“A Brutal And Cowardly Attack”: Charleston Church Massacre Inspired By White Supremacy
“I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go,” declared the young white gunman as he emptied clip after clip of a .45 caliber handgun into the small group of African-American churchgoers at a Wednesday evening Bible study.
After sitting amid the congregation for nearly an hour, he stood up and started firing the handgun he’d recently received as a birthday present. He kept firing, reloading his gun five times in a rampage that left eight people dead on the floor of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Another, the ninth, died on the way to the hospital. The church had been founded by worshipers fleeing racism; white slaveholders had previously burned it to the ground for its connection with a thwarted slave revolt; and in the civil rights era it became a symbol and headquarters of the movement. Now it was once again in the crosshairs.
The church sits less than a dozen miles from the park where Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was gunned down by a white police officer. The calls of “Black Lives Matter” were still ringing throughout Charleston, when gunshots again cut down black lives.
The victims of this brutal and cowardly attack inside the sanctuary of a house of worship included a South Carolina state senator, a librarian, and a recent college graduate.
The alleged killer, later identified as Dylann Storm Roof of nearby Lexington, fled the scene in his black four-door sedan adorned with an ornamental license plate that read “Confederate States of America” with the image of the Confederate flag. After a 15-hour manhunt, Roof was arrested without incident nearly 250 miles away, during a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina.
Though new details continue to be unearthed, a portrait of 21-year-old Roof as a withdrawn, troubled man with an interest in white supremacy is starting to emerge.
The Daily Beast quoted a classmate from White Knoll High School about his reputation for spouting racism. “Just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” said John Mullins. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”
“Southern pride” still runs deep in parts of South Carolina. The wounds of slavery and the Civil War are still unhealed, in many ways. Despite many protests, the Confederate flag continues to fly over the state capitol building. In January 2000, at the dawn of the new millennium, 6,000 Confederate flag supporters marched through Columbia, the state capital, according to Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics.
This spring, just 90 miles from the shooting, a statewide Tea Party convention invited a white nationalist leader to speak. The organizers canceled his appearance after the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights exposed his ideology. At that same convention, however, Tea Party officials and potential presidential candidates shared the stage with a Tea Partier who promotes a book that refers to blacks as “pickaninnies,” claims that slaves were treated humanely, and insists that slavery was just as inhumane for the slavemasters.
Beyond the racist jokes and Confederate flags on his car, Roof displayed more of the warning signs of involvement with white nationalism on his Facebook page. His profile photo shows him in the winter woods staring into the camera, clad in a black jacket with two flags affixed above over his chest: an apartheid-era South African flag, and a flag used to represent the unrecognized state of Rhodesia, after the former British colony of South Rhodesia fractured and a white minority attempted to take control of the country. Both patches are worn by white nationalists in the United States to express support for white minority rule.
Roof’s recent arrests also indicate that he may have had additional targets in mind for his killing spree. Last February he attracted attention at the Columbiana Centre, a shopping mall, when he asked store employees “out-of-the-ordinary questions” such as how many people were working and what time they would be leaving, according to a police report. A police officer questioning Roof at the scene discovered that he was illegally in possession of a controlled substance; he was arrested and charged with felony drug possession. In April, Roof was charged with trespassing on the roof of the same mall.
In a sad commentary about the dominance of local gun culture, the same morning that The Charleston Post and Courier ran a front-page story about the shooting with the headline “Church attack kills 9,” some readers found the headline obscured by a sticker advertising “Ladies’ Night” at the ATP Gun Shop & Range in Summerville, South Carolina.
By: Devin Burghart, Vice President of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights; the National Memo, June 18, 2015
“In A Terrible Predicament”: A Victory For Obamacare’s Challengers Will Be A Disaster For Republican Candidates
Once the conservative legal strategy that gave rise to King v. Burwell got off the ground, Republicans in Congress probably had no choice but to become cheerleaders for, or active participants in, the ensuing litigation.
The imminence of the decision in the Obamacare challenge, expected from the Supreme Court sometime this month, is exposing the terrible predicament the entire strategy created for the party.
