The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: chaos
Mike Johnson

Speaker Begs GOP Caucus To Stop Hitting Him -- So They Hit Him Harder

The Republican House is finally back to official work.They kicked off their short week with a conference meeting in which Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly asked Republicans to stop publicly being mean to him on social media. That did not go over well. In fact, it backfired and the House was once again thrown into chaos.

“Conservative Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) emerged furious, telling reporters that Johnson ‘should never have been hired,’" Axios reports. Davidson also told reporters that he walked out of the meeting early because he did not want to stick around to hear Johnson and leaderships’ “drivel.”

The contentious meeting Wednesday featured a dispute between Johnson and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who might still be smarting about how badly he lost his own bid to be speaker. The hardliners in the conference are angry at Johnson over his agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). They made that clear both in the meeting and by taking the fight to the floor, once again shutting the House down.

Thirteen House Republicans voted against a procedural bill to start debate on three bills that aren’t even related to the funding fight. They pulled a trick that had only been used once previously in the last two decades to bring legislative business in the House to a halt. This is exactly what the maniacs did to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy when they were mad at him for trying to avoid a government shutdown. We all remember how that ended.

“We’re making a statement that what the deal, as has been announced, that doesn’t secure the border and that doesn’t cut our spending, and that’s gonna be passed apparently under suspension of the rules with predominantly Democrat votes is unacceptable,” Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good of Virginia told reporters Wednesday after the vote. The ever-present implication behind that now is that they can take another speaker down if they feel like it.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was one of the 13 and has been Johnson’s chief detractor on social media, most recently tweeting a graphic that showed a picture of Johnson and Schumer with a wad of burning cash, writing “doing nothing is better than doing what the @HouseGOP is ready to do.” He wasn’t feeling particularly chastised by Johnson on Wednesday.

Asked if he will keep this obstruction up, he told reporters, "We'll see … Right now, the point here is that we're not remotely satisfied." That’s pretty close to the response Roy recently gave on whether he was gearing up to oust Johnson. “[T]hat’s not the road I prefer,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “[W]e’ll see what happens this week.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump’s Brand Is Chaos

Trump’s Brand Is Chaos

It’s not for nothing that Donald J. Trump was inducted into the professional wrestling Hall of Fame in 2013. The billionaire braggart’s entire presidential campaign is straight out of the WWE “Wrestlemania” playbook—all preposterous boasts, racialized taunts and simulated mayhem that threatens to turn into the real thing.
And wouldn’t TV news networks just love it?

Back last summer, when this column first took note of his uncanny impersonation of 1950s charismatic bleach-blonde bad guy Dr. Jerry Graham (“I have the body that men fear and women adore”) I was unaware of Trump’s enshrinement. Having outgrown pro-wrestling after eighth-grade, I’d never witnessed the 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires” between Trump and WWE impresario Vincent McMahon.

Anyway, if you want a laugh, Google the fool thing. Sure, it’s several minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but watching Trump posing, preening and throwing what a Rolling Stone reporter accurately characterized as “some of the worst punches in wrestling history” might wise you up to the game.

Alternatively, you could be a chump and show up at one of his campaign events to scream insults at some similarly deluded fool, or even get cold-cocked by a 78 year-old patriot and watch it being broadcast in an endless loop by CNN.

“I’d like to punch him in the face,” Trump said of a protestor at an earlier event, one of several similar incitements.

Yeah, well, the guy would probably survive.

For all The Donald’s penchant for sleeping with friends’ wives and bragging about it (Chapter 11, “The Art of the Deal”) I doubt he’s had much pugilistic experience. Very few guys with full-time butlers also have educated left-hooks. Surrounded by bodyguards most of his life, Trump appears to enjoy watching them bully people.
But could things get out of hand as the campaign proceeds? Sure they could. This is the USA. Riots-R-Us. Scaring people into supporting a strongman is Trump’s only real hope of running this scam all the way to the White House.

“For the Manhattan billionaire,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough commented in the Washington Post, “manufactured chaos is just as profitable for his brand as Paris Hilton’s sex tape was for hers.”

Never mind that Scarborough and “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski until quite recently fawned over Trump almost daily. He followed former Obama White House chief of staff (and son of Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard J. Daley) in suggesting that the candidate scheduled a campaign event on the inner-city University of Illinois-Chicago campus precisely “for the purpose of provoking protests that would energize Trump’s own supporters.”

Let’s you and him fight. Worked perfectly too. Does it matter that the students who boasted of their ability to shut the Trump rally down are Bernie Sanders supporters? No, but it figures.

As Scarborough also correctly observed, they’re political naïfs who got played, giving Trump a fine opportunity to whine “on cable news channels about how his First Amendment rights were being violated. He was doing all of this while reaching a far larger audience than he could have ever done while actually speaking at a rally.”

Sanders would do well to emphasize to supporters his own reverence for free speech rights, which I do not doubt. Why give the bully a chance to play at being the REAL victim?

On his Esquire Politics blog, my man Charles P. Pierce addressed the issue with characteristic understatement: “let’s all stipulate that chanting for Bernie Sanders while you’re shutting down a Trump rally is just about as stupid a political move as there is.”

You want to protest? Fine. Pierce suggested setting up picket lines outside the arena. “Stop being played for such suckers. Stop enlisting yourself in his bloody vaudeville.”

Meanwhile, let’s remain calm, shall we? This is nothing close to 1968, that annus horribilis in American life. No Vietnam War, with its hundreds of conscripted dead every week. No cities in flames, and prayerfully nothing like the Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations that broke the nation’s heart.

A handful of hotheads at Trump rallies shouldn’t blind us to the fact, as President Obama recently pointed out, that the angriest people in America are those without a clue about what’s actually going on.

Asked if he bore responsibility for the nation’s “incredibly polarized political climate,” Obama was scathing.

“I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” he said “but being blamed for their primaries and who they’re selecting for their party is novel.”

“Think about it: if somebody told you seven years ago we’d have 4.9% unemployment, 20 million newly insured, gas is $1.80, deficits cut by three-quarters, marriage equality a reality, bin Laden out of the picture, Wall Street reform in place you wouldn’t have believed me….Imagine what Trump would say if he actually had a record like this—instead of selling steaks.”

And shadow-boxing with college kids.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves the stage after speaking about the results of the Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri primary elections during a news conference held at his Mar-A-Lago Club, in Palm Beach, Florida, March 15, 2016.  REUTERS/Joe Skipper   

In Libya, Civilians Bear Cost Of War

The Libyan revolution might have deposed a dictator, but it also created months of chaos, with a vacuum of authority and accountability. Civilians in Libya have experienced countless human rights abuses, the reports of which are just beginning to surface.

News from Libya has often been confusing and sometimes contradictory, so information about human rights has tended to be buried in reports about the progress of the rebels in their fight against Gadhafi. The rebel leaders of the National Transitional Council have objected to the presence of UN military observers and police to help restore order, leaving many questions about the extent of human rights abuses by both sides. Now, with Gadhafi’s power essentially gone, news of the conflict’s effects on civilians has made the need for peace — and for subsequent justice and accountability — even more pressing.

The Associated Press reported that the Libyan rebels have been rounding up thousands of black Africans and detaining them in temporary jails. The rebels accused the detainees of fighting as mercenaries for Gadhafi, even though many say they are innocent migrant workers. Many black Africans from other countries, such as Mali and Niger, had come to Libya seeking work in recent decades. Since many of those people have different forms of ID and often served in Gadhafi’s military at some point, the rebels are suspicious that they are all mercenaries even if they claim to support the rebel cause. The rebels assert they are treating the detainees well, but the fact still remains that they have been holding people — by some estimates, more than 5,000 people in Tripoli — against their will without a trial.

Handling the prisoners is one of the first major tests for the rebel leaders, who are scrambling to set up a government that they promise will respect human rights and international norms, unlike the dictatorship they overthrew.

The rebels’ National Transitional Council has called on fighters not to abuse prisoners and says those accused of crimes will receive fair trials. There has been little credible evidence of rebels killing or systematically abusing captives during the six-month conflict. Still, the African Union and Amnesty International have protested the treatment of blacks inside Libya, saying there is a potential for serious abuse.

“The danger is that there is no oversight by any authorities, and the people who are carrying out the arrests — more like abductions — are not trained to respect human rights,” said Diana Eltahawy of Amnesty International. “They are people who carry a lot of anger against people they believe committed atrocities.”

Even so, the treatment of detainees is significantly better than the reports of human rights abuses by the pro-Gadhafi forces. The International Criminal Court has already issued indictments against Gadhafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his intelligence chief Abdallah al-Senousi for allegedly ordering security forces to kill unarmed protesters when the conflict began in February.

Since then, the abuses have intensified. Physicians for Human Rights found that troops loyal to Gadhafi have forced civilians to act as human shields and have employed systematic rape as a weapon of war. Their report urges further investigations into these human rights abuses so that the perpetrators will be punished for their actions: “Prosecutions, vetting, and other necessary methods of accountability will guide the Libyan people as they choose how best to forge a secure and just social and political order in the aftermath of conflict.”

Other human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have collected evidence that confirm abuses by Gadhafi’s troops, including arbitrary slayings, hostage-taking, and rapes. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that many Libyans have “disappeared,” with their whereabouts and welfare unknown. A spokesperson for OHCHR said, “We are also deeply concerned about reports that there are still thousands of people unaccounted for who were arrested or taken prisoner by Gadhafi security forces either earlier in the conflict, or before it even started.”

The exact numbers of civilian deaths, and the extent of the violence, are still unclear as the conflict continues.

Civil wars always have a significant impact on civilians as well as soldiers, and the ramifications of internal violence do not disappear when “peace” is declared. Once the Libyan revolution is complete, the new government will have to deal with the devastation left behind by a bloody, months-long conflict. Hopefully, the new leaders will hold human rights violators accountable for their wartime actions and will make a firm commitment to protecting all citizens.