July 18, 2016

Here's one from Wayne Barrett and Democracy Now about dRumpf's beaucoup org crime connections:

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/30/a_classic_state_capitalist_how_donald

The multi part series elaborates on all manner of criminal connections benefitting Fred and l'il donnie.

One thing that struck me was the connection of Roger Stone to Roy Cohn. I always had Manafort Black & Stone down as intel-connected repug operatives. I just saw a recent article equating Manafort to a mobster, has ties to Russian organized crime. I don't throw out the intel connection idea entirely, but wonder if that group come from organized crime and got involved in repug intel, or if they're from intel and got involved in working with mob connected people. Chicken or egg?

July 13, 2016

He's so proud of his business successes, and he did nothing wrong, and he

is such a straight shooter who tells it like it is. Why would he not want to see video publicly broadcast of his favorite thing in the world -- which is l'il donnie dRumpf mouthing off on camera -- talking about his success, saying his wonderful success was fair and legal and due to his genius, and telling the blunt and unvarnished truth, like he always does?

July 8, 2016

Where's the 'anonymous' part come into play? Eric said donnie gave the money.

We know Eric, we know donnie, we know the foundation.

He's a chip off the old block.

June 30, 2016

Thanks, river. I just fucking knew this would happen. rec, nt.

May 28, 2016

Recced.

Any attempt to explain the ineffable phenomenom of that nazi weasel's popularity with his fans is welcome, and trying to understand and analyze it is important. Agreed that the supporter shows extreme cognitive dissonance in the examples brought up by other post-ers, and the cogdis can help explain things.

The polite one-on-one interaction with the interviewer seems like it softens the edges on dRumpf's followers' image too much. For every polite cog dis person like this one, there are 10 screaming aggressive yahoos. It's not just watching them as a group screaming their approval for his applause lines that are attacking other people and nations, it's watching his individual followers interacting with others, telling them to 'go to auschwitz', 'go back to me hi co', physically assaulting peaceful protestors, stuff like that. So the polite 22 year old is part of that mob anyway, and even if he remains polite, he's drowned in a sea of crazy belligerents.

Every hate filled and aggressive thing he's said and done just made his polls rise among the small percentage of voting Americans who decided the repug primary. They really like the fact that their hero is disgusting and repellent to the people that the repugs regard as their 'enemies', they're blissfully happy that he's trolling Dems, Women, progressives, Blacks, Hispanics, Moslems, Labor, Chinese, the poor, scientists, intellectuals, etc. They relish the negative reaction dRumpf provokes in people that his followers hate anyway.

One recent online Nation article summed up the appeal of his stump speeches by saying the key idea is that America has been 'cheated and humiliated', and his followers are furious about it. He's just trying to rally the dirtbag brownshirts with this idea, but it's a key underlying tenet of his campaign, epitomized by the 'make america great again' key slogan, (though he's trying to resurrect the 'America First' lindbergh slogan also, like McCain did in '08). The idea is that his followers get to say they feel the've been attacked first, or that they're threatened with attack, so they should strike back, or strike pre-emptively against their enemies. Some of them may have been attacked, by dRumpf and his bloated plutocrat repug buddies, but they're too brainwashed or unintelligent to see that, so there's not much that can be done for them.

Another article link from this week's Media Matters e-mail analyzed the authoritarian nature of drumpf, and his supporters' response to it. All of the constant anti-factual lying flip flopping he exhibits about the wall, barring muslims, whether he likes his opponents or thinks they're losers, his tax cut plan, his energy plan, self-funding his campaign, opposing Goldman Sachs and pharma execs, debating Bernie, releasing tax returns, being John Barron and John Miller -- every open lie and 180 degree contradiction is either swallowed whole by his followers, or allowed to occur completely un-noticed by them, because once he said what they wanted to hear, they stopped paying attention and are willfully ignoring coverage that would undercut the reason they claim makes them back him. The appeal here is that to people who want an authoritarian strong-man, there's no such thing as factual objective truth, all power to decide what reality is rests in the hands of their leader, who can contradict himself openly from moment to moment, from sentence to sentence, in the same stump speech. His followers hate reality, because reality is unfriendly to repug policy positions, so they want a strong man to say 'screw actual reality, reality is what I say it is'.

It seems like what he's doing is giving his followers the go ahead to be as hateful & belligerent as they want, to believe whatever freakishly insane and fascist lying conspiracy theory ideas they want to, and then he's allowing them to act on those feelings and beliefs. Telling them it's ok to feel that way and think that way, and that it's time to take the gloves off, he's letting them off their chains, he's 'freeing' them to act -- act like nazis. And it's exhilarating to them.

March 29, 2016

The accomodation that Zubik is attacking now was actually USED to justify the 5-4 Hobby Lobby

decision by the 5 member conservative majority.

