kpete
kpete's JournalWe're at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean? I Imagine - Peace on Earth.
We're at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean?After accounting for eight out of 10 Americans in 1976, white Christians are now a minority, a study has found. The political implications could be profound
America is a Christian nation: this much has always been a political axiom, especially for conservatives. Even someone as godless and immoral as the 45th president feels the need to pay lip service to the idea. On the Christian Broadcasting Network last year, he summarized his own theological position with the phrase: “God is the ultimate.”
And in the conservative mind, American Christianity has long been hitched to whiteness. The right learned, over the second half of the 20th century, to talk about this connection using abstractions like “Judeo-Christian values”, alongside coded racial talk, to let voters know which side they were on.
But change is afoot, and US demographics are morphing with potentially far-reaching consequences. Last week, in a report entitled America’s Changing Religious Identity, the nonpartisan research organization Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) concluded that white Christians were now a minority in the US population.
Soon, white people as a whole will be, too.
The survey is no ordinary one. It was based on a huge sample of 101,000 Americans from all 50 states, and concluded that just 43% of the population were white Christians. To put that in perspective, in 1976, eight in 10 Americans were identified as such, and a full 55% were white Protestants. Even as recently as 1996, white Christians were two-thirds of the population.
MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/20/end-of-white-christian-america
TPM: The Personal is the Geopolitical, or Trump's Batshit UN Speech Explained
Hyper-nationalism is often innocuous or even salutary for states which know mostly oppression and degradation. In powerful states, it’s a source of immense danger.
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When the weak or the marginalized are defiant or even threatening, there is a self-regulating dynamic which limits the danger or renders it minimal. We can see this on both the domestic and international fronts. Chants of “black power” may be superficially comparable to chants of “white power”. But most of us intuitively understand they are very different. The defiance and demand of the marginalized or disempowered is inherently defensive in nature whereas the defiance and demand of the powerful is inherently aggressive and menacing.
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............Trump imagines a US which is a revisionist power amidst its own global imperium. The US is the dominant military power in every corner of the globe. The global economy revolves around the dollar, providing huge benefits to the US economy. One can debate the benignity or rapaciousness of US power. But no one can deny that the current world order and its foundational institutions are built to make the United States at least the first among equals of all the nation’s of the world.
And yet to President Trump we are laughed at and tricked by all the nation’s of the world, taken advantage of at every turn. We’ve been humiliated for too long and we’ve had enough. The consistency with which Trump has talked for decades about the US being ‘laughed at’ and humiliated by other countries is remarkable. This represents a deep, though minority strain of American politics on the right. But for Trump it clearly grows mostly out of personal experience and character. The mix of intense insecurity couple with a need for dominance and aggression is too central to his own personality not to be the driver of this vision of the world and America’s role in it.
Nor is it a coincidence that Trump is the doyen of white Americans who feel they are discriminated against in America, despite the fact that whites remain the dominant group in almost all sectors of American life. Both internationally and domestically these are pre-existing and intermingled strains of American political culture. But Trump embodies both because through some unhinged alchemy his own life trajectory and damaged psyche made that possible. That’s why he is President.
the rest:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-personal-is-the-geopolitical
Mueller's Manafort focus goes beyond Russia: Focus Spans 11 Years Back To Jan. 2006
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/910297472379052032https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/910306385094639616
Washington (CNN)Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team is reaching back more than a decade in its investigation of Paul Manafort, a sign of the pressure Mueller is placing on President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman.
The FBI's warrant for a July search of Manafort's Alexandria, Virginia, home said the investigation centered on possible crimes committed as far back as January 2006, according to a source briefed on the investigation.
The broad time frame is the latest indication that Mueller's team is going well beyond Russian meddling during the campaign as part of its investigation of Trump campaign associates. Manafort, who has been the subject of an FBI investigation for three years, has emerged as a focal point for Mueller.
The search, an unusually hard-nosed tactic in a probe that centers on possible tax and financial crimes, began before dawn as Manafort and his wife lay in bed, according to sources briefed on the matter.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/politics/mueller-manafort-pressure-decade-investigation/index.html
Deplorable GOP Lawmaker: "All Lives Splatter"
RAPID CITY — A Republican state lawmaker faced calls to apologize Tuesday after she shared an image on Facebook depicting protesters being hit by a vehicle under the caption, "All Lives Splatter."
Rep. Lynne DiSanto shared the image September 7, less than one month after a driver plowed through counter protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 others.
The Box Elder Republican deleted the post Tuesday after it was circulated by members of progressive groups South Dakota Forward and Indivisible Rapid City, who called on the lawmaker to apologize.
"To put up a meme that pretty much encourages violence and possibly murder, that's inappropriate. She's a community leader and an elected official," said Lori Miller, a spokeswoman for Indivisible Rapid City. "Not only is she inciting violence, she is targeting a certain race of people."
DiSanto, who is the GOP's majority whip in the House, did not immediately return a phone call requesting comment.
http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/19/s-d-gop-whip-shares-meme-endorsing-vehicular-assault-protesters/682564001/
GOP chairman declares bipartisan ObamaCare fix DEAD.
GOP chairman declares bipartisan ObamaCare fix dead
© Greg Nash
The Senate health committee chairman on Tuesday released a statement ending a bipartisan effort to find an ObamaCare fix amid a new GOP push to repeal the law.
"During the last month, we have worked hard and in good faith, but have not found the necessary consensus among Republicans and Democrats to put a bill in the Senate leaders’ hands that could be enacted," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate health committee, said in a statement.
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/351431-gop-chairman-declares-bipartisan-obamacare-fix-dead
https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/910252587689095168
https://twitter.com/burgessev/status/910238448627470338
Devastating statement from PM of Dominica."We have lost all what money can buy and replace."
https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/910105454457606144
Rude Pundit: The Short Bus to Armageddon: Trump at the UN-When do we get to stop being embarrassed,
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"Which group of shit-sniffing baboons is he gonna talk to this time?" we wonder. Will it be the crazed conservative hawks, the ones whose savagery make Democratic hawks look like confused parakeets? Will it be his base, whose heads are evolving into the shape of a permanent dunce cap, the one-third of the American populace who pretend they want anarchy when, really, all they want are more guns and fewer dark-skinned people? Will it be the unsatiated capitalists, the ones who would monetize child rape if they thought they could squeeze a few more pennies out of the bloodied anuses of babies? And usually, it's all three, to varying degrees, with Trump a carnival barker yelling at the freaks and carnies to scoop up the spilled popcorn and toss it back in with the rest to sell again tomorrow.
At the United Nations today, Trump spoke stiffly and boorishly, his pinch-fingered hand gesticulating like he was jacking off his own micropenis.It was like some kind of dumb college prank, where you make the stupidest freshman get up at karaoke and sing the National Anthem instead of some damn Ed Sheeran song. Put a MAGA hat on that bitch, and you've got a Trump voter.
Whatever you think of the U.N., most of the leaders in that room are people who have dedicated their lives to the politics of their nation. Most of them are vastly educated, well-read, worldly, and, to varying degrees, smart enough to know a fucking idiot when they see one. So you had to imagine the reactions to Trump at the General Assembly ranged from horror to bemusement to calculating how easy it would be to roll this rube (looking at you, Saudi Arabia).
Did Trump brag about how great things are now that he's been president for all of 8 months? Fuck, yeah, you know he did. Actually, apparently, his presidency started even earlier: "The United States has done very well since Election Day last November 8th. The stock market is at an all-time high -- a record. Unemployment is at its lowest level in 16 years, and because of our regulatory and other reforms, we have more people working in the United States today than ever before. Companies are moving back, creating job growth the likes of which our country has not seen in a very long time." Yes, I'm sure Hage Geingob, the president of Namibia, who has a PhD in international relations from the University of Leeds, really thought that Trump deserved the credit for this. (By the way, interestingly, Geingob came to the United States to start college at Temple University, in Philadelphia, in 1964 before transferring to Fordham University in New York City. Trump started at Fordham in 1964 before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.)
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MORE:
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-short-bus-to-armageddon-trump-at-un.html
Trumputins election is Deconstructed by the minute.
President Trump's Pick for Russian Ambassador: 'No Question' Moscow Interfered in Election
Richard Lardner / AP
12:49 PM ET
(WASHINGTON) — Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, President Donald Trump's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Russia, told Congress on Tuesday that Moscow's meddling in the 2016 presidential election led directly to the lack of trust between the two former Cold War foes.
Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Huntsman struck a tough tone amid heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow. The relationship has been marred in recent months by a series of expulsions of diplomats and closures of diplomatic missions.
"There is no question that the Russian government interfered in the U.S. election last year and Moscow continues to meddle in the democratic processes of our friends and allies," said Huntsman, who also noted that Russia continues to disregard its commitments to arms control treaties.
MORE:
http://time.com/4948302/jon-huntsman-russia-election-interference/
Broke? Trump is using campaign donations & RNC funds to pay legal bills from Russia investigation!
Rich people are cheap. I have had some limited time with rich people, and holy hell are they are cheap (#notallrichpeople). But the Trump grift can only be understood by acknowledging that Trump is broke. Not precisely, of course, but broke in the sense that he lives paycheck to paycheck and at the mercy of creditors like most of the rest of us if at a grander if short-fingered scale.
The U.S. Federal Election Commission allows the use of private campaign funds to pay legal bills arising from being a candidate or elected official.
While previous presidential campaigns have used these funds to pay for routine legal matters such as ballot access disputes and compliance requirements, Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/910237822732390400
https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/910237672337223680
More:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/19/trump-using-campaign-rnc-funds-to-pay-russia-probe-legal-bills-reuters-citing-sources.html
via:
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2017/09/trump-is-broke.html
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