Month: September 2015

Avoiding the divide-and-conquer trap
by Tom Sullivan

We undercut our own message, Barber told the crowd yesterday, when we argue that their policies are morally wrong and then call our extremist opponents “right.”

Moral Mondays leader Reverend William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, spoke yesterday at St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Asheville, NC as part of the
Daily Kos Connects weekend that continues today. Barber gave an informal talk covering some old Moral Monday ground, including the history of fusion politics and what he calls “the 3rd Reconstruction.” Plus some history behind the use of “left” and “right,” labels Barber believes progressives should avoid. For fusion politics to succeed, we have to reject arguing on our adversaries terms. (Anat Shenker-Osorio would be so pleased.) Our opponents’ policies are neither “right” not “conservative,” but “extremist.”

But to roll back the South’s new Jim Crow, the change has to come, Barber argued, from the grassroots, not from Washington. People ask him to come to their state to lead their movements. He will not. But he will come and help teach them how to lead their own.

Barber expanded yesterday into how blacks and whites and LBGTQ and other progressive partners must work together to avoid opponents’ divide-and-conquer trap. “When they ask, ‘Is it about class or race?'” Barber smiled. “It is.”

Fusion politics means we have each others’ backs. The press might come to you because your issue is racial justice. But we can demonstrate solidarity publicly by answering instead, “I want to talk about LBGTQ issues.”

The man is focused.

Just for fun

by digby

Here’s a nice, sweet story for a Friday night:

The lively 80-year-old Fort Worth, Texas, native says he never planned on dedicating his golden years to helping needy pets. Instead, it was a duty thrust upon him by the heartlessness of others.

“We live down on a dead-end street, where me and my brother have a horse barn,” Bostick told The Dodo. “People sometimes come by and dump dogs out here, leaving them to starve. So, we started feeding them, letting them in, taking them to the vet to get them spayed and neutered. We made a place for them to live.”

Over the years, Bostick has taken in countless abandoned dogs. But more than just keeping them safe, he’s found an adorable way to keep them happy, too.

While the rescued dogs have plenty of room to run and play on Bostick’s farm, the retiree thought it would nice to be able to take them on little trips to other places as well. That’s about the time he was inspired to build a canine-specific form of transportation just for them.

“One day I was out and I seen this guy with a tractor who attached these carts to pull rocks. I thought, ‘Dang, that would do for a dog train,'” said Bostick. “I’m a pretty good welder, so I took these plastic barrels with holes cut in them, and put wheels under them and tied them together.”

And with that, the dog train was born.

Those dogs look so darned happy.

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The Democratic party won’t have Kim Davis to kick around anymore

by digby

She’s converted:

A county clerk in Kentucky who was briefly jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples said on Friday that she and her family have switched to the Republican Party because the Democrats no longer represented them.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, 50, who has said her beliefs as an Apostolic Christian prevent her from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, said they had changed parties last week. She was a long-time Democrat in eastern Kentucky.

“My husband and I had talked about it for quite a while and we came to the conclusion that the Democratic Party left us a long time ago, so why were we hanging on?” she told Reuters in an interview at a hotel in Washington, where she has traveled to be feted at a Family Research Council event later on Friday.

Buh Bye:

(And yes, that’s Ted Cruz photo bombing the shot. I just love that …)

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Stephen and Liz

by digby

ICYMI:

Warren is just so terrific on these issues. Since she isn’t running for president I hope she’s in the Senate for a good long while — with a partner in the White House who can at least nudge the government in her direction. Unfortunately, no matter what she’s going to be facing Chuck Schumer who is not exactly one of her allies. Still, just having her out there making this case in plain language to people is so valuable that even if she can’t get the shit turned around just stopping the momentum will have been a job well done.

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When the Tea Party saved us from John Boehner

by digby

David Corn takes a trip down Boehner lane:

The surprise is that Boehner, an insider institutionalist leading a band of blow-it-up tea partiers, has lasted so long—that is, that he put up with the nonsense in his caucus and managed to survive. But he survived by yielding to the extreme forces in the GOP, which he and other party leaders had fueled and exploited to win control of Congress. Consequently, Boehner will exit the speakership with few positive accomplishments. He failed his own side by not stopping President Barack Obama on health care reform and other measures that conservatives despise, and he failed himself by not achieving any grand legislation that bears his mark. As speaker, he was more of an attendant than a legislator.

