Under ordinary circumstances, said Mursch, Coin Hive is used by some websites as an alternative to advertising. But in the case of PolitiFact, somebody has programmed the site to run multiple versions of Coin Hive simultaneously, basically bringing any visitor's computer to a processing halt.(there were links to refutatons to "voter fraud" allegations.) twisted chick on dreamwidth notified readers.
He found that without increased infection control measures, like regularly testing patients for pandemic resistance, and quarantining anyone who’s a carrier, CRE would be endemic—i.e. living full-time—at nearly every Orange County health care facility within a decade.Wired, Megan Molteni
Sessions’ entire speech was shot through with falsehoods and distortions, each one playing directly off ugly racist stereotypes and assumptions that have nothing to do with the facts on hand.Amanda Marcotte, Salon, in AlterNet.
None of this should be a surprise, however.
You see where I'm going with this? I'm sure there are literally hundreds of young folk calling themselves anarchists and similar names, as there have been for decades, running around the US from demonstration to demonstration, towards whom I have a partially indulgent but critical attitude, because I think even the most systematic anarchist thinking is utopian and sentimental, but can't help admiring the fervor of their engagement; and I think some young people calling themselves anarchists or anti-fascists or what have you showing up for demonstrations have an unfortunate willingness to mix it up with anybody on the right who's looking for a fight, which I think is morally questionable and tactically messed up, a "major gift to the right", as Noam Chomsky is saying; and I know a number of people are using the word "antifa". But I'm starting to think it doesn't add up to being a thing.
When they think “one of their own,” they’re not thinking about someone who shares their religious convictions; they’re thinking about someone who knows how to run a good con and pluck the pigeons. Religious hucksters like Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Jim Bakker see in Trump a fellow con artist and one they admire because he was able to pull off his swindle without having to hide behind a veil of piety and false prophecy. He was even able to get away without paying taxes, the same as they do, but without having to come up with the religious angle.
Among the documents is a 10-page fundraising letter dated April 22, 2016 and penned by SPN president and CEO Tracie Sharp. It bluntly describes its $8.39 million “Breakthrough 2016” campaign to advance the alliance’s goals to “defund and defang” unions and “clear pathways toward passage of so many other pro-freedom initiatives in the states.”They aren't pro your freedom!
Among the so-called victories that have put the “wind at our backs,” Sharp writes, are Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s dismantlement of collective bargaining, and so-called right-to-work laws —which weaken worker protections — passed in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and West Virginia. It also boasts of its battles against teachers unions and touts the expansion of charter schools as being aligned with the alliance’s “pro-freedom” goals.
During this episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show, Professor Snyder and Chauncey evaluate the health of American democracy after eight months of Trump as president, discuss how the recent white supremacist terrorism in Charlottesville could potentially fit into Trump's plans for authoritarianism in America, if Charlottesville was a "Reichstag Fire" moment, and how the rule of law is threatened by Trump's regime.
"There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law," he writes in his Monday column. "What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed."
It's not hard [t]o understand why Trump would be eager to pardon Arpaio. The president fawns over dictators like Duterte and Putin, and accuses immigrants of being rapists. Of course he'd love the idea of a strongman flourishing in an American county. In addition, Krugman points out, "the pardon is a signal to those who might be tempted to make deals with the special investigator as the Russia probe closes in on the White House: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you."
WASHINGTON—Defying U.S. safety protections for human trials, an American university and a group of wealthy libertarians, including a prominent Donald Trump supporter, are backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine.Because ethical standards are so difficult and expensive and bad for the bottom line, donchano? The university in question is Southern Illinois University
The American businessmen, including Trump adviser Peter Thiel, invested $7 million in the ongoing vaccine research, according to the U.S. company behind it. Southern Illinois University also trumpeted the research and the study’s lead researcher, even though he did not rely on traditional U.S. safety oversight in the first trial, held on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts.
The most pathetic thing here is how shocked they pretend to be that their views are attacked, as if no one ever told them that slavery and genocide [...] are bad things to support. And maybe that's on all of us.
It's certainly on the media. Every time there was an article or CNN investigation on whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, the media made it seem like it was a legitimate story. Led by the nose by right-wing bullshit websites and commentators, the mainstream media gave the spittle-strewn glow of credence to it all, whether it's ACORN or the New Black Panther Party or the thuggish images of black victims of violence, like Trayvon Martin.
Over the last few weeks Trump has played an arena-scale concert where the unifying themes of his music are racism, bigotry, nativism and prejudice.
