Why #MeToo Doesn't Work On Trump

You can't splatter a pig with mud and expect the pig to be upset about it, after all.  Accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump by over a dozen women simply doesn't matter.

“What was she, like, the 28th or something?” one former White House official pondered to me. In a separate conversation, another offered a different guess: “Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

They were talking about E. Jean Carroll, the longtime Elle advice columnist who, for the first time last week, publicly accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room more than 20 years ago. And what they were trying to do was locate the latest number of women who have accused the president of sexual misconduct. (The answer: at least 22.)

For these former officials, the apparently incalculable magnitude of this number did not cause them to reconsider Trump’s every denial of the varied allegations—to wonder, for example, about the likelihood that 22 or 23 or 28 women were all lying in their stories of harassment, groping, unwanted kissing, and, in Carroll’s case, sexual assault.

Rather, for them, the increase in the number of women seemed to mirror the increase in their indifference. Another accusation, they seemed to say, was like another dollop of numbing cream. “I didn’t read it,” the second former official told me, referring to Carroll’s written account in New York, which was an excerpt from her forthcoming book. “We’re just kind of numb to it all at this point.”

One current White House official said that “the only thing” that “caught my eye” was Trump’s dismissal of Carroll’s claim. Speaking to reporters from The Hill on Monday, the president addressed her allegation from behind the Resolute desk: “I’ll say it with great respect: No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, okay?”

“Like, what are you gonna do?” the official said. “This is the guy you got.”

Only one of the half-dozen officials I spoke to, who currently work in or have worked in the White House and on the Trump campaign, had read Carroll’s essay, and none agreed to go on the record with their comments. Taken together, the officials’ quick willingness to dismiss the allegation, not to mention their disinterest in learning more, reflects several of the defining factors of the Trump administration: an under-siege mentality, distrust in the press, and an unwavering loyalty to the president they’ve aligned themselves with. But there’s another reason their assessment is noteworthy. The private reactions of Trump’s top allies reveal how, inside the president’s orbit, the gravity of words such as sexual assaultno longer seems to register. And that attitude—call it a collective shrug—could inform how the government responds to sexual-misconduct claims for, potentially, the next six years.

If you can't get the country to respond to sexual assault by the man in the Oval Office (and no, don't bring up Bill Clinton, because there was a response to him and it was impeachment) then nobody's going to care. Sexual assault is now 100% okay if you're powerful enough.

I know that's always been true, but having that confirmed is pretty grim.

Certainly House Democrats don't seem to care about rectifying it.

The Mask Slips Once Again

And this time, it's Trump's boss, Vladimir Putin, who lets slip the truth about where he is taking America.

Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force.

In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.

Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

“[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said.

Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

“This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.”

He added: “Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” 

Normally, I'd be happy to see a Russian autocrat gangster like Putin get his comeuppance from an American president putting Putin's cynical proto-fascism into the dumpster, but our own leaders are also autocrat gangsters, and they like what they see in Putin's philosophy, a country of one-third of a billion people ruled by a handful of petty tyrants.

Putin sees a world where countries cower from might and the strong rule all.

In 2019, he's not wrong.

StupidiNews!

• Several House Democrats voted with most Republicans to easily pass the Senate GOP version of border security legislation 305-102 after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reversed course on the bill.
• Republicans are calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts after Thursday's 5-4 decision to block a Census citizenship question, Donald Trump says he may delay the 2020 Census.
• Apple design chief and iPhone engineer Jony Ive is leaving Apple to form his own firm, Apple says Ive will continue to work on the company's designs for now.
• Putative UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he's keeping open the option to suspend Parliament if there's no deal on Brexit by October 31.
• Twitter says it will apply warning labels to tweets in the "public interest" that violate its terms and conditions, a policy that appears to be a direct warning to Donald Trump.

Last Call For A Supreme Split

The final day of the 2018-2019 SCOTUS term landed with three massive decisions, and it was largely a wash.  First, Chief Justice Roberts ruled in a 5-4 split that the federal courts have no business whatsoever dealing with state gerrymandering issues, giving a massive, permanent structural win to Republicans.

In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution.

Now just two years away from the redrawing of new districts at the start of the next decade, legislators in states that have control of all levels of governments after the 2020 election may feel emboldened by the ruling, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School.

"We are in Mad Max territory now; there are no rules," Levitt said. "I think you'll see more legislators in more states [where there is unilateral control] taking up the mantle of extreme partisan aggression against people who disagree with them."

Republicans now have unlimited authority to redraw districts as they see fit.  Expect states like NC, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Wisconsin to redraw districts concentrating black voters into one or two districts, and leaving all other districts majority white and Republican. 

The prime result of this ruling, combined with demographics, could very well mean a permanent GOP Congress as state legislatures will simply keep themselves in power.

Democrats will try to keep up in states like Florida and Illinois, but I would suspect that entire states could become one-party affairs.

The good news:  Republicans won't be able to use the 2020 Census to force citizenship questions on everyone.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberal justices, saying the administration did not provide adequate justification for the question.

The reason provided by the White House seem "contrived", the justices wrote in a 5-4 ruling.

The White House argued the question would help protect minority voters.

But the Census Bureau's own experts say it would lead to a major undercount.

Though the ruling deals a blow to the Trump administration, the complicated decision does not bar the question for either its language or the underlying premise.

Instead, by sending the case back to a lower court, Justice Roberts left open the possibility that the Trump administration could provide the necessary justification to add a question on citizenship to the census.

This battle will be back again before the court next June.  Count on it.

But don't get pulled over by cops though.  Not even your blood is safe from police search and seizure.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police may, without a warrant, order blood drawn from an unconscious person suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol.

The Fourth Amendment generally requires police to obtain a warrant for a blood draw. But in a 5-4 vote on Thursday, the court upheld a Wisconsin law that says people driving on a public road have impliedly consented to having their blood drawn if police suspect them of driving under the influence. It also said that "exigent circumstances" permit police to obtain a blood sample without a warrant.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority vote.

The decision conflicts with previous court rulings in which the justices ruled that a blood draw is a significant bodily intrusion into a person's privacy and that there are less intrusive ways of enforcing drunken driving laws against unconscious motorists — getting a warrant, for instance, which in these tech-savvy days can be done relatively easily and quickly.

In 2013, for instance, the high court ruled that police violated the Constitution when they ordered a nonconsensual blood draw without a warrant in a routine DUI case. The vote then was 5-4, but two of the justices in that majority, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, are no longer on the court.

A court that can rule the state has a right to your bodily fluids can rob you of consent for a lot of things, guys.

It's not a good day for America.

Not at all.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Her name is Marshae Jones.

In 2018 she was five months pregnant in Birmingham, Alabama and was shot in the stomach with another woman during a fight over the child's father.  The fetus died as a result.  A grand jury refused to indict the shooter because of the state's castle laws concerning self-defense, but now Jones is being charged with manslaughter in the death of her own unborn baby.

A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death. 

Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday. 

Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire. Police initially charged 23-year-old Ebony Jemison with manslaughter, but the charge against Jemison was dismissed after the grand jury failed to indict her. 

The shooting happened about noon on Dec. 4, 2018, outside Dollar General on Park Road. Officers were dispatched to the scene on a report of someone shot but arrived to find the shooting victim – later identified as Jones - had been picked up and driven to Fairfield. Police and paramedics then found the Jones at a Fairfield convenience store.
From Fairfield Jones was taken to UAB Hospital. She was five months pregnant and was shot in the stomach. The unborn baby did not survive the shooting. 

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

For the crime of being shot, Masrhae Jones is looking at up to 20 years in prison.  Not the person who actually shot her, but the woman who was shot.  Even without Alabama's awful abortion law, the legal notion that a woman can be charged with felony manslaughter for the death of a fetus is utterly insane, and the only possible societal reason to do that is to selectively use the law to incarcerate women of color and black women in particular.

This is repugnant.  It's precisely what people said would happen with this stupid notion that fetuses have the same rights as people, that miscarriages and injuries would become reasons to lock women up for decades for the crime of getting pregnant and failing to deliver a child.

This is what these ghouls want, women scared and pliant and existing only to reproduce or go to prison, non-citizens who fear their own goddamn wombs.

I hate this nonsense.

The Silence Of The Gun Nuts

In the end, the malevolent evil that came to silence right-wing NRA gun nut Dana Loesch and her stochastic terrorism broadcasts at NRATV were not the Democrats or the media or the Clintons or the gun safety advocates, but her own employers pulling the plug because of all the legal trouble they are drowning in.

The National Rifle Association has shut down production at NRATV. 

The N.R.A. on Tuesday also severed all business with its estranged advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, which operates NRATV, the N.R.A.’s live broadcasting media arm, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. 

While NRATV may continue to air past content, its live broadcasting will end and its on-air personalities — Ackerman employees who included Dana Loesch — will no longer be the public faces of the N.R.A. It remained unclear whether the N.R.A. might try to hire some of those employees, but there was no indication it was negotiating to do so. 

The move comes amid a flurry of lawsuits between the N.R.A. and Ackerman, and increasing acrimony that surfaced after two prominent N.R.A. board members first criticized NRATV in an article in The Times in March. The separation had become inevitable: The two sides said last month that they were ending their three-decade-plus partnership. 

“Many members expressed concern about the messaging on NRATV becoming too far removed from our core mission: defending the Second Amendment,” Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s longtime chief executive, wrote in a message to members that was expected to be sent out by Wednesday. “So, after careful consideration, I am announcing that starting today, we are undergoing a significant change in our communications strategy. We are no longer airing ‘live TV’ programming.” 

In a notice to Ackerman’s chief executive, Revan McQueen, sent Tuesday night, the N.R.A. said it “regrets that a longstanding, formerly productive relationship comes to an end in this fashion.” 

Ackerman, in its own statement, said it was “not surprised that the N.R.A. is unwilling to honor its agreement to end our contract and our long-standing relationship in an orderly and amicable manner.”

I think when the full story of the NRA's collapse comes out, it's going to be a key moment for the dismantling of the Trump regime.  I think they're going to talk, they're going to absolutely say they tok Russian money to help Donald Trump, and that they did it with Trump's blessing.

Dana Loesch and her hateful little band of gun-toting terrorists will land on their feet somewhere, but God I'd love for her to be indicted.

StupidiNews!

• In a 20-3 vote the Senate Health Committee has moved a bill to the full Senate that would lower drug prices, protect Americans from surprise ER bills, and raise the national smoking age to 21.
• Iran says it cannot save the 2015 UN nuclear deal without pressure from the EU, Russia and China on the Trump regime.
• Donald Trump is doubling down on the notion that he can fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at will, but analysts say doing so could touch off a massive market selloff.
• Donald Trump also plans to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of this year's G20 summit in Japan.
• Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are warning that Chinese tariffs will cost the video game console industry $350 million a year and could put thousands of game industry employees out of work.

Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment, If Anyone Noticed

I talked about the accusations of author E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump over the weekend.  Carroll has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a bathroom of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996.  As I said, only the Washington Post even bothered to put the accusation on the front page.  As a result, half of America was unaware the story even happened, because it wasn't reported.

In an excerpt of her memoir published Friday, Carroll wrote that Trump assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the mid-’90s. Trump denied the accusation, saying in one statement that he had never met Carroll (a photograph included in the story showed otherwise) and in a later interview claimed she was “not my type.”

The accusation generated significant coverage. But in a news cycle already saturated with other stories, including tensions with Iran, it got relatively short shrift in newspapers like The New York Times and on Sunday morning talk shows.

“The day that [Carroll’s allegation] dropped it felt like it was very much a part of the conversation on Twitter,” Shani Hilton, deputy managing editor for news at the Los Angeles Times, told CNN on Sunday. “It was really blowing up ― I mean all day long … Two days later, it kind of feels like it’s faded away.”

In a HuffPost/YouGov survey conducted Friday night and Saturday, just 11% of Americans said they’d heard a lot about Carroll’s allegations. About half those polled, 53%, hadn’t heard anything at all. (Because survey respondents tend to be more politically engaged, these numbers are, if anything, probably a little high.)

For the sake of comparison, polling this year found that respondents had heard more about the renewed debate over the Hyde Amendment, the mass shooting in Virginia Beach, the new Alabama abortion law, the release of the Mueller report, the blackface controversy involving Virginia’s governor and the end of the government shutdown.

“In the case of Trump, the sheer number of sexual misconduct allegations seems to have had a desensitizing effect,” Vox’s Anna North wrote, “with the press and the public beginning to treat an account of sexual assault by the US commander-in-chief as simply business as usual.”

That ― along with the general stability of Trump’s ratings ― may help to explain why views have changed so little since Trump’s time on the campaign trail.

Trump sexually assaulting women is now the new normal.  It's no longer news.  And America no longer cares.  More people heard about Joe Biden's Hyde Amendment flip.  More people heard about the Virginia Beach shooting (another news item category we've become 100% desensitized towards).

Trump simply normalizes his evil, and our broken media shrugs and plays along.

The Hunter And The Hunted, Con't

A couple of weeks ago I noted that California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter was already facing indictment on campaign fraud and embezzlement.  He won re-election in 2018 because he was able to paint his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, as a Muslim terrorist and ended up winning by 9,000 votes.

Earlier this month Hunter's wife plead guilty to conspiracy with her husband to misuse campaign funds in order to cooperate with the feds.  And now the other shoe has dropped: Hunter allegedly spent those campaign funds on multiple affairs with mistresses...among other things.

Embattled Rep. Duncan Hunter used campaign funds to pay for extramarital affairs with lobbyists and congressional staffers, prosecutors in California alleged in a court filing Monday. 

The salacious revelation joins a host of other charges levied against the California Republican, who pleaded not guilty last year on counts of wire fraud, falsifying records and campaign finance violations. 

Hunter's wife Margaret, who also faced federal charges, pleaded guilty earlier this month and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Rep. Hunter has denied the previous allegations against him. 

The filing, submitted as part of a series of motions by California prosecutors on evidence they hope to use in a trial scheduled to begin in September, provides detailed accounts of five different affairs, including one with a woman who worked in Hunter's congressional office. 

According to the filing, Hunter and the unnamed staffer "occasionally spent nights together at his office" and went on dates funded by campaign cash. One night, at a Washington, DC, bar known for indoor mini golf, Hunter spent $202 in campaign funds for drinks and snacks, the filing says. 

Prosecutors describe another affair, with a lobbyist, that included a rendezvous at a ski resort near Lake Tahoe, paid for in large part by campaign funds. 

Hunter also went on a "'double date' road trip" with the lobbyist and another couple, which included another congressman. He spent $905 in campaign funds on a hotel bar tab and the room he shared with the woman, the filing says.

Oh, but it gets worse.

Another mystery in the case remains unresolved. At the end of the filing, prosecutors mentioned a mysterious “clearly non-work related activity during (Duncan Hunter’s) get-togethers with his close personal friends.” 

The document didn’t disclose what exactly that “potentially sensitive evidence” is because prosecutors said doing so “runs the risk of improperly tainting the jury pool before the trial begins.”

Duncan's been a naughty boy with taxpayer money.

Stay tuned.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

It looks like Oregon Republicans and their white supremacist terrorist allies have won, as terrified Oregon Democrats are apparently now folding on the climate change cap and trade bill that set off this mess in the first place.

Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney said on Tuesday morning that the climate change bill at the center of Republicans’ walkout lacks the votes necessary to pass, because not enough Democrats support it.

"House Bill 2020 does not have the votes on the Senate floor,” Courtney, D-Salem, said after Democrats assembled on the floor Tuesday. “That will not change.” He then ticked off a lengthy list of pending policy and budget bills that he said have bipartisan support.

Senate Republicans fled the state last week to block a vote on the carbon capping plan. Courtney appeared to be laying groundwork for Republicans to return, but it was not immediately clear that Republicans would agree to return to vote on other bills. Oregon lawmakers face a June 30 deadline to wrap up work under the state Constitution.

Sen. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario, said as of around 10 a.m., he had not yet heard of Courtney’s announcement. However, he said there would be a lot of concern about a possible head fake by Democrats, and a variety of procedural issues that would have to be addressed before Republicans would likely agree to come back to the Capitol.

Democrats also took time to react to Courtney’s statement Tuesday. Two hours after Courtney’s statement, Gov. Kate Brown issued a statement in which she appeared to acknowledge the bill was dead.

“Senate Republicans have blocked a bill that provides a better future for our state and for our children, and the tactics they employed to do so are not just unacceptable, but dangerous,” Brown said, adding that Republicans were “moving us dangerously close to the self-serving stalemate in Washington, DC.”

“It’s now up to Republicans to prove me wrong," Brown said. "Are they against climate change legislation or are they against democracy? If they are not back by Wednesday afternoon, we will know the answer.”

Brown declared on Monday that she would not negotiate with Republicans until they returned to Oregon.

House Speaker Tina Kotek, of Portland, weighed in on Twitter just before noon Tuesday, saying of Courtney’s statement that the climate bill was dead, “I believe him.” 

“This has been a dark week for the integrity of the Legislature,” Kotek wrote. “Senate Rs have been threatening our democratic institution and subverting the will of Oregon voters who know we need to act now. Their walkout has come at immense cost to our institution and potentially the planet.”

It's entirely possible that this is a fakeout to trick Republicans into showing back up and then getting steamrolled.  If so, it's both ballsy and stupid, but it might just work.

But if it's not a fakeout, then Republicans just proved political terrorism and threatening violence against Democrats works. Expect Republicans in other blue states to start reacting to Democratic legislation in the same way.

If Republicans realize that they can use the open threat of violence and the repressive power of government to keep Democrats from ever passing any legislation at all, even in states where Democrats have a supermajority plus the Governor's office as with Oregon, then we've lost our small-d democracy, representative or otherwise, permanently.

There's plenty of evidence that the problem here is personal and not systemic, and that Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney has completely lost control of the chamber and that Oregon Senate Republicans are taking full advantage.

But why should Oregon Republicans not pull this stunt every time the Democrats want to pass a bill?  They're already playing the victim card here, saying that being linked to domestic terrorists like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers in the state is an insult so grave that it means they'll never return, and never allow another vote.

So what happens if one party is willing to break a functioning government beyond repair?  What is the other party prepared to do in order to restore that government?

We've asked this question before in the past, and the answer has never been without a great cost to the country.

StupidiNews!

• House Democrats have subpoenaed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to testify in open hearings before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees on July 17.
• Mexico says that the 15,000 troops along the US border are not there to detain asylum seekers, and President Obrador says a detention last week will be investigated.
• House Democrats have passed a bill authorizing funding for housing asylum seekers but the White House says it will veto the measure because of increased oversight on ICE operations.
• The White House says First Lady Melania Trump's chief spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham will replace outgoing Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
• After years of proclaiming the country was AIDS-free, Pyongyang medical officials are admitting North Korea has a epidemic of over 8,300 HIV cases that need treatment.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

We've now reached the "heads will roll" part of the latest "kids in concentration camps" news cycle, where somebody gets fired for the only real offense in the Trump regime: making Donald Trump look like a bad guy on TV news. I predicted it would be Acting DHS Kevin McAleenan a few days ago, and that still might happen over ICE raids, but apparently Trump has found somebody to fall on their sword for him, and that's Acting Border Patrol head John Sanders, who is now "retiring".

President Donald Trump sought to put distance between himself and the retiring acting Border Patrol chief John Sanders, saying that he doesn’t think he ever met him, though he’s heard good things.

“I didn’t speak to him. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him actually,” Trump said when asked if he had a hand in the ouster. “We have some very good people running it. And, you know, I don’t know anything about it. I hear he’s a very good man, a good person. I don’t know him. I don’t think I ever spoke to him.”

Sanders’ impending resignation comes as the outcry grows over the conditions immigrants, especially underage ones, have been living in at the border. Children at the station in Clint, Texas were reported to lack clean clothes, access to showers and sufficient nutrition. Though most of the children were removed from the dire situation after reports were published, 100 of them were recently shunted back.

Sanders has held the post in an acting capacity since Trump tapped former Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan to replace ex-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

So for now, Trump has his head to mount on the wall and plausible deniability.  He can point at Sanders, say that it was all his failure, that he's leaving, and people might even believe him.

Of course things will get much worse, but as along as Trump has an endless supply of Acting executive agency heads to spit and roast in public, nothing will actually change.  Sanders will be replaced by former Border Patrol head Mark Morgan, who was forced out 30 months ago just after Trump took office.

Now Morgan is leading Trump's camps for kids.  Fun.

America's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Jennifer Rubin is still an awful human being who has enabled Republicans into the Trump era and bears more than a little responsibility for the people she now rails against as a "Never Trump" Republican.  She's of course shocked to discover that nearly half of Republicans are now in favor of open discrimination against black folk, LGBTQ, Jews, and Muslims.

In a disturbing new poll, the Public Religion Research Institute finds that “while at least two thirds of Americans oppose allowing small business owners to refuse products or services to minority groups based on their religious beliefs, a small but increasing proportion of Americans think it should be permissible to turn away customers based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, or race.”

As one might expect, the big uptick in those willing to refuse service comes among Republicans, but Democrats aren’t immune from the trend to declare that one’s religion permits discrimination against others. “From 2014 to 2019, the partisan gap on this issue has dramatically increased. Nearly half (47%) of Republicans favor such a policy, which is more than double the 21% who favored the policy in 2014. By contrast, today only 18% of Democrats and 24% of independents support these kind of religiously based service refusals. These numbers are also an increase from 2014, when only 11% of Democrats and 16% of independents agreed.” 

The difference between the parties is stark:

More than one in five (22%) Americans say small businesses should be able to refuse to serve Muslims on religious grounds. Men are more likely than women to agree (25% vs. 20%). Around three in ten white evangelical Protestants (32%) and white mainline Protestants (28%) say small businesses should be allowed to refuse to serve Muslims for religious reasons, compared to around one in five nonwhite Protestants (21%), Catholics (19%), and the religiously unaffiliated (17%) who say the same.

Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to support religiously based refusals to serve gay or lesbian people (47% vs. 18%), transgender people (44% vs. 19%), atheists (37% vs. 17%), and Muslims (32% vs. 14%).

And now 19 percent (up from 12 percent) say it is fine to deny service to Jews, and 15 percent (up from 10 percent) say it is acceptable to deny service to African Americans.

Donald Trump made it okay to be a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic.  Not only did he make it okay, he made it American legal policy.

We are at the point where the majority of the GOP openly favors discrimination, and the end of the Civil Rights era.  A second Trump term will seal America's fate on this.

The Road To 2020

Boston Globe columnist John Ellis reminds us that for all intents and purposes, the Democratic nominee will be decided by Super Tuesday in March, months before the convention and it's the media, not the voters, who will choose a winner.

Major media coverage of a presidential campaign breaks down into four parts: the preprimary season, the primary season, the summer conventions, and the general election season (including the debates and the expensive election night broadcast). 

What happens every four years, without fail, is that major media organizations blow through their preprimary budgets. In the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, they have already begun eating into the budget for primary coverage. 

By the time the Iowa caucus results are reported and the campaign caravan decamps to New Hampshire, the CFOs of the various news organizations (and their parent companies) are apoplectic, muttering darkly about “wild overspending.” Word quickly comes down from on high: It has to stop.

And stop it does. After New Hampshire, the coverage of many candidates becomes the coverage of two (maybe three, but probably not). Costs are cut by relying on affiliates and local news outlets to provide video and text from “the campaign trail,” which is then stitched together by producers and editors in New York. 

The real campaign plays out in Manhattan and Washington television studios. Cable news outlets (especially) make every effort to push the “campaign” into television studios and away from “the campaign trail.” 

Because of budget concerns, the pressure to anoint a winner increases as the early March Super Tuesday primaries near. We saw this in 2016. Hillary Clinton was declared the winner long before she actually won the nomination. This time, California will be deemed decisive. Whoever wins there, it will be said, wins the nomination. 

The rationale for this projection will be financial fact: Every losing candidate will have spent his or her last dollars on advertising in frightfully expensive Super Tuesday media markets. Reality will say they cannot carry on (without money). Reports of the winner’s post-Super Tuesday fund-raising windfall will reinforce this analysis. 

In the meantime, coverage of the Democratic presidential nomination campaign will be framed by a “brackets” narrative. The semi-finals bracket narrative has already commenced. 

Joe Biden, for the moment, leads in the “most-likely-to beat-Trump bracket.” (Pete Buttigieg is moving up.) Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are running neck and neck in the “street fight” bracket, although it appears that Warren has gained the upper hand. 

The finalists will be chosen by Iowa and New Hampshire. The finals will play out against the backdrop of electability. If surveys show that Warren is just as likely to beat Trump as, say, Biden, she’ll win Super Tuesday and, in all likelihood, be the nominee. 

Which brings us to one last point about the Democratic primary and caucus electorate. They want the nomination process over quickly. Preferably, they’d like a nominee by mid-March. Whether it’s Biden or Warren or Buttigieg or Sanders, at some level, doesn’t matter. They just want to drop the gloves and start the brawl, with or without an agenda.

I think Buttigieg is going to crash, possibly replaced by Harris.  But we're already effectively down to five while for some insane reason more Democrats are entering the field.

I am going to be very glad when primary season ends.  We need a candidate and to solidify behind them and go take Trump and the GOP down ASAP.

StupidiNews!

• A new British study finds a link between anticholinergic drugs, used to treat bladder, muscle and epilepsy issues, and an increased risk of developing dementia later in life.
• The 2026 Winter Olympic games have been awarded to Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, beating out Stockholm, Sweden and returning to the site of the 1956 winter games.
• Donald Trump has authorized new targeted financial sanctions against Iran's leaders in response to last week's downing of a US drone by Iran over international waters.
• US intelligence experts see not only Russia, but China and Iran using active cyber measures to influence the 2020 elections over the next 17 months.
• Researchers in Peru say that modern versions of ancient canals built by indigenous peoples 3,000 years ago may be the key to managing the country's water shortages today.