[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Meanwhile, it turns out that not only do tariffs hut your own citizens (who are the ones paying the higher prices) but they also send the financial sector into a tizzy:

New Yorker Op-Ed: Trump’s Crazy Mexico Tariff Is Stoking a Meltdown on Wall Street
Bloomberg: Morgan Stanley Sees Recession Within a Year If Trade War Gets Any Worse

Jonathan Swan's (Axios) interview with Kushner seems like it will be a hoot.

Here's a transcript of part of the interview when Swan asks about racism and Trump.

It's right after where Kushner completely forgets that Trump was sued by the federal government for refusing to rent to black people, the whole Central Park Five debacle (including 1989 when he spent $85,000 for full page ads arguing the (black and Hispanic) kids that were arrested should be executed and in 2002 when they were completely exonerated and in 2014 when they were awarded $40 million in damages and Trump insisted they were still guilty because "they didn't have the pasts of angels"), sh*thole countries, very fine people, etc. and declares Trump to be completely racism free.

Swan: Was birtherism racist?

Kushner: Um, look I wasn't really involved with that.

Swan: I know weren't! Was it racist?

Kushner: Like I said, I wasn't involved with that.

Swan: I know you weren't. Was it racist?

Kushner: Look, I know who the president is and I haven't seen anything in him that is racist. So, again, I wasn't involved with that.

Yeah, looking forward to a Tweet meltdown by Trump trashing Swan over this.

This clip sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun.

https://mobile.twitter.com/yashar/st...

In an interview with Jared Kushner, @jonathanvswan brings up Saudi Crown Prince MBS and says

1. He orders the murder of a WaPo journalist

2. Kidnaps the Lebanese Prime Minister

3. He indiscriminately bombs civilians in Yemen

Then he asks, "What do you see in this guy?"

Jayhawker wrote:

Yeah, looking forward to a Tweet meltdown by Trump trashing Swan over this.

This clip sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun.

https://mobile.twitter.com/yashar/st...

In an interview with Jared Kushner, @jonathanvswan brings up Saudi Crown Prince MBS and says

1. He orders the murder of a WaPo journalist

2. Kidnaps the Lebanese Prime Minister

3. He indiscriminately bombs civilians in Yemen

Then he asks, "What do you see in this guy?"

Dollar Signs?

NathanialG wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

How do you not give the symbol weight?

When you use it underwater?

OR IN SPACE!

Prederick wrote:

Making Sense of the New American Right

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history (..)

lol

nako wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Making Sense of the New American Right

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history (..)

lol

I also laughed at

and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we're lucky, their translation into public policy.
Yonder wrote:
nako wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Making Sense of the New American Right

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history (..)

lol

I also laughed at

and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we're lucky, their translation into public policy.

It is amusing. They’re turning America into a peak capitalism utopia that’s on track to destroy the Earth and they act so bummed that they don’t always get their way, policy wise. Just mostly.

Side note: I can't get over how many ignorant bigots keep targeting Sikhs. Which, I think, goes to show the shallowness of the basis for their hate: despite their rationalization, it's really just about attacking the Other People.

USA Today: Salem man gets jail, probation for hate crime attack on Sikh store owner

Racism has fallout damage. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given that other forms of bigotry have similar effects. Transphobes attacking cis women they perceive as insufficiently feminine, for example.

Meanwhile, in what is probably the biggest developing story right now, the Republican gerrymandering conspiracy is getting dragged out into the light.

Slate (What Next podcast): The GOP Operative Haunting Republicans From the Grave: How Tom Hofeller’s archives could upend gerrymandering and the U.S. census.
LA Times: Census question on citizenship began as GOP plan to hurt Democrats, documents show

OG_slinger wrote:

Bannon's the saddest Bond villain Sith Lord yet.

Education Week: Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming

Last December, early on a Sunday morning, Amanda Lafrenais tweeted about her cats.

“I would die for you,” the 31-year old comic book artist from Clute, Texas wrote.

To human eyes, the post seems innocuous.

But in an age of heightened fear about mass school shootings, it tripped invisible alarms.

The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company’s algorithms flagged Lafrenais’s tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district’s superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year, according to documents obtained by Education Week.

