Ramping up the fear

Did they really?

Some Democratic caucus members omitted "one nation under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance during DNC meetings. But the line was not excluded from any of the convention’s primetime televised spots.

On the first night of the DNC, participants sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" instead of saying the Pledge of Allegiance. On the second, third and fourth nights, "under God" was included in the pledge.

  Politifact

Personally, I think the line should be omitted from the pledge. It was only put in there by the Eisenhower administration as a scare tactic in the first place to turn people against Communism.

Promise?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Glenn Beck wants to be relevant again

Or at least make the big bucks again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The politics of fear

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Hillary!

I actually take some comfort in the realization that if Trump and Pence should both go down - which they would do in a just world - Nancy Pelosi would be president.  Not my first choice, but dear god, a couple months ago, it would have been Paul Ryan.

And I'm damned sure Nancy wouldn't step aside if she got the job.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

El Chapo trial puts the lie to Trump's drug entry claims

If he had written "just blocks from," it wouldn't have taken me as long to decipher that last line.  I kept reading "exit only" and wondering what the heck the blocks were and why the CBP office would have them knowing those were drug tunnels.  Maybe it's just too early.  Or the blood wolf moon.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because devout Muslims abandon their prayer rugs all the time

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:





Amen.

Meanwhile in Iran

Police in Iran’s capital have arrested 29 women accused of being “deceived” into joining protests against a law that makes wearing the hijab compulsory.

Women across the country have been protesting by climbing onto telecom boxes, taking off their headscarves and waving them aloft on sticks.

Although women in Iran have fought against the hijab for nearly four decades, the new wave of protests has grabbed more attention and sparked a debate rarely seen before over personal freedoms.

Police in Iran’s capital have arrested 29 women accused of being “deceived” into joining protests against a law that makes wearing the hijab compulsory. Women across the country have been protesting by climbing onto telecom boxes, taking off their headscarves and waving them aloft on sticks. Although women in Iran have fought against the hijab for nearly four decades, the new wave of protests has grabbed more attention and sparked a debate rarely seen before over personal freedoms.

[...]

Soheila Jolodarzadeh, a female member of the Iranian parliament, said the protests were the result of longstanding restrictions. “They’re happening because of our wrong approach,” she said, according to the semi-official Ilna news agency. “We imposed restrictions on women and put them under unnecessary restrains."

[...]

Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, described the protests on Wednesday as “childish”, “emotionally charged” and instigated “from outside the country”.

Masih Alinejad, a US-based journalist and activist, started the White Wednesdays campaign in May 2017, encouraging women to wear white headscarves or take them off in protest at the rules.

[...]

[S]he works for the US government-funded Voice Of America service, she has received no funds for either of her campaigns.

[...]

“The Iranian police announced in 2014 that they’ve warned, arrested or sent to court nearly 3.6 million women because of having bad hijab, so these arrests are not new, if people are protesting it’s exactly because of such a crackdown,” she told the Guardian.

  The Guardian

I hope these women are able to win this small freedom to choose, and that they don't have to suffer much for it. It's as heinous for them to be forced to wear any type of garment if they don't want as it is for countries in Europe to make it illegal for them to wear it if they do.

Reminder: Iran, before US support of the corrupt and dictatorial Shah led to an uprising that brought religious fanatics to power in the 80s, was quite modern socially.  That's an oversimplification, of course, but at the root of much of the strife in the Middle East is US meddling and manipulation.  Then we get to blame the Middle Easterners for always being in strife.  The old saw about how they've been fighting each other for centuries isn't accurate.  You could say the same about Europe with about as much accuracy. 

And, this kind of shit doesn't help anything:

Viralize this

When You're in the Wrong, Double Down, Part 2

via GIPHY

He's not worried.  His nukes are bigger.  They're the biggest, believe me.

And what do you mean, "if".  If you just heard him, you know what he said.

SAD!

A decade-long study shows a disturbing trend of anxiety levels among US citizens. Deep concerns of war and natural disasters continue to distress people across the country, the newly published survey has found.

In the survey conducted by the global information technology company, Unisys, the US jumped to 8 out of 13 countries surveyed. Americans are now on par with Colombia in terms of their perceptions of security, according to the Miami Herald.

[...]

Some 68 percent of Americans cite national security issues such as war and terrorism as something they are either very or extremely worried about, making it the number one anxiety driver in the US.

[...]

The countries that are feeling even more jittery than the US are Argentina, The Philippines, Brazil, Malaysia and Mexico, according to the Herald.

  RT

When you think about the fact that Colombians are plagued by brutal drug cartels, and the others have notoriously undependable governments, that's kind of crazy. But, when you think about the fact that the US is the world's largest purveyor of war - IN OTHER COUNTRIES - that's really crazy.

“It appears that our cloak of security, the impression that we had, that we are more secure than the rest of the world, is starting to fade,” Bill Searcy, Vice President for Global Justice, Law Enforcement and Border Security at Unisys, said.

[...]

