Month: July 2016

Mass murder machines in the hands of average humans


by digby

I’m having a hard time thinking about anything but the latest violence today.  I was up very late last night writing about it. But it does occur to me that aside  from our usual daily gun carnage in the last few years we’ve had mentally ill people shooting up grade schools and movie theaters, anti-abortion zealots shooting up Planned parenthood clinics, white supremacists shooting up black churches, Muslim extremists shooting up gay nightclubs and now it appears we have had a black militant shooting up police officers.

We’re a culture under stress and our love affair with semi-automatic weapons is making it way too easy for people in the cross-currents to act on their grievances by killing large numbers of people.

The common denominator isn’t the people — they all have different motives. It’s the goddamned guns.

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Some rambling thoughts on the carnage


by digby

I wrote about the horror for Salon this morning:

Yesterday afternoon the nation was once more reeling from news of police officers shooting black men, one in deep south big city Louisiana and one in the upper midwest suburban Minnesota. These two cases are a little bit different from the ones we’ve dealt with in the recent past in that both men were legally armed but from what we could tell were not threatening the police. Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was shot point blank while on the ground in police custody, is an open carry state meaning that anyone is allowed to have a gun on their person in public with no questions asked. Minnesota, is a concealed carry state and the other victim,  Philando Castile, was shot after telling the officer that he was licensed and armed.

And then, horrifyingly, came another mass shooting last night, a horrific sniper assault on Dallas Police Officers as a peaceful protest against the Sterling and Castile shootings was coming to a close. This is what it looked like before the shooting started:

Before Terror Struck, Dallas PD Documented Hours of Peaceful Demonstration https://t.co/yQbghhQDVl pic.twitter.com/T5BHbf0STo

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) July 8, 2016

As I write this one of the suspects has killed himself and police are questioning others. I have no idea what motivated this beyond the obvious desire to kill policemen. All I know is that we’ve had yet another mass shooting, this time culminating in 5 police officers dead, 11 shot in a shoot-out on the streets of Dallas Texas. That familiar sense of disorientation has overtaken me as I contemplate the yet more carnage caused by gun violence in America.

I was watching the CNN coverage last night and they featured a tourist on the phone saying that he’d seen a black guy wandering around the protest carrying a semi-automatic wearing camo gear and they’d informed the police. As he was talking, the police released a photo of this man saying he was a suspect and the tourist identified him as the man he saw. Within a short period of time it was determined through social media and video that he was not involved in the shooting and had actually turned his gun over to the police. The man’s name was Mark Hughes and his brother Corey was one of he organizers of the march.

Hours later the brothers appeared on CBS after Mark Hughes was released and Corey said that he originally brought his brother to the cops because he was afraid that someone was going to shoot first and ask questions later. That was my first thought as well. Open carry is legal in Texas, but a black man is very brave on a good day to do it. He was vilified throughout the nation as a suspected cop-killer but he was luckier than Alton Sterling or Philando Castile or the five policemen and the dozens of others around the country who were shot and killed over the past few days.

Guns are supposed to protect us aren’t they? But this week you had two African American men who believed that they could protect themselves with a gun and it was their guns that got them killed. Another African American man legally carrying an AR-15 at a protest was tagged as a murder suspect and in the febrile atmosphere of that awful scene is very lucky he wasn’t killed.

After Newtown and Paris and every other mass shooting we were told that the answer to these problems is for more people to be armed so they can “take out” the bad guys when they start shooting. After Orlando, Donald Trump even mused on the stump that it would have been “beautiful”:

“If we had people, where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac. And this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting and one of the people in that room happened to have (a gun) and goes boom. You know what, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks.”

Well, in Dallas last night dozens if not hundreds of highly trained good guys with guns were unable to stop madmen from killing four of their own and injuring seven more. And it was anything but beautiful.

