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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

When he won he literally had a meltdown about how this was the worst thing.

I seem to recall reading a story about that, either in the New York Times or the Washington Post about how Trump had been shocked at having been elected president because he didn’t think that would happen. Word has it Trump got in the race for no other reason than to improve his brand and get lots of free publicity, it never occurred to him, or anyone in his inner circle that he’d actually win. Hell, just about nobody did.

[ZombieHavoc]

I still don't buy that Trump didn't want to win. I am sure he didn't think he woud win. I'm positive Melania did not want to be first lady.

[jetengine]

I still don't buy that Trump didn't want to win. I am sure he didn't think he woud win. I'm positive Melania did not want to be first lady.

He wanted to leverage the fame to start his own network.

[Tendrin]

A staffer of former Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) was indicted Monday on charges that she gave fake petition signatures to officials in an attempt to get a third-party candidate on the ballot. The goal was to pull votes away from Taylor’s Democratic opponent. Instead, it backfired, The Virginian-Pilot reported.

Lauren Creekmore Peabody is one of five on Taylor’s campaign who worked to get petition signatures to help independent Shaun Brown get on the ballot. She was charged with two counts of election fraud, which is punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a $2,500 fine.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/05/vir...candal-report/

[Tendrin]

The chief of staff for Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (R) has admitted using cocaine and other drugs in legislative offices.
Cade Cothren made the admission after a WTVF investigation uncovered text messages which indicated drugs had been used.

“Regarding the texts in question, I readily admit that I sent some of them,” Cothren said in a statement made jointly with Casada. “I do so because they are part of a personal testimony that I am privileged to share, which is not lost on me.”

“Nonetheless, I unfortunately turned to maladaptive coping mechanisms,” the chief of staff continued. “However, I thank God for these experiences because they have allowed me a unique opportunity to witness to the young men who will come after me that actions have consequences.”

According to WFTV, the text messages also included “racist sentiments.” Cothren was serving as the Tennessee House Republican Caucus press secretary at the time the text messages were sent.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/05/ten...pmKhW0.twitter


Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

whatever. I was a Bernie supporter last time around (my preference would be Elizabeth Warren this time). I got up bright and early to vote for Hillary. haven't met any Bernie supporters who thought that Trump was the lesser of two evils. I do know people who were just not energized enough to vote. but, instead of anecdotal "evidence," i'll just go with the Washington Post take on it (surprisingly similar to the South Park take)...

The poll found that Obama-Trump voters, many of whom are working-class whites and were pivotal to Trump’s victory, are economically losing ground and are skeptical of Democratic solutions to their problems. Among the findings:

50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.
A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.
42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump. (Forty percent say that about congressional Republicans.) A total of 77 percent of Obama-Trump voters said Trump’s policies will favor some mix of all other classes (middle class, poor, all equally), while a total of 58 percent said that about congressional Democrats.


doesn't seem to favor your take on it. seems like a bunch of working class whites thought that Hillary was looking out for the rich as opposed to the working class. but that's because Hillary is an establishment candidate. and trump is a snakeoil salesman.

It's such a bs argument and always has been. In the two most recent Democratic primaries.... the one that didn't feature Bernie is the one where the runner up pulled more people away from the eventual nominee. There's no real empiracle proof that it was any different than what should be expected as the norm. It's just the usual people who need something external to blame for the loss.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Donald Jr. privately said to a friend something like "When Trump was told that he won the election, he looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melanie was bursting into tears, but not of joy".

Trump was the classic example of the dog that caught the car, but had no idea what to do next. Two plus years later, it can be argued he still doesn’t.

[Tami]

Revealed: new evidence of China's mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang

Around this time of the year, the edge of the Taklamakan desert in far western China should be overflowing with people. For decades, every spring thousands of Uighur Muslims would converge on the Imam Asim shrine, a group of buildings and fences surrounding a small mud tomb believed to contain the remains of a holy warrior from the eighth century.

Pilgrims from across the Hotan oasis would come seeking healing, fertility, and absolution, trekking through the sand in the footsteps of those ahead of them. It was one of the largest shrine festivals in the region. People left offerings and tied pieces of cloth to branches, markers of their prayers.

Visiting a sacred shrine three times, it was believed, was as good as completing the hajj, a journey many in underdeveloped southern Xinjiang could not afford.

But this year, the Imam Asim shrine is empty. Its mosque, khaniqah, a place for Sufi rituals, and other buildings have been torn down, leaving only the tomb. The offerings and flags have disappeared. Pilgrims no longer visit.

