StupidiNews!

• Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang continue to rise after Donald Trump threatened "fire and fury" against North Korea, and North Korea responded with threats against Guam.
• French police officials say a driver deliberately targeted and wounded six French soldiers with a vehicle, the soldiers were outside a Paris barracks on an anti-terrorism patrol.
• Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has pulled into the lead after Wednesday's presidential vote count, opposition leader Raila Odinga is claiming Kenyatta is behind massive voter fraud.
• The UK is among several other countries looking to follow the FDA's lead on possibly stripping nicotine and other addictive chemicals from cigarettes entirely.
• Disney confirms it will be pulling its animated films and TV shows from Netflix in 2019 to start its own streaming service, the fate of Marvel and Lucasfilms movies remains unknown.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem

Last week an improvised explosive device was thrown through a window of a Minnesota Islamic Center in the Twin Cities, causing severe damage and it was only by luck that nobody was hurt or killed at the time.  It was definitely an act of domestic terror, but the Trump regime has been strangely silent on the attack.

That silence ended late Monday when regime spokesman Sebastian Gorka suggested strongly that the reason why the White House has refused to comment on the terrorism is because the White House believes it was a false flag attack in order to damage Dear Leader Trump.

The White House will not officially comment on the bombing of a Minnesota mosque because it may be a hate crime faked by a liberal, according to Trump national security adviser Sebastian Gorka. 

An as-of-yet unidentified individual threw a makeshift bomb through the window of a mosque in Minnesota Saturday, and Gorka was asked on MSNBC Monday if the White House will comment. Gorka said that the White House will “absolutely” comment once there is a finalized investigation into the incident. 

“There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,” Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes by right wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to be prop propagated by the left. Let’s allow the local authorities to provide their assessment and then the White House will make its comments.” 

But Trump has, in the past, commented on attacks without full information, including a recent June attack in the Philippines, which may have been a robbery gone wrong. He has not been so fast to cry terrorism after the Minnesota bombing, despite the fact that Minnesota’s governor called the attack terrorism. 

Gorka is correct that there have been incidents of hate crimes in recent months that were made to look like they were perpetrated by someone other than the actual perpetrator. 

On Tuesday, the FBI accused an Israeli teen of making bomb threats to U.S. schools and Jewish community centers more than 100 times since January. The teen also allegedly sold his bomb threat services online and offered to frame people for the threats.
But as the MSNBC host pointed out, authorities can and should still condemn attacks, even if the perpetrator is in question. 

“You don’t have to make a statement about who did it but you can make a statement denouncing how terrible it is to attack a building of worship,” the host said. 

“That’s fine and I’m sure the president will do that,” Gorka responded.

But three days have passed and the president still hasn’t done that.

Nor will he.  And remember, this isn't just some random right-wing pundit making this horrible statement that an attack on a mosque is not only beneath Trump commenting on, but was in fact done to hurt Trump politically, this was said by a White House employee and adviser to Trump.

This is unconscionable in every way, and yet this is where we are in America in 2017.  We have to keep pushing to get Trump out of office before this country self-immolates.

Welcome To HateFest '17!

The largest public gathering of white supremacist Klansmen, neo-Nazi skinheads, and alt-right jackasses in decades will be this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia as The Losers of the Civil War come together to mourn the loss of yet another of their participation trophy monuments.  We've seen these racist losers whine and moan before and they still keep losing.

Only this time around these guys will be heavily armed and spoiling for a bloody fight, and they very well may get it.

A planned demonstration by white nationalist extremists in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been described as the “largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades in the United States” by a monitoring group. 

The Unite the Right gathering of extremists protesting the removal of a Confederate-era statue will draw alt-right groups, neo-Confederates, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, all of whom have been “emboldened by the Trump presidency,” according to nonprofit civil rights group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). 

The extremists will be met by counter-demonstrators from left-wing and civil rights groups, including Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with Virginia state law enforcement officers equipped with riot gear to police the event alongside officers from local forces. 

Law enforcement officials believe the rally could draw thousands, according to local media reports. Congregate Charlottesville, a multi-denominational clergy group, made a July call for 1,000 clergy, especially white clergy, to attend the rally in protest, according to the Charlottesville Courier Dispatch.

According to the SPLC, Saturday’s event will be the first large-scale physical meeting by disparate white nationalist and far-right groups, who have previously been confined to extremist messaging boards, websites and social media. 

