Relations between the United States and Israel have been rocky during the Obama administration and people in the Jewish state are keeping close tabs on the 2016 presidential race. However, Israelis woke up on Friday morning to some surprising headlines, thanks to this year’s crop of unconventional candidates.
The Times of Israel led with Donald J. Trump’s referring to Jewish people as “good negotiators” and with his declining to commit to supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the country. “Trump courts Republican Jews with offensive stereotypes,” the headline blared atop a story that described his remarks as “anti-Semitic.”
Friday Reads
Posted: December 11, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Every Child Succeeds, Mitt Romney, No Child Left Behind, Republican Brokered Convention, Senator Al Franken, US Education Reform 9 Comments
Good Day!!
There’s actually a bit of good news this week hidden among the atrocities. “No Child Left Behind” has been replaced with “Every Child Succeeds”. That sounds like one replacing one bit of jargon for another. However, there’s some substantive changes and there’s some hope it will be good for teachers, students, and taxpayers.
The testing and accountability regime–which really led to a layer of bureaucracy, massive testing and costs–has been criticized by the education community since its inception. I remember hearing it called “No Teacher Left Standing” by friends teaching in the Public Education system. It’s a function of corporate bureaucrat think which basically frames all situations in terms of no one can be trusted but a report-generating middle man who basically just ensures every one does their jobs based on some really bizarre set of standards invented by Corporate CEOS like Romney, Fiorino and Trump who notably have no clue what they’re doing in their own companies let alone a school system.
Select “educational outcomes” were boiled down to the most base things and it resulted in teaching to a particular test because teachers feared for their jobs. The idea of developing a child’s critical thinking skills, their ability to work with others, and their basic nature of surging, fixating and mastering one content area using a variety of different senses was ignored. As a result, “No Child Left Behind” represented the worst of American Business practices. Trivial outcomes were emphasized. Control was paramount. The humanity of teachers and students was ignored. Bureaucratic managers and unnecessary consultants raked in money as Districts struggled to implement and report results.
Unfortunately, this mindset has also crept into Higher Education and I can tell you that my job has switched from teaching to constantly grading stuff, reporting on outcomes, and paperwork. It’s not a good situation for any one. It creates a really stressful, negative environment too.
Here’s a good basic outline by USA Today on what’s changing. This was a bipartisan effort which has been extremely rare given the pledge by Republicans to thwart any possible Obama-backed law.
No Child Left Behind:
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, was a civil rights law that provided education funding to states and attempted to ensure that every student had access to an education. The law would expire every three to five years, requiring Congress to reauthorize it. In 2001, Democrats and Republicans in Congress became increasingly concerned by the growing achievement gaps that left poor and minority students in failing schools, and devised a system of testing and accountability to fix it. “The fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning,” President George W. Bush said in the Jan. 8, 2002, signing ceremony.
Every Student Succeeds Act: The new law tries to preserve the spirit of No Child Left Behind, while fixing what were widely perceived as its one-size-fits-all approach.“The goals of No Child Left Behind, the predecessor of this law, were the right ones: High standards. Accountability. Closing the achievement gap,” Obama said Thursday. “But in practice, it often fell short. It didn’t always consider the specific needs of each community. It led to too much testing during classroom time. It often forced schools and school districts into cookie-cutter reforms that didn’t always produce the kinds of results that we wanted to see.”
NPR has some interesting analysis on the law.
The new law changes much about the federal government’s role in education, largely by scaling back Washington’s influence. While ESSA keeps in place the basic testing requirements of No Child Left Behind, it strips away many of the high stakes that had been attached to student scores.
The job of evaluating schools and deciding how to fix them will shift largely back to states. Gone too is the requirement, added several years ago by the Obama administration, that states use student scores to evaluate teachers.
The new law, which passed the House and Senate with rare, resounding bipartisan support, would also expand access to high-quality preschool.
Before the signing, President Obama made clear that he believed the goals of NCLB — namely high standards, accountability and closing the achievement gap — were the right ones. But in practice, he said, the law fell short.
“It often forced schools and school districts into cookie-cutter reforms that didn’t always produce the kinds of results that we wanted to see,” Obama said.
NCLB was signed by President George W. Bush in early 2002 and was, itself, an update of a much older law — the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. While ESSA officially marks the end of the NCLB era, the majority of states have for several years received waivers from the Obama administration, exempting them from some of the law’s toughest requirements.
Minnesota Senator Al Franken was a key supporter and mover for the change. You can see his speech to the Senate encouraging a yes vote on the bill on his web page. Minnesota is a state that is consistently one
of the best for educational outcomes and has a vibrant public school system.
Now, this bill is not perfect. But it’s a huge improvement over NCLB. Over the last 13 years, we learned that the one-size-fits-all approach to fixing failing schools wasn’t working. That’s why this bill is designed to find a balance between giving states more flexibility while still making sure that states intervene and fix schools where students are not learning.
Over the last several years, I’ve met with principals, teachers, students, parents, and school administrators in Minnesota. These conversations have helped me develop my education priorities to help improve our schools, our communities, and our nation’s future. I worked with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find common ground, and I’m very pleased that many of my priorities to improve student outcomes and close the achievement gap are reflected in the legislation that is before us today.
These priorities include things like strengthening STEM education, expanding student mental health services, increasing access to courses that help high school students earn college credit, and improving the preparation and recruitment of principals for high need schools. I also successfully fought to renew the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program which provides critical after-school learning activities for students. Another one of my priorities helps increase the number of counselors and social workers in our schools.
And my provision to allow states to use Computer Adaptive Tests will go a long way toward improving the quality of assessments used in our schools and will give teachers and parents more accurate and timely information on their students’ progress.
I was also able to include a new Native language immersion program because I believe language is critical to maintaining cultural heritage and helping Native American students succeed. In addition, I wrote a provision to provide foster children who move to new school districts the opportunity to stay at their current school if it’s in their best interest.
Again, I’m very pleased that these priorities have been included in the legislation we are considering today, and I thank my colleagues for working with me on them. These provisions will help hundreds of thousands of students in Minnesota and across the country reach their full potential.
So one of the most interesting things that has just come out of the battle royale that is the republican presidential primary campaign is the news that a supposed “secret” meeting took place among establishment Republicans like Dick Cheney. There is now official talk of a brokered convention. Establishment Republicans have been concerned about the rise of both Donald Trump and Ben Carson and the incredible chaos that’s occurred because of differences in priorities between insurgent and establishment Republicans. We may be looking at an event that hasn’t happened for some time.
Will there be a contested convention?
Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as businessman Donald Trump continues to sit atop the polls in the GOP presidential race.
More than 20 of them convened Monday near the Capitol for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, and the prospect of Trump nearing next year’s nominating convention in Cleveland with a significant number of delegates dominated the discussion, according to five people familiar with the meeting.
Weighing in on that scenario as Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listened, several longtime Republican power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative, the people said.
The development represents a major shift for veteran Republican strategists, who until this month had spoken of a brokered convention only in the most hypothetical terms — and had tried to encourage a drama-free nomination by limiting debates and setting an earlier convention date.
Now, those same leaders see a floor fight as a real possibility. And so does Trump, who said in an interview last week that he, too, is preparing.
Ben Carson on Friday blasted the Republican National Committee following a Washington Post report that nearly two-dozen establishment party figures were prepping for a potential brokered convention as Donald Trump continues to lead most polls.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus held a dinner in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and, according to five people who spoke with the Post, the possibility of Trump heading into the Cleveland convention with a substantial number of delegates was a topic of discussion. Some attendees suggested the establishment lay the groundwork for a floor fight that could lead the party’s mainstream wing to unite behind an alternative. Carson rejected this approach.
“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” Carson said in a statement released by his campaign.
Carson said he prays the Post’s report is incorrect and threatened to leave the GOP. “If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it,” said Carson, who added that if the plot is accurate, “I assure you Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party.”
The retired neurosurgeon said that next summer’s Cleveland convention could be the last Republican National Convention if leaders try to manipulate it.
“I am prepared to lose fair and square, as I am sure is Donald,” Carson said. “But I will not sit by and watch a theft. I intend on being the nominee. If I am not, the winner will have my support. If the winner isn’t our nominee then we have a massive problem.”
Establishment Republicans fear that Donald Trump–as their presidential nominee–means that Democratic party will have a real chance at taking back the Senate and even the House. The Cook Political Report explains that this might be an overreaction.
To most Republican strategists, there’s no bigger nightmare than Donald Trump as the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2016. This week, just about every Democrat running for president, Senate, House, and their respective campaign committees sought to tie Republicans to Trump and brand them one big bunch of xenophobes. Talk of a down-ballot Republican apocalypse has reached fever pitch.
Even setting aside the remoteness of a scenario in which Trump would face Hillary Clinton in a one-on-one contest, such talk is premature and possibly overblown.
Given Trump’s unpopularity with the electorate overall, there’s a possibility he could end an era of very close and competitive presidential elections and suffer a landslide defeat (by modern standards). But what would that mean down-ballot? If Trump becomes his own radioactive island, GOP candidates in swing districts would have no choice but to renounce him and run far away for cover.
The challenge in assessing their odds for survival in such a scenario is that there hasn’t been a blowout presidential election in a very long time. However, history is on the GOP’s side.
Since 1960, there have only been three elections in which one candidate prevailed by a double-digit margin in a presidential race: Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 (by 22.6 percent), Richard Nixon over George McGovern in 1972 (by 23.2 percent), and Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984 (by 18.2 percent). In all three instances, Democrats retained control of the House.
Despite the predictable outcome of each of the three landslides, there is scant evidence the losing side’s demoralized voters stayed home in huge numbers or bolted their party en masse down-ballot compared to the previous presidential cycle. In each case, voters seemed to evaluate presidential candidates on a case-by-case basis but stuck with their core party preferences for Congress.
With Donald Trump’s ruinous domination of the Republican primary polls showing no signs of abating, top leaders in the GOP are reportedly now preparing for the possibility of a contentious brokered convention next year in Cleveland.
If that happens, a small group of wealthy donors and die-hard loyalists close to Mitt Romney will be ready with a strategy to win him the nomination from the convention floor.
Romney thought seriously about entering the 2016 race earlier this year, and ultimately decided against it. But as I report in my new book, The Wilderness, when the former Republican nominee informed friends, family, and a few close allies late in January that he was going to announce his decision to bow out, some urged him to reconsider:
The Republicans have seriously lost it. All I can say is that Nixon’s Southern Strategy has caused the vultures to come home to roost.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Selective Attention and Tangled Webs
Posted: December 4, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, Mid Day Reads, religious extremists, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights 5 Comments
We’ve had a few tough weeks.
The problem with constant access to media is that you get constant access to unpleasant things and people. Also, the folks that wish harm on others get a constant bombardment of stimulus, propaganda and instructions. That sets off a lot of copy cat nastiness.
The United States experiences rampage killers like no other. We also have politicians that we might as well characterize as mass killers. Their policies kill our fellow citizens and enable others to do so. Our system preys on the weak and turns the crazy loose on us. What ever happened to solving problems through policy instead of creating them through political maneuvering and manipulating constitutional rights?
The power of the NRA is a case study in what can happen in democracies when a powerful, plutocratic entity only acts in its best interest and funds and threatens policymakers. If only members of government were as concerned with the other Constitutional Amendments as they are with shielding the beefed up version of the second amendment that we now have thanks to the NRA and the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. Our right to privacy and our right to be free of a state-forced and sanctioned, majority-pushed religion is under attack.
We hear demands and see policy prescriptions that enshrine bigotry and unequal treatment under the law hiding under calls to protect religious liberty. When real religious liberty is threatened, these same folks seem dumbstruck. Their shallow and contradictory arguments scream “Allow me to do what ever I want in the name of religious freedom including restricting the civil rights of others but please put those practicing other religions on a register and monitor them constantly and make them follow my tenets and fetishes. Restrict their free exercise and allow our society to inflict mine on others.”
What we’ve really seen the past few weeks is religious fanaticism hyped up with access to weapons and enablers. The problem is that our treatment of these actions and speech is systemically different even though our Constitution and judicial history indicate what they want isn’t in keeping with US ‘values’. Religious fanaticism is condemned in one form of practice. It’s being tackled with suggestions that would restrict other’s Constitutional Rights. Religious fanaticism is being enabled on the other hand. It’s equally being tackled with suggestions that would restrict other’s Constitutional Rights. This makes my head spin and my heart hurt.
So, it seems that the San Bernadino shooters were “radicalized” in to some form of wahhabism. The woman was sympathetic to ISIS. The man may have been set off by being harassed by a “messianic Jewish” co-worker who was one of the victims of the rampage shooting when it came to a head at a holiday party. Oh, and the same day we had all this going on another shooting occurred at a Women’s Health Clinic. We also found out the that Colorado Planned Parenthood rampage shooter had targeted women’s clinics before. Some one or thing “radicalized” him too. Yet, we have no media coverage or political obsession on that.
Is it because he only killed three and he’s not the latest thing in rampage killing? Or, is it because what radicalized him is one of the political parties and a part of their base? (This is a base that includes Opus Dei members of SCOTUS and a ton of “The Family” members in the House.
We cannot deny that our supposed pluralistic, tolerant, and religious neutral society has been accessed by the worst of our fringes. No wonder the FBI is having difficulty characterizing our recent set of domestic/international terrorist activities. Our radical christianists have gone international in creating an international terror network against GLBT persons and fund groups that force conversion on Muslims and others. If ISIS is radicalizing folks in California, what do we call “Christian” Pastors that radicalize folks in Uganda?
Just to add some icing to this cake, we’ve had the most violent and death-filled Black Friday Shopping day also. Oh, and this last Black Friday saw
gun sales soar. Ho, ho ho …. Prince of Peace …. Holiday Spirit … wtf is wrong with this country? We now have holiday shopping as a violent, rampage event.
I suppose I should mention that there was a mass shooting just blocks from me at a park filled with children and old people recently. It was across the St. Claude Avenue line of demarcation but I heard the rounds of both the semi-automatic and the hand guns from about six blocks. Silly me. I was thinking it was likely early Thanksgiving fireworks. I live in a city with constant gun violence.
Interestingly enough, our DA has asked the NRA to try to craft some “reasonable” limits to gun access. No one–not even the US Senate–can accomplish this.
Less than two weeks removed from a mass shooting in Bunny Friend Park that left 17 injured and in the recent shadow from a mass shooting in California that left 14 dead, Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro invited the National Rifle Association to find solutions to the gun violence that plagues New Orleans and the nation.
“Both locally and nationally we are seeing an increase in gun-related violence,” Cannizzaro said. “In New Orleans, the street trade of firearms has become too prolific.
The Senate just voted to on a bill to stop people on the Terrorist list from getting access to guns. It was mostly symbolic since anything related to gun regulations gets defeated immediately these days. I only wish that Serial Clinic Harassers could be put on that list too since any sensible gun bill that hits the Capitol floor is symbolic these days and we could use that symbolism.
We can sure stack up the number of gun violence victims but heaven forbid they get healthcare. Sick and poor people are the victims of bad policy. The umpty umpth repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act was also up for a vote. One Republican voted for the Feinstein Bill. Several Democrats voted against it.
Senate Republicans on Thursday rejected an amendment to the ObamaCare repeal bill that would have tied it to a separate fight on blocking suspected or known terrorists from being able to buy guns.
Senators voted 45-54 on procedural hurdle for the measure from Sen. Dianne Feinstein.The California Democrat’s proposal, which she has also introduced as a separate piece of legislation, would allow the attorney general to block the sale or transfer of a gun or explosive to a suspected or known terrorist if the individual is believed to use the weapons in an act of terrorism.Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) broke rank and voted against moving forward with Feinstein’s amendment, while Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) voted with Democrats.Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, Feinstein called her amendment “the definition of a no-brainer.”She underscored the bipartisan support behind the proposal, pointing out that a House Republican has introduced a similar bill and the idea was initially backed by the Bush administration’s Department of Justice in 2007.Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), however, suggested that Feinstein’s amendment would strip Americans of due process.“This is not the way we’re supposed to do things in this country,” he said ahead of the vote.Senators rejected an amendment from Cornyn by a 55-44 vote. The Texan’s proposal would have allowed the attorney general to delay suspected terrorists from getting a gun for up to 72 hours as they try to get a court to approve blocking the sale of the firearm.The transfer of the gun would be blocked if a court determines that the person wanting to buy the gun has committed or will commit an act of terrorism.“If you believe the federal government is omniscient and all competent vote for the Feinstein amendment,” Cornyn added ahead of the votes, noting that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was on a terror watch list.Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) voted to move forward with Cornyn’s proposal. Kirk voted against the amendment on the procedural hurdle.
We are a divided country. I’m sure Heitkamp’s North Dakota voters have no idea what it’s like to live in an urban area with constant gun violence. 
Just as it seems that many Republican Presidential candidates–and one in particular--don’t seem to know much about the lives and beliefs of any one outside their particular demographic ( wealthy WASP/C men). Politicians seem more subservient to a pet demographic and lobby more than ever. This used to be more common in the House but rare in the Senate. This is no longer the case in the years of stopping Obama at any cost.
I’m going to back step a little to show you that “discussion” between rampage shooter and victim in San Bernadino. Keep in mind that a “Messianic Jew” is basically one that has converted to Christianity while maintaining a Jewish identity.
Thalasinos’ friend, Kuuleme Stephens, told The Associated Press that she happened to call him while he was working with Farook, and that he brought her into their debate, loudly declaring that Farook “doesn’t agree that Islam is not a peaceful religion.” She heard Farook counter that Americans don’t understand Islam, and Thalasinos responded by saying “I don’t know how to talk with him,” she said.
Stephens said she didn’t sense any pending violence at the time, and it is not clear if their debates factored in the attack. Stephens said Thalasinos did not believe his co-worker would ever turn violent.
However, Stephens said his grieving wife told her later Thursday to tell the media that she now “believes her husband was martyred for his faith and beliefs.” It wasn’t immediately clear why Jennifer Thalasinos came to that conclusion.
You kind’ve have to wonder what it might be like if your co-worker is constantly trying to characterize your beliefs as something he desperately wants them to be and you can’t seem to convince him otherwise. We’ve all been victims of obnoxious proselytizers, I’m sure, and yet all of us, don’t go full throttle radical jihadi on them. All serial Clinic Harassers don’t all use semi-automatics to inflict damage either. The problem is that the entire systems creates, sets up, and enables the rampage shooters and our leaders seem more complicit than ever.
The problem is a basic lack in the ability to empathize and sympathize with other human beings. How many people do you know that just have to insist they’re right? I’ve seen it come to angry words and even school yard brawls. But why, in our country, does that anger jump to the idea that you have to insist you’re right with a damned semi-automatic weapon that takes out first graders, play ground revelers, women seeking health care and public health inspectors?
The bigger question is, however, if we look to our leaders to seek out the middle ground and to protect our rights to be us in a society where there are many folks that don’t live like us, look like us, and share religious beliefs like us, and then can’t seem to think outside their own little box, how do we survive as a country?
Each Republican Presidential candidate has characterized a blatantly false propaganda film as showing something horrible about a place that simply helps poor people get access to health care and a constitutional right. Every time we get a rampage shooter, sensible majority supported laws controlling access to certain weapons and weapon stockpiling becomes an affront to duck hunters. Gay people are taking away religious freedom for wanting equal access to Civil Marriage but monitoring all members of a specific religion is just common sense disaster prevention. Depriving US citizens of everything because their parents brought them here while undocumented is just protecting our borders.
Orwell was prescient, wasn’t he?
We’ve so twisted our characterizations of others that we can no longer find any kind of commonality and middle ground. It’s time to get back to Politics as usual and to find ways of protecting Americans instead of creating environments where we demonize each other then grieve when some one acts on those demons with an arsenal. I believe the tangled web does come from the deception of others as Walter Scott so famously suggested. Unfortunately, the others appear to be a huge number of elected officials. We’re not going to see anything change until we stop the ones that continually lie, deceive, and mischaracterize our fellow human beings and citizens.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: How do you solve a problem like The Donald?
Posted: November 27, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads | Tags: bigotry, Donald Trump, fascism, intolerance, Racism, Republican Party, Trump mania, xenophobia 26 Comments
It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and hopefully, you’re able to rest and relax!
It’s the official start of Crass Consumerism Season so the throngs of the junk-driven are out buying cheap worthless stuff today that will undoubtedly fill up landfills some time next year.
There are many things about US Society that are downright shameful. Our history of slavery, mass genocide of indigenous peoples, destruction of old growth forests, treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and women just are parts of the darkest parts of our history that we cannot deny and should not forget. Today we seem doomed to repeat bad behavior.
We live in a society where police mercilessly attack and kill unarmed citizens and the leading Republican Candidate stands before an enthralled audience making fun of disabled Americans and arguing that deeply harmed minority citizens get what they have coming to them. Meanwhile, they’ll spend this weekend being thankful for Murica! and exercising their right to trample others into the ground for the chance of getting a cheap shiny object. Some will probably be toting guns in full view because Murica! too.
And yet, many of us persevere in the basic values that established our country’s form of governance. That would be things like rule of law which is established by the people’s representatives, the nonestablishment of a government supported and enforced religion, and the rights of all of our citizens to life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness. These are our ongoing presents to ourselves and to humankind even though we tend to get lost in a mountain of shiny objects.
Why do we continue to bring out both the worst and the best of humanity?
One of the most horrifying thing about the cold-blooded shooting of LaQuan McDonald in Chicago last year is that it took a good-hearted, fair-minded public servant whistle blower to bring this atrocity of justice to the attention of the courts and the public. We could not catch nor fact check–let alone hold accountable–public servants without camera technology, cell phones, and the internet. Now, there is a call that cameras be omnipresent. It has always been their word against ours and they win because law and order Murica!. Believe me, I know this intimately. The police intimidate witnesses and manufacture evidence. The system believes them. But now, we have cameras and they have cameras. We are a nation of Big Brothers.
In other words, it took a highly non-standard series of events—a whistleblower and many lawsuits—for Chicagoans to learn of, and then get to see, the incident. (As recently as November 13, Rahm Emanuel, the city’s mayor, refused to put a hard date on the video’s release.) If a similar incident were to happen, and it was captured on a body cam, what would it take to make it public—another whistleblower?
It’s more than an academic question. The city of Chicago will soon spend $1 million in federal funds to purchase body cameras for its force. As I wrote last December, the campaign which got dashboard cameras installed in most American police cars last decade looks a lot like the one that currently seeks to get body cameras placed on most American police. Then, as now, a coalition of local chiefs and anti-police-violence activists rallied to support the technology. Then, as now, millions in federal funding soon followed.