One nation, under surveillance, very divisible.

Before this morning, I was under the impression that my opinion of the North Carolina Republicans couldn't get any lower.

Slate: Newly Discovered Files Suggest GOP Lawmakers Lied in Court About Racial Gerrymandering to Stop An Election

The latest bombshell from the formerly secret files of the GOP’s top gerrymandering guru emerged on Thursday, and it’s astounding: Voting rights advocates claim to have evidence that North Carolina Republican lawmakers repeatedly lied to a federal court, and to the public, in a successful effort to delay a special election that threatened their legislative supermajority.

According to Common Cause, these representations to the district court were a lie. Republican legislative leaders told the court that they had not “start[ed] the laborious process of redistricting earlier” than July 2017, and that they could only “begin the process of compiling a record in July 2017 with a goal of enacting new plans by the end of the year.” These lawmakers claimed they needed more time to “engage in internal discussions about the design of remedial districts” and “prepare draft remedial plans.” This effectively convinced the court to scrap the special election.

Further, at a legislative hearing, a Democratic lawmakers explicitly asked Rep. David Lewis, who led the redistricting effort, whether there was “anything that has been drawn by Dr. Hofeller or anybody else that you know of that have not yet been released.” Lewis responded: “Not that I know of, sir.” He also stated: “I have not yet drawn maps nor have I directed that maps be drawn, nor am I aware of any other entity operating in conjunction with the leadership that has drawn maps.”

The Hofeller files tell a different story. According to a new legal filing, these materials reveal Hofeller had completed more than 97 percent of the new Senate plan and 90 percent of the new House plan by June 2017. In other words, Republicans allegedly lied to the federal district court. In July 2017, GOP lawmakers claimed that they had prepared no maps and therefore could not draw new districts in time for a special election—when, in reality, those maps were nearly finished.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Common Cause accused Republicans of lying about their use of racial data in redistricting. Because it was fixing a racial gerrymander, the district court ordered that data “identifying the race of individuals or voters shall not be used in the drawing of legislative districts in the 2017 House and Senate plans.” Republicans told the court that “data regarding the race of voters was not used in the drawing of the districts, and, in fact, was not even loaded into the computer used by the map drawer to construct the districts.” They added that “we have not had and do not have racial data on any of these districts” and “there was no racial data reviewed in the preparation of this map.”

The Hofeller files reveal, Common Cause wrote, “that none of the above statements were true.” In fact, his computer seems to have had data “regarding the racial composition of the proposed districts for each and every iteration of his draft maps.” Hofeller even displayed the black voting age population in some draft maps, and “had racial data on the draft districts in Excel spreadsheets.” As Republicans swore to a court that they would not incorporate racial data—not even look at such data—their mapmaker was, the evidence shows, doing exactly that.

Someone please write to the GOP politicians in NC for me and ask them all to resign. I left so they won't listen to me, but if you're still there they'll...probably send you a form letter or something.

Mother f*ckers. I hate this state.

Stele wrote:

Mother f*ckers. I hate this state.

At least we managed not to pass the ridiculous Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act, which is just an anti-abortion bill disguised under a ridiculous name to make headlines when people votes against it.

I wonder if any of the political leadership will ever own up to the fact that attempts to keep passing laws like these could have played a major part in driving away huge tech companies (Apple, Amazon) from coming to NC...

So when do they get arrested for perjury?

LeapingGnome wrote:

So when do they get arrested for perjury?

Representative David Lewis is now claiming that Hofeller must have been making the maps on his own for fun.

LeapingGnome wrote:

So when do they get arrested for perjury?

When do they get arrested for X counts of violating people's civil rights, where X equals the number of people who voted or could have voted while their racist-ass maps were in effect?

Gremlin wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

So when do they get arrested for perjury?

Representative David Lewis is now claiming that Hofeller must have been making the maps on his own for fun.

IMAGE(https://media1.tenor.com/images/6dde115ba938020d1f1d2443a786df19/tenor.gif?itemid=4436076)

Gremlin wrote:

Representative David Lewis is now claiming that Hofeller must have been making the maps on his own for fun.

Weird that Hofeller had the free time to make detailed redistricting maps for funsies while the RNC was paying him $22,000 a month for "legal and compliance" work.