It is one of more than two dozen Islamic religious sites that have been partly or completely demolished in Xinjiang since 2016, according to an investigation by the Guardian and open-source journalism site Bellingcat that offers new evidence of large-scale mosque razing in the Chinese territory where rights groups say Muslim minorities suffer severe religious repression.

[Mister Mets]

Trump tweets white nationistic rgetoric and white nationalist groups.

That was easy, anyone for tea ?

What do you mean here? What kind of white nationalist rhetoric does he tweet? And wouldn't this be the more important complaint than retweeting?
In addition, how does he tweet white nationalist groups?

If you retweet someone else, you should be familiar with that someone else. At least enough to know whether or not you agree with the tweet. Why would anyone retweet something without knowing if they agree with it or not?

There are two arguments. Did he agree with the tweet? Probably. The objection is to the person making the point, rather than the point being so out of line it's disqualifying for anyone to agree with it.

The second argument is that he should know more about the people he retweets. That's fair enough, although it may be difficult to implement/ insist on as a universal rule.

This.

Also, presidents have teams of advisers who are supposed to keep them informed and avoid his sort of thing.
Also, anyone, a president or otherwise, can do a goddamned Google search.


If you'd like to not be called out for playing defense for individuals who shared the views of white nationalists... again... You can choose to criticize him for it, you can choose to ignore it, or just avoid ending up defend Trump, or other members like Steve King when they do things like this.

Hell, a wiser man might notice a pattern, instead of falling into a habit of ending up on this side of the debate, and acting surprised when it keeps happening.

Trump's tweets are often made without adviser input. There's the visual that he's in his bed at 3AM complaining about whatever he sees on Fox News.

It's also not clear that the level of vetting/ collaboration you insist on is useful. There were all the emails back and forth about a Hillary Clinton tweet during her campaign, where it took 12 staffers 12 hours and ten different drafts to make an innocuous comment about wages.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...one_tweet.html

One of the appeals of twitter is the ideal of getting the individual's views, rather than those of their advisers. When politicians are more careful, it begs the question of what kind of things they're hiding about their views and understandings, if they're so afraid of voters and constituents finding out.

[Mister Mets]

It's such a bs argument and always has been. In the two most recent Democratic primaries.... the one that didn't feature Bernie is the one where the runner up pulled more people away from the eventual nominee. There's no real empiracle proof that it was any different than what should be expected as the norm. It's just the usual people who need something external to blame for the loss.

I've been surprised at the polls suggesting a quarter of Hillary primary voters didn't vote for Obama. That just seems like BS, although I wonder if it can be explained by Hillary primary voters who liked Obama being more likely to tell pollsters that they voted for him.

I still don't buy that Trump didn't want to win. I am sure he didn't think he woud win. I'm positive Melania did not want to be first lady.

The main argument for him wanting to be President is the way he has governed as President. It does suggest that he has clear policy preferences, which would not have been implemented with Hillary Clinton in the White House.

The counterargument is that he may be a nihilist or a sociopath.

[worstblogever]

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/05/ten...pmKhW0.twitter

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

A reminder: Tennessee Republicans have wanted to drug test welfare recipients... and one of the main people pushing for that was snorting coke at the capitol.

I mean, there's "full of s***" hypocrisy. And then there's the GOP.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Donald Trump presents Tiger Woods with Presidential Medal of Freedom

https://www.bbc.com/sport/golf/48179361

Another celebrity gets the highest civilian American award. And from a celebrity president no less.

The prize recognises "individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the security or national interests of America, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavours".

What did Tiger Woods do for America? did his golfing contribute to the national security or national interests of America, let alone world peace? What has he done to contribute to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors?


Too many celebrities receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom may have cheapened the award.

Short and sweet: It was one cheating sociopath with a thing for blond white women lavishing praise on another cheating sociopath with a thing for blond white women. Nothing more, nothing less.

====================

Congress Is Failing

As House Democrats dither over moving forward with impeachment in a divided government and Senate Republicans are satisfied confirming judges rather than passing legislation, a pressing question is emerging: What the hell is Congress good for, anyway?

The House and Senate have been divided many times. Congress and the presidency are rarely controlled by one party. But the extent to which this Congress is already proving itself worthless as a legislative body and as a check against the president is historic.

“This is the worst I’ve seen it,” congressional historian and American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein told HuffPost this week. “With Nixon, we had people like Howard Baker, Hugh Scott, Barry Goldwater, Bill Cohen and John Rhodes. There is no equivalent today. And we have far worse corruption and lying.”

Ornstein added that Trump and his Cabinet are taking “defiance of Congress to a level we have not seen before.”

While Democrats in the House certainly aren’t lining up behind Trump, they also aren’t lining up against him. Impeachment efforts in the House have been relegated to a few Democrats on a quixotic mission, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has effectively pumped the brakes on all the talk.

Special counsel Robert Mueller declined to make a prosecutorial judgment on Trump and multiple examples of his potential obstruction of justice. But the Mueller report includes a whole section on Congress protecting “the integrity of its own proceedings, grand jury investigations, and federal criminal trials.”

Mueller seemed to be prodding Congress toward impeachment: “We concluded that Congress can validly regulate the president’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice,” the report said.

Instead of impeachment, however, congressional Democrats mostly met the report with yet another round of carefully worded press releases calling for more investigation.

The problem with that position is that the Trump administration is barely cooperating with those investigations.

Trump himself said he would ignore every subpoena related to oversight of his administration. In defiance of the law, the Treasury Department refuses to turn over his tax returns. Members of his administration routinely don’t show up to testify before the House ― Attorney General William Barr turned down his scheduled appearance last week, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross passed on his invitation to speak before the Appropriations Committee. Trump is even suing his own banks to block them from turning over his financial statements.

Pelosi said last week that she viewed the president’s “blanket” position refusing to answer to any document or testimony requests as “obstruction of justice.” But the rebukes ring hollow when Pelosi simultaneously cautions Democrats against opening impeachment proceedings, worrying it could cost her party at the ballot box in 2020.

She even told The New York Times last week that Democrats need to remain in the center to “inoculate” against the possibility that Trump refuses to vacate the presidency in a close election.

So scared are Democrats of a standoff with Trump that they’ve convinced themselves they need to play nice ― because the truth is, they have hardly any remedy for Trump playing hardball.

This, friends, is some seriously frightening ****. Our democracy is clearly at risk like never before, thanks to Trump's shenanigans and spineless, compliant Republicans who flat out refuse to check his power.

**********

Trump Would Have Been Charged With Obstruction If He Weren’t President, Former U.S. Prosecutors Say

Conduct outlined in the Mueller report would lead to multiple felony charges against anyone else, according to at least 560 former federal prosecutors. And being president is the ONLY thing keeping Trump out of prison, which is why he'll do ANYTHING, including ripping up the Constitution (with the help of spineless, compliant Republicans) to stay in office. Speaking of prosecutors....

**********

Ex-Giuliani Assistant ‘100% Confident’ Prosecutor Rudy Would’ve Indicted Trump

Jeffrey Harris says his old boss would’ve charged Trump “in a heartbeat.” Now he's relentlessly kissing Trump's ass and is his biggest supporter.

**********

Senators Urge Harsh Penalty For Facebook, Say A $5 Billion Hit Would Be A ‘Bargain’

The tech giant has been criticized for improperly handling consumer data, and lawmakers want more than money. Question is, will they get anything from Zuckerberg?

**********

Swastika Flyers Dropped By Drone On Ariana Grande Concert, Sacramento State Campus

The chilling missives used several of President Donald Trump’s catchphrases to attack the press. I'm sure Trump or his sycophants on Faux News would call this disturbing incident just a case of free speech at work.

[worstblogever]

Also a reminder: It's a crime to fly drones over concerts, as of 3 years ago. Some Nazi promoting that website just earned themselves jail time.

And proved to us Facebook still isn't doing enough to ban Neo-Nazis.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Texas’ 17th District, Bill Flores, who we noted prior to reaching office in the 2010 Tea Party Wave, worked as an executive in the energy industry, including as a CEO of a fracking company, and another oil drilling company that he ran so well, it declared bankruptcy at a cost of $7.6 million to taxpayers. Flores has already shown us the depths of his hypocrisy, voting against disaster relief aid for victims for Hurricane Sandy, and then only a few months later, crying out for disaster relief for the man-made disaster of no oversight that caused an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Flores was talking about impeaching President Obama for "violating the Constitution" in 2013 town halls, and alongside Louis Gohmert proposed legislation that would offer $1 million dollars to anyone who could provide information about IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner's long deleted e-mails. Lastly, during riots in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, Bill Flores went on the Family Research Council's "Wall Builders" show with Tony Perkins to explain the cause of civil unrest was actually... GAY MARRIAGE. Yeah, he said that. As well as putting out a press release after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling calling it an "unfortunate display of judicial activism". On February 22nd, 2017, Bill Flores ditched his own town hall to meet with his constituents, citing “a scheduling conflict”, and left the good people of Texas’ 17th to hold the town hall with their representative in absentia. We’ll note that within a year, Rep. Flores has become so flippant in regards to his constituents that he’ll block them from his social media accounts for having the nerve to criticize him, at all. Any illusion that Flores has the interests of the people who elect him at heart should be dissolved by that fact.

Texas’ 17th Congressional District has a +13 Republican lean, which allowed Flores to coast to re-election in 2018 with 57% of the vote (note, he under-performed the partisan lean of his district by 6-7%). Thus, Bill Flores has returned to Congress to resume being a partisan s***:

• January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Flores also voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
• February 28th, 2019: Bill Flores votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Flores votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.

Bill Flores has managed five terms in office, and we’re hoping against a sixth, because obviously.

[aja_christopher]

What do you mean here? What kind of white nationalist rhetoric does he tweet? And wouldn't this be the more important complaint than retweeting?
In addition, how does he tweet white nationalist groups?

Mets, constantly asking these kinds of questions about Trump -- and your fellow Republicans -- when you can easily can find the answers yourself on Google in less than ten seconds, is purposefully ignorant at best and openly dishonest at worst.

Meanwhile, people of color are suffering directly while you "debate" and try to pretend that Trump and the Republican party aren't responsible for the recent rise of racist rhetoric and action in and across this nation.

------
"A short history of all the times Donald Trump has retweeted or engaged with white nationalist Twitter accounts"

https://www.indy100.com/article/dona...er-kkk-8830011

----
"On a Wednesday night in June 2015, a 21-year-old white man walked into a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and gunned down nine black parishioners taking part in a weekly Bible study group. Dylann Storm Roof sat quietly with the group for about an hour before taking out his Glock pistol and firing 70 rounds, stopping five times to reload. Court testimony revealed that during the shooting Roof said, “Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world.”

How this horrific violence came to take place traces back to a particularly destructive idea, one as old as the United States itself and rooted in the country’s white supremacy: that black men are a physical threat to white people. The narrative that black men are inherently violent and prone to rape white women, as Roof said during his rampage, has been prevalent for centuries. This idea has served as the primary justification for the need to oppress black people to protect the common — meaning white — good.

Roof saw himself as a victim standing up for oppressed whites, not as an aggressor. He had a racist “awakening” spurred by online research he did about the 2012 murder of the black high-school student Trayvon Martin. As he wrote in his manifesto, the Martin killing “prompted me to type in the words ‘black on white crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”

Roof’s internet search quickly led him to the website of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that claims to document an ignored war against whites being waged by violent black people. Google led Roof down a rabbit hole of hate, leaping from one hate site to the next, many filled with “evidence” that black people are pillaging, raping and murdering white people.

“There were pages and pages of these brutal black on White murders,” Roof wrote in his manifesto. “I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored.”

It’s not surprising that a fragile-minded young man who swallowed hate material whole came to see this so-called problem of black-on-white crime as something he had to personally confront. But the resonance of these ideas goes much deeper, infecting the thinking of many prominent people, including public policymakers to this day.

Take then-Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, who in November 2015 tweeted an image that originated from a neo-Nazi account that made exactly the same point as the hate sites Roof was reading. Filled with bogus crime statistics, the graphic Trump tweeted supposedly showed that black people are uniquely violent. The Washington Post found that the data in Trump’s tweet to be false.



This image, tweeted by then-Presidential Candidate Donald Trump on Nov. 22, 2015, originated from a neo-Nazi account. It displays bogus crime statistics.

One of the most exaggerated statistics was about the number of white people killed by other white people. Trump’s tweet claimed the number was 16 percent, while the FBI’s data shows it is 82 percent. The tweet also asserted that 81 percent of whites are killed by black people; the FBI number is 15 percent.

As the Post concluded, “Trump cast blacks as the primary killers of whites, but the exact opposite is true. By overwhelming percentages, whites tend to kill other whites. Similarly, blacks tend to kill other blacks.

These trends have been observed for decades.”

https://www.splcenter.org/20180614/b...ck-white-crime

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...icide-victims/