A Truly Dangerous Candidate in Trump

WaPo says Trump is unprecedented threat to American democracy. An unprecedented editorial.

Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid

Donald Trump’s NATO comments are the scariest thing he’s said

Wednesday night, Donald Trump said something that made a nuclear war between the United States and Russia more likely. With a few thoughtless words, he made World War III — the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust — plausible.

This probably scans like hyperbole, the kind of thing you hear a lot in politics. I assure you, it’s not. Not this time.

What Trump said, in an interview published by the New York Times, is that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the United States’ allies in NATO if they were attacked by a foreign power. This extended, Trump said, to the Baltic countries right on Russia’s border — countries Russia might conceivably invade.

The NATO alliance is the key deterrent against this: It is founded on a promise that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all. Trump is directly undermining this promise.

The consequences are hard to overstate. He is trashing one of the foundations of the postwar European order, which has helped guaranteed peace on the continent for 70 years. And by equivocating on whether he would defend the Baltics, he creates a dangerous amount of uncertainty among Russians as to how seriously the US takes its NATO treaty commitments — the kind of uncertainty that, yes, could spark an actual conflict between the US and Russia.

This is what happens when you let a flamboyant reality star get this close to the highest office in the land: You get someone who doesn’t understand the machinery of state, and plays with literal nuclear fire as a result.

 

 (short answer is "no")

GOP Platform Proposes to Get Rid of National Parks and National Forests

Just flat-out barking insanity.

And there's even an anti-national park GOP caucus.

The GOP is a fucking death cult.

GOP Convention Platform Is a Haven for Religious Zealots, Bigots and Cranks

GOP Platform Committee Embraces A Purely Puritanical Agenda

So far this week Republicans have worked religiously to adopt a staunchly neo-conservative theocratic platform that embraces a strict, Puritanical view of the family and children, bans military women from serving in combat, defines coal as America’s preferred clean energy source, replaces the Constitution with the Christian bible, and in keeping with the Puritanical agenda, declares pornography a “public health crisis.” 

First, declaring “porn” as a public health crisis is really cover for the reality that porn is “a serious problem and health crisis” among the Christian community, particularly the Christian male, porn addicted, community. The evangelicals running the platform writing committee claim “Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children’s safety and well-being.” 

It sounds as if Republicans and evangelicals have a serious “traditional Christian family” parenting problem if they can’t keep their young religious perverts off of porn sites they’re not allowed to legally visit. Their horrid, traditional family parenting, or devastating porn addiction epidemic, doesn’t mean they can start down a path to abolish free speech, or free Internet porn, for the rest of the population because they have porn-addiction issues. And, it belies their contention that they hate government intruding into Americans’ private lives, unless it comports with the Puritanical leanings of the religious right: then government tyranny and intrusions for religion’s sake is admirably godly. 

Despite a year-old SCOTUS ruling that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, and the party’s first openly-gay platform committee member participating in the debate, the RNC rejected an amendment to have a “thoughtful conversation” on same-sex marriage. The amendment didn’t demand a full embrace of marriage equality, that would be too much to ask; just that the Party “have a thoughtful conversation” on marriage equality. The openly gay delegate from Washington D.C., Rachel Hoff, said during the debate and while fighting back tears, “We are your daughters, we are your friends. All I ask today is that you include me and people like me.” About 30 delegates agreed with Ms. Hoff, but these were religious Republicans and most of the committee agreed with religious malcontent Tony Perkins not to remove traditional marriage language from the platform; social conservatives will not embrace, much less talk about marriage equality. 

It really leads one to wonder why an openly gay person would be a Republican delegate, much less ever vote for one of the hate-mongers. Never straying too far afield from the conversation on the imagined threats of same-sex marriage, religious Republicans inserted language claiming that children raised by “traditional” families are superior to those raised by same-sex couples. 

The official wording reads, “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage.” Except that is patently false and yet another typical religious Republican lie. According to myriad studies, and specifically a very recent UCLA study: “There is no difference in the outcomes for same-sex couple’s children, including their general health, emotional difficulties, coping behavior, or learning behavior.”

The GOP’s Civil War Over LGBT Rights Just Killed a Spending Bill

BIGOTED ASSHOLES!

All Paul Ryan wanted was to appropriate some funds for energy and water spending: a quick and easy vote, bang the gavel, go home, and CrossFit hard enough to forget the Donald’s name. But lately, routine spending bills in the House have had a funny habit of turning into acrimonious debates over LGBT rights. 

Last week, Democratic congressman Sean Patrick Maloney proposed an amendment to a Veterans Affairs appropriations bill barring federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT employees — thus enshrining President Obama’s 2014 executive order on that matter into law. 

The amendment appeared to pass — then a bunch of Republicans switched their votes. And then Democrats chanted “Shame, shame, shame,” and the Human Rights Campaign blasted the GOP flip-floppers over Twitter, and Speaker Ryan had another fire to put out. 

Late Wednesday night, Maloney reintroduced the amendment, this time to an energy and water spending bill. Pennsylvania Republican Joe Pitts tried to split the baby, adding a line stipulating that the ban wouldn't apply in circumstances where its enforcement would violate the Constitution. Since conservatives think the Constitution guarantees Christians the right to discriminate against gay people, while liberals think it demands the exact opposite, this was supposed to let both sides win. 

And for a while there, they seemed to: The amendment passed with 43 Republican votes. And then, just before the full bill came up for a vote, Georgia congressman Rick Allen treated his colleagues to a prayer about "the gays." Per Politico: The breakdown of the appropriations process started earlier in the day when Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.) opened the weekly GOP conference meeting with a prayer about the LGBT issue, prior to the vote. He read a passage from the Bible and questioned whether members would violate their religious principles if they supported the bill. 

Moderate Republicans were stunned by Allen's remarks, and some walked out of the meeting in protest, according to GOP lawmakers. The appropriations bill fell 305–112, as a majority of Republicans voted it down in protest of the LGBT-rights provision. The vast majority of Democrats also turned on the bill after the GOP caucus filled it with poison pills. 

Among these was a provision barring the federal government from spending money to calculate the climate impact of regulations, one cutting off all funding to “sanctuary cities," and an amendment prohibiting the federal government from withholding funds from North Carolina if it continues to violate the president’s federal order about transgender bathroom rights.

GOP Psychopath Tom Cotton

Senator: 'We have an under-incarceration problem'

(CNN)Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton spoke out against bipartisan efforts to reform America's criminal justice system at a conservative think tank in Washington on Thursday, saying, "If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem." 

"For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed," Cotton said at the Hudson Institute. The Arkansas senator has been a staunch opponent of bipartisan legislation which would push to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent criminal offenders. The bill would also give judges greater discretion on sentencing for low level drug related crimes.   

Cotton called efforts to restore voting rights to felons, and making it easier for ex-felons to seek employment "dangerous." "Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19% of property crimes and 47% of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem," Cotton said. "The truth is you cannot decrease the severity and certainty of sentences without increasing crime," Cotton said. "It's simply impossible." 

Criminal justice reform advocates claim the severity of the sentencing does not have much of an effect on repeat offenders and crime rates. "When he says we have all of these unsolved crimes, so that's why we should be filling the prisons even more, where is he going to get the resources to prosecute those if we're spending so much money putting a nonviolent drug offender in prison for 30 years," said Kevin Ring, Vice President of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a non-profit organization. "This is a misallocation of resources. No one is trying to make a trade off between safety and security. We're saying we can get more safety if we use our resources efficiently."

Cotton is a traitorous monster... totally lacking in humanity. Fuck him.

The Continuing Saga of Trump and GOP Assholery

 JUST IN: Ryan: We can work with Trump http://hill.cm/QnqTSsQ 

So the GOP leadership is willing to work with a man they call a "fraud" and "con artist," just not with the twice-elected POTUS Obama.

GOP Senate Will Not Even Consider Obama Supreme Court Nominee or Hold Hearings

Motherfuckers:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell says flatly that his party won't permit a vote on any Supreme Court nominee submitted by President Barack Obama but will "revisit the matter" after the presidential election in November. The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that Obama is within his rights to nominate a replacement to Antonin Scalia but said Republicans controlling the Senate would exercise their rights to "withhold" consent.