Thursday Reads: Orwell’s Dystopia Has Arrived in the U.S.A

Good Morning!

Today’s News is overwhelming, so here’s a list of top stories.

1. A Mass shooting in California:

UPDATE: USA Today says shooter identified as David Long, 28, former marine.

LA Times: Gunman kills 12 in ‘horrific’ mass shooting at Thousand Oaks bar packed with college students.

A gunman threw smoke bombs and rained bullets on a crowd of hundreds inside a Thousand Oaks bar Wednesday night, killing a dozen people including a Ventura County Sheriff’s Department sergeant who was trying to stop the carnage

Authorities have not yet identified the gunman, who died in the incident, or any of the victims inside the bar.

The gunman was dressed in black when he burst into the Borderline Bar & Grill, a country-music-themed venue that is popular with college students, around 11:20 p.m., according to Sheriff Geoff Dean.

LA Times: Some inside Borderline bar survived Las Vegas mass shooting, friends say.

2. Ruth Bader Ginsburg injured and hospitalized.

3. Constitutional Crisis

Yesterday Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and installed Matt Whitaker, a partisan who could shut down the Mueller investigation, as acting AG. Important reads:

The Guardian: Trump’s acting attorney general was part of firm US accused of vast scam.

Donald Trump’s new acting attorney general was part of a company accused by the US government of running a multimillion-dollar scam.

Matthew Whitaker was paid to sit on the advisory board of World Patent Marketing, which was ordered in May this year to pay a $26m settlement following legal action by federal authorities, which said it tricked aspiring inventors.

Court filings in the case against World Patent Marketing show that Whitaker received regular payments of $1,875 from the Florida-based company, and sent a threatening email to a victim of the alleged scam.

Whitaker publicly vouched for the company, claiming in a December 2014 statement that they “go beyond making statements about doing business ‘ethically’ and translate those words into action”.

Whitaker, a former US attorney for the southern district of Iowa, said at the time: “I would only align myself with a first-class organization.”

Whitaker’s role in the alleged scam was first reported by the Miami New Times in August 2017, shortly before he joined the Trump administration as a senior aide to Sessions.

The Daily Beast: Jeff Sessions’ Replacement, Matthew Whitaker, Led Secretive Anti-Dem Group.

It’s been a meteoric rise for the 48-year-old Republican, an ex-prosecutor and failed political candidate who less than two years ago was the head of a little-known conservative nonprofit with designs on a judgeship in his home state of Iowa.

Through that nonprofit, and with the help of a PR firm later tied to a bizarre conspiracy theory, Whitaker ran interference for Sessions at one of the most fraught moments in his tumultuous time as attorney general.

In March 2017, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had neglected to tell the Senate at his confirmation hearing about prior conversations he had with the Russian ambassador.

The attorney general came under blistering criticism, especially as he had not yet recused himself from supervising the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Then Whitaker spoke up. As executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, an organization that served primarily to level ethics complaints against Democrats, he released a statement defending Sessions.

“If we are going to have a national discussion about Senators meeting with ambassadors it is appropriate for all Senators to disclose who they met with so the public, and apparently the media, understand that all Senator Sessions did was his job,” Whitaker said in the statement.

Gee, I wonder why Trump installed Whitaker in the DOJ?

Into: Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker Has A Disturbingly Anti-LGBTQ Past.

With Whitaker suddenly in charge of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, and poised to disrupt investigations into President Trump’s possible collusion with Russia to steal the presidential election (among other things), we need to know as much as possible about who he is and what he believes.

In 2004, Whitaker was appointed by former President George W. Bush to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. While serving as U.S. Attorney, Whitaker helped launch an extortion investigation into state senator Matt McCoy — then Iowa’s highest-ranking gay official.

But according to McCoy, the extortion charges were nothing but an excuse to target him for his gay rights advocacy in office, which included passing a school anti-bullying measure, fighting a state ban on same-sex marriage, and working to pass anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people in housing and employment. In a 2007 interview with the Advocate, McCoy said Whitaker was behind a campaign to smear him with extortion charges because he was a tireless proponent of LGBTQ rights measures, whereas Whitaker wanted to prove his conservative loyalties.

“Since coming out as an openly gay man, I have been a continuous target of groups targeting gays to advance their own agendas of intolerance and hate,”  McCoy told the Advocate. “Clearly, there is significant speculation about what has motivated federal officials to take this action against me.”

