Hullabaloo

Thursday, July 06, 2017

 
What to expect from the Trump-Putin meeting

by digby

Nobody knows what will happen, of course. But Spencer Ackerman asked some former spies and investigators with longtime experience dealing with the KGB and its successor the FSB, which trained President Putin, to speculate. Here's a little bit of what they said:

Ahead of meeting the U.S. president in Hamburg, [Putin's] foreign ministry has said the agenda will concern everything from Syria to Ukraine to returning two intelligence complexes on U.S. soil – even to gay rights in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster has said there won’t be a “specific agenda” for discussion, beyond “whatever the president wants to talk about.” There is confusion on the U.S. side about whether McMaster’s Russia chief, the Putin skeptic Fiona Hill, will attend the meeting.

Putin, former spies say, is well-positioned to dominate the meeting. Whether he wants commitments from Trump on specific things or simply a grip-and-grin photo op, Putin stands a good chance of getting his way – provided he tells Trump to ignore the losers and the critics and portrays what Putin wants as how Trump gets the drop on them yet again.

“Trump is just about a sociopathic narcissist,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA interrogator and analyst. “That’s not to denounce him, just an assessment of the guy…. Fulsome praise, full of garbage, is a small price to pay to get what you want.”

To cultivate Trump, Carle said, “you praise and piss him off at the same time. You want to push his buttons to get him to do something reflexive.” That is, point Trump’s fury in the direction of what Putin can portray as a mutual enemy – even if it’s a traditional U.S. ally.

“What do they want? Say it’s eastern Ukraine. You continue to undermine the U.S. commitment and the need for NATO, and you do that by talking about what he thinks he understands: money and trade. You build upon the spurious line that Germany and NATO are free riders, bilking Americans out of money. ‘Why should Americans die for some Krauts?’ That plays in the Peoria that is Trump’s mind.”

“The truly scary part is Putin only has to say to Trump ‘you are right and the haters are wrong’ to manipulate him,” adds Naveed Jamali, a former undercover FBI double agent. The Russians, Jamali added, are “devious motherfuckers,” skilled at manipulating others into doing their bidding without recognizing it.

The last time Trump met with Russian dignitaries, he shared with them intelligence on the so-called Islamic State provided to the U.S. by Israel. This time, Trump’s briefers in the CIA may be more likely to obscure their sources of information while providing Trump with what he needs to know ahead of the economic summit, said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst – something which, in turn, may impact Putin’s goals for their meeting.

“I’d not look at it as an opportunity to squeeze secrets out of Trump but rather to [maneuver] U.S. policy,” Pillar said, whether on Ukraine, lifting Obama-era sanctions on Russia, or Syria. For that, Putin is likely to rely on “techniques of flattery.”

A test case for Russia came in Saudi Arabia, Jamali said. There, the Saudis threw Trump a massive party for the president’s first foreign trip, replete with nonstop flattery, a dance involving swords and a photo with a mysterious orb that garnered worldwide publicity. Weeks later, with Saudi Arabia in a massive regional dispute with Qatar, Trump openly backed the Saudi sideeven as his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called for an end to the conflict.

The Saudi Arabia visit might also provide a template for Russia for a different reason.

With Russia at the center of the scandal overhanging the Trump administration, no one interviewed for this story expected the Putin-Trump meeting to yield immediate deliverables or anything else that Trump’s critics can portray as a favor for Putin. But late Wednesday, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, floated a possible expansion of U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria, creating the possibility that the G20 meetup will yield a shifted course for the U.S. on terms favorable to Russia.

In the absence of a clear Russia policy from the young administration, Putin’s goal for the meeting is to maneuver that emerging policy in his favor – or, failing that, encourage the chaos that tends to characterize Trump’s foreign policies.

“Putin’s minimum objective will be to demonstrate that Russia is a co-equal power, which he can achieve with a simple handshake-and-smile photo,” said Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s top Russia policy official in the Obama administration. Beyond that is for Trump to give a “verbal commitment to work toward returning the intelligence [facilities] shut down by Obama” or a similar pledge to “work to modify or eliminate sanctions on Russia.”

In Moscow, all this appears as the U.S. finally giving Russia its due.

Maybe Trump will surprise us. But I doubt it. The most likely scenario is that he'll say that he and Vlad have ushered in a new era of cooperation and good will because he will have been flattered into thinking that's the case. And that will buy him many plaudits from blind partisans who were Russia hawks just six months ago, right-wingers who just love a strongman no matter where he's from and lefties who want to believe that Trump is a serious peacemaker intent upon taking down the neoliberals who allegedly want permanent war with Russia.

We'll have to see. But Trump is a fool and Putin is not so I'm going to guess that Russia will likely come out of this meeting feeling strengthened. And maybe that's fine. Good feelings are good. It all depends on what comes next.

Update: It looks like the inexperienced oilman Rex Tillersonwill be the only one in the room with Trump,  Putin and his very experienced foreign minister. 

There will likely only be six people in the room when President Trump meets President Putin on Friday at the sidelines of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany. 

According to an official familiar with the meeting's planning, it will be Trump, Putin, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and translators.

What could go wrong?

digby 7/06/2017 03:30:00 PM

 
What it's like to be on their radar

by digby

This first person account of the "Pizzagate" assault is just an uplifting account of the community rallying around a victim of right wing bullshit. It's also a very scary account of the effects of right wing propaganda:

Of all the bizarre turns in the 2016 presidential race, few top Pizzagate. The conspiracy theory, spread across alt-right media, centered on the idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, one of her top aides, were running a secret child-trafficking ring out of a pizza place, Comet Ping Pong, in Washington, D.C. The story was ludicrous, but for Comet's owner, James Alefantis, the nightmare was real and terrifying--from the first virulent posts online to the day a gunman stormed the pizzeria. --As told to Burt Helm

It was about 9:30 or 10 on the night of November 5 when I saw I had a voice mail from Will Sommer, a reporter at the Washington City Paper: "Do you know about this online conspiracy theory that you're running a child-slavery ring out of Comet with Hillary Clinton?"

It was right before the election. A lot of crazy things were happening. A lot of talk about conspiracies was being thrown around, and John Podesta's emails had been hacked and were being leaked. Over the years, I had had email exchanges with Podesta about cooking for fund­raisers. At first, I was like, "Oh, this is so funny. I'm in WikiLeaks." We started getting weird comments on Comet's Facebook and Instagram posts and on my personal accounts. I just deleted them and set my account to private.

When Donald Trump won, I thought, now, finally, at least this crazy conspiracy theory will go away. But the opposite happened. It grew and grew and became more and more focused on Comet. I got a call from a friend who works at MIT's Media­ Lab. He told me, this thing is out of control.

Messages and comments poured in. At one point, I was getting about 75 personal messages on social media a day. My response was to shut everything down--delete the comments, try not to respond. I thought, obviously this has to end eventually.

But it only kept escalating. Many of the messages were violent--"I have a gun. I want you to die"--and gory--"I pray that someone comes in with an assault rifle and kills everyone inside Comet. I want to cut open your guts and watch them spill out on the floor." I'd just shut my laptop and go on with my day.

It got scary when users started performing what I'll call "citizen's investigations." Users sifted through my social media profiles and started messaging everyone who'd ever liked or commented on a post of mine. I started getting calls from friends, family, and customers who said they were getting harassed online as well.