There was a specific month when Boehner’s dream of being a historic speaker evaporated: July 2011. His fellow Republicans had precipitated a crisis in Washington by refusing to accede to a routine move—raising the debt ceiling so the US government could pay its bills. Tea partiers were demanding deficit reduction and huge cuts in government spending in return for lifting the debt ceiling and threatening a financial crash. This led to a flurry of talks between the president and GOP leaders, and Obama saw this crisis as an opportunity. He initiated secret negotiations with Boehner. Why did they have to be undercover? To protect Boehner. The speaker could not persuade his own caucus that talking with the president to explore compromise had any value.

Through these conversations, Obama and Boehner reached what Washingtonians called a grand bargain. In essence, Obama would agree to cuts in government spending (including reductions in entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but without any fundamental changes in these programs), and Boehner accepted increases in tax revenues that would be accomplished through reforming the tax code. At one private White House meeting of congressional leaders, Boehner declared, “I didn’t run for speaker just to have a fancy title.” He wanted to get something done. Something big.

Obama’s Democratic allies on the Hill—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi—were wary of the deal. Eric Cantor, then the No. 2 Republican in the House, was also against it, believing House GOPers would never buy it. But Boehner wanted to try. White House aides began haggling with Boehner’s top staffers over the details. Obama was willing to take heat from his side to get this deal done and move on to other matters, such as how to improve the economy and create more jobs. Boehner, though, ended up bending to politics.

As his aides were hammering out the specifics with the White House, several of Boehner’s closest allies in the House Republican caucus came to his office. Word had spread that he was working on a deal with Obama that would lead to the end of tax breaks for the wealthy and an increase in tax revenues. As one of those lawmakers later recalled, “We told him, ‘You’re too far over the tips of your skis.'” These House members wanted him to pull back—and these were his friends. They were worried that if he proceeded, rebellious tea partiers would toss him out as speaker. Cantor and his allies, they warned Boehner, were whispering that Boehner had become a RINO—a “Republican in Name Only.”

About the same time, the conservative editorialists of the Wall Street Journal—who had been tipped off to the details under negotiation—published an editorial decrying Boehner and insinuating that he would be finished as speaker if he continued to pursue this deal.

After all this, Boehner turned tail. He backed out of the serious talks for the grand bargain. At one point, he even refused to return Obama’s call. Instead, he publicly proclaimed, “We are not close to an agreement.” But they had been. And he had been near to a sweeping piece of legislation that Boehner believed the nation needed. He just couldn’t make his own Republicans, who loathed any notion of compromise, act reasonably, and he was not willing to confront these extremists and risk his position as speaker. He might have been in charge of the House Republican caucus, but he was hardly a leader. He was a hostage.

And thank God for that.

It’s unlikely the president will negotiate over Planned Parenthood so this new shutdown threat is of a different color. (The administration learned their lesson after that episode.)Boehner resigning now is supposed to make it possible for him to cobble together a continuing resolution with Democrats. The question will be whether he can find enough Republicans to go along. Maybe there’s a whole group of them ready to resign, who knows?

As for whip Kevin McCarthy succeeding him, good luck getting the wingnuts to approve a newbie (elected in 2007) immigration squish from California in 2015. If he wins, it will be with mostly Democrats and it’s hard to see how that puts him in any better position than Boehner.

These people are nuts. And they’re getting nuttier. I don’t think the chances of a shutdown have actually diminished much.

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Fiorina doubles down on her dishonesty

by digby

Her Super-Pac decided to make an ad featuring the dishonest stock footage Fiorina claimed was in the Planned Parenthood videos. The ad is just as false as the claims she made in her weird staccato accusations in the debate.

I wrote about the Carly phenomenon again for Salon this morning:

“Carly is a cancer survivor and doesn’t need to be lectured on women’s health by anyone. Over their long and factually incorrect letter, Planned Parenthood doesn’t and can’t deny they butchering babies and selling their organs [sic]. This is about the character of our nation.”

Other campaigns have climbed down from similar claims about the videos. Fiorina and her allies have done no such thing. Three days after the debate, CARLY for America — the PAC that legally has to keep its distance from Fiorina’s actual campaign — put together a video that spliced the candidate’s answer with different clips. The viewer, hearing about the controversy but unaware of the original videos, might think that Fiorina nailed it.

Cleveland, Ohio resident Carol McDowell, who came to Fiorina’s event while on vacation in Charleston, said Fiorina’s debate performance really “won us over” — pointing to two of her friends. “I loved the Planned Parenthood response that she had. The things being done today — it’s gone way beyond just abortion and it needs to stop.”…

Kristol’s “uh oh”

by digby

In this week’s Weekly Standard William Kristol has written column called “uh oh”:

How big a problem is it that the two leading Republican candidates for president aren’t actually qualified to be president?
[…]
“Well,” you’re tempted to retort, “why should we believe that neither Trump nor Carson is qualified to be president?”

