Month: April 2017

Don’t blame Canada for Wisconsin’s dairy crisis

The Canadian news program The National, which airs on Canada’s public broadcaster CBC in Canada, recently did a feature story about the dairy crisis in Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump is trying to falsely blame on Canada and their policies regarding trade of ultra-filtered milk from the United States to Canada.

The CBC featured a pair of Wisconsin dairy farm families, the Sauer family of the Waterloo, Wisconsin area and the family of Sarah Lloyd and Nels Nelson of Columbia County. Having watched the video on the CBC website more than once, it’s inherently clear to me that overproduction, not international trade policies, are responsible for Wisconsin’s dairy crisis. Despite the real problems facing Wisconsin dairy, Trump has tried to blame Canada for the struggles that Wisconsin dairy farmers have faced, and it’s clear to me that Trump has no real understanding of how the dairy industry works.

Additionally, as farmer and Wisconsin Farmers Union (WFU) regional director Chris Holman stated on the WFU website, state government policies in Wisconsin have only made the overproduction problem in the Wisconsin dairy industry even worse, and have also led to fewer dairy farms producing more of Wisconsin’s milk:

Here in Wisconsin, state programs like the Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 Initiative have made the situation even worse. Beyond pushing Wisconsin dairy farmers to reach 30 billion pounds of milk production by 2020, the initiative—with no sense of irony—provides grants “to improve the long-term viability of Wisconsin’s Dairy Industry.” If you dive into data from USDA and the Wisconsin Agricultural Statistic Service, we’ve lost 2,411 dairy farms since March 2012 when the 30 x 20 initiative was announced. That’s an average of almost 500 dairy farms per year. We are growing our production but it is being done by fewer and fewer, larger farms.

The Wisconsin Farmers Union is an organization that seeks to improve the quality of life of family farmers and rural communities in Wisconsin.

Trump can blame Canada and sing the Green Acres theme song all he wants, but it’s not going to change the fact that he doesn’t understand the real problems facing Wisconsin’s dairy farm families.

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(TRIGGER WARNING) Comparing Bernie Sanders to a domestic abuser minimizes domestic abuse

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post contains a tweet that includes an image depicting violence against women. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

The Democratic Party is being increasingly dominated by two forms of progressivism. One form of progressivism prioritizes human rights issues, especially in regards to women’s reproductive rights, over other issues. This form of progressivism is associated with very liberal voters who voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries/caucuses, who are the core base of support, although not 100% of the support, of the resistance to the Trump Administration. The other form of progressivism prioritizes economic issues, especially in regards to efforts to reduce income inequality, over other issues. This form of progressivism is very strongly associated with Bernie Sanders, in fact, Sanders has often by criticized by progressive critics of Sanders for having supported candidates for public office who oppose abortion rights (although Bernie himself has a very pro-choice voting record as a U.S. Senator) and not regarding reproductive rights as an important issue.

Sanders has come under extremely heavy criticism for publicly endorsing Omaha, Nebraska mayoral candidate Heath Mello, who, as a member of Nebraska’s unicameral state legislature, voted for legislation that required doctors to give women who consider terminating a pregnancy a list of ultrasound providers. Although Mello has publicly disavowed his past support for anti-abortion legislation, the bill that he supported as a state legislator was designed purely to shame women, and nobody can re-write history.

Sanders’s support for Mello has prompted a large amount of criticism from progressive critics of Sanders. While most of the criticism has been over the fact that Sanders has, despite being pro-choice himself, endorsed anti-choice politicians from time to time, as well as Sanders not regarding women’s rights issues as important, there has been at least one example of criticism of Sanders that goes straight into the gutter of American politics. This was a tweet that somebody going under the alias “BroStoogeRally” posted about Bernie endorsing Jon Ossoff, a pro-choice and anti-interventionist Democrat who is running in a special election in the 6th Congressional District of Georgia:

Really? Bernie endorses a candidate with a realistic chance of winning a U.S. House seat that was previously held by a Republican who is now a member of the Trump Cabinet, and this guy has the gall to compare Bernie to a domestic abuser? Bernie is, to my knowledge, not a domestic abuser, and comparing someone like Bernie to a domestic abuser minimizes violence against women, which is a serious problem in America. Although these statistics date back to no later than late 2014, nearly 5 million American women each year experience physical violence by an intimate partner, one in four American women will be victims of severe violence by an intimate partner, and over 38 million American women have experienced physical intimate partner violence at some point in their lifetimes. It is inherently clear that domestic violence is a major problem in America, and using graphic images of domestic violence to compare political figures who aren’t domestic abusers to domestic abusers minimizes the serious problem in America that is domestic violence.

The GOP and the media don’t want you to know it, but it’s not over yet in Georgia

The winner of the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is…nobody! For congressional special elections, Georgia uses a two-round system in which all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, appear on the same ballot in the first round, and, if one candidate gets a majority of the first-round vote, that candidate wins, otherwise, a runoff election is held at a later date between the top two candidates, regardless of party affiliation. No candidate received a first-round majority, although Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff came only a couple thousand votes short of an outright victory, and Ossoff will face Republican candidate Karen Handel in a June 20 runoff.

The narrative from the Republicans and the corporate media is that they believe that Handel is going to win the runoff easily. Trump is touting a “BIG “R” win” on Twitter, even though nobody has won the election yet, and the runoff election is two months away.

Let me tell you this: the election in the 6th District of Georgia has only begun, and there are a number of reasons why:

  • Most pre-election opinion polling had Ossoff projected to receive somewhere around 40-45% of the vote in the first round. Ossoff received roughly 48% of the vote in the first round, slightly outperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election performance in most precincts in the 6th District of Georgia.
  • Handel might be the worst candidate for the Republicans to have sent to the runoff. She ran as not enough of a Trump loyalist for the Trump loyalist crowd in the first round, and now she’s trying to run as a Trump loyalist in the runoff. Also, Handel was the person who nearly destroyed the Susan G. Komen Foundation over her opposition to reproductive rights.
  • Trump is very unpopular among some voters in the 6th District of Georgia who had voted strongly Republican prior to November of last year; most of these voters voted for Ossoff in the first round of the 6th District special election.
  • Trump may campaign for Handel at some point before the June 20 runoff.

If you live in the 6th Congressional District of Georgia, vote for Jon Ossoff on June 20.

FACT: Hitler gassed his own people

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post quotes a Wikipedia article that includes a graphic description of atrocities that occurred as part of the Holocaust. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

The Jewish holiday of Passover began at sunset yesterday, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer marked the occasion by saying this about the Holocaust:

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in an effort to shame Russia’s alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his use of chemical weapons, said Tuesday Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II.

While Hitler did not use chemical weapons on the battlefield, Hitler and the Nazis used gas chambers to exterminate Jews, disabled people and others.

Here’s the truth about the Nazis’ use of gas to kill millions of Jews, people of other ethnic groups, and disabled people as part of the Holocaust:

Starting in December 1939, the Nazis introduced new methods of mass murder by using gas. First, experimental gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed trunk compartment, were used to kill mental-care clients of sanatoria in Pomerania, East Prussia, and occupied Poland, as part of an operation termed Action T4. In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, larger vans holding up to 100 people were used from November 1941, using the engine’s exhaust rather than a cylinder. These vans were introduced to the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941, and another 15 of them were used by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union. These gas vans were developed and run under supervision of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) and were used to kill about 500,000 people, primarily Jews but also Romani and others. The vans were carefully monitored and after a month of observation a report stated that “ninety seven thousand have been processed using three vans, without any defects showing up in the machines”.

[…]

All prisoners arrived by train at the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard. At Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, the camp officials on duty subjected individuals to selections. A small percentage of new arrivals deemed fit to work were sent to slave labor; the majority were marched from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying “baths” and “sauna.” They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel so as to avoid panic, and were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. When they asked for water because they were thirsty after the long journey in the cattle trains, they were told to hurry up, because coffee was waiting for them in the camp, and it was getting cold.

According to Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 people, and bunker 2 held 1,200. Once the chamber was full, the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing toxic HCN, or hydrogen cyanide. Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höß, who estimated that about one-third of the victims died immediately. Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: “Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives.” When they were removed, if the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.

Sean Spicer has no clue of what he’s talking about. It’s an indisputable fact that Hitler gassed his own people. There might be differences between how Hitler and al-Assad used gas to kill their own people, but they both gassed their own people.

Neil Gorsuch plagiarized multiple authors in book and academic article

Senate Republicans intend to change the rules of the Senate in order to confirm a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) for this guy:

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.

The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them.

[…]

…six experts on academic integrity contacted independently by POLITICO differed in their assessment of what Gorsuch did, ranging from calling it a clear impropriety to mere sloppiness.

You read that correctly. Neil Gorsuch, who is likely to be confirmed to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, plagiarized other people’s writings on more than one occasion. Gorsuch isn’t just too ideologically extreme for our nation’s highest bench. He’s too unethical for our nation’s highest bench.

Is Trump considering resignation?

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told the political news website West Wing Reports that President Donald Trump “will not finish his term”:

Claude Taylor, a travel photographer who was a White House staffer during the Bill Clinton administration, has publicly claimed that an independent journalist and two unnamed sources are saying that Trump is considering, among other options, resigning the presidency:

I’m inclined to believe that, despite Trump’s ties to the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia, his horrible relationship with fellow Republicans in Congress, the Trumpcare failure, his controversial political appointments, nepotism in the White House, and every other political controversy surrounding the Trump Administration that you can think of, Trump probably has no intention of resigning. For virtually Trump’s entire adult life, his modus operandi has been to get as wealthy and powerful by any means possible, and Trump would obviously lose a ton of power by resigning from the presidency. However, I could be very wrong about that.

SATIRE: Donald Trump threatens 2020 Tokyo Olympic boycott if torch relay runs through Hiroshima or Nagasaki

As if President Donald Trump hasn’t angered enough people, Trump is now angering the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and supporters of the Olympic movement. That’s because Trump, in an early-morning Twitter rant, threatened to force the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) to boycott the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan if Tokyo Olympic organizers ran the Olympic torch through Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki, two Japanese cities that the U.S. military dropped nuclear weapons on during World War II in order to force Japan to surrender to the United States.

In an extended Twitter rant, Trump called the IOC “a globalist mafia that hates America”, accused the Tokyo Olympic organizers of “attacking America’s military superiority”, called the Japanese people “total losers”, and called members of the U.S. Olympic team “unpatriotic”.

Trump was quickly criticized by Democratic Party elected officials and leaders, current and former Olympic athletes, virtually everyone associated with the NBC television network, virtually every significant public figure in Japan, and the entire IOC, although many Republicans, including U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-KY) are defending Trump’s Olympic boycott threat, and the USOC has not issued any statement regarding the boycott threat.

Every single Democratic Caucus member in each house of Congress signed a letter, written by U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), calling for Trump to “immediately renounce his asinine Olympic boycott threat” and “immediately apologize to the International Olympic Committee, the Tokyo Olympic organizers, and the people of Japan for impugning the Olympic movement”. The letter did not call for Trump to apologize for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on behalf of the United States, although the letter did note that the Olympics are “a major component of America’s reputation worldwide”. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who himself led a multi-nation boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow over the then-Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, said that he saw “no justification whatsoever” for a Tokyo Olympic boycott.

Many current and former Olympic athletes are extremely angry at Trump over his boycott threat. U.S. Olympic swimmer Lilly King, who famously defeated Russian swimmer Yuliya Yefimova for individual gold in Rio in 2016, criticized the proposed boycott and suggested that Trump is afraid that she might defeat the Russians again. Even current and former Olympic athletes who are politically conservative, such as decorated former Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton and decorated Olympic shooter Kim Rhode, were livid at the thought of Trump boycotting the Tokyo Olympics over a war that ended over seven decades ago, with Retton saying that it will probably be the only time in her life that she’ll criticize a Republican elected official.

Beyond U.S. politicians and Olympic athletes, Trump is getting a ton of pushback from every corner of the globe, particularly those with a stake in Tokyo Olympics in some form. Longtime NBC Olympic anchor Bob Costas, who will not be the primetime NBC anchor for future Olympic telecasts for reasons unrelated to the Trump boycott threat, said that Trump “was acting like a strongman from a country like North Korea” instead of “acting like what would be expected of an American leader”. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that he hoped that a “bully” like Trump would not damper the Olympic spirit in Japan and worldwide, but he also said that he fears that Trump has become “too irrational”. One member of the IOC from a European country who refused to publicly disclose his or her name went as far as to compare Trump’s boycott threat to the 1972 Munich Massacre, and all other members of the IOC have also criticized the boycott threat.

Long story short, if destroying a country’s reputation was an Olympic sport, Trump would be an Olympic gold medalist.