Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The family of Keith Scott viewed the police video and it`s worth repeating that afterward the family made a statement through their lawyers which reads in part, "It is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands. When he was shot and killed, Mr. Scott`s hands were by his side and he was slowly walking backwards."
Now, [Donald] Trump has thus far gotten endorsements from illustrious group, that includes Sarah Palin, David Duke, Dennis Rodman, racially profiling birther sheriff, Joe Arpaio, vaping Congressman Duncan Hunter, and just this afternoon, infamous Maine Governor Paul LePage who accused drug dealers with D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty of impregnating white women.
It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize?
According to "Huffington Post", one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records,newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.
There was a man named Robert Dear who in court said he was a warrior for the babies, whose ex-wife talked about his Christian beliefs motivating his desire to attack and murder three people, including a police officer, in Colorado.That man is a Christian. He`s an avowed Christian. He appears to have acted on those Christian beliefs to undertake that act of violence.
Now, in an analysis of campaign finance filings by Politico we learned the [Donald] Trump campaign has paid Trump businesses more than $8 million so far in this race, that includes $1.3 million in rent for campaign offices, half a million for food and facilities for events, over $300,000 for corporate staffers, and nearly $6 million for the use of Trump`s private plane.
People in the media often tend to assume it`s like Trump and [Ted] Cruz fighting over the same voters but when you look at the people who say they`re voting for Donald Trump he does as well with voters who describe themselves as moderate or liberal as he does with voters who themselves as very conservative. So, not all the Trump base would go to Cruz as a second choice.
None of us were prepared to hear what Justice Scalia said, because in essence what he was saying is let`s go back to pre-Board of Education - Brown versus Board of Education, 1950s America where blacks are doing all right going to black schools or schools where blacks go. He said go to less advanced schools where they do all right. We`re going back to separate but equal.
There are a variety of groups, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Sierra Club, that are groups that do very good work, that do a lot of things that I personally believe in, that are also as a descriptive matter they`re part of what you`re going to call an establishment in Washington of the sort of center-left probably, Center for American Progress. They are part of it.
Generally the impulse to find justice through punitive measures can be a kind of quicksand. What James Whitman, the scholar I cite in the chapter of my book, talks about as an urge to level down, I think you see that everywhere. We're going to be a punitive society, so we might as well level out that punitiveness. Bankers and college swim stars and everyone face that same kind of wrath.
I`ve been spending a fair amount of time in the recesses of white nationalist, white supremacist social media online areas, what called itself is the "alt right", which is sort of the euphemistic term they use for what is essentially modern day white supremacy. And they are some of [Donald]Trump - this has been reported from the beginning but they are very excited about [anti-Muslim] proposal.
Twilight of the Elites main thesis has been borne out far past what I could ever have imagined. The major idea was that these series of elite failures created this crisis of authority which was fertilizing distrust in the pillars and institutions of American society. In the absence of that authority there's this vacuum which is easily filled by authoritarian solutions, and I think that's exactly what happened.
The degree to which I try to be honest that there's some Donald Trump in all of us. The seduction of the promise of order, the politics of white fear, it's not just some other group of uneducated white people who are susceptible to those appeals. It's everyone. And not just white people, frankly. All Americans have this susceptibility to a politics of fear and order that I think we have to be really honest about.
The [Hillary] Clinton campaign posted a pretty clever online quiz that makes a similar point with the Republican presidential field. Who said it? Donald Trump or not Donald Trump? For example, quote, "I mean you can prove you are a Christian. You can`t prove it, then you err on the side of caution." That was not Donald Trump. It was this guy, who strongly denounced Trump`s proposed Muslim ban but supports a religious test for refugees.
I've had a dozen people tell me, maybe more, 'What would have happened if Michael Brown had shot and killed Darren Wilson? Do you think he would be free right now? Do you think he would not have been charged by now?' People just see this manifest double-standard in front of them that's coming at the long line of a whole bunch of grievances that have built up over time because of the dynamics of Ferguson and frankly, the dynamics of race in America more broadly.
The other theory of the case - and it`s not just one that people opposed to him politically believe, but also people who share the Republican Party`s beliefs or conservative, but don`t like Donald Trump, is that he`s fundamentally a narcissist who has become addicted to the attention, is sort of compulsively driven by attention, and this has given him an outlet for that attention, and crucially doesn`t actually care about the party that he is nominally representing.
In the case of Philando Castile, we believe he was complying, it might have been precipitated by a police officer telling him to open the glove compartment.We have other examples in which people have met the same fate when they appear to be complying. Yet the way that the system tends to operate and the way the police when you talk to them view that situation is they are looking for things that trigger their perception of threat and that`s a highly subjective judgment.
I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
The central question for American politics right now is how did the country that elected Barack Obama elect Donald Trump. There's a lot to what Ta-Nehisi says about the racial reaction and backlash. And the power and the force and ultimately the success. The man who was selling this racist conspiracy theory about the first black President's birth: that's what launched him into a political career that ended up getting him elected the President of the United States. That is an absolutely remarkable fact.
We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.
The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.
The issue of the American justice system is so much broader than any one party, or any area of the country, or any one policy, because the totality of it is that it's driven by the underlying politics. The underlying politics are white fear and wrath and punishment. And that's what tends to be consistent. As I say in the book, that's the magnet that's drawing the iron filings into alignment. That's the thing that's powering all of it. The gravitational pole of those politics operate on each of these disparate little actors.
I was looking, a piece in the "L.A. Times" about a paper called "The Menace" back in 1915, that was railing against Catholics and it said all sorts of things about them. They are essentially a fifth column. They are crypto fascists, that they said if we were compelled to live in this term with Romanists, that`s their term of Catholics, the Romanists will have to be taught their place in. Was that bigotry or were they correct back then to look at Catholicism as fundamentally alien and threatening to the American way of life?
If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.
The Cook Political Report now predicting senate democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats, which would give them the majority. Pointing out the history shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle, one party tends to win the lion`s share of them. With two weeks to Election Day, there`s not enough time for republicans to recover toss-up seats in states where Hillary Clinton is currently leading, considering this, early voting is under way, and [Donald]Trump won`t be any help especially since his campaign doesn`t really have a ground game to speak of.