Did you watch the debate? Neither Trump nor Carson has much of a grasp of the issues. Neither has a demonstrated ability to govern. Trump is certainly the less qualified of the two, a self-regarding blowhard who’s not much of a conservative to boot, who is not now and will never be qualified to be president.

Carson is a Christian gentleman and a genuine conservative. But he’s not yet prepared to be president, and he’d have to show an awful lot of growth to be ready a year from now.

Nice of him to notice. It shows he’s learned from his mistakes:

The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.

On October 6th, in another Times column, Kristol cryptically acknowledged having been entertained by the Governor. He mentioned meeting Palin “in far more relaxed circumstances, in Alaska over a year ago.” The column featured one of the few interviews that Palin has granted to the national media since becoming McCain’s running mate. Kristol quoted Palin saying that the debate had been a “liberating” experience, then wrote, “Shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.”

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QOTD: They really mean it edition

by digby

Jeb!

“Our message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn’t one of division and ‘Get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff.”

He was in South Carolina. Natch.

Here’s the thing. He’s just saying what they all believe. Romney also said it out loud when he said:

“What the president, president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote.”

These are the “moderates”.

Will Sen. Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Prosecution of Companies like Exxon?

by Gaius Publius

I’ve been writing recently about the blockbuster report by Inside Climate News that Exxon knew, as early as 1977, that climate change was very likely real and that continuing to burn fossil fuels would disrupt the livability of the planet. The main page of the ICN report is here. My initial discussion is here.

Prior to those revelations, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (see below) and others were calling for RICO civil suits against companies financing climate deniers to determine if these companies are guilty of defrauding the public in the same way the tobacco companies were guilty of defrauding the public. This piece is about those calls for RICO lawsuits, in particular, Sheldon Whitehouse’s.

Bottom line first, to keep the timeline clear:

• Before it was known that Exxon knew (before the full release of their internal documents), Senator Whitehouse and others thought companies funding deniers may be defrauding the country in the same way tobacco companies defrauded the country and their customers.
   
• Whitehouse and others have already called for a federal RICO (racketeering) lawsuit to investigate the allegation and, if proved, to stop the lying and the fraud and seek damages.
   
• One of the hurdles for a RICO conviction (as opposed to a lawsuit or investigation) involves proving that the companies knew they were lying. In the case of tobacco companies, pre-trial discovery overcame that problem. Subpoenaed internal company documents showed they knew.
   
• Now Inside Climate News has released a treasure trove of internal Exxon documents going back to 1977, documents that appear to show the company knew, internally, that global warming was real and that the likely cause was carbon (CO2) emissions. ICN has also, with Frontline, interviewed many of the participants in Exxon’s then study of global warming. This evidence is strongly against Exxon’s claim that global warming is “uncertain” or unrelated to burning fossil fuel, its main product.
   
• In light of this new information, will Sen. Whitehouse renew his call for a federal RICO investigation? Will others?
   
• Will climate-aware voters call for Democratic political candidates to go on the record about RICO investigations?

The last two bullets above represent next steps. Care to help?

Now the details.

Sheldon Whitehouse Wants to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies For Climate Fraud

Back in late May, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former prosecutor, wrote an op-ed calling for RICO investigations into companies engaged in and financing climate denial, likening these practices to the fraudulent practices of tobacco companies, who were similarly sued. (Hat tip to Daniel Marans at the Huffington Post, who wrote about the op-ed and from whom I borrowed this section’s heading.)

Whitehouse starts by discussing the case of the tobacco companies (my emphasis throughout):

The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people

by Sheldon Whitehouse

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.
Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”

Notice that Whitehouse is not accusing the carbon (fossil fuel) companies of having different ideas than most climate scientists. He’s accusing them of fraud. You’ll hear cries of “criminalizing ideas” from professional climate deniers if this lawsuit moves seriously forward. Far from having differing ideas, however, a successful suit will prove that the carbon companies, like the tobacco companies, have the same ideas the public and most scientists have … and that they lied about what they knew. That’s not prosecuting ideas; it’s prosecuting … well, fraud, something the government frequently does (except in the case of Wall Street investment banks) and should do as part of its job. 

Whitehouse: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Acting Like Tobacco Companies

Whitehouse documents considerable similarity between the tobacco industry’s funding of claims it knew to be wrong — that smoking was safe, or at best, its harm was “unproven” — and the funding of similar claims by the carbon companies. For example:

The shape of the fossil fuel industry’s denial operation has been documented by, among others, Drexel University professor Robert Brulle. In a 2013 paper published in the journal Climatic Change, Brulle described a complex network of organizations and funding that appears designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry’s fingerprints. To quote directly from Brulle’s report, it was “a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate.” That sounds a lot like Kessler’s findings in
the tobacco racketeering case.

