Last Call For The Racism Is The Point

Donald Trump figures in an electorate that is 70-75% white that overt appeals to racism will win him re-election in 2020, and he's most likely going to be correct.

President Trump launched another broadside Saturday on a Democratic political opponent, calling a prominent black congressman’s Baltimore district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and saying “no human being would want to live there.”

That Twitter attack on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) plunged the nation into yet another anguished debate over the president’s divisive rhetoric. And it came just two weeks after Trump called out four minority congresswomen with a racist go-back-to-your-country taunt.

The assault on Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, prompted immediate condemnations from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Young and several other top Democrats.

The outburst also undercut efforts by many Republicans over the past two weeks to defend Trump and insist that his earlier attacks were based in ideology rather than race.

But Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks are good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.

This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen.

Racism wins with white voters, especially younger white voters.

A slim majority (51%) of white working-class Americans identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.2 About one-third (34%) are affiliated with or lean toward the Democratic Party. Americans overall lean the opposite direction, with significantly more identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party (47% vs. 41%, respectively).

White working-class Southerners stand out for their exceptionally strong attachment to the Republican Party. Nearly six in ten (58%) white working-class Southerners identify as Republican or lean Republican, compared to fewer than half who live in the Northeast (46%), Midwest (48%), and West (47%).

In the general population, younger Americans are significantly more likely than older Americans to identify with or lean towards the Democratic Party. But younger white working-class Americans are actually less Democratic than those who are older. A majority (57%) of white working-class young adults identify as Republican or lean towards the GOP, compared to only 29% who identify as or lean Democratic—a gap of 28 percentage points. Among white working-class seniors, the party identification gap is only 15 percentage points, with 51% at least leaning toward the Republican Party and 36% leaning toward the Democratic Party.

The patterns of ideological identification among the white working class largely follow the patterns of partisan identification. White working-class Americans are twice as likely to identify as conservative (43%) than liberal (21%). Fewer than one in three (29%) identify as politically moderate.

Notably, however, even though younger white working-class Americans are more likely than white working-class seniors to identify as Republican, they are less likely to identify as conservative. White working-class young adults are less than half as likely as white working-class seniors to identify as conservative (23% vs. 50%, respectively). Four in ten (40%) young white working-class Americans are moderate, and more than one-quarter (26%) identify as liberal.

Demographics aren't going to save us.  White Millennials are even more racist than previous generations and they love Trump, and what's more, they love that whole "glibertarian nonsense" angle where they profess no love for either party as independents, but vote Republican in even higher numbers than any other generational cohort.

Most of all, they want an authoritarian leader like Trump.

Authoritarian-style leadership is much more attractive to white working-class Americans than to white college-educated Americans. Six in ten (60%) white working-class Americans, compared to only 32% of white college-educated Americans say we need such a strong leader; two-thirds (67%) of white college-educated Americans disagree.

There is significant disagreement by age. Roughly two-thirds (66%) of white working-class seniors, compared to roughly half (52%) of white working-class young adults, say the country needs a leader who is willing to break the rules.

White working-class Christians across denominations are about equally as likely to express a preference for a leader willing to defy the standards of conduct, including approximately six in ten evangelical Protestants (63%), mainline Protestants (62%), and Catholics (67%). White working-class Americans who are religiously unaffiliated are far less likely to say such a leader is desirable (42%).

They want someone who will make everyone else suffer.

They know exactly why they voted for Trump.  If anything, Trump isn't racist enough.

Let that sink in.  He needs to "widen his lens even further".

Here in Kentucky, the plan is working.

Witch Hunt," "Treason Dem" and "Racist AOC" were seen on the brick walls of the Louisville Democratic Party Headquarters on Sunday afternoon in large white letters that appear to have been painted on with a roller.

Louisville Metro Police said they received a call of criminal mischief around 10 a.m. Sunday at the Louisville Democratic Party Headquarters at 1501 Durrett Lane.

AOC is a common nickname for freshman U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is often criticized by Republicans, including the president, for her liberal policies.

President Donald Trump and his supporters have frequently called special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election a "witch hunt."

It's not clear when the vandalism took place, and there have been no related arrests reported.

The Louisville Democratic Party issued a statement Sunday evening that called the vandalism "hate filled graffiti" and an "unfortunate symptom of today’s environment where folks won’t come together for honest debate and discourse."

"Free speech is about buying a billboard with your opinions," the statement reads, "not vandalizing a building with graffiti."

Stochastic terrorism is working.  Known Democrats will be targeted, scared, terrorized, discouraged, and won't venture out to vote.  Not when it could cost you everything.

And white Republican racists?  They will vote for Trump again and again.  Democrats still think they can win back the heartland of white working-class voters in 90% white states. 

They are wasting their time.

Trump is their permission slip to do all this stuff their hate-filled hearts have been itching to do for decades years now.  He's giving them the power to do it and to get away with it.  And they will never stop now that they have a taste for it.

It's going to end in massive bloodshed.  History assures it.

The racism is the point.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Trump's new Director of National Intelligence nominee, Rep. John Ratcliffe, has been given his marching orders right out of the gate, and it's to help Attorney General William Barr arrest and prosecute Democrats.

Mr. Ratcliffe met privately with Mr. Trump at the White House July 19 to discuss taking the job, administration officials said.

Mr. Ratcliffe sharply questioned Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, at last week’s hearing and accused him of not following Justice Department guidelines after Mr. Mueller said he could not exonerate the president of obstruction of justice charges.

If a special counsel cannot bring charges, Mr. Ratcliffe argued, he should not presume to say a target was not cleared.

