[johnu]

johnu, on 2018-October-27, 21:48, said:

Apparently Dennison wasn't tough enough on immigrants, or anti-semetic enough , but Dennison is also the one who is single-handedly demonizing immigrants and the immigrant caravan and threatening to use military force to stop it at the border.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy Deletes Tweet Attacking 3 Wealthy Jews In The Democratic Party

Maybe Dennison lets others spew anti-semetic rhetoric for obvious family reasons.

[Winstonm]

I admit to not knowing all of the coded messaging developed by the right wing to obfuscate racial bias in order to appeal to the southern Democrats after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but having worked with a preacherly right-winger from Kentucky I learned a lot of it, and the remnants are still used today.

That made me take exception to the following proclamation: (emphasis added)

Quote

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, defended on Sunday the GOP campaign arms ads targeting billionaire George Soros, who is Jewish, in light of the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. “Our independent expenditure arm is independent. But that ad is factual. And it also has nothing to do with calling for violence. That ad is a factual ad,” Stivers said on NBC’s Meet the Press, responding to a television advertisement paid by the NRCC that targets a Democratic candidate in Minnesota by tying him to Soros and Wall Street bankers.

Here is an explanation of the coded message of the ad tying Soros to Wall Street Bankers by decoding a similar message from Rush Limbaugh: (emphasis added for clarity)

Quote

Take a look at a statement made by Rush Limbaugh last year, in which he explained that Jews who voted for Obama may now have “buyer’s remorse” because Obama was supposedly going after Wall Street:

"There are a lot of people, when you say banker, people think Jewish. People who have, uh, prejudice, people who have—um, uh, you know—what’s the best way to say—a little, little prejudice about them. To some people, bankers is code word for Jewish. And guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers! He’s assaulting money people! And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there."

Let’s parse this statement:

“To some people, bankers is code word for Jewish. And guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers! He’s assaulting money people!”

Here Limbaugh plays a rhetorical trick. He evokes a premise, but—recognizing the premise would get him into trouble—credits the premise to “a lot of people” and “some people.” He even says that the premise carries “a little prejudice.” Yet after attributing this idea of “bankers = Jews” to people other than himself, Limbaugh proceeds to draw a conclusion on the basis that the premise is correct:

"So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there."

You can only “wonder” this if you accept the premise that “bankers” and “money people” are synonymous with “Jews,” and that Jewish public opinion sways with the temperament of Wall Street.

Moreover, his conclusion is preceded with the following:

"And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish."

He states this as a fact. The fact by itself is meaningless: there may or may not be a lot of Jews on Wall Street, and their representation may be proportionately higher or lower compared to wider demographics, but what is the purpose of making such an assertion? In Limbaugh’s context, it establishes a correlation between Jews and the gears of capital, which supports his conclusion that Jews may be experiencing “buyer’s remorse” from Obama’s supposed attack on the Jewish institution known as Wall Street.

So we have a classic anti-Semitic statement, only slightly veiled, of the sort that we are told is popular at Zucotti Park.

I find it ironic that the group that most rails against political correctness has its own politically correct code. And then its use is publicly defended on national tv.

[johnu]

johnu, on 2018-October-26, 14:45, said:

I hope your view is correct, but fascism is on the rise from Australia to most of Europe. Look at Austria, Germany, France, and Italy which are at the forefront of the movement.

CNN Brazilians cast ballots as right-wing candidate leads in polls

Bolsonaro affiliates with right wing fascists and there is serious worry that he will return Brazil to a dictatorship to fix the country's problems if elected based on public statement by he and his running mate.

[hrothgar]

https://finance.yaho...OQzEFOYPJgUzLqc

[Al_U_Card]

Winstonm, on 2018-October-28, 10:08, said:

I admit to not knowing all of the coded messaging developed by the right wing to obfuscate racial bias in order to appeal to the southern Democrats after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but having worked with a preacherly right-winger from Kentucky I learned a lot of it, and the remnants are still used today.

Prolly had its roots in Roosevelt's catering to Dixiecrat (read segregationist democrats) sentiments on the New Deal to get it passed. Excluding migrant and service workers pretty much excluded blacks from the immediate economic benefits. The CRA had its own list of "compromises" to gain support. Politics, whodathunkit?

[johnu]

Al_U_Card, on 2018-October-28, 14:31, said:

Prolly had its roots in Roosevelt's catering to Dixiecrat (read segregationist democrats) sentiments on the New Deal to get it passed. Excluding migrant and service workers pretty much excluded blacks from the immediate economic benefits. The CRA had its own list of "compromises" to gain support. Politics, whodathunkit?

When the Republicans Really Were the Party of Lincoln

By 1948, Dixiecrats were starting to completely break with the Democratic party. Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat and won 39 electoral votes by winning 4 Confederate states.

In 1964, after signing the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously said "We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation." as Dixiecrats were making a full exodus to the Republican party. He was wrong since we're nearing the end of the 2nd generation after the Civil Rights Act and the Democrats are still not competitive in the South.

[Al_U_Card]

johnu, on 2018-October-28, 14:57, said:

When the Republicans Really Were the Party of Lincoln

By 1948, Dixiecrats were starting to completely break with the Democratic party. Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat and won 39 electoral votes by winning 4 Confederate states.

In 1964, after signing the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously said "We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation." as Dixiecrats were making a full exodus to the Republican party. He was wrong since we're nearing the end of the 2nd generation after the Civil Rights Act and the Democrats are still not competitive in the South.

How many is "full"?

[johnu]

Explaining why he didn't cancel rally, Dennison falsely says NYSE opened day after 9/11

Another example that nothing is too big, or too small for Dennison to outright lie about. Only in Dennison world is there no record of what happened way back in 2001. Most of his supporters either wouldn't care that he lied again, or would take his word against in person and historical records.

[johnu]

Al_U_Card, on 2018-October-28, 17:36, said:

How many is "full"?

More than enough to change the south from solid blue to overwhelmingly solid red. If you want an estimate, google 99-44/100%

[y66]

I'm baffled by David Gelernter's assertion in his October 21 WSJ Op-Ed titled The Real Reason They Hate Trump

Quote

The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.

He's a thoughtful guy and someone I've admired since I read Mirror Worlds 20+ years ago. I realize he has conservative views but my sense is that he's way too honest to make up stuff like that for self-serving reasons and yet it doesn't square at all with my view of the typical American or the views of my progressive friends who hate Trump most because they believe he could care less about the typical American and that his policies and the policies of his party have been and will continue to be disastrous for typical Americans.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

If you are at all like me, you’ve barely begun to process what we’ve just lived through in the last week in Jeffersontown, Kentucky; in Pittsburgh; and in the attempted assassinations of a number of prominent Democrats. Single episodes of hate or madness are, alas, something we’ll always have, but this feels different — because it really is different.

We can’t specifically connect individual actions to the overall political atmosphere, just as we can’t specifically conclude that a specific hurricane is the consequence of climate change. Perhaps the bigots in Kentucky and Pittsburgh would have acted anyway; perhaps in a different political climate, the attempted bomber would have found other targets.

What we can do, however, is face the climate honestly. And the truth is that people who watch the news within the Republican-aligned media, and listen to Republican politicians including the president of the United States, are being fed a nonstop diet of crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories. Adam Serwer has a good piece detailing exactly what the Fox News audience was hearing about a migrant caravan making its way through Mexico.

And a lot of people believe that those crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories are true. Why wouldn’t they? Most of us grew up in a media atmosphere in which programs that looked like the news mostly told the truth. We didn’t all grow up believing that presidents told the truth, of course, but we’ve never had a president who has such a total disregard for the truth. We certainly haven’t had a president — at least not in the modern communications era, when you can see and hear him saying it — call the news media “enemies of the people” and encourage the idea that his political opponents should be locked up. Dahlia Lithwick is quite correct: “The point is that people who hate Jews and immigrants and minorities believe that when they commit violence against these people, they are behaving as the followers their president wants them to be” (and see too Rick Hasen and my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Cass Sunstein).

Donald Trump bears the greatest responsibility for the political atmosphere right now, because after all, he is president. Whether because he deliberately wants to stir up hatred or if it’s just the way he is, presidents have more to do with how all of us think about politics than any other individual. It’s a huge mistake, however, to think this is just about Trump. The strain of this kind of politics goes back within the Republican Party to Joe McCarthy, to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and most decisively to Newt Gingrich, who explicitly trained an entire generation or two of Republican politicians to emphasize division and animosity, and is still at it today.

Even worse, it’s institutionalized and spread by the Republican Party-aligned media, so much so that I suspect a lot of perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans at the elite level wind up believing a lot of garbage because it’s constantly being talked about by everyone around them as if it were real.

The impulses toward conspiracy theories and hatred know no political or ideological affiliation. There are plenty of crazy conspiracy theories circulating among Democrats and liberals now, just as there always have been. What’s different is that for the most part, most of the time, Democratic Party leaders shoot those stories down or ignore them. There were crazy conspiracy theories about, for example, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and various nations in the Middle East. But there were no House special committees to fan the flames of those phony stories. Nothing like the (multiple, seemingly endless) investigations of Vince Foster’s suicide or the disaster in Benghazi. There were no nutty theories when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama met normal resistance from the bureaucracy that it was all a Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson plot. Well, there probably were — but the Democratic Party-aligned media (much less the “neutral” media) and leading Democratic politicians mostly ignored them, at least in public. They certainly didn’t obsess over them for months or years without evidence or even logic to back them up.

Trump, to be sure, is an outlier even among Republicans. He’s personally responsible for amplifying dozens of phony stories: Just last week, outside all the craziness about the caravan, he also claimed that there were riots in California having to do with sanctuary cities. There were, of course, no riots. His recent slogan is “jobs not mobs” — there are, of course, no mobs. I could go on.

None of this is to hold Donald Trump or the Republican Party or any party actor specifically responsible for the terrible events of the past week. Only those who committed those acts bear that responsibility. What Trump and his allies are responsible for, however, is what they’ve done and said.

So, Mr. Bernstein suspects that a lot of perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans at the elite level wind up believing a lot of garbage because it’s constantly being talked about by everyone around them as if it were real. Perhaps that accounts for Mr. Gelernter's op-ed and many of the posts by perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans here in the water cooler.

[Al_U_Card]

johnu, on 2018-October-29, 02:36, said:

More than enough to change the south from solid blue to overwhelmingly solid red. If you want an estimate, google 99-44/100%

I am having trouble finding names to match your assertion...but I will keep looking unless it is the 56/100

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2018-October-29, 08:19, said:

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:


So, Mr. Bernstein suspects that a lot of perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans at the elite level wind up believing a lot of garbage because it’s constantly being talked about by everyone around them as if it were real. Perhaps that accounts for Mr. Gelernter's op-ed and many of the posts by perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans here in the water cooler.

Critical thinking skills have been lost.

Quote

“The ability to think critically is more important now than it has ever been,” urges Kris Potrafka, founder and CEO of Music Firsthand. “Everything is at risk if we don’t all learn to think more critically.” If people cannot think critically, he explains, they not only lessen their prospects of climbing the ladder in their respective industries, but they also become easily susceptible to things like fraud and manipulation.

Conservative columnist Max Boot explains:

Quote

There is partisanship on both sides of the political spectrum, but no left-wing outlets propagate extremism as successfully or widely as conservative media do. A new study of “Network Propaganda” by three Harvard researchers notes that liberals, by and large, get their news from sources such as The Post, the Times, NPR and CNN that, regardless of any political bias, also engage in rigorous fact-checking. Conservatives, by contrast, are being brainwashed by right-wing media that are an “echo chamber” for “rumor and conspiracy theory.”

[Winstonm]

For anyone who is still denying the relationship of support for this president and racial bias, there is this, offered by Daryl Johnson, former Department of Homeland Security analyst: (emphasis added)

Quote

DARYL JOHNSON: We’ve had almost eight years of far-right groups recruiting, radicalizing and growing in strength. Typically during Republican administrations we see a decrease in activity. But under this administration they continue to operate at a heightened level. One reason why is the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump.

Building a border wall, deporting immigrants, a travel ban on Muslim countries — these are themes discussed on white-nationalist message boards and websites for years, now being endorsed and talked about at the highest levels of the government. He’s retweeted messages about Muslims from conspiracy sites. What keeps these groups energized and active is the fact that the administration has mainstreamed their message and tried to put it forth as policy.

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2018-October-26, 14:45, said:

I hope your view is correct, but fascism is on the rise from Australia to most of Europe. Look at Austria, Germany, France, and Italy which are at the forefront of the movement.

Along these line, this article from The Atlantic is valuable.

Quote

I recently analyzed about 30,000 Twitter accounts that self-identified as alt-right, or followed someone who did, for vox-Pol, the European academic network studying extremism on social media. The results were illuminating.

The alt-right is often described as a movement or ideology. It is better understood as a political bloc that seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies. While it is international in reach, its center of gravity can be found in the United States. Because the alt-right is a bloc, it has to be understood by mapping its components and analyzing how they overlap and how they differ. (Not everyone who associates with the bloc online self-identifies as alt-right.)....This, more than anything else, was the glue that held the alt-right social network together. Support for Trump was shared by virtually all parts of the network and was reflected in nearly every metric, including tabulations of the most-followed, most-retweeted, and most-influential accounts; the most-used words in Twitter profiles; and in the top two hashtags (#maga, which outperformed all other hashtags by a wide margin, and #trump).

[awm]

y66, on 2018-October-29, 08:06, said:

I'm baffled by David Gelernter's assertion in his October 21 WSJ Op-Ed titled The Real Reason They Hate Trump

Despite peoples' assertions that Trump doesn't really have an agenda and "just wants to do what works", his policies since the election have been right out of the conservative Republican playbook, including a big budget-busting tax cut (mostly helping the owners of large privately-owned businesses), appointing judges hostile to abortion rights to the courts, attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no real replacement plan, and rolling back environmental protections. So it's perfectly legitimate to dislike Trump for policy reasons.

But I suspect a lot of the revulsion (or love) for Trump on a personal level has to do with peoples' experience with bullying. If you were a bully in school, or you wish you could behave like a bully but feel held back by societal expectations, you probably adore Trump. If you think people who are bullied probably brought it on themselves in some way, or that they're a bunch of whiners and being bullied is just part of life, then you're probably okay with Trump.

If you were victimized by a bully in school, or you're close to someone who was, you probably despise Trump. If you feel like we should follow the "golden rule" and treating people with respect is just part of being a good person, you probably can't stand Trump.

Even Trump's fans accept that he's a bully, and insults people all the time. They're just okay with it (and in some cases even like him for it).

[Winstonm]

Is there no shame left with these people? How can you use such tragedy to spin hate to try to make yourself sound righteous to the religious voters?

Quote

In a Monday morning appearance on Fox News, Kellyanne Conway suggested “anti-religious” late-night comedians fostered an environment for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to take place.

“The anti-religiosity in this country that is somehow in vogue and funny to make fun of anybody of faith, to constantly be making fun of people that express religion — the late-night comedians, the unfunny people on TV shows — it’s always anti-religious,” Conway said, without naming particular hosts

Let's get this straight. Antisemitism inflamed by radicalizing alt-right propaganda was at the heart of this horrible event in Pittsburgh.

[ggwhiz]

Winstonm, on 2018-October-29, 11:35, said:

Let's get this straight. Antisemitism inflamed by radicalizing alt-right propaganda was at the heart of this horrible event in Pittsburgh.

Gillum was right not only about DeSantis but the entire GOP when he said "I'm not accusing you of being racist but racists believe you are".

[ldrews]

ggwhiz, on 2018-October-29, 12:07, said:

Gillum was right not only about DeSantis but the entire GOP when he said "I'm not accusing you of being racist but racists believe you are".

So it appears that Gillum depends on racists for his information regarding racists. Does he also use them for other policy input?

[johnu]

ldrews, on 2018-October-29, 12:32, said:

So it appears that Gillum depends on racists for his information regarding racists. Does he also use them for other policy input?

Once again, a mediocre try by you, but again, no cigar. Gillum is just 1 person out of millions who recognizes racists because most racists can't avoid highlighting themselves by their own words and actions. BTW, are you intentionally being gullible or are you just clueless in not recognizing that Gillum was just trying to be somewhat civil in not directly saying DeSantis is a racist?