Extremist ‘Constitutional Sheriffs’ Meet With Senators, Their Supporters Call for Obama’s Lynching
By David Neiwert on January 8, 2015 - 3:59 pm
From SPLC's Hatewatch Blog:
In one of the spacious meeting rooms of the Russell Senate Building in Washington, D.C., last month, three conservative members of Congress had an unusual meeting with a small group of law-enforcement officers who ascribe to far-right “constitutionalist” theories.
CSPOA-SenateU.S. Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and David Vitter, R-La., and Rep. Martha Blackburn, R-Tenn., all met with former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, the far-right former lawman from Graham County, Ariz., who now leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a group of “constitutionalist” sheriffs who see themselves the last line of defense against those who would seek to infringe on the U.S. Constitution.
Originally billed in the National Review as a “massive gathering” of sheriffs from around the nation to protest immigration, the event was organized by two sheriffs who are active leaders in former Mack’s CSPOA and drew a much smaller crowd. And while CSPOA promoted the event and reported on it afterward, Mack told Hatewatch that it was not the chief organizer.
<snip>
Just down the Capitol Mall that same day, a small group of protesters supporting the sheriffs gathered at the White House and began shouting slogans and demanding the removal of President Obama. Some in the crowd demanded the president be lynched–”Hang the lying Muslim traitor!” one of them shouted.
Link:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2015/01/08/as-extremist-constitutional-sheriffs-meet-with-senators-their-supporters-call-for-obamas-lynching/
@coldjoint,
you really are an asshole aren't you? just my free speech take.
@coldjoint,
Who's stalking you, carpfart? I'm researching you, dummy. Notice how I don't post on your threads? You post on mine. I've posted more information on the voting out Republicans than you, Mr "ItsObama's fault".
You're stalking me and RexRed. And I think its a crack up.
In Tremendous Display of Incompetence, GOP FAILS to pass first major bill of 114th Congress
And tell me, who is supposed to make certain they have the votes before it comes to the floor? Why, that would be the Majority Whip, Steve Scalise (R - Nazi Whisperer).
House GOP Unexpectedly Fails To Pass First Major Bill In New Congress
Something surprising happened in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Wednesday afternoon: the chamber, with a large Republican majority, failed to pass a GOP-backed jobs regulation and reform bill.
The bill was expected to pass handily but since it was being treated as a "suspension" Democrats were able to defeat it.
...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/house-republicans-jobs-regulation-reform-bill-fails-suspension?utm_content=buffera93e3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
January 8, 2015
How California Bested Texas
By Vauhini Vara
Back in 2011, the Texas economy was doing so well, and California’s so poorly, that the Democratic lieutenant governor of California, Gavin Newsom, travelled to Austin to seek advice from an unlikely mentor: the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry. When Newsom returned, he remarked, appreciatively, “They’re aggressive, we’re not. They know what they’re after, we don’t.”
Ten years earlier, in 2001, Texas’s G.D.P. was equal to about fifty-six per cent of California’s. By 2011, that figure had risen to sixty-seven per cent. After Newsom’s visit, the gap continued to narrow, and by 2013 it stood at seventy per cent. That year, Perry took out radio ads in California, telling business owners there, “Building a business is tough, but I hear building a business in California is next to impossible. This is Texas Governor Rick Perry, and I have a message for California businesses: Come check out Texas.”
California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, dismissed the ad as “barely a fart,” but some observers assumed that he was only feigning nonchalance. By then, a narrative had been established about the states’ differing fortunes, thanks partly to Perry’s bid for the Republican Presidential nomination the previous year, during which he made much of the “Texas Miracle.” While California was struggling to recover from the recession, Texas was thriving. Along with faster G.D.P. growth, Texas boasted a much lower unemployment rate, and from 2009 to 2012 it was responsible for the most new business establishments in the U.S.—more than a fifth of the country-wide total—while California’s number fell. In October, 2013, Time magazine published a cover article by the economist Tyler Cowen proclaiming that Texas represented “America’s future”; the accompanying illustration showed all the fifty states rearranged, like puzzle pieces, into the shape of Texas. Commentators chalked up the state’s success to factors like affordable housing, a business-friendly regulatory environment, and the lack of a state income tax. By contrast, California’s top income-tax rate and its housing costs were among the highest in the nation, and its business regulations—particularly those having to do with the environment—were seen as especially onerous and costly.
These days, though, no one is talking about the lessons California should learn from Texas. California’s economy is improving, and its budget is finally balanced—partly because of budget cuts and a voter-approved tax hike in 2012, and partly because the stock-market boom has translated into more tax receipts from California’s wealthiest residents (the ones with those high income-tax rates). These changes happen to come as Texas, the nation’s biggest oil-producing state by far, is grappling with a collapse in oil prices, which has depressed the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil to under fifty dollars a barrel for the first time in more than five years. It will be several months before the government publishes figures on G.D.P. and business creation for the period coinciding with the drop in oil prices, but already there are signs of trouble. Michael Feroli, the chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, said in December, “We think Texas will, at least, have a rough 2015 ahead, and is at risk of slipping into a regional recession.” The Texas budget, too, could be hurt by lost oil and gas taxes.
Brown, who was sworn in on Monday for a second consecutive term as governor of California (his fourth, including a stint from the late seventies to the early eighties), must have enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude if he happened to scan the Wall Street Journal on his way to the inauguration. In an article on how the oil slump could hurt Texas, Jon Hilsenrath and his colleagues wrote, “Some Texans sobered by memories of past energy busts are bracing for a fall. The argument among economists and business leaders isn’t whether the state will be hurt, but how badly.”
The concerns about Texas’s fortunes speak to a misperception of the state’s recent boom, and of California’s bust. Texas’s outperformance of California had a lot to do with factors beyond the control of politicians like Perry and Newsom—namely, the importance of real estate to California’s economy, and the importance of oil to Texas’s. In 2008, the real-estate and rental-and-leasing sectors were responsible for about sixteen per cent of California’s G.D.P., almost double the proportion in Texas. So it was inevitable that California was hit harder by the housing crash that sparked the recession than Texas was. At the same time, Texas benefitted disproportionately from a rise in oil prices in recent years. Oil and gas extraction makes up about eleven per cent of Texas’s economy, compared with one per cent of California’s. In 2008, the year the recession began, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil hit a record, topping a hundred and forty dollars a barrel; the price fell later that year, but it recovered relatively fast, reaching a hundred dollars again by 2011. Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told me that the recent natural-gas boom, coupled with rising oil prices, has been largely responsible for Texas’s growth, in G.D.P. as well as in employment and new business establishments, since the recession. The role of policy measures like low taxes and the light regulation of businesses was probably overstated, he said.
If all the booms and busts of recent years have taught states anything, Muro said, it’s that it is dangerous to rely too much on one industry for economic growth—especially if that industry is as volatile as real estate or oil. After the last time oil prices crashed, in 1986, bringing the Texas economy down with them, the state government made a point to broaden its economy into other areas. In the wake of the recent recession, the governor’s office and others claimed that Texas has successfully expanded into industries outside of the oil sector—especially the kinds of newer, fast-growing ones, such as tech, that have made places like Silicon Valley so successful. The Internet scene in Austin was particularly celebrated. “Texas has made a concerted long-term effort to build a broadly diversified economy that allows job creators from a wide variety of sectors and industries to thrive here,” Lucy Nashed, a press secretary for Perry, told me. She said that “will allow the state economy to weather the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle better than less diversified economies.” But, Muro noted, “The question is, given what is happening in oil and gas, how far along has that diversification proceeded in Texas?”
The simplest way to gauge Texas’s diversification is to look at the current percentage of G.D.P. from oil-and-gas extraction compared with the level prior to the last oil crash. In 1985, the year before the crash, about fourteen per cent of Texas’s G.D.P. derived from oil-and-gas extraction—three percentage points higher than the level in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s not a huge change, but it’s certainly significant. Muro and his colleagues at Brookings wanted to explore the nature of this diversification further, though, so they compiled a list of fifty “advanced” industries—the kind that invest a great deal in research and development, and that attract highly educated workers from science, technology, engineering, and math fields—and tried to find out where these industries are concentrated geographically. (Such industries are important because they tend to grow faster than more established sectors, pay high wages, and have long supply chains, which means their growth ripples into other parts of the economy.)
