Month: November 2015

Why the FBI is on the scene of the Planned Parenthood shooting

by digby

Also:

No, we don’t know for sure the motive of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter. It’s always possible that he was a former employee who’d been fired or something. But contrary to the wingnuts suddenly showing tremendous reluctance to pass any judgement about events today, common sense suggests that a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in one of the centers of anti-abortion activity in the country might just have some connection to right wing domestic terrorism.

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I Won the Thanksgiving debate with my Republican Uncle!


by Spocko


This year I was ready for my Republican Uncle at Thanksgiving.  I had all my facts, talking points and debate strategies prepared. I rehearsed in my head my counter points to his points.

I listened closely as he repeated easily debunked economic theories that came from the 1%. I took mental notes while he talked about school “reform.” My zingers and responses to his follow up points on taxes were epic and hilarious.

I had my source articles bookmarked on my phone for referring to guns, refugees, Middle East politics and oil.

But I didn’t say anything at first. I let him build his case all afternoon. Then during dinner I got ready to pounce.

I anticipated the aftermath of my epic beat down. I envisioned it something like Emma Stone lipsyncing to DJ Khaled’s “All I do is win.”

This time I was going to force him to admit that I was right and that he was wrong, and to agree to never again bring up ideas that had been proven failures. I’ve killed lies before and I’m tired of pretending that reality didn’t happen because he didn’t like it. But even that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to win this year.

I wanted to win because I wanted to hurt him, like he had hurt me. He had disrespected me and my “bleeding-heart liberal” views. Time and time again I was proved right, yet I wasn’t allowed to gloat or “rub it in.”  Fuck that!

I knew this would be upsetting to my aunt and other uncle, but screw them! They had let him go on with his bullshit with no challenges for DECADES! Why didn’t they shut him down or defend my views? Why did I have to be “the better man?”

I realized I wanted to punish him for believing this conservative bullshit and also for spreading these sick views, views that were cruel, lacked empathy and had failed time and time again.

Would humiliating him in front of the rest of the family shut him up? I got ready to bring up his all his past hypocrisies and crush him once and for all time.

I could win this year. I had the power. I could show him a direct link from his current problems, the people he had voted for and their horrible ideas. I learned from the right wing, I would show no mercy, give no quarter.

We reached the “what are you grateful for,” part of the dinner. He talked about how the 1% strategies weren’t working for him (because he wasn’t the 1%).  How scary life is with no real safety net. Why support of family was so important to him.

Then I realized I had been set up for this debate by a long line of right wing radio and TV hosts.  People whose job it is to push wedges between families and communities for fun and profit. Their definition of winning is not mine.

I have spent years making these RW talkers who spread division less profitable, something that hurts them.  These were my opponents, not my Republican Uncle. By playing their game, their way, I was following their script–not mine.

Finally the question came to me. “What are you grateful for Spocko?”

“Mrs. Spocko, everyone here and my friends all over the world.”

“Now, who is ready for a nice vegan dessert?”

Fade in “All I do is win, win, win no matter what…”

Tweet ‘o the day

by digby

Good old Jonah Goldberg always ready to say something totally ridiculous at a time of crisis:

Shooting at a bank? Has anyone blamed Bernie Sanders for his extreme rhetoric yet?— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) November 27, 2015

This was as the police were rescuing people inside the Planned Parenthood building and they were tracking the shooter who was holed up inside of it.

You undoubtedly recall Goldberg’s famous blog post during Katrina:

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS – I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen.

That was on the first day.

Update: This guy always comes through

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What are these human rights you speak of?

by digby

I don’t know what to say about this:

France is to opt out of some aspects of the European Human Rights Convention while the state of emergency declared after this month’s Paris attacks is in force. As well as raids on mosques and Islamic charities, police have swooped on radical environmentalists since the measure was introduced.

Some of the measures taken because of the state of emergency are “likely to necessitate exemption from some of the rights guaranteed” by the convention, the French authorities have told Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland.

