All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[InformationGeek]

I knew it was smart for me to keep an eye on Omar Navarro. It gets weirder and weirder with him.

The FBI and Capitol Police want to talk with Rep. Maxine Waters’ 2018 Republican opponent about a fake letter he posted to Twitter that falsely indicated the congresswoman wants to resettle tens of thousands of refugees in her Los Angeles district.

The Republican candidate, Omar Navarro, said he will meet with FBI agents at his California campaign office Wednesday at their request.

In December, Waters formally asked the FBI and Capitol Police to investigate the letter, which appears to be on Waters’ House office stationery and includes her signature.

It is a federal crime to impersonate a federal official and misuse a federal seal.

Navarro told The Times after Waters filed the December complaint that someone he did not know sent his campaign the letter on Facebook, and he did not vet whether it was real before putting it online.

“I don’t know why they are looking into me since I’m not the one who fabricated the letter,” Navarro said Monday. He said he has not had contact with the person who sent him the letter since December.

Navarro has not deleted the tweet from his account and it continues to be retweeted, totaling more than 800 times as of this week.

He reacted online to the FBI meeting Monday, tweeting, “Let’s get this straight I tweet a letter which says Maxine Waters wants to bring 41,000 Somali refugees. I only tweet according to this document asking a question. Now the FBI is on me for her complaint. She threatens the president and his supporters and no investigation on her.”

Navarro said he’d like to have an attorney present at the meeting and may have to postpone it. He also said he is not the only person who shared the letter online, and said Waters' complaint was meant to divert attention from real issues of the district and create a false narrative about him.

The letter says the congresswoman wants to bring refugees to her congressional district after the 2018 election “and perhaps even once I have secured the Speaker of the House position.”

The letter contains several inaccuracies. It references multiple committees and subcommittees that Waters does not serve on, and lists an address for a district office that has been closed for nearly a decade.

In December, Waters’ chief of staff, Twaun Samuel, called it “a forgery and a fake.” In Waters’ complaint, the congresswoman said she had not communicated with the person the letter was addressed to — Teri Williams, president of the Los Angeles-based OneUnited Bank — about any refugee resettlement program. Samuel did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Navarro tweeted the letter, along with a message: “According to this document, Maxine Waters wants more terrorists, like the one who bombed NYC, in California’s 43rd District. As Congressman of CA’s 43rd District, I will oppose such policies.”

Man this guy is a real piece of work. Hope you can squeeze him in sometime WBE.

[Mister Mets]

Naive question from a Brit..but why don’t US Republican politicians just refrain from using such terms (ones that a fair number might reasonably think are racist)?

If I was a Republican politician...I would assume they lose more votes than they gain...because I’d assume many decent people wouldn’t vote for me if I used those terms, and the committed racists won’t vote Democrat, so I can’t lose those votes.

Is that cynical calculation wrong?

This is messy for a few reasons, since it involves guessing at the motives of other people and their interpretations with what they're trying to communicate.

The law of averages suggests that some things that are perceived as dog whistles are false positives (IE- statements that had connotations that someone who is outside the social media left wasn't aware/ hadn't internalized.)

The whole point of a dog whistle should be to appeal to a subgroup without swing voters hearing anything, although it seems pretty clear that the left is on the lookout for this stuff, so that would rarely work out. One argument would be that the racist has underestimated his opponents' ability to pick up on a connection. It should be pretty obvious that liberals are going to leap at any combination of monkey and African-American; however, there is the possibility that candidates and their staffers are going to be stupid and wrong in guessing how their opponents will respond.

There may also be a third maneuver of baiting opponents into overreactions. Josh Barro and Will Saletan wrote about this on twitter.

IMO, the sane, charitable take is that "monkey this up" is, in context, a serious rhetorical gaffe that displays deplorable insensitivity to the history and reality of race relations in Florida and the the US.