Whitaker made his anti-LGBTQ views known most prominently during his 2014 run for Iowa Senate. In an interview with the conservative Christian news site Caffeinated Thoughts, then-candidate Whitaker decried President Obama’s handling of same-sex marriage — which the Supreme Court did not make legal nationwide until June 2015.

More at the link.

Des Moines Register: Matthew Whitaker’s troubling opinion: Judges need a biblical view.

(Rekha Basu column from May, 2014)

If elected to the U.S. Senate, former U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker says he would only support federal judges who have a Biblical view, and specifically a New Testament view, of justice. “If they have a secular world view, then I’m going to be very concerned about how they judge,” Whitaker said at an April 25, 2014, Family Leader debate.

Whitaker didn’t return my call to his office, but as a lawyer, one might expect him to know that setting religious conditions for holding a public office would violate the Iowa and U.S. constitutions. He was effectively saying that if elected, he would see no place for a judge of Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic or other faith, or of no faith. Yet no one in the audience or on the podium seemed to have a problem with that, and his answer drew applause.

The debate venue had something to do with that. The event was sponsored by the Family Leader, the conservative Christian organization that engineered the ouster by voters in 2010 of three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. The moderator, blogger Erick Erickson, asked questions designed to compel the four Republican candidates to prove their Christian credentials. And though U.S. senator is a secular office, they mostly obliged.

More on Whitaker:

4. Sarah Huckabee Sanders bans CNN’s Jim Acosta from White House grounds, uses doctored Infowars video to falsely accused Acosta of “putting hands on” WH intern.

Newsweek: 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted a video to Twitter of the clash between CNN’s Jim Acosta and President Donald Trump that appears to be a doctored version shared previously by an editor for conspiracy website InfoWars.

Acosta had his White House pass revoked after an incident in which he sparred verbally with the president and refused to hand over the microphone to a staffer. Acosta is CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent.

The edited footage is speeded up to make it look like Acosta forced the woman’s arm down as she went to grab the mic.

Paul Joseph Watson, a far-right conspiracy theorist and editor-at-large of InfoWars, wrote for the Alex Jones-run website that “Acosta clearly uses his left arm to physically resist/restrain the woman.”

On Twitter, Watson accused Acosta of using his arm “to overpower her” and shared the doctored footage, which zooms in on the reporter’s arm.

The original clip shows the staffer grabbing the mic and attempting to pull it away as Acosta holds on. Her arm meets with Acosta’s hand, which drops with his arm as she tries to pull the mic and turn to hand it to another reporter.

“We stand by our decision to revoke this individual’s hard pass. We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video,” Sanders tweeted along with the misleading InfoWars version of the footage.

5. Election Updates

Yahoo News: Florida Governor Race Recount Now Likely, Andrew Gillum Claims Vote Gap Down To 15,000 Votes Behind DeSantis.

As the United States Senate race in Florida headed to a recount, the governor’s race there on Wednesday morning also looked likely to go to a recount of its own even though Democrat Andrew Gillum, as The New York Times reported, gave a concession speech on Tuesday and Republican Ron DeSantis, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, declared victory.

Though the latest vote count in the race, reported by The Times, showed DeSantis ahead by 55,439 votes, a margin of 0.7 percent — outside the margin of 0.5 percent which would entitle Gillum to demand a recount — according to one report, Gillum’s camp now says that the vote gap between the two candidates is much smaller.

According to April Ryan, White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, Gillum’s representatives as of Wednesday morning said that his losing margin was only about 15,000 votes.

Courage, Sky Dancers! Please share your thoughts and links to stories on any topic in the comment thread.

All Hallows Day Reads

Good Morning!!

I wonder if life in Trumpworld will get better after the elections are over? My guess is no, but I’m still hoping. Today’s news is so depressing that I don’t even want to read most of it, much less post it here.

Trump released his very own Willie Horton-style ad, his big lies are getting bigger by the day, his hate speech is getting more and more overt, and he’s threatening to send 15,000 troops to the Southern border to defend against a rag-tag group of mostly women and children. And the awful truth is that members of the media are aiding and abetting his disgusting behavior.

Before I get to some recommended reads, here are some feel-good Halloween stories.

Buzzfeed: The Little Girl Obsessed With Michelle Obama’s Portrait Dressed As Her For Halloween.

Remember Parker Curry? She was the little girl who went viral in March after she was photographed staring in awe at Michelle Obama’s official portrait.

I’m sure you can guess what Parker wanted to be on Halloween.

Jessica told BuzzFeed News Wednesday that when she asked Parker what she wanted to dress as for Halloween, the toddler’s response was immediate.

