Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 12m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.1% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand third day.
On this day in 1974, Pres. Nixon announces his resignation, to take effect the next day at noon.
Recommended for reading in full:
Molly Beck reports Nearly everyone supports universal background checks for gun buyers. Here’s why Wisconsin is unlikely to make it law:
The vast majority of people in Wisconsin agree on making that policy change, according to 2018 polling by Marquette University Law School. Nationally, 96% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 89% of Independents support the measure, according to a recent Marist poll.
Despite overwhelming support, the move likely won’t be made here anytime soon.
“For any Republican to say ‘I support universal background checks’ would be career suicide,” Clemson University political scientist Steven Miller said.
The National Rifle Association’s political arm likely would help elect a primary opponent of any Republican candidate who seeks or supports such restrictions, Miller said, and support for the added safeguard, while wide, isn’t that intense.
“Most people think that’s a good idea, but most people don’t care too much and the people who oppose that are really serious about that,” he said. “Because the minority is much more mobilized, they are more likely to get what they want.”
VOX-Pol released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled The Alt-Right Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content on Twitter, authored by J.M. Berger, on 15 October 2018:
Key Findings
There were four overlapping themes apparent that dominated the alt-right network in this study:
Support for US President Donald Trump, support for white nationalism, opposition to immigration (often framed in anti-Muslim terms), and accounts primarily devoted to transgressive trolling and harassment.
@realdonaldtrump was the most influential Twitter account among all users analysed in this study; @richardbspencer was the most influential account within the specific network of users who followed accounts that contained the phrase ‘alt-right’ in their Twitter profiles.
Support for Trump outstripped all other themes by a wide margin, including references to his name and various campaign slogans in hashtags and user self-descriptions. The most common word in user profiles was ‘MAGA’ (short for Make America Great Again, Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan), and the most common word pair in user profiles was ‘Trump supporter’.
The alt-right network was most consistently ‘for’ Trump, but users frequently defined themselves by what they were ‘against’. Top word pairs in user self-descriptions included ‘anti-EU’, ‘anti-Islam’, ‘anti-globalist’, ‘anti-feminist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.
While the alt-right’s presence on Twitter was substantial, probably encompassing more than 100,000 users as a conservative estimate, the sample analysed here showed extensive evidence of manipulation, including manipulated follower counts, follower tracking, and automated tweeting. Neither the source nor the exact scope of these efforts could be conclusively determined.
It’s far past time to label the NRA for what it actually is; A neo-confederate anarchist cabal masquerading as a hunter safety organization. They long ago bottomed out on the grand arc of cause-business-racket, as LaPierre’s “Buy me a 6 Million dollar mansion” play shows. There is a limitless number of rubes to gull, so they are not done yet, although clearly fissures are appearing in the organization.
Our very own RoJo is “Skeptical of background checks” sayeth the J-S this AM. It would be charitable to say RoJo and the rest of the Republicans are just scared of the NRA, but that would masquerade that fact that rather than being scared of the NRA, they are in wholesale *agreement* with them.
The republican party understands that they are not going to win any national elections anymore with their attitude toward the now multi-cultural character of our country, so they are busily arming their supporters for the last stand of the “pure-white-american” revolution. The R-team is the new Afrikaners. It won’t work out any better here for the racists than it did in S. Africa, and the tree of liberty is likely to end up thoroughly irrigated before we get it all settled.
The democrats are approaching all this as a political issue. The republicans are considering it an existential fight for the survival of their Aryan race, where there are no rules of engagement. They will do what they have to, with no restrictions, to maintain power. They will make whatever allies they need to to, such as the Saudis and the Russians, to help them survive. They are being very nice to the gun manufacturers, as they will be handy to have on their side when it all turns to shit.
My (admittedly apocalyptic) estimate about what happens next is not positive. Trump, even with all the Russian help he can get, will lose the election. He will not give Liz or Kamala or Joe a big hug and best wishes on the way out the door. He will, instead, barricade the door and send his troops to the streets.
Then it will boil down to where the folks with the real firepower come down. Are they Anarchists or Patriots? We know the R-Team racists are on the A-Team. Local/county Law enforcement will be depressingly split on the issue. That local LE is a cesspool of racism is undeniable. The National Guard reports to their state governors, presuming they still take orders from them, so that is likely a split, too.
Where the Feds come down matters most. The CBP will be A-Team. I’m not sure about FBI and the military. They, obviously, are most of what matters. Some sort of military “Receivership” for the country is not out of the question.
All of this sounds depressingly like Argentine history, but it could well happen here, despite all of our smug assertions of “American Exceptionalism”. We are about to have a “discussion”, as we did in 1860, about the true nature of American values. 585,000, or 1 in 22 Americans, lost their lives in that debate.
I hope I’m wrong…
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We want, all of us, a peaceful society. We are not, however, those who call for violence: those calls come from neo-Confederates and even worse groups. They foment violence, and enablers at Fox and other outlets defend them while falsely accusing others.
Nothing but nothing about the constitutional right to bear arms compels support for an organization of Trump-supporting bigots who form alliances with Putin’s circle for their own enrichment. On the contrary, support for constitutional rights compels among the reasonable a rejection of Trumpism, of bigotry generally, and of anything whatever to do with Putin.
To support the NRA would be to engage in one’s own degradation; to oppose that foul association is to affirm worthy and foundational principles.