These two were booted from a different Walmart in 2020. Nazis like to go to Walmart apparently
The mass shooting on Monday garnered hardly a mention in the news because the shooter only managed to wound four people before he killed himself. No biggie in America’s shooting gallery. But it is worth noting that it appears he had an ideological motive:
Benjamin Charles Jones, 20, of Dayton, Ohio, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart after he shot two Black females, a white female and a white male Monday, the FBI stated.
One victim remained in critical condition, while three others suffered from non-life-threatening injuries.
Based on evidence, including journal entries, investigators believe the attack was at least partially racially motivated, when Jones fired from a Hi-Point .45 caliber carbine purchased two days before the incident, according to a news release.
Court documents obtained by News Center 7′s I-Team show two Nazi flags, “the SS history book,” a shooting complex card, handwritten notes, a laptop, and an external hard drive were also allegedly among items investigators found at Jones’ house.
Let’s not lose sight of the right wing racist antisemites in our midst. They’re the ones with all the guns.
A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags and transgender athletes slipped a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office, hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda.
But the Democratic majority that swept the conservative Moms For Liberty slate out of office hopes to block the unusual — they say illegal — payout and bring calm to the Central Bucks School District, whose affluent suburbs and bucolic farms near Philadelphia have been roiled by infighting since the 2020 pandemic.
“People are really sick of the embarrassing meetings, the vitriol, they’re tired of our district being in the news for all the wrong reasons. And … the students are aware of what’s been going on, particularly our LGBTQ students and their friends and allies,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won a third term on the board.
The district, with about 17,000 students in 23 schools, has spent $1.5 million on legal and public relations fees amid competing lawsuits, discrimination complaints and investigations in the past two years, including a pending suit over its suspension of a middle school teacher who supported LGBTQ and other marginalized students.
I wonder if those moms got a little taste…
This is a perfect lesson for people to see exactly who it is that’s causing all the trouble in our politics. It isn’t a bunch of woke college kids, it’s these Real Americans who have all lost their minds. And, by the way, they’re corrupt too! Surprise!
The New York judge overseeing Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial and his law clerk have received hundreds of harassing messages that court security has deemed “serious and credible” since the former president began publicly criticizing court staff.
Since October 3, when Trump posted on social media a baseless allegation about Judge Arthur Engoron’s law clerk, threats against the judge “increased exponentially” and were also directed to his clerk, according to Charles Hollon, a court officer-captain in New York assigned to the Judicial Threats Assessment unit of the Department of Public Safety, who signed a sworn statement.
Hollon said the threats against the judge and his clerk are “considered to be serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative.”
Trump’s social media posting prompted the judge to impose a gag order prohibiting the former president from making statements about court staff. The gag order was later extended to include Trump’s attorneys from commenting on the judge’s private communications with his law clerk.
At the time, the judge said his chambers had received hundreds of harassing and threatening calls and emails. The additional details made public in the Wednesday filing, however, reveal the extent of that contact, including dozens of messages daily, phone doxing and the increased use of antisemitic language.
Engoron has fined Trump twice for a total of $15,000 for violating the gag order.
Last week, a New York appeals court judge temporarily lifted the gag order after Trump argued it violated his constitutional rights. The ruling to stay the order is temporary to allow time for a fuller panel of judges to weigh in.
In a court filing Wednesday, a lawyer for the Court Administration for New York state asked an appeals court panel to keep the gag order in place and deny Trump’s effort to permanently lift the gag order. Hollon’s sworn statement was included in the filing. Lawyers for the New York attorney general’s office also urged the court to keep the gag order in place, writing that a “speedy denial” is necessary to ensure the safety of court staff as well as “the integrity and the orderly administration of the proceedings through the end of the trial.”
Hollon said Engoron’s law clerk has received 20-30 calls per day to her personal cell phone and 30-50 messages daily on social media platforms and two personal email addresses.
On a daily basis, he said, the judge and his staff receive hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, email and voicemail messages such that security staff are “having to constantly reassess and evaluate what security protections to put in place to ensure the safety of the judge and those around him.”