“Flat out. No hesitation. Half of a second later. ‘I want to be Michelle Obama,’ and I was like Whoa,” Jessica recalled. “I thought she was going to be like, ‘I want to be Elsa or some other character like that.”

Jessica found someone who offered to make the costume. Here it is:

See more photos at the Buzzfeed link.

A little boy in Tennessee dressed as a “real-life” hero. Fox 26: Tennessee boy dresses as Waffle House hero James Shaw Jr. for school’s ‘Hero Day’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) – A boy from Gallatin traded in a superhero cape for medical tape Friday at his school’s “Hero Day.”

So, wearing a gray hoodie with the word “live” on his chest and tape on his right hand, Tayir showed up to Union Stem Elementary dressed as James Shaw Jr.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) – A boy from Gallatin traded in a superhero cape for medical tape Friday at his school’s “Hero Day.”

When a gunman opened fire at an Antioch Waffle House in April, James Shaw Jr. jumped into action and grabbed the barrel of the shooter’s AR-15 and threw it behind the diner’s counter. Police say the move saved many lives.

Taurean C. Sanderlin, 29; Joe R. Perez, 20; De’Ebony Groves, 21, of Gallatin; and Akilah Dasilva, 23, of Antioch, were killed in the shooting.

And then he got to meet his hero in person!

Here’s a little girl who dressed as Emma González from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Now for some reads:

The New York Times has an op-ed by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman: The Neuroscience of Hate Speech. An excerpt:

Of course, it’s difficult to prove that incendiary speech is a direct cause of violent acts. But humans are social creatures — including and perhaps especially the unhinged and misfits among us — who are easily influenced by the rage that is everywhere these days. Could that explain why just in the past two weeks we have seen the horrifying slaughter of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with the man arrested described as a rabid anti-Semite, as well as what the authorities say was the attempted bombing of prominent Trump critics by an ardent Trump supporter?

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that the kind of hate and fear-mongering that is the stock-in-trade of Mr. Trump and his enablers can goad deranged people to action. But psychology and neuroscience can give us some important insights into the power of powerful people’s words.

We know that repeated exposure to hate speech can increase prejudice, as a series of Polish studies confirmed last year. It can also desensitize individuals to verbal aggression, in part because it normalizes what is usually socially condemned behavior.

At the same time, politicians like Mr. Trump who stoke anger and fear in their supporters provoke a surge of stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine, and engage the amygdala, the brain center for threat. One study, for example, that focused on “the processing of danger” showed that threatening language can directly activate the amygdala. This makes it hard for people to dial down their emotions and think before they act.

Mr. Trump has managed to convince his supporters that America is the victim and that we face an existential threat from imagined dangers like the migrant caravan and the “fake, fake disgusting news.”

Click on the link to read the rest.

At Bloomberg Opinion, Jonathan Bernstein argues that Trump’s Bigotry Isn’t Working.

What is President Donald Trump running on in the final days of the midterm campaign? He’s going with – once again – full-on bigotry, with nonstop talk about fictional riots over sanctuary cities, fictional threats from a group of poor migrants heading north, and now a racist ad that is reminding people of the ugliest campaign spots in recent history. He’s also talking about taking citizenship away from … well, it’s not exactly clear. But certainly lots of very scary, very threatening Thems.

And, yes, he’s doing all this a week after bombs were mailed to high-profile Democrats and shootings in Pittsburgh and Kentucky. I think he’s also complaining that Democrats are dividing the nation. Contradictions of logic don’t bother him very much.

There’s a lot to say about a president who would campaign like this and a party that would mostly go along with it. But an important thing to remember is that, as the Fix’s Aaron Blake noted this week, we have no idea if any of this will actually help Republicans win.

So far, there’s very little evidence that it’s helping. Yes, Republicans have solidified their position in the Senate a bit, but it’s not clear that that’s due to any recent campaigning or events. (If there was one event that seemed to have moved Nate Silver’s Senate forecast, it was Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle.) It’s more likely due to natural Republican voters returning home, which was always the big danger for Democrats in states such as Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas. And remember that Republicans are benefiting from this year’s Senate map: Democrats would have to win in safe states, swing states, and even some quite red states to gain any ground.

Read the rest at Bloomberg.

Kevin Drum writes that the Internet is helping, not hurting: Social Media Is Making the World a Better Place. Quit Griping About It.

I once wrote that the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Likewise, it might very well make good people better and bad people worse. But on average, that doesn’t mean the world is a worse place. So why does it seem so much worse?

