Manage The Symptoms - Treat The Disease

Our "public discourse" has all the structure and dignity of a bar fight. The guy makes a point, and instead of a reasoned rebuttal, she just jumps in and talks over him.

We'd best stop wondering why we're not getting anywhere, and start concentrating on who benefits from perpetuating this divisive crap.

Today's Eternal Sadness

Some fuckin' jerk with an AR-15.

5 dead and at least 18 wounded or injured.

"Conservatives" flap their gums, and they "pray", and they fill the room with worthless balloon juice, but we all know they'll never ever stand up and do one fuckin' thing that might stop the next asshole before he acts on his impulse - an impulse that's probably there all along, but one that is encouraged - if not outright propagated - by the kind of hateful rhetoric we hear from the wingnuts pretty much all day every day.

(live updates)

Police provide update on mass shooting at Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub that left 5 dead

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- Five people are dead and multiple others are injured after a shooting at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub.

According to CSPD, officers responded to reports of an active shooting at Club Q in the 3400 block of N. Academy Blvd. at 11:57 p.m. Officers from all four patrol divisions in the city responded to the shooting.

At the scene, Lt. Castro with CSPD said officers immediately located the suspect inside the bar. That suspect has since been taken to a hospital for medical attention and is in custody. It's unclear what those injuries are, however, Lt. Castro said this shooting did not involve officers.

According to police, five people are dead and at least 18 others are injured in the shooting. The victims were taken to hospitals around the city.

The Colorado Springs Fire Department said they triaged the scene. This was treated as a mass casualty event response, something CSFD said firefighters are trained for.

At this time, CSPD said most individuals not injured in the shooting have been reunited with their loved ones. The department is working with hospitals to notify families and loved ones of the injured and deceased.

CSPD said N. Academy Blvd. is closed in both directions between N. Carefree Cir. and Village Seven Rd. while law enforcement works in the area. There isn't a timeline for how long this investigation will take but people are asked to avoid the area into Sunday morning.

If you are searching for a loved one who might've been at Club Q Saturday night, you're asked to contact the Colorado Springs Police Department at 719-444-7000.

Anyone who has video of the shooting or was a witness not already interviewed at the scene, please contact the police. All vehicles at the scene at the time of the shooting are to remain at the scene, according to CSPD.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is on the scene and helping with the investigation. Officers are with victims at the hospital.

Club Q's released the following statement on its official Facebook page:

• Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community.
• Our prays and thoughts are with all the victims and their families and friends.
• We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.Club Q

KRDO asked police if they believe this attack was a hate crime. CSPD said it's too early in the investigation to determine a motive.

According to Club Q's website, Saturday night had a drag show earlier in the night and was set to stay open until 2 a.m.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, a mass shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed.

KRDO spoke with a man who was at Club Q roughly ten minutes before shots were fired. He was able to connect with one of his friends who was shot at the hospital. According to him, his friend said the shooter came into the nightclub and began firing. The friend said the suspect was wearing a mask and a vest of some sort.

He also said he lost friends in the shooting.

Be Nice

... until it's time to not be nice.

Today's Tweet

Together with Today's Eternal Sadness

Kremlin Don laughs when MAGAt says to shoot immigrants 😡😡😡pic.twitter.com/ebHf2JWAgG

— Hear Me Roar (@Stop_Trump20) August 4, 2019

20 dead and 26 wounded in El Paso yesterday.

9 dead and 24 wounded today in Dayton.

Dayton police tweeted that an active shooter situation began at 1 a.m. Sunday in a historic district that’s a popular nightlife destination, but officers nearby were able to “put an end to it quickly.” Lt. Col. Matt Carper said at a press conference that the suspect was shot to death by responding officers.

- and -

...The shooting took place in the Oregon District, a historic neighborhood that Carper described as “a safe part of downtown,” home to entertainment options, including bars, restaurants and theaters.

Today's Eternal Sadness

In another perfect example of just how fucking stoopid the wingnuts are, Christchurch NZ becomes the latest candidate for enshrinement in the Hall Of Infamy.