But then, the story of police dash cams ground to a halt. There has never been a widespread study of whether dash cams reduced racial profiling or police abuse, though some smaller studies have found they they did not. (It’s highly likely that body-worn cameras will be better studied.) And as various cities limited access to dash-cam footage, it became difficult for citizens and activists to obtain video.
Will the story be the same with body cameras?
Similarly, Donald Trump has been caught on camera saying facist, outrageous, bigoted, and hateful things about people. He’s definitely one of those cheap, shiny objects chased by those easily distracted by cheap shiny objects. His latest attack included a mimicking the illness and related handicap of a NYT 
reporter whose only crime was providing evidence that he’s a big fat liar. This too was captured on camera and the evidence of his denial stands debunked by fact-checking and documentation also. However, the press follows leading presidential contenders and documents their every move and word. Have we arrived at the point where we have to similarly ensure that every elected official and public servant in a position of power is similarly hounded? Are most of our officials so corruptible that they can’t be trusted to freely move with out a public eye on them as suggested by Orwell in 1984? Think what it took to capture David Vitter’s calls to the DC Madam from the floor of the Senate or Anthony Weiner’s dick pix? Do we have to continually babysit them with cameras to ensure they don’t tap their toes in public restrooms, harass teenage pages, and threaten reporters with bodily harm?
A day after he was widely rebuked for mocking a reporter with a physical disability, business mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump on Thursday denied that he had done so and accused the reporter of “using his disability to grandstand.”
Trump also demanded an apology from the New York Times, the reporter’s employer, which earlier in the week issued a statement condemning Trump for ridiculing “the appearance of one of our reporters.”
The incident occurred Tuesday at a rally in South Carolina, as Trump was defending his recent claim that he had witnessed thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001, as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. On stage, Trump berated Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski for his recent recollection of an article he wrote a few days after the attacks, which Trump has been citing to defend his claim.
Trump appeared to mock Kovaleski’s physical condition; the reporter has arthrogryposis, which visibly limits flexibility in his arms.
“Now, the poor guy — you’ve got to see this guy, ‘Ah, I don’t know what I said! I don’t remember!’ ” Trump said as he jerked his arms in front of his body.
Trump’s assertions about Muslims celebrating in 2001 have been fact-checked and discredited by law enforcement and government officials who were in New Jersey in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks.
Trump has defended his recollections by citing a 2001 article by Kovaleski, who worked for The Washington Post at the time and wrote that “authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”
Those allegations were never corroborated but have persisted in online rumors in the 14 years since the attacks. In an interview on CNN this week, Kovaleski said he did not recall “anyone saying there were thousands, or even hundreds, of people celebrating.”
My friend and fellow Louisiana Blogger Lamar White Jr. does a great job of tearing into The Donald’s excuse.
He launched his campaign by claiming the majority of undocumented immigrants from Mexico were rapists and drug dealers sent to the United States by the Mexican government. He believes it’s possible that Barack Obama forged his own birth certificate and lied about the identity of his own mother in order to eventually run for president (note: The only way Obama would not be eligible for office is if his mother wasn’t who he said she was; it doesn’t matter where he was born). He said that an American prisoner of war who spent five and a half years being tortured and has spent the rest of his life in public service was not a “war hero.” He suggested that Megyn Kelly of Fox News was critical of him at a debate because she was on her period. He thinks the United States should consider building a database of all Muslims in the country and an enormous wall on our border with Mexico. Apparently, he is the only person in the world who saw footage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey cheering on the streets as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.
Amazingly, sadly, pathetically, none of this has made a dent in Donald Trump’s xenophobic, fascistic, and bigoted campaign to become the next President of the United States. But on Tuesday, at a rally in South Carolina, he unwittingly hit the detonate button on his campaign. This time, finally, Donald Trump can run but he can’t hide.
This time, he picked on the wrong person.
It’s funny, but several things converged to get me to the title of the post today. The first was thinking how do we get rid of this man? How far is too far? The second, was hearing a friend saying she was ashamed of that our country had so many people that could support him. What kind of person does that? The perfect storm happened when I’d already found the title, starting writing, and then up popped an update on Memorandum with this article in the Washington Monthly: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Trump-Mania?. Nancy LeTourneau and I must be seeking guidance from the same greater universal vibe.
When Republicans lost that race to Barack Obama, they tapped into all the energy Palin had stirred up in their base in an attempt to delegitimize the election and fuel their obstruction. Those are the same flames Donald Trump is exploiting today.
Greg Sargent expressed his skepticism that any of the attacks currently being planned or implemented against Trump will have an effect on his supporters. To demonstrate how right he is about that, take a look at this post one of them wroterecently. Obviously the writer has heard about the reports that some members of theGOP establishment are planning to launch a coordinated attack against Trump.
You truly Mr. GOP whatever, underestimated the voter here. In voter, I am speaking of the TRUMP VOTER . The one who knows the games, the drills, and will never vote for any other GOP candidate no matter what you do. I, myself will vote for Micky Mouse before I vote for any other than Trump!
You have just ruined the club you call a party. You are a private entity and it is now obvious what you all do. So puppet controllers for the puppet masters. Go to ….your elections on your own. I am done with you and America wants Trump and we will vote for Donald Trump either third party or on your lousy ticket. You, however, are done. Broken, and over. You have had your last party, enjoy it!Her commenters obviously agree. Here’s just the first one:
I knew the GOP wasn’t to be trusted, they hate Trump, they can’t control him because he is his own man. I know I am not the only one that will vote for him and no one else, whether he runs GOP or 3rd Party. He has the vision, the intelligence and the guts to do what is right for America and its people, he owes no one and he will make the tough decisions. He’s not interested in being PC he’s interested in saving this Nation. The GOP should be ashamed, they should be backing Trump all the way, but that would be against everything they believe in….their own self interests. Go Trump will be heard loud and clear across the land and this will backfire on you establishment GOP’rs!!!!!Nothing anyone says about Trump is going to change these people’s mind. Attacks on him only reinforce what they already believe – which is that the Republican Party has abandoned them and is terminally broken. The Grand Old Party created an insurgency that is now turning on them. That’s what Trump-mania is coming down to.
“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”
These people are not confused. They are sticking with Trump, the only candidate who gets it, who is man enough to show the enemy who’s boss.
Barnhill is wearing a button he just bought from a vender outside the convention center. It says “TRUMP 2016: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS.”
They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans.
“In today’s time, if I’m a white person who’s proud to be white, I’m a racist,” says 44-year-old Kevin Stubbs, a land surveyor who shared his Marlboro Reds with an African American T-shirt vender on the way in. “Yet a minority can say that.”
“I do not feel safe,” says his fiancee, Loree Ballenberger, 42. “People are coming in across the border, and we have no idea where they are coming from.” She recently called her congressman to urge him to vote for a bill limiting Syrian refugees.
“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.
“I look at the pictures of those refugees and they all look like able-bodied young men, 18 to 30 years old,” says his wife, Patrice Matthews, a 62-year-old retired school-district worker. Matthews doesn’t see why we have to be the ones to help these people. “It’s their country—they need to take it back,” she says.
I hear versions of the point about able-bodied young men from five different people. I hear, over and over again, that illegal immigration is the biggest problem we face. Almost everyone says their second-choice candidate is Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas; many express a wish that he and Trump would run on the same ticket.
Barnhill, the man with the “balls” button, says, “Like he says, people have got to abide by the law. And unfortunately, a lot of minorities don’t.”