That’s pretty easy: the internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.

Contrary to common opinion, however, this has little to do with the nature of these mediums. Sure, they’ve become more visceral over time: first words, then pictures, then voice, then moving images, and finally all of that packaged together and delivered with the power of gossip from a trusted friend. But what’s really different is how much time we spend on them—and by this I mean the time we spend on news, not crossword puzzles or Gilligan’s Island. We are addicted to our smartphones, and that means we spend far more time absorbing news than we used to with TV or radio. There’s the news we actively seek out. There’s the news we get after acccidentally clicking on something else. And then, just to make sure we don’t miss one single thing, there’s the news that’s forced on us because we’ve set up our smartphones to buzz and beep at us when something happens.

This means that we are aware of much more news than in the pre-internet days.

And that brings me circuitously to my point: broadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary. Human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising that we end up thinking the world is getting worse.

Instead, though, consider a different possibility: the world is roughly the same as it’s always been, but we see the bad parts more frequently and more intensely than ever before.

Read the rest at Mother Jones.

Matthew Yglesias: Journalists should stop repeating Trump’s lies. Plus, we need a more robust theory of the media.

Covering President Donald Trump is hard, but the media is blowing the easy parts.

That’s what I thought as I read Ezra Klein’s fascinating, troubling take on Vox about how Trump manipulates the media. Ezra raises a lot of really good, really difficult questions about how the media can and should handle the situation in which Trump clearly wants to bait the press into a Trump versus the media narrative.

Yet what I’m hung up on are the easy questions. Tuesday morning, for example, Axios published an interview/scoop in which Trump floated the idea of trying to abrogate birthright citizenship via an executive order. This is ridiculous on its face as a procedural matter, but substantively Trump remarked that “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States.”

That’s a pithy, punchy line, but it’s also completely untrue. The citizenship standard known as unrestricted jus soli exists in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, and about 30 more countries, almost all of them, like the ones I named, located in the Western Hemisphere.

So hundreds of news outlets posted stories and tweets that repeated Trump’s lies. Yglesias’s suggestion:

When a public official makes a material misstatement of fact, you might want to do a story about the fact that he is lying or confused or ignorant or whatever you think is going on. But you don’t just relay the misinformation in your social media copy and headlines.

Read the whole thing at Vox.

That’s all I’ve got for today. What stories are you following?

Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!!

Trump came up with another shiny object for his fans today. He told Axios that he plans to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship. That would involve invalidating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. There would be legal challenges and the question would end up in the Supreme Court. Would the Kavanaugh court go along with Trump? The New York Times:

President Trump said he was preparing an executive order to end birthright citizenship in the United States, his latest attention-grabbing maneuver days before midterm congressional elections, during which he has sought to activate his base by vowing to clamp down on immigrants and immigration.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Mr. Trump told Axios during an interview that was released in part on Tuesday. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

In fact, dozens of other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports restricting immigration and whose work Mr. Trump’s advisers often cite.

Um . . . no.

Doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants was an idea Mr. Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempting to would be certain to prompt legal challenges….

To accomplish the idea he floated on Tuesday, Mr. Trump would have to find a way around the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment means that any child born in the United States is considered a citizen. Amendments to the Constitution cannot be overridden by presidential action, and can be changed or undone only by overwhelming majorities in Congress or the states, with a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or through a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of state legislatures.

Hillary Clinton predicted in 2016 that Trump would try this.

https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1057277661809127425

Trump is really going all out with the hate leading up to November 6. This is just one more disgusting example of his pandering to the far right while trying to get the media to stop talking about violence attacks that he has contributed to with his rhetoric at his vile Hitler rallies.

Despite pleas from Pittsburgh’s Mayor and members of the Jewish community, Trump plans to go to visit the grieving city this afternoon. NPR: Trump To Visit Pittsburgh Despite Objections From Mayor, Jewish Leaders.

President Trump plans to travel to Pittsburgh on Tuesday afternoon, as the city continues to mourn Saturday’s massacre that claimed the lives of 11 worshippers at a synagogue.

When Trump arrives, he is expected to meet with members of the local Jewish community. But the visit comes despite the wishes of some political and religious leaders who felt that the president should come at a later date — or not at all.

The visit is the same day of the first funerals for those killed at the Tree of Life synagogue.

The city’s Democratic mayor, Bill Peduto, urged the president not to come while friends and families were burying their loved ones.

“I do believe that it would be best to put the attention on families this week and if he were to visit, choose a different time to do it,” Peduto told CNN.

CNN: Local, national officials decline to appear with Trump in Pittsburgh.

Local and national officials are declining to appear with President Donald Trump on Tuesday when he visits a grieving Pittsburgh, where funerals for slain congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue are set to begin.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were all invited to join the President on his visit but declined, according to two congressional sources.

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, was also invited to join Trump in Pittsburgh but declined, according to a spokesman, citing previous commitments in another part of the state.

A spate of local and state officials also said they would not appear with Trump when he visits a hospital and pays respects to the 11 victims of Saturday’s massacre.

The White House has declined to say who the President will meet with when he travels to Pittsburgh on Tuesday afternoon. One official described the visit as “understated.” He’ll be joined by the first lady, as well as daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who are Jewish.

You’d think Trump would postpone this trip when even Mitch McConnell declined to accompany him. I wonder what he’s up to?

And then there’s Mike Pence and his fake rabbi. Pence asked a “rabbi” from “Jews for Jesus” to speak at an event he held in Michigan. The Jewish News: ‘Jews for Jesus’ Rabbi Speaks at Campaign Rally with VP Pence, Lena Epstein

An invocation from messianic Christian rabbi Loren Jacobs at a campaign rally in Waterford for Republican congressional candidate Lena Epstein has sparked outrage mere days after 11 Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh because of their faith.

Vice President Mike Pence, a devout Christian, was at the rally for Epstein. A spokesperson for Pence said he did not know Loren Jacobs of the Messianic congregation Shema Yisrael when he invited him to offer a prayer for the Tree of Life synagogue victims gunned down by an anti-Semite last weekend.

“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and Father of my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and Father too,” Jacobs, wearing a tallit, said. Jacobs was ordained at an evangelical seminary and uses the title “rabbi.” As Pence stood next to him, Jacobs ended his prayer by saying, “in the name of Jesus.”

Jews for Jesus, as many call messianic Christians, are not accepted in mainstream Judaism as one of their main missions is the conversion of Jews to Christianity. After Jacobs’ prayer, many took to social media to express their anger that a Jewish rabbi had not been asked to give the invocation.

A Pence aide told the Associated Press that Jacobs was invited to pray at the event by GOP congressional candidate Lena Epstein…..Rabbi Jason Miller said on Facebook that Epstein could have chosen any one of at least 60 rabbis on a directory of Michigan rabbis. “Yet the only rabbi they could find to offer a prayer for the 11 Jewish victims in Pittsburgh at the Mike Pence rally was a local Jews for Jesus rabbi? That’s pathetic!”

Epstein attempted to justify her recommendation–you can read her statement at the link. It certainly appears that Trump and Pence are trying to signal to their followers that more anti-Semitic violence will be met with shrugs from the administration.

Please check out this Twitter thread by Rafael Shiminov.

Shiminov writes that Jacobs (the fake rabbi) offered prayers for Republican candidates and the Republican Party and did not even pray for the victims of the massacre in Pittsburgh until Pence brought him up after the event to amend his remarks! Shiminov says this sends a clear message to Trumpists.

One final depressing story before I end this depressing post (h/t Delphyne).

The New York Times: 2 Sisters Were Found Dead in the River, Duct-Taped Together. Police Have Few Answers.

A person strolling through Riverside Park last Wednesday afternoon spotted something jarring on the riverbank and called the police.

There, below a small pier that juts out from the park at 68th Street, lay the bodies of two young women, bound together by duct tape at their waists and ankles. They had not been in the water long, the police said. Clad in similar black leggings and black jackets with fur trim, their bodies bore no obvious signs of trauma.

The police initially had trouble identifying the young women. Hints that they might be related surfaced a day after they were found when police sketches revealed striking similarities: the same curly dark hair, the same build, the same skin tone.

By Friday, detectives had learned the women were sisters from Saudi Arabia who lived in Fairfax, Va.

Rotana Farea was 22; Tala Farea was 16. They had a history of going missing, and they had recently requested asylum in the United States, the police said.

But beyond that, the circumstances of their deaths have remained a mystery. Investigators have struggled to piece together how two young women from a city more than 250 miles away turned up along Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.

The police are investigating the possibility that the sisters may have carried out a suicide pact, taping themselves together and throwing themselves in the river. But detectives have not ruled out murder. The medical examiner’s office has yet to determine the cause of death. No one has claimed the bodies.

Here’s Twitter thread about this story by Mona Eltahawy.

That’s about all I can handle for today. Please post your own thoughts and links in the comment thread below.