African Americans are in mortal fear of being shot by police. They carry guns for protection and they get shot because of it. Police are in fear of being shot as well and our ongoing national shame of racism leads many of them to overreact when they deal with black suspects. Last night police officers were marked for death by killers with semi-automatic rifles. It’s not just that guns are the tools of death, they are also the reason for the carnage. All these guns, all these deaths are making people crazy with fear and stress and paranoia. They’re giving all of us PTSD.

As Amanda Marcotte noted yesterday the NRA had nothing to say about police officers killing black citizens who were legally carrying guns this week. Their minions in the GOP have refused to do anything about the ongoing gun violence after mentally ill people shot up college campuses and movie theaters and elementary schools and night clubs. Thousands of children dying in gun accidents every year doesn’t move them. They cannot even bring themselves to regulate the semi-automatic weapons which are responsible for at least 65 out of 81 mass shootings since 1982. So I’m not going to suggest that a mass shooting of 11 police officers will move them to end the slaughter either. They’ll just say the police need more and better guns. That’s their answer for everything.  And we’ll all adjust and go on until the next one and the one after that. I have no idea what it will take to break this cycle.

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Another bad day in Dallas
by Tom Sullivan

Police are still trying to sort out what happened when snipers opened fire on police during a peaceful protest in Dallas last night. Hundreds of people were in the street protesting the police shootings this week of Alton Sterling (in Baton Rouge, LA) and Philando Castile (in St. Paul, MN) when the shooting began. Police were the targets. Twelve officers were shot and 5 of them died. Two civilians are reported injured. Police say there is no known connection to international terrorist groups. The New York Times reports:

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said that four people armed with rifles were believed to have carried out the attacks. They positioned themselves in triangulated locations near the end of the route the protesters planned to take.

The police had three people in custody and were negotiating in the early-morning hours with a fourth, who was in a garage in downtown Dallas at the El Centro community college.

Latest reports indicate the fourth suspect is dead. There is no other information at this time on their identities.

Early on in the event, police shared a photo of a “person of interest,” black man at the protest carrying an AR-15. It is legal in Texas to do so, but the photo ran across the media and the Internet. Very quickly it became apparent from videos shared on social media that this man had not been a shooter. He was down on the street in the crowd. The gun was not loaded. The situation was.

Shots fired at #blacklivesmattertx March @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/2TqIQgkXVm— DMN Photo (@dallasnewsphoto) July 8, 2016

But in the confusion, he became a “suspect.” As the reporter who later interviewed him observed, he suddenly became the most wanted man in America. Watch:

Man mistakenly identified as person of interest in Dallas shooting speaks out to @CBSDFW: https://t.co/owV2Bw2tpq pic.twitter.com/RnagbjlazP— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 8, 2016

He is very lucky he is not dead. Why people feel the need to carry and display firearms and why lawmakers feel the need to enable (and encourage) that is beyond me. That police tend to treat whites and blacks carrying firearms differently — the origins of the protests last night across the country — remains a problem to be addressed. This could be another long, hot summer.

Sometimes, #Perspective is important. Today, I feel, is one of those times. We are ALL lucky to be alive. #Love pic.twitter.com/foFzSrfZUE— Barry Sloane (@BarrySloane) July 8, 2016

Not an ordinary election

by digby

Jonathan Chait takes a look at some uncomfortable parallels:

Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, by the historian Henry Ashby Turner, describes the political machinations that allowed Hitler to seize the chancellorship of Germany. (I stole the idea to read it from Matthew Yglesias, via Twitter.) In January 1933, the Nazi party’s vote share had begun to decline, and its party was undergoing a serious internal crisis, with dues falling, members drifting off, and other leaders questioning Hitler’s direction. A widely shared belief across the political spectrum at the time held that Hitler would not and could not win the chancellorship, because Germany’s revered conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg, had long vowed to deny such a position to Hitler.

