Month: September 2016

Monday’s Debate Is Not An Episode Of ‘America’s Got Presidential Talent


by Spocko

My friend Joel Silberman was on MSNBC talking about what to expect at the debates. He talked about how important it is for the media to not lower the bar for Trump.

This isn’t Dancing With the Stars, or The Voice or America’s Got Presidential Talent. We’re talking about the leader of the free world so let’s ask some real questions and hold them accountable.

Monday’s debate should be a place where both candidates get asked serious questions and are expected to give serious answers. The performance should be judged by how well each answers those questions. But that is so BORING! The mainstream media knows that, so they do everything they can to make the debates more dramatic and exciting. “Live questions from social media! Live audiences to cheer and boo! Gotcha questions!”

Trump won his debates partly because he’s been running for Entertainer in Chief and has delivered. (The last funny Republican was Bob Dole, so the media knows Trump is a rare bird.)

The media played along with Trump as Entertainer in Chief because it’s more fun. Serious policy answers are boring and don’t get ratings.

Trump knows he isn’t going to win a debate based on having good policy answers, he’ll win because he has the best zingers and “In your face, liberals!” one-liner positions on everything. People remember, “Well, there you go again.” from Reagan, which makes sense because as an actor he knew how to deliver a well-timed line. This is Debate Theater not a debate.

My question for Monday is, “Will Trump pay any price for not having deeper answers to serious questions?”

Some people in his camp might think he needs to show knowledge about the issues, they will be ignored. That stuff is for liberal nerds and policy wonks who read blogs and know the names of Supreme Court Justices. His voters just want to hear zingers and see swagger.

Roger Ailes, the un-incarcerated serial sexual harasser, is advising Trump. He’s not going to tell him to bone up on Aleppo. He’ll advise him on how to say the things his Fox audience loves. He’ll remind him, “You don’t need to satisfy Holt and the liberal media, they are already in the tank for Hillary. You need to satisfy your base. Show them you are the alpha and are in control.”

I see where Trump has already suggested inviting Gennifer Flowers to the debate, So now I expect Holt to bring up the Lewinsky affair.  Holt might use the “some people say…” formula because “it’s out there” and will define it as a “character” issue.  If he doesn’t, Trump might bring it up via the Clinton Foundation then wondering, “What role will Bill play if elected? Then ending with a, “Well, if you can’t control your husband… how are you going to be able to control anything?” comment.

This is classic right wing projection attack model. Trump’s the one with problems with his foundation and with relinquishing control of his business, but she will be the one having to defend her’s.

In general the idea is to position Hillary as the Cuckolded President. If questioned about what he means with his “If you can’t control your husband” comment he will say, “I was talking about control of the Clinton FOUNDATION, not about what your husband did while in the White House!”

If Trump brings up the Lewinsky affair, and I think he will, he will do it by defending and forgiving her. He will acknowledge he’s no saint, people have a right to privacy, etc. BUT, his point will be made. This interaction will be seen as a “character” debate about her. Not about the thrice married man who cheated on his wife.  

It will be a big “OMG, HE WENT THERE!”moment. How she responds will be all the media will want to talk about, as well as the audacity of Trump bringing it up.

(I’ve watched a bunch of clips of Trump on The Apprentice. He knew how to control the moment. Now some of that is editing, but his confidence in the setting is what comes across. Even if his reasoning, when you look at it later, is clearly capricious and loopy, he still “wins the interaction” especially if there is no one there to follow up and question him. )

Karl Rove and Karen Hughes believed, and showed time after time with Bush, that “It’s better to look and sound strong than to actually BE strong.” When they didn’t want to talk about a plan, they classified it. When it didn’t work, they changed what the goals were. Details are for underlings. It’s about the look and the attitude. You want policies and positions? Sure, if they can fit on a tweet. That, Trump can do.

Which Media will show up?

When Tamron Hall asked what to expect from Trump, Joel responded. “That’s the wild card, isn’t it? Which Donald shows up?” That will depend on which Media shows up. Will it be the media that don’t feel it’s their job to point out lies and errors, as Chris Wallace of Fox News said? Or will it be the media that understands the winners’ policies will mean life or death to millions? And when the Media gets their answers will they accept them without follow up or demand more?

In the distant past, the metric for success by the journalist moderator were good questions that let people see the knowledge, competence and character of the candidates so voters can decide. I think the last time we saw that was when the League of Women Voters were in charge. If we have a moderator who sees the job like that, then Hillary will nail the debate with knowledge and competence.

If that is how Holt approaches the debate, Trump will try to move to be light and funny. He’ll kick the policy details down the road. If Holt then doesn’t ask for more detail or accepts vagaries, Trump wins because Holt has let Trump set the rules.

Hillary understands Debate Theater, she knows how to play the zinger game. Zingers actually can be very powerful. I hope someone is writing some new ones for her. She’s come up with a few good ones in the past. “A man who can be baited by a tweet” and “Delete your account.”

Here’s the deal, we need the media that shows up to hold each candidate to the same, “Millions of lives are in the balance” standard. Because that is the reality. If they don’t, and let him control the moment and the depth of the debate, Trump will have a real shot at winning the debate, and perhaps the election–and that’s not entertaining at all.

Cross posted to Crooks and Liars and Spocko’s Brain

Nothing more to say

by digby

As a white person, would you want to be treated the same as blacks?https://t.co/fZvHP6fNfm by @OccupyDemocrats pic.twitter.com/RrNvxDtlkQ

— KHARY PENEBAKER (@kharyp) August 22, 2016

There is Only One Presidential Candidate Part Five 

by tristero

The NY Times endorsed Clinton but actually they’re heavily promoting Trump for president. How heavily? Literally by a 2:1 margin.

Put another way, the Times believes that what Trump says and does is twice as important as what his closest rival says and does.

Think I’m kidding? If you go now (now being September 24, 2016 at 2:18 EST) to the NY Times Web site and do a word search, you will come up with

Trump: 16 mentions
Clinton: 8 mentions

2 Pictures of Trump
1 picture of Clinton

It’s no wonder he’s pulled even.

Yes, it was torture, Part XXIV


by digby

This video of a petrified 15 year old girl being pepper sprayed in the back of a police car has been making the rounds. It’s a complicated story. The girl hit a car with her bicycle. The cops showed and tried to talk to her, she got scared and tried to ride away and when they stopped and detained her she got hysterical and non-compliant. The cops handcuffed her and put her to the ground, finally decided to take her to the station and wrestled her in the back of their cruiser. She was screaming and crying and as they were trying to close the door on the car as she writhed in the back, one of the officers who had arrived late to the scene put his hand through the window and said if she didn’t “get in the car” she was going to get sprayed. And then he sprayed her with pepper spray right in the face. While she was handcuffed and could not wipe her eyes.

They had her in the car. She was not a danger to anyone. She was emotionally overwrought and needed to be calmed and soothed not further agitated. Indeed, she might have even been injured for all they knew.

Pepper spraying her was a punitive act of torture.

And the police department says it was all good police work.

This episode reminds me of this post from long ago which continues to haunt me whenever I see pepper spray being used up-close by police:

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Yes of course pepper spray is a torture device

by digby

The hideous pepper spraying of college students at UC Davis yesterday reminds me of a similar case in the 90s, which I’ve written about several times before.

In 1997, environmentalists were staging a sit-in against the cutting of old forest in Humboldt county. The police sprayed pepper spray directly into the protesters eyes in similar fashion to what happened in UC yesterday and then used liquified pepper spray and applied it directly to the protesters eyes with q-tips. I’m not kidding. There’s video:

I was writing about the use of tasers when I wrote this piece back in 2009:

Why is it that the taser videos always show a bunch of cops sauntering around, three or four of them bent over a prone person in handcuffs, blithely administering the taser as if they are merely wiping a speck of dust off the suspects shirt? I think that’s the part I find so chilling — it’s so methodical, so cold, so completely inhuman — that it seems like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel featuring robots or aliens.

