Dayton – immigrationcourtside.com

TRUMP SEES MASS MURDER AS OPPORTUNITY TO SPREAD LIES, HATE, RACISM, & DIVISION, WHILE TOUTING HIS “PERSONALITY CULT” — Hits On Leaders of Dayton, El Paso, While Upping Racial Tensions That Undoubtedly Will Lead To More White Supremacist Domestic Terror In The Near Future!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lashes-out-at-beto-orourke-and-the-media-ahead-of-visits-to-el-paso-and-dayton/2019/08/07/b0aa8afc-b8fb-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

Ashley Parker
White House Reporter
Washington Post

From the Washington Post:

By Ashley Parker ,

Philip Rucker ,

Jenna Johnson and

Felicia Sonmez

August 8 at 12:01 AM

EL PASO — On a day when President Trump vowed to tone down his rhetoric and help the country heal following two mass slayings, he did the opposite — lacing his visits Wednesday to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, with a flurry of attacks on local leaders and memorializing his trips with grinning thumbs-up photos.

A traditional role for presidents has been to offer comfort and solace to all Americans at times of national tragedy, but the day provided a fresh testament to Trump’s limitations in striking notes of unity and empathy.

When Trump swooped into the grieving border city of El Paso to offer condolences following the massacre of Latinos allegedly by a white supremacist, some of the city’s elected leaders and thousands of its citizens declared the president unwelcome.

In his only public remarks during the trip, Trump lashed out at Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, both Democrats, over their characterization of his visit with hospital patients in Dayton.

“We had an amazing day,” Trump said in El Paso as he concluded his visit. “As you know, we left Ohio. The love, the respect for the office of the presidency.”

Trump also praised El Paso police officers and other first responders and shook their hands, telling one female officer, “I saw you on television the other day and you were fantastic.”

None of the eight patients still being treated at University Medical Center in El Paso agreed to meet with Trump when he visited the hospital, UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke said. Two victims who already had been discharged returned to the hospital with family members to meet with the president.

“This is a very sensitive time in their lives,” Mielke said. “Some of them said they didn’t want to meet with the president. Some of them didn’t want any visitors.”

Before Trump’s visit Wednesday, however, some of the hospitalized victims accepted visits from a number of city and county elected officials, as well as Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) and Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.).

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president and first lady Melania Trump met with “victims of the tragedy while at the hospital” and were “received very warmly by not just victims and their families, but by the many members of medical staff who lined the hallways to meet them. It was a moving visit for all involved.”

El Paso and Dayton were not merely the latest in the multiplying series of American mass shootings. The carnage in El Paso is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, with parallels between a racist manifesto posted minutes before the shooting and the president’s own anti-immigration rhetoric.

President Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio on Wednesday. (Ty Greenlees/AP)

This has thrust Trump into the center of a roiling political and societal debate, with some Democratic leaders saying the president has emboldened white supremacy and is a threat to the nation.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who is running to unseat Trump in 2020, said in a speech Wednesday, “We have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”

When the Mayor of Dayton first saw @realDonaldTrump tweet about her pic.twitter.com/Z8YdyeebXp

— Scott Wartman (@ScottWartman) August 7, 2019

Both in Dayton and El Paso, Trump kept almost entirely out of public view, a marked break with tradition, as presidents visiting grieving communities typically offer public condolences.

Trump avoided the Oregon district where the shooting in Dayton took place, and just a short drive from Miami Valley Hospital, which he did visit. Whaley said he would not have been welcome in the Oregon District, where scores of demonstrators congregated, holding anti-Trump signs and chanting “Do something!” in a call for stricter gun laws.

Brown and Whaley described the visit by the president and first lady in favorable terms.

“They were hurting. He was comforting. He did the right things. Melania did the right things,” Brown told reporters. “And it’s his job in part to comfort people. I’m glad he did it in those hospital rooms.”

Whaley added: “I think the victims and the first responders were grateful that the president of the United States came to Dayton.”

Both Brown and Whaley, however, were also sharply critical of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and Republican resistance to gun-control legislation.

Whaley later responded to Trump’s comments about her and Brown by calling him “a bully and a coward.” She said on CNN, “It’s fine that he wants to bully me and Sen. Brown. We’re okay. We can take it.”

The traveling press corps was not allowed to observe Trump’s visit with three victims who remained hospitalized. It fell therefore to White House aide Dan Scavino to proclaim in a tweet that Trump “was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital.”

[‘Hispanic invasion’: A white nationalist version of Texas that never existed]

Trump and the first lady also met with police officers, fire officials, trauma surgeons and nurses at the facility, which treated 23 victims of the shooting. The hospital invited victims who had already been released to come back and meet with the president and the first lady.

“It was an authentic visit,” hospital president Mike Uhl said, praising Trump as “attentive, present and extremely accommodating.”

Trump offered his own affirmation on Twitter: “It was a warm & wonderful visit. Tremendous enthusiasm & even Love.”

Grisham said journalists were kept out of the hospital visit because staff did not want it to devolve into “a photo op” and overwhelm the victims with media.

The White House, however, distributed its own photos of Trump smiling for pictures with first responders, along with a slickly produced video, helping make the president the center of attention.

Trump’s reception in El Paso was less hospitable, and not only because so many local leaders have said they believe his rhetoric inspired Saturday’s slayings at a shopping center near the U.S.-Mexico border. Although he won the state of Texas in the 2016 election, Trump captured just 25.7 percent of the vote in El Paso County, the worst performance recorded here by a major-party presidential candidate in at least two decades.

An ever-growing makeshift memorial has sprouted near the shooting scene that features piles of colorful flowers, a row of white crosses, a line of prayer candles, as well as messages to the president. “Mr. T, Respect our sorrow and grief. Do not ‘invade’ our city,” reads one note, a reference to Trump’s repeated warnings of a migrant “invasion” at the border.

Just before Trump arrived in El Paso — where he and the first lady met with law enforcement personnel at an emergency operations center following their hospital visit — several hundred people gathered in opposition to his trip .

Congregating under the hot midday sun in a baseball field for an “El Paso Strong” event, some held homemade signs. “Go home! You are NOT welcome here!” read one. “This was Trump-inspired terrorism,” read another. “Trump repent,” read a third.

At one point, the crowd chanted, “Send him back!” — a nod to the incendiary “Send her back!” chant about Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at one of Trump’s campaign rallies last month.

“We feel like right now we should be in mourning, and we feel like we should be collecting our thoughts, we should be doing vigils and we should be gathering together as a community. We believe it is an insult that the president is coming here,” said one of the organizers, Jaime Candelaria, a 37-year-old singer and songwriter.

[‘Be quiet!’: Trump claims Beto O’Rourke uses a ‘phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage’]

Escobar said onstage, “In this moment, someone is visiting … I felt it was important that we come together and not focus on the visitor, but focus on El Paso.” She added, “We will not stop resisting the hate! Resisting the bigotry! Resisting the racism!”

In the crowd at the El Paso Strong event was Shawn Nixon, 20, a Walmart employee who was at work restocking the school supplies area when the gunman opened fire Saturday morning. At the sound of the shots, Nixon said he fell to the ground, pulling with him a young child who had been shopping with his mother.

“All I’m just asking for Donald Trump, for the president, to do is to say ‘sorry,’ ” Nixon said. “He created this crime. He created it because of his words. Every time that he’s on TV, that’s what he’s doing.”

During his flight home from El Paso, Trump attacked Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), the twin brother of presidential candidate Julián Castro, tweeting that he “makes a fool of himself every time he opens his mouth.” The congressman has come under scrutiny for publicizing a list of San Antonio donors who have contributed to Trump and accusing them of “fueling a campaign of hate.”

On Saturday in El Paso, authorities said, a man opened fire inside the Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring two dozen others. At 1:05 a.m. Sunday, a gunman killed nine people and injured 27 others outside a bar in Dayton, police said.

All week, Trump has zigzagged between two competing instincts: unite and divide.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, Trump remained cloistered at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., issuing only short statements on Twitter. Back at the White House on Monday, the president delivered a scripted speech in which he preached harmony.

“Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside — so destructive — and find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters.

The president did not heed his own advice, however. Late Tuesday night, he took to Twitter to attack Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman running for president who has said Trump bears some responsibility for the shooting there because of his demonization of Latino immigrants.

Trump tweeted: “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement — & be quiet!”

Then, as he departed the White House on Wednesday morning en route to Ohio, Trump told reporters he would refrain from attacking his adversaries during the trip.

“I would like to stay out of the political fray,” the president said. Asked about his rhetoric, he said he thinks it “brings people together” and added, “I think we have toned it down.”

[Gannett building in McLean evacuated after reports of man with weapon]

That detente lasted only a few minutes. Answering a reporter’s question about Biden, Trump pounced. “Joe is a pretty incompetent guy,” the president said. “Joe Biden has truly lost his fastball, that I can tell you.”

By the time the president had left Dayton, he was back on Twitter and sniping at Democrats, a tirade triggered by his consumption of cable television news aboard Air Force One.

“Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech. Sooo Boring! The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks with this guy,” the president wrote.

Then he lashed out at Brown and Whaley, falsely accusing them of “totally misrepresenting” the reception he received at Miami Valley Hospital. He alleged that their news conference immediately after the president’s visit “was a fraud.”

But neither Brown nor Whaley said Trump received a poor reception at the hospital.

When Whaley first saw Trump’s tweets criticizing her and Brown, she paused for a moment to read them on a cellphone and said, “I don’t — I mean, I’m really confused. We said he was treated, like, very well. So, I don’t know why they’re talking about ‘misrepresenting.’

“Oh, well, you know,” the mayor added with a shrug. “He lives in his world of Twitter.”

Parker and Johnson reported from El Paso, and Rucker and Sonmez reported from Washington. Arelis R. Hernández in Dayton, Robert Moore in El Paso, and Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.

*************************************

Totally lacking in human decency. Totally unqualified for any office, let alone the highest one in the land. Will enough folks ”wise up” and stand up to this cowardly bully before it’s too late for all of us?

PWS

08-09-19

MITCH McCONNELL & HIS GOP CRONIES ARE INSURING THAT OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WILL CONTINUE TO BE IN UNNECESSARY DANGER OF RIGHT-WING TERRORIST GUN VIOLENCE NO MATTER WHO IS PRESIDENT – Judges Can Be “Stooges” Too, & That’s The Litmus Test For The NRA’s Wholly-Owned Subsidiary, GOP Enterprises & Its “CEO!”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/senate-republicans-gun-control-judges.html

Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:

The Republican Party has no real plan to stop the epidemic of mass shootings that has turned American life into a gruesome Hobbesian nightmare. It’s easy to see why. All available evidence confirms that the guns are the problem: The United States’ patchwork of lax firearms laws allows Americans to slaughter civilians with astonishing ease. To stop mass shootings, lawmakers will need to tighten both federal and state gun laws, which Republicans refuse to do. We must remain sitting ducks, waiting to learn—in Sen. Marco Rubio’s memorable phrasing—whose “turn” it is next to be massacred.

Shortly after the El Paso, Texas, shooting on Saturday, the New York Times published an article that inadvertently presaged Republicans’ nonresponse to the imminent bloodbath. Senate Republicans, the Times noted, have passed virtually no legislation of any kind so far this year. In the face of mounting crises, the Senate’s GOP leaders have allowed little deliberation and few votes. They certainly won’t bring H.R. 8, a universal background check bill that already passed the House of Representatives, to the floor.

Instead, the Senate operates as “an approval factory” for Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, the Times found. Under Trump, the Senate has confirmed two Supreme Court justices, 99 district courts judges, and 43 federal court of appeals judges. Today, nearly 1 in 4 judges on the powerful courts of appeals was nominated by Trump. The president is reshaping the judiciary in the image of the Republican Party’s far-right conservative wing.

Today, nearly 1 in 4 judges on the powerful courts of appeals was nominated by Trump.

It would be a mistake to claim that the Senate has taken no action on gun control. While the House passes gun safety measures, the Senate installs judges who are eager to strike such measures down. Republican lawmakers have taken the long view: They may lose majorities in Congress and state legislatures, but Trump’s judges will sit on the bench for decades to come. Any future firearms restrictions may be invalidated; many existing gun safety laws are in serious jeopardy. The GOP may have no plan to stop mass shootings, but it does have a plan to ensure that Democrats can’t stop them, either.

To understand the dynamic here, it’s important to remember that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions have been fairly narrow. In 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, the court ruled that the amendment protects law-abiding individuals’ right to keep handguns in the home for self-defense. In 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, the court held that this right applies against state and local governments. Thus, the Constitution prevents the government from outlawing the possession of a handgun in the home. Under current precedent, the Second Amendment poses no threat to the vast majority of proposed gun regulations.

Try as it might, the National Rifle Association and its allies have failed to persuade the Supreme Court to go any further. The court has declined to hear challenges to a ban on assault weapons, a requirement that guns be stored in a lockbox, a prohibition on concealed carry, and a mandatory waiting period between firearm purchases. A majority of the justices have simply refused to expand Heller and McDonald to curb Americans’ ability to protect themselves from the gun massacres that plague us today.

Trump’s judges are desperate to change that. Start with his Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In 2017, Gorsuch joined Justice Clarence Thomas in declaring that states may not ban civilians from carrying concealed weapons in public. Their dissent accused the court of treating “the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.” By joining Thomas’ opinion, Gorsuch signaled that he would force every state to allow concealed carry—even though states with looser concealed carry laws have more gun deaths. Gorsuch and Thomas also dissented from the Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, which were used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.

Kavanaugh, too, proved to be a gun extremist during his tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In a 2011 dissent, Kavanaugh declared that D.C.’s ban on assault weapons infringed upon the Second Amendment. The District argued that the ban would save lives, since these guns are disproportionately used in mass shootings. Kavanaugh, however, claimed that Heller established a right to purchase assault weapons because there “is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction” between semi-automatic handguns and rifles. (In fact, a typical semi-automatic rifle bullet exits the muzzle with far more powerthan the typical semi-automatic handgun bullet, making it substantially more devastating to the human body.)

Trump’s lower-court nominees are now openly lobbying the Supreme Court to strike down more gun laws. These judges have advanced an ambitious argument that limitations on the right to bear arms must pass strict scrutiny, the most stringent constitutional standard available. A strict scrutiny test would effectively kill any legislation that was not “narrowly tailored” to advance a compelling state interest—and preventing a mass shooting may not be a good enough reason.

In July 2018, four of Trump’s nominees to the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals condemned a federal law that bars licensed dealers from selling handguns to out-of-state residents. The law does not ban interstate gun transfers; it merely requires handguns to be transferred to a dealer in the state where the buyer resides.

There is nothing especially burdensome about this law. Congress intended dealers to ensure that every handgun transfer complies with the laws of the state where the buyer resides. A panel of judges for the 5^thCircuit upheld the law, and the full court voted not to disturb that ruling. Yet seven judges, including four Trump nominees, dissented, arguing that the law is unconstitutional. Judge James Ho, one of Trump’s most outwardly partisan nominees, scorned the government’s reasoning that “to protect against the violations of the few, we must burden the constitutional rights of the many.” Ho applied strict scrutiny, arguing that because there are “less restrictive alternatives,” like “better information sharing,” the law is not narrowly tailored.

In December, Judge Stephanos Bibas, another Trump nominee, wrote a similar dissent to a decision by the 3^rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A panel of judges upheld New Jersey’s ban on large-capacity magazines (or LCMs). The majority noted that LCMs “have been used in numerous mass shootings” and result “in increased fatalities and injuries.” Without access to LCMs, shooters “must reload more frequently,” giving bystanders opportunities to flee or intervene. Applying intermediate scrutiny, the majority found that the New Jersey law “reasonably fits the State’s interest in promoting public safety.”

Bibas’ dissent could’ve been ghostwritten by the NRA’s lawyers. “The Second Amendment is an equal part of the Bill of Rights,” he wrote. “We may not water it down and balance it away based on our own sense of wise policy.” Bibas argued that the New Jersey law impaired the “core right” of self-defense and must therefore be subject to strict scrutiny. He found that the statute flunked that test, dismissing the “armchair proposition that smaller magazines force shooters to pause more often to reload.”

Many of Trump’s nominees appear to agree that some unknown number of people must be shot to death before the government can limit access to firearms.

“Armchair proposition”? Here, Bibas questioned a fact that countless mass shooting survivors can confirm: When a shooter pauses to reload, his intended victims have more time to escape. Bibas’ casuistry demonstrates a flaw in the conservative approach to the Second Amendment. Trump nominees keep demanding that any firearm restriction be subject to heightened scrutiny. But this test is a chilling mismatch for the Second Amendment, because when we talk about “tailoring” gun restrictions, we are really asking how many people must die before the government can justify its laws.

U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez, a George W. Bush nominee, illustrated this grisly truth in June 2017. Benitez blocked a California measure that outlawed large-capacity magazines, finding that it failed heightened scrutiny. Why? “Of the ten mass shooting events that occurred in California,” Benitez wrote, “only two involved the use of a magazine holding more than 10 rounds.” The ban’s “marginal good effects”—that is, the lives it would’ve saved—did not justify it. Because “only two” California mass shootings involved LCMs, the law was not reasonably tailored to protect the public.

The next year, a man walked into a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, and killed 12 people. He used large-capacity magazines that he purchased legally. The weapons would have been illegal if Benitez had not blocked California’s ban on LCMs.

Many of Trump’s nominees appear to agree that some unknown number of people must be shot to death before the government can limit access to firearms. Others take an even more extreme approach. In his 2011 dissent, Kavanaugh suggested that courts must look to “text, history, and tradition” to gauge the legality of gun control laws. They cannot deploy any kind of “interest-balancing test.” Unless a gun restriction is “longstanding,” Kavanaugh wrote, it is unconstitutional. This standard—which Ho cited favorably—would prohibit the government from experimenting with any new gun safety law. We would be stuck with the small set of regulations deemed “longstanding” by the courts. No matter how many bodies piled up, we would be helpless to protect ourselves against the butchery.

Trump’s judges are hoping the Supreme Court will kickstart this Second Amendment revolution. They might not have to wait long. This fall, the justices will hear a challenge to New York City’s restriction on the transportation of guns outside the home (unless it’s dismissed as moot). They may use the opportunity to enshrine a new Second Amendment standard into law. The conservative majority could demand that gun laws survive strict scrutiny. Or it could hold that any law that’s not “longstanding” be struck down, as Kavanaugh prefers.

Whatever the justices decide, scores of Trump judges in the lower courts will be waiting to vigorously enforce their decision, knocking down as many gun restrictions as possible. Republican senators will continue to confirm judicial nominees at a record pace. To the extent that the GOP has a plan to address mass shootings, this is it: stack the courts with more judges who will prevent American from addressing gun violence. Trump and the Senate are working together to build a judiciary that renders our government permanently powerless to take action against the bloodshed.

*****************************************

No perversion too great, no cause too grotesque for the GOP and their “Head Turtle.” While Mitch & Co. might think that their kids, because of their White Supremacist lineage, will be immune from bullets fired by White Supremacists and other hate mongers, there is no scientific evidence that is true. On the other hand, to be in today’s GOP is to ignore scientific evidence (except for the pseudo-science behind racism and restrictionist immigration policies).

At some point after the U.S. disappears as a nation, historians will look back in awe at how stupid a supposedly advanced country could be by empowering scam artists like Trump, McConnell, and the GOP. Indeed, “fiddling while Rome burns” would be an apt analogy for most of today’s GOP on gun control, immigration, climate change, heath care, debt control, income inequality, realistic taxes, retirement security, infrastructure, education, global cooperation, trade, and a host of other pressing issues.

PWS

08-05-19

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