States are allowed to opt out in case of war or a danger “threatening the life of the nation”, although they cannot be exempted from certain provisions, including bans on torture and cruel and inhuman treatment.

Exemptions can be challenged at the European Court of Human Rights.

There have been 1,616 searches of premises, 211 arrests, 161 people charged and 293 weapons seized since the state of emergency was declared.

Among the premises raided have been mosques, prayer rooms and shops targeted because “radical Islamists” were said to frequent them or because some sermons given were judged extreme.

But others have been on the homes of people who have taken part in environmental protests and occupations, such as the camp at the site of the proposed airport near Nantes in western France and one aiming to stop a dam in the south-west where a protester was killed.

Several activists have been placed under house arrest, apparently for fear that they might have defied the ban on demonstrations ahead of the Cop21 climate conference, which opens on Sunday 29 December.

Obviously, all the talk about civilized Western values is just a nice little concept that has no meaning in reality. Good to know. And it’s also good to be assured that one can never be too cynical about government opportunistically stretching police powers whenever possible.

The lesson here for the rest of the world is that “threatening the life of the nation” does not mean an existential threat as one might have assumed. It just means a horrific act of mass violence. Very clarifying.

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More Thanksgiving revisionism

by digby

Sharing this because you need to know how hard these folks are working these days to change our traditional understanding of American history. Liberals do this too as progress and time change the way we look at things. But this is unusual because conservatives are supposed to be the traditionalists.

But then American conservatives aren’t really conservative are they? Anyway, this is from the Richard Viguerie group:

The establishment media, encouraged none too subtly by President Obama’s Thanksgiving address, and his policies of bringing thousands of potential Islamist terrorists to this country and unconstitutionally granting amnesty and work permits to millions of illegal aliens, has now decreed that “Thanksgiving is about immigration” and that the Pilgrims were “illegal immigrants.”

Normally this could be dismissed as a bunch of soft-headed liberal nonsense, but in the light of Obama’s announcement that he wants to bring additional Muslim “refugees” to America, and grassroots concerns about Common Core and the rewriting of American history in many of our school textbooks, it bears closer examination and rebuttal.

First of all, Thanksgiving is in no way about “immigration.” It may be about faith in God*, perseverance, brotherhood in the face of hardship or even the value of goodwill among diverse people, but it is not about immigration for the simple reason that the Pilgrims did not consider themselves to be “immigrants.”

They were pioneers – colonizers who undertook a voyage for “the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country.”

If today’s immigrants come to America with similar goals to advance Islam – and there’s plenty of reason to believe that many legal and illegal immigrants from Muslim countries do – then we should certainly not see their arrival as a reason to celebrate, because they represent an existential threat to our way of life.

It is also worth noting that the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans – Indians – was not the relationship of welfare recipient Pilgrim to welfare giving Indian that liberals would like us to think.

The treaty of friendship signed between Massasoiet (Massasoit) the Chief of the local Indians and the Pilgrims was very much in the Pilgrims’ favor:

I. That neither he nor any of his, should injure or do hurt to any of their people.

II. That if any of his did any hurt to any of theirs, he should send the offender that they might punish him.

III. That if any thing were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be restored; and they should do the like to his.

IV. That if any did unjustly war against him, they would aid him; and if any did war against them, he should aid them.

V. That he should send to his neighbors’ confederates to certify them of this, that they might not wrong them, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

VI. That when their men came to them, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them.

These are hardly the terms a supplicant asks for from a stronger party – quite the reverse.

True, the Pilgrims needed and received tutelage in how to farm and survive in the tough conditions of 17th Century New England – but the bargain was one of commerce, trade and profit, not welfare.

Indeed, Tisquantum, a.k.a. Squanto, the English-speaking Indian who offered counsel to the Pilgrims, eventually set himself up to leverage the fear the Indians had for English technology for his own private benefit, exacting tributes to put in a good word for someone, or by threatening to have the English release the plague against them.

Squanto even went so far as trying to trick the Pilgrims into a show of military action, by claiming certain Indian groups were in conspiracy together to fight the English: but he went too far, and his treachery was discovered by both the Pilgrims and the Indians. **

In other words, far from being a noble savage Squanto was a practitioner of power politics straight out of Machiavelli.

It is also worth noting that a little more than 50 years after the first Thanksgiving King Phillip’s War broke out between the colonists and the Indians. The economy of New England was severely damaged, half the towns were attacked, something like one-tenth of all men available for military service were lost and the Indians were virtually wiped out.

It was King Phillip’s War, not the first Thanksgiving, that resulted in the first official Thanksgiving proclamation, setting a day of Thanksgiving on June 29, 1676, for “reserving many of our Towns from Desolation Threatened, and attempted by the Enemy, and giving us especially of late with many of our Confederates many signal Advantages against them, without such Disadvantage to ourselves as formerly we have been sensible of, if it be the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed…”

That is hardly the warm, touchy-feely story that grade school kids (and adult liberals) would like to believe about the relationship they imagine between the piously incompetent Pilgrims and the peaceable in-touch with nature granola eating Indians.

In the light of liberal revision of what Thanksgiving is about it is also worth recalling that of the over 100 passengers who sailed for America on the Mayflower, only 53 Pilgrims were there to celebrate the first Thanksgiving.

In the first three centuries of European-American history, practically everyone who came to America of their own volition came as a pioneer, not as an “immigrant.” They came for liberty and of necessity to wrest a living (and riches if they could find them) from Nature and from a wild and often unforgiving land; sometimes they fought, sometimes they negotiated and traded, but no one gave them anything.

Today, as Muslims who reject constitutional liberty in favor of Sharia are brought here at taxpayer expense to undermine and possibly attack this country and illegal aliens are put-up in hotels with swimming pools, given a free education, free medical care and even given free underwear, the pioneering aspect of what the Pilgrims accomplished, and how they survived in America has been pretty much scrubbed out of history.

If Thanksgiving is about anything, it is about the spirit of the Pilgrims and how, through the Glory of God, a small band of pious pioneers, not immigrants, planted the values upon which a great Nation was built, and could be lost if we forget them.

There you have it.

They are totally not like pilgrims

by digby

Some people are upset by this comment:

“Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail, the world is still full of pilgrims – men and women who want nothing more than the chance for a safer, better future for themselves and their families. What makes America America is that we offer that chance. We turn Lady Liberty’s light to the world, and widen our circle of concern to say that all God’s children are worthy of our compassion and care. That’s part of what makes this the greatest country on Earth.”

Here’s why they are nothing like the pilgrims according to the Daily Caller:

They Were Pioneers

America was founded by people leaving the relative safety of Europe for the unknown perils of the new world, and the Pilgrims were no exception. While few nations accepted the strong Calvinist beliefs of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, these dissidents could still count on the benefit of civilization by remaining in Europe.

When they came to Plymouth, these settlers had to do the very difficult task of creating entirely new communities in a strange land — largely all by themselves. It’s hard to be a refugee claiming asylum when you’re crossing an ocean to a land that’s largely unsettled and is a more dangerous place than where you hail from. There was little refuge to be had in this untamed country for the Pilgrims — especially considering how many new arrivals died in the months upon hitting shore due to disease and other harsh living conditions. (RELATED: It’s ‘Un-American’ To Impose Refugee Resettlement On The Country)

For this reason, they were pioneers creating a society from the ground up rather than refugees coming to a well-established, prosperous society.

They Had No Government Assistance

This statement is an obvious fact when you consider the facts of life in seventeenth-century America. There was hardly any government, much less government assistance to be had. The Pilgrims also had to finance their passage to the new world with a Virginia Company loan that required them to work for seven years to pay off. The only real help they had from any form of government was the tacit permission to settle in English-claimed lands.

Today’s refugees are a different matter. The U.S. government pays for the flights of these migrants to come here. Even though there’s a stated requirement that the refugees must pay back the feds for the free ticket once they start working, 91 percent of these individuals go straight onto government assistance upon arrival — with 68 percent on welfare.

