“To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held accountable,” Trump said, adding that he had just met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Chris Wray for an update on a federal civil rights investigation into the incident.Anyone who acted criminally... that too would include all sides.
“We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he added.
“You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation toward the most serious charges that can be brought because this is unequivocally an unacceptable evil attack,” Mr. Sessions said, adding that terrorism and civil rights investigators were working on the case....
The “domestic terrorism” language is largely symbolic — many of the law's stiffest penalties are for international terrorism that do not apply domestically. But the debate over language has raged for more than a decade, as Muslim groups in particular argue that the word terrorism is used only when the attackers are Muslim....
Something like that happened to John McCain when he was captured. The lynch mob was held back only by a North Vietnamese nurse who protected him.And here's a link to a 2016 article following up on Keshia Thomas:
"We all have a conscience and it was my responsibility to do what I felt was right," Thomas said in a phone interview on June 23, the day after the 20-year anniversary of the incident....
Thomas remembers appearing in opposition to the KKK group in an effort organized by the National Women's Rights Organizing Coalition outside Ann Arbor's city hall on June 22, 1996. At one point, a woman with a megaphone shouted, "There's a Klansman in the crowd!"
Thomas, who was still in high school, turned and saw McKeel Jr., taking off away from the crowd. It wasn't long before mob mentality took over and the crowd had McKeel on the ground.
Thomas, horrified to see the man being kicked and beaten, threw herself on top of McKeel to shield him from the blows.
He's got the fire and the fury at his command
But you don't have to worry, just hold onto Jesus' hand.
We'll all be safe from Satan when the thunder rolls.
We just gotta help me keep the devil way down in the hole.
Isaiah 42:25 So he poured upon him the heat of his anger and the fury of war; it set him on fire all around, but he did not understand; it burned him, but he did not take it to heart.And the New Testament:
Isaiah 66:15 For the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the whirlwind, to pay back his anger in fury, and his rebuke in flames of fire.
Lamentations 2:4 He has bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe; he has killed all in whom we took pride in the tent of daughter Zion; he has poured out his fury like fire.
Ezekiel 19:12 But it was plucked up in fury, cast down to the ground; the east wind dried it up; its fruit was stripped off, its strong stem was withered; the fire consumed it.
Ezekiel 23:25 I will direct my indignation against you, in order that they may deal with you in fury. They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword. They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire.
Hebrews 10:26-37 For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.... For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.”ADDED: Possibly related: An op-ed in today's NYT titled "Christianity Does Not Justify Trump’s ‘Fire and Fury.'" I didn't realize anyone had been arguing that, and I'd just noticed that "fury of fire" in the New Testament. The author, Steven Paulikas, is an Episcopal priest in Park Slope (Brooklyn, NY).
There has been discussion about whether the president’s bold words on Kim were improvised or part of a strategy to push China into cracking down on North Korea. Jeffress’s comments reveal a third dimension: a corrupted theology that could supply a misguided moral thrust to the president’s potential course of action. Seen in this light, the vision of “fire and fury” should be taken very seriously and at face value, an apocalyptic statement resulting from a highly unorthodox theology with no basis in the Bible.
The show of strength was about “allegiance . . . to the Constitution,” particularly the First Amendment, said Christian Yingling, leader of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia...The second-highest-rated comment over there is:
The fact that no shots were fired, Yingling said, was a testament “to the discipline of the 32 brave souls serving under me during this particular operation.” In a telephone interview Sunday, he sought to dispel “the absurd idea in the public’s mind” that his group of “patriots” was allied with or sympathetic to the white nationalists....
When his group arrived in Charlottesville, “we put our own beliefs off to the side,” Yingling said. “Not one of my people said a word. They were given specific orders to remain quiet the entire time we were there. . . . Our mission was to help people exercise their First Amendment rights without being physically assaulted. It was a resounding success until we were just so drastically outnumbered that we couldn’t stop the craziness. It was nothing short of horrifying.”...
“Jacka---s,” was how he described both sides, meaning the white nationalists, who billed the gathering as Unite the Right, and the counterprotesters, many marching under the banner of Antifa, for “anti-fascist.” Yingling also criticized police, saying that officers were poorly prepared for the violence and not assertive enough in combating it and that they should have enlisted the militiamen to help prevent the mayhem.
Yingling calls both sides in the protest "jackasses'. Yingling and his kind are bigger jackasses; bringing that kind of firepower to a protest. A bunch of punk cowboys who get erections dressing up and playing with guns. And did they have any effect on the outcome? No. Militias are bullsh - t. They just salivate for the day they can pop somebody. Buncha sickos. Grow up little boys.Third highest-rated:
This is terrifying. You have armed individuals roaming the street who are neither military nor law enforcement but unapologetic storm troopers. Whatever this is, it is not about the first amendment.ADDED: What would have happened if these people were not there? Would it have been more violent, or would the police have stepped up and maintained order? Remember that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe defended the inaction of the policy, seemingly on the basis of the scariness of the militia people:
“It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons. You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army.... I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. "And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”I don't know where he got the 80% number. He weirdly blames and credits the militia.
I read your blog since 2001I invite your comments in the allegedly abhorrent comments section.
And you really lost your way in the days of Trump. I stopped somewhere mid election 2016. Your comment section became abhorrent. While you like to champion free speech, the speech you host on your blog is disgusting. I suppose you thought there was money for your retirement in becoming the Trump blog (Simon is such a genius!) because why else would you become the comment section for his followers? A man who accomplished nothing without his dad making deals for him? You should be ashamed. Shame on you. I see today you are excuse making. Just shame on you in the same shame that the Donald didn't want to acknowledge he knew who Duke was in 2016 and on this Saturday wanted to make sure he still did not offend. You should be so ashamed, but I fear you are proud of yourself like a lawyer who defends the devil. Your [sic] always looking for an angle. You're wrong.
“You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon. He is a terrorist.”That doesn't explain doing nothing about the fighting and brawling Caine-Conley describes. And if the police had managed the crowds, perhaps the car incident would not have been triggered.
Jason Kessler, the organizer of the so-called Unite the Right rally... complained that the authorities had “exacerbated the violence” by failing to separate his followers from counterprotesters, leading to the melee.I've seen how the police have managed crowds here in Madison, Wisconsin — huge rallies with opposing sides. I'd like to know how the police in Virginia could be so impotent. Are they so afraid of being accused of doing something wrong that they protect themselves by doing nothing?
Asked about the brawling and why police did not do more to control it, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety, said in an interview on Sunday that “it was a volatile situation and it’s unfortunate people resorted to violence.’’ But, he said, “From our plan, to ensure the safety of our citizens and property, it went extremely well.’’Pathetic. The police were afraid of the guns? But no shots were fired, even in response to punching and brawling. That makes it sound as though those people with guns were quite restrained, and yet they terrified the police.
Governor McAuliffe also defended the police response, saying, “It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons. You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army,” he added. “I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. “And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”
But, in fact, cannabis use has long been part of religion, from ancient Chinese shamans to modern-day Rastafarians: inducing altered states of consciousness has been a cornerstone of belief since time immemorial. And even without drugs, whether it’s spinning Sufi dancers or drumming voodoo priests, or even just simple prayer or meditation, taking the mind to a higher plane has always been a road to the divine, whatever you may conceive that to be.Many years ago, I based a Constitutional Law exam on a case I'd read about, where people had formed a church around marijuana use with the hope of being able to argue that they were entitled under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to an exemption from the federal criminal law. I seem to remember the name of the religion as "Our Church," but that might just have been the name I came up with for the exam.
ROGER SIMON: Is Charlottesville Really What’s Going on in the USA?... and second by Glenn Reynolds...
Read the whole thing.
I WAS GOING TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT CHARLOTTESVILLE TODAY, but honestly I don’t think I could do better than Roger Simon. I do want to echo his comment that, for all the racial tension we see in the media and in politics, out in the actual world black and white people seem to be getting along pretty well. I wrote something about that here.Somehow, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I look at those people — with their cheesy tiki torches, their cosplay shields, and their lack of female companionship — and I see them as lost souls. I'd like to invite them down off the ledge and into a more rational, loving human existence.
You'll sound like you've been spending a lot of time in pubs and microbreweries if — instead of "suburban" — you say "surban."
"I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump's not a white supremacist," said Bloom, who became visibly upset as she learned of the injuries and deaths at the rally.NPR writes "she knew he was attending a rally in Virginia" but "didn't know it was a white supremacist rally." Notice the assumption that it's simply a fact that it was "a white supremacist rally." I'm not sure that's established. I don't think you can assume that everyone who attended that rally has a "white supremacist" ideology, but I think there's a big effort right now to lump the entire alt-right into that category. I think it's better to treat people as individuals and not throw them into stereotypes (especially if the stereotypes are going to be big and crude). To be carefully factually accurate, you shouldn't assume that a person from out of town who is driving a car is attending the rally.
"He had an African-American friend so ...," she said before her voice trailed off. She added that she'd be surprised if her son's views were that far right, according to the AP.
In a photo posted to Twitter by the Anti-Defamation League and reported by BuzzFeed, a man who appears to be Fields Jr. can be seen brandishing a black shield handed out by the self-proclaimed fascist group Vanguard America.Are these 2 pictures of the same man?
"Age doesn’t mean a damn thing to me or to Gert,” [Alvin Mann] said. “We don’t see it as a barrier. We still do what we want to do in life.”...
Last year, Mr. Mann became the oldest person to graduate from Mount St. Mary College... At 93, he drove 80 miles round trip twice a week for nearly two and a half years to accrue the 30 credits needed to obtain a degree he had started working on in his 70s....
“We studied many historical events like World War II and the Vietnam and Korean Wars, but this was stuff I had actually lived through,” Mr. Mann said. “No wonder I aced most of my exams.”...
“This man is 94 years old, and I see him outside chopping down trees, dragging logs out of the woods with his old Ford tractor, stacking firewood and cutting the grass,” [a neighbor] said. “Then I see him and Gert running around like two high school sweethearts, holding hands and kissing, and driving to New York City on weekends....”
Britta Carlson, 28, was riding the uptown 6 train to a concert on July 27 when a mysterious message popped up on her smartphone.She even hit "accept"!
“iPhone 1 would like to share a note with you,” read the note sent at 6:51 p.m. She hit “Accept” and was horrified by what she saw. “It was just a huge close-up picture of a disgusting penis,” said Carlson, of Bushwick, Brooklyn...."
... “It really felt like someone had actually just flashed me.... It never even crossed my mind that someone may use it to send stuff like that"....How can you be 28 years old and capable of riding on the subway in New York City and have a mind that wouldn't imagine such a thing happening?
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