The press guffawed when Obama eviscerated Trump at the correspondents dinner but think the clown deserves respect now that he's a fascist?
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) November 20, 2015
There’s a lot of American voters who just want to blow up the world, per Reuters:
American voters are evenly split between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as their top choice to address the issue of terrorism following the Paris attacks, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Asked to choose from the entire field of 2016 presidential hopefuls, 20 percent of 1,106 respondents surveyed between Nov. 16-17 opted for Trump. An equal share of the electorate picked Clinton.(polling.reuters.com/#!poll/TM743Y15)
Given Clinton’s background as a former secretary of state it is perhaps not surprising that she did reasonably well in the poll. However, Trump’s good showing upends an emerging narrative that the Paris shootings and suicide bombings would prompt voters to rethink their support for the real estate billionaire, who leads the field of Republican presidential candidates…
Glenn Matlosz, 71, of Audubon, New Jersey, said Trump would be the most able to address terrorism because he’s proven to be a straight talker.
“He’s telling it as it is,” said Matlosz, who describes himself as a Democrat. “He’s not mincing any words. There is no gobbledygook there. Everybody else is squawking.”…
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said voters respond to candidates they perceive as taking a tough stance and aren’t necessarily looking at their biographies…
Trump is talking broadly about his approach instead of bogging voters down with details, said Republican strategist John Feehery.
“He’s the one who is speaking in the simplest language that is most understandable to the average voter,” Feehery said. “He’s not talking about ‘no-fly’ zones. He’s not getting into policy. He’s talking about, ‘Lets go kill ISIS.'”…
Translation: And the permanent Republican “establishment” is totally fine with an ignorant loudmouth whose solution to every world problem is YELL ABOUT BLOWING STUFF UP….
We used to worry that Trump was going to make Jeb or Rubio look moderate, but actually Carson made Trump look moderate and rational.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 18, 2015
Jenna Johnson, reporting for the Washington Post:
WORCESTER, Mass. — As police officers escorted a shouting protester out of the rally Donald Trump held in a converted ice hockey arena on Wednesday night, the crowd of 10,500 held up their cellphone cameras, booed and then chanted: “USA! USA! USA!”
“Isn’t a Trump rally much more exciting than these other ones?” the presidential candidate marveled as he took in the scene. “And that kind of stuff only adds to the excitement, I tell you. Just incredible.”…
During a press conference before the rally, reporters pressed Trump to explain why he continues to say President Obama plans to resettle 250,000 Syrian refugees in the United States even though the administration has only publicly committed to accepting 10,000. Trump said his larger number comes from a “pretty good source” and is likely accurate because he has correctly predicted a number of other foreign events, including the rise of Osama bin Laden.
“You watch,” he said, “I’ll be right.”
Trump once again cursed as he described what he would do as president to Islamic State terrorists: “We’ve got to knock the s— out of these people. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to do it.” The crowd once again began chanting: “USA! USA! USA!”…
And Trump continued to warn his supporters that these terrorists could use the Internet as a weapon.
“They’re using the Internet, and they’re recruiting people,” Trump said. “We’ve got to take back the Internet because they are taking people. They’re literally brainwashing people. They’re brainwashing our youth… We can’t let that happen. We have innocent youth, and they are misguided.”…
Throughout the evening there were sporadic outbursts from protesters who were led away by police, often shouting and struggling as they went. As television journalists rushed to capture these interactions, Trump’s campaign staff members tried to block several of them from doing so, refusing to let reporters leave a barricaded work area they called “the pen.”
After CNN reporter Noah Gray left “the pen” to document a group of protesters who unveiled a sign reading “Migrant lives matter,” Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski turned to campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks and said: “Hey: Tell Noah, get back in the pen or he’s f—— blacklisted,” according to a recording of the incident.
As Gray went into the crowd to film reaction to the sign, which had already been taken down, Lewandowski confronted him directly: “Inside the pen, or I will pull your credentials. Media goes in the pen.” Lewandowski at first said the order was because of security, but then said: “I’m telling you. I’m telling you. Media stays in the pen.”…
As he often does at rallies, Trump asked the crowd what should happen to Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who abandoned his post in Afghanistan in 2009, was held hostage and then rescued. Trump called Bergdahl “a dirty, rotten traitor.”
“What do we do with Sgt. Bergdahl, 50 years ago?” Trump asked, calling on an older man sitting near the front who stood and shaped his hand like a gun. “That’s right. Boom. Boom!… Boom, he’s gone. He’s gone!”…
A great people besieged by evil forces, its young people “lead astray” by wicked propaganda and a media that does not know its place, riddled with traitors, fifth columnists, social parasites? There’s a name for that ideology, as some candy-arsed lie-bral at the far-left Fiscal Times complains…
… Trump’s campaign — literally from the moment he announced it by claiming that the Mexican government is sending rapists and murderers into the U.S. — has been based on a combination of whipping up fear of some shadowy outside force bent on harming “real” Americans, alleging the existence of an additional threat in the form of some sort of fifth column inside the country, and then offering himself as the great protector who will stand in its way.
There’s powerful historical precedent for people coming to power in that way. Google it. It always ends badly…
Official crowd count for Donald Trump's rally in Worcester tonight, according to arena officials: 10,500. HT @stevefosketttg
— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) November 19, 2015
Omnes Omnibus
I am beyond enraged about the cowardice of people arguing against accepting refugees. Not only do we have a moral obligation to do it (if one needs an explanation of that, one is a shit), but we have treaty and statutory obligations to do so. Let’s pressure our lawmakers to live up to their responsibilities.
Calouste
From now on I’ll refer to this short-fingered vulgarian as Adolf Trump.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Opossums are nature’s mistake. They have enough to deal with without being connected with Trump.
cckids
If this campaign goes much longer without someone doing a parody of Trump in “Springtime for Hitler”, I will be very disappointed in the comedians of America.
NotMax
Triumph of the Shrill.
Ruckus
FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. JUST FUCK IT.
I just posted a comment and the server ate it the fuck up. Water Girl said earlier that she hopped that I would not just leave because of the problems but that is exactly what I’m thinking of doing. I, and many many others have lost many, many comments over the last two weeks, let alone all the FYWP losses before that. I really wonder what my sanity level must be if I’m willing to stay through this shit.
Ruckus
This of course it posts. The good one it swallows fucking whole.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@NotMax: Bravo.
SRW1
Maybe the US really is special and doesn’t need anywhere close to 30 percent unemployment to give the keys to a little fascist.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
If that really was an opossum it would shit on his head every day in self defense and self respect.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: I’ve had about four eaten tonight. I’ve taken to copying the comment before posting just in case, that way I can just paste it. All of us know its frustrating, just hang in there a couple of weeks until they get it sorted.
Duane
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
My sanity has enough internal issues, what with my health, let alone this shit.
And yes I’ve been copying so that I can do that but you know some times after working for a week making 18 tiny, very high precision tools for the medical industry my internal safety barriers are somewhat stretched.
Omnes Omnibus
@SRW1: Look at the survey. Is it reliable? Who was surveyed? Do not condemn everyone based on one poll.
RaflW
The feeling of actually living inside one of the dystopian novels I ate up as a teen in the early 80s is becoming sickening.
22over7
A few short months ago the very idea of Trump running was a joke. Everybody said oh, don’t worry about it, he’ll get bored, or the press will cause him to stomp off, or he’ll say something stupid and ruin himself.
Instead he has the press cowering, he’s electrifying crowds with Mussolini-like nationalism, the other R candidates won’t come near him, and the establishment Rs are wringing their hands.