Conservatives are “having a real one” right now.

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/5/1863739...

I dropped in on conservative podcasts this weekend to hear conservatives on the libertarian side of the spectrum accusing their rivals of edging towards theocracy or “The Handmaid’s Tale”. More than one random podcast people talked about their worry that this is where Trumpism is headed currently.

In Alabama — where lawmakers banned abortion for rape victims — rapists’ parental rights are protected.

When a young woman came to the Family Services of North Alabama office last year for help with trauma, saying she had been raped by her step-uncle when she was 15, rape crisis advocate Portia Shepherd heard something that “killed me, shocked me.”

The step-uncle, who was getting out of jail after a drug conviction, wanted to be a part of their child’s life. And in Alabama, the alleged rapist could get custody.

“It’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life,” said Shepherd. “On the state level, people were shocked. How could Alabama even be missing this law?”

Alabama is one of two states with no statute terminating parental rights for a person found to have conceived the child by rape or incest, a fact that has gained fresh relevance since its lawmakers adopted the nation’s strictest abortion ban in May. That statute even outlaws the procedure for victims of sexual assault and jails doctors who perform it, except in cases of serious risk to the woman’s health.

Is it too late to revisit the whole Secede From the Union thing?

It should be no surprise that in a country that is rapidly trying to erase basic human rights that we end up valuing the rights of a rapist over the victim(s).

I'm afraid to ask what the other state is besides Alabama?

I'd wager it's Mississippi. But I couldn't rule out my home state of Kentucky.

Stele wrote:

I'm afraid to ask what the other state is besides Alabama?

I'd wager it's Mississippi. But I couldn't rule out my home state of Kentucky.

Minnesota

Delbin wrote:

Is it too late to revisit the whole Secede From the Union thing?

I realize this is a glib comment, but doing that would only punish the victims of this terrible sh*t. We don't need them to secede, we need to force them to actually follow the will of the people by having fair elections.

TheGameguru wrote:

It should be no surprise that in a country that is rapidly trying to erase basic human rights that we end up valuing the rights of a rapist over the victim(s).

Well, I think you might be giving short-sighted politicians whose only goal seems to be to say and do anything just to get elected a bit too much credit. Granted, some may have real convictions, but then again... Alabama Governor Calls Life “Precious” and “Sacred,” Then Denies Clemency to Michael Samra.

So yeah, a convict rapist may have parental rights in one case, and maybe another [wrongfully] convicted rapist could be on death row without any recourse in another.

DSGamer wrote:

Conservatives are “having a real one” right now.

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/5/1863739...

Kavanaugh crying about being accused of attempted rape seems to have been a big moment for a lot of conservatives, in a way I don't quite get. I mean, I understand the visceral fear of being accused of something you think you're innocent of...but Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court. (And has an all-woman law clerk crew.) His punishment was...to feel kind of bad and talk about beer.

Spoiler:

It's probably at least partially symptomatic of feeling like their sexual mores have become unmoored. The cultural shift from purity-ethics to consent-ethics looks a lot like unbridled anarchy, particularly if you've spent your entire life thinking that every one who isn't your particular flavor of Christian is deliberately rebelling against God. Hence the Armani position, deathly afraid of cross-dressing because policing rigid gender roles is essential to prevent your children from even thinking about non-heterosexual married sex. (Thinking about means inevitably being tempted to do it. Better not to know about it.)

Trumpism is absolutely headed towards autocracy. Though the theocratic bunch is unlikely to be happy with the results in the long term, his sexual values line up with theirs in the short term (and Pence-and-co have been running to domestic morals side of things anyway).

Conservatism is now the neoliberal wing vs. the religious conservatives (further splintered into evangelical, traditional catholic, and others) vs. libertarians vs. white power. Some parts are more compatible than others.

(The left side of the spectrum has it's own factions: neoliberals, centrist liberals, leftists, democratic socialists, etc. But the internal divisions there are along lines of affinity as much as they are about ideology...)

Looking for consistency or decency from an elected Republican is waiting for a train that don't come.

Mixolyde wrote:

Looking for consistency or decency from an elected Republican is waiting for a train that don't come.

Godot is a republican who loves and lives the values he espouses?