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

[Tami]

So then who's responsible for "covfefe?"

That has to be a genuine Trumpism.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Not if they keep getting welfare payments so they don't bail on him. We are literally paying them so they don't feel the costs of his tarrifs as hard.

Stop me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t that, gasp....SOCIALISM?

[Jack Dracula]

The tweets with properly constructed sentences are probably hers.

Sometimes I suspect he's letting Baron do it.

The DJI is down 444 points as I am writing this.

It never stops. It's like a bottomless pit of winning.

[worstblogever]

He's on record as lusting after his own daughter so...

He's also on record as admitting to busting in on the dressing room where girls were changing at teen beauty pageants as a perk of being the owner of said pageant.

So that's also an interesting coincidence.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

One Of Jeffrey Epstein’s Guards Was A Temp Correctional Officer: Report

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is now under scrutiny for what Attorney General William Barr called “serious irregularities.” But, convenient irregularities, right? Meanwhile....

**********

Rudy Giuliani Tries To Tamp Down Epstein Conspiracy Theories After Trump Spread One

The president’s attorney is asking the public to withhold judgment on the accused sex trafficker’s death. Yo, Rudy, maybe you should've said that to your boss. Just a thought.

**********

Farmers Reel After Sonny Perdue Mocks Them As ‘Whiners’ Amid Trade War Bankruptcies

Minnesota Farmers Union president calls the agriculture secretary’s dig “very insensitive. It took everyone by surprise.” To those farmers: Remember, the Trump Administration is on your side! PSYCH!

**********

Hate Has Flourished In 2 Years Since ‘Unite The Right’ Rally In Charlottesville

Many lawmakers are only starting to acknowledge how common domestic terror and white supremacy are in the U.S. Yeah, and it's all thanks to support by the President who made the latter wholly acceptable since he took office.

**********

Top Immigration Official Grilled On Whether Statue Of Liberty Still Matters

A reporter asked Ken Cuccinelli if the sentiments expressed on the statue’s plaque are “still operative in the United States.” Sure, those words still matter----if you're white!

[jetengine]

And to the poster that said something like, "Liberterianism doesn't work because it requires humans to be at their 100% best at all times." That is true.

In America, when I say I'm libertarian I get a lot of flack and when I say things that pretty much make people think I'm a liberal because I'm for all most social programs, they call me a liberal. Conversely, when I talk about some of my views on finance, I get called a Republican.

When I go to Japan, Canada, or the UK (the 3 places I travel the most) ... they all get that libertarians are all about liberty and don't understand why most Americans are eager to trade their personal freedoms they personally don't use in order to hurt another group that needs those freedoms in order to live.

I was the guy and I'm british. I'm very well aware of what Liberterianism is. The first thing you described is the basic results of a fair and democratic system. The second is actual Liberterianism. The problem is your American and your system is broken.

[Tendrin]

At a Farmfest listening session with farmers in Minnesota, Perdue hit back at the complaints with his joke: “What do you call two farmers in a basement? A whine cellar.”
As he pounded the table in mirth, some of the thousands of farmers at the event laughed nervously — which was followed by boos.
“It was definitely not an appropriate thing to say,” Minnesota Farmers Union President Gary Wertish told HuffPost. “It was very insensitive. It took everyone by surprise. He doesn’t understand what farmers are dealing with, and he’s the head of the Department of Agriculture. He’s supposed to be working for farmers.”
Wertish said several farmers have complained about Perdue’s comment to him in person and via email.

It's douchebags all the way down.

[shooshoomanjoe]

It's douchebags all the way down.

Several months ago, farmers were concerned about their financial status due to the trade wars yet they still supporter trump. Difficult to feel sorry for them. I wonder if they still support trump.

[worstblogever]

Several months ago, farmers were concerned about their financial status due to the trade wars yet they still supporter trump. Difficult to feel sorry for them. I wonder if they still support trump.

Polls out of Iowa and Kansas say... not as much as they did two years ago. They're hurting, they know why, and because of who.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Several months ago, farmers were concerned about their financial status due to the trade wars yet they still supporter trump. Difficult to feel sorry for them. I wonder if they still support trump.

If they support Trump, it's only because of the handouts (a.k.a. Agricultural Welfare) he's given them since he started his ill-conceived trade war with China. But that will only go so far or last so long, and the Chinese have already demonstrated they're all too willing to give Trump the middle finger by going elsewhere for the products they used to get from American farmers. In the long run, the farmers are going to lose, and lose BIG.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile on David Earl Williams III, the former candidate for U.S. Congress to represent Illinois’ 9th District who on the way towards his challenge of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, actually managed to get beat by Susan Atanus, a fellow Republican who believed that God created things like tornadoes and autism to punish us for abortions and tolerance of gays. How in the world could that happen? Williams was accused of domestic violence by an ex-girlfriend, and that’s already not good… but then he got caught impersonating her online and making posts to try and get her fired from her job and thrown out of the college she was attending. When the court recommended Williams undergo a psychiatcric evaluation, he refused to attend… and then only made it seem like he was hiding some diagnosis that would have truly sabotaged his chances even further.

One this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Bill Connor, a Tea Party Challenger to Lindsay Graham for his U.S. Senate seat in the Republican Primary during the 2014 elections. Connor did not get into detail on too many of his issue positions, but he was a big fan of the 10th Amendment and "states' rights", believing that they should be honored so that South Carolina and other states could reject the Affordable Care Act, if they chose. During the primary debate between Graham's challengers, Bill Connor's main tactic to appear the best candidate was to wave a copy of the Constitution around at the podium while occasionally giving assertions that European soldiers he fought alongside in Afghanistan were less hard-working and ingenious than American soldiers because “Europe had gone socialist” and “post-Christian”, that a separation of church and state has led “atheism to be our national religion”; and that Congress should disband federal appeals courts that enforce church-state separation because “if you’re being biblical, you’re doing your job as a judge.” To cement his conservative credentials even further, he insisted that Congress should impeach President Obama over his executive orders on immigration, and flat-out called climate change science "gobbledy-gook". He then asked, sarcastically, that the entire collected audience to take a deep breath, and then exhale it, declaring that since they all just released carbon dioxide, they had just contributed to climate change.

On this date in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile about Kay Daly, who was originally one of the primary challengers vying to unseat incumbent Congresswoman Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District in the 2016 elections, even creating her own campaign ad to go “RINO Hunting” against her. And WOW what a memorable advertisement it was, where over the course of 30 seconds, Daly accused Ellmers of being a “feminist” who “let homosexuals pretend they’re married”, a “RINO who voted to fund Obamacare and raise the debt ceiling", and that offered “special protections to immigrant child molesters”. Daly’s ad then looped Renee Ellmers saying “RINO” three times, before cutting to a shot of herself in the woods, declaring that she was “hunting RINOS” and inviting others to join her, before firing off a blast of buckshot. Now for reference… we’re talking about RENEE ELLMERS here, the Tea Party Republican who got elected by stirring up fears about a “9/11 Victory Mosque”, whose only real moderate moment of note is that she hesitated on voting for HR 7, a piece of anti-abortion legislation in early 2015. But still, Daly wasn’t done. She then sent out a follow-up e-mail to prospective voters where she charged that Ellmers "Hispanders" to "interlopers" and "deportables." (aka undocumented immigrants) and also took issue with Ellmers' support foran Equal Rights Amendment as "the one lesbians used to burn their bras over" and taking her to task for "Hillary Clinton's Feminist Museum bill" (translation: the National Women's History Museum). After all that bluster and vitriol directed at Renee Ellmers, though… Kay Daly saw a redistricting shift happen in North Carolina, and ended up changing her mind to instead run in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, as one of seventeen (yes, 17) Republicans in a primary for the seat. She was proud of her efforts to weaken Ellmers, though, declaring in her new announcement that she was opposed to women serving in the military, and that with Ellmers’ difficulties “the last Southern White RINO has been driven to extinction.” Considering that Kay Daly also feels there is a gay mafia persecuting her because she supports transphobic bathroom bans (no irony, there), and refers to trangendered people are “perverts and deviants”, or “transgenderrhoids” we in no way feel bad for her for finishing way back in eleventh in the Republican Primary for that Congressional seat with only 2.8% of the vote. Sadly, we’re thinking this isn’t the last that we’ll hear of Kay Daly in North Carolina politics, but we're going to set aside her CSGOPOTD profile and go ahead and take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 598-25, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled John Faircloth, a former police chief of Fair Point, North Carolina who first ran for office to serve District 61 in the North Carolina House of Representatives in… you guessed it, the 2010 Tea Party Wave. It’s unfortunate that Faircloth’s previous profession in law enforcement seems to be affecting his role as a legislator. On two occasions in the past years, Faircloth has sponsored legislation to make it impossible for citizens to have police body-cam footage released. In 2015, Faircloth had a failed attempt in the form of HB 713 and then turned around in 2016 to file HB 972.

Now, with incidents of police violence around the country against suspects and even police officers in Baltimore being caught on their own body-cams planting evidence on suspects they’re shaking down, the ability for someone victimized by police to have their accounts being verified by the video footage can be crucial to assuring accountability from police departments. But a conservative former cop doesn’t like the sound of that, and would like sheriffs to be immune to the concept of transparency, and just tell the public to get bent if someone’s beat by police. Shockingly, towards the tail end of the turbulent reign of former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, Faircloth’s bill managed to get passed through the legislature, and signed into law.

Now, you might say, “Well, it’s hypothetically bad. It’s not like police violating the public trust is common throughout North Carolina. (HA!) And it’s still up to the sheriff, who wouldn’t suppress the footage if a rogue cop beat up an innocent citizen as this law permits.”

Well, guess what? It didn’t even take more than a few months for such a scenario to arise, and be met with a legal challenge. At a 2017 Fourth of July celebration in Greensboro, North Carolina, a 15-year-old young man by the name of Josh Charles was waiting outside a restroom while his mother was taking younger siblings to got to the bathroom, and in the time it took her to get back, Charles was accused of fighting with police, resisting arrest, and spitting blood in their face. In the time it took for a couple kids to go potty, all that supposedly happened and his mother walks back with the rest of the family to find her teenaged son on the ground in a pool of blood with a cop holding his hand around her son’s neck, as if to choke him. And guess what the Greensboro police don’t want the public to see? The body camera footage from the cops on scene.

So you can thank John Faircloth for this scenario.

But suppressing body camera footage isn’t the only way that John Faircloth would like to empower the cops in North Carolina. Since 2010, the shenanigans that the North Carolina GOP have pulled have caused frequent protests, most famously those on Moral Mondays and being led by the Rev. William Barber. And there’s no better idea to put a stop to that than to sponsor legislation to suppress the First Amendment right to protest. John Faircloth co-sponsored HB 249, which would allow police to label protests that “block traffic” as “economic terrorists”, and allow police to arrest them. Why, that doesn’t sound like something out of an Orwell novel, does it?

The rest of Faircloth’s voting record is pretty troubling, as well. On top of anti-choice votes and voting to cut voting rights, he voted to block the Medicaid expansion in North Carolina, and for the conservative but unconstitutional staple of drug testing welfare recipients. Perhaps most dubious are his votes for anti-LGBTQ measures, as in 2011, he voted to amend the North Carolina state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, and more recently in 2016, voted for HB 2, North Carolina’s anti-LGBT bill that includes a transgender bathroom ban, and causes boycotts of the state.

At the age of 80, it’s unclear how long Faircloth plans on staying in office again in 2020, but even with North Carolina’s gerrymandered legislative map completely redrawn by a judge’s order for the 2018 elections, Faircloth ran for re-election anyway, with no one to oppose him in the GOP Primary and won a fifth term in office with 57% of the vote. He has returned to work trying to spend all of his time in office protecting any member of law enforcement who guns down a citizen, trying again to prevent who can access police body camera footage without the consent of a judge (because that’s going to re-establish the public trust in police).

[Tami]

The Republican Running Against Donald Trump Took His Message To The Iowa State Fair. Few Listened.

DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates descended on Iowa in a flurry of activity this weekend, attending the annual Wing Ding dinner and speaking at the Iowa State Fair, meeting as many voters as they could and kicking off the primary season in earnest. Top-tier candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders attracted huge crowds who followed their every move as they ate corn dogs and looked at the cow made of butter.

And then, more quietly, there was Bill Weld.

Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, arrived at the fair Sunday morning as a drizzly rain started to pick up. In 2016, Weld ran on the Libertarian presidential ticket as Gary Johnson’s running mate. This time, Weld is mounting a primary challenge to President Donald Trump as a Republican. Weld is the quintessential never-Trump Republican; he believes, essentially, that the Republican Party has been hijacked by Trump and twisted beyond recognition, and that with the right candidate and some momentum, everything could go back to normal. “Patrician” is a word that has often been applied to Weld. During a gaggle after his speech at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox, a reporter asked what he planned to eat at the fair; I expected Weld to mention Iowa State Fair staples like pork chops on a stick or corn dogs, but instead he said that he generally wanted to eat “something fried,” and asked if the fair had fried dough.

Weld led Massachusetts in the 1990s as a centrist Republican who was pro-choice and who recognized domestic civil partnerships for gay couples. Weld isn’t the first Republican ever to challenge a sitting president of his own party — Ronald Reagan famously did so in 1976, taking on Gerald Ford. But Reagan’s conservative movement was growing into a dominant force in the party, and he only lost the nomination after a battle on the convention floor — and won the presidency four years later. Weld’s strain of Republicanism is, unlike Reagan’s at the time, on the wane. And though conservatives who are repulsed by Trump certainly still exist, the Republican Party provides no home for their views. Despite his unpopularity with the American public writ large, Trump is extremely popular among Republican primary voters, and the modern GOP has reshaped itself around his agenda and persona.

So Weld is starting at a considerable disadvantage. It didn’t help that his soapbox speech took place during the rainiest part of the day as a small crowd huddled under ponchos to watch him. Despite the pariah status of anti-Trump Republicans in today’s GOP, Weld didn’t face much hostility, though not everyone watching seemed sold.

[Mister Mets]

Can Trump be censured or something....for retweeting a right wing conspiracy tweet dredging linking the Clintons to Epstein's death?

He could be. Censure is the appropriate method of showing displeasure at something a politician does that is not illegal. His opponents probably don't want to waste time on that, and there is the problem that debunking a lie can make it more prominent, which results in more people believing it.

https://medium.com/berkman-klein-cen...e-bb315d3b93fc

But there is one big drawback to fact-checking and lie-correcting. The more often a lie is repeated, even in the context of debunking it, the more believable it becomes. Familiarity provides the impression of truth. Furthermore, false statements, even when we know they are false, influence our emotional response to people and events.

[Tendrin]

With a string of inane comments meant to distract people, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro keeps re-earning the title of “the Brazilian Trump.”
His latest crazy comment came Friday when he said that one way to save the environment is if people “poop every other day.”
But many in the media missed the key context. Bolsonaro is not someone who cares about the environment. He is someone who is in fact accelerating the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest, and who says crazy stuff just to get the attention or cause distraction.
Bolsonaro’s comment was the result of a reporter asking him about whether Brazil can simultaneously grow more food while protecting the environment. And this question is the crucial context to understand Bolsonaro’s reply: “It’s enough to eat a little less. You talk about environmental pollution. It’s enough to poop every other day. That will be better for the whole world.”

https://thinkprogress.org/poop-every...source=twitter