“So, Americans need to know this as they listen to the Democrats and socialists on the other side of the aisle as they do dramatic readings from this report,” Mr. Ratcliffe said of the part of Mr. Mueller’s report that described how the president sought to impede the investigation, “that Volume II of this report was not authorized under the law to be written.”

On Sunday morning, Mr. Ratcliffe said on Fox News that Democrats “accused Donald Trump of a crime, and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation.”

“I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime, I just want there to be a fair process to get there,” he added. “What I do know, as a former federal prosecutor, is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”

Both Barr and Ratcliffe are on board, and Ratcliffe will sail through Senate confirmation, no matter what Intelligence Committee Chair GOP Sen. Richard Burr thinks, because Trump will hang him up and butcher him like a side of beef if he doesn't.

“Now the things that Bob Mueller said he didn’t know about and his team clearly didn’t look at, those are things that would be fair for Bill Barr and the Department of Justice to look at. Because we know that things happened in the Obama administration that haven’t been answered. There’s been no accountability for that yet," Ratcliffe said.

“Well, the special counsel told us ... that they didn't do it. And if they didn't do it, the only place we can get the answers is from the Justice Department right now," Ratcliffe said. "The American people want that. Their faith and trust, Maria, has been shaken in our Justice Department, and the only way to get that back is for there to be real accountability with a very fair process. Again, I have supreme confidence in Bill Barr's ability to deliver that. And at the end of the day, wherever the outcome may be, as long as we know that the process was fair, the evaluation was fair, justice will be done. Look, the truth always defends itself.”

Again, we have the new AG and now potential new DNI promising the investigations of and possible arrests and indictments of former Obama administration officials, most likely coming over the next 12 months, possibly leading up to Obama himself.

Does anyone here think Trump is somehow above trying to put Barack Obama in jail in order to feed his base the ultimate red meat hate stew?

Putin On A Show

As things get dicey in Russia with the largest anti-Putin protests in over a decade, Vlad the Impaler is moving quickly to crush dissent.

Nearly 1,400 people were detained in a violent police crackdown on an opposition protest in Moscow, a Russian monitoring group said Sunday, adding that was the largest number of detentions at a rally in the Russian capital this decade.
OVD-Info, which has monitored police arrests since 2011, said the number of the detentions from Saturday’s protest reached 1,373 by early Sunday. The overwhelming majority of people were soon released but 150 remained in custody, OVD-Info and a lawyers’ legal aid group said Sunday.

Crackdowns on the anti-government protesters began days before the rally. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested and sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail for calling for Saturday’s protest against election authorities who barred some opposition candidates from running in the Sept. 8 vote for Moscow city council.

Navalny was unexpectedly hospitalized Sunday with a severe allergy attack, his spokeswoman said.

Kira Yarmysh said Navalny, who did not have any allergies beforehand, was taken from the Moscow jail to a hospital in the morning, arriving with severe facial swelling and red rashes. Hours later, she said Navalny was in a “satisfactory condition.”

Russian police violently dispersed thousands of people who thronged the streets of Moscow on Saturday to protest the move by election authorities. Several protesters reported broken limbs and head injuries. Police justified their response by saying that the rally was not sanctioned by authorities.
Along with the arrests of the mostly young demonstrators, several opposition activists who wanted to run for the Moscow City Duma were arrested throughout the city.

Police eventually cordoned off the City Hall and dispersed protesters from the area, but thousands of demonstrators reassembled in several different locations nearby and a new round of arrests began. Russian police beat some protesters to the ground with wide truncheon swings while others tried to push the police away.

Police said the protesters numbered about 3,500 but aerial footage from several locations suggested at least 8,000 people turned out.
Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition figure who was barred from running for city council office in Moscow, was detained Sunday afternoon as he delivered food to some of the Moscow protesters still in jail.

Worse, it looks like Navalny's "allergy attack" was a Putin poison special.

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was hospitalized Wednesday for an "allergic reaction," following his arrest during mass protests against election authorities in Moscow, according to his spokeswoman. Navalny's personal doctor later wrote on Facebook that she does not believe he is suffering from an allergic reaction, but the effects of "undefined chemical substances."

Why it matters: Navalny is an anti-corruption lawyer whose fierce opposition to Vladimir Putin has caused him to be arrested and jailed by Russian authorities a number of times. Navalny's spokeswoman says he has never had an allergic reaction in his life, raising questions about whether his illness could in fact be the product of political retaliation. Putin has been accused of poisoning or having political opponents assassinated in the past.

Police reportedly did not want Navalny to be transported to the hospital, and relented only when the ambulance crew threatened to make a scene, according to Navalny's spokeswoman. 

About 20 journalists who showed up at the hospital where Navalny is being treated have been detained by police, according to Russian media.

Of note: The "allergic reaction" is not Navalny's first physical ailment resulting from his advocacy. In 2017, a chemical attack on his face caused him to lose 80% of his vision in one eye, per his website.

Putin certainly isn't above murdering or harming critics.  And once again,  Trump is watching and taking notes.

StupidiNews!

• Nigerian officials are blaming Militant group Boko Haram for an attack on a funeral in the country's Nganzai district, at least 65 people are confirmed dead and dozens more injured.
• The death toll from Saturday's twin earthquakes in the Philippines has risen to eight as rescue workers continue to search the remote Batanes islands for survivors.
• Three people were shot and killed and 12 injured at the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival near San Jose, California Sunday evening as festival goers scattered from gunshots.
• More than 50 have been arrested as police clashed with protesters in Hong Kong over the weekend, Chinese officials say they will brief the city and officials Monday to try to defuse tensions.
• New studies find that the speed of climate change is outpacing most species's ability to adapt, which scientists fear could lead to mass extinctions of birds, insects, plants, and fish.