So the federal agencies paying for these trips may have to wait awhile for airfare compensation.

Hostile Natives Were All Around

While it’s true that the Pilgrims and their nearby co-settlers the Puritans initially had cordial relations with the Indian tribes, that goodwill didn’t last long. By 1636, the colonists were engaged in brutal warfare with the Pequot Confederation and eventually came into conflict the Wampanoag — the Indians who participated in the historical Thanksgiving feast — in the coming years.

Many Indians resented the newcomers for coming onto their land and were more than willing to slaughter any colonists who they saw as a threat.

Contrary to mainstream media hysteria, today’s refugees suffer a warm embrace from Americans who support them with tax funds and local amenities. Any verbal or physical attack on them can be treated as a hate crime and punished severely. Any American who might be worried by these new arrivals can face castigation by a biased media and powerful political leaders — such as our own president.

There were no New York Time editorials to bash the Pequot as nativist xenophobes for scalping Pilgrims back in the 1630s.

They Created Safe Communities

In spite of being surrounded by hostile natives and living with constant outbreaks of the plague, the Pilgrims and the Puritans were well-known for building communities defined by order, prosperity, hard work and thrift. Crime was not tolerated and resulted in harsh sentencing.

On the other hand, many refugee communities in the U.S. and Europe are defined by the opposite conditions. Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood — a top destination for Somali refugees — has become a hotbed for crime and radical Islam. From 2003 to 2013, the federal government had deported over a 1,000 refugees for violent crime convictions. (RELATED: America Already Has A Refugee Problem On Its Hands)

In Europe, several countries are experiencing a refugee crime wave that is stretching police thin and putting cities on edge.

They Were Christian

The Pilgrims were devout Calvinists who came to America to create model religious communities. Today’s refugees are primarily non-Christian, as can be ascertained by the top countries of origin for settled migrants from the year 2013.

This fact only becomes an important point when considering Syrian Christians. Many groups of people around the world are persecuted for their religion and/or ethnicity — and many of them are non-Christian. In Syria, though, the most persecuted group is arguably the Christian minority. Islamist rebels — not just ISIS — single them out for retribution, punitive taxes and even death merely for the faith they practice.

But even though this is a clearly persecuted group, America has hardly taken in any out of the nearly 3,000 Syrians we have resettled so far. Less than 3 percent of the migrants accepted by the U.S. are Christian, even though they comprise 10 percent of the Syrian population and most of the rebel factions are hostile towards them.

With these facts in mind, it’s hard to make any comparison with the Syrian refugees and the Calvinist Pilgrims. Life was much harder for the seventeenth century settlers, yet they still managed to plant the seeds for a future nation through their struggles.

Today, that nation that was forged by Pilgrims and other transplants from the British Isles is saying no to the idea of taking in more Syrian refugees.

And they were white, let’s not forget that. Also too, it’s the 2000s not the 1600s, which makes it like, totally different. They didn’t have TV then. Or planes. Or Burger King even. So you can’t really compare them. They don’t even eat Thanksgiving dinner probably because it’s like it cannibalism or something for them. Because Turkey. So this is right on.

Well, there is one thing he got wrong. These refugees are facing a hostile population.

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How oil fuels ISIS

by Gaius Publius

ISIS is a complex entity, in part a state and in part a jihadist insurgency. To the extent that they’re a state, they hold territory and govern (including, ironically, offering free government-provided health care). Here’s a look at ISIS-held territory, including the location of oil fields and refineries within that territory.

The U.S. and its allies are in a bind. ISIS finances its operations from its oil revenue. Most of its oil isn’t sold on the international market, but the local one. That is, millions of people in the region depend on ISIS oil for their energy needs, even the anti-ISIS rebels in Syria. If those oil fields and refineries were bombed or otherwise put out of commission, the disruption to civilians in the region would be enormous. This likely accounts for the fact that of the more than 10,000 air strikes against ISIS by the U.S.-led coalition, fewer than 200 have targeted its oil infrastructure.

The story comes from the Financial Times. Only part is below, but it’s all fascinating:

Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists

Erika Solomon in Beirut, Guy Chazan and Sam Jones in London

Jihadis’ oil operation forces even their enemies to trade with them

On the outskirts of al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria, with warplanes flying overhead, a line of trucks stretches for 6km. Some drivers wait for a month to fill up with crude.

Falafel stalls and tea shops have sprung up to cater to the drivers, such is the demand for oil. Traders sometimes leave their trucks unguarded for weeks, waiting for their turn.

This is the land of Isis, the jihadi organisation in control of swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory. The trade in oil has been declared a prime target by the international military coalition fighting the group. And yet it goes on, undisturbed.

Oil is the black gold that funds Isis’ black flag — it fuels its war machine, provides electricity and gives the fanatical jihadis critical leverage against their neighbours.

But more than a year after US President Barack Obama launched an international coalition to fight Isis, the bustling trade at al-Omar and at least eight other fields has come to symbolise the dilemma the campaign faces: how to bring down the “caliphate” without destabilising the life of the estimated 10m civilians in areas under Isis control, and punishing the west’s allies?

The resilience of Isis, and the weakness of the US-led campaign, have given Russia a pretext to launch its own, bold intervention in Syria.

Despite all these efforts, dozens of interviews with Syrian traders and oil engineers as well as western intelligence officials and oil experts reveal a sprawling operation almost akin to a state oil company that has grown in size and expertise despite international attempts to destroy it. …

Estimates by local traders and engineers put crude production in Isis-held territory at about 34,000-40,000 bpd. The oil is sold at the wellhead for between $20 and $45 a barrel, earning the militants an average of $1.5m a day.

About selling to their enemies in Syria:

“It’s a situation that makes you laugh and cry,” said one Syrian rebel commander in Aleppo, who buys diesel from Isis areas even as his forces fight the group on the front lines. “But we have no other choice, and we are a poor man’s revolution. Is anyone else offering to give us fuel?”

It’s both a complicated situation and a lucrative one (my emphasis):

When [ISIS] pushed through northern Iraq and took over Mosul, Isis also seized the Ajil and Allas fields in north-eastern Iraq’s Kirkuk province. The very day of its takeover, locals say, militants secured the fields and engineers were sent in to begin operations and ship the oil to market.

“They were ready, they had people there in charge of the financial side, they had technicians that adjusted the filling and storage process,” said a local sheikh from the town of Hawija, near Kirkuk. “They brought hundreds of trucks in from Kirkuk and Mosul and they started to extract the oil and export it.” An average of 150 trucks, he added, were filled daily, with each containing about $10,000-worth of oil. Isis lost the fields to the Iraqi army in April but made an estimated $450m from them in the 10 months it controlled the area.

While al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network, depended on donations from wealthy foreign sponsors, Isis has derived its financial strength from its status as monopoly producer of an essential commodity consumed in vast quantities throughout the area it controls. Even without being able to export, it can thrive because it has a huge captive market in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, diesel and petrol produced in Isis areas are not only consumed in territory the group controls but in areas that are technically at war with it, such as Syria’s rebel-held north: the region is dependent on the jihadis’ fuel for its survival. Hospitals, shops, tractors and machinery used to pull victims out of rubble run on generators that are powered by Isis oil.

“At any moment, the diesel can be cut. No diesel — Isis knows our life is completely dead,” says one oil trader who comes from rebel-held Aleppo each week to buy fuel and spoke to the Financial Times by telephone.

The article details well the way the oil industry is managed. ISIS, unlike a number of other jihadist groups, has a professional core and it shows. ISIS, after all, is led by a ex-Iraqi army officers, the people L. Paul Bremer fired almost as soon as he took office as Bush’s “proconsul” in Iraq:

As the top civilian administrator of the former Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer was permitted to rule by decree. Among his first and most notable decrees were Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1, which banned the Ba’ath party in all forms[14] and Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2 dismantled the Iraqi Army.[15]

In a very real sense, ISIS is Bush’s and Bremer’s direct creation.

