‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’
by Tom Sullivan

At an event Saturday night in eastern Tennessee, an organizer brought up the meme that poor people tend to “vote against their best interests,” for Republicans who vote to slash safety net programs that keep them afloat. This complaint, as I have written, is an old pet peeve. First, because it’s a lefty dog whistle for saying those voters are stupid — which they hear clearly even if we cannot. And second, as liberals do we really want our neighbors to go into the voting booth to vote what’s best for No. 1 rather than for an America that aspires to something better? But Saturday night, the same organizer offered a new twist from a New York Times article by ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis:

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

This is perhaps a manifestation of the “last place aversion” I wrote about in February. It is the need to have someone to look down on so you do not see yourself on the bottom rung of life’s ladder:

Two of McElwee’s links go to Stanford studies suggesting how last-place aversion explains why, for example, “individuals making just above the minimum wage are the most likely to oppose its increase.” (Last-place aversion, by the way, holds “for both whites and minorities.”)

But the MacGillis column suggests the greater problem for Democrats is not losing the votes of those “a notch or two up,” but losing the participation of “the least of these,” as Jesus once described them:

This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge ramifications — polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows even larger among poor nonvoters. In the early 1990s, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky freely cited the desirability of having a more select electorate when he opposed an effort to expand voter registration. And this fall, Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, reportedly said low turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state’s Obamacare gains wouldn’t help Democrats. “I remember being in the room when Jennings was asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance,” State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a Louisville journalist. “And he simply said, ‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’ ”

Can you say cynical? Sure. I knew you could. I would bet a lot of them do not own cars or have photo IDs either. But then, I know, that’s verging into tinfoil hat territory.

Demographics are working against Republican turnout. Democrats cannot afford to have economic hardships working against theirs. They had best take this matter pretty seriously heading into the 2016 election and the 2020 census.

Oh how they love to be “politically incorrect”

by digby

It makes them feel so transgressive:

The sign on the front door of the Ohio family bakery states things plainly:

A photo of the sign hit the Internet this week, and its unapologetic, pro-American message began going viral Friday.

So how have things been since then at Schuler’s Bakery in Springfield?

Staffers manning the Sunday evening crowd told TheBlaze that not only is the sign still affixed to the front door, but also business has doubled.

They go on to say that they’ve gotten angry phone calls from liberals. No word on what what it is the angry libs were upset about. I’m guessing it’s the Merry Christman thing or maybe the thanking of the troops and first responders. Liberals hate all those things. Especially Christmas.

If they really want to be politically incorrect they’d put up a sign telling all the dirty “illegals” to go back to Mexico and saying Muslims are all terrorists and blacks are a bunch of freeloaders and criminals. Or, just put up a Trump for President sign.

That’s the real deal. The rest of this is child’s play that only smug Fox viewers think anyone cares about. But being truly politically incorrect might actually cost them customers so they’re bravely fighting the war on Christmas instead.

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What could go wrong

by digby

So, some armed yahoos stood outside a mosque, wearing bandanas over their faces, looking for trouble. They didn’t get it. But they made their point:

About a dozen protesters — most carrying long guns, some masked and one with his mother — lined up outside an Irving mosque on Saturday. They had come from as far away as Hunt County to the green-domed complex. To “Stop the Islamization of America,” as the mother’s hand-drawn sign urged.

A pickup tooted on its way down Esters Road, not the first or last driver to endorse the message. Right behind the truck, a sedan pulled out of the Islamic Center of Irving lot, where afternoon prayers had just finished, and blasted Arabic music as it passed.

Two men on the sidewalk mocked the song, distorting foreign lyrics into gibberish as the car sped away. Then they huddled in the cold around their cigarettes, guns and flags, waiting for another passer-by to pay attention. It was a strange protest, held at a strange time in a suburb strangely relevant to America’s brand of anti-Islamic politics.

“We tried to talk to the mosque before we did this, but they wouldn’t return our messages,” said David Wright, dressed in black all the way from his backwards baseball cap to the barrel of his tactical shotgun. “So here we are.”

