The Mask Slips Again...

...And again, Republicans accidentally tell the truth about what they are thinking and doing.  Today's contestant: Sen. Marco Rubio.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has found a silver lining in the Paris terror attacks that left 130 people dead: he said the violence prompted Americans to have a serious conversation about national security, and he suggested that conversation in turn has benefited his presidential campaign.

Rubio made the comment while discussing his rising poll numbers with "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. When Wallace asked whether Rubio thought his foreign policy credentials gave him a polling boost in the wake of the Nov. 13 terror attacks, the Florida Republican replied that his team doesn't put much stock in polls that were "going to fluctuate" this early in the primary race. 

He went on to argue that the attacks led to a "positive" shift to national security in the political conversation, one he wanted to see continue "not just for political advantage." 

"I obviously am not happy about the events that happened last week in Paris," Rubio told Wallace. "But I think it's a positive development that it suddenly has forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security because it is the most important thing a President will do and it is the most important function of the federal government." 

"I hope that we focus on that note more, not just for political advantage but because the world has become a very dangerous place," he added.

Rubio is counting on the steady diet of fear and hatred in the wake of the Paris attacks to be good for Republicans in general and specifically for Marco Rubio, I see.

I mean, he's not lying about what he thinks is going to happen.  Certainly with Rubio calling for sending enough US ground troops into Syria to inflict "humiliating defeats" on ISIS, he's not lying about what he thinks there either.

Now, whether or not it will help him with voters when Trump is calling for rounding up Latinos and Muslims and such?  Probably not.

But with the economy improving and unemployment down sharply from 2010 highs, suddenly the only thing that matters is ISIS.

The Vitter End, Con't

James Hohmann at the Washington Post concedes that GOP Sen. David Vitter's last minute attacks on John bel Edwards (and President Obama) over the Paris attacks made Democrats very, very nervous over the weekend.

Democrats felt very good about winning the Louisiana governor’s race until the Paris attacks happened on Friday the 13th. 

Republican Sen. David Vitter, trailing by double digits in the polls, immediately seized on whether the United States should admit Syrian refugees. The issue let him get off the mat after weeks of attacks over his 2007 prostitution scandal. He went to Washington to give a floor speech on Syria, publicly sent a letter warning of a “missing” refugee and got on TV just a little more than 48 hours after the carnage in France with an advertisement invoking the horror. 

Vitter and his Republican allies had struggled mightily to make the red-state, off-year race against Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards a referendum on President Obama. This gave them the chance. 

Elisabeth Pearson, the executive director of Democratic Governors Association, suddenly had flashbacks to last year’s midterm elections. Several winnable contests broke away from them at the last minute because of voter fears about the Ebola outbreak, ISIS beheadings and children pouring across the border. Particularly in Maine, the Democrat was considered the favorite but Republican Gov. Paul LePage came from behind to win by publicly chastising quarantined nurse Kaci Hickox for returning to the state.

The difference this time?  Democrats moved fast to attack Vitter on Syria, and Edwards quickly distanced himself from the Obama administration.

The Democratic candidate initially botched his response. A note on Edwards’ Facebook page said he’d work to “both accommodate refugees who are fleeing from religious persecution and ensure that all our people are safe.” Then he edited “accommodate” to “assist,” before putting out a statement that declared, “In light of the recent tragedy in Paris, it’s imperative for us to pause the influx of refugees flowing into our state without more information on the security measures in place.”

Gumbo PAC got its counterattack ad on the air by Wednesday. “It’s David Vitter who said he didn’t believe Syria posed a threat to the United States or our allies,” the narrator said, insisting that Edwards opposed allowing refugees in. The response ad also borrowed a page from the Republican’s 2014 playbook, attacking Vitter for missing “two-thirds of the committee hearings he was supposed to attend on Syria.”

Again, Vitter was such a terrible candidate that Edwards won anyway, but the lesson here is that Democrats in the South especially will continue to run against Obama.  Whether or not they'll run against Hillary too, we'll see.

Still, Edwards won here, and he's willing to expand Medicaid for Louisiana where Vitter was not.  It's a win, even an ugly one, and a bad Dem is still better than any Republican.

StupidiNews!