How will this end? The authors aren’t sure:

Isis’ luck with oil may not last. Coalition bombs, the Russian intervention and low oil prices could put pressure on revenues. The biggest threat to Isis’ production so far, however, has been the depletion of Syria’s ageing oilfields. It does not have the technology of major foreign companies to counteract what locals describe as a slow drop in production. Isis’ need for fuel for its military operations means there is also less oil to sell in the market.

For now, though, in Isis-controlled territory, the jihadis control the supply and there is no shortage of demand. “Everyone here needs diesel: for water, for farming, for hospitals, for offices. If diesel is cut off, there is no life here,” says a businessman who works near Aleppo. “Isis knows this [oil] is a winning card.”

The situation in Iraq and Syria isn’t stable, but it isn’t unstable either. Dismantling ISIS is going to be a tough nut to crack. Radicalizing a great many more of the region’s residents is a distinct possibility if Western and Russian attacks increase.

A Nation Free of Oil

One final thought. Have you ever wondered what the nation and our foreign policy would be like today if Jimmy Carter had won in 1980, the solar panels had stayed on the roof of the White House, renewable energy production had thrived, and the nation, by determined effort, were freed of all dependence on fossil fuel?

That world, with the possibility of leisurely conversion from carbon, is gone. But for a time in the 1970s the door was wide open. If a certain Presidential candidate hadn’t cut a deal with a certain hostage-holding government, we might even have walked through it. How much better would our lives be today, if we were a nation free of oil?

GP

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Black musings for Black Friday
by Tom Sullivan

As America heads off to its collective orgy of individual consumption, I ponder how much our belief in our own beliefs is self-reinforcing and a kind of faith both religious and secular.

At Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether points to a three-part documentary, The Power of Nightmares 1: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (BBC-2004). From the Wikipedia summary:

The film compares the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, drawing comparisons between their origins, and remarking on similarities between the two groups. More controversially, it argues that radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organisation, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth, or noble lie, perpetuated by leaders of many countries—and particularly neoconservatives in the U.S.—in a renewed attempt to unite and inspire their people after the ultimate failure of more utopian ideas.

Interesting parallels between the religious radicals and the noeconservative project to make the Soviets the bogie man hiding behind every tree and under every bed:

This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It might not be true, but it was necessary to reengage the public in a grand vision of America’s destiny that would give meaning and purpose to their lives.

The neoconservatives were succeeding in creating a simplistic fiction, a vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all evil in the world, and America as the only country that could rescue the world.

If the intelligence had to be cooked to show that the Soviets were a bigger threat than our intelligence services and military thought, so be it. With the Soviets gone, we had to find and/or create a new Evil Empire. (The same Washington players — Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc. — who hyped the Soviet threat later hyped Saddam, then al Qaeda. Now this season’s Big Bad is ISIS.) Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamic theorist the documentary proposes as a parallel to Leo Strauss, proposed a project to rescue the world from western culture’s “state of barbarous ignorance” in which “you’re so corrupt that you can’t even know you’re corrupt,” writes Strether. A kind of moral Dunning-Kreuger effect.

Watching the Donald Trump circus now, it is easy to see the effects of both. And it’s hard not to see the parallels between the two forms of religion.

QOTD: Molly Ball

by digby

From the campaign trail with Trump:

Despite all the negativity and fear, the energy in this room does not feel dark and aggressive and threatening. It doesn’t feel like a powder keg about to blow, a lynch mob about to rampage. It feels joyous.

“There is so much love in every room I go to,” Trump says, near the end of nearly an hour and a half of free-associative bombast, silly and sometimes offensive impressions, and insane pronouncements. “We want our country to be great again, and we know it can be done!”
[…]
This is the thing Trump knows: You can stand around fretting about truth and propriety and the danger of pandering to baser instincts.

Or you can give the people what they want.

Read the piece to see what it is they want.

It’s going to be interesting to see just how many of these folks there are out there.

Update: This New York Times piece adds more detail about what makes these rallies so joyful:

At recent Trump rallies, supporters have spit in protesters’ faces, tackled demonstrators in Miami, and shoved and punched a Black Lives Matter activist in Alabama. (“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Mr. Trump said after the episode.) Mostly, he has embraced the scuffles as a new and action-packed dimension of the Donald Trump experience.

“Isn’t a Trump rally much more exciting than these other ones?” Mr. Trump asked as the police ejected a protester shouting “Trump’s a racist” from a rally in Worcester, Mass., last week. “That kind of stuff only adds to the excitement.”
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To supporters seeing him up close, the Trump experience was very real. They locked eyes on him and nodded religiously when he talked about “anchor babies” cast by unauthorized immigrants, or the “animals and savages” perpetrating terrorism, or the “scum” on the streets. Guarded by a line of Secret Service agents under the stage, he made his fans howl with laughter and shake their heads in disgust at “stupid” leaders who use teleprompters.

He even got them to mock their brethren who could not get into the hall. “You should have gotten here earlier,” Mr. Trump said to applause.

When he referred to the man identified as the ringleader of the Paris attacks this month as “the guy with the dirty, filthy hat,” the crowd chuckled, but one of the high school girls, unexpectedly appalled, shouted, “You bastard,” before lowering her head.

When Mr. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding as an interrogation tactic against terrorism suspects, and added, “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway,” an older couple behind the group of teenagers threw back their heads in utter delight.

“Amen,” the woman said.

“Oh, my God,” one of the high school girls said. Another covered her mouth in shock.

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You can get anything you want

by digby

It’s the 50th anniversary of this famous Thanksgiving.

And it’s all true!

On Thanksgiving 1965, Arlo Guthrie visited friend Alice Brock and her husband at their home, a church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and did them a favor by taking out their garbage. The dump was closed that day, so Guthrie and a friend dropped the garbage off a cliff where other locals had previously dropped trash. Guthrie was arrested the following day, and the mark on his record miraculously kept him out of Vietnam by making him ineligible for the draft.

Guthrie recalled the incident in hilarious detail in 1967’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” which became his most beloved song and the subject of a 1969 movie. (The Old Trinity Church, where Alice lived, is now the Guthrie Center). It’s also become a Thanksgiving tradition, played nationwide on public radio every year. “To have what happened to me actually happen and not be a work of fiction still remains amazing,” Guthrie says. “It’s an amazing set of crazy circumstances that reminds me of an old Charlie Chaplin movie. It’s slapstick.” Guthrie, who very rarely plays the song live, kicks off an 18-month tour celebrating the event that inspired the song on January 21st in Daytona Beach, Florida. Here, Guthrie reflects on his unlikely classic.

Did you ever think “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” would be your most beloved song?

Well, you have to remember that back in ’65, all the way into the early Seventies, nobody in their right mind would have written an 18-minute monologue. I mean if it was 2:31, stations wouldn’t play it. So I never expected it to even be on a record, let alone get airplay, let alone have it made into a movie. I mean, that was all like a whirlwind of events that were way beyond my control.

The song was kind of a novelty song when you started it, right?

I did take the war in Vietnam seriously, and I was in college. I began college in Billings, Montana, in September of 1965. I was gonna study forestry. And I came home for Thanksgiving vacation and stayed with my friends in this old church they had purchased. So when I first started writing about it, it was just repeating or telling my audience what had happened to me. Because I thought it was funny.

To have what happened to me actually happen and not be a work of fiction still remains amazing. It’s an amazing set of crazy circumstances that reminds me of an old Charlie Chaplin movie. It’s slapstick. I mean, who gets arrested for littering? And who goes to court and finds themselves before a blind judge with pictures as evidence? I mean, that’s crazy! And then to be rejected from the military because I had a littering record? I mean, those events were real and not only that, those people played themselves in the movie! The cop in the movie is the real Officer Obie and the judge in the movie, the blind judge is the real Judge Hannon. And these are real people! And they consented to play themselves because they think they, like me, observed the absurdity of the circumstance.