Trump Is Gaslighting Soybean Farmers

Many rural areas, especially in the Mid-West voted for Donald Trump.  Now, thanks to Trump wholly self-created trade war these same rural areas are likely to take an economic beating, particularly as China retaliates for Trump's tariffs and looks to other markets to replace agricultural products previously  purchased from American farmers. Trump is trying to deceive these - in my view fools and/or bigots - who fell for his appeals to racism and xenophobia by trying to pretend that China and other nations commenced the trade war that Trump himself started.  A piece in Slate looks at this gaslighting of what Trump hopes will prove to be the gullible.   Here are excerpts:

American soybean farmers are fretting about becoming a casualty of Donald Trump’s brewing trade war with China, which happens to be their most important export market. Prices for the crop took a dive after tensions between the U.S. and Beijing began to flare up earlier this year, and in June, the People’s Republic finally placed a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans and other agricultural products in retaliation for the White House’s duties on Chinese goods.

[Trump] The president, of course, is trying to absolve himself of all responsibility:  “I am in Brussels, but always thinking about our farmers. Soy beans fell 50% from 2012 to my election. Farmers have done poorly for 15 years. Other countries’ trade barriers and tariffs have been destroying their businesses. I will open...”

I don’t usually like to use the phrase gaslighting, because it’s kind of a cliche at this point, but I’m pretty sure this is gaslighting. Trump is right on the narrow point that prices for soybeans have fallen by around half since 2012. But that really has nothing to do with trade barriers by other countries, as he suggests. Crop prices have plunged because of a worldwide boom in farming production that’s led to a giant commodity glut. Meanwhile, exports have actually been a crucial bright spot for American farmers: Measured by tonnage, the U.S. sells a little under half of its total soybean production overseas, with almost 60 percent of those exports headed to China alone last year.

U.S. soybean exports to China* were already down 22 percent through the first five months of this year, and the great fear among growers is that they could end up permanently losing market share there as buyers there shift to other suppliers, particularly Brazil, while Trump’s trade conflict wears on.

[Trump] The president wants the farm belt to believe he’s coming to its rescue. Somehow, I doubt farmers are going to buy it.

Trump played these voters for fools and karma may be about to catch up with them. 

The Much Deserved Implosion of Milo Yiannopoulos

As noted on prior occasions, I have no use for Milo Yiannopoulos and other gay "conservatives" who, in my view, are most motivated by either greed, racism or internalized homophobia.  Indeed, some personal acquaintances who will remain unnamed could use some intense therapy sessions to deal with their unvoiced self-loathing and masochism.  A column in Slate looks at the rise and even more rapid implosion of Yiannopoulos who has learned a harsh lesson in the willingness of the right to use supposed gay conservatives only so long as it fits the agenda.  Then one is discarded like worthless trash.  Yiannopoulos should be a lesson to other gays who allow themselves to be cynically used by their actual enemies.  Here are column excerpts:

You can thank Steve Bannon, now a central figure in Donald Trump’s administration, for making the clownish hustler Milo Yiannopoulos a star. As the editor of Breitbart, Bannon recruited Yiannopoulos to the site, where he published columns like “No, J.C. Penney, Fat People Should Absolutely Hate Themselves” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” If Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Yiannopoulos is a Trump voter’s fantasy of a decadent gay sophisticate. His shtick is to wrap various shades of reaction—anti-feminism, racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims—in camp, to sell bigotry as cheeky provocation. He and co-author Allum Bokhari put it this way, in a Breitbart ode to the alt-right: “Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish ‘Shlomo Shekelburg’ to ‘Remove Kebab,’ an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.”

Yiannopoulos uses his gayness to grant absolution to his mostly straight right-wing audiences, telling them that by reveling in prejudice, they are bravely flouting taboos. During the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, an at event billed as an America First Unity Rally, Yiannopoulos told a crowd full of bikers and Alex Jones acolytes: “I might be a dick-sucking faggot, but I fucking hate the left … the left in this country is a cancer that you need to eradicate.” As a gay man, he added, he aims to be “transgressive, to be naughty, to be mischievous. And today in America that means being right-wing.”

It turns out the right isn’t quite as enamored of transgression as Yiannopoulos thought. In the past few days, his career has imploded, thanks to old but previously little-noticed recordings in which he celebrates sex between teenage boys and adult men. In quick succession, Yiannopoulos’ invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference was withdrawn, his $250,000 Simon and Schuster book contract was canceled, and on Tuesday afternoon, he resigned from Breitbart. Even Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who coined the term alt-right, now dismisses him.

Yiannopoulos, a sworn enemy of victim culture, reacted to his sudden fall by playing the victim card. “I’m a gay man and a child-abuse victim,” he said, at a Tuesday afternoon press conference in SoHo. . . . Over the next 30 minutes, Yiannopoulos apologized, deflected, complained about a political witch hunt, and tried to cast himself as a performer being held to an unfairly literal journalistic standard.

Yiannopoulos’ act was all about baiting liberals over free speech; he’d say something repulsive, the left would react, and conservatives could play the defenders of edgy self-expression. In the end, however, the right shut him down the second he made conservatives uncomfortable. Going forward, even if any right-wingers are willing to be associated with him, it will be hard for him to continue the fiction that conservatives are uniquely open-minded. That means he’s no use to them, or to anyone, really. Poor snowflake.

"Conservative Gay" Milo Yiannopoulos' Book Deal Canceled

There are many self-loathing gays who cling to conservativism.  Some are closeted like, in my view, Republicans Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli who are just a tad too hysterical about gays and gay relationships.  Then you have "out" gays who nonetheless cling to the GOP - think the Log Cabin Republicans - even as conservatives trash them and work to make them third class citizens.  Then there is alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos who mainly seeks to shock, insult and denigrate the rest of the LGBT community.  In my view, all three categories of individuals require serious mental health interventions, but Yiannopoulos falls into a category all his own.  Seemingly, his never ending effort to shock and appall has at last backfired.  In the wake of newly released videos that suggest a support for pedophilia, he finds his misconceived book deal cancelled, himself dis invited from CPAC, a gathering of right wing extremists, and his job at the always sleazy Breitbart News at risk.    USA Today looks at  Yiannopoulos' self-immolation.  Here are excerpts:

Milo Yiannopoulos' book Dangerous was canceled abruptly Monday after Republican conservatives released clips of videos-with-audio in which he seemed to condone sex between men and boys.

In a terse statement released Monday afternoon, the right-wing provocateur's publisher said: "After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have canceled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos."

Minutes later, Yiannopoulos posted this on Facebook: "They canceled my book."

Yiannopoulos' provocative right-wing persona (he attacked feminists and trashed women who used birth control, to name a few of his views), helped get him a reported $250,000 book deal from Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, which was due to release Dangerous in June.

The gay British writer, who has collected kudos in the era of Donald Trump as a self-described "dangerous" provocateur, teetered on the edge of disaster Monday after Republican conservatives released clips of videos-with-audio in which he talked about his own past as a teenager who had sex with men and suggested that some young teen boys might be old enough to give consent to such sexual relationships.

Yiannopoulos tried on Facebook to defend himself but it didn't matter. He was abruptly dis-invited from speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference starting this week in Washington, according to a tweet from the American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp.

Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos' employer, Breitbart News, was reported by Fox Business Network and Washingtonian magazine to be considering whether to fire him from his writer/editor job where he has gained fame and infamy in equal measure while gleefully aiming vitriol at liberals, gays, Jews, foreigners, Democrats, plus many others.

Yiannopoulos has so far not commented on his CPAC snub. But he fought back against his critics in a long post Monday on Facebook that he called "a note for idiots."  He denied being in favor of pedophilia, acknowledged he does believe there are relationships between "younger men" and older men that can help a young gay man, and admitted he shouldn't have used the word "boy" in discussing those relationships.

The clips, dug up after Yiannopoulos was invited to speak at CPAC, record Yiannopoulos discussing Jews, sexual consent, statutory rape, child abuse and homosexuality. He also joked — in an "edgy way," he claimed — about his own teen sexual encounter with a priest. 

Sorry, but I cannot summon an ounce of sympathy for this vile individual.  Karma can be a bitch and he royally deserves to receive what he has dished out.

The Donald Trump - RNC War Escalates

The RNC and the so-called GOP establishment continue to try to close their eyes to their own responsibility for setting the stage for the destruction of the Republican Party which they now want to lay at the feet of Donald Trump.  Without the RNC's and the GOP establishment's welcoming of Christofacists, white supremacists and know nothings into the GOP, there would be no Donald Trump candidacy.  Nor would Trump be attacking the party's inner workings and delegate selection process and  saying that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”  Personally, I love that karma is finally coming back to bite the RNC and so-called establishment in the ass big time.  For far to long the courted factions that decent people should have shunned and encouraged all kinds of misogyny.  Now, the are paying the piper.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the escalating warfare:

Tensions between the Republican Party and its own front-runner erupted into a full-blown public battle as top party officials rebuked Donald Trump on Friday for alleging that the GOP primary system was “rigged” against him.

The dispute, which has been simmering for days, centers on Trump’s failure to win any delegates last weekend in Colorado, which selected its 34 delegates at a party convention rather than a primary attended by voters. All went to Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The outcome prompted a daily stream of complaints and allegations this week from Trump, who wrote in an op-ed published in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”

A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that “each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it.”

The fight again pits Trump against a Republican establishment that is still broadly opposed to his candidacy and struggling to reconcile with the possibility that he could be the GOP presidential nominee in November. Veterans of past presidential campaigns warned that the feuding could have an adverse effect on down-ballot races and on the ability to defeat Hillary Clinton, seen as the likely Democratic nominee, in the fall.

“Traditionally, this is the time that the party and front-runner come together and make the plans necessary to defeat the Democratic candidate in the fall,” said Michael Steel, who was an aide for Jeb Bush’s campaign and previously worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 and as spokesman for John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) when he was House speaker. “That’s clearly not happening, and it’s going to make it tougher to beat Secretary Clinton.”

Ron Bonjean, a former top adviser to Republican congressional leaders, called the Trump-RNC showdown “unprecedented” and warned that “taking a flamethrower to the Republican Party machine” could backfire on Trump.

“This is like a general severely criticizing his own special forces before ordering them to go into battle,” he said in an email. “Trump runs the risk of demoralizing grass-roots party organizers when he is going to need every asset to help him beat the Democratic nominee.”

One of the keys to Trump’s success until now has been his willingness to harshly criticize the party establishment, but he will need the support of the RNC in fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts if he wins the nomination. 

The fresh tension comes just as the party heads into another busy period of delegate allocation and selection. This weekend, seven states will hold meetings to select at least some of their delegates.

Republicans will gather in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia for meetings in congressional districts to award their delegates. And in Wyoming, Republicans are hosting a convention similar to the one held in Colorado, and Trump’s team concedes that they are again poised to lose to Cruz.

GOP Establishment in Near Panic Over Trump and Carson

The so-called Republican Party establishment cynically welcomed the Christofascists and white supremacist crowd into the party base with the short term view of winning elections by catering to the ugliest elements of society.  Now, that same crowd is in a near panic over the fact that they may have to lie in the bed they shortsightedly made by allowing the crazies and haters to hijack the party base, driving sane and moderate voters to flee the party in droves (I and my extended family all fled the asylum).  The shortsightedness - or perhaps hubris in thinking that they could control the swamp fever addled  base - of the establishment set the stage for the candidacies of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP establishment's belated consideration of the monster it created.  Here are excerpts:

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.

Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.

The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.

“The rest of the field is still wishing upon a star that Trump and Carson are going to ­self-destruct,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former adviser to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. But, he said, “they have to be made to self-destruct. . . . Nothing has happened at this point to dislodge Trump or Carson.”

According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.

For months, the GOP professional class assumed Trump and Carson would fizzle with time. Voters would get serious, the thinking went, after seeing the outsiders share a stage with more experienced politicians at the first debate. . . . . None of that happened, of course, leaving establishment figures disoriented. 

“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she [Nikki Haley] said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”

There are similar concerns about Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is gaining steam and is loathed by party elites, but they are more muted, at least for now.

[T]he party establishment’s greatest weapon — big money — is partly on the shelf. Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot and a billionaire supporter of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said he is troubled that many associates in the New York financial community have so far refused to invest in a campaign due to the race’s volatility. . . . . “People don’t want to write checks unless they think the candidate has a chance of winning.”

“I’m very worried that the Republican-base voter is more motivated by anger, distrust of D.C. and politicians and will throw away the opportunity to nominate a candidate with proven experience that can win.” 

The apprehension among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the worries.

“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”

Angst about Trump intensified this week after he made two comments that could prove damaging in a general election. First, he explained his opposition to raising the minimum wage by saying “wages are too high.” Second, he said he would create a federal “deportation force” to remove the more than 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.

“To have a leading candidate propose a new federal police force that is going to flush out illegal immigrants across the nation? That’s very disturbing and concerning to me about where that leads Republicans,”

“If we don’t have the right [nominee], we could lose the Senate, and we could face losses in the House. Those are very, very real concerns. If we’re not careful and we nominate Trump, we’re looking at a race like Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, getting beat up across the board because of our nominee.”  

These "elites" should have seen the likely consequences of allowing those detached from any form of objective reality  taking over the party based.  Instead, they merely looked at the short term.  Now they need to face the results of their own blindness and stupidity.  Karma can be a real bitch.

 

Message to Victoria Cobb of the Family Foundation

I suspect that Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation based in Richmond is not what one would describe as happy in light of yesterday's and today's court actions.  Since Ms. Cobb's stock in trade is hate, bigotry and divisiveness, I thought this image summed up her situation rather well.  May karma continue to repay her for her actions.

Karma Can Be A Bitch: Virginia Beach GOP Event Collides With Racist Travel Restrictions

Last year the Virginia Beach resort strip was in an uproar as an unofficial college weekend of students from historically black colleges descended for a weekend that in some instances turned raucous.  In response, as detailed in the Virginian Pilot, this year the Virginia Beach city government  - which leans heavily Republican - has announced that there will be severe restrictions on access to the Virginia Beach oceanfront to avoid a repeat of last year's congestion.   Of course, none of the restrictions being put in place by the Virginia Beach police department are utilized when the influx of students is from historically white colleges.

The irony?  The Republican Party of Virginia Beach which has had its problems with overt racism and seen a party chairman resign and a former chair disgraced due to crude racists "jokes" that reached the media is having its biggest fundraiser of the year for its affiliated women's' clubs - the Star Spangled Ball - this weekend at the oceanfront.  Now, the RPVB is worried that attendees may have difficulty getting to the event.

Karma can indeed be a bitch.  As for my familiarity with the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, I was the original incorporator of the entity when it incorporated and I served as its registered agent for a number of years until I finally severed all ties with the GOP because of its inability to separate Christofascist religious belief from the civil laws.  Personally, I hope the attendees of the Star Spangled Ball have one hell of a hard time getting to the event.