American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

Right winger shows up at ICE protest and gets arrested

Police arrest far-right extremist Jake Lang after vehicles drive onto sidewalk in Minneapolis
Minneapolis police arrested far-right extremist Jake Lang and others on probable cause riot after driving onto a sidewalk near City Hall, impacting public safety.
MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis police arrested far-right extremist Jake Lang and several others Tuesday after two vehicles drove onto a sidewalk toward a crowd gathered near Minneapolis City Hall, according to police.

At approximately 11:50 a.m., Lang arrived near City Hall with other people traveling in two vehicles, the Minneapolis Police Department said.

Police said both vehicles drove onto the sidewalk in front of City Hall, where a crowd of people had gathered. Officers moved in and directed the vehicles away from the sidewalk and out of the area.

https://www.kare11.com/article/news/loc ... 367cd5bef7

[Tero]

Chinless 60-year old gets S Carolina nomination. The state has not had a Democrat for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darline_Graham
Sister of dead gay Republican.

[Brian Peacock]

Chins are overrated.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The Trumpist Republican contempt for the population of the US becomes more and more apparent. 'Nobody has a right to clean water, and the government doesn't have to tell the truth about such things.' This is from the Fifth Circuit Court, which has long been infamous as probably the staunchest right-wing circuit court in the country. Also a Trump-appointed judge of course.

'You Don’t Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules'

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said. “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

That may be true in Mississippi—but on the state level in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution. New York’s state constitution, as of a 2021 amendment, states that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” So too in Massachusetts, where “the right to clean air and water” has been constitutionally protected since 1972.

But according to the Fifth Circuit ruling, the US constitution is too narrow for such a claim. The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices—a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”

[...]

[Brian Peacock]

Why should I pay taxes just to stop other people's children getting preventable diseases?

[Sean Hayden]

That's right, it's better to pay taxes to give other people's kids preventable diseases.

In "Operation Desert Storm " of 1991, the American military deliberately targeted and destroyed water treatment plants and power plants (as well as other key infrastructural elements). In August 1990, UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq that blocked the importation of specialized equipment and chemicals, including chlorine for water purification. The UN continued imposing sanctions for thirteen years, preventing Iraq from repairing damaged water treatment plants and pipes.

By the early 1990's, Iraq no longer had the capacity to maintain an adequate supply of potable water for agriculture and human consumption. Accordingly, water delivery plummeted significantly, which resulted in serious health epidemics. By 1996, it was estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children had died from preventable diseases under the period of sanctions. Children under five were particularly susceptible to water-borne diseases and diarrhea as a result of dehydration and drinking contaminated water. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimated that between 1990 and 2000, the average per capital share of potable water decreased from 330 liters to 150 liters in Baghdad and from 180 liters to 65 liters in rural areas.

https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/ncci- ... ent-rivers

[Brian Peacock]

That make for grim reading. You know, the more I hear about the West's military adventures in the Middle-East the less I like it.

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah, I look at it like being married to the mob: I have good life, a great life, but there’s a real chance I’ll do my time in hell for it.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

Merry Kirkmass everybody.

[Brian Peacock]

days_with_kirk.jpg (43.11 KiB) Viewed 769 times

[Tero]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/us/p ... fears.html

"Now, as his party faces its most difficult political environment in years, the president and his supporters are attempting — once more — to channel fear into electoral victory. It’s a strategy that is both old and new, playing off the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to stoke Cold War-era fears of communism and socialism."

"He moved through the country’s biggest battleground races state by state, attacking each Democratic nominee by name. Should they win, he warned, Congress would be controlled by a “communist caucus.”

"Democrats brushed off the characterization as an effort by Mr. Trump to distract from the issues at the top of mind for voters, including the high cost of gas, groceries and health care."

"Despite the bravado among Republicans in Dallas, the decision to focus so much attention on vilifying Democrats amounted to a tacit admission that the best shot Republicans may have of victory — or at least staving off a wave of defeat — is to paint the alternative as worse."

"As Democrats battle over their future, Republicans are rushing to brand them all as outside of the mainstream of American political life. In his speech, Mr. Trump offered his analysis of the state of the Democratic Party, proclaiming recent primary winners to be the “most extreme and dangerous group of candidates” to ever seek office.

“These people are radical left communists,” he said. “In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics.”

CNN political analyst Ronald Brownstein cautions Democrats to not get over confident heading into the November election. The headline on his latest column reads, "Why Democrats' blue wave might not be as big as expected."

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/13/politics ... terms-2026

"The 2026 election will be decided where the wave meets the wall.

"Signs are accumulating that the blue wave of Democratic support this year may be even higher than in the 2018 election, when a backlash against President Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term carried the party back into control of the House of Representatives. But the defensive wall that Republicans are constructing against that Democratic tide also looks bigger than in 2018.

"The height of the wave gives Democrats legitimate reasons to expect they can win races deep into previously reliably Republican territory. The depth of the wall gives Republicans plausible reasons to hope they can contain their losses to a modest level."

"For Democrats, the wave is being powered primarily by turnout and Trump: clear signs that their partisans are more energized than Republicans about voting this year and that voters are now more negative on the president’s performance than not only in 2018, but also in other modern midterms that broke sharply against the party holding the White House, such as 2010 and 2006.

"For Republicans, the central bricks in the wall are money and the map: a financial advantage magnified by crucial recent decisions from the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, and an electoral battlefield that is playing out almost entirely in places Trump carried in 2024."

"All of this — especially the economy and the war — has predictably eroded Trump’s support. The negative views of Trump’s economic management “didn’t really exist in 2018,” said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch. “2018 was like: ‘He’s a bad guy, crazy guy, but the economy is good.’ Now it’s: ‘He’s a bad guy, crazy guy, and the economy is bad.’”

"Most analysts agree the biggest risk for the GOP among disillusioned Trump supporters is that they will not vote at all. “That’s one of the major challenges for Republican candidates,” Ayres says. “Democratic enthusiasm is substantially higher than Republican enthusiasm at the moment.”

"On paper, the Senate map is even more forbidding. Of the Republican-held seats Democrats are most seriously contesting, Maine is the only one in a state that supported Harris; North Carolina is the sole other state on the Senate map where Harris even came close. Trump prevailed by double digits in every other state whose Senate seat Democrats are targeting — Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, much less Kansas and Nebraska (where Democrats are supporting an independent candidate.)

"Even in these states, Trump’s approval has generally fallen into negative territory, which provides Democrats their opening. But to win on this stony soil, Democratic candidates must overcome years of alienation from their national party. In these red states, Democrats “have to establish yourself as a really unique candidate who is going to change the way things are,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “It isn’t going to be the party that wins; it is going to be a vote for change that wins.”

[Brian Peacock]

...As Democrats battle over their future, Republicans are rushing to brand them all as outside of the mainstream of American political life. ...

This, it seems to me, is something the Democratic candidates can actually lean into: coming from outside of the usual rigmarole of US politics; new candidates with a fresh vision and very little ties to the ways things have previously worked.

It would be bunkum of course, because money rather than ideas or competences decide elections, but it would be worth giving a go.

[Tero]

Hundreds of FBI agents were fired or forced into retirement because they had been assigned to work on cases related to the January 6 insurrection or the collection of documents Trump was keeping in one of his bathrooms down in Florida. A thousand or more were so disgusted they just up and quit. So the FBI became dangerously short-handed.

Patel claims the FBI has been getting more job applicants than at any time in its history, but even if that's true it turned out that a very large proportion of those applicants were unqualified because they didn't have experience in law enforcement or ran afoul of one of the FBI's automatic disqualifiers, such as bestiality. How to solve the recruitment problem? Lower the standards.

more
https://www.reuters.com/legal/governmen ... 026-09-15/

[JimC]

FBI agents are not allowed bestiality! Say it ain't so!