I believe Hillary Clinton is the George H. W. Bush of 2016.
She notes that, “Bush 41 ran and won as Reagan’s third term, exactly like Secretary Clinton is running for Obama’s third term.”
It is a particularly significant observation because she was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Today was the first day for Maryland early voting, so Sharon* and I went to vote.
I noticed three things:
I have to figure that the Clinton campaign has strip mined staff from Maryland for their “firewall” in New York State.
The change from touch screen to optoscan is a good thing in my opinion.
It’s faster, and it retains a paper trail for a possible recount.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Bernie Sanders walked the picket line with striking Verizon workers, and then the thin skinned CEO of the telco called the Senator contemptible.
Bernie responded that he welcomed the contempt of the these overpaid CEOs.
It a appears that the membership of the Transit Workers Union Local 100 also appreciated the contempt shown by those CEOs , because their membship overwhelmingly voted to endorse Sanders for the New York primary on Wednesday.
Not a surprise. After all, his opponent was on the board of directors for the virulently anti-union Walmart for years.
Hillary and Bernie went toe to toe in Brooklyn.
I was watching, and Charlie was hooting and hollering like it was the denouement of the next Star Wars movie.
He has Hillary pegged as being part of the Empire.
My quick take:
It was the most contentious debate yet.No clue as to what the pundits will be saying in the morning.
The Federal Reserve and the FDIC just rejected the living wills required under Dodd Frank of the 5 largest banks in America:
“The goal to end too big to fail and protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts remains just that: only a goal,” Thomas M. Hoenig, the vice chairman of the F.D.I.C., said in a statement.
The regulators were responding to the so-called living wills that banks must submit to regulators on a regular basis to explain how the banks plan to enter bankruptcy in an orderly fashion in case of a crisis. The living wills are a requirement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, intended to help make large financial institutions less of a threat to the wider economy.
The Fed and the F.D.I.C., which jointly oversee the largest banks, agreed that the plans put forward by five of the big banks, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon, were “not credible or would not facilitate an orderly resolution under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.”
Only one of the biggest banks, Citigroup, was given a passing grade by both agencies, though it too was told that its plans needed improvements. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley received passing grades from only one of the two agencies.
Of course the Vampire Squid got a passing grade.
BTW, the only reason that this happened is because Elizabeth Warren nailed Fed chair Janet Yellen to the wall over her inaction on this Dodd Frank requirement:
………
A serious dust-up occurred on July 15, 2014 during a Senate Banking hearing between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Fed Chair Janet Yellen on the matter of these living wills. Warren told Yellen that at the time of its collapse in 2008, Lehman Brothers had $639 billion in assets and 209 subsidiaries and it took three years to unwind the bank in bankruptcy. Warren singled out JPMorgan Chase for comparison, saying that it has $2.5 trillion in assets and 3,391 subsidiaries.
Dodd-Frank specifically states that these wind-down plans must be “credible” each year or the Fed and FDIC must reject them and force the banks to take remedial steps such as simplifying their structure or selling off assets.
Yellen was clearly not prepared for this line of questioning and stumbled badly in her answers to Warren. She said the Fed was pursuing a “process,” that the plans are “complex” with some banks submitting plans that are “tens of thousands of pages.” Yellen then summed up with this:“I think what was intended is this interpretation you’re talking about, whether they’re credible, in other words, do they facilitate an orderly resolution, and I think we need to give these firms feedback.”
This hearing came more than six years after the greatest Wall Street banking collapse since the Great Depression and Warren was visibly agitated by these stonewalling answers from Yellen. Warren responded:“I have to say, Chair Yellen, I think the language in the statute is pretty clear, that you are required, the Fed is required, to call it every year on whether these institutions have a credible plan — and I remind you, there are very effective tools that you have available to you that you can use if those plans are not credible, including forcing these financial institutions to simplify their structure or forcing them to liquidate some of their assets — in other words, break them up.
“And I just want to say one more thing about this process, the plans are designed not just to be reviewed by the Fed and the FDIC, but also to bring some kind of confidence to the marketplace and to the American taxpayer that in fact there really is a plan for doing something if one of these banks starts to implode.”
