Showing posts with label political violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political violence. Show all posts
Oct 28, 2024
Aug 28, 2024
Aug 9, 2024
The Real Inside Job
At his "news conference" yesterday, Trump again claimed Jan6 was a peaceful protest where no one was killed.
Trump to blame for death of woman trampled in Capitol riot, family member says
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The brother-in-law of a woman killed during Wednesday's assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob seeking to overturn President Donald Trump's election loss said he blames Trump for the riot, and has joined calls for him to be removed from office.
Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old resident of Kennesaw, Georgia, was one of four civilians who died in the rioting, according to Washington, DC police. A Capitol Police officer also died from injuries in the melee.
Police did not disclose the cause of Boyland's death.
However, Justin Winchell, a friend who accompanied Boyland to a Trump rally near the White House and marched with her to the Capitol, told Atlanta CBS affiliate WGCL that she was trampled to death in a massive crowd surge when protesters clashed with Capitol Police.
"I got my arm underneath her, that was pulling her out - pulling her out - and then another guy fell on top of her and another guy was just walking" over her, he said. "I mean, there was people crushed."
Boyland's brother-in-law, Justin Cave, told Atlanta media that his wife, Boyland's sister, had tried to persuade her not to attend the Trump rally in Washington.
Boyland was "passionate about her beliefs" and support of Trump, and the family was grieving for others killed and injured in the rioting, he told a local Fox television reporter.
"I've never tried to be a political person, but it's my own personal belief that the president's words incited a riot that killed four of his biggest fans last night and I believe that we should invoke the 25th Amendment at this time," Cave said.
 |
| Roseanne Boyland |
Jul 21, 2024
The Shooters
They did a study of attempted assassinations between 1949 and 1996, and found there's no good solid profile for people who end up going after a president or other public figure / politician.
In broad terms:
A 20-year-old’s perplexing place in the catalogue of American gunmen
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who used a gun purchased by his father after the Sandy Hook massacre, evokes the profile of a mass shooter. Instead he fired at a former president.
In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun sales in America exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the country’s most infamous killers.
Millions of Americans rushed to stock up, and among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son was also in elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and, according to authorities, fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d once given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was, according to people who knew him, not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class, Bethel Park neighborhood. He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation. Why he pulled the trigger, investigators still don’t know or, at least, have yet to say publicly.
Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.
It’s important for investigators to understand what leads to any killing, but it’s essential in this case, at this moment, when some fear the country’s political fissures could lead to more bloodshed, said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
“If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,” Engel said. “It’s important that we know whether or not we need to worry about political violence, more than any other violence.”
Three decades ago, the U.S. Secret Service set out to analyze 83 actual or would-be assassins who had acted between 1949 and 1996, eventually publishing a report intended to help law enforcement better understand, and thwart, these attacks.
By study’s end, the researchers had come to a stark conclusion: “There are no accurate — or useful — descriptive, demographic, or psychological ‘profiles’ of American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers.”
Crooks conforms with some of the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In other ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students at the time. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns, and only one in four traveled elsewhere in their state, or one beside it, in pursuit of their target. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
And then there are the mass killers Crooks conjures. At a briefing with lawmakers, law enforcement officials shared that Crooks had researched Oxford High shooter Ethan Crumbley as well as his mother and father. Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents of a mass shooter ever convicted of homicide. In a rampage that ended the lives of four schoolmates in 2021, Crumbley, like Crooks, used a firearm that had been purchased by his father.
Crooks parallels the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, Adam Lanza, in several obvious ways. Besides their ages, both were gaunt and withdrawn, with limited social circles. Both grew up in homes stocked with firearms and had a clear interest in them: Lanza, who aspired to become a Marine, studied guns and fired them with his mother at a shooting range; Crooks, who, investigators and reporters have learned, belonged to a shooting club and died in a T-shirt adorned with the logo of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to guns, had tried out for his high school rifle team but did not make it because he was a poor marksman. Both 20-year-olds showed signs of rising distress — Crooks researched major depressive disorder on his phone, lawmakers were told — before their violent acts. And Lanza, too, committed his assault with a parent’s semiautomatic rifle.
But the similarities end there, said Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.” With crude explosive devices packed into his car, Crooks traveled to a rally an hour from his home and took aim at a 78-year-old former president, grazing him, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore and gravely wounding two other spectators. In Newtown, Conn., Lanza killed his mother before returning to a school he’d once attended and gunning down six staff members and 20 first-graders.
Their personal lives diverge as well. When Langman assesses young shooters, he consistently finds that they faltered in key “life domains”: education, employment, intimacy, family and social network.
“If you look at Lanza,” Langman said, “he was failing in, essentially, all five of those domains.”
Lanza, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, struggled to function in classes, instead attending home school through much of his teens. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and was especially sensitive to light and sound. He stopped speaking to his father two years before the shooting and communicated with his mother, with whom he lived, through email. He was obsessed with death, compiling a detailed spreadsheet of 400 people who’d committed various acts of violence.
Crooks, Langman said, appeared to have been succeeding in several of those life domains.
He worked at a nursing home and, after graduating from community college with an associate’s degree in engineering science, planned to attend Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh this fall. It’s unclear whether he dated or what his relationship was with his parents — both licensed professional counselors — but he still lived with them. Those who knew him said that, at least in high school, he maintained a small but consistent group of friends.
“This is not a case of someone who’s failed in everything and feels like he’s a loser, a nobody, and the only thing he can do with his life is go out in a blaze of glory,” Langman said.
Still, he cautioned, it’s early in the investigation. Langman recalled the case of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at Pulse nightclub in Florida. A cursory look at Mateen would have suggested that he also led a relatively successful life. He had a wife and child and worked as a security guard.
“People in those situations are not supposed to throw it all away, because it’s too much to live for, but he did,” Langman said. “When you see that, then you have to really look inside the man. Not look at the externals, but look at the internals.”
That look, Langman said, revealed a psychopath.
Mateen beat his wife, she later alleged, and while he did hold a job, he failed in his aspiration to make a career in law enforcement, at least in part because of his preoccupation with violence.
Who Crooks really was has yet to be revealed, but that doesn’t mean it never will. After the Sandy Hook shooting, many people concluded that Lanza had left behind no online footprint.
“It turned out not to be true at all,” Langman said. “He covered his tracks very well.”
So well, in fact, that six hours of audio Lanza recorded wasn’t discovered on YouTube until 2021 — nine years after his death.
And yet, what drove him to such horrific violence remains unknown.
Despite public perception, assassins’ motives can be equally difficult to flesh out.
“When the first crack of the bullet is heard, aimed at a political figure, it’s natural for us to presume, logical even, that this is politically motivated,” said Engel, the presidential historian.
That, he added, is often not the case.
In 1881, President James Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau, who was delusional, felt slighted over a job he didn’t get. Nearly a century later, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald Ford, at least in part to win the approval of cult leader Charles Manson.
Video from March 30, 1981 shows an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and highlights former press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head. (Video: Reuters)
“I’m still not sure that we have a great grasp of what was motivating Lee Harvey Oswald,” Engel said of President John F. Kennedy’s killer. “And of course, most famously, John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan, did it basically to impress a girl” — the actress Jodie Foster.
Crooks, it appears, wasn’t only interested in Trump. On his phone, investigators found images of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family. Along with the rally in Butler, Crooks had looked up information on August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Those disparate inquiries, experts say, suggest that Crooks may have largely been driven by a desire for attention and chose his target out of convenience.
“This is a person likely trying to make headlines, going out in a final act,” said Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project. “This is the thing that they’re going to be seen for.”
Perhaps no school shooter motivated by a quest for fame received more of it than 18-year-old Eric Harris, who, along with a friend, Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people at Columbine High in Colorado in 1999.
“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” Harris once wrote. Propelled by intense media coverage of his image, backstory and demented world view, Harris’s persona has inspired dozens of gunmen in the 25 years since, including Lanza.
Over the past decade, public mass shooters have won far less notoriety as their numbers have multiplied. Even some of the deadliest killers — the ones at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., and the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, for example — are not household names.
In a single week, Crooks’s name has appeared in thousands of headlines as his image spread across the globe. Peterson fears that other disillusioned fame-seekers who once would have turned to a different sort of violence may now be emboldened to attempt this kind.
“It has changed the course of the political conversation. It’s having ripple effects. It’s actually changing politics, and potentially the election in some way,” she said. “So, if one 20-year-old kid with an AR-15 can pull that off, that is something that’s scary.”
Peterson also noted there is only one commonality among all isolated, troubled young men who eventually become shooters, and America has struggled to address it since long before Crooks’s father bought that rifle 11 years ago: their access to a gun.
- 86% were men
- 77% were white
- More than half were single
- 60% had no kids
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who used a gun purchased by his father after the Sandy Hook massacre, evokes the profile of a mass shooter. Instead he fired at a former president.
In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun sales in America exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the country’s most infamous killers.
Millions of Americans rushed to stock up, and among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son was also in elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and, according to authorities, fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d once given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was, according to people who knew him, not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class, Bethel Park neighborhood. He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation. Why he pulled the trigger, investigators still don’t know or, at least, have yet to say publicly.
Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.
It’s important for investigators to understand what leads to any killing, but it’s essential in this case, at this moment, when some fear the country’s political fissures could lead to more bloodshed, said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
“If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,” Engel said. “It’s important that we know whether or not we need to worry about political violence, more than any other violence.”
Three decades ago, the U.S. Secret Service set out to analyze 83 actual or would-be assassins who had acted between 1949 and 1996, eventually publishing a report intended to help law enforcement better understand, and thwart, these attacks.
By study’s end, the researchers had come to a stark conclusion: “There are no accurate — or useful — descriptive, demographic, or psychological ‘profiles’ of American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers.”
Crooks conforms with some of the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In other ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students at the time. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns, and only one in four traveled elsewhere in their state, or one beside it, in pursuit of their target. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
And then there are the mass killers Crooks conjures. At a briefing with lawmakers, law enforcement officials shared that Crooks had researched Oxford High shooter Ethan Crumbley as well as his mother and father. Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents of a mass shooter ever convicted of homicide. In a rampage that ended the lives of four schoolmates in 2021, Crumbley, like Crooks, used a firearm that had been purchased by his father.
Crooks parallels the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, Adam Lanza, in several obvious ways. Besides their ages, both were gaunt and withdrawn, with limited social circles. Both grew up in homes stocked with firearms and had a clear interest in them: Lanza, who aspired to become a Marine, studied guns and fired them with his mother at a shooting range; Crooks, who, investigators and reporters have learned, belonged to a shooting club and died in a T-shirt adorned with the logo of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to guns, had tried out for his high school rifle team but did not make it because he was a poor marksman. Both 20-year-olds showed signs of rising distress — Crooks researched major depressive disorder on his phone, lawmakers were told — before their violent acts. And Lanza, too, committed his assault with a parent’s semiautomatic rifle.
But the similarities end there, said Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.” With crude explosive devices packed into his car, Crooks traveled to a rally an hour from his home and took aim at a 78-year-old former president, grazing him, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore and gravely wounding two other spectators. In Newtown, Conn., Lanza killed his mother before returning to a school he’d once attended and gunning down six staff members and 20 first-graders.
Their personal lives diverge as well. When Langman assesses young shooters, he consistently finds that they faltered in key “life domains”: education, employment, intimacy, family and social network.
“If you look at Lanza,” Langman said, “he was failing in, essentially, all five of those domains.”
Lanza, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, struggled to function in classes, instead attending home school through much of his teens. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and was especially sensitive to light and sound. He stopped speaking to his father two years before the shooting and communicated with his mother, with whom he lived, through email. He was obsessed with death, compiling a detailed spreadsheet of 400 people who’d committed various acts of violence.
Crooks, Langman said, appeared to have been succeeding in several of those life domains.
He worked at a nursing home and, after graduating from community college with an associate’s degree in engineering science, planned to attend Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh this fall. It’s unclear whether he dated or what his relationship was with his parents — both licensed professional counselors — but he still lived with them. Those who knew him said that, at least in high school, he maintained a small but consistent group of friends.
“This is not a case of someone who’s failed in everything and feels like he’s a loser, a nobody, and the only thing he can do with his life is go out in a blaze of glory,” Langman said.
Still, he cautioned, it’s early in the investigation. Langman recalled the case of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at Pulse nightclub in Florida. A cursory look at Mateen would have suggested that he also led a relatively successful life. He had a wife and child and worked as a security guard.
“People in those situations are not supposed to throw it all away, because it’s too much to live for, but he did,” Langman said. “When you see that, then you have to really look inside the man. Not look at the externals, but look at the internals.”
That look, Langman said, revealed a psychopath.
Mateen beat his wife, she later alleged, and while he did hold a job, he failed in his aspiration to make a career in law enforcement, at least in part because of his preoccupation with violence.
Who Crooks really was has yet to be revealed, but that doesn’t mean it never will. After the Sandy Hook shooting, many people concluded that Lanza had left behind no online footprint.
“It turned out not to be true at all,” Langman said. “He covered his tracks very well.”
So well, in fact, that six hours of audio Lanza recorded wasn’t discovered on YouTube until 2021 — nine years after his death.
And yet, what drove him to such horrific violence remains unknown.
Despite public perception, assassins’ motives can be equally difficult to flesh out.
“When the first crack of the bullet is heard, aimed at a political figure, it’s natural for us to presume, logical even, that this is politically motivated,” said Engel, the presidential historian.
That, he added, is often not the case.
In 1881, President James Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau, who was delusional, felt slighted over a job he didn’t get. Nearly a century later, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald Ford, at least in part to win the approval of cult leader Charles Manson.
Video from March 30, 1981 shows an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and highlights former press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head. (Video: Reuters)
“I’m still not sure that we have a great grasp of what was motivating Lee Harvey Oswald,” Engel said of President John F. Kennedy’s killer. “And of course, most famously, John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan, did it basically to impress a girl” — the actress Jodie Foster.
Crooks, it appears, wasn’t only interested in Trump. On his phone, investigators found images of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family. Along with the rally in Butler, Crooks had looked up information on August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Those disparate inquiries, experts say, suggest that Crooks may have largely been driven by a desire for attention and chose his target out of convenience.
“This is a person likely trying to make headlines, going out in a final act,” said Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project. “This is the thing that they’re going to be seen for.”
Perhaps no school shooter motivated by a quest for fame received more of it than 18-year-old Eric Harris, who, along with a friend, Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people at Columbine High in Colorado in 1999.
“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” Harris once wrote. Propelled by intense media coverage of his image, backstory and demented world view, Harris’s persona has inspired dozens of gunmen in the 25 years since, including Lanza.
Over the past decade, public mass shooters have won far less notoriety as their numbers have multiplied. Even some of the deadliest killers — the ones at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., and the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, for example — are not household names.
In a single week, Crooks’s name has appeared in thousands of headlines as his image spread across the globe. Peterson fears that other disillusioned fame-seekers who once would have turned to a different sort of violence may now be emboldened to attempt this kind.
“It has changed the course of the political conversation. It’s having ripple effects. It’s actually changing politics, and potentially the election in some way,” she said. “So, if one 20-year-old kid with an AR-15 can pull that off, that is something that’s scary.”
Peterson also noted there is only one commonality among all isolated, troubled young men who eventually become shooters, and America has struggled to address it since long before Crooks’s father bought that rifle 11 years ago: their access to a gun.
A crime can happen only when these three criteria are met:
- Motive
- Opportunity
- Means
Take a away any one of those, and there is no crime.
Guns are the Means in the commission of gun crimes. And part of me can't believe that even has to be said. But this is America - so, yeah.
Jul 16, 2024
Out Of The Rifle Muzzle Of Babes
We have a kid who was bullied, and I'm fairly sure that was a contributing factor, even though it's not possible to know to what extent. And while we're never going to learn exactly what was going on with him - and at the risk of projecting my own thoughts onto him - it's not unreasonable to think that maybe he recognized what a total fraud Trump is, and what he wanted to do was to show the MAGA faithful that Trump is not the friend he's pretending to be, and so he needs to be rejected by a "real conservative" with all the fury and violence that Trump himself is bringing to bear on the people he says he wants to help.
It's also possible that the shooter needed to show his tormentors that he could strike back at them by taking down what he thought was the model for their shitty behavior towards him.
I don't know. I'm guessing.
So, on to the RNC in Milwaukee, where we see a NYC billionaire - backed by other billionaires - supported by a large group of billionaire-funded radical wingnut think tanks - who has just announced that his choice for VP (JD Vance) is a Yale Law grad, who worked in Venture Capital, and who married a fellow Yale grad working as a litigator.
Taken together, how is all that not the "elites" that MAGA is constantly whining about?
WaPo takes a swipe at profiling Vance:
J.D. Vance pick unnerves GOP’s business elite, thrills populists
The Ohio senator leads a GOP faction sharply breaking with party ideology on free markets, trade and other policies
Former president Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee reflects the ascendancy of the party’s populist economic wing — and the choice is alarming traditional conservative policymakers and elite donors who opposed the pick.
Vance has suggested a break with the Republican Party’s economic orthodoxy of the last several decades on a range of policy issues, including unions, antitrust, trade and taxes, even making comments that appear at odds with Trump, who already scrambled the party’s ideology.
The first-term senator has embraced a more active role for government intervention in the economy than most Republicans, emerging as a leader of a minority faction among GOP senators that also includes Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.). Vance has praised President Biden’s antitrust crusader at the Federal Trade Commission, called for a higher minimum wage and even once called for raising taxes on corporations — all positions anathema to conservatives. The departure is particularly stark compared with the vice president of Trump’s first term, Mike Pence, who branded himself as an adherent of Ronald Reagan by embodying GOP orthodoxy on issues ranging from deficits to taxes, or former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, another GOP vice-presidential nominee known for his free-market orthodoxy.
“It’s clear to most leaders of the party that the future will be the Vances, the Hawleys and the Rubios — to have one of them be on the ticket is a very significant marker, or in some ways validation, of the direction the Republican Party is now heading on key economic issues,” said Oren Cass, a Vance ally and president of American Compass, a think tank closely tied to the economic populists in the GOP. “Vance articulates a very clear perspective on the failure of what he’ll call the ‘market fundamentalism’ of the GOP — the consensus economic policy of the last few decades.”
“It’s clear to most leaders of the party that the future will be the Vances, the Hawleys and the Rubios — to have one of them be on the ticket is a very significant marker, or in some ways validation, of the direction the Republican Party is now heading on key economic issues,” said Oren Cass, a Vance ally and president of American Compass, a think tank closely tied to the economic populists in the GOP. “Vance articulates a very clear perspective on the failure of what he’ll call the ‘market fundamentalism’ of the GOP — the consensus economic policy of the last few decades.”
Vance’s predecessor, former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), was also viewed as closely allied with the party’s traditional GOP policymakers.
“The emergence of Trump has caused a populist, aggressive side of the GOP to split off on economics, and Vance is one of the leaders of that populist caucus,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to Portman and is now at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “Trump is much more economically populist, anti-free trade than traditional Republicans, and Vance has pushed hard to support this new populist economics in the GOP.”
Vance’s rise has rankled some GOP elites: Many top party donors opposed the pick, including Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire president of the hedge fund Citadel, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In a statement, Griffin said Trump had “many good choices for Vice President, and I appreciate the thoughtful deliberation of the President and his team.”
Pence is now tied to a conservative think tank working to counter the influence of Vance and his allies on economic policy. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was also opposed to Vance, pushing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who espouses more traditional Republican economic views, according to two other people with knowledge of the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. (Murdoch’s preference for Burgum and opposition to Vance was first reported by NOTUS.)
Alarm over Vance’s connection to Cass’s American Compass group and support for FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has spread among top business executives and donors, said one senior business figure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid opinions. Vance said earlier this year that Khan is “doing a pretty good job,” citing the FTC crackdown on tech giants.
“He has a lot of unconventional views on the economic front that run contrary to a lot of things conservative Republicans have traditionally stood for,” said one GOP strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations, in an interview before the selection was announced. “Major donors and business leaders will be dismayed if he’s the vice-presidential pick.”
Despite those differences, Vance is now one of the leaders of a party firmly committed to many tenets of traditional free market ideology. Deregulation of businesses, cutting taxes, reducing federal spending on social programs, limiting the power of the U.S. government — all are key priorities not just of the GOP overall but of Trump specifically.
Trump, for instance, has called for extending the GOP’s 2017 tax law, which sharply reduced corporate and estate taxes and was heavily criticized as a giveaway to the rich. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated middle-income taxpayers would save $900 on average from the law in 2025, compared to an estimated $61,000 saved by the average taxpayer in the top 1 percent that year.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, which pushes lower taxes, said Vance had signed his organization’s pledge to not support tax increases.
“He’s a Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump tax cut supporter — he’s made that clear every time he’s spoken about the issue,” Norquist said. “People sometimes point to him because he did the ‘I’m from Appalachia thing,’ as if that means he’d be open to the populist politics.”
Democrats also say the break represented by the new GOP vanguard is overstated. Vance may nod in a more populist direction, but is likely to march in lockstep behind a Trump agenda heavily favored by big business groups, they say. Vance has not yet backed anywhere near the scale of government intervention Democrats say is necessary to deal with numerous crises facing families — child care, health care, housing and more. Vance opposed Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which devoted hundreds billions of dollars in clean energy subsidies to revive domestic manufacturing. Some top donors may oppose his ascension, but Vance has long been tied to GOP megadonor and billionaire Peter Thiel.
“What they’re trying to do is tap into white working-class cultural and social signifiers, while doing as little as possible to actually reduce incomes at the top and actually redistribute them down. It’s a delicate game they play,” said Matt Bruenig, co-founder of the People’s Policy Project, which advances left-wing policies. “Obviously, it’s going to miss the welfare state, it’s going to miss tax-based redistribution — these things that are essential to creating an egalitarian society.”
The shifts from traditional GOP rhetoric are clear on some issues, though.
In March 2017, Vance said he found “the Democratic Party is actually the rational party when it comes to housing policy.”
In February 2020, Vance criticized “right-to-work” policies, favored by conservatives, that sharply curtail the ability of unions to organize.
In April 2021, after corporate leaders discussed how to respond to GOP changes in state voting laws, Vance said on the social media site then known as Twitter: “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing.”
Last year, Vance criticized GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s proposals to reform Social Security, which Vance characterized as an attempt to “cut Social Security so she can send more cash to Ukraine.”
Though he worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Vance’s rhetoric about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy has been particularly striking for a Republican.
“Our economy is based on consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth,” he wrote in 2020 for the American Mind. “For two decades, while America has consumed much and made little, there has been no better industry than moving fake currency from one location to another.”
Vance has joined with Rubio and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) to call for government intervention to revitalize the U.S. defense industrial base. Asked about Trump’s plan to impose 10 percent tariffs on all imports, a measure even many Republicans fear would prove disruptive to the global economy, Vance defended “broad based tariffs” and said: “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.”
Saurabh Sharma, president of American Moment, a Trump-aligned conservative group focused on training congressional and presidential staffers, also pointed to Vance’s stances on immigration and foreign policy. Vance has strongly criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine, in opposition to more traditional Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and argued for a tougher crackdown on immigrants than even most GOP lawmakers support.
“Senator Vance took the revolution in economic orthodoxy President Trump brought to the party,” Sharma said, “and became its foremost champion in the Senate.”
“The emergence of Trump has caused a populist, aggressive side of the GOP to split off on economics, and Vance is one of the leaders of that populist caucus,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to Portman and is now at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “Trump is much more economically populist, anti-free trade than traditional Republicans, and Vance has pushed hard to support this new populist economics in the GOP.”
Vance’s rise has rankled some GOP elites: Many top party donors opposed the pick, including Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire president of the hedge fund Citadel, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In a statement, Griffin said Trump had “many good choices for Vice President, and I appreciate the thoughtful deliberation of the President and his team.”
Pence is now tied to a conservative think tank working to counter the influence of Vance and his allies on economic policy. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was also opposed to Vance, pushing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who espouses more traditional Republican economic views, according to two other people with knowledge of the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. (Murdoch’s preference for Burgum and opposition to Vance was first reported by NOTUS.)
Alarm over Vance’s connection to Cass’s American Compass group and support for FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has spread among top business executives and donors, said one senior business figure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid opinions. Vance said earlier this year that Khan is “doing a pretty good job,” citing the FTC crackdown on tech giants.
“He has a lot of unconventional views on the economic front that run contrary to a lot of things conservative Republicans have traditionally stood for,” said one GOP strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations, in an interview before the selection was announced. “Major donors and business leaders will be dismayed if he’s the vice-presidential pick.”
Despite those differences, Vance is now one of the leaders of a party firmly committed to many tenets of traditional free market ideology. Deregulation of businesses, cutting taxes, reducing federal spending on social programs, limiting the power of the U.S. government — all are key priorities not just of the GOP overall but of Trump specifically.
Trump, for instance, has called for extending the GOP’s 2017 tax law, which sharply reduced corporate and estate taxes and was heavily criticized as a giveaway to the rich. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated middle-income taxpayers would save $900 on average from the law in 2025, compared to an estimated $61,000 saved by the average taxpayer in the top 1 percent that year.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, which pushes lower taxes, said Vance had signed his organization’s pledge to not support tax increases.
“He’s a Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump tax cut supporter — he’s made that clear every time he’s spoken about the issue,” Norquist said. “People sometimes point to him because he did the ‘I’m from Appalachia thing,’ as if that means he’d be open to the populist politics.”
Democrats also say the break represented by the new GOP vanguard is overstated. Vance may nod in a more populist direction, but is likely to march in lockstep behind a Trump agenda heavily favored by big business groups, they say. Vance has not yet backed anywhere near the scale of government intervention Democrats say is necessary to deal with numerous crises facing families — child care, health care, housing and more. Vance opposed Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which devoted hundreds billions of dollars in clean energy subsidies to revive domestic manufacturing. Some top donors may oppose his ascension, but Vance has long been tied to GOP megadonor and billionaire Peter Thiel.
“What they’re trying to do is tap into white working-class cultural and social signifiers, while doing as little as possible to actually reduce incomes at the top and actually redistribute them down. It’s a delicate game they play,” said Matt Bruenig, co-founder of the People’s Policy Project, which advances left-wing policies. “Obviously, it’s going to miss the welfare state, it’s going to miss tax-based redistribution — these things that are essential to creating an egalitarian society.”
The shifts from traditional GOP rhetoric are clear on some issues, though.
In March 2017, Vance said he found “the Democratic Party is actually the rational party when it comes to housing policy.”
In February 2020, Vance criticized “right-to-work” policies, favored by conservatives, that sharply curtail the ability of unions to organize.
In April 2021, after corporate leaders discussed how to respond to GOP changes in state voting laws, Vance said on the social media site then known as Twitter: “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing.”
Last year, Vance criticized GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s proposals to reform Social Security, which Vance characterized as an attempt to “cut Social Security so she can send more cash to Ukraine.”
Though he worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Vance’s rhetoric about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy has been particularly striking for a Republican.
“Our economy is based on consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth,” he wrote in 2020 for the American Mind. “For two decades, while America has consumed much and made little, there has been no better industry than moving fake currency from one location to another.”
Vance has joined with Rubio and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) to call for government intervention to revitalize the U.S. defense industrial base. Asked about Trump’s plan to impose 10 percent tariffs on all imports, a measure even many Republicans fear would prove disruptive to the global economy, Vance defended “broad based tariffs” and said: “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.”
Saurabh Sharma, president of American Moment, a Trump-aligned conservative group focused on training congressional and presidential staffers, also pointed to Vance’s stances on immigration and foreign policy. Vance has strongly criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine, in opposition to more traditional Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and argued for a tougher crackdown on immigrants than even most GOP lawmakers support.
“Senator Vance took the revolution in economic orthodoxy President Trump brought to the party,” Sharma said, “and became its foremost champion in the Senate.”
Jul 14, 2024
Hoo Boy
Say what? Is she telling us we should all be up
on a rooftop somewhere
trying to shoot Trump's ears off?
This confuses me.
Tit For Tat
On August 3, 2019, some Texas dickhead - having claimed enmity for immigrants because of the "Hispanic invasion at our southern border", and praising the anti-Muslim asshole who killed 51 in Christchurch NZ 5 months earlier - killed 23 at a Walmart in El Paso.
On October 28, 2022, a wingnut broke into Nancy Pelosi's house, and finding that she wasn't home, proceeded to beat her husband Paul with a hammer.