There’s more to back up his assertions in the op-ed. This is just part of the evidence he cites.

Whitehouse Wants to Use Discovery to See if Carbon Companies Are Guilty of Lying

At the time he wrote the op-ed, May 2015, Whitehouse wasn’t sure — he didn’t have the evidence — that the carbon companies were guilty in the same way the tobacco companies were. He didn’t know, in other words, whether they knew they were lying. In the case of the tobacco companies, it took the “discovery” phase of the lawsuit to uncover the proof:

The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

Thanks to the ICN report, we now appear to have that information.

Will Sheldon Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Lawsuit in Light of the Exxon Documents?

Above, Whitehouse wrote (and I bolded): “I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We
don’t have enough information to make that conclusion.” I think any interpretation of Exxon’s own internal documents is a strong indicator of real concern and guilty knowledge on their part.

For example, from the initial ICN report:

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

Other documents and company actions show Exxon took Black’s warning very seriously. ICN is writing analyses of the documents it has released (document repository here, if you want to lookat them for yourself). For example, read “Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models“. In it you’ll learn that in 1979 a researcher told company executives that “unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be ‘noticeable temperature changes’ and 400 parts per million [ppm] of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.” We’re at 400 ppm today. The company spent millions studying global warming, including funding a then-state-of-the-art supertanker to take sea and air temperature readings.

This is explosive information. Will Sheldon Whitehouse renew his call for the government to file a RICO lawsuit against Exxon and others like them who finance climate denial in order to continue their profits? He should, in my view. Who knows what other documents will be uncovered by aggressive “discovery” and subpoenas?

If you recall, the tobacco companies lost their case, lost it big, and paid a heavy price. Isn’t it time the carbon companies — Exxon, the Koch companies, BP and Shell — paid a price for their misdeeds as well? Just because we may have crossed some lines, reached some tipping points (peak water in California) doesn’t mean we can’t act now to prevent even worse consequences (multi-meter sea level rise in this century, as much as 240 feet when all ice melts).

James Hansen would call this a moral obligation. So would I.

It’s Going to Take Force

I’d like to close with something I wrote earlier: Don’t be confused. It’s going to take force to defeat the fossil fuel companies. We’re not in a debate with them, we’re in a battle. It will take an exercise of power to make the Kochs and the Exxons stand down. Battle means weapons — the weapon of public opinion, yes, but stronger ones too, the strongest we can find.

A multi-billion-dollar federal lawsuit, one with every chance of succeeding, would count as force in my book. Would Senator Whitehouse, Senator Sanders or candidate Clinton be willing to call for one? Perhaps it’s time to ask them.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

Taking on the fundamentalists
by Tom Sullivan

Quotes from Pope Francis’ speech to Congress yesterday are all over the Net this morning: The 9 most notable; The 10 most important; The 10 Most Political, etc.

One passage that is getting less attention than those more easily spun as partisan is the section on fundamentalism:

All of us are quite aware of, and deeply worried by, the disturbing social and political situation of the world today. Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind. A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps. We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. That is something which you, as a people, reject.

Or we would like to think so. Some Iraqis might argue otherwise.

People will hear that passage according to their own proclivities. With the international press focused on ISIS and on Al Qaida, most Americans will hear it as a warning against Islamist terror. But “any other kind” and “simplistic reductionism” are not limited to those.

The thing that most people miss about fundamentalism is this: fundamentalism is not about what you think, but how you think. Having spent many years in the American South among religious fundamentalists, having watched the Midas Cult’s callous disregard for the common good in blind obeisance to its economic ideology, and having on occasion encountered left-wing fundamentalists, I find they all have this in common: you are either with them or against them. They are rigidly ideological, doctrinaire, single-minded, obsessed with purity, and not much fun to be around. They see the world, as the pope said, in black-and-white terms: “the righteous and sinners.” They simply disagree about who is whom.

Loss of the ability to laugh at yourself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. So when it comes to religion, or to economic or political ideology, yeah, they are pretty humorless, too.

Francis continued:

The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation, which has accomplished so much good throughout the history of the United States. The complexity, the gravity and the urgency of these challenges demand that we pool our resources and talents, and resolve to support one another, with respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience.

A couple of weeks ago, some volunteers showed up to do some building and grounds work at the local Democratic headquarters. Overnight, the front doors had been spray painted with “Death to the DNC.” Pretty inside baseball. Your typical wingnut would have used “libtards” or “Democracks.” Check your fundamentalism.