Hindenburg and the German right viewed Hitler in strikingly similar terms to how Republican elites view Trump. Yes, they badly underestimated his fanaticism, which Hitler had downplayed in public. While they failed to anticipate that Hitler would launch a total war and industrial-scale genocide, they did consider him a buffoon. Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German-Nationals, deemed the Nazis “little better than a rabble, with dangerously radical social and economic notions,” writes Turner. Hindenburg considered Hitler qualified to head the postal ministry at best. Hitler, in their eyes, was not a serious man, unfit to govern, a classless buffoon. His appeal, the German elite believed, came from his outsider status, which allowed him to posture against the political system and make extravagant promises to his followers that would never be tested against reality. What’s more, Hitler’s explicit contempt for democracy made even the authoritarian German right nervous about entrusting him with power.

All this is to say that German conservatives did not see Hitler as Hitler — they saw Hitler as Trump. And the reasons they devised to overcome their qualms and accept him as the head of the government would ring familiar to followers of the 2016 campaign. They believed the responsibility of governing would tame Hitler, and that his beliefs were amorphous and could be shaped by advisers once in office. They respected his populist appeal and believed it could serve their own ends. (Hugenberg, writes Turner, “recognized that [the Nazis] were far more successful than his party in mobilizing mass support and hoped to harness their movement to destroy the republic and establish a rightist authoritarian regime.”) Their myopic concern with specifics of their policy agenda overcame their general sense of unease. (One right-wing landowner was “hopeful of relief measures by a Hitler cabinet for the depressed agriculture of the east,” and thus concluded “the army and the forces of conservatism would suffice to prevent a one-party Nazi dictatorship.”) Think of the supply-siders supporting Trump in the hope he can enact major tax cuts, or the social conservatives enthused about his list of potential judges, and you’ll have a picture of the thought process.

There is one more parallel between the events of 1933 and the events of 2016: Most of the complicit parties (the main exception being the scheming Franz von Papen) did not fully apprehend the extent of their actions until it was too late. In Germany, Hitler’s ascent required complicated intrigue, the upshot of which was that conservatives believed they had parliamentary leverage that would restrain Hitler. They placed enormous faith in the power of this leverage, until the final two days, when the rumor of an impending military coup rushed their timetable, and the once-crucial terms of Hitler’s chancellorship became forgotten details, discarded in a mad rush.

The Republican Party’s timetable for ushering Trump into the Oval Office appears at first glance to be much more leisurely. Republicans may feel like they can endorse Trump now, avoiding the consequence of alienating their pro-Trump constituents, secure in the knowledge that he is likely to lose. It probably does not feel to Trump’s queasy endorsers that they are actually helping to make him president. But appearances are deceiving. Betting markets give Trump better than a one-in-four chance to prevail. FiveThirtyEight, a more reliable forecaster, gives him better than a one-in-five chance. That is not negligible. If Trump’s polls improve, the pressure for Republicans to support him will only grow. There is, realistically, little opportunity for Republicans to stop Trump once they have jumped aboard. Through Election Day, a Trump presidency will be a mere hypothetical. Afterward, if it happens, the reality will descend all at once.

There’s more. It’s very good but chilling … As Chait points out, Trump may have wavered on issues like health care or abortion but he’s been remarkably consistent in his virulent nationalism and respect for authoritarian strongmen and police power.

It’s any American’s privilege to obsess over Clinton’s emails and her other faults and flaws. That’s politics. But the media’s tendency to try to even out the alleged crimes and misdeeds between the two candidates is dangerous. Clinton is a mainstream American politician and Trump is … not.

This is not an ordinary election and one hopes that nobody fools themselves into thinking it is.

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by digby

I see this woman on TV a lot. But I have never heard her give this explanation for her crusade to stop Trump:

Gordon Klingenschmitt dedicated two recent episodes of his “Pray In Jesus Name” program to interviewing Kendal Unruh, a longtime Religious Right activist who is now leading a “Free The Delegates” effort aimed at changing the rules at the upcoming Republican National Convention in hopes of preventing Donald Trump from receiving the nomination.  

When Klingenschmitt, a Colorado GOP lawmaker, noted that such a move would likely alienate the millions of voters who supported Trump during the Republican primaries, Unruh asserted that Republicans actually didn’t vote for Trump and that he only won because Democrats crossed over to vote for him as a “Trojan horse” that would destroy the GOP and that she has been raised up by God to stop this from happening. 

Those who voted from Trump, Unruh declared, “are not in the Republican Party. There’s 3.3 million Republicans that voted for Donald Trump, he got 14 million votes; the rest of those were Democrats and independents that came in and flooded open primaries and blanket primaries. The Democrats and independents took advantage of same-day voter laws and they gave us a Trojan horse candidate.” 

Convention delegates are “obligated to be the firewall to tyranny” and resist “mob rule,” she stated, which is why convention rules must be changed in order to deny Trump the nomination before he can ruin the GOP’s “godly, conservative, pro-life, pro-family heritage.” 

“We’re not destroying the party,” she insisted. “We’re actually saving the party.”
“Trust God for the outcome of this,” Unruh declared. “I believe that God put me in this position to be here for such a time as this.”

Well isn’t that special? I wish her Godspeed in her endeavors. But she is obviously as much of a conspiracy nut as Trump is …

*I don’t know if she’s related to anti-abortion zealot Leslee Unruh, but they do seem to be cut from he same cloth.
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Statements of concern by America’s leaders

by digby

President Obama on the latest tragic police shootings:

All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. We’ve seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go out to the families and communities who’ve suffered such a painful loss.

Although I am constrained in commenting on the particular facts of these cases, I am encouraged that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation in Baton Rouge, and I have full confidence in their professionalism and their ability to conduct a thoughtful, thorough, and fair inquiry.

But regardless of the outcome of such investigations, what’s clear is that these fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.

To admit we’ve got a serious problem in no way contradicts our respect and appreciation for the vast majority of police officers who put their lives on the line to protect us every single day. It is to say that, as a nation, we can and must do better to institute the best practices that reduce the appearance or reality of racial bias in law enforcement.

That’s why, two years ago, I set up a Task Force on 21st Century Policing that convened police officers, community leaders, and activists. Together, they came up with detailed recommendations on how to improve community policing. So even as officials continue to look into this week’s tragic shootings, we also need communities to address the underlying fissures that lead to these incidents, and to implement those ideas that can make a difference. That’s how we’ll keep our communities safe.

And that’s how we can start restoring confidence that all people in this great nation are equal before the law.

In the meantime, all Americans should recognize the anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling — feelings that are being expressed in peaceful protests and vigils. Michelle and I share those feelings. Rather than fall into a predictable pattern of division and political posturing, let’s reflect on what we can do better. Let’s come together as a nation, and keep faith with one another, in order to ensure a future where all of our children know that their lives matter.

Hillary Clinton:

“The death of Alton Sterling is a tragedy, and my prayers are with his family, including his five children. From Staten Island to Baltimore, Ferguson to Baton Rouge, too many African American families mourn the loss of a loved one from a police-involved incident. Something is profoundly wrong when so many Americans have reason to believe that our country doesn’t consider them as precious as others because of the color of their skin. “I am glad the Department of Justice has agreed to a full and thorough review of this shooting. Incidents like this one have undermined the trust between police departments and the communities they serve. We need to rebuild that trust. We need to ensure justice is served. That begins with common sense reforms like ending racial profiling, providing better training on de-escalation and implicit bias, and supporting municipalities that refer the investigation and prosecution of police-involved deaths to independent bodies. All over America, there are police officers demonstrating how to protect the public without resorting to unnecessary force. We need to learn from and build on those examples. “Progress is possible if we stand together and never waver in our fight to secure the future that every American deserves.”

Donald Trump:

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Paul Ryan comedian

by digby

This is just typical political theatre BS totally expected from Ryan but it’s the last line that’s hilarious:

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ryan reiterated that he has asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to bar Clinton from receiving classified briefings for the rest of the campaign.

Ryan says “it stands to reason that individuals who are ‘extremely careless’ with classified information should be denied further access to that type of information.”

Ryan added that he was confident that Donald Trump could handle classified information.

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Trump tries to assert his dominance

by digby

After the constitutionalist who has obviously never looked at the constitution visited the House GOP caucus, he met with Senators who he apparently believes are the president’s servants:

Donald Trump’s private meeting Thursday with Senate Republicans – designed to foster greater party unity ahead of the national convention in Cleveland — grew combative as the presumptive presidential nominee admonished three senators who have been critical of his candidacy and predicted they would lose their reelection bids, according to two Republican officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges.

Trump’s most tense exchange was with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been vocal in his concerns about the business mogul’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric and policies on immigration that the senator argues alienate many Latino and other voters in Arizona.

When Flake stood up and introduced himself, Trump told him: “You’ve been very critical of me.”

“Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona – the one who didn’t get captured – and I want to talk to you about statements like that,” Flake responded, according to two Republican officials.

Flake was referencing Trump’s comments last summer about the military service of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. Trump questioned whether McCain was a war hero because he was captured.

Flake told Trump that he wants to be able to support him – “I’m not part of the Never Trump movement,” the senator said – but that he remains uncomfortable backing him, the officials said.

Trump said at the meeting that he has yet to attack Flake hard, but threatened to begin doing so.

Flake’s spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Trump also called out Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who withdrew his endorsement of Trump last month citing the business mogul’s racially-based attacks on a federal judge, and said he did not approve of the senator’s action, said the officials.

Characterizing Kirk as a loser, Trump vowed that he would carry Illinois in the general election even though the state traditionally has been solidly Democratic in presidential contests. Kirk did not attend the meeting with Trump.

Trump also singled out Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who has refused to support Trump and has emerged as perhaps the most vocal advocate for a third-party candidate. Sasse declined to speak with reporters as he left the meeting.

Politico added this little detail:

At one point during the gathering, Trump turned to the Nebraska senator and said, “You must want Hillary,” according to a source in the room. Sasse, who has vowed not to vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton, did not respond, the source said.

That’s some hardcore Putin-style leadership right there. In front of all the other Senators, he said that he’s going to “go after” a US Senator of his own party. And then insulted another one to his face.

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The strict constitutionalist

by digby

Trump in his meeting today with the House GOP caucus:

Another Republican in the meeting who declined to go on the record so he could speak candidly told TPM that Trump was asked pointedly if he would defend Article I of the Constitution.

“Not only will I stand up for Article One,” Trump enthusiastically stated, according to the member in the room. “I’ll stand up for Article Two, Article 12, you name it of the Constitution.”

The Republican member said that Trump’s lack of knowledge about how many articles exist, gave him “a little pause.” (The Constitution has seven articles and 27 amendments.)

“There wasn’t a lot of substance, and I think at some point we got to get to substance in the most significant political position in the world,” the member said.

Blake Farenthold (R-TX) dismissed the flub as little more than a small error.

“He was just listing out numbers,” Farenthold said. “I think he was confusing Articles and Amendments. Remember, this guy doesn’t speak from a TelePrompter. He speaks from the heart.”

Right. The president can’t be expected to know the constitutional mumbo jumbo, especially the Article that confers all legislative powers to the congress. Why should he? He clearly has no intention of following such a ridiculous edict.

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“The way the release is written makes it difficult to determine precisely how much Trump raised and for which committees and during which time period,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California at Irvine School of Law, told TPM. “So, we’ll have to wait for the official FEC report before we know for sure what the money figures actually look like.”

