Thứ Bảy, 19 tháng 3, 2016

Blocking traffic

Blocking traffic

by digby

A lot of people seem very upset that some protesters blocked traffic on the way to the Trump rally in Arizona today. Here are some pictures:




Oh wait, sorry. Those were rightwingers blocking buses containing child refugees in the summer of 2014. They were patriotic citizens exercicing their 1st Amendment rights.

Here's the horror that happened today to some safe and well-off white people driving their cars:



The humanity.


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A random sampling of the obsessions of a 12 year old's mind

A random sampling of the obsessions of a 12 year old's mind

 by digby

For those of you who aren't on twitter every day, here's a look at how the GOP front runner spends his time.










































(That one's particularly rich considering his new bromances with Christie and Carson.  But needless to say, self-awareness isn't his strong suit.














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How many will vote for him anyway?

How many will vote for him anyway?

by digby














Huffington Post has a new poll out. Lordy:
Half of America believes Donald Trump’s campaign exhibits fascist undertones, with only 30 percent disagreeing, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. The sentiment isn’t contained to Democrats, who unsurprisingly are willing to agree with a negative statement about their political rivals. Forty-five percent of independents also say Trump’s campaign has echoes of fascism, as do a full 28 percent of Republicans.

About half the country believes Trump encourages violence at his campaign events, with just 34 percent saying he doesn’t. The rest aren’t sure. Meanwhile, 27 percent of Republicans say it’s acceptable to “rough up” protesters at political events...

Two-thirds say there’s more violence at Trump’s events than at those for other candidates, with 62 percent saying the clashes are part of a broader pattern rather than isolated incidents.

That's not to say that people like protesters:

The data indicates that people generally consider protesters and the media to be most responsible for the uptick in violence, even if they also agree that Trump fans the flames. Fifty-four percent say protesters shoulder “a lot” of the blame, 41 percent say Trump’s supporters do and 47 percent say Trump himself does.

Only 23 percent of Republicans, though, say Trump is largely responsible, with barely one-quarter believing that he encourages violence.

Republicans place even less blame on Trump’s supporters, as just 18 percent say they bear a lot of responsibility. In contrast, half place that level of blame on “the mainstream media,” and 78 percent put that degree of fault on protesters.

While some of the GOP response is likely due to rallying around the party’s front-runner, Republicans are also less amenable toward protesting in general. They’re 20 points less likely than Democrats to say it’s acceptable for protesters to turn up at candidates’ rallies, and nearly twice as likely to say it’s all right for those protesters to be thrown out.


I'm sure they had a different opinion a few years back though, aren't you?

These are the same people, after all, who applauded this directive to disrupt town halls nationwide back in 2009:

— Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

— Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

— Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

Imagine that. Thousands of conservatives converged on town hall meetings to shut down speech and deny their representatives the ability to “have an intelligent debate.” And if you’ve forgotten how all those people got their instructions and information, there were many industry groups coordinating them, one of which was called “Conservatives for Patients Rights”, run by Rick Scott, at the time a disgraced hospital executive and now the governor of Florida.

This is not to say that Republicans were not genuinely upset that people might get affordable health care. The mere idea of it turned them into ravening beasts. For instance this famous exchange outside of a town hall in Columbus, Ohio, in which “protesters” harass and humiliate a man with Parkinson’s disease, screaming “no more handouts!”

Inside the halls, they shouted down their senators and representatives, laughed at people whose children had died for lack of health care and otherwise behaved like animals.

And they engaged in tactics far more intimidating than anything the Black Lives Matter protesters have done: some of them showed up to the town halls armed, at least one carrying a placard saying “it is time to water the tree of liberty!” (a reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”).

That practice has become much more common in recent years, being used against gun regulation groups like Moms Demand Action and at various Muslim gatherings and well as the armed “protests” like the Bundy standoff and the recent events in Oregon.

And there is that small matter of decades of right-wing harassment and violence at abortion clinics. Just three months ago a right wing anti-abortion terrorist killed three people in Colorado Springs.

Let's just say that Republicans have a lot of nerve complaining about protesters. Or fascism.


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"Get a job!"

"Get a job!" 

by digby

Am I the only one who finds it curious that Trump's alleged populist appeal to the working class who've been screwed by the man includes this line to protesters?

"Go home and get a job. Go home. Get a job. Get a job!" Trump said

And outside the rallies, you'll hear his supporters chanting the same thing:



And here I thought all these people were poor unemployed manufacturing workers struggling to get by.  Does it make sense that such people would be yelling "get a job" to Trump protesters if they were motivated by a bad job market? Hmmmm.



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Kevin McCarthy really is a moron

Kevin McCarthy really is a moron

by digby





















You already knew that, of course. But this confirms that he's even more stupid than you thought:

On a quiet February morning, before most lawmakers had returned from recess, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy gathered a handful of reporters in his Capitol Hill office. He was in a good mood, bantering about the prior week’s spell of snow, his posture relaxed. A few minutes later, his shoulders stiffened. A reporter, breaking the chain of questions on House budget negotiations and the upcoming legislative calendar, had asked: “Is Donald Trump conservative?”

McCarthy repeated the question. “Is Donald Trump conservative?”

“Yes. Is he a conservative?”

The majority leader twisted his wedding band. “I think he is a conservative. He’s a Republican.”

The reporter pressed. “You only have to be a Republican to be a conservative?” “He identifies himself as a Republican,” McCarthy said. “He’s been in the business world, I’ve seen his actions that he’s taken. . . . Maybe on his television show he’s made conservative decisions, too. But I take him as a conservative.” He moved on to the next question.

At the time McCarthy spoke, tip-toeing around the elephant in the room may have seemed harmless or even prudent. But in the month since, as Trump has marched ever closer to the nomination despite his refusal to disavow the KKK and the violent atmosphere at his rallies, he’s sparked a full-blown backlash from grassroots activists in the #NeverTrump movement and from establishment heavyweights such as Mitt Romney.

Those anti-Trump forces are now expressing frustration that they’ve been met with a wall of silence — or worse, a rationalization of Trump’s candidacy — from Capitol Hill. They say lawmakers have willfully turned a blind eye to the long-term wreckage Trump could inflict on the GOP, concerning themselves only with the short-term costs of alienating his supporters in an election year. McCarthy and other top lawmakers suddenly find themselves at odds with prominent party elders such as Romney. So it is that McCarthy and other top lawmakers suddenly find themselves at odds with prominent party elders such as Romney.

The chasm widened on Thursday when McCarthy touted the benefits of Trump’s candidacy at a Public Policy Institute event in Sacramento. As the Sacramento Bee reported, the majority leader argued that Trump has inspired a slew of intensely motivated new Republican voters to turn out and that those voters would ultimately help GOP incumbents down-ballot.

Trump endorsed the sentiment via Twitter. “Thank you Kevin,” he wrote. “With unification of the party, Republican wins will be massive!”

McCarthy seems to have forgotten that his district in California has a whole lot of Hispanic voters who haven't voted in the past. I suspect Trumpie might be just the motivator they've been waiting for.


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Crisis of confidence by @BloggersRUs

Crisis of confidence

by Tom Sullivan

The loss of confidence in this country for its institutions and distrust among citizens for each other has really reached toxic levels. Enter Donald Trump and supporters who seem bent on making the country great again by burning the place to the ground. But those levels of distrust are present now across party and ideological lines. In this primary season especially, everyone seems hypervigilant for the stab in the back from allies and quick to read the worst intentions into any statements or government actions. Not without some priming.

After Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem, his fans worked assiduously at proving it. With success. For thirty years or more, Republicans have worked at undermining confidence in American elections by promoting the idea that widespread fraud is at work undetected. Since 1982, the RNC has been under a consent decree prohibiting it from implementing its own voter fraud prevention measures — or voter suppression, if you see them through jaundiced eyes. In 2012, the last time (of which I am aware) that the Republican Party tried to get the 1982 consent decree voided, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit essentially laughed them out of court. Again. So they have turned after years of such rejection to state legislatures to accomplish the same thing through voter ID. Through relentless propagandizing, they convinced a large swath of the country that the threat from the elusive zombie voter is real and justifies such restrictive measures.

On Tuesday, there were some lines at the polls here in North Carolina and other issues with the new voter ID law. It will be worse in November.

In a story on America's longing for something lost, the Washington Post cites New Hampshire students' reactions to the primary and debates. A 19 year-old Bernie Sanders volunteer commented on the perception of corruption and mistrust:

“If you look at Republicans or Democrats, you are looking at 10 years of things people don’t trust,” Brown said. “Before, we could trust our government, but then we had the NSA wiretapping, and while the world is getting bigger, our politics are getting so much smaller and more corrupt.”
That perception is nonpartisan. After brisk turnout caused an early voting site here to run out of Democratic sample ballots, locals took to radio and social media to speculate that it was because the fix was in somehow. Against somebody. By someone. On Primary Day, the slightest problem set off alarm bells. There were problems, but now people are seeing random errors as evidence of dark conspiracies.

I mentioned to an out-of-state volunteer that the conspiracy meme seemed to be spreading and was itself becoming itself an issue. The Board of Elections was excellent and doing its best under the state's confusing new rules. By the way, I bragged, with John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina on Election Night 2008, our county had delivered the final 17,000 votes that put Obama over the top and turned the state blue. We were late reporting because a data transfer glitch had delayed uploading the votes to Raleigh.

The young woman sitting nearby looked up and made air quotes, "Right. 'Glitch'."

Head : desk.

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Thứ Sáu, 18 tháng 3, 2016

Friday Night Soother

Friday Night Soother

by digby

A couple of adorable Democrats!

Evelyn and Abigail Wool guest paging in the Alaska State Capitol. 






































Get 'em started early ...


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