The public has never been allowed to see those 10,000 pages of what it would take to unwind one of the banking behemoths but is instead provided with a mere glimpse of each bank’s plan. Warren’s reference to bringing “confidence to the marketplace” was called into further question yesterday when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own study on the living wills, which they refer to as “Resolution Plans.”
The GAO noted that the FDIC’s Board of Directors determined that all of the 2013 plans submitted by systemically important banks with more than $250 billion in nonbank assets were “not credible” or “would not facilitate an orderly resolution under the Code.” The Federal Reserve, however, made no such determination and simply said the banks would have to improve their plans going forward.
The GAO also gave low marks to the regulators in terms of public transparency on the living will process, writing in the report that “FDIC and the Federal Reserve are considering publicly providing more information about their resolution plan reviews. Federal Reserve officials told us that while they were continuously evaluating the release of more plan information into the public domain, they did not have a time frame for reaching a decision on this issue. FDIC officials also told us that the regulator was considering disclosing more information about its review process but had not yet reached the point of sharing such information with the public.”
Warren is one of the good ones.
Dennis Skinner is a legend. #ResignDavidCameron pic.twitter.com/bMV70aIDeU— Sean O’ Donovan (@henriksen1) April 9, 2016
In Europe the US general in charge of NATO seems hell bent on triggering a confrontation with Russia, while in the Asia-Pacific, an admiral is determined to lobby for similar dick swinging with regard to the Chinese.
I would remind Barack Obama that it was this sort of sh%$ that had Harry S Truman making his well justified decision to fire Douglas MacArthur:
The U.S. military’s top commander in the Pacific is arguing behind closed doors for a more confrontational approach to counter and reverse China’s strategic gains in the South China Sea, appeals that have met resistance from the White House at nearly every turn.
Adm. Harry Harris is proposing a muscular U.S. response to China’s island-building that may include launching aircraft and conducting military operations within 12 miles of these man-made islands, as part of an effort to stop what he has called the “Great Wall of Sand” before it extends within 140 miles from the Philippines’ capital, sources say.
Harris and his U.S. Pacific Command have been waging a persistent campaign in public and in private over the past several months to raise the profile of China’s land grab, accusing China outright in February of militarizing the South China Sea.
………
Harris and PACOM officials have been lobbying the National Security Council, Capitol Hill and Pentagon leaders to send a clear message that they won’t tolerate continued bullying of neighbors. Part of the approach includes more aggressive, frequent and close patrols of China’s artificial islands, Navy Times has learned.
These guys want to force humiliating back-down from the Chinese, which isn’t going to happen.
This is John Foster Dulles style brinksmanship, and in addition to being batsh%$ insane, it is not something that should be decided by the uniformed military.
How about reasserting civilian control of the military, Mr. Obama?
“Failure to move forward … would be a profound setback for American interests in the region,” Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. “It would be a signal that we do not have staying power and cause countries to hedge on their alignment with the United States.”
The administration is running out of time to get the accord ratified by Congress and faces an uphill slog to win approval with the leading presidential candidates in both parties opposed to the deal. Republican front-runner Donald Trump has denounced free trade deals as harmful to American workers and a drag on the U.S. economy. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who supported the TPP as secretary of state under Obama, has come out against the TPP under pressure from the left, including labor unions and her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who also opposes it.
But in a conference call with reporters, administration officials warned that China is poised to step into an economic and leadership void if the U.S. falters in the pact with 11 other nations, including Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia. While Trump and Sanders have called outsourcing and trade imbalances with China detrimental to the United States, White House allies said that the economic competition from China, which is not included in the TPP, is a reason to endorse the deal.
So apparently it’s not a trade deal, and it won’t provide meaningful benefits, it’s a political and diplomatic ploy to be used in a war against China.
Do you want to lose your job just to f%$# with China?
Well, I don’t either.
Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He’d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He’d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of the spotlight for himself in the process. He’d been named president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
He and his wife, Michelle Rhee—once the brightest star in the corporate-backed “education reform” movement—showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. An adviser told Johnson’s hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, that the couple was a “modern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton.” There was talk about a run for California governor or U.S. Senate.
At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a “world-class” city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, “never check out a library book,” and have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.”
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By the fall of 2015, Johnson’s political career was effectively over. He was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint. The City of Sacramento’s legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this November. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his most significant mayoral achievement.
Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sacramento’s city finance department is warning that the city’s spending is already “unsustainable” and budget deficits are imminent. For now, however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the new arena district—where a decaying shopping mall had been before.
It goes on and on, and it gets more petty and sordid.
It’s not surprising. At the core of his political success has always been the Hope Academy charter school, which much like most of the charter school empires, is built on a foundation of broken promises and dubious statistics.
H/t Atrios
It appears that Brian Newby, the Executive Director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, got his job there because his patron,Kansas Secretary of State Chris Korbach, pulled strings to insert him at the agency, where he later made transparently illegal moves to further Korbach’s goal of suppressing minority votes:
A Kansas county elections official used close ties to one of the nation’s leading advocates of voting restrictions to help secure the top job at a government agency entrusted with making voting more accessible, and then used the federal position to implement an obstacle to voter registration in three states.
An email provided to The Associated Press through open records requests offers a glimpse into the mindset of Brian Newby, executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who decided — without public comment or approval from bosses — that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a national form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship.
As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: “I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.”
Voting rights advocates were stunned by Newby’s action once he got the job and have sued to overturn it. Activists say it flies in the face of the commission’s mission to provide a simple, easy form to encourage voter registration.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must accept and use the federal voter registration form, and an appeals court ruled in 2014 in a lawsuit filed by Kobach that states could not force the commission to require residents to provide proof-of-citizenship documents on the national form.
………
Documents obtained by AP show Newby’s ties to Kobach, the architect of voter ID and other restrictive voter registration laws around the nation that he says are needed to prevent voter fraud. Critics say there is very little voter fraud and Kobach’s measures hurt voter registration and deprive eligible voters of the right to vote.
Kobach had appointed Newby to be a county elections commissioner in Kansas, and helped him get the federal job that he took in November.
“I wanted you in the loop, in part because of other issues in the past with the EAC,” Newby emailed Kobach. “I also don’t want you thinking that you can’t count on me in an upcoming period that will tax our resources.”
………
Kobach said Wednesday that he spoke to one, and possibly two of the Republican commissioners, about Newby prior to his hiring.
………
But documents from open records requests and interviews by AP show that as early as April 2015 and continuing in the months leading to Newby’s hiring by the commission, Kobach and his staff met with county officials to discuss concerns about Newby’s job performance in Kansas. Those concerns led officials to call for an audit of the Johnson County election office Newby led.
Kobach told AP he never informed the federal commissioners about those problems, and insisted they would not have affected Newby’s performance at his federal job.
The audit released earlier this month found Newby intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, wasted taxpayer funds and improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses while at his former job in Kansas. Newby has called the audit inaccurate and misleading.
………
Newby told Kobach that he never would have been considered for such a high-profile position if it weren’t for Kobach’s support, adding that he would be saying “repeated prayers of thanksgiving for that.”
You can find more about the audit here, and it appears that this guy was stealing the taxpayer’s money, on pretty chickensh%$ stuff, like getting reimbursements for limo service to the airport despite having a car allowance.
As Yael T. Abouhalkah of he Kansas City Star so pithily states, “Kris Kobach’s voter fraud slime now stretches from Johnson County to Washington.”
H/t Charlie Pierce.
While President Barack Obama won’t tell us who he will be supporting in the general election, one candidate he has fully endorsed is Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Wasserman Schultz is currently running for her life in Florida against the first Democratic congressional opponent she has faced during her time in the House. Opponent Tim Canova is running on the idea that Wasserman Schultz is far too corrupt and indebted to Wall Street to effectively represent the people of her district. Canova has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders and has been backed by some of the same groups that Sanders is.
President Obama does not often endorse candidates in House primaries, so his support for Wasserman Schultz is telling.
Interestingly enough, this came shortly after the Florida Democratic Party was shamed into providing voter lists to Mr. Canova:
Last week, the Florida Democratic Party — and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — took some serious heat after it banned upstart congressional candidate Tim Canova from using the party’s voter data files, which help candidates research and contact supporters. But the Florida Democratic Party reversed its decision yesterday, party spokesperson Max Steele has confirmed to New Times.
Improbably, this was the second voter-data scandal to ensnare Wasserman Schultz this election cycle. In December, Wasserman Schultz, acting as chair of the Democratic National Committee, temporarily banned Bernie Sanders from accessing the DNC’s voter data files after his campaign staffer was caught hacking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign data. (The information allows candidates to research and contact potential supporters in their area.) But the move backfired, and Wasserman Schultz has since been accused of intentionally trying to sink Sanders’ chances at the presidency. Sanders sued, the move was overturned, and critics across the country have called for her ouster. She’s had a bad few months.
In something of a twist, Canova, who once advised Sanders on Wall Street reform, then said he had also been denied access to that very same data. This was due to a Florida Democratic Party rule, instituted in 2010, which bans candidates running against incumbents from using the information. In an interview, Canova called the rule “undemocratic” and said the party was acting to protect Wasserman Schultz.
The party did not offer data access “to candidates challenging incumbent members of Florida’s Democratic congressional delegation,” Steele told New Times earlier this month. “This policy has been applied uniformly across the board since 2010. We stand with our incumbent members of Congress, and we’re proud of the job they do representing the people of Florida. The Voter File is proprietary software created and owned by the Democratic National Committee that is maintained and operated by the Florida Democratic Party here in state.”
………
After Canova put up a fight, the Florida Democratic Party reconsidered how Canova’s case looked to the outside world, Steele says. The party made the choice today to give Canova, and only Canova, access to the file.
“Given the unique circumstances of having an incumbent member of Congress who is also the DNC chair who is being challenged by a Democrat (a situation that as you can imagine has never arisen), the FDP has decided to grant Mr. Canova access to the Voter File,” Steele said via email. The file will cost $3,500 to access.
Steele reiterated that this will be a one-time policy change: “Given the dual nature of an incumbent who is also a national party chair, we’ve decided to grant Mr. Canova access to avoid any appearance of favoritism,” he said. Other candidates who run against incumbents will be out of luck.
As an aside, they would not have done this, or at least not have done this so soon, unless there was a significant amount of loathing directed towards Wasserman Schultz in the state party.
Considering her refusal to support challenges to reactionary Cuban-American Republicans in competitive districts, I rather expect that there is no small amount of loathing among the locals there.
In an interview with the AP, Elizabeth Warren spoke of Bernie Sanders favorably, and said that he should continue his campaign:
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren waded deeper into the presidential primary debate Thursday, sharpening her criticism of Donald Trump and cheering on Bernie Sanders.
The Massachusetts Democrat described the Republican presidential front-runner as a failed businessman who inherited a fortune from his father and then maintained it ‘‘by cheating people, by defrauding people, and by skipping out on paying his creditors through Chapter 11’’ bankruptcy protection.
………
On Thursday, when asked if Bernie Sanders should drop out of the race, Warren praised the Democratic senator from Vermont.
Sanders has echoed Warren’s criticism of Wall Street and rising student load debt more than any other candidate.
‘‘He’s out there. He fights from the heart. This is who Bernie is,’’ Warren said. ‘‘He has put the right issues on the table both for the Democratic Party and for the country in general so I’m still cheering Bernie on.’’
I don’t know who she favors, but it is clear that, at a minimum, she thinks that it is important for Bernie Sanders to push Hillary Clinton’s positions away from the mindless triangulation of Bill Clinton.
Because if a topless protester shows up, Sanders lets her in, and Trump kicks her out:
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders this week joked about a topless woman who showed up at one of his rallies recently to protest Republican rival Donald Trump.
“Well, I was trying very hard to get every detail,” the Vermont senator joked during an interview with Phoenix-area radio station KTAR when asked if he could read the text on the woman’s chest.
“No, just kidding,” Sanders chuckled as the male radio hosts erupted into laughter.
“No, actually I was trying to focus on a couple of other things,” Sanders continued, trying to stifle another laugh as he pivoted to discuss campaign issues of income inequality.
A woman who tried unsuccessfully to get into one of Trump’s rallies in Arizona over the weekend opted to show up at Sanders’s rally in Phoenix on Saturday instead.
The words “stop fascism” were revealed on her back and “hate speech is not free speech” were marked on her chest, as she stood on someone’s back, interrupting Sanders’s rally.
She was also wearing “Free the Nipple” pasties.
Photos (she is quite fetching) available at the links.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.