The deal is that it really does take balls to to tap your foot in a stall in a Minneapolis Airport to signal you’re up for sex, or post a profile on Tinder when you’re a values politician with a wife and family at home, or
Audience members listen as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the Burlington Memorial Auditorium, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015, in Burlington, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
sext out a dick pick. It takes balls to call the DC madam during a Senate vote from the floor of the US Senate. It certainly takes balls to send a bunch of aides off to steal papers from some one’s therapist or the office of the other party who opposes you. It takes balls to send investigators to spy on your political enemies and stalk a private blogger whose only sin was to interview one of your hookers. It takes balls to sexually harass teen pages and to suppress the findings of a police report that shows the cold blooded murder of citizen until after your re-election.
Most of our elected officials have plenty of that.
What’s the difference between that and the false bravado of The Donald whose exploits are basically that of a trust fund bully well versed in prep school mean?
Well, that appears to be the appeal bigotry. This is what really separates the ballsy from the fascist. That is also why we now see the move to remove coming from the Republicans themselves. The Donald’s brand is exposing the underlying bigotry of conservatism and the game they play with their base. It’s okay to play footsy, but we can’t have any cameras or it becomes as obvious as the Donald mimicking the hands of a man with a chronic muscle ailment.
Many say the populist crazy talk is typical of the White House primaries, but Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s increasingly incendiary remarks are leading some conservatives to brand him a “fascist” and party rivals to ramp up attacks against him.
Most spectacularly, the real estate tycoon recently said he would support registering Muslims in a database, and insisted — despite lacking any evidence — he saw Arabs in New Jersey cheer when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.
His stance has become so belligerent that voices are asking, even inside his party, whether he is committed to democratic values.
Republican experts are warning that Trump could do lasting damage to the GOP, and that his nomination in the party primaries would essentially hand the presidency to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Several campaign teams in the primary race now appear to be coalescing around the need to oppose the celebrity billionaire’s candidacy.
Establishment conservatives even took the unfathomable step of using the F-word against a member of their own party.
“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” Max Boot, a military historian and foreign policy advisor to Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, posted on Twitter.
“Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period,” added John Noonan, a national security advisor to former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
In its Tuesday editorial the New York Times said the past week of the campaign had been “dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies.”
The Seattle Times used similarly strong language in a Wednesday editorial that denounced Trump’s “button-pushing lie after button-pushing lie.”
“Trump’s campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism,” the paper said. “It needs to be rejected.”
Frankly, I think if you dress this shit up and code words–like Ronald Reagan announcing his presidency while hinting that he’ll go after ‘welfare queens’ by carefully choosing the location of the announcement–you’ll do just fine. The deal is that you can’t get caught. The problem is that the world of the internet, cameras, and citizen journalists make this all very difficult.
The problem is this. When do we see that people like Trump and officers that shoot unarmed black men are not really outliers in US society. There’s a bunch of them out there and they do find refuge in the Republican party and the nation’s press who portrays white, male, christian terrorists as “lone wolves” or dismisses the hard bigotry of a preacher politicians like Huckabee or Santorum simply because they don’t have the money to go far enough?
When do look at ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves why we tolerate this craziness? Why do we insist that all lives matter instead of recognizing the institutional murder of unarmed black citizens? Why do we shrug when Christians announce their persecuted then go after planned parenthood on religious grounds all while screaming Muslims want unAmerican sharia law? We’re a society who likes shiny things and we’re willing to trample a kid to get at a vegetable steamer all in the name of a holiday supposedly for the prince of peace.
Riddle me how so many of us can be that bigoted and that dumb and we can solve a problem like the Donald and the accompanying Trump mania some day. Yeah, what exactly do we do with stupid white people?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads
Posted: November 23, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Surreality | Tags: Ben Carson, Ben Nevers, Bobby Jindal, Donald Trump, John Bel Edwards, Louisiana 13 Comments
Hello Monday and Sky Dancers!!!
I’m beginning to think we should offer free psychotropics and mental health screenings for folks voting Republican these days. You might consider putting a candy bowl of them out for your crazy uncle and cousins still voting Republican as a holiday treat. Tolerance and displays of so much delusion should definitely be on the radars of what’s left of our mental health systems. It’s hard to know where to start but the fact that Donald Trump is the leading presidential candidate and basically doing it by taking pages and policies out of Hitler’s playbook is one example worthy of discussion.
However, let me start locally with Slum Dog Governor Piyush Jindal who has decided he needs to take a “victory lap” around the state before he fades into oblivion. You might think I’m kidding on this so I’m going to include some quotes from the state’s major newspaper for good measure because I am not kidding. He’s finally retreated from the cornfields of Iowa. We’re expecting a huge budget deficit mid term thanks to his stupid accounting tricks and tax giveaways. A Blue Dog Democrat–John Bel Edwards–supported by many Republicans is set to follow him into the statehouse.
Jindal wants to travel the state for some local accolades. Good luck with that Governor! All but about 20% of us can’t stand the sight or sound of you.
With only weeks remaining in office, Gov. Bobby Jindal has returned home to try to shore up his Louisiana legacy after his presidential campaign ended unsurprisingly with him headed to a new home in Baton Rouge, rather than the White House.
A statewide tour and press releases touting his accomplishments might be too little too late to win kind thoughts from the folks in Louisiana, where his approval ratings have dropped to record lows.
The term-limited Republican is seeking to exit the governor’s mansion in January with Louisiana residents remembering his economic development wins and education overhaul, rather than prevailing criticisms that he put his national ambitions over the state’s needs.
Jindal dismissed such criticisms in the press conference he held in Baton Rouge, a post mortem of sorts, after scrapping his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
“We’ve continued to work every single day that I’ve been governor to work hard to move our state forward. I’m proud of the result,” he said. He added: “I think that I will be leaving our state better off than we were eight years ago.”
Yes indeed! Well, about that leaving the state better that it was eight years ago part …
Now that his campaign is officially dead, however, it’s worth highlighting Jindal’s record as governor of Louisiana. This is what the man did. This is what he accomplished. This is what he leaves behind. And this what he should be remembered for.
- He entered office with an $865 million surplus and he will exit with a $1.6 billion deficit.
- Funding for higher education has been cut by more than 80 percent, and the entire system is experiencing a fiscal crisis.
- Funding for youth services has been cut by 40 percent.
- Funding for Veterans Affairs programs has been cut by 69 percent.
- The Department of Environmental Quality has been cut by 96 percent (in a state with a rapidly eroding coastline).
- He rejected a Medicaid expansion in order to protest Obamacare, and thousands of low-income Louisianans remain without health care as a result.
- Louisiana has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation; the highest diabetes-related death rate; the highest rate of death from breast cancer; the third highest rate of cancers deaths overall; and the eighth highest rate of teenage pregnancy.
- He rejected $300 million of federal stimulus money (one his favorite talking points at the time), despite Louisiana’s underfunded and crumbling infrastructure.
- He issued a symbolic executive order that defended discrimination under the guise of “religious freedom.”
- He sold out his state to protect BP against legitimate lawsuits. (Side note: Jindal’s brother is a lawyer for the firm representing BP).
- He held a massive “prayer rally” on the state’s flagship campus, a rally that promoted his presidential campaign and distributed materials blaming gay people for hurricanes and natural disasters.
- He signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allowed creationism to be taught in science courses at public schools.
There are countless other examples of Jindal’s failures, but this list is fairly illustrative of his career as Governor of Louisiana. This is what he did in order to pitch himself as a fiscally responsible, small government conservative in GOP primary states. It explains why 70 percent of Louisianans now disapprove of the job he has done. And it explains why he won’t be missed and why the Republican gubernatorial candidate following him, David Vitter, has tried unsuccessfully to run away from Jindal’s record.
The stench of Jindal’s administration will linger for years in Louisiana, and everyone here knows it. His presidential campaign was and is a punchline, but his governorship was a moral and political failure, and a tragedy for thousands of Louisianans. If he’s ever elected again for public office, I can assure you it won’t be as a Louisianan.
I’d say Sean Illing’s list is a pretty decent capsule of the wreckage. I’d have to add that you can put many a sad face on how bad life has gotten with Jindal administration including mine.
We have a kinda sorta Democrat now whose first act was to appoint the former Republican State Senator responsible for the Creationism in public schools disguised as science to be his chief of staff. His transition team is remarkably full of Republicans. However, he still says that the Medicaid expansion is priority one and it could be one of the reasons why Nevers got the job. I’m trying to be optimistic here. You can hold my hand if you want to help.
“The expansion of health care coverage for working families is among the highest priorities. It’s something I’ve been working on for three years, and I never once during this campaign shied away from that particular issue,” Edwards said during a news conference with reporters in New Orleans. “So we are going to expand the Medicaid program in Louisiana. We’re going to do it as soon as we possibly can and as responsibly as we possibly can.”
The strongest signal yet of Edwards’ commitment to Medicaid expansion is his appointment of state Sen. Ben Nevers to be his chief of staff. Nevers has been one of the foremost advocates of Medicaid expansion in the Legislature, at times offering tearful testimony as he pleaded with colleagues to expand the federal program to cover people who aren’t paid enough to purchase their own insurance.
Asked about the significance of Medicaid expansion to the working poor, Nevers said, “it means life or death to many people across this state.”
“There are over 242,000 people without medical insurance in this state who go to work everyday; who have been dependable employees,” Nevers said. “It would mean the opportunity for them to have insurance for them and their families. I can tell you that there’s many people across this state who’ve suffered tremendously because we’ve refused to expand Medicaid.”
When asked what it means to him personally, Nevers said, “It means a tremendous amount to me.
“As you know, I filed bills the last three years to expand Medicaid and could not get them out of the Senate or the House,” Nevers said. “It’s been a very frustrating experience because I know we’re sending dollars to Washington D.C. that we refuse to take back in our own state. Now that’s just ludicrous.”
This state is among the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick. Things certainly could not get much worse.
People here and all around the country certainly do not trust their governments. Is this the real legacy of Reagan’s dementia and eagerness to poor shame? 
A year ahead of the presidential election, the American public is deeply cynical about government, politics and the nation’s elected leaders in a way that has become quite familiar.
Currently, just 19% say they can trust the government always or most of the time,among the lowest levels in the past half-century. Only 20% would describe government programs as being well-run. And elected officials are held in such low regard that 55% of the public says “ordinary Americans” would do a better job of solving national problems.
Yet at the same time, most Americans have a lengthy to-do list for this object of their frustration: Majorities want the federal government to have a major role in addressing issues ranging from terrorism and disaster response to education and the environment.
And most Americans like the way the federal government handles many of these same issues, though they are broadly critical of its handling of others – especially poverty and immigration.
A new national survey by Pew Research Center, based on more than 6,000 interviews conducted between August 27 and October 4, 2015, finds that public attitudes about government and politics defy easy categorization. The study builds upon previous reports about the government’s role and performance in 2010 and 1998. This report was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support for the survey from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The partisan divide over the size and scope of government remains as wide as ever: Support for smaller government endures as a Republican touchstone. Fully 80% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they prefer a smaller government with fewer services, compared with just 31% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Yet both Republicans and Democrats favor significant government involvement on an array of specific issues. Among the public overall, majorities say the federal government should have a major role in dealing with 12 of 13 issues included in the survey, all except advancing space exploration.
There is bipartisan agreement that the federal government should play a major role in dealing with terrorism, natural disasters, food and medicine safety, and roads and infrastructure. And while the presidential campaign has exposed sharp partisan divisions over immigration policy, large majorities of both Republicans (85%) and Democrats (80%) say the government should have a major role in managing the immigration system.
But the partisan differences over government’s appropriate role are revealing – with the widest gaps on several issues relating to the social safety net.
That last bit certainly shows up in the Trumpettes and his followers who don’t appear to understand that offering up the same policies as Hitler isn’t a good thing.
Only about a third of Republicans and Republican leaners see a major role for the federal government in helping people get out of poverty (36%) and ensuring access to health care (34%), by far the lowest percentages for any of the 13 issues tested. Fully 72% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say the government should have a major role in helping people out of poverty, and 83% say it should play a major role in ensuring access to health care.
Moreover, while majorities of Republicans favor a major government role in ensuring a basic income for people 65 and older (59%), protecting the environment (58%) and ensuring access to high-quality education (55%), much larger shares of Democrats – 80% or more in each case – favor a large government role.
So what explains the Republican base’s fascination with some one touring the country touting a book written on the Constitution that believes the Constitution was written by Thomas Jefferson? Is this the result of whackadoo Texans controlling the nation’s textbook content or deliberate, delusional ignorance?
It’s a common misconception that Thomas Jefferson participated in drafting the U.S. Constitution in 1787. But as Republican presidential candidate and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson points out in his latest book, “A More Perfect Union,” Jefferson was “missing in action,” serving in Paris as minister to France.
That did not stop Carson from praising Jefferson in a C-Span interview Sunday as one of the most impressive of the Founding Fathers because he “tried to craft our Constitution in a way that it would control peoples’ natural tendencies and control the natural growth of the government.”
It’s not the first time Carson has abused Jefferson’s history. “Thomas Jefferson himself said, ‘Gun control works great for the people who are law-abiding citizens and it does nothing for the criminals, and all it does is put the people at risk,’ ” he told Fox’s Neil Cavuto after the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., in early October. Jefferson never said that.
In his book, Carson repeated a version of the same statement, noting what he called “Thomas Jefferson’s warning: ‘Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather than encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
The supposed Jefferson comment on gun control is listed among many “spurious” quotations by the Monticello Web site. “This is not something Jefferson wrote,” say the researchers at Monticello, but rather comes from a passage he included in his “Legal Commonplace Book.” The passage, they note, was written by Cesare Beccaria in his “Essay on Crimes and Punishments” and was copied by Jefferson.
Oddly, Carson’s footnote to the quote duly notes that it comes from Beccaria and not Jefferson.
Republican obsession with all things not true but that play into their views of the world is on full display in the Trump poll numbers. The more outrageously untrue and appalling things that spew out of Trump’s 
mouth yields a bump up in the polls. I mean, what kind’ve person could get a huge number of the Jewish population volunteering to register as Muslims just to express their outrage at the suggestion we start a database of the nation’s followers of Islam. Trump’s latest outrages include the huge lie that thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks. This earned him another Pinnochio from WAPO’s fact checkers and the NYC police.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You raised some eyebrows yesterday with comments you made at your latest rally. I want to show them, relating to 9/11.
VIDEO CLIP OF DONALD TRUMP, IN WHICH HE SAYS: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “You know, the police say that didn’t happen and all those rumors have been on the Internet for some time. So did you misspeak yesterday?”
TRUMP: “It did happen. I saw it.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “You saw that…”
TRUMP: It was on television. I saw it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: “…with your own eyes?”
TRUMP: “George, it did happen.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Police say it didn’t happen.”
TRUMP: “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “As I said, the police have said it didn’t happen.”
— Exchange on ABC’s “This Week,” Nov. 22, 2015
This exchange demonstrates the folly of trying to fact-check Donald Trump. Even when confronted with contrary information — “police say it didn’t happen” — he insists that with his own eyes he saw “thousands and thousands” of cheering Arabs in New Jersey celebrating as the World Trade Center collapsed during the Sept. 11 attacks.
Trump has already earned more Four-Pinocchio ratings than any other candidate this year. He is about to earn another one.
The Jersey City Mayor says the “account is absurd” too.
He also is race baiting and just bragged about his audience beating up a Black Lives Matter protester. He upped the ante by tweeting the right wing trope that blacks are murdering blacks with an appalling racist graphic attached. He still has yet to suggest any thing policy related. He seems perfectly happy to just spew vitriol. That is also what the base seems to love. His tweet about black murder rates is definitely creating consternation from every one but the Republican base.
Donald Trump is taking heat on social media for a Sunday afternoon tweet of statistics purporting to show that the vast majority of murdered black people in the U.S. are killed by other black people.
The tweet was apparently Trump’s response to a Twitter thread about support from white supremacists for the GOP front-runner.
It also comes the day after a Black Lives Matter protester said he was physically and verbally assaulted at a Trump rally.
The image Trump posted includes a list of “USA Crime Statistics ~ 2015.” The two that are highlighted are “Blacks Killed by Police ~~ 1%” and “Blacks Killed by Blacks ~~ 97%.”
A drawing of a black man wielding a sideways pistol and wearing army pants, military boots and a bandana and mask accompanies the statistics, which are sourced to the “Crime Statistics Bureau” in San Francisco.
The message immediately took off on the social media platform, with thousands of people retweeting it and liking it within an hour. But many also lashed out angrily against the real estate mogul, calling Trump a racist and questioning the veracity of the stats.
Indeed, an initial search to confirm the numbers couldn’t turn up a “Crime Statistic Bureau” in San Francisco.
However, the percentages do, in some ways, align with Department of Justice (DOJ) findings from several years ago. A DOJ study released in 2011 reported that 93 percent of black homicides were committed by other blacks between 1980 and 2008.
In 2014, that figure was roughly 90 percent in 2014, according to the latest DOJ numbers.
The category tweeted out by Trump that doesn’t fit with DOJ statistics is “Whites Killed by Whites,” which Trump’s tweet indicated was 16 percent.
According to the department’s 2011 report, 84 percent of white homicides were committed by whites between 1980 and 2008. That number was 82 percent in 2014.
Trump has been roundly bashed during his presidential campaign for disparaging comments made about Mexican immigrants, Syrian refugees, Muslims and black people.
We’ve written a lot about the alternative reality were Republicans and their elected officials and candidates reside. I’ve noticed the disconnect is getting worse on many levels. But, again, look at Louisiana. People down here got fed up with it. Maybe the rest of the places that have Republican governors that are beyond delusional–Kansas, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan,Indiana etc.–will wake up to what’s actually going on. But then again, take Kentucky.
Please.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Perpetuating Lies, Hate, and Stereotypes
Posted: November 20, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, Migrant and Refugee Crisis in Europe and Mediterranean, morning reads, the GOP | Tags: David Vitter, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Right Wing Hysteria and paranoia, Syrian refugees, xenophobia 20 Comments
Happy Friday!!!
It’s coming up on the weekend here in Louisiana and we will be voting for Governor tomorrow. It really, really looks like we will have a Blue Dog Democrat for governor. The polls are consistently showing Senator David Vitter losing the race. You can tell how badly Vitter’s doing by the way his ads have gotten increasingly shameful on so many levels. They are full of lies, distortion, racism, and hate. A number of Republicans from Vitter’s home parish and congressional district have come out in support of his Democratic opponent John Bel Edwards. Edwards is not my idea of a Democratic candidate, but I’m firmly in the any one but Vitter column. I will go to the polls tomorrow. The fact that Louisiana could be creeping back into the purple state category should be a lesson for many. The fact the vitriol is not working should also. Bel Edwards is dishing it right back out to him with a cherry on top.
Edwards is a Democrat, Vitter a Republican, and both are Catholics in a state with a strong evangelical presence—and a state that thrives on politics as blood sport. The central issue in this election campaign is a 2007 prostitution scandal that Vitter thought he had put behind him.
This election has become the dirtiest slug fest since the 1991 “race from hell” when Edwin Edwards (no kin to John Bel), though trailed by corruption scandals, won a record fourth term, crushing David Duke, the former Klan leader and closet Nazi. Both men later went to prison. Duke for mail fraud, Edwards for extortion tied to casino licenses. Such are the vagaries of democracy in the Bayou State.
The pivotal question this year is whether Edwards’s growing lead is a purely anti-Vitter phenomenon—and whether the senator is capable of reversing it. Vitter does possess samurai-level skills in slash-attack politics.
But a November 12 University of New Orleans (UNO) poll has Edwards at 54 percent, with a 22 point lead, gaining two points since the Tuesday debate.
A larger question looms: If the margin holds, does the Edwards surge signal a sputtering of the Republican Southern strategy that exploits racial division by demonizing President Obama?
Either way, if Edwards wins big, you can bet the car that Hillary Rodham Clinton will try to make him her new best friend.
A lawyer and West Point graduate who frequently cites the military academy’s honor code and touts himself as “pro-life and pro-gun,” Edwards is a blue dog Democrat—one of the last of the centrist-conservative Democrats, blue dogs being an endangered species in Congress and nearly extinct in statewide offices across the beef red South. But there is nothing cookie-cutter about Edwards’s views: Since taking his seat in the state legislature in 2006 and particularly since 2012, when he became state House minority leader, Edwards has spearheaded the opposition to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s deep cuts to higher education and his refusal to take Medicaid funds under Obamacare—to no avail.
The state race isn’t the only one where lies, distortion, racism, and vitriol is rampant. Donald Trump’s rhetoric is just the most overt example of
The U.S. has committed at least 15,000 combat troops and billions of dollars to extend the war of Afghanistan another 10 years, to 2024. Imagine what Americans would have thought if Bush had told them what was in store after 9/11.
what’s left in the Republican Party. His suggestion to keep a federal register of Muslims in the U.S. is rightly drawing comparisons to the registrations of Jewish populations in Hitler’s NAZI Germany. I’m not one to appreciate the tendency of folks to Godwin but Trump has clearly jumped into the fascism part of the political spectrum and should be shamed. Hillary tweeted condemnation of Trump’s suggestion yesterday and characterized his rhetoric as “shocking”. She was joined by the other Democrats in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Hillary Clinton condemned Donald Trump’s call to require Muslims to register in a database, calling his idea “shocking.”
“This is shocking rhetoric. It should be denounced by all seeking to lead this country. –H,” she tweeted, linking to a New York Times story, quoting Trump as saying he’d “absolutely” require Muslims to do so.
In an interview with NBC news Thursday night, Trump was asked to clarify comments he had made to Yahoo News, saying he would not rule out such a registry for Muslims if he were president.
“Should there be a database system that tracks the Muslims in this country?” an NBC reporter asked Trump at an event in Newton, Iowa.
“There should be a lot of systems. Beyond database, we should have a lot of systems. And today, you can do it,” Trump said. “I would certainly implement that — absolutely.”
He said the database would stop people from coming into the United States illegally. And he could accomplish it with “good management procedures,” he said.
The other two Democratic presidential candidates also rebuked Trump.
Bernie Sanders called the statement “outrageous and bigoted.”
“What an outrageous and bigoted statement. @realDonaldTrump should be ashamed of himself,” the Vermont senator tweeted.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley addressed Trump’s comments Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“When you hear people like Donald Trump talking about wanting to do ID cards based on religion, what the hell is that? I mean, how is that at all American?” he asked.
Even Texas whackadoo Ted Cruz rejected the idea. Cruz may be getting a whiff of doom for the Donald.
Ted Cruz on Friday disavowed Donald Trump’s support for requiring American Muslims register as such, a rare public break with the current GOP frontrunner.