The phone started ringing all day long. You can't ignore phone calls when it's part of your business. People call the pizza place to ask, "How busy is it? Can we get a table? We want to order food." Now my staff was hearing "We know what's going on! You should turn James in! You're going to go to jail too if you don't." Or screaming "You're sick!" Some people I knew were like, "This is stupid." Others were terrified. I had to learn how to get these posts taken down, the steps you can take to reclaim your privacy. Mostly, there's nothing you can do.

The stress does weird things to your body. I was exhausted every day but never tired. I was on full alert, full of adrenaline. It was very intense. Then I'd go to the restaurant, and everything was normal. I'd feel fear, but there'd be all these families and kids happily eating. It was like a parallel universe.

Later, Cecilia Kang, a reporter for The New York Times, asked to write a piece about what was happening. At the time, I'd been denying media requests. Once the Times piece came out, it wasn't a dirty secret--everyone knew about Pizzagate. Employees and I talked every day about how to field questions from customers.

The community really rallied around us. Online, a movement started--"We'll all go to Comet at 6 p.m. Sunday to show our support!" It was like, thanks, people, but can't you just come in several waves--400 people showed up at once. The managers were saying, "We are going to be hugged to death!" From that point on, every day was like our busiest day of the year.

The gunman arrived on the afternoon of December 4. I wasn't in. I was at a church fair when I got the call from one of my managers. She was crying and said, "A guy came in with an assault rifle."

The man with the gun, Edgar Welch, had decided to "self-investigate" Comet. He rushed in through the front door and walked toward the back, and shot open the only locked door in the restaurant, a closet, damaging computer systems inside. My manager told me everyone was safe and evacuated to a firehouse across the street. When I got there, the police had locked down the block. That night, we went back. It was so weird. The tables were empty, but you could see full beers and half-eaten pizza on the table--the moment when time stopped.

At that point, I was ready to close temporarily. The next day, the phone never stopped ringing--"When are you open? Are you open tonight?" Basically, the community said, "We're coming. Open your doors." From Sunday until Tuesday evening, I did everything I could to get security in order. And we opened. The way people came out to support us, it was incredible, an overwhelming sensation.

From that point on, though, I was fearful. I was still receiving death threats. I started wearing a hat and sunglasses to leave the house. And the security people were like, "Yeah. You're in danger."

There's more. Read the whole thing.

All political violence is wrong, no matter who does it. And paranoid weirdos come in all partisan stripes. The man who shot Republicans at a baseball game was obviously politically motivated and became violent.  But this is something else. It's a full-blown lunatic conspiracy theory flogged by people with relationships to the highest levels of the Trump campaign.

The loon didn't kill anyone, thank God. But there are major right wing organizations who are portraying millions of mainstream liberals as violent traitors who are destroying the nation. It's only a matter of time.
.





digby 7/06/2017 02:00:00 PM

 
Let's hope they can keep the matches away from the toddler

by digby

It's hard to believe but the big question surrounding the Trump Putin summit is whether Trump will allow any adult supervision of the talks:

Internally, administration and White House officials are fretting about the prospect of a Trump-Putin meeting that bears any resemblance to the president’s May gathering in the Oval Office with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.

During that meeting, Trump divulged sensitive details of Israeli intelligence surrounding planned ISIS terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe. Russian government photos from the meeting—American photographers were barred from the event—portrayed what seemed to be a friendly, even lighthearted, meeting between the president and Russia’s top diplomats. 

A Wednesday report from the New York Times detailed concerns both within and outside of the administration that Trump and Putin might emerge looking like allies and friends, a sentiment that officials also relayed to The Daily Beast.

“Yeah, it’s a concern,” a third White House official, citing fallout over Trump’s May meeting, said of those potential pitfalls. “After Lavrov, it’s always a concern.”

Part of the concern stems from Trump’s tendency to shoot from the hip in tweets and public statements that frequently contradict statements from his own aides. That habit ensnared National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his deputy Dina Powell in the aftermath of the Lavrov meeting, when they all-but-denied that Trump had divulged sensitive intelligence to the Russians, only to have the president tacitly confirm that he did hours later.

McMaster and Powell were both in the room for that meeting. And senior aides are pushing for Powell to join Hill during the president’s Putin pow-wow as well, according to administration sources. As of Wednesday, the list for those participating in the meeting had not yet been finalized.

But aides have been pushing to stack the meeting with officials who might help nudge Trump in the right direction—or at least present a more politically palatable front.

“The idea is to get as many adults in the room as humanly possible,” one senior administration official said.

Jesus. He's already said contradictory things about Russia, an anodyne American speech about respecting borders and blah, blah, blah and then telling a reporter that sure, Russia meddled in the election, well, maybe, we don't really know, and anyway other countries did it too.

Clearly, he's fine with it. They helped him and he's grateful for it. There is no other way to interpret his behavior. Whether he knew about it, or ok'd the help, either tacitly or implicitly, is still unknown. But he knows now and he's obviously happy they did it.

It's fair to wonder why he isn't saying anything "stronger" (his favorite word) at this late date. I have hesitated to speculate about blackmail but it's getting harder to discount the possibility. There is no reason why he should still be hedging about this unless he's afraid of something.

.






digby 7/06/2017 12:30:00 PM

 

Paul and Mitch have a headache

by digby

I wrote about what the Republicans are facing for Salon this morning:

It’s weeks like this when Democrats need to remind themselves that with Donald Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in Congress, they not only have to walk and chew gum at the same time, they have to do it blindfolded on a tightrope. They’re looking at a potential nuclear event on the Korean peninsula, a historic meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin in which anything could happen, a global confab with 20 world leaders and the necessity to prevent the legislative atrocity of the GOP health care bill.

All that is on top of the ongoing trickle of news about the Russia investigation and the various horrors emanating from the executive agencies that would normally inspire headlines and protests of their own. The news media will flit from one thing to another, and is especially drawn to its own ongoing war with the White House, which is somewhat understandable.

It’s a lot to keep up with. Indeed, the assault from every angle, while haphazard and chaotic, may succeed in some areas simply because it’s impossible to defend against all of it.

But let’s not forget that the Republicans are also facing a monster agenda that is even more unpopular than their president, who consistently hovers around a 35-to-40 percent approval rating. First of all, they have been getting an earful from their constituents over the July 4 break. And it hasn’t been pretty. In town hall after town hall, Republicans have had to try to explain to angry and terrified citizens why they are considering voting for a plan that, according to polling by USA Today, finds approval from only 12 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, we have newly anointed health care experts Ted Cruz and Rand Paul offering “alternatives.” Paul, with an assist from the wily right-winger with a smile, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, wants to just pull the plug on Obamacare tomorrow and then think about something different sometime in the future. Maybe. He confidently assures us that those people who depend upon it will be happy that the Republicans granted them freedom from life-saving health care. Cruz, on the other hand, seems to be attempting to unconvincingly morph from a radical obstructionist to a conciliatory mediator with a “compromise” that everyone knows will still amount to vast numbers of uninsured people accompanied by pain, suffering and financial catastrophe. (So naturally conservatives on Capitol Hill are warming to it.)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has undoubtedly been losing some sleep over the past few days. He’s facing an unpalatable choice. He’s going to have to try to pass something among the awful plans on offer, making his vulnerable 2018 senators even more vulnerable — or he’s going to fail to pass something among the awful plans on offer, making his vulnerable 2018 senators even more vulnerable. And there is nothing more important to McConnell than keeping control of the Senate in 2018.

Then there’s the House, the moderate members of which held their noses and voted for their version of this health care monstrosity with the promise that they were going to “fix it in the Senate.” That didn’t happen. Indeed, in some ways the Senate bill is even worse. But the House Freedom Caucus has already put the leadership on notice that the Senate bill is unacceptably generous and they’re demanding more cruelty or they are out.

That doesn’t mean Republicans won’t pass the health care bill in the end, of course. Enough members could easily conclude that they are in a lose-lose situation so they might as well get their tax cuts. But lets just say that it’s not getting any easier.

But that’s not the GOP leadership’s only problem, however. The longer the health care bill takes, the further back they have to push the other important items on their agenda, including the 2018 budget resolution and the conservative holy grail: tax reform.

According to Stan Collender in Forbes, unlike in previous years when the budget was pushed back with continuing resolutions, Republicans face disaster if they don’t pass a budget this year.

Unless they decide to change the procedures, the entire Trump/GOP legislative strategy relies on Congress adopting a 2018 budget resolution that includes reconciliation instructions to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees to do tax reform. 

A budget resolution will also provide the Senate with the legally required guidelines on how much it can appropriate next year. Without that it will have trouble moving forward.

You see, Republican leaders had a plan, but it hinged on pushing their health care reform bill quick and dirty through the House and then the Senate so they could immediately jump to the budget and set the table for tax reform. The problem now is that House Republicans are at each other’s throats over spending priorities, to the point that the House Budget Committee had to cancel its planned mark-up session. The Senate hasn’t even scheduled one yet.

And then there’s the debt ceiling, which comes up again in August — although most people think there will be enough money to fund the government until October. As Collender notes in his piece for Forbes, the problem is that nobody trusts Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s numbers, or anyone else’s coming from the Trump administration, and the required “clean” debt ceiling vote will be a tough lift, even with the GOP in full charge of the government. According to Niv Ellis at The Hill, only 16 current GOP House members backed the last such debt ceiling vote and not many will commit to doing it again. Democrats certainly have no reason to bail them out after the way Republicans behaved the last time this came up under President Obama.

Needless to say, nobody knows what kind of a mess Trump and his minions will create in the middle of all this. Recall that during the campaign, Trump said the country should just default on the debt and then “renegotiate,” the same way he used to refuse to pay vendors, then offer them a pittance and tell them to sue him if they didn’t like it. It’s conceivable Trump might even veto his own party’s debt-ceiling legislation.

All these votes ahead, and there will be many of them, will be misery for the GOP Congress and its leadership in particular. They only have themselves to blame for that. Republicans have spent years building a majority full of extremists and obstructionists and they just helped elect a man who has no idea how government works and seems to have no capacity to learn. What did they expect?

.

digby 7/06/2017 11:00:00 AM

 
Surely it's only the uneducated...

by digby

This is a problem with the lower order, amirite? Surely, it isn't manifested among educated elites ...

From the Harvard Crimson:

The Fox Club will not allow the nine women who had enjoyed “provisional” status in the group to become full members, effectively expelling the women and marking the club’s return to all-male status almost two years after it first became co-ed. 

The move, detailed in internal correspondence between recent Fox graduates, ends the club’s experiment in co-ed membership, which began in October 2015 when undergraduates admitted a group of upperclassmen women as members. That decision deeply divided the club, pitting graduate and undergraduate members against each other as Harvard administrators pressured final clubs to go gender-neutral. 

Ultimately, the club’s graduate leadership allowed the women to stay on as “provisional” members—a designation that many male members also adopted at the time in a show of support for their female peers. But the club did not invite any more women to join the club, accepting an all-male class of membership last fall.

The Fox Club will not allow the nine women who had enjoyed 'provisional' status in the group to become full members, marking the club's return to all-male status. 

 It's only 2017. What's the hurry? And anyway, it's not as if elite clubs at Ivy league universities provide any special professional networking possibilities.

Oh, and look here. The ultimate elite organization:

digby 7/06/2017 09:30:00 AM

 

Trumpcare for kids

by Tom Sullivan

Source: Georgetown University

If policymakers are not focusing on quick fixes, they are fixating on the the wrong problems. Politico this morning examines how the focus on lowering insurance premiums misses the still-growing overall cost of health care: prescription drugs, hospital stays, deductibles, co-pays, etc. Even if Republicans were to somehow rein in premiums, the overall costs are going to pop out somewhere else, like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury from a broken thermometer.

Growing premiums made a tight, sound-bite issue to run on last fall:

“Too many in the GOP confuse adjustments in how insurance premiums are regulated with bringing competitive pressures to bear on the costs of medical services,” the American Enterprise Institute’s James Capretta wrote in a recent commentary for Real Clear Health. “They say they want lower premiums for consumers, but their supposed solution would simply shift premium payments from one set of consumers to another.”

Republicans claim their plans for replacing Obamacare will cut the federal government's health care expenditures — $800 billion less on Medicaid over a decade. But that will only shift the burden elsewhere.

Many Republicans predict that limiting federal payments to states would force Medicaid to be more efficient. Democrats says the GOP bill would basically thrust those costs onto the states and onto Medicaid beneficiaries themselves, who are too poor, by definition, to get their care — often including nursing homes — without government assistance.

The CBO gave a mixed assessment of what would happen to premiums under the GOP proposals. They’d rise before they’d fall — and they wouldn’t fall for everyone. Older and sicker people could well end up paying more, and government subsidies would be smaller, meaning that even if the sticker price of insurance comes down, many people at the lower end of the income scale wouldn’t be able to afford it.

The Kaiser Family Foundation believes it is the overall cost of health care the public feels more than premiums.

The Los Angeles Times considers what $800 billion less spent on Medicaid will mean to children in rural areas such as Fayette County, West Virginia where voters overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. Five percent of children nationwide are without health coverage today, down from 14 percent two decades ago. Cutting Medicaid puts them at renewed risk:

“There is just no way to cut Medicaid on the scale that they are talking about and avoid hitting kids,” said Dr. Traci Acklin, who grew up in Fayette County and now runs the only pediatrician’s practice in Montgomery, out of the first floor of a community hospital founded a century ago to care for sick miners.

“Without the health insurance, kids aren’t going to get the immunizations and the checkups. There are going to be more lost days of school. More trips to the emergency room.... It would be food or healthcare for a lot of these families.”

Medicaid expenditures for children yield improved health, reading scores, and reduced dropout rates as well as higher future earnings according to research cited by the Times:

Overall, the Senate GOP legislation would slash more than a third of federal Medicaid funds over the next 20 years and nearly double the ranks of the uninsured by 2026, according to recent analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Budget analysts and many state governors, including some Republicans, predict such a retrenchment will have a devastating impact, including on children, as some 45 million low-income children rely on Medicaid and CHIP nationally.

The vast majority of counties where those children on Medicaid or CHIP reside — 622 of the 780 counties — have populations under 50,000, the report continues. "Most of the counties are overwhelmingly white, with the exception of predominantly African American counties in the Mississippi Delta and heavily Latino counties in New Mexico and along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas." In Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, a majority of children in three-quarters of the counties count on two or more taxpayer-supported plans.

