MAY 11, 2018


NEWS AND VIEWS


THE TRUMPITES AND WHAT THEY BELIEVE

WHO ARE THE TRUMP FOLLOWERS AND WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? JUST HOW FAR TO THE RIGHT ARE THEY IN GENERAL? HOW MANY WELL-TO-DO PEOPLE ARE AMONG THEM VERSUS JUST THE POOR TO MIDDLE CLASS WHITES? HOW DO THEY RANK INDIVIDUALLY AS TO ISSUES SUCH AS RACE, ECONOMIC CLASS STATUS BELIEFS, EDUCATION, URBAN VS RURAL LIFE, THEIR RELIGIOUS PRACTICES, THEIR ECONOMIC THEORIES, RESTRICTION OF IMMIGRATION BASED ON NATIONAL ORIGIN, RELIGION AND SKIN COLOR, HUMAN RIGHTS, GUN CONTROL, MALE PRIVILEGE, POLICING AND MILITARY ISSUES, RADICAL RIGHTIST GROUPS SUCH AS MILITIA AND SOVEREIGN CITIZENS, TEA PARTY, WOMEN’S RIGHTS? HAVE ANY RECENT SURVEYS OR SCHOLARLY STUDIES OF THEM AS INDIVIDUALS BEEN DONE? I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY CARE MOST ABOUT AND WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON. SEE THE NEXT FEW NEWS ARTICLES.

THE ORIGIN OF THIS TRAIN OF THOUGHT IS THE CRASS BEHAVIOR BY TWO CLOSE BELIEVERS IN TRUMP’S POLITICAL AND PERSONAL VIEWS RECENTLY; AND I WILL NEVER FORGET DONALD TRUMP’S GROTESQUELY IMITATING A REPORTER WHO HAS A NEUROLOGICAL DISORDER IN FRONT OF THE NEWS CAMERAS. THE MAN ASKED HIM A QUESTION THAT HE DIDN’T LIKE. HE MAY HAVE BEEN BROUGHT UP WITH MONEY, BUT NOT WITH GOOD PARENTAL TEACHING. BY THE WAY, HIS FATHER WAS A MEMBER OF THE KKK IN THE 1920S, AND AS PEOPLE SAY, “THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE.”

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/white-house-aide-jokes-about-mccain-dying/
White House Aide Jokes About McCain Dying
When it comes to the Trump White House, the fish rots from the head down.
DOUG MATACONIS · FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2018 · 4 COMMENTS

As if to double down on the repulsive comments made on Fox Business Network by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney that James Joyner wrote about earlier today, a White House aide reportedly dismissed Senator John McCain’s opposition to Gina Haspel’s nomination to be C.I.A. Director by joking about the fact that he’ll be dead soon:

White House aide Kelly Sadler responded to Sen. John McCain’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director by saying Thursday morning that “he’s dying anyway,” a White House official told CNN.

The official said Sadler, who is in charge of surrogate communications, meant it as a joke, “but it fell flat.”

McCain announced last year that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer, and he issued a statement Wednesday calling on his fellow senators to oppose Gina Haspel, Trump’s nominee for CIA director, whose ties to the use of interrogation methods widely considered torture have drawn significant criticism.

Asked about Sadler’s comment, a White House official said, “We respect Senator McCain’s service to our nation, and he and his family are in our prayers during this difficult time.”

Sadler called the senator’s daughter Meghan McCain on Thursday to apologize for the remark, a source close to the situation told CNN, although it’s unclear what her response was.

The Hill first reported on Sadler’s remark.

McCain called Haspel a “patriot” in his statement in [sic] Wednesday but referenced her record and testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee to implore the Senate to vote down her nomination.

Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing,” McCain’s statement read. “Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying. I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advice and consent and reject this nomination.”

Haspel said in a statement Thursday evening that she has the “utmost respect” for McCain.

“I have the utmost respect for Senator McCain, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which he has approached this nomination process.”

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of John McCain, said of the White House aide’s comment, “Ms. Sadler, may I remind you that John McCain has a lot of friends in the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle. Nobody is laughing in the Senate.”

