All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Tami]

Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says

Donald Trump called for the population of Seoul to be moved during an Oval Office meeting when tensions between the US and North Korea were at their height, according to a new book about the president’s relations with the US military.

In Trump and his Generals: The Cost of Chaos, the national security and counter-terrorism expert Peter Bergen also gives new details of Trump’s demands that the families of US service members in South Korea be evacuated, which the North Korean regime would have interpreted as a clear move towards war. In both cases, Trump’s impetuous diktats were ignored by his top officials.

Bergen’s book, the latest in a string of accounts of the president’s erratic leadership on national security issues, is being published on Tuesday at a time when friction between Washington and Pyongyang is once more on the rise, after more than 18 months of detente and summitry. The North Korean leadership is threatening a resumption of missile tests, and a war of words between Trump and Kim Jong-un is simmering once more.

Trump has resurrected his nickname for Kim, “Rocket Man”. North Korea conducted a missile engine test at a site that it had previously mothballed, and on Monday a senior regime official called the US president a “heedless and erratic old man”.

The level of mutual hostility is still some way off from the worst period in 2017 when a conflict looked a real possibility.

In his book, Bergen – a vice-president of the New America thinktank – describes an Oval Office meeting on North Korea in mid-April 2017, after a string of North Korean missile tests. Trump’s top national security officials were present and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a model of a secret North Korean facility the size of coffee table, to illustrate the regime’s covert programmes.

According to Bergen, Trump was also shown a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night, showing the lights of China and South Korea and the blackness of North Korea in between. Trump initially mistook the void for an ocean. When he was shown the bright lights of Seoul just 30 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, the president asked: “Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?”

“They have to move,” Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. “They have to move!”

[Tami]

Queensland school runs out of water as commercial bottlers harvest local supplies

This is one of gthe strangest stories I've encountered in a while

The Tamborine Mountain state school has run out of water, even as water miners in the Gold Coast hinterland are sending millions of litres to commercial bottling operations.

Trucks sent by the Queensland government carrying emergency supplies to the school, including Mount Tamborine bottled water, have been passing trucks heading in the opposite direction taking local water to bottling plants for beverage giants such as Coca-Cola.

The school remains open but parents have been advised by teachers to consider keeping their children at home.

Water miners in the Mount Tamborine area supply roughly 130m litres of water each year to commercial bottling operations. Now the local bores are running dry.

“I was staggered,” one local resident, Craig Peters, told Guardian Australia. “It was more or less the final straw for me. The school’s bore is 50 metres deep and has never ever had these issues before.”

“We had an award ceremony at the school yesterday and earlier in the day [the school] sent out an SMS about the water situation.

“At the conclusion of that ceremony they said give serious consideration to not sending kids to school for the rest of the week because of the lack of water.

“The school bore has been operating since the school was there. There’s many other bores that have run dry. We are the largest community in Australia that doesn’t have reticulated water. If it doesn’t rain, people get water trucked in to fill their tanks.

“Now the government is buying water back from Coca-Cola to bring here, which is where it came from in the first place.”

The education department said it would continue to deliver water to the school until the end of the school holidays.

Residents said the situation was a tipping point and would concentrate longstanding concern that the local water supply should be prioritised above the three commercial operations, which between them have approvals to send roughly 2.5m litres a week down the mountain.

The situation seems to fall into a regulatory void, with no mechanism to halt commercial operations in times of severe drought or ensure that local water is allocated to locals.

Peters said the community wanted the state’s natural resources minister, Anthony Lynham, to use emergency powers to prioritise local supply.

Lynham said in a statement he understood the concerns of residents and the impact of the drought on their water supply.

“As I have previously said, groundwater is not regulated on Mount Tamborine and so my department does not have the power to limit take.

[Tendrin]

Bottled water is killing people.

[TheManInBlack]

Bottled water is killing people.

Nestle is doing the exact same **** to rural Ontario. The people have been protesting for years, but the corrupt government can't be bothered to stop it.

[Tendrin]

Nestle is doing the exact same **** to rural Ontario. The people have been protesting for years, but the corrupt government can't be bothered to stop it.

Yep. We need to end water privatization. Flat out.

[jetengine]

Nestle are fucking evil.

[Mecegirl]

I know I shouldn't be by now, but sometimes I'm in awe of how stupid this administration thinks we are.

I don't even know if it's that? It may be that they know their supporters will eat anything up. They don't care about it if you don't support them. They will cheat to win anyway.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in 2014, in 2015, and in 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Jim Hagedorn, who has twice failed to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Minnesota's 1st District. His credentials are being a former CEO for Miracle Gro and... well, the classic GOP nepotism of being the son of a former Congressman himself. The problem with Hagedorn was he had a habit of writing to the "Bluestern Prairie", where he offered a variety of politically incorrect thoughts about gays, minorities, and Democrats. Things like calling Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell "undeserving bimbos in tennis shoes", calling former Congressman Herb Kohl a "switch-hitter" and "packer", echoing John Wayne's sentiment that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", and discussing an election between Mike Taylor and Max Baucus by using imagery about fisting and lubrication. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Hagedorn was too controversial to get elected to the House in 2014 against Democrat Tim Walz, and in 2016, Hagedorn actually wanted a rematch, hoping people would just forget about all his controversial remarks if he kept his nose clean for two more years. Hagedorn was wrong, and still lost, this time at least in a much closer affair by only about 2500 votes. This had a lot to do with Hagedorn accusing Walz of “letting terrorists in”, because he supports refugees being settled in the United States who might just be Muslim. That takes some balls, given that Walz has served in National Guard for 25 years. But hey, we’re talking about Jim Hagedorn here, who took time to deride Black Lives Matter in the debate between the two for virtually no reason other than race-baiting.

It was on this date in 2017 that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Dan Johnson, a church bishop who in 2016, won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives by 156 votes. This was in spite of the fact that Johnson is an extreme enough bigot that the head of the Kentucky GOP even condemned him. Over several Facebook posts, Johnson had the delightful habit of comparing the Obama family to apes. There also was the part where Johnson called for a ban of the religion of Islam in the United States (Heard of the First Amendment, Dan?), or the numerous times that he posted images of the Confederate flag. Johnson cited the fact that a sign hangs outside his church that says, “Jesus and this church are not politically correct,” while insisting he’s not racist because as he puts it, “I love America. I love people. I believe red, yellow, black and white, all are precious in God's sight. I'm not a racist. I'd like to know first off, what images that are being considered offensive. It wasn't meant to be racist. I can tell you that. My history's good there. I can see how people would be offended in that. I wasn't trying to offend anybody, but, I think Facebook's entertaining.” Considering Johnson also mixed a lot of pro-gun messaging into the Gospels of Jesus, maybe he wasn’t up to snuff on his scripture. However, Dan Johnson was accused of molesting a girl who attended his church in 2012, when she was only 16 years old. He of course, claimed that the accusation was “politically motivated”. But where there was smoke, there was a lot more fire coming, because before a local media expose broke detailing how rowdy and inappropriate the behavior around Johnson’s parish actually was, he committed suicide rather than face justice in court. His widow then tried running for his seat in the special election to replace him and lost.

On this date in 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where we’ll be talking about Nick Sauer, a former member of the Illinois House of Representatives who served one term in office after winning election in 2016 through the benefit of getting to run for the state legislature unopposed. When you read Sauer’s biography, the entire thing reeks of entitlement and his being earmarked by senior Republicans for advancement. Whether it was working in Bush 43’s Department of Commerce, to him being elevated time and again in races for the Illinois Board of Education, then to the state legislature, and then his placement on both the State Toll Highway Authority, and a key position on a Illinois House of Representatives Committee aimed at curtailing sexual harassment at the state capitol. That last one comes with a big ol’ spoonful of hypocrisy because only weeks after his placement on a committee in the state legislature to combat sexual harassment, when Nick Sauer himself was accused of posting nude photos of his ex-girlfriend online, and catfish other men that she was looking for sex, so that those men would send her harassing messages asking for sexual favors. Or, as prosecutors in Illinois refer to it, Nick Sauer committed “a felony charge of revenge porn”. Once the news broke, a college roommate of Sauer’s came forward, and claimed he was a “predator of the highest order” who had victimized “dozens” of other people, detailing an incident that took place between himself and Sauer where the young Republican attacked him, unprovoked, with an electric razor, taking a chunk of his hair from his scalp and prompting a scuffle. Once Sauer started to realize he was about to get his *** kicked, he said, “it doesn’t look that bad”. Sauer waited a few days, then deleted the majority of his social media accounts, leaving only his Instagram up but on “private” and resigned in disgrace. We’ll set aside his profile at this time to go ahead and take a look at a different kooky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 806-40, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

Mark Harris

Welcome to what is the 806th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where we’ll be discussing Mark Harris, a pastor who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2014, and in 2016, missed out on his shot to upset Congressman Robert Pittenger by all of 900 votes. Part of the reason that folks might not have been elevating Mark Harris to victory could have been that he would blurt out some pretty ludicrous Evangelical fever-dreams, like the time that he promised there wouldn’t be “peace in Israel until Jews and Muslims convert to Christianity”:

“You cannot be in that land, as powerful and as moving as it is, without realizing the incredible tension that is constantly in that land between the Palestinians and the Jews. There will never be peace in Jerusalem until the day comes that every knee shall bow, every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Jesus, when he went into Jerusalem, said, ‘I am the vine. I am the true vine,’ and until those that are called in Islam realize that and until those that are called in Judaism realize that, for that matter, until those that are caught in the religion of Christianity and are missing the personal relationship with Jesus Christ, realize that, there’ll never be peace in their soul or peace in their city.”

