;)
The Commentariat -- May 19, 2016
Afternoon Update:
Today in Responsible Leadership from the Guy Who's Not Hitler: David Graham of The Atlantic: "Disasters serve as the crucibles in which leaders are tested, and the disappearance of EgyptAir 804 -- though less than 24 hours old -- is already serving that purpose in the presidential race. Early Thursday morning, before Egyptian authorities (or anyone else) had made any statements about possible causes for the airplane's disappearance over the Mediterranean, Trump tweeted this:
Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!"
Akhilleus: At least he's right about great hate and sickness. Making political hay off the deaths of 66 passengers with zero knowledge of the facts is not the best predictor of the possibility of prudent action as president.
CBS News: "Morley Safer, the CBS newsman who changed war reporting forever when he showed GIs burning the huts of Vietnamese villagers and went on to become the iconic 60 Minutes correspondent whose stylish stories on America's most-watched news program made him one of television's most enduring stars, died today in Manhattan." He was 84. -- Akhilleus
Enlightenment in the Confederate Midwest: Sarah Ferris of The Hill: "Oklahoma lawmakers on Thursday approved a bill making it a felony for doctors to perform abortions, which opponents say is essentially a ban on the procedure. The Republican bill, which has been called the first of its kind nationally, will now be sent to the desk of GOP Gov. Mary Fallin. She has five days to sign or veto the bill before it automatically becomes law."
Akhilleus: Sorry ladies, the Supreme Court might say that you have the right to an abortion but they didn't say you had any right to a doctor. But hey, good luck with that coat hanger.
"Shame!" Rachel Bade and Ben Weyl of Politico: The House erupted in chaos Thursday morning with Democrats crying foul after Republicans hastily convinced a few of their own to switch their votes and narrowly block an amendment intended to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination. It was an unruly scene on the floor, with Democrats chanting "shame!" after GOP leaders just barely muscled up the votes to reject, 212-213, an amendment by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) that would have effectively barred federal contractors from getting government work if they discriminate against the LGBT community.
Akhilleus: Apparently Paul Ryan pulled a fast one to change the outcome of the vote by ignoring House rules including informing members of exactly which cowardly bigots changed their vote at the last minute. Darrell Issa was one. Disgraceful.
*****
Timothy Noah of Politico: "The Obama administration is shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three -- all to beat a May 23 deadline to prevent a President Donald Trump from overturning them. The goal is to deny Trump the opportunity to kill those regulations under an expedited process should he be elected president and Congress remain in Republican control." -- safari ...
Rachael Wade of Politico: "Two weeks ago, in a closed-door meeting with Paul Ryan, Reps. Jim Jordanand Mark Meadows gave the speaker an ultimatum: They would force a House vote to impeach the IRS commissioner -- unless he allowed the Judiciary Committee to take action against John Koskineninstead...But after getting nowhere in the plea for action...Jordan and Meadows took matters into their own hands, threatening to use an obscure House procedure to push the measure to the floor.They got their hearing announcement less than a week later. It's exactly the sort of arm-twisting Ryan set out to avoidwhen he took the speaker's job last fall." --safari...
...Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like Politico trying to give the GOP and Ryan some "responsibility" cover. Does anyone really think Ryan gives two flips about burning down the IRS? Give me a break --safari
... Charles Pierce: "Paul Ryan Thinks Overtime Pay Is Actually -- Wait for It -- Bad for Workers." CW: You'll have to read the post to learn why Pierce concludes, "Biggest. Fake. Ever." Pierce is too kind.
Vann Newkirk IIof The Atlantic: "Ever since the anniversary of Brown v. Board, [it] has provided an opportunity for assessing just how far the country has come since the Jim Crow days of naked segregation. The results have been, at best, mixed.... But one of the most enduring -- and least noticed -- areas of racial segregation even after Brown v. Board has been health care." --safari
Presidential Race
In The Atlantic, David Frum & Bob Shrum discuss the election cycle and its likely place in political history. --safari
Burned. Josh Marshall of TPM: "Over the last several weeks I've had a series of conversations with multiple highly knowledgable, highly placed people...[T]he 'burn it down' attitude, the upping the ante, everything we saw in that statement released today by the campaign seems to be coming from Sanders himself.... Sanders narrative today has essentially been that he is political legitimacy. The Democratic party needs to realize that. This, as I said earlier, is the problem with lying to your supporters. Sanders is telling his supporters that he can still win, which he can't. He's suggesting that the win is being stolen by a corrupt establishment, an impression which will be validated when his phony prediction turns out not to be true." --safari ...
... Nolan Mccaskill of Politico: "The latest controversy roiling the Democratic Party showed no signs of abating Wednesday, as Bernie Sanders' campaign put the onus of the rift splitting Democrats on Debbie Wasserman Schultz's failed leadership, accusing her of 'throwing shade' on the Vermont senator from the beginning.... Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, pointedly accused Wasserman Schultz of undermining the Sanders campaign from the get-go and called into question her leadership."--safari...
...Steve M.: "I'm predicting that Bernie Sanders won't endorse Hillary Clinton. The contempt Sanders feels for Clinton and the Democratic establishment is now bone-deep. It's classic male anger, rooted in outrage at being disrespected...He's going to fight to the last primary, then he's going to try to twist superdelegates' arms, then he and his people are going to demand a platform that resolves every disagreement between himself and Clinton in his favor. And when the platform fails to repudiate the party's nominee on every point of disagreement, he's going to walk." --safari note: Houston, we have a problem.
...Enter the Strongman. TBOGG in RawStory: "Despite assurances from Bernie Sanders campaign manager that, 'There's not going to be any violence in Philadelphia.... I guarantee that,' it is almost a dead certainty that protesters are going to hit the streets of Philly in July and give the GOP and Donald Trumpjust what they need to avoid, if not a loss, a shot at avoiding an election wipe-out.... Enter Donald Trump, who will promise to make America great again by restoring law and order. In 1968, a deeply divided Democratic Party went to Chicago and promptly went to war with itself...In a country already roiled by riots in major cities, former Vice President and failed 1962 gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon was able to resurrect his his all-but-dead political career as a law and order candidate." --safari
** The Little Woman. Gail Collins: "Hillary wants to be the first woman ever elected president of the United States. The economy is the central issue in the campaign. The fact that she's assuring voters that Bill will take care of it is ... totally wrong. It would be better if he wasn't on the scene at all. Let us count the ways." -- CW
Scott Lemieux in the American Prospect: "Sanders is having an effect on Clinton, but he is not causing her to change her stance, so much as he is compelling Clinton to emphasize her existing, more-liberal positions." -- CW
Katy Tur & Ali Vitali of NBC News: "Donald Trump met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in New York on Wednesday, the latest in his efforts to strengthen his foreign policy bona fides. Trump's motorcade rolled into Kissinger's home around 3 p.m. where the low-profile meeting that lasted about one hour. Trump aides say the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and 92-year-old diplomat have spoken over the phone multiple times, and Trump requested the face-to-face." CW: Great! Man largely responsible (and quite okay with) mass murder of civilians meets with man quite okay with mass murder of civilians.
Don't hold your breath. Peter Breinart of The Atlantic: "Donald Trump's war on the media threatens fundamental American principles -- making it crucial that responsible conservatives speak out...If Republicans rationalize Trump's assault on press freedom as a necessary, hardball response to the media's liberal, pro-Clinton bias, many journalists will treat that as a reasonable point of view. Thus, Trump's behavior will be legitimized. And, of course, if Trump is elected president, his power to intimidate and restrict the press will expand exponentially." --safari
David Frum of The Atlantic: "Republican primary voters have nominated Donald Trump. Republican politicians failed to stop them....[The GOP's] task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire -- rescue as much of their party as can be rescued -- while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them." --safari...
...Rise of the Confederacy. Chauncey DeVega in Alternet: "There are two consistent themes about the American right-wing in the Age o Obama. First, racism and conservatism is now one and the same thing. Second, the Republican Party is the United States' largest white identity organization.... The ascendance of Donald Trump and his coronation as the presumed 2016 Republican presidential candidate is the logical outcome of a several decades-long pattern of racism, nativism, and bigotry by the American right-wing and its news entertainment disinformation machine." --safari
...So yesterday we had Trump's wife assure us he's not Hitler (linked yesterday) and today his daugtherIvanka Trump assures us "he's not a groper" of women. Is this really happening? --safari
Mark Stern of Slate: "On Wednesday...Trump likely squashed any Republican fears that his judicial selection would be insufficiently conservative and signaled to those Republicans still unsure about supporting him by releasing his SCOTUS short list. The 11 names on his list are all staunchly right wing, more in the vein of the blatantly partisan Justice Samuel Alito than of the libertarian-leaning iconoclast Justice Antonin Scalia." --safari note: Stern gives a short run down on the top hits list. ...
... Paul Waldman: "You know what I'd like to see? Some interviewer ask him, a day or two from now, how many of these names he remembers. Because I'm guessing somebody just handed him a list, which he glanced at and said, 'Sure, that looks fine.' * It turns out that [Don] Willet, who's on the Texas Supreme Court, has been mocking Trump on Twitter for months. And some of them are pretty funny, like this one: '"We'll rebuild the Death Star. It'll be amazing, believe me. And the rebels will pay for it." -- Darth Trump.'" -- CW ...
... Bethania Palma Markus of RawStory: "A legal advocacy group for LGBT people has called one of theDonald Trump's prospective Supreme Court nominees 'the most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory.'...In a 2003 legal brief arguing to uphold a Texas law criminalizing consensual LGBT sex,[William] Pryor compared it to "polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery' and argued that states should be free to prosecute gay people as criminals. He said the rights of LGBT people as a group are not protected by the Constitution." --safari ...
... Police Dogs, Da, Gays, Nyet: Donald Trump's list of Supreme Court nominees sounds more like members of the old Soviet politburo than temperate American jurists, according to Betsy Woodruff and Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast: "Monica Lewinsky connections, Twitter celebrity status, relaxed views on police-dog brutality, and comparisons of gay sex to necrophilia Donald Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees has it all. On Wednesday afternoon, the real-estate mogul rolled out eleven names of would-be members of the highest court in the land, and it was a veritable dream team of conservative judiciary icons. -- Akhilleus
A Trumpal Revolution? Fans of Mao are now fans of Trump, according to Jiayang Fan of The New Yorker: "America may still be reeling from Trump's victory as the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, but many Chinese, watching from the other side of the world, view his ascent as natural: the rise of another strongman whose politics of exclusion and rhetoric of hate both reprise and reflect China's past and present anxieties." ...
... Akhilleus: Can we expect Donaldo to come out with his own Little Red Book any day now? Wonder what the Birchers think about all these commies cozying up to Drumpf?
Beyond the Beltway (and Beyond)
CW Personal Note: I traveled across North Carolina yesterday & stopped at two bathrooms. Not a single transgender person accosted me. The new "bathroom law" is really working! (The fact that not a single transgender person has accosted me ever in 70 years should in no way diminish your view of the effectiveness & necessity of North Carolina's law.) However, I did nearly walk into a men's room by mistake where I might have humiliated some fellows, so I think North Carolina should deal with people like me by passing a law disallowing women to use public restrooms.
Emma Graham-Harrison of the Guardian: "Police have fired teargas at protesters calling for the resignation of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and shut down swaths of central Caracas to control the demonstrations, as the Caribbean nation slid deeper into political crisis. Wednesday's protests came the day after Maduro said the opposition-controlled parliament had become irrelevant and predicted that it might soon 'disappear.'" --safari
Juan Cole: Iranian members of parliament have approved the details of a bill that insists US compensate Iran for its crimes against that country. The bill comes as a result of a $2 billion judgment against Iran entered by a US court and backed by an act of the US Congress, on behalf of the families of Marines killed in a Beirut bombing in 1983...Iran won't see a dime. But it is the case that in a world where courts are making claims for universal jurisdiction, the US should be careful about litigating past political and military conflicts.Washington's list of crimes is so long that sooner or later it will boomerang on the US elites." --safari (Thanks to PD for the link)
Powered by nature. Arthur Nelsen of the Guardian: "Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone for four consecutive days last week in a clean energy milestone revealed by data analysis of national energy network figures. Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run...News of the zero emissions landmark comes just days after Germany announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on Sunday 15 May, with power prices turning negative at several times in the day -- effectively paying consumers to use it." --safari
Fearmongers? Ewen MacCaskill of the Guardian: "A startling claim that the west is on course for war with Russia has been delivered by the former deputy commander of Nato, the former British general Sir Alexander Richard Shirreff. In a book published on Wednesday, 2017 War With Russia, Shirreff argues that the events in Crimea have destroyed the post-cold-war settlement and set the stage for conflict, beginning next year." --safari
**The Rise of the Far Right. Sylvie Kauffman of the New York Times: "On Monday, the Western world may well wake up to the news that, for the first time since the defeat of Nazism, a European country has democratically elected a far-right head of state. Norbert Hofer, of the Austrian Freedom Party, claimed 35 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election on April 24. Now he is heading into the second round on Sunday with the two mainstream parties having been eliminated from the runoff and the Social Democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann, having resigned." --safari
News Ledes
New York Times: "Egypt and Greece mounted a marine search-and-rescue operation in the southern Aegean Sea early Thursday for an EgyptAir passenger jet with 66 people on board that suddenly disappeared over the Mediterranean shortly before it was due to land in Cairo. The reason for the plane's disappearance was unclear, but the developments touched off fears about terrorism and investigations in Egypt, Greece and France, where the plane took off." -- CW ...
... The Guardian has live updates here. The New York Times' updates are here.
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Reader Comments (16)
Dire warnings from Sylvie Kauffman ( see above) although there have been these far right rumblings for decades now. It seemed after WWII Europe was chastened ( Germany still is) and in this country the Vietnam War woke us up from a comfortable slumber. I'm not sure the invasion of Iraq triggered all this turmoil, but it sure as hell was the catalyst–– Isis certainly is the child of that war––Big Bagdaddie took notes and rallied his troops while holed up in jail. So––now we find ourselves once again having to deal with Outsiders who have crept Inside and want to keep those "Others" (lice, scum, vermin, etc) Out.
"President Obama, we are told, is working on his legacy; visits to Cuba and Hiroshima are certainly appropriate. But there is another mission to embark on with Europeans. Or the man celebrated in 2008 as the first black American to be elected president will risk going down in history as the last American leader to preside over a Western democratic order."
P.S. Just want to say, safari, you are doing a cracker jack job here. You and Akhilleus, who always gives us his "Je na sais quoi stylisticky thingy", deserve our deep appreciation.
When Johnny Carson first had Dolly Parton on his show they invariably got to discussing her ample bosom. She assured him "they" were real to which he responded: "I'd give a year's salary to peek under that dress of yours." Well, bosoms aside, I'd give a few week's gin and tonics to peek into that closed meeting between Trump and Kissinger. What on earth went on with our frail, elderly statesman who you can now barely understand and the Donald? Was this for show or was Trump actually seeking some kind of truth from a man whose foreign policy escapades were as wicked as they were successful. Several years ago the president and CEO of New America and professor emerita of of politics and international affairs at Princeton wrote a great and thorough piece on Kissinger called "The Twilight of the Statesman" in which she concluded that what Kissinger does not seem to understand is the way in which a sense of overriding purpose can be as essential to human existence as breathing. She ends her essay with this:
"As a nation, we lose that purpose at our peril. A balance of power may be perfectly consistent with all kinds of evils, and those evils, if we do nothing to impede or end them, will cost us the support of––and even earn the hatred of–-many peoples in many places. Henry Kissinger's rejection of moral considerations in foreign policy has been the default position of statesmen for centuries. But ignoring what happens to people in a world increasingly shaped by people will no longer work. The day of the pure statesman is done."
So––Henry to Donald––what sage advice if any?
This, on the Right's favorite whipping boy, the IRS, appeared in today's local paper:
"Dear Editor,
Lured by the siren call of conspiracy theories?
Like the one that claimed the hapless Bush II administration was the actual author of the 9/11 attacks?
Or that the stealth Muslim Obama was really born in Kenya?
Not wild enough for you? Connect the dots on this one:
While the nation has continued to grow, he Republican controlled House has cut the IRS budget by 17% since 2010.
A recent IRS report estimates $458 billion in 2016 unpaid personal and corporate income tax, up slightly from past years and totaling over four trillion dollars in unpaid income tax over the last decade.
The same Republicans, who cut the IRS budget and who are now trying to impeach the IRS Commissioner, hastened to attack the IRS for not doing its job.
House speaker Paul Ryan met this week with presumptive Republican nominee Trump, who has said his own tax returns are none of our business, to discuss the deficit that worries Republicans so much. Before publicly supporting Trump, Ryan wanted assurance that Trump would adhere to “true conservative principles,” like eliminating the Affordable Care Act, voucherizing Medicare and weakening Social Security.
At this point we don’t know how that conversation went. But we do know Trump's own tax proposal would cut taxes at all income levels, the largest benefits going to the highest income households and reduce federal revenues by $9.5 trillion over its first decade, not counting the interest costs that massive debt would incur.
What to make of all this? No fiscally responsible human being could possibly behave this way.
But the numbers are there for all to see, so outlandish as it might be, the conclusion is inescapable.
One of our major political parties has been infiltrated by undocumented aliens from another planet who can’t do math."
I had fun with this one, and the way thing are going (last night's report of a Fox poll showing Trump beating HRC only one dire instance), sanity requires I seek and find many such sources of light-heartedness in the next five months...
Ideas welcome.
Ken,
The blank hypocrisy of Republicans in congress makes one wonder if we need a new word for the deceitful sanctimoniousness and unctuous double dealing from Confederate frauds. This IRS business is so transparently a set up, it's like a city selling off fire trucks and rescue apparatus, handing out squirt guns and a length of clothesline to fire fighters, then complaining that they're slacking off.
But it also makes me wonder what voters can be thinking. When a lying fraud like Paul Ryan stands up and says "More money for hard working Americans who have been getting screwed on overtime for years? To hell with that. It's the CEOs we're concerned about" he might as well pin a sign to his chest saying "We don't care about average Americans". Because they don't. How much clearer can it be? Instead, we hear the eminences grises of pusillanimous punditry marshaling their most serious and sonorous intonations with which to denounce this latest outrage from the Kenyan Usurper.
We need that Daily News headline writer to come up with a new one:
Ryan to Middle America: Drop Dead.
I'm not even sure that would work. Plenty of voters would still blame Obama for screwing them.
PD,
Trump and Kissinger? Sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch.
I dunno, as weird as things have been for months now, they're getting weirder. So Trump meets with a war criminal and advocate of the murder of nuns and children to learn....what? How to do it? That's comforting. You don't ask for advice from John Dillinger unless you're planning on robbing a few banks, right?
Then he goes out and hires someone to vett his VP choices. Who does he get? The guy responsible for Sarah Palin, the single biggest VP fail in US history. It's like hiring someone like Ace Greenberg to be your advisor on economic policy. Greenberg was the chairman of Bear Stearns who was telling everyone to buy stock in his company 24 hours before it went belly up in the Bush Economic Cliff Dive.
What's next? Hiring the CEO of McDonald's as your chief advisor on healthy eating?
His list of potential Supreme Court nominees includes a guy who thinks it's perfectly A-okay to sic police dogs on handcuffed suspects, and another who declares that gay marriage is the same as bestiality and believes that government has no business supporting public education.
If the guy were trying to be as stupidly outrageous as possible, he couldn't do a better job, but the pundits still nod sagely, stroke their chins, and say "Oh yes, what were we thinking? Public education? Nothing good can come of that. And while we're thinking about that, let's allow these attack dogs to gnaw on a few suspects then we'll call up Henry the K and ask his advice on which country to bomb next."
"Joke" isn't even in the ballpark.
One more thought about Paul Ryan, whose self-satisfied smirk always puts me in mind of a face in dire need of a fist.
What can you expect from a Confederate Speaker of the House? The last few Republican speakers have been a serial adulterer--and liar, a child molester--and liar, a cowardly drunk--and liar, and now a con man--and liar.
At least they're consistent about something.
Now about that fist...
Haven't been following the details of the faux outrage over Facebook's purported liberal bias but did read this in the NYTimes today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/opinion/the-real-bias-built-in-at-facebook.html?
Found it a bit incoherent, but by implication it did highlight another of the Right's favorite hypocrisies.
The same folks who deep-sixed the Fairness Doctrine love to whine about the unfair liberal media...the same media (irony within irony) that has gleefully served up Trump as our political main course.
Can't make this stuff up.
North Carolina Chief Bigot, Governor Pat McCrory, is now whining that his state's bathroom problem, which stems directly from a bill he supported and signed into law, by the way, is not his fault at all. Neither is it the fault of LGBT haters.
It's Congress' fault. The Party of Responsibility passes the buck once again. It's about as predictable as a Paul Ryan lie.
But what really, really, really, really makes the guv wicked mad...ooooh so mad....is that his civil rights are being attacked. Do you believe this guy? This is the guy who killed North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, which allows black death row inmates to question whether race entered into their sentencing. Of course statistics have no bearing on the matter. In a state where African Americans make up a little over 20% of the population but over 50% of death row inmates. McCrory has also been a yuuuuuge proponent of curtailing voting rights, especially those of voters who might be poor, minority, and--most importantly--Democratic, essentially, anyone who might not think voting for him was a great idea. And we don't have to mention that his transgender hate bill is a direct affront to the civil rights of other NC residents.
But forget all that. His right to fuck with other peoples' rights has not been assured by congress, so it's all their fault. He's trying also to escape any blame for his and his party's bigotry by blaming congress and the president.
"'...I don’t think government should tell the private sector what their locker room, shower room and bathroom policies should be.' But that is, however, what the North Carolina law did for its public buildings."
These fucking people!
I would like to add my thanks to the people of this community who are still providing the best news "tidbits" for our consumption every single day. I am totally unable to do the things they are doing right now, so it is simply a gift to those of us like me. AK: I always love your comments-- you are the most creative user of adverbs and adjectives that I know! And thanks to safari and PD, who must read everything published in the world. And Marie, love yours as always. You "guys" all rock!
Should we be worried about Bernie?
I gotta say, kids, I'm getting a tad antsy about Philadelphia and beyond. Yesterday I heard Howard Dean offering iron clad assurances that Sanders will get his shit together and bring himself and his supporters in line to elect a Democrat. He sounded like a guy who was trying to convince himself. There was plenty of "well, but on the other hand, Bernie's a very proud guy..."
I am not reassured.
If Bernie hands this thing to Trump and the Hordes of Darkness because of pique...
Hillary's people need to chop down a few olive trees and hustle over to Bernie to get this thing under control. If they leave it to the Sanders people, there may not be time for any fence mending.
Once again, I am not reassured.
The Guy Who is Not Hitler awaits...
Re: NYT "Bernie going rouge"
The reader comments were quite surprising and disappointing.
And the crowd replied to Pontius Pilate, "Give us Hillary".
Akhilleus and Dan,
As the Sainted Ronald famously said, "There you go again."
In this case, depressing me further. As we've said before, religiosity is as dangerous in politics as it is anywhere else. It's Gresham's Law of rationality: Bad thought drives out good, and there' a lot of bad (or absent) thought around.
So we have thoughtless Bernie supporters on the one side and the Trump phenomenon on the other. In the recent NYReview, Mark Danner describes the Trump phenomenon's strength intelligently and accurately enough to depress me even more:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/the-magic-of-donald-trump
Not sure if this is a recommendation. Depends on your state of mind.
Ken,
The Danner article features a frighteningly prescient prediction of our current state by the philosopher Richard Rorty. But the truly scary line from this piece is this one:
"[Trump], despite his negative poll numbers among women and minorities and all the other factors that, we are told, will make his election impossible, might stand only one highly telegenic terrorist attack away from becoming the national embodiment of all our fears."
If this EgyptAir crash turns out to be the work of terrorists, look for Herr Drumpf to pick it up and beat it to death. Look for unrelenting demagoguery, for intemperate irrationality to carry the day. Look for the sort of fear mongering--not only by Drumpf, but by Fox and the rest of the Confederate media machine--that will make the Bush/Cheney dementia in the wake of 9/11 appear the very soul of levelheaded restraint.
Republicans likely consider themselves masters of fear as a political tool. We may all be about to see what fear in the hands of an unhinged, ignorant, narcissistic thug can do.
Hmm . . . Another "database error"?
"A Maryland delegate selected by Donald Trump's presidential campaign for the Republican National Convention was indicted on Wednesday on federal weapons and child pornography charges."
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/trump-delegate-indicted-federal-weapons-and-child-porn-charges
Elizabeth Warren Takes On the ‘Gig Economy’ | The Nation
"The gig economy has not otherwise been an enormous issue on the campaign trail, and legislators in Congress haven’t attempted to address it in any comprehensive way. But Thursday in Washington, Senator Elizabeth Warren waded into the debate with a lengthy policy speech at the annual New America conference in which she said it’s time to “rethink the basic bargain for workers who produce much of the value in this economy.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/elizabeth-warren-takes-on-the-gig-economy/