Month: August 2016

Trump turned over a big rock

by digby

… And what’s crawling out from underneath it is pretty scary:

The non-partisan Southern Poverty Law Center sounded the alarm this week about white supremacist groups, on- and offline, citing Trump’s words and actions as signals of support.

The SPLC’s Heidi Beirich, who tracks the rhetoric and actions of hate groups, pointed to the Trump campaign’s pattern of following and retweeting influential white supremacists, giving interviews to explicitly racist media outlets, and repeatedly emphasizing the criminality of people of color and immigrants. She told reporters this treatment “reinforces the core beliefs of the white nationalist movement.”

“For the first time, they feel they have someone running for the highest office saying things they believe and want to see,” she said. “White nationalists desperately fear the demographic changes the country is going through, and they see Trump as their last stand and last best hope for controlling the country.”

Just one example of the creepy creatures now scurrying all over the place:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.) says he has received a torrent of racist emails and phone calls since a hacker leaked contact information for House Democrats.

“When somebody puts your address on the internet, there are people who aren’t as mentally healthy as we hope they should be and they could do something,” he said Thursday, according to McClatchy.

“It was a lot of cowardly comments. These are probably people who wouldn’t have done it sitting in front of me. They may have been thinking it, but they wouldn’t have said it.”
Cleaver said dozens of callers harassed him with profanity and “the N word” starting on Aug. 12.

The former Kansas City, Mo., mayor said some offenders also called him “a baby killer” or insulted his Methodist faith.

Cleaver added other attacks came via email, with one even appearing to originate from a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) representative.

“Whenever I’m talking about how horrible the phone calls were, I have to remind myself that the first phone call was a classy gentleman who was very nice and helpful,” he said, referencing a man from Raytown, Mo., who warned him his information was compromised.

“He said, ‘Look, I need to let you know your phone number has been put on the internet along with your email, along with your address and along with your wife’s name.’ I said, ‘How did that happen?’ He said, ‘Whoever hacked your information put it online.’”

Of course this isn’t entirely new

Cleaver said he is particularly cautious about threats after an attempted firebombing of his office in September 2014.

McClatchy said Eric King was sentenced last June to 10 years in federal prison for breaking a window at Cleaver’s district office and throwing Molotov cocktails inside. No one was occupying the office during the incident.

King calls himself an anti-government anarchist, FWIW.

Thank Drudge for helping to get the Democratic congresspeople’s information out there — but at least some of his GOP readers are decent:

Amid the nastiness, Cleaver said, his faith in humanity has been buoyed by the first caller from Raytown, who gave the congressman a heads-up that his information had been compromised.

“Not only did he call to warn me about what was going on, sent me another text to say, ‘Hang in there,’ and ‘I’m willing to talk to law enforcement’ . . . He was a very nice guy,” Cleaver said.

“Whenever I’m talking about how horrible the phone calls were, I have to remind myself that the first phone call was a classy gentleman who was very nice and helpful,” he said.

That tipster, as it turns out, was Sam Dawson, a 57-year-old Republican who first read about the hack that exposed the congressman’s information on the conservative Drudge Report website.

“I didn’t do it expecting anything out of it, just common courtesy,” said Dawson, a stay-at-home dad of three kids. “People’s politics are politics,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you have to do that kind of thing to people.”

No kidding.

This is ugly but something we should expect when a white nationalist runs for president and wins the nomination of one of the two major American parties.

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by digby

Conway will be forgiven for saying ridiculously dishonest things like this because she’s a hired gun and everyone expects them to lie. But this is one whopper she should never be allowed to forget. George Stephanopoulos confronted her with her own comments when she was working for Ted Cruz’s Super PAC in which she was critical of Trump’s personal insults:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what changed for you?

And do you stand by those comments?

CONWAY: I do. And the reason is I don’t like when people hurl personal insults. That will never change. That’s not my style. I’m a mother of four shall children. And it would be a terrible example for me to feel otherwise —

STEPHANOPOULOS: You think Mr. Trump’s going to change on that?

CONWAY: Well, but he doesn’t hurl personal insults.

Uh huh:

The 250 People, Places and Things Donald
Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List

Since declaring his candidacy for president last June, Donald Trump has used Twitter to lob insults at presidential candidates, journalists, news organizations, nations, a Neil Young song and even a lectern in the Oval Office. We know this because we’ve read, tagged and quoted them all. Below, a directory of sorts, with links to the original tweets. Insults within the last 60 days are highlighted.

I don’t envy her trying to do the impossible which is to make Trump warm and fuzzy for college educated white people. But she is gamely trying, even though it’s making her look like a fool.

