(Joel Pett via GoComics.com)
Via Billmon’s twitter feed, David Corn at Mother Jones introduces us to the latest GOP propaganda / money funnel:
Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington—including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner—has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell—including aides to congressional Republicans—cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders. They devise strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. And the Groundswell gang is mounting a behind-the-scenes organized effort to eradicate the outsize influence of GOP über-strategist/pundit Karl Rove within Republican and conservative ranks. (For more on Groundswell’s “two front war” against Rove—a major clash on the right—click here.)
One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)….
A certain amount of secrecy cloaks Groundswell’s efforts. Though members have been encouraged to zap out tweets with a #GSW hashtag, a message circulated to members of its Google group noted that the role of certain advocates should be kept “off of the Google group for OPSEC [operational security] reasons.” This “will avoid any potential for bad press for someone if a communication item is leaked,” the message explained. (The Groundswell documents were provided to Mother Jones by a source who had access to its Google group page and who has asked not to be identified.)…
At the March 27 meeting, Groundswell participants discussed one multipurpose theme they had been deploying for weeks to bash the president on a variety of fronts, including immigration reform and the sequester: Obama places “politics over public safety.” In a display of Groundswell’s message-syncing, members of the group repeatedly flogged this phrase in public. Frank Gaffney penned a Washington Times op-ed titled “Putting Politics Over Public Safety.” Tom Fitton headlined a Judicial Watch weekly update “Politics over Public Safety: More Illegal Alien Criminals Released by Obama Administration.” Peter List, editor of LaborUnionReport.com, authored a RedState.com post called “Obama’s Machiavellian Sequestration Pain Game: Putting Politics Over Public Safety.” Matthew Boyle used the phrase in an immigration-related article for Breitbart. And Dan Bongino promoted Boyle’s story on Twitter by tweeting, “Politics over public safety?” In a message to Groundswellers, Ginni Thomas awarded “brownie points” to Fitton, Gaffney, and other members for promoting the “politics over public safety” riff…
… Groundswellers constantly brainstorm via their Google group in search of a magic talking point, or a silver bullet of messaging. On April 24, Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, posted a message to the Google group, writing, “We should have a unified name for the immigration bill so that as the other side is calling it ‘reform,’ we present a unified front against that notion. If we’re all calling it different things, their ‘reform’ message will win. We only combat the idea that it is reform if we hammer back with one different phrase/name.” She tossed out a few ideas: “Schumer-Rubio bill,” “anti-security bill,” and “amnesty bill.” Sheryl Kaufman, the communications director for Rep. Jim Bridenstine, chimed in that she was fond of a phrase derived by MonCreif: “‘OBAMAGRATION’—I love it!! Communicates the similarity with Obamacare.” …
BGinCHI
Can we find a way to combine this thread and the last one?
Why can’t the parasites infest these parasites and kill the whole hive?
dmsilev
I’m still giggling over these bits:
and
Steve in the ATL
Add in a Cheney and George Zimmerman and you will seal this as the least likeable group of people in the country
dmsilev
@BGinCHI: That never works. You end up just breeding stronger parasites.
dmsilev
Also worth noting, many of the “journalists” who take part in this little circle-jerk were among those who were screaming and wailing about JournoList (remember that?).
Keith G
And again, PBS shows why it’s a bit narrow minded and self defeating for progressives to conger up reasons not to support it.
The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage: How Guest Workers Lower US Wages
Emphasis mine.
karen marie
John Boehner is STILL flogging “Fast and Furious” in his outgoing message. It’s just hard to fathom, except that it keeps the base base in line and the money flowing in.
CS
@dmsilev:
You beat me to it.
Baud
Apparently, the latest gambit is to tell the public not to participate in Obamacare, and to shut down the government until Obamacare is defunded….
To which I’m thinking, “What a great way to advertise the full implementation of Obamacare!”