“The rest of the world also climbed, but the US climbed at a higher rate,” Searcy added.

[...]

The last time the US was included in the survey was in 2014.The score for the US spiked 37 percentage points in the wrong direction in just two years.

Trump or Hillary - either one could be the reason.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Terror! Scary! Terror! Scary!

via GIPHY

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  London's mayor never said there's no reason to be alarmed.

Trump! Russia!

Yes, Julia.  It also shows how gullible you "and so many" others (aka knee-jerk news consumers) are.  Stop passing on "scary" memes before you check them out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

"Pro-ISIS"

America Today: The Age of Unreason

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

  Edward R Murrow as quoted by Bill Moyers

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Be Afraid

All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District have been ordered closed due to a threat.

School district spokeswoman Ellen Morgan announced the closure on Tuesday but released no further details. At a press conference, school superintendent Ramon Cortines said that the threat was “not to one school, two school or three schools” but to “many schools” and “at school students” generally. He declined to describe the nature of the threat.

He said he had asked staffers at schools to look for “anything that is out of order” but “not to touch anything, not to do anything” before contacting authorities – suggesting that he and school officials fear a bomb threat.

  The Guardian

Now that's what I call streamlining fear-mongering.

The superintendent said the district police chief informed him of the threat around 5am on Tuesday. “He shared with me that some of the details talked about backpacks, talked about other packages,” Cortines said.

That's very helpful.  Backpacks in schools.  Beware.

Students will soon not be allowed to carry backpacks and have to go back to the bad old days before backpacks when we carried loose books in our arms, jostling them around and dropping them often enough trying to open doors.  Maybe backpack manufacturers will go bankrupt.  Or maybe they can make transparent packs with built-in metal detectors.

Steve Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles school police department, said the threat was delivered as an “electronic” message, and that the decision to close schools was made “in an abundance of caution”.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest "abundance" is too weak an adjective.

Cortines said that he would release a statement describing the threat only after police had searched schools. He asked for employers to be flexible with parents so that they could reunite with children.

Everyone duly frightened and more enraged about Muslim terrorists.

“We get threats all the time,” he said. “We do evacuate schools, we do lock down schools, etc. We do not release students until we notify parents.

“So what we are doing today is not different than what we always do, except we are doing this in a mass way.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Talking Out Your Ass

In theater terms [...] there was one new and actually striking part [of president Obama's speech on Sunday], which came toward the end when he called on Muslims to decry ISIS, or ISIL as he insists on saying. He used the usual liberal language about how most Muslims are great, but he also said that religious fundamentalism is “a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse.” At times he sounded like he was even about to utter the words “radical Islam,” which Democrats for some silly reason have decided they shouldn’t use.

This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge to Muslim Americans, or at least the first time he’s done it in such a public way that it will sink in on the collective public mind that the president said it. That’s actually kind of a huge deal. It says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s OK, because every ethnic and religious group outside the Pilgrims has had to do that earning and fighting. They’ve all faced suspicion, and they’ve all proven that they were better than that. Muslim Americans will have to do the same.

  Daily Beast

And, how, pray tell do they do that? How do they prove that, right now, so non-Muslim Americans will be comfortable?

But, even more fundamental (if I may use that word without causing fright) to the issue:  No, the rights anyone has as an American do NOT have to be earned or fought for.  They are rights.  Period.  And they are rights by virtue of being an American.

If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen.

What the hell happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"  Isn't that an American value?  Does it exclude certain groups of people?  If they haven't done anything to merit suspicion, why is it up to them to make you less suspicious?  And again, I have to ask: how would they DO that?

Why don't white Christians have to PROVE they don't condone killings by white supremacists?

And, once again, as he has been throughout his presidency, Obama is being led by the nose by rabid Republicans. He hasn't the courage to stand up and say, "Enough!  I won't condone this kind of anti-American bullshit."  That most rabid of Republicans, Donald Trump, is advocating no Muslims be allowed to enter the U.S. until we "figure it out" whatever the hell that means, and Rand Paul, who sometimes manages to sound fairly reasonable, has introduced legislation to keep out anyone from "nations with known radical elements while a new system is developed to screen properly." WTF, Rand? That would cover essentially every First World country, including our own! Just go ahead and pull a Trump: close all the borders.

In the fifties, people were hounded and lives were destroyed because of their political beliefs. Now the same is being done because of religious beliefs. What a fine showing of progress.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Fox News correspondent called Obama "a total pussy" on air.  He's not calling him a coward for the same reasons I have, and I strongly object to the term being used.  (So perhaps I should stop calling people dicks?)

FURTHER UPDATE:

A Duke University study found more terrorism suspects and perpetrators were brought to the attention of law enforcement by members of the Muslim-American community than were discovered through U.S. government investigations.

  CNN

What does Mr. Obama have to say about that?

EVEN FURTHER UPDATE:

Who Will Save Us?

He's probably on his way to the US this very minute.  We need to waste no time arguing now.  Screw the "back door" approach.  We need a law allowing the NSA direct access to ALL our communications in real time. It's okay.  You have nothing to hide.  Only bad people do.

Not soon enough.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Toyota Cow Tow

U.S. counter-terror officials have asked Toyota, the world’s second largest auto maker, to help them determine how ISIS has managed to acquire the large number of Toyota pick-up trucks and SUVs seen prominently in the terror group’s propaganda videos in Iraq, Syria and Libya, ABC News has learned.

Toyota says it does not know how ISIS obtained the vehicles and is “supporting” the inquiry led by the Terror Financing unit of the Treasury Department -- part of a broad U.S. effort to prevent Western-made goods from ending up in the hands of the terror group.

[...]

“We have procedures in place to help ensure our products are not diverted for unauthorized military use,” said Lewis, the Toyota executive.

  ABC

And what procedures would those be? I guess it's a national security secret.  Does Toyota have undercover agents in ISIS?

Toyota Hilux pickups, an overseas model similar to the Toyota Tacoma, and Toyota Land Cruisers have become fixtures in videos of the ISIS campaign in Iraq, Syria and Libya, with their truck beds loaded with heavy weapons and cabs jammed with terrorists.

[...]

Questions about the ISIS use of Toyota vehicles have circulated for years. In 2014, a report by the radio broadcaster Public Radio International noted that the U.S. State Department delivered 43 Toyota trucks to Syrian rebels. A more recent report in an Australian newspaper said that more than 800 of the trucks had been reported missing in Sydney between 2014 and 2015, and quoted terror experts speculating that they may have been exported to ISIS territory.

For years! Since 2014.

How many Americans are going to go out and sell their Toyota pickup to so they don't get pegged as terrorists? And how much will new sales in the US drop?

“Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who is CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit working to expose the financial support networks of terror groups.

The "ISIS brand."

Buy American, dammit!

“I don’t think Toyota’s trying to intentionally profit from it, but they are on notice now and they should do more,” Wallace said. “They should be able to figure it out... how are these trucks getting there. I think they should disclose that, put a stop to that, and put policies and procedures in places that are real and effective to make sure that we don’t see videos of ISIS using Toyota trucks in the future.”

Because Toyota has its own police force? Toyota can "put a stop to" illegal sales or terrorist trade?  Impressive.

Wlaace, head of something called the Counter Extremism Project, is today's version of Joseph McCarthy, and Toyota is now "on notice."

For the love of Pete. What next? I have to wonder if this would have happened if ISIS videos showed Ford or Chevrolet pickups.

And lest we forget in the anti-Toyota campaign frenzy, much of ISIS and other terrorist groups' actual military weaponry is made by American "defense" companies.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Holy cow.

From The Counter Extremism Project's "About Us" page:

CEP is assembling the world’s most extensive research database on extremist groups and their networks of support, providing an indispensable resource to governments, media, NGOs and the public.

[...]

Modeled in part on advocacy efforts to counter Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, CEP will expose shadowy channels of financial support to extremist groups and bring to bear private and public sector pressure to disrupt them.

From their "Mission Statement":

The Counter Extremism Project will:

• Expose, degrade, and stop the financing and other economic support of global extremist organizations;

• Build a best-in-class clearinghouse and database of extremist groups and their supporters, mapping the social and financial networks, tools and methodologies on which these groups rely.

So Toyota is now mapped as a supporter of ISIS.

Guess who else is works for this "indispensible" provider of terrorist information?

Try to Keep Up

Get Scared & Stay Scared

A casual search reveals the FBI and DHS are a pitiful 0 for 40 warning of terror attacks—some of which were specifically about 4th of July threats, none of which materialized in any way.

[...]

The actual terror attacks carried out on US soil—the Times Square bomber, “Underwear bomber,” Boston bombing and Garland attacks—were accompanied by no such warnings. (Nor were the often deadlier terrorist attacks by right-wing white terrorists–but terrorism in this category is rarely if ever the subject of FBI warnings.)

[...]

The problem is three fold:

1. The FBI has all the incentive in the world to issue warnings and no incentive whatsoever to not issue warnings. Issuing warnings has no downside, while not doing so is all downside.
2. The FBI, like all agencies of the government, does not operate in a political vacuum. Emphasizing the “ISIS threat” at home necessarily helps prop up the broader war effort the FBI’s boss, the president of the United States, must sell to a war-weary public. The incentive is to therefore highlight the smallest threats. This was a feature that did not go unnoticed during the Bush years, but has since fallen out of fashion.
3. It has no actual utility. What does it mean to be “more vigilant”? It’s a vague call to alertness that officials, aside from “beefing up security” by local police, never quite explain what it means. If the FBI wanted to tell local police departments to up their security of the 4th of July weekend, surely they could do so quietly, without the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security having to go on all major networks talking over b-roll of ISIS in apocalyptic terms.

  Adam Johnson at FAIR

One might think so. Apparently, however, we need to be reminded periodically that our government needs those extra powers of domestic surveillance in order to keep us “safe”

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.