US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

I'm reminded of that This American Life episode from back in '04 when they were talking to folks who were pretty sure they were going to vote for W. and they'd tell them all of this shit about W. and they were like 'oh, I didn't know that, I'm not sure I can vote for him now' and then they'd come back a little while down the road and the people would be like 'yeah, I think I'm gonna vote for him' and the TAL people were like 'but what about the stuff we discussed?' and the W. voters would be like 'oh, yeah, that was bad, hmm, probably shouldn't vote for him' and then of course they ultimately voted for him.

Nuke democracy. I mean, not really. But maybe.

― a butt, at which the shaft of ridicule is daily glanced (Old Lunch), Monday, October 29, 2018 12:37 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chMCU5VSuqw

Trump doesn't need to hop on the radio and say GO OUT AND KILL YOUR NEIGHBORS or order the Border Patrol to take over the 200 miles inland from the border when Q is stirring the slurry daily and people are being slaughtered by openly fascicst nutjobs. Strategy of tension.

i've never been so angry as i've been in the past 48 hours. i've started smoking again.

can the people of pittsburgh just, like, blockade him at the airport?

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy), Monday, October 29, 2018 7:44 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they sure can--nurses, steelworkers, postal workers and grad students in pittsburgh unions have been upping their militancy this year, and if those elements link up with the NGO mobilizers & spontaneists something significant could happen.

idk what I can do. I signed that Bend the Arc letter but it was Soros funded after all lol

doesn't look like the synogogue is going to object though

Despite some backlash against Trump, Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers on Monday said during an interview on CNN that "the president of the United States is always welcome."
The most reliable politics newsletter.

"I'm a citizen. He's my president. He's certainly welcome," Myers said.

which makes the optics of any any protests significantly worse for protestors imo

i suspect some of his congregants feel otherwise.

xpost

sure does

sigh

xp

doesn't look like the synogogue is going to object though

― Οὖτις, Monday, October 29, 2018 8:02 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ugh this acceptance of his visit feels so...extorted by fear

local officials also have doubts

https://triblive.com/local/allegheny/14226791-74/peduto-on-potential-presidential-visit-wait-until-after-the-funerals

I hope he does go, cuz the odds that he says something super offensive are v high

“I do not welcome this president to my city,” Lynnette Lederman, a former synagogue president, told CNN on Monday morning.

doesn't look like the synogogue is going to object though

― Οὖτις, Monday, October 29, 2018 8:02 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ugh this acceptance of his visit feels so...extorted by fear

From our local forum, a poster says:
"Others are speaking on their personal opinion. Being the rabbi of the synagogue some diplomacy is needed. Additionally being a man of god he probably feels it's not his place to be excluding a person."

Sarah Sanders says Trump was elected by "an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans."

For those playing along at home, Trump's opponent got nearly 66 million votes -- in other words, a majority. pic.twitter.com/DW1QdauJlu

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) October 29, 2018

true, but those people truly don't count to trump. one of the norms that he discarded early on was the pretense that he represents everyone in the united states. the 66 million clinton voters are just as much his enemy as the media is

so apparently Sarah Sanders suggested that writ of habeas corpus and posse comitatus might be suspended for the caravan??

Dave Zirin:

We need loud rallies against racism. We need speak-outs for immigrants. We need to say that trans rights are human rights. We need public meetings about what fascism is and how to fight it. We need to provide security and ensure safe spaces for groups that are attempting to come together. We need with masses of numbers to physically confront these fascists when they come to our towns. I’m not talking about us having our own small bands of street fighters against their brass-knuckled Civil War re-enactors, but masses of us occupying their spaces and preventing them from gathering, organizing, and, to put it bluntly, killing. ... I have never been more convinced that solidarity is the only way to win, because I don’t see another alternative, other than losing. And if we lose, we lose everything.

the Trump admin just pulled a Spanish-language documentary it was running in Cuba calling George Soros a "multimillionaire Jew" and "a non-believing Jew of flexible morals" https://t.co/7R0QR39X9X

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) October 29, 2018

Radio Televisión Martí, a network overseen by the U.S. government that broadcasts to Cuba, pulled a video segment it produced months ago that relied on material from the conservative group Judicial Watch and referred to Democratic donor George Soros as a “multimillionaire Jew,” Mother Jones reported last week.

“George Soros has his eye on Latin America. But Judicial Watch, an American investigative legal group, also has its eye on Soros and what it sees as his lethal influence to destroy democracies,” the narrator of the segment says in the video, according to an English translation published by Mother Jones. “It describes him as a millionaire investor and stock market speculator who exploits capitalism and Wall Street to finance anti-system movements that fill his pockets.”

notably, it was one of the leaders of Judicial Watch who just got banned from Fox/Fox Business after referring to the "Soros-occupied State Department", a direct reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

it was also Josh Marshall/TPM who raised the alarm on the "Soros-occupied state department" thing. he wrote a little bit last night about how insane it was that he just happened to come across it, and that apparently the segment had been running for two days on fox business and no one else had seemed to notice or complain about it until he did

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-country-awash-in-foxs-dark-toxins

The point is simple. What is remarkable is not that this happened on a major national cable network owned by a major media conglomerate and watched by millions of people. What is remarkable is that stuff like this happens all the time and it mainly goes unnoticed and un-cared about. It is another part of the story of the growing convergence verging on indistinguishability between the country’s nominally center-right party, the GOP, and the revanchist nationalist right, with all its racism, anti-Semitism and conspiratorial mindset.

some creepy ass shit going on

Radio Marti is a scam designed to keep seventh-rate Cuban-American production talent employed. If the GOP believed in cutting costs from the budget, it could start there.

btw here's an example of the sort of Giant Brain Genious that is common in these parts:

I remember hearing those exact words during the run-up to Prop 13 in California in 1978. Fucking hell, nothing has changed.

Tomás P. Regalado then told Mother Jones that the videos were removed from the broadcaster’s website when the news organization approached him about the content.

In his statement, Regalado merely said that the story did not have “balance” and should have had additional sources.

“Judicial Watch is a good source, but having said that, it should not have been the only source. The two part series was not precise and did not have on the record sources to balance the story,” Regaldo told Mother Jones. “To be fair and to show that we in the new administration are committed to journalistic integrity, the stories have been pulled out of the digital page, not because we want to hide anything, but because we want to be transparent if we say that the story did not have the required balance, then it should not be on the air.”

ladies and gents, the former mayor of the City of Miami.

@HeerJeet: Two days after the worst anti-Semitic massacre ever on American soil, the Vice President appears at an event with group whose main purpose is to proselytize to Jews & convert them to Christianity.

Rabbi Loren Jacobs of Messianic synagogue Shema Yisrael offers prayer before VP Pence speaks at Michigan campaign event: "God of Abraham ... God and Father of my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah...hate inspired shooting in synagogue in Pittsburgh"https://t.co/tRwFvBTjYE pic.twitter.com/u6JJCfdhgj

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) October 29, 2018

notably, it was one of the leaders of Judicial Watch who just got banned from Fox/Fox Business after referring to the "Soros-occupied State Department", a direct reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
― Karl Malone, Monday, October 29, 2018 8:24 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this man is employed as adjunct faculty at George Mason University, teaching journalism and law to their students:
https://communication.gmu.edu/people/cfarrel7

i encourage you to very politely and firmly, under your own names of course, contact his department chair and the university's president and explain what Mr. Farrell and his organization, Judicial Watch, have been up to in terms of spreading anti-semitic propaganda.

to find contact info for those folks:
president: https://president.gmu.edu/contact/
dep't chair: https://communication.gmu.edu/contact

re: theories about trump's approval rating, i subscribe to the occam's razor theory that when something else is in the news it goes up, but when he is in the news it goes down.

he's been in the news every single day for about 3 years now. his approval rating should be at 0.

this would be just for the mysterious people who cause his approval rating to fluctuate between the high-30s to mid-40s

yeah, this theory also helps to understand why there was a "kavanaugh effect" on trump's ratings, despite the fact that kavanaugh is extremely unpopular.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department will deploy at least 5,200 active-duty troops to the southern border by the end of this week to help harden security there, officials announced on Monday, part of an election-season response by President Trump to hold off a group of Central American migrants moving north through Mexico.

An initial group of 800 soldiers already is heading to Texas from Fort Campbell and Fort Knox, according to Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, the commander of the United States Northern Command.

The deployment is the first piece of a multistage approach that Mr. Trump has been considering for several weeks, and which also is expected to include executive action to bar entry to Central Americans, including for those seeking asylum.

“We will not allow a large group to enter the United States in an unsafe and unlawful manner,” said Kevin K. McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

uh, good, so how about you process their requests for asylum as you would any other day? maybe make sure you bring in lots of extra staff, instead of soldiers, to handle the increased applications that day?

lol they got a Jew for Jesus, obviously xps

according to this analysis by some rando who occasionally includes #basta in his tweets, these are the top sponsors for Fox News for the 3rd quarter of 2018:

https://i.imgur.com/TEjB008.png

i place zero faith in this analysis or methodology. but, assuming it was even close to correct, would it be that difficult to not give money to any of these corporations? many of them are in industries with plenty of other competitors.

Shep Smith on the migrant caravan: "There is no invasion. No one is coming to get you. There is nothing at all to worry about." pic.twitter.com/4dLmPuZem0

— Jon Passantino (@passantino) October 29, 2018

how does this guy still have a job

Easy! He's FOX's insurance/assurance that they're not a right wing front organization. Shep has the most secure job in the building.

yup

I dunno how he lives with himself tbh

there are probably a lot of people watching that think he's part of a conspiracy, too. good to keep a conspiracy guy on to keep drawing those viewers

(I know I know he sleeps soundly on a giant pile of money etc.)

I dunno how he lives with himself tbh

― Οὖτις, Monday,

http://gawker.com/shepard-smith-tells-waitress-get-my-fucking-drink-1449482969

Gawker Was A Good Website

can't say I miss Gawker

gawker is going to be pissed off when they find out

check out this extremely normal nonchalant correction

Charles Payne: "One of our guests said some of the people in the caravan may have diseases like leprosy and TB. Well, we want to say we have no way of independently confirming this."

The guest also said the migrants/asylum seekers have smallpox, which is impossible and a lie. pic.twitter.com/c7yqPjiz2I

— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) October 29, 2018

someone finally tried this defense huh

The lawyers for a racist Trump fan who plotted to kill Muslims in 2016 wants the judge to show leniency because he was whipped up into a state of irrational fear by the rhetoric of Trump, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. https://t.co/jy00FeDSiR

— Paul Blumenthal d/b/a James McMorgans LLC (@PaulBlu) October 29, 2018

Being an African-American Fox commentator must be....I don't even know. How do these folks look in the mirror every morning? Do their families talk to them? Are they donating their salaries to the NAACP? I can't even.

Also, LEPROSY?!?

(Which does connect to Jesus, Christianity, irony, etc.)

also, violent response to lepers seeking asylum has been proven to be self-defeating in john carpenter's "the fog"