• Raids in Brussels have netted 16 but suspected Paris attacker Saleh Abdesalam is not among them, schools remain closed as the Belgian capital remains on lockdown for a third day.
• A group of physicians in Minnesota are calling for public high schools to end football in the state, citing health and safety concerns and a sharp rise in concussions for students.
• Two are dead in a US military helicopter crash in South Korea, the Pentagon is investigating the accident.
• In a massive $150 billion deal, drugmaker Pfizer will be acquired by rival Allergan and could move its HQ to Ireland in another example of inversion to avoid all US corporate taxes.
• A new study finds that sleeping in on the weekend or your days off may lead to metabolic health problems like increased obesity and insulin resistance.

Post-Racial America Update

Trump supporters are exactly who we thought they were.

A black protester reportedly was tackled, punched, and kicked Saturday during a Donald Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama.

The incident was recorded by CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond. In the video, an altercation in the middle of a crowd is visible.

CNN later reported that at least six white attendees at the rally punched, kicked, and tackled the protester, who appeared to have shouted “black lives matter.”

According to Stephon Dingle, a reporter for WIAT, the protester also yelled “dump Trump” before the incident began.

During the altercation, Trump reportedly stopped his speech to say “get him the hell out of here.” Law enforcement then escorted the protester out of the building, which Dingle recorded.

This is how the Trump people deal with dissent.  It's a perfect microcosm of what will happen to black America under Trump.  There won't be a place for us.

But Post-Racial America.

Meanwhile, In Fortress Texas...

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is so petrified of Syrian refugees that he's threatening to eliminate state funding for non-governmental, non-profit organizations that help them.  You know, church charities.

Gov. Abbott announced last Monday that he, like dozens of other xenophobic governors, would stop efforts to allow Syrian refugees into his state in the wake of the deadly attacks in Paris. Part of the governor’s announcement included the sending of a letter from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to local non-profits, demanding that they comply with the Governor’s request by Friday afternoon.

The state could forseeably choose not to accept federal funding for the organizations that don’t comply, according to immigration attorney Gordon Quan.

“It puts them in a situation that I think is very uncomfortable,” Quan told local KHOU News. “This is basically saying, ‘Don’t do resettlement. If you do resettlement of these Syrian refugees, you may be endangering the whole program that you have’.”

As Friday came and went, some agencies that work with refugees in Texas balked at the directive, arguing that because resettlement is a federal responsibility, Gov. Abbott does not have the authority to make such a directive.

Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact, which works closely with resettlement agencies, wrote in a letter to the state that the move “constitutes an unprecedented attempt on the part of a state agency to pressure private, nonprofit organizations to violate federal law and their federal contractual obligations.”

The letter asks the state to meet with resettlement agencies and federal authorities to decide whether Abbott actually has the authority to tell organizations to ignore the pleas of homeless people.

Abbott clearly believes he does have the authority, and at least some non-profits are now calling his bluff. He's turning to a Breitbart story that "proves" refugees coming over the Texas-Mexico border are really ISIS terrorists, which of course is false.

But this is where we are right now.

You will see Muslims beaten, hurt, shot, even killed in the US before you ever see a "Paris-style" assault on a US city.  I guarantee this.

Sunday Long Read: Building Bevinstan

ProPublica's Alec MacGillis takes a crack at explaining why working class blue states have gone blood red in the last five years and argues that pro-union New Deal Dems have sat out election after election and will continue to do so.

In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “intergenerational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.

It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers havedetected alarming trends in their mortality rates.

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

MacGillis argues that voting, and even getting political news has become so onerous for the poorest Americans now that they simply don't care anymore: who has time to vote when you literally cannot put food on the table for your family?

Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.

The poorest Americans are least likely to vote, and least likely to be organized to vote.  Meanwhile, the second lowest quintile of Americans have become sharply Republican.  The result, in Southern and Midwestern states, has been catastrophic.

Kentucky is just the latest state to fall.

Last Call For The Vitter End

AP has called Louisiana Governor's race for Democrat John Bel Edwards.

Looks like Sen. David Vitter will lose by about 8-10 points when all is said and done.

A good night for the blue team.

It Feels Like 2002 Again

Greg Sargent takes a look at a new Washington Post/ABC poll in the wake of last week's Paris attacks and finds America's clock has been set back to early 2002.

— By 54-43, Americans oppose taking in refugees from the conflicts in Syria and other Mideast countries even after screening them for security.

— By 52-47, Americans are not confident that the U.S. can identify and keep out possible terrorists who may be among these refugees. (One bright spot: 78 percent of Americans don’t think religion should be considered in determining whether to accept refugees.)

— By 81-18, Americans think it is likely that there will be a terrorist attack in the U.S. in the near future that will cause large numbers of lives to be lost.

— By 55-45, Americans are not confident in the ability of the U.S. government to prevent further terror attacks against Americans here.

— By 72-25, Americans say that it is more important for the government to investigate terror threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy, rather than refraining from intruding on personal privacy.

In fairness, this is pretty vague — “intruding on personal privacy” could mean a lot of different things in terms of actual policy — but it’s still pretty lopsided, perhaps another reminder that public fear sends concerns about civil liberties right out the window.

— 60 percent of Americans want to see an “increased use of U.S. ground forces” against ISIS, and 73 percent of Americans want to see increased air strikes.

— Americans say by 59-37 that the U.S. is “at war with radical Islam.”

So Democrats are on the minority side of a fair amount of these. Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with Obama in coming out against sending in ground troops (though Republicans have been vague on this point, too, and Clinton has called for stepped up air strikes). Clinton and virtually all Democrats have called for the program for admitting Syrian refugees to continue, while the GOP candidates and many Congressional Republicans have called for it to be “paused” or for an outright ban on their entry. There is little confidence in the current administration’s ability to keep us safe — at least right at this moment — and Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have ramped up the calls for a beefed up surveillance state.

Sargent is being kind, as both Trump and Rubio are calling for effectively suspending the US Constitution and tracking the country's Muslims, treating all of them outright as terror suspects that need to be marked.  Trump in particular wants to close down mosques and "do the unthinkable" because it may be "necessary".

Exit questions:

One, aren't you glad Obama is president right now as opposed to any of the Republicans over the last seven, eight years?

Two, if Obama really was a crypto-neocon warmonger, as I have repeatedly been assured he is by "real liberals", we'd be at war right now with tens of thousands of ground troops on the way to Syria, wouldn't we?

Three, do you believe Hillary would send ground troops like Trump, Carson, Rubio or Cruz would?

Democrats need to ask themselves and answer these questions.

Belgian (Not) Waffles

The Belgian government has put Brussels on high alert as they expect an "imminent" Paris-style assault.

A week after Paris bombings and shootings carried out by Islamic State militants, of whom one suspect from Brussels is at large, Brussels was placed on the top level "four" in the government's threat scale after a meeting of police, justice and intelligence officials.

Soldiers were on guard in parts of Brussels, a city of 1.2 million people and home to institutions of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO.

"The result of relatively precise information pointed to the risk of an attack along the lines of what took take place in Paris," Prime Minister Charles Michel told a news conference on Saturday after a meeting of the national security council. The Paris attacks left 130 people dead.

"We are talking about the threat that several individuals with arms and explosives would launch an attack perhaps in several locations at the same time," Michel said, adding people should be alert but not panic.

He declined to elaborate, but said the government would review the situation on Sunday afternoon.

The metro system is to remain closed until then, in line with recommendation of the government's crisis center. Major shopping centers and stores did open on Saturday morning, with soldiers deployed outside shops.

However, many began closing their doors from around midday.

I'm not terribly surprised by this, given the connection to Brussels by the militants who hit Paris eight days ago, the Belgian capital seemed like the obvious next target in Europe.  I'm hoping that nobody else is hurt and that Belgian police can find these guys before they strike.

Democrats Behaving Badly, Con't

Of all the political excuses to use when embroiled in scandal of your own making in 2015, "I didn't know this would go viral" borders on gross incompetence.

The mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, apologized Friday for his recent remarks comparing the current threat of terrorism in the U.S. to the national mood after Pearl Harbor, invoking the internment of Japanese-Americans in his call to block Syrian refugees.

Mayor David Bowers said in a statement released Wednesday he's "reminded" of the internment of Japanese-Americans with "the threat of harm to America from Isis [sic]" now "just as real and serious."

The remarks were met with nearly universal condemnation, with members of the community calling on the mayor to resign, and prompted TV actor George Takei to invite the mayor to a musical about internment camps.

One, assume everything can go viral.

Two, read a history book once in your life.

Three, the really bad parts of America's history?  Try to remember that they should not be repeated.

Last Call For The Kids Are Not Alright

C'mon Millennials, read the goddamn Constitution once in a while.

American Millennials are far more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data on free speech and media across the globe.

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.

Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.

Compared with people we surveyed in dozens of nations, Americans as a whole are less likely to favor the government being able to prevent speech of any kind. The debate over what kind of speech should be tolerated in public has become a major story around the globe in recent weeks – from racial issues on many U.S. college campuses to questions about speech laws in Europe in the wake of concerns about refugees from the Middle East and the terrorist attacks in Paris.

