The Freakout Escalates: DNC, MSDNC & Korporate Democrats Losing Their Minds Over The Appeal Of Bernie Sanders

-by Noah

About 20 years ago, I was looking for something to watch on the telly while I ate my dinner and I happened upon the Chris Matthews Hardball show. It was the first time I had ever seen in it and to this day, I simply turn the sound down or switch the channel whenever his show comes on. Why? Simple. First impressions mean a lot. That night Matthews was interviewing Newt Gingrich and it was anything but hardball. Since that night, I've called the show exactly what it is: Nerfball. Chris Mathews interviewing Newtie was no interview. It was a lovefest of nudge-nudge and wink-wink between two conservative geezers that were old beyond their chronological years; old and in the way. They might as well have been twins rejoicing after being separated for years. The cloying banter on the part of Matthews was a sickening aural plague. Matthews asked the softest questions, all teed up for his buddy Newt to hammer over the fence to the glee of both. MSNBC might as well have been showing us two semi-demented guys talking politics in the lunch room of a nursing home. Neither man had a grip on current day reality, and that was 20 years ago. It was like Hannity and Giuliani are these days, except it was hard to tell which one was Hannity and which one was Giuliani. It was at least that bad. It was, as they say, some really sick shit.

For a long time after that, I saw Matthews rail against progressives on other MSNBC shows, especially whenever election time rolled around. Progressive was a word that he spat out. Even when he feebly tried to hide his contempt, it showed. Even when he tried to cloak himself in his supposed northeastern liberal roots, it showed. He'd long outgrown his so-called "liberalism." Besides, his brand of liberalism was the dated and establishment kind, a co-option kind that was very prevalent in the 1960s when Kennedy Democrats decided to try on the trappings of being more "with it." It was pretty phony then. I saw that first hand. I called it opportunistic liberalism. Anything for a vote. And that was 50+ years ago. Matthews is the embodiment of that. He didn't evolve. He stayed in one place and atrophied while many of us moved on. We progressed. He became a living fossil. Due to his calcification, what Matthews became then, now often appears, in comparison to modern progressives, to be what Barry Goldwater and John Birchers were way back then. The same charge can be directed at politicians like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and any Republican you care to name. They are all people from another time, another century, and they are not what we need.

Hello! What time is it? We don't need media people or politicians who are so stuck in the past. It doesn't have to do with age but with intellect. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn't stop growing 50 wears ago and they are of the same generation. Yours truly is only a few years behind. Some people have moved into the 21st century. Others feel more comfortable in the past, the reality that they know. They fear the future but, damn, we are now 20 years into a century that we shouldn't even call new anymore. Hillary Clinton didn't get it in 2016. Matthews doesn't get it now.

Matthews has made an effort to fake it. A few years ago he at least tried to hide behind a facade of tolerance for progressives. At MSNBC, he had stuck his finger into the air and detected a gentle breeze flowing left and went with it, at least on face value. As they say, follow the money, and he did, but Bernie Sanders is more than that weak facade of Matthews could bear. On Saturday, as the Nevada Caucus results came in, Matthews snapped for good. He came back out of his Consevervadem closet, bowing the door of the hinges practically screaming, comparing Sanders, a Jewish man, to Hitler's Nazis who stormed into France shortly before he was born:

It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat... I think it's a little late to stop him, and that's the problem... I'm reading about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says 'It's over.' And Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?' He said, 'It's over.'

Over at CNN, former Obama administration official Van Jones spoke for his fellow bubble dwellers when he said:

Nobody thought six months ago that we would be sitting here with Bernie Sanders on his way to the nomination. He's on his way to the nomination. Something could happen to stop him. Somebody may have some marbles to throw at the stairs or a banana peel. They better find it. Because this guy is off and running.

It's not really over, of course, but to people like Matthews and the equally calcified Democratic National Committee led by Tom Perez (Think of him as this year's Debbie Wasserman Schultz), it is, or at least they fear it is. Bernie isn't one of their proscribed, pre-approved choices. He's not a member of the club. He's only what, in their eyes, too many voters, so far, want. Damn voters! How dare they have opinions! The DNC and their media hacks like Chris Matthews treat Bernie winning as their worst nightmare and, looked at one way, he is. Bernie is such a threat to their gravy train and safe, status quo that they've launched themselves into a state of panic when, in fact, they should be embracing Senator Sanders as a gift. In order to win, you need enthusiastic voters. That's what Trump has and you have to match enthusiasm with enthusiasm or else you don't have a chance. In order to survive as a political party and have a future, you need young people and Latinos coming in your door, and that is what Bernie is rounding up and delivering. He is a gift and the lords of the party gnash their teeth and wail. They are pathetic and they are dangerous, not only to us but the very existence of the party. Their hate for Bernie could deliver not just the nomination to a flaccid Conservadem euphemistically called a "moderate," it could also deliver the election to Trump whether Senator Sanders ends up with the nomination or not. Obviously, that would be fine with korporate America and their shills like Chris Matthews.

The Matthews outburst wasn't just a moment of crankiness and twitching fear, it was also a moment of moral bankruptcy, and, speaking of moral bankruptcy, as I write this on Monday afternoon, MSNBC has not fired Matthews on the spot. They haven't reprimanded him. They haven't even commented. Any silence between the Matthews outburst and the time you read this not shows us the true colors of MSNBC's parent company, COMCAST. Anything they may do now is too little too late.