I’ll never forget the horror of seeing the video of those environmental protesters having their eyes calmly swabbed with Q tips soaked in liquid pepper spray, by the Humboldt County sheriffs dept. In searching for the video I came across this San Francisco Examiner editorial from 1997, that could be written today about tasers:

Justifying Torture

Law enforcement arguments in a federal lawsuit are malarkey – pepper spray used senselessly hurts cops as much as protesters

San Francisco Examiner
Monday, Nov. 17, 1997 Page A 18

It’s almost farcical for law enforcement officials to continue defending pepper spray as a weapon to get protesters to follow orders. A videotape of officers applying pepper spray in liquid form to demonstrators’ eyes shows the technique to be a form of torture.

Yet, attorneys for the Humboldt County Sheriff and the Eureka Police Department argue in federal court that this use of pepper spray is legitimate and unobjectionable. In court papers filed in a protesters’ suit against the cops, police training expert Joseph J. Callahan Jr. says, implausibly, that the videotape could be used as a training film “illustrating modern police practices delivered in a calm, deliberate manner.” (Remind us not to volunteer as guinea pigs for Mr. Callahan.)

The videotape was shot by Humboldt sheriff’s deputies at an Oct. 16 demonstration, against logging in the Headwaters Forest, that took place in the Eureka office of Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Windsor. Four women who had chained themselves together with heavy metal “black bears” got liquid pepper spray rubbed into their eyes with cotton swabs, and one woman who refused even then to move had the pepper mist sprayed into her face.

This hurts, as the videotaped reactions make clear. But it broke up the demonstration pronto, and that’s what counted for the law enforcers.

“At stake,” attorneys for the cops argue, “is whether professionally trained police officers are to be deprived of the use of pepper spray, a substance carried by millions of private citizens in this country.”

But this is really not the issue. Most people don’t object to police using pepper spray the way it’s designed to be used: To subdue a suspect who threatens officers or threatens to flee. Neither occurred in the case of the Eureka protesters.

Police shouldn’t use pepper spray, or any other weapon, to dish out punishment to suspects. Just because cops are in a hurry doesn’t make it OK for them to take shortcuts, or inflict pain to get things done.

The argument doesn’t wash that no lasting damage was done by the pepper spray. By the same logic, police could use branding irons, sharp knives or psychological abuse on recalcitrant protesters as long as “no lasting damage was done.”

Other police legal arguments are similarly shallow. An attorney for the cops said the use of heavy metal sleeves linked with chains that made protesters virtually immovable amounted to “active resistance,” justifying the use of pepper spray.

In the past, police used metal grinders to cut through the heavy metal in order to oust demonstrators. That takes longer and is inconvenient, but it doesn’t violate anyone’s civil rights or threaten their physical well-being.

No one wants to live in a society where police are free to do whatever they wish in order to punish suspected law breakers. Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Constitution. And anyway, punishment is up to the courts to determine and the penal system to administer.

What cops risk through indiscriminate use of pepper spray, and its indiscriminate defense in court, is losing it altogether. If police are too dense to distinguish between legitimate use and torture, the Legislature should eliminate any confusion and outlaw pepper spray, period.

That holds true for all weapons that can be used for torture.

It took three tries and eight years, but the protesters finally won their case against the police in federal court. They were awarded a dollar.

An article called “Pepper Spray, Pain and Justice” from the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in northern California on the use of pepper stray as a torture device gives all the details of this famous case.

It tells the harrowing story that you see in that video up top, including the chilling statement by the police after they were done pepper spraying one of the girls directly in the face: “We’re not torturing you anymore.” 

It asks the question:

Are these valid tactics for the DA’s office to use? May the Sheriff and the DA single out forest activists for “special treatment” when they are arrested and charged? The argument for this would be that the protests are costly to the county, and in an effort to contain those costs by reducing the number of protesters, or to prevent nonviolent civil disobedience which is expensive to the government, the government may use its discretionary powers to make the experience these activists have with the criminal justice system as unpleasant and costly as possible. The use of pepper spray to torment activists who are nonviolently sitting-in can be seen as the latest and most extreme step in this campaign.

The difficulty with this approach is that it puts the Sheriff and the DA into the position of the judge. It metes out punishment — pain, days in jail, costly trips to court, disruption of normal life — without the bother of proving guilt. Did the Queen in Alice in Wonderland say, “First the sentence, then the trial”? Even children can see that this is backwards.

Oh that wacky Donald

by digby

Here’s yet another example of Trump basically saying whatever comes into his head and getting away with it. It’s a powerful tool. He can contradict himself, make no sense, be totally uninformed and pathologically mendacious and at least 40% of the country thinks he’s terrific because “he tells it like it is” and a fair number of other people think he’s more honest than his opponent.

Donald J. Trump on Thursday traveled to Pittsburgh, a city once synonymous with the rich coal seam that runs beneath it and now the capital of natural gas fracking, to promise the impossible: a boom for both coal and gas.

Mr. Trump’s energy promises to those attending a corporate conference contained a fundamentally incompatible concept, as expanding the exploration of natural gas is the surest way to hurt coal production, and vice versa. Since the two fuels compete directly for the same market — the power plants that light American homes — it is effectively impossible to increase production of one without decreasing the other.

But ever the salesman, Mr. Trump gave it a go and promised to restore the region’s old coal economy and pump up its booming new gas economy.

“The shale energy revolution will unleash massive wealth for America,” he told an audience of chief executives from the energy industry. “And we will end the war on coal and the war on miners.”

It is not the first time Mr. Trump has tailored his policies to be all things to all audiences. Last week, he told auditors tallying the cost of his tax plan that he had dropped a $1 trillion tax cut for small businesses while he told the small business lobby he had not. He has promised a foreign policy more focused on American interests than on global entanglements as he promises to widen the war on the Islamic State and take oil from Iraq. His immigration policies have swung wildly depending on his audience.

Energy experts said Mr. Trump’s pledges on gas and coal pandered to his audience while showing a lack of basic knowledge about energy markets.

“There is a fundamental inconsistency between Trump’s promise to ‘bring the coal industry back 100 percent,’ as he says, and any promises to use government policy to grow the market for natural gas,” said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard.

“The primary cause of the tremendous fall in coal employment is low natural gas prices, due to increased supplies of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing,” Professor Stavins said. “If the Trump administration wanted to help coal, it could ban fracking. But he can’t have it both ways.”

Sure he can. He’s a magic man.

Something to haunt your nightmares

by digby

Time Magazine reports:

As recently as a couple of years ago, when Max Geishüttner was in his second year of law school in the Austrian city of Linz, he tended to avoid talking about his support for the country’s Freedom Party. It wasn’t exactly taboo, but a lot of Austrians still associated the party with racism, even neo-Nazism. Its first two leaders, from 1956 to 1978, were former SS officers, and their successors in the years that followed were implicated in a series of scandals over anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. In the homeland of Adolf Hitler, who also went to school in Linz, such a reputation seemed an impossible obstacle to popular acceptance in a Europe that was supposed to have left such prejudices behind.

“So you would feel, like, a bad conscience if you say, ‘I vote for the FPO,’” Geishüttner told me at one of the party’s campaign rallies in mid-September, using the Freedom Party’s German abbreviation. But 2016 is different. Thanks to a broader shift to the right in European politics, the FPO has become the most popular party in Austria, with its support growing fastest among voters younger than 30. Its presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, is well positioned to win a runoff election in December, which would make Austria the first country in Western Europe to elect a far-right head of state since the fall of Nazi Germany. “Now it’s normal,” said Geishüttner.

The Freedom Party’s rise is not an anomaly. Across the once placid political landscape of Western Europe, right-wing upstarts have created what Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, recently termed “galloping populism.” He was referring to movements like the Sweden Democrats, the National Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and other voices on the far right calling for their once open countries to close up and turn inward. But the insurgency is not limited to Europe. All the rising rightist parties are aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in what they encourage voters to fear: migrants taking your jobs, Muslims threatening your culture and security, political correctness threatening your ability to speak your mind and, above all, entrenched elites selling you out in the service of the wealthy and well-connected.

In the case of Austria, the man responsible for harnessing this formula is Heinz-Christian Strache, a fast-talking, telegenic former dental technician who took over as FPO chairman in 2005. Back then, the party’s approval ratings were in the single digits, weighed down by claims of anti-Semitism that had dogged its upper ranks for years. But Strache changed the party’s image. Support for the state of Israel became part of its platform, and its new leaders renounced the aversion that their predecessors had expressed toward Jews. Instead, Strache focused his party’s hostility on a different minority group: Muslims.

“Political Islam,” he told TIME in an interview in his office in Vienna, “is the fascism of today, and that is what we have to fight.” Such claims would have once been met with outrage in Europe, but no longer. Amid the political backlash to the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, when more than a million asylum seekers from around the Muslim world came streaming into the E.U., a patchwork of populist movements have begun to call for Europeans to shut their borders to Muslim migrants, close Islamic schools and ban Muslim women from covering their hair or face in public. And they’re winning.

We have one of these too. And the US is the world’s only superpower.

There is Only One Candidate Part Four 

by tristero

Yesterday, a fairly typical day at Huffington Post, Trump received much more than twice as many headlines as Clinton. And there were more than 4 times as many pictures of Trump as there were of Clinton.

This kind of gross skewing of coverage is repeated throughout the media. You think this might have something to do with Trump’s unnervingly high poll numbers?


You think????

*****

Scroll on Huffington Post September 23, 2016 6:13 PM EST.

The major headline is “Charlotte Horror.” What follows are the headlines that mention US presidents and candidates for 7 page downs on my monitor. Here is a summary:

Mentions of Trump: 16 (including the name of his son 1x)
Pictures of Trump: 9 (with 5 additional pictures of Trump in the side bars)

Mentions of Clinton: 6
Pictures of Clinton: 2 (with 1 additional picture of Clinton in the side bar)

Mentions of Obama: 2
Pictures of Obama: 1 (with 1 additional picture of Obama in the side bar)

****

Why Hillary Is More Than Ready To Take On Trump At The Debate (with pics of both)
Trump Team Builds ‘Psychological Profile’ Of Clinton
Hillary Leads Nationally, Struggles In Some Battleground States

Fox News Gives Trump A Pass On Birther Crusade It Helped Fuel (with picture of Trump)
Obama’s Long, Frustrating And Fruitless Campaign To Kill Birtherism

CRUZ CAVES! Endorses Trump After RNC Snub (with picture of Trump)

Obama Sets Up Congress Override Vote With Veto Of 9/11 Lawsuit Bill (with picture of Obama)

Trump Hotels Covered Up A Massive Credit Card Theft. Then They Let It Happen Again. (with picture of Trump)
MORE: Trump Repeatedly Sued For Disability Violations

Glenn Beck Is Not Taking Ted Cruz’s Trump Endorsement Well

Hillary Goes After Misogynist Trump (with picture of Trump)
Clinton’s Formula For Devastating Ads Against Donald

The Explosive And Twisted History Of The Dakota Access Pipeline
Feud Exposes Rift In Organized Labor

Most Voters Don’t Think Trump Respects Ordinary Americans (with picture of Trump)

U.S. Intel Probes Ties Between Trump Adviser And Kremlin

It’s Time To Play The ‘Debate Expectations’ Game! (with picture of Trump)
What Can Clinton Do About The Inevitable Debate Question About Her Emails?

After Backing Republicans For Almost A Century, Cincinnati Enquirer Endorses Hillary (with picture of Clinton)

Elite ‘Bundlers’ Raise More Than $113 Million For Clinton

As We Honor The Sacrifices Of Gold Star Families, Remember That Trump Insulted One (with picture of Trump)

Trump Expands His Supreme Court Wish List, Because Nothing Matters (with picture of Trump)

Eric Trump Laughably Claims His Dad Built Business From ‘Just About Nothing’

Patagonia’s Ex-CEO Moves To Create Argentina’s Largest National Park

Omarosa: ‘Every Critic, Every Detractor, Will Have To Bow Down To President Trump’

Trump Campaign Replaces One Racist County Chair With Another

They still believe nothing can be done
by Tom Sullivan

On Saturday morning there is usually time for a thoughtful (I hope) run back through the week’s news. But this morning I cannot get a story published this morning out of my mind.

I have long admired the work David Waldman (@KagroX) has done on Twitter in chronicling the sickening, daily litany of accidental shootings (#gunFAIL) in this country. I don’t know how he can stand it. Plus, we’ve seen this week two more shootings of African-American men by police with itchy trigger fingers. What we rarely get is the backstory of victims of the daily carnage of accidental or intentional gun violence in this country.

On Saturday 23 November 2013, ten children across America, all boys, died from gunshots. In an extract at the Guardian from the soon-published “Another Day In The Death Of America,” Gary Younge tells the stories of the shooting deaths of two young boys on that day. He picked the day at random.

Seen in the context of the ordinariness of their lives, their stories are heartbreaking. Younge spent two years piecing their stories together from interviews with their families.

Jaiden Dixon, 9, was getting ready to leave for school with his mother Nicole and his older brother when the doorbell rang. He opened it, thinking it was one of the girls down the street who might need a lift:

Jaiden opened the door gingerly, hiding behind it, poised to jump out and shout, “Boo!” when one of the girls showed her face. But nobody stepped forward. Time was suspended as the minor commotion of an unexpected visitor failed to materialise. Nicole craned her neck into the cleft of silence to find out who it was. She looked to Jarid; Jarid shrugged.

Slowly, curiously, Jaiden walked around the door. That’s when Nicole heard the “pop”. Her first thought was, “Why are these girls popping a balloon? What are they trying to do, scare me to death?” But then she saw Jaiden’s head snap back, first once, then twice, before he hit the floor. “It was just real quiet. It was like everything stopped. And I remember staring at Jarid.” She knew what had happened. It was Danny.

A former boyfriend and Jaiden’s father, a man with a violent temper and an actual physical list he’d written of people he wanted to kill. He’d come for Nicole, but shot the first person he saw in the doorway before speeding away. He left his son in a pool of blood with a bullet through his skull. Danny Thornton drove 20 minutes away to the workplace of another ex-girlfriend he had not seen in 12 years. He shot her too (she survived) before committing suicide by cop in a Walmart parking lot.

Tyler Dunn, 11, lived in tiny Marlette, population 1,879, in rural Michigan an hour northeast of Flint. He was staying over on Friday night at the house of a friend, “Brandon.” Brandon’s father Jerry was a truck driver who sometimes took the boys hunting or sometimes take them along on his day-long delivery runs. But this day they decided not to go, and Jerry left them at the house. That evening before Jerry got home, Brandon called 911:

An officer went inside, where he found a lever-action rifle on the kitchen floor and Tyler on the dining-room floor, in a Mountain Dew T-shirt and sweatpants, with a large pool of blood surrounding his head. There was a huge wound on the left side of his head. The policeman found no pulse, called dispatch, and told them Tyler was dead. As he left, he saw a shotgun lying on the living room couch and four holes in the dining-room window.

Nobody but Brandon will ever know for sure what happened that night, Sheriff Biniecki says. Brandon claims they were playing Xbox when he got a rifle out of Jerry’s closet to show Tyler. He asked Tyler to hold it while he went to get his milkshake from the bedroom. He came back and took the rifle from Tyler, who passed it to him butt first, the muzzle pointing in Tyler’s direction. Brandon was resting it against the wall when the gun got caught on his pocket and went off.

The house contained a small arsenal. Both Brandon and his father faced charges, Brandon in juvenile court.

The effects on both families that lost children were devastating.

Younge writes:

This is not a story about gun control. It is a story made possible by the absence of gun control. Americans are no more violent than anybody else. What makes their society more deadly is the widespread availability of firearms. To defend this by way of the second amendment – the right to bear arms – has about the same relevance as seeking to understand the roots of modern terrorism through readings of the Qur’an. To base an argument on an ancient text is effectively to abdicate your responsibility to understand the present. Adopted in 1791, the second amendment states: “A well–regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” These 27 words have been elevated to the level of scripture, inscribed on a blood-soaked pedestal thwarting all debate, more than 200 years after its passing.

None of the family members I spoke to raised the second amendment. Almost all believed guns were too readily available; none believed there was anything that could be done. But when I told them of other families who had lost children that day, they seemed shocked. It was as though they had lost a loved one in a war, unaware that the same war was simultaneously claiming other lives – indeed, unaware that a war was taking place. As though it were happening only to them, when in fact it was happening to America. Every day.

From Newark to San Jose, eight other children (older teens) died that day: killed by a stray bullet, in a drive-by shooting, in a case of mistaken identity, by accident by a friend or in gang violence.

I still find it hard to believe that, days after Terence Crutcher died at the hands of police in Tulsa, Keith Scott would get out of his vehicle – while surrounded by Charlotte police – with a gun in his hand. His wife insists he did not have one. And the casual way it appears police tossed “something” onto the pavement at Scott’s feet suggests the something seen in blurry images was not a handgun. But in a country awash with them, it’s not surprising police “see” guns everywhere. Of course, there’s the 2nd Amendment, so nothing can be done about that.

Friday night soother

by digby

Here’s the conservative movement’s answer to Donald Trump’s abdication of every tenet of freedom and liberty they’ve espoused for the last half century. This one’s by Richard Viguerie. And that picture above is the cover of a new book they’re pimping to keep the coffers full:

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”  Samuel Johnson
The 2016 Presidential Election is now about six weeks away – a bit more than a fortnight – but close enough that it should concentrate the mind of every conservative and right-of-center voter in America on what the effects of a Hillary Clinton presidency would be on their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens.  

Accordingly, this booklet isn’t about why conservatives should support Donald Trump, or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or any other candidate running for President.  

Instead, it is a cannonball through the doors of the Ivory Towers of those “conservatives” who continue to obdurately claim that a Hillary Clinton presidency might not be that bad, that the country can recover after four or eight years, and that her policies won’t be aimed at marginalizing, if not outlawing, the conservative worldview.
To outline and explain these dangers I asked a group of conservative leaders to share with me their assessment of what a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean to those Americans who hold traditional Judeo-Christian values and who believe in American exceptionalism.
Most of these leaders had not backed Donald Trump during the Republican Primaries, but the response was immediate and overwhelming – far beyond the expected pro forma election year support for the Republican candidate for president.   

In fact, each of these respected conservative leaders saw Hillary Clinton not as merely a wrongheaded political opponent, but as a genuine threat to the future of the conservative movement and to the domestic tranquility of this great country.  

The dangers that these leaders saw in a Hillary Clinton presidency represent not obscure Capitol Hill policy differences, but dangers to the peaceful lives of ordinary Americans.  

What they told me was that Americans who believe in the right-to-life; Americans who believe that marriage between one man and one woman is Biblically ordained; Americans who own guns; Americans who believe in the rule of law and protecting our borders are all at risk. Perhaps most at risk from a Clinton presidency are those Americans who believe that the Constitution is the law that governs and restrains government.  

The one voice that is not represented, and from whom I expected to receive a response was my longtime friend, the First Lady of the Conservative Movement Phyllis Schlafly. Not only was Phyllis Schlafly the first major conservative leader to endorse Donald Trump, she was also conservativism’s most effective opponent of the radical Leftist Feminism to which Hillary Clinton subscribes and wishes to impose upon America.  

What’s more, the Trump campaign’s populist – conservative coalition of outsiders seemed to be the very embodiment of her 1964 classic A Choice Not An Echo, committed as they are to breaking the power of the kingmakers, as Phyllis called the Wall Street – Washington – Silicon Valley Axis.  

Unfortunately, before she could submit her response, Phyllis Schlafly passed away and it is to her and her lifelong struggle against the establishment kingmakers and the radical Left that this booklet is dedicated. 

Remember, they like to lose. It makes it easier to fund raise.

.