In 2018, however, Harris was not messing around, recruiting some of the dirtiest players in North Carolina on his campaign staff to make sure he was going to beat Pittenger and any Democratic challenger that emerged in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, hiring a chap by the name of McRae Dowless who was known to do things that were decidedly not legal to help whatever campaign he worked on.

As such, when Harris then beat Pittenger by about 900 votes, Pittenger and his campaign staff notified the authorities about exactly the sorts of shenanigans McRae Dowless was up to, specifically, that he and his staff would collect absentee ballots from people in the district, and fill those ballots out to “help” the voters, going down the line and voting for anyone who was paying Dowless. The evidence of chicanery is pretty obvious, considering that somehow Harris won 437 of a possible 456 votes in Bladen County, where Dowless worked his magic. During the general election, investigators became aware of Dowless’ scheme for Harris’ benefit, and even though Mark Harris “won” North Carolina’s 9th by 905 votes over Democrat Cal Cunningham, his victory was never certified by the North Carolina election board and he was never sworn in to serve in Congress.

The press began to report on the scandal, and Harris tried dismissing the accusations as “slander” made up by the “liberal media”, who were just reporting on things that even North Carolina Republicans were acknowledging. He also pleaded with judges to just declare him the winner, despite all the blantant voter fraud committed. As investigations intensified, Harris fled from the press at every stop, including one prolific moment where he was believed to have pulled a fire alarm to cover his escape.

At the trial in February of 2019, Harris' own son confirmed his father was aware of McCrae Dowless’ scheme, and that he warned his father against committing election fraud. That probably had a lot to do with why Mark Harris did not join the field in the special “do-over” election for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. At least he has a career as a pastor to fall back on, but people might wonder about his honesty.

We’re just going to remain thrilled he never made it to office.
 

[Tendrin]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/2019-...ushpmg00000004

There’s been a nationwide rise in laws prohibiting sleeping in public, even as emergency shelters are unable to meet the demand for beds. As of 2019, 51% of cities have at least one law banning sleeping in public. Thirteen of those laws have been introduced since 2006.
Tent camping in public is prohibited even more often. Currently, 72% of cities have one or more laws on the books banning it, with cities enacting 33 of those laws since 2006.
The biggest uptick in bans affecting the homeless concerns sleeping in vehicles, which 50% of cities currently ban. Since 2006, 64 laws banning vehicle sleeping have gone on the books. A whopping 22 of them were put into effect in the last three years.
There has also been an uptick in laws banning begging, sitting or lying in public, rummaging and dumpster-diving and loitering.

They really just want homeless people to die quiet.

[jetengine]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/2019-...ushpmg00000004



They really just want homeless people to die quiet.

Much like the "Trade abortion" debate we had a while ago these laws are fine if you actually do something to ensure homelessness is dealt with

[Tendrin]

Much like the "Trade abortion" debate we had a while ago these laws are fine if you actually do something to ensure homelessness is dealt with

These laws are, in fact, not fine even in that scenario.

[jetengine]

These laws are, in fact, not fine even in that scenario.

True, if somebody falls asleep on a bench because its a warm afternoon that shouldn't be an issue.

[Tami]

McConnell will move to acquit Trump if he's impeached, not merely dismiss charges, 2 Republican senators say

(CNN)Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to hold a final vote to acquit President Donald Trump, should he be impeached, when a majority of senators believe his trial has run its course instead of holding a vote on dismissing the articles of impeachment, two Republican senators told CNN on Wednesday.

Republicans want to have a vote on acquittal -- to clear the President of the charges against him -- not simply rely on a 51-vote threshold procedural motion to dismiss the hotly disputed case.

The Constitution mandates 67 votes are required to convict the President and remove him from office, a barrier widely considered too high to be reached in this case.

One vote McConnell can't rely on is that of Vice President Mike Pence, who has "no role in impeachment," according to a GOP leadership aide, despite being president of the Senate with the mandate to break ties.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

McConnell will move to acquit Trump if he's impeached, not merely dismiss charges, 2 Republican senators say

If I didn't know better, I'd be surprised Moscow Mitch is willing to go to bat for Trump like that. But, it falls nicely into my harebrained theory that if the GOP loses Trump, they lose his base which are more loyal to him than the party. And if Republicans lose the base, they lose the election, and, quite possibly, the Senate as well. Bottom line: Keeping Trump and his base fat, dumb and happy keeps the GOP in power so they can continue fucking over the country. Say what you will about McConnell, but the man damn sure isn't stupid. Traitorous? Yes. Stupid? Nope.