Wright said he organized the rally in the wake of an Islamic terrorist group’s massacre of Parisian civilians this month. Like millions of Americans, he wants to block Syrian refugees from U.S. shores, lest they replicate the attack here.

But like a fraction of those millions, he was convinced that Irving’s mosque had established the country’s first Islamic court earlier in the year—a false rumor that started online but grew in popularity after Mayor Beth Van Duyne made it the focus of speeches to Tea Party groups.

“They shut the illegal court down,” Wright said, incorrectly. “And then, they threatened to kill the mayor.”

Thus, the guns. A protester with a bandana over his face showed off his AR-15 to traffic. A 20-year-old who wants to join the Army and ban Islam in the United States carried a Remington hunting rifle while his mother held the sign.

“They’re mostly for self-defense or protection,” Wright said, eyeing his 12-gauge. “But I’m not going to lie. We do want to show force. … It would be ridiculous to protest Islam without defending ourselves.”

That sounded a bit ridiculous to David Palmer, a City Council member who wandered down to the protest in sweatpants after a concerned mosque member told him about it.

“Does it look like there’s any threat here? Nobody’s even close to them,” Palmer said, standing in a parking lot where police cars nearly outnumbered the four or five mosque members who watched the spectacle.

“My initial impression was they were using them for intimidation,” Palmer said. “I doubt that they’d be happy if some of the Muslim churchgoers here showed up at their Christian church, their Baptist church, their Methodist church tomorrow morning with rifles slung over their shoulders.”

Palmer said the police chief personally warned mosque leaders about the rally. They in turn urged their worshippers to steer clear of the group, which calls itself the Bureau of American Islamic Relations and had recycled some of the signs it took to a Richardson mosque last month, on a national day of protest against Islam.

The worshippers largely took that advice, ignoring the protest until it broke up after a couple hours. The Muslims in the tiny audience declined to share their opinion — instead offering praise for freedom of speech and variations on “no comment.”

But back on the sidewalk, a man who wore a name tag that read “Big Daddy Infidel” and was afraid to give his full name worried about the day he would be forced to use his hunting rifle to take a human life.

“You know, I hope 10 years from now, we just stood out here and froze to say what we wanted to say, and nothing ever came of it on either side,” he said quietly. “I hope the supplies I have in my house, the food and the water and medical supplies, I have to use up in my retirement years.”

But, he concluded, “This stuff is among us. People are blind if they don’t think it is.”

Yes, dangerous “stuff is among us”. And it’s carrying weapons outside places where people worship.

I wrote this piece a while back about what the gin proliferation zealots are really doing when they use their guns to make political points:

“Look at my gun!” Why NRA’s scary “open carry” craze is not about freedom

Freedom for a man with a gun trumps freedom for parents of kids who feel endangered by him. Our scary new reality

• by Heather Digby Parton 
•  May 7, 2014 

But what does Rush think?

by digby

Unsurprisingly, he likes Trump and Cruz. Trump because he has patterned his style directly on Rush. (“Talent on loan from God ….”) and Cruz because he’s the ideologue of his dreams. You know he likes fascist stuff he’s hearing from Trump. Makes him all excited. But Cruz is the guy who could make the trains run on time, if you catch my drift:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh says GOP primary front-runner Donald Trump is doing a “great service” by taking on the media and political correctness in his presidential campaign.

“Donald Trump is, I think, doing a great service,” Limbaugh said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He is showing that you do not have to fear attacks from media.”

“He’s showing you do not have to fear being politically correct or violating political correctness,” Limbaugh added.

The radio host also weighed in on other 2016 candidates. He said Ben Carson is “one of the most decent human beings in the country,” but not equipped to be president “at this stage.”

“But any of these Republicans running would be better than Hillary [Clinton] or what we’ve got now,” Limbaugh said. “So based on that comparison, yes, I’d vote for him if it were up to him and Hillary.”

He praised Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as “brilliant” and “conservative through and through.”

“Trustworthy, strong, confident, leader, and somebody in whom you can totally depend,” he added of the Texas senator.

Limbaugh said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign lacks passion and energy.

“I don’t think he really wants to do this,” he said. “I’m watching, and I just don’t see the passion, I don’t see fire, it’s as though people in his campaign want him to do it because they want to get back in power.”

“I just don’t see Jeb with all that energy that says I need this, the country needs me, I can’t wait to do this. I just don’t see any of that,” he added.

In case you were wondering, Rubio is an amnesty squish and not to be trusted.

Just so you know where the real power base of the GOP is coming from.

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And now for something completely Carson

by digby

Trump gave us some really ugly black-shirt stuff this morning. Carson’s just … Carson. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: Dr. Carson, thank you for joining us this morning. Glad you’re with us right now.

And I do want to get your response to some of the things we’ve talked about with Donald Trump on how to respond to ISIS.

Number one, he said we should bring back those enhanced interrogation techniques, which President Obama discontinued like waterboarding. Do you agree?

CARSON: I agree that there’s no such thing as political correctness when you’re fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you and everything that you have anything to do with. And I’m not one who is real big on telling the enemy what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you would do that even though many consider waterboarding torture?

CARSON: As I said, I’m not real big on telling them what we would or would not do. I just don’t think that’s a — I don’t see where that accomplishes anything for us.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You have said we should monitor any churches or mosques where there is a lot of radicalization or things that are anti-American. How would you determine that?

CARSON: Well, I said in the larger capacity that we should monitor anything — mosques, church, school, you know, shopping center where there is a lot of radicalization going on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But how would you know that is happening?

CARSON: Intelligence. We have intelligence on the ground already.

We do need to enhance that. You know, for instance, we’ve learned last week that the FBI seems to be only to be able to monitor 30 to 60 people at a time. And we know there’s a lot more than that that need to be monitored.

We need to get very serious about our intelligence.

Remember what happened with the monitoring at the airports. So much of the stuff was able to get through.

We have to really improve that very significantly. We’re talking about the safety of the American people.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you want to enhance the intelligence.

How about this issue of the terror watch list? As I told Mr. Trump, under the current law, people on the terror watchlist are permitted to buy guns, have been permitted to buy guns and explosives. Would you continue that?

CARSON: Well, as you, I’m sure, know, there are a lot of people on that watchlist and they have no idea why they’re on that list and they’ve been trying to get their names off of it and no one will give them information. You know, I am a big supporter of the Second Amendment, and I don’t want to deprive people unnecessarily of that. There needs to be better due process.

And that’s one thing that I’m very interested in finding a way to make government more responsive to the people. It’s really unfair that people can’t get a real hearing. And they get put on a list and nobody can tell them why they’re there, and they go through for years and years and they have to be tormented. It just doesn’t make any sense.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you — on the broader strategy against ISIS, I spoke with President Obama last week, as you know, and had him respond to your comments you made at the debate where you said it would be fairly easy to take out the ISIS oil fields near Anbar. Here’s what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: What I think is that he doesn’t know much about it. And, look, George I think it’s fair to say that over the last several years I’ve had access to all the best military minds in the country and all the best foreign policy minds in the country. If I’m down in the situation room talking with people who have worked in these regions and who have run major military operations and they don’t think it’s easy, then it’s probably not easy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think your advisers are better than President Obama’s?

CARSON: Well, you know what I do know is that, you know, we have people who are very dangerous and they want to destroy us. And we don’t really have the option of deciding whether it’s easy or not to take them out. We have to take them out. We have to do what’s necessary. And what that means is we need to make it very difficult for them to move money. We need to get rid of their ability to derive money from oil, whether we take the fields or whether we blow the fields up. I’ve been saying that for a very long time.

We need to take the land back.

You know, the land is just sitting there. You know, they have…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you need ground troops to take the land back…

CARSON: …propaganda — they have all the propaganda associated with that.

You know, you see in northern Iraq that we’ve been able to work extremely effectively with the Kurds. That’s a fighting force that we need to cultivate. And, you know, we’ve sort of given up on the Iraqi fighting force because, you know, they’ve fled when they were fired upon. But the fact of the matter is, they didn’t have the right kind of advisers. And our special ops people — if you put the special ops people there with them, I don’t think you’re going to see that same kind of thing happening.

We can fight with those forces, and we need to consult our Department of Defense in terms of what do — what else do we need? We need to define for them the mission. And then we need to say to them what do you need in order to accomplish that. And that’s what we should do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: A lot of focus this week on your foreign policy views and your advisers. New York Times headline said you were struggling with foreign policy. And one of your close friends and business manager Armstrong Williams was actually quoted saying Dr. Carson is still on a learning curve. There is much for him to learn.

You know, with national security and terrorism such a top concern now of voters, can you explain why they should choose a commander-in-chief who is still on a learning curve?

CARSON: Well, I hope everybody is on a learning curve. You know in medicine we have something called CME, continuing medical education.

It recognizes the fact that things are always in the process of changing. And if you stay stagnant and you say, well, I’m up on it and now I’ll go relax, you’re not going to be very competent. And the same thing applies with being commander-in-chief. The world is a rapidly changing place. All kinds of dynamics going on. Yes, we should have in place protocols to deal with that 2:00 a.m. call in the morning, but we also need to have the ability to think quickly and to be flexible.

You know, I would be willing to say that I probably have more 2:00 a.m. in the morning experience than everybody else running combined, making life and death decisions. You have to be able to do that.

And you know, so who has got the most experience? I don’t know that it necessarily comes down to politics, it comes down to practical experience solving difficult problems doing things quickly and efficiently and using the resources available to you to get that done.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, Dr. Carson, new CBS poll out this morning shows Ted Cruz pulling ahead of you in Iowa for the first time since May. Are you worried about the fact that you may be losing steam there?

CARSON: Well, you know, it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. So, there’s going to be ups and downs as we go along the way. That’s why we have an elongated process rather than just a week or two.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Don’t seem too concerned. Dr. Carson, thanks for joining us this morning.

Yes, thanks.  I’ve got a bumper sticker for him: Not quite as scary but just as dumb as Trump.  

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Back to the 50s

by digby

You may have heard about this in passing but you should click over and read this whole post by David Roberts about how the Republicans on the Science Committee, led by Lamar Smith a climate change denier, are abusing their subpoena power and intimidating and threatening scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yes, you heard that right. Scientists. From NOAA. The ones who warn us about hurricanes.

It’s essentially a climate change witch hunt. For real:

To date, Smith has offered no evidence in support of his sweeping accusation of scientific fraud and collusion.

Smith is after another Climategate

This Washington Post story is somewhat indicative of coverage thus far in “objective” political media, in that it is unwilling to identify the partisan elephant in the room. Instead it treats the dispute as an abstract intellectual debate over the extent of privacy vs. public disclosure.

But why this extraordinary attempt to extend subpoena powers? What evidence justifies it?

Political journalists may not say so, but Johnson does: the model for this sort of thing is “Climategate.” Remember that? In 2009 and ’10, climate deniers combed through a bunch of hacked personal emails among climate scientists at the UK’s University of East Anglia, selectively leaking out-of-context bits that could be spun to sound suspicious. The press ate it up, chasing every shiny bauble. Later, multiple independent investigations cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but by then the press had moved on.

That’s the model of success for the climate denial movement. And it’s what Smith is trying to replicate. He wants some negative or embarrassing stories in the run-up to the Paris climate talks next month. It’s pretty obvious to everyone in DC; it would be cool if political journalists would tell the benighted masses in the rest of the country.

It’s also the model they have used for years against Democrats. They make the lives of everyone involved miserable, abusing their powers, digging into their personal lives and all their communications, causing them to have to spend money to hire lawyers and threatening them with criminal sanctions. This is the strategy of the Republican Clinton style witch hunt now trained on scientists.