The researchers’ findings were somewhat surprising. Texas has a significant presence in five of the fifty advanced industries. That makes it the twelfth most diverse state—less diverse than California, which is involved in fourteen advanced industries, but more so than New York, the third-most-populous state. But three of the five advanced industries present in Texas are related to the energy sector—for instance, manufacturing of petroleum and coal products—which means they could be vulnerable to the oil crash, too. “By this measure, Texas is not monolithically tied to oil and gas, but it’s highly oriented towards it,” Muro told me. “One would have to wonder about the implications of the gas crash.”
To be fair, Texas is better prepared than it was in 1986—partly because of policy measures by Perry and his predecessors. The economy has become more diverse, even if it hasn’t progressed as far as some might hope. Plus, the state gets a smaller proportion of its budget revenue from oil and gas taxes than it did before 1986. Texas is also more reliant on the sales tax nowadays, which could be helpful if lower gas costs lead people to spend more money elsewhere.
California, meanwhile, still has plenty of problems of its own. For all of the wealth Silicon Valley has produced, even since the recession, its businesses employ remarkably few people—about eight thousand at Facebook, for example—and those workers tend to come from elite backgrounds. That’s one reason why, despite the success of Facebook and others, California’s unemployment rate is still among the highest in the nation, and why unemployment varies so astonishingly across the state, from about four per cent in Silicon Valley to twenty-three per cent in Imperial County, which borders Mexico and Arizona. The state’s cost of living also remains high. Brown’s inaugural address skimmed over these issues, but Newsom, standing in a hallway outside the chambers where the speech took place, was available to comment. It seemed that he was no longer concerned about California’s relative weakness when compared with Texas but rather about the inequities within his own state. There are “two Californias,” he told the Sacramento Bee—“a very wealthy coastal economy, in contrast to a struggling inland economy.”
Vauhini Vara, the former business editor of newyorker.com, lives in San Francisco and is a business and technology correspondent for the site.
Mike Huckabee: Ban Marriage Equality Because Bisexuals Demand Two Spouses
4 save share group 13
Posted by Soph0571 3:37AM 1/09/2015
U.S. News posted excerpts today from an early copy of Mike Huckabee’s new book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” where the former Arkansas governor and likely presidential candidate tries to make the case for banning same-sex marriage.
Huckabee, who also spends time in the book analyzing Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s marriage and comparing the Club for Growth, one of his fiercest critics on the right, to suicide bombers, claims that the government must continue to prohibit same-sex unions because of bisexuals who, according to Huckabee, desire to have two spouses – one male and one female.
by David Badash
January 08, 2015 8:23 PM
Fox News Host Asks How We Can Tell 'Bad Guys' If We Can't See 'Tone Of Their Skin'?
Fox News host Shannon Bream might have some explaining to do – if she worked for any other news network.
Change the conversation, change the world
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Ever since the horrific terrorist attack on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Fox News has been busy at work trying to blame President Barack Obama for it, and trying to turn it into ratings gold by making it their next Benghazi.
On Fox's "Outnumbered" Wednesday, the cast got into a discussion about how Paris police didn't have enough weapons, which enabled – they claimed – the Islamic extremist terrorists to massacre 12 people.
Enter Fox News anchor Shannon Bream, a former corporate attorney and graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
Bream, speaking unscripted, wondered how police would be able to identify "bad guys" if they had ski masks and couldn't "even know what color," what "the tone of their skin was?"
Her commentary – totally unquestioned by the four other Fox News hosts – was in response to co-host Kennedy Montgomery, aka "Kennedy," who had said, "sometimes bad guys don't look like bad guys."
"That's my question about these guys because if we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had, you know, ski masks on, do we even know what color they were?," Bream asked. "What the tone of their skin was," she tried to clarify – as if that were less racist. "I mean what if they didn't look like typical bad guys?"
Media Matters noted that Bream "apparently," was "implying that certain skin tones should raise red flags for law enforcement."
And calling it "naked racism," Blue Nation Review noted that "Fox News tends to cloak its racism in code words and dog whistles," but "sometimes it’s disturbingly on display," as it was Wednesday.
@bobsal u1553115,
I would say unbelievable but unfortunately it's not.
@revelette2,
I took away from this, that you can't get a description of someone committing a crime if they are covered up. How do they pass information on to other police agencies if the only description if someone is in a mask?
I'm not surprised you guys find racism in this, you guys, like Rev Al, see racism everywhere. Even in places it isn't.
@bobsal u1553115,
How can we know the bad guys (girls) if they do not hold up their Jerry Falwell diplomas? Shame on racists...
And what color is God, or the son of God?