But then I’ve never quite gotten my head around the current GOP.
gogol's wife
Isn’t Gayle Trotter the “ordinary housewife” who appeared at the Congressional hearing on guns and talked about guarding her babies with an AK-47 or some such?
danielx
What, no Ralph Reed? No gathering of national-level Republican grifters/swine can be complete without him!
AnotherBruce
If only there were another right wing think tank to preach the true conservative message, and spread damaging information about Obama, Yeah, that’s what we need.
Ash Can
Please proceed, GOP.
BGinCHI
BTW, you know who else touted public safety as a reason to seize power?
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
Robespierre?
BGinCHI
I’m guessing they spend the last hour of every meeting figuring out how to get handsomely paid. Then they close by biting the heads off chickens.
John O
Kevin Drum has a funny bit on this today.
Is Frank Gaffney deemed sane enough for even THIS company? That guy is a total loon.
dmsilev
@BGinCHI: Frederick Douglass?
Belafon
@BGinCHI: 42 of the other 43 presidents? I figure Washington didn’t really have to do much.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: According the Texas history textbooks the answer is Abe Lincoln.
gogol's wife
@dmsilev:
How do they plan to get their writing up to 4th-grade level?
dmsilev
@gogol’s wife: Charter schools and vouchers of course.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: And lose their audience?
Unpossible.
Seanly
@Keith G:
Women & minorities are both way underrepresented in civil engineering. In my 20 years of professional work (not including grad school) I’ve worked with one (1) college educated US citizen who was a minority.
Back on topic – what a bunch of maroons. People hate their message not because of Obama magic or poor marketing but because their message stinks.
Kay
They have to put this theme:
and this theme:
together somehow.
dollared
Wow. Trotter, Gaffney, Bolton. We need to get them a 12 seat limo. All the clowns in one car.
NickT
It’s so unfair when people accurately perceive the reality behind the white hood.
Trollhattan
Aww, can’t they go all in and call it what they want: “OBAMANIGRATION”?
Ginni: drunk dial me. I have eye-deurrs.
Tone in DC
“We are failing the propaganda battle with minorities. Terms like, ‘GOP,’ ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Conservative’ communicate ‘racism.’”
I had to laugh at that. These teabaggers actually admit that GOP, conservative and such communicate racism. You’d think these 4th graders would say that “conservatives ARE NOT racists!!eleventy!”
Pretty much all these guys are spouting is fact-free shit (President Obama is compromising public safety!) and the idea that the president’s name is, in and of itself, a dirty word in their universe.
piratedan
Guess Hillary was right, there is a wide ranging Right Wing organization attempting to control the media and put forth a consistent GOP narrative, my bad Hils….
Kay
@dmsilev:
I wonder why that is?
Tone in DC
@gogol’s wife:
LULz.
Given the #GSW examples in this post, they’ll need to put in some serious work.
kindness
It has all the elements of TeaHaddist Drama/comedy. They whine. They howl. They scratch bite and kick. They say bad things about others. Then they all have a big ‘happy ending’ in a heap on the ListServe floor.
And all I get is screwed up the oh no hole. Ginny Thomas you’re one cruel bitch.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI:
Interestingly enough, 79 years ago this summer the “Night of the Long Knives” took place, in part to reassure the order loving German people the wild and crazies of the National Socialist movement (the SA, led by Ernst Röhm, who actually believed in the “Socialist” part of National Socialism) had been brought under control, no longer terrorizing the streets with their, um, boisterous partisanship.
quannlace
‘Groundswell?’ My first image was of the Little Rascals meeting in their clubhouse. Except poor Buckwheat would not have been allowed in.
dmsilev
@Kay: It’s just a messaging failure. Clearly, they just need to find the right set of Twitter hashtags and everything will be fine.
The Other Chuck
This is what you get when you chase all the intellectuals out of your party.
Baud
@The Other Chuck:
I miss Howard.