Matthews isn't exactly alone at MSNBC of course. While the channel is better than the overtly right-leaning Wolf Blitzer led CNN and totally wacko nutjob outlets like FOX "News," and Sinclair, not to mention Drudge, Breitbart, and Trump favorite Alex Jones, there are others at MSNBC who share in Matthews's panic, a panic that has the DNC spinning like the head of that poor little girl in "The Exorcist." Give it another month and they will sound like her too. Since COMCAST took over MSNBC, there has been an obvious move right to the extent that many of us ruefully joke that the channel has become MSDNC, a bland merger of MSNBC and the DNC. Warning #1 to the DNC Establishment Suits and their media minions: You keep saying Bernie isn't a Democrat but you ignore the fact that his voters are and he's more of a real democrat then you've ever been. Warning #2: Bland wallpaper news and commentary doesn't beget any more support or enthusiasm than bland wallpaper politicians. You might as well bring back Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale.

Among the worst of the bubble dwelling offenders at MSNBC are former Conservadem $enator Claire McCaskill of Missouri who all but clutches her pearls every time Bernie's name comes up. There's the execrable Chuck Todd who has been living in a doorless Republican closet his whole pointless career. There's Katy Tur who doesn't seem too happy at all about the way things are going in the Democratic primaries. There's Nicole Wallace who at least openly admits to being a Republican who doesn't like Trump. However, she was George W. Bush's Communications Director so that bears close attention. Then there's Joy Reid. Reid is the most disappointing of all of them other than Matthews himself. Reid not only has a history of homophobia but she has taken to immaturely openly and loudly sighing when her guests speak up in favor of Sen. Sanders. She reminds me of Al Gore in the first Bush-Gore debate when he sighed, smirked, and made faces at everything Bush had to say. At least Bush deserve and earned the disrespect. And let's not forget the guy who runs the whole thing, the perfectly named Andy Lack who has made a career out of being forced out of one Korporate CEO job only to land in a new one. He's perhaps most infamous for his farcical and clueless tenure at Sony Entertainment.

Meanwhile, Howie has tweeted out a poll where followers can voice their choice of who at MSDNC should walk the plank first. Matthews has a commanding lead but why stop with him?

Democratic Party Establishment Interests Do Not Align With The Grassroots Of The Party-- Not Even A Little

Siena is a generally useless poll--except in New York state. For some reason, they tend to be fairly predictive there. Their new poll, released yesterday, shows Bernie winning the primary with Bloomberg in the #2 spot. Among registered Democrats:

• Bernie- 25%
• Bloomberg- 21%
• Status Quo Joe- 13%
• Elizabeth- 11%
• Mayo Pete- 9%
• Klobuchar- 9%

All 6 Democrats beat Trump in head-to-head match-ups, although Bloomberg does best-- beating Trump by 25 points. Although Bernie and Biden have more support from Democrats, Bloomberg manages to garner more support from Republicans than any of the Democratic candidates and also leads with Independents, presumably Republican-leaning Independents.

Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth have very high favorables among Democrats, while NY Dems rate Mayo Pete and Bloomberg significantly lower. And when it comes to unfavorables, Bloomberg is the most disliked by Democrats. Bloomberg has the highest favorables among GOP voters. Bernie has the highest favorables among Independents.

New York's 274 pledged delegates will be up for grabs on April 28 in a northeast Super-Tuesday that also includes Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware-- for a grand total of 663 delegates, the most of any day besides March 3. It's possible that Bernie will have-- despite corporate media anti-working class hysteria-- enough delegates in his pocket to be unstoppable. Reporting after the Nevada blowout, BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer noted that "David Plouffe, who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, said on MSNBC Saturday night that if the primary stays crowded after Super Tuesday, Sanders could have a hold on the nomination."

“If it is more than a two-candidate race, certainly, if it’s a four or five-candidate race, Bernie Sanders can walk to the nomination getting 35, 36, 37 percent of the vote,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.

He later made that more explicit. “But basically, if we’re-- Brian, if it’s March 3rd and we’re talking about Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, and Sanders, and everybody’s in, Bernie’s going to win almost all the delegates he needs to build an impenetrable delegate lead. That’s just math. It’s not my opinion, it’s just simple math."

The final vote in Nevada was released late yesterday-- along with the delegate assignations. Bernie wins, establishment loses

Even as anti-progressive an operative as Hillary's losing campaign manager and the DCCC's all-time worst disaster-maker, Robby Mook-- a walking onomatopoeia-- said that "If he has a three-figure lead, there is no catching up. It’s too late after Super Tuesday. Even if the field drops down to two people, that person still has to be beating him by 10-20 points in the remaining contests. This is the fog everybody is in right now. If you aren’t Sanders you have to deal with this problem before Super Tuesday."

On Sunday, William Rivers Pitt wrote that "Plouffe’s sober assessment of the state of the race, combined with Sanders’s resounding Nevada victory, had a strange and terrible effect on the minds of a number of MSNBC regulars. No longer content to ignore or dismiss Sanders’s status as frontrunner, that network’s top names spent the bulk of Saturday evening in a state of near panic, weaving a tapestry of impending doom out of literal Nazi analogies and Russia scaremongering."

“Right now, it’s about 1:15 Moscow time,” said James Carville, the longtime Democratic establishment strategist and occasional Gollum impersonator. “This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He’s probably staying up watching this right now. How you doing, Vlad?”

MSNBC Host Joy Reid, for her part, smashed the panic button straight through the table in a breathless aria for the ages regarding the seeming menace of Sanders supporters in the face of puddle-bound Democratic establishment candidates.

“They’re turning the tables over and they don’t care what the potential result is,” said Reid of Sanders voters:

They’re the hungriest. He only had to consolidate them, and the moderates, the sort of mushy moderates, think that they have the luxury of luxuriating on whether they’ll have someone who can speak six languages, you know, maybe today I want this woman who’s from the Midwest and, you know, maybe I’ll go with the vice president…. No one is as hungry, angry, enraged and determined as Sanders voters. Democrats need to sober up and figure out what the hell they are going to do about it.

On Friday, Dr. Jason Johnson, another regular MSNBC contributor, went on SiriusXM’s The Karen Hunter Show earlier this week and referred to Black women who have appeared in the media to support Sanders’s campaign as “the island of misfit black girls.” The group of women to which he was referring includes Barbara Smith-- the respected Black feminist critic who co-founded the Combahee River Collective and coined the term “identity politics”-- and Nina Turner, the Ohio politician who is now national co-chair of the Sanders campaign.

Sanders’s national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, offered this response:

On Saturday, Johnson apologized for the remark.

Meanwhile, Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host and former press secretary to George W. Bush, went scratching for whatever wildly discredited anti-Sanders rocks she could throw, arguing that Sanders “hasn’t been vetted by either the press or the other candidates.”

Apparently, Wallace is unaware-- or is pretending to be unaware-- of the decades during which Sanders has served in politics, and his presidential primary run against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment in 2016. If that isn’t “vetted,” then nothing is.

But it was MSNBC’s own human weathervane, Chris Matthews, who took home the prize for Most Offensive Anti-Bernie Slander on Saturday night. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” he lamented, “and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says ‘How can it be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’ So I had that suppressed feeling.”

Suppressed feeling? Not so much, Chris. By Sunday morning, #FireChrisMatthews” was the top trending topic on Twitter.

The Sanders campaign’s communications director, Mike Casca, responded with somber astonishment that a national news network would liken the campaign of a Jewish presidential candidate to the Third Reich:

I expect Sanders’s opponents to say ridiculous things as they watch him pull away. It’s primary season; if you’re losing and still acting reasonable, you aren’t trying hard enough. But to watch MSNBC, the so-called “liberal” network, sink into this kind of venomous Fox News-worthy nonsense is a bright, blinking warning light for the entire institution of U.S. journalism.

The establishment wing of the Democratic Party and its cohort of faux-progressive media mouthpieces have been confronted by their own senescence after so many decades of poorly managed control, and they are not liking the taste of it. Even if they manage to thwart Sanders’s nomination with brazenly undemocratic power moves at the convention, the party will never be the same after 2016 and this year’s elections. The writing is on the wall, and it is making them scream on live television.

The dinosaurs have seen the meteor, and it’s coming by way of Brooklyn and Vermont.

Shaniyat Chowdhury is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in southeast Queens, for a seat held by one of DC's most corrupt swamp residents. Chowdhury has endorsed Bernie while his opponent has been bought by Bloomberg. "Give the people what they want! I think members members of Congress forget they are in a job as public servants and not to serve themselves. It’s clear the people want Bernie to win because he is speaking to their pain. Denying them the right to healthcare is a big F-you to the American public and those members need to be primaried. My opponent for example, endorsed the racist oligarch Bloomberg who was a democrat for fifteen minutes. Against the interest of the people in NY-05 he is taking Bloomberg’s money to be his campaign for-chair so Democrat’s like Bernie cannot win. We are going door-to-door and not one person is happy about Meeks and Bloomberg. No matter how much power one person may have, the people will always revolt to win back power."


 

Smearing Bernie

On Friday night, Ryan Grim broke a fascinating piece of news. It isn't news to anyone who's been reading DWT for the last 12 months that Elizabeth Warren was the most likely Bernie running mate, despite two campaign staffs that are hostile to each other. But what Grim reported was that Bernie was considering Elizabeth for two jobs: VP and treasury secretary... at the same time. They researched if it is constitutional and found that it is. Great! And then she can be president for two terms after him. 12 or 16 years of a progressive executive brand-- just what we need after 4 years of a fascistic one.

But then came the Great Smear Meagan Day called it a manufactured narrative that exemplifies "how the media repeats cynical, bad-faith attacks until they get seen as fact." Pundits, she wrote, are whispering that "a Sanders victory would mean 'another misogynist as president.' These broad characterizations will be repeated ad nauseam until nobody even remembers where they came from. They will be “obviously true” because they’re things everybody knows, and everybody will know them because they’re obviously true. If ugly, baseless accusations like these aren’t confronted with unequivocal pushback from the very outset, they have a tendency to snowball. This is exactly how the absurd and blatantly false claim that Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of an 'antisemite army' in the Labour Party became a kind of common sense in the United Kingdom."

One of the most bitter and furious of the vast MSNBC contingent of Bernie haters...

This isn't our first rodeo. We’ve seen tendentious and cynical allegations of personal misogyny leveled at Sanders before, notably during his previous presidential run against Hillary Clinton. When Sanders told Clinton that the gun control debate will not be resolved by people shouting at those they disagree with, she suggested that Sanders has a problem with women speaking out. When he wagged his finger as he asserted that single-payer is the only way to realize health care as a universal right, his finger-wagging was condemned as sexist.

Over time, people stopped being able to recall these specific incidents, if they ever caught wind of them at all. “Bernie’s sexist” was just a feeling many people had, and they didn’t know where it came from. This is how baseless rumors harden into consensus. It’s how we ended up with MSNBC analysts saying that “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl. I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is. But I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate.”

The only way to deal with such distortions is to push back with the truth.

In this case, the truth is this: whether or not it was originally her idea to do so, Warren consciously chose to weaponize unverifiable rumors about the content of a private conversation between her and Sanders in order to damage him in the eleventh hour, as he was rising in the polls and she was falling. She was intentionally ambiguous in a way that encouraged the worst possible interpretation of Sanders’s contribution to their conversation. She got a big applause at the debate by sparring with a fictitious version of Sanders who doesn’t believe women can win presidential elections

And now we have media figures implicitly comparing whatever Sanders said to Warren to sexual assault, and suggesting that skepticism of her account is tantamount to disbelieving a rape survivor-- cowing people into silence about what very plainly transpired before all our eyes.

Sanders’s campaign is on the rise. If we begin to see an uptick in chatter about his supposed misogyny, we shouldn’t be surprised. And we shouldn’t let it slide, either. If we hear someone say that Bernie Sanders doesn’t think a woman can be president, we should recount this story to them. We should help them understand that it’s all a game of telephone, and that there’s too much at stake to keep playing.

Morning consult just announced the most popular and the least popular senators again, as they do every year. Every year Bernie has been the most popular senator within his state (65%)-- and he is again this year. Lucky for him Joy Reid and the rest of the Comcast hate squad don't live in Vermont! Here are the approvals for all the senators who ventured out onto the presidential candidates' stage this cycle:

Bernie- 65%
Amy Klobuchar- 56%
Elizabeth Warren- 50%
Sherrod Brown- 46%
Cory Booker- 45%
Kirsten Gillibrand- 42%
Kamala Harris- 41%
Michael Bennet- 39%

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

With great sadness and anger, I can't help but think about what happens to many women who seek a court injunction against a belligerent, crazed and abusive man. If impeachment is the equivalent of that kind of injunction, then just imagine what Trump's sick mind is plotting for us next. Same goes for his henchmen. That just makes it even more imperative that we not make any compromises whatsoever with Trump and his enablers and supporters. Way too many have been made already to this point. There's no need to dress pretty for any red-hatted devils, anywhere or at any time. Sledgehammers, people. Sledgehammers!

Republicans Stick Like Glue To Trump-- He Really Does Represent What They Are

Like their dear leader Trump, 9% of Americans think there's no such thing as Climate Change. Trump has convinced himself that the Climate Crisis is nothing but a "Chinese hoax. Everyone else, according to a new poll from CBS News, now recognizes that Climate Change is for real and most Americans feel we've got to address it or suffer the consequences. Most Republicans poo-poo the whole idea of it, another reason these people just do not belong in government on any level.

That's the problems with the critique of Trump from the right. Conservatives tend to be nearly as dangerous to the country as he is. Just as the neo-fascist Michigan GOP joined 4 other extremist state Republican parties to openly fix the Republican primary for Trump, one of his opponents, ex-Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh claimed that the GOP has turned into a cult. "State law," wrote Malachi Barrett, "prevents Michigan Republicans from joining other states to cancel their presidential primaries, but the state party adopted changes all but assuring its delegates will go to President Donald Trump and not his long-shot GOP challengers... Michigan Republican Party spokesperson Tony Zammit said the state party’s delegate apportionment rules were changed this year, requiring candidates to receive at least 20% of the primary vote in order to receive any delegates. The other Republican parties with neo-fascist, fully authoritarian leadership who have bowed to the Trump campaign's demands are in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina... Trump’s challengers said cancelling primaries disenfranchises voters and silences criticism of the president." Trump's excuse: "The four states that canceled it don’t want to waste their money. If there was a race, they would certainly want to do that. But they’re considered to be a laughing stock. They’re considered to be a joke. And those four states don’t want to waste their money. Having primary campaigns and having a primary election is very expensive."

3 Stooges by Nancy Ohanian

Walsh says his campaign is strictly about one thing and one thing only: Trump. And he said the Republican Party leaders, singling out House minority leaders Kevin McCarthy, seem to be "scared to death" of Señor Trumpanzee, which, he said, is "an absolute shame." The shame is that the Republican Party remains moored in the backwards politics of conservatism-- and that includes not just McCarthy but Walsh as well.





"Look," said Walsh, "I believe Trump is unfit. I believe he lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. I believe he’s a danger to this country. I guarantee you most of my former colleagues privately, they feel the same way about Trump. And what they are hoping for, David, is that he loses in 2010. They know, Kevin McCarthy knows, that because of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is losing young people, they’re losing people of color, they’re losing women, and they’re losing people in the suburbs. Donald Trump is destroying the party but yet they want him to leave in two years in 2020, and then they think they can pick the pieces up again. That’s cowardly and that’s wrong... All Trump cares about is Trump. So Trump will use racism and bigotry and xenophobia and anything-- he’ll use anything if it helps Trump... Look, this election is not about Trump’s tariffs or Trump’s debt increases. This is about Trump. It’s a referendum on Trump. The man is unfit. Conway knows that and I know that."

But... ask any of the anti-Trump Republicans about Climate Change. Ian fact-- ask any conservatives about Climate Change. They're too busy with materialism to learn about the threat it poses. No, don't ask Republicans or conservative Democrats about the Climate Crisis... ask Bernie instead:

Is Trump Re-Sparking Anti-Semitism Among American Evangelicals?

