Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Can you imagine George W. Bush having gone to the still smoldering pile of rubble and wreckage at the World Trade Center and posing, smiling gleefully from ear to ear, with thumbs up no less? Or, how about Barack Obama standing in front of Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut with a broad, shit-eating grin on his face?

For Donnie Jackass, his visits to Dayton and El Paso last week were all about Donnie Jackass, no one else, living or dead, or wounded and lying in a hospital bed. The visits were photo-ops, opportunities to make the horrific tragedies all about himself, at least in his severely mentally ill mind. For Donnie Jackass, it was all about "great turnout" and "ratings." In El Paso, he even joked about the crowd size when he held one of his hate-mongering rallies there several months ago. "They loved me." Trump is a walking, talking obscenity of the worst magnitude. In El Paso, he even used an infant who was orphaned as his parents shielded him from the hail of bullets as a prop. He then turned his visit into a campaign video for his 2020 campaign.

But, most telling of all was that constant smile in the presence of so much terror, pain, and human misery. People with a certain skin tone and heritage are now afraid to even go outside. Kids are afraid to go to school. That's exactly the way Trump and his supporters want it. They call it deterrence. Trumpists don't want to even see "those people;" never mind the simple fact that many of the El Paso families that lost people have been American families far longer than Trump's family has has been.

The smile we see in these pictures is the smile of a man in a state of sociopathic or even psychotic ecstasy. Only a madman, incapable of any kind of empathy whatsoever, smiles like that in that kind of situation. It was a happy day for a man who dedicates himself to hurting as many people as possible. I bet he keeps count. I bet he even inflates the numbers just like he does with the number of attendees at his inauguration and at his sicko rallies. Great visit. Great turnout.

To his followers, Trump is a messiah of pain infliction. To people who aren't so morally bankrupt, Trump is now the figurehead of domestic terror. By his words, his actions, and his smile, you can tell that he is proud of being both.

Trump's White Nationalism Is A Threat To The Safety Of Every American

When Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton heard-- through the grapevine-- that Trump was thinking of going to Dayton to comfort the victims of the white nationalist mayhem he had caused, she joked that if Dayton was lucky Trump would direct AirForce One to fly to Toledo instead. That would be a long shot-- he'll be there, and in El Paso, today. The Washington Post's John Wagner reported that his "appearances that will not be universally welcome as the two cities grieve from weekend mass shootings that left 31 dead and many others injured and rattled. After hiding out in his rat-infested Bedminster golf resort all weekend while his white nationalist supporters ran amuck, Kellyanne Conway lied to the media, claiming he's wanted to go there since he heard of the massacres and suggested his "itinerary would be similar to other visits in the wake of mass shootings or natural disasters. 'He’s goes, trying to help heal communities, meeting with those who are injured, those loved ones who have survived the innocents who have lost their lives so senselessly and tragically,' she said. 'He meets with local law enforcement, federal law enforcement. He meets with medical professionals. He thanks first responders.'" That's today's script.

Several past and present Democratic officials urged Trump not to visit El Paso, a city of about 683,000 with a largely Latino population, in the aftermath of Saturday’s anti-immigrant attack at a Walmart Supercenter that left 22 dead.

Officials are still investigating but believe the alleged gunman posted a manifesto that echoed Trump’s harsh rhetoric on immigrants, notably describing his attack as “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

“This president, who helped create the hatred that made Saturday’s tragedy possible, should not come to El Paso,” former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) tweeted late Monday afternoon. “We do not need more division. We need to heal. He has no place here.”

The words of O’Rourke, a presidential candidate, echoed those earlier in the day of Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), whose district includes the El Paso Walmart targeted in the massacre.

During a television appearance Monday, she urged the president and his team “to consider the fact that his words and his actions have played a role in this.”

“From my perspective, he is not welcome here,” Escobar said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “He should not come here while we are in mourning.”

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo (R) said at a Monday news conference that Trump will visit his city on Wednesday. He said he would welcome Trump in an official capacity and ask him “to support our efforts with any and all federal resources that are available.”

But Margo also cautioned Trump against invoking his previous rhetoric to talk about the border city.

“I will continue to challenge any harmful and inaccurate statements made about El Paso,” Margo said. “We will not allow anyone to portray El Paso in a way that is not consistent with our history and values.”

Adolpho Telles, chairman of the El Paso County Republican Party, said during a television interview Wednesday that he welcomes Trump’s visit.

“Clearly it is going to help with people healing, and this is a time of healing,” Telles said on CNN.

He accused Democrats of “making this a political event for their benefit.”

White House officials say Trump is also planning to visit Dayton, where another gunman killed nine people early Sunday.

Asked during a CNN interview Tuesday morning if he wants Trump to visit his home state, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) noted that he represents a different area but said that Trump “would not be welcome in my hometown.”