Sadler’s remark about the Arizona Republican echoed Trump’s remark at the outset of his campaign for president, when he mocked McCain’s time as a prisoner of war by saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”

McCain’s wife had a message of her own for Sadler via Twitter:


Cindy McCain
✔
@cindymccain
@kellysadler45 May I remind you my husband has a family, 7 children and 5 grandchildren.

7:43 PM - May 10, 2018
62.7K
23.3K people are talking about this
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The roots of all of this lie, of course, in McCain’s opposition to Haspel’s nomination, which is rooted in his long-standing opposition to the use of torture by the C.I.A. during the period after the September 11th attacks and his own experiences as a Prisoner of War during the Vietnam War. Just days after Haspel’s nomination was announced, McCain expressed doubts about her nomination and earlier this week issued a statement urging the Senate to reject her nomination. It all comes at a time when McCain is back home in Arizona recovering from both chemotherapy and radiation treatments related to the brain cancer he announced he was diagnosed with last year and from apparently unrelated intestinal surgery. While there have not been any recent updates on McCain’s condition, the Senator has said in the past that his prognosis is poor, and it’s worth noting that the form of cancer that he is dealing with has a high mortality rate, especially in patients of his advanced age.

More recently, McCain has been the subject of a long profile in The New York Times. It has also been reported that McCain was visited by his longtime friend former Vice-President Joe Biden recently and was also visited by another longtime Senate friend, former Senator Joe Lieberman. During that visit, it’s been reported that McCain told Biden that he’s concerned about the future direction of the country and urged his friend to stay involved in politics, possibly a reference to a potential Presidential run on Biden’s part in 2020. Also, McCain’s daughter Meghan visited him in Arizona again last weekend, although one suspects that she has been traveling there quite frequently anyway. Finally, it’s worth noting that McCain had said last year that he hoped to return to Washington in January. That didn’t happen, obviously, and at this point, it’s unclear when, or if, McCain will be able to resume his Senatorial duties.

Obviously, Sadler’s remarks are inexcusable and the fact that she has apparently reached out to Cindy McCain to apologize doesn’t excuse her “joke” or the fact that, according to some reports, several people in the West Wing meeting in question laughed at her bizarre and offensive attempt at humor. In another White House, of course, it’s unlikely that we’d see something like this, but this is yet another example about how Trump’s leadership by example has impacted his whole Administration. With respect to McCain individually, Trump has often been especially horrible. Just weeks after he declared his candidacy, for example, Trump mocked the notion that McCain was a hero by saying that he likes heroes who weren’t captured. Given the controversy that had erupted when Trump first flirted with the idea of running for President regarding Trump’s avoidance of the draft during the same Vietnam War that McCain served in, the comment was particularly galling and was the first of many times during the course of the campaign that Trump would be condemned by many mainstream Republicans for something he said. The animosity only intensified when Trump became President and McCain became one of the few Senators willing to speak out against the President and he has often been a thorn in Trump’s side on legislative matters over the course of the past fifteen months. The most memorable example of that, of course, was late in the summer last year when McCain returned to the Senate after his initial cancer diagnosis to famously deliver a “thumbs down” that led to the defeat of the effort to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act. More recently, McCain has reportedly told friends and colleagues that he feels more liberated to speak out against the leader of his party, and this liberation is no doubt enhanced by the report that McCain has said that he will not run for re-election in 2022 even if he does manage to win his battle with cancer.

In addition to all of that, there’s also Trump’s long history of attacking people in general including Mexicans, Muslims, disabled Americans, and women such as Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina. In addition to all of that, there’s been the Access Hollywood tape, the credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women, and Trump’s comments in the wake of the racist rally in Charlottesville last July. All of this has, quite obviously, set a tone in the White House that has tarnished even the most supposedly honorable people working under the President. For example, when the President came under fire for his appallingly tone deaf remarks to the wife of one of the soldiers killed in Niger last year, Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine General with a previously honorable reputation, took upon himself the task of appearing in the White House Briefing Room to defend the President and attack a Florida Congresswoman with an attack that later turned out to be utterly false. To put it bluntly, this President has basically what can only be called a reverse Midas Effect, everything he touches turns to crap. Ms. Sadler is just the latest pathetic example of that.

About Doug Mataconis
Doug holds a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010. Before joining OTB, he wrote at Below The Beltway, The Liberty Papers, and United Liberty Follow Doug on Twitter | Facebook


TORTURE AS A RECOMMENDED WAY TO INTERROGATE PRISONERS.

THE MOTTO SEEMS TO BE: IF IT WORKS, DO IT. FIRST, THAT’S OFTEN IMMORAL, BUT SECOND, DOES IT REALLY WORK? I’M SURE IT DOES SOMETIMES, BUT THE INFORMATION THE PRISONER GIVES MAY BE UNTRUE, SO WHAT HAVE WE GAINED AS WE BECOME MORE AND MORE INHUMANE? THE UNRELIABILITY OF INFORMATION GAINED UNDER DURESS HAS BEEN AFFIRMED BY AT LEAST ONE MILITARY EXPERT ON INTERROGATION ON THE NEWS SEVERAL YEARS AGO. KIND TREATMENT WORKS BETTER, HE SAID, BY PRODUCING A POSITIVE HUMAN RESPONSE TOWARD THE INTERROGATOR; THOUGH TO A SADIST, IT ISN’T NEARLY AS MUCH FUN AS ABUSE.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17340906/fox-news-mccain-torture-work-songbird-general
Fox Business guest says torture “worked on John McCain.” That’s offensive — and flatly wrong.
What a terrible, no good, very bad take.
By Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com Updated May 10, 2018, 5:44pm EDT

Photograph -- Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney falsely claimed on Fox Business that torture “worked on John McCain.” Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

In the annals of bad TV takes, it’s going to be hard to beat the one offered by a Fox Business guest earlier today: Torture works, and he knows tortures works because it made John McCain cough up sensitive information during the years he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“It worked on John [McCain],” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said during a Thursday appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’”

McInerney, an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, mentioned McCain in a segment about CIA director nominee Gina Haspel. Here’s why: On Wednesday, the senator vowed to vote against her nomination and recommended his colleagues do the same. (Haspel reportedly oversaw the torture of prisoners after 9/11 and the destruction of nearly 100 videotapes documenting some of the CIA’s more brutal interrogation sessions.)

But let’s be clear: Torture didn’t work on McCain — not even close.

Here’s McCain’s account of being tortured in his book Faith of My Fathers: “Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron.”

As Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey pointed out on Twitter, McCain also “refused early release from a prison camp where he was tortured so as not to leave his men behind.”

McInerney didn’t offer any examples of things that McCain purportedly gave up under torture, so It’s unclear what he meant by his reference to the senator and former GOP presidential candidate.


That may be why Fox Business host Charles Payne, who interviewed McInerney, promptly issued a two-tweet apology for failing to challenge the general’s comments.


Charles V Payne
✔
@cvpayne
19h
My Apology to Senator McCain and his Family
“This morning on a show I was hosting, a guest made a very false and derogatory remark about Senator John McCain. At the time, I had the control room in my ear telling me to wrap the segment, and did not hear the comment.


Charles V Payne
✔
@cvpayne
I regret I did not catch this remark, as it should have been challenged. As a proud military veteran and son of a Vietnam Vet these words neither reflect my or the network’s feelings about Senator McCain, or his remarkable service and sacrifice to this country.”
Charles V. Payne

3:00 PM - May 10, 2018
6,459
2,856 people are talking about this
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But perhaps the network needs to apologize for having McInerney on in the first place. This is a man, after all, who falsely insisted that former President Barack Obama wasn’t an American (and that Obama was a secret Muslim).

Here’s how far McInerney once took that argument, per Mother Jones:

In 2010, McInerney filed an affidavit in support of an army officer who was awaiting trial for refusing to obey orders from his commanding officers until Obama produced his long-form birth certificate. McInerney said in the affidavit he has “widespread and legitimate concerns that the President is constitutionally ineligible to hold office.”

It was good of Payne to take responsibility for failing to challenge McInerney’s attacks on McCain, and McInerney himself will address his remarks on Fox at 6 pm Thursday. But it would be even better if Fox had cut its ties with him a long time ago.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said McInereney was a Fox News guest. He was actually a Fox Business guest.


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http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-border-crossers-20180507-story.html
POLITICS
LA TIMES
Children are likely to be separated from parents illegally crossing the border under new Trump administration policy
By JOSEPH TANFANI and CINDY CARCAMO
MAY 07, 2018 | 5:15 PM

All immigrants who cross the border illegally will be charged with a crime under a new "zero tolerance" border enforcement policy, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said Monday, launching a crackdown that could overwhelm already-clogged detention facilities and immigration courts with hundreds of thousands of new cases.

Sessions also said that families who illegally cross the border may be separated after their arrest, with children sent to juvenile shelters while their parents are sent to adult detention facilities. Until now, border agents tried to keep parents and their children at the same detention site.

The new policy is expected to send a flood of deportation cases — and legal challenges — into federal courts. It also could put thousands more immigrants in detention facilities and children in shelters, and is likely to strain an immigration system that has struggled to keep up with a surge in enforcement under President Trump. Until now, individuals apprehended while crossing illegally were often simply bused back over the border without charges. That was especially common for people without criminal records or previous immigration violations.

"This border is not open. Don't come unlawfully…. Make your claim. Wait your turn," Sessions said Monday, speaking to reporters at Border Field State Park, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border near Imperial Beach in San Diego County. "We cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation."

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"If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law," Sessions said earlier Monday in Scottsdale, Ariz. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."

Families seeking asylum and presenting themselves at official U.S. border crossings will be allowed to stay together as they seek protected status, according to a U.S. official familiar with the new policy.

But asylum seekers caught crossing illegally will be charged with a crime and their children sent to refugee shelters, even as agents conduct the legally required interview to evaluate their asylum claims.

Sessions said that no blanket policy would mandate separating all parents from their kids, but acknowledged that such cases would increase under the new rules.

"We don't want to separate families, but we don't want families to enter the border illegally," Sessions said. "We urge them not to do so."

Mexican country music could be heard from the southern side of the border as Sessions made the argument for a no-tolerance approach to border crossers. He spoke near a spot called Friendship Park, dedicated by then-First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971. Back then she stepped across the barbed-wire barrier marking the U.S.-Mexico border, embraced Mexican children and declared, "I hope there won't be a fence here too long."

Immigration activists denounced the new policy to separate parents from children, and said they expected to see it challenged in court. Past court decisions have put severe restrictions on the government's ability to detain children for immigration violations.

"It's clear this administration wants to use families who are fleeing violence as a pawn in a larger strategy to end immigration to the U.S.," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group.

"They're making a decision any parents would make in rescuing their kids," he said. "For this administration to say, 'we will then separate you from your child,' is morally corrupt."

The stepped-up enforcement comes during a documented shift in immigration patterns, with fewer Mexicans crossing the border to find work in the United States, and an uptick in children and families fleeing violence in Central American countries and asking for U.S. asylum.

The Trump administration has called for a change in federal immigration law to close what it terms "loopholes" that allow people who file asylum claims to be released while waiting, sometimes years, for their cases to be heard in the nation's overloaded immigration courts.

For now, the latest iteration in immigration processing will have a dramatic impact on Border Patrol operations along the border and potentially require major new funding from Congress.

So far this fiscal year, Border Patrol officers have detained about 288,000 people. But only about 30,000 of those were charged with a crime for crossing the border, and only about 12,000 were charged with the more serious crime of reentry, which is a felony. The rest were sent back across the border.

Likewise, the administration is trying to push asylum seekers away from dangerous border crossings in the desert and along the Rio Grande and to authorized ports of entry where they can be processed.

But many border stations are ill-equipped to take care of a surge of new cases, said Doris Meissner, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"They are strongly incentivizing serious bottlenecks at the ports of entry, and maybe they're doing that on purpose," she said.

Meissner called the new policy an "overreaction," and said the administration is using a blunt-force prosecution approach to address complicated problems in the asylum system.

Administration officials have described illegal immigration as a growing crisis that requires extraordinary new enforcement measures. The White House has sent National Guard troops to the border, sought a huge surge of Border Patrol officers, and pushed Congress — so far unsuccessfully — to appropriate billions of dollars to build a wall across most of the Southwest border.

The number of border apprehensions more than tripled in March and April, to 101,220, compared with the same two months last year. But the total is generally comparable to recent years and still below the surge of minors that overwhelmed the system in 2013 and far below the levels seen in the 1990s or early 2000s.

The Trump administration is convinced that detaining more border crossers will serve as an effective deterrent. When agents in El Paso started apprehending more families in 2017, the number of illegal crossings dropped by 64%, a Homeland Security official said.

But this kind of high-intensity prosecution approach has been tried before. Since 2005, some U.S. attorney offices in districts near the border have filed charges en masse against all border crossers. The strategy, called Operation Streamline, started in the George W. Bush administration, and immigration authorities have defended it as an effective deterrent.

Judges and immigrant advocates have criticized the program for straining court resources and short-circuiting immigrants' legal protections, while internal watchdogs have questioned whether there is any evidence that the approach is an effective use of resources.

The Justice Department last week announced plans to send 35 additional prosecutors to Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico to help handle the expected surge, along with reassigning 18 immigration judges to speed the progress of asylum claims.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which handles the shelters for migrant children, also is preparing to take in many more cases.

The administration's unhappiness with the current system was reinforced when a caravan of more than 200 asylum seekers from Central America traveled through Mexico and arrived in Tijuana on April 29, drawing angry tweets from President Trump.

"Caravans coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW," he tweeted on April 1. All the people from the caravan were allowed to enter the United States to seek asylum, as the law requires. Despite the caravan's role as a rhetorical foil for Trump, it would not have been affected by the administration's new policy because the migrants in the group entered at an approved port of entry.

Sessions has frequently made a target of California, with its immigrant-friendly policies on "sanctuary" cities. Soon after he started speaking, Sessions was interrupted by a lone protester, Will Johnson of San Diego, who yelled, "We don't want you in our state."

He was answered by Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said the administration was simply enforcing the law.

"I usually don't address hecklers but I will address this one," he said. "If people, like the heckler, don't like what we do, call your congressman to change the law."

Tanfani reported from Washington and Carcamo from San Diego.

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @jtanfani



THIS COMMENTARY SECTION IS JUST MY “VIEWS,” BUT IT COMES FROM A VERY INTERESTING WEBSITE: https://americasvoice.org/trumphatemap/. TAKE A LOOK AT IT.

THIS IS A DAILY INPUT SITE CALLED THE “TRUMP HATE MAP.” THERE ARE OTHER INTERESTING ARTICLES ALSO ON IT, AND OF COURSE THE READER COMMENTS. I DIDN’T SEE ANY REFERENCE TO WHO RUNS THE SITE AND COMPILES ITS’ STATISTICS, SO READ IT WITH A GRAIN OF SALT. THE USE OF LITTLE TRUMP FACES DOTTED ACROSS THE MAP SHOWS, AT LEAST, A LACK OF TOTAL SERIOUSNESS. THIS IS CLEARLY NOT THE NEW YORK TIMES.

THERE ARE SOME SHOCKING NEWS BITS HERE WHICH I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE, AND FROM SOME UNEXPECTED PLACES. THE MOST FREQUENT HATE-RELATED CASES ARE IN THE NORTH EASTERN UNITED STATES, WITH THE SECOND BEING CALIFORNIA, AND ANOTHER SIZEABLE NUMBER IN NORTHWESTERN AFRICA. BOTH US AREAS OF CALIFORNIA AND THE NORTHEASTERN QUADRANT ARE USUALLY CONSIDERED RELATIVELY “LIBERAL.” HOWEVER, IN THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF A WELLSVILLE, NY SOFTBALL DUGOUT SPRAY PAINTED WITH A SWASTIKA FOLLOWED BY THE WORDS, “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.”

ANOTHER SAD STATEMENT I FOUND, AND THIS COMES FROM THE SUPPOSEDLY SANE ONE IN THE TRUMP GROUP, JOHN KELLY, ACCORDING TO AMERICASVOICE.ORG: “‘IMMIGRANTS DON’T HAVE SKILLS;’ [AND] ‘CAN’T ASSIMILATE.’” NO MATTER WHAT THE ELITE THINK, SUCH AS THE BILLIONAIRES, SUCH A STATEMENT IS SO OVERLY BROAD AS TO BE TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. THE PROBLEM IS THAT SUCH THINKING IS THE VERY HEART OF OUR PREJUDICES – JUDGING QUICKLY ON RELATIVELY LITTLE INFORMATION OF ONE OF THE DESIGNATED SCAPEGOATS.

[SEE:https://americasvoice.org/press_releases/icymi-john-kelly-lets-out-his-inner-steve-king-immigrants/.] AS FOR IMMIGRANTS BEING LOW-SKILLED, FIRST, EINSTEIN WAS AN IMMIGRANT. SECOND, THERE ARE TOO MANY AMERICA BORN PEOPLE, WHO DON’T HAVE NEARLY THE LEVEL OF SKILLS AS WE NEED IN OUR CITIZENS, BUT SO FAR WE HAVE ALLOWED THEM TO STAY IN AMERICA – MAYBE BECAUSE WE KNOW THAT WE SHOULD HAVE PUT OUT A GREATER AND MORE RATIONAL EFFORT INTO TEACHING OUR KIDS BETTER. WILL WE ALL, IF WE FAIL IN SOME SKILL OR ANOTHER, BE DEPORTED TO SOME OTHER COUNTRY? JUST LET THEM TRY THAT, AND YOU WILL SEE SPONTANEOUS REBELLIONS POPPING UP ALL ACROSS THIS COUNTRY.

AN ISSUE THAT DOES DISTURB ME IS THAT WE NEED PROTECTION AGAINST DANGEROUS RADICAL GROUPS LIKE NEO-NAZIS FROM OPEN PARTICIPATION AS A POLITICAL FORCE HERE, OR DO WE HAVE SOME FRAMEWORK ON WHICH TO ATTACH BASIC RULES AS TO WHAT WE ALLOW IN THE US? I KNOW, THAT’S AN AREA OF AMERICAN JUSTICE THAT IS TREACHEROUS. EVEN IF WE HAVE TO TWEAK THE CONSTITUTION, IN MY VIEW WE REALLY DO NEED THAT, IT SHOULD BE DONE WITH CAUTION AND ATTENTION TO DETAIL, AND NOT IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF A BIG, BOISTEROUS NEW CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION AS SOME REPUBLICANS HAVE TAKEN TO CALLING FOR. AN EVENT LIKE THAT WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT EXCUSE FOR AN AGGRESSIVE GROUP TO REALLY DAMAGE THE LIVES OF SEGMENTS OF OUR POPULATION IN COMPARISON TO OTHERS – TAKING AWAY THE VOTING RIGHTS OF SOME INCONVENIENT GROUP, FOR INSTANCE, OR THE MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY PROTECTION OF PEOPLE LIKE ME.

WE ARE AT PRESENT IN A SITUATION WHEN WE NEED TO UNSEAT A PRESIDENT WHO IS REALLY UNACCEPTABLE IN MANY WAYS, AND VEERS MUCH TOO FAR OVER TO THE RIGHT POLITICALLY AS WELL. THERE IS NO QUESTION IN MY MIND, PERSONALLY, THAT HE IS COURTING SPECIFICALLY THOSE NEO-NAZI INDIVIDUALS, NO MATTER WHAT POLITICAL VIEWS THEY PROFESS TO BELIEVE. SOME RELIGIOUS GROUPS ARE, IT SEEMS TO ME, THINLY VEILED ALT-RIGHTISTS. IF A POLITICAL PARTY OR THEIR PHILOSOPHY TENDS TO DESTROY A PROTECTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS IN ANY WAY, OR SHOULD A NAZI, FASCIST, ANARCHIST OR OTHER VIOLENT GROUP WHICH MAKES AN ATTEMPT TO OVERCOME OUR GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING BY STEALTH IN THE GUISE OF A NORMAL ELECTION BE BANNED FROM GOVERNMENT SERVICE? I THINK WE NEED TO LOOK AT THAT WITHOUT REMOVING IMPORTANT PARTS OF THE CONSTITUTION.

IT’S TIME, PERHAPS, TO REVISE MORE THAN ONE PART OF THE CONSTITUTION, AND LAWS AS WELL. VAGUENESS OR ANTIQUATED WORDING LEADS TO MISINTERPRETATION, AND FROM THERE TO INJUSTICE. WHEN I HAVE READ PARTS OF THE CONSTITUTION (FEW THOUGH THEY MAY BE) I HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED BY THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WORDING BECAUSE IT SOUNDS ELEGANT, BUT IT COULD BE CLEARER AND MORE INSTRUCTIVE AS WELL IF THAT WERE SIMPLIFIED, CLARIFIED AND BROUGHT UP TO MODERN TIMES. THE PASSAGES ON HOW THE PRESIDENT IS TO BE CHOSEN AND THEN REMOVED FROM OFFICE IF NEED BE, WHICH I READ LAST YEAR WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP TOOK OVER, IS UNCLEAR AND LACKING IN SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS. I WOULD LIKE TO SEE FEWER CLARIFICATIONS BY THE SUPREME COURT, AND FEWER CASES SENT UP TO THE TOP FOR THEIR EXAMINATION, WHICH SHOULD HAPPEN AS THE CONSTITUTION BECOMES MORE MODERNIZED AND READABLE.



THIS STORY GIVES SOME PROOF OF WHAT WE HAVE KNOWN, FOR MONTHS NOW, TO BE TRUE. IT IS A STUDY OF THE FACEBOOK ADS PUBLISHED BY RUSSIAN SOURCES. THEY PURPOSELY TARGET OUR RACIAL DISCORD AS THE EASIEST AND MOST DAMAGING TRIGGER POINT IN THEIR AIM TO CREATE DISORDER HERE.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found-facebook-ads-russians-accused-election-meddling/602319002/
We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Their dominant strategy: Sowing racial discord
Nick Penzenstadler, Brad Heath, Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY Published 7:47 p.m. ET May 11, 2018 | Updated 7:51 p.m. ET May 11, 2018

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings:

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device.

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related sports [sic] rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017.

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Interactive Graphic: Explaining Russia's Facebook campaign aimed at Americans

Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western Democracy by targeting extreme identity groups.

“Effective polarization can happen when you’re promoting the idea that, ‘I like my group, but I don’t like the other group’ and pushing distance between the two extreme sides,” Kim said. “And we know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages that might not be aimed at converting voters, but suppressing turnout and undermining the Democratic process.”

More: Thousands of Facebook ads bought by Russians to fool U.S. voters released by Congress

More: Here's how Russian manipulators were able to target Facebook users

More: Read the special counsel's indictment of the Internet Research Agency

Background: Special counsel indicts Russian nationals for interfering with U.S. elections and political processes

The most prominent ad — with 1.3 million impressions and 73,000 clicks — illustrates how the influence campaign was executed.

A Facebook page called “Back the Badge,” landed on Oct. 19, 2016, following a summer that saw more than 100 Black Lives Matter protests, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in August and protests over the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Keith Lamont Scott in North Carolina.

The information analyzed by the USA TODAY Network shows the Internet Research Agency paid 110,058 rubles, or $1,785, for the Facebook spot. It targeted 20 to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.”

The very next day, the influence operation paid for an ad depicting two black brothers handcuffed in Colorado for “driving while black.” That ad targeted people interested in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and black history. Within minutes, the Russian company targeted the same group with an ad that said “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.”

USC professor Nick Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, says the ad campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed during the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the LA Olympics by faking propaganda from the KKK threatening black athletes.

"Soviet news media always played up U.S. racism, exaggerating the levels of hatred even beyond the horrific levels of the reality in the 1950s," Cull wrote in an email. "It was one reason Eisenhower decided to move on civil rights."

Adam Schiff, the Minority Leader of the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so that academics could study both the intention and breadth of the targeting.

“These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society or race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said in an interview with USA TODAY Network. “Americans should take away that the Russians perceive these divisions as vulnerabilities and to a degree can be exploited by a sophisticated campaign.”

A federal grand jury in February indicted 13 individuals accused of working for the Internet Research Agency to produce the ads. The charges related to meddling in the 2016 election, the only election interference case Mueller's office has filed so far.

The indictment included emails from the Russian company's employees that left no doubt that their objectives were “to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” This effort “included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment states.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined comment on the ads this week. An attorney for two of the companies indicted by Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. One of the companies, Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, entered a not-guilty plea on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in D.C.

The USA TODAY Network analysis found that Russians effort first used a raft of viral memes referencing banal American pop culture, like Spongebob Squarepants and Pokémon, to apparently build support behind legitimate-looking connections before deploying the racially-tinged spots.

Hundreds of ads mixed race and policing, with many mimicking Black Lives Matter activists that melded real news events with accusations of abuse by white officers.

That type of subversion only hurts legitimate efforts to calm tensions over policing and hate crimes, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Johnson said the Russian ads likely helped to fuel “hateful, xenophobic rhetoric” throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.

“When you’re stoking fear to get a negative action directed at a targeted population based on race, and when a foreign nation uses that fear to subvert and undermine democracy, that’s become a serious problem,” Johnson said. “It’s a warning for technology companies and corporations that private citizens have entrusted with their privacy to receive factual information.”

It’s hard to measure precise impact of the campaign targeting police and their families, but it certainly didn’t help, said Jim Pasco, senior adviser to the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union.

"There is absolutely no doubt that these ad placements further inflamed tensions in already volatile and already sensitive situations at critical times," Pasco said.

The tech tools have changed, but the themes of disruption have not, said Bret Schafer of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks activity of Russia-linked social media bots and trolls.

Social media is an effective way to target wedge issues because of the ability to micro-target ads, sending messages to confederate flag supporters at the same time as Black Lives Matter sympathizers to stoke divisions, he said.

“They are stirring up the racial pot, while then trying to connect with minority groups and saying: Look at how racist the content is online. They don’t really have to do that because the content online is racist without the Russians, to be very clear,” Schafer said.

He added that it's hard to measure how effective the campaigns were in general. Some of the ads "completely bombed," based on interactions. But stoking racial fears and tensions was often effective.

"Some of the most racist ads put out got the highest levels of engagement,” Schafer said. “It seems that when their messaging went to the extreme on some of these issues, it actually landed the hardest punch.

“If they hit 10% of the time, it's still effective for them,” Schafer said.

Contributing: Jai Agnish, The Bergen (N.J.) Record; Stacey Barchenger, Asbury (N.J.) Park Press, Natalie Alison, The Tennessean; Dave Boucher, The Tennessean; Kevin Crowe; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Algernon D’Ammassa, The Deming (N.M.) Headlight; Mike Ellis, Anderson Independent Mail; Stacie Galang, Ventura County Star; Greg Holman, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader; Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY; John Kelly, USA TODAY; Ledyard King, USA TODAY; Laura Mandaro, USA TODAY; John Moses, Farmington (N.M) Daily-Times; Tovah Olsen, Lansing State Journal; Alex Ptachick, USA TODAY; Steve Reilly, USA TODAY; Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press; Mariah Timms, (Murfreesboro, Tenn.) Daily News Journal; Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY; Dana Williams, Pacific Daily News (Guam); Anna Wolfe, Jackson (Miss.) Clarion Ledger; Amy Wu, Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal.