Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Cincinnati Enquirer's Hannah Sparling makes it very clear in her investigation that Cincinnati and the surrounding Tri-State area has a problem with Neo-Nazis.

A group of neo-Nazis here has a seemingly simple plan. 

They’re organizing in Ohio and the surrounding states, on a mission to win the hearts and minds of poor white people. 

They want a whites-only state. And to get it, members of a group called the Traditionalist Worker Party are preaching a time-tested strategy employed for decades by grassroots groups. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. It’s charity work, essentially. 

Until it turns into something else. 

That’s the plan, anyway. In reality, The Enquirer could find little evidence of the TWP’s charity work. And let’s be clear: While the party’s leadership says this is about white advocacy and helping the poor, it is also about a group of people who are anti-Semitic, anti-diversity and who do not want to live with anyone but white people. 

The TWP is in turmoil after co-founder Matthew Heimbach was charged with battery on March 13. The party's website was disabled shortly after that happened, and it's unclear how the charges might affect the group's long-term goals. More on that later.

For now, here's what we know: The TWP is a political party and one of more than 100 neo-Nazi hate groups operating in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Party leaders reject such labels, saying they are about helping white people, not hate. They typically call themselves white nationalists instead of neo-Nazis. 

The TWP is a national group, but its members are concentrated in, and focused on, America’s middle, in states such as Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee. 

They are targeting young people – particularly young, white men. 

They are targeting the addicted and their families, bemoaning what they see as a piddly response to the opioid crisis. 

And they are targeting Appalachia, where, they say, poor, white people are losing hope. There is no future for white people in America, said Heimbach, 26, who lives in Paoli, Indiana. 

“We’ve been waiting for decades for the government, for companies, corporations, the Flying Spaghetti Monster to come and fix these things, but they’re not,” Heimbach said. “So the time is now for us to simply say, ‘We can’t count on anyone but ourselves.’”

This is what I'm up against every day here as a black man here in Northern Kentucky.  They were quiet before, but they were here.   If you're wondering how the terrorist suicide bomber in Austin was radicalized, it's because of groups like the Traditional Worker's Party.

I keep saying there are places in this state I won't go into for fear of my life, for fear of these asshole skinheads deciding a big black guy needs to get his ass kicked today by a group of white guys half my age.

They are flat out Neo-Nazi terrorists, period.  I'd say it's time we start treating them like it but the problem is the GOP is doing exactly that.

Clinton made them angry.

Dubya made them organize.

Obama made them furious.

Trump made them loyal.

Ohio GOP's War On Women Continues

Ohio Republicans are trying to outlaw abortion in the state again in a bill that has no chance of passage, let alone it standing up to Constitutional muster, but they're trying anyway because "Ohio Republicans".

Ohio's GOP lawmakers want to ban abortions – a likely violation of federal law.

A bill from two Republican lawmakers, introduced Monday, would ban all abortions in Ohio. Doctors could be charged with murder or sued for the wrongful deaths of aborted fetuses, according to the proposal. Kentucky lawmakers are considering a similar ban. 

In recent years, Ohio lawmakers have limited abortions by restricting them to earlier in a pregnancy or banning them after a diagnosis of Down syndrome. 

Most of these efforts took aim at Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ensured access to most abortions. Some of the new Ohio laws have faced legal challenges. But none take on abortion as directly as the proposal introduced this week.
Opponents of the bill fear it could charge doctors with murder, punishable by life in prison or the death penalty. 

"Anti-choice extremists from the Ohio Statehouse to the White House are lining up their dominoes to topple Roe v. Wade and punish those who seek or provide abortion care," said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, in a statement.

So why do it?  Simple.

Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, said he knows a federal court could find his bill unconstitutional. But that decision could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider abortion access. 

"Obviously, Roe v. Wade could be revisited," Hood said.

So many of these anti-choice zealots want to go down in history as passing the law that reaches the US Supreme Court becoming the basis for overturning Roe.   They want that place in history more than life itself, it seems.

This won't be that bill, but one of these days and soon it will happen.  We had the chance to stop this in 2016 but of course all the people who said "What difference would it make" or "There's no difference between Trump and Clinton" made that not happen.

The butcher's bill on that is coming sooner rather than later.

Cry Havok, And Let Slip The Mustache Of War

I've said time and again that John Bolton joining Trump's foreign policy team basically guaranteed war with Iran, North Korea, or both. That catastrophic scenario has now come to pass, as Bolton will be replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a few weeks.

President Trump named John R. Bolton, a hard-line former American ambassador to the United Nations, as his third national security adviser on Thursday, continuing a shake-up that creates one of the most hawkish national security teams of any White House in recent history.

Mr. Bolton will replace Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer who was tapped last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign policy operation but who never developed a comfortable relationship with the president.

The move, which was sudden but not unexpected, signals a more confrontational approach in American foreign policy at a time when Mr. Trump faces mounting challenges, including from Iran and North Korea.

The president replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson last week with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, a former Army officer and Tea Party congressman who has spoken about regime change in Pyongyang and about ripping up the Iran nuclear deal.

Mr. Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military action who served in the George W. Bush administration, has called for action against Iran and North Korea. In an interview on Thursday on Fox News, soon after his appointment was announced in a presidential tweet, he declined to say whether Mr. Trump should go through with a planned meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

General McMaster will retire from the military, ending a career that included senior commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had discussed his departure with Mr. Trump for several weeks, White House officials said, but decided to speed it up because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his exchanges with foreign officials.

Mr. Trump, the White House officials said, also wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with Mr. Kim, which is scheduled to occur by the end of May.

With Pompeo at State and now Bolton running the NSC, the odds that Trump is talked into direct military action against Pyongyang or Tehran is ludicrously high.  I know I make a lot of predictions, and use quote a bit of superlative hyperbole to get my points across, but guys?

I'm scared.

This is deadly, deadly serious, and I am 100% convinced the question now isn't whether we attack Iran and/or North Korea, but when, and in what order.  Voting for Democrats this fall and taking back the House and Senate as a check on Trump's military aspirations is now a moral imperative.  Fred Kaplan at Slate has the right of it despite his long history of being a smug asshole.

Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever “madman theory” to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and America’s other enemies too.

His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.

In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney finagled Bolton a job as undersecretary of state for arms control—an inside joke, since Bolton has never read an arms-control treaty that he liked. But his real assignment was to serve as Cheney’s spy in Foggy Bottom, monitoring and, when possible, obstructing any attempts at peaceful diplomacy mounted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Powell got the boot, Cheney wanted to make Bolton deputy secretary of state, replacing Richard Armitage, who resigned along with his best friend Powell. But Powell’s replacement, Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bush’s national security adviser, blocked the move, fully aware of Bolton’s obstructionist ideology.

As a compromise, Bush nominated Bolton to be United Nations ambassador, but that move proved unbearable to even the Republican-controlled Senate at the time. It was one thing to be critical of the U.N.—it’s a body deserving of criticism—but Bolton opposed its very existence. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he once said in a speech, adding, “If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.”

More than that, he was hostile to the idea of international law, having once declared, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

We're going to another disastrous war.  Maybe two.  Hell, maybe more.  With Mueller closing in, there may not be a way to stop it.  Most of the groundwork for an attack has already been set.  When Trump's May meeting with Kim Jong-Un fails spectacularly or fails to even happen in the first place, the bombs will start falling later this year.

I almost guarantee it at this point.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate passed a $1.3 trillion House spending bill early this morning to keep the government funded for another six months, Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill today.
• More than 130 pilot whales beached themselves and died on Australia's southwestern coast on Friday as rescue workers tried in vain to herd the animals back to sea.
• Kentucky lawmakers are looking to pass one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bans, ending dilation and evacuation procedures after just 10 weeks of pregnancy.
• The Dow shed 700 points Thursday and Asian markets are roiling today after Trump's tariffs were announced, China is planning to retaliate with 25% tariffs on dozens of US imports.
• Hackers have hit the City of Atlanta's computer systems with a ransomware attack, demanding tens of thousands of dollars to restore the city government's affected PCs.