The sane, charitable take about charges of "dog whistling" racism is the conclusion outruns the evidence at hand, but it's not unreasonable to think that a candidate endorsed by Trump, who race-baits like his life depends on it, may be willing to indulge in sly race-baiting.

I think the whole thing is on purpose -- DeSantis wants to bait the Democrats into "making things about race" while retaining plausible-enough deniability

Which is not quite the same thing as a dog whistle? The message is more to his opponents than his supporters.

[Mister Mets]

The New York Times appears to have posted the opening of an article describing a debate that hadn't yet.

https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/statu...34166712934401

[InformationGeek]

Holy crap... this... this horrible.

On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.

In a statement, the State Department said that it “has not changed policy or practice regarding the adjudication of passport applications,” adding that “the U.S.-Mexico border region happens to be an area of the country where there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud.”

But cases identified by The Washington Post and interviews with immigration attorneys suggest a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.

Juan said he was infuriated by the government’s response. “I served my country. I fought for my country,” he said, speaking on the condition that his last name not be used so that he wouldn’t be targeted by immigration enforcement.

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.


The same midwives who provided fraudulent birth certificates also delivered thousands of babies legally in the United States. It has proved nearly impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate documents, all of them officially issued by the state of Texas decades ago.

A 2009 government settlement in a case litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union seemed like it had mostly put an end to the passport denials. Attorneys reported that the number of denials declined during the rest of the Obama administration, and the government settled promptly when people filed complaints after being denied passports.

But under President Trump, the passport denials and revocations appear to be surging, becoming part of a broader interrogation into the citizenship of people who have lived, voted and worked in the United States for their entire lives.

[JCAll]

Holy crap... this... this horrible.

Yeah, that's the hallmark of the current justice department. The most horrible interpretation of the laws, the cruelest methods of enforcement.

[Kevinroc]

https://american-ledger.com/accounta...s-and-muslims/

DeSantis Moderates Hate-Filled Facebook Group That Attacks African-Americans, Parkland Survivors and Muslims

Ron DeSantis, the Trump-endorsed congressman who won Tuesday’s GOP primary for Florida governor, is an administrator on an active Facebook group where conservatives share racist, conspiratorial and incendiary posts about a litany of targets, including black Americans and South Africans, the “deep state,” survivors of February’s massacre at a Florida high school, immigrants, Muslims and, in recent days, John McCain.

DeSantis was listed as one of the group’s 52 administrators and moderators as of Wednesday. His involvement in the group was first noted by a researcher for Media Matters for America on Tuesday.

[4saken1]

Naive question from a Brit..but why don’t US Republican politicians just refrain from using such terms (ones that a fair number might reasonably think are racist)?

If I was a Republican politician...I would assume they lose more votes than they gain...because I’d assume many decent people wouldn’t vote for me if I used those terms, and the committed racists won’t vote Democrat, so I can’t lose those votes.

Is that cynical calculation wrong?

The beautiful thing about dog whistles is that most people can't hear them except their intended targets. This makes it easy to maintain deniability. The fact that most Republicans at this point will believe just about anything they hear on FAUX News and regard anything else as 'fake news' makes it that much easier to deny that there was anything racist said or done in the first place. A majority of the Party actually thinks racism is dead because a black President was elected. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing! Even when their policies disproportionately hurt people of color, they find rationalizations to make it seem like they are not racist policies.

In the end, though, both Parties are constantly looking for ways to attract new voters. As more and more racist old Republicans die off, the Republican Party is scrambling to attract younger voters. Until they find a way to do this, they can always rely on gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the Green Party to steer Elections their way.

[Mister Ferro]

The New York Times appears to have posted the opening of an article describing a debate that hadn't yet.

https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/statu...34166712934401

Apparently that debate was on an hour tape delay but then the Times went ahead and published about the beginning.

[JCAll]

There may also be a third maneuver of baiting opponents into overreactions. Josh Barro and Will Saletan wrote about this on twitter.

Ah yes, we certainly can't discount good old-fashioned trolling these days.
I wish trolling had never gone mainstream.