And as Roberts points out, the press is complicit. One of the major reasons why these Republicans get away with it is because the press is happy to be fed any juicy tidbits their “sources” in these investigations vomit up and don’t want to endanger their relationships by telling the real story. Then the scandals  just take on a life of their own. Read the whole thing for the details. It’s mind boggling.

The Republicans want to go back to the 50s, and we always assume it’s because it was a time when America was the colossus left standing after the war and the country was prosperous. I don’t think that’s right. They want to go back to the 50s because that’s when white people were allowed to dominate people of color and the red scare gave the right wingers license to use the government to intimidate and harass their political enemies with impunity.

Welcome back to the 50s.

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Trump on a roll and letting it all hang out

by digby

It’s a no-brainer, amirite?

He actually said “enemy of the state”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You did stir up a controversy with those comments over the database. Let’s try to clear that up.

Are you unequivocally now ruling out a database on all Muslims?

TRUMP: No, not at all. I want a database for the refugees that — if they come into the country. We have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse.

And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances. We want to go with watchlists. We want to go with databases.

And we have no choice. We have no idea who’s being sent in here. This could be the — it’s probably not, but it could be the great Trojan horse of all time, where they come in.

When I look at those migration — when I look at the migration and the lines and I see all strong, very powerful looking men, they’re men and I see very few women, I see very few children, there’s something strange going on.

And if you look at what’s happened in Europe, a lot of bad things are happening in Europe. Just ask the folks that live in Germany, George. A lot of bad things are happening. So —

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the statistics do show —

TRUMP: We want to be smart.

We want to — hey, George, we want to be vigilant. We have to be vigilant and we have to call — is radical — you know, we have to just say it. It’s radical Islamic terrorism, and that’s what it is. And we have a president that won’t even issue the term.

But when these Syrians come in, or wherever they are, because we’re not even sure that they’re coming in from Syria, if they’re going to come in, we have to be very, very vigilant. And a database would be fine for them and a watchlist is fine. We have to watch and see what we’re doing.

They should not come in, by the way. They should not be allowed to come in.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Just for the record, though, the statistics do show the majority of the refugees coming in are women and children.

You’ve also told Yahoo! News that we have to be doing things that were unthinkable a year ago. I want to get into what you had in mind.

For example, do you think we should bring back enhanced interrogation like waterboarding?

TRUMP: Well, we have to be strong. You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads. They use drowning people. I don’t know if you’ve seen with the cages, where they put people in cages and they drown them in the ocean and they lift out the cage. And we’re talking about waterboarding.

We have to be tough —

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’d bring back waterboarding?

TRUMP: We have to — I would bring it back, yes. I would bring it back. I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us, what they’re doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head. That’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve also said we have to consider closing mosques. Jeb Bush called that a sign of weakness.

TRUMP: Well, Jeb Bush is a weak person and that’s been defined very strongly. I mean, Jeb is a weak person who is a — you know, I call him a low energy person. That’s what he is. I mean, call him anything you want, but Jeb is a person that will not solve a problem like this.

You have very, very tough people that you’re dealing with. They only understand strength. They don’t understand weakness. Somebody like Jeb, and others that are running against me — and by the way Hillary is another one.

I mean, Hillary is a person who doesn’t have the strength or the stamina, in my opinion, to be president. She doesn’t have strength or stamina. She’s not a strong enough person to be president.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what would be your criteria —

TRUMP: We’re dealing with —

STEPHANOPOULOS: — for closing a mosque?

TRUMP: We’re dealing with very — George, we’re dealing with very, very strong people. And you need strength and you need stamina.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I get that, but —

TRUMP: Hillary does not have that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: — I want to get the details though.

What would be your criteria for closing a mosque?

And how does that square with the First Amendment?

You’ve said your top priority would be to preserve and protect our religious liberties.

Is that only for Christians?

What are your criteria for closing a mosque?

TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to close mosques; I want to surveil mosques. I want mosques surveiled. We were doing it New York City for a while until the worst mayor that New York City has ever had got elected —

STEPHANOPOULOS: All mosques?

TRUMP: — De Blasio, which was a fluke. And all I would do, certainly there are certain hot spots and everybody knows they’re hot spots.

And let me tell you, the people that are involved in those mosques, they know who the bad ones are and they know who the good ones are, but they don’t talk. And we have to surveil the mosques — and we were doing it.

We were doing it recently until De Blasio closed them up in New York City. We were doing it recently. We have to surveil the mosques.

And big material and good material, from what I understood, from a very good source, was coming out of those mosques. We were learning a lot. And they were stopping problems and potential problems by learning what was happening.

Hey, look, I don’t want to close up mosques but things have to happen where, if you’ve got — you have got to use strong measures or you’re going to see buildings coming down all over New York City and elsewhere.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve also talked about you want to keep the terror watchlist but, under current law, individuals on the terror watchlist and the no-fly list have been allowed to buy guns and explosives.

Are you OK with that?

TRUMP: We have to have a watchlist, and if that watchlist has somebody that’s — you know, we have — you know, we have the laws right now. We have the laws already on the books as far as Second Amendment for guns, and as you know I’m a big, big, really big proponent of the Second Amendment.

If in — I’ll give you an example. If in Paris some of those people, those — and if you had some of those people had guns, you wouldn’t have had the horror show that you had with nobody —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But why should someone on the watch list —

TRUMP: — out of hundreds of people had guns —

STEPHANOPOULOS: — be able to have a gun?

TRUMP: — no, no. You — if people are on a watch list or people are sick, you have already — this is already covered in the legislation that we already have, George. It’s already fully covered.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, but under current law —

TRUMP: But we have —

STEPHANOPOULOS: — people on the watch list —

TRUMP: — if we have an enemy of state —

STEPHANOPOULOS: — are allowed to buy guns.

TRUMP: Listen, George, if we have an enemy of state, I don’t want to give him anything. I want to have him in jail, that’s what I want. I want to have him in jail.

But if those people in Paris had guns in that room, it would have been a shootout and very few people would have been hurt by comparison to the number that were hurt.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But yesterday…

TRUMP: I’ll tell you who would have been hurt, the bad guys would…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But yes or no?

TRUMP: — because they were the only ones that had the guns.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Trump, yes or no, should someone on the terror watch list be allowed to buy a gun?

TRUMP: If somebody is on a watch list and an enemy of state and we know it’s an enemy of state, I would keep them away, absolutely.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, you made — you raised some eyebrows yesterday with comments you made at — at your latest rally — and I want to show them, relating to 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, the police say that didn’t happen and all those rumors have been on the Internet for some time.

So did you meek — misspeak yesterday?

TRUMP: It did happen. I saw it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You saw that…

TRUMP: It was on television. I saw it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: — with your own eyes.

TRUMP: George, it did happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Police say it didn’t happen.

TRUMP: There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George.

Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.

There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.

STEPHANOPOULOS: As I said, the police have said it didn’t happen.

In case you were wondering he went up in the polls this week.

Update: Oh and this happened too:

A black protester at Trump’s rally today in Alabama was shoved, tackled, punched & kicked: https://t.co/Aq0wuaAtax pic.twitter.com/cTRDMtjuBl

— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 21, 2015

Trump was asked to weigh in on his supporters’ actions on Fox & Friends Sunday morning. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said. “It was disgusting what he was doing.”
The Republican frontrunner compared what happened at his rally to a Black Lives Matter protest at a Bernie Sanders event, which prompted the Democratic candidate to release a detailed racial justice plan. “This is not the way Bernie Sanders handled his problem, I will tell you, but I have a lot of fans and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy, a troublemaker, looking to make trouble,” Trump said.

Had enough of you!
by Tom Sullivan

Salon’s headline is more satisfying than the text, but Bill Curry’s prescription for Democrats not being Republican punching bags on foreign policy again after the Paris attacks cuts to the heart of it:

Democrats have been losing the national security debate for years. Most aren’t any good at it. Some don’t even try. Few have the courage or conviction to challenge failed doctrines. So they crouch in the cellar praying the storm will soon pass. If this one doesn’t, its blood-dimmed tide may sweep a Republican into the White House and the country into a limitless, trackless war. To keep that from happening Democrats must find the courage and skill to lay out a clear, credible alternative to the reflexive militarism of the past. As things stand, they aren’t even close.

[snip]

After 9/11 Democrats should have played every point. When Bush said “they hate us for our freedom” Democrats should have said, “No, they hate us because we arm rulers they are at war with’.”When he said “we fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” they should have said, “No, they’re here because we’re there, propping up petrol states with guns and bribes.: When he said “the world’s a better place without Saddam in it,” they should have said “not for the hundred-thousand Iraqi dead or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who fled their homes; not for our killed or wounded soldiers or their loved ones. Nor is America better off as a bankrupt, nor is the Middle East better off in a permanent state of bloody chaos.”

Bush was wrong about everything. When experts told him the key to defeating Al Qaeda was law enforcement not military power, he presumed to ridicule their “pre-9/11 thinking.” Iraq laid bare the vulnerability of our military to the asymmetrical tactics of jihad, but 13 years later Democrats have yet to make a solid case for junking what we no longer need. The reorganizations of intelligence and homeland security were bipartisan boondoggles. The tragic mistake was of course the invasion of Iraq. It’s worth recalling that a majority of Democrats voted against it, but also that most did so quietly.

Democrats stay away from foreign policy because it is seen as Republican turf. But it would not be, writes Curry, “if Democrats challenged them on it relentlessly, with facts and fearless logic.” Instead, they allow Republicans to preen and posture as if they actually know what the fuck they are doing (as they do with pretty much everything else). Left unchallenged, Republicans will tickle America’s lizard brain into more knee-jerk, emotionally driven idiocy. Like sending the Marines into Syria.

Steve Coll at New Yorker considers case studies on why a swift military victory in a civil war never seems to yield a long-term solution. Coll points out how deploying the same-old in Syria is a recipe for turning American “liberators” into targets (emphasis mine):

If President Obama ordered the Marines into urgent action, they could be waving flags of liberation in Raqqa by New Year’s. But, after taking the region, killing scores of ISIS commanders as well as Syrian civilians, and flushing surviving fighters and international recruits into the broken, ungoverned cities of Syria and Iraq’s Sunni heartland, then what? Without political coöperation from Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, Turkey, the Al Qaeda ally Al Nusra, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and others, the Marines (and the French or NATO allies that might assist them) would soon become targets for a mind-bogglingly diverse array of opponents.

Syrian rebels overwhelmingly regard Assad’s regime as their main enemy, and for good reason: his forces have killed more Syrians than anyone else has. In the absence of a political agreement with Assad or his removal from office, it is impossible to conceive of a Muslim-majority occupation force that would be able and willing to keep the peace after the Marines departed. Some may argue that it would be worthwhile, nonetheless, to wipe out the Islamic State on the ground and deal with the fallout later. After Paris, such an approach may hold emotional appeal. After Afghanistan and Iraq, however, it is not a responsible course of action.

Then again, whether it is war crimes or financial ones, Team Personal Responsibility has a real knack for avoiding any, especially when it has an itch that needs scratching. Consequences are for losers. And “every human life is precious and has potential” until it belongs to The Other du jour.

In not pushing back, in not holding the bullies accountable for the damage wrought by privileged irresponsibility, Democrats are complicit in it. “Punch the lying bullies in the nose: Trump, Cruz and GOP know-nothings only win when Democrats cower — or provide an echo” reads Salon’s headline for Curry’s critique. Frankly, the Democratic base would respond to that punch at least as strongly as the Republican base would respond to punching ISIS. Lefties have lizard brains too. This one, frankly, hears in that headline the satisfying echo of Captain Kirk dispatching a Klingon officer in Star Trek III:

Kirk: [stomping on Kruge] I have had… enough… of YOU!

[Kruge falls screaming into the lavascape below]

7th inning stretch

by digby

Just cuz: