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Month: August 2019

It Could Get Worse by tristero

Published by tristero on August 5, 2019

It Could Get Worse 

by tristero

The problem with having an incompetent, mentally ill blabbermouth of a US president is that, well, omigod…

Donald Trump may have to mediate in Kashmir after all. 

When the U.S. president suggested last month that he had been asked by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to act as middleman between India and Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan region, it looked like a gauche diplomatic gaffe, and New Delhi promptly shot him down. 

Over the past weekend, however, South Asia’s most dangerous faultline has flared up to such an extent that it is no longer unthinkable that the world’s global policeman could have to step in to cool tensions between two military heavyweights, both armed with nuclear weapons. 

On Monday, the Indian government announced it would revoke its part of Kashmir’s special status as an autonomous region, going back on the agreement that allowed Muslim-majority Kashmir to become part of India in the first place. It’s a highly assertive step from the Hindu nationalist government that effectively tears up a seven-decade-long compromise. In the build-up to the announcement, the government cut internet access, placed regional leaders under house arrest, told tourists, students and pilgrims to quit the region, announced a curfew and added even more troops to the 500,000 already stationed there. 

Trump landed himself squarely in the middle of this intractable quagmire on July 22. Seated next to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in the White House, he unwittingly dropped a bombshell by claiming Modi had asked him to mediate in Kashmir. 

The last U.S. president to have made a notable intervention was Bill Clinton, who helped bring to an end the brief Kargil War between India and Pakistan in Kashmir in 1999. 

Trump may just have been bragging, but it was a jaw-dropping moment in the subcontinent. India went into firefighting mode. If Modi really had made such a request for outside intervention, it would have broken an agreement with Pakistan that Kashmir could only be handled as a bilateral issue. Within the hour, the Indian foreign ministry said “no such request” had been made and its media fulminated at the suggestion. Indian Congress Party lawmaker Shashi Tharoor said: “I honestly don’t think Trump has the slightest idea of what he’s talking about.” 

Two weeks on, though, the diplomatic stakes look way higher. India is now under pressure from groups as diverse as the Chinese government and Amnesty International.
Pakistan itself welcomed Trump’s suggested mediation with a larger neighbor. Khan nodded with approval as Trump made his remarks in the White House, and said: “I can tell you that, right now, you would have the prayers of over a billion people if you can mediate and resolve this issue.” His Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the offer was “more than Pakistan’s expectations.” 

Undaunted by India’s pushback, Trump reaffirmed on August 2 that he was happy to intervene.

 May God, the Gods, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and all the Buddhas in the world protect us.

Meanwhile, get ready for the health care push back

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

Meanwhile, get ready for the health care push back

by digby

They won the 2010 midterms with this. I don’t know that it will work again. But you can be sure they’ll spend a lot of money trying.

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Blast from the past: “Obama’s race war”

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

Blast from the past

by digby

Here’s a reminder from Bizarroworld circa 2010:

Obama’s Race War


By Ben Shapiro

July 13, 2010

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by racist whites seeking to fight against radical Republican efforts to reconstruct the South. The KKK targeted both blacks and white Republicans; they even targeted some Southern white Democrats who weren’t sufficiently anti-black. The KKK’s argument: Blacks, by their mere presence and attempts to participate in the political process, were destroying the dignity of the white South.

The radical Republicans in Congress fought the KKK tooth and nail; in the early 1870s, they passed the Force Acts, designed to destroy the KKK once and for all. Those acts allowed the president to use the federal military to enforce the 15th Amendment. It nearly did the trick. Within a few years, the KKK had been virtually wiped out.

Then came the election of 1876. Not only did Southern Democrats — often closely allied with the KKK — win back South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, they also helped broker an election deal with Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but Hayes won a majority of one vote in the Electoral College through a series of complex machinations. A constitutional crisis ensued. It was solved when Hayes essentially promised to end reconstruction efforts and withdraw federal troops from the South in return for Democratic support for his presidency. Offshoots of the KKK quickly returned, restoring the South to a state of horrific oppression and segregation; it uprooted the progress made since the end of the Civil War. Southern Democrats instituted Jim Crow and revivified both violence and racism on a massive scale.

The moral of this story is simple: Racial violence can only flourish with the approval or apathy of federal, state and local government.

Fast forward 132 years. Racial violence is becoming a norm around the nation. The city of Oakland, for reasons both racial and economic, has announced that it will stop using police to investigate grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism. The Justice Department is suing the state of Arizona for cracking down on illegal immigration — a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to woo Hispanic voters by making it more difficult for Arizona law enforcement to crack down on Hispanic illegal offenders. The Obama Justice Department has also dropped an investigation into the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, despite the fact that videotape shows members of the New Black Panther Party wielding clubs outside a voting place.

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that the Justice Department will investigate the shooting of a black career criminal in Oakland, after the white police officer who committed the shooting was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; Holder has said nothing about the massive looting, largely by minorities, that followed the verdict.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to ramp up the anti-white rhetoric. This is nothing new. Holder famously called us a “nation of cowards” on racial matters last year; Obama himself called his white grandmother a “typical white person” and blasted the Cambridge Police Department for racial profiling; Michelle Obama wrote her Princeton thesis on how white folks were racists; Michelle and Barack went to Rev. Wright’s racist church for 20 years. They’ve all just upped the ante recently. Now Holder says that the Arizona law will promote racial profiling; Obama agrees with him; and Michelle Obama visits the NAACP, where she tells the black audience to “increase our intensity.”

What’s their motivation? Supposedly, the Obama administration is simply fired up by the presence of the tea partiers, in the same way the KKK was fired up by the presence of voting blacks in the South. Black Democrats in the House have fabricated claims of tea partiers shouting the “n-word,” even as they ignore white union members shouting the “n-word” at black tea partier Kenneth Gladney. The NAACP claims that the tea party is “racist,” with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous telling members that his goal was to pour “ice on the tea party.”

That’s just an excuse. The Obama administration is racist. They are using that racism to let black criminals off the hook, justify illegal immigration, hamstring law enforcement across the country, and push redistribution as a solution to supposed continuing discrimination against “people of color.” The predictable result of this policy will resemble the results of the 1876 election: federal abdication on racial violence, state abdication on racial violence and local abdication on racial violence. The next race war will come not from racist whites, but from racist blacks and Hispanics who feel empowered to act on their racism by an administration that excuses all minority misbehavior.

This was the common parlance on the right during the Obama years. It is what made the white supremacist Donald Trump possible six years later.

And Ben Shapiro is considered one of the leading intellectual lights of conservative politics today.

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QOTD: Beto O’Rourke

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

QOTD: Beto O’Rourke

by digby

Joan Walsh echoes my feelings about O’Rourke’s comments:

[T]hat’s what I thought too, honestly, when I saw news outlets covering Trump descending from Marine One Sunday afternoon—after he essentially golfed through two massacres, including one in Dayton, Ohio, where the shooter’s motive still isn’t clear—as though he’d say something meaningful. At the bottom of the stairway from the helicopter, a marine stood at attention, just as he would for any other president, and so did the media, cameras and notebooks ready. Trump shared his trademark mix of lies, evasions, and word salad—he makes Sarah Palin look articulate—and it went out live to television watchers all over the country.

These rituals in which Trump is treated like any other president demean the memories of those who died in El Paso, at the Tree of Life and Poway synagogues, and those who might have died had the bombs that Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc sent to Democrats and the media detonated earlier this year.

Afterward, anchor people and reporters dutifully fact-checked Trump’s tarmac lies; some even noticed the absence of any mention of the racism that drove the El Paso murderer. But covering Trump’s return from golf as though it was newsworthy is just another way the media normalizes him.

On Monday morning, Trump had a better speech prepared. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” he intoned. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.” But the fact that he called Dayton “Toledo” got more immediate attention, and mockery, than the hypocrisy of denouncing “white supremacy” when his administration advances it every day. “He really did set a different tone than he did in the past when it comes to condemning this hate,” an NBC White House correspondent claimed. In some quarters, Trump even got praise for using the term “white supremacy,” as though it heralded a change in his policies. It will not.

As tristero pointed out below, O’Rourke continued this morning:

Bonus quote from Jerry Nadler:

Babies in cages, urban “infestation”, “send her back”, invasion and on and on and on. They are right.

There is talk that if O’Rourke would decide to go back home and run against John Cornyn, the whole country would support him. I normally don’t engage in the common Democratic hectoring of people to run for different offices because I feel it’s presumptuous. There are no indispensable politicians and if one decides not to run for a certain office, there’s always someone else to do it.

However, in this case I will make an exception. I like O’Rourke, always have. I don’t know that I would vote for him in a primary but I wouldn’t be upset if he won the nomination. Having said that, I think it’s obvious that his heart and passion lie with his city and state and considering that something pretty big is happening in Texas (the 4th GOP congressman announced his retirement today) it is possible that Beto could win in a presidential year (he almost won in a midterm) and could help turn Texas blue. I realize it’s a long shot but it’s one worth trying — if they could escalate a phenomenon that many of the analysts say is happening anyway, it would be the ballgame. Republicans can’t win without Texas.

And, by the way, the other two former governors Bullock of Montana and Hickenlooper of Colorado could do the same thing. Nothing changes as long as the gravedigger of democracy, Moscow Mitch, leads the Senate.

Update:

This is the problem.

She has the chronology wrong. Trump first came out after Charlottesville and said this:

Saturday afternoon, President Trump, speaking at the start of a veterans’ event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., addressed what he described as “the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

In his comments, President Trump condemned the bloody protests, but he did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans, blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

“It’s been going on for a long time in our country, it’s not Donald Trump, it’s not Barack Obama,” said Mr. Trump, adding that he had been in contact with Virginia officials. After calling for the “swift restoration of law and order,” he offered a plea for unity among Americans of “all races, creeds and colors.”

Then, after criticism, he made his canned speech condemning the Ku Klux Klan etc. That was followed a couple of days later by his famous “both sides” press conference.

After everything we’ve seen some reporters are still giving him credit for being sincere when he makes these ridiculous teleprompter speeches with dead eyes and a very dry mouth. It’s unbelievable.

George Conway had this right:

So we all know what’s going to happen here. Something like this:

Trump will go on TV tomorrow and give a speech. On paper, the speech may say some of the right things. It will look somewhat presidential. There’s an off chance it might even be good (grading on a curve).

But the problem will be that it was given by Trump, who’s incapable of sincere empathy. So it’ll be hard to believe that he believes the words he said. And his speech won’t address his own hateful, racist rhetoric.

So he’ll be roundly criticized for that. And he’ll also be criticized on policy grounds, because whatever he says on that score will not suffice for many people.

He’ll see and hear all this criticism on TV, and he’ll stew. And stew. He’ll grow angry and resentful that he was forced to give the speech in the first place.

Finally, perhaps within 24 or 48 hours, the narcissistic pressure will break the dam, and his anger and frustration will gush forward.

He’ll tweet, otherwise say, or do something that’ll completely undo whatever positive benefit came from the speech.

We’ve seen this movie before how many times?

Every. Single. Time.

Working the FBI refs gets the job done

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

Working the FBI refs gets the job done

by digby

Reporter: Do you see white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?

I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems,” Trump said Friday. “I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it yet. They’re just learning about the person and the people involved. But it’s certainly a terrible thing. Terrible thing.

Oh look:

Dave Gomez, a former FBI supervisor who oversaw terrorism cases, said he thinks FBI officials are wary of pursuing white nationalists aggressively because of the fierce political debates surrounding the issue.

“I believe Christopher A. Wray is an honorable man, but I think in many ways the FBI is hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would,” Gomez said. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It’s a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor.”

Somehow I don’t think Bill Barr is someone who thinks this is a very important problem. At best. At worst, he’s on board, just like the president.

Republicans did this with the media for decades and it was very successful. Now they have turned their attention to law enforcement.

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If you want to stop white supremacist terrorism, the Republicans must be driven from power

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

If you want to stop white supremacist terrorism, the Republicans must be driven from power

by digby
My Salon column this morning:

I’ve written a lot about gun violence over the past few years. It’s inevitable when you write about politics in America. But sometime after the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, when a gunman shot nearly 600 people, killing 59, something snapped in me and I slipped into despair.

After Newtown, I had been sure that something would change. There was no way a civilized country could tolerate the massacre of tiny six-year-old children by a deranged young man with access to deadly mass killing machines. For a short while, it seemed that we had finally reached our limits. Republicans were shaken. The public was overwhelmed with grief and rage. I was wrong.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre soon stunned the nation with a militant war cry that left the political world shaken. Mitch McConnell stepped up to deliver the coup de grace:

Under the leadership of now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican party once more coalesced around the cause of gun proliferation and that was the end of that.

The bloodshed continued, of course. For any number of motives and sometimes no discernible motive at all, with regularity, someone would start shooting into a crowd and a large number of people would be injured and die. And each time I continued to believe that somehow the growing body count would finally shake the consciences of Republican leaders and basic sanity would prevail.

The Las Vegas slaughter finally quashed that last little bit of hope, however, at least for the foreseeable future. There you had hundreds of country music fans, many of them probably GOP voters, mowed down in one of America’s premier tourist destinations, yet it was soon obvious that despite all the usual “thoughts and prayers” and promises that this time “felt different” it would make no difference at all.

And it didn’t. These massacres are now ritualized national events, human sacrifices to our gun culture, each one eating the sin then purging the guilt. And then it happens again.

I now believe any recognition that unfettered access to weapons that are designed to kill many humans as quickly as possible is incompatible with civilized society will only come about when the Republican party has been reduced to a small minority without the necessary political power to prevent it.

The GOP is the roadblock to peace.

They have agency and they simply refuse to use it. Since our system is heavily weighted against one of the two parties shrinking to such a level, with such undemocratic features as the Senate, the electoral college and gerrymandering, I have no idea if and when that will come about. However, there is a dangerous new development in this ongoing nightmare that could conceivably shake up this dynamic — the mainstreaming of white supremacism.

The combination of gun fetishism and the election of Donald Trump has brought us a lethal upsurge in domestic terrorism by a movement that is inspired and encouraged by the president of the United States. This past Saturday’s attack in El Paso, Texas is just the latest example.

A confluence of ideology and terrorism isn’t new, of course. In fact, we’ve been dealing with it for years in the US, and with special intensity since 2001. The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan has been active for more than a century. 24 years ago, right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and injured 680 more in Oklahoma City. And, needless to say, we were attacked by militant Islamic extremists on 9/11 and there have been several mass shootings and other forms of violence perpetrated by people claiming to be acting on behalf of Al Qaeda or ISIS since.

What’s different now in this rise of white nationalist terrorism is the fact that the terrorists are echoing the precise rhetoric of the president of the United States and a major U.S. media company. Such rhetoric is in common everyday usage at Republican political rallies, on social media and television. It is as mainstream as hate gets:

Here you can watch Trump using the charged term “invasion” as well as his tacit acknowledgment that it is unacceptable to say such a thing. Yet he says it. With relish:

This white supremacist rhetoric goes from Trump to Fox News to GOP officials to armed and angry white men and back again in a vicious and dangerous feedback loop:

And it’s picking up steam as we go into the election. I have written about Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric and his racist strategy for winning re-election. He is literally running on this message:

He “jokes” about shooting refugees at the border:

Trump is a classic demagogue and he’s made it clear from the day he announced his campaign in 2015 that he was a champion of xenophobes and racists. As recently as this week he was angrily denouncing major American cities as being “infested” and verbally assaulting members of congress who are immigrants, Muslims and people of color, inspiring his slavering followers to chant “send her back!”

And for all the fun “bonding” among the very white crowds at his rallies, some people are clearly hearing this as a call to violence. This weekend a man walked into a Walmart near the Mexican border and shot nearly 50 people leaving behind an angry screed reflecting many of the same ideas that are discussed casually on Fox News, right-wing radio and by the President of the United States.

But perhaps this will mark a change in the usual trajectory of these events. The emergence of this white nationalist terrorist movement, fueled by gun culture, Donald Trump and Republican ideology, may just focus the minds of most Americans enough to realize that the only way to stop this carnage is to fundamentally reform our politics. So far, mass shootings alone have failed to do that. Perhaps the knowledge that the Republican Party itself is inspiring domestic terrorism with its toxic ideology will. We must hope so or it’s only going to get worse.

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Thank You, Beto o’Rourke by tristero

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

Thank You, Beto O’Rourke 

by tristero

Thank you, Beto O’Rourke, for telling it exactly like it is:

“We have a president right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation,” the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said, quoting earlier Trump remarks. 

“You may call a cockroach an infestation, you may use that word in the Third Reich to describe those who are undesirable, who must be put down because they are subhuman. You do not expect to hear that in the United States of America in this age, in our generation, in this beautiful country that decided 243 years ago that we would not define ourselves by race or ethnicity or our differences — but by the fact that we were all created equal.”  

Yes, indeed, Trump’s rhetoric is that of Nazi Germany’s. Good for Beto for saying it, and saying it now, when it’s harder for Trump and his deplorable enablers in Congress to escape the consequences.

So now the question is, how will other Democrats respond? It is my sincere hope that they double down on Beto’s remarks and back Trump into a corner: either Trump continues his Nazi-era rhetoric or he gives it up. Either way he turns, Trump would be weakened.

Of course, Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But this is one they shouldn’t.

One more point: In the wake of El Paso, changing the subject from gun control to “mental health” is a losing proposition for Republicans.

Obviously, the kind of hateful rhetoric spewing out of the computer of the gunman — the same hateful rhetoric spewing out of the mouth of Donald Trump — is a sign of severe mental illness. Both need help and should be immediately denied access both to guns and political power.

Ritual human sacrifice: the price of freedom? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 5, 2019

Ritual human sacrifice: the price of freedom?
by Tom Sullivan

Reports indicate the FBI has not yet determined a motive behind the Dayton, Ohio shooting rampage Sunday morning. But with mass-shootings in Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton coming within a week, it is natural to wonder if they are connected. They are. In guns and in death.

How else is less clear. As of Wednesday, the FBI had not determined a motive for the Gilroy shootings that left three dead and six wounded. The gunman shot himself.

“The information that’s out there, it’s being reported that there’s white nationalism or any type of those ideologies,” Special Agent John Bennett told reporters. “That has not been determined and I wanted to knock that down.”

Authorities are investigating the El Paso shootings as domestic terrorism. Twenty killed, over two dozen injured. The suspect in that case surrendered to police. Prior to the attack, police say, he posted online a statement filled with anti-immigrant and racist language. The “invasion” of Texas by Latinos would make Texas solidly Democratic and turn the country into a one-party state, etc. He drove from the Dallas suburbs to El Paso to kill as many Mexicans as possible. His statement echoes language broadcast weekly by the acting president and conservative opinion outlets.

The Ohio suspect arrived in downtown Dayton Saturday night with the sister he later gunned down and her male companion. He separated from the other two and later appeared in a mask and began shooting people in the street before police shot and killed him. But not before he killed nine others in under a minute.

The Dayton Daily News reports the gunman, while he had no significant criminal record, had an “unusual obsession with killing and death.” Plus, a history of drawing up death lists and “a dark energy around him.”

“I think this is less of a hate crime and more of an ‘I hate everybody’ crime,” Demoy Howell, a former classmate, told the Daily News. “I honestly feel more comfortable now knowing that he’s gone.”

There is enough evidence to find a connection between El Paso and other white nationalist violence. The alleged shooter’s online statement “reads as a carbon copy of that espoused by those who carried out the recent and respective attacks on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” writes CJ Werleman for the Sydney Morning Herald:

These right-wing extremists are not only channelling neo-Nazi borne “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories, which frame demographic change as a threat to white Europeans, but also taking a cue from the words and policies of President Donald Trump.

[…]

It’s worth remembering that when a Rwandan politician described Rwanda’s Tutsi minority as “cockroaches” it started a genocide that resulted in the deaths of upwards of one million people in that country.

While close in time, the Gilroy and Dayton deaths may not be connected to El Paso by ideology any more than Chicago’s summer ritual of drive-by shootings are. Seven were wounded in a park there over the weekend.

They are all connected, however, by a gun culture that demands ritual human sacrifice as the price others must pay for the “freedom,” so-called, of the gun lobby to profit from it. They are connected by gun fetishists and bought politicians who do nothing while solemnly offering thoughts and prayers. They are connected by a feedback loop of violence that normalizes shooting rampages, drive-by shootings, police shootings of unarmed black men, veterans’ suicides, and the weekly list of accidental shootings curated at #gunfail.

They are connected by the tacit permission one slaughter — political or not — gives to the next, and lately by conspiracy theories that claim white people are being “replaced” at the apex of the socio-political ladder by lessers, i.e., by people of color who must be stopped.

A friend in TV used to joke that he got started filming the daily “wreck at 6.” Now, it’s the daily body count.

As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine addressed a Dayton vigil Sunday night, the crowd chanted over and over, “Do something!“


Meme by @litbrit.

The Right’s Extreme Narcissism by tristero

Published by digby on August 5, 2019

The Right’s Extreme Narcissism

by tristero

Here is the creator of 8Chan, commenting on the El Paso shooting. The article claims that he regrets his role in founding the site. Here’s how he expresses that regret:

“Another 8chan shooting?” he tweeted on Saturday. “Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?”

How about the families of the victims? Will they be able to move on with their lives? How about the living but physically and psychologically wounded victims?

The guy’s remark reveals the same combination of psychopathology, lack of empathy, and narcissism that Trump shows humanity — and which is likely to destroy it.

Yes, the 8Chan creator shows a dim awareness that maybe his Frankenstein monster might also be bad for others. He wants it shut down (well, duh).

But to answer his question, no, he will never be able to move on with his life. If he didn’t want the cause of being branded the creator of 8Chan, well, he shoulda thought of the consequences. Sorry but it’s cause and effect. It’s the law of the universe.

Trump’s “invasion” talk can’t be erased

Published by digby on August 4, 2019

Trump’s “invasion” talk can’t be erased

by digby

It appears that someone is deleting some of Trump’s tweets mentioning “invasion” of migrants.

They are all captured. Here’s the list from the Trump twitter archive:

CNN captured them too:

And there’s this:

It’s intentional. They know what they are doing.

Update: