The Abortion Conundrum.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., flanked by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., left, and Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, speaks at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 6, 2017. CREDIT: AP/J. Scott Applewhite.

The rethugs have painted themselves into a corner in their effort to deny healthcare to American citizens. They want anti-abortion language and rule in the Fuck You Bill, but if they include it, that might just derail their evil scheme. If they don’t include it, the theocrats will be upset and oppose it. Oh, a villain’s work is never done. Interestingly, they’ve managed to place themselves in a position of being foiled no matter the direction. I’d like to think this is good news, as far as killing off this sinister legislation, but I’m sure it won’t stop them for long.

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who interprets Senate rules, told Republicans that a provision that stops people from using refundable tax credits for private insurance covering abortion may not be allowed, according to the Hill.

Republicans decided to push this legislation through using budget reconciliation, so they wouldn’t need any Democratic votes, but anti-abortion language does not fall under budgetary changes. This means they would be in violation of the Byrd Rule, which says that a bill’s language can’t be more about policy matters than how much money is being spent.

But if Republicans fail to include the language, influential anti-choice groups will oppose the repeal-and-replace bill they’ve worked months on and spent the majority of the Obama administration vowing to pass. Anti-choice groups, such as the Susan B Anthony List and Family Research Council, have pressured Senators to include prohibitions on abortion coverage and funding of Planned Parenthood in the health care bill, or they will oppose it. Some Republican Senate leaders similarly say that the bill can’t stray too far from the caucus’ stance on abortion, according to Politico.

[…]

David Christensen, vice president of government affairs at Family Research Council, a far-right conservative group, told the Hill, “If the Byrd Rule were to be an obstacle to ensuring the GOP replacement plan in the Senate does not subsidize abortion, that’s something that would be a serious problem for us and the pro-life community.”

Orrin Hatch said he believed that a bill without anti-choice language could possibly doom the bill. Republicans are looking for workarounds that could allow them to restrict abortion coverage and still make it through budget reconciliation.

Think Progress has the full story.

And, The Idiot Fucks Us All Into The Ground.

President Trump announced Thursday afternoon that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, a move that honors a campaign promise but risks rupturing global alliances and disappointing both environmentalists and corporate titans.

But Trump said he would seek to negotiate a new climate deal that is, in his view, “fair” to America’s interests.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers,” Trump said.

“We’re getting out,” he added, “but we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. If we can, that’s great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”

Trump argued that the Paris agreement would “punish” the United States and instituted “onerous energy restrictions” that would stymie economic growth, especially in manufacturing industries. The president claimed that meeting the accord’s greenhouse gas emission standards would cost the United States close to $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product and 6.5 million industrial jobs.

I can’t go on. Not right now. Jesus Fuck, the idiot is going to kill us all. Full story is at The Washington Post. Read at your peril. Also, stay the hell away from twitter, it’s infested with fucking idiots, waving their tiny flags, which are considerably bigger than their brains.

There’s also this, but there’s no funny business with Russia, no, no.  And this: Trump’s argument for withdrawing from Paris agreement contains multi-trillion dollar math error: In a cost-benefit analysis, you’re supposed to analyze the costs and the benefits.

Climate Accord: Trump To Pull Out.

“Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic, center right, after appearing to be pushed by Donald Trump, center.” CREDIT for caption/photo: AP/Matt Dunham.

There’s been a great deal of anxiety laden speculation over the Paris Climate Accord, as that represents our last, best hope. It seems it’s a last, best hope that the Tiny Tyrant wants no part of, and plans to withdraw from.  This is not yet formal, and the Tiny Tyrant is subject to doing rapid turnabouts on a whim, but he’s never been secretive about his scorn for the climate accord, or his desire to pull out. The damage he has already done here in uStates is tremendous, it won’t be long before we’re back to 1970s levels of pollution, with smog alerts and steeping in trash and toxicity once again. Naturally, this will lead to a much sicker populace, one which will not be able to take care of themselves, thanks to the Fuck You Care Plan. There’s one other country which is also adamantly against the climate accord. Bet you don’t need three guesses, either. It’s Russia.

President Donald Trump has privately told “confidants” he intends to leave the Paris accord on climate change, “according to three sources with direct knowledge,” Axios reported Saturday.

After persuading voters that America isn’t great anymore, Trump apparently intends to make sure of it — by having this country lead the effort to kill humanity’s last, best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Quitting a unanimous agreement by 190+ nations after a two-decade negotiating process would make us a rogue nation, a global pariah, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And, it could make Putin happy, as we’ll see.

While Trump tweeted out Saturday from Italy that “I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters after the G7 meeting, “The whole discussion about climate has been difficult, or rather very unsatisfactory.” She added, “Here we have the situation that six members, or even seven if you want to add the EU, stand against one.”

Axios notes that “Although Trump made it clear during the campaign and in multiple conversations before his overseas trip that he favored withdrawal, he has been known to abruptly change his mind.” They add, however, top political appointees at EPA “were relieved” when Trump refused to join a consensus G7 statement reaffirming “their strong commitment” to the Paris accord.

While the White House’s attack on domestic climate action already undermines the global effort to avert climate catastrophe, we shouldn’t discount the importance of a U.S. withdrawal from Paris — especially if Trump teams with Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine the whole global negotiating process.

Think Progress has the full story.

“It did not meet our core values,” (Updated.)

CREDIT: Twitter.

Cops brazenly gun down 15 year old Jordan Edwards, and now that their lies have been exposed, we get “it did not meet our core values.” How about you arrest and charge the murderous piece of shit cop who decided a 15 year old just had to die? The fact that you haven’t says plenty to me about your so called “core values”.

Think Progress has the full story. My mood is definitely not better.

UPDATE: The murderer has been fired, but not charged, and not arrested. Full story here.

Bad News for Women, a la Trump.

Austin Ruse speaks at 2015 conference on sexual orientation and gender identity in international law.

Austin Ruse speaks at 2015 conference on sexual orientation and gender identity in international law.

The Trump administration this week named representatives from two intensely anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ groups, C-Fam and the Heritage Foundation, to be part of the official U.S. delegation to the session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which began on Monday and runs until March 24.

The State Department’s press release announcing the delegation calls the session “the most important annual meeting on women’s issues at the United Nations.” But just last week, in an email titled “Seven Days to War…Meet the Enemy, Learn Their Names,” C-Fam called it “one of the most dangerous meetings of the year.” On Monday morning, C-Fam sent out an email calling the session an “assault on life and family” and begging for money, portraying themselves as a “small and relatively weak” organization pitted against the “rich and powerful” forces such as the U.N. human rights office; now they are part of the official U.S. delegation.

C-Fam, formerly the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, and its leader Austin Ruse are so committed to enshrining “traditional” ideologies about gender, marriage and family in international law that they have teamed up with many of the world’s most repressive regimes to carry out their fight at the U.N. The Heritage Foundation is at the heart of a massive Religious Right coalition pushing to give business owners a broad legal right to discriminate against LGBT people and families as well as single parents based on their holding traditional religious views about gender, marriage and family.

As you can see from the wiki links, neither C-Fam or the Heritage Foundation are “small, relatively weak” organizations. They are both powerful, and they both have unfettered access to the Trump Regime, whereas previous administrations restrained them somewhat. The rise of the Religious Reich has been ongoing, but now is the time for alarm, because the current regime has no problem at all with crushing tank of Christian oppression running ramshod over everyone and everything they don’t like, and that’s a considerable list. The mere fact they have been designated representatives to such an important session is not good news. These people are anything but interested in the status of women and girls, outside of a determination to make sure all women and girls are ground well into the dirt, under the boot of patriarchy.

Trump’s massive expansion of the global gag rule already made it clear that his administration was willing to target some of the world’s most vulnerable people in order to meet the demands of his Religious Right base. Ruse recently complained about efforts by other nations and nonprofits to mitigate the harm of Trump’s policy on public health efforts in poor countries. The official appointments of C-Fam and Heritage effectively remove any lingering doubts about the Trump administration’s abandonment of what has been important U.S. advocacy for reproductive health and LGBTQ human rights around the world.

OutRight Action International, a human rights group active at the U.N., decried the appointments. “Fundamentalist notions about how women and girls should behave should never be the basis of advising or negotiating US foreign policy,” said Executive Director Jessica Stern in a statement. She also called it “a bad sign that two organizations that have tried to delegitimize the United Nations and human rights internationally now sit on the official US delegation.” Stern held out hope that even in the face of these appointments, the U.S. might be willing to support Commission on the Status of Women conclusions condemning discrimination.

Oh, I wouldn’t be holding my breath on that last. We are in dark days here, the Gilded age is back, and women don’t hold much of a place, as far as being considered full human beings, who are, in every way, the equal of men.

The delegation will be led by anti-choice U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and her deputy Michele Sison. Joining them as Public Delegates will be Lisa Correnti, C-Fam’s executive vice president, and Grace Melton, Heritage Foundation associate for social issues at the U.N.

When it comes to social issues in regard to women, it’s quite plain where the Religious Reich is concerned: women belong under the thumb of a man, must be virginal until placed under said thumb, no, no contraception, absolutely no choice, because no autonomy, and certainly none of that queer business!

Via RWW.

Aaaaand, We Are Back to Reefer Madness.

The famous ending

The famous ending

Oh, the regressive idiocy never ends. The manufactured war on drugs has caused an untold amount of misery, primarily in the form of people being tossed into a prison without a glance, or worse, shot to death by those oh so valiant drug hunting cops. (Deep sarcasm, in case you’re hard of sarcasm.) Jeff Sessions, bigot extraordinaire, and asshole ignoramus has decided we need to go straight back to the days of Tell Your Children. Yes, lies, oh lies are wonderful! And just when we, as a society, were finally making some progress on the whole weed front. A nice smoke now and then goes a long way with my pain issues, but as I’m a pain patient, I’m under the federal thumb, and am routinely drug tested as a requirement to receiving scrips for mild pain meds. There may have been a shot at medical weed, but not any more. Fuck Sessions, and fuck the so-called war on drugs. Mano Singham has an excellent post up which tangentially addresses that manufactured mess. In that post, he quotes a bit from John Ehrlichman:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And that’s the truth, right there. This shit has been going on all my life, and all it has done is fuel the prison complex, enable murderous cops, and cost taxpayers an obscene amount of money. There is no “war on drugs”. You’ll note that it’s never one, or even two specific drugs that remain a constant in this war, because that doesn’t keep the money pouring in to militarize cops even more. No, there’s always a new, terrifying “epidemic”, oh my yes! When I was a sophomore in high school, it moved from weed to speed. I still remember the stupid anti-drug comics which were handed out. They had as much value as a Chick tract. It’s just fucking propaganda, the same old propaganda. This is what they looked like:

14-15

Freedom Road. Full comic here.

Actually, it’s this specific image I remember, the rest not so much:

02

Anyroad, as most people will have noticed, it’s always a “new” drug “crisis”, weed, heroin, speed, coke, crack, meth, and on and on. Right now, we’re doing the prescription opiates “crisis”. You’ll also have noted, I’m sure, that none of these so-called crises are ever actually dealt with before moving on to the next exciting drug to titillate the masses and incite fear. And here we go the fuck again, back to weed.

Marijuana users and heroin addicts are basically the same, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia.

“I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana — so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful,” said Sessions. He went on to call for a revival of hardline ’80s- and ‘90s-style “educating people and telling them the terrible truth about drugs.”

“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life,” Sessions said.

For someone on a bar stool arguing with his friends, this would be a stupid but harmless “hot take.” But for the top law enforcement official in a nation of 320 million people, it’s a malicious string of lies intended to justify dangerous policies.

Sessions’ mockery of the idea that marijuana could help people struggling with opiate addiction is especially frustrating to Steve Miller, who retired as a sergeant after 18 years on a suburban Detroit police force and now works as a private investigator at a lawfirm specializing in medical marijuana cases.

“He’s out of reality in that statement. Marijuana has proven to be very beneficial medically for people. And there are studies coming out now showing it is helping people get off their opiate and heroin addictions, and showing it helps kick alcohol addiction as well,” Miller, one of many law enforcement professionals who advocates to end marijuana prohibition, told ThinkProgress. “I don’t know where his medical training comes from that he makes these statements.”

Oh well, that one’s easy, Sessions doesn’t have any medical training. He doesn’t have as much training as your average dog. Sessions is dragging out one of the oldest, most incorrect of all drug propagandism: “it’s just as bad as heroin!!111!!!” There is no reason for this bullshit to be waved about again, especially not by a suspect attorney general. As pointed out in Mano Singham’s post, this is to largely fuel the prison industrial complex. How else can you legally enslave people and get your labor done for free? This is absolutely intolerable, and people should not put up with it for one second. Unfortunately, I’ve had many years in which to watch people fall for this utter bullshit time and time again. It’s time to wake up.

Think Progress has the full story.

Nazis Basking in Steve King’s Supremacist Glow.

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All the Nazis have a brand new hero, Rep. Steve King. King finally stopped dancing around his white supremacist beliefs, and all the Nazis are jubilant, as reported by Think Progress.

CREDIT: Screenshot, Daily Stormer.

CREDIT: Screenshot, Daily Stormer.

“Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point,” Andrew Anglin wrote on Sunday. Anglin is the founder of The Daily Stormer, a meme-heavy, far-right site that takes its name from an English translation of a Nazi tabloid. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported The Daily Stormer has become the most popular English-language, far-right site on the internet.

“OUR civilization and SOMEBODY ELSE’S babies. Not really any nuance there,” Anglin wrote. “Steve King should be Speaker of the House. Period. There [sic] is as plain as the nose on your face. He is /ourguy/.”

[…]

And that, from a sitting congressman, is part of what has internet racists excited — both about the comments themselves, and what they suggest regarding the prominence of white nationalism under Trump.

“King is more /ourguy/ than Trump has ever been, but would he be saying these kinds of things without Trump? We can only hope these kinds of statements serve to embolden more of our people, as they see that people like themselves are in positions of power,” begins an article on Altright.com, Richard Spencer’s new site.

[…]

Spencer himself also praised the comments, saying in a YouTube video that he’s “proud” of King and musing, “if this is a signal that conservatives are moving in the right direction under Trump, that they are getting at something real, then I am very happy.”

That line was echoed on Gab, which became the favored messaging platform of white nationalists after Twitter started cracking down on hate speech.

“If Trump’s presidency has emboldened members of Congress to speak up against our destruction, the success or failure of Trump’s policies will be a mere footnote in his legacy,” one use wrote.

David Duke, former leader of the KKK, went on a Twitter tear praising King, urging supporters to move to Iowa, and floating King as a successor to Trump who would “finish the job.”

[…]

King also drew praise on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi web forum founded by a former Alabama Klan boss. The SPLC calls Stormfront “the first major hate site on the Internet,” and, until it was overtaken by the Daily Stormer, it was the most prominent.

“Congressman King has always stood up to the anti-white establishment but lately he seems to have manned up to his full power level,” one user wrote, praising King for not walking back on Monday. “When they get our back we need to get theirs. A U.S. Congressman is not just some smuck [sic]. BUGS, Alt-Right, 4Chan, Pepe Task Force…you guys already own most of the internet. Maybe help out the Congressman?”

Other users at Stormfront were thrilled at the new platform for their ideas.

“At least the idea is being talked about in the news,” one user wrote, ending their post “88” — which is shorthand among neo-Nazis for “Heil Hitler.”

[…]

“It’s time for KING STEVE to take his place below the throne of the GOD EMPEROR,” he wrote. The “god emperor” is a far-right pet name for President Trump. “We need Steve King memes ASAP. Make them, spread them. We already memed a man President, we can meme a man Speaker.”

It remains to be seen whether or not King will stand firm in his white supremacism after the inevitable backlash. So far, he’s doubled down and been unapologetic in the face of criticism. I don’t really need to point out how bad this is, do I?

Full story at Think Progress.

Rewriting the Constitution.

Photo Credit: Kim Davies / Flickr.

Photo Credit: Kim Davies / Flickr.

Imagine if the U.S. Constitution barred the EPA and Department of Education from existing. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with a national minimum wage.

Imagine that the Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks and even big food and pharma—all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures, because the Constitution prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can’t even enforce voting or civil rights laws.

To add injury to insult, the federal government has to shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, housing supports and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do.

A few years ago, it would have been a thought experiment; now it’s nearly reality. Billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to provide corprations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits, and chop away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security or child labor laws.

The fact is that they’re just a few states away from meeting their goal, and have already held dress rehearsals in Washington D.C.—with representatives from all 50 states—for a Constitutional Convention that would change America forever.

[…]

On April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against fascist Germany and Japan, the New York Times published an op-ed by Vice President Henry Wallace discussing explicitly the issue of very wealthy people setting out to take over our government.

Wallace spoke directly to the danger of multimillionaire and corporate power, defining right-wing industrialists as people “who in case of conflict put money and power ahead of human beings.” He added that “in their search for money and power [they] are ruthless and deceitful. … They… follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”

In his strongest indictment of that day’s equivalent of today’s billionaire class, Wallace wrote, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

As Wallace’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt said when accepting his party’s re-nomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, “out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties…. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.”

We stand at the same crossroads Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II, only this time the Supreme Court (in 1976 with Buckley, 1978 in Bellotti and in 2010 with Citizens United) has given American billionaires the power to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money to own politicians and demand behavior from them so outrageous that they’d even lie on live TV and deny science itself.

The billionaire right’s behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, “In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.”

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings have come full circle. It’s critical that we call out these economic royalists for what they’re doing, and not let them and their minions rewrite our Constitution.

Thom Hartmann’s full article is at AlterNet, and very scary reading, but it’s important reading. Highly Recommended.

Facts Be Damned. Oh, And Fuck Women.

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon listens at right as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the White House on January 31. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon listens at right as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the White House on January 31. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

One of the uglier aspects of the ‘new’ Muslim ban is a focus on ‘honor killings’, even though that’s not a massive problem here in uStates, but it’s a convenient thing to rail about when you’re attempting to incite a racial panic. Just how much the Regime does not care about victims of honor killings is highlighted by the fact that the Violence Against Women grants are going to be eliminated, even though roughly 1,500 women are murdered as a result of domestic violence per year. It should not be ignored that both Trump and Bannon have been accused of domestic violence. Nor should Trump’s attitude toward women in general, which is incredibly ugly. The reasoning behind the ban is nothing more than slimy white nationalism, and there isn’t all that much to cover the shit over, they simply don’t care. Well, that’s not quite fair. They do care about any possibility of having this ban legally overturned as well. As usual the problem does not just rest with the Regime’s legislation and executive orders. It also lies on the shoulders of all those Regime voters and supporters.

I am sick to death of people wringing their hands over these poor, poor Trumpians who start crying when the chickens come home to roost. No, I do not have sympathy for them, because they have none for anyone, they were firmly and flatly in favour of bigotry, hatred, and misogyny, and any of them who claim they weren’t, they are liars. Trump’s whole fucking campaign was nothing but a constant litany of bigotry, hatred, and misogyny, as well as a paen to the might of white, and a psalm sung to the filthy rich.

The whole excuse of “well, some of them just wanted to throw a brick at the establisment” is a fucking lie, too. One Big Lie. If those people truly wanted to buck the establishment, Trump would have been dumped and Sanders would have ended up in the white house, and we would be moving towards a properly socialized government. That would have been tossing a brick at the man. Voting for Trump? For fuck’s sake, how could you possibly get more establishment? The excuse of “they thought he was a good business man!” won’t wash either. Trump’s constant failures over the years were not a secret. His incompetency was out there for all to see, during the whole campaign. The regime voters chose to ignore it. The excuse of “oh hey jobs”? No, doesn’t wash either, because what all those white Trumpians meant by that was “stomp all over those brown peoples!”. They never have anything to say when you point out that they don’t want to work cleaning toilets and peoples’ houses.

No, no more fucking excuses. The assholes who voted in the regime who are now crying? They’re only crying because they weren’t supposed to get bitten on the arse. They wanted all those others to get fucked over. Anyroad, back to the fucked up, shit-caked ban…

President Trump’s second Muslim ban, signed on Monday, includes a provision directing the Department of Homeland Security to collect and make public “information regarding the number and types of gender-based violence against women, including so-called ‘honor killings,’ in the United States by foreign nationals.”

According to numbers from a Department of Justice-sponsored study conducted in 2014, there are less than 30 such “honor killings” in the country each year. The killings — which are “perceived by the perpetrator to be a way to restore honor to the family in the face of a perceived damage,” according to the report — are sometimes “motivated by a radical and dark interpretation of Islam,” as Fox News wrote in late 2015.

The inclusion of the “honor killings” provision in the new Muslim ban marks the second time in a week the Trump administration has outlined a plan to use federal resources “to whip up as much racial panic as possible,” as Matt Yglesias of Vox puts it. The first instance was Trump’s vow to create the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office, or VOICE, during his speech to Congress last week, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

In a similar vein, the number of “honor killings” in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to the roughly 1,500 women who are murdered as a result of domestic violence in a given year. But according to numerous reports, Trump’s budget proposal will eliminate the Department of Justice’s Violence Against Women grants. Those grants had a $480 million budget last year and funded 25 grant programs helping domestic violence victims, according to Mother Jones. Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon have both been accused of domestic assault.

[…]

But the “honor killing” provision is just the latest example of Trump trying to portray Islam in a violent light. Despite the fact that a person in America is much more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim terrorist, the Trump administration has signaled it wants a federal counter-terrorism program to stop focusing on violent white supremacists and any other extremist groups not comprised of Muslims. And after the Department of Homeland Security released a report last month undermining the administration’s core rationale for the Muslim ban  — “citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity,” it found — the administration tried to downplay the report.

“The president asked for an intelligence assessment,” the a senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal. “This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.”

Right. An accurate assessment is provided, but the Tiny Tyrant doesn’t want that, and neither does shadow tyrant Bannon. They want shit shoveled onto a platter, and shaped into the form of whatever they asked for, providing them with a basis for the regime.

Think Progress has the full story.

Also see: The mass deportation of African immigrants that isn’t getting media attention. Nobody noticed.

A “Normal” Moment.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

It seems that a good deal of media and regular folks are falling all over themselves about how reasonable Trump’s speech was, it was all so gosh darn normal, oh my yes! Except it wasn’t. It was the same old shit, wrapped up in the flag and exceptional Americanism, with a white nationalist filling. Raw Story has a brief article about this, noting the White House surprise at how media pundits were won over by this speech.

President Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night got glowing reviews from some pundits on cable news — and it turns out even the White House is surprised by how easily they were won over.

Washington Post reporter Robert Costa tweeted on Wednesday morning that some sources he’s talked with in the White House are “frankly surprised at how pundits are warming to the speech.”

This is particularly surprising to them, Costa writes, because “Trump has not changed” and there is “no big shift in policy coming.”

Think Progress has a longer piece about this piece of bullshit which too many people are swallowing whole. Interestingly, the white supremacist scum are thrilled about it, because instead of paying attention to the bits of trapping, they focused on actual content, which is a gift to Nazis everywhere.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump portrayed the United States as an island of civilization under siege from immigrant cartels and terrorists posing as refugees.

Trump touted a new Department of Homeland Security office that will target “criminal aliens.” He lied about immigration’s effect on the U.S. economy, boasted about sharp rollbacks to the regulatory state, renewed his call for eradicating the Affordable Care Act, hinted at further efforts to privatize the American education system, and offered a strident defense of his administration’s Muslim ban. At no point did he deviate from the “nationalist-populist” ideology his administration has adopted under top strategist Steve Bannon, former chairman of the white-nationalist website Breitbart.

On the other hand, Trump also read off a teleprompter, tossed off a cursory denunciation of “hate,” and wrapped up the speech with some pablum about how Americans should believe in themselves.

Those minor grace points were enough to earn Trump rapturous applause from the usual pundit gaggle, which is evidently willing to embrace a white-nationalist policy agenda if the presentation includes a few Hallmark aphorisms and leaves out any overt racial slurs.

CNN’s Van Jones said Trump “became President of the United States” when he acknowledged the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL, who was sitting in the audience.

Oh FFS, really? Trump acts like a normal person for 10 fucking seconds, and people are tripping over their tongues at how great he is? Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s not enough, it’s just not enough to say we are in trouble here. We are past trouble. There aren’t even words. We’re up to our neck in fascism, but it’s okay, because someone managed to get Trump to read some nice words from a teleprompter. Why didn’t anyone bother to note that Ms. Owens wouldn’t have been a grieving widow if it weren’t for Trump’s ego and need to play war? That Trump doesn’t want to go along with the investigation requested by Owen’s father? No, he’s so very presidential because he addressed a widow.

The vile Nazi scum were elated, but for reasons grounded in reality:

David Duke @DrDavidDuke

Hail to the Chief – No change on policy to deport illegals and on track to CUT major legal immigration necessary to take our country back!

Richard ? Spencer ✔ @RichardBSpencer

After the PC bullshit is out of the way, Trump is making a Trump speech.#trumpaddress

So, what’s it going to take for all the non-Nazi scum to see what’s actually being said and what’s actually going on?

Via Think Progress.

Also see:

Trump lied. Right-wing extremists — not foreigners — commit more terror attacks in the U.S.

Trump’s address to Congress was riddled with falsehoods about the energy industry.

Trump was so busy attacking immigrants he barely acknowledged hate crimes.

Trump draws a fake conclusion from a study that actually finds immigration is good for the economy.

Trump’s Blame Shifting: False Flag!

Tucker Viemeister.

Tucker Viemeister.

Trump is worse than a little sprog. Whenever something bad happens, he immediately looks for someone to blame, anyone except who is actually responsible, like white supremacist scum. In regard to the recent acts of anti-semitism, which are increasing, Trump decided to imply that while sad, they could, y’know, be a false flag operation, done to make someone else look bad. Apparently, the Tiny Tyrant hasn’t figured out that no one needs to make the current nazi infested government look bad, they are doing a fine job of that themselves. Not in the least bit surprising, various white supremacists are also spreading the false flag bullshit. Just in case this is needed: the false flag crap is just that, it’s a lie.

President Donald Trump received a lashing online after suggesting that his supporters were being framed for anti-Semitic bomb threats.

Trump on Tuesday suggested to attorneys generals that threats targeting Jewish community centers and attacks on Jewish cemeteries could be false flag operations. When speaking about the acts, which he called “reprehensible,” the president said “the reverse can be true,” according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. “Someone’s doing it to make others look bad,” Trump added.

“He just said, ‘sometimes it’s the reverse,’” Shapiro recalled. “‘It’s to make people or make others look bad.’ He used ‘reverse’ two to three times in his comments.”

The Anti-Defamation League quickly released a statement calling on the president to clarify his remarks.

You can see many of the responses here.

In case that wasn’t enough idiocy, Anthony Scaramucci is trying to pin the blame on democrats, citing Breitbart as his go to source for this claim. Seriously, can we stop the world, I want the fuck off.

A senior adviser to President Donald Trump suggested Democrats may be to blame for dozens of threats recently against Jewish community centers.

Anthony Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital hedge fund and a former employee at Goldman Sachs, sent out a pair of tweets questioning the possibility that Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters may be behind the threats, reported The Hill.

[…]

Scarmucci, a top Trump fundraiser tapped as White House public liaison to government agencies and businesses, linked to a Breitbart News article Tuesday morning on a Project Veritas investigation of “trained provocateurs” at GOP rallies.

“It’s not yet clear who the #JCC offenders are. Don’t forget @TheDemocrats effort to incite violence at Trump rallies,” Scaramucci tweeted.

A reporter called him out for his baseless claim, and Scarmucci doubled down.

Via Raw Story. Same response here: the only thing making Trump look bad is Trump and his crew of henchtoadies.

We Must Win Wars Again!

Reflections, Lee Teeter, 1988.

Reflections, Lee Teter, 1988.

War. We need more war. We must win those wars! Fuck people, fuck the environment, fuck the economy, fuck healthcare, all we want is cannon fodder – get your young asses over here so we can kill you for no reason! Jesus Fuck.

In a speech to American governors, President Donald Trump attacked the military, saying “We never win wars anymore. We never fight to win. We have to start winning wars again.’

The message was a preface to Trump’s budget announcement that he plans to increase military spending. The United States already spends more in defense than any other country in the industrial world by multitudes. Trump explained that when he was in high school they won wars with major tank battles. In the past he’s spoken out on the lack of battleships that the U.S. military has.

Trump received four draft deferments during the Vietnam War for bone spurs.

That useless, craven caitiff found a convenient, and monied way to get out of the draft. He’s all for other people dying though. I still remember the name of the Lieutenant on my POW MIA bracelet. No word of him was ever heard, or at least no information was ever released. All the government cared about was covering up the travesty of that so called war. I remember handing out those bracelets, a call to action, a mass remonstrance to our government for their shameful actions. Looks like it’s shameful action time again. Trump will start a war so he can feel like a big man. Any takers on whether or not this asshole will try to reinstate the draft?