“I’m a big fan of Donald Trump’s but I’m not a fan of government registries of American citizens,” he told reporters of a plan Trump said he backed a day earlier. “The First Amendment protects religious liberty, I’ve spent the past several decades defending religious liberty.”
Marco Rubio, however, has adopted similar over-the-top xenophobic and unconstitutional policy calling for a shut down of any place where Muslims might gather and be inspired. This leaves Jeb Bush as the voice of reason in the little tent of horror.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) seems to be going further than even Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in advocating the crackdown of U.S. Muslims. He doesn’t just want to consider shutting down mosques, as Trump says, but wants to shut down “any place where radicals are being inspired.”
“It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired,” Rubio said on Fox News’ The Kelly File on Thursday night when asked if he agreed with Trump. “The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities.”
“So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at,” he continued.
Trump first articulated potentially shutting down U.S. mosques on Monday during a call in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when hosts asked if he would consider doing the same thing France did and shut down U.S. mosques with direct terrorist ties. Trump said he would “strongly consider” it, then lamented NYPD shutting down its domestic surveillance program targeting Muslims in New York City. Later this week he suggested the U.S. would “absolutely” create a federal database of Muslimsif he were elected president.
Both Trump and Rubio could be putting forth these ideas because polling suggests that limiting rights of Muslims is popular with Republican voters. A poll released this week found that 25 percent of Rubio supporters liked the idea of shutting down U.S. mosques.
Meanwhile establishment candidate Jeb Bush has resisted targeting of U.S. mosques: “You talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people, that’s just wrong …. it’s manipulating people’s angst and their fears. That’s not strength. That’s weakness.”
These are typical chicken hawks. They speak of bombing everything in sight and the run in fear of widows and orphans and healthcare workers
tending to the Ebola stricken. Paul Krugman is quick to point to the right wing’s tendency to panic under infinitesimally small odds of bad things. His op ed today is focused on the Erick Erickson who is very high on my list of worst human being on the planet.
The French themselves are making a point of staying calm, indeed of going out to cafes to show that they refuse to be intimidated. But Mr. Erickson declared on his website that he won’t be going to see the new “Star Wars” movie on opening day, because “there are no metal detectors at American theaters.”
Lightsabers aside, are Mr. Erickson’s fears any sillier than those of the dozens of governors — almost all Republicans — who want to ban Syrian refugees from their states?
Mr. Obama certainly thinks they’re being ridiculous; he mocked politicians who claim that they’re so tough that they could stare down America’s enemies, but are “scared of widows and orphans.” (He was probably talking in particular about Chris Christie, who has said that he even wants to ban young children.) Again, the contrast with France, where President François Hollande has reaffirmed the nation’s willingness to take in refugees, is striking.
I didn’t hear similar rhetoric when folks in a theatre were shot up and many murdered in either Colorado or Louisiana. I just read calls for more armed citizens to join in the shoot ups. But, Krugman believes the paranoia is part and parcel of their basic reaction to what goes on framed in terms of an Obama Presidency. As mentioned in the Vitter-Edwards fight above, Republics seem to connect every little bad thing to the President and state it in completely hyped up terms. Connecting Mary Landrieu to Obama certainly worked in the negative Louisiana Senatorial race last year.
What explains the modern right’s propensity for panic? Part of it, no doubt, is the familiar point that many bullies are also cowards. But I think it’s also linked to the apocalyptic mind-set that has developed among Republicans during the Obama years.
Think about it. From the day Mr. Obama took office, his political foes have warned about imminent catastrophe. Fiscal crisis! Hyperinflation! Economic collapse, brought on by the scourge of health insurance! And nobody on the right dares point out the failure of the promised disasters to materialize, or suggest a more nuanced approach.
Given this context, it’s only natural that the right would seize on a terrorist attack in France as proof that Mr. Obama has left America undefended and vulnerable. Ted Cruz, who has a real chance of becoming the Republican nominee, goes so far as to declare that the president “does not wish to defend this country.”
The context also explains why Beltway insiders were so foolish when they imagined that the Paris attacks would deflate Donald Trump’s candidacy, that Republican voters would turn to establishment candidates who are serious about national security.
Who, exactly, are these serious candidates? And why would the establishment, which has spent years encouraging the base to indulge its fears and reject nuance, now expect that base to understand the difference between tough talk and actual effectiveness?
Sure enough, polling since the Paris attack suggests that Mr. Trump has actually gained ground.
The point is that at this point panic is what the right is all about, and the Republican nomination will go to whoever can most effectively channel that panic. Will the same hold true in the general election?
The fact that all of the Paris bombers were European nationals is completely ignored by the right wing media. I grew up in a a hell hole of backwardness called Omaha, Nebraska. Most of the folks that I know that basically never left or moved into neighboring hellholes are putting up some of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen including linking refugees to the Fort Hood Shooter who was born in Virginia. I also actually had some one point out to me that if we didn’t stop the Syrian refugees we might go the way of Native Americans when the Colonists came over. I’ve never seen such an level of panic that people appear to have left any sense of proportion in a gutter somewhere. It seems worse than the Ebola hysteria of a few years ago.
We’ve had an attack today on a Western Hotel in Malia. Additionally, there have been recent attacks in Kenya and Lebanon that appear to be Isis-inspired and possibly planned. I can understand being extremely careful in places like this. How do these events or events in Paris translate to being paranoid in small towns in the middle of the country where even most Americans wouldn’t and don’t want to live? We’ve had plenty of pressers by NYC officials–NYC is definitely always a potential terrorist target–and they’re doing their usual thing and not particularly worried.
What should be worrying is the weird attraction of any extremist philosophy–including fundamentalist religions of all types–to young people.
What is it that is causing many young people to feel so disenfranchised from the mainstream they hook up with cults? This has always been a challenge in the developed world.
You may want to spend some time with a profile at the Daily Mail on the female jihadi killed in St.-Denis. People who do not live countries with abject poverty and little opportunity for education and economic advancement are less of a concern than our homemade terrorists. This includes folks drawn to white supremacy as well as the violent jihadi mentality.
The woman killed in the Saint-Denis siege was a party animal with a string of boyfriends who had shown no interest in religion, it emerged today.
Hasna Ait Boulahcen, 26, was blown to bits when a second unnamed terrorist detonated a bomb after anti-terror police closed in on the safehouse where she was hiding with her cousin, the mastermind of the Paris attacks.
Just a day after her death, family and acquaintances gave extraordinary accounts of a young woman with a ‘bad reputation’ who was known for her love of alcohol and cigarettes rather than devotion to Islam.
Her brother Youssouf Ait Boulahcen said that she had had no interest in religion, never read the Koran and had only started wearing a Muslim veil a month ago.
A photograph has also emerged of Ait Boulahcen posing for a selfie in the bath. Her face is covered in heavy make-up and she wears nothing but jewellery.
She’s not exactly the posterchild for your basic practicing cafeteria Muslim let alone a Jihadi. What on earth happened to flip her?
Home grown white male christian extremists are far more of a danger here in this country yet, law enforcement has to keep its concerns underwrap for fear of inciting a Fox Nation backlash. The NRA isn’t concerned about any terrorist, felon, or mentally ill person getting access to an arsenal. How do we explain right wing paranoia in light of that? In this country, toddlers kill more people that radical jihadists.
All I know is that I’m very sick and tired of this racist, hateful, unconstitutional and down right UnAmerican response to the latest panic from the right. A few years ago it was stopping all flights from an entire continent. Now, it’s stopping refugees from one single country that’s in the middle of a civil war.
It’s ridiculous and it’s unbecoming.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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