Month: August 2017

Turning over the Trump Inc rock

by digby

Of course this was going to happen:

Federal investigators exploring whether Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian spies have seized on Trump and his associates’ financial ties to Russia as one of the most fertile avenues for moving their probe forward, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The web of financial ties could offer a more concrete path toward potential prosecution than the broader and murkier questions of collusion in the 2016 campaign, these sources said.

One year after the FBI opened an investigation, the probe is now managed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Sources described an investigation that has widened to focus on possible financial crimes, some unconnected to the 2016 elections, alongside the ongoing scrutiny of possible illegal coordination with Russian spy agencies and alleged attempts by President Donald Trump and others to obstruct the FBI investigation. Even investigative leads that have nothing to do with Russia but involve Trump associates are being referred to the special counsel to encourage subjects of the investigation to cooperate, according to two law enforcement sources.

This is how they do it. Once you’re under investigation they turn over every rock and they follow the facts wherever they lead. There are no “red lines.” This is what criminal investigations are all about. H

It’s been obvious for years that Trump’s business dealing were dirty, corrupt and criminal. That’s the world he has lived and worked in for decades. He evaded the authorities because frankly he just wasn’t a big enough fish to go after.

The monumental hubris and narcissism of the man allowed him to believe that he could become president and no one would ever look into any of this. That’s crazy all by itself. It’s the most high profile job in the world. Why would anyone run for president if they have these kinds of secrets to hide? It was an epic error in judgment.

To then go out of his way to make enemies of some of the most powerful people in America and around the world is so self-destructive that it’s clear that on some level he’s looking for a way out.

Maybe it seemed like a game to him when it all started. A performance, another WWE grandstand. It wasn’t. And now it’s all coming down around his head and it may be taking his family down with him.

Unfortunately, he may take the country with him too.

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by digby

Charles Krauthamer believes that impeaching Trump, indeed, doing anything about him at all, would be a terrible betrayal of the people who voted for him and shake their faith in the American system of government:

Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer called the idea of impeaching President Trump “a catastrophic mistake” on Thursday, warning that there’s no evidence Trump has committed a crime. 

“Collusion is unseemly but it ain’t a crime,” Krauthammer said in an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. 

“You’ve got a political establishment, mostly Democratic but there are some Republicans, that would like to see him taken out of office.” 

“I think that would be a catastrophic mistake,” he added.
Krauthammer warned that impeaching Trump would cause millions that voted for him to question the stability of American democracy. 

“It would cause a rupture in the country where people would say, ‘when we people, the ones who have been abandoned elect someone we like, our guy gets taken out? 

I thought we had a stable democracy,'” he said.

He stressed that he doesn’t defend Trump, but only thinks that impeachment is a mistake. 

“Again, I think he’s unfit,” Krauthammer said, “but that’s not the grounds for removal.”

“If you think a man is unfit, you vote against him,” Krauthammer added. “But you don’t remove him from office. And that’s where I’m afraid we are headed, given the forces that surround the president.”

“The world’s “indispensable nation” can no longer be led by a man incapable of seeing, or feeling, anything beyond himself” Krauthammer 1998 https://t.co/c3YRfJUqxT

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) August 4, 2017

He didn’t seem too worried about the people who voted for Bill Clinton losing faith in democracy when they impeached him over a personal affair. But then a president who lies every single day everything being impeached for colluding with a foreign government and obstructing an investigation into that collusion is nothing compared to lying about unauthorized fellatio.

His voters are very special you see. They are “the ones who have been abandoned” so we need to be very careful not to do anything to upset them. Like uphold the constitution.

And certainly a president being elected under these dubious circumstances says nothing about the stability of our democracy. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.

It’s not as though there’s anything at stake here. An unfit president suspected of being involved with a foreign adversary, totally in over his head, making the world more dangerous by the day is completely unimportant compared to the sensitive feelings of Trump voters. Let’s just move along and hope he doesn’t get a bunch of people killed before the next election.

Because stability.

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QOTD: Steve Schmidt

by digby

GOP strategist Steve Schmidt On MSNBC with Nicole Wallace yesterday:

We worked on two presidential campaigns at high levels and there weren’t any Russians around. I don’t think there were Russians round the Obama campaign or the Kerry campaign either. This campaign had Russians all over the place!

Wallace added  that it was even weirder that everyone on the Trump campaign couldn’t remember meeting any of these Russian.

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Trouble comin’ every day
by Tom Sullivan

Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington in recent weeks to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 elections and possible Donald Trump campaign coordination in those efforts. The FBI declined to comment.

Prior to the Mueller appointment in May, federal investigators had opened a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia to assist in the investigation into former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s dealings with Russia. The Journal continues:

“This is yet a further sign that there is a long-term, large-scale series of prosecutions being contemplated and being pursued by the special counsel,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. “If there was already a grand jury in Alexandria looking at Flynn, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel for the same guy. This suggests that the investigation is bigger and wider than Flynn, perhaps substantially so.”

Thomas Zeno, a federal prosecutor for 29 years before becoming a lawyer at the Squire Patton Boggs law firm, said the grand jury was “confirmation that this is a very vigorous investigation going on.”

But not an indication that any indictments are imminent, Zeno added.

In a followup report, the Washington Post adds:

Mueller’s investigation now includes a look at whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James B. Comey, as well as deep dives into financial and other dealings of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

[…]

Experts said that Washington would be the appropriate place to convene a grand jury to examine actions taken by Trump since he became president and took up residence at the White House. Many of the potential crimes Mueller’s team is investigating would have occurred in the District, such as allegations that Trump aides or advisers made false statements in disclosure records or lied to federal agents. The Post has previously reported that Mueller is investigating whether the president tried to obstruct justice leading up to his firing of Comey.

Amidst the investigations, bills introduced in the Senate by two bipartisan pairs of senators to protect Mueller from White House retaliation indicate growing concerns that Trump might take further action to quash the investigation. Sens. Thom Tillis, R., N.C., and Chris Coons, D., Del., produced a bill to allow a special counsel to challenge his or her dismissal before a three-judge panel within two weeks, the Journal reports. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R., S.C., and Cory Booker, D., N.J., previously teamed up to prepare a similar bill, indicating the concern in Congress is significant. Trump has repeatedly called the investigation a “witch hunt.”

White House special counsel Ty Cobb told the Post the new grand jury is “… news to me, but it’s welcome news to the extent it suggests that it may accelerate the resolution of Mr. Mueller’s work. The White House has every interest in bringing this to a prompt and fair conclusion. As we’ve said in the past, we’re committed to cooperating fully with Mr. Mueller.”

For their part, Russian authorities have denied any interference.

For Trump’s part, he went to all the way to West Virginia to mock the Mueller investigation’s “Russian hoax” and to bask in the adulation of authoritarian followers. The Guardian reports:

“Have you seen any Russians in West Virginia or Ohio or Pennsylvania? Are there any Russians here tonight, any Russians? They can’t beat us at the voting booths so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you want. They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership that you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us and most importantly demeaning to our country and demeaning to our constitution.”

So says the needy authoritarian who has never run anything but a closely held family business built on inherited money, a man with neither an interest in nor reverence for any authority other than his own base impulses. Hubris, the name is Trump.

in March 1974 Nixon visited The Grand Ole Opry and got a hero's welcome–five months later he was forced to resign https://t.co/UIEEiDuVGr— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 4, 2017

On that note, start your Friday with some Frank.

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Cretinous imbecility on the world stage

by digby

Jonathan Chait unpacks the transcript of Trump’s call with he Australian Prime Minister in the first two weeks of the administration.

Trump is a moron. But you knew that:

Australia has a policy of refusing to accept refugees who arrive by boat. The reason, as Turnbull patiently attempts to explain several times, is that it believes giving refuge to people who arrive by boat would encourage smuggling and create unsafe passage with a high risk of deaths at sea. But it had a large number of refugees who had arrived by sea, living in difficult conditions, whom Australia would not resettle (for fear of encouraging more boat trafficking) but whom it did not want to deport, either. The United States government agreed under President Obama to vet 1,250 of these refugees and accept as many of them as it deemed safe.