I’m beginning to feel that the only thing standing between us and Generalissimo Trump is Hillary. Hope she’s up for it.
Ruckus
@Duane:
Some people think war solves all. They don’t really know anything about warfare and it’s costs, mainly because the assholes they vote for don’t really know anything about warfare and it’s costs and neither party to that vote want to know. Because they are binary people, black/white, good/bad, their religion/others religions, their side/everyone else, with us/against us. They aren’t necessarily stupid but they are simple. Logic is missing, nuance is missing, reasoning is missing. Rationalization they’ve got though, as it takes rationalization to come up with reasons for their binary thinking.
tom
Candidate Trump is going to get someone killed because of his rhetoric. I suspect a President Trump would get a lot of people killed and very few of them would be terrorists.
Poptartacus
Trump, trump trump. It’s like a drumbeat across the land. He I’ll crush the enemies of the faithful, and make America great again
Ruckus
@22over7:
I’m not worried about Clinton being up for it. I’m worried about enough people being able to look at his shit and deciding that it really is shit and then vote for her.
My post that got eaten started out very much like yours with the exception that I thought he is in this to win. What else has he got going for him other than being rich? He’s already got the jackass thing down, he’s had to show that he isn’t nearly as rich as he’s been saying (3 billion ain’t pocket change but it ain’t 10 billion either), who trusts him in his business anymore, which by the way is selling himself and that dead rodent on his head, nothing more.
22over7
@Ruckus: Hillary has to be able to make the people see. The press certainly won’t help.
And I expect many Germans and Italians thought those upstarts would never amount to anything, either.
Ruckus
@22over7:
A bit of truth to this, that’s for sure. Yes she does have to sell herself to them but if you are a binary thinker, yes/no, black/white, us/them, you probably aren’t going to make the connection no matter how good she really is. Sanders certainly has some good points but he seems to be sort of binary himself, and seemingly having a hard time breaking out of that. Clinton is to my mind better balanced and nuanced. And I was not a fan of hers last time. Is she perfect? Of course not, as the Syrian no fly zone thing shows. But is she worlds better than any conservative? By infinite miles. Will she be as good as President Obama? Only way to know is to let her try.
ruemara
These people are absolute fucking idiots who should be ground into fish food before they poison the gene pool. And that’s my temperate response.
bluehill
The same country that repubs thought were cowards not that many years ago is still accepting refugees despite the attacks. Who’s the coward now?
Reading this article about the difference between fear management and danger management. I think it explains a lot about the republican mindset.
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/FEARvsDANGER.html
“… Fear Management vs. Danger Management
Let’s start with the fact that there’s a difference between fear management and danger management. I’m talking in extremes here, but it’s to communicate an idea.
Let’s say you’re terrified of vampires. No amount of rational explanation that vampires don’t exist and aren’t a danger is going to help. That’s because ‘terror’ comes from a deeper level of your brain than rational. However, if someone gives you a talisman (like a cross) and says “This will keep away the vampires” then that’s going really seem to work.
The reason ISN’T that it solves the problem. It’s not even that it soothes your fears. It’s that it reconfirms your fears. It gives you an ‘answer’ in the context of your terror.
By giving you a talisman against vampires, it confirms vampires exist, that they are a danger and that without this talisman you are in danger. By having this talisman you are emotionally empowered without ever addressing the fact that vampires don’t exist. Or, that you believe in them and are letting fear of imaginary monsters guide your life.
That is fear management. It only addresses the emotions, NOT the actual problem.
Having lived in the desert, I can tell you that scorpions are real. Worse it isn’t the big ugly black ones that are dangerous, it’s the little, hard-to-see small brown ones that will kill you. Being stung by a scorpion is a very legitimate danger in the desert.
However, if you develop certain habits –like shaking out your boots, pulling your bed covers back before you climb in, not going barefoot, not sticking your hand into dark places, wearing gloves when moving piles of stuff outdoors, etc.– you reduce your chances of getting stung by about 99%.
Good habits, based on proven strategies is danger management. It’s not sexy. It’s not exciting. It’s really not emotionally empowering. It’s just good safety protocols.
When It Gets Mixed and Mushed
When fear management is applied to danger management you get an ugly and ineffective hybrid. This is why I used scorpions and vampires as models. Unreasonable fear is easy to spot when applied to vampires. It’s more insidious when applied to a legitimate danger…”
Ruckus
@ruemara:
What do you have against fish?
SRW1
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, there still was a ‘maybe’ in that comment of mine.
Linnaeus
Well, folks, we can’t get too upset about this. People have legitimate concerns!
Amir Khalid
Whether Hillary prevails over Trump in the election next year will depend on whether Americans are willing to prefer a knowledgeable, experienced and rational woman over an ignorant, inexperienced, racist demagogue of a man. Those polls seem to remind us that it’s not a sure thing they will pick her.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Ruckus:
As a (hopefully temporary) solution, copy your message text to the clipboard right before you press Publish. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C or mouse/tablet equivalent.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s not just the RIGHT thing to do, it’s not just the OBLIGATORY thing to do, but it’s the SMART thing to do, taking away a weapon Daesh is using against us. Rejecting refugees is playing into Daesh’s hands. They couldn’t be more pleased with this reaction, it’s everything they hoped for. And these fucking cowards are handing it to them on a silver platter.
The politicians who are pandering to the pants pissers are giving aid and comfort to Daesh.
Amir Khalid
And speaking of ignorant, inexperienced, racist demagogues, get a load of this guy.
BlueDWarrior
I’ve run out of words to describe my level of just guttural disdain for these Republican candidates and their fanboys in the public and the media. All Trump is doing is just shouting whatever crops up into the collective Republican id, and the rest of them eat it up like manna from heaven.
I’m just afraid the fever won’t break until the collective us as Americans are subject to a ‘true’ facistic regime.
seaboogie
Just ponder for a moment that that sentence is even possible…Makes the news of the day somewhat less Onion-esque.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack (phone):
I have been doing this on anything but snark posts but my mind is, as I posted earlier a, a bit preoccupied and I forgot. Reminds me of something a guy I worked decades ago with once said, “He’s the kind of guy who wears 2 condoms, pajamas, and lights out to fuck his wife. And he’s had a vasectomy.” Can’t be too careful you know.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
He must only have fun house mirrors. At least in his mind.
magurakurin
@Amir Khalid: I think it is way to early for the general election head to head polls to really give much insight into the actual result. We pretty much know that whoever gets the GOP nod is going to get 45 to 48 percent of the vote no matter who it is. I’d rather see Clinton stomping them all right now, but I’m not going to panic yet if she loses in some random polls at this point in time.
On the other hand, Sanders is fucked though. His polling in the South is really awful. He is close to not even making the 15% threshold to receive delegates in some of these races. I hope his supporters are doing more than just talking trash about Hillary Clinton on the internet. They need to be knocking on doors in South Carolina so the whole cart doesn’t race away from him before March. And the SEC primary will be brutal for him if these huge margins are maintained.
mclaren
Nobody gets it.
Americans are bully worshipers.
That means that Americans fall to their knees in front of the biggest and most sadistic bully. When President Obama was bashing away at Trump and humiliating him in front of a crowd, the press fell to their knees. Then when Trump started bashing away at the other Republican candidates, the press fell to their knees in front of him.
The American press genuflects in front of anyone who brutalizes or humiliates a weaker victim. A 250-pound prizefighter who beats up a small crippled child? The American press lionizes the fighter. U.S. troops who napalm defenseless women in the world’s poorest countries? The American press swoon with adoration. Now a cryptofascist billionaire screams for the most powerful country in the world to savage some of the poorest migrants on the planet, rural Mexicans trying to come across the border to make a living? The American press is having spontaneous orgasms.
America’s motive power is sadism + cowardice. Bullies embody the American dream: beat up some weak defenseless opponent and get cheered for it. Of course the press worships Trump. How could they not?
From the point of view of the American press corps, the only thing better would be for Trump to bludgeon puppies, or take a baseball bat to an infant girl.
David Koch
@Calouste: well, his actual last name is Drumpf and his dad belonged to the KKK, so you’re close.
mclaren
@Ruckus:
Losing comments is nothing. Wait till you get the nonstop NO DATA RECEIVED error that tells you the balloon juice website is not accessible because the server received no data at all. You can spend 20 minutes at a time banging away at the ENTER key on your computer, and the server will still tell you it didn’t receive any data. Tons ‘o fun for the whole family.
My prediction?
Tommy will manage to combine the two errors. Wait for it: it’ll happen.
Then Cole will jump in and cuss anyone who complains. It’s the American way. The biggest fuckups always get lavishly praised, the most incompetent people always rise to the top. Fail your way to success and glory, that’s the new American paradigm, from the misbegotten Iraq invasion to the failed War on Drugs to the unbelievable fuckeduppery of IT “webmasters” who can’t find their asses in a hall of mirrors, yet still continue to get hired and pull down those big big bucks.
mclaren
@magurakurin:
BINGO.
The general election’s a year away. Do you think anyone will remember these Paris attacks a year from now?
Do you think anyone will give a flying fuck that Donald Trump or Ben Carson was once in the lead 8, 9 10 months back when we get to July of 2016?
Not a chance.
The American people are a trivial people, a silly people, a flighty people, a small-minded people, a shallow people, an easily-distracted people, a feckless people, a callow people, a gullible people.
Americans pay attention to the latest shiny object and quickly forget even the most seemingly earth-shaking issues the moment their stomachs growl or the wallets feel empty. The really big question right now is whether we get another major recession before election day in November 2016. Not whether this campaign will be about Donald Trump’s cryptofascist Latino-bashing or Ben Carson’s delusional Egyptian granary pyramids or this week’s Paris attacks.
mclaren
Incidentally, the inimitable James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has a hilarious takedown of Trump in the latest issue:
This writing is so good almost every line is quotable.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/wolcott-trump-insult-comic
David Koch
There is an attack & hostage situation in Mali right now. 170 in a hotel have been taken hostage. I doubt any republicans or corporate media sympathizers will call for a US invasion. It’s not Paris, London, NY and they’re not white after all
Frankensteinbeck
Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination are quite high. His odds of winning the presidency are quite low. We go on about the 45% floor Republicans have, but the same thing works in reverse, and our floor is higher in presidential election years. Democrats are disgusted by him. A lot of Republicans are embarrassed by him. Maybe most importantly, Hispanics (with very good reason!) hate him with a passion unlike their attitude for any other GOP candidate. Even given their lower voting rates, imagine the effect of the Hispanic vote dropping from about a third Republican to less than 10%. That could give us the House.
I’m supremely glad this incident happened so long from the election, because fear drives Republican turnout, and even a Republican press can’t keep this going that long.
@mclaren:
Kind of like above, I would argue that only about half of America are bully worshippers, but yeah, it’s real and half of America is a huge and disgusting number, and it sure includes the press. Look at how they lapped up Bush giving them insulting nicknames.
@22over7:
From the moment he threw out the hard racism, I knew he had a good shot. The GOP base are sick of having to pretend they’re not driven by hate.
@bluehill:
Entomologist checking in. If you mean you live in the American West, the little bitty scorpions can’t kill you. Only one American scorpion is at all dangerous, and it’s yellow and the size of a finger. Like the black widow’s bite, its sting very rarely kills, but you sure as Hell won’t enjoy the non-fatal symptoms.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone :)
rikyrah
Donald Trump’s Plan for a Muslim Database Draws Comparison to Nazi Germany
by VAUGHN HILLYARD
NEWTON, Iowa — Donald Trump “would certainly implement” a database system tracking Muslims in the United States, the Republican front-runner told NBC News on Thursday night.
“I would certainly implement that. Absolutely,” Trump said in Newton, Iowa, in between campaign town halls.
“There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases,” he added. “We should have a lot of systems.”
When asked whether Muslims would be legally obligated to sign into the database, Trump responded, “They have to be — they have to be.”
…………………..
Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of the nonprofit Interfaith Alliance, drew the same comparison Thursday night.
“My father was in World War II, and he fought to preserve America against what the Nazis were doing,” Moline told NBC News.
“This is exactly why there is an America, to not be like that,” he said.
Trump was repeatedly asked to explain how his idea was different. Four times, he responded: “You tell me.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-says-he-would-certainly-implement-muslim-database-n466716?nc=4444
raven
@rikyrah: And to you from the Emerald Coast! Gotta of get some sunrise pix in minute!
Mustang Bobby
@Calouste: I prefer Il Douche.
Mustang Bobby
And a gracious good Friday morning (at least that what it is here in South Florida) to all. I saw a community theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance the other night directed by a friend who was my first theatre professor 45 years ago. It was really good, but now I can’t get “With Cat-Like Tread” out of my head.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Also, we are beyond capable. Yes, this horrifies me as well. We should be jumping on this out of self interest alone, if for no other reason.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: Yup.
Another Holocene Human
@SRW1: We’re more like South Africa than we’ll ever admit.
Ever notice that refrain of “minority, minority, minority”. Straight up denial that we’re like South Africa, where a minority terrorized and disenfranchised the majority for years. Terms like “majoritarian” imply that it’s just “rule of mob” rather than a racist state, which the US has been since day one due in no small part to our little slavery problem.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: I’m going with bacterial mats. The thing about bacteria is, they will be fed.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus:
Rationalization is that amazing part of the brain that kicks in when you make a decision, but especially a questionable one, as when you lie. Perhaps you’re only lying to yourself. Well, you can’t avoid your phone calls, so that rationalization kicks up into high gear.
Your rationalizations will be as persuasive as you are.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Holocene Human: In some ways we are worse than South Africa ever was. I read somewhere that we have a larger percentage of our black populace imprisoned than SA did at the height of apartheid.
Another Holocene Human
@magurakurin:
This typo is awesome.
Another Holocene Human
@OzarkHillbilly: And there’s the Tuskegee Experiment. On the other hand, SA had the mining camps. Even after 1990, extremely low wages and terrible working conditions obtained.
The US went for “prison state” incarceration rates. Like one sees in authoritarian states.
eta: who needs Angola State Prison when you have the mining camps?
Keith G
Wait a minute….
The mainstream media resources that I follow do not respect Trump. They do cover him because unfortunately his words are accepted by many Republican as having legitimacy. These resources tend to include vocabulary which sometimes discreetly, sometimes overtly, tag Trump as being (minimally) a very unserious thinker.
Another Holocene Human
@David Koch:
Dammit, I was hoping for Strumpf, like the Smurfs (les Schtroumpfs).
Also a comical Tirolian knee high sock.
FlipYrWhig
@Mustang Bobby: well, now you’ve done it to me too…
Another Holocene Human
OT: so I didn’t read because paywalled, but WSJ reported that net flows from Mexico of migrants are reversed. Now I suppose peak construction and fruit picking season are over, but they implied this was a bigger trend. I don’t know if they were just counting border crossings or nationality, because a lot of folks coming over have been Hondurans who just traveled via Mexico.
Has Mexico’s economy improved? (I mean, more than it already had.) What’s up?
bemused
It made me happy this morning to learn that Willie Nelson sang “Living in the Promised Land” at tribute where he received the Gershwin Prize and got a standing ovation. It was reported that Kevin McCarthy was in attendance and seen reading his texts or something through Willie’s song although he did clap at the end.
J R in WV
Guys,
The site redesign has to do with how Balloon-Juice behaves and looks on your computer/tablet/phone. It has not yet fixed any problems dealing with how B-J on your computer talks to the servers where comments and posts (and the code base for Balloon-Juice) all live.
This is the job of the hosting company that John hires to run the servers John rents for our data, and the communications they set up between the internet and their server farms.
Tommy and Alain have worked on B-J behavior and appearance on your machines, along with mistermix and John. And that work is mostly done [I hope someone fixes the back arrow behavior before the ned of all this!!]
But having problems with data gone missing, responses timing out, all that is with the Internet host connections and the server farm maintenance. Which hasn’t happened yet. Feel free to gripe about it, it irritates me too. But don’t be blaming Tommy or Alain, or John OR mistermix for something they don’t have much to do with. Please.
As my Grandma would say “Boys, just hold yer water!” patience. please.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Holocene Human: I heard on NPR that the driver was people wanting family time. It is normal as most of them return home from time to time. Why are so many doing it now? Could just be statistical noise. Time will tell.
Bart
Utterly infuriating: an African-American woman locks herself out of her apartment, calls a locksmith and gets into her own apartment; meanwhile her white neighbour has called to police to report a Hispanic(!) woman breaking into the apartment. Nineteen(!) cops show up and order her out with guns drawn. Go read the whole thing, it’s just astonishing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/18/my-white-neighbor-thought-i-was-breaking-into-my-own-apartment-nineteen-cops-showed-up/
kindness
Is it Trump who is a failed candidate or is it all his voters who are failed citizens?
bystander
This may have been covered last night, but I noticed JC’s tweets about Elise Labott, the CNN reporter who has been suspended for a tweet. I had to go to her FB page and sure enough, rwns three feet thick piling on.
I hope Frankensteinbeck is right about how the country would react to a Trump/Clinton contest. After Bush Jr, nothing surprises me.
OzarkHillbilly
@kindness: Both.
mai naem mobile
Is this a likely voters survey or did they survey anybody who walks down the street and considers TMZ the news and has the Kardashians as apppintment viewing?
mai naem mobile
We need to remember Sarah of the Snowbilly Northwoods got actual votes in ’08. Anything is possible in America!
mclaren
@rikyrah:
Moslems today, liberals tomorrow, then the gays…
These guys are playing the Greatest Hits of 1935.
Sherparick
@cckids: Yes, time to rewrite the song.
It is very silly to underestimate Trump. He understands modern media and celebrity (he has been at it for 35 years). And he has the pulse on a Neo-Confederate America, about 60% of the white population, which has been in a growing panic since 2009 when they suddenly realized that a Black guy was President, and that all the privileges of being White in America may soon be “Gone with the Wind.”
People never thought Reagan could be President, and Trump is far smarter and more energetic then Ronald Reagan was on his best, pre-Alzheirmer days.
Keith G
@J R in WV: Thanks for your reminder on this. I have never understood anger, or even worse, self pity emanating from the frustration caused by using a free service.
The largest amount of frustration I have felt during this process was not from the glitches but was from people making the most absurdly privileged criticisms and, worse yet, attacks.
That frustration was extraordinarily minimal since there are about a billion other things to do on this planet.
Another Holocene Human
@bystander: Had to look that up. Suspended for that? Wow. And CNN claiming they have to be neutral because FOX and MSNBC are partisan. lolololol.
Another Holocene Human
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe they just made some fucking money this year and can afford to go home for a while.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Keith G: I just attempted to post a similar reply to JR in WV, but it got eated.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Sherparick: On the other hand, St. Ronnie had been the twice elected governor of the most populous state in the country and had already run for President twice before 1980. The appropriate parallel would be when he ran against Pat Brown in 1966.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Holocene Human: FYWP just sicced the comment gremlins on me. Al Jazeera has a story up:
Report: More Mexicans leaving US than arriving
Money quote:
Applejinx
My concern isn’t that Trump will win. My concern is that Hillary is watching Trump and drawing all the wrong conclusions. That’s why I’m going out to a Bernie organizer meeting today, even though it’s a terrible time for me to take hours just to drive to New Hampshire and attend a meeting.
Hillary will be steered by what she thinks is going to win her votes. Period. I don’t think she cares about anything else. But she’s also paying attention to what people want, and unlike Bernie she’s not there to tell them they’re wrong, even if they’re wrong. She just wants their votes.
This is why Bernie has to beat her, or come very close. It’s a precautionary measure to stop Hillary from trying to triangulate and pick up wingnut votes by out-warmongering Trump. That’s the worrying thing: in order to cover the widest possible ground, she wants to reach out towards what she sees on the hard right. Trump’s shoving that window so far towards sheer fascism, and I want no concessions to that mindset. Bow to that God and the terrorists win.
Iowa Old Lady
My biggest hope (fantasy?) about the shameful R behavior this year is that young people are watching and are horrified. I hope it’s creating a generation of D voters.
Applejinx
Consider that part of the reason Trump’s winning the R nomination, is that of all of them, he’s by far the most likely to tell you you’re wrong if he thinks you are. He delights in it, it’s his favorite thing ever.
Bernie is our counterpart to him, the one who can tap into that ‘give us somebody who isn’t pandering and false!’.
Hillary runs the risk of thinking it’s about his policies, and leaning towards those to pander. WORST POSSIBLE tactic. She would be better off getting in a physical slap-fight with Trump and screeching at him like a harpy, at least it would seem unscripted.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: My step-daughter told me a couple of months ago that she was appalled by Trump and she says she tries to keep an open mind between the D’s and R’s.
debbie
I wonder if McConnell’s thinking to himself that maybe that 100% obstruction thing might have been a mistake?
OzarkHillbilly
Life imitating Kafka:
Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case
Welcome to the banana republic formerly known as Kansas.
gene108
@Iowa Old Lady:
I think it is creating a generation of “fuck it, politics suck why bother” and rejuvenated right-wingers. Though I hope I am wrong.
I am just feeling very optimistic about the future. Edit Not very optimietic
mclaren
@Another Holocene Human:
Mexico’s economy hasn’t improved, America’s economy has gone into the toilet. That 5.5% unemployment figure we keep hearing about? It’s because so many Americans have given up looking for work.
Something doesn’t add up when you compare the different government statistics. 5.5% unemployment, but an all-time record low employment participation rate.
So let’s see…the press and economists trumpet a ‘strong’ employment gain of 279,000 people last month, yet the number of people who have dropped out of the labor force increased by 579,000 from August. Hmmm… Let’s see… That’s…oh, golly gee, a net negative number of 300,000 people in the workforce, yet the press reports only on the employment gains.
We’re told that the inflation rate as measured by the CPI runs less than 2% per annum. Meanwhile, rents in Portland OR have gone up 40% over the last 2 years. Let’s do the math once again: the square root of 1.4 is about 1.184, so the actual rate of inflation for apartment rents in Portland OR is 18.4% per year, not 1.8% as the CPI claims. Oh, but wait! That’s right! The CPI (consumer price index) specifically excludes housing costs and energy costs. Gee, that’s convenient, isn’t it? And as for rents in San Francisco? They’ve gone up by 40% in just one year. New York? Fuhgeddaboudit, they’re reaching new altitude records daily. Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago? Same story.
The plain fact is that rents have never taken up as much of the average person’s paycheck as they do now, in 2015. Ever. Not in recorded economic statistics in the history of the United States. Middle class workers are getting forced out of all the major cities in America by unaffordable rents and stratospheric housing prices. There is not one single major city in America where a worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a minimum wage income and have any money left over for luxuries like food or gasoline or clothing.
Mind you, I’m not making a shadowstats-type argument that the government or economists are actually lying about things like the inflation rate or the unemployment. I’m just pointing out the fact that the government and economists have very conveniently defined these numbers so that (for example) unemployment numbers can go down even while the number of people in the workforce as a whole drops. That’s impossible and everyone knows it. If the total number of people as a percentage of the workforce drops, then common sense tells you that unemployment HAS to rise. You can only get away from that conclusion by carefully redefining unemployed people as “people actively looking for work.” Those who are homeless, or living in their parents’ basement, or subsisting on food stamps and crashing on a friend’s couch, well, they’re not technically unemployed, so they don’t count.
The U.S. economy is much worse than the statistics suggest. Some economists, like Umair Haque and Brad deLong, are pointing this out. Check beneath the surface stats like GDP growth and unemployment rate to the underlying numbers, and you find out things are truly dire for the average American. Example: one third of Americans are now just one paycheck away from being homeless. Example: 62% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings to tide them over in case of catastrophe. Example: subprime auto loans are at all-time high with the rejection rate for car loans now at an all-time low and the total balance of auto loans outstanding a mind-boggling 870 billion dollars, with all-time record average loan length of 5.5 years. Example: in most big cities in the United States, it takes more than 85% of a monthly minimum wage to pay for rent on a single bedroom apartment.
These are not sustainable trends. These are not the signs of a healthy economy.
It seems clear that the American economy is so bad right now that Mexicans are leaving because they just can’t find work. Jobs that used to be done by Mexican immigrants without green cards are now being done by recent college graduates and formerly middle-class people who’ve been laid off and can never find a job in the legitimate economy again, so must make do with cash-only jobs like landscaping and busboy in the underground ‘gray’ economy.
That’s my take on why Mexicans are leaving America to go back to Mexico. As the U.S. middle class collapses, formerly middle class American citizens desperately grasp at the jobs the undocumented immigrants used to do.
debbie
.
bemused
@Iowa Old Lady:
I TRY to hope that not so young people can no longer ignore the shameful R behavior and are horrified.
gene108
@debbie:
The 100% obstruction landed McConnell his dream job as Senate Majority Leader, that he has waited a lifetime for and helped Republicans have a lock on the House for the foreseeable future, as well as dominance at the state and local levels.
He really does not care which Reoublican is President, as long as he is running the Senate.
debbie
@ruemara:
And it all started with Sarah Palin…
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
I listened to a Cruz interview yesterday. He’s blaming the current wave of terrorism on “Clinton-Obama policies,” as if the intervening 8 years had been bathed in magic pixie dust so that nothing bad at all had happened during that period.
The Pale Scot
@Amir Khalid:
That’s what scares me Amir. These are the people that selected a doddering actor who even before he was elected was confusing his acting roles with reality over a former ambassador and CIA director in the primary, then choose him over a former naval officer and nuclear engineer.
That was when I decided not to have children, I couldn’t see country of morons with a nuclear inventory lasting long.
Denali
Isn’t it interesting that the Republicans finally have an issue that they can play upon – fear. The economy is working; unemployment is down; crime is also down. But now they have been given a gift. They are probably incredibly grateful to the terrorists for this opportunity. Sickening.
debbie
@J R in WV:
What??? Two wrongs don’t make a right?
ms_canadada
@rikyrah: Good morning to you! I really appreciate your daily sunny greeting. Have a wonderful day.
debbie
@Another Holocene Human:
Nothing wrong with what she said. No problems as I recall with the depictions of a weeping SOL after 9/11.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human: Net immigration from Mexico has been negative for years. That’s what, to me, makes all the freakouts about a border wall seem so unreal. They’re mostly worrying about a flood of Mexican economic migrants that has already stopped.
Keep in mind, though, it’s not just migrants from Mexico who come in through the Mexican border. The refugee crisis that had Republicans freaking out in 2014 was about Central American children, who I think were mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
MomSense
@Mustang Bobby:
As problems go, that’s a good one.
FlipYrWhig
@bystander: Wait, what? I went to high school with Elise Labott.
Bobby Thomson
@magurakurin:
If they are, it isn’t working, and I’m OK with that.
It is an article of faith among Sanders supporters (such as Martin Longman and Al Giordano) that he will win Iowa and New Hampshire because he is putting all his efforts into organizing those states, and that then the narrative will instantly change as it did for John Kerry in 2004. That was a really weird year. There were several candidates jockeying for first, no one was running away with the contest, and no one was really out of it before Iowa. Then Clark and Dean imploded almost overnight, and Democrats were scared and jumped on the bandwagon of a national security candidate. Kerry occasionally dropped into single digits, but was never as far out of the lead nationally as Sanders has been for months. O’Malley’s campaign is basically over, making this a two-person contest that Clinton can easily win outside of Sanders’ neighborhood.
And again, I’m OK with that. It will take a pretty bad defeat to bring some of the Internet fanbois back to Earth. I love Sanders and think he’s been good for this election, but the Koch-funded faux purity troll campaign has been transparent and annoying. (It takes only a few paid fluffers to whip people up.) I won’t miss it.
mclaren
@debbie:
“Wave of terrorism”?
It’s one attack. ONE.
You can’t do statistics with a sample size of one.
There is no “wave” of terror attacks. There has been one, in France, in the last 5 years. That’s not a “wave of attacks.”
So when someone hits your car with their car, do you call up your insurance company and report a ‘wave of car crashes’?
When you get sick with the flu, do you announce to people that there’s a `wave of influenza’?
One event is one event. This hysteria about a ‘wave’ of `terror attacks’ is just delusional.
One of the things Bruce Schneier keeps point out is terror attacks after 1990 are one-off events. The Muraugh Building bombing in 1995 is a one-of-its-kind event. it was never repeated. The twin towers attack was a one-of-its-kind event. It has never been repeated.
The Paris attack has all the same hallmarks of this one-of-a-kind event. It will almost certainly not be repeated.
We really seriously need to stop describing the one-off singular events as “a wave of attacks” or “a dangerous trend” or “increasing amounts of terorrism.” A one-time-only event is not a trend.
Statistically speaking, the average American or the average Parisian is 50 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than from a terror attack, and 100 times more likely to die from slipping and falling in the bathtub than from a terror attack. Yet no one talks about “waves of lightning deaths” or ‘waves of bathroom slip-and-fall deaths.’
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: So Republicans basically hate brown children. You know, “pro-life.”
debbie
@mclaren:
He and his ilk are lumping BLM into that “wave.”
ETA: And of course what’s going on in Mali now will only reinforce this lie.
Botsplainer
Conservatives really are the people we thought they were – authoritarian, racist, misogynist, bigoted, cruel, violent and relentlessly, mindlessly reckless in pursuit of ideology, regardless of their protestations to the contrary.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
More proof of how ingrained that thinking is when Hollywood makes a movie about ISIS taking over London to kill the (white) American president…
https://youtu.be/LgFvg2zvN6A
But it’s starting to come across like a lot of conservatives think ISIS is some real life version of Cobra from GI-Joe.
Bobby Thomson
@Frankensteinbeck:
People do have very short memories, but they seemed to do a good job keeping the 9/11 fear going. I agree, though, that will be looking for something extra to inspire the mob, like Ebola 2.0. And Daesh will be doing its part to turn out the vote for Republicans.
mclaren
@Sherparick:
Reagan was a diabolically genial and kindly-seeming sociopath with a genius for getting the people to love him even while his policies destroyed their lives, while Trump wears his cruelty and sociopathy on his sleeve. Plus, it’s quite clear that Trump’s business policies have ruined the lives of most of the people who live in New York City by making real estate unaffordable.
Also, America was rich and smug when the Cruel Man With the Constant Smile ran for president in 1980. Today, Americans realize that a great deal is at stake in this election, and the average middle class voter is hurting badly and understands that this economy and this society is in real serious trouble. Remember: we weren’t living in a militarized panopticon-surveillance national security state under undeclared martial law back in 1980, and recent college grads and people over 50 could find a job. The average voter today understands that continued Republican policies mean more economic crashes, fewer jobs, more endless unwinnable foreign wars, more stasi-style police state militarization. As well as more war on drugs, more war on women, more war on abortion, etc. etc. etc.
So the analogy with Reagan just doesn’t hold.
debbie
@Botsplainer:
That is a seriously excellent sentence.
magurakurin
@Another Holocene Human:
If you meant, SEC Primary, that’s what they are calling Super Tuesday since the southern states are front loaded this year. So South Eastern Conference Primary. Any other typos I can’t be sure of because I’m such a shitty speller.
mclaren
@Botsplainer:
True — and refreshingly, unlike 1980 or 2001, we’re now seeing massive pushback by the entire Democratic party and much of the press against the Republicans for these toxic traits.
Back in 1980, Jimmy Carter and the Democrats didn’t present a united front against Reagan’s delusions and voodoo economics and outright lies. Now they are.
Back in September 2001, the entire Democratic party shamefully caved and folded and supinely voted in favor of all the insane policies the Republicans rammed through (Democrats vote din the AUMF, Democrats voted for the Iraq invasion, Democrats voted for the tax cuts for billionaires, Democrats voted for the USA
PatriotTreason Act).Not so now. That encourages me greatly.
Germy
@Bobby Thomson:
Yes, there was something on the LawyersGuns&Money blog about that. Someone connected with Karl Rove is setting up a scam where HRC gets attacked “from the Left” just to create enough doubt and discouragement so people stay home on election day.
Bobby Thomson
@mclaren: Sorry, I was around in 1980. We were still feeling the effects of stagflation and energy costs were skyrocketing. Reagan was viewed as a joke until suddenly he wasn’t.
Germy
@mclaren:
I want to believe that, but I’m discouraged by the list of democrats who voted to restrict refugees. The list is too long, in my opinion.
BillinGlendaleCA
@mclaren:
No, the economy was sliding into recession in 1980 and there was the oil crisis of 1979.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus:
Quoted for truth. I am enraged as well as terribly sad. How did all these haters and bedwetters get elected?
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: Anchor babies! Ebola-infected anchor babies!!!! Sent by the ISIS branch in Guatemala!
rikyrah
Miss Honduras dead: Boyfriend of Maria Jose Alvarado’s sister, who went missing days before Miss World, confesses to her murder
Police say Plutarco Ruiz admitted shooting the two women dead before taking officers to the burial site
Ian Johnston
The boyfriend of Miss Honduras’ sister has confessed to killing her and the 19-year-old beauty queen, a leading police officer has said.
Two bodies believed to be of Maria Jose Alvarado, who was due to compete in the Miss World Pageant in London in December, and her sister, Sofia, 23, were found buried on a river bank in mountains near Santa Barbara in Honduras on Wednesday
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/miss-honduras-dead-suspect-confesses-to-killing-beauty-queen-and-her-sister-9871690.html
weaselone
@mclaren: you do realize that words have specific meanings, right? There is nothing contradictory in having 500k people leaving the labor force and employment increasing by 300k, nor can you just net them out and arrive at a meaningful figure. Now, 500k people leaving the labor market isn’t generally a positive economic indicator, and the economics writers you name make decent cases for the economy being weaker than the unemployment rate and raw employment figures suggest. You do not make that case by misusing the numbers and tossing out rent increases in desirable, supply constrained real estate markets.
Cermet
@mclaren: Damn – there you go again sighting facts; next, you will tell us what we don’t want to hear … . By the way, very good support of your premise. Write reports, much?
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: I still hope you will hang in there. I don’t think hanging it’s so much a measure of your sanity as maybe it’s a measure of what you get out of Balloon Juice in its better times.
I don’t know if you saw Cole’s comment, but it sounds like the server hosting people are doing a big upgrade today. That might bring temporary chaos but it should help a lot with stability once the upgrade is completed.
Also, if their upgrade doesn’t help with the issues of the page not being available, comments being eaten, etc, then it will be obvious that the problems lie with the website itself, with no ability to assume the problem is with the web hosting. That may sound like a bad thing, but to this technical person, that still sounds like progress to me. Once you know the problem is on your end, then the solution to the problem is under your control.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
If Trump makes it to the general election and I were Hillary, I’d put is deranged Ben Carson belt buckle rant on constant loop. I really thought that would be his last hurrah but I guess not. Still, who could look at that tape and think, this guy is POTUS material? I mean, the 27 percenters won’t care but for anyone else…I have a hard time believing any of them wouldn’t find it disqualifying.
C.V. Danes
If you ever wanted to know what it must have felt like to watch Germany descend into Naziism, just look around and weep.
Matt McIrvin
@mclaren:
It’s not that simple.
The government counts discouraged and “marginally attached” workers (U-4, U-5) and the underemployed (U-6). Those numbers are higher than U-3, but they’re not steady or rising. They’re all going down in step with U-3, and the biggest difference is between U-5 and U-6. Often, what you hear is that some big change during the Clinton administration cooked the numbers, but that (if I recall correctly) was just going from U-5 to U-3. Not a big difference.
So if you claim those numbers are really going up, you are making the Shadowstats argument.
I am also skeptical of the “common sense says” argument, because if you break it down by gender, you find that the rise in labor force participation up to the late 90s was entirely because of women entering the workforce. Labor force participation for men has been dropping since the 1950s. Yet we don’t say that unemployment for men has been rising continuously since the 1950s. It obviously hasn’t.
So what’s going on? I think it’s two things, on the basis of looking at BLS statistics broken down by age groups. First of all, the whole population is getting older, so more people are retired. That’s not to say that people are retiring earlier, because they’re not. Labor-force participation is actually increasing in the older age brackets. But it’s still lower in those brackets than in the younger ones, and more people are moving into those brackets.
The other thing is where there’s a grain of truth in your argument. It’s that labor-force participation among people in their teens and twenties is down, and I do think that’s because of a persistently slack labor market. There are kids who are delaying entering the workforce in the first place. Some may be well-off kids who are trying to wait it out in school, not taking summer jobs, etc. But if they’re not working, that in itself exacerbates the student-debt problem.
I often hear that there’s a persistent problem with long-term umemployment for middle-aged workers, some with outdated skills, and I think there is one. But you can’t see it in labor-force participation. The participation rate for people in their forties and fifties is stable or rising.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@C.V. Danes: So were are the Communists and Fascists fighting in the streets?
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The website redesign threads come close.
germy
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/did-the-paris-attacks-actually-give-boost-trump.html#
germy
what’s the fucking point
gvg
@mclaren: There are fewer American’s employed because the boomers are retiring. A fact that we knew was coming for decades.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-baby-boomers-retirement-means-for-the-u-s-economy/
“For decades, the retirement of the baby boom generation has been a looming economic threat. Now, it’s no longer looming — it’s here. Every month, more than a quarter-million Americans turn 65. ”
“The recession may have delayed the inevitable for a time. The financial crisis wiped away billions in retirement savings, forcing many Americans to work longer than planned. But the stock market has since rebounded, and there are signs that more Americans are at last feeling confident enough to leave the workforce. The labor force participation rate for older Americans — the share of those 55 and older who are working or actively looking for work — has fallen over the past year after rising through the recession and early years of the recovery. Roughly 17 percent of baby boomers now report that they are retired, up from 10 percent in 2010.”
first time copying a link since the change and not sure what’s going to happen.
Chris
@SRW1:
Maybe the US really is special and doesn’t need anywhere close to 30 percent unemployment to give the keys to a little fascist.
It’s noteworthy that the closest thing to a fascist regime we’ve had in America, the Confederate States of America, came to power not in reaction to a massive economic crisis, or to the shock of a major military defeat. It came to power because for the first time in their lives, a presidential election put somebody in the White House that the slave owners didn’t like.
Matt McIrvin
…Now DeLong’s argument is more sophisticated, and I think he’s right. It’s that GDP growth never went back to the extrapolated pre-recession trend, like it did with past recessions. And I think he’s right about the main reason too: it’s that the public sector kept getting slashed at all levels, rather than growing to pick up slack in the private labor market as it did after previous recessions.
WaterGirl
@germy: That doesn’t sound like you! Maybe you are thrown off because you are no longer mangling shoes?
WaterGirl
@Baud: Hey, I have been missing you on the threads! How goes it in your world?
gogol's wife
@mclaren:
Thanks for reminding me, I wanted to quote “An orange Elvis squirted from a can of Cheez Whiz” on here, but I forgot. Immortal phrase!
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I’ve been here. Hope you are back posting regularly. About to go into the dentist’s chair, so wish me luck.
WaterGirl
@Baud: ugh. wishing you luck and the quick passing of time while you are there!
will definitely be back now that the site is more readable.
germy
@WaterGirl: No, just had a bunch of comments disappear. And then when I posted a “naked” link I went into moderation limbo.
Kay
This has to be the biggest “both sides do it” reach of this year:
I would just like to object to this blanket assertion: I am no more “jittery” than I was last month.
Huckabee said “Americans are afraid”. I wish he would leave me out of his loathsome, fear-mongering personal enrichment scam. I have more respect for pay day lenders and those people who sell rip-off replacement window deals. They at least don’t claim to speak for “Americans”.
WaterGirl
@germy: That is maddening! I have taken to copying my comment before pressing post, but sometimes I forget. ugh.
Matt McIrvin
By the way, if you want a whole lot of charts of the labor force participation rate broken down and sliced up a million ways, there’s your link.
It looks to me as if effect #1 I talked about, people moving into older cohorts where participation has always been lower, is ongoing, whereas effect #2, young people delaying entering the labor force, hit hard in one sharp shock in 2008-09 and basically has persisted without much change since then. The number of people who were once working, but have left the labor force because of discouragement, went way up with the recession but is decreasing.
Chris
@The Pale Scot:
That’s what scares me Amir. These are the people that selected a doddering actor who even before he was elected was confusing his acting roles with reality over a former ambassador and CIA director in the primary, then choose him over a former naval officer and nuclear engineer.
One of the most interesting things about the Reagan election is that while the guy ran in large part on a strong-on-defense Cold War platform, he beat not one but two former military officers (one of them a war veteran) on the strength of his own service making… propaganda movies. A procedure that would be repeated twenty years later when George W. Bush, a draft-dodger, beat three people who’d served in Vietnam (Gore, McCain and Kerry) – two of them in combat roles. (Though to be fair to Bush, even his service in the ANG was less phony than Reagan’s – there are a lot more ways to be killed by a malfunctioning fighter jet than by motion picture equipment).
It was the time when the right wing and much of the nation resolutely embraced fiction over reality, repeatedly choosing the person least qualified to decide anything war-related over the people with actual experience in that domain, because the unqualified person sold them the line of bullshit they liked to hear. We’re still seeing it today.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Kerry’s statement was dumb (the degree of “rationale” or lack thereof was about the same for both attacks), but it wasn’t a “both sides do it”.
I am afraid. I’m not afraid of ISIS, I’m afraid of people like Huckabee. And Trump, and Carson, and Marco Rubio, and the rest of the lot.
MomSense
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’ve been saying this since the reign of C+ Augustus, the American right wing and the terrorists are in a symbiotic relationship. They need each other to gain and/or stay in power.
MomSense
@Mustang Bobby:
Il douche! Perfect.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. And in the French version of that, afraid of the Front National.
NotMax
A Republican (!) worthy of praise for these words.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I spent the last terror panic patiently listening to all these arguments about how there are “legitimate concerns”. I’m just not playing along this time. I don’t know a whole lot about immigration law but I know enough to know that the refugees are not a threat, as compared to other threats, in reality. Crossing the street involves risk. There are no risk-free activities. I don’t even know who these Americans are who had this enormous, child-like faith that any of these leaders were “protecting” all of us 100% anyway. I never in my adult life believed that. Not one day.
Seanly
NPR played some clips from that rally yesterday. First, it sounded like some rightwing comedian working the crowd. Second, can he really keep up this hateful act for another 11 months? Third, WTF is wrong with the people buying this fascist act?
ruemara
@Bart: read it a couple of days ago. Jesus Christ, the fucking comments.
Chris
@Kay:
The gun violence is what makes it especially blatant.
We’ve decided long ago that the tree of liberty should be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and schoolchildren. As a result of which we have the equivalent of a Paris attack on an ongoing basis in this country. What possible difference does it make if a few of the people going on shooting rampages are now Muslims?
NotMax
@Kay
“We must not give in to the temptation to close ourselves off”
– François Hollande
France’s proposed acceptance of 30,000 refugees stands unaltered.
japa21
@NotMax: Unbelievable. That is even better than what many Dems have said. He is echoing Obama. Of course, he has probably doomed his reelection chances. Sure somebody is filing papers, as we speak, to challenge him in the primary.
NotMax
Comment appears to have disappeared into who knows where. Second attempt.
@Kay
“We must not give in to the temptation to close ourselves off.”
– François Hollande
France’s proposed acceptance of 30,000 refugees stands unaltered.
Eric U.
just do what the TWIB people do, publish many times
rikyrah
@Botsplainer:
TELL THAT TRUTH
schrodinger's cat
When did the home of the brave and the land of the free become the home of easily frightened and the land of the perpetually afraid.
Peale
@Bobby Thomson: seriously, I think the attAck would need to be in the U.S. To sustain this level of hyperbole for months. We can’t remember Sandy Hook , but if The Sandy Hook shooter was named Abdullah, the outrage would have lasted more than six weeks. This attack was in France and at some point someone is going to notice that none of the terrorists were Syrian.
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
In the comments to that TPM story, it’s noted that he still voted to keep Syrian refugees out. Fine words indeed, but not matched by his action.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
A description repeatedly used on my then active blog from 2001 onward still (all too sadly) stands.
Government of the panicked, by the panicked, for the panicked.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
I don’t know, but I have to say that I find the quote “nation of cowards” to be one of the most spot-on commentaries on our era.
scav
I’m so not buying the “legitimate fears” justification BS. All I somehow see is a 400-lb fat man sitting down to a 12-course meal of deep-fried Snickers talking about legitimate hunger. Because these legitimate fears seem always to blow up like a windstorm prior to an election or ratings sweep and then die away. And the legitimacy always seems to err on the side of legitimazing only certain fears — fear of the police, for example, beating you up after driving or locking yourself out of the appartment is just evidence you’ve done something wrong and aren’t properly deferential.
schrodinger's cat
Creating impossible road blocks for Iraqi refugees (they are also impacted by yesterday’s bill) is shameful to say the least. Especially, given the role the Bush misadventure and its aftermath is responsible for the current situation in Iraq.
Why are all these so called middle experts, the thoroughly discredited cheerleaders for Iraq. I am speaking of the Snooze Hour let alone CNN or Fox News.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
My cringing (D) rep also voted yes.
Abhorred her before, loathe her even more now.
Always knew her true colors would show. (Her family’s machinations in state politics have been consistently odious and ultra-ultra-right.)
But she has been anointed a rising star so such gross deviations will, most unfortunately, be ignored or swept under the rug by most.
Librarian
@Kay: This seems to be the emerging Villager consensus: that Obama acted “petulant” and “snarky” last week when he (horrors!) attacked the Republicans. John Meacham just said the same thing on Morning Joe. He actually said that Obama “had a bad week.” Nothing about how the GOP has been acting. Did I mention that Meacham is a hack, a charlatan and a tool?
Peale
@schrodinger’s cat: Yep. We’ve accepted 130K Iraqi refugees in the past 10 years. And of course, they have been causing as many problems as, well, not that many problems at all and all of them related to the types of problems that people generally have. But hey, you can’t vouch for em and don’t want to be responsible if someday sometime somewhere there is a rape or robbery, so let’s just go nuts with the laws.
This law must have been in the wings for quite some time since it passed so quickly. I’m sure it will be expanded to exclude all Muslim countries eventually.
D58826
You know the world has jumped the shark when Scalia makes sense. From Huffington:
WaterGirl
@NotMax: A sighting of a Republican statesman! That’s becoming more rare than Bigfoot. thanks for posting
Hoodie
@NotMax: Hate to tell you, while the speech was nice, the guy voted for the bill.
Matt McIrvin
@D58826: Yeah, but let’s see if Scalia is still talking like that now.
Matt McIrvin
@scav: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard some Germans complaining about actual trouble being stirred by ultraconservative Muslims in their refugee camps, but they have refugee camps; they’re experiencing this on a whole different order of magnitude from anything happening in the United States. And the United States is freaking out more. It’s just absurd.
The frustrating thing is, it’s not like we can prove a negative to someone who’s chosen to obsess about this. You can always squint at the situation all day long and see some kind of an argument that there might actually be a refugee who is a terrorist, or becomes a terrorist, and you know the moment that happens everyone acts vindicated. Stated in terms of relative risk, it’s completely absurd. But that argument doesn’t work politically; you have to bow down to total irrationality and argue on its terms.
And even Charlie Pierce ceded too much ground to this. I think he might have been arguing against some strawman open-borders hypothetical in which we just let in everybody without screening, but that wouldn’t happen anyway.
? Martin
I will never forget the exchange I overheard at the hardware store where the checker and a customer were casually discussing why they were both hoping the rapture would come soon – the checker because she hated her job, and the customer because she had run up a bunch of credit card debt. I butted in and asked why either one thought they would get into heaven given that they were both hoping for most of humanity to face tribulation so that they could escape these mundane economic inconveniences, before heading over to another checker.
These people vote, and you can only imagine they are voting for whoever will turn the earth into a sea of brimstone the fastest.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg:
That’s interesting–I hadn’t seen the numbers for this year.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: Well, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting (as opposed to the 2014 Fort Hood shooting) was pretty much what you’re imagining– it was by an Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan who had been become a radical Islamist and was exchanging emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, and there was a push to classify it as a terrorist act, but I don’t really recall a long-term freakout on the level of what’s happening now. I think people were preoccupied with other things, like the economy being in the crapper.
bemused
@? Martin:
What was their reaction?
? Martin
“For the last three years, California has added jobs at a rate faster than all but five other states.”
And that’s with both tax increases and increased spending to social programs. It would be nice to see someone like Clinton draw a contrast between California and Kansas.
? Martin
@bemused: They started to defend how good a person they were. Just the usual lack of introspection with no real doubt in their mind they would be among the chosen few. These people can’t be reasoned with, but it made me feel better – well, until I realized that they are still voters.
? Martin
Rubio: “It’s about closing down any place, whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site, any place where radicals are being inspired”
Then we need to close down most GOP state legislatures, from what I’ve seen.
Chris
@Peale:
Yep. Couple years ago the topic of Afghan interpreters came up, and I commented somewhat disgustedly that I didn’t expect much action, because no one would want the responsibility; if even one turned out to be a mole, people would remember him and ignore everyone else. This week has been that on steroids.
Ruckus
I’m back!
For those of you nicely knocking me for being frustrated, please tell me that you aren’t as well. Everyone has a point at which they say please, enough is enough. I’ve been in mgf for most of my life other than when I worked in professional sports. I’m back in mfg as I’ve said before and what I make is usually high precision things in metal for various industries, usually in ones and twos, rarely more than ten parts. I started working with computers over 40 yrs ago and have programmed a lot over the years. Not usually the kind of programming we think of now but this and what I do gives me a lot of experience in frustration. A whole fucking lot. And I know people who own an ISP who have built several server farms and provide highly secure systems. So while my experience is not direct I’ve seen a lot of the issues close up. I know frustration and I hit my wall last night.
Deal with it.
Elie
@Sherparick:
I totally disagree that Trump is a lot smarter– maybe more cunning for sure. Yes — at least we think he has more energy than Raegan… Remember that this is a 69 year old who has never run for anything. Obama was in his late 40’s and in shape and he got gray while running for office. Trump is also a screamer and has a volatile personality. This can be associated with unexpected cardiac and or cerebral events, even if conditions like hypertension are managed. Looking at that red face and that circumorbital fat and edema — I’m not thinking that he is in A-1 health. This is a tough thing he is trying to do and its all risk and exposure — unlike what he has done in the past.
Citizen_X
I’m imagining a visit from Future Me, back in the ’80s while I’m watching the “Put ’em up against the wall!” scene from The Wall:
Future Me: You know who’s going to act this out, in real life, in the future?
Me: I dunno. Hitler’s hidden grandson? Reagan’s clone?
FM: Donald. Fucking. Trump.
Me: Oh, piss off!
bemused
@? Martin:
I think it’s hilarious they are so positive they are rapture worthy. Quite arrogant of these people to decide for God that they are saved and chosen to be raptured.
Bill
@bemused:
It’s an easy life when you’ve been told “faith alone” gets you a spot in paradise.
WaterGirl
@? Martin: Martin, I love you for butting in and speaking up, and I loved what you said, as well.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Ruckus, I hope I am not included in the group you are referring to because I was trying to encourage you to hang in there, but I don’t for a second not understand the frustration.
Apologies if I didn’t communicate that well. I think those of us who have experience in programming or technology have perhaps been more frustrated than most because we know it didn’t have to go this way.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re still here!
WaterGirl
Oops, dead thread. It appears that I am talking to myself.