Ryan, another Democratic hopeful whose congressional district includes a large swath of northeastern Ohio, called Trump “a polarizing figure.”

“He finds a million ways to divide us,” Ryan said. “He’s got to get beyond that.”

Trump, meanwhile, took to Twitter on Tuesday to push back against a tacit rebuke from former president Barack Obama.

In social media posts on Monday, Obama called on the country to reject words “coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders” that feed fear and hatred and normalize racist sentiments.

In his tweet, Trump quoted co-host Brian Kilmeade on Fox News’s Fox & Friends as pointing out that it was unusual for past president to speak out about the current occupant of the Oval Office in the wake of mass shootings.

“Did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy Hook,” Trump quoted Kilmeade as saying. “President Obama had 32 mass shootings during his reign. Not many people said Obama is out of Control. Mass shootings were happening before the President even thought about running for Pres.”

That's probably not the way Greg Miller was looking at it when he wrote, also for the Post, Far-right Violence Spurs Calls To Revise Security Priorities. He noted that the country "continues to employ a staggering arsenal of armed forces, unmanned drones, intelligence agencies and sweeping domestic authorities to contain a threat-- Islamist terrorism-- that has claimed about 100 lives on American soil since the nation mobilized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. No remotely comparable array of national power has been directed against the threat now emerging from the far right, a loose but lethal collection of ideologies whose adherents have killed roughly the same number of people in the United States, post-9/11, as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined. The disparity is a source of growing alarm for officials and experts, some of whom now say the United States is overdue for a realignment of national security priorities as violence on the far right escalates."

The 22 murdered in El Paso Saturday were part of a spate of massacres incited by Trump's white nationalism "directed at targets selected for racial or religious reasons, including shootings at synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh... The prospects for a change in course, however, appear limited-- complicated by legal constraints, toxic American political currents and the amorphous nature of an adversary that has no dis­cern­ible structure or Osama bin Laden-like leader and has burrowed into corners of the Internet the way al-Qaeda once hid in the mountain redoubts of Afghanistan. The grim statistics associated with these two strains of extremism have begun to converge. The numbers of people killed in attacks linked to Islamist radicals or the far right in the United States since 2002 are virtually equivalent-- 104 versus 109, respectively, according to data compiled by the think tank New America .

Protecting the public from the most pressing terrorist threat “has been our governing principle for many years now,” said Lisa Monaco, who served as the top counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama. Given the surge in attacks linked to the far right, she said, “we need to prioritize our resources and focus on this threat.”

In some ways, the opposite has occurred under President Trump.

Last year, the administration downgraded the position that Monaco previously held, meaning that the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House no longer reports directly to the president.

The administration has also curtailed or disbanded a Department of Homeland Security program that had been created to counter violent extremism by working with regional authorities and organizations to identify those vulnerable to radicalization, whether by Islamist groups or the far right.

The main obstacle to mobilizing against the white supremacist threat, officials said, may be political. Trump on Monday denounced the alleged white nationalist sentiments of the suspected killer in El Paso. But his presidency has come to be defined by policies that are aligned with aspects of the white nationalist agenda and his penchant for fanning racial animus.

“This both makes the mobilization more necessary and interferes with that mobilization,” said Dan Byman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University and a former staff member of the 9/11 Commission. Trump’s words and actions, he said, amplify the danger by emboldening those with radical, racist views, while his signals of tolerance toward such groups-- including his comments after violence in Charlottesville-- undermine his subordinates’ ability to agree upon and organize around the threat.

Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in U.S. politics has also contributed to the far right’s rise, experts said. Since at least 2015, Moscow’s destabilization efforts have included sweeping online operations aimed at sowing racial division in the United States by promoting the positions of white nationalists.

A social media study by researcher J.M. Berger concluded that far-right networks online are dominated by intersecting themes: “support for U.S. President Donald Trump, support for white nationalism, opposition to immigration (often framed in ­anti-Muslim terms).”

The latter is an area in which the response to 9/11-- with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and multibillion-dollar investments in border security aimed at blocking entry to radicalized Muslims-- may have fostered xenophobic attitudes that contributed to the rise of the far right.

There are indications that U.S. national security agencies are beginning to shift toward the far-right threat. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently testified that the bureau had made about 100 domestic terrorism arrests in the past nine months and that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

But others said the almost singular reliance on the bureau to disrupt far-right networks-- with little or no involvement of other agencies-- underscores the extent to which the government has failed to adapt.

Nicholas Rasmussen, who served three years as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that attacks linked to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State-- including the Boston bombings and the night club shooting in Orlando-- were invariably followed by “all-hands” meetings at the White House. Among those assembled were often the heads of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Treasury and State departments.

“But I suspect that didn’t happen this weekend at the White House,” Rasmussen said. “If it had happened in the Obama or Bush White Houses, I’m not sure it would have either. Because as soon as you hear ‘domestic,’ everybody reverts to ‘Well, the FBI has the ball.’ ” He added: “The FBI is hands down the best investigative law enforcement agency in the world, but asking them to take on this problem on their own makes no sense.”

A National Security Council spokesman declined to say whether any Cabinet-level meetings had taken place at the White House in the wake of the latest shootings, citing policy against such disclosures.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Words matter. Herr Trump built his psychotic campaign and his psychotic presidency on particularly hateful words. We all know what they are. They don't have to be repeated here. He runs whole Neo-Nazi rallies on those words. His fellow racists don their little red KKK MAGA hats and cheer his every evil word at those rallies. He re-tweets his favorite white supremacy tropes from his favorite white supremacy websites in the wee hours of the morning. He will repeat his hate-filled words over and over again, even from the Rose Garden itself.

Once in office and filling the White House with fellow white supremacists like Sebastian Gorka, John Kelly, Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Betsy DeVos, and all the rest, his words, and his actions have been designed to embolden those who think like he does and unleash the forces of hate to new lows in our society. For Herr Trump, the deaths of Heather Heyer and two Virginia State Police in Charlottesville would never be enough. He has continued to escalate and escalate, catapulting his bigotry into a viral wave of racism across the land. Saturday's mass murder at an El Paso, Texas mall is, no doubt, music to his sick mind. HIs party smirks and cynically spouts their "thoughts and prayers" mantra and dreams of finding endless ways to continue their support the man they continue to proudly point to as their leader.

The El Paso shooter, whose name I will not mention here, left the usual white supremacist manifesto, a manifesto that might as well be a Trump speech or the campaign speech of any Republican senator, congresscretin, or Republican convention participant. Lindsay Graham? You bet. Moscow Mitch? FOX "News" scripts? You bet. The manifesto was full of the usual hate "the Hispanics" rhetoric:

Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs... rotting from the inside out... the heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold.

The shooter also declared his support for the gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. What a surprise, eh? You know the shooter's manifesto, no matter how much they may claim otherwise, has put quite a smile on the faces in the White House, especially "Dear Leader's."

BREAKING: Trump Wins Again-- One Of His Supporters Slaughters 20 Brown People In Texas

A few hours ago Washington Post reporters Hannah Knowles, Morgan Krakow and Michael Rosenwald wrote that "Multiple people were shot and killed at a Walmart and nearby mall in El Paso on Saturday afternoon, sending shoppers racing for cover in a chaotic scene that prompted a massive police and medical response, local authorities and government officials said." At the time of their report there were 18 dead. Then it was 19. Now it's 20. There are also at least 40 injured. "City police," wrote the trio, "said the shooting began about 10 a.m. local time and quickly warned that people should avoid the area of Hawkins and Gateway East boulevards. The department said in another tweet at 10:09 a.m. that the shooter remained active. The shooting apparently began outside the Walmart."

The shooter was Patrick Crusius, a 21 year old right-wing white nationalist from Allen, Texas, a very white (70%) suburb north of Dallas. He was taken into custody around noon, so two hours after he had begun gunning people down with an AK47, the NRA's and GOP's favorite killing machine. Local reports say Crusius was all worked up and went from aisle to aisle shooting everyone-- including a 4-month old child-- until he ran out of ammo.

Crusius left a 4-page manifesto that differs only in slight details from the Trump reelection campaign. He went out of his way to explain he was a racist even before Trump was elected and demands no one blame Trump for what he was about to do: "My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I putting this here because some people will blame the President...for the attack. This is not the case." Do you feel reassured?

What worries Crusius is that there were too many brown people coming into Texas and that Texas would turn blue. "America will soon become a one party-state. The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate. Although the Republican Party is also terrible. Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Procorporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future."

He posted the manifesto this morning on 8chan, a place were Nazis and other far right extremists, as well as Trump supporters ,communicate with each other. Rightists are very upset that just because the anti-immigrant, white supremicist terrorist, gun nut killed a bunch of brown-skinned people Trump might be blamed. Typical:

The reports are still fluid and apparently a second person has been taken into custody, but so far there is no verification that it was someone in the Trump cabinet, or applying for a job with the regime. Nor is anyone absolutely certain that anyone involved was an actual official the NRA. It could have easily been any random Republican in the Texas state legislature. We'll have to see, won't we? Let's not just to any conclusions. The FBI is examining the Crusius Manifesto.

Steven Miller (And Trump) Want To Sell You A Bridge... While Status Quo Joe Biden Says He Wants To Build One

Adam Schiff was on CNN yesterday, questioning questioning congressional Republicans' devotion to Congress as an institution (and the U.S. Constitution) in light of Trump's fake national emergency. "It will not be a separation of powers any more," he said, "just a separation of parties. So this is going to be a moment of truth for my GOP colleagues." When Republicans go on TV to discuss arguments they can't win-- like Trump's blatant lies about this or that or the other and all of the above-- they gravitate to their safe space: Trump TV. However, Steven Miller, one of the least sympathetic characters in current politics-- even without the shoe-polish on his head-- just may have been somewhat surprised by what happened to him yesterday on Chris Wallace's show.

Watch it above. Wallace hammered Trump's in-house Nazi when he tried vomiting out memorized press department talking points instead of answering the questions. Rachel Maddow would have be kinder and gentler. Miller could almost have been on with Lawrence O'Donnell. I wrote "almost" because O'Donnell wouldn't have let him get away with this bullshit for the sake of comity and politeness:

WALLACE: 'I didn’t need to do this.' How does that justify a national emergency?

MILLER: Well as you know Chris, we already have 4,000 troops on the border in light of a national emergency, a decision that was made almost a year ago, as we see an increasing number of people crossing the border as well as increasing violence in Mexico. What the president was saying is that like past presidents, he could choose to ignore this crisis, choose to ignore this emergency as others have; that’s not what he’s going to do.

Wallace should have called him out for asserting that because of Trump's election stunt of sending some troops to the border ("a decision that was made almost a year ago," as if that was relevant) there is a national emergency. There isn't. And Miller is insisting that the troops-- which don't need to be there, except in his mind-- must be protected with a wall. He also falsely claimed that "we see an increasing number of people crossing the border." There are fewer illegal crossings than in decades. He also stuck in-- pure fear-mongering-- that we see "increasing violence in Mexico." Not true, not relevant. Wallace didn't let it all go by without pushback though:

"The president talks about an invasion," he said, "used that word multiple times on Friday-- an invasion on the Southern border. But let’s look at the facts, I want to put them up on the screen; 1.6 million people were stopped crossing the border illegally back in 2000, less than a quarter that many were caught last year. The government’s own numbers show, for all the president is talking about drugs streaming over the border, 80 to 90 percent of the cocaine, heroin and fentanyl seized at the border is seized at ports of entry, not along unfenced areas.bAnd in 2017 twice as many of the new people in the country illegally were from visa overstays, as were from crossing the border. Again, where’s the emergency-- the national emergency to build a wall?"

Miller's response was to attack George W. Bush and accuse him of "an astonishing betrayal of the American people" for allowing illegal immigration to double from 6 to 12 million. Bringing in "cheap labor" has, of course been the agenda of the big industrial and agricultural backers of the GOP for far longer than a century. Miller isn't from that wing of the party, though. He's a proud and insistent Know Nothing Republican and he's dragged his mentally-impaired boss down that rabbit hole with him.

Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin had some bad news for the Know Nothings this weekend. First of all, he wrote that within hours of Trumpanzee's Rose Garden speech, "the advocacy group Public Citizen filed suit in the Washington, D.C., federal district court to block implementation of the emergency declaration. The plaintiffs-- three Texas landowners who were notified by the government that their property could be taken to build the wall; and the Frontera Audubon Society, which operates a nature preserve in the Rio Grande Valley-- contend that no national emergency exists, and that even if one did, Mr. Trump exceeded the authority Congress gave the president to respond to military contingencies. 'The facts make clear that the premise of the president's declaration that the absence of a wall in the areas where construction is planned is an emergency is legally untenable and an impermissible basis for seeking to obligate funds that Congress has refused to appropriate for a border wall,' said Allison Zieve, a Public Citizen lawyer representing the plaintiffs."

Bevin also wrote, separately, that Democratic-led states and border communities said they were readying lawsuits to halt construction that Congress had not authorized. In Texas, El Paso County, which Señor Trumpanzee "visited Monday to make his case for a border emergency, said it would join with nonprofit groups to challenge the president’s action. 'President Trump has already made many negative and false statements about our community in the attempt to justify his border wall,' Ricardo Sanmaniego, the county judge, or chief executive, said in a release. The 'emergency declaration will further damage El Paso County’s reputation and economy, and we are determined to stop this from happening.'"

A few words about El Paso County, the 6th most populous in Texas. Beto represented most of it in Congress and now that seat is held by a long-time ally of his, Veronica Escobar. The county is blue. Kerry beat Bush 56-43% there in 2004. Obama won it-- both times-- by even greater margins. Hillary win in 2016 was a landslide-- 145,509 (69.6%) to 54,567 (25.9%). El Paso County is not Trump-friendly. Even in the 2016 GOP primary, Trump came in 3rd, after Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Not a great place for his racist policy agenda to face a jury.