In the transcript, Trump is unable to absorb any of these facts. He calls the refugees “prisoners,” and repeatedly brings up the Cuban boatlift (in which Castro dumped criminals onto Florida). He is unable to absorb Turnbull’s explanation that they are economic refugees, not from conflict zones, and that the United States has the ability to turn away any of them it deems dangerous.

Donald Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy

President Trump’s efforts to fix his headline-making crises often have the effect of making the situation worse.

Turnbull tries to explain to Trump that refugees have not been detained because they pose a danger to Australian society, but in order to deter ship-based smuggling:

Trump: Why haven’t you let them out? Why have you not let them into your society?

Turnbull: Okay, I will explain why. It is not because they are bad people. It is because in order to stop people smugglers, we had to deprive them of the product. So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Noble [sic] Prize winning genius, we will not let you in. Because the problem with the people —

At this point, Trump fails to understand the policy altogether, and proceeds to congratulate Turnbull for what Trump mistakes to be a draconian policy of total exclusion:

Trump: That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am … Because you do not want to destroy your country. Look at what has happened in Germany. Look at what is happening in these countries.

Trump has completely failed to understand either that the refugees are not considered dangerous, or, again, that they are being held because of a categorical ban on ship-based refugee traffic.

He also fails to understand the number of refugees in the agreement:

Trump: I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people and I agree I can vet them, but that puts me in a bad position. It makes me look so bad and I have only been here a week.

Turnbull: With great respect, that is not right – It is not 2,000.

Trump: Well, it is close. I have also heard like 5,000 as well.

Turnbull: The given number in the agreement is 1,250 and it is entirely a matter of your vetting.

Then Trump returns to his belief that they are bad, and failing to understand the concept that they have been detained merely because they arrived by sea and not because they committed a crime:

Trump: I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.

Turnbull: I would not be so sure about that. They are basically —

Trump: Well, maybe you should let them out of prison.

He still thinks they’re criminals.

Later, Trump asks what happens if all the refugees fail his vetting process:

Trump: I hate having to do it, but I am still going to vet them very closely. Suppose I vet them closely and I do not take any?

Turnbull: That is the point I have been trying to make.

After several attempts by Turnbull to explain Australia’s policy, Trump again expresses his total inability to understand what it is:

Trump: Does anybody know who these people are? Who are they? Where do they come from? Are they going to become the Boston bomber in five years? Or two years? Who are these people?

Turnbull: Let me explain. We know exactly who they are. They have been on Nauru or Manus for over three years and the only reason we cannot let them into Australia is because of our commitment to not allow people to come by boat. Otherwise we would have let them in. If they had arrived by airplane and with a tourist visa then they would be here.

Trump: Malcom [sic], but they are arrived on a boat?

After Turnbull has told Trump several times that the refugees have been detained because they arrived by boat, and only for that reason, Trump’s question is, “But they are arrived on a boat?”

Soon after, Turnbull again reiterates that Australia’s policy is to detain any refugee who arrives by boat:

Turnbull: The only people that we do not take are people who come by boa. So we would rather take a not very attractive guy that help you out then to take a Noble [sic] Peace Prize winner that comes by boat. That is the point.”

Trump: What is the thing with boats? Why do you discriminate against boats? No, I know, they come from certain regions. I get it.

No, you don’t get it at all! It’s not that they come from certain regions! It’s that they come by boat!

So Turnbull very patiently tries to explain again that the policy has nothing to do with what region the refugees come from:

Turnbull: No, let me explain why. The problem with the boats it that you are basically outsourcing your immigration program to people smugglers and also you get thousands of people drowning at sea.

At this point, Trump gives up asking about the policy and just starts venting about the terribleness of deals in general:

I do not know what he got out of it. We never get anything out of it — START Treaty, the Iran deal. I do not know where they find these people to make these stupid deals. I am going to get killed on this thing.

Shortly afterward, the call ends in brusque fashion, and Turnbull presumably begins drinking heavily.

I think we’ve all been drinking heavily since November 9th.

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He knew

by digby

…. that he was in over his head:

Local agit-prop for fun and profit

by digby

I’ve written about Sinclair Broadcasting many times. But this look at the latest from Media Matters shows it’s starting to get very, very weird:

Local television news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group has been making headlines in recent weeks as it seeks to both double down on its requirement that its stations run mandated conservative commentary segments and vastly expand its reach into new major cities across the United States.

Plenty of recent major profiles of Sinclair have discussed its unusual tactic of designating certain conservative commentary segments it produces in its national studios as “must-runs,” meaning that every Sinclair-owned local television news station — all 73, across 33 states and the District of Columbia — is required to air them. The Sinclair brand has been openly right-wing for decades, causing controversy when executives similarly mandated the airing of an anti-John Kerry documentary and chose not to run a Nightline episode they viewed as critical of George W. Bush in the early 2000s.

The latest Sinclair profiles often focus on the “Bottom Line with Boris” segments starring former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, who is now employed as Sinclair’s chief political analyst. Epshteyn has been producing 60- to 90-second commentary segments several times a week since Sinclair hired him in April. Last month, Sinclair announced it would be upping Epshteyn’s segments from airing three times per week to nine.

Employees at Sinclair stations across the country, from Seattle, WA, to Washington, D.C., are expressing concerns about the clearly conservative must-run segments pushed by Sinclair executives.

Anchors at individual local news stations owned by Sinclair are seemingly not required to introduce the segments in any particular way before running them; in fact, employees at at least one station have said they try to run the segments along with commercials “so they blend in with paid spots.” The on-air segments themselves have no built-in disclosure that Epshteyn was until recently employed by the same White House he now regularly lavishes with on-air praise (online versions of his commentary note his White House connection). Viewers also might not know that Sinclair’s efforts to expand to new cities across the country and corner the markets in mid-sized cities in battleground states are possible only because of the deregulatory efforts of the administration Epshteyn loves so dearly.

Sinclair is empowering Epshteyn to broadcast regular segments effusively praising his former employer to local TV news viewers across the country who aren’t signing up to watch garbled propaganda every evening. His segments often seem to lazily tow the administration’s line on a given news story, when they bother to address a story at all — sometimes his segments are glaringly focused on subjects that have nothing to do with whatever embarrassing headlines Trump is making that day.

There are a few key examples of Epshteyn’s propaganda you may have already seen, like the video from June in which he mirrored the Trump administration’s war on the press by declaring the White House press briefing “a circus and a distraction,” or last weekend’s jaw-droppingly ill-timed defense of 10-day White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

But these aren’t isolated examples. Here are five other “Bottom Line with Boris” segments that your aunt in Cedar Rapids may have unwittingly watched. Judge for yourself…

CNN is biased against Trump!

In Epshteyn’s June 28 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he focused on echoing Trump’s talking points casting CNN as biased and pushing a highly misleading (and embarrassing) video of a CNN medicalproducer discussing the network’s political coverage from right-wing video artist James O’Keefe.

Epshteyn concluded that CNN was “struggling” to report on the facts writ large:

It’s also important to further focus on CNN’s digital presence. The network’s website is supposed to be delivering news. However, it is dominated by opinion-based headlines and articles with more commentary than impartial fact. The bottom line is this: CNN, along with other cable news networks, is struggling to stick to the facts and to be impartial in covering politics in general and this president specifically.
States should cooperate with Trump’s “voter fraud” commission!

In Epshteyn’s July 5 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he encouraged states to cooperate with the Trump administration’s bogus voter fraud commission, which experts have said could actually be used to suppress legal votes.

Epshteyn concluded:

The extent of voter fraud in our elections has been hotly debated between the left and the right. The president’s commission has been established to come up with a factual, impartial answer to that question. The states should do everything within their power to cooperate with the commission, and that’s the bottom line.
Trump’s Department of Veteran Affairs is crushing it!

Don’t trust any national media to report on James Comey!

In Epshteyn’s June 11 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he covered former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before Congress on June 9. Epshteyn’s commentary did not focus on the substance of the hearing, but rather on three aspects Epshteyn says the “national media” failed to cover, including its own “inaccurate” reporting on Russia.

There are more examples at the link.

This is very disturbing stuff. This is local TV, not cable which most people assume to be well … local. It has a level of credibility with many Americans who mistrust the national networks. And this is pure propaganda.

And by the way, Boris Epshteyn’s connected to all the Russia stuff too… 

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Obstruction for dummies

by digby

Trump’s cover up has been so crude and so obvious that he’s gotten himself into real trouble. Via Vox:

Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials.

McCabe has told colleagues that he too is a potential witness in the probe of whether Trump broke the law by trying to thwart the FBI’s Russia investigation and the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Two senior federal law enforcement officials have told me that the new revelations illustrate why they believe the potential case against Trump is stronger than outsiders have thought.

“What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official said. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”

Trump and his supporters have long argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the special counsel to bring an obstruction case against Trump. The case would rely on the word of one man versus another, that of the president of the United States versus the FBI director he fired. But this was never the case.

Including Comey, as many as 10, and possibly more, of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned as part of the investigation into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, according to two government investigators with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Comey’s notes on his conversations could also be used as evidence, according to many reports.

The White House declined to comment. First contacted by email by on July 27, White House spokesperson Kelly Love responded late Wednesday saying, “This would be a question for outside counsel.” Love did not name which of the president’s many lawyers to contact. Marc E. Kasowitz, an attorney for the president, did not respond to a phone message Wednesday evening. The FBI also declined to comment.

This is pretty amazing.

One of the biggest concerns of civil libertarians is always that the president would try to use the federal police and intelligence capabilities for their own purposes. I don’t think most of us thought any president would be so crude about it.

If we build it they will use it

by digby

I wrote about the DHS for Salon this morning:

Three years ago next week, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed a young man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That shooting sparked nationwide unrest and a national discussion of “use of force” doctrine and the militarization of the police. Those had been subjects of concern among civil libertarians for some time as more and more departments around the country developed policing models based upon the rules of engagement in war zones.

War in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than 15 years has produced a surplus of military gear that ends up being sold to local law enforcement agencies, along with a culture of “us against them” that’s created a sense of siege in too many communities of color. Although this has been a gradual change, the sight of all that combat-style weaponry rolling down the streets of the middle American suburb of Ferguson came as a shock to a lot of people.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which grew out of the Trayvon Williams shooting in 2013, gained momentum after Ferguson, as did various organizations working on policing reform. Awareness seemed to be growing that the drug war had become a real war. As the ACLU report, “The War Comes Home” stated:

All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.

Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.

For a brief moment it felt as if there might be the political will to put a stop to some of these excesses. But of course for every action there’s a reaction, and a backlash against Black Lives Matter and police reform grew as well. When Donald Trump came along promising to be the “law and order” president and won the election, whatever progress was being made stalled out completely.

Unfortunately, it’s not just local police forces that are militarized; national police agencies are as well. The Department of Homeland Security has the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with ICE and the Border Patrol heavily invested in tactics and strategies developed in war zones. They use all manner of military equipment, including battle-tested helicopters and weaponized drone aircraft.

Their reach is much farther into the country than most people realize. Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, has a huge jurisdiction that stretches 100 miles from any U.S. international border, whether on land or at sea. That means it covers the entire state of Florida and the entire state of Maine, as well as virtually every major metropolitan area. These agencies routinely use interior checkpoints far from any border for roundups of suspected undocumented immigrants and conduct various other kinds of Homeland Security investigations.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the second largest federal investigative agency in the country after the FBI, with more that 20,000 employees. Under the direction of former Marine Gen. John Kelly (now the White House chief of staff), and despite protestations that they are only going after the “bad hombres,” ICE agents have been instructed to “take off the gloves” and seize any and all undocumented immigrants that may cross their paths.

As Kelly’s last act as DHS director, the agency conducted a nationwide sweep. According to Vox, these were the results:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a nationwide sweep — ostensibly designed to catch Central Americans who’d come to the US as family units — in late July. But according to the press release they sent out Tuesday, 70 percent of the immigrants they captured were merely collateral damage … that means more than half of the immigrants picked up in last week’s ICE raids hadn’t been targeted and didn’t have criminal records.

In case anyone is inclined to think that such a powerful, lawless police agency is no threat to law-abiding citizens, this should serve as a wake-up call. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast reported that when the first version of the travel ban went into effect shortly after Trump’s inauguration, high-level Homeland Security officials issued specific orders to treat immigration lawyers as protesters and to refuse to cooperate with members of Congress. They photographed elected officials who came to the airports and shared the information with other offices, which should make even Trump-friendly congressional representatives a little nervous.

This is a powerful federal police force whose agents have been given a green light to do whatever they want. As this New Yorker article by Jonathan Blitzer points out, some longtime agents are nervous about it:

“I like predictability,” the agent said. “I like being able to go into work and have faith in my senior managers and the Administration, and to know that, regardless of their political views, at the end of the day they’re going to do something that’s appropriate. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Furthermore, the Trump administration wants to hire 15,000 more agents to throw into this chaos. According to a new report by the DHS inspector general, that would require vetting more than a million people in order to fill those jobs. Even worse, the report says that the department is so poorly run that it couldn’t come up with any decent reason to justify hiring all those new agents in the first place.

I’m not sure this will stop them from doing it. We already knew that the agency planned to lower its standards anyway. Remember, the “law and order” president promised his loyalists that “American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” He wants his police state.

Maybe Congress will finally find some backbone in its dealings with President Trump and tighten the purse strings. We can only hope so. These massive paramilitary agencies have already expanded their mission beyond any reasonable scope. They represent a threat to democracy and the rule of law, and the last thing we need is even more of them.

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The “Show Me Your Hands” state?
by Tom Sullivan

Branson photo – Missouri Division of Tourism

“How do you come to Missouri, run out of gas and find yourself dead in a jail cell when you haven’t broken any laws?” asked Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP.

The national NAACP has issued its first travel advisory for any state after recent violent incidents and threats against people of color. The advisory comes in part as a response to police shootings nationally and in anticipation of immigration legislation in Texas and Arizona:

The Missouri travel advisory is the first time an NAACP conference has ever made one state the subject of a warning about discrimination and racist attacks, a spokesman for the national organization said Tuesday.

Missouri became the first because of recent legislation making discrimination lawsuits harder to win, and in response to longtime racial disparities in traffic enforcement and a spate of incidents cited as examples of harm coming to minority residents and visitors, say state NAACP leaders.

Those incidents included racial slurs against black students at the University of Missouri and the death earlier this year of 28-year-old Tory Sanders, a black man from Tennessee who took a wrong turn while traveling and died in a southeast Missouri jail even though he hadn’t been accused of a crime.

Chapel says police are pulling over drivers “because of their skin color, they’re being beaten up or killed.” And the rate is going up, Chapel says.

The NAACP’s advisory also cites the most recent attorney general’s report showing black drivers in Missouri were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites. Those reports have been showing the disparity since the attorney general began releasing the data in 2000.

In May, the owner of a Blue Springs barbershop found his shop windows stained with racial slurs. The same two words appeared on three separate windows in black paint: “Die (N-word).”

Normally, the State Department issues such advisories for countries facing instability or war. But after police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota in 2016, McClatchy reports, the Bahamas issued a travel advisory for its citizens visiting the United States, advising them to exercise caution, especially when interacting with police. The Bahamas is 91 percent black.

While the Missouri advisory is a first for the NAACP, the ACLU issued a similar advisory for Texas in May.

Sanders told police he suffered from mental illness and ended up in a cell, tasered, and dead after a tragedy of errors including a jail run by a sheriff already facing

… eighteen criminal counts in two unrelated cases. The sheriff is also a defendant in four federal civil lawsuits, including one that involves the 2015 death of an inmate and another in which he is accused of letting a pregnant inmate languish for so long without access to medical care that her baby was stillborn in 2014.

There goes your family vacation in Branson.

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