Message from @retiredDep
Discord ID: 465554383581741068
Get Rid of John Kerry, what is he still doing there?
Check out @jamesirving2’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/jamesirving2/status/1015992016122011650?s=09
THAILAND RESCUE: Continuing coverage from the scene where four of the 12 boys trapped in Thailand have been saved from the cave. (ABC)
More: https://bit.ly/2u11hgg
Check out @vnuek’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/vnuek/status/1015992513184837632?s=09
Lol they say they can’t cure Trump
https://www.facebook.com/60987623733/posts/10156600006438734/
Haiti Protests Carry on Despite Fuel Hike U-Turn; Flights Canceled https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/haiti-protests-fuel-americans/2018/07/08/id/870517/
WASHINGTON (Circa) — When the Red Hen opened its doors Thursday, it was greeted by a mix of picketers and prospective customers, the remnants of anger and energy lingering after the rapidly-shifting spotlight of political controversy moved on.
The Lexington, Virginia restaurant had closed for nearly two weeks amid threats, harassment, and protests after its owner interrupted White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ dinner and asked her to leave on June 22. One protester was arrested last week for allegedly throwing chicken feces at the restaurant.
The owner has defended the decision, saying her staff was uncomfortable serving a representative of the Trump administration. Alongside other cases of Trump officials having meals interrupted by activists, though, it spurred a public debate over the depths of incivility on the left.
Two thousand miles away, President Donald Trump took the stage Thursday at a campaign rally in Great Falls, Montana, regaling the cheering crowd with extemporaneous attacks on his political enemies. At one point, he promised if he ever debates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., whom he derisively referred to as “Pocahontas,” he will throw a DNA test it at her and demand she prove her contested Native American heritage.
"We will take that little kit and say, but we have to do it gently. Because we're in the '#MeToo' generation so I have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn't hit her and injure her arm even though it only weighs probably two ounces,” he said.
Trump also unleashed insults against Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who was recently scolded by her own party leadership for encouraging people to “push back” against administration officials in public. He has repeatedly labeled her crazy and “low IQ” while she has reportedly faced death threats over her comments.
Democrats and feminists were not Trump’s only targets. He mocked former President George H.W. Bush’s use of the phrase “a thousand points of light” to promote volunteerism and complained about cancer-stricken GOP Sen. John McCain’s vote on a 2017 health care reform bill.
Also on Thursday night, police in San Antonio, Texas arrested Kino Jimenez, a 30-year-old man accused of accosting a teen Trump supporter in a Whataburger, throwing a drink in his face, and ripping a “Make America Great Again” hat off his head. Trump and his campaign manager have offered to send the victim a new signed hat.
These incidents represent the latest symptoms of a chronic disease in American political discourse that experts say is growing more severe and more difficult to cure with Donald Trump in the White House.
“The vitriol and the division in our politics has been ongoing,” said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University and author of “Civility and American Democracy.” “I think Trump has exacerbated it, but he’s not the cause of it… He’s taking advantage of it in a lot of ways.”
Michael Cornfield, an associate professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and director of the Public Echoes of Rhetoric in America Project, sees Trump’s deliberate rudeness as one of two major factors escalating incivility. The other is the spread of smartphones as a means of communication, changing the way people interact.
Smartphones disorient people, and a lot of what civility is is knowing where you are, who you’re with, and our standards change depending on where you are and who you’re with,” he said.
Cornfield has found Trump’s behavior to be less of a deviation from typical hardball campaigning than others, at least when it comes to attacking other politicians, foreign countries, and the media.
“Take name-calling, for example. A lot of people have gone after Trump and said that’s rude…,” he said. “Name-calling is standard in American politics, particularly when you are campaigning for office.”
Carolyn Lukensmeyer, executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona, pointed to additional causes of division, including partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and too much money being spent on politics.
“American politics has been broken for some time,” she said. “It did not just happen in the 2016 election.”
This is not to say Trump and the cavalcade of candidates who rolled in the mud with him throughout the campaign helped matters any.
“We saw behavior modeled by people running for president of the United States that we haven’t seen before,” Lukensmeyer said.
Many progressives see calls for civility in the battle against a proudly uncivil president who ran on combating “political correctness” as unilateral disarmament. Liberals harangued Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., at a town hall Monday with demands to resist Trump and discard decorum.
“We are in a gunfight and we have a butter knife,” one activist said, according to the Washington Post.
Others warn matching Trump’s egregious behavior with their own further energizes his base and alienates moderate voters.
“Donald Trump’s all-over-the-place, very unpresidential vitriol is contagious and has destroyed the Republican Party’s ability to speak to swing voters,” said Democratic strategist Craig Varoga. “The challenge for Democrats in this toxic environment is to learn from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, who personally may have experienced outrage but were never publicly outrageous, and always remained strong and reasonable under the most excruciating circumstances, and always kept the moral high ground.”
Politics in America has rarely been a polite enterprise, but Lukensmeyer said the rhetoric is currently the worst it has been since the post-Civil War era. The institute had a graduate student watch every modern presidential debate before the Trump-Clinton debates, and the difference was stark.
“There just was no kind of personal attack like we saw between Clinton and Trump and the kind of stalking behavior we witnessed on the stage…,” she said. “In terms of literally the actual language, sometimes inciting violence, that has not been seen in modern political history period.”
One significant change in the wake of the 2016 election is the continued animosity people feel 18 months later not just toward candidates but toward each other over whom they voted for.
“We still have Americans hating, vilifying, and demonizing people who voted for the other candidate,” Lukensmeyer said.
The National Institute for Civil Discourse has received calls from people unable to interact with relatives at holiday dinners, religious leaders dealing with congregation members not speaking to each other, and corporations whose staffs have not returned to pre-election levels of productivity.
Alan Dershowitz, a prominent attorney and former Hillary Clinton supporter, has witnessed this backlash as he becomes increasingly vocal in defending the legality of President Trump’s actions. He complained in an op-ed for the Hill this week that he has been shunned by liberals in Martha’s Vineyard as a result.
On Fox News Thursday, Dershowitz went further, telling Tucker Carlson, “At a party this week on Martha’s Vineyard, a woman said, ‘If Dershowitz were here tonight, I’d stab him through the heart.’”
Another difference from past periods of political division highlighted by Clayton is the open incivility of the White House itself, which recently used its Twitter account to accuse specific Democrats of supporting MS-13.
“You haven’t seen the sort of explicit baiting of the opposition coming from the White House,” he said.
Graham on NKorea's Rebuke: 'I See China's Hands all Over This' Sunday, 08 July 2018 10:35 AM https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/lindesey-graham-north-korea-china-influence/2018/07/08/id/870529/
NYC Yanks Tax Break on Trump's Fifth Avenue Condo https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/new-york-city-donald-trump-tax-break-mahattan/2018/07/06/id/870287/
LAKELAND STANDOFF UPDATE: More than 20 hours later, 39-year-old Gary Cauley is still barricaded inside a home with his 6-year-old daughter. Officers say they aren't expecting him to surrender anytime soon and have brought in bunker trailers for officers to sleep in shifts. https://on.wtsp.com/2MYSbYt
NATO Amb. Kay Bailey Hutchison: Trump Impact - Allies 'Hiking' Defense Spending Sunday, 08 July 2018 11:42 AM https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/kay-bailey-hutchison-nato-allies-spending-increasing/2018/07/08/id/870534/
