August 3 and 4, 2016


News and Views


https://www.yahoo.com/tv/joe-scarborough-says-donald-trump-asked-three-171548781.html

Joe Scarborough Says Donald Trump Asked Three Times Why We Can’t Just Use Nuclear Weapons If We Have Them
Will Lerner
Wed, Aug 3 10:15 AM PDT

Video -- Fareed Zakaria Calls Donald Trump ‘Bulls*** Artist’ During Live CNN Segment


The past few days of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign have been fraught with missteps and controversy. But things took a more chilling turn when on Wednesday, Joe Scarborough, alongside his MSNBC colleagues, was chatting with retired four-star Gen. Michael Hayden and the Morning Joe host relayed an anecdote about Trump he had been told.

“I’ll have to be very careful here,” Scarborough said slowly. “Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’ That’s one of the reasons why he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him.”

Scarborough, previously a Republican congressman from Florida, clearly startled his colleagues with this story. “Trump,” asked a nonplussed Mike Barnicle. “Trump asked three times?” “Three times, in an hour briefing,” confirmed Scarborough. “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”

CBS News reporter Sopan Deb, covering the Trump campaign for his network, tweeted, “Trump camp says ‘There is no truth to this,’ referring to [Scarborough’s] claim about Trump asking about why we can’t use nuclear weapons.”

Hayden, who also served as director of the NSA and CIA under both Democratic and Republican presidents and has yet to endorse any candidate for president, explained to the MSNBC panel that if a President Trump wanted to use nuclear weapons, he could use nuclear weapons. “It’s scenario-dependent,” Hayden said. “But the system is designed for speed and decisiveness. It’s not designed to debate the decision.”

“Oy,” responded Scarborough’s co-host Mika Brzezinski.

While his feud with Khizir and Ghazala Khan might be want [sic] dominated headlines, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also caused a stir when he seemed to suggest in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine, despite Russia annexing Crimea in 2014. On CNN Monday, Fareed Zakaria suggested this was just another moment of Trump being ill-equipped to talk about the issues of today.

Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or leave your comments below.



Email, August 3, 2016

Anti-Planned Parenthood Acts in several states

Dear Lucy,

Here's a nice-sounding bill that became law in North Carolina last year: the Women and Children's Protection Act.

You care about women and children, you want them to be protected — seems like something you might want to support, right?

Wrong. This bill isn't about protecting anyone. It actually forces women seeking certain abortions to undergo an ultrasound — and then submit that ultrasound image to the state government. So, the people who work for Governor Pat "McCreepy" McCrory get to peek at your uterus — FUN!

In all seriousness, this is just one of many bills meant to sound pro-woman while actually pushing outrageous attacks on reproductive health and rights.

Want to know what's lurking in cleverly named but dangerous legislation like this? And what these bills should be called? Check out our informative *new* tool, the Deception Decoder, now.

Anti-women's health lawmakers think they can sneak their dangerous agenda through if they come up with misleading, pleasant-sounding names for their bills. Don't be fooled.

The Supreme Court wasn't fooled when it struck down Texas's anti-abortion bill, HB 2, in June — saying the burdens these state laws impose on women could not be justified by claims that they protect women's health.

That decision has already caused similar laws in three other states to falter, and gives us a strong legal argument for undoing even more restrictions. But it all starts with recognizing their true motives, which are more often than not thinly veiled attempts to restrict access to reproductive health care.

Find out what's happening in your state and others now — and take action with us to stop the attacks on reproductive health and rights where you live and beyond!



This law in my home state NC is the worst I’ve heard described. Require an ultrasound and then mandate that it be sent to the State Government? I can imagine why they are requiring that. They hope to prove that the pregnancy is beyond the legal cutoff date, probably. It is horribly intrusive, however, and the attending physician is almost always able to determine that information. So now, they aren’t trusting doctors to follow the law. I do hate the way “conservative” people think!


AFTERNOON SATANIC CLUBS --

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/an-after-school-satan-club-could-be-coming-to-your-kids-elementary-school/2016/07/30/63f485e6-5427-11e6-88eb-7dda4e2f2aec_story.html

Education
An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid’s elementary school
By Katherine Stewart
July 30, 2016


This very interesting article shows a trend toward the building of what I would like to call a “Progressive Backlash” against the Neo-fascists in this country. So does the skyrocket of Afternoon Satan Club climb to the worldwide fame that Bernie Sanders found himself in this last year or two? I avidly hope so. We of generous turn of mind have given ground to Rightists by having our eyes closed to what was happening on their part.

Until the wild-eyed Militia groups took over Federal land without opposition last year, none of my acquaintances thought anything about them except to laugh at their views. How dangerously complacent. Awareness and caution are not always paranoia. Thank goodness Bernie Sanders stepped in with his many highly astute contributions to the public discussion. The refreshing story of the Satan Clubs, which are following in his path on the social environment, is given in a separate Blog under today’s date. Read it and view the videos.



http://www.npr.org/2016/08/04/488625889/what-changed-trump-s-terrific-primary-run-hits-the-post-convention-skids

Donald Trump Might Be In Real Trouble This Time
RON ELVING
August 4, 2016 9:06 AM ET

Photograph -- Donald Trump has seen controversy before, but his latest round of offenses has reopened a rift in the GOP, and his poll numbers have slipped badly, marking a potential turning point in the campaign. Evan Vucci/AP
POLITICS -- Libertarian Candidates Pitch Themselves As Antidote To Partisanship
Photograph -- Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Ashburn, Va.
POLITICS -- Can This Campaign Be Saved? GOP Scrambles To 'Reset' Trump
POLITICS -- Clinton Highlights Billionaires' Support As A Way To Try To Undermine Trump


Let's take a step back from the news of the past few days and ask a fundamental question: Why does everything suddenly seem different?

Donald Trump, the unsinkable candidate who seemed immune to political consequences while winning Republican presidential primaries month after month, now finds himself with an ailing campaign and a bad case of personal toxicity.

Cable TV and other news media are obsessed with fallout within Team Trump and dissension in the Republican Party. When Trump holds a rally or takes to Twitter, half the nation seems to hold its breath — waiting for him to insult someone, snarl at a baby or maybe punt a puppy off the podium.

Why? Because the contest has changed, the media context has changed — and Trump has been caught in a confluence of damaging stories.

Not the primary anymore

First, the contest has changed from a one-party affair to a national test. The long months of partisan infighting, debates, primaries and caucuses — culminating in the nominating convention — are now over. Much of the system of rewards and incentives, that process ingrained in the various contestants, is now irrelevant or even counterproductive.

The audience has increased both in size and attentiveness. The fall campaign is a far broader canvas, luring more than twice as many voters and a far more diverse mix of the population. As the demands of the audience change, the tenor of the appeals and the manner of the candidates usually does, too.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson needs to get to 15 percent in polls to make it onto the debate stage this fall.

Those who do not "pivot to the general" must deal with the consequences. Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 were all running against incumbents, a tough row to hoe. But all stayed the course that had sustained them in the primaries, believing they would inspire new voters and scramble the electoral map. They lost in the Electoral College by a combined score of 1,537 to 77.

A rush of negative news and a vanished lead

The media context changes, too, in the immediate aftermath of the conventions. The great winnowing is done; the questions of the preceding 18 months have been answered. Focus shifts to a simpler, binary choice.

This new concentration can change the physics of the campaign. In the primary months, the usual laws of gravity did not seem to apply to Trump. The businessman and 70-year-old first-time candidate could say nearly anything about anyone. He could defy the norms of political discourse. Whatever damage he suffered was lost amid his mounting vote totals. In the end, he amassed nearly half the Republican vote — easily a plurality in a huge field of candidates.

He generated controversy wherever he went, yet seemed to thrive on it. Until now. Now suddenly the freewheeling Trump personality that had been a wellspring of success has become a gusher of miscues and offenses. It is as though someone somewhere suddenly found a switch and changed the polarity on the Trump phenomenon from positive to negative overnight.

Ted Cruz, Trump's toughest primary foe, warned that the media were storing up bad stories about Trump to unload on him after he became the nominee. So far it has appeared more as though the media have looked on the everyday Trump with a different lens — while reprising some of the same stories that were first related months ago.

Trump's convention in Cleveland was successful enough. There were awkward moments and rough patches, but the guy who got booed off the stage was not Trump but Cruz. At the end, there was a big audience for Trump's acceptance speech, a respectable bump in the polls and several days of being the front-runner for the fall.

But in the past five days, Trump has seen that lead vanish and become a double-digit deficit in some instances. Hillary Clinton got a boost from her own convention, but it grew with each passing day in August — reflecting the news and the impression that Trump himself was making. Clinton has gone from losing the advantage after the Republican convention, in an average of the national polls, to now holding a consistent lead. That lead has also grown in some state polls.

A different kind of attack

That negative news rush was full of Trump's personal feuds, starting with a Gold Star family whose son, a U.S. Army captain, died in Iraq. The Khans appeared at the Democratic Convention to object to Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Trump and his surrogates struck back at Khizr and Ghazala Khan in highly personal and even slanderous terms, leading to their being featured on countless websites and TV programs.

The Trump counterattack alienated millions, including veterans groups and military figures and Republicans for whom the parents of the fallen are sacrosanct. Trump may have thought that, as Muslims who had denounced him, they were fair game. But it was he who got whistled for being out of bounds.

Rebuked by many top leaders of the GOP, Trump struck back by saying he did not support some of them over their primary opponents. To say this gesture was unprecedented is to understate the shock of it, not to mention the destructive impact. Independence is a virtue widely respected in America. Turning on teammates is something else again.

Trump then salted some of these same wounds by accepting the gift of an actual veteran's Purple Heart medal and saying he'd always wanted one, but joked that he found it easier to get it as a gift. This happened on the same day The New York Times reminded readers of Trump's four student deferments and subsequent medical deferment for "bone spurs" during the Vietnam War.

That was just the beginning

In this same brief stretch, Trump has managed to insult the leading fundraisers of the conservative universe, Charles and David Koch, by saying they only gave to "political puppets." He also claimed to have turned down a meeting with the Kochs, even though it had been they who refused a meeting sought by Trump's own fundraisers.

And speaking of disruption, Trump indicated he did not want to debate Hillary Clinton on this fall's predetermined dates — apparently unaware that these dates had been set by an independent, bipartisan commission 10 months ago. Trump said two of the dates conflicted with NFL football games and claimed to have a letter of protest from the NFL. No such letter had been sent, the NFL said, adding it had no problem with the dates.

Far more serious was Trump's random allegation that someone might be "rigging" the election in November to deny him the White House. Sowing seeds of doubt about the integrity of an election before the fact — and with no evidence — is disruption in yet another form. It does fit Trump's broad narrative for what he is up against in this moment in history, however, so we should expect to hear it often.

Small wonder that some (anonymous) Republicans have told reporters they are discussing a Plan B, or a "Break Glass" contingency plan to replace Trump at the top of their ticket. Suffice it to say nothing of this kind has ever happened in American politics. The Republican National Committee has the authority to choose a new nominee, but only if the convention's choice has died, become incapacitated or voluntarily withdrawn from the race.

Trump has at times been rumored to be ambivalent about his presidential bid. Some believe he ran to prove a point, or to extend his "reality TV star" franchise or otherwise burnish his personal brand. Now that he has the nomination, could he be cooling on the thought of actually becoming a public servant? Does he have misgivings about the role for which he is auditioning?

In all likelihood, Trump would have dealt with any such misgivings long ago, when he first led in Republican opinion polls nearly a year ago — or certainly by the spring of this year, when he became the presumptive nominee.

There is simply no reason to think a man such as Trump would back away from the challenge of a lifetime, ceding the chance to be president to a Republican who would not even be of his own choosing.

Trump clearly believes he can right his ship and recover what he has lost in the polls, as quickly as he lost it. But he needs to do this swiftly, because narratives tend to settle in soon after the conventions.

And right now, the prevailing story line has the greater voting public perceiving Trump through the wrong end of its telescope — a figure no longer larger than life but much reduced, and getting smaller every day.



“Cable TV and other news media are obsessed with fallout within Team Trump and dissension in the Republican Party. When Trump holds a rally or takes to Twitter, half the nation seems to hold its breath — waiting for him to insult someone, snarl at a baby or maybe punt a puppy off the podium. …. The audience has increased both in size and attentiveness. The fall campaign is a far broader canvas, luring more than twice as many voters and a far more diverse mix of the population. …. The businessman and 70-year-old first-time candidate could say nearly anything about anyone. He could defy the norms of political discourse. Whatever damage he suffered was lost amid his mounting vote totals. …. Trump may have thought that, as Muslims who had denounced him, they were fair game. But it was he who got whistled for being out of bounds. …. In this same brief stretch, Trump has managed to insult the leading fundraisers of the conservative universe, Charles and David Koch, by saying they only gave to "political puppets." He also claimed to have turned down a meeting with the Kochs, even though it had been they who refused a meeting sought by Trump's own fundraisers. …. Trump said two of the dates conflicted with NFL football games and claimed to have a letter of protest from the NFL. No such letter had been sent, the NFL said, adding it had no problem with the dates.”


I think at first we all were being taken off guard constantly by first one and then another of his rather bizarre antics. I came to the conclusion that he is not, actually, a serious presidential candidate, but a frustrated standup comedian. A lot of the outrageous things he comes out with are his (misguided) sense of humor. I think the writer is very likely correct in saying that Trump may have thought that – in his circles – an Islamic couple would not garner the empathy of the public, so his personal attacks against them would do him no harm in the polls. People are beginning to see that he, really and truly, is a kind of maniac rather than a boldly outspoken leader. They are getting tired of his “humor” and afraid of what kind of spokesman for the country he can possibly be. I think maybe Hillary has this election in the bag. Of course we have to go out the polls and actually vote. So many people in this country get so caught up in what pollsters are saying that they fail to realize that predictions are not reality yet.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-board-parole-birmingham-church-bomber-thomas-edwin-blanton/

Alabama board denies parole for Birmingham church bomber
AP August 3, 2016, 10:43 AM

18 PHOTOS -- 1963: The year everything happened
Photograph -- Thomas Blanton Jr., being led away by Jefferson County Sheriff's deputies after the former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted on May 1, 2001 for the murder of the four black girls in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. AP
Play VIDEO -- Victims of 1963 church bombing remembered


MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Alabama's parole board decided Wednesday against freeing a one-time Ku Klux Klansman convicted in a church bombing that killed four black girls more than 50 years ago.

The decision to keep Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., 78, imprisoned was met with applause at the hearing. Relatives of three of the slain girls spoke against Blanton's release during the hearing.

"Justice is served," Lisa McNair, sister of bombing victim Denise McNair, said afterward.

Blanton is the last surviving KKK member convicted of murder in the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church.

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for being part of a group of Klansmen who planted a dynamite bomb that exploded outside the church on Sept. 15, 1963. The blast killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia Wesley.

The girls, who were inside the church preparing for worship, died instantly in a hail of bricks and stone that seriously injured Collins' sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph. Their deaths inside a church on a Sunday morning became a symbol worldwide of the depth of racial hatred in the segregated South.

Blanton did not attend the hearing, which lasted about 30 minutes. In Alabama, inmates do not attend such hearings. No one spoke on behalf of his release.

Relatives of all four victims were on hand, and the room was full of people opposing Blanton's parole. Members of the Birmingham NAACP chapter rode to Montgomery on a bus to be there.

Sarah Collins Rudolph, 65, of Birmingham, acknowledged she was nervous about testifying before the board, but added, "I had to come speak for Addie."

The board ordinarily has three members but there's a vacancy. Only two members heard Blanton's case, which came up for automatic review. Board member Cliff Walker said Blanton can seek another review in five years -- the longest possible wait under Alabama law. The board could have allowed him to return as quickly as one year.

Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Blanton on the state charge, had previously said Blanton shouldn't be released since he has never accepted responsibility for the bombing or expressed any remorse for a crime that was aimed at maintaining racial separation at a time when Birmingham's public schools were facing a court order to desegregate.

Long a suspect in the case, Blanton was the second of three people convicted in the bombing. Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, and Bobby Frank Cherry, who was convicted in the bombing in 2002, have both died in prison.

Blanton and Cherry were indicted in 2000 after the FBI reopened an investigation of the bombing. Evidence against Blanton included secret recordings that were made using FBI bugs at his home and in the car of a fellow Klansman turned informant.



I am so glad that this evil man will not be allowed out on parole. If he had been, I would have been furious.