The problems Republicans will encounter if they win King—eliminating billions of dollars worth of insurance subsidies—are fairly clear and have been detailed at length. But it is also quite conceivable that the whole effort will boomerang on the GOP even if the government wins in King, and the federal subsidies survive for those states using federally facilitated exchanges. A number of persuasive legal arguments point to a victory for the government. But one of the most likely paths begins with the Court concluding that the Affordable Care Act statute is ambiguous—that both parties’ readings of the law are plausible—and that deference should go to the government.
As Chief Justice John Roberts suggested with his one and only question at oral arguments, this would leave the door ajar for a future presidential administration to reinterpret the statute, and discontinue the subsidies.
It’s difficult to fathom that any Republican president would turn off the subsidies quite as abruptly as the challengers want the Court to do. But if the government wins in this way—on what’s known as the second step of the Chevron deference standard—it will create a new conservative litmus test for Republican presidential candidates. If elected, will you shut down the subsidies? I suspect most of the candidates will yield to pressure from the right and promise to do precisely that. Most immediately, this promise becomes a general election liability for the Republican primary winner. If that person becomes president, it will turn into an administrative and political nightmare, forcing states and the U.S. Congress to grapple with a completely elective policy fiasco.
King, as Josh Marshall noted recently, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.”
That the case was conceived by conservatives and endorsed by Republicans has created an extensive paper trail tying the GOP to the consequences of a decision for the challengers. It has also forced Republicans to playact as if they can and will fix the problems that flow from an adverse King ruling. Initially the idea was to foam the runway for conservative justices eager to void the subsidies; it has become an accession to the reality that the public will hold Republicans to account for the ensuing chaos.
Among the pitfalls of the extended charade is that Republican presidential candidates will reject and condemn proposals to clean up a King mess if they even resemble constructive solutions.
“Things can’t be turned on a dime,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn told Politico. “People can run for president, but we’ve actually got to solve a problem.” Cornyn may have been thinking of his fellow Texan Ted Cruz, who wants to use King as a pretext to repeal all of Obamacare. But his discomfort with Cruz’ absolutism carries a whiff of inconsistency: Cornyn signed on to Republican briefs, first urging the justices to hear King and then asking them to void the subsidies. In January he eagerly anticipated that the Court would “render a body blow to Obamacare from which I don’t think it will ever recover.”
The promise of the King challenge has apparently faded since then. Republicans in Congress are quite likely incapable of solving the problem Cornyn was talking about in a way that pleases conservatives, and will be little better equipped if a Republican president discontinues the subsidies on his own. Six months ago, Republicans claimed excitedly that the path to repealing Obamacare outright ran through a victory in King. Now it seems that the best political outcome for Republicans would be to lose the case as conclusively and embarrassingly as possible.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 17, 2015
“In A Cellar-Dwelling Outpost”: Rush Limbaugh Demoted To Another Irrelevant, Ratings-Challenged Station In A Major Market
The good news for Rush Limbaugh: One month after being notified he was getting dumped by his Boston talk radio host station, the talker has a new AM home in New England.
The bad news: The station currently boasts a 0.6 rating, trails four non-commercial stations in the market and becomes yet another big-city, cellar-dwelling outpost that Limbaugh is forced to call home.
The station, WKOX, is the type of “bottom-rung” affiliate that Limbaugh was rarely associated with during his halcyon days as the king of talk radio. But those days seem to be dwindling as the Boston fall from grace has previously played out for Limbaugh in places like Los Angeles and Indianapolis. In each instance, Limbaugh exited a prosperous, longtime radio home and was forced to settle for an also-ran outlet with minuscule ratings.
Limbaugh’s ongoing major market woes can be traced to his 2012 on-air meltdown over Sandra Fluke, where he castigated and insulted the graduate student for three days on his program, calling her a “slut” and suggesting she post videos of herself having sex on the Internet. (Fluke’s sin in the eyes of Limbaugh was testifying before Congress in favor of contraception mandates for health care insurance.)
The astonishing Limbaugh monologues sparked an unprecedented advertiser exodus, which means selling his show has become a major lift for the affiliate stations that pay a hefty fee for the right to carry his program. The Wall Street Journal has reported on the millions of dollars in advertising revenue that Limbaugh’s host stations lose because of the talker’s stigma on Madison Avenue.
The still-unfolding repercussions? Some key stations want out of their Limbaugh deals. And when those deals are up, nobody else is stepping forward to ink new contracts with Rush.
Here’s what happened in Boston, and it’s becoming a trend. In May, WRKO announced it wasn’t renewing Limbaugh’s program, which meant the host would have to find a new home on the dial. No problem, right? Hopping around to another affiliate isn’t that unusual in the world of syndicated radio. What was unusual, at least for Limbaugh, was that not one other Boston station moved to pick up his show. Years ago, general managers lined up for the chance to broadcast Limbaugh’s ratings heavyweight show and jumped whenever it became available in the market.
But no more. With ratings issues in recent years and selling the show to advertisers becoming increasingly difficult, stations seem reluctant to pay a steep price for Limbaugh’s program. (But yes, Limbaugh’s syndicator, Premier Radio Networks, still pays the talker $50 million a year.)
In Boston, Limbaugh had to once again be bailed out by his corporate bosses. Formerly known as Clear Channel, iHeartMedia owns the syndication company that produces and sells Limbaugh’s radio show. iHeartMedia owns hundreds of radio stations.
So, with no takers in Boston, iHeartMedia turned to its lowly WKOX station, scrubbed its Spanish language format, and will flip it to “Talk 1430” on June 29, where listeners will hear a hodgepodge of far-right talk mixed Fox Sports Radio programming. “With the lack of options for gaining syndication revenue from another broadcaster, dumping the extraneous 1430 format becomes the only clear option for the company,” noted RadioInsight.
And don’t expect Limbaugh to turn things around for WKOX. His show struggled on WRKO, which boasts a 50,000-watt signal. In contrast, WKOX broadcasts from a tiny 5,000-watt signal, which doesn’t even cover the entire Boston metropolitan area.
Does this demotion sound familiar? The same Limbaugh farewell just played out in the red state of Indiana where the talker was dumped by his AM home of 22 years, WIBC in Indianapolis. After WIBC announced the programming divorce (the station was reportedly having trouble finding advertisers for Rush’s show), no other stations in the market stepped forward to buy Limbaugh’s program, which meant he had to be bailed out by iHeartMedia. The radio giant shoehorned Limbaugh onto its lowly rated all-sports channel in the market. (Current rating: 0.5.)
So why the obsession with finding Limbaugh even a low-rent home in places like Boston and Indianapolis? The answer revolves around clearance. “Rush Limbaugh is heard in every measured radio market in America, and that will continue to be the case in Boston,” Premiere’s Rachel Nelson told the Boston Globe last month. In other words, Limbaugh and his syndicator are determined that his show be heard (or cleared, in industry-speak), in every radio market in America — and especially in major markets — no matter what.
“It looks like Premiere parent iHeart will end up doing the same thing in Boston it’s doing in Indianapolis as a last resort: bringing Rush back in house on a marginal signal just to maintain the clearance,” noted NorthEast Radio Watch this week.
That, obviously, is not a blueprint for long-term success.
In terms of trying to sell the show to national advertisers as well as maintaining the Rush reputation as the most powerful talker on the dial, Limbaugh and Premiere simply cannot have Rush’s show off the air in places like Boston and Indianapolis. So Premiere’s parent company is willing do whatever it takes to make room for Limbaugh, even if it means sticking him on a ratings doormat at the far, far end of the radio dial and surrounding him with sports talk shows.
The question now is how many more cracks in the dam is iHeartMedia going to have to plug as more markets decide they’re not interested in Limbaugh’s program?
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, June 17, 2015
“The Limits Of “Israeli Exceptionalism”: The Perilous Path The Current Israeli Government Is Pursuing
This incident from the 2008 campaign, relayed by Matthew Duss at TNR, tells you a lot about trends in U.S. thinking about Israel in the Netanyahu era:
[R]epresentatives of the Obama, McCain, and Clinton teams appeared at a Jewish community forum. Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, spoke for Obama, explaining that he wanted to see a “plurality of views” on Israel. Clinton adviser Ann Lewis responded that the United States should simply support Israeli policy, regardless of its content. “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel,” she said.
It was a pretty strange statement (is there any other country in the world to whose electorate anyone would similarly suggest outsourcing U.S. policy decisions?), but it does accurately describe the operating theory upon which much of conservative pro-Israel advocacy in Washington is based.
But it’s an increasingly rare point of view outside the conservative opinion bubble. After her service in the Obama administration, it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton would not again allow herself to be represented as simply ratifying whatever policy is yielded by Israeli elections (presumably the only way one is permitted to deduce “decisions of the Israeli people,” who are deeply divided by Netanyahu’s policies towards Palestinians and indeed towards the rest of the world).
It’s against this backdrop of a growing tendency among Democrats to reject the idea of “Israeli exceptionalism” as the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy that you can understand the perilous path the current Israeli government is pursuing in demanding the same–or perhaps greater– unconditional American support as in the past. This posture is not only liberating Democrats to assert national interests as superior to those of any foreign country in formulating U.S. foreign policy, but as I think we will see in 2016, leading public sentiment in the same direction.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Wasgington Monthly, June 17, 2015
“How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Donald?”: The Republican Party Just Got A Giant Headache, With A Comb-Over On Top
For years now, Donald Trump has threatened to run for president. In the past it has been just a publicity stunt — he says he might run, he gets some attention, eventually he gives it up. And pretty much everyone, myself included, thought that’s what Trump was doing this time around, even as he scheduled an announcement today (the theory that made the most sense to me said that he would announce that he was creating the classiest, most high-end super PAC anywhere). But believe it or not, Donald Trump is actually running for president.
There’s no way to know how far this will go. Philip Bump recently took a look at Trump’s poll numbers, and he ranks somewhere between the U.S. Congress and foot fungus. (My favorite detail: Asked about why 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa said they’d never vote for him, Trump responded, “That’s because they don’t think I’m running. When they think I’m running, they go through the roof.”) But he has enough money to finance a campaign for as long as he likes, which essentially means until he gets bored. That could be quite some time.
Trump’s candidacy presents a problem for the news media. How do you report on someone like him? Is it even worth fact-checking the ridiculous statements he constantly makes, or should we not even bother? Given that he has zero chance of winning his party’s nomination, should reporters be assigned to cover him? Why does he deserve more attention than, say, Ben Carson?
The truth is that he’s going to be covered, and covered amply, because he brings entertainment value to the campaign. He is, without question, a unique American character. Most politicians have a heightened self-regard, but Trump is in a league by himself when it comes to delusional egotism, which is part of what makes him compelling to watch. It was apparent in the bizarre, stream-of-consciousness rant that passed for his announcement speech.
“Our country needs a truly great leader,” he said, speaking of himself. “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created, I tell you.”
It’s Trump’s lack of self-awareness that makes him such a wonder to behold. The man who has brought vulgarity to new heights thinks he’s the epitome of class, and even if no sane person would sit through an hour of “the Apprentice,” it’s hard to look away when he starts talking.
But the ones with the real dilemma are the leaders of the Republican Party, which is why the Democratic Party is absolutely licking its chops at his entry. The DNC’s statement today said simply that Trump “adds some much-needed seriousness that has been previously lacking from the GOP field, and we look forward to hearing more about his ideas for the nation.”
Republicans have already been struggling to bring order to a race with as many as fifteen candidates, and while some people (I plead guilty) derisively refer to the primary contest as it existed before as a clown show, it now features one of the country’s foremost clowns. And according to the rules the RNC and the participating TV networks set to limit the upcoming debates to ten participants — a threshold of performance in recent polls — Trump would qualify to participate. And it’s likely to stay that way, since the bottom rungs are occupied by candidates who poll in the low single digits. Trump may not be the nominee, but he’ll probably be able to pull five or ten percent of Republican voters, putting him somewhere in the middle of the pack.
So at the debates, we may end up watching Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio try to get a word in while Trump goes on about his solid gold toilets, the models he’s dated, and his brilliant secret plan to defeat ISIS (maybe we’ll finally learn what it is!). That could make the real candidates look like sober leaders who can be trusted to take the country’s reins. Anything’s possible. But it may be more likely that Trump will make the party look more foolish than it already does. He may be a walking caricature, but is what he has to say about issues any less serious than what we’ve heard from the other candidates? Is Trump’s secret ISIS plan likely to be dumber than the idea that we just need to show “strength” and “resolve” and everything in the Middle East will turn out fine? Is what Trump has to say about the economy any less grounded in fact and experience than the other candidates’ belief that if we cut taxes for people like Donald Trump, the economy will get better for everyone?
The Republican Party just got a giant headache, with a comb-over on top.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, June16, 2015
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