"The debate was important because it cut to the heart of what the conservative majority promised in their 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, the last Supreme Court challenge concerning Obamacare’s contraceptive regulations. The 5-4 decision saying certain for-profits didn't have to cover birth control pointed to the very accommodation for religious nonprofits that the nonprofits are objecting to now.

“The effect of the HHS-created accommodation on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero,” Alito wrote then."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/scotus-zubik-healthcare


Now the same rightwing court members (minus Scalia) are lining up to mad-dog that accomodation with unknowledgeable pot shots. So they used it as an excuse for their abysmal Hobby Lobby decision, saying 'see, our ruling won't hurt anything, because there's this HHS accomodation'. Now that they rammed Hobby Lobby through with those specious arguments, they suddenly don't know why the accomodation should even exist. Apparently, in their mind, it existed only to justify their Hobby Lobby ruling.

March 27, 2016

What 'Democrats for dRumpf'?

Here's a nice piece of hopeful analysis, from Josh M Marshall's blog, telling us about the fake idea that dRumpf will appeal broadly to low income resentful whites. It has some not-pie-in-the-sky, useful reality-based data observations, which refutes the mass media's pretense that the moderate income white American electorate will switch in embittered droves to the gop's far-right candidate:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-reshuffling-the-deck

excerpt

" We can see from the polls and the rallies that Trump draws heavily from the white middle and working classes. A more specific marker is voters who do and don't have a college degree. But this isn't 1950 or 1965. The vast majority of those people are already Republican voters, if not always registered Republicans.

Here's the more operative question: if we're using the stereotype of 'white working class' voters, how many white working class voters do you think Trump will pull in the general election who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012? That second part of the equation is the critical one. Because if it's voters who were already in the Republican column it doesn't really matter in terms of reevaluating the 2000-2012 era electoral map. (Democrats would certainly love to get back some of those white voters; but that's a different question.) My gut sense is that the Obama '08, '12/Trump '16 number is pretty small. Maybe extremely small. If nothing else that hunch is backed up by a lot of highly suggestive if not dispositive polling data.

Let's consider some data.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote to Obama's 39%. And he lost. (In 2008, with McCain, it was 55% to 43%.) The most notable number is that Trump currently seems to be substantially underperforming that number. An ABC/Washington Post poll from early March found that Trump was winning white voters by a margin of 49% to 40% against Clinton. That's definitely winning the white vote. But it is not even close to the margin Mitt Romney got and still lost.

That number alone, if it holds up at all, should stop a lot of the 'reshuffling the deck' thinking in its tracks. That theory posits a sort of Braveheart-esque raging last gasp of white people putting Trump over the top. But at least at the moment, he's doing dramatically worse among whites than either of the last two guys who lost. That is, to put it mildly, a big problem for Trump.

The truth is that Trump would not only need to win dramatically more white voters than Romney (who lost); he'd need to expand the white electorate. Indeed, this claim comes up again and again. Trump, we're told, can motivate demoralized white voters who haven't voted recently or ever. But as Romney campaign strategist Stuart Stevens notes, this is fantasy. There aren't any missing white voters. The voting rate among whites has been going up like other demographic subgroups in recent years. There just aren't any missing ones out there, unless you opt for heroic/unicorn theories of turnout. "


This isn't to say that we shouldn't take dRumpf or any other far right creep nominee seriously. But this piece struck me as important and positive because though I've been paying attention to the unusual deference to (and shilling on behalf of) dRumpf by the media, I hadn't been seeing through the scary threatening bogeyman the same media was crafting about 'the massive legion' of angry white disaffected Americans who were going to put the dRumpenfuhrer over the top. The same media who's dishonestly pushing him is also dishonestly lying about demographics, in order to push him. It's 2 + 2, and I had been misreading it.

On an unrelated note, the blog's Tierney Sneed has been turning in some fantastic, very enjoyable reporting on TPM for a while now, and I just wanted to mention how good both her info and style are.

March 25, 2016

We're on very different wave-lengths, here.

I don't mind if one attacks Islam as a philosophy, or if one finds that many good and wonderful people can be found within the g o p. Neither of those issues form the basis of my reply to the o.p.

The simple issue for me is that these terror attacks occurred, then certain 'critical thinkers' in the right wing began stating that the religion of Islam and all its adherents made them happen, which is wrong. The o.p.s implication that the victims' own 'incorrect' critical thought analysis -- that 'Islamic refugees and Islamic people in general aren't murderous terrorists' -- is what tragically led to their deaths -- that implication is also just wrong.

I frankly DO indict millions of repuglican people, because they see the ideas and performance of their leaders, and wholeheartedly back them anyway. Or they don't have the tiniest scintilla of a clue about those leaders' ideas and performances, and vote to put them in power anyway. And no such endorsement of those terrorist attackers by hundreds of millions of Islamic religious adherents occurred; the small number of terrorists didn't run on a platform of terrorist action, then get the go-ahead supportive endorsement or vote 'in favor' from the rest of Islam. So one who conflates anti-repug sentiments with anti-Islam sentiments on this issue (or any other) is way off base, staggeringly so. The super super majority of Islam's adherents are simply practicing their faith and not committing violent massacres, but the practice of boosting promoting adhering to the repugs is an attack on billions of other people, as it aims to put our country's very considerable power in the hands of people with abhorrently bad ideas who promise to do very bad things with that power.

I'm hard pressed to come up with 'democratically elected' sharia governments you may be thinking about, when you discuss "Islamic leaders who promise policies and enact laws that are fascist and they are supported by people who vote them into power in the name of Islam", in your post. I do know about a ton of western backed feudal monarchies, Standard Oil installed strongman dictators, beaucoup west-sponsored coups that toppled democratically elected leaders in Islamic nations, one party elections with mandatory participation, weapons shipments to and intel backing of radical islamic sects for geopolitical purposes, the elimination of moderate oppositional leaders, etc. Which democratic Islamic countries are you thinking of here, obe? I've been paying attention for a long time, but apparently I'm playing catch up.

Despite what the american taliban repug party aims for, there is a very big difference between religion and political party, at least according to the people who founded our system of government. That's a key reason for our separation of church and state. Under our system, one can feel free to criticize any and all religions, for whatever reason they want, and speak freely about their critical thinking on the subject. Where the boundary exists is that religous zealots can't take control of our gov and use its tremendous powers to go after people who have the 'wrong' religious philosophies/belief systems, to enforce their own zealous religious beliefs. And secular political parties can't circumscribe peaceful legal religious practice. Religion can't take over gov, and gov can't take over religion, which is how it should remain.

So what exactly is the 'appropriate action one should take' regarding this terrorist attack, in your estimation, obe? The way I have it figured, determining the right course of action won't come from the unclear thinking and spur of the moment gut reaction feelings discussed in the o.p., and it certainly won't resemble anything that our kind opponents in the gop are pushing for, now.

January 23, 2016

The repugs pull this shit all the time. It's well orchestrated.

Their top power creeps have an initiative they want to put over, like stealing publicly owned land, or eliminating womens' rights, or scapegoating immigrants or religious minorities, or demonizing federal enforcement agencies. Then up pops a crazy, well-armed right wing group of dirtbag lackey whitie zealots, who pull out their weapons, commit crimes, threaten and use violence, kill people and blow stuff up. And simultaneously the repug power brokers' other dirtbag lackeys, in elected positions and think tanks and media, rationalize defend excuse justify and legislatively codify those exact same initiatives.

They're always threatening civil war, it's a subtext in every fake grievance and outrage they scream and whine about. This legislative angle is just civil war by stealth, because they're sneaky little cowards, and as long as they get exactly what they want, they don't care how they get it. They're like spoiled toddlers with adult bodies and guns.

January 11, 2016

When the chips are down, count on the repug 'loyal opposition':

Repug Helen Chenoweth, after the Ok. City bombing:

"The most peaceful and responsible thing this body could do is listen to the complaints of people who have resorted to violent action."
Helen Chenoweth
U. S. Congresswoman (Republican, ID)
Debate, House of Representatives shortly after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, 1995

http://politicalquotes.org/node/28866


The repug zoo, after OKC:

"Last week, (Speaker of the House) Gingrich declared that Westerners have a "genuine fear" of the federal government that Easterners and city dwellers should try to understand.
...
Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) has declared his sympathy for Westerners angry at government, saying: "I don't disagree with their arguments." And Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Ida.) has said plainly that citizens "have a reason to be afraid of their government." Rep. Steve Stockman, a Texas Republican, acknowledged last week that he had written an article in the June issue of Guns & Ammo magazine suggesting that the Clinton Administration had organized the 1993 raid by federal agents on the Branch Davidian religious compound near Waco, Tex., with an eye on bolstering public support for gun control.

Two leading GOP presidential candidates, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, have not been so outspoken. But both have joined the call for hearings into alleged government wrongdoing in the bloody Waco raid and in the 1992 shootout with white supremacist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Ida. When former President George Bush renounced his National Rifle Assn. membership last week over NRA fund-raising literature that called federal agents "jackbooted thugs," Dole made it clear that he would not follow suit. And Gramm is scheduled to address an NRA convention later this month at which a more militantly anti-government NRA faction is expected to oust leaders who have sought a less political role for the organization." "

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-05-15/news/mn-886_1_militia-groups


Repugs Steve King, and Scott Brown, after Joseph Stack's kamikazi attack on IRS building:

"Yet some could still understand Stack’s anti-government frustration, or as Republican Congressman Steve King said: “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.” Said Republican Senator Scott Brown of Stack: “You don’t know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues, certainly. No one likes paying taxes, obviously. But the way we’re trying to deal with things and have been in the past… people want us to do better. They want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way.” "

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/tactv/was-joe-stack-a-terrorist/