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Month: June 2017

Shooting through the fence

Published by digby on June 20, 2017

Shooting through the fence

by digby

Apparently, Americans are allowed to shoot through the border fence and kill people on the Mexico side. Or, at least, we think we are.


This story is just awful. We’ll have to see if the shooter is held liable for what he did:

A 16-year-old Mexican teenager killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent appeared to be on the ground as the agent fired 13 of the 16 shots through the border fence in Nogales, a partial video of the 2012 killing showed Monday.

Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguezwas lying facedown on the ground and did not appear to be moving as Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz fired two of the three volleys that hit Elena Rodriguez in the upper back, upper arms and head, a video reconstruction by federal prosecutors showed.

The portions of the video, along with the video reconstruction, were shown for the first time Monday in a U.S. District Court hearing in Tucson. Swartz has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder in the teen’s death.

Swartz’s trial is scheduled to begin in October. Defense attorneys have asked the judge not to permit the video to be shown at trial, arguing the video evidence is unreliable. District Judge Raner C. Collins has not yet ruled.

Araceli Rodríguez, mother of Jose Antonio Elena-Rodriguez, who was shot to death by the Border Patrol in 2012, marches along the border fence in Nogales with family, friends and human-rights groups protesting the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policies.
Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, died after being shot multiple times by one or more U.S. Border Patrol agents in Nogales. Sonora state police say they found Elena Rodriguez’s body “with various gunshot wounds on different parts of the body.” The body was found four blocks from the border crossing in downtown Nogales, at a spot where there is a roughly 20-foot drop from the base of the fence to the street below.

The video in question shows Swartz fired 16 times through the fence in three bursts:

First, he went to the fence and fired three times from the U.S. side to the Mexican side, where Elena Rodriguez was.

Swartz then moved west along the fence and fired 10 shots through the slats in the fence.

The agent reloaded and then fired three more times into Mexico.

It was during the second and third volleys that Elena Rodriguez appeared to be lying on the ground next to a building, barely moving, according to the video shown in court.

A reconstruction of the shooting by expert witness James Tavernetti showed that he believed Elena Rodriguez could have been shot once in the back while standing up, but the remainder of the shots hit him in the head, back and arms while he was still on the ground.

Tavernetti’s video offered several potential scenarios of how Elena Rodriguez was stuck by the 10 bullets, but said the most plausible was that almost all of the bullets hit him while he was lying facedown on the ground.

Prosecutors also showed graphic photos of a deceased Elena Rodriguez taken during his autopsy.

The video viewed Monday was shot from two border cameras operated by the Border Patrol. One was was mounted on a pole near the scene of the shooting, just west of the primary port of entry in Nogales. The other was mounted about 2,500 feet away and east of the port of entry.

The video shown in court melded images from both cameras and showed that two individuals were climbing back into Mexico from theU.S. and got stuck for a period at the top of the fence. Later, two individuals — perhaps the same two people — are seen making six throwing motions, like they were throwing rocks. Seven rocks were found on the U.S. side, the video reconstruction showed.

In the very grainy and dark video, which was shot at night, Elena Rodriguez can be seen walking up to the two individuals on Calle Internacional from a distance away before Swartz starts shooting from the American side.

It is unclear exactly how close Elena Rodriguez got to the individuals throwing the rocks before shots were fired. The other two individuals ran behind the closest building, a doctor’s office, while Elena Rodriguez was hit and went down.

Elena Rodriguez’s mother, Araceli Rodriguez, held her head down for much of the hearing, either looking at the floor or holding her head in her lap as prosecutors showed detailed three-dimensional images of the crime scene. She left the courtroom with other family members as the video and pictures were shown.

More on this case here:

2 years later, teen’s mom still waiting for answers
Experts: Pressure led to murder charges
Border Patrol agent pleads not guilty
Trial for border agent in shooting death delayed
Border Patrol rules 4 shootings justified
Agent: ‘I shot and there’s someone dead in Mexico’
7 times rock-throwing ended in deadly force by border agents
Defense attorney: U.S. doesn’t have right to try agent
Supreme Court vacancy ripples through cross-border shooting case

Banana Republic special

Published by digby on June 20, 2017

Banana Republic special

by digby

I’m not talking about 20% off on t-shirts. I’m talking about this embarrassing, creepy, oligarchic BS:

China has invited President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law to visit later this year, according to people familiar with the matter, in the latest sign of the first family’s growing influence over foreign affairs.

Details of the possible trip by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both of whom have official jobs in the White House, were still under discussion, according to a U.S. official and a Chinese official who asked not to be identified. The visit may also help prepare for a trip by the president himself, said the Chinese official, who asked not be identified disclosing plans that haven’t been announced.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump hosted the U.S.’s newly sworn-in ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, for an introductory dinner Sunday at the Trump Hotel in Washington, according to the U.S. official, who asked not to be identified confirming a meeting that hasn’t been made public. The former Iowa governor, who has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since the 1980s, is expected to depart Friday and arrive in China next week after meetings in Honolulu.

The discussions highlight Trump’s reliance on the couple to manage some of the U.S.’s thorniest issues. Neither Ivanka Trump, 35, who has been an executive in her father’s company and started her own fashion line, or Kushner, a 36-year-old property tycoon, has any prior government experience. Kushner will to travel to the Middle East this week to push for a Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He also visited Iraq in April.

It’s mind-boggling that we’re putting up with this. These two people are totally unqualified to do anything in government much less play this important role. It’s an outrage.

To think people were freaking out that Chelsea Clinton hadn’t promised to enter a cloister and never show her face while her mother served in the White House. There were demands from all sides that she resign from the board of the Clinton Foundation and any other charitable work and go back to school to become a pediatrician or a kindergarten teacher in order to ensure there was no conflict of interest. You can be sure that unless she completely withdrew from all public appearances, including going out to dinner or taking a vacation to a foreign land, we would have had multiple investigations into the outrageous nepotistic corruption on display.

But hey, par for the course. Republican presidents are now allowed to hire family to work in the White House and serve as high ranking government officials in foreign affairs while keeping their private businesses a secret. It’s all good.

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Mr Popular redux

Published by digby on June 20, 2017

Mr Popular redux

by digby

New CBS poll:

President Trump’s job approval rating has dipped in recent weeks, pushed down by negative reaction to his handling of the Russia investigations, and he’s seen some slippage among Republicans as well. A third of Americans say his approach to the issue has made their opinion of him worse, and his handling of that matter gets lower marks than any of his others, like the economy or terrorism, for which he rates higher.

Americans of all stripes do seem inclined to want to get to the bottom of things: most believe that the Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation will be impartial, and that the president should not do anything to try to stop it — a view that also runs across partisan lines.

But divisions remain not only over what happened in the Russia matter, but whether it is serious or not. Most who approve of the President say it is not serious. Most Republicans feel the President is being criticized more than his predecessors and for some of them, that just makes them back the President even more.

Of the issues on which Americans evaluated President Trump for this poll, they give the president his most negative marks on his handling of the Russia matter — just 28 percent approve, while 63 percent disapprove. A third say the president’s approach to this issue has made them think worse of him.

Republicans approve of how Mr. Trump is handling the Russia issue, but in far lower numbers (at 57 percent) than their support for the job he’s doing on the issues of the economy (80 percent) and terrorism (77 percent).

Even as some in their ranks disapprove of how the President is handling the investigation, most Republicans don’t think the issue is serious. Just one in five Republicans thinks it is a critical security matter, and more than half call the investigations a political distraction that should be put aside. Even among Republicans who think it at least somewhat likely the Trump campaign had improper communications with Russia, just a third view the issue as critical to national security.

I would just like to invite you to imagine what Republicans would be saying if the show were on the other foot. It’s unfathomable that they would be so sanguine about a Democratic presidential campaign having operatives involved with Russia.

More Americans say their opinion of Mr. Trump has grown worse, not better, because of his handling of the Russia investigations. Still, for most (including majorities of Republicans and independents), his approach to the issue hasn’t caused their view of him to change.

The percentage of Americans who thinks it is at least somewhat likely that Mr. Trump’s campaign associates had improper contact with the Russian government has also risen a bit in recent months — from 59 percent in March to 65 percent today.

