Do... something!

But, of course, we won't, huh?

Another day, another mass shooting

If we didn't do anything after Sandy Hook, we sure as hell won't do anything now, huh? After all, every lunatic in America needs a way to kill large numbers of innocent people as quickly as possible, right?

Hell, it's worse than that. We can't have registration. We can't have researchers studying gun violence. We can't even have a simple way of determining who the murders were after-the-fact. Nothing is too extreme for the NRA and its enablers.

Anderson Cooper's response to Trump

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what it was like to see Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power in 1930s Germany. Well, I imagine that it was a lot like this, don't you think?

Look at that idiot, the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, whining about what a victim he is. Look at those loony supporters, eagerly cheering every lie, gorging themselves on dishonesty, victimization, and bitter hatred.

And look at the Republican Party, which created this monster through decades of their "Southern strategy" of deliberately wooing white racists. Now, even treason isn't enough to really bother them. They criticize timidly, sure, but they still do everything Trump wants.

Creationists don't build starships

I haven't been blogging lately, and that's not likely to change. But I thought I'd mention this post at Stonekettle Station. I highly recommend it.

I'm not going to blog about this myself. He says everything I could say - and better. So I'll just give you the general idea with a few brief excerpts:

These sons of bitches just can’t seem to face reality.

We didn’t know.

We hoped he'd act more presidential.

I mean, we knew Trump was an ignorant self-aggrandizing jackass with no experience in government at all, right. We knew that. We knew he was a liar, a misogynist, a con artist, an abuser, and a bully. We knew he was prone to uncontrolled rage and that there was no filter between his ego and his thumbs. We knew that. We knew all of that. Of course we did. Sure. That part was obvious. But see, we hoped – we hoped – Trump would somehow just magically become a dignified adult, suddenly imbued with reason and self-control and filled with knowledge and wisdom of how to actually run a government.

That is what they told us. That is literally what they told us. He’s just doing this to get elected. Once he’s president, you’ll see. He’ll straighten out, he’ll become…

…a unicorn.

Now, admittedly, we’re not really sure how any of that would happen, but we hoped it would.

We hoped it would.

Magical thinking.

Trump is the manifestation of all the worst aspects of modern America writ large, loud, florid, and proudly ignorant. A mindset that is shamelessly hypocritical, self-important and self-involved, wrapped in a flag waving a cross and obsessed with money at the expense of everything else, downing handfuls of Viagra not because we need it but rather for instant self gratification without effort, and a sneering dismissal of any debate that can’t be compressed into a Tweet as “Too Long; Didn’t Read.”

I’m not the first to note that Trump is what stupid people think a smart person sounds like and it doesn’t take much digging around on social media to find those who despite all evidence to the contrary still dogmatically believe in they’re going to get a unicorn...

Somewhere in the last half a century, we Americans traded Apollo moon ships for the Creation Museum and the ugly truth of the matter is that Donald Trump is a reflection of who we’ve become as a nation.

Trump is the utterly predictable result of decades of an increasingly dumber and dumber electorate. A deliberately dumber electorate, Idiocracy in action, a society that dismisses intelligence and education and experience as “elitism” while howling in drunken mirth at Honey Boo Boo and lighting their farts on fire.

Creationists don’t build starships.

Read the whole thing here. Seriously, read it!

Surreal disarray and a confused mental state

(Mike Luckovich)

Do you think the crazy can't get worse? Take a look at yesterday:

President Donald Trump questioned why the Civil War — which erupted 150 years ago over slavery — needed to happen. He said he would be "honored" to meet with Kim Jong-Un, the violent North Korean dictator who is developing nuclear missiles and oppresses his people, under the "right circumstances."

The president floated, and backed away from, a tax on gasoline. Trump said he was "looking at" breaking up the big banks, sending the stock market sliding. He seemed to praise Philippines strongman President Rodrigo Duterte for his high approval ratings. He promised changes to the Republican health care bill, though he has seemed unsure what was in the legislation, even as his advisers whipped votes for it.

And Monday still had nine hours to go.

"It seems to be among the most bizarre recent 24 hours in American presidential history," said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. "It was all just surreal disarray and a confused mental state from the president." ...

"White supremacists, lost causers, states-rights activists could latch onto this,” said David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University. “I don’t know if Trump even knows he’s doing it. You can be too ignorant to know you’re ignorant.”

Fun, huh? And this presidency has barely begun!

Read the whole article. It's scary as hell. Trump seems to have completely lost his mind.

(Mike Luckovich)

The only true surprise?

The only true surprise? Well, very little surprises me these days, and idiots in the White House isn't one of them.

Of course, I was surprised when we actually elected the Idiot in Chief. After that, I'm not sure what it would take to actually surprise me.

Donald Trump lies on Twitter during a Congressional hearing on his Twitter lies!

Crazy, isn't it? This is just a very small part of last night's Daily Show with Trevor Noah, but it points out one of the most absurd things about all this. Donald Trump lied on Twitter during the Congressional hearing called, at least in part, to refute his previous lie on Twitter!

Does it get any crazier than this? Yes, it probably does, doesn't it? And Trump will undoubtedly demonstrate that (again!) within a few days, at most.