Villago Delenda Est
The truth. IT BURNS!
Suffern ACE
@danielx: Ralph Reed goes to Grover’s weekly gathering of the minds. Yes, these are the folks who think Grover is too soft.
quannlace
It’s the same old crapola. Forget policies or whatever the GOP has actually done. If they can only get the ‘message’ right, American voters will come flocking back to the one true faith.
Similar thing during the last campaign. Once people got to know the ‘real Romney,’ people will be racing over to him. The ‘real Romney’ was promised week after week, to the Convention and beyond.
gogol's wife
@quannlace:
And then Mother Jones gave us the real Romney. That was a thing of beauty.
The Moar You Know
Read it. Those people are so fucking pathetic and divorced from reality I could almost feel sorry for them, except that they are traitors trying to destroy our government and way of life.
Wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep if they were all hauled in front of a wall and shot.
Kay
@dmsilev:
It’s like they can’t help it. Why not just oppose Perez on labor issues? They hate organized labor, everyone knows they hate organized labor, and he’s obviously on the other side of that issue. Why go to “Sharia law” and “antagonism towards whites”?
Can they really complain that “GOP” means “bigot” if that’s where they go immediately and inevitably? Seems accurate to me!
catclub
Is Ginni Thomas really that well known that she does not need to be identified as wife of supreme court Justice Thomas?
Beltway insider article?
Gex
Here’s the thing. I find their need to declare war on everything to be telling enough, I don’t need the policy proscriptions behind it. I know all I need to know when they feel like they need to force people to understand just how right they are. They clearly are persuading no one. And,wars on things , the “real” Americans, the seceding, the voting restrictions, etc. pretty much indicate they have no interest in persuading people. They are into forcing people.
Yatsuno
@quannlace:
The Real Rmoney got revealed in a subversive video at a fundraiser. The GOP was never going to show us that side of him even though he was the most sincere he’s ever been at that gathering of his peers. That is the reality they want to hide from the general public.
Miss Waterlow
Help. Could anyone point me in the direction of at least an outline of a conservative plan for real-life governing?
I keep asking my conservative Republican family members (who bait me) and I just hear more about what they hate (Obama, atheists, wanton sex at universities, unions), about society’s “takers,” how this administration is the most radical and terrifying ever in the whole history of the universe, etc. (oh, and some cagey stuff about gay marriage, black people, abortion, illegal aliens and muslims), but they never tell me how they would prefer to see the country function. I mean, how does the conservative vision play out on the ground? What life look and feel like under a full set of conservative laws? How does it work?
I know, I know, they don’t really have a plan, except to block Obama, and all that, but someone must have laid something down on paper (and I’m not talking about Hayek or foundational thinkers – I’m talking about the guys and gals in office – or in the media – today). I haven’t got time to look for it – I don’t have time to be on here! But I thought you all, if anyone, could help me out. I want, actually, to have a somewhat substantive discussion with my in-laws, whom I love, bless their Fox-News-addled souls.
Thanks.
aimai
@gogol’s wife: Yes, she’s the “Kuwaiti Ambassador’s Daughter Testifies About Babies Dumped Out of Incubators” of the current war. Stock footage. Stock actresses.
Anne Laurie
@catclub:
She is so identified, in the header of the article. This is an excerpt, you can read the whole thing at the link.
Yatsuno
@gogol’s wife: I shall be ever thankful James Earl Carter had children, to have grandchildren, to expose that horrid human for what he is.
The Moar You Know
@Miss Waterlow: I’m betting it looks a lot like Saudi Arabia, but with crosses.
Not being snarky.
Another Halocene Human
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/07/24/new-evidence-in-georgia-infants-death-points-to-parents-not-two-black-teens/
This is a truly vomit-inducing story. I never believed the story about the teens shooting the kid for a minute. Way too 1990 crack epidemic kinda shit and even so, back then the “depraved” shootings were in the course of robberies and you know a little baby ain’t got shit! The story smacked of Susan Smith (and Charles Stuart) but it didn’t stop the RW hate machine from pimping the fuck out of, showing their ugly VDARE colors.
Now it turns out there was gun powder residue on both parents’ hands… and the mom was asking her grown daughter about getting insurance money. Like, I always thought that baby insurance was a sick scam’n shit but this takes the cake!
Ash Can
@Miss Waterlow:
The best you’ll come up with is probably the official GOP Party Platform, issued during the 2012 Republican National Convention.
Ash Can
LOL! Looks like linking to the GOP 2012 Party Platform has put me in moderation. The site must be allergic to that shit.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Baud:
Listen I keep saying that Michelle’s next initiative should be to “prevent accidents at home” and consist of telling people not to drink bleach, not to bang themselves on the head with hammers, not to get stuck toast out of the toaster with a fork, not to climb poorly balanced ladders onto the roof, that sort of thing. That’ll do some serious herd thinning right there. Why won’t they listen to me.
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Don’t romanticize them too quickly. The SA’s role was to (to borrow a phrased from Old Daley) “Create disorder” and they efficiently did so, ratcheting up the intensity of streetfights with Communists until the date of the state election, then going home when the Nazis won, proving that the Nazis were the “Law and Order” party.
SA were caught with all kinds of illegal weapons like brass knuckles and such, back in the quaint old days (of the Old Republic) when governments could ban weapons and it didn’t kill FREEDOM it actually enhanced it. Oh wait argle blargle Hitler banned gunzzzzzz zap zap programming erased. Updating from Groundswell est time 43:12.
Another Halocene Human
@Kay:
Too attached to their faux populist racist agenda?
If they came out against labor, their racist fellow travelers might catch on…
They like going after labor when they can divide the house against itself.
Baud
Dammit, NSA! Couldn’t you give this information to Snowden?
RSA
@dmsilev:
I can’t think of more deserving and appropriate targets for profiling.
Kay
@Another Halocene Human:
The 17 year old was to be tried as an adult. 17 years old.
It’s disgusting that police had the information from the daughter since March, and that they never released the information that implicates the parents.
ranchandsyrup
@Miss Waterlow: Supply side Jesus flying a helicopter with Teddy Nugent mowing down libtards, brown people and sluts like the side gunner from full metal jacket that doesn’t lead the women and children as much when he’s firing.
Patricia Kayden
@quannlace: But voters got the “real Romney”. He was horrible and hated the poor/middle class (47%). That’s why he was soundly defeated by a Black man (horror!).
Looking forward to the “real” Santorum or “Paul” the next time around.
Kyle
Groundswellers claimed that Perez, then a senior Justice Department official, supported “Muslim Brotherhood organizations and Shariah.”
“Sharia law” is the new “communist”, a preposterously paranoiac smear that can be directed at anyone who isn’t a hard-core Xtian dominionist.
lamh36
ICYMI: Surprising no one but her most ardent defenderst, Paula Deen is actually a horrible human being. I’m not even sure who I’m madder at, this black woman, for letting Paula Deen essentially steal her secrets and pay her way less than she was worth, and yet she still seems to be trying to stay on Miss Paula’s good side even with all the shit…DAMN!
Paula Deen’s Cook Tells of Slights, Steeped in History
daverave
Please FSM, bring on a targeted asteroid to swell the ground under their meeting…
Short Bus Bully
This quote sums up PROJECT GROUNDSWELL (/giggle) perfectly.
Please proceed, shitheads.
Kay
@Another Halocene Human:
You and I both thought it was a weird story the second we heard it, but the police and the prosecutor concluded it was “gang related” and now they may not have enough to convict the parents, because they chased a 15 year old and a 17 year old for 5 months. It’s just very difficult to understand why that woman was so credible to them, you know, after they had the gunpowder and the daughter. In March.
maya
@Litlebritdifrnt: The most important safety item FLOTUS should push is to always make certain that your gun isn’t loaded when you’re cleaning it or pointing it, just for fun, at one of your relatives or gun club friends.
Spaghetti Lee
I’m sorry, but I just can’t be scared of a group where people like Ginni Thomas and Matt Boyle are seen as leadership material.
Patricia Kayden
@Another Halocene Human: Shocking! I never really heard much about the baby shooting story since I stay away from rightwing/conservative media.
This sounds like the Susan Smith situation, which I remember well as a teenager in Canada. Interesting that Whites are killing their family members and then pointing to Black bogeymen as the culprits. Says a lot about how racism is still engrained in the national psyche.
feebog
That list of “Groundswell” members sounds like someone left the asylum doors open overnight. And shouldn’t John Bolton be trying to whip up a war somewhere in the middle east for us to spend a couple trillion on? I know its a free country and all, but to have the wife of a sitting supreme court justice so far out on the fringe is more than a little creepy. Don’t ever remember the spouse of a SCJ being so involved in partisan politics before.
Jay C
@dmsilev:
Isn’t that basically how most right-wing “calls to action” are written NOW?
No wonder they are so interested in keeping themselves below-the-radar as much as possible: an “organization” fronted by the likes of Ginny Thomas, John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, and Jerry “My God is Bigger Than Your God” Boykin?? If nothing else, for hiding their foreign-policy A- team!
lamh36
ugh, yeah it’s between Weiner and his wife, so dude…shut up about it already. Why the heck isn’t Weiner just sticking to the campaign stuff? Why is he still making statements and shit.. ugh. And I may be cynical, but where there’s 3 – 10, I’d bet more, I’m betting he’s not including the women he sent pics to unsolicited…Ugh. Anyway, I just wish dude would STFU about it. You know you can refuse to answer questions like that just keep it moving.
Weiner Says There are More Women
amk
@quannlace: And yet 59% skayred whites flocked to mittbot.
Jay C
@feebog:
Not surprising, since Virginia Thomas is really the only one. And one, BTW, whose partisan/ideological activities has gone pretty much unmentioned and/or unexamined by the Washington political media. Wonder why that is….?
amk
@Miss Waterlow: you’re asking for unpossible.
TR
Oh, please, Brer Republican! Please don’t label it “Obamagration”! If you link immigration reform with the Democrats like that, we’ll be stuck with all those millions of Latino voters for generations!
Hungry Joe
I’ve never understood why any juvenile would be tried as an adult, since the whole idea behind instituting a special set of rules and punishments for juveniles is that they’re NOT adults, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Is it pretty much just, “Yeah, he’s a juvenile, but the crime he’s accused of is so heinous/pisses us off so much that we’re gonna ignore all that”? Sounds way too arbitrary.
TR
@Jay C:
Every single time a case comes before the Supreme Court involving any issue that Ginni Thomas is involved in, liberals need to scream loudly for Thomas to recuse himself. He won’t, of course, but that couple needs to be shamed publicly and repeatedly.
Chris
@Miss Waterlow:
Their vision? They don’t have one. Not the way you or I would understand it. They don’t think about government in terms of how to govern or what policies to enact or how to solve the country’s problems – they think about it in terms of who’s to blame for them and how to make them suffer for it. (The libertarian vision of government – “it should have no role except military, police and justice system” – is popular among them because it fits that vision).
To the extent that they think about the “what kind of society should we have?” at all, the answer is “all we need to do is neutralize the Undesirables, and the country will revert to [insert favorite Lost Golden Age here – the fifties, the Gilded Age, the founders’ era] back when everything was for the best.”
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
You may remember the colossal screw-up by the Chicago police about 10 years ago where they got “confessions” from a couple of young boys who were under 10 years old, claiming that they had raped and murdered a little girl about their age, only to discover that there was semen on the girl’s body so the boys couldn’t possibly have done it. And the police had managed to completely contaminate the memories of their only possible witnesses, the two boys.
But, hey, the boys were black, so how were the cops supposed to know they were innocent?
ETA: I wonder if the gunpowder evidence will be enough for the insurance company to deny the claim.
TR
@Hungry Joe:
I can’t remember who, but some comedian (David Cross?) had a brilliant bit about this. “Oh, we’re going to try this kid as adult? Great, then next we can try that man as a woman, and maybe that robber as a cocker spaniel.”
Roger Moore
@Miss Waterlow:
I think you’ll find it the same place you find Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and sane Republicans.
mrmike
I venture to guess these same folks bitched about Journolist.
La plus ca change.
jl
@John O:
I agree. I see three references to Frank Gaffney and “Frank Gaffney penned”
I don’t see how very publicly crowdsourcing or swelling or booming or whatever you call it for sane people to see on the internet will do any good, if you have racists, paranoids, and vicious loons in general and at large writing the content.
Probably will reduce their precious White Slice Bread vote a litter more a little faster.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Waterlow:
You can start with the Ryan Plan. It’s completely fucking nuts and completes the destruction of the middle class, but Ryan’s one of the few who’s actually written anything down. Most of the rest of them don’t bother to do anything but mouth a few platitudes.
MomSense
@Yatsuno:
Ann was asked about Mitt being stiff and she made that crazy comment about unzipping him and letting the real Mitt out and I remember thinking no, no, no, no, no I don’t ever want to see Mitt being that real!!
joel hanes
@Miss Waterlow:
Could anyone point me in the direction of at least an outline of a conservative plan for real-life governing?
You might google “Lochner era”, or “Gilded Age”, or “Anschluss”, or “Dredd Scott” for historical clues.
Yatsuno
@MomSense: Apparently CNN a week or so ago decided that it was newsworthy to mention that Willard has a 22nd grandspawn. I just wanted that whole family to disappear into the dustbin of history.
MomSense
@joel hanes:
Or the John Birch Society.
Marc
Ginni Thomas, John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, Ken Blackwell, Gayle Trotter, AND Allen West? That’s like the all-star team of crazy.
MomSense
@Yatsuno:
I know–there is something so creepy about them.
jl
I think a problem is that the internet is so public, and so hard to sweep history under the rug.
You don’t have to wait for a sneaked out audio of Mitt high on too many flavored waters talking privately with his wealthy base. Harder to tell different stories to different groups and hide the evidence.
These supposedly savvy media and PR people (including mayoral candidates) just do not seem to get the fact that stuff thrown up, or shot out, or hot dogged (as it were) on the internet and social media does not go away, and very cheap and easy to dig up for forensic political analysis. For all to see.
It will not end well, though probably will be useful to create more short term tactical obstruction, fake scandals and various reactionary burps that harm us all.
Edit: “flavored waters’ from comedian Mike McCrea on on the I forget what it was show.
Edit 2: Jimmy Dore Show
The Moar You Know
@lamh36: I’m a white guy, raised in Southern California, never lived in a place that had any more than a few black folks – and I mean that in the traditional sense of few, as in “three or four”, and have had no more than minimal interaction with the same. I say this before I’m going to comment on something where I may be wholly missing some racial nuance that’s critical. Tell me if I am.
I understand your anger but would suggest that the person to be mad at is Ms. Deen, who, notwithstanding any racial issues, is, save for gender, exactly like the kind of shitbag employer I made rich 15 years ago, right down to the salary he paid me. I was young and did not know any better. It occurs to me that there would be no way for Ms. Charles to know better either. I feel quite bad for her, she’s been as exploited as it’s possible to exploit a human being outside of actually making them a slave. Something tells me that if it were legal, Ms. Deen would have done that too.
Again, if I’m missing something, you let me know.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah. I don’t get it. Her story was completely bizarre, as was her affect after, when she immediately announced she was packing up the child’s things to give away, she has a history of mental illness, a history of child abuse, gunpowder on her hands, her daughter says she did it, her infant has a life insurance policy, but it’s somehow “gang-related” so the 15 and 17 year old teenagers shot the baby.
Cassidy
@Mnemosyne: Waitaminute…did a white woman kill her kid and blame it on black people? Say it ain’t so. This is unheard of.
Suffern ACE
@Kay: Have the charges been dropped? Until the charges are dropped I would not be convinced that the authorities are going to exonerate the teens.
Kay
There’s truth to this, for Republicans in Texas. It’s bad politically for them. A court found intentional discrimination against Latinos in Texas by Republicans, so they probably don’t want to air that dirty laundry outside the narrow confines of the original Section 5 case, which almost no one besides voting rights people paid attention to. Oh, well. It’s important to examine these issues.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: We had one similar here in San Diego about 15 years ago, Stephanie Crowe. Only difference was everyone involved was white. She was found carved up in her bed. In spite of a drifter being arrested three blocks away with blood on his shirt, the cops decided her brother and some friends had done it as they were “acting funny”, and took ’em downtown and beat them until they confessed. The confessions were so unbelievable that the San Diego DA dropped the charges against them (threatening to refile if they felt like it) which has never happened here before to my knowledge. The only people in San Diego who get charges dropped against them are cops.
Six years later, the cops grudgingly filed charges against the homeless guy, after a lot of public pressure from the family. He was convicted, and that conviction was overturned due to the DNA evidence having degraded over time in storage.
He’s free.
San Diego police are some of the worst in this country. If you come here, watch your ass.
Mike in NC
These scum need to be marched into a field and machine-gunned.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
I don’t know. I keep going back to the same article when I look. It scares me to death for them, how it’s gotten this far. Do you remember the Central Park “wilding” case? 4 of the 5 confessed. None of them had anything to do with it, but they were 14 and 15 and 16, so they “confessed”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Too merciful. I’m holding out for drawing and quartering.
scav
Interesting list of Bulldozer elite, dedicated to pushing the dirt around (and out) in order to build their Groundswell, not doubt to be later sub-contracted out for landscaping with astroturf. Botoxed beauties on tap for further PR starbursts!
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
It makes sense in the conservative mind: black people hate white people, and they’re always looking for a thrill, so of course they would shoot an innocent white baby just for the hell of it. Why wouldn’t they?
It’s the same way they made Trayvon Martin into the bad guy — he was a black kid, so the prosecution had to prove he wasn’t a vicious killer-in-waiting because just look at him, amirite?
JGabriel
David Corn:
You know what’s a real good way to counter the impression that you’re racists?
Stop being racist.
Redshirt
It’s like an Arkham Asylum staff meeting.
debbie
A 30-front war?!? This is like Quadaffi all over again.
fuckwit
Keep fucking that chicken.
Plantsmantx
MonCreif is the one who was fired from ACORN for basically stealing money, and decided that the grifting was greener on the other side.
Paul in KY
@Miss Waterlow: Have you ever read ‘1984’?
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: I’d go for breaking on the wheel.
SFAW
@Marc:
Almost. They’re missing their Cleanup (Hitter) of Crazy, Pammy Geller.
Plus a few others, I guess. (Where “few” = the hundreds more of Rethug “thought”-leaders-who-are-actually-completely-fucking-crazy-and-stupid-to-boot.
It’s like the entire group of them is trying to prove Dean Wormer wrong. (Well, a variation of his admonition, that is.)
Wilson Heath
The #gsw hashtag must not have been checked with the NRA and confederated gun nuts. Hashtagging the standard law enforcement and medical abbreviation for gun shot wound is gonna be just awesome come the next Aurora or Sandy Hook or the next five-year old shooting a two-year old with his Christmas Glock. I pray to FSM that they use the hashtag when defending the NRA line then.