There was also no word on how many of the foreign politicians they illegally solicited came through for them but they are still working hard to get them to donate. This letter went out yesterday to a Scottish MP:

latest attempt from the #Trump campaign to solicit funds from Scottish PM Natalie McGarry! pic.twitter.com/oUyJz9I88a

— Rapunzel (@co_rapunzel4) July 7, 2016

However, he had to hope that anyone who gave money didn’t listen to Hillary Clinton’s speech in Atlantic City yesterday or they might regret their “investment” the same way virtually everyone who has ever done business with him regrets theirs. (I wrote about his Atlantic City debacle for Salon a while back.) Clinton laid out the whole story along with the other exposes that have been done on his failed  projects in Florida and Baja California as well as scams like Trump University. Let’s just say his record is nothing to brag about. 

Marty Rosenberg, one of Trump’s many victims spoke as well:

Over a quarter of a century ago– Over a quarter of a century ago, I was one of the contractors participating in building the Taj Mahal. It was this time that Donald Trump made a promise to me, my family, and to the people of Atlantic City.  If you do a good job– if you do a good job, in a timely manner, you will be paid an agreed upon, agreement. This promise went unfulfilled. Trump’s actions caused great financial burdens to most of us. Some lost their businesses, some went through a bankruptcy, all suffered emotionally. All the while, Mr. Trump went about his extravagant lifestyle, never giving any of us a second thought. I am here today to help ensure that this sort of manipulation of people by Trump will not continue on a national stage.

If his recent FEC Reports are to be believed, he’s running his campaign in similar fashion. The May report showed that just as he always paid himself first in his failed businesses, he is also funneling millions from his campaign back into his own companies and family enterprises. He paid himself 350k or the use of his personal jet and  125k for Trump restaurants. 65k went for golf and 4k to his son’s wine company. His largest single expenditure for staging went to his own resort Mar-a Lago. He also paid for his family’s travel expenses, which seems unnecessary since they are all multi-millionaires.

The report had a number of very odd expenditures including one to an entity called “Draper-Sterling” an obvious reference to the TV show “Madmen.” It was traced to a residence in New Hampshire owned by someone peripherally associated with some political consulting and a group called Patriots for America which was involved with a Missouri Senate race. (You can read about the whole strange story at Think Progress.)

And yesterday CNBC reported that a close look at Trump’s FEC filings show that his campaign has been sloppy at best and fraudulent at worst in its payments to its own staff:

A series of filing anomalies point to a Donald Trump camp that is either unaware of campaign finance law, or is actively funneling donors’ cash to insiders, according to several experts interviewed by CNBC. 

These “red flags,” as one expert deemed them, include a total lack of disclosure on which vendors staffers for the presumptive Republican nominee are paying, an “unusual” six-figure payout to campaign staff for nontaxable expenses and what appeared to be double reimbursements for some employees’ expenses.

If he’s having his staff pad their expense reports and phony up vendor payments he is as low rent and cheap as it gets. If he didn’t know about it then his reputation as a genius businessman who will snap the federal budget into shape is, shall we say, overstated. And it’s entirely possible that it’s downright criminal:

The Trump camp’s handling of so-called contribution refunds also sparked questions. All Trump staffers who logged “in-kind” purchases were both reimbursed for those costs and also appeared to receive a second payment in the form of a campaign contribution refund. 

In addition to representing a second payment, this practice raises questions because contribution refunds are normally for donors who exceed their legally defined limits, not paid staffers, multiple experts told CNBC… 

Importantly, Gross said, this method of payment “has the net effect of giving the appearance that the campaign is receiving more donations than it is even though the cash on hand works out in the final analysis. 

The CNBC report is very thorough, looking at individual line items which show some very dicey entries that certainly appear to be in keeping with his longstanding practice of taking expenses off the top of all his losing enterprises before they crash and burn. Or it may just be that neither Trump or anyone who works for him has the slightest idea what they are doing.

CNBC audited the campaign reports before it had much money. If it’s true that they’ve collected somewhere between 25 and 50 million for the campaign in the last month then the real grift is just about to kick in.  Remember, Trump told Fortune magazine back in 2000, “it’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”  It’s not as if he didn’t warn anyone.