Among those expected to address the gathering are alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer, and rapper turned alt-right troll Tim Gionet, also known as "Baked Alaska," reports Vice. 

“This is the biggest rally event we’ve had this millennium,” event organizer Brad Griffin said on a recent radio showed hosted by former KKK leader David Duke. 

Racial activists “get hung up on interacting with people online,” and the racist message board culture has its drawbacks, Griffin said, creating “a lot of paranoia when people don’t know each other in real life.” 

But the Unite the Right rally will give “the movement a real world presence, which it hasn’t had in 15 years,” Griffin said.

It won't take much for this particular powder keg to blow, and should it happen things are going to go straight to hell in a heartbeat.  I'm hoping against hope that nothing happens to anyone here: the counter-protesters, the cops, and yeah, even the skinheads don't deserve to die over this idiocy.  But I'm betting that this is going to be an infamous event that we'll look back on as a milepost on our current road to hell, and that road is going to run red this weekend.

These are not well people, guys.

A Pence-ive Denial At Best

Over the weekend the NY Times ran a story on VP Mike Pence readying himself for 2020 (or sooner) should there be a vacancy in the Oval Office.  Pence couldn't wait to protest this, of course.

Vice President Mike Pence declared his loyalty to President Trump on Sunday and denounced a New York Times article suggesting that he was positioning himself to run for president in 2020 if Mr. Trump does not seek a second term. 

“Today’s article in The New York Times is disgraceful and offensive to me, my family and our entire team,” the vice president said in a statement. “The allegations in this article are categorically false and represent just the latest attempt by the media to divide this administration.” 

He added: “Whatever fake news may come our way, my entire team will continue to focus all our efforts to advance the president’s agenda and see him re-elected in 2020. Any suggestion otherwise is both laughable and absurd.” 

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, said in response: “We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting and will let the story speak for itself.”

The problem of course is that despite his many many protestations Pence is building that campaign machine now and not in 2023, for instance.

Mr. Pence has set up a political fund-raising organization, Great America Committee, and has hosted key figures at the vice president’s mansion, like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and representatives of Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire conservative financiers. Last month, the vice president hosted Kelly and Joe Craft, coal barons from Kentucky. 

A top White House official said Sunday that there would be no reason for the vice president to prepare his own White House bid because Mr. Trump planned to run. “The president says privately and publicly often, George, that he’ll be there for seven and a half more years. So he plans on being a two-term president,” Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, told George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” on ABC. “It is absolutely true that the vice president is getting ready for 2020, for re-election as vice president.” 

Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if there was any concern that Mr. Pence was running a shadow campaign. “Zero concern,” Ms. Conway said. “That is complete fiction. That is complete fabrication. And I know that his advisers who had comments attributed to them have pushed back strongly, as has the vice president. And as am I right now unequivocally.” 

She added: “Vice President Pence is a very loyal, very dutiful, but also incredibly effective vice president, and active vice president, with this president.”

Lots of screaming, but Pence isn't alone, either.  Other Republicans want a shot at 2020 and are betting on the Trump regime's disintegration.  The rats may be fleeing the sinking Trump poop cruise, but they're stealing the lifeboats while they're at it.

You're nuts if you don't think Pence will stab Trump in the front (forget the back) if the opportunity presents itself and it looks like Donny is headed for Nixon territory. He'll find plenty of GOP hands offering him the knife to do it with too, if it means they hold on the country without the baggage of Trump.

Only six months into this term and we've already got Pence plotting.  These guys won't make it, and when it blows up it's going to be spectacular.  No, I don't think Trump will be impeached, but resignation is still possible.

Don't tell me that though hasn't occurred to Mike Pence, either...that is unless he's involved in this too, and there's a pretty good chance he is.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Franklin has made landfall along Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula coast, the storm is expected to re-enter the Gulf of Mexico and threaten Mexico's east coast by Thursday. 
• At the 200-day mark of his term, a new CNN poll finds only 1 in 4 Americans trust information from Donald Trump's White House, but overall approval among GOP voters remains high.
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Thailand for the first major US visit since 2014's military coup, Tillerson pressed Thai leaders to join in economic sanctions against North Korea.
• South African President Jacob Zuma faces yet another no-confidence vote in parliament, this time the vote will be conducted by secret ballot to protect lawmakers from retaliation.
• Google CEO Sundar Pichal has stepped in from vacation to remove a Google engineer from the company after a controversial manifesto attacking diversity hiring went public this weekend.

Last Call For The National Revenge Association

Since President Scaryblack Shabazz "Where the white women at?" Ali McBlackmalcolm X is no longer in the White House and firearm and ammo sales are down sharply in 2017 without a Democrat around to "come to take your guns", it seems that the National Rifle Association has to continue to drum up its own targets of fear in order to sell, sell, sell those shootin' irons.  As a result, right-wing loudmouth Dana Loesch and the NRA have declared war on the NY Times.

Another inflammatory video from the National Rife Association went viral Friday afternoon. 

In a short video, NRA spokesperson and conservative firebrand Dana Loesch threatened a "laser-focus" on the New York Times, dubbing the paper "pretentious" and "tone-deaf" without specifying what issues the NRA has with the Times' reporting.

"We've had it with your narratives, your propaganda, your fake news," Loesch said. "We've had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life." 

"Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow," she added. "We've going to fisk the New York Times and find out just what deep, rich means to this old, gray hag."

"Laser-focus" and "shot across the proverbial bow" from a firearm advocacy group is a pretty unmistakable threat, is it not?

Alas, Trump can't sell guns quite like the inchoate racist rage against a black president did.  I don't think fear of a newspaper will do it either, but it's much more likely to get a reporter shot one of these days.

Of course, maybe that's the point.

Trading Blows Over The TPP

Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, and there were plenty of folks in Congress on both the left and the right who would have scuttled any attempt to ratify the trade pact anyway.  The result?  Rural America, which overwhelmingly voted for Trump, will be the first to suffer the vast economic consequences as the rest of the world takes its money elsewhere.

On a cloud-swept landscape dotted with grain elevators, a meat producer called Prestage Farms is building a 700,000-square-foot processing plant. The gleaming new factory is both the great hope of Wright County, which voted by a 2-1 margin for Donald Trump, and the victim of one of Trump’s first policy moves, his decision to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

For much of industrial America, the TPP was a suspect deal, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which some argue led to a massive offshoring of U.S. jobs to Mexico. But for the already struggling agricultural sector, the sprawling 12-nation TPP, covering 40 percent of the world’s economy, was a lifeline. It was a chance to erase punishing tariffs that restricted the United States — the onetime “breadbasket of the world” — from selling its meats, grains and dairy products to massive importers of foodstuffs such as Japan and Vietnam.

The decision to pull out of the trade deal has become a double hit on places like Eagle Grove. The promised bump of $10 billion in agricultural output over 15 years, based on estimates by the U.S. International Trade Commission, won’t materialize. But Trump’s decision to withdraw from the pact also cleared the way for rival exporters such as Australia, New Zealand and the European Union to negotiate even lower tariffs with importing nations, creating potentially greater competitive advantages over U.S. exports.

A POLITICO analysis found that the 11 other TPP countries are now involved in a whopping 27 separate trade negotiations with each other, other major trading powers in the region like China and massive blocs like the EU. Those efforts range from exploratory conversations to deals already signed and awaiting ratification. Seven of the most significant deals for U.S. farmers were either launched or concluded in the five months since the United States withdrew from the TPP.

“I’m scared to death,” said Ron Prestage, whose North Carolina-based family pork and poultry business made its huge investment in the plant near Eagle Grove in part to reap expected gains from the TPP. “I don’t guess I’ve gone beyond the point of no return on the new plant, but we did already start digging our wells and started moving dirt.”

He and other agricultural businesspeople and workers have reason for concern.

On July 6, the EU, which already exports as much pork to Japan as the United States does, announced political agreement on a new deal that would give European pork farmers an advantage of up to $2 per pound over U.S. exporters under certain circumstances — a move which, if unchecked, is all but certain to create a widening gap between EU exports and those from the United States.

European wine producers, who sold more than $1 billion to Japan between 2014 and 2016, would also see a 15 percent tariff on exports to Japan disappear while U.S. exporters would continue to face that duty at the border. For other products, the deal essentially mirrors the rates negotiated under the TPP, which the United States has surrendered, giving the EU a clear advantage over U.S. farmers.

The EU’s deal is all the more noteworthy because American farmers were relying on the TPP — to which the EU was not a member — to give them an advantage over European competitors. But in a further rebuke to the United States, Tokyo decided within a matter of weeks to offer the European nations virtually the same agricultural access to its market that United States trade officials had spent two excruciating years extracting through near-monthly meetings with their Japanese counterparts on the sidelines of the broader TPP negotiations; the United States is now left out.

The EU, which also recently inked a deal with Vietnam, is now moving forward with talks with Malaysia and is in the process of modernizing a pre-existing trade deal with Mexico.

Meanwhile, a bloc of four Latin-American countries—Mexico, Peru, Chile and Colombia, known as the Pacific Alliance—is quickly becoming the leading force for free trade in the region, announcing near the end of June it would commence its own negotiations with New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, heedless of its neighbor to the north.

The rest of the world is moving on, leaving the Trump regime behind.  The free trade argument is that in order to protect US jobs, we have to engage in trade protectionism and make it cheaper to produce goods here instead of importing them from Asia, Africa, the EU and South America.

But the flip side to that is exports: trade protectionism also costs US jobs as other countries go elsewhere to buy things that we export.  The anti-trade folks say the balance still favors us as we import far more, meaning we'll come out ahead.  I beg to differ here in 2017, things are too interconnected to sit out the game like this.

Keep in mind however that there are going to be losers in a tariff war too, and there will be US jobs lost in places that can't exactly afford to lose them.  Barack Obama fought for the TPP because of this, but it got scrapped (along with the Paris Climate agreement and you know, our country) last November.

The US may be the world's biggest economy, we represent 24% of the planet's global economic activity, but that leaves 76% elsewhere.  The rest of the world will go on without us, and for the most part they already are.  We chose to elect the guy who would make that happen while carefully choosing to enrich himself at the expense of his own voters.

What did you think the end result of that was going to be?

Reaping What The Gardner Sowed

It's Senate August recess time, and that means it's the time of year where senators sneak home and hold town halls with constituents hoping nobody but supporters show up, so they can check off boxes without making too much in the way of negative national news.  

Alas, this year there's little chance of that going to plan this year for GOP senators especially, as Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner tried to rip the bandage off the failed GOP health care plan debacle and got his town hall over this weekend, before opposition could mobilize (or so goes the thinking.)

Gardner discovered the opposition was waiting for him, and it wasn't pretty.  Washington Journal's Vinnie Longobardo:

The meeting was meant to discuss the disastrous aftermath of an environmental catastrophe, last year’s wastewater spill at the Gold King Mine in south west Colorado. When you haven’t held a town hall in over a year, however, you may find that your constituents have some pent up questions and not a few previously unvoiced frustrations that they want to add to the agenda.

All it took was one man’s pleading question from the audience regarding Senator Gardner’s vote in favor of the failed Republican-designed bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. “Why on earth,” did the Senator vote for this bill “when the vast majority of your constituents opposed it?”, asked the angry citizen, according to an account of the meeting on Shareblue.com.

His reply–“Well, I voted for it because I will vote to continue to work to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act,”– left the audience jeering, booing, and drowning out his pitiful excuses and lies.

“The Affordable Care Act isn’t working. It’s not working. It’s not working,” he stammered, before being reminded of the grim reality of health care in the pre-Obamacare era by a constituent who shouted out:

“I never had insurance until the ACA. I could never afford it.”

The audience wanted accountability. They repeatedly asked why he hadn’t held town hall meetings sooner and when he would set up a “real” town hall. With an audience picked at random from names put into a hat, Gardner couldn’t use the typical Republican canard that he was ambushed by paid protestors with an agenda to sell. These were real people with real concerns.

Perhaps this is not the type of August vacation that the Colorado Senator had in mind. Perhaps if he had held a few town halls when the health care legislation was being crafted, he wouldn’t be so apparently surprised at the reaction of the people he is supposed to be representing to the threat of their healthcare being ripped from their hands.

He has until 2020 until he’s up for re-election. Perhaps he’ll learn a lesson from this latest debacle. Or perhaps the good citizens of Colorado will elect someone who listens to them and cares about their interests, rather than parroting the Republican party line and trading the people’s health for tax breaks that only benefit the rich.

Which brings up a good point: Republicans are going to have to defend a lot of vulnerable seats in 2020 in the same way the Dems are having to defend Senate seats in 2018.  Should the Trump albatross still be on the ticket then, Republicans like Gardner are in for spectacular amounts of trouble.

Sure, a lot could happen between now and then and almost certainly will.  But if the Dems can't quite retake the Senate in 2018, in 2020 they will have an extremely good chance to do just that.

StupidiNews!

• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced that the city will sue the Justice Department over withholding federal law enforcement grants due to Chicago's sanctuary city status.
• Archaeologists in Israel have found the site of the lost Roman city of Julias, the possible home of three of Jesus's apostles near the Sea of Galilee.
• South Korean President Moon Jae-in has agreed to continue to pressure North Korea in a call with Donald Trump as Pyongyang has vowed "ultimate measures" against new UN sanctions.
• Brexit uncertainty continues to weigh down UK consumer spending as everything from housing to food prices are dropping according to the Bank of England's latest figures.
• "Pharma Bro" CEO Martin Shkreli has been found guilty on three of eight federal charges for his role in manipulating drug prices to cover losses for his hedge fund.

Last Call For You Never Go The Full Goebbels

Meanwhile, the Trump regime position of White House Communications Director Minister Of Propaganda Mouth of Sauron is still open, and it looks like Tang the Conqueror has found just the guy jackass neo-Nazi fascist for the job.

Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump, is reportedly under consideration to succeed Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director.

Miller isn't the frontrunner for the job, Axios reported Saturday. But White House chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly likes the idea.

Miller, a former staffer to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), received praise from his colleagues after sparring with CNN reporter Jim Acosta during a press briefing Wednesday.

In that exchange, Miller fiercely defended a White House-backed bill that would establish a merit-based immigration system and accused Acosta of having a "cosmopolitan bias."

Trump applauded Miller's performance at the press briefing, according to Axios. The president was also pleased with Miller's combative performance during a series of appearances on the Sunday news show circuit earlier this year.

We go back to the end of May and Bill Cohan's Vanity Fair profile on Miller for a reason, here's a guy whose claim to fame was the unwavering defense of Duke's lacrosse team a decade ago.

Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence. His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Sessions, with Miller at his side, almost single-handedly killed the 2013 bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “Our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

It was a jaw-dropping statement, even by Trumpian standards. “Horrendous” and “embarrassing” was how Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, described Miller’s claims, adding for good measure, “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.”

Since then, despite winning Trump’s approval for his bravura performance—“Great job!” the president tweeted—Miller has been kept under wraps, more seen than heard, although he was in the Mar-a-Lago photo of Trump and his advisers authorizing the April missile strike on an air base in Syria.

And now this card-carrying white supremacist asshole will almost certainly be running the White House's propaganda mill.  The fact that he's even employed by the federal government is insulting, let alone the White House, but in 2017 the executive branch has decided that only white, male landowning Americans count (just like our founding fathers, heyo!) and there's no better face for this than Miller.

Look at the people Trump has surrounded himself with.  That's all you need to know.

Oh, and Trump TV is beefing up its anchor staff as CNN's Kayleigh McEnany has now joined the weekly state-run social media broadcast praising Dear Leader.

More of this is coming, folks.  A lot more. And it will be coming sooner and closer than you think.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is expanding its conservative-leaning television empire into nearly three-quarters of American households — but its aggressive takeover of the airwaves wouldn’t have been possible without help from President Donald Trump's chief at the Federal Communications Commission.

Sinclair, already the nation’s largest TV broadcaster, plans to buy 42 stations from Tribune Media in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. It got a critical assist this spring from Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who revived a decades-old regulatory loophole that will keep Sinclair from vastly exceeding federal limits on media ownership.

The change will allow Sinclair — a company known for injecting "must run" conservative segments into its local programming — to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations. That’s nearly double the congressionally imposed nationwide audience cap of 39 percent.

The FCC and the company both say the agency wasn’t giving Sinclair any special favors by reviving the loophole, known as the “UHF discount,” which has long been considered technologically obsolete. But the Tribune deal would not have been viable if not for Pai’s intervention: Sinclair already reaches an estimated 38 percent of U.S. households without the discount, leaving it almost no room for growth.

The loophole is a throwback to the days when the ultra-high-frequency TV spectrum —the part higher than Channel 13 — was filled with low-budget stations with often-scratchy reception over analog rabbit ears. That quality gap no longer exists in today's world of digital television, but under the policy that Pai revived, the commission does not fully count those stations’ market size when tallying a broadcaster's national reach.

The stage is being set for state-run, pro-Trump media. Sinclair will now be able to reach every home east of the Oklahoma panhandle with their mandated "local news" segments on how great Trump is.  The White House can reach everyone else with social media and Trump TV.  All this is happening within just six months of him taking office, and it will only get worse.

Stay tuned, as they say.

You may not have a choice much longer on that, by the way.

That's Real White Of You, Donny, Con't

Emory professor of African American Studies and author Carol Anderson pens an op-ed in the NYT today on Trump, how he got there, and why he's not going anywhere soon: white resentment and identity politics fully rule our political landscape now, cemented by the backlash against Barack Obama, and the country will continue down this dark path for some time.

White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.

If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist street cred that no other Republican candidate could match, and that credibility has sustained him in office — no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he, and he alone, could Make America White Again.

The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.

Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country. Last week, Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions put the latest package under the tree: a staffing call for a case on reverse discrimination in college admissions, likely the first step in a federal assault on affirmative action and a determination to hunt for colleges and universities that discriminate against white applicants.

That so many of these policies are based on perception and lies rather than reality is nothing new. White resentment has long thrived on the fantasy of being under siege and having to fight back, as the mass lynchings and destruction of thriving, politically active black communities in Colfax, La. (1873), Wilmington, N.C. (1898), Ocoee, Fla. (1920), and Tulsa, Okla. (1921), attest. White resentment needs the boogeyman of job-taking, maiden-ravaging, tax-evading, criminally inclined others to justify the policies that thwart the upward mobility and success of people of color.

The last half-century hasn’t changed that. The war on drugs, for example, branded African-Americans and Latinos as felons, which stripped them of voting rights and access to housing and education just when the civil rights movement had pushed open the doors to those opportunities in the United States.

Similarly, the intensified war on immigrants comes, not coincidentally, at the moment when Latinos have gained visible political power, asserted their place in American society and achieved greater access to schools and colleges. The ICE raids have terrorized these communities, led to attendance drop-offs in schools and silenced many from even seeking their legal rights when abused.

And it's my generation who is happily embracing this.  We grew up with improving race relations, but all of that was dismantled as Republicans out of power went back to the oldest trick in the book to win back two-thirds of the states, Congress, and the White House.  At this point the Trump regime is actively hostile to the civil rights of anyone who isn't white and male, and Millennials are discovering a heady cocktail of power indeed.

And so it goes.  We're still fighting the same civil rights battles of 50 years ago because the people who needed to change didn't.

Sunday Long Read: These Kids Are Liable To Snap(chat)

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from The Atlantic with an excerpt from sociologist Jean Twenge's book on the post-Millennial generation.  Twenge calls them the iGen, the first generation completely connected to the world of social media, and they are as different from Millennials as Millennials are from Generation X.

The big thing for iGen is the smartphone, as the PC was to my generation and the TV was to my parents, and while Twenge finds iGen teens are far less likely to drink, smoke, have sex or even drive then Millennials or their Gen X parents, Twenge cautions that coming of age in the world where Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook are available 24/7 is putting today's kids at serious risk of mental health issues.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it. 

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. 

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. 

Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills. 

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones. 

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

I'm going to say that having been around computers since I was in grade school and the internet since high school, (the glorious days of telnet, VAX terminals, America Online and my first IT job at a dial-up ISP) that the problem is less the technology and more of the people using it.  Kids can be cruel, that part hasn't changed. Kids given a platform and someone to pick on with other kids watching can be awful. Kids given the power of social media and a global audience can be lethal.

Giving that power to kids is a bad idea, but at the same time in 2017 I've made the argument on a number of occasions that the internet should be treated as a public utility, like power, water and sanitation.  You need it in order to function as a member of society, full stop.

What the solution is, parents that get involved in their kids' lives, still applies.

Our Little Domestic Terror Problem Hasn't Gone Away

This time in Bloomington, Minnesota, where "Minnesota nice" has turned into an IED through the window of an Islamic center and detonating.

A blast caused by what the FBI called “an improvised explosive device” rocked a Bloomington Islamic center before dawn Saturday, just as a small group of Muslim worshipers had gathered for the day’s first round of prayers.

No one was hurt in the explosion, which heavily damaged an imam’s office at the Dar Al Farooq Center and sent smoke wafting through the large building. Windows in the office were shattered, either by the blast or by an object thrown through them.

The blast was reported at 5:05 a.m. as about a dozen people gathered in a room nearby for morning prayers and jolted awake many residents of the neighborhood. Congregants and neighbors expressed relief that there were no injuries, but also reacted with shock and dismay.

When police arrived, they found smoke and fire damage to the building, said Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts. Agents from the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives soon joined the investigation. A large area outside the center was taped off as investigators, including members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, combed through the grass.

At an early evening news conference, Special Agent in Charge Richard Thornton said an “improvised explosive device” caused the blast, but that investigators still must determine “who and why.”

“The post-blast environment is very detailed,” he said. “You search the wide area in an attempt to find as many components as you can of the device to help us understand how the device was made. That process is substantially complete. … It was an improvised explosive device that was set off early this morning.”

Hopefully the FBI will track this bastard down, but as to the why, well, welcome to Trump's America, where both immigrants and Muslims are targets for ongoing violence sanctioned by the man currently on a 17-day golf vacation.

The Crackdown Sessions

Didn't take long for this week's Trump regime leaks to trigger another round of open threats from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions against the free press, and I'm betting this time around they won't be idle threats, either.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that the Department of Justice plans to crack down on leaks coming from the department and intelligence community.

“I have this message for our friends in the intelligence community. The Department of Justice is open for business and I have, this morning, this warning: Don’t do it,” Sessions said. “For the past several months we have made changes and are seriously ramping up our efforts.”

Sessions also said the department is reviewing its policy on media subpoenas.

“We respect the important role the press plays and will give them respect, but they cannot place lives at risk with impunity,” he said. “We must balance their role with protecting our national security and the lives of those who serve in the intelligence community, the armed forces and all law-abiding Americans.”

“This nation must end this culture of leaks,” he went on. “We will investigate and seek to bring criminals to justice. We will not allow rogue anonymous sources with security clearances to sell out our country.”

Sessions noted that the department has tripled the number of active leak investigations compared to the number at the end of the last administration.

President Donald Trump has raged against leaks that he says are damaging to him, and publicly complained that Sessions has not been tough enough on leaks.

“I want the attorney general to be much tougher,” Trump said last week. “I want the leaks from intelligence agencies, which are leaking like rarely have they ever leaked before, at a very important level. These are intelligence agencies we cannot have that happen.”

Sessions wants leakers, and he's willing to go through as many press protections as possible in order to get them, but I honestly don't think it will be very long before Sessions starts putting reporters in jail along with career FBI, CIA and NSA folks, who just happen to be to people who are working on the investigations into Trump's dirty laundry.

Then again, he might go after Mueller too.  Who knows?

The closer the trap's jaws get to Trump's throat, the more he'll lash out.  It's what failing dictators do, folks.

Last Call For The General Gets A Head

Let's not mince words here: White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly is still a right-wing racist Islamophobic lunatic and getting him out of Homeland Security (while a good idea) still means he's there working for Trump.

But if anything, Kelly seems to be good at collecting pelts of Trump's worst hires because Trump himself won't do it.  Kelly has already cashiered Tony Scaramucci and along with an alliance with National Security Council head Gen. H.R. McMaster, the notion is that Kelly will start taking out the garbage.

Looks like Kelly may have found his first head in actual card-carrying Bannon flunkie Seb Gorka, a man whom nobody can explain why he is still there and eating all the office snacks.

A senior administration official says Sebastian Gorka, a former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as a counterterrorism adviser, will be leaving the White House in the coming days.

The official says that Gorka had initially been hired to play a key role on the Strategic Initiatives Group, an advisory panel created by Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon to run parallel to the National Security Council.

But that group fizzled out in the early months of the administration. Gorka was unable to get clearance for the National Security Council after he was charged last year with carrying a weapon at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

The official spoke anonymously to discuss private personnel matters. Attempts to reach Gorka by email for comment were not immediately successful.

Kelly is still a jackass, but Gorka was a no-fooling Nazi white supremacist fascist, so if Gorka's out, that's a small point in Kelly's favor that's still completely overshadowed by the fact he's still working for Trump.