Fuck. Fuck you, Trump, fuck every single goddamn person who brought us here.

Full story here.

The Police State of America.

Area

Back in 2014, this was one sentence in a long comment written to an oblivious ass about events in Ferguson, Missouri:

A lot of us recognize the dire nature of this situation, and that sooner or later, that rumble will mow down our towns.

The rumble is here. It’s been here for a while, those at the No DAPL camp got to see it up close and personal, more than once. That noise you hear is the boot stomp of a police state, soon to be wherever you live in the States. Legislators have been busy for a while, coming up with various ways to strip people of their rights, and to punish them severely for attempting to exercise those rights. We’re not only back to the bad old days of COINTELPRO (don’t need that anymore, they have Palantir), it’s much worse now. Lately, I’ve been posting a bit of music every day, from the bad old days, which reflected the protests and fights we were in, music which helped to mobilize people. Turns out, we need that more than ever now. Young people, unlike old farts like myself, don’t have the experience of just how far our government is willing to go to shut down dissent. While past experience informs my current alarm, what’s happening now is worse. Much, much worse. Don’t be thinking it’s okay because you aren’t the protesting kind of person – your rights have been shredded and tossed to the wind too. Once open dissent is shut down, it’s never long before it isn’t safe to criticise or be thought unloyal. The loyalist business has already infected the white house, and that’s gotten worse too, with people being fired for having been critical of Trump.

Flint Taylor, a founding partner of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office, told AlterNet that he believes that Trump’s three executive orders on crime and policing have emboldened these state-level initiatives. One decree, titled “Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers,” is premised on the false claim that there is a war on cops. The order instructs the executive branch to “develop strategies, in a process led by the Department of Justice (Department) and within the boundaries of the Constitution and existing Federal laws, to further enhance the protection and safety of Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers.”

Sessions, who heads the DOJ, has said that he does not believe systemic police brutality is a problem worth addressing.

“The language of this executive order is focused on ‘preventing violence,’ which was the exact language of the memoranda that former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote justifying the neutralization—i.e. destruction—of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to the Black Panthers,” said Taylor. “One of the key aspects of COINTELPRO was to ‘prevent violence.’ That was the cover for destroying movements.”

“Together with all the other preliminary indications from the Trump administration, this executive order bodes extremely ill, particularly for communities of color, in terms of unleashing the already awesome and racist power of police departments in cities across the country.”

Meanwhile, right-wing Republicans in Congress, with apparent backing from the Trump administration, are advancing efforts to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The initiative, which emanates from far-right conspiracy theories that the Sunni Islamist group is infiltrating the U.S. government, is aimed at crushing Muslim civil society organizations at the core of resistance to Trump.

Amidst a climate of authoritarianism, anti-protest laws are advancing alongside so-called Blue Lives Matter bills that protect police officers under hate crime laws meant to safeguard historically oppressed communities. These initiatives are spreading across the country, with Republicans now in control of roughly two-thirds of the partisan legislative chambers in the United States.

“I definitely think there are a lot of Republicans who feel that Trump is a dog whistle to start writing bills that infringe on people’s rights, because we’re seeing that on a federal level,” said Grimm. “They are taking advantage of this time to make sure that people who don’t agree with them don’t have the right to express that. This is how you move toward fascism and nationalism, by getting rid of dissent.”

That’s just a bit of the full article running down all the current legislation looking to strip rights and quash dissent.

There’s also this:

Upon entering Spicer’s second floor office, staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check,” to prove they had nothing to hide.

Spicer, who consulted with White House counsel Don McGahn before calling the meeting, was accompanied by White House lawyers in the room, according to multiple sources. There, he explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Federal Records Act, according to multiple sources in the room.

The phone checks included whatever electronics staffers were carrying when they were summoned to the unexpected follow-up meeting, including government-issued and personal cell phones.

Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media. It’s not the first time that warnings about leaks have promptly leaked. The State Department’s legal office issued a four-page memo warning of the dangers of leaks — that memo was immediately posted by the Washington Post.

But with mounting tension inside the West Wing over stories portraying an administration lurching between crises and simmering in dysfunction, aides are increasingly frustrated by the pressure-cooker environment and worried about their futures there.

Full story at Politico. It should not need to be said that open, transparent governments don’t need to fear leaks. Authoritarian regimes, however…