John Oliver: A man like Putin

The funny thing is that the comments section of this video clip is overrun with pro-Putin trolls claiming that his critics "are all Jews" and otherwise pushing the idea that Putin's Russia is no different from America.

Clearly, we need John Oliver, don't we?

As America lurches towards fascism

(TPM)

From the BBC:

At a different time, in another country, it was effectively a death sentence.

Being branded an "enemy of the people" by the likes of Stalin or Mao brought at best suspicion and stigma, at worst hard labour or death.

Now the chilling phrase - which is at least as old as Emperor Nero, who was called "hostis publicus", enemy of the public, by the Senate in AD 68 - is making something of a comeback.

In November, the UK Daily Mail used its entire front page to brand three judges "enemies of the people" following a legal ruling on the Brexit process.

Then on Friday, President Donald Trump deployed the epithet against mainstream US media outlets that he sees as hostile.

"The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" he wrote on Twitter. ...

Steve Silberman, an award-winning writer and journalist, wondered whether the remark would prompt Trump supporters to shoot at journalists.

And that might not be a far-fetched concern. Late last year, a Trump supporter opened fire in a pizza restaurant at the centre of a bizarre conspiracy theory about child abuse.

The US president's use of "enemies of the people" raises unavoidable echoes of some of history's most murderous dictators.

Under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, out-of-favour artists and politicians were designated enemies and many were sent to hard labour camps or killed. Others were stigmatised and denied access to education and employment.

And Chairman Mao, the leader of China who presided over the deaths of millions of people in a famine brought about by his Great Leap Forward, was also known to use the phrase against anyone who opposed him, with terrible consequences. ...

Carl Bernstein, a reporter who helped to bring down Richard Nixon with his reporting on the Watergate scandal, tweeted: "The most dangerous 'enemy of the people' is presidential lying - always. Attacks on press by Donald Trump more treacherous than Nixon's."

Is Donald Trump really that ignorant, that he doesn't realize the historical significance of "enemy of the people"? That's how dictators talk.

Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party want you to get your 'news' directly from him, without anyone pointing out when Trump lies. That's fascist thinking.

Rep. Lamar Smith, from Texas, actually said, "Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth." Believe it or not, this is the guy Republicans put in charge of the House Science Committee!

Keep in mind that this is the president who readily repeats lies with the justification that he saw or heard them somewhere. And that's where we Americans are supposed to get "the unvarnished truth"? Really?

We're still less than one month into this pathetic, dangerous excuse for a presidency. How crazy can it get?

President Trump's first solo press conference

Yesterday, Donald Trump's first solo press conference as president was just crazy piled on top of crazy. As others have said, it was unhinged. It was nonstop whining. And it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If this didn't scare you about the future of our country, nothing will. And we're not even a month into his presidency yet!

I can't even begin to recount all of the lunacy he displayed here. TPM has posted the 8 Craziest Moments and 5 Overlooked Asides, but even those barely scratch the surface. It was just nuts! SNL will have to devote an entire show to this press conference if they hope to come even close to the insanity of the real thing.

This is one of the best reactions, for its brief length, from Jake Tapper at CNN:



"It was Festivus." Heh, heh. Now, that was funny. But his point was very serious.

"At one point he said that the leaks were real but the news was fake, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever." Tapper is right. If it's fake, it's not a leak.

You can't claim that the intelligence community is leaking classified data while also claiming that news organizations are lying when they report it. Yet that's exactly what Trump has been claiming.

Tapper mentions Peter Alexander at NBC, and the clip below shows that brief segment of the news conference.

Remember, after the election, Donald Trump bragged and bragged about winning one of the biggest electoral college margins in history, while also claiming that he won the popular vote. Neither of those claims was true - not even close!

Recently, he's dialed back the first of those claims, maybe because it was so ludicrously false. But he replaced it with a claim that was just as demonstrably false, that he had the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.



That "304 or 306" stuff is because Trump didn't even get that part right. He's repeatedly claimed that he got 306 electoral votes, when he actually got 304. But that's hardly the main thing here. I mean, at this point, no one is going to expect Donald Trump to get numbers right.

But he claimed, as he has been claiming, that he won the biggest electoral college victory since Reagan. Alexander started to correct him, mentioning one of Barack Obama's wins (both were bigger than Trump's), when Trump interrupted to change that claim to just Republican wins. But even that isn't true, which Alexander noted when he finished his sentence.

"So why should Americans trust you, when you accuse the information they receive as being fake, when you're providing information that's not accurate?" Good question, isn't it?

But like everything else where Donald Trump has been demonstrably wrong, he shrugs it off as just something 'he was given.'  "Actually, I've seen that information around." But the point is that it's not true.

We've seen this over and over again, throughout the campaign and right into the presidency. We saw it when he falsely claimed to have seen thousands of American Muslims cheering on 9/11. We saw it when he claimed that he actually won the popular vote, because 3-5 million people voted illegally.

Over and over again, Donald Trump either lies or is just too stupid to separate fantasy from reality. I don't know which it is, but it's scary as hell, either way, given that he's now President of the United States.

PS. Please note that Trump is holding a 2020 campaign rally in Florida tomorrow! Yes, this is an actual campaign rally, paid for by his 2020 presidential campaign, less than one month into his term of office. How crazy is that?

National insecurity

(Mike Keefe)

As pretty much his first action as president, our new clown-in-chief, Donald Trump, has gone completely off the rails about... the size of the crowds at his inauguration.

Incredible, isn't it? TPM called it "National Insecurity," and I liked that so much I borrowed it for the headline here, too. What's next? Apparently, Trump still thinks he's a 'reality TV' star.

It's not just Trump. His whole team has become equally hysterical about this. At the first White House press briefing of this new administration, Trump's press secretary did nothing but rant about the press and lie about the crowd at the inauguration, without taking a single question from journalists.

Here's how TPM describes it:

On the one hand it is chilling, bizarre, un-American to see the President's spokesman begin the term excoriating and threatening the press, telling demonstrable lies, speaking with a palpable rage in his voice. On the other, the President and his toadies are on the second day almost vanishingly small. They are embarrassing themselves. They look silly. They look ridiculous. It is hard to be intimidated by ridiculousness. I suspect this will be the abiding duality of the Trump presidency.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager and now a senior White House advisor, has been trying desperately to make insanity seem... well, slightly less crazy.

It wasn't lying, you see. It was just "alternative facts":

Senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway said in an interview Sunday morning that White House press secretary Sean Spicer wasn't lying about crowd size at the President's inauguration—he was just giving "alternative facts." ...

"You did not answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood," [Chuck] Todd interrupted. "Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one."

"No, it doesn't. Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck," Conway replied. "You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is—"

"Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts?" Todd interjected, looking incredulous. "Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true."

Conway tried to interrupt, but Todd continued.

"Look, alternative facts are not facts," he said.

But they are for faith-based people. For faith-based people, reality is whatever you want it to be. They don't care about the truth of their beliefs, but only about whether or not they want to believe them. These are the same people who've decided that facts don't exist.

They're wrong, of course. Facts do exist and, unlike gods, they don't cease to exist when you stop believing in them. Donald Trump can push his 'alternative' reality all he likes. That still won't make it true.

Even Fox News agrees that they're lying. Even Fox News thinks that this is crazy. And when Republicans get too crazy for Fox News, you know it's bad.

But I haven't even mentioned the craziest part of all this. On his first day in office, Donald Trump went to the headquarters of the CIA and spent his time bragging about how smart he is, whining about the media, and... yes, arguing about the crowd size at his inauguration.

Yes, at the CIA. On his first official day in office.

Again, from TPM:

A presidential speech that was intended to thank the intelligence community quickly went off the rails Saturday as Donald Trump talked about himself, his inauguration crowd, the dishonest media and how great his party was.

Trump appeared at the CIA on his first official day as the 45th president after a rough few weeks where he'd heavily criticized the agency, blamed it for leaks and questioned their assessment that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election. In a brief 15-minute statement, Trump meandered, but without the kind of discipline or grace one might expect from the commander in chief. ...

It seemed at every turn, Trump would pivot to himself. As he talked about his choice to lead the CIA Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Trump noted that he himself was smart.

"I met him and I said, he is so good. Number one in his class at West Point. I know a lot about West Point, and I'm a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at M.I.T. for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways," Trump said. "He was an academic genius, and then they say, there's Donald Trump, an intellectual, trust me, I'm like a smart person." ...

It was a strange juxtaposition: a President, standing before the memorial wall at the CIA that honors the lives lost by agency officers as he talked about crowd size and his intelligence. According to the pool report, there were about 400 CIA employees at the agency Saturday. At first, the cheering came from across the crowd, but the pooler noted that as the speech continued, the senior officials in the front grew "subdued."

I'll bet they did! Keep in mind that this was a speech that was supposed to show support for the CIA (so it should have made them happy).

Trump himself said, "I am so behind you and I know maybe sometimes you haven't gotten the backing that you've wanted and you're going to get so much backing. Maybe you'll say, 'don't give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we don't need that much backing.'"

Who talks like that? Who says, "...and then they say, there's Donald Trump, an intellectual, trust me, I'm like a smart person"?

I've known lots of smart people. None of them talk like that. That's like a dumb person's idea of what a smart person says. How scary is that when you're talking about the President of the United States?

After her "alternative facts" gambit failed, Kellyanne Conway was reduced to arguing that size doesn't matter. No, of course it doesn't. But this wouldn't have been news at all if Donald Trump hadn't thrown a temper tantrum about it:

"I completely agree with that. We spent eleven hours on the air during the inauguration, barely talked about the crowd size if we brought it up at all," George Stephanopoulos replied. "The question is, why does the President choose to talk about that at the CIA? Why does he send his press secretary out to talk about it in his first White House briefing and say things that aren't true?"

This just gets scarier and scarier. After one day in office, Donald Trump already seems to be going insane from the stress. What has America done to itself?

For the record, there were a lot of people at Trump's inauguration, just as you'd expect. But from every bit of evidence (i.e. everything but unsupported claims from Donald Trump himself or his spokespeople), they didn't match the crowds at either of Barack Obama's inaugurations. (Here's Snopes.com, too.)

Please note that the National Park Service doesn't release official estimates of these crowds anymore, not since the organizers of the Million Man March threatened to sue because, like Trump, they wanted to believe they had a bigger turnout. (And, of course, Trump has banned the Park Service from Twitter after they posted a picture comparing the crowd size this year with Obama's 2009 inauguration.)

Is the crowd size important? No, not even slightly. Rather, it wouldn't have been important if Donald Trump hadn't had such a meltdown about it, if his press secretary hadn't lied about it, and if his campaign manager hadn't made such ludicrous claims about "alternative facts."

This is only important because of Trump's clownish reaction to any perceived slight. Remember how he claimed that he'd won one of the biggest Electoral College landslides in American history (false) and also that he'd actually won the popular vote? (That's even less true. Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes than he did.)

But if Trump wants to talk size, let's compare. One of the few hopeful indicators of this new year is that the Women's March on Washington yesterday - protesting Trump - apparently had a crowd three times as big as the inauguration the day before.

You can believe whatever you like - Trump supporters certainly will - but there are pictures from the same EarthCam at the same time of day. Well, until Russia hacks it, I suppose. :)

(Mike Luckovich)

The crackpot and the crack-up

The GOP just gets crazier and crazier and crazier, doesn't it? But these are the people the GOP base wants running their party.

Mainstream Republicans created this monster by deliberately wooing white racists and then using racism, sexism, and xenophobia to nurture the beast. Nothing was too much, as long as there was some political benefit to be made from it.

And now? They can't control the monster they created, but they're afraid of denouncing it, too. They're not just evil, they're also cowardly. Losing even one election isn't a sacrifice they're willing to make, so they'll sacrifice our country, instead.

Yes, this stuff is funny, but it won't be funny if Trump actually wins. And it won't be funny if lunatic Republicans actually do start shooting people the day after the election.

They're crazy enough to brag about it. Are they crazy enough to do it? Let's hope not. But so far, I've seen no limit to the crazy.

"I unraveled her"

That's Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen. It's hilarious, isn't it?

But you know what's really funny? He doesn't seem to understand how bad that makes him look. Indeed, he apparently thinks he "controlled the interview."

An interview between a CNN anchor and a top aide to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump devolved into a palpably uncomfortable debate over polls on Wednesday evening.

In a conversation with Yahoo News shortly after the conversation aired, Michael Cohen, an executive vice president and attorney at the Trump Organization, said he believed he “controlled the interview” with Brianna Keilar.

“I think I unraveled her,” Cohen boasted.

Watch it for yourself. That interview is going viral because it's so funny. But Trump supporters are faith-based. They believe only what they want to believe.

And in their imagination, they're winning. The polls don't matter, because the polls aren't telling them what they want to believe.

Don't get me wrong. Trump could win, especially if liberals get complacent and/or stupid. But the election is certainly not looking to be in his favor right now.

Unless you're Donald Trump or one of his clueless supporters, at least. Then, the polls have to be wrong, because they don't want them to be right.

Fox 'News' is pushing that narrative, too, of course, though not everyone there. I have to give Dana Perino some credit, much as it pains me to do so. But Eric Bolling is acting like you'd expect Eric Bolling to act.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is claiming that, if he does lose the election, it will be because the election is "rigged." Obviously, he can't stand to be a "loser," so he's already preparing his excuses. And, at the same time, he's encouraging his loonier supporters to assassinate President Clinton, afterwards.

This is taking faith-based thinking to a whole new level, while also encouraging domestic terrorism. Yeah, this is the Republican Party's presidential candidate. They've brought it on themselves, too. Republican leaders and political pundits have only themselves to blame.

Trump is crazy in small ways, too

Note that Donald Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, like suggesting that gun nuts kill his political opponent. He's crazy in small ways, too. He's petty in small ways. He's unhinged in small ways, not just the big ways.

Here's a little more about that elevator incident in Colorado. This, too, shows what kind of person Donald Trump is:

Last month, Donald Trump thanked a Colorado fire marshal who rescued him and his entourage from a stalled elevator by accusing him of intentionally keeping supporters out of his rally.

What Trump didn't divulge was that a member of his entourage apparently fiddling with an elevator bypass key got the group stuck in that elevator in the first place, internal emails obtained by local TV station KMGH and published Wednesday revealed.

Yeah, this was even crazier than it seemed at first, since Donald Trump's 'entourage' apparently caused the problem in the first place!

I'll skip the details here - read the whole article if you want - because I want to include this part:

Though Trump and his companions were evacuated through the top elevator hatch by members of the fire department, the incident resulted in Trump arriving an hour late to his rally on the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus (UCCS).

Upon arrival, Trump proceeded to criticize the fire marshal for keeping some of his supporters out of the venue.

"We have thousands of beautiful, wonderful, great people outside, and we have in the room next door over 1,000 people,” Trump said at the rally. “They won't let them in. And the reason they won't let them in is because they don't know what the hell they're doing."

The emails obtained by KMGH indicated that the fire department, UCCS and Trump campaign all had been in communication about the exact number of people allowed in the main hall and overflow room. The limits allowed for 1,500 people in the event center and 1,000 in the overflow room.

Lacey expressed his frustration in an email to his friend.

"We had worked with UCCS of which we have a great relationship with and their security.. (University Cops)…. And our PD… and worked out the event loading on Thursday,” he wrote, as quoted by KGMH. “All was well.. until they wanted more people… Secret Service were butts too… wanted me to let more people in because he (Trump) was threatening to leave the room.. and they hadn’t secured the other location. I communicated to them that my problem was the public.. theirs was their candidate."

Lacey also wrote that it wasn’t his “problem” that the campaign allegedly “dispersed 10K on-line tickets for a 2500 load event.”

KMGH also obtained a contract the Trump campaign signed with UCCS promising to comply with the facility rules “prescribed by the Fire and Police Departments.”

Contacted by the news station about that new information, a Trump spokesperson said the campaign had no interest in keeping that particular story alive.

Yeah, I'll bet. Of course, with Donald Trump, no story stays alive for long, because he always follows up with something even crazier the next day.

And note that Trump didn't just accuse the fire marshal, Brett Lacey, of being incompetent (immediately after being rescued by the fire department from a screw up Trump's own people caused), but actually accused him of having a political motive for following the rules that Trump's people had agreed with ahead of time.

Within an hour, The Denver Post noted, the GOP presidential nominee was bashing the fire marshal at his rally.

“So I have to tell you this. This is why our country doesn’t work,” Trump said from the stage at his Friday rally, which began nearly an hour late as a result of the mishap. “We have plenty of space here. We have thousands of people outside trying to get in. And we have a fire marshal that said, ‘Oh, we can’t allow more people.’

"The reason they won’t let them in is because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

“Hey, maybe they’re a Hillary person. Could that be possible? Probably. I don’t think there are too many of them," Trump said.

Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, in dangerous ways. He's also crazy in the most petty ways you can imagine. And that's the guy Republicans have nominated to be our next president, with the control codes to the world's largest supply of nuclear weapons.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Trump's assassination talk has a history behind it

(Raging Pencils)

Here's a follow-up article at TMP on Donald Trump's suggestion that gun nuts assassinate Hillary Clinton. Such remarks don't exist in a vacuum. There's a lot of recent history in which right-wingers push that insane idea.

Some excerpts:

“In anti-government circles, and even in hate group circles, where this idea of 'Second Amendment remedies' is not a joke, who knows how that is going to be perceived,” said Ryan Lenz, the editor of Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog.

“In reality, in the past, we’ve seen it being perceived as a sizable influx of support and validation for ideologies that, up until this campaign, had no place in mainstream political discourse,” Lenz told TPM. ...

... like the language Trump has deployed to discuss immigration, "rigged" elections and Muslims, his rhetoric around Clinton and the Second Amendment wasn’t born in a vacuum. Trump is perhaps the most prominent of a series of conservative politicians who've toyed with the idea that gun owners may need to resort to violence against an oppressive government.

In 2010, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) posted on social media "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" while pointing to a list of Obamacare-supporting lawmakers.

During her 2014 campaign, freshman Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said she believed in her right to carry guns to defend herself “whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

Failed 2010 Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) warned that “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”

And Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) congressional challenger in 2009, Republican Robert Lowry, shot at a human-shaped gun range target with Wasserman Schultz’s initials written on it.

Brett Lunceford, a former professor who has researched the political discourse around guns, said these sort of remarks and actions feed into a belief that “the Second Amendment was put in place to overthrow the government if need be."

“[Trump’s] throwing a bone to that mythology, that, if the government is tyrannical, ‘Well you guys are the ones that can do something about it,’” Lunceford told TPM. “There’s this idea that they’re the ones that can stop tyranny. It’s not about self defense, it’s about defense from the government.”

Just think of how batshit crazy that is. It's basically the same thinking as in ISIS. It's terrorism. If you can't get what you want though voting - because you can't convince the majority that you're right - you just start shooting people.

That's how terrorists think. This used to be heard only in the extreme nutcase fringe of the right-wing. Now, it's mainstream Republican Party thinking.

We don't live in the 18th Century anymore, with "taxation without representation." These days, we do have representation. We have a democracy. If you don't like our government, you can change it - up to and including changing the U.S. Constitution itself.

But the trick is that you need other people to agree with you. You're not the dictator here. No one is the dictator. If you want to become president, you need a majority of people to support you. OK, OK, George W. Bush became president without that, so our system isn't perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than terrorism!

In right-wing mythology, though, you have guns so you can shoot the police, politicians, and other government officials if you don't like the way elections go. How insane is that? Even their beloved 2nd Amendment doesn't imply anything like that, not even close. (Indeed, if you actually read it, "well regulated" is specifically written into the amendment itself.)

This is insane right-wing fringe ideology,... only it's not just on the fringe these days. It's being promoted by Republican senators, governors, and even by the Republican Party's presidential candidate. How crazy can these people get?

Donald Trump said exactly what he meant, and his supporters understood him very, very well: "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

No, he didn't come right out and tell people to shoot Hillary Clinton. Even Trump isn't that stupid. And he probably doesn't want anyone to shoot her before the election. He said it himself. If she's elected and can pick her judges, that's the time for assassination, that's the time for terrorism.

Meanwhile, he's just using that rhetoric for political advantage (which will backfire, I hope). His crazier supporters might not wait, but so what? All Trump cares about is winning. And that means he's become increasingly unhinged as it's clear that he's losing, and losing badly.

I can't predict what Trump will say next, because he just gets loonier and loonier. But what's next for the Republican Party? Will the GOP, too, just get loonier and loonier? Or if they're beaten in a landslide this year, will sane Republicans finally take back their party?

There are still sane Republicans, right?

(Nick Anderson)

Second Amendment remedies

(Tom Toles)

Donald Trump has said many stupid, crazy things during this campaign, but suggesting that gun nuts assassinate his political opponent tops the list, don't you think?

The Republican presidential nominee said of his Democratic opponent: "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

"But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

It's hardly even worth pointing out that Hillary Clinton has never suggested abolishing the Second Amendment. Obviously, it wouldn't make any difference if she had, since assassination is terrorism, not politics.

Since when can a candidate for President of the United States - the nominee of one of our two main political parties, no less - get away with suggesting assassination, just because the polls show that he's losing badly? How could anyone still support this guy?

Of course, this isn't completely new to the GOP:

This isn't the first time that a Republican has suggested drastic action against Clinton. In June, Trump delegate and New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro (R), who also chairs Trump’s veterans group, said that Clinton should be put on the firing line and be "shot for treason" over the terror attacks in Benghazi. The Secret Service launched an investigation into Baldasaro’s comments.

Earlier in August, longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone suggested that if Clinton wins a state like Florida — where she currently leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup, according to polling — then the election would be "illegitimate," in which case he promised a "bloodbath."

But this isn't just any random moron, this is the specific moron Republicans have chosen as their presidential candidate.

And now this particular moron, Donald Trump, has escalated the rhetoric, magnifying those threats of terrorism, by actually suggesting that gun nuts assassinate his political opponent. And make no mistake, that's exactly what he was saying, despite desperate attempts by Republican leaders to spin it otherwise.

If you vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton in November, or even if you sit out the election entirely, you will be encouraging this kind of bullshit. We Americans need to take a stand.

And face it, the Republican Party will never change unless the party loses in a landslide. Anything less than that won't be enough. It needs to be a shocking loss, an overwhelming loss, with no possibility to spin it as anything else.

I remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I remember the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I remember the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  That's not the kind of America I want. Do you?

I was unhappy when the five Republicans on our Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush. I was astonished when Bush was re-elected in 2004, after we already knew what a complete disaster he was. But I didn't shoot anyone. I didn't even suggest shooting anyone. And I would have immediately turned against anyone who did.

How could Donald Trump be happening in America? Have Republicans completely lost their minds?

(Mike Luckovich)

The obvious

(Drew Sheneman)

Will Donald Trump drop out of the presidential campaign? (Note that he'd lose the election even if he won all of the "tossup" states in the current polls.) Will Republican leaders finally abandon their support of the GOP nominee?

As Josh Marshall at TPM says, I'll believe it when I see it. But he makes a very good point here:

There's a lot of chatter this morning - based on absolutely nothing, so far as I can tell - that Donald Trump might drop out of the presidential race. I emphasize: as far as I can tell, chatter based on nothing but what I suspect is wishful thinking on the part of Republicans. At the same time, reporters are quoting high level Republicans sources saying that in the next few days top tier Republicans might come out in opposition to Trump. I will totally believe it when I see it.

But I can't help but note what seems obvious.

We've had Judge Curiel, Megyn Kelly, the banning of an entire religion from America's shores, the demand to deport 3% of the US population, the Khan family, protester beatings. Tell me when to stop, okay? There's a lot more. And yet what seems to have been the red line was Trump refusing to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain in their Republican primaries. Yes, the Khan debacle was big. But little more than a week ago we had Republicans coming out of Cleveland saying that Trump was killing it.

Even if you take a more generous view - an extremely generous view - and say that it wasn't really the non-endorsements, that it was just the flood of everything that's happened since the convention, still there's a problem. Because Trump can say, not without real credibility, that the GOP power structure only turned on him when he refused to endorse them. He has maneuvered them into looking deeply craven, having missed the opportunity to abandon him on their own terms. Of course this isn't that unfair since they are actually craven regardless.

In truth, I don't think it's really the Khans or the endorsements. It's the polls.

Let me just add two things. First, I've linked to a presidential scoreboard that changes all the time, and there's a long way to go until November. As I'm writing this, it shows that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency if she won all of the states that are currently considered "strongly Clinton," "favors Clinton," and "leans Clinton."

That means that Donald Trump would lose the election even if he won all of the current "tossup" states.

Yes, that's a ray of sunshine I desperately need. But it doesn't mean much right now. It's certainly no guarantee! Indeed, a convention typically gives a candidate a bounce in the polls, and the Democratic National Convention just ended. By the time you read this, things could be different.

Still, things are looking good for the Democrats right now (not nearly as good as they should be looking, though - I'm just amazed that the election is close at all). Republican leaders are worried, as they should be.

(Nick Anderson)

But second, this is the same political party which deliberately used racism for their own political advantage. The Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' set them to deliberately wooing racists in order to gain more political power. It was just unbelievably cynical, selfish, and flat-out wrong.

This is the same political party whose leaders, during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression - while America was simultaneously fighting two wars - met and agreed among themselves to do nothing the upcoming president wanted, no matter what it was, as a strategy for winning back the White House four years later.

Again, this was a cynical political move, to deliberately harm America (or refuse to help, at the very least), in order to advance their own political power. Luckily for us, it failed.

And this is the same political party whose leaders in the U.S. Senate were arguably willing to commit treason against their own country, by sabotaging America's side in the negotiations with Iran. They may have rationalized that in their own minds - Republicans are nothing if not faith-based - but they were still willing to harm our country in order to advance their own political power.

So I'd suggest remembering all that when looking at how Republican leaders treat Donald Trump. Most of them had problems with Trump - and for good reasons. But when Trump was winning, they were eager to climb on-board. Sure, Trump made them cringe - mostly because he was too blatant about what Republicans are supposed to suggest more subtly - but what's a little racism if you can win with it?

After all, Republicans have made that decision before - indeed, over and over again since their 'Southern strategy' was begun by Richard Nixon and further developed by Lee Atwater in the Reagan years. Hell, the past eight years, they've gleefully ramped up the hysteria about our first black president. Trump himself was a 'birther.'

If there's any integrity left in the Republican Party, it's clearly in the minority. So Republican leaders were quite willing to climb on the Trump bandwagon as long as he seemed to be winning. But the polls aren't looking good now, and that is all that matters to most of them. That's obvious.

Will Donald Trump drop out of the race? Hmm,... maybe. Clearly, he has a real horror of being considered a 'loser.' He's already trying to run away from debating Hillary Clinton, it seems. Among his other bad qualities, he's a narcissist. He's going to look out for himself, regardless of anything else.

On the other hand, he's also been talking about how the election will be 'rigged.' Thus, he seems to be preparing an excuse. He wouldn't be a loser if the game was rigged, right? So that might be enough for him.

I don't think that Donald Trump himself knows what he will do. He's not a thinker. He just feels and reacts (one of the many reasons why he'd be a danger as President of the United States). It's possible that Republican leaders are floating the possibility that he'll quit without Trump even considering that... unprecedented option.

Either way, this whole thing is completely nuts, isn't it?

(Joel Pett)

PS. If you're not scared enough yet about the possibility of a Trump presidency, check out this story about his interest in using nuclear weapons. "If we have them, why can’t we use them?"

That isn't something we should have to tell anyone, let alone the guy with the launch codes!

What next with Donald Trump?

Friday, I posted the video of a powerful speech given at the Democratic National Convention by the father of a U.S. army captain killed in Iraq.

So how did Donald Trump react to that? He has mocked the grieving mother of that American soldier:

Lawyer Khizr Khan gave a moving tribute to their son, Humayun, who received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after he was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. During the speech, Khan's wife, Ghazala, stood quietly by his side.

"If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me," Trump said, in an interview with ABC's "This Week."

Ghazala Khan has said she didn't speak because she's still overwhelmed by her grief and can't even look at photos of her son without crying. ...

Trump's comments about Khan came a day after he criticized retired four-star Gen. John Allen and slammed a Colorado Springs, Colorado, fire marshal for capping attendance at the event. The fire marshal, Brett Lacey, was recently honored by the city as "Civilian of the Year" for his role in helping the wounded at a 2015 mass shooting at a local Planned Parenthood.

Is there no limit to how low Donald Trump can sink? Of course, I've been saying that about the Republican Party for years, and there's been no limit so far. I mean, look at their nominee for president.

And maybe I should note this, too, while I'm at it:

Senior Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, remained silent, as did vice presidential nominee Mike Pence.

The thing about Donald Trump is that everyone expects shit like this from him. His supporters cheer it. The media take it for granted. And by and large, other Republican leaders enable it, because winning the election is all that really matters to them.

When Trump makes outlandish remarks every single day, they cease to have any effect. Of course, he's a celebrity, and for a celebrity, no news is bad news. Being outrageous is the best way to remain a celebrity. Heck, it's won the Republican Party nomination for him. It's the 'reality TV' version of a presidential election.

And the media love it, because they're making money from it. They're not in business for their health, you know. The purpose of American media is to make a profit.

America is better than Donald Trump, but money and political power tend to be of more immediate importance to the people who have both riding on him.

And among the general public, there's enough ignorance, apathy, bigotry, and wishful-thinking to make this a close election. Not just on the right, either. In fact, this probably wouldn't be a close election if some liberals weren't completely clueless.

Nothing Donald Trump has said has hurt him. His demonstrable lies haven't hurt him. His bigotry hasn't hurt him. His refusal to release his tax returns (which would likely demonstrate that he's not as wealthy as he says he is, and maybe even reveal his connection to Russian oligarchs) hasn't hurt him.

His unprecedented comments about NATO haven't hurt him. His refusal to offer policy details hasn't hurt him. His many bankruptcies haven't hurt him. Donald Trump is just a big mouth with a comb-over. There's zero substance to him. And yet he's this close to becoming our next president.

I was astonished when George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, after we already knew what a complete disaster he was. But I'm more astonished this year that someone like Donald Trump has a real, non-zero chance of becoming President of the United  States.

Six minutes of sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton

You know, they didn't even include most of the attacks on Hillary Clinton's appearance - hair, clothing, makeup, etc.

The media can't seem to get enough of criticizing her pantsuits. And recently, Elizabeth Warren appeared on stage with her, and all the media could talk about was how they were both wearing blue outfits.

Of course, we all know that, when it comes to female politicians, what really matters is their appearance, right?  LOL

Make America Fear Again

At the Republican National Convention Monday, the theme was "Make America Fear Again." Well, that was the real theme. Speakers pushed fear at hysterical cowards. Well, that's been the Republican strategy for some time now, hasn't it?

The fact that crime has dropped in recent decades is immaterial to the elderly white men - and some women - who are easily frightened by change. Of course, that's ideal for a fascist political message. Make people afraid, and then offer them vague promises from a bombastic authoritarian promising to make them feel safe again.

The fact that it's the authoritarian who's pushing that fear doesn't seem to register with them. Well, they're faith-based, not evidence-based. They believe what they want to believe.

Is terrorism scary? Of course. That's the whole point of terrorism. Terrorism is a tool of the weak, and it relies on cowardice. Terrorists want to make you afraid, so that you'll overreact (thus creating more terrorists for them). If you're easily scared, that's perfect for them.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party is allied with the terrorists in this. The Republican Party wants the same thing the terrorists want - to make you afraid, so that you'll overreact (in this case, so you'll elect a bombastic, narcissistic, fascist clown to the presidency of the United States).

This convention has been crazy, so far. (The only sane part of it was plagiarized from Michelle Obama.) Josh Marshall at TPM noted this about the first day in Cleveland:

We've become so inured to Trump's brand of incitement that it's barely gotten any notice that Trump had three parents whose children had been killed by illegal/undocumented immigrants tell their stories and whip up outrage and fear about the brown menace to the South. These were either brutal murders or killings with extreme negligence. The pain these parents experience is unfathomable.

But whatever you think about undocumented immigrants there's no evidence they are more violent or more prone to murder than others in American society. One could just as easily get three people whose children had been killed by African-Americans or Jews, people whose pain and anguish would be no less harrowing. This isn't illustration; it's incitement. When Trump first did this in California a couple months ago people were aghast. Now it's normal.

Even more disturbing, numerous speakers from the dais, including some of the top speakers of the evening, called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned. At least two - and I think more - actually led the crowd in chants of "lock her up!" There has never been any evidence of criminal activity on Clinton's part. An investigation with a lot of pressure to find something amiss concluded that no charges should be recommended against her and that no prosecutor would bring charges against her for anything connected to her private email server.

It goes without saying that it is a highly dangerous development when one presidential nominee and his supporters make into a rallying cry that the opposing candidate should be imprisoned. This is not Russia. This is not some rickety Latin American Republic from half a century ago. This is America. For all our failings and foibles this is not a path we've ever gone down.

This is not a disagreement about a matter of law: it is a demand for vengeance and punishment, one rooted in the pathologies of the current Trumpite right and inevitably to some extent about the fact that Clinton is a woman. If you have a chance rewatch the speeches by Rudy Giuliani or even more ret. Gen Michael Flynn. These are not normal convention speeches. It is only a small skip and a jump to the state legislator in West Virginia who demanded Clinton by executed by hanging on the National Mall. In such a climate, don't fool yourself: worse can happen.

Today's Republican Party was built on their notorious "Southern strategy" of deliberately wooing white racists. Politically, that worked great for them for decades. But it's not working so well these days.

Rather, it's still working great within the GOP base, those people who were attracted to the party by that racism in the first place, but not so well in the rest of our country. Elsewhere, they're losing, and they know it. That's making them hysterical.

That's why we're getting this apocalyptic rhetoric. They're losing. They know it. That's why fascism is gaining ground in the Republican Party.

There were riots in some American cities when my Irish ancestors started arriving here in large numbers. Now, we're getting that same kind of hysteria about Hispanic immigrants. Lou Holz called it an "invasion" when he spoke at a Republican luncheon in Cleveland:

“I don’t want to become you,” he said, as quoted by the Daily Beast. “I don’t want to speak your language, I don’t want to celebrate your holidays, I sure as hell don’t want to cheer for your soccer team!”

But we didn't become the Irish. Those Irish immigrants became us. If  you don't want to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, no one is forcing you. And I don't cheer for soccer any more than I cheer for football.

This is fear-mongering, pure and simple. We turned away Jewish refugees in the 1930s, sending them back to be killed in the Holocaust - sending back Jewish children to be killed in the Holocaust. That, too, was because of bigotry and fear.

And now? Now we're seeing that same bigotry and fear when it comes to Muslim immigrants. And even worse, it's America, this time, which is turning to fascism - a significant proportion of us, at least.

Not every Republican is happy with Donald Trump, true (although the vast majority still support him). But these are the same people who've gleefully pushed bigotry, irrational fear, and hysterical anger for decades now, for their own political ambition. This is the party built on racism and fear-mongering.

The Republican Party created Donald Trump. This is the end result (hopefully) of that "Southern strategy." No Republican leader should be surprised by this.

And if you're still a Republican, even after the race-baiting and the fear-mongering, don't act so superior to Trump now. You were quite willing to use these hysterical bigots, even if you're not one yourself.