On Thursday, John Pavlovitz had some responses to people who say "you've gotten too political?" Know anyone like that? Pav: There are phrases you hear so much, they start to become white noise:

• “You’re too political.”
• “You’re too angry.”
• “You’re too partisan.”

He's been a registered Independent for thirty years and growing up he was "taught to avoid talking about politics and religion in mixed company, and made it a point never to vilify groups en masse or to demonize individuals in leadership outright whenever speaking about the events of the day. Even in the most challenging times," he continued, "I always lived and spoke with the assumption that most people were good, that the majority of Americans would default to decency over party,  and that our systems of checks and balances would keep us from veering too far into violent extremism. I always believed that the center would hold." Waiting for the "but." Hang in there.

In my twenty-five as a local church pastor, I always did my best to keep matters of politics at arm’s length, for fear of alienating the people in my care. I was careful to stay safely in the center, never choosing sides, always playing devil’s advocate-- which turns out to be a really lousy position for a minister. That middle place can actually be the spot where you lose your soul. You can think you’re hearing all perspectives-- when you’re really sitting on the fence of cowardice. It’s a place privilege anesthetizes you into neutrality and silence.

As I began writing publicly, I kept things similarly vague. In the first four years of the blog (prior to the 2016 Presidential campaign), I never singled out a politician by name or mentioned a political party in my writing. “If you do that” a good friend cautioned me, “you’ll eliminate half your prospective audience.”

Since 2016, it’s become clear that these are different times.

• They necessitate specificity.
• They demand clarity.
• They call for authenticity.

I believe this President, emboldened by this version of the Republican Party and a fully politicized Evangelical Church-- is doing irreparable and continual harm to our rule of law, our standards of decency, our environment, our personal liberties, our elections, our people, and our standing in the world.

I see this Administration as an unprecedented betrayal of the freedoms and systems we all hold dear. I believe there has been a wholesale soul-selling of Republican politicians and Conservative Christian leaders; a historic power grab the likes of which we’ve never seen in this country.

That, along with the increasing silence of many of my white, moderate Christian friends, has left me feeling more burdened than ever to speak explicitly and repeatedly; to leverage my platform and my newsfeed and my voice on behalf of a nation and Church that have lost the plot.

That’s not going to change.

Because of the volume and the relentlessness of this President’s cruelty-- there must be a similarly passionate and compassionate response.

Because every day we are bombarded with a new real or manufactured urgency-- we need to step in again with facts and truth to combat it.

Because each morning a different attack comes: on migrants or meal vouchers or national parks or transgender soldiers or Jewish Americans or journalists or shooting victims-- then each morning there must be those of us who unequivocally oppose it all.

As long as this man and his cadre of sycophants continues to shun their responsibility and horde wealth and preach fear and prey upon the vulnerable and serve only half of their constituents and use religion as a weapon-- I’m going to continue to say everything.

You’re free to label it “too political,” but I know that’s simply a term people use when someone else’s boldness conflicts with their comfort, challenges their prejudices, calls out their malevolence, and rattles their privilege.

If this clarity and directness offends you or you feel I’ve grown too angry or too political, you’re free to mute or unfriend me, to stop reading me or stop inviting me to dinner or talking to me at the bus stop. Social media is optional and my page is not a Democracy-- though I’m working to make sure we continue to live in one.

I’m not going to apologize for saying what I believe needs to be said, because I think the people who are threatened by this Administration are worth it. It’s really that simple.

Silence in turbulent times is a luxury that privilege affords.

I believe the greatest responsibility people of morality, faith, and conscience have, is to leverage that privilege for the common good.

I want to look back at the end of my life and know that I did all I could to protect diversity, equality, and justice.

• You think I’ve gotten too loud.
I believe you’ve grown frighteningly quiet.

• You believe I’m too opinionated.
I think you’re still trying to straddle the fence.

• You say I’ve gotten too political.
I say I’ve become more human.

Jewish Americans? Why throw us in there? Don't Evangelical Christians and Republicans love Jews? Sorry but... not so much. Jews from Europe like my family looked for refuge in America, primarily from Germans, from Eastern European fascists and from Russians. If they made it to America, it may have taken a generation or two but they've largely been integrated and accepted. Mostly. Evangelicals have always been mistrustful and filled with animosity towards Jews; they just kept it under wraps in recent decades, at least more than they are now, as Julie Zauzmer reported for the Washington Post Friday: How Antisemitic Beliefs Have Taken Hold Among Some Evangelical Christians

Some evangelical true believers have come to believe that the Tsar Trump "is surrounded by a Zionist environment with completely different values from Christians. It’s kabbalist. It’s Talmudic values. Not the word of God. In other words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Why do we have pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ values, and we do not have more freedom to protect our faith? We are persecuted now... [Jews] say, 'We’ve got America. We control America.'" That’s what these Trump voters think they know.

It’s an anti-Semitic viewpoint shared by a number of evangelical Christians across the country. The relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught for almost 2,000 years since the death of Jesus. Today, with a president who levels accusations about Jews and who encourages his fans to mistrust the mainstream media, a growing number of evangelicals are turning to the Internet for information and finding anti-Jewish beliefs there.

Christians take their cues for what to think about Jews from many sources. They include the long history of evangelicals’ support for the state of Israel and Trump, who this week declared that Jews who vote for Democrats-- meaning more than 70 percent of all Jews in the United States-- are “disloyal.”

In churches across America, evangelicals say they don’t believe they can get unbiased facts from any traditional news outlet that Trump has branded “fake news” (though many are fans of Fox News). They watch TV networks other than Fox and read major news websites but don’t trust them. Instead, they seek news from alternative websites and YouTube videos in which fiery pastors decry Jewish influence.

Pastors are aware of the conspiracy theories floating among their congregants, including a small number of virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic beliefs that some Christians interviewed by the Washington Post this summer professed.

But leaders can be unwilling to address these beliefs head-on. After a churchgoing evangelical Christian was charged with killing a Jewish woman at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., this year-- an act officials say he prefaced with a declaration including both anti-Semitic tropes from the Internet and Christian theology from church-- some pastors called for a national conversation about how evangelical pastors can make clear that such beliefs aren’t acceptable in their pews.

That doesn’t sit well with many evangelical pastors’ insistence that their job is to preach the Bible, not stray into current events.

...Historically, evangelicals have thought of themselves as very good friends of the Jews, not as anti-Semites. The two faiths share the Old Testament and basic watchwords of tolerance such as loving your neighbor as yourself. Evangelicals often think fondly of Jews as their religious forebears-- after all, Christ’s early followers were Jews of 2,000 years ago-- even if they think Jews are missing the crucial Jesus part of the story. Major evangelical publications regularly denounce anti-Semitism as evil, in the strongest terms.

And evangelicals tend to fiercely defend and embrace the state of Israel, a Jewish nation, because of its central role in their own faith. The nation is the site of Christian holy spots, including the places where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and resurrected. Certain interpretations of Revelation say that Jewish presence in Israel is important for Christians, because it will take the homecoming of Jews to the land of Israel to bring about the return of the Messiah.

But Christian theology has also gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism for centuries, dating back long before Martin Luther. To this day, some Christians believe that the Jews killed Jesus and that modern Jews should bear the guilt.

“There are plenty of evangelicals who have views about Jewish power, who assume Jews are controlling things. Jerry Falwell [Sr.] joked about how Jews could make more money,” said Daniel Hummel, a historian at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin who recently published a book about evangelicals and Jews.

Hummel described the deep-rooted anti-Semitic beliefs among some evangelicals as both cultural and theological, with the cultural beliefs coming from their conservative neighbors and the theological beliefs dating to early Christianity, when Christians first started casting themselves as the new chosen people replacing the Jews.



“Some associations in certain conservative areas, with Jews being liberal, cosmopolitan, international and that being a threat to American Christian identity: You’re going to find those views, weirdly, right alongside expressing support for Israel,” Hummel said. “Someone like that would be vaguely or even strongly anti-Semitic but also pro-Israel.”

And politically, evangelicals find themselves sharing common cause with right-wing anti-Semites. They might have little else in common, but both groups are enthusiastic supporters of Trump. And Trump, who strives to court that evangelical fandom, has flirted with anti-Semitism before this week. During his campaign, he retweeted and defended an image from a white supremacist website, showing Hillary Clinton’s face over a pile of money and a six-pointed Jewish star. He famously said that the demonstrators who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville included “very fine people.”

Deborah Lipstadt, a historian who is one of the foremost researchers on anti-Semitism, said she has noticed that politically conservative talking points echo the language common to anti-Semites much more often. She pointed to Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” 12 times.

“This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community,” Hawley said, referring not to Jews but to liberal elites.

“I’m sure most of the people who appeared there would say, ‘I’m a good friend of Jews,’ and they probably are,” Lipstadt said. “But if you took out the word ‘cosmopolitan’ and put in the word ‘Jew’-- it sounds like a traditional anti-Semitic trope… It’s the kind of thing that will attract the anti-Semites.

At its root, this trope relies on a mistrust of major institutions, and a suspicion that Jews are manipulating them. Some of this attitude, including skepticism of big government, has always been part of the American conservative mind-set, Lipstadt noted. But some of it is new, including increased hostility toward big business on the part of some conservative populists, in contrast to the old Republican Party embrace of commerce.

“There’s a theory that’s out and about, about the manipulation of news, fake news. And how you can’t trust judges. And you can’t trust big pharma, that’s why we shouldn’t be vaccinated… These kind of conspiracy theories [about manipulating institutions], for centuries, are just so connected to anti-Semitism that it’s hard to just ignore,” Lipstadt said. “It’s hard to say this is just by chance.”




Evangelicals are not inherently anti-Semitic, she noted. But they tend to share these conservative suspicions of the news media and of elites, and to view themselves as the victims of the elites-- a worldview that predisposes some to align themselves with anti-Semites.

Some online video-makers who espouse anti-Semitism do so with an openly Christian imprimatur.

Aryeh Tuchman, the associate director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, points to several YouTube channels where pastors promote a mix of Christian theology and anti-Jewish animus.

TruNews, a nightly newscast with more than 18 million views on YouTube, bills its purpose “to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream media.” Jews and Israel are a constant target for Rick Wiles, the Florida pastor who runs the show.

In the past month alone, Wiles has posited that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might not have died but instead been spirited away to a safe house in Israel; listed the names of “Hollywood Jews” who produced the pulled-from-theaters satirical movie “The Hunt” and suggested that they actually want to hunt and kill white Christians; called the non-Jewish billionaire “Rabbi Warren Buffett"; said the government could take away guns from anyone who criticizes Israel; referred to Ivanka Trump, who is Jewish, as “Yael Kushner"; and more.

Steven Anderson, the pastor of a Baptist church in Arizona who caused outrage during the Obama administration by saying he was praying for the president’s death, runs a YouTube channel with more than 62 million views. In sermons online, he claims, “The Jews believe that it’s okay for them to steal from Gentiles"; says that Jews and gay people run Hollywood; and emphasizes that Jews killed Jesus and are not God’s chosen people.

Tuchman said he worries that YouTube makes these beliefs unusually potent. First, the site’s never-ending recommendations feature might steer someone who was just looking for videos about the Bible to watch sermons that promote conspiracy theories. “To what extent can anti-Semitism jump from one stream of Christianity to another, especially when the anti-Semitic content may be queued up for a viewer by YouTube?” he asked.

And second, he fears that YouTube will treat with kid gloves a video creator who is also a pastor. “These channels may present themselves as mainstream, as religious Christian channels,” he said. “There may be reluctance to take them on, and they give them the benefit of the doubt that this is their religious belief, even if they may potentially violate the terms of service on YouTube or anywhere else.”

Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman for YouTube, did not comment specifically on Wiles, Anderson or other pastors, but said, “We enforce our policies consistently, and regardless of viewpoint, including religious beliefs.” That includes a new policy instated in June that bans statements that a race or religious group is superior to justify discrimination, even if the video does not explicitly call for violence.

For Wanda and Doug Meyer, like many other evangelical Christians across the country, these YouTube channels are their primary source of news. They turn to YouTube to understand events that seem vitally important to them, like policy in Washington that will impact their religious freedom at home in Brandon, Fla.

Wanda, who taught in a public elementary school for 33 years, and Doug, a semiretired insurance specialist, have given up on newspapers and TV channels, the outlets that Trump-- whom they adore-- calls “fake news.” On YouTube, they find the pastors who pray with Trump at the White House, the pastors they really trust.

“It’s right there on YouTube. You don’t hear it on mainstream media. We know Kenneth Copeland. We know Paula White. We know David Barton,” Wanda said. “Different ministers, that’s where we get our news. People who know what’s really going on.”

As they ate lunch after the service at their large evangelical church, the Meyers said they would like to someday visit Israel, which is religiously important to them. But they also watch a lot of videos online when they’re watching those pastors’ sermons. They believe, with total certainty, in what they hear, even when the information is false: That humans have nothing to do with climate change. That Muslims are trying to implement laws in U.S. states that would allow them to kill Christians with impunity. That a shadowy group, including wealthy Jews as leaders, meant to use Hillary Clinton to bring about “one world government.”

Wanda says they try to “stay up to date” on the “spiritual battle … financed by the Illuminati and the Rothschilds.”

After all, she trusts the source has a higher authority: “These are ministers we know, we respect.”

Frank Schaeffer was on Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning. He explained that the real audience-- a very, very dangerous audience-- for Trump's fit last week is the evangelical white nationalist voters. "They," Schaeffer explained, "are very suspicious of Jews, very anti-Semitic to their core when it comes to them saying that 'Jews are all lost and going to burn in Hell.' They love Israel because it is strong; it goes to war; it looks like them; there are guns around; they fight... Trump has painted a target on the backs of liberal Jews. He has said, 'If I lose in 2020, you know who to blame.' And who is it? It's the Jews again for being 'disloyal.' ... This is real stuff. He's a fool. So perhaps he doesn't understand what he's unleashing. But when you paint a target on the back of Jews and say 'Your disloyalty will cost me the election"... That's what he's saying... it has nothing to do with the Jewish vote. He is now back in the camp of white nationalism and genocide that came about in Europe when Hitler blamed the Jews for their economic problems in the Weimar Republic. Make no mistake-- this is horror and this is coming from the American president. He is a disgusting individual and he has to be stopped."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

There's Charlie Manson. There's Ted Bundy. There's Jim Jones. There's Jeffrey Dahmer. America has produced some spectacularly sick and twisted psychopaths. The men I've just mentioned killed a total of hundreds of innocent Americans. What Charlie Manson did is, perhaps, most widely known. The gruesome details of what Jeffrey Dahmer did are impossible to stomach. No one knows for sure how many women Ted Bundy killed. Jim Jones got his followers to knowingly drink cyanide-laced cups of grape Kool-Aid. It is Jones who provides the best comparison or metaphor for what Paul Ryan is. People repeatedly have drunk Ryan's Kool-Aid as he has rammed republican ideals and policies through congress that end up killing Americans. Whether it's his pro-pollution attacks on the environment, the removal of regulations on chemical corporations that fill our lives with carcinogens, the promotion of Earth threatening global warming, or the removal of healthcare and well-being of Americans, or fighting against the dignity that earned Social Security benefits provide, Ryan has pushed for things that will cause far more deaths of Americans than the four men I mentioned above. He has done all of this with an evil smirk. Men like Ryan even consider an increase in children born with birth defects a plus. He is a merchant of death and human misery on a medieval scale.

Here's the punchline: Don't be shocked if he ends up being President Of The United States in the very near future.

The Shithole "President" Is Illegitimate And Always Will Be

I just went through a couple of very intense years of cancer treatment. My doctor is an award-winning researcher and my cancer is extremely rare and extremely difficult to manage. She was one of the world's experts in it and she saved my life. She was born in China and I consider myself very lucky that her family immigrated to America, to California, where I live. Another specialist who my primary care physician suggested I also talk to suggested a much less intense treatment for the disease, much less stressful treatment. Everyone dies within a couple of years who goes that route. He's just a few years behind the times.