[worstblogever]

The idea that he shouldn't be defended in the instance because you think he's wrong overall is dangerous. It suggests the details don't matter, which one of the problems with Trump, rather than an instruction manual for his critics.

Uh huh...

Let's back that up with this news article...

You were saying, Mets? I ask again, is Ron DeSantis the hill you want to go and die on, or are you about to begin an impassioned defense of someone else with an "R" next to their name like Art Jones next?

I knew it was smart for me to keep an eye on Omar Navarro. It gets weirder and weirder with him.

Man this guy is a real piece of work. Hope you can squeeze him in sometime WBE.

Not before election day. He's in the queue to pop up around mid-February.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

This is messy for a few reasons, since it involves guessing at the motives of other people and their interpretations with what they're trying to communicate.

The law of averages suggests that some things that are perceived as dog whistles are false positives (IE- statements that had connotations that someone who is outside the social media left wasn't aware/ hadn't internalized.)

The whole point of a dog whistle should be to appeal to a subgroup without swing voters hearing anything, although it seems pretty clear that the left is on the lookout for this stuff, so that would rarely work out. One argument would be that the racist has underestimated his opponents' ability to pick up on a connection. It should be pretty obvious that liberals are going to leap at any combination of monkey and African-American; however, there is the possibility that candidates and their staffers are going to be stupid and wrong in guessing how their opponents will respond.

There may also be a third maneuver of baiting opponents into overreactions. Josh Barro and Will Saletan wrote about this on twitter.

To be honest the thought did cross my mind today that Republicans might do that, not as bait for their voters, but more so that they can gain a Democratic reaction that will give them something to rally against. Like does saying something that could be interpreted as comparing an African American to an ape play well with some racists on the right, sure. Getting Democrats to police language is something that appeals to more people on the rights sensibilities towards culture politics. It's the same reason they feed off guys like Milo.

[skyvolt2000]

Naive question from a Brit..but why don’t US Republican politicians just refrain from using such terms (ones that a fair number might reasonably think are racist)?

If I was a Republican politician...I would assume they lose more votes than they gain...because I’d assume many decent people wouldn’t vote for me if I used those terms, and the committed racists won’t vote Democrat, so I can’t lose those votes.

Is that cynical calculation wrong?

Because in most states everyone knows a LOT of voters don't come out of the wood work unless it's time to vote for President.

And if you KNOW you can get away with whatever and still get elected-you wouldn't care.

An issue we have here in Dallas where we have folks (both parties) do stuff-including ones who were found GUILTY of crimes or under federal investigation. And they didn't win by a FEW votes-they won in LAND SLIDES. Elections declared over after 2% of the votes are in.

So take that monkey comment and the moderation of a hate group Facebook page-is that ENOUGH to get Pookie, Ray Ray, Billy Joe, Jose and the old fossils out to vote?

You saw who ran to the polls in 2016. They are going to vote no matter what. It's the ones who don't bother who are the issue.

[InformationGeek]

Not before election day. He's in the queue to pop up around mid-February.

That's a shame, but understandable. It's sad that you're only going to be able to squeeze him in then. So much insanity.

[Gray Lensman]

To be honest the thought did cross my mind today that Republicans might do that, not as bait for their voters, but more so that they can gain a Democratic reaction that will give them something to rally against. Like does saying something that could be interpreted as comparing an African American to an ape play well with some racists on the right, sure. Getting Democrats to police language is something that appeals to more people on the rights sensibilities towards culture politics. It's the same reason they feed off guys like Milo.

It's what Scott Walker has been doing in Wisconsin for years. Not so much racial dog whistles, but provoking the opposition (typically unions) into overreacting.

[zinderel]

Holy crap... this... this horrible.

Horrible indeed. And utterly unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. It's like back when Blackwater's leader brought Trump a suggestion for a secret spy agency that would report exclusively to him. No one was shocked that Trump was considering the idea.

Come to think of it, but...what ever came of that...?