If the current Republican plan(s) for Obamacare reform pass, more is at stake for adults as well, writes Anna Maria Barry-Jester at FiveThirtyEight:

There’s little doubt that reducing the program’s federal funding by $772 billion over the next 10 years would alter who Medicaid covers and what services enrollees can receive. Medicaid covers more people than any other entitlement program in the country, so any changes would affect a lot of people. The program is responsible for 62 percent of nursing home residents in the U.S. and covers nearly half of all births. It also insures people who are in particularly dire need of health care: children with complicated, chronic conditions and people with HIV, for example. And that costs a lot of money. Medicaid is one of the federal government’s largest expenses, after Social Security, defense and Medicare. It’s the second-largest expense to states, after education.

What a shame the richest country in the world can no longer afford Americans. It will shed blood to defend them, but it won't spend money to heal them.

Well. The holiday is over. Time to get back (myself included) to making sure our electeds don't get an extended one.

Update: NC Senators faxed.


Undercover Blue 7/06/2017 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

 
He's with the Nazis

by digby

How many of these loons are there anyway?

A video posted by Representative Clay Higgins from inside a former gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Saturday sparked outrage from officials, who took him to task for politicizing a space where around 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were exterminated. Rather than pausing to reflect in silence as signs request, Higgins, who serves on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, chose the somber setting as the backdrop for a call to arms in his home country.

“This is why homeland security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible,” Higgins says in the video, over a violin solo from Holocaust drama Schindler’s List. “The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II. The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this. It’s hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment — unwavering commitment — to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”

I'm not sure who this Republican congressman is identifying with here. It appears that most people think he's taking the side of the victims of the Holocaust even though his call for a strong military and Homeland Security doesn't exactly scan unless he thinks that Americans are in danger of being shipped off to concentration camps in other countries. Or something.

In fact,  if you look at his other writings it's not entirely clear that he isn't taking the side of the perpetrators:

Higgins’ enthusiasm for Trump and the policies he has ushered in extends beyond homeland security videos filmed in former gas chambers. In a Facebook post last month, the former sheriff’s department spokesman declared that “all of Christendom…is at war with Islamic horror” and called for all Muslims suspected of being “radicalized” to be killed.

“Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter,” Higgins wrote. “Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

He's an extremely stupid person with no idea about what happened in WWII, obviously. So, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he just doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the Holocaust. But his rants about Muslims certainly show him to be a violent, sadistic man --- just the type that ran the death camps. They said "kill them all" too. And they got 6 million of them.

.



digby 7/05/2017 06:00:00 PM

 
Confused POTUS

by digby

This is odd. Trump doesn't seem to realize his limo is right in front of him:

I swear to God Trump is sundowning.
Here he is, confused, wandering away from his limo.
He had to be redirected.#25thAmendmentNow pic.twitter.com/0ZZOMTMd1k

— Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) July 4, 2017

But who knows? Maybe he thought he had to speak with someone or thought he was supposed to ride in another vehicle.His reaction suggests that he was looking for his limo but we don't really know. But he's wandered away a couple of times before.

And he did this:



In that case, Rudy was literally sitting right in front of him and he said, "where's Rudy?" That's weird.

I don't know if this means anything. Anyone who's being filmed constantly is bound to look confused and strange some of the time. But these little incidents are piling up. If they aren't just the result of stress and distraction and he is suffering from memory lapses we'll see clearer evidence of it soon.

When Reagan started to show real signs of problems he was at the end of his term and he had a very disciplined crew around him that was highly competent to cover for him. His wife was also deeply involved and fiercely protective. I don't think I'm being too critical when I say that isn't something where Trump's staff and family have shown much talent. Maybe Jivanka will step up for him but so far they've just contributed to the chaos.


.





digby 7/05/2017 04:30:00 PM

 
What confidence?

by digby

The Upshot takes a look at the current economy:

After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, Americans’ optimism about the economic future soared. But midway through the year, that optimism has not translated into concrete economic gains.

This seeming contradiction exposes a reality about the role of psychology in economics — or more specifically, how psychology is connected only loosely to actual growth. It will take more than feelings to fix the sluggishness that has been evident in the United States and other major economies for years. Confidence isn’t some magic elixir for the economy: Businesses will hire and invest only when they see concrete evidence of demand for their products, and consumers intensify their spending only when their incomes justify it.

The sharp rise in economic optimism after the election came through no matter how the question was asked or who answered, whether the survey was intended to capture consumer confidence or consumer comfort or consumer sentiment. It was true in surveys of small-business owners and of C.E.O.s of some of the biggest companies in the world. And the rise during the winter months in these surveys has mostly been sustained in the months since.

Ok, let me stop right there. WTF? Did "Americans" actually think electing a cretinous moron for president would be good for the economy? I guess I could buy that it might have no effect if I thought that US political leadership and government policies were actually pretty irrelevant to the economy. But what in the world made anyone but Trump's personal cult believe he'd be a positive force for growth? Especially the supposedly smart people on Wall Street?

Well, now that I think about it, the supposedly smart people on Wall Street probably just assumed that he'd cut their taxes and that's good enough for government work as far as they're concerned.

Anyway, they were all wrong:

But the economy is plodding along at the same modest rate it has for the last eight years nonetheless — at least when you look at “hard” data around economic activity instead of “soft” data like surveys, as analysts put it.

President Trump said on Twitter on Sunday that the stock market was at an “all-time high” and that unemployment was at its lowest level in years, both of which are true (he added that wages would start going up, which is certainly possible).

But in overall measures of economic activity, the expansion looks much as it has for years, with steady growth of around 2 percent. The Trump economy so far looks an awful lot like the Obama economy.

For all of business executives’ apparent enthusiasm, the nation is adding jobs more slowly in 2017 than it did in 2016, and investment spending by businesses is growing modestly; new orders for capital goods are up only 0.7 percent so far in 2017.

Consumers’ spending was 2.7 percent higher in the first four months this year than in the same period of 2016, adjusted for inflation — which is slower than the 3.2 percent year-over-year gain at the end of 2016.

And while the stock market has been surging and the Federal Reserve has raised short-term interest rates, long-term Treasury bond yields remain very low, suggesting that traders do not buy the idea that growth is poised to accelerate. A falling dollar suggests currency markets see improving prospects in Europe and elsewhere.

There is no sign a recession is brewing, but neither is there evidence for the kind of boom you might expect if you believe that confidence is a crucial driver of economic growth.

He goes on to explain that the whole concept of "confidence" is mostly bullshit because people really don't have any way of explaining something so complicated. Confidence does often grow when incomes rise and people gain wealth. Duh. But just "feeling it," doesn't translate into growth itself and neither just "feeling" that things are going sideways necessarily translate into a slump. Sometimes these things correlate but sometimes they don't.

But don't worry, we're in the "you can believe me or you can believe your eyes" Trump era in which he'll tell us how rich we all are and we'll believe it. Let's call it Trump's virtual economy where we are all living like Ivanka. It's so nice being rich and glamorous. If only we didn't need food, shelter and health care, we could all live the dream.

By the way, it turns out that all that American confidence after the election was only Republicans. Democrats were not excited. So, it was simply partisanship and nobody who works with other people's money should have ever looked at those numbers as if they had anything to do with the economy. In fact, it's financial malpractice if they did ...

.
digby 7/05/2017 03:00:00 PM

 
One of Trump's fabled "Forgotten Men"

by digby

A Parkinson's patient getting harassed by Tea Partiers back in 2009

This story is so sad on so many levels it's just depressing:

Bradley Ledgerwood, 36, is a proud Republican and an enthusiastic fan of President Trump.

He’s also on a fast track to becoming one of Trump’s fabled Forgotten Men.

Ledgerwood has been enamored with politics all his life. An active member of the Craighead County Republican Committee and the Northeast Arkansas Political Animals lunch club, he serves as an alderman for 342-person Cash, Ark.

Profoundly physically disabled, Ledgerwood participates in these activities only through the help of two government-funded programs that are now on the chopping block: Medicaid and legal aid.

You’ve no doubt heard lots about threats to the first of these, given Republican efforts to wring $800 billion from the federal low-income health insurance program. So let’s focus on the second, which has received almost no attention, despite facing an existential threat from both the president and House Republicans.

At 2, Ledgerwood was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which left him unable to walk, stand, bathe himself, eat or use the bathroom without assistance.

“My mom and dad are basically my hands and feet,” he told me by phone Friday.

His mother, in fact, cares for him full time and has done so for many years. She was able to quit her job and provide round-the-clock care as a result of a special Medicaid program designed to help people with serious disabilities avoid institutionalization. The program pays for hours worked by in-home caregivers, which can include family members.

In Ledgerwood’s case, the state has consistently determined that he qualifies for 56 hours of care, the maximum.

At least, it did until last year.

That’s when the Arkansas Department of Human Services abruptly cut Ledgerwood’s weekly hours nearly in half, despite the fact that his medical needs had not changed. With minimal explanation, officials claimed that a new computer algorithm determined that he did not need so much care. Other families experienced similar cuts in caregiving hours.

This cut would devastate the family’s precarious finances. His mother contemplated returning to work and sending Ledgerwood to a nursing home.

“That would destroy my life,” he says in no uncertain terms. Fiscally minded voter that he is, he adds that institutionalization would also cost the state multiple times more money than family-provided home care.

Alongside six other plaintiffs with disabilities, Ledgerwood sued the state — and won. The case is currently on appeal.

How was Ledgerwood able to secure legal representation? Not through a lucrative GoFundMe campaign, or lottery windfall, or some long-lost rich uncle.

It was through Legal Aid of Arkansas, one of 133 programs that receive grants from the Legal Services Corporation, a congressionally established nonprofit that funds civil legal services for about 2 million low-income people each year.

And low-income families, whether in red-state America or blue, turn out to need a lot of legal help.

In the past year, 7 in 10 low-income families experienced at least one civil legal problem, according to a recent University of Chicago NORC survey done for the Legal Services Corporation. Such problems include foreclosures, domestic violence (getting a restraining order, for example), custody disputes, debt repayment or neglectful landlords. The elderly, rural residents and veterans — all core components of the Republican base — are especially well-represented in this population.
[...]
In the “ skinny budget” released in March, Trump proposed eliminating the Legal Services Corporation entirely. At the time, this produced bipartisan pleas for “robust funding” for the organization. Nonetheless, last week a House appropriations subcommittee passed a bill that would slash the organization ’s funding by roughly a quarter, from $385 million to $300 million. If enacted, such cuts would inevitably leave many families such as Ledgerwood’s and Figueroa’s to fend for themselves.

For now, Ledgerwood still supports Trump (“He reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan”) and remains confident that his president and his party will have his back.

But, he says, “If I lose my lawyer and my services, I may feel a little differently.”

Someone should tell him that the Republican Party wants to do away with Medicaid altogether and have him "shop" for the best price for insurance for his medical condition, which he won't be able to get because of his pre-existing condition. The Arkansas law pulling back his services was just a trial run.

He also needs to get a job because "you have to work for everything you get."


Sigh. I just don't know what to say about this anymore.

.


digby 7/05/2017 01:30:00 PM

 
Ooh, scary liberals

by digby

This ad is just downright nasty:



And here's the point: messing with liberals:




The Washington Post found at least a couple of NRA members who saw what this thing was really all about:

“I’m an old white guy and a life member, but this BS is disgusting,” Facebook user Eric Eugene Rush commented under the post. “When you spew crap like this, you don’t speak for me anymore. I try to avoid doing things on the spur of the moment, but I’ll be thinking about canceling my membership.”

“Jeeeeesus … it almost looks like you’re encouraging violence against demonstrators,” Steve van der Lacy wrote. “Just let the police do their jobs when or if protests get out of hand.”

There was a lot of commentary from the left that this was a call for civil war. But it isn't it's a call for an authoritarian crackdown by the US Government. You may think that's an unusual tack for the 2nd Amendment zealots to take but it isn't. They consider themselves to be adjuncts of the police when it comes to fighting liberal protesters, African Americans and immigrants. They were on the ground "protecting businesses" in Ferguson. And you can bet that if there are widespread protests that challenge the police, they'll be with them.

They are happy for the government police agencies to crack down on their political enemies. They only hate the government when it comes to guns and taxes.

Remember, Trump himself celebrated vigilantism on the trail. He has no trouble with the idea of armed citizens taking on the "criminals" to "help"the police. As long as the criminals are the right criminals, if you know what I mean.



.





digby 7/05/2017 12:00:00 PM

 
What does The Donald really want from Vlad?

by digby

I wrote about Trump's big upcoming foreign adventure for Salon today:

In a couple of days President Trump is going overseas again, for a meeting with world leaders of the G-20 in Hamburg. This time he will also meet with his favorite leader of all, Vladimir Putin, one on one. This is ostensibly the first time they will have met in person. I say ostensibly because Trump has made so many contradictory statements that for all we know they’ve been secret pals for years.

Recall that back in October of 2013, when asked what he thought of Putin, Trump told David Letterman that he “met him once.” In November of that year, Trump told MSNBC that he had a relationship with him. In February of 2014 he went on “Fox & Friends” and said Putin contacted him during the Miss Universe pageant and was “so nice.”

The following March, regarding Putin, Trump told the Daily Mail: “The relationship is great, and it would be great if I had the position I should have. That June he answered “yes,” when asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity if he’d had any contact with Putin.

After Trump announced that he was running for president in 2015 he started to say simply that he thought he’d “get along well” with the Russian president, but he stopped saying that he’d already met him. Although when right-wing radio host Michael Savage asked him directly if he had met Putin, Trump said, “Yes, yes, a long time ago. We got along great, by the way.”

When the issue came up in a Republican primary debate in November 2015 Trump said, “I got to know [Putin] very well because we were both on ‘60 Minutes,’ we were stablemates, and we did very well that night. But, you know that.” (He later admitted that the program had just featured separate profiles on the two men.) By February 2016 he changed his tune again, saying at a rally that he had no relationship with Putin. Then in May of that year, when asked if he’d ever spoken to Vladimir Putin, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “Yeah, I have no comment on that, no comment.” Baier asked again and the candidate said, “Yeah, but I don’t want to comment because, let’s assume I did. Perhaps it was personal. You know, I don’t want to hurt his confidence. But I know Russia well.”

By July, on the verge of the general election campaign, Trump was denying having any relationship with Putin of his government at all. He told a Miami CBS affiliate, “I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do, I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.” He repeated that at the campaign debates with Hillary Clinton in the fall.

So, we really don’t know whether Trump has met the Russian president before. He’s lied about it one way or the other. We do know that he greatly admires him and has been one of his most strident defenders in the last few years, whether it was against accusations that Putin had poisoned political enemies, invaded a neighboring country or ordered the killing of opposition journalists. Indeed, Trump has been known to say that America does the same thing, implying it’s no big deal if Putin does it too.

The Washington Post reported last week that there was a major battle within the White House over this meeting:

Many administration officials believe the U.S. needs to maintain its distance from Russia at such a sensitive time — and interact only with great caution. But Trump and some others within his administration have been pressing for a full bilateral meeting. He’s calling for media access and all the typical protocol associated with such sessions, even as officials within the State Department and National Security Council urge more restraint, according to a current and a former administration official.

Some advisers have recommended that the president instead do either a quick, informal “pull-aside” on the sidelines of the summit, or that the U.S. and Russian delegations hold “strategic stability talks,” which typically don’t involve the presidents.

One imagines that some of the political people were leery of the optics of Trump and Putin together in the middle of this Russiagate firestorm. And the policy people were undoubtedly terrified that Trump will say something that sends the world careening on a course nobody anticipated.

As it turns out, Trump put his foot down and they are going to do the whole dog-and-pony show, a “full bilateral meeting.”

Most foreign policy experts think Trump should bring up the Russian election-meddling, but there’s no indication he has any intention of doing that. After all, he is one of the country’s greatest skeptics that Russia was involved at all. National security adviser H.R. McMaster recently told CNN that the Trump-Putin talks had “no specific agenda. It’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about.” What could go wrong?

We do know that Trump has asked for a list of “deliverables” he could offer to the Russian president when they meet. There was some speculation that it could include the return of the compounds in the U.S. that were seized by the Obama administration last winter as punishment for the reported meddling in the campaign. Needless to say, lifting the sanctions over the invasion of Crimea will certainly be at the top of Putin’s wish list.

No one knows what Trump might ask in return. He certainly doesn’t seem to be inclined to put human rights on the table and the administration is thinking of withdrawing from the international nuclear-weapons treaty (which may be the only thing keeping the world from a new arms race) so a nonproliferation pact is not likely to be high on the president’s list.

But there is one thing Trump has talked about in the past that he could ask for in return for his “deliverables.” Speaking about Putin back in 2015, Trump told Anderson Cooper:

He would never keep somebody like [Edward] Snowden in Russia. He hates Obama. He doesn’t respect Obama. Obama doesn’t like him either. But he has no respect for Obama. Has a hatred for Obama. And Snowden is living the life. Look if that — if I’m president, Putin says, “Hey, boom, you’re gone.” I guarantee you this.

If Vladimir Putin wants to create some more chaos in the U.S., that would be one way of doing it. It would give Trump a big win in the eyes of the intelligence community that has been harshly critical. It would enrage many of the Russia skeptics on the left who have defended Trump’s outreach to the Russian president. Europeans would be sharply divided, Americans would be arguing along old faultlines and the entire Russia story would go sideways.

I have thought from the day Trump won the election that Vladimir Putin could well see this as the perfect inauguration present for his friend. If he can get Trump to agree to loosen sanctions or otherwise reward him handsomely — in exchange for something that costs him nothing, and could be viewed as ridding himself of a problem he doesn’t need — Putin will have proved that he, not Donald Trump, is the world’s greatest dealmaker. And Donald Trump won’t even know he’s been played like a balalaika.

.

digby 7/05/2017 10:30:00 AM

 
You go, Handmaids

by digby


This is a powerful image:

They've appeared in Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, California, and New York; cloaked in stark red robes and white bonnets, the women sit in silence with their faces turned down, subdued and still yet quietly creepy.

On Tuesday, the handmaids went to Washington: over a dozen women dressed in costume circled the Capitol in protest of the Senate Republican health care bill that would strip Planned Parenthood of funding and block Medicaid patients from receiving health care at the clinics.

While a new television show has brought Margaret Atwood's dystopian sci-fi book "The Handmaid's Tale" newfound popularity, women around the country are bringing handmaids to life — and to their state capital buildings — for reasons that have more to do with science than fiction.

At the New York state legislature in Albany last Wednesday, handmaids appeared for the third day in a row to silently urge lawmakers to bring a floor vote on two reproductive health bills they say would protect women against potential federal restrictions many fear the Trump administration could bring.

Vanessa Giraldo, a Brooklyn resident who works with special-needs children, took two days off work to take part in the demonstration Monday and Tuesday.

"We’re trying to pass the Reproductive Health Act in order to at least protect New Yorkers because the federal landscape is very hostile to women’s reproductive rights," said Giraldo.

Giraldo said that standing before her state's leaders stock-still in the restrictive garb was "terrifying" but powerful: "It felt like, this could very well be our future. And it’s definitely our past."

In Atwood's dystopian novel — and the Hulu show based on the book — handmaids are slave women forced to serve as reproductive vessels for powerful but infertile elites. Ritually raped and made to become pregnant over and over, the handmaids are little more than walking wombs with no say over their own lives.

"The Handmaid’s Tale is based on what actually has happened to women throughout history, where women have been essentially narrowed down to their reproductive abilities," said Stephanie Craddock Sherwood, executive director of the Ohio abortion fund Women Have Options (WHO).

Sherwood crafted the white bonnets worn by activists in Ohio who entered the statehouse in Columbus on June 13. She said her group banded together with other reproductive rights organizations, like NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, to stage the silent protest against a bill that would effectively ban abortions after 13 weeks.

The #OhioHandmaids waiting silently as the state considers the next plan to force women to give birth against their wishes or medical advice pic.twitter.com/pGBBBlK9rO

— NARAL ProChoice Ohio (@ProChoiceOH) June 13, 2017

The tactic of dressing like handmaids to observe legislative debates and votes on women's healthcare started in Texas this March, where NARAL Pro-Choice Texas director Heather Busby got the idea from watching actors promote the Hulu show on the streets during the South By Southwest festival.

A 'Texas Handmaids' Facebook group was created to organize the first demonstration, at a March 20 state senate debate on two abortion-related bills — one would ban doctors from performing dilation & extraction procedures, while another would give doctors permission to lie to a pregnant patient about fetal anomalies if they thought she might consider an abortion.

"I was nervous at first about whether it would work, would people understand or would they think it was some kind of red riding hood thing. But they got it," said Busby, who has since helped organize sewing parties to create more of the red cloaks.

In the U.S., worries are building among reproductive rights advocates who fear the Trump administration could severely roll back access to abortion and other forms of women's health care.

"The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary tale about a future without reproductive rights and the critical need to protect access to that care," said Danielle Wells, assistant director of state policy media at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

As the demonstrations continue to spread, and more women appear in statehouses dressed as handmaids, the red-cloaked allegory gets stronger.

"Any limits to reproductive healthcare access, on birth control and abortion access, is essentially forcing women into pregnancy and motherhood," said Sherwood. "It’s limiting our futures and lives, so that we are only our uteruses and our reproductive ability."

That's about it.

.


digby 7/05/2017 09:00:00 AM

 

"A mindset is not a fact"

by Tom Sullivan

Tonya Jameson

Chief Rausch said that when investigating complaints, it is essential to understand an officer’s mindset to determine the facts. A mindset is not a fact.

My wife traveled from North Carolina to a private residence in the Knoxville, Tennessee area last summer to pick up a used truck she bought from the owner days earlier. There is absolutely no way — none — that she would have experienced what happened in May to Tonya Jameson. My wife is white.

Jameson traveled there from Charlotte and Jameson is black. A week later, the former Charlotte Observer reporter published this account on her blog:

I was putting my license plate on an Isuzu SUV that I bought on April 28 from a nice lady in Jefferson City, TN when it happened.

I rented a one-way rental from Charlotte, NC to Morristown, TN, and took an unmarked taxi to the woman’s house on May 3. I talked to her the day before and told her that I would be coming to pick it up and she could remove her license plate because I had NC plates. The car was parked in the same spot in her driveway as it was the previous week when I purchased it from her.

After the cab dropped me off, I got the plate and my screw driver out of the duffel bag to put my plates on. I was screwing in the license plate when I heard: “Hands up, I’m an off duty officer.”

I turned slowly with my hands up. I explained that I bought the car the previous week. He didn’t lower his gun. He’s the seller’s son-in-law, also a Knoxville cop, and lives across the street. He said he saw me get out of a car, which sped away.

It was a taxi, I explain. From where, he asks, still holding the gun on me. Morristown (about 20 minutes away), I reply.

He’s incredulous. I tell him the registration and bill of sale (signed by the woman) are in my duffel bag. I tell him the keys are in my pocket. He tells me not to move. I ask if I can put down the small screwdriver that I’m sweatily holding in the air. He says yes. I ask if I can put my hands down, and he says yes.

He’s still pointing his gun at me as he calls 911. He reports a suspected auto theft. He finishes the call and holsters his gun. I exhale and lean against the truck. He tells me to sit on the step beside the house.

I again invite him to check the registration in my bag. I share various details about his mother-in-law. He tells me he knew she was selling the car, but she didn’t tell him she’d sold it.

A Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputy arrives. I’m thinking this should finally be over, and I can be on my way back to Charlotte. The off-duty cop tells his side of the story. I tell the deputy I have the registration in my bag. Does he check it? Nope. Does he run the plates? Nah. I offer him the signed bill of sale and keys. Not good enough.

He tells me to call the cab company and tell the taxi to return to the house. The dispatcher says “sorry honey,” but is willing to talk to the deputy. He doesn’t want to talk to her. He wants to talk the woman who sold me the car, which no one can reach by phone. She’s not home. She’s out cutting the grass on a hill, and she isn’t answering her cell. We’ve been over this already. No one can get her by phone.

I tell the deputy again that registration is in my bag, and it matches the VIN on the car. Or he can simply run the plates. He asks for the title. I tell him that I don’t have the title with me.

He asks if I have the phone number of the woman who sold me the car. Yes. He asks for her number. I read it to him from my phone. He compares it to the number on the bill of sale. It matched. (I’m not sure what that proved). He still doesn’t run the plate.

Since I was finally allowed to pick up my phone off the ground, I text a friend: “Cops here. They don’t believe I bought the car. Just stay on the line ... gonna call.”

Finally, the off-duty cop gets the seller’s daughter on the phone. She confirms that the car was sold to someone in NC. Did I mention that the off-duty cop was the seller’s son-in-law, and knew she was selling the car?

They let me go with a weak apology, and the typical, “There’ve been a lot of burglaries in the area.”

The deputy thanks the off-duty cop, who’d held the gun on me.

All of that talk about police de-escalating situations hasn’t reached Jefferson County, TN. The Knoxville cop’s first inclination was to point a gun at me. I was kneeling down with my back turned to him screwing in a license plate. It was broad daylight. I wasn’t fleeing nor was I threatening him in any way. He could’ve just asked me what was I doing without drawing his gun first. Then instead of following common sense by simply running the plate, the Jefferson County deputy asks me a bunch of nonsense questions.

I filed a complaint with the Knoxville Police Department’s Internal Affairs regarding the officer who drew his gun on me. I talked to Jefferson County Sheriff G.W. “Bud” McCoig about how his deputy handled the call. McCoig said his deputy acted appropriately despite not running my tag or looking at the registration (the deputy denied that I told him I had the registration). Since the deputy only stayed for 11 minutes, McCoig didn’t think it was a big deal. I explained that after one cop pulls a gun on you, and then the law enforcement officer who arrives won’t follow common sense and simply run the plate, but instead interrogates you, 11 minutes is an eternity. I told him his officer created an even tenser encounter. McCoig was unsympathetic and concluded the conversation with, “I’m glad everything worked out and as far as I’m concerned this is closed.”

I’m waiting to hear back from the KPD’s Internal Affairs. They needed additional information from me today. I’m not sure what if anything I can do about the ineptitude at the Jefferson County Sheriff Department.

I do know that I’m thankful that I survived that day. I understand how easily a police encounter can escalate. Some cops are willing to draw guns first and ask questions later. It also showed me how they protect each other. We’re expected to be thankful they didn’t kill us, beat us or lock us up in the name of public safety. The system isn’t set up to protect us. It’s set up to protect them when they abuse their power.

Unacceptable: "We must remain calm while facing a loaded gun while the trained officers can panic and overreact." https://t.co/CVpDRAwiF2

— Becky Bond (@bbond) July 4, 2017

“I told the chief point blank, I don’t think the officer would’ve reacted the same way if he saw me as a white female or a white male,” Jameson said.

Knoxville's Internal Affairs concluded in late June that Officer Matthew Janish’s actions "were lawful and proper":

"In this case, even though he was off duty, the investigation showed that Officer Janish acted within the bounds of his training and appropriate police work in investigating a situation that appeared suspicious to him," reads a statement from Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero.

"Any of us can imagine what it would be like to be alone in an unfamiliar area, having done nothing wrong, and suddenly be confronted by a man with a gun," Rogero's statement continues. "Ms. Jameson had a terrible experience, and she was understandably upset by it."

Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch flew to North Carolina on Tuesday to "meet with (Jameson) to explain the situation, to explain the results of the investigation, and to allow Ms. Jameson the opportunity to ask questions," said KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk.

But in mid-May, former Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith told WATE Janish had a better option than approaching Jameson with a weapon drawn:

“The smart thing, and what he’s trained to do, is to notify the jurisdiction just like anybody else, call 911 or if he had a police radio and it was in reach of Knox County Communications District, he could have gotten on the radio and said something. Unless there was some aggression or threat, he was not trained to flash his weapon.”

On Saturday, Jameson was back writing for the Charlotte Observer:

My case is another example of how the system is broken. Although my encounter didn’t end tragically, it could have, as all too many have (Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Michael Brown and others), and his actions likely would have still been deemed “lawful and proper.”

The system is designed to exonerate police officers, not provide justice for their victims. My incident, however, gives me new insight into just how much the law values police lives over the citizens they are supposed to protect.

Chief Rausch said that when investigating complaints, it is essential to understand an officer’s mindset to determine the facts. A mindset is not a fact.

Here are the facts that Janish appeared to focus on – the unmarked cab, a black person, the duffel bag and the license plate.

Then here are other facts that he ignored – he knew his mother-in-law was selling the car, it was broad daylight, and I knew her first name, but not her last name. I offered to show him the keys, registration and bill of sale signed by his mother-in-law.

Those are the actual facts. Officer Janish’s mindset was the scenario he created in his head. His fears weren’t facts.

Jameson told the Knoxville Mercury, “He painted this whole picture where he felt threatened. And if they feel threatened, the system’s going to let them off. And that’s crazy.” The transcript of the 911 call, Jameson asserts, shows Janish was "amped."

She concludes her Observer column describing the ludicrousness of the encounter:

I fought every impulse to do anything that would make him feel threatened. I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one expected to remain calm.

But Janish didn't shoot her, so it's all good:

"He didn't do anything wrong, and he apologized," said Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch. "It was just one of these unfortunate incidents that happen," he added.

Just not to white people, he didn't add. As Jameson said, if police feel threatened, the system’s going to give them the benefit of the doubt before the people they are supposed to protect.

Two weeks ago, another off-duty cop in St. Louis, but black like Jameson, came out of his house to assist fellow officers with a stolen car that crashed down the street. No screenwriter would write this. It's too cliché:

According to a department summary of the incident released later Thursday, two officers who encountered the armed off-duty officer ordered him to the ground. He complied. When they recognized the off-duty officer, they told him he could stand up and walk toward them.

Another officer just arriving at the scene saw the off-duty officer get up and, not knowing he was an officer, fired his weapon once at the man. He hit the off-duty officer in the arm, the department said.

The police first claimed their off-duty colleague had been hit in crossfire between officers and suspects.

Mindset indeed. Is "shoot first" a must-check box on police academy applications these days or do they simply train that into them? "We're the only country in the world that polices like this," a critical Sheriff Mike Chitwood of Volusia County, FL told the Tampa Bay Times. I've written about this again and again, yet we seem still to be training and arming police for war, not for peacekeeping. For resolving situations with force, not for deescalating them. It's racial profiling, but it's more than that. It's a culture. Let's call it "Code Blue."*

Recall this scene from A Few Good Men in which Capt. Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon) tries to undermine the defense by demonstrating that "Code Red" ritual beatings appear nowhere in the Marine Corps manuals:

You can bet Code Blue is not in police training manuals either. "Stop going for my gun!" is not in there. "He was reaching for his waistband" is not in there. "Stop resisting!" is not in there. Nor other "cover-your-ass" justifications for excessive and deadly force by police. Nor deleting crime scene video. Instituting implicit bias training to reduce racial profiling is not enough. Implicit means unconscious. Code Blue is a culture. It is something learned.

* Not to be confused with the police scanner Code Blue.


Undercover Blue 7/05/2017 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

 
Revolution for Dummies

by digby

This would be funny if it weren't for that fact that these pathetic loons carry real guns:

A few hundred armed militia group members, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Ku Klux Klaners, supporters of President Donald Trump, and other self-described patriots descended upon the Gettysburg battlefield Saturday to defend the site’s Confederate symbols from phantom activists with the violent far-left group Antifa.

Some carried semi-automatic rifles ― permitted in Pennsylvania ― as they peered out across the battlefield with binoculars, on the lookout for the black-clad, face-masked anti-fascists, anarchists and socialists they said they had heard were traveling to the national park to dishonor Confederate graves, monuments and flags.

There are lots of families with kids touring Gettysburg on this week-end. And it's a very moving experience. It's just lucky one of these bozos didn't shoot one of them.

One of them did, however, get a shot off:

Although many came expecting violence ― even after Antifa made it clear its adherents never planned to show up ― the only bloodshed came when a lone militia group member accidentally shot himself in the leg.

digby 7/04/2017 06:00:00 PM

 
They love him, they really love him

by digby

If you are distressed and disturbed by our president's cretinous behavior consider this:

The online poll of 4,965 adults, taken June 29 to July 3 (error estimate: +/- 2.5 points), found:

33% of Republicans say they get their news only from Fox.

64% of all adults disapprove of Trump's use of Twitter (89% Dems, 38% Republicans).

Describing his tweets (all adults): undignified 47% ... mean 34% ... entertaining 26% ... presidential 7%.

Jon Cohen, Survey Monkey's SVP, survey research, emails me his takeaways:

"A red flag for Democrats continues to be a perception that Trump is isolating himself from the GOP base with his tweets. Not only do most Republicans approve of his use of Twitter, but asked to describe those tweets, the No. 1 mention among the GOP is 'truthful,' with 'entertaining' in second place." 

Guys... it's not just him. It's his voters too. Luckily they aren't a majority. Unluckily, their party is nuts and holds most of the political power in the country and they're trying to create roadblocks so that the rest of us aren't able to vote.

What's wrong with these people?

.
digby 7/04/2017 04:30:00 PM

 
How to survive Trumpcare

by digby

One of Lawyers, Guns and Money's sharp commenters took the time to explain how to be a smart health care consumer under Trumpcare. Bookmark it. You might need it:

I think I’m starting to see the brilliance of the conservative Republican market driven, outsourced delivery model. For example, consider a massive heart attack strikes a 55 year old man without a health insurance policy but a HSA with 6 month’s of contributions.

Step 1 – call Uber, not 911. Pay the peak pricing gladly – it still beats a fully loaded EMT response . Plus, if they don’t show up you get a $5 credit, should you survive

Step 2 – remember to not go comatose. Such lack of discipline at this critical pricing decision point could adversely impact your ability to make a rational decision on the services you may be willing to pay for and which supplier in your particular market you may want to utilize. You can ignore this if you live in a rural market and the nearest regional hospital with an ICU is 25 miles away.

Step 3 – direct the Uber driver to the nearest accredited hospital while you use your iPhone to solicit quotes from alternative medical retail establishments (hospitals, clinics, etc) don’t forget to read the reviews. At these times it’s also especially helpful to bring up your pre-defined Excel template that you cribbed from Consumer Reports to plug in the quotes as you are making your way to the first medical retail establishment in your itinerary for this medical emergency. Be glad you aren’t a rape victim so you can be sure that whatever fully informed facility and treatment path you decide on, the hospital won’t refuse to treat you according to your wishes. OTOH, the medical retail establishment might not treat you unless you can produce a current liquid net worth and credit score that meets their patient treatment scoring index. Subprime can lead to restricted options.

Step 4 – If your are alive and still conscious when you reach the first medical retail establishment remember ‘you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.’ Just think of the ER staff and attending physicians as Turkish rug merchants. They need your business, keep in mind that you may need to just walk away if they refuse to bargain in good faith. Beware of hardball negotiation and scare tactics like:

You should have called 911 instead of Uber, now it’s going to cost you an extra week in ICU.

If you had been getting regular checkups and lowered your cholesterol from 525 you wouldn’t need the bypass and the stent.

You should take our offer because you won’t make it to the next medical retail establishment.

Don’t let these medical financial predators stampede you in to making rash split second decisions that they claim are life or death. Take your time, gather all the data, read all the reviews and make a carefully considered, rational decision. Don’t treat this like that impulse buy when you bought that overpriced, red convertible that had that incredibly hot model in the magazine ad.

Good luck, with a solid plan and the patience to not panic under pressure you’ll be able to get a great deal. Should you die, it’s not your problem anyway. If you have severe brain damage, you might still have gotten a bargain by not paying for services you didn’t get. Plus using Uber is a major savings opportunity. Not everybody needs trained medical technicians administering CPR, oxygen, or other stabilizing procedures.

Next week: how to determine if you really even need Uber to reach your local medical retail establishment.

Previous articles: How to have physicians bid for your business when your appendix has burst

Thinking of selling your blood, plasma, organs – read this first!

digby 7/04/2017 03:00:00 PM