Right wing Christians are currently engaged in fear-mongering about transgender people in bathrooms while they mostly ignore this:
Despite all those transgender bathroom laws GOP state legislatures keep passing, a child is far more likely to be molested at church.
In 2014 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) came out with a report on sexual abuse in the Catholic church. It turns out that from 1950-2013, 17,259 victims made accusations and 6,427 clerics had been counted as “not implausibly” or “credibly” accused. This doesn’t even account for underreporting or include the unusually large number victims who came forward in 2003 in the wake of the Boston Globe‘s eye-opening report on sexual abuse in the Catholic church by their Spotlight team…
Meanwhile, for all of their yammering about gay marriage and public restrooms, evangelical protestant churches also have a lot to answer for. In 2015, the exposure of 19 and Counting‘s Josh Duggar’s sexual proclivities revealed not only that America’s favorite Christian family wasn’t as wholesome as they seem (and that their faith community helped enable him). In February, the Washingtonian broke a story revealing decades of sexual abuse against children in Sovereign Grace Ministries, a suburban megachurch network.
Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.”
Democrats will miss him when he’s gone, and should appreciate her while she’s here, says Martin Longman:
I expected Democrats to begin expressing much higher approval numbers for Obama once they were forced to really think about Clinton or Sanders in the White House, but the trend is even stronger with independents who basically hate their choices in this election cycle:
Democrats have slowly looked at Obama more favorably since the beginning of 2015, but independents have begun to look at Obama much more favorably. After a sharp slide following his reelection, independents turned their opinions of Obama around at the beginning of 2014. Over the past year, that’s escalated. And since ratings from Democrats and Republicans are more stable, that shift by independents moves the needle a lot.
People don’t always realize that Obama’s approval numbers have been held down by the ambivalence of a lot of Democrats. The same is happening now to a much greater degree to Hillary Clinton. She won’t really have to do anything to see her negatives decline once the Democrats unite around her as the only chance of keeping Donald Trump away from the nuclear codes. If independents follow suit, which they will if they campaign is waged competently, she won’t be laboring under historically high negatives by the time people start voting.
As I said yesterday, Democrats want to fall in love with their candidates, while Republicans want to fall in line. You are seeing that now with all the Republicans falling in line behind Trump. And you will see Hillary’s numbers rise when Democrats unite. The story of the Summer is set: The Resurrection of Hillary.
Harold Meyerson, Democratic Socialist and Sanders supporter:
Over the past 48 hours, the Bernie Sanders campaign has all but eclipsed its own message. Like the antiwar movement of the 1960s—whence I came—a small group of its activists have themselves become the story, supplanting Sanders’s powerful critique of economic elites and the sway they hold over our politics. The issues that Bernie has so forcefully highlighted have been shunted to the background; the Bros have taken center stage.
We’ve seen this all before. By the late 1960s, most Americans had turned against the Vietnam War, but the extremism of a small share of the antiwar activists, and their proclivity for violent confrontations, turned millions of Americans even more decidedly against the protestors—a backlash that gave the Nixon administration the political space to continue the war for four more years.
This year, Americans have flocked to Sanders’s banner in numbers vastly exceeding any that a radical critic of capitalism has ever been able to claim. His indictment of Wall Street has resonated across the political spectrum; his proposals to break up the big banks, raise the minimum wage to $15, create tuition-free public colleges, and drive a wedge between the financial sector and elected officials have won wide acclaim, and enabled him to secure more than 40 percent of the votes in this year’s Democratic primaries and caucuses.
But now, what is arguably the most successful left campaign in the nation’s history stands in danger of being undone by an infantile fraction of its own supporters. The threats of violence, the shouting down of such lifelong liberals as Barbara Boxer, and the growing desire of some in the campaign, both on its periphery and at its core, to walk away from the real prospect of building left power by refusing to work with allies and potential allies in the Democratic Party—all these now threaten the campaign’s potential to bring lasting change to American politics.
I think Meyerson’s point is good, but I also think it is growing moot. Things seem to be calming down. And if reports are to be believed, Bernie, in quietly assuring Senate Democrats that he will not tear the party apart, is also calming down and will bring his supporters over.
Trump: "We never win" #WeWinDonald @owillis pic.twitter.com/KkeWuCSVwU
— Anne B (@abroshar) May 20, 2016
This meme must become central to Hillary’s campaign. Optimism defeats Pessimism every time.
Dana Milbank on the disdain Trump holds for America, and Americans.
Just how gullible does Donald Trump suppose the American voter is?
The billionaire showman has been the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for only a couple of weeks, yet his general election strategy is already becoming clear: hope for a mass nationwide outbreak of short-term memory loss. His top strategist, Paul Manafort, has said that the “part that he’s been playing is now evolving.” But this isn’t evolution — it’s reincarnation.
That call Trump made “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Turns out that was “just a suggestion,” he now says.
The federal minimum wage increase, which he repeatedly opposed? Now he’s “looking at” an increase, he says.
The massive tax cut he proposed during the primary, which analysts said would add $10 trillion to the federal debt? Never mind! He’s hired experts to rewrite it in a way that cuts taxes less for the wealthy.
Those tax returns he promised “certainly” to release? Not going to happen, he says now.
Sen. Bernie Sanders “cranked up his crusade” against the Democratic establishment, declaring that he is supporting DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) primary challenger, Politico reports.
“The move, a clear and intended affront to the Florida congresswoman, comes amid long-standing tensions between the two Democrats. Sanders and his allies contend that Wasserman Schultz has not been an honest broker during his run for the Democratic nomination and they have seethed over a number of issues ranging from the debate schedule to the amount of representation on the convention standing committees.”
NBC News: “The Trump campaign has said it will focus on about a dozen states during the general election, including Florida, but the candidate has not held a single campaign event there since winning the state’s primary in March… Even though Trump has become the presumptive nominee well before his Democratic rival, his general election team doesn’t yet have a real presence in the state. The campaign has yet to set up any of the infrastructure necessary to win a campaign in Florida, leaving its 29 delegates very much up in the air.”
“Trump’s lack of a ground game isn’t surprising. It’s been a criticism of his campaign throughout the primary process, but as both parties turn to the general election, the lack of local organization becomes more of an issue.”
Donald Trump has cheated veterans out of 6 million dollars.
Adam Gopnik: “One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses.”
“To say ‘Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that’ is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.”