Like this, from her interview with David Muir in which he asked who Trump was referring to when he expressed “regrets.”

“Sometimes, in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and believe it or not I regret it,” Trump said. “I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.” 

“He was talking about anyone who feels offended by anything he said,” Conway elaborated today. 

“He took extra time yesterday going over that speech with a pen so that was a decision he made. Those are his words.” 

Conway did not clarify whether Trump would apologize for specific comments or whether he would personally apology to the parents of Capt. Khan. 

“He may. But I certainly hope they heard him,” she said. “I hope America heard him because of all the people, David, who have been saying, ‘Hey, let’s get Trump to pivot, let’s get him to be more presidential.’ That is presidential.”

That is definitely not presidential. The fact that he used his own words to express regret is not believable in the first place, but more importantly the fact that she felt she had to say he used his very own pen on the speech suggests the image of a juvenile. Which he is. His insults prove it.

Real apologies are not sent out to “anyone who might be offended.” They are specific.  And look at the face Trump pulled when he said it:

But she’s got a job to do. And it’s not easy.

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Politics and Reality Radio: Private Prisons Can See the Writing on the Wall; Is Obamacare Unraveling?


by digby

This week, Joshua Holland considers how much fun Donald Trump’s comically dysfunctional campaign would be if only it was certain that he wouldn’t become president.

Then we’re joined by Keith Rouda from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to talk Obamacare. News last week that Aetna was pulling out of the exchanges sent shockwaves through the media. Were the gloom and doom predictions about the Affordable Care Act actually coming true, for once? Well, it turns out that there’s more to the story.

Finally, Christopher Petrella, a lecturer in American cultural studies at Bates college who studies mass incarceration and the private prison industry, joins us to talk about the DOJ’s announcement that it would phase out the use of private prisons, and what that really means, and doesn’t mean, for our carceral culture.

Playlist:
Cream: “Strange Brew”
Johnny Cash: “Folsom Prison Blues”
Jeff Buckley: “Hallelujah”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Podbean.

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Trump rolls up his sleeves for 49 seconds of disaster relief

A creeping, man-made disaster
by Tom Sullivan

Days ago, a remote Inuit village in Alaska voted to relocate:

Residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, voted Wednesday to relocate its ancestral island home to safer ground, escaping eroding shores and rising seas brought on by climate change.

Melting sea ice has strengthened the storms that beat along the island’s shores, causing chunks to drop off into the ocean, even as the permafrost on which the community is built is rapidly disappearing.

We are going to see more of this.

Farther south, flooding in Louisiana is already receding … from the country’s newsrooms and living rooms. A couple days of disaster porn, of people being rescued by boat from flooded homes after an unbranded storm, then it’s back to Donald Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.

Sean Illing last week took the media and the country to task at Salon:

In Louisiana, there’s a gnawing sense that the national media seems wholly uninterested in this disaster. One listens in vain for a mention of the floods amid the breathless coverage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s email testimony. I monitored the news over the weekend and was disturbed by the indifference. The historic floods felt like an afterthought, a throwaway segment sandwiched between Buick commercials.

Illing writes, it is just “a story that doesn’t fit neatly into pre-established media narratives. It’s just regular people living out their Sisyphean nightmares in places no one cares about.” Like Shishmaref. It’s news filler like the “Media Break” segments from Robocop. A day of mourning for a country. We’ll be right back.

One football field of land disappears from Louisiana’s coast every hour, writes Zack Kopplin at Slate, so why care?

If we must blame something for this flood, we should direct our blame at climate change. According to the National Weather Service, there was only a 0.1 percent chance of this flood according to historical models. This storm shouldn’t have happened. Many of the homes that were destroyed weren’t in a flood zone. (Unlike in New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, where the flooding was well-predicted.)

But after Hurricane Katrina, Kopplin sneers, a former Slate editor wrote approvingly of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert’s suggestion that New Orleans be bulldozed:

What that decade-old commentary about bulldozing New Orleans missed is that we weren’t looking for opinions, we were looking for help. But Louisiana is viewed as a backwater, so instead we just got paternalistic think pieces about why we didn’t deserve help. We’re too poor, we’re too corrupt, and our schools were failing. “New Orleans puts the ‘D’ into dysfunctional,” Shafer wrote, suggesting residents stay in Texas.

But because we, as a country, have collectively endangered our future by overusing fossil fuels, that doesn’t mean Louisiana has sacrificed its right to exist and its people should leave. Climate change could sink all of our major coastal cities, but Louisiana is being held to a different standard, because we’ve already been hit with so many disasters. We’ve suffered so much that people are tired of hearing about us. In fact, we’ve suffered so much that people outside of Louisiana assume that we want to leave.

They don’t. But we won’t care until it happens in places we care about. Meanwhile, disaster brings out the predators. Scammers are already taking advantage of others’ misfortune to try to make their own:

Around the corner from Schexnayder, a woman absorbed in salvaging her home said she was approached by a man claiming to be from a popular Baton Rouge church. He had his young daughter with him and said he was helping organize federal assistance.

She asked that CNN not embarrass her, so we’ll just use her first name, Chasin. She’s a fraud investigator so she should have known better when he asked for her FEMA identification number, she said.

She wasn’t in the best state of mind. Her home had just been destroyed by flooding, and the guy had a little girl with him. A kid! She didn’t realize until later it was a scam.

“You’ve got to be a real piece of s***,” Chasin’s husband said.

Right on cue, D.R. Tucker at Political Animal has some choice words for some other predators. Fueling U.S. Forward, a $10 million-a-year effort by the Koch brothers to promote the positive aspects of burning fossil fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles got off the ground at the Red State Gathering 2016 in Denver last week. “While Louisiana drowned.” Tucker writes:

Charles and David Koch built this, this monument to malevolence. We always knew they were ruthless…but to do this while Louisiana drowned as a clear result of fossil-fueled climate change is beyond heartless. This is Trumpian in its treachery.

[…]

The sociopathy of the Kochs shocks the conscience. Looking at a world on fire, they call for the use of more fossil fuels to further increase their profits as they further inflame the planet. If Joseph Welch were alive today, he wouldn’t ask the Kochs if they had any sense of decency; he’d tell them he already knew they had none.

Why didn’t the people in Louisiana and Alaska just move onto their yachts?

Why is Trump ragging on Angela Merkel


by digby

Hillary Clinton; Donald Trump; Angela Merkel (Credit: Reuters/Chris Bergin/Brian Snyder/Stefanie

I thought it was very weird that Trump brought up German chancellor Angela Merkel in his speech this past week. It seems like an odd non-sequitor, at best a dogwhistle to the weird Russian connection. But apparently, it’s connected to white supremacy. Natch.

Amanda Marcotte explains:

Donald Trump has a new obsession: comparing Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. During a Monday speech, Trump denounced the “massive immigration” to Germany under Merkel, for which he blames crime rising “to levels that no one thought would they would ever see.” He followed up this speech with press releases and a hashtag aimed at equating Clinton and Merkel.

The choice is an odd one on its surface because most Americans don’t have an opinion about Merkel, even when they know who she is. But as Alice Ollstein of Think Progress persuasively argued on Wednesday, the meme makes more sense when one considers that white supremacists definitely know who Merkel is, because they hate her:

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” an “anti-White traitor,” and “a patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked, in articles about Merkel, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

It’s yet another example of how Trump is mainstreaming white supremacist sentiment. But by making two women the center of an attack, he is also highlighting the way that antifeminism and white supremacy are tied into each other, since people in alt-right, white supremacist circles like to blame feminism for what they see as the “decline” of the white race.

I have only had a vague sense of this until now. It’s very disturbing:

“A new genre of declinist literature, ranging from anxious to apocalyptic, has appeared to warn of the coming population implosion and the loss of Europe to more fertile, faithful Muslims,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in her 2010 book “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.” She cites Mark Steyn’s“America Alone” and Pat Buchanan’s “The Death of the West” as books that raise the alarm about “Westerners” and their supposedly low birth rates. Both books focus heavily on blaming women for this purported decline.
[…]
Because of the antifeminist angle, this argument has really taken root in antichoice circles, as well.

“The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America’s culture warriors tell anxious Europeans,” Kathryn Joyce wrote in the Nation in 2008, “isn’t ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of ‘antifamily’ permissiveness — contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women’s liberation and careers, ‘selfish’ secularism and gay rights — enabling ‘decadent’ white couples to neglect their reproductive duties.”

There’s more.

This is Alt-Right.  And as hard as it is to believe, they’re worse than what came before.

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Bringing in the big guns

by digby

Trump went to Minnesota for a fundraiser last night:

Michele and Marcus Bachmann are here. She told reporters she’s met privately with Trump and is advising him on foreign policy.

— Patrick Condon (@patricktcondon) August 20, 2016

Perfect. Remember this?

Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Steve King (R-Iowa) were in Egypt this past weekend and took the opportunity to film an unusual 15 minutes long joint statement praising the current government in Egypt.

In the video posted by the Washington Post’s Max Fisher, Bachmann thanks the Egyptian military for overthrowing former President Mohammed Morsi and cracking down against the “great evil” and “common enemy” of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I want to assure the people of Egypt that I, as a member of Congress, will stand strong in support of continuing military support, United States support financially, to stand for the military in Egypt,” Bachmann said in the video. “We know that you have been a partner. You’ve been a partner in the war on terrorism. You’ve acted bravely here on the front lines.”

Gohmert compared the man now running Egypt, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to George Washington and said the “bloodthirsty Muslim Brothers” want to “destabilize things” and seek “that large caliphate.”

The video is largely being panned by the American media. Fisher calls the video a “doozy,” Business Insider’s Brett Logiurato calls the video “bizarre, to say the least,” and the New York Times quotes a political scientists who “called the lawmakers’ statements ‘utterly absurd’ and compared the conference to ‘a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit — unbelievable, ludicrous, almost comic if it wasn’t so painful.'”

The trio’s call for support stand against where the administration seems to be heading. Last week President Barack Obama’s national security team recommended the U.S. suspend aid to Egypt over the ousting of Morsi.

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Trump’s first general election ad at last

by digby

It’s just as awful as you’d expect:

Right Wing Watch points out that one of the citations it uses is sourced to the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant “think tank” founded by notorious white nationalist John Tanton.

Hidden bias

by digby

This is depressing:

Most people in the United States say they accept interracial relationships, but a new study of brain activity shows some hidden bias.

Researchers surveyed students at the University of Nebraska — young people, not those who grew up in a more overtly racist time — and recorded their brain activity while they looked at pictures of hundreds of couples.

In a survey of attitudes about relationships, the students reported little disapproval of interracial couples. But photos of interracial couples triggered activity in a part of the brain that registers disgust.
[…]
Researchers conducted three experiments from 2013 to 2015, studying the views of college students at the University of Nebraska on heterosexual couples in which one person was black and the other white.

“We chose to limit our investigation to black-white interracial romances because previous research indicates that whites show the strongest opposition to black-white interracial couples,” according to the study. “We chose to avoid adding an additional layer of complexity by restricting our investigation to heterosexual couples.”

In the first experiment, 152 students were asked whether they accepted mixed-race relationships. The respondents were about evenly split between the sexes; 87 percent were white, 5 percent were Latino, 3 percent were Asian, 3 percent black and 2 percent were of some other race.

As part of a longer survey, participants were also asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 100 how disgusted they felt about a black man in a romantic relationship with a white woman, or a white man in a relationship with a black woman. Participants were also asked whether they would date, marry or have a child with a black person. Acceptance was high overall for both sets of relationships, but for those who disapproved, “the less accepting you are of interracial relationships, the more disgusted you are by them,” Skinner said.

In the second study, 19 participants had their brain activity monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG). They were shown 200 real engagement and wedding photos: 50 black men with white women, 50 white men with black women and 50 each of same-race black and white couples.

While sitting in front of a computer, the photos of mixed-race and same-race couples were randomly shown to participants. They were told that they had to quickly respond to whether the couple should be “included” or “excluded” from a future study on relationships by pressing a button that corresponded to each answer.

Researchers found that the insula, a part of the brain that registers disgust, was highly active when participants viewed the photos of the interracial couples, but was not highly engaged when viewers saw the images of same-race couples, whether they were white or black.

“There’s a significant difference between the activation of the insula between interracial and same-race couples,” Skinner said. “The way we have been interpreting that is that people are experiencing a heightened level of disgust when they are socially evaluating or viewing interracial couples relative to same-race couples.”

I have no idea if that study was well-designed. But it’s clearly true for certain individuals:

Rowe, 32, walked up to the couple and, without warning, yelled a racial slur and lunged with his knife, police say. The blade grazed the woman and went into the man’s hip, according to a news release from Olympia police.

“The suspect is unknown to the victims and the attack appears to have been unprovoked,” police said in the statement.

After the attack, Rowe ran off as stunned onlookers dialed 911. The 47-year-old male victim, not realizing how badly he was injured, chased Rowe and “tripped him up,” said Lt. Paul Lower, a police department spokesman. Rowe hit his head on the ground and was knocked unconscious.

No one involved had life-threatening injuries, but police said Rowe’s behavior grew stranger as officers tried to wrestle him into the back of a patrol car.

“He tells them, ‘Yeah, I stabbed them. I’m a white supremacist,’” Lower said. “He begins talking about Donald Trump rallies and attacking people at the Black Lives Matter protest.”

According to court documents obtained by the Olympian, Rowe, who was unconscious when police encountered him, had tattoos that read “skinhead,” “white power” and “hooligan.” One tattoo showed the Confederate flag.

Rowe was arrested and booked into the Thurston County Jail on two charges of first-degree assault and possible malicious harassment, which in Washington state is a designation used for hate crimes. The investigation continues.

“This has all the hallmarks of a hate crime,” Deputy Prosecutor Joseph Wheeler said at Rowe’s court hearing Wednesday, according to the Olympian. “This black-and-white couple was simply expressing their love for one another.”

Yeah, these are good times …

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The rain falls on the just and the unjust
by Tom Sullivan

John Martin, 1789–1854, British, The Deluge, 1834. Public domain.

No offense meant to readers in drought-stricken California, but the violence of rainfall lately has noticeably increased on this coast. I have never seen cloudbursts like this outside of hurricanes. Ten minutes later, the sun is out. Maybe it’s just me. Then again, maybe not:

Climate change increases the probability of some types of weather. Recent heavy rains and flooding in the Northeast, Midwest, and Great Plains are consistent with a warming planet, and such events are expected to become more common over time.

As average temperatures in regions across the country have gone up, more rain has fallen during the heaviest downpours. Very heavy precipitation events, defined as the heaviest one percent, now drop 67 percent more precipitation in the Northeast, 31 percent more in the Midwest and 15 percent more in the Great Plains, including the Dakotas, than they did 50 years ago.

This happens because warmer air holds more moisture. This fact is apparent when you see water vapor hanging in the air after turning off a hot shower. When warm air holding moisture meets cooler air, the moisture condenses into tiny droplets that float in the air. If the drops get bigger and become heavy enough, they fall as precipitation.

It’s been an awful summer for violence in Baton Rouge, some of it weather-related, maybe all of it human-related. From Robert Mann of the N.O. Times-Picayune:

The news from Baton Rouge last month was a city immersed in crisis and death, divided and virtually at war with itself over the death of Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old black man killed by Baton Rouge police officers in early July. Twelve days later, another tragedy engulfed the city — the shooting of six police officers, three of whom died.

What a difference a few weeks and 30-plus inches of rain have made. The news is still crisis and death. This time, however, it’s because the city and region were engulfed in deadly floodwaters.

Just what Old Testament injunction has Baton Rouge violated that explains the tragedies that have befallen that city this summer? Has anyone consulted Jerry Falwell Jr.? Or wait, Tony Perkins? He has a home there. What does he think?

Mark Silk savored the irony for the Religion News Service:

Comes the news that the Baton Rouge flooding destroyed Tony Perkins’ home and forced the Family Research Council president and his family to escape by canoe to their RV on higher ground.

Perkins revealed this in a special segment of his radio show a couple of days ago, describing the disaster as “a flood of near biblical proportions.”

There are those who have noted some irony here, since when Hurricane Joaquin threatened Washington last year, Perkins declared the storm to be God’s punishment for the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.

That of course recalled the interpretations of Hurricane Katrina by Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and Yehuda Levin, as well as Robertson and Jerry Falwell’s explanation of 9/11, and so on.

So what is God’s judgment on Baton Rouge? Perkins this time isn’t saying, the Almighty having brought judgment down on both West Baton Rouge Parish and East Baton Rouge Parish. The former, writes Silk, went for Donald Trump in the primary and the latter chose Ted Cruz, as did Perkins. Perkins later gave a speech for Trump at the Republican National Convention, the never-changing Almighty having taken a lesson from Richard Nixon that “flexibility is the first principle of politics.”

Robert Mann wonders if perhaps this isn’t an opportunity for a community’s healing:

Might it be more useful to view this disaster as an opportunity for a reset – a time to turn from anger to understanding, from division to unity, from grievance to mercy? Might our collective anguish prompt us to acknowledge that Baton Rouge – every square mile of it – is populated by good people of sacred worth who deserve our care and respect?

When we resume the fraught debate over race and police-community relations, might we remember that some of those we recently vilified are the same people who were saving us from rooftops and front porches?

Floodwaters are no respecter of persons and lives. Flooding claimed the homes of blacks, whites, Republicans, Democrats, police and protestor. For a time, we were all in the same boat – some of us literally so.

It’s a shame that lesson isn’t as sticky nor as romantic and attractive as the myth of the Randian rugged individualist. Every man for himself is the winner’s creed until the rains set in.