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On Roy Moore and His "Christian Values" |
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Saturday, 02 December 2017 14:51 |
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Kimmel writes: "Roy Moore is this guy running for Senate in Alabama, even though multiple women accused him of hitting on them, groping them, etcetera, before they were 18 years old. Well, Roy Moore is not happy with me."
Jimmy Kimmel. (photo: Randy Holmes/Getty Images)
On Roy Moore and His "Christian Values"
By Jimmy Kimmel, The Washington Post
02 December 17
 oy Moore is this guy running for Senate in Alabama, even though multiple women accused him of hitting on them, groping them, etcetera, before they were 18 years old. Well, Roy Moore is not happy with me.
What happened was, they had a rally for Roy Moore at a church in Theodore, Alabama, last night. Roy is running against someone, who, as far as I know hasn’t been accused of child molesting, a guy named Doug Jones. The election is on December 12. Somehow, according to these new polls they released this week, Roy Moore leads Doug Jones by five or six points, which doesn’t say a lot for Doug. Even though Roy Moore was reportedly so creepy around young girls, he was banned from the mall in Gadsden, Alabama.
Imagine getting banned from the mall. Just think about that. No Hot Dog on a Stick for you. So they had a rally for Roy, and a number of his supporters were there and one of them just happened to be our friend Jake Byrd, who — Jake Byrd is a character who has a Forrest Gump-like knack for showing up at all the big events. If you’re not familiar with his work, this is Jake at a Donald Trump rally in Dallas in 2015. (https://www.facebook.com/RealTruthNow/videos/1008312835888051/)
He’s very passionate. So Jake got on a plane and went to Alabama last night, and apparently there was an incident that resulted in him getting kicked out of the rally. We’ll show you all the footage of that later. But apparently the commotion touched a nerve because today, Roy Moore lashed out at me.
He wrote, “Jimmy Kimmel, if you want to mock our Christian values, come down here to Alabama and do it man to man.” I responded and he responded back and I responded again; it’s all on Twitter.
But the bottom line is this: I accept the invitation. I will come down there. What I’m going to do is — I think you’re actually going to like this, Roy. I’m going to come to Gadsden, Alabama, with a team of high school cheerleaders, okay? We’ll meet you at the mall. Don’t worry, I can get you in.
And then when the girls and I show up, if you can control yourself and behave, if you can somehow manage to keep little Roy in your little cowboy pants when those nubile cheerleaders come bounding in, you and I, we’ll sit down at the food court, we’ll have a little Panda Express and we’ll talk about Christian values.
Because, and I don’t know, it doesn’t fit your stereotype — but I happen to be a Christian, too. I made my first Holy Communion; I was confirmed; I pray; I support my church; one of my closest friends is a priest; I baptized my children. Christian is actually my middle name. I know that’s shocking, but it’s true.
So if you’re open to it, when we sit down, I will share with you what I learned at my church. At my church, forcing yourself on underaged girls is a no-no. Some even consider it to be a sin. Not that you did that, of course. Allegedly.
But when you commit a sin at our church, at our church we’re encouraged to confess and ask for forgiveness for the sin. Not to call the women you allegedly victimized liars and damage them even more. To confess.
But maybe your church is different. I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together. I’ll be happy to talk it through. I would gladly sit down to interview you about it. Or maybe when you say, “Come to Alabama and we’ll do it man to man,” maybe that means you’re challenging me to a fight, which is kind of what it sounds like. And if you are, I accept, by the way. I accept that invitation. There is no one I would love to fight more than you. I will put my Christian values aside just for you and for that fight.
So if you are challenging me to a fight, here’s what we’ll do. Let’s find a place to do it. I’ll wear a Girl Scout uniform so you can have something to get excited about. And the winner, whoever wins the fight, will give all the money we charge for the tickets to charity. My charity will be the women who came forward to say you molested them, okay? All right, tough guy, with your little pistol?
Roy Moore is never — he’s too scared to even debate the guy he’s running against, Doug Jones. With me he wants to go man to man. Maybe if he went man to man instead of man to little girl, you wouldn’t be in this situation. Allegedly. Allegedly!
I feel sorry for the people in Alabama. I go online, there’s people posting things like this about Alabama: “They falsely accused Jesus! Vote Roy Moore.” Yes, that is completely crazy. But not everyone in Alabama supports this monster. In fact, almost half the people – I remember living in Arizona … I lived in Arizona in the ’80s when Ed Mecham was elected governor. He was a nut. He would have fit right in with these guys today. He won with 40 percent of the vote.
And I was so embarrassed to be from there, to be from the state he was governor of, I felt like I had to explain myself to everyone. I imagine that’s how a lot of people in Alabama feel.
So if you do have that feeling, know that at least here in Hollywood, we don’t hate Alabama. We love Alabama, so much we sent Reese Witherspoon to make a movie about you, okay? We just don’t like alleged child molesters. And we hope you can see your way clear to not electing one to the Senate of the United States of America, that’s all. That seems reasonable, right?
By the way, I understand if you don’t, if you’re a Republican, you don’t want to vote for a Democrat. Just don’t vote, then. You’ll feel better about yourself.
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FOCUS: The Mass Murder Question |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38303"><span class="small">Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 December 2017 12:14 |
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Dugger writes: "Let's identify and name the hidden question in the historic crisis facing the human species, the possible sudden nuclear war between the United States and North Korea. Will Kim Jong-un's oncoming nuclear weapons that will be able to reach the entire United States?"
A mushroom cloud. (photo: Medium)
The Mass Murder Question
By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News
02 December 17
 et’s identify and name the hidden question in the historic crisis facing the human species, the possible sudden nuclear war between the United States and North Korea. Will Kim Jong-un’s oncoming nuclear weapons that will be able to reach the entire United States, just as the other seven nuclear-weapons states’ bombs can, deter President Trump from attacking his nation? Will Trump and his generals strike North Korea first in a “preventive war?” Might North Korea or South Korea suddenly bomb the other?
These headlines are just nationalistic variations on the concealed, euphemized meaning of “nuclear deterrence,” which is the mass murder question: Whether we, the American people and the United States, will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend ourselves and our allies, as Trump warned the United Nations, which in turn depends on what he means by “forced to defend.” Whether a U.S. first strike will as expected activate North Korea’s instant retaliation with its artillery that can blast the ten million people of Seoul, its armed forces of a million men, and possibly its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Careful analysts estimate 30,000 dead almost at once. There are about 28,500 American GIs in South Korea and 54,000 in Japan. Trump himself has forecast that such a war could cause ten million dead.
The Cold War “deterrence theory” credited with preventing World War III, which still rules, has always concealed from vivid public knowledge what will happen if it fails, as Trump has said that it very well may these days. Under still prevailing “launch on warning” practices, if, say, “we” see a swarm of nuclear weapons zipping toward us, we vow to immediately launch our nuclear weapons against the attacking nation just before hit. Deterrence failing means mutual suicidal mass murder and whatever consequences come after that. President Johnson told the country that if a mutual exchange happened between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., 40 million Americans would die in the first half hour. Likewise, more or less, would Russians. This now is the worst such crisis since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with its deciding heads of state not John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, but Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. And for all the talks between Trump and de-facto dictator Xi Jinping of China, the fact also remains that still-Communist China threw its army into the first Korean War against the United States.
Despite Dictator Kim’s hit-back blustering against Trump and the U.S., Kim had made it specific several times that his goal is a nuclear arsenal that can hit the U.S. mainland in order to deter the U.S. from attacking North Korea. Only a moron would not assume that if Kim attacked us first, his regime and much of his country would be gone, and Kim is not a moron. Trump’s goal, which has often been restated by his generals, is to prevent North Korea from having a nuclear arsenal at all. That appears to be his precondition for negotiating with Kim, which almost no well-informed experts expect Kim even to consider. Trump’s tweets and rhetoric in sum certainly imply that if Kim continues on his course, Trump intends an attack on North Korea with the military forces of the United States: War. As for Trump’s exclusive and solitary personal power to order the use of “our” nuclear weapons, Congress has done nothing at all that requires a collective decision or an act of Congress beforehand for such use, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have done anything that might stop him by impeaching him.
Trump’s two bloodthirstiest and most terrifying threats, he being the president of the United States and the commander in chief of the most powerful and the most destructive military forces in the history of humanity, occurred this summer and at the beginning of the fall. Then, as seen August 8th on NBC News, his arms folded across his chest, his mouth turned down, seated during a meeting among many others at a long conference table and referring to no notes at any time, Trump said, “Korea had best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly with power the likes of which this world has never seen.” He put a slight emphasis on the word “this.”
Bluffing? This is not a poker game. In Trump’s mind then and there the fire and fury he described is obviously much worse than Hamburg, Dresden, Doolittle over Tokyo, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Then, on September 19th, standing before and speaking to the United Nations and the entire world, Trump said, “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Surely he had premeditated and understood what, saying that, he said. Some hoped he was just bullying and bluffing Kim, but he was speaking for the United States not just to the official representatives of 193 nations, but to all of us around the world. It is reasonable that he was probably telling us within what he meant by his words what he will seek to do and/or do on his own with the American people’s vast arsenal to “totally destroy North Korea.” As of now, his words “we will have no choice” but to destroy North Korea suggest that we have no choices now, which is false. We have many choices and some huge alternatives: negotiations with Kim without preconditions; sending Jimmy Carter to go talk with Kim for us; Trump going to talk to Kim himself (as he said earlier he was willing to do); having President Moon of South Korea go; or, as we have with other problematical nuclear-weapons nations, accepting North Korea as one of the nine mutually-deterred nuclear-weapons states. Trump could even call upon Congress to join the 122 nations of the UN who passed a proposed treaty to ban nuclear weapons from the world and who are now participating in seeking its ratification.
It is possible that Trump used those four deadly words “totally destroy North Korea” just for emphasis, but the human race cannot risk ten million of us dead or a world nuclear war on that possibility. The American president announced his threat and the whole world heard it.
Merriam Webster’s tenth edition gives these definitions of “total”: “comprising or contributing a whole: ENTIRE”; “absolute. utter”; “involving a complete and unified effort, esp. to achieve a desired effort,” as one example, total war. My 1999 Encarta World English Dictionary says “totally” means “1. Completely, in a complete or utter way. 2. used for our basis how good bad or complete something is.” My Oxford Reference Dictionary says “total” means “including everything comprising the whole” and the example “total war” is defined as “war in which all available weapons and resources are employed.”
The population of North Korea is about 25,000,000. Donald Trump may be prepared to make the American people complicit with him in mass murder, inviting every one of us to consider, as a citizen, now, our own benevolent ethics or mass-murdering nature.
Ronnie Dugger is author of biographies of Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and the crack U.S. pilot over Hiroshima who called in Paul Tibbetts to atomic-bomb that city. Dugger won the 2011 George Polk career journalism award. Founding editor of the Texas Observer, he has written also a book about universities and numerous articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. He has been writing about Trump and nuclear weapons on Reader Supported News since July 2016.
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FOCUS: Trump's Consumer Victory Officially Makes a Joke of Financial Reform |
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Saturday, 02 December 2017 11:44 |
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Taibbi writes: "Earlier this year, when researching a story on Donald Trump's executive appointments, I talked to current and former Hill staffers about Mick Mulvaney."
Mick Mulvaney, pictured in September, is Trump's new pick to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Trump's Consumer Victory Officially Makes a Joke of Financial Reform
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
02 December 17
Nearly a decade after the crash, Trump makes a mockery of one of the few meaningful checks on the financial services industry
 arlier this year, when researching a story on Donald Trump's executive appointments, I talked to current and former Hill staffers about Mick Mulvaney. The humorless debt truther from South Carolina was the man His Orangeness wanted to put in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, and the mention of Mulvaney's name generated a lot of adjectives.
"Dumb even by congressional standards," was one description. "A moron's moron."
Mulvaney was most famous for wanting to solve the national debt by deploying his sweeping ignorance of global economics as budget policy. Putting him in charge of the OMB was therefore like putting the Baader-Meinhof gang in charge of Lufthansa.
Like the rapturist preachers who spend their Sundays rooting for the end of the world, Mulvaney believes in a paradise that apparently rests somewhere just beyond the smoldering catastrophe that would follow a default on the national debt.
"I have yet to meet someone who can articulate the negative consequences [of defaulting]," he said during the debt-ceiling debate in 2010. Congress is home to a lot of third-rate lawyers and between-jobs bowling buddies of regional rich folk who got pushed into public service almost by default.
Even in this crowd, Mulvaney has always been thought of by his peers as overmatched. When Trump made him OMB chief, the move was widely interpreted on the Hill as a Bannonite sabotage ploy, a short-cut to crushing government from within.
Now this same policy cooler is going to be put in permanent charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This, after a Trump-appointed judge denied the request for an emergency restraining order against his appointment sought by deputy CFPB Director Leandra English.
Donald Trump, for one, is happy!
Mulvaney is a ghoulish pick for the CFPB post for a variety of reasons, the worst probably being that he appears to be an enthusiastic supporter of the payday lending industry. Payday lenders are the exact reason you need an agency like the CFPB.
They are pure human scum. Even by the rock-bottom standards of the American service industry, the payday-loan profit model is indefensibly exploitative. Your average flasher or school-zone meth dealer wouldn't be caught hanging out with a payday lender.
The payday loan business depended for ages upon the absence of any requirement that such lenders investigate the borrower's ability to repay. The typical payday operation set up shop in low-income, impoverished areas, forking out small cash loans, ostensibly against their destitute customers' next salary checks.
While federal bank examiners practically live in bigger banks, ruthlessly examining the viability of the bank's portfolio of loans, payday lenders have traditionally not had to run so much as a credit check on borrowers.
There were new rules coming – from the old head of the CFPB – that that would have forced payday lenders to run credit checks. It took the CFPB five years of research to come up with the new system. But who knows what will happen to that effort now.
Incidentally, the reason payday lenders didn't want to have to check on borrowers' repayment ability is that that information was irrelevant to their business model. These outfits didn't really want the small profits that came when the customer actually repaid the "payday" loan on time.
The real money was earned when borrowers got stuck rolling the loans over once, then twice, then over and over in an endless loop of killer fees. Once borrowers fall into that particular blender, they can find themselves paying far more interest than principal, hit with rates as high as 350 percent.
In a civilized country such "debt traps" would be illegal, but in America they're barely even disreputable. Why, the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mulvaney, can accept $26,000 in donations from such people in just the 2016 election cycle alone – and not even feel embarrassed about it! And when talking to the previous CFPB chief in a House hearing about payday lenders, Mulvaney in 2014 could offer this opinion without shame:
"I share your understanding that small-dollar lending serves an important function for many borrowers, especially those who may not utilize traditional banking services, and hope the Bureau will work to ensure the continued viability and availability of these products," Mulvaney said.
The dark irony of Mulvaney being put in charge of the CFPB by, of all people, Donald Trump, is that it shows how totally we've bullseyed the worst-case scenario that could have been imagined, when the country was considering a policy response to the financial disaster of 2008.
The formation of the CFPB was one of the key features of the Dodd-Frank Act, crafted in the wake of that crash. The reform was designed at a time when taxpayers had just shelled out a fortune to rescue the economy from larger-scale versions of payday-style financial predation.
Many subprime loans were no-money-down pipe dreams pushed on similar populations of economically vulnerable people, particularly minorities and the elderly. As with payday loans, subprime borrowers were often sucked into years of spiraling penalty payments by unscrupulous lenders.
A government agency dedicated to spotting and preventing such snake-oil consumer scams might have been able to prevent the 2008 crash. That none existed was amazing to begin with. Government officials came to similar conclusions after the 1929 crash, when they created agencies like the SEC to help protect until-then unprotected investors.
That was the thinking behind the founding of the CFPB. Most of the financial regulatory system until then had been focused on larger economic questions like soundness and liquidity, and there was virtually no one on the beat to protect individual consumers.
Still, it took a fierce fight during the Dodd-Frank negotiations just to get the CFPB at all, as Republicans were fiercely opposed to its creation and especially anxious to prevent Elizabeth Warren from heading it.
Now the agency is being taken over by a politician subsidized by predatory lenders, and nominated by as infamous a scam artist as has ever graced the halls of the White House. Giving the founder of Trump University and projects like Trump SoHo the power to nominate the head of the nation's leading consumer protection agency is a punch line stupid enough to make even Dennis Miller groan.
As Trump always finds a way to up the media ante, the next step is surely something like putting someone like Angelo Mozilo in charge of HUD. Whatever the worst move you can imagine might be, it's coming. What a joke this country has become.
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Mr. Trump, You're No Beacon |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 December 2017 09:30 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Good governance is a form of power. It serves as an example, and in some cases a beacon, for the rest of the world. It says, 'Look at what you can achieve.'"
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
Mr. Trump, You're No Beacon
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
02 December 17
 ood governance is a form of power. It serves as an example, and in some cases a beacon, for the rest of the world. It says, “Look at what you can achieve. You can be like us. You should want to be like us.” The United States under Donald Trump is not that beacon. Other countries shouldn’t want to be like us right now. We don’t have good governance in this country. We used to, with a few exceptions, and it didn’t matter whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House. But Donald Trump is different. He’s dangerous.
Since at least the end of World War II, many foreign countries have looked to the United States as an exemplar of honest, corruption-free, and democratic governance. Our economy was consistently strong, our people were well-fed and employed, our medical care was the best in the world, most Americans who wanted a home could buy one, our elections were generally untainted, and we were generous with other countries around the world who were trying to stave off poverty, famine, and war. Yes, many U.S. states had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the civil rights era. But overall, the country moved in the right direction.
For the most part, our foreign policy since World War II had been bipartisan. (We can argue that it was not so bipartisan under Reagan, but that can be the subject of another column.) Both parties supported détente with the Soviet Union, Nixon’s opening to China, the Middle East Peace Process, the opening to Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the international response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, to name a few foreign policy challenges. But that’s not the case under Trump.
So far during the Trump administration, the unapologetic draft dodger has relied on the military to dictate foreign policy. It is rarely Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who makes broad foreign policy pronouncements. It is usually Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who is known in Washington as “Mad Dog Mattis” for a reason. It’s no surprise, then, that the State Department has been decimated of experienced personnel and that 13 Assistant Secretary of State positions remain vacant.
Furthermore, when confronted over the State Department’s emasculation, Trump said that we don’t need all those senior officials. “I’m the only one that matters” on foreign policy, he said. Of course, he also sent his utterly inexperienced son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Israel to negotiate a “really, really great” peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, only to later remark, “Who ever thought the peace process was this complicated?” In addition, the White House recently announced the closure of the Palestinian Authority’s Washington office, only to later realize the blunder and to make a second announcement that the first announcement had been made by accident. Other countries are watching this. And they are by turns amused and horrified.
Trump further weakened the country by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords and by appointing a long list of climate change deniers to senior positions in the Environmental Protection Agency, where they can do further damage to the environment they’re supposed to be protecting. Even if you don’t believe that climate change is caused by humans, how do you intend to influence the debate and the response if you’re literally the only country in the world that isn’t a signatory? Other countries are watching.
The president consistently works to weaken the independence of the press by calling anything he doesn’t like – or any story that criticizes him – “fake news.” This weakens our very democracy. So many countries around the world do indeed have fake news. Just ask the people of North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran, Russia, China, and so many other places if they believe the news that they receive. Many don’t because it’s deliberately slanted. It’s meant to propagandize their citizens. But it used to be illegal to propagandize the American people. A free press is all about telling us what the government doesn’t want us to know. Having a president who weakens the fourth estate, who weakens freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is dangerous. Remember, other countries are watching.
We now have a president who, at best, pretends that racism isn’t a problem in our country and, at worst, is racist. He is, after all, the same person who refers repeatedly to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” because of Warren’s profession of Native Americans among her ancestors. He is the same person who referred to a group of African-Americans visiting the Oval Office as “you people” and who said during the campaign that “laziness is a trait in blacks.” Other countries are watching!
I do not intend solely to bash Donald Trump here, although, in my view, he deserves it. Both political parties have weakened our government and our country by their words and actions. When Republican leaders said upon Barack Obama’s inauguration that they wanted him to fail, or that they would do what they could to ensure that he failed, that weakened us. Similarly, when Democrats refused to accept the results of the 2016 election and said the same things about Trump, that also weakened us.
When Republicans refused to confirm an Obama Supreme Court nominee because we were “within a year of an election,” an outrageous and unprecedented notion, that weakened us. And it also set a dangerous precedent that Democrats undoubtedly will seize upon when they have the opportunity, and they will. This was a breakdown in the democratic process. And other countries saw it.
When our political leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, jump to the defense of men accused convincingly of sexual harassment, or, in some cases, sexual assault, uttering nonsense like “He hasn’t admitted to anything,” (Trump on Roy Moore) or “He has not yet been given due process,” (Nancy Pelosi on John Conyers), it weakens us. Other countries see that we don’t protect the rights of victims. We condone sexual violence. We do exactly what their governments do.
Former Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser famously said, “The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear cut stupid decisions. You only make complicated stupid decisions, which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” The world is not missing anything here. We are indeed making stupid decisions. The country is off the rails. We weaken ourselves and our nation when we say and do stupid things. This is not a partisan issue. It is a patriotic one. The world is watching! Let’s act like the leaders that we want the rest of the world to think we are.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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merica’s rich have gotten richer for decades, while the middle class and poor have seen meager gains. Since the mid-20th century, the top 1 percent have 