Movement here is driven primarily by Republicans: 40 percent now think it is at least somewhat likely that Trump associates had improper contact with the Russian government, up from just a quarter in March.

More than six in 10 Americans now believe Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, an increase from March when only half believed this, but less than half think this interference was in order to help Donald Trump get elected. Republicans are also more likely now than they were in March to think Russia interfered in the 2016 election (though most remain skeptical that it was in order to help the Trump campaign).

By a margin of more than two-to-one, Americans think Donald Trump is more interested in protecting his administration from investigation (64 percent) than protecting the United States from Russian interference (30 percent). Here, most Republicans break with Democrats and independents in defending the President, but one-third do feel the President is more concerned about his own Administration.

They believe all this about him and it’s fine with them. They don’t care.

A majority of Americans think at least something improper occurred in those meetings with James Comey, though just over a quarter think his actions rise to the level of illegality. Most Republicans don’t think the president did anything wrong at all.

Of course not. If he’d gotten a consensual blow job, that would have been an impeachable offense. If he’d had private email server they would have wanted him locked up in jail.

It’s just partisanship. But still, this stuff is different than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. We’ve never had a counter-intelligence investigation inside the oval office and we’ve never had a president who failed to take something like the intrusion in the election by a foreign power seriously.

The good news is that we’ll never have to take their flag-waving, USA! USA!, “these colors don’t run” crapola seriously ever again.

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The GOP will kill to get their tax cuts

Published by digby on June 20, 2017

The GOP will kill to get their tax cuts


by digby

I wrote about the health care atrocity coming down the pike for Salon this morning:

A few days ago a Republican Senate aide was asked by a reporter why the GOP leadership felt the need to keep all the discussions for the health care bill completely under wraps and he replied, “we’re not stupid.” They know that what they are planning is so poisonous to the voters that if they were to let anyone see the monstrosity they are constructing before the bill is hurriedly voted on and signed by President Trump into law, it would cause riots. After all, only 17% of the American people approve of the bill as it currently stands.

The fact is that Republicans are willing to destroy the health and financial security of millions of Americans so they can give massive tax cuts to Ivanka and Jared and others like them who are lucky enough to be vastly wealthy already. This is their first real chance to enact permanent tax cuts since 1986. (See this Vox explainer as to why this is.)They’ve been chasing this dream a very long time. It is their white whale, so important that even the prospect of millions of people suffering and going bankrupt is not enough to make them think better of it. They are willing to hold hands, jump over a cliff and commit political suicide for it, that’s how important it is to them.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is insistent that they get this hugely unpopular piece of legislation done as quickly as possible, preferably before the Fourth of July recess when Senators would have to go home and face their desperate and horrified constituents. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that he plans to release the text later this week then have the Congressional Budget office release its estimate of the cost and the devastation to human lives early next week followed by an immediate vote and then a quick getaway out of town so they can spend the holiday counting up all the money they’ve just voted to give themselves and their rich friends.

In the meantime, the GOP leadership is dealing with the avalanche of criticism they’re receiving the way their puerile president has taught them. Here is Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas:

None of it is “fake news.” It’s all true.

And here is Cornyn in 2010, tweeting about the ACA:

Unlike the current Senate process the ACA went through dozens of hearings and amendments (many of them offered and accepted by Republicans.)

If they manage to get this passed in the Senate, presumably they will hammer out some kind of compromise in conference with the House where they will pretend to have a big fight over some details that they will then “fix”, telling the public that the bill is now going to provide everyone who needs it with cheap, excellent health care. It will be a lie but it won’t matter because they’ll hurriedly get it to Trump’s desk so he can declare that it’s no longer a “mean” “son of a bitch” and stage his greatest, signing photo op show on earth.

And then, according to the Wall Street Journal, they will immediately pivot to the next item on their bucket list, you guessed it:  tax reform.

That’s the plan anyway. At this point it’s unknown whether McConnell can pull it off. He only has two votes to spare and it looks like Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska have called dibs. (It was nice of them to give those to two of the five GOP women Senators since they didn’t bother to invite even one of them into their boys only health care club.) We’ll have to see if there is even one other Republican Senator with any empathy for the people they are going to make suffer or any sense about the terrible risk they are taking with the American economy. Since they have done virtually no research, held any hearings or consulted with experts (according to health care industry leaders) they may just manage to destroy the entire health care sector, which comprises one sixth of the US economy. But they’ll have their tax cuts.

