This Might Not Be Radical Enough

Via PZ Myers at Pharyngula:




Ramen

Both Sides

From Wonkette commenter Rocky:

They Must Be Crushed

Charlie Pierce, on the deplorables who cheer the Pumpkin Traitor:

I don't have to "understand" the people who cheer this maniacal prattle—even though that's not particularly hard. For the good of the country, their political power has to be crushed, repeatedly, election after election, until we are sure this mockery of democracy never happens again.

When Outreach is Foolish and Dangerous

The world has changed.  The old ways don't work any more. Bipartisanship is as outmoded as handwritten thank-you notes.  They still exist, but they are inefficient and counter-productive.

Batocchio at Hullabloo:

It wouldn't be right to abandon political outreach completely, but it's wise to identify who can actually be reached and who's a lost cause, at least in the short run. It's folly to expect conservative and Republican leaders to develop a conscience. It's dangerous to believe that their donors, who have invested in a long game of increased and hoarded power, want a democracy and a fair system. It's madness to think that rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans will abandon spite or party loyalty. And it's wishful thinking that mainstream corporate media outlets will abandon bothsiderism bullshit and other shallow analysis, no matter how much it hurts the nation. For now and the foreseeable future, the key thing to do about American conservatives and the Republican Party is to vigorously oppose them. It's up to the rest of us who care about good policy and responsible governance to talk, learn from each other, support each other and mobilize.

Scoundrels and Hypocrites

Hate is what drives them.  Always has been, always will be.

vacuumslayer at LGM:

Trump won because Russia and Comey interfered in our election, yes. But the fact is that there were just enough supporters of Trump to give him that plausible “win.” People saw in Trump a chance to exact revenge on all the people they dislike–feminists, liberals, and people of color.

For Trump voters the chance to punish women for being sexual is dream come true; it’s their raison d’être. It’s why they get “teary-eyed” when they talk about abortion. They’re so excited about having a chance to exert control over women they dislike.

 

The evangelicals, meanwhile, are in a death cult. They would genuinely rather the world end than have to share the it with people who aren’t exactly like them.

The Trump coalition is  fine group of scoundrels and hypocrites.

Novermber 6: VOTE, goddammit!  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

For the Zillionth Time, Stop Wasting Money on Repugs Who Will NEVER Vote Democratic

The DINO poobahs and consultants still selling the same old centrist bullshit that has failed for 20 years do not have Democratic best interests at heart.  The hand-wringers pleading for the compromise with people who Want. Us. Dead. are not on our side. The repug trolls who handed the election to the Pumpkin Traitor and now dare to dispense campaign advice cannot be trusted.

Listen to Zandar:

White evangelical Christians will never, ever, ever, ever leave Donald Trump, and Democrats need to stop wasting time, resources, manpower and money chasing after them, and I hope the Washington Post article on the members of a Southern Baptist church in Alabama makes this painfully clear.  They are lost.

SNIP

They are lost.  They thought Obama was going to "end racism" by absolving white America of slavery and Jim Crow and lynch mobs and history, and when Obama pointed out that racism still existed, they turned on him and the Democrats in frightening numbers.  And they are lost.  They aren't coming back.  Not when Trump's GOP is gladly the white supremacy party.

SNIP

They are lost, and they are done.  Trump's evil won't repel them, and appeals to economic populism will fall on deaf ears.  They believe their reward for fighting for Trump and for white Christianity lies in heaven.  They are a lost cause.  All Democrats are doing is ignoring their own base in order to try to shave a few off the margins in the suburbs and exurbs, and it's coming at the direct expense of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.  It's a fool's trade.

SNIP

Their hearts are closed and their minds are made up.  We have fifteen weeks left from tomorrow.  If Dems do not regain control of the House at the minimum, we are done as a nation.  The damage by the time November 2020 rolls around will be incalculable if they still control the country. I understand the need to grow the Democratic party brand, but that means getting new voters out that we can reach, not chasing Obama-Trump voters who are not coming back this year and may never come back.

If we don't get our crap together now, we will be the ones who are lost.  If the events of this week where it became clear that Trump is compromised by Russia and no longer cares if the world knows about it didn't cause a crippling and obvious collapse in support for Trump, there is nothing that will, save Donald Trump becoming a Black Lives Matter fan on national TV.

It is time to move on.

Fierce Resistance

I am going to dinner tonight in a deep-red town.  I am wearing my Obama Miss Me Yet? T-shirt. It's not much, especially if no one confronts me about it, but it's something.

Digby, channeling Lincoln in a column from the day after the election:

This is why the right-wingers are so angry. It's not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him. We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are "avowedly with them," they will continue to believe that "all their troubles proceed from us."
That is not going to happen. Trump's forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn't vote for him. And they won't. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers' guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It's all on them.
Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. 

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Just Do the Right Thing

There's a ridiculous and counter-productive "debate" going on right now about how Democrats should handle the nomination of a face-eating leopard to the Supreme Court.

Should Democrats fight like rabid ferrets in a losing cause in order to inspire Democratic voters for the November elections?

Or should they surrender in order to protect red-state Democratic Senators up for re-election?

Or maybe put up a token resistance that won't anger repug voters and drive them to the polls?

When the likely electoral consequences of such what-if game-playing are not clear and obvious, stop playing games.  Just. Do. The. Right. Thing.

The Right Thing is to loudly condemn any nominee who is not Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Gov. Steve Beshear.

The Right Thing is to vote against the Orange Loser's nominee and discourage any Democratic Senator from doing otherwise.

The Right Thing is to speak clearly, loudly and often about the catastrophe the Orange Loser's nominee will bring down on this country.

Do the right thing, and let the chips fall where they may.

Supreme Court Just Protecting White Supremacy

What have the conservatives on the Supreme Court unleashed with their stripping Muslims and non-white voters of their civil and human rights?  The same thing that always happens when the government winks at white/christian supremacy: anti-minority violence.

Think Progress:

Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) should have been an easy case.

Unlike many modern religious liberty cases, where religious conservatives demand the power to limit the rights of others, Gobitis involved two children who were expelled from a public school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The two youths were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believed that “such a gesture of respect for the flag was forbidden by command of Scripture.”

As a matter of law, the Gobitis children should have prevailed. Generally, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force individuals to speak against their will. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the Supreme Court later held in a similar case, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

And yet, Gobitis now stands as the paradigmatic example of how the Supreme Court can turn its back on a vulnerable group — and unleash the wolves of authoritarianism in the process.

A society committed to “ultimate values of civilization,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “may, in self-protection, utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties.”

“National unity,” Frankfurter added, “is the basis of national security.”

The Gobitis decision was not a sweeping denial of the shared humanity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It did not strip Witnesses of all their rights to seek protection from the law, or declare them to be enemies of American society. Yet it may as well have done so, because the public reaction to the decision was swift and harsh.

Gobitis came down in June of 1940. By the next September, according to the ACLU, more than a thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in 236 different incidents nationwide.

Solicitor General Francis Biddle warned that “self-constituted bands of mob patrioteers are roaming about the country, setting upon these people, beating them, driving them out of their homes.”

A lawyer who belonged to the faith lamented that hundreds of his fellow Witnesses were “beaten, kidnapped, tarred and feathered, throttled in castor oil, tied together an chased through the streets, castrated, maimed, hanged, shot, and otherwise consigned to mayhem.”

In one of these incidents, which is recounted in historian Shawn Francis Peters’ book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, Witnesses in a small Pennsylvania town were harassed, arrested on frivolous charges, set upon by mobs of fifty men or more, beaten, kicked, and dragged through the streets, then held and questioned by police for hours before they could seek medical treatment for their injuries.

In another incident, which took place just days after the Gobitis decision, vigilantes burned a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place of worship in Maine, then rioted for days.

SNIP

One again, in other words, a Supreme Court decision making a relatively narrow incursion on minority rights fostered a much larger attack on those rights. State lawmakers’ reaction to Crawford was neither as violent as the aftermath of Gobitis and Brown II nor as transparently lawless. But Crawford may provide the biggest warning of all about what could happen in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim Ban decision.

The story of Gobitis was a story of authoritarian elements within the general populace viewing a Supreme Court decision as a license to lash out at a disfavored minority group. The story of Crawford, by contrast, is the story of anti-democratic elements who wield the official power of the government deciding to push the envelope after the Supreme Court signaled that they were likely to get away with it.

Trump v. Hawaii is a case about an authoritarian, anti-democratic president. And it is a case about a racist, who does not feel bound by the Constitution, and who likes to lash out at vulnerable immigrants.

There’s no telling what he may do if the Supreme Court emboldens him further.

Of Course They're Raping the 4-Year-Old Girls; That's the Point

 It's a terror tactic and a war crime, and it's exactly what repugs want.

 

Down with Tyranny:

UPDATE: Who's Taking Care Of The Kidnapped Kids?

Guys like Deputy Sheriff Jose Nunez, a 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriff's Department. According to the Dallas Morning News Nunez (not Devin Nunes this time) sexually assaulted a 4-year-old girl and threatened the victim's mother into staying quiet about the assaults.

Sheriff Javier Salazar said the girl had been assaulted multiple times over the course of several months. The mother is an undocumented immigrants and Nunez said she'd be deported if she told anyone.

Let's Blow Up Some Lies

And remember, these are lies that are literally killing people while also inuring us to the disappearance of the rule of law, and thus Democracy.

Actually, "lie" is the wrong word.  I use it because there is no word that accurately and adequately describes what they are doing.

Digby:

This Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Margo Schlanger rounds up some of the ways you can contribute volunteer or otherwise help:

First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.

There are two different policies in play, and both are new.

First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.

Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jaillike immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.

So that is what is happening. Whether or not that is what the Bible demands is the subject of a different column. Good explainers on what is and is not legal detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers can also be found here and here and here.

Next: Which groups to support.

This is not being done against the will of Trump voters.  This is what they were promised and what they demanded.  62 million Deplorables are responsible for this.  And proud of it.

The Resistance: No More Being Nice

Zandar:

So no, the notion that Republicans will turn on Trump even should Mueller or the Senate present evidence of conspiracy or worse is ludicrous.  They will defend Trump even at the cost of their own livelihoods.  The Republican party is nothing more than the racist, misogynist, bigoted cult of personality that worships Trump, and so are all of his voters.

I'm tired of being nice to them.  It's only made them love Trump more.

It's time to call these assholes out this November and throw them out of power for good.  Get registered, get ready, get friends, get to the polls.  At every turn President Obama's open hand was met by fist after fist.

Now it's time to fight.

Keep Blaming the Trump Voters; Everything Bad Really Is Their Fault

They are traitors.  And not just in the neo-confederate wasn't-slavery-great sense.  Their hatred of everything that America stands for, everything that, yes, makes America great, has brought us to the precipice of catastrophe.

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:

The 62 million people who decided to turn the United States into a shithole country by electing Donald Trump fourteen months ago deserve the blame for the disorder and chaos in the District of Columbia. There is no logic or basis to the nonsense that officially began at midnight on January 20, 2018…but there was no logic or basis to the nonsense that was the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP

Those who claimed to have voted for Trump because he would “shake things up” actually did so because they wanted him to prevent the government from providing any assistance or fair treatment whatsoever to people they consider “undesirables.” 

They’re loving this shutdown, because they figure that a profoundly dysfunctional federal government is preferable to a federal government that’s providing “handouts,” “welfare,” “food stamps,” “Obamaphones,” etc.

Their hatred–their fear and loathing for anyone not like them–is responsible for this government shutdown. If they had their way, armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would smash into the homes of every DACA beneficiary and force those beneficiaries to get on the first plane back to their countries of origin. If they had their way, every woman who marched this weekend would be denied equal pay for equal work, the right to control their own bodies and possibly even the right to vote. If they had their way, the bill that made Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday would have been repealed long ago–even though their previous hero, Ronald Reagan, signed that bill into law.

SNIP

...  the 45th president is “a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.” Those who voted for him knew that, but they didn’t care. They’re responsible for the madness we have now. Like an arms dealer who eagerly sells weapons to a tyrant, those voters gave Trump the ammunition he needed to shoot down our democracy.

Jackass Whisperers

Bad Kitty in Wonkette comments:

BadKitty904  jesterpunk • 20 hours ago

Fuck wasting any more time on them. VOTE.

The Proud Deplorables

Their candidates are shit, and they are shit. Stop making excuses for them.

Digby:

I keep hearing this. And it's true that the rest of the country disdains them. It's because they are voting for cretinous monsters who are destroying the country and possibly the world. Maybe if they stop doing that the rest of us would have a little bit more respect for them.

Seriously --- pussy grabbers and child molesters? They have lost all common decency. And they expect the rest of the country to just sit back and say nothing? 

The Madness Now

From before Tuesday's victories, a reminder of what we are up against.

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal

Five years on, it’s hard to recall Obama’s re-election without thinking about the millions of Americans who stewed in racial outrage when Obama delivered his victory speech, who hurled the worst insults at Michelle and Sasha and Malia when they saw that beautiful family on their television screens, who regarded the white voters who rejected Romney in favor of Obama as traitors to their race–and who unleashed their outrage in the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 Presidential election. It shocks the conscience to think about the sickness in the souls of those who looked at Obama as he delivered that speech and saw him not as the man who rescued the economy, not as the man who brought down Osama bin Laden, not as the man who saved lives through the Affordable Care Act, but as someone who should be a field slave. 

The folks who viewed Obama that way will never leave Trump’s side. They couldn’t care less about Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. They think Robert Mueller’s a member of the “Deep State” trying to remove their hero from power. They agree with every tweet. They will never change–and unless those who opposed the wingnuttery of Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016 harness their power in a consistent, effective manner in 2018 and 2020, those who hate Obama and love Trump will maintain their outsized influence over this country’s political power.

Five years ago, Obama’s re-election slogan was “Forward.” Will this country move forward again? If so, how soon?

The Real Democratic Base

Here's how much real Democratic candidates don't need Trump voters.

Zandar:

Why did Ralph Northam win Virginia's gubernatorial last night by nearly ten points?  Black, Asian, and Latinx voters, and especially black women.

SNIP

It wasn't women who gave Ralph Northam the win, it was women of color who gave him the win. Among white voters, who still made up two-thirds of voters last night, Gillespie had a cake walk and won going away.

Enough black voters turned out to not only stop Gillespie cold, but to pick up the seats they needed in order to, along with Northam's win and Democrat Justin Fairfax's win as the state's new black Lt. Governor, take control of the state's House of Delegates in a 50-50 split by picking up a whopping 16 seats.

Northam has about an 8.5% win.  That's pretty much the exact margin black women gave him overall.  Without black women, this is a tie race.  With them, Northam won easily.

Oh, and with Dems winning the Washington State Senate special election and New Jersey's gubernatorial race, that's three states last night that went from split to Democratic control.

Maine too voted to expand Medicaid.  Overwhelmingly.

Thanks, Donny!

The lesson is when black voters show up, Democrats win and win BIG. We know this. What I don't know why we're trying to worry about winning back white men who voted for Republicans by a 27 point margin.  Get more black votes out.  Fight voter suppression.  Jesus, it's not multi-variable calculus, guys.

Republicans know this lesson well and have been trying to disenfranchise black voters for decades exactly because they know black voters win election for Dems because we vote for Dems. Duh.

Why some Democrats still yet don't understand this, I'll never know.

Genuflect, Citizens, or Suffer the Consequences

The people who destroyed this family vote.  Do you?

Zandar:

When the man in the Oval Office demands retribution against those who question authority, his cultists respond with brutal efficiency, even in blue strongholds like Massachusetts.

Last week, Kato Mele’s 23-year-old daughter said some things on Facebook that many people found appalling. She wrote that the White Rose Coffeehouse in Lynn, which her mother owns and where she worked, would never host a “coffee with a cop” event, klatches designed to build goodwill between police and the community.

“I will not be part of the false rhetoric that cops are just misunderstood good guys,” Mele’s daughter wrote, among other things. “They uphold an unjust system and murder without consequence.”

For this opinion, the family business was targeted and destroyed.

The chief of police in Lynn responded beautifully.

“This is a non-story,” Michael Mageary told Lynn’s Daily Item on Sunday. “This young lady has the right to say whatever she wants and we respect that. We will continue to do our job every day. My sense is that most officers will avoid the establishment, but that is their choice.”

But by then, it was already too late. A mob had descended within hours of the Facebook post, whipped up by a website that specializes in (and makes money from) marshaling drooling goons for mass attacks, mostly on victims who express left-of-center views.

SNIP

The opinion that police shouldn't murder people is so unacceptable in America in 2017 that this is the result: internet Brownshirts burn a business to the ground and harass a family out of their livelihood in the space of a week.

Whenever you hear somebody complaining about "Social Justice Warriors" and "liberal intolerance", remember the story of the Mele family.  I've been personally targeted before for my opinions on this blog, and I've paid a price for those opinions in the past, but never like this.  The threat to do to me what was done to the Mele family has been made on several occasions, and so far I'm still here.

And yet these are the same assholes who will tell you every day, at length, on multiple media platforms, that they are being silenced every day of their lives.

Believe What They Want

Here's a new game:  name something - anything - that the Orange Loser could do that would turn freakazoids against him.

No, not public admission of sexual assault.  Not the utter dearth of anything resembling religious belief or devotion. Not telling stories about sexual orgies to 10,000 Boy Scouts.

And of course not embracing, protecting and promoting white supremacy and violent racism.

Digby:

They believe what they want to believe. As long as he isn't gay, I guess they're fine with anything he does. And even then, at this point I think they'd probably all roll with that too. Many of them read Breitbart obviously and have no problem with Milo. Michael Flynn feted him like a rock star.

It's all just depressing as hell because we all know that there are many Democrats looking for ways to appease these people by selling out people of color and women (or at least telling them to go sit in the back of the bus and be quiet) so they can appeal to these people. It won't work. It never works. They are right wing extremists in every way, not just religious conservatives. You can't break them off with appeals to their "traditional morality" because they don't believe in it themselves. It's obviously a pose. But you knew that. Look at Ted Haggart, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker --- pretty much all of them.

Complainers About "Political Correctness" Are Just Afraid to Debate

PZ Myers:

“Political correctness” is a bullshit term used to disparage something important: thoughtfulness and honest discussion. Complaining about political correctness just means you’re admitting that you have zero interest in listening to the other side.

 Of course not; they never have the facts on their side, so they will lose any reasonable debate.  They just scream "political correctness" and run away.