He has threatened to end civil rights protections for gays and lesbians, announced that transgender soldiers would be kicked out of the United States military, directed his surrogates to launch a full-on effort to end “affirmative action” programs in higher education because they “discriminate” against white people, told America’s police to brutalize suspects (i.e., black and brown people), offered macabre tales about young white women being tortured and killed by Mexican gang members, promised to change America’s immigration policy to give preference to English-speaking immigrants (white people), and continues his efforts to ban Muslims from the United States.
Trump knows his crowd.
45’s supporters claim to like him because he says what he thinks, and isn’t “politically correct.” The belief that he says what he thinks, of course, rests on the presumption that he does think, about which nothing further need be said right now. They like him because he is willing to call a spade a spade, you should pardon the expression. But the political correctness they decry is the only thing that keeps him from calling the white working-class voters ignorant unwashed hillbilly trailer trash. If he drops that mask (that’s what the word “hypocrite” originally meant), they’re fair game as much as their non-white neighbors. The only thing that keeps him from doing that is that they vote for him.
[Star] Parker quickly turned into an alternate reality person, using alternative facts and full on homophobe.Emphases added.
Parker said, "But you know what's really interesting and really incredible irony here is the same people that are demanding that the Confederate flag comes down are the same people that are insisting that the Rainbow flag goes up. These two flags represent the exact same thing."
I mean, WTF? I'll say it again: WTF?
The Confederate flag represents slave owners who refused to give up their slaves and became traitors to the country, which resulted in a long and bloody civil war which cost the lives of around 620,000 soldiers, on both sides.
The Rainbow flag represents the LGBT community and the pride they have in each other. Gays in America and in many countries have been subjected to violence, imprisonment and death for centuries.
In Charlottesville, the Confederate flag and their southern heroes were being worshiped by white supremacists, who are anti-Semitic in nature, loved slavery and were celebrating their superiority over the black community, as well as all other minorities in America.
Then Parker became an outright Nazi defender.
She continued, "That certain people, groups are not welcome here. So if Nancy Pelosi wants to say that we're going to start shutting down First Amendment rights of a certain group of people, then what what happens next time that the homosexuals want to walk through an American city and protest and counter protesters come out?"
And more than that. White supremacy is evil. Nazism is evil. The racism and hate we saw in Charlottesville yesterday is evil. The domestic terrorism that happened there yesterday — a man, motivated by racial hate, mowing down innocents — is evil. And none of what happened yesterday just happened. It happened because the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists felt emboldened. They felt emboldened because they believe that one of their own is in the White House, or at least, feel like he’s surrounded himself with enough of their own (or enough fellow travelers) that it’s all the same from a practical point of view. They believe their time has come round at last, and they believe no one is going to stop them, because one of their own has his hand on the levers of power.
Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of a criminal charge Monday for refusing to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants, marking a final rebuke for a politician who once drew strong popularity from such crackdowns but was ultimately booted from office as voters became frustrated over his headline-grabbing tactics and deepening legal troubles.
So now we have no:
Secretary of the Army
Secretary of the Navy
Surgeon General
Deputy Secretary of State
[...]
No strategy for defeating ISIS but a great one for combating a street gang and now no
Communications Director or
Director of Homeland Security.
You know, Donnie Dumbo, I'm not as experienced as you in this presidenting business, but I do know one thing: When you're playing Musical Chairs, the idea is to have more people than open seats, not the other way around.
President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this.There were no WMDs in Iraq. Anyone remember that?
Tomi Lahren, conservative firebrand, bashes Obamacare while benefiting from itIt's the headline.
Previously, U.S. Senators were selected by state legislatures and political party bosses beholden to powerful industries. The corruption scandals erupting from the wheeling and dealing fueled some of the great muckraking investigative journalism of the early 20th Century. In 1912, progressive Republican U.S. Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette[ ]campaigned for the popular election of U.S. Senators as a means of cracking down on political corruption and corporate control of the democracy. Reformers introduced direct primary elections, ballot initiatives, and recall votes, in the same time period.(Also, I wanted to highlight that there was a time that "progressive Republican" was not an oxymoron.)
As John Nichols, who broke the story for the Nation, wrote: “If successful, they will reverse one of the great strides toward democracy in American history: the 1913 decision to end the corrupt practice of letting state legislators barter off Senate seats in backroom deals with campaign donors and lobbyists.”(David Daley, AlterNet)
The language of this draft resolution, however, frames this in precisely the opposite way. It argues that the 17th amendment, ratified in 1914, did not empower voters but instead disempowered states. As a result, there have been “many unintended consequences, including runaway federal deficits, unfunded mandates, overreach by federal agencies and burdensome impositions by the federal government upon the states.”
Keep in mind that these were easy questions because the reporters know that if you ask Trump something about policy, like "Can you explain a single fucking thing about how the ACA exchanges work?" or if you challenge him, like "Why did you lie about Medicaid cuts?" he'll just shut down like an overstimulated toddler. Even on the softball questions, he got basic facts wrong and he didn't know when to shut the fuck up. Sure, Trump ought to be interviewed like anyone would Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or, fuck, Mitt Romney, but we all know that he's fucking stupid so get the stupid people to talk about the one thing they feel comfortable with: themselves.
It's not shocking anymore. And we need to be careful about that. The thing about a boxing match is that the fighters can never let it get boring and rote. It might be exhausting or excruciating. But you gotta stay in the moments or you'll find yourself flat on your ass, without health care, with your country at war, with your voting rights gone, and with your environment collapsing.
See, for all of Marshall's points here, what Josh simply doesn't get is that Don Jr. and Jared both 100% believe the worst case scenarios for either of them will be a blanket presidential pardon. They know that in the end, Trump simply won't let his eldest son, or his favorite son-in-law go to prison. Period.
And man, this story gets brutal from here. Puliafito was a party monster, heavy on both the party and the monster, and a woman nearly paid with her life as a result. It's an astonishing account, and the Times spent months running this story down.
The most gonzo part of the story is that Puliafito kept himself in one piece while doing benders that would make Keith Richards blush and still show up to work the next day...and he was fantastic as both a dean and as an eye surgeon, by all accounts.
In deep-red America, the white Christian god is king, figuratively and literally. Religious fundamentalism has shaped most of their belief systems. Systems built on a fundamentalist framework are not conducive to introspection, questioning, learning, or change. When you have a belief system built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism, especially by anyone not a member of your tribe and in a position of power. The problem isn’t that coastal elites don’t understand rural Americans. The problem is that rural America doesn’t understand itself and will never listen to anyone outside its bubble. It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views will be automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they will not even entertain the possibility that it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact that I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal.(Forsetti's Justice, AlterNet) Emphasis added.
At some point during the discussion, they will say, “That’s your education talking,” derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response, because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts.
Social Security has nothing to do with funding for any of these programs. Social Security is paid for entirely by the workers who will get the benefits. It subtracts not one dime from the federal budget. Except, of course, when the Congress is obligated to REPAY the money it BORROWED FROM Social Security.
That fear of being laughed at lives right at the existential core of toxic masculinity. In his excellent 2004 book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, psychologist Stephen Ducat showed that conservative masculinity is rooted in the idea that penetration—having your body, property, resources, sense of control, or dignity taken against your will—is for women, gay men, and other people who don’t have what it “takes” to secure their own boundaries, and therefore exist to be dominated by those who do. A “real man” is, by definition, one who can and will defend his personal boundaries against all threats at all times—and also has the power, if he wishes, to violate the boundaries of others if he chooses.Sara Robinson (yes!!!), Rewired. (Book title links to Amazon in original.) (Just close the pop-up; I do agree, but I've given out my email address too often.)(via Shakesville.)
Meanwhile Trump, his family and his closest associates are using the presidency to personally enrich themselves. They view it as a personal ATM and not as a means of serving the public good and the general welfare. Except for what he can force by fiat, Trump has accomplished none of his major campaign promises — and in the case of building his “amazing” wall and “draining the swamp” he has all but admitted such promises were snake oil and outright lies to con the rubes.(Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable)
Nevertheless, Trump’s voters still enthusiastically support him.
[Caltech geochemist Kenneth] Farley was testifying in his capacity as the project scientist for the 2020 Mars rover, and at the end of Rohrabacher's allotted time, the congressman asked for one extra question.
"You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago," he told the panel. "Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?"
"So the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago, not thousands of years ago," Farley replied. "And there would be ... there's no evidence that I'm aware of..."
Rohrabacher persisted: "Would you rule that out? See, there's some people ... well, anyway..."
"I would say that is extremely unlikely," Farley said.
The point is that even a man as flawed and sinful as David can find favor in God's eyes as long as he acknowledges God's greatness and answers to His will. God has been long in the habit of using sinners for His purposes. And as we are all sinners and we are all tools for him to use according to His needs, it's not for us to judge when He decides to use someone as flawed and sinful as Donald Trump. It's all part of the plan. It would seem then that God's plan includes spreading fear and loathing of Muslims and Mexicans, turning away war refugees, deporting people by the millions, breaking up countless families in the process, taking health care away from many millions more, leaving children, old people, the poor, and unfortunate to suffer and die, and in short, having us as a Christian nation ignoring Matthew 25.
The local TV news giant has been pushing a right-wing slant on local television stations across the country for years. Owned by the Smiths, a family of longtime Republican donors who have all the ambition of News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch but a much lower profile, Sinclair has mostly flown under the radar. But following the election of President Donald Trump, the network has begun adopting the playbook Roger Ailes used to turn Fox News into a conservative media goliath.(Pam Vogel, Media Matters, via AlterNet)
Over the last few months, Sinclair has been requiring its stations to run more commentaries from pro-Trump personalities and expanding its reach to greater numbers of unassuming viewers in new local media markets. Now it's defending these clear moves to mimic the aspiring state media over at Fox with warped, brainwash-y logic: The conservative propaganda it pushes on its viewers is necessary because the rest of the media is biased.
That is “what made it possible for him to see the character of the regime Hitler represented when so many others did not.”(Fred Clark, The Slacktivist, at Patheos, which I need to add to the blogroll.)
After decades of accusations from conservatives that the American left advances reprehensible moral relativism, this week we saw that the real sin was having morals of any kind. What the Trump family modeled for the world this week is what it looks like to have none. Watergate veteran John Dean warned during the Bush II administration of the rise of "Conservatives Without Conscience."
I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall...A quarter century ago, after the collapse of communism, we declared that history was over—and in an amazing way we forgot everything we once knew about communism, fascism and National Socialism...
It is not going to be hard for Democrats to oppose Trump’s wall, and it doesn’t matter if it is a “bollard” wall or a solar energy plant that can power the entire southwest. There will be no votes for Trump’s stupid wall. Perhaps nowhere does President Trump more clearly demonstrate that he’s insane than when he talks about this subject. He wants windows on the wall so people will be able to see the drug dealers on the other side before they hoist 60 lb. sacks of dope over the top and onto their necks. In case you are in doubt about the lunacy of this talk, a typical bowling ball is 15 lbs. Could you throw four bowling balls all at once fifty feet into the air?
Everything in the interview is like this. It’s all funhouse mirrors and mostly false assertions that are as incriminating as they are intended to be exculpatory. If the New York Times were to interview Trump tomorrow and ask all the same questions, all the details would be different but the overall impression would be the same. The president lies so much and has such a distorted idea of what’s happening around him that he literally doesn’t know or care what is true and what is not.
What shines through it all, though, is his unapologetic intention to obstruct justice. He didn’t want Sessions to bow out of his appointment because he was compromised. He didn’t want Sessions to testify truthfully. He wanted Sessions to kill the investigation and he recused himself instead. For that, he cannot be forgiven.
I believe, although cannot prove, that they had sent Manafort to Trump with a hard offer to refuse. Manafort would work on his delegate count for no pay. Michael Flynn was already compromised because he hadn’t notified the Pentagon that he was taking tens of thousands of dollars from the Kremlin to make appearances on the Russian Today (RT) network and badmouth the Obama administration. The Trump campaign was therefore compromised six ways to Sunday by the time the summer had begun.
[...]
The overall picture is clear. Russia wanted Trump to win and Trump wanted Russia’s help. The collusion was explicit, some of it is well-documented, and the defense is now that anybody would have done the same.
Those willing to answer questions said they have never used truck leases as a way to mistreat drivers. Several insisted that truckers’ allegations have been manufactured as part of a union organizing campaign by the Teamsters. The union has for years helped drivers file labor complaints and lawsuits.Dunno. The Teamsters would be making a lot more noise.
[...] Since the election, leftists and conservatives have also seen eye to eye when it comes to denouncing liberals like Markos Moulitsas, the founder of liberal website Daily Kos, who gleefully cheered when it was reported earlier this year that people in red states would be disproportionately hurt by Trumpcare. “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance,” declared Moulitsas on his blog. “They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For.” In another instance, the liberal blogger earned bipartisan condemnation (so to speak) when he tweeted in response to the Trump administration denying North Carolina hurricane aid: “There’s your reward for voting Republican, North Carolina.”(Conor Lynch, Salon, via AlterNet)
Liberals like Moulitsas have almost become caricatures of the smug and unsympathetic liberal elite that right-wingers have long depicted; it’s as if liberals have gradually come to adopt the ridiculous qualities that Republicans have assigned to them over the years. Which brings us to an important point: Leftists haven’t suddenly jumped on the liberal-bashing bandwagon because it’s the hip thing to do in the age of Trump, but because many self-described liberals have become the obnoxious and out-of-touch liberal elite that conservatives have long claimed them to be, while simultaneously shifting toward the right on various economic issues. (To be fair, obviously the right doesn’t see it this way.) Saval touches on this in his Times Magazine essay, observing that to call someone a liberal today “is often to denounce him or her as having abandoned liberalism.”
[...]
In response to the left-wing calls for class politics, liberals have frequently argued that leftists have an unhealthy “obsession” with economic issues, and that they disregard social issues like LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights. Some liberals have even implied — absurdly — that left-wingers are closet cultural reactionaries. It was sometimes claimed during the 2016 primary campaign that progressives who favored Sanders didn’t like Hillary Clinton because of her gender, rather than her politics. But this kind of deflection simply reinforces the leftist critique of liberals, who, as Saval puts it (in summarizing the left’s perspective), “shroud an ambiguous, even reactionary agenda under a superficial commitment to social justice and moderate, incremental change.”
There is no reason other than racism that marijuana is illegal, and it’s very clear from the history that that’s the case. [...] But all of our drug laws, including alcohol prohibition, resulted from racist or anti-immigration panic, or a combination of the two.
In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people -- white and Black -- the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back. He sought, in his words, to "enchain Leviathan," which is why I titled the book Democracy in Chains.(Mark Karlin, Truthout via AlterNet)
“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.[Emphasis added] (Jerry Useem, The Atlantic)
It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld. The majority of the documents we obtained are diary-like reports from the entertainment liaison offices, which rarely refer to script changes, and never in an explicit, detailed way. However, the documents do reveal that the DOD requires a preview screening of any project they support and sometimes makes changes even after a production has wrapped.Plays spoooooooky theremin.
[...]
In all, we are looking at a vast, militarised propaganda apparatus operating throughout the screen entertainment industry in the United States.
By the way, even the questions the IN-GOP asks are bullshit. Here's one person responding to the last one, about small businesses: "Before the ACA, my company didn't offer insurance benefits to the hundred or so employees at my location. Now, we have a choice of plans. Amazing what a little pressure can accomplish."
We have enough data and research that says that most of the people who voted for Trump were motivated by racial resentment. In their eyes, everything that’s wrong in their lives – and by extension, America – is a direct result of the upward mobility of black folks; the influx of immigrants; and also, the belief that Christianity in America is under attack by Muslims.(Rippa, The Intersection of Madness and Reality)
This was the reality.
[...]
There’s no room for finding common ground with people who see my humanity as an impediment to their daily lives. Again, as a person of color, my humanity isn’t afforded the benefit of the doubt. So much so, that they supported a candidate who sold them on the idea that non-white people and folks who look like me are seen as the problem. Changing that misconception – otherwise correctly identified as racism – doesn’t rest with me.
The bottom line: That would give Republicans a better idea of the impact of his proposal, which would let insurers sell health plans that don't meet Affordable Care Act standards — including, potentially, waiving the pre-existing condition rules — as long as they also sell plans that comply with all of the ACA insurance regulations.
Anyway, Cruz, in his typical pompous ass way, believes he has solved the Senate's health care bill. His proposal is designed to allow moderate Republicans who are still on the fence to claim they saved the Obamacare protections that are popular with voters while simultaneously allowing insurers to offer plans that don't include such protections, thus costing the government less and pleasing hard-line right-wingers like Cruz. If you're thinking to yourself, how the hell would that work? The short answer is that it wouldn't.
Lundergan Grimes was well prepared to discuss Trump's phony voter fraud commission at length and replied, "If Donald Trump asked for not only your address but date of birth, political affiliation and entire voting history along with last four digits of your social security number, would you give it to him?"(John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
She continued, "The answer from Kentucky and states around the United States is a resounding no. There is no state fully complying with what has been a request from a sham commission that the president set up to try to create and find evidence to back up a lie that has simply been disputed..."
While the rest of the Sunday shows spent the bulk of their time focusing on Trump's tweets (thereby justifying the distraction technique perfectly), Joy Ann Reid had on writer Ari Berman to discuss Trump's voter fraud commission, headed by Kris Kobach.Nicole Belle, Crooks and Liars. Video of Ms. Reid talking to Mr. Berman, who writes for the New York Times magazine.
