Monday Open Thread [11.23.15]

NATIONAL—Washington Post-ABC News: Clinton 60, Sanders 34, O’Malley 3
NATIONAL—FOX News: Clinton 55, Sanders 32, O’Malley 3
MARYLAND–SENATOR–Baltimore Sun/Univ. of Baltimore: With Cummings: Cummings 40, Van Hollen 28, Edwards 19. Without Cummings: Van Hollen 45, Edwards 31

NATIONAL—FOX News: Trump 28, Carson 18, Rubio 14, Cruz 14, Bush 5, Fiorina 3, Huckabee 3, Christie 3, Kasich 2, Paul 2, Pataki 1
NATIONAL—Washington Post-ABC News: Trump 32, Carson 22, Rubio 11, Cruz 8, Bush 6, Fiorina 4, Huckabee 3, Kasich 3, Paul 3, Christie 2,Graham 1, Santorum 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Suffolk University/Boston Globe: Trump 22, Rubio 11, Carson 10, Cruz 9, Kasich 9. Interestingly, if Mitt Romney jumped into the race he would lead Trump, 31% to 15%.
SOUTH CAROLINA—CBS News: Trump 35, Carson 19, Rubio 16, Cruz 13, Bush 5.
IOWA—CBS News: Trump 30, Cruz 21, Carson 19, Rubio 11, Bush 5.
NEW HAMPSHIRE—CBS News: Trump 32, Rubio 13, Carson 10, Cruz 10, Kasich 8, Bush 6, Fiorina 6, Christie 5

Nicholas Kristof goes biblical on this week’s descent into American fascism.

AS anti-refugee hysteria sweeps many of our political leaders, particularly Republicans, I wonder what they would have told a desperate refugee family fleeing the Middle East. You’ve heard of this family: a carpenter named Joseph, his wife, Mary, and their baby son, Jesus. …

The vote by the House of Representatives effectively to slam the door on Syrian refugees was the crassest kind of political grandstanding, scapegoating some of the world’s most vulnerable people to score political points. As a woman named Maria Radford tweeted me after the vote, “the Statue of Liberty must be crying with shame.”

Yes, security is a legitimate concern. And, yes, we can’t rule out the possibility that a terrorist will slip in with the refugees. Among refugees admitted to the U.S. since 9/11, there has been about one arrest for terrorism offenses for every 250,000 refugees, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Then again, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations there’s maybe a 100-times greater likelihood that, say, a Floridian will turn out to be a murderer over a 10-year period than that a refugee will attempt terrorism.

Donald Trump has had one hell of a weekend. After announcing the expansion of his Nazi Party platform to round up all Latinos for deportation with the creation of a National Muslim Database and forcing them to wear or carry ID cards, he ordered a black protester removed from rally, and his brownshirt supporters violently assaulted the protester during his removal. Trump celebrated the assault by saying that the black guy deserved it. He announced that he may run as an Independent after all if he does not get the GOP nomination, violating an earlier pledge he signed. He says he will be bringing back torture if elected. He continued to repeat and spread a repeatedly discredited and false story that “thousands of Arabs and Arab-Americans across the Hudson River, in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheered as the Twin Towers collapsed. As George Stephanopoulos repeatedly told him: police officers who were there have stated that it did not happen. He then retweets a wildly inaccurate and racist picture/chart on crime statistics:

The Crime Statistics Bureau in San Francisco does not appear to exist. From Think Progress:

Official crime statistics for the United States are collected by the FBI. The racial breakdown of the victims and offenders for murders are detailed in a report that is released yearly. The 2015 report, therefore, has not yet been released. The data, however, is stable from year-to-year. The FBI’s 2014 report, which was released in late September, reveals that the statistics in Trump’s graphic are fake and designed to stoke racial prejudice against blacks. Trump’s graphic states that 81% of whites who are murdered are murdered by blacks. This is false. The actual data shows that 14% of white murder victims are murdered by a black person. (In 2013, it was 13.6%.) The percentage of blacks murdered by other blacks (89.9%) is similar to the percentage of whites murdered by other whites (82.3%). Trump’s graphic falsely states that 97% of blacks are killed by other blacks but just 16% of whites are killed by other whites.

He retweeted this for no other reason than to signal his hatred of all African Americans. That is the only conclusion you can draw.

David Atkins reveals Trumps’ strategy:

Trump’s incessant barrage of outrageous pronouncements is reminiscent of the Gish Gallop strategy of argumentation: keeping your opponent on their heels and unable to debate effectively by throwing out so many false and misleading statements that it becomes too difficult to address any single one of them or make your own case. It’s a common creationist tactic, and a common tool of hucksters and swindlers everywhere.

Donald Trump is doing the Presidential campaign version of it in the 24-hour media cycle. No sooner does he make one absurd and dangerous statement than he follows it up with a different one, all the while making himself the center of attention and drowning out both his opponents and the ability to effectively respond to the previous outrage.

It’s sometimes hard to imagine what general election attack ads against Trump would even look like. Donald Trump isn’t an oppo gold mine—he’s more like a giant strobe-lit rave party of glittering, disorienting attack ad opportunities. One could literally fill hundreds of 30-second attack ads with his campaign statements alone, to say nothing of his personal history, and we’re still over a week from December.

Sasha Abramsky at The Nation writes The GOP Stampede Toward Fascism After the Paris Attacks:

There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.

It is an acrid smell, a mid-century aroma tinted with totalitarianism and historical ignorance. No society can protect its open, pluralistic politics by thoughtlessly clamping down on civil liberties. No country can seriously sustain its claim to being a beacon for human liberty if its most demagogic forces are unleashed against vulnerable, hungry, scared, and desperate refugees.

In my mind’s eye, I see the young child drowned in the Mediterranean, the photographs of whom, just a few weeks back, captured the world’s attention and, quite rightly, tugged at our collective heartstrings. I see the families who get off airplanes after odysseys of thousands of miles, pick up their worldly belongings—usually just two or three suitcases—and, with the help of organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, are given a chance to start lives anew, welcomed into communities around the country. I see all of our better instincts at work in helping these men, women, and children start afresh. And now, competing with these images, I see something uglier being unleashed. I see powerful figures such as Trump beating up on helpless refugee children. I see a stampede on the right to exploit a catastrophe, to exploit the war crimes of madmen, for partisan political gain.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Hillary Clinton is better-trusted on dealing with the terrorism threat, with her biggest edge over Donald Trump.

“By 50% to 42%, more Americans say they trust Clinton to handle the threat of terrorism than Trump, who leads the Republican field and responded to the Paris terrorist attacks by calling for heightened surveillance of mosques and redoubling his opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to settle in the U.S.”

A new Pew Research poll finds that Republicans “are nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say they are angry with the government. And among politically engaged Republicans and Democrats – those who vote frequently and follow politics on a regular basis – the gap is nearly four-to-one (42% to 11%).”

No shit.

With no sense of shame, no sense of hypocrisy or irony, batshat insane Congressman Louie Gohlmert (R-TX) says President Obama is playing politics with the Syrian Refugee Crisis. I mean, there are times when you figuratively bang your head against a wall or a desk, and there are times that you do it literally just to get the cognitive dissonance out of your head. This is the latter.

“I obviously am not happy about the events that happened last week in Paris, but I think it’s a positive development” says Marco Rubio, who was obviously happy that the Paris Attacks occurred.