All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[InformationGeek]

Just some enthic cleansing. Nothing to see here.

Referring to Kurds living along Turkish border in Syria, Trump says of Turkey, "they had to have it cleaned out." https://t.co/W8J7IFctO3

[Tendrin]

gohmert3.JPG

Hey, WBE, check this one out.

[numberthirty]

One other thing about some of the recent Sander's endorsements...

This is a pretty recent entry from Warren's Twitter...

- https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status...41574712745984

For most of America’s history, when our companies did better, our workers did better – and America built a thriving middle class. The Accountable Capitalism Act will help realign our skewed market incentives so companies & workers can once again do well together.

While I don't think that Warren is always lousy on this sort of thing, this just ain't the case. It was a very short window of time that also involved a boom. While you see mention of Sanders being "Left" to "White Men", Warren's take here isn't particularly left. Never mind the history past the period that Warren is talking about.

Anybody who is not white(and plenty of people who are white) will be able to tell you that this "Business And Workers Together..." thing is kinda "Rose Colored Glasses". Never mind if it will work in a time without a boom and Multinationals.

Not that Warren's bad. Just there is absolutely an alternative to the above that folks might feel more at home backing.

[GindyPosts]

A few months ago, I mentioned the story in Alaska about Mike Dunleavy slashing practically the entire state budget, presumably to spite a bunch of people, and then a campaign was made to issue a runoff campaign to both get rid of Dunleavy and then elect somebody else. The campaign needed over 28,500 signatures to be examined; it got just over 49K.

https://www.adn.com/politics/2019/09...in-five-weeks/

[GindyPosts]

Okay so something happened to me while I was out to lunch with my father and friend on Wednesday. The man at the table next to me was describing to his table mate that he was trans racial. He was a white man who identified as a black man. He said he understands the plight of African Americans because he has been discriminated against because he identifies as a black man. I didnt say anything to the man but to be honest I was slightly upset. African American have faced real discrimination and racism and their history in America has not been pleasant. This man went as far as to say he deserves to be included in programs designed to help African Americans like minority Naacp loans and collage grants. African Americans have been through real struggles and for this man to claim he understands and relates to them because he views himself as a black man is kind of offensive.

Has the Pc movement become so absurd that trans Racial is a real thing or was this guy just being an ass?

…

Sounds more like the dude is all "How come them black folk get all these things but I can't get no support for my cracker ass?"

I'm going to try and word this carefully, since I mean well but I am worried how I'll say it is going to come out wrong: I largely examine what historically has been institutionalized racism today as class discrimination that just happens to be populated mostly by minorities. The reason I say that is because I'm a white person who still is still below "the poverty line", and obviously, given the fact that people helped build systems purposefully set up to trap and keep blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnics groups in the bottom portion of society, news reports and socioeconomic studies don't and won't feel any obligated sympathy for the white people that are trapped since, surprise, surprise, us white folk weren't meant to be trapped by it. And although things like profiling in the legal system skew in favor towards Caucasians (again, not proud of that fact, but let's be realistic, it is what it is), what it sounds like with this random person at this table is more of an embittered person who just happened to be dealt a crummy hand and felt like he didn't have the "race card" to bail him out. Unfortunately, someone like him could set a legal precedent that NAACP loans and college grants discriminate if he decided to, I dunno, file a lawsuit and it somehow got momentum amongst the crank segment of the population, which can ultimately screw over the very people who need and use those that they were designed for.

Which did happen in Charlotte in the late 1990s where a disgruntled white parent, upset that his daughter lost out to a black student for a private academy, filed a complaint, setting a precedent that in essence, resegregated schools. By the way, the parent moved his family before the verdict was made, with the prevailing argument by bigots and morons being "we already did it ("it" being racial integration), why do we have to keep doing it?"

My point is, for a white person, the feeling of being denied entitlement may frustrate and anger you, but you aren't given anything just because of skin color. If he's complaining about college grants, there's FAFSA, which offer grants to all walks of life, and that's what helped finally get me into college. If he wants a loan that badly, certainly there will be somebody willing to offer him one. But it sounds more like he's just complaining about not getting what he felt was offered to him and instead is envisioning his life vicariously as somebody he's not since he wants a free meal ticket, since he now thinks black people are being given these "free" things whites used to get.

[Malvolio]

gohmert3.JPG

Hey, WBE, check this one out.

Well, we have to ask, just how smart is hell anyway?

[Robotman]

Just some enthic cleansing. Nothing to see here.

Jeezus. I’m shocked I can still be shocked at this point. The president of the United States causally supporting ethnic cleansing. Absolutely sickening.

[Tendrin]

I... but... what....

President Donald Trump has appointed an author of self-styled “Illuminati” self-help and financial advice books to a position on a federal education board.
The appointment of George Mentz ― who also writes under the pen name “Magus Incognito” ― to the Commission on Presidential Scholars was announced last Wednesday in a White House press release.
The group is tasked with selecting “presidential scholars” from across the country, an honorific reserved for 161 high school seniors who “demonstrate exceptional accomplishments in academics, the arts, career and technical education and an outstanding commitment to public service.”
Federal Election Commission filings show Mentz has given substantial sums to Republican causes and candidates, including more than $10,000 to Trump’s campaign and an associated political action committee.
Mentz’s author page on Amazon suggests that he is a prolific writer, with more than 60 titles to his name. That includes works with titles like “The Law of Attraction & Prosperity Bible – The Illuminati Wealth Manifesto & Codex” and “The Illuminati Handbook – The Path of Illumination and Ascension.”

https://news.yahoo.com/magus-incogni...st_sjwumo1bpf4

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Former Special Operations Commander Warns Nation Is Under Attack From Our Own President

“If this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership America needs ... it is time for a new person ... the sooner, the better,” writes retired Adm. William McRaven. Well said! You know who I wish would speak out like that? See below....

**********

Jim Mattis Turns Trump’s ‘Overrated’ Insult Into An Oscar-Worthy Badge Of Honor

The former defense secretary unleashed a hilarious roast on the president at the annual Alfred Smith memorial dinner. I for one am NOT impressed. Until Mattis speaks up and speaks out about what went on in Trump's White House, then he's more Lap Dog than Mad Dog.

**********

After Taking Presidential Corruption To New Heights, Trump Calls Everyone Else Corrupt

Trump has called Democratic leaders, the news media, former President Barack Obama and the entire 2016 election “corrupt.” Lord have mercy! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

**********

GOP Senators Shrug As Trump Plans To Host G-7 Summit At His Own Resort

“I just think it’s another day in the life of Washington, D.C., these days,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. Yes, another day of gutless, emasculated Republicans meekly bending over and kissing Trump's orange ass while he lines his pockets. Absolutely pathetic!

**********

GOP Senator Breaks With White House Over Ukraine Quid Pro Quo

“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said. Unimpressed. Murkowski will express phony outrage, then obediently toe the party line.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of former Texas Governor and two-time failed presidential candidate Rick Perry, pictured above accidentally cosplaying Heath Ledger in a homophobic campaign ad from his 2012 Presidential campaign. All joking aside, Rick Perry does love him some guns, even going jogging and stopping from his cardio workout to add extra orifices via lead projectiles to coyotes that offend him. He’s equally callous about ending the lives of human beings, apparently, having executed over 250 people, more than any governor in U.S. History, including Todd Willingham, who after his death, was later proved innocent of the crime of which he was convicted. Perry, however, has no regrets. But don’t worry, he does love life. At least if the life in question has yet to be born. In his last term as governor, Rick Perry signed some of the harshest anti-abortion legislation into law (it’s still being decided by higher courts if it’s constitutional or not), causing mass protests at the state capitol. This is a man, while governor, who openly discussed having Texas secede from the union, and also backed anti-government tax scofflaw Cliven Bundy in his fight against the Bureau of Land Management in 2014.

His 2012 campaign for president was supposed to be him riding to the Republicans’ rescue to deny Barack Obama a second term, but it was an unmitigated disaster, and included the revelation that his family’s vacation ranch was named with a racial slur, several campaign stops where he rambled on incoherently and made people speculate he was high on painkillers, and even how he forgot what the three government offices he wanted to shut down in a GOP primary debate, offering a meager, “OOPS” after his brain fart. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Perry claimed the unemployment number given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every month is “doctored”, talked with Glenn Beck about the Jade Helm 15 Conspiracy Theory, claimed that the shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina was not a race-motivated hate crime, but an “accident” motivated by drug use, recommended people start carrying firearms in dark movie theatres to shoot back blindly at any potential mass shooters who might attack them there, and compared himself to Jesus at a campaign rally in South Carolina. As a result, Perry’s second presidential campaign only lasted 92 days before he ran out of money.

In the interests of staying relevant, and perhaps softening his image a bit, Rick Perry appeared on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, where he hoped to learn enough footwork to not embarrass himself at his daughter’s wedding later on in the year. He was eliminated very early on because… well, he was a terrible dancer, but you’re gonna fail miserably if you try to dance to “God Bless Texas” when you’re supposed to be performing a cha-cha. There was, for a time, speculation about Rick Perry being a primary challenger for Ted Cruz in the 2018 mid-term elections, but instead, Rick Perry inexplicably took a job of the Secretary of the Department of Energy in Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”. He had no qualifications for the job, and was going to be running a department of our government that he advocated should be eliminated completely (well, after Ron Paul reminded him). Now, we’ve established that Perry is quite the dumbass, but get this… Perry advocated for eliminating the Dept. of Energy. He then took the job running it. Perry then admitted his surprise in that he had no idea what his job was when he accepted it, and was surprised at what the Department of Energy does. So what has Perry been doing when he hasn’t used his position to help coal barons get rich? W

ell, he’s stupid enough to get crank-called by Russian pranksters. Which… is at last not the worst scandal the Trump administration has with the Russians. Perry is currently embroiled in the Trump administration’s Ukraine scandal, because of his meetings with Ukraine’s president where he may have been pressuring the country to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden to assist the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, as well as potential irregularities with the oil and gas companies in Ukraine. He was subpoenaed by the House just last week and keeps flip-flopping on whether or not he's resigning his Cabinet spot.

[worstblogever]

Doug Ducey
It was on this date one year ago that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who has been in office now since 2014, who has at least lowered the bar for insane and racist Arizona Governors was already set pretty high by his predecessor, Jan Brewer.

Ducey’s career prior to running for office was that he was the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream parlor chain, resigning from that spot in 2007 and then winning office in 2010 as Arizona State Treasurer. Our delay in profiling Ducey for the past year or two came to a quick end due to the above photo, where Gov. Ducey was posing with members of a supposed “Patriot Movement AZ” that’s a white nationalist group, and there’s not just members of the MAGA crowd, but they’re throwing up white supremacist hand gestures for the photo. What makes it even worse was the timing… While Gov. Ducey was meeting with these fringe hatemongers, he was simultaneously refusing to meet with education leaders during Arizona’s #RedforEd teacher’s strike. You kind of get the sense that his priorities are skewed, you know? That isn’t a one-off, either. As Ducey also spoke before Turning Point USA, another racist and anti-Semitic conservative group in August of 2018, and he answered to criticism over it by claiming that “he didn’t know” they were as bad as they are.

How racist is Doug Ducey? He came out strong to oppose removing Confederate monuments in Arizona, even though the Confederacy pre-dated his state’s existence by a few decades. He chose to put this statement out within a week of the murder of Heather Heyer and 20 others being injured in a terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, carried out by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.

This guy is out of touch with the interests of actual people. While there were literally school students camping out right outside Ducey’s office to protest gun violence in schools after the Parkland Shooting back in March of 2018, he was too busy posting on Twitter about free agent players leaving the Arizona Cardinals.

He’s also extreme enough on anti-choice legislation that he signed a law that would require physicians performing abortions in Arizona to attempt to resuscitate any fetus that survives the procedure… which would be amazing because fetuses are physically incapable of surviving outside the womb by definition. Their qualification of if the attempt needs to be made? If the fetus has a heartbeat. That would mean ANY abortion performed at six weeks or beyond… whether or not the fetus has developed other organs to survive. It’s… frankly mad science (and likely to be overturned by the courts).

At this point, you start to get the feeling that Ducey is some kind of spectacular ***hole. That’s probably why he and Donald Trump are fans of one another. Ducey actually praised Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, (yes THAT Joe Arpaio) and earlier this year, when Trump demanded the governors of several states deploy the National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border for what amounted to an expensive photo-op to commemorate Trump’s bigotry, Doug Ducey was more than happy to humor the idea and join in the racism. Hell, even without any influence by Trump, Ducey has tried blocking the resettlement of refugees into Arizona this past year, and has been more than willing to sign whatever anti-immigrant legislation that crosses his desk.

Sadly, it’s on anti-immigrant stupidity that Doug Ducey has almost exclusively campaigned on in 2018, as he runs against Democratic challenger David Garcia. As you might expect from an Arizona Republican running against a Hispanic challenger, Ducey’s campaign ads were a hot bed of race-baiting, and primarily attack Garcia as supposedly wanting “open borders”, and doing everything he can to appeal to aggrieved white xenophobes as much as possible. That led to Ducey coasting to re-election by a 15-point margin in 2018, and now the only thing that’s going to see him removed from office is if he follows the trend of Arizona Governors who get impeached through the years.

Our main update on Doug Ducey is just a note about how full of s*** he is. You see, in July of 2019, a lot of Republicans were bent out of shape about the relationship between Nike and Colin Kaepernick, who made the great offense of kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police violence, as the First Amendment allows him to do. Well, Nike had announced that it would pull shoes from the market that were Betsy Ross themed around the 4th of July, and the conservative media continued the feud, frothing at the mouth about Nike boycotts. One of the loudest critics was, Doug Ducey, who as part of a day long Twitter thread about it, was threatening to pull financial incentives towards Nike for creating jobs in Arizona. And then, two days later, the Arizona Republic photographed Doug Ducey at a charity event… WEARING NIKE SHOES.

Way to stay on point, Doug. You’re an embarrassment.

[Tami]

A surprise announcement from the Russian news service, TASS: According to the FSB in Russia, the US government has now agreed to carrying out joint cyber operations with Russian intelligence.

What?

Twitter Link

Russia says it is starting to resume U.S. cyber cooperation: TASS

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States are gradually starting to resume cooperation on cyber security, TASS news agency cited the head of Russia’s FSB Federal Security Service as saying on Thursday.

Russia’s bilateral relations with the United States are at post-Cold War lows, strained by an array of issues including U.S. allegations that Russia meddled in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.

“...we are restoring these (cyber security) relations,” FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov said.

Yep, Trump is giving the burglar (Russia) the keys to the front door and the codes to the security system.

[Tendrin]

Twitter Link

Russia says it is starting to resume U.S. cyber cooperation: TASS



Yep, Trump is giving the burglar (Russia) the keys to the front door and the codes to the security system.

Yikes indeed. The plan is, of course, even more intense 2020 interference.

[InformationGeek]

Oh hey, while we focus on Trump profiting from the G7, here's him profiting from the Kurds, the scumbag.

G7 to Doral is hardly today's only news about @realDonaldTrump profiting from his presidency:

An evening of prayer for the Kurds is scheduled for Trump Hotel DC.

Trump will profit from people praying for a remedy to a crisis he instigated.

via @1100Penn https://t.co/AoSL97C28O

And WBE, look who is helping him. Some familiar faces.

Aided by speakers Larry Kudlow, Sen. Cory Garner, Rep. Mark Meadows, and Rep. Doug Collins, the Faith and Freedom Coalition stuffed Trump's collection plate, holding a two-day gathering at the Trump Hotel D.C.

via @1100penn https://t.co/AoSL97C28O https://t.co/jZTqEqVTnL

And then there's this vileness.

WATCH: President Trump on Turkey attacking the Kurds: "Sometimes you have to let them fight, like two kids in a lot. You have to let them fight, and then you pull them apart!" https://t.co/rSgu1U3ERu

[Mister Mets]

Okay so something happened to me while I was out to lunch with my father and friend on Wednesday. The man at the table next to me was describing to his table mate that he was trans racial. He was a white man who identified as a black man. He said he understands the plight of African Americans because he has been discriminated against because he identifies as a black man. I didnt say anything to the man but to be honest I was slightly upset. African American have faced real discrimination and racism and their history in America has not been pleasant. This man went as far as to say he deserves to be included in programs designed to help African Americans like minority Naacp loans and collage grants. African Americans have been through real struggles and for this man to claim he understands and relates to them because he views himself as a black man is kind of offensive.

Has the Pc movement become so absurd that trans Racial is a real thing or was this guy just being an ass?

I think the guy was being an ass. It sounds more like a right-winger mocking the left than what someone on the left would believe.

This was the strategy I felt like they should have gone with from the beginning. Just dare the GOP senators to do anything about it. They still wont impeach and will make excuses so why go through several iterations of the story. MoskowMitch will continue to protect him so why worry what it looks like? The hardcore base will follow him to hell no matter what.

Earlier strategies wouldn't take into account just how bad his recent behavior is, or how incriminating some of the comments by his allies (Giuliani, Mulvaney) would be.