My China-born doctor wasn't the only one who treated me though. The hospital had a lot of very skilled nurses working on me on a day ti day basis. One who I came to absolutely love is a woman named Cindy. My heart leaps when I go see her every three months for my on-going treatment. Cindy's family immigrated from the Philippines. Other nurses who worked on me were from Latin America and Asia and they all made me feel wonderful and all contributed to my recovery. But in California it seems like most of the nurses are from the Philippines.

In South Florida, though, it appears that most of the nurses at from Haiti. While I was going through my ordeal, one of my oldest friends was dealing with his mothers passing. His mother was very wealthy and didn't want to die in a facility. So she lived out the last years of her life at home in Miami in her palatial home. My friend lives in New York and he tried to go down to see her every week or so, She needed pretty intense 24/7 treatment and her head nurse, a Haitian woman, was in charge. I'll tell you how great of a job she did-- a woman with her own life and her own troubles. When my friend's mom eventually died, me friend gave the nurse $250,000. Nice tip. He sometimes wonders if he gave her-- this Haitian immigrant-- enough. "Take them out," said the worthless piece of shit head of the kakistocracy this week. Up top is a commentary from American Alisha Laventure, a Dallas TV news anchor whose parents immigrated from Haiti, a "shithole country" according to the racist slob sitting and stuffing his ugly face with McDonald's in the Oval Office. Below is a much more overtly emotional commentary from MSNBC's Joy Reid, one of who's parents came from Haiti and one from the Congo, another "shithole country" according to Trump. Please find the time to watch both.

I spent the holidays in Thailand. Thais are too polite to bring up Trump, but Europeans we met there-- there are far more Europeans traveling these days than there are Americans-- always brought up Trump, none, at least none that we met, admiringly, the way they talked about Obama. "How could you?" they all asked, almost accusingly. What do you think Africans think about our ignorant racist slob of a leader?

The African Group of UN ambassadors is "extremely appalled at, and strongly condemns the outrageous, racist and xenophobic remarks by the president of the United States of America as widely reported by the media," a statement said.

After an emergency session to weigh Trump's remarks, the group said it was "concerned at the continuing and growing trend from the US administration toward Africa and people of African descent to denigrate the continent and people of color."

While demanding a "retraction and an apology" from Trump, the 54 countries also thanked those Americans "from all walks of life who have condemned the remarks."

The resolution was passed unanimously after four hours of discussions.

Why hasn't Speaker Paul Ryan or Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy introduced a resolution in Congress disassociating the United States from Trump's vile comments? Really-- why haven't they?

NPR's Karen Grisby Bates tried figuring out what's going on with all this Republican racism and xenophobia. "He's saying exactly what he wants to say," she wrote about Trump. "As the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out, 'Make America Great Again' really means Make America White Again."

One way to do that is to cut back on people from the aforementioned "shithole countries"-- countries that, coincidentally, are full of black and brown people-- to make room for immigrants from countries the president deems more desirable. He seems to like Norway. (Although as one Twitter user asked, why would most Scandinavians, who have higher education rates than their U.S. counterparts and a far more extensive social service system, want to trade that for what we have here?)

People from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are who Trump doesn't want. But he cannot turn back time. The country is getting browner, and America 2018 is never going to look like America 1918. Interracial marriages continue to increase; the bi- and multiracial population steadily grows. And the world has not stopped spinning.

So yes, calling most of Africa and the Western world's oldest independent black nation the institutional equivalent of a latrine is a new low in racial vulgarity for this president. But we probably haven't reached an absolute nadir yet.

Nevertheless, we should worry at the constant stream of racist, crude remarks this president unleashes on the public. Normalizing that kind of behavior leads to what sociologists call "otherization"-- making the subject of one's remarks different from one's self to the point that it is easier to neglect, harm, even kill people one doesn't see as people. It happened in Germany in 1939. It happened in Rwanda in the '90s. It's happening now in Myanmar.

Donald Trump's relegation of whole nations filled with black and brown people to an undesirable inconvenience is another step down a slippery slope. If it's not called out and stopped, it could lead to something far worse than hurt feelings.

Which is why we should still take a moment to be shocked when the president of the United States says racist things. Even if you know his history.

This weekend, a NY Times editorial reminded its readers, few of whom need reminding, that "Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar." In a new notorious meeting with congressional leaders he asked "why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a 'Great Wall' along the Mexican border... The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history."

No one is denying that Haiti and some of these other countries have profound problems today. Of course, those problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name just a few, kidnapping and enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generations

The United States has long held itself out as a light among nations based on the American ideal of equality. But the deeper history tells a different story.

The sociologists David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin have shown that the United States pioneered racially based exclusionary immigration policies in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Not long before he was elected president, for example, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the bigoted but then-common view that the Chinese should be kept out of America because they were “racially inferior.”)

It should sober Americans to know that authoritarian governments in Chile, Cuba and Uruguay ended racist immigration policies decades before the United States.

...What is concerning is not the wall, or the word “shithole” or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.

Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as “very fine people.”

Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that the 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States “all have AIDS,” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa once they had seen the United States. See a pattern yet?

...Republicans in Congress are spending most of their time finding ways to avoid talking about their openly bigoted chief executive. Some claimed not to have heard what Mr. Trump said. Others offered tepid defenses of his “salty” talk. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Mr. Trump’s comments “unhelpful,” clearly wishing he could return to his daily schedule of enriching the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.

Up to Congress? That means it's up to us, the citizens of this country to defeat every Republican-- and every Democrat who enables Republicans (corrupt, paid off Blue Dogs and New Dems like Dan Lipinski and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) this year so Congress can deal with the shit Trump and the GOP are clogging up the system with.