And on, and on, and on.
So I'm wondering if yesterday's assassination attempt makes us even.
But no. Do you wanna know how really bad it is? Think about how the guy who shoot at Trump was a registered Republican, wearing a wingnut t-shirt, as he tried to kill the leader of his own cult.
That's one take on it. And of course, it's not likely to stick, because the wingnut conspiracy mill is spinning up, and I imagine we're about to see all manner of wild shit thrown into the mix.
Jul 13, 2024
Fuck This Shit
The shooter is dead, one spectator is dead, and at least two others (at this writing) are seriously wounded.
I will not mourn the passing of the jerk who fired the shots. I won't celebrate his extermination, but I'm not sorry to see him gone.
This seems like a pretty good time to say something like what Biden said an hour or two ago - ie: This sucks and we need to stop doing this kinda shit.
But we're dealing with Donald Trump here, so absolutely nothing is out of bounds when it comes to trying to cash in on anything that happens.
And of course, we can count on the Press Poodles to reward his "fighting spirit" - because that's exactly what they're doing right now, as I listen to the coverage.
Now the fuckwads on MSNBC are doubling down of their 2016 playbook - "two deeply flawed candidates, who are fiercely hated outside of their own base of loyal voters, and blah blah blah".
And the kicker - dickhead Don Jr couldn't resist fanning the flames, blaming "the radical left...".
“I just spoke to my father on the phone and he is in great spirits,” Trump Jr. said in a statement. “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.”
Let me hazard a guess, and say we're about to hear some very inflammatory shit from MAGA.
BTW, anybody who says something like, "This is not who we are", should be reminded that right about half of our sitting or former presidents have been shot or shot at.
Get fucking real - this is exactly who we are.
Apr 27, 2024
Not News
Yeah - like Trump didn't "order" anybody to do shitty things on Jan6.
Nobody with a living thinking brain believes Putin didn't have a hand in it.
Everybody knows "the boss" isn't going to be disappointed to hear the news that the biggest threat to his very existence has conveniently expired - no matter what the circumstance.
U.S. intelligence agencies agree Russian president probably didn’t order opposition leader’s killing “at that moment,” according to report.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “likely” didn’t order opposition leader Alexei Navalny to be killed at an Arctic prison in February, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Navalny, the leading figure in Russia’s beleaguered opposition, died on Feb. 16 in a penal colony. The EU and the U.S. directly blamed Russia for Navalny’s death, moving toward imposing new sanctions on the Kremlin.
But the WSJ said Saturday that several U.S. agencies — including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the U.S. State Department’s intelligence unit — agree that Putin probably didn’t order Navalny’s death “at that moment,” citing people familiar with the matter.
According to the WSJ report, U.S. intelligence agencies have shared the assessment with some European intelligence agencies. But some European security officials “remain skeptical” that Putin didn’t play a direct hand in Navalny’s death, considering his tight grip on Russia.
The U.S. assessment is “based on a range of information, including some classified intelligence, and an analysis of public facts, including the timing of his death and how it overshadowed Putin’s re-election,” the WSJ reported.
Navalny ally Leonid Volkov told the WSJ that “the idea of Putin being not informed and not approving killing Navalny is ridiculous.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to comment on the issue, according to the WSJ report.
Putin has denied any involvement in Navalny’s death. Last month, the Russian president said that he had agreed to swap the opposition leader in a prisoner exchange days before Navalny died, confirming claims made by a close Navalny ally that Russia and Western officials had negotiated a prisoner exchange deal.
On Saturday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he had seen the WSJ’s report.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a high-quality material that deserves any attention,” Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian media. “Some very empty arguments. Apparently, they planted it for Saturday reading to the world audience,” he said.
Feb 4, 2024
Jan 13, 2024
Red Hats
At the risk of belaboring the obvious: In the 1920s and 30s, it was Black Shirts in Italy, and Brown Shirts in Germany.
Now it's Red Hats here in USAmerica Inc.
They've been convinced of the absurdities, and they've begun to commit the atrocities.
To date, the news organization has identified at least 232 violent incidents fueled by political motives since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. The events range from riots to brawls at political demonstrations to beatings and murders.Nov 15, 2023
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