking questions about immigration without being called upon. Ramos was later readmitted and permitted to ask about immigration, during which he said Trump could still deport immigrants compassionately. “I have a bigger heart than you do,” Trump replied. Trump’s non-specific answer to the question ended with a personal insult directed at the reporter.
And:
Trump’s vendetta against the press extended to the Des Moines Register. When the paper issued an editorial calling for Trump to withdraw from the campaign, he refused to give the paper’s reporters credentials to attend his campaign event in Iowa in July. He also called the paper “failing” and “very dishonest.” Other journalists he thinks have treated him harshly he refers to as “losers” or unintelligent, as if the definition of lack of intelligence is to not agree with him.
Attempting to bully the press to silence criticism of him is anti-American.
The part I want to focus on isn’t the First Amendment, nor the press, nor Bernie Sanders, nor even Donald Trump as a person. It’s the bullying.
Bullying in the World of the Wealthy
Play the clip at the top again (it’s just over 40 seconds), and notice the sneering, the arrogance, the presumption of power. Notice also, at the 0:17 mark, how he uses just his lips to signal his — what, bodyguard? — to act like a goon squad and physically force Ramos out of the room. Trump sneers, smacks his lips to summon the goon, and the goon lays hands on the reporter.
This is exercise of power, presumption of power, and comfort with the presumption of power — all three — on Trump’s part. It’s a way of saying and showing, “I’m at the top, I deserve to be at the top, and I’m going to use all of the power that being at the top provides me.”
At the tip of the pyramid, the very top of the U.S. (and international) food chain, this kind of sneering, bullying, and presumption of the right to bully, is almost the norm. This is really the way a surprising number of people in that position regularly act. The fact that we rarely see it, and therefore rarely associate them with this extreme arrogance, isn’t a function of their not doing it. It’s a function of their invisibility. Until Donald Trump.
That’s obviously true, once you think about it. You can’t vote for David Koch, just Scott Walker. You can’t vote for Sheldon Adelson, just Marco Rubio. And so on.
It’s also true that we almost never see the puppeteers, or their world. We don’t see their homes (their gold, crystal and mahogany palaces really), their jets, their yachts, their servants, their private schools, their privileges. We imagine that they have estates. We don’t imagine that they have dozens of them, each.
For example, Jeff Greene is a New York billionaire — literally billionaire — who made his money in real estate. This is how he lives, via New York magazine:
It’s incredible, right?” shouts Jeff Greene over the roar of the two-seater dune buggy’s motor. “It’s 55 acres!” Still in his whites from this morning’s tennis match, he’s giving a personal tour of his Sag Harbor estate, barreling at 30 miles per hour through the vast forest of scrubby pines and soft moss of its gated grounds. “Beautiful nature here!” A blur of deer goes by, and the trees break to reveal the summer sun glinting off a grassy lagoon. Greene slows by its shore. “This is our swan pond, and this is our private beach,” he says, gesturing toward a slip of white sand encircling the edge of the North Haven Peninsula. “It goes all the way to the ferry. Three thousand feet of beach,” he adds, a smile spreading across his tanned face.
The punch line?
[2009 is] when he picked up this property for around $40 million (half the 2007 listing price), which he and his wife have christened “Greene Haven.” “I wish we could spend more time here,” he says. “Honestly, we have so many great homes.”
When you imagine great wealth, do you imagine it on that scale? Likely not, because that world is invisible. Until Donald Trump.
… Is Being Revealed by Donald Trump
What’s different about Donald Trump? He’s not just the puppet, meaning the candidate — he’s his own puppeteer. This means that for the second time in modern electoral history, a puppeteer has put himself on center stage. The first was Mitt Romney, he of the “47%” speech. Before him we’ve had just puppets, financed solely by others.
If it’s true that you can’t vote for Sheldon Adelson, say, only his puppet Mario Rubio, it’s even more true that you can’t even see Sheldon Adelson most of the time, or David Koch, or Jamie Dimon. (Do you know what any of their voices sound like, for example? Do you know if Jamie Dimon is tall or short?)
But occasionally one of them makes an unwanted public appearance, and then we see who they are. This is Sheldon Adelson, courtesy of a must-read 2012 piece by Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone:
Why GOP Mega-Donor Sheldon Adelson Is Mad, Bad and a Danger to the Republic
… Adelson’s company Las Vegas Sands (LVS) spends more on security for him and his family than any other publicly held corporation, $2.5 million – two and a half times more than Dell, Oracle, and Amazon spend on their CEOs. He usually ambles around with an armed former agent of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency – for instance, into a deposition for a lawsuit filed by employees (including security guards!) claiming they hadn’t been paid overtime. It was quite a scene – and one that you can see for yourself, because once Adelson tried to have the plaintiffs’ lawyers cited for contempt after a TV station received and aired a videotape of the deposition, the publication Vegas Inc. ran the video as part of their coverage of this latest Adelson legal action. It reveals a creepy sourpuss who is a blatant liar: Adelson said he brought in the muscle because he felt threatened when the plaintiff lawyer “attempted to throw books at” him. See for yourself (at 2:40) if such a thing ever happened, then his astonishing petulance when a lawyer objects to continuing a legal proceeding with an armed janissary staring him down.
And here’s that video. Feel free to focus on the fact that Adelson brought “muscle,” armed muscle, into a deposition. But also focus just on his manner. How like Donald Trump is Sheldon Adelson?
If the above video does not appear or play in your browser, go here, or play this link in a media player. But please do watch; it’s a doozy. It’s also the second video in this three-video piece.
My point? Donald Trump is peeling the mask off the world of the mega-rich, the very very rich. And far too many of them are like what you see here. Bullies and proud of it.
Conan the Politician
It’s almost like they’ve taken lessons from this man, isn’t it?
And that’s your third video. If you want the single reason your descendants may be hunter-gatherers, to take one consequence, you’re looking at it.
Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis left the detention center yesterday after serving five days in jail for contempt of court. Davis had refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a federal court order. Republican presidential candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was waiting for her:
The case has become a lightning rod for religious freedom advocates who oppose same-sex marriage. For Republican presidential candidates, it has presented an opportunity to court evangelical voters and break away from the crowded field.
“She has ignited something across this country,” Huckabee told reporters Tuesday. “People are tired of the tyranny of judicial action that takes people’s freedoms away, takes their basic fundamental constitutional rights and puts them in jeopardy, and the tyranny of a legislative court that believes it can make up law and somehow find a way to enforce it.”
Hyperbole much, Huck? He praised Davis for surrendeing her freedom for her beliefs. I would have thought surrendering one’s freedom without gunfire (or at least ritual gun display) was heresy on the right. Who knew?
U.S. District Judge David Bunning ordered Davis’ release based on her clerks’ compliance with the order. “After remanding Defendant Davis to the custody of the U.S. Marshal, five of her six deputy clerks stated under oath that they would comply with the Court’s Order and issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.” He further ordered Davis not to interfere with the issuing of the licenses. Meaning, she could be back in jail any day.
Two points. In one video clip, Huckabee mentions “the Christ that came into her life four years ago.” Given her rhetoric and that it’s eastern Kentucky, she probably has all the percolating zeal of the newly “born again” driving her. (Davis is reportedly an Apostolic Pentacostal.) The last time we passed through eastern Kentucky, it was late at night. We were fascinated to hear on the radio one of those screaming, hyperventilating preachers sermonizing himself into emotional collapse. Wow. They are still out there. Snake handlers, too.
Second, a sense of religious persecution goes hand-in-hand with white privilege and cultural resentment among many conservatives, especially so in the South. Davis being a registered Democrat makes little difference. Notice the crosses and Christian flags in the crowd outside the detention center. If you are not one of them, you are one of THEM. This is their country. A Christian country. A particular style of Christian country. A white, particular style of Christian country. They are God’s chosen. They are supposed to be in charge. They (and God, sure) are supposed to decide what the law is. It doesn’t matter what the law actually says, or means. What matters is what they believe the law should be. Or else it doesn’t apply to them. Or else, tyranny.
During a recount here in November 2012, I was at the local Board of Elections when a T-party member flashed a handwritten sign at a young woman from Warren Wilson College: “You are a law breaker.” A redistricting error by the GOP-controlled legislature — a precinct line drawn down the middle of the campus — allowed a handful of students’ votes to decide control of the county commission in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Democrats held the majority by 17 votes.
The law-optionals were lecturing us on law breaking. They must have argued for an hour that college students should not be allowed to vote except at their parents’ home address. Citing the 1979 Supreme Court ruling didn’t matter to them. Quoting chapter and verse from the state statute didn’t matter. What mattered was what they thought the law should be. And if the law as written did not support their stance (à la Kim Davis), if it did not say what they thought it should say? Tyranny.