Rob Slane asks, “Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity?“
Putin isn’t taking weaponizing stupidity, as Mr. Slane notes, “It could just be a case that we really are run by ignorant buffoons who never learn, and even if Mr Putin were inclined to develop a way of Weaponising Stupidity, he’d actually be wasting his time.”
Still, it’s a nice theory.
Russia may be reducing its military presence in Syria, but they have started shipping weapons to the Kurds.
That sound you hear is the sound of Turkish heads exploding:
Russia delivered the first of five planned shipments of anti-aircraft weapons to Kurdish troops in northern Iraq. According to Russian experts, Moscow officially revealed this fact for the first time with the intention to change its Middle East policy and emphasize the importance of the Kurds in the region.
In Iraq arrived first shipment of Russian weapons to Kurdish volunteer movement “Peshmerga”, who fight against the “Islamic state” terrorist organization in the region. Senior officials of the Russian Foreign Ministry handed over anti-aircraft weapons ZU-23-2 (23 mm caliber) to the forces of resistance.
„Shipment of weapons arrived on March 14. It is intended for Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the handover of weapons was held with the presense of Ambassador and Consul General of Russia in Iraq, and Deputy Chief of Staff of “Peshmerga”, RIA Novosti quoted Artjomova Grigorjan, attaché of the Russian general consulate in the Iraqi city of Erbil.
According to him, the parties discuss the further delivery of the weapons. “After the handover of weapons Russian ambassador said that this is not the last delivery. He stressed that Russia hopes “Peshmerga” and the Iraqi armed forces will use this weapon to win against “Islamic state”, said the Russian attaché.
Do not confuse the ZU-23-2 with the ZSU23-4 radar guided self-propelled antiaircraft system.
The ZU is optically guided towed system.
In a modern battlefield, its antiaircraft capabilities are limited, but it is relative mobile and capable in a surface to surface mode.
More importantly, it implies that the Russians might be willing to send more capable surface to air systems, such as the ZSU, or surplus SA-6 or SA-8 systems, which they could use against Turkish air strikes.
Let the shrieks or outrage from Ankara begin.
………
See what happened there? Slick, wasn’t it? My man Chuck Todd asked Schmidt why the anti-Trump Republicans weren’t banding together to support the clear runner-up and Schmidt started babbling about small-d democratic processes wah-dee-doo-dah. The direct answer to the question…
So, why isn’t the cavalry rallying around Cruz?
“Because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is a messianic and friendless theocrat whose policies are a mix of the Book of Revelation and The Fountainhead, and anyone who looks at him thinks of the skeevy uncle whom they tell their kids to avoid at Thanksgiving, and anyone who listens to him who isn’t already lost in Jesus wouldn’t trust him to park their car.”
Mr. Pierce owes me a screen wipe.
Upon announcing Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme court, they tweeted that he would ignore the Constitution of the United States of America:
“Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016
Those “Technicalities” are the bill of rights, and their comment reflects that Garland is positively dismissive about the due process rights of defendants.
I do understand political realities, but the idea that any President would try to trumpet the willingness of a nominee for Supreme Court justice to ignore the Constitution is truly awful.
H/t Cory Robin.
Don’t rely on internet polls to name something:
A state-of-the-art research vessel in search of a name is getting some help from the general public and their top choice is flying in the face of British nautical convention.
Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) launched an online voting contest, asking for inspirational names of historical figures, landmarks and movements to christen the £200-million ship ($375-million CAD). The internet responded, and the current frontrunner is none-other than RRS Boaty McBoatface.
The 15,000-ton, 128-yard-long Royal Research Ship is currently under construction on the coast of Merseyside and is gearing up to be launched for a research mission to Antarctica in 2019.
The much more appropriate RRS Henry Worsley, RRS David Attenborough and RRS Pillar of Autumn are the current runners-up, though Boaty McBoatface is outpacing its closest competitor 10-1 with over 22,500 votes.
The online poll has proven to be so successful that NERC reported the high traffic caused the website to temporarily crash Sunday.
It appears that, much like many things on the internet, the meme started as a joke:
A man who suggested naming a new £200m ship Boaty McBoatface has apologised.
The suggestion has attracted more than 27,000 votes in an online poll of names for the Royal Research ship, causing the website to crash.
Former BBC presenter James Hand said he found the list of possible names “really funny” so decided to “throw one into the ring”.
He “apologised profusely” to the Natural Environment Research Council.
There is no guarantee the ship will be given the name that tops the poll, with the final decision to be made by the chief executive of the NERC.
Other names in the running are RRS Pingu, RRS Usain Boat and RRS David Attenborough.
A NERC spokesperson said staff were “very much enjoying hearing everyone’s ideas”.
Mr Hand said: “I read the story about naming the ship on the BBC website on Thursday and some of the entries were really funny – my favourite was Clifford The Big Red Boat.
“I thought I would throw one into the ring. By Friday night it was leading by a couple of thousand, and when the site crashed on Sunday it was leading by 8,000. It’s been utterly bizarre.”
Boaty McBoatface is 25,000 votes ahead of the second place suggestion, RRS Henry Worsley.
The boat is being built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead on Merseyside and when completed in 2019 it will study ice sheets, ocean currents and marine life as part of the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey.
“I’ve apologised profusely to the people behind the website,” the former Good Morning Jersey host said.
BTW, you can go to this link to vote.
I have already voted for Boaty McBoatface, because I am an asshole.
I am talking to Charles Camosy, of course, who is arguing that the problem with the Democratic Party is that it is not friendly enough to people who want to criminalize abortion.
In 1964, the same sorts of people were saying that the Democratic Party needed to accommodate the sensibilities of segregationists.
F%$# that, and F%$# you, Mr. Carmosy.
You do not capitulate to tyranny or evil.
Have you heard the latest update on anthropogenic climate chane?
It turns out that the month of February was completely off the charts:
Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as “astronomical,” ”staggering” and “strange.” They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.
This was not just another of the drumbeat of 10 straight broken monthly global heat records, triggered by a super El Nino and man-made global warming. February 2016 obliterated old marks by such a margin that it was the most above-normal month since meteorologists started keeping track in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA said Earth averaged 56.08 degrees Fahrenheit (13.38 degrees Celsius) in February, 2.18 degrees (1.21 degrees Celsius) above average, beating the old record for February set in 2015 by nearly six-tenths of a degree (one-third of a degree Celsius).
The old record was set just last December and the last three months have been the most above-normal months on record, said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden. And it’s not just NOAA. NASA, which uses different statistical techniques, as well as a University of Alabama Huntsville team and the private Remote Sensing System team, which measure using satellites, also said February 2016 had the biggest departure from normal on record.
These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.
“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”
“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”
In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).
It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius).These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.
“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”
“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”
In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).
It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius
Clearly man made global warming is a hoax.
Every major model for climate change as proven to be too conservative.
The reality has been worse, and it is likely to get worse.
).
H/t Jim Romenesko.
Rather unsurprisingly, no police officers have received any meaningful discipline for that behavior:
Denver police officers performed searches on state and federal criminal justice databases that were not work-related and instead were made to help officers’ in the romance department and to assist friends, according to an independent department monitor. The report said that punishment, usually a written reprimand instead of being charged criminally, is not enough to deter future abuse of the National Crime information Center (NCIC) and the Colorado Crime Information Center (CCIC) databases.
“When used appropriately, they can be powerful tools to investigate crime,” the report stated. “But the misuse of these databases for personal, non-law enforcement purposes may compromise public trust and result in harm to community members. We believe that the reprimands that are generally imposed on DPD (Denver Police Department) officers who misuse the databases do not reflect the seriousness of that violation, and may not sufficiently deter future misuse.”
The report by Independent Monitor Nicholas Mitchell listed a host of wrongful searches, including an officer getting a phone number of a woman he met on assignment, and an officer running the license plate of a man for a friend who then stalked that person. None of the 25 Denver officers who abused the crime databases were charged with any access crime. The harshest penalty was a three-day suspension. Civilians who accessed the databases without authorization, however, most likely would be charged with hacking.
There’s been reports across the country of officers wrongly accessing criminal justice records for their personal use, sometimes resulting in criminal punishment. And sometimes police officers abuse the database to troll their own. In 2012, for example, Minneapolis paid out $1 million to a former female police officer whose driver’s license record was looked up more than 400 times by fellow officers.
I would bet dollars to navy beans that the suspensions were of the paid variety.
We saw the exactly the same thing with the NSA.
This is what happens when the authorities have access to your data. They abuse that access for their personal benefit.
This is why the bulk collection of data by the state security apparatus is so toxic.
Mystery still surrounds an unsolved December break-in at an executive office inside City Hall where Flint water files were kept.
As of Friday, March 18, there were still no suspects in the case, and officials say it may never be known what — other than a TV — was taken.
But the city’s new police chief Tim Johnson says it’s too suspicious that there was a break-in where important documents were kept, just as investigations began heating up and decision makers were beginning to be held accountable.
“It was definitely an inside job. The power cord (to the TV) wasn’t even taken. The average drug user knows that you’d need the power cord to be able to pawn it,” Johnson said.
………
An employee returning to work at City Hall, 1101 S. Saginaw St., after the holiday break on Monday, Dec. 28, discovered a broken window and the break-in. No other offices were disturbed.[Flint Mayor Karen] Weaver did not say exactly where the room was located in the suite, but did say a window was broken in an apparent effort to access to the area.
“They had to know what room to go into, I could just say that,” she said.
This does sound a like a Nixonian rat-f%$#ing, doesn’t it?
Iain Duncan Smith, the British Work and Pensions Secretary, has resigned over cuts to disability payments to the UK’s most vulnerable:
Iain Duncan Smith has resigned as work and pensions secretary, denouncing £4bn of planned cuts to disability benefits as “indefensible”.
He complains of pressure to “salami slice” welfare, saying the latest cuts were a “compromise too far” in a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers.
David Cameron said he was “puzzled and disappointed” at the resignation.
Earlier, the government had indicated it would look again at some of the proposed disability benefits changes.
‘Enormous regret’
BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said: “There had been bad blood off and on between Chancellor George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over some of the more controversial welfare reforms, but nobody expected this move only 48 hours since the Budget.”
She added that she understood Mr Cameron had personally tried to persuade Mr Duncan Smith to stay on and called the resignation “a bombshell at a very sensitive time”
………
Mr Duncan Smith, who was the Conservative Party leader and Leader of the Opposition from 2001 to 2003, wrote in his resignation letter that the changes to disability benefits were “defensible in narrow terms, given the continuing deficit”.
But he said they should have formed part of “a wider process” of finding the best way to focus resources on those most in need.
“I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest,” Mr Duncan Smith said.
“Too often my team and I have been pressured in the immediate run up to a Budget or fiscal event to deliver yet more reductions to the working-age benefit bill.
“There has been too much emphasis on money-saving exercises and not enough awareness from the Treasury, in particular, that the government’s vision of a new welfare-to-work system could not be repeatedly salami-sliced.
“It is therefore with enormous regret that I have decided to resign.”
………
Over the weekend Iain Duncan Smith discovered the Chancellor planned to offer cuts in Capital Gains Tax and was very unhappy that those tax cuts were to be offered to the better off, while he had been forced to make more welfare cuts prematurely, in his view. When Number 10 and the Treasury then backtracked on the reforms to PIP today, he concluded that he could no longer remain in government.
Sources close to him are absolutely adamant that his decision was in no way related to his views on Europe.
Smith supports a Brexit from the EU, so there is some speculation that his exit was influenced by this difference.
Personally, I am inclined to think that there are crass political motivations, but I’m a cynic that way.
11 Weeks ago, the DPRK claimed to have set off a hydrogen bomb.
Most of the experts said that this was not the case, as the seismic data did not show a significantly larger blast than its previous tests, and normally a first time full Thermonuclear (3-stage) device will be big.
At the time, I suggested that it was not a full 3 stage device, but that it was a boosted device, where there is not a whole bunch of fusion, perhaps 5% of the blast.
I suggested that this was important because what a boosted fission device does allow for is a miniaturized warhead, because the additional neutrons from the small amount of fusion allow for a smaller amount of fissile material.
North Korea claims it has the know how and capability to develop a nuclear warhead to equip ballistic missiles. This claim has been substantiated today, by the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Kim Jong-Un, presenting a complex spherical object claimed to be the country’s miniaturized thermonuclear warhead.“The nuclear warheads have been standardised to be fit for ballistic missiles by miniaturising them,” Kim noted during a visit with nuclear technicians that was reported by the DPRK state media today.
It is possible that the new warhead is designed for the Korean KN08 intermediate range ballistic missile that has yet to be tested in flight. Once proven, the missile is expected to boast the range and payload capacity to deliver attacks on US targets in the Pacific and west coast. Kim also stressed that the miniaturised warheads were “thermo-nuclear” devices, echoing the North’s claim that the nuclear test it conducted in January was of a more powerful hydrogen bomb.
………
North Korea’s claim to have successfully tested an H-bomb in January was greeted with scepticism at the time as the estimated yield was seen as far too low for a full-fledged thermo-nuclear device.
However, weapons experts have suggested it may have been a “boosted” fission device, which makes more efficient use of nuclear material and can be made smaller without sacrificing yield.
I wasn’t the only one out there suggesting this scenario, but I was in the minority, and it appears that I nailed it.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had her State Department aggressively push fracking across the world:
One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Department’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.
The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.
………
Clinton, who was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, believed that shale gas could help rewrite global energy politics. “This is a moment of profound change,” she later told a crowd at Georgetown University. “Countries that used to depend on others for their energy are now producers. How will this shape world events? Who will benefit, and who will not?…The answers to these questions are being written right now, and we intend to play a major role.” Clinton tapped a lawyer named David Goldwyn as her special envoy for international energy affairs; his charge was “to elevate energy diplomacy as a key function of US foreign policy.”
………
Goldwyn had a long history of promoting drilling overseas—both as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. From 2005 to 2009 he directed the US-Libya Business Association, an organization funded primarily by US oil companies—including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon—clamoring to tap Libya’s abundant supply. Goldwyn lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies and even battled legislation that would have allowed families of the Lockerbie bombing victims to sue the Libyan government for its alleged role in the attack.
………
But environmental groups were barely consulted, while industry played a crucial role. When Goldwyn unveiled the initiative in April 2010, it was at a meeting of the United States Energy Association, a trade organization representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, all of which were pursuing fracking overseas. Among their top targets was Poland, which preliminary studies suggested had abundant shale gas. The day after Goldwyn’s announcement, the US Embassy in Warsaw helped organize a shale gas conference, underwritten by these same companies (plus the oil field services company Halliburton) and attended by officials from the departments of State and Energy.
………
Around the time of his departure, WikiLeaks released a slew of diplomatic cables, including one describing a 2009 meeting during which Goldwyn and Canadian officials discussed development of the Alberta oil sands—a project benefiting some of the same firms behind the US-Libya Business Association. The cable said that Goldwyn had coached his Canadian counterparts on improving “oil sands messaging” and helped alleviate their concerns about getting oil sands crude to US markets. This embarrassed the State Department, which is reviewing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal to transport crude oil from Canada and is under fire from environmentalists.
After leaving State, Goldwyn took a job with Sutherland, a law and lobbying firm that touts his “deep understanding” of pipeline issues, and launched his own company, Goldwyn Global Strategies.
In late 2011, Clinton finally unveiled the new Bureau of Energy Resources, with 63 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget. She also promised to instruct US embassies around the globe to step up their work on energy issues and “pursue more outreach to private-sector energy” firms, some of which had generously supported both her and President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. (One Chevron executive bundled large sums for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, for example.)
So Clinton, who at the Flint debates was using double-talk about common sense regulations, employed a energy industry lobbyist to run her policy of aggressively pushing fracking to the world.
Later in the article, they talk about how her pet lobbyist lobbied aggressively for Canadian tar sands at State.
Yes, she sure sounds like someone who is serious about the dangers of fracking and Canadian bitumen, and the associated problems with global warming, doesn’t she?
After about 40 years, people are starting that hedge funds both under-perform the market and charge outrageous fees, and so the most overpaid professionals on Wall Street can’t pay as much their 35,000 square foot Summer cottages any more:
This had to happen. Now we’re getting reports that in the Hamptons, on Long Island’s east end, where Wall Street’s richest hobnob over the summer, home prices at the very top, after a phenomenal boom, are getting crushed.
What’s getting blamed? The crummy performance of the markets last year.
The average price in 2015 of the ten most expensive homes sold in the area has crashed 20% from a year earlier – to a measly $35.5 million.
After soaring a mind-bending 180% in five years, from $15.9 million in 2009, the average price of the top ten homes had reached $44.6 million in 2014, according to a report by Town & Country Real Estate in East Hampton, cited by Reuters.
The year 2009 was when the Fed’s “wealth effect” strategy was kicking in. It was precisely what Bernanke wanted to accomplish. He spelled it out in an editorial. The Fed’s “strong and creative measures” would inflate asset prices, which would lead those benefiting the most from it, including those on Wall Street that extract fees and get paid big bonuses, to feel wealthier and spend a little more, which would crank up the economy. And this is what happened in the Hamptons.
I am so not crushed by this news.
Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.
We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.
Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.
We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.
Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.
We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.
She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.
You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.
Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.
It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
It appears to be gaining meme status on the internet.
Administrators at the South Orangetown School District decided that the Tappan Zee High School theater production of the Tony Award winning Mel Brooks musical The Producers:
Administrators have ordered the removal of swastikas from a high school production of The Producers, the famous Mel Brooks film that makes fun of Nazism.
The New York school district that oversees Tappan Zee High School considers the inclusion of a swastika to be offensive and, possibly, a hate crime—regardless of the context.
“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told the local CBS station.
The kids in the play had a different reaction.
“It’s satire, not supposed to be taken seriously,” said Tyler Lowe, a student performer. CBS notes that Lowe is himself Jewish.
It’s not surprising that the teens understand the play better than the district does. The plot concerns a pair of producers who put together a deliberately bad, patently offensive pro-Hilter play in order to profit from its commercial failure. They are thwarted when the play is a hit—the audience assumes it’s satire.
………
The danger comes when authority figures try to shelter kids from offensive ideas and symbols. It’s better to let them behold the swastika, and laugh at it, than live in fear of it.
As Mel Brooks—creator of The Producers—said in a 2001 interview:
“I was never crazy about Hitler…If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win…That’s what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.”
These guys are responsible for seeing our kids educated, and I wouldn’t trust them to cut their own meat.
We’ve all seen the video of the Trump supporter sucker punching a protester as he was being escorted out by deputies.
Well, the police chief was not impressed with the lack of response of his deputies on the scene, and he lowered the boom on them:
Five sheriff’s deputies in North Carolina have been suspended without pay following a Donald Trump rally where a protester was sucker-punched as he was being escorted out, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday.
Videos recorded at the March 9 rally in Fayetteville, N.C., showed a Trump supporter assaulting an anti-Trump protester, who was then detained by numerous uniformed men as his assailant walked away.
“The actions of the deputies and their failures to act in situations such as that which occurred during the Trump rally at the Crown Coliseum have never been and will not ever be tolerated under the policies of this office,” Sheriff Earl Butler said in a statement.
………
As Jones walked toward the exit, a man, who appeared to be white, emerged and punched him in the face.
“Boom, he caught me,” Jones told The Post in a telephone interview. “After I get it, before I could even gain my thoughts, I’m on the ground getting escorted out.”
John Franklin McGraw, 78, was not detained at the time. He was charged the following day with assault and disorderly conduct.
Jones told NBC affiliate WRAL that “I thought I was being arrested” by the deputies after being punched. “I saw, later on, that [McGraw] went back to his seat so I am trying to figure out why was he able to go back to his seat,” he said.
Three of the deputies have been demoted in rank and suspended for five days. The two others were suspended for three days.
Butler said the deputies were being disciplined for “unsatisfactory performance and failing to discharge the duties and policies” of the department.
What most of us saw was thuggish behavior by a Trump supporter.
To his credit, what Sheriff Butler saw was police officers literally turning their backs to a crime that was committed right in front of them.
He took names and kicked but.
Good for him.
On the other hand, “H H”, as in, “Heil Hitler”
And you can get it on T-Shirts and Pillows
The PBS news hour did a warm fuzzy about how politically engaged some Trump supporters in North Caroline were deeply involving themselves in the political process.
Somehow, they missed the fact that this family was festooned with white supremacist tattoos:
Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.
If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.
Someone at the News Hour has got a lot of explaining to do.
This sort of stuff is American Nazi 101, and I have no clue how everyone involved in this news report missed it.
D
onald Trump is now strongly implying that any attempt to stop his nomination by the Republican establishment at the convention will be met by rioters:
………
But let’s say a miracle happens and one of the many Republican candidates who is fantasizing about rushing in to save the party manages to unify the party. What then?
Would Trump — who by then will have little-to-zero hope of launching a third-party run — just sit back an absorb a massive humiliation?
Well, you won’t like Trump supporters when they are angry and legally indemnified against violence.
This threat isn’t just some fantasy I’ve conjured. Trump has all but said he and his “people” would resist being usurped with everything he’s got:“I don’t know that that’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you, there are going to be a lot of people that will be very upset if that doesn’t happen. I think that would be pretty unfair.”
With his daily war against protesters as training and his followers seeing him as their savior, maybe the Republican establishment will decide they’re better off just letting Trump take the nomination. Sure it could be the end of the GOP and the dawn of American fascism. But at least he’ll try to cut their taxes by $1.3 million a year.
I am so glad that the Donald is their problem, and not ours.