Since the gag order was lifted on November 16, Hollon said, the number of messages increased. He also said about half of the harassing messages the clerk received were antisemitic.
He named her. Clearly, he wants to send the message to his cult to do her harm. And they are listening.
One red state I track from cycle to cycle showed half its Democratic county committees leaderless or unorganized this time in 2022. When I checked the state party’s website again this week, Every Single One had a county chair listed with email contacts (all but one). I was elated. It won’t change anything electoral-count-wise in 2024, but it’s remarkable organizing progress in two years. It could mean a less-red state legislature in the near future, and a more hospitable environment for residents, especially women. It’s something to be thankful for today.
Combined with Democratic wins around the state, every county that Joe Biden won in 2020 will now have a Democratic-led county government, covering 56% of the state’s population. As Bolts Magazine’s Daniel Nichanian has detailed, Pennsylvania’s county governments play an important role in administering elections, determining access to voting, and certifying election results in this major swing state.
Democrats are winning almost everywhere lately. Simon Rosenberg (Hopium Chronicles) is among those who have taken notice (Salon):
The Democrats have been winning in off-year elections. We won in the red wave midterm that we weren’t supposed to win last year. We won in the general election. This idea that as the electorate gets bigger, it gets more Republican is false. The Democrats have won more votes in the last seven out of eight elections than the Republicans. No political party has done that in American history. In the last four elections, we’ve beaten the Republicans on average by 51 to 46 by five points.
In addition, there is a big anti-MAGA majority in this country and it continues to show up to give the Democrats big electoral victories when nobody expects it. I also have no idea how Donald Trump is going to pick up a single new vote beyond the voters who voted for him in 2020. And it’s far more likely that he gets 45% of the vote than he does 49% of the vote. Trump is not a strong candidate. He’s only getting 60% of the Republican field right now. That means 40% of Republicans are not supporting him right now. Trump needs 95% of Republicans to even have a remote chance of winning. He is very far away from that. Trump is actually showing a lot of structural weakness, not strength.
I know the polls have shown what they’ve shown. First of all, the election is a year away. Not to be overlooked, there are polls showing Biden up by between two and five points nationally over Trump. There is contradictory data out there — which is what happened with the non-existent red wave in 2022. For Trump to be in the high 40s, or even ahead of Biden, it would put Trump in a place that no Republican candidate has been in 20 years. I just don’t buy that given the fact that when actual Democrats and Republicans go vote, we do well, and they don’t. I’m not going to tell you we’re going to win. I can’t predict that. But I would much rather be us than them given everything I know about politics.
The Republicans are in far greater trouble than is generally understood. Consider these facts: Trump has been convicted of sexual assault, he was involved in one of the largest financial scandals in American history, he will have been probably responsible for the greatest security breach in the history of potentially the United States and even the West, he will have overseen a party-wide conspiracy to overturn an election and to end American democracy, and he is more responsible for ending Roe v. Wade and taking away women’s reproductive rights than any other single person in the country. When you add all that up, I just don’t know how Donald Trump, the worst candidate in American history, wins.
Rosenberg will host NC Democratic Party Chair AndersonClayton (photo at top) in a Zoom event next Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET. A few of us geezers helped this Gen Zsuperstar take the reins here and begin prepping our state to go blue in 2024. Clayton is another reason for me to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Us Boomers? The wisest of us know when to step aside. We’re done. We’re advisors.
There is a lot of grassroots energy out there that’s not visible to Average Joe. Some of the organizing occurs on Zoom and in the streets rather than in the press. (Not seeing it on your vidscreen doesn’t mean it’s not happening.) But the level of commitment and activity is as high as I’ve seen since the first Obama campaign, even if the hair at most of those meetings is still too gray for my liking.
Note those headlines. They are unusually … direct. Paul Campos at LGM notes this phenomenon as well, taking a look at one of the most jarring from Tom Edsall in NY Times today headlines “The Roots Of trump’s Rage::
Edsall specializes in long think pieces for the NYT, in which he interviews experts who try to understand the Trump phenomenon in, what up until now, has been a kind of “even handed” way, i.e., yes Trump is a disturbing figure, but let’s try to understand why nearly half the country elected him and wants him to be president again. Today’s edition of this series, published on a notable anniversary in American history, goes in a different direction right from the top:
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”
This is a long piece, but there’s never any gesture towards “on the other hand” at any point within it. The whole thing is a brutally straightforward indictment of Trump as a literally insane aspiring autocrat, based on interviews with mental health experts, who document Trump’s ongoing deterioration into pure grandiose narcissism and psychopathy:
I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”
Miller wrote that he has
long thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity; failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table and Trump seems rather high on those traits along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).
I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”
Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration,” adding “this behavior is also consistent with psychopathy which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”
Again, the whole thing is like this, with no equivocation or on the other handing or Joe Biden is really old.
This kind of accurate unflinching coverage is also reflected in a NYT story from earlier this week, that reported on Trump’s fascistic rhetoric about “vermin” and “poisoned blood” while pulling no punches.
Edsall again:
Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.
“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”
In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”
This was not followed by any temporizing comments about Joe Biden’s mental deterioration, real or imagined.
What may be happening here is that the elite media are finally beginning to come to terms with what is actually happening in this country at this historical moment.
A society and its political and legal systems are not suicide pacts. Donald Trump cannot be allowed to become president again, for reasons laid out cogently by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. His re-election would be a fundamental revocation of liberal democracy.
A dictator is trying to break into the White House, and liberal democracy has both the right and the duty to stand its ground.
Have they finally realized that the threat isn’t just to immigrants and hippies? They’re personally at the top of the list.
They have to keep it up constantly for the next year for it to truly penetrate. The media needs to absorb this deeply into their consciousness as part of their responsibility.
Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies. Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of “divisive concepts” about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers.
The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas. But the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse.
The number of applications for OB-GYN residencies is down more than 10 percent in states that have banned abortion since Dobbs. Forty-eight teachers in Hernando County, Florida, fed up with “Don’t Say Gay” and other new laws restricting what they can teach, resigned or retired at the end of the last school year. A North Carolina law confining transgender people to bathrooms in accordance with what it said on their birth certificate was projected, before it was repealed, to cost that state $3.76 billion in business investment, including the loss of a planned global operations center for PayPal in Charlotte. A survey of college faculty in four red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) about political interference in higher education found a falloff in the number of job candidates for faculty positions, and 67 percent of the respondents said they would not recommend their state to colleagues as a place to work. Indeed, nearly one-third said they were actively considering employment elsewhere.
Read the whole article if you can. It is full of individual stories of doctors, teachers, scientists etc making the tough decision to leave because of the restrictions on them personally and professionally.
I doubt the red state Republicans have regrets about this. Their survival in office depends upon the voters being under-educated and easily exploited. It remains to be seen how much they miss having businesses which depend upon an educated workforce as a tax base. But maybe they don’t really care about that either.
A few years back on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake and received a very nice note from journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it very much. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty Cake.It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good.
* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk * 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar, * 1/4 cup chopped walnuts * a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.
Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.
Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.
Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.
Icing: Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.
Sometimes I think that if I were young I’d vote with my feet and go somewhere else. This is lunacy:
More than half of American voters — 52% — say they or someone in their household owns a gun, per the latest NBC News national poll.
That’s the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.
In 2019, 46% of Americans said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, per an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And in February 2013, that share was 42%.
“In the last ten years, we’ve grown [10 points] in gun ownership. That’s a very stunning number,” said Micah Roberts of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that co-conducted the poll with members of the Democratic polling firm Hart Research.
“By and large, things don’t change that dramatically that quickly when it comes to something as fundamental as whether you own a gun,” Roberts added.
Gun ownership does fall along partisan lines, as it has for years, the poll finds.
This month, 66% of Republican voters surveyed say that they or someone in their household owns a gun, while just 45% of independents and 41% of Democrats say the same.
In 2004, a March NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 57% of Republicans said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, while just 41% of independents and 33% of Democrats said the same.
Meanwhile gun deaths are soaring. I wonder why?
By the way, Democrats are arming too at a very fast rate. I can’t say why that would be but it’s a fair guess that at least some are worried about the rest of these gun nuts. It’s a vicious circle.