We've gone over "vile speech" before.  You may not like it, it's hateful, it's awful, but the Constitution is pretty clear about the government banning it.  It's not going to happen.

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

Lexington Herald-Leader cartoonist Joel Pett goes right for the jugular on Matt Bevin's response on Syrian refugees:



Now...you can definitely make the argument that this cartoon is out of bounds and that Pett went way over the line here, involving Bevin's four adopted children from Ethiopia.

But there's no such debate on the propriety of Bevin's response, via BuzzFeed's Chris Geidner:



Like Pett's cartoon or not (I do not, and I think Pett should apologize) he still has free speech rights, and the direct threat of a governor saying that a political cartoonist or any member of the press's opinion "will not be tolerated by our administration" is flat-out unconstitutional.

There's no argument there to be had.

But welcome to Bevinstan.

Post-Racial America Update

There are people who are unconscionably awful human beings out there doing unspeakable things to their fellow humans, but I'm pretty sure the folks behind this are absolutely bound for the lower planes.

Two brothers in Horry County, South Carolina are facing charges that they treated a mentally handicapped black employee like a slave for years, beating and overworking the man, who lived in squalor on property owned by their restaurant. 

According to the Charleston Post and Courier, two Charleston attorneys filed a civil suit on behalf of Christopher Smith, who worked at the J&J Cafeteria in Conway for 23 years, but was hideously abused and exploited from 2010 to 2014. 

The suit lists 14 counts against J&J owner Ernest J. Edwards and manager Bobby Paul Edwards, including false imprisonment, discrimination and exploitive labor practices. Bobby Edwards, 50, was arrested a year ago in connection with the case. Those charges are still pending. 

Last October, Smith was rescued when social workers received a tip from an anonymous source who expressed concern for the man’s safety. Attorneys Mullins McLeod and David Aylor said that while the civil suit cannot change the past or rectify the harm done to Smith, hopefully it will “bring about positive change in the future.” 

The Post and Courier explained that Smith worked at the Edwards brothers’ business for more than two decades, but it was when Bobby took over as manager in 2010 that Smith’s situation turned ugly. 

Smith was routinely called the N-word, according to the suit. He was savagely beaten with a frying pan, hot tongs, butcher knives, belt buckles and fists. He worked 18-hour shifts Monday through Saturday and 11-hour shifts on Sundays with no breaks, receiving little pay. His total wages for each year added up to less than $3,000. 

The complaint against the Edwards said that Smith was often abused on the job, dragged into the walk-in freezer where he could be heard screaming in terror and pain by other employees and begging his abusers not to kill him.

And they kept him as an effective slave for years.  Please, please tell me these assholes are going to prison for a very long time.

Please.

StupidiNews!

• At least three are dead after gunmen stormed a Raddison hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako Friday, taking 170 hostages including UN staff members and an Air France jet crew.
• Convicted Israeli-American spy Jonathan Pollard has been released from a US prison almost 30 years after his arrest for leaking classified military intelligence to Israel.
• The House has overwhelmingly passed legislation suspending the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the US, the White House may not be able to prevent a veto override.
• UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer, is considering dropping Obamacare plans in 2017, which would be a major blow to the program.
• A federal judge in Illinois has ruled against the DHS and DoJ when it comes to warrant requirements for deploying cell phone surveillance.

Last Call For Marked By The Beast

Are we surprised that the same Donald Trump calling for an Eisenhower-era "Operation Wetback" style roundup of eleven million Latinos is now calling for a national database to identify and track the country's Muslim citizens?

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump believes that the war on terror will require unprecedented surveillance of America’s Muslims.

“We’re going to have to do thing that we never did before,” he said during a Yahoo interview. 

“Some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. 

“Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy,” he added. “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” 

Trump would not rule out warrantless searches in his plans for increased surveillance of the nation’s Muslims, Yahoo reported Thursday. 

He also remained open toward registering U.S. Muslims in a database or giving them special identification identifying their faith, the news outlet added. 

“We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

Closing mosques, tracking Muslims, perhaps giving them armbands to identify them?  Hey Republicans? This is your current front-runner for President saying this.

And I don't blame Trump for his racist idiocy, I blame the "moderate Republicans" for accepting this and supporting this and the voters for electing Republicans who don't have a problem doing this to fellow American citizens.

Time to reclaim your party and clean house, guys.  Or live with your racist, awful party's consequences.