Last week, Ezra Klein wrote a piece that made a “heightening the contradictions” case laying out the probability that this repeal will end up pushing the Democrats to fight for Medicare For All in the future. And why not? They tried to do a nice market based plan that would preserve many of the features that Republicans insist they care about and it was met with fierce resistance from the start. There is little margin for Democrats to try to appease them in the future.

But it’s a mistake to see this as a silver lining. For one thing, there is no guarantee that this will be successful. American politics of the last half century are littered with the dead political careers of people who tried to reform it. This may be a turning point but there are no guarantees and it could take years before a new plan is passed and implemented. And there’s no telling what the Supreme Court would do to it even if Democrats had full control of the congress and the presidency. So it’s very important to remember that in the meantime the human cost of this repeal would be devastating to millions of our fellow citizens.

If the final plan follows the general contours of the House bill, the list of various categories of your fellow Americans who will be hurt is very long. Via Vox, here’s a partial list of those negatively affected starting with working poor people who gained Medicaid under Obamacare, seniors, disabled people, and others who qualified for Medicaid even before Obamacare, states hard hit by the opiate crisis, pregnant women and new mothers, people with preexisting conditions, families with chronic conditions, low-income Americans not on Medicaid, older people on the exchanges, children in special education programs, people in states that take a Medicaid “block grant,” who could see dramatic cuts in coverage and Planned Parenthood patients. These people aren’t simply collateral damage on the road to a better program down the road.

If the Democrats have finally reached a consensus that they must run on and deliver guaranteed universal health care, that’s great. Let’s hope they won’t have to do it on the backs of all those people whose lives will be ruined by what Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are planning to do next week.

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Georgia 6th: Fresh out and blue by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 20, 2017

Georgia 6th: Fresh out and blue
by Tom Sullivan


Photo via Ossoff campaign Facebook page.

The polls are open for the special election runoff in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Recent surveys show the most expensive congressional race in history between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel too close to call. If Ossoff pulls out a win in this red, suburban Atlanta district, it won’t be simply the money that won it, but an army of really pissed off women:

“I tell people that I am fresh out of fucks,” says Tamara Brooking. “Seriously. I’m done. I’m done pretending that your hateful rhetoric is okay. I’m done pretending that people like us must be quiet to make you feel comfortable.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution summarizes what is at stake:

The race is much more than a vote to fill out the remainder of former U.S. Rep. Tom Price’s term after President Donald Trump’s tapped him to be health secretary. Both parties have poured unprecedented resources into the race — the cost now tops $50 million — and both see it as a chance to send a message to the American electorate.

Democrats hope an Ossoff victory could deal a blow to Trump’s presidency and the GOP agenda, while giving other candidates a path to flipping more conservative strongholds. Republicans see a Handel win as a chance to bolster incumbents in competitive districts who are nervous about allying with Trump.

Ossoff’s post-Trump, post-Women’s March foot soldiers are nervous no more. The campaign reports 12,000 volunteers. “There’s something of a renaissance of civic engagement and political activism afoot, and it’s being led by women,” Ossoff told New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister. Liberal Moms of Roswell and Cobb Counties (LMRC) and Pave It Blue sprang up once the shock of November 8 began to sink in:

Especially surprising is that the closeness of the race can largely be attributed to the obsessive energies of the sixth district’s women, an army of mostly white, suburban working mothers who had until now lived politically somnambulant lives. In the wake of Donald Trump’s November defeat of Hillary Clinton, many of these Georgia women have remade their lives, transforming themselves and their communities through unceasing political engagement. To visit Georgia’s sixth in the days before the runoff is to land on a planet populated by politically impassioned women, talking as if they have just walked off the set of Thelma & Louise, using a language of awakening, liberation, and political fury that should indeed discomfit their conservative neighbors, and — if it is a harbinger of what’s to come — should shake conservative America more broadly.

And in finding their voices, Traister writes, women like Ann White, 63, found each other:

“My favorite slogan,” she said, trying to keep from crying as she spoke, “is ‘You are not alone.’ I found my people.” Like almost all of the Ossoff women I spoke to, White described her political awakening as a coming out. “I am no longer in the closet,” she said. “I am out, I am out blue. Everybody knows now that I’m a Democrat, that I’m liberal. And they’re kind of tired of it, but that’s okay. I’m not done. I’m just getting started.”

Woman after woman shared this sentiment. “I never even put a sign in my yard because I wasn’t sure how it would be received if it wasn’t a Republican sign,” said Cherish Burnham, 43, of her life as a Democrat, growing up in the red sixth district. On the morning of November 9, she said, consumed by hopelessness, she went to volunteer at her triplet sons’ elementary-school science class, where she saw two other mothers who also looked stricken. After tentative inquiries, the trio realized they were all upset about the same thing; they stood outside the school in conversation for an hour; they told her about LMRC. The expression of primal, agonizing anger that followed Trump’s election meant that for the first time, some women — even those who’d been living in proximity to each other for years— could hear each other for the first time.

“Every time I see an Ossoff sign I feel like I have an ally,” said Tamara Brooking, a 50-year-old research assistant to a novelist.

“Signs don’t vote” is received wisdom in the campaign world. Clinton supporters last fall (and Obama supporters before them) were mystified that their candidates’ signs were unavailable at our local Democratic headquarters — even to buy. I apologized repeatedly to Hillary Clinton supporters upset at the proliferation of Trump signs along the roadside. Statistic-spouting campaign professionals refuse to spend money on them, I explained. Signs are expensive. And they just get stolen, run over, and defaced. The pros prefer to focus on direct voter contact.

Grassroots volunteers are unimpressed. Signs are about territory for them, like gang symbols. But what yard signs can do is create buzz for candidates lacking name recognition. What their presence has done for Democratic women in Republican north Atlanta is make it safe for them to come out of hiding, find each other, and amplify their voices.

Many women have put LMRC magnets on their cars; if they spot a magnet on the parked car, they turn it 180 degrees as a kind of greeting. “It’s to let each other know, ‘my sisters are here,’” said Jennifer Mosbacher, 42. “It’s this feeling of camaraderie in an area where you have often felt very isolated and disenfranchised. But now you can go to your neighborhood grocery store and get flipped, and you’re like cool, someone else is here.”

Today they have to deliver. They have to, as one unofficial slogan says, “vote your Ossoff.”

A former congressional staffer, Ossoff has run a very un-Bernie-Sanders-like, middle-of-the-road campaign as a technocrat who wants to cut wasteful spending. Handel is an anti-choice, former Georgia secretary of state with a penchant for vote suppression and a reputation for nearly destroying the Komen breast cancer charity. While the anti-Trump sentiment has garnered Ossoff ground troops among suburban women, what counts is turnout. Can the bland, 30 year-old inspire people, especially young people, to carry him over the finish line? Early voters have cast 140,000 ballots, including over 36,000 who did not vote in April.

Politico reports:

“It’s showing in the early vote that Ossoff may not be exciting the young leftists that he got last time since his tone has changed,” Rountree said, pointing to Ossoff’s strategy of appealing to moderates as an explanation for a Democratic drop off. “His messaging in the runoff has been very bland and neutral.”

However, it could pay off in crossover votes: A source familiar with the Ossoff campaign said their modeling shows that 10 to 15 percent of Republican voters could break to Ossoff, who is also winning virtually every Democratic voter. Analysis by a GOP analytics firm after the April primary showed that Ossoff was already attracting a small but significant share of cross-party support at that point.

Democrats noted that 33,000 new voters have participated in early voting, a group that is trending “more diverse, so more likely to be African-American by a significant margin, and more likely to be women,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO at TargetSmart, a data-analytics firm.

Nate Silver believes the race is a tossup, and any “takes” on the outcome will likely be overblown unless the margin of victory is greater than 5 points. By Silver’s reckoning, Ossoff leads by a “not-very-safe” 2 point margin, adding, “You’d rather be 2 points ahead than 2 points behind, however.” He continues:

As I said, however, the vote comes at a critical time for Republicans — and extracting any signal at all from Georgia might be enough to influence their behavior. Republicans really are in a pickle on health care. The AHCA is so unpopular that they’d have been better off politically letting it die back in March, at least in my view. But I don’t have a vote in Congress and Republicans do, and they’ve tallied the costs and benefits differently, given that the bill has already passed the House and is very much alive in the Senate. The central political argument Republicans have advanced on behalf of the bill is that failing to pass it would constitute a broken promise to repeal Obamacare, demotivating the GOP base. That argument will lose credibility if a Democrat wins in a traditionally Republican district despite what looks as though it will be high turnout.

Nervous Republicans in Congress will watch this race for a sign it is safe to “come out,” much as Democratic women did in Georgia’s 6th. Should Handel lose, it may encourage them to begin standing up to Donald Trump and his legion of Republican doom. Then again, they may wait until they’ve secured their tax cut bill to do it. If even then.

Newt whining about partisanship is like the sun whining about being hot

Published by digby on June 20, 2017

Newt whining about partisanship is like the sun whining about being hot

by digby

I wrote earlier about how the Republicans are trying to play by the Ken Starr playbook by defaming Robert Mueller as a Democratic artisn (which he isn’t) and explained why it won’t work.

Joe Conason explores their overwhelming hypocrisy:

Such deep concern over the partisan affiliation of a special counsel or an independent counsel is something new for the Republicans. None of them voiced any qualms when, under the old Independent Counsel Act, a panel of three Republican judges consistently appointed Republican prosecutors to investigate a Democratic administration, as they did several times when Bill Clinton was president.

Blatantly biased against Clinton, that judicial panel — headed by an intemperate, outspoken, and extremely rightwing jurist named David Sentelle — was caught rigging the appointment of Kenneth Starr to replace the first Whitewater independent counsel, Robert Fiske. Although Fiske too was a Republican, he was an experienced prosecutor and a straight arrow who was disposing of the Whitewater charges against the Clintons too swiftly and dispassionately to serve his party’s purposes. Frustrated Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the media demanded his removal.

As Fiske’s successor, Starr had no prosecutorial experience but his partisan credentials were certainly in order: a former Republican judicial appointee and solicitor general, active in the Virginia GOP and the Federalist Society, adviser to right-wing nonprofits and counsel to the tobacco industry and many other Republican-oriented corporations. He was perfect, if perfection meant an independent counsel who would squander tens of millions of dollars, prosecute irrelevant defendants, and instigate a wholly unrelated probe of Clinton’s sex life, all in order to bring down the Democratic president.

Starr himself had no idea how to conduct an investigation. But he immediately hired a thoroughly ideological Republican staff that did — including deputy independent counsel Hick Ewing, a former U.S. Attorney in Memphis renowned for his right-wing fundamentalist zeal; and deputy independent counsel Jackie Bennett, a former federal prosecutor in south Texas, where he pursued cases against Democratic officeholders with mixed success and came to be known as “the Thug.”

Starr’s operation reflected the political orientation of nearly all of the independent counsel investigations under Clinton. And when Starr left, his replacement was Robert Ray, who actually ran for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in New Jersey in 2002, only months after he filed the Office of Independent Counsel’s final report on Whitewater.

With few exceptions, every independent counsel or special counsel since the Reagan era has been a Republican, whether the investigation involved a Democratic or Republican administration. If a Democratic judicial panel had appointed a series of Democratic prosecutors, the Republicans would still be screaming two decades later.

Mueller is a Republican too. They wouldn’t have let him be confirmed for FBI director if he hadn’t been.

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What would Gianforte do?

Published by digby on June 19, 2017
What would Gianforte do?

by digby

Montana Republican Gianforte was right to attack a reporter for no good reason because he was throwing him out of God’s house. Or something. 

Regarding June 9 letter by Polly Pfister, Helena (“OK with Christians to assault some?“: 

Jesus assaulted and bodily threw the money changers out of the temple who were trespassing in Gods’ house. 

Greg Gianforte emulated Jesus by assaulting Ben Jacobs, who was trespassing and invading his privacy. He also proved to be a real Montanan to his supporters who are not self-proclaimed Christians but abide by the teachings and actions of Jesus. 

Peter Linzmaier, 

Thompson Falls

Amen.