BBC:

A gunman, who identified himself in footage of an attack as a 28-year-old Australian called Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed his rampage to Facebook from a head-mounted camera. The footage showed him firing indiscriminately at men, women and children from close range inside the Al-Noor mosque.

If your whole bullshit anti-Muslim / anti-Immigrant project is to vilify and demonize certain kinds of people, then why are you guys constantly doing things that move the world to sympathize with them?

And of course, it's not unreasonable to think we can anticipate the Ammosexuals' argument that New Zealand has strict gun laws, and yet, they've just experienced a mass shooting by a bad guy with a gun.

Do we really need to point out that the Aussies and the Kiwis have experienced maybe 2 of these incidents in the last 20+ years, while USAmerica Inc sees this shit on a regular and frequent basis?

Seriously - you're just a buncha fuckin' idiots who don't understand one fuckin' thing about any-fuckin'-thing.

It Gets Worse

Speaking of the bombs mailed to several of Cult45's favorite enemies, Rush Limbaugh opined, "Conservatives just don't do that sort of thing."

We reached out to Barnett Slepian, George Tiller and several daycare workers in Oklahoma City, but they were all unavailable for comment.

Michelle Goldberg, NYT:

On Wednesday night, after bombs were sent to a number of Donald Trump’s most prominent enemies, he held a rally in Mosinee, Wis. A president with even a pretense to statesmanship would have canceled it — the country was in the middle of what can reasonably be described as a terrorist attack, with someone attempting mass murder against leading Democrats. Trump, needless to say, is not such a president.

At the rally — which featured Trump fans chanting, “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, to whom one of the bombs was addressed — Trump called for the country to come together “in peace and harmony.” Then, in characteristic fashion, he blamed the press for America’s climate of simmering rage. “The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories,” he said.

It was an audacious act of misdirection, especially since the attack included a bomb sent to the New York offices of CNN, one of Trump’s favorite punching bags. But while Trump’s words were meant to further derange American political debate, they were, in one sense, clarifying. They demonstrated the rank disingenuousness of conservative complaints about “incivility,” a term that’s increasingly used to conflate expressions of political anger with political violence, equating yelling at politicians with trying to kill them.

- and -

The violent part of the right is integrated into the Republican Party in a way that has no analogue on the left. A few months before the Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that devolved into a deadly riot, Corey Stewart, now the Republican candidate for Senate in that state, appeared at an event sponsored by one of Unite the Right’s organizers, Jason Kessler. (He’s since disavowed both Kessler and Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist he once described as a “personal hero.”) One rallygoer, James Allsup, had been president of the Washington State University College Republicans. He stepped down amid the ensuing controversy, but was later elected a precinct committee officer by his local party organization. (The Republican National Committee has denounced him.)

- and -

The dubious category of “civility” lets people on the right pretend that mailing a politician a bomb is in the same vein as berating a politician in a restaurant. It’s a sort of right-wing political correctness, treating rudeness toward powerful people as akin to assault.

In June, the actor Robert De Niro cursed at Trump during a speech at the Tony Awards. On Thursday, news broke that De Niro was among those who were sent explosive devices. Only one of these things is a problem. We are in a dark place in this country. The blame belongs with Trump, not those shouting their opposition to him.

Christian Picciolini, LA Times (from 10-07-18):

When four members of the white supremacist group Rise Above Movement were arrested last week on federal charges that they traveled to Virginia last year with the intent to incite a riot and commit violence, many news outlets referred to the group as an “alt-right fight club.” Others called it “a racist social club.”

The Rise Above Movement, or R.A.M., is far more dangerous than these euphemistic labels suggest. An extreme hate group that grew out of California’s skinhead subculture, R.A.M. calls for the extermination of Jews and other “anti-white” enemies, not to mention the overthrow of the U.S. government.

R.A.M. is one of many violent hate groups that espouse such views. Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group that is organized into cells and whose name means “atomic weapons” in German, openly aspires to terroristic violence. Proud Boys, another group in the white-power ecosystem, has demonstrated a propensity for extreme violence.

Despite the dangers posed by such groups, many Americans tend to view their violent acts as either the work of a mentally deranged individual or the collective anger of misguided young men who are merely lashing out. This outlook is dangerously naive and one we can no longer afford to indulge.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the U.S. grew from 784 to 917 between 2014 and 2016. There are now 954 hate groups across the country. Some of these groups include “pro-white” militia that are engaged in paramilitary-style training, learning hand-to-hand combat and guerilla warfare techniques and planning strategic attacks on critical infrastructure.

If jihadists were plotting any of the above on American soil — to kill American citizens and take out U.S. power grids, among other things — our collective response would be far less permissive. Put another way, if these extremists had brown skin, we would call them terrorists.

Instead, we wave away their threats and do so despite this glaring fact: White extremists have committed nearly 75% of all terrorist attacks on American soil since September 11.

SPLC Hate Group Map

- and -

Inspired by the writings of Hitler and the idea of “white jihad,” members of groups like R.A.M. and Proud Boys don’t need much provocation to become violent. Indeed, members of Atomwaffen Division have been charged in five killings over the past two years.

Samuel Woodward, the 20-year-old Newport Beach man charged with stabbing a former high school classmate nearly 20 times, is reportedly a member of Atomwaffen.

In Reston, Va., a 17-year-old Atomwaffen member was charged last year with murdering his girlfriend’s parents, reportedly because they had forbidden their daughter from dating him.

In Tampa, Fla., Devon Arthurs, a 19-year-old former Atomwaffen devotee who converted to radical Islam, was charged last year with shooting two of his neo-Nazi roommates after they ridiculed his sudden transformation.
In a separate case, another of Arthurs’ roommates, Brandon Russell, 22, an Atomwaffen leader, was arrested for possessing radioactive material and bomb-making devices. Among his possessions, police found a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

It is true that the leaders of such groups draw in disillusioned young men who believe the world has sidelined them. But just because their members look familiar to many Americans does not make them less dangerous. Their violence is part of a growing pattern of domestic terrorism and should not be excused as an adolescent blip.


And oh BTW -

What Up Widdat?

NSFW

This one came over the toobz today from a coupla different places.

Seems to me, as hung up as we are on trying to run this joint down the middle, we oughta see just as many of these coming from "the other side", shouldn't we?

I mean, if we're stuck in this tribal struggle and both sides are firmly entrenched, locked in some kind of tit-for-tat exchange, we should see fire from the other side.

We hear Cult45 - kinda all the time - railing about violence coming from "the left" and what a hellscape America is becoming because the Dems have allowed rampaging bands of illegal immigrant MS13 monsters and blah blah blah.

Shouldn't there be plenty of video on that shit? The same as there's practically never a day goes by that we don't see some white jagoff raggin' on brown people?

I don't check Breitbart a lot, but I check. Same with Fox Nation and some others. What am I missing?

Da Wimmins

A quick exercise in Poe's Law:

And Now, This

We should keep in mind that Trump is not just priming his supporters to rebel if he loses in Pennsylvania because of "cheating" - he's also priming those supporters to defend the results if he "wins" because of cheating.

And we've already seen lots of priming for 'the 2nd amendment" appeals.

Stochastic Probability

Applied to politics = 

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.

It's not like we aren't aware of this shit, Mr Trump.

At each step, plausible deniability increases through the diffusion of responsibility. "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

Trump knows what he's done, even if his intent at the time was nothing more than one of his usual stunts to say something heinously inflammatory in order to generate some free media.

And the statements that have come from his campaign are again the usual bullshit aimed at kicking the news cycle around to keep the coverage going - to give the story legs.

"It's called the power of unification – 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power. And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won't be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump." --Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor.

That's a near-perfect, classically content-free "explanation".  Notice, there's nothing in there that even tries to pretend that Trump is condemning violence against a political opponent.

Charlie Pierce put up a quote from (I think) Hunter S Thompson, and tag-lined it with this:

What he said on Tuesday is something Donald Trump does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. It seems one could stoop even lower than Nixon to be president.

And of course, the usual asshole apologists were out to make sure we got a good dose of False Equivalence:

Here's the point on this little piece of your freak show, Mr Halperin: If it was bad for Hillary to say what she said in 2008, then it's bad for Trump to say what he said 2016.

See how that works?  Bad is bad is bad.  You don't get to say Hillary was wrong to do it back then, so it's OK for Trump to do it now. dick

But what riles me now is that neither The Hillary gang nor the Press Poodles are getting after this with any kind of zest or gusto.

"Here's what Americans need to hear from you, Mr Trump, and in no uncertain terms:

- you are not calling for violence

- you condemn violence against any political opponent at any time for any reason

- you reject the support of anybody who'd even think violence against a political opponent is in any way OK

- you understand that sometimes we get a little nutty, but everybody has to leave their guns out of this

- be passionate; be vocal; be steadfast - just don't be a dick"

Are ya getting any of this, Mr Trump?

Score Card

For those of you scoring at home - or even if you're all by yourself - somebody's gotta be trying to keep track of all the shitty things Trump has said or done - things that so many of the Press Poodles tell us will blow him up and scatter his remains to the four winds.  But then, somehow, he stays around because the "lefty librul lame-stream media" are unable to resist breaking away from any and all programming to make sure we all get to see Lil Donny doing whatever he does that will surely disgust all of us, while we are never quite disgusted enough to stop watching that crap which of course is why they keep showing us that crap.

Anyway, here's a (probably) partial list:

• outraged prisoners of war by doubting the heroism of Vietnam veteran John McCain, because he allowed himself to be captured
• he appeared to accuse Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly of asking him tough questions because she was menstruating
• accused Mexican immigrants to the US of being rapists
• claimed that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently ejected from a rally deserved to be “roughed up”
• appeared to mock a New York Times journalist for his disability and then accused the journalist of “grandstanding” on that disability in his response
• falsely accused Muslim Americans of cheering on the 9/11 attackers
• agreed with suggestions that all such Muslims should have their names tracked on a database
• Trump’s Twitter account recirculated racially charged but falsified crime statistics from an actual Nazi sympathiser
• complained that many of these incidents were exaggerated by the political media, saying 70% of whom are “scum”

The KrugMan Speaks

August 6, 2013, 10:42 am 48 Comments

Another Bad Story Bites The Dust

One of the remarkable things about the ongoing economic crisis is the endless search for explanations of something that’s actually quite simple — the sluggish pace of recovery. You have a large overhang of private debt; you have a still-depressed housing sector; and you have contractionary fiscal policy. Add to this the well-established fact that recovery tends to be slow after recessions caused not by tight money but by private-sector overreach, and there’s just no mystery that needs explaining.

Yet we’ve seen an endless series of analyses declaring that there is indeed a deep mystery, and it must be Obama’s Fault. Probably the most influential of these analyses was the claim that Obama was creating “uncertainty”, and this was holding everything back.

Larry Mishel did a thorough debunking of this meme almost two years ago. And sure enough, the index of uncertainty that everyone was pointing to has plunged, with no visible boost to the economy.

Will anyone who bought into this story engage in some serious self-analysis? Why am I even asking?

That last line is the dominant theme of our current dysfunction, and I'm trying hard not to think we can just slap some sense into people.  

Domestic Terrorism

From Crooks and Liars today, a story about another incident of political violence.

See the video here (the embedding code isn't working for me today)

Did you catch the operative phrase in the video?  At about :55, the News Poodle says, "Burris admits he's liberal".  Well, there ya have it - he admits it!  And so then, of course, the rest of the piece is all about Animal Cruelty, and not a word about the crime as an obvious act of terrorism against a political opponent.

There are red flags popping up in lots of places.

Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Not us (cont.)

Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Not us (cont.)

#4 is exactly what we need to be talking about:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle.