Cotton, T Sen
==
SEE TWO
primary 5/18 on haspell booster
CLAREMONSTER?!
NO MERRI
name spike 8/16?
mercer
bak 519
pow
===
DUCK 3 26 IRAN WAR
wareagle.substack.com
https://wareagle.substack.com › p › the-iran-war-exposes-the-farce-of
The Iran War Exposes the Farce of American "Representative Democracy"
On Monday, Rubio said that the United States began the war because the State of Israel planned to attack Iran, and that this would lead to Iranian reprisals against US bases. Rubio was essentially stating that Tel Aviv forced the US into the war. Trump today directly contradicted his Secretary of State—as well as the GOP Speaker of the House and GOP Senator Tom Cotton—and claimed "I ...
The Wall Street Journal
Sen. Tom Cotton Says U.S. Campaign in Iran Could Take Weeks
3 days agoSen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the U.S.'s priority is destroying Iran's missile arsenal in a campaign that could take weeks. "The help that ...
The Hill
https://thehill.com › policy › defense › 5761539-cotton-republican-support-iran
Tom Cotton: Republicans 'overwhelmingly' back military action on Iran
3 days ago" Donald Trump has launched a war on Iran and Congress must convene on Monday to vote on Thomas Massie's and my war powers resolution to stop this war," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a ...
Daily Beast
MAGA Senator Tom Cotton Cornered on Trump's Bizarre Wartime Truth ...
3 days agoSen. Tom Cotton on Sunday was put on the defensive over President Trump's decision to announce a war in a Truth Social video instead of seeking congressional authorization. Pressed on Face the ...
Daily Mail
Cotton rebukes CBS host's hint that Trump wants US troops in Iran
3 days agoSenator Tom Cotton fought back on the idea that President Donald Trump wants to send American soldiers to Iran during a Sunday morning appearance on CBS.
Yahoo
https://www.yahoo.com › news › articles › tom-cotton-says-iran-imminent-172714499.html
Tom Cotton Says Iran Has Been An 'Imminent Threat to U.S. For ... - Yahoo
1 day agoSen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) raised eyebrows on Tuesday after he claimed Iran had "posed an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years." Reacting to the joint U.S.-Israel war against Iran on ...
Eurasia Review
The Iran War Exposes The Farce Of American 'Representative Democracy ...
TodayBy Ryan McMaken The Trump administration has unilaterally—without any Congressional debate or vote, of course—forced Americans into yet another war. This time, the war is a large-scale ...
CNN
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton to the Iranian people: 'Help is here'
3 days agoRepublican Sen. Tom Cotton responds to questions about whether President Donald Trump's strikes in Iran were justified - plus what they mean for the future of Iranian leadership.
Author:Dana Bash
Arkansas Times
Tom Cotton gets the war with Iran he's always wanted
Jun 23, 2025Two days after President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities on behalf of the Israeli government, the world is waiting to see what happens next. Will Iran limit its ...
CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com › news › iran-us-israel-attack-tom-cotton-senate
Sen. Tom Cotton says U.S., allies looking at "weeks, not ... - CBS News
4 days agoSen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Saturday that he believes that there could be "weeks, not days, of joint efforts" by the U.S. and its allies in Iran after ...
an 4 24
just normal gop macho strict fr bs?
tensions in the Middle East escalated during the April 13-14 weekend when Iran attacked Israel with drones and missiles, many of which were shot down by U.S. forces.
President Joe Biden has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Gaza policy as the death toll in Gaza continues to soar. However, Biden has also made it clear that the U.S. remains a major ally of Israel.
Protests against Netanyahu's policies have been plentiful in the United States. And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is drawing vehement criticism after promoting violence against protesters.
In an April 15 post on X, formerly Twitter, the GOP senator wrote, "I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."
Politico's Niall Stanage noted that Cotton edited his tweet, replacing "take matters into your own hands" with the longer "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way."
New York Daily News columnist Brandon Friedman tweeted, "Cotton should be expelled from the Senate over this."
On X, journalist Brian Beutler commented, "Remember when people insisted that Cotton simply meant for troops to discern with perfect accuracy between protesters and rioters and intended no harm to the former?"
READ MORE:[The Big Picture: Donald J. Trump's attempted coup
In response to Cotton, Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr. — a frequent guest on MSNBC — tweeted, "What is wrong with you?"
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said of Cotton, "What? He wants to kill Americans. That makes him a Republican."
Activist Charlotte Clymer, a former press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, told Cotton, "Why is violence your answer to every problem? Why are you so weak?"
Wade Lentz, co-host of "The Patriot Pastor's Podcast," tweeted, "It's sad that an Arkansas Senator asks that American citizens put their lives in danger when he has done not one thing to address this in DC. Do something besides posting about it, and then show us how you have addressed it in Washington."
---
an 12 23
after presidential candidate and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley failed to condemn slavery when answering a question about the cause of the Civil War, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) decided to weigh in with a comment of his own.
"The Civil War started because the American people elected an anti-slavery Republican as president and Democrats revolted rather than accept minor restrictions on the expansion of slavery to the western territories," Cotton posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.
Cotton's tweet was met with almost universal scorn on the social media platform, with journalists and pundits pointing out the Arkansas Republican's false equivalency of antebellum-era politics with today's very different political environment.
"MAGA propagandists like Tom Cotton don't want you to understand that Southern racists used to be Democrats but are Republicans now. This partisan sea change happened through the 1960s, '70s and '80s," former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob tweeted. "It's explained in those history books that Republicans don't want you to read."
Liberal social media personality Ron Filipowski piled on in a similar fashion, calling Cotton's tweet "another ignorant and stupid analogy."
"This Republican Party doesn’t even resemble the one from 2015 much less 1860," Filipowski tweeted. "And the white southern Dixiecrats all switched to Republicans in the 1970-80s, so the Democratic Party today also in no way resembles that of 1860."
Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali went even further, reminding his followers that it isn't Democrats but Republicans that today are defending the preservation of Confederate monuments.
READ MORE: 'I'll vote for Biden': Top Koch group official rebels against Nikki Haley endorsement
"Democrats today aren't waving or defending the Confederate flag or lamenting about the 'lost cause.' That's Tom Cotton's GOP," Ali tweeted. "If Lincoln was a Republican today, the MAGA extremists would probably try to assassinate him."
And in response to Cotton's follow-up tweet in which he wrote that "Democrats would sooner tear the country apart than treat all citizens equally before the law, regardless of color," Ali fired back.
"Tom Cotton will support Trump for President who cited Hitler and said immigrants poison the blood of this country and incited a failed insurrection, but go on about equality and tearing the country apart," he wrote.
South Carolina-based pediatrician Dr. Michael O'Brien was simple in his criticism, tweeting, "Tom Cotton is a prime example of why we should never ban books."
READ MORE:Tom Cotton slammed for boosting conspiracy theories about journalists
---
===
an 12 23
attorney General Stephen Miller? Vice President Tucker Carlson? White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon? CIA Director Kash Patel? A new report detailing a second Donald Trump presidency’s “loyalty first” potential cabinet nominees is sending shock waves over their extremist positions and in some cases an entirely insufficient level of experience for the job.
“Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios,” the news outlet reported in an exclusive Thursday morning. “If Trump won in 2024, he’d turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action, the sources tell us.”
Some of these possible picks for the very top levels of government hold or have promoted white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian, or fascistic policies or beliefs.
Axios calls them “full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump’s way.”
READ MORE: Jim Comer Decimated by NBC Reporter in ‘Under Two Minutes’
“They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home,” Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report, adding, “They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.”
“Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — a former Army infantry officer known for his hard edge, and who wrote a New York Times op-ed in Trump’s first term supporting use of the Insurrection Act against civil disorder — would be considered to head the Pentagon,” according to Axios.
Most of the names mentioned in the Axios report are well-known, and they are being promoted by many surrounding the disgraced criminally-indicted ex-president.
“Donald Trump Jr. has floated [Mike] Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to be Trump’s interim attorney general — saying it would be a ‘shot across the bow of the swamp,'” Axios reports. “In his public auditions for the job, the bombastic Davis has promised a ‘three-week reign of terror‘ in which he would ‘put kids in cages’ and jail prosecutors and journalists who have gone after Trump — even telling MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan that he has ‘his spot picked out in the D.C. gulag.'”
Meanwhile, Melania Trump is pushing for “booted” Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson to be Trump’s running mate.
Other vice presidential possibilities mentioned include Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, U.S. Senator J.D Vance, and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Some close to Trump are promoting themselves for the vice presidential role, including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL).
Axios also reports that “Johnny McEntee,Trump’s loyalty vetter and enforcer, [who] headed presidential personnel in the first term … might return to that role with even more power. He also could be Trump’s gatekeeper as head of Oval Office operations, or could be Cabinet secretary, riding herd on the White House liaisons to each department.”
READ MORE: Mike Johnson Likens Himself to Moses, Tells Christian Nationalists God Charted His Path to Speaker
“By late 2020, McEntee had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term, reaching far down the federal bureaucracy in a mission to truly ‘clean out’ the ‘Deep State.’ That project has continued outside of government with a $22 million presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation.”
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Axios’ Jim VandeHei, who co-authored the report, dove even further into how concerning these potential picks are, leading the Biden campaign to post a clip of a small portion of his remarks on social media:
IFrame Content twt?
Vandehei went on to say, “you might like that, then you’re going to be electrified by this group but if you don’t like it, you’re probably going to be horrified by some of the picks. But what’s in common with all of these people is they share at least a willingness to do all the things that Donald Trump would say.”
And he reminded that none of Trump’s previous team that guarded the American people against his worst instincts will be part of a second Trump administration.
“None of those shackles will exist. He’s going to come in with a group of enablers and a group of executors. So whatever you thought about the first term, he’s going to be able to do things at a velocity rate he wasn’t capable of because he didn’t really know how to govern,” Vandehei added. “Now he knows a little bit better, but he’s surrounded by people and there’s these multimillion dollar efforts outside of his own orbit at the Heritage Foundation.”
“It’s not necessarily about substance,” he said of how the people choosing who becomes part of any next Trump administration would be, “it’s basically an ideological litmus test. Are you willing to believe wholly in Donald Trump, serve loyalty to Donald Trump and then implement his view of what the world should look like? If you can pass that test you might be one of the 50,000 people who get to come into [his] government.”
Meanwhile, critics responding to the Axios report are voicing extreme concern.
“This is about the most dystopian article ever written,” observed The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. “Like asking ChatGPT to write about a fantasy Trump administration cabinet that blends Nazis and celebrities in the style of 2008 Politico playbook.”
Former Biden Commerce Dept. official Caitlin Legacki wrote, “This Axios reporting should be a 5-alarm fire. Terrifying stuff in here and it’s barely making waves.”
U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) warned, “This is what is at stake in 2024 & lurking behind every single thing the extreme MAGA GOP is doing. Don’t lose the plot in their chaos or we will lose our democracy.”
New Jersey Treasury Dept. official Darryl Isherwood summed up what many seemed to be saying: “If this doesn’t scare you, you’re not paying attention.”
Watch the video above or at this link.
an 4 22
As Democratic lawmakers worked to finalize the confirmation of US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a number perplexing events took place in national political theater this week. One of the most pivotal moments centered on Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison’s attack on Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) following the Republican senator's suggestion that Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer, per The Washington Post.
Harrison described Cotton as a “maggot, infested man” while collectively calling out the Republican Party and labeling it a political party “built on fraud, fear, and fascism.”
Almost immediately after Harrison made the remarks, the Republican National Committee (RNC) fired back with a response. But instead of criticizing the Democratic official for his charge about the party, the RNC focused more on his remarks targeting Cotton. In a newly published op-ed, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank highlighted the seemingly odd argument from the party.
"Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the 'maggot-infested' charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation," Milbank wrote. "As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation."
So, Milbank decided to discuss those three keypoints as he highlighted how they factually relate to the Republican Party. In reference to fraud, Milbank highlighted the irony Republicans' claims of fraud as he noted the evidence of fraud that has been uncovered actually proves it was likely committed by members of their own party.
"The 'big lie' about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless," he wrote.
He went on to offer an example of the type offearmongering Republicans are responsible for invoking. "Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)," Milbank highlighted, "said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because 'their heart is with the murderers.' Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson 'left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.'”
Milbank also noted recent remarks made by Ohio Senate Republican candidate J.D. Vance. In a recent ad, hesaid, “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Assessing Republican lawmakers' opposition to a resolution in support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Milbank explained how their perspective aligns with fascism. "Sixty-three House Republicans — 30 percent of the caucus — voted against a resolution this week affirming unequivocal support for NATO as authoritarian Russia attacks democratic Ukraine," he wrote.
On another note, he added, "A Republican National Committee resolution, never rescinded, refers to the Capitol insurrection not as an authoritarian attempt to overthrow democracy and keep the defeated Trump in power but as legitimate political discourse.' And Trump expresses regret he didn’t march to the Capitol with the insurrectionists."
He concluded, "Is the GOP 'a party built on fraud, fear, and fascism'? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits."
hmmn aha12 21 some kind of rubber inverse [eg the squad asks for apology for racist remarks? ]or asymmetry? tom cotton? has never authored a bill? chris hayes has hissy fit b/c comm chair cut him off b/c gop procedural ploy, help up confirm votes till got apology from schumer?who did, but also promise not to do it again;
an 821
the men's fellowship was told to bring guns. "They call it Shootin' with the Savior," my friend said. "I'm 70 years old! And I am not going to march into the woods with a Bible and a gun, and line up for target practice. It's pure nonsense is what it is."
I've stopped in the parking lot to chat with Bob. Bob belongs to one of the biggest churches in town. This last year, he has been attending services remotely on Facebook. Though he has been an active member for decades, he's unsure whether he will go back. His pastor, he said, never took the covid seriously. "Remember that church shooting they had down in Texas a few years back?" Bob said as we stepped aside for two women to pass. "It wasn't two weeks 'til we had the whole church strung up with security cameras and men carrying guns inside and outside Sunday service. But the virus? The one that could actually kill me and my wife? Our pastor hardly mentions it."
Bob is an anti-Trump conservative and I am an outspoken liberal, both political outcasts here in rural Anderson County, Kentucky, population 23,000, where the disgraced former president won more than 70 percent of the vote in 2016 and 2020.
It is normal for us to see men carrying guns of all sizes whether at Walmart or the State Capitol 15 miles up the road. It is normal to see armed Three Percenters guarding the confederate statue on the courthouse lawn or standing outside the Judge Executive's office before a public meeting, having a laugh with the locals. And it is normal to see and hear the constant, unwavering refusal, in person and online, of these men refusing to wear masks or take the vaccine. Is that a diaper on your face?! Don't be a sheep! Fauci is a phony!Whether it is the national obsession with guns or the refusal of a free, lifesaving vaccine, either way, performative masculinity is literally killing us.
My own brother remains unvaccinated. In one of his Facebook profile photos, he appears fully decked out in his National Guard gear with AR-15 style rifles stacked on the ground in a circle around him. Photo title: "Me and my bitches." When I asked our (vaccinated) dad why my brother is not vaccinated, he told me that in the beginning it was politics. Now it's just chest-thumping stubbornness.
"He can't get vaccinated now," he said, "because then you'll be right."
"If I'm right that makes him a pussy?" I said.
"Exactly."
United States Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas—where the over-12 vaccination rate is 41.45 percent—recently spoke at the Third Annual Machine Gun Shoot in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire. Cotton can be seen on camera, smiling and chatting with a crowd of men at the range while shooting large, heavy, rapid-fire guns.
Does anyone believe these men are vaccinated? And why is a senator from Arkansas wasting his time on a shooting range in New Hampshire? Because it is no longer enough to prove your presidential manhood by riding a horse (Ronald Reagan) or clearing brush (George W. Bush). You have to be filmed firing the biggest, loudest firearm you can. That or getting on Fox primetime to rant about how masks and vaccine requirements, like proposed gun laws, infringe on American freedoms.
United States Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote in her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance,that the country loses eight kids and teens to gun violence every day. "If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials," the Democrat wrote. "We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children."
We did not move heaven and earth, nor will we.
We can't get 30 percent to take a free vaccine.
The population of Kentucky is about the same as the population of Los Angeles, yet we rank 15th in the nation in gun suicides. Our junior United States Senator Rand Paul touts gun rights anytime someone hands him a microphone. Mass, preventable death does not move him. So it was no surprise this past year, as Americans were dying daily by the thousands, when Paul made himself infamous for publicly berating Dr. Anthony Fauci and for being on the Senate floor sans-mask throughout the covid pandemic.
What does it matter if 610,000 Americans are dead from a virus. Is that a diaper on your face?! Don't be a sheep! Fauci is a phony!Like Tom Cotton on the shooting range, performative masculinity is the drug Rand Paul's voting base is jonesing for. And who has time to move heaven and earth when there are elections to think about?
Like Bob, I missed Shootin' with the Savior, but I did go to an outdoor range during the pandemic where, with the help of firearms experts, I learned to shoot nine guns ranging in size from the AR-15 to a pistol I can fit in my pocket. I hadn't shot a gun in 40 years and wanted to see what all the Proud Boy hoopla was about. What I learned is the AR-15 is easy to shoot. Too easy. I did not mug for a camera crew to prove it.
Our health director here in Anderson County tells me that he's booking around 40 vaccine appointments a week, of which 30 might show up. Because school starts next week, on Saturday, he held a special clinic. Only 37 people came. Today, I asked him, "What's it going to take to get people's attention? The death of someone's child?"
He did not answer, nor did I expect him to.
Men have been gunning down children at schools since Columbine. Their stories are a blip in the news cycle. School kids dying from the virus will be one more blip.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wuhan-lab-leak/
an salon
Last month, seemingly spurred on by this column from a controversial former science reporter for The New York Times, it became suddenly fashionable in some journalistic circles to scold the mainstream press for dismissing or ignoring something called the "lab leak theory" regarding the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
To be sure, the possibility that the coronavirus was released in a lab accident in Wuhan, China, has never been fully discounted by the scientific establishment but long treated as less likely than that it emerged from a purely natural origin. Still, led by Matt Yglesias from his (sigh) Substack blog, a narrative started to form in May that the mainstream media was deliberately ignoring a scientifically valid hypothesis because of a, heaven help us, bias against conservatives. Otherwise reputable opinion writerslike Jonathan Chait of New York, eager to demonstrate that they are Not Biased© and Care About Hearing All Sides©, took up the mantle, scolding the mainstream press for supposedly dismissing the "lab leak hypothesis" out of hand, simply because Donald Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., were fond of it.
The scolding worked.
As Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review wrote earlier this month, "we've seen a gusher of opinion essays in the same vein, indicting the mainstream press and prominent experts for characterizing a plausible hypothesis as a conspiracy theory for essentially political reasons." This, in turn, resulted in a slew "of news articles asserting that the lab-leak theory has 'gone mainstream,' and is getting a 'second look.'" Here at Salon, we addressed the sudden surge of interest in this theory by highlighting the basic reality: Scientists do not think it's likely, plus there is no new evidence that would suggest that it's become any more likely than it was before the pearl-clutching about "bias" began. Soon, however, President Joe Biden gave in to the pressure and ordered an intelligence investigation into the theory.
The problem with all this moralizing about "bias," however, is that the original reason that the media wasn't doing more to hype the "lab leak" hypothesis had little to do with politics and everything to do with science. As science educator Rebecca Watson explained in a video responding to the controversy last week, "There is currently no evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab. None." And, as Justin Ling of Foreign Policy argued Tuesday, "Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory," and, in fact, the hype around the idea is literally "just speculation."
Indeed, the finger-waggers had it backwards. The media isn't biased against the right but biased in favor of the right.
If it weren't for conservative pressure, there would probably be no substantive media interest the "lab leak" hypothesis. Typically, news outlets are loathed to publish speculation that emerges from fringe conspiracy theory boards that have offered little in the way of real evidence for their claims. But when the conspiracy theorists are politically motivated right-wingers, they tend to get more of a media hearing than say, Bigfoot enthusiasts.
Wednesday morning, the "why won't the media do more to indulge this evidence-free right-wing speculation" crowd got egg on their face with a new report from the Washington Postthat wreaked havoc on claims that the "lab leak hypothesis" failed to get a fair hearing. On the contrary, there has been "an ongoing, sometimes politicized and so far fruitless effort inside the U.S. government to determine whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be the result of engineering or a lab leak."
The report documents an extensive hunt for evidence of the "lab leak" theory throughout the federal government. Much of it driven by Donald Trump's desire to blame someone else, ideally China, to divert attention from his own failures. But more responsible actors in the federal government, including prominent health officials like Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci also gave the "lab leak" hypothesis a good deal of time and attention. But while the White House was heavily pressuring every bureaucrat in sight to give them something, anything, they could use to push this "lab leak" hypothesis, the evidence simply wasn't there.
The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain.
The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who, as Lindsay Beyerstein of Alternet explains, feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault."
Attention journalists: The way to avoid political bias in media is to, well, avoid political bias. Which means avoiding giving life to poorly evidenced ideas, simply because they're being hyped by the right. What happened instead is that the press gave into right-wing bullying. In doing so, the press ignored the usual journalistic standards for weighing facts and evidence. Now it's likely most Americans have heard more about lab leaks than they have about the far more plausible theory that the coronavirus pandemic emerged from nature.
To make it all worse, the hyping of the "lab leak" hypothesis meant politely ignoring the fact that Trump, Cotton, and Pompeo were winking at an even less plausible conspiracy theory that holds that China deliberately manufactured the coronavirus as a bioweapon. People who have heard this bioweapon conspiracy theory and see headlines or cable news chryons touting the "lab leak" theory will assume that's what is being discussed, and assume that it's now been proved. And once that kind of misinformation is out there, it's pretty hard to claw it back.
A lot of critics who accused the media of ignoring the "lab leak" hypothesis claim to be interested in putting facts before political bias. They worry that mainstream journalists are disregarding good information simply because the sources are conservative or even because they have a history of lying. (As if credibility isn't an important consideration in sourcing information!)
But what this debacle shows is that the mainstream media has the opposite problem. They all too often give in to Republican bullying and allow themselves to be used as conduits for right-wing disinformation campaigns. Yes, prioritizing truth over politics often leads to news stories that have a "liberal" feel to them. That's because the American right is wholly committed to lying and disinformation. But journalism should put reality before the tender feelings of lying right-wingers. Especially when it comes to scientific disputes where we all supposedly agree it would be better if politics were kept out of it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mcconnell-is-betting-democrats-dont-have-the-will-to-fight-fire-with-fire-biden-should-prove-them-wrong
...Back in 2013, then-Congressman Tom Cotton introduced a bill in the House called the "**Stop Court-Packing Act**" which would have eliminated three seats on the D.C. Court of Appeals. That seems like a strange title, but it gives away the game. He was trying to stop President Obama from being able to fill those three empty seats. Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, agreed, writing a piece in the National Review called "Don't let the Democrats pack the DC Circuit." Keep in mind that these were legitimate vacancies.
As it happens, McConnell kept those and many other seats open so that a Republicans could fill them, so they needn't have worried. And he's very proud of it:
...
an 920
David Edwards / Raw Story September 20, 2020
Fox News host Chris Wallace accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) of hypocrisy on Sunday after he vowed to push forward with a vote to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader…
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920
no lnx twt
thehill
Trump on Sunday threatened to withhold funding from California schools incorporating The New York Times’ 1619 Project in their classrooms.
"Department of Education is looking at this," Trump tweeted in response to an anonymous post claiming the Times’ series had been “implemented… into the public schools” in California.
"If so, they will not be funded!" he added.
The president’s allies have frequently targeted the Pulitzer-winning Times series, which emphasizes the legacy of slavery in American history.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July introduced legislation that would make any schools using 1619 Project materials ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Cotton called the series “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union.”
Pelosi: Trump 'engaged in fright and fear' in efforts to 'discredit'...
DeWine: Trump 'extremely respectful' of military, says report has...
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week ordered federal agencies to end workplace sensitivity training that teaches the U.S. “is an inherently racist or evil country” or "that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."
It is unclear to what extent, if at all, such programs are in place at the agencies, with the OMB citing “press reports.”
==
barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/
no lnx alex h
President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.
They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”
Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.
Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”
Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”
Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.
“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”
For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”
Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
US Senate candidate, AR
Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.
If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.
We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gop-senator-horrifies-readers-with-a-new-authoritarian-call-in-the-new-york-times/
it's a simple headline: “Send in the troops.” But its meaning is clear, and it’s deeply disturbing.
That’s the title the New York Times gave to a new op-ed written by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the most militaristic and hawkish members of Congress. He had previously caused a stir this week by calling for the military to be unleashed on protesters with a “no quarter” order — meaning that they would take no prisoners and simply kill at will. Cotton later said he had been speaking metaphorically.
But his new op-ed isn’t about symbolism. He painted a grim picture of the violence that has accompanied some of the peaceful protests calling for justice in the name of George Floyd, a man who was recently heinously killed by police.
“[N]ihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes,” he wrote. “These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.”
Cotton didn’t mention the fact that a recent FBI report, as uncovered by The Nation, warned of potential protest violence with links to the right-wing. And he completely ignored the ongoing violence from law enforcement itself, frequently directed at peaceful protesters and journalists with no justification. It’s exactly this violence that is fueling the ongoing unrest, but Cotton and his ilk ignore it completely or excuse it. There should be no excuse for unjustified and unprovoked violence by protesters or police, but the government bears special responsibility for making sure agents of the state are accountable and remaining strictly within the limits of the law and morality.
Instead — as always — Cotton wants to ratchet up the level of confrontation, echoing the president’s instincts, by bringing in the military:
One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.
The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
He didn’t consider that escalating the stakes of the clashes, rather than moving for de-escalation, could make the situation worse, not better. And he dismissed the possibility that giving President Donald Trump this power would place us on a glide path to authoritarianism, something many Republicans claimed to fear with Barack Obama was in the White House.
But oppressive acts of force are always Cotton’s solution. He once said war with Iran would be over quickly, a crystal clear display of the hawk’s fallacy that violence is an easy answer. And conveniently, Cotton seems to like being seen to side with Trump; two of his other recent Times op-eds were defenses of killing Qassim Suleimani and of buying Greenland.
There’s no shred of an indication of nuance or thoughtfulness in his argument. There’s no fear of unintended consequences, or a warning about taking things too far. It’s pure authoritarian propaganda. And it’s a disturbing sign of what the GOP is becoming.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/
There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.
This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like
to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.
Iraq Redux?
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.
Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.
In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.
To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.
Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.
The Wuhan Lab Lies
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.
On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website *ZeroHedge* ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.
A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the *Global Disinformation Index*.)
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”
On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.
A Finger on the Scale
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.
Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.
Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch:{ regular:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/yale-psychiatrist-explains-why-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-donald-trumps-irrational-cult-is-a-deadly-combination/
wacko
ref
no lnx twt
It's Time to Stop Televising Trump's Briefings]
Fox News Is Still Peddling Coronavirus Misinformation to Its Extremely At-Risk Viewers
The network's audience skews older. When will it stop doubling down on the propaganda that could put viewers in mortal danger?
image
BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 13, 2020
The people most at risk in the novel coronavirus pandemic are the elderly and those with immunodeficiency. That's why we all have a duty to practice social distancing, even if we are younger and unlikely to bear the brunt of all this. We owe it to people in gravest danger. In America, many of those at-risk older folks watch a lot of Fox News. In some cases, it's their main or only source of information. But even over the last day or so, the network has scarcely changed the tune on its opinion shows, even as Fox employees are now starting to work from home.
The morning and primetime shows are still downplaying the threat of the virus, occasionally suggesting it's some sort of plot orchestrated against the president. (By the Deep State? In coordination with, uh, 60 million Italians? And the first lady of Canada?) The network is offering people misinformation or even outright conspiracies, often by booking guests who have zero expertise in any field beyond kissing Donald Trump's ass. In short, the Fox News Channel is an enterprise that seems determined to place its core customer base in mortal danger. Beyond the sociopathy, this seems bad for business.
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It's Not 'Politicizing the Crisis,' It's Your Duty]
We had one example last night on the television program hosted by Sean Hannity, just the man you want serving up fact-like objects regarding a global pandemic. The superstar peddler of resentment and paranoia hosted a succession of people who know nothing about pandemic disease to yell at each other about who's peddling "Chinese propaganda." Then he had on Tom Cotton, United States Senator from Arkansas, and one of the most brazenly irresponsible people in elected office today.
.@SenTomCotton on the Bidens' coziness w/ China: "In light of how China's unleashed this plague on the entire world ... it's even more urgent that we examine Joe Biden's decade long record of being wrong on China" and Hunter's biz dealings. pic.twitter.com/PZZVZ4GYaJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020
They are conspiracizing about Hunter Bidenafter weeks of completely failing their viewers on the actual defining issue of the day. Not only that, Cotton was determined to hit every insane note. He had a fair-enough critique of Joe Biden's comments on China—they were, indeed, stupid—but then it was on to vague insinuation of Biden corruption; unproven claims about the effectiveness of Trump's travel ban on China; framing the pandemic, without evidence, as an attack on America by "the Chinese Communist Party." Using smoke and mirrors that fans of The Emails (2016) will recognize, Cotton attempted to tie Hunter Biden's overseas business connections to coronavirus.
Then Hannity jumped in with some (nonsense) Ukraine talk before a brief discussion of how hard he, Sean Hannity, has worked for his money.
Then Cotton was back on, suggesting there are "fishy circumstances" and calling for an investigation into the Bidens. Again, this is amid a global pandemic Fox has downplayed for weeks. (Cotton, for his part, has been making a lot of noise about it.) Then Cotton reiterated the notion, citing zero evidence, that this is some sort of bioweapon attack orchestrated by China on the whole world. If there is an elected official hornier for international conflict than Tom Cotton, his first name is Lindsey.
Cotton: China is "not going to get away with infecting the world with this Chinese Coronavirus” pic.twitter.com/DbFN48h5H9
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020
Yes, the Chinese government lied and distorted the issue for months and punished whistleblowers in totalitarian fashion. We still had months to prepare and did nothing. The President of the United States himself distorted and downplayed the threat constantly. He said people were going to work while sick, no big deal. He said it would go away miraculously. He said we were on the brink of having a vaccine available. All of this was complete bullshit, excavated from his ass and served up to the public at a juncture when we actually could have done something.
And just last night, we learned via NPR this public posture completely reflected what was going on behind the scenes. Trump rejected pleas from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that coronavirus represented a serious threat that required action in January. Up until this week, the president has resisted widespread testing—one of the keys to South Korea's success in mitigating the problem—for a simple reason: "The president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall."
Throughout all this, the president and his allies have believed they can will this thing away like every other scandal that has struck his presidency. If they just keep doubling down on unreality, eventually enough people will believe it that it will be true, just like all their other scams. Except the virus is impervious to bullshit. Cotton's deployment of the term "Chinese coronavirus" is a signal they are going to try to racism their way out of this now, but it's not going to work when Fox News viewers start contracting the virus in large numbers. Which, as it stands, is going to happen. Earlier this week, a congressional doctor estimated 75 to 150 million Americans will get this thing. But this is what Fox served up to viewers this morning.
On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020
What the fuck, man? Why are you hosting Trump's pastor-adjacent amigo—who has intricate ties to former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—to talk about a public-health threat? What value does Jerry Falwell offer if you actually want to inform your viewers, who again are often in the most at-risk demographic group, about the situation with COVID-19? (Later, he called for various counties to secede from Virginia. To reiterate: what the fuck?) Falwell even took Cotton's bioweapon conspiracy-mongering to a new level, suggesting this was the result of North Korea's (??) work in cahoots with China. Also, he said it's an impeachment hoax. Again: 60 million Italians are quarantined in their homes, singing together out their windows to feel they're not alone for days on end, as part of a plan to remove the American president from office?
This is just more doubling down, even as these people surely know that some of the people watching are going to die from this thing. That is just a fact. Fox News viewers who've been told for weeks that this thing is not a big deal, that the media is blowing it out of proportion to hurt the president, that it's some bioweapon-slash-hoax, are going to die. Eventually, everyone will agree that this was not some Liberal Fake News Anti-Trump Hoax. Eventually, it will surely be clear, even to Fox News viewers, that Fox News has been lying about it in conjunction with the president. Will this change how people evaluate what constitutes a good source of information? Don't hold your breath.
JACK HOLMES Politics Editor
Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
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[Right-wing political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pitch reporters their latest far-fetched scandal on a balcony outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]
Like bees to honey, the pro-Trump fringe descended on this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside of the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., in hopes of stealing a sliver of the spotlight for themselves.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and a cohort of his Infowars employees roamed the conference’s exhibition hall and the escalators on their way to radio row, attracting a crowd of star-struck attendees with their cell phones hoisted above their heads to get video of Jones. Right Wing Watch asked Jones for his thoughts on the new coronavirus now spreading around the world, a subject that Vice President Mike Pence had directly addressed on the CPAC main stage hours earlier.
“We know it’s a manmade bioweapon, produced by the U.S. government, sold to China in 2015. That was in theJournal of Science.That’s why we got a bit concerned about it. It’s a chimera cross-viral species system,” Jones said, going on to argue that the U.S. should restrict travel from China.
Right Wing Watch was unable to track down a Journal of Science article that made that assertion, which was recentlyfloated by Sen. Tom Cottonof Arkansas, as well.According to The New York Times, former White House strategist Steve Bannon is also a purveyor of the theory, which is widely disavowed by scientists.
[Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones rides an escalator to radio row at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]
Jones told journalists at CPAC that he felt at home with CPAC attendees, “But the Republican establishment, I don’t feel at home with them. But we’re here to let them know that we’re taking the Republican party over.”
:{On a terrace overlooking the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center lobby, Republican political personalitiesJacob Wohland Jack Burkman hosted a press conference, as they did last year. In the audience, far-right political entertainer Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys hate group, accosted reporters. McInnes was later}
:{. One attendee told Right Wing Watch they reported McInnes to security after McInnes threatened to assault them. A request for information from CPAC about McInnes’ ejection was not immediately returned.}:
Laura Loomer, anti-Muslim activistwho is pursuing a bid for Congress in Florida, was spotted around CPAC touting her campaign. Last year, Loomer had her media credentials revoked and was removed from CPAC after harassing journalists in the media filing center; this year she donned standard attendee credentials.
But white nationalist organization leader Patrick Casey never made it past the conference center’s front door, according to a post in his Telegram chat channel. On days that the vice president or president speaks at CPAC, guards at the doors of the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center require conference credentials or hotel room keys to enter the building. Casey falsely claimed to his followers that the policy was new for this year.
Tags: Alex JonesGavin McInnesJack BurkmanJacob WohlLaura LoomerPatrick CaseyCPAC 2020Identity Evropa InfoWar
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/republican-sen-tom-cotton-says-only-deranged-people-dont-seen-that-greenland-is-vital/
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explains crazy?
Much has been written about CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted in a 2006 article for The Nation:“Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).”
As a result of these meetings, CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative andChristian Zionist Gary Bauerto its board and naming Bauer the first director of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
CUFI has since won powerful allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former ArkansasGovernor Mike Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Penceamong its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”
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Cotton blasted as ‘delusional’ for claiming that war with Iran could be won in only ‘two strikes’
Cotton blasted as ‘delusional’ for claiming that war with Iran could be won in only ‘two strikes’
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GOP’s Tom Cotton calls for unauthorized ‘retaliatory strike’ on Iran with ‘the fire and fury of the military’
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/dont-fall-for-it-arizona-congressman-and-former-marine-who-gets-the-same-intel-as-tom-cotton-warns-some-gopers-are-exaggerating-the-iran-threat/
Before Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona pursued a career in politics, he served in the United States military: Gallego was a Marine infantryman in Iraq in 2005. And the 39-year-old Democratic congressman is warning that the push for a military confrontation with Iran in 2019 is full of misleading assertions.
Gallego, now a member of the House Armed Services Committee, received a classified briefing on May 17—and the following day, he told the Washington Post, “What I saw was a lot of misinterpretation and wanting conflict coming from the administration and intelligence community. Intel doesn’t show existential threats. Even what it shows, it doesn’t show threats to U.S. interests.”
The claim that Iran poses a major threat to the U.S. in 2019, according to Gallego, is mainly being advanced by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. On Saturday, Gallego took to Twitter and warned, “I get the same intel as Cotton. He is greatly exaggerating the situation to spur us to war. Don’t fall for it.”
President Donald Trump has been highly critical of President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry on Iran policy, terminating their arms agreement with the Iranian government. But Trump has, at times, been quite critical of neocons as well. And according to the Washington Post, Trump has reportedly become frustrated with Boltonas well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Iran—believing them to be unnecessarily hawkish with that country.
“Deterrence is important to contain bad actors like Iran, but there has to be a fine line between deterrence and escalation,” Gallego told the Washington Post. “We can’t automatically go to war because a 17-year-old fires an AK-47 at U.S. interests.”
After serving in the Arizona State Senate for four years, Gallego was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 and was reelected in 2016 and 2018.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/this-right-wing-senator-just-said-the-u-s-could-quickly-win-a-war-against-iran-with-two-strikes/
==
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/13/17113952/rex-tillerson-fired-tom-cotton-cia-gina-haspel
Tom Cotton was supposed to be CIA director. He isn’t — and that’s trouble for Trump.
When you’re so unpopular you can’t recruit your top ally in Congress.
By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Mar 13, 2018, 12:40pm EDT
President Donald Trump with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). Zach Gibson/Pool/Getty Images
There was something off about President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.
Back in the fall, the line of succession was supposed to look like this:
The Trump White House already had a plan to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and to replace Pompeo with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Cotton was Trump’s “favorite” to take over the intelligence agency, per the New York Times.
If asked to serve, Cotton “does his duty when the country calls,” a friend of his told Axios.
But on Tuesday, when the president finally decided to fire Tillerson, it didn’t go quite according to plan. Pompeo was indeed elevated to the State Department — but Cotton was left in the Senate. Instead, Gina Haspel was named as Trump’s new CIA director. She will be, notably, the first woman nominated to the post and is a seasoned spy who briefly oversaw a torture black site in Thailand during the George W. Bush years, per CBS News.
So what happened? It depends on whom you ask. But the inescapable lesson is this: Trump’s administration has become so radioactive that the president can’t bring in one of his party’s most promising stars, one of his closest allies in the Republican establishment, to take such a prominent post.
The White House is in the midst of a scary staffing crisis, shedding officials who have mustered at least some experience running the federal government and failing to attract top talent to replace them. Cotton, whatever the reason for his being skipped over for the CIA directorship, is just the latest example of how the poisonous environs created by Trump are undermining his ability to build his own administration.
Why Gina Haspel is CIA director instead of Tom Cotton
There are at least three different theories out there to explain why Trump decided to tap Haspel to lead the CIA instead of Cotton. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive either; it could have been a combination of the following:
The White House didn’t want to open up Cotton’s Arkansas Senate seat after the GOP’s shocking loss in the Alabama Senate race and other special elections.
Cotton started to find the job less attractive given the possibility that Trump, a historically unpopular president, could lose in 2020.
With Cotton looking ahead to his own presidential campaign someday, staying in the Senate is a better platform for building and keeping a national profile than leading a covert intelligence agency.
Eliana Johnson
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@elianayjohnson
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton was at one point favorite to take over CIA. White House became hesitant to put another safe Senate seat on the table, source close to Cotton tells me, and job became less attractive to him as the window he’d serve in it shrunk assuming Trump loss in 20
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Ben Pershing
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@benpershing
The fact that Tom Cotton is staying in the Senate rather than moving to the CIA is probably better for his long-term presidential hopes. @AdamWollner laid out the case back in January. ($$) https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/662277/cotton-which-road-leads-white-house?mref=search-result …
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5:27 AM - Mar 13, 2018
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However you look at it, the first two theories tell the same story: The national political environment is so unfavorable to Republicans that the White House had real fears that they could lose a Senate seat in Arkansas (a state Trump won by 27 points in 2016). And Cotton, as fervent a Trump true believer as you will find in the United State Congress, is harboring real doubts that his president can win again in 2020.
Why it’s important that Cotton was passed over
The wildest part is neither of those lines of thinking is illogical.
In December, Republicans lost an open Senate seat — one that Trump had also opened up by picking Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general — in Alabama, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by an even bigger margin than he did in Arkansas. Sure, that might have been in part because the GOP nominee was a credibly accused child predator, but the Republican establishment has proven pretty bad at getting its preferred nominee elected in primaries. It was apparently too big a risk.
On Cotton’s end, looking ahead to 2020 and his own presidential ambitions, he should absolutely be wary of attaching himself too tightly to Trump. This is a president who, at the end of his first year in the White House, had the lowest approval rating ever even as the economy continued to perform relatively well. That is quite a feat, given how tightly the economy and presidential approval ratings are usually linked.
Javier Zarracina/Vox
It is certainly true that the Senate probably is a better launching pad for a presidential campaign whenever Cotton decides to run — George H.W. Bush is the only CIA director to reach the White House. But that was already true back in October and November when the Cotton-to-CIA hype was its hottest and his friends were telling Axios that he would serve if called.
Something changed. The simplest explanation is that Trump’s political standing, even within his own party, has eroded to such a degree that the Arkansas Senate seat could be in jeopardy and Cotton now doubts the president’s reelection viability.
In Langley, maybe this doesn’t matter much. Haspel is certainly qualified, from a résumé point of view, and seems to share Cotton’s comfort with torture.
But the strange case of Tom Cotton and the CIA is emblematic of Trump’s struggle to attract, as he loves to say, the best people. It is a fierce ouroboros: Trump’s incompetence feeds his struggle to recruit his preferred candidates. Given the trajectory of his presidency, it is probably only going to get worse.
IN THIS STORYSTREAM
Trump White House firings, resignations, and ousters
Trump is having a tough time finding his next chief of staff
Tom Cotton was supposed to be CIA director. He isn’t — and that’s trouble for Trump.
Rex Tillerson has been fired. Experts say he did damage that could last “a generation.”
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/
RESHUFFLING OF President Trump’s foreign policy apparatus, reported by The New York Times on Thursday, would see Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ushered out the door, to be replaced by current director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo.
That opening at the CIA would, in turn, be filled by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas.
Is there a more dangerous member of Congress than Tom Cotton?
The hawkish Republican senator and former U.S. Army captain has never hidden his relentless obsession with confronting Iran. He has led the charge on Capitol Hill to dismantle the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic while constantly banging the drum for tougher sanctions and even airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. With apologies to Winston Churchill, Cotton wants “war-war” not “jaw-jaw” — and he seems to have won over the know-nothing president of the United States. Last week, President Donald Trump refused to certify to Congress that the Iran nuclear deal is in the U.S. national interest and warned that U.S participation in that agreement could “be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”
You might call Cotton, who is now being touted as the next director of the CIA, the “Trump whisperer.” In fact, according to the Weekly Standard, in a recent meeting with his top national security and foreign policy advisers, “having failed to receive the decertification option from his own team, Trump called Senator Tom Cotton and put him on speakerphone. The president asked Cotton to make the case for decertifying the Iran deal. Cotton took five minutes and walked Trump and his team through the case, emphasizing one point in particular: re-certifying the deal would be declaring that it was in the national security interest of the United States, something Cotton understood that Trump didn’t believe.”
The Weekly Standard report added that Trump “left the phone call” convinced that the decision to decertify was “the right one.”
Got that? The reality TV star who now occupies the Oval Office defied the advice of his own inner circle, including Defense Secretary James Mattis; ignored the pleas of America’s closest allies; and dismissed the evidence offered by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the deal. Instead, he decided to go with the advice of a 40-year-old freshman senator from Arkansas, who has zero expertise in Middle East diplomacy and none in the field of nuclear proliferation.
If Cotton’s service in Iraq is being held up as evidence of his patriotism, then all to the good. But patrolling dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad is not the equivalent of a training in foreign policy, just as serving as a deckhand on a ship isn’t much of an education in ship building. And it can’t be said that by living hard realities Cotton was drawn to his ultra-conservative politics. No, he’s been an outspoken conservative since he arrived on Harvard’s college campus. Cotton gives the impression of the type of right-wing student who loved little more than to debate and enrage liberals, arming himself with as many factoids as possible to embarrass his hapless opponent. He started as a young man with the view of the world he has today and built credentials around it. Don’t be fooled.
Lest we forget, this is the same Cotton who was accused of “treachery”and “mutiny” after penning a 2015 “open letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in which he asked them effectively to ignore the foreign policy of the president of the United States, because the next one might undo it. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time,” he warned.
This is the same Cotton who compared the Iran nuclear negotiations to the
of Nazi Germany in the 1930s; the same Cotton who shot to prominence in conservative circles after writing a letter to the New York Times from Iraq in 2006, calling for three of the paper’s journalists to be put “behind bars” for their coverage of a secret Bush administration program (one of thosereporters, James Risen, is now a colleague of mine at The Intercept); the same Cotton who once said his only objection to Guantánamo Bay was that “there are too many empty beds”; the same Cotton who claims to enjoy eating birthday cake every day of the week. (OK, admittedly, this last point is not relevant to his knee-jerk hawkishness, but it’s still worth noting. What kind of maniac eats birthday cake every single day?)
IN MANY WAYS, Cotton is the GOP foreign policy equivalent of House Speaker Paul Ryan: disingenuous, ignorant, and out of his depth, yet feted by the D.C. press corps as a Very Serious Person — a resume and a vocabulary as a substitute for seriousness.
There is, however, nothing serious about him — despite his two degrees from Harvard. Like Ryan, Cotton’s policy ideas fall apart the minute they are applied to the real world. “The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” Cotton declared in June, before explaining how he believed the United States should “support internal domestic dissent” in Iran by backing minority ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turkmen, and Baloches, who “aren’t enthusiastic about living in a Persian Shia despotism.”
This is madness. Have we forgotten how much blood was spilled in Iraq thanks to such a nakedly sectarian “divide and rule” strategy? Are we supposed to ignore the way in which outside powers stirred up “internal domestic dissent” in Syria, by arming and funding vicious jihadist groups?
Then again, though Cotton may now be the most hawkish senator in the United States — step aside John McCain and Lindsey Graham — we should perhaps thank him for his bluntness. Remember: Every time former President Barack Obama or a member of his administration framed the argument over the nuclear deal as a choice between diplomacy or war, Republicans would cry foul. This, they would say, was a false choice; critics of the deal merely wanted a better deal.
But Cotton is clear about regime change. He is clear about airstrikes. He is clear about wanting to crush Iran. Consider his recent remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations where, referring to the impact of sanctions on Iran’s economy, Cotton said: “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees, you drive him to the ground and choke him out,” later adding, “If they’re on their knees in surrender, then you accept their surrender.”
This is the kind of language you might expect from a tinpot African dictator trying to suppress a domestic revolt — or maybe from a teenager obsessed with playing “Call of Duty” on his Playstation — and not from a leading member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The idea that Iran is about to “surrender” to the United States anytime soon is laughable. Equally absurd is Cotton’s claim that “calibrated strikes” against the Islamic Republic, modeled on Bill Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox four-day bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1998, would put a halt to the Iranian nuclear program. “If we are forced to take action,” the senator told his audience at the CFR, “the United States has the ability to totally destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.”
This is next-level stupidity. First, a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would, in the words of former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent – an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”
Second, it is impossible to “destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” without invading and occupying the country, and rounding up and executing every single scientist working on the nuclear program.
Third, Iran in 2017 is not Iraq in 1998. Why wouldn’t the Iranians retaliateagainst U.S. interests, both in the region and beyond? How many U.S. lives is Cotton willing to sacrifice?
Perhaps the former U.S. Army captain and (maybe) future director of the CIA should have a quiet word with an actual expert: retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, who, as head of CENTCOM, organized Operation Desert Fox. Speaking about the potential fallout from a similar set of airstrikes against Iran, back in 2009, Zinni asked the following questions:
After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the Gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles … and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course, the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? The MOIS, the intelligence service — what happens if another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S., and Israel, they fire up the streets and now we got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, OK?
Zinni concluded his remarks with a stark warning to hawks like Cotton, who seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing: “Like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”
Lies are the currency of the American right wing, so ubiquitous in politics and media that many have dubbed the phenomenon a "post-truth" crisis.
So it was genuinely surprising Monday when Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — himself a hard-line member of the conservative movement and is in many ways a radical figure in his own right — called out a member of his own party for spreading fake news. His denunciation of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) came in response to tweet thread about the pending criminal justice reform bill in the Senate, which is spurring divisions among members of the Republican caucus.
In his own tweet about the bill over the weekend, Cotton had spread fears about the bill, saying "it gives early release to 'low level, nonviolent' criminals like those convicted of assaulting police, even with deadly weapons," and to "criminals who steal passports & immigration docs from aliens who have been trafficked to keep them in captivity." He also said there have been no hearings on the bill.
"I highly respect my colleague from Arkansas but everything in his tweet and this thread is 100% Fake News," Lee said in response to Cotton's tweets.
He continued:
Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
Replying to @SenMikeLee
First, the House Judiciary committee passed the First Step Act out of committee on May 9 of this year, and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the highly similar Sentencing and Corrections Act out of committee on Feb 15 of this year. These are not new policies. 2/
1,499
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Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
Replying to @SenMikeLee
Second, and more importantly, the First Step Act does not “give early release” to anyone. Anyone claiming it does, does not understand how the bill works. 3/
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Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
Replying to @SenMikeLee
What the First Step Act does do is encourage rehabilitation by incentivizing inmates to participate in recidivism reduction programs by giving them time credits that can help them qualify for prerelease custody. 4/
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Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
Replying to @SenMikeLee
Nothing in the First Step Act gives inmates early release. It only incentivizes participation in recidivism reduction programs. At all times the Bureau of Prisons retains all authority over who does and does not qualify for early release. 5/
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Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
- Nov 19, 2018
Replying to @SenMikeLee
Nothing in the First Step Act gives inmates early release. It only incentivizes participation in recidivism reduction programs. At all times the Bureau of Prisons retains all authority over who does and does not qualify for early release. 5/
Mike Lee
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@SenMikeLee
If @SenTomCotton has good faith problems with this bill then he should welcome a full and open debate on the Senate floor where he can offer amendments to provisions he finds objectionable. But first this bill needs to be brought to the Senate floor so debate can begin. /END
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It was a stern rebuke to the Cotton, who has a long history of false statements and blatant lies. Cotton is also one of the most anti-immigrant members of Congress and has preposterously suggested that the United States has "under-incarceration" problem. In light of the fact that the United States has one of the largest incarcerated populations per capita in the world, and given the vast racial disparities that plague the system, it's unreasonable to interpret his views as driven by anything other than deep-seated racism.
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https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00033363&cycle=2014
2013-18
| Club for Growth | $457,924 | $457,924 | $0 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Elliott Management | $147,900 | $147,900 | $0 |
| 3 | Stephens Group | $130,000 | $120,000 | $10,000 |
| 4 | Goldman Sachs | $124,649 | $104,649 | $20,000 |
| 5 | Senate Conservatives Fund | $81,210 | $76,210 | $5,000 |
| 6 | Citadel LLC | $45,450 | $45,450 | $0 |
| 7 | Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher | $44,900 | $42,400 | $2,500 |
| 8 | Crow Holdings | $42,200 | $42,200 | $0 |
| 9 | Koch Industries | $41,300 | $31,300 | $10,000 |
| 10 | Wells Fargo | $37,422 | $28,422 | $9,000 |
| 11 | McKinsey & Co | $36,200 | $36,200 | $0 |
| 12 | MCNA Dental Plans | $34,200 | $34,200 | $0 |
| 13 | Formation 8 | $32,300 | $32,300 | $0 |
| 14 | Citizens for Prosperity in America Today | $31,299 | $21,300 | $9,999 |
| 15 | Kirkland & Ellis | $30,050 | $30,050 | $0 |
| 16 | Mountaire Corp | $29,200 | $29,200 | $0 |
| 17 | Crownquest Operating | $28,600 | $28,600 | $0 |
| 18 | Arvest Bank Group | $28,400 | $13,400 | $15,000 |
| 19 | Murphy Oil | $28,150 | $23,150 | $5,000 |
| 20 | Affiliated Managers Group | $27,280 | $27,280 | $27,280 |
| Club for Growth | $457,924 | $457,924 | $0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elliott Management | $137,900 | $137,900 | $0 |
| Stephens Group | $104,300 | $94,300 | $10,000 |
| Senate Conservatives Fund | $81,210 | $76,210 | $5,000 |
| Goldman Sachs | $50,549 | $40,549 | $10,000 |
2014?
| Club for Growth | $457,924 | $457,924 | $0 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Elliott Management | $137,900 | $137,900 | $0 | |||
| 3 | Stephens Group | $104,300 | $94,300 | $10,000 | |||
| 4 | Senate Conservatives Fund | $81,210 | $76,210 | $5,000 | |||
| 5 | Goldman Sachs | $50,549 | $40,549 | $10,000 | |||
| 6 | Koch Industries | Yes | $41,200 | $31,200 | $10,000 | ||
| 7 | Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher | $40,650 | $38,150 | $2,500 | |||
| 8 | Citadel LLC | $35,050 | $35,050 | $0 | |||
| 9 | McKinsey & Co | $33,500 | $33,500 | $0 | |||
| 10 | Crow Holdings | $31,400 | $31,400 | $0 | |||
| 11 | Citizens for Prosperity in America Today | $31,299 | $21,300 | $9,999 | |||
| 12 | Crownquest Operating | $28,600 | $28,600 | $0 | |||
| 13 | Murphy Oil | $28,150 | $23,150 | $5,000 | |||
| 14 | Kirkland & Ellis | $27,550 | $27,550 | $0 | |||
| 15 | Wells Fargo | $25,522 | $23,022 | $2,500 | |||
| 16 | Dillard's Inc | $24,900 | $24,900 | $0 | |||
| 17 | Arvest Bank Group | $23,400 | $13,400 | $10,000 | |||
| 18 | Devon Energy | $20,900 | $10,900 | $10,000 | |||
| 19 | Affiliated Managers Group | $20,800 | $20,800 | $0 | |||
| 19 | Boich Companies | $20,800 | $20,800 | $0 | |||
| 19 | Arkwest Communications | $20,800 | $20,800 |
==
2014
4.
| Paul Singer, $5.3 million, Republican |
Singer, a New York hedge fund manager pejoratively called a "vulture capitalist" for his firm's ownership of Argentine debt, is the top individual Republican political donor of the cycle. He was the driving force behind New York's legalization of gay marriage, and has spent millions on legalization efforts in other states, including Maryland and New Hampshire. This cycle, he’s also supporting Republicans opposed to same-sex marriage, such as Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Alaska Senate candidate Dan Sullivan and South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham.
5.
| Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, $5 million, Republican |
Since 2010, the Uihleins, owners of the Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline, have given millions to local and national tea party organizations and Republican candidates. In 2012, they supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign to fight a recall and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate bid. This year, they’ve given to the Senate campaigns of Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Col. Rob Maness in Louisiana. “I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m trying to help people who believe as I do in limited government and free markets,” Richard Uihlein told Crain’s Chicago Business. “I’m not one to hide from that.”
6.
| Robert and Diana Mercer, $3.71 million, Republican |
Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund manager, spent millions in 2012 contributing to GOP establishment groups like American Crossroads. This cycle, he’s also spent big on tea party Republicans. According to disclosure records, Mercer, 67, and his wife Diana have contributed to the Senate campaigns of Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, Greg Brannon in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Rep. David Vitter in Louisiana.
==
test run camb anal?
CNN) -- Cambridge Analytica, the data company Donald Trump's campaign hired during the 2016 presidential election, has been under a magnifying glass this week after a whistleblower claimed that the firm misused the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users.
The firm is partly owned by GOP donor and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, and has ties to former and current Trump advisers. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is the firm's former vice president, and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway consulted for the company.
But Trump isn't the only prominent GOP client to pay for services from the firm. Here are other Republicans who have hired Cambridge Analytica. There have been no allegations of unethical behavior by Cambridge Analytica on behalf of these Republican candidates or groups.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton
Cotton paid some $20,000 for Cambridge Analytica's consulting services from 2013 through 2014 as he was campaigning for the Senate.
Sen. Thom Tillis and the North Carolina Republican Party
Tillis and the North Carolina GOP spent $345,000 for "microtargeting" from 2014 through 2015, geared at helping Tillis defeat Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan in 2014, the most expensive US Senate race in historyat the time. Cambridge Analytica's website touts the success of their efforts in the race, saying they "were able to design and deploy messages tailored to these audiences according to their particular psychographic profiles."
Make America Number 1 Super PAC
The Mercer-backed Keep the Promise I/Make America Number 1 super PAC paid $1,476,484 to Cambridge Analytica from 2015 through 2016. The PAC funded a series of pro-Ted Cruz ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. The PAC was also led by Conway prior to her joining the Trump campaign.
John Bolton Super PAC
Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton isbeing considered to replace H.R. McMaster as White House national security adviser. According to FEC filings, Bolton's super PAC doled out $1,152,299 for Cambridge Analytica's work from 2014 through 2016. All of the services billed are for "research" and "survey research."
Ted Cruz and Ben Carson
During their 2016 presidential campaigns, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson solicited Cambridge Analytica for media services, survey research, web services and database management. The Cruz campaign directly spent $5.8 million for the firm's services. In addition, Keep the Promise II super PAC, which is associated with the "Keep the Promise" network of the Mercer-backed PACs, was funded by Cruz supporter and Texas billionaire Toby Neugebauer. The PAC paid $570,000 for Cambridge Analytica's services -- the largest expenditure for the PAC during the election cycle.
Carson, meanwhile, spent $438,065 for the firm's work.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/tom-cottons-cease-and-desist-letter-activist-raises-serious-first-amendment-questions
In October, Stacey Lane — a human resources professional of 19 years, got in the mail a cease-and-desist letter from Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark. The letter, in an envelope addressed to Lane, said that all communication “must cease and desist immediately with all offices of U.S. Senator Tom Cotton.”
“Healthcare was really big issue before I got the letter. I did what I could to call senators and congressmen and raise the concerns I had,” Lane told Salon.
The letter — now getting attention in the national media — is raising questions about whether or not it's possible to bar a person from petitioning their government's representatives.
[ltr img]
Lane says she’d call the office once or twice a week, usually during times that preceded a major vote or legislative action. There would be several weeks where she wouldn’t call at all.
“My calls were purposeful typically surrounding a major vote or legislative action or call to action via the various activist groups. I was not a serial, daily caller-just-to-call type [of] person,” Lane said.
According to Tom Cotton’s office, Lane — a member of Ozark Indivisible, an activist group part of the Resistance movement against the Trump administration, used vulgar language on multiple occasions. The final incident, which prompted officials in Cotton’s office to administer a cease and desist, was when Lane allegedly called a 19-year-old intern a c**t. According to Cotton’s office, the letter was issued based on the guidance of the U.S. Capitol Police, who has not returned Salon’s request for immediate comment.
When the cease and desist letter started to make noise on Twitter, John Noonan, Senior Counselor for Military and Defense Affairs in Cotton’s office, tweeted about the event to set the record straight to anyone who criticized the move — like the ACLU.
No reason this national security stuff can't be fun. [@SenTomCotton. Alumnus @JebBush @MittRomney. Ex-USAF nuke guy]
- This went out to a single constituent, not a group.
- That constituent called a 19 year old intern a c***.
- Constituent had multiple warnings.
- We have a very different understanding of "harassment." https://t.co/gJdFYviELw
— John Noonan (@noonanjo) January 18, 2018
Lane told Salon she didn’t recall calling the intern a c**t though, it’s a word she’s maybe used “two times in my life.”
“Have I used colorful language? Yes, but it’s nothing more than I see our president using,” Lane told Salon.
Cotton’s office issued a statement about the matter saying, “If an employee of Senator Cotton receives repeated communications that are harassing and vulgar, or any communication that contains a threat, our policy is to notify theU.S. Capitol Police’s Threat Assessment Sectionand, in accordance with their guidance, send a cease and desist letter to the individual making the harassing or threatening communication.”
Indeed, vulgar language can be rattling, but issuing a cease and desist veers into the realm of prior restraint, explained David Snyder, executive director of First Amendment Coalition.
“This letter is inappropriate, and I would say it’s borderline unconstitutional,” Snyder told Salon. “This kind of speech, as offensive as it may be and as vulgar as it is, is just part of the game; it’s part of what happens in a democracy.”
Snyder added that protests, by nature, are not polite.
Of course, the first Amendment doesn’t protect threatening language where a person’s individual safety is at risk.
“If this staffer had a legitimate concern for personal safety then this might be someone the office should report to the Capitol Police and let them deal with it from there,” Snyder said.
When Salon asked Cotton’s office if this cease and desist letter was a violation of the First Amendment, they said they didn’t have a comment.
Wayne B Giampietro, General Counsel to the First Amendment Lawyers Association, suggested that a tactic like this could be a form of intimidation.
“Anyone who wants to try to intimidate someone can send a cease and desist letter. Whether that letter is worth the paper its written on is another story,” he told Salon. “Unless the profanities are a direct and imminent threat to the lawmaker, they are almost certainly protected by the First Amendment.”
Lane says when she received the letter she felt like it was a threat.
It was a tactic to suppress my voice,” she told Salon.
Indivisible, the activist group Lane is part of, has had a tumultuous relationship with Cotton and his office, which the Arkansas Times has been following. Salon spoke to another Indivisible activist who had been arrested in his office following a protest. A video has also surfaced on Facebook of protesters being kicked out of Cotton’s office.
Cotton, 40, is the youngest serving U.S. senator. Before his election to the Senate he served one term in the House. Cotton has been rumoredto be named the next CIA director.
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lcv 0/3%
http://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/tom-cotton
Undermining Critical Habitat for Wildlife :{| League of Conservation ...:(style="font-weight:normal"):}:
scorecard.lcv.org/.../2015-128-undermining-critical-ha...
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Tom Cotton Blocks Dying Appointee to 'Inflict Pain' on President Obama
www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/.../tom-cotton-block-dying-appointee/
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Chair of the imbecile caucus: Sen. Tom Cotton proudly stands at the ...
www.salon.com/.../chair_of_the_imbecile_caucus_sen_tom_cotton_proudly_sta...
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years ago a friend who had graduated Georgetown and worked briefly in Washington explained why he had left the city and politics. In D.C., he said, people would kill a good policy because of a personal vendetta against the person presenting it, even if they knew that policy would result in net positives for society. My buddy quickly became so disillusioned that he quit to pursue a career in a field without so many poisonous vipers: He moved to Hollywood to write for television.
And this was in the late 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s second term. Washington was a model of bonhomie then compared to the polarization of today.
I thought of my friend when I read this Frank Bruni column in the New York Times on Monday. Bruni traced the story of Cassandra Butts, a graduate of Harvard Law School and longtime friend of President Obama who had served as Deputy White House Counsel early in his administration. In February of 2014, the president nominated Butts to be the ambassador to the Bahamas. In keeping with their tradition of saying no to everything Obama proposes, Republicans in the Senate put a hold on Butts’ confirmation. She was still waiting for them to lift it when she died two weeks ago after a short bout with leukemia.
The senator behind the hold was Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has predicated his entire brief Senate career on being an irredeemable dickhead. According to Bruni, Butts once went to Cotton to ask why he wouldn’t lift the hold on her nomination.
[H]e explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president.
Cotton’s spokeswoman did not dispute Butts’s characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career.
That’s nice of him. Maybe Cotton can eulogize Butts at her funeral. Seems like the least he could do after keeping hertwisting in the wind for over two years – 835 days, to be exact – just because he wanted to “inflict special pain” on President Obama.
It’s not that Butts was unqualified to serve as ambassador to the Bahamas. With all due respect to the Bahamas, it’s not exactly a nation with a complicated geopolitical situation. Butts was a trained lawyer – in fact, she and Cotton graduated from the same law school – who had worked in the White House and on Capitol Hill for a decade. She was the consummate Washington professional for whom such ambassadorships often serve as rewards for hard work and loyalty to a presidential administration.
Some people might have a problem with the less-than-egalitarian nature of this system, but that was not Cotton’s complaint. He was upset about a leak from the Secret Service when he first placed the hold on Butts, but by the end he was not keeping it there due to some principled good-government crusade. He didn’t have a particular ideological grievance against Butts – well, he probably did, but nothing that made her unqualified to serve as ambassador to an island nation with zero strategic value beyond being a popular honeymoon spot for besotted newlyweds. It wasn’t as if Obama had appointed her to be the ambassador to Iran, a nation Tom Cotton would turn into Beirut circa 1983 before he would ever consider talking to its government.
No, Cotton kept this hold for two reasons. The first is that he is a nasty, small-minded, arrogant, repugnant, self-righteous, testosterone-fueled warmongering jackhole with an over-inflated sense of his own value both to the nation’s political process and humanity in general.
Second, Cotton is a perfect creature of what the Republican Party has evolved into over the last 40 years, a change that has reached its nadir (maybe) in the Obama era. It is a party with no coherent ideological beliefs, no governing philosophy, and no interest in developing either beyond the usual platitudes about cutting taxes and keeping government small. It is a party of nihilism. It is a party of angry toddlers stamping their feet and holding their breath until they either get what they want or turn blue.
This nihilistic approach has led the base to nominate Donald Trump, who is the ultimate expression of the modern GOP’s id: An overgrown, racist toddler coated in Cheeto dust. And now the party’s leaders are shocked, SHOCKED to find themselves stuck with him and staring down the barrel of a potential crushing in this fall’s general election.
There has long been a strain of thought that if only our leaders in Washington would spend more time together, eating meals and attending cocktail parties, they would find common ground on some of the issues bedeviling the nation. Maybe then they could hammer out compromises, engage in the legislative log-rolling that has been part of our system since the first Congress convened.
But it’s hard to see how, say, President Obama inviting Cotton over to the White House for a beer would have changed his mind on Cassandra Butts. The junior senator from Arkansas doesn’t see the president as a legitimate chief executive, nor does he see any value in holding to the informal norms that help our government to function in the first place. All he sees is an enemy to be crushed at all costs. As a former soldier, maybe he thinks of the now-deceased Cassandra Butts spending the last two years of her life in nomination limbo as collateral damage. I’d say he should be ashamed, if I thought he was capable of such an emotion.
Our list of the 10 candidates who received the highest percentage of the money from elite donors includes many candidates from wealthy states, and nationally-known candidates like Sens.Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as well as new members who won high-profile races in 2014 like Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark.
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/04/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent-in-2014-mega-donors-fuel-rising-cost-of-elections
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/04/1327105/-Tom-Cotton-channels-his-inner-Jesse-Helms-in-new-immigrant-bashing-ad#
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Extremist Republican Tom Cotton, joined by an assortment of corporate lobbyists, proudly announced today his endorsement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is another good reason — a very good reason — to vote against Tom Cotton.
It is NOT, as you might think, really an umbrella organization for all the little chambers around the country that labor to land business. It is a fully integrated part of the Republican machine and anonymously funded. It can be found on the wrong side of every populist issue — from wages and worker protection to the environment and fair taxes. Source Watch notes:
... the New York Times reported in October 2010 that half of the Chamber's $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 big-money donors, many of whom enlisted the Chamber's help to fight political and public opinion battles on their behalf (such as opposing financial or healthcare reforms, or other regulations). The Chamber is "dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries," according to James Carter, executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce.
Kochs involved?
You betcha.
Drill baby drill. Where there's a Koch there's a Cotton. He's proud of his 92 percent chamber voting record, an affront to day-laboring Arkansans.
The U.S. Chamber is so bad, Source Watch notes:
The U.S. Chamber's partisan, corporate-funded (and often untrue) campaign attacks have compelled many local Chambers of Commerce to disassociate from the U.S. Chamber. Despite the U.S. Chamber's attempts to portray itself as a community of small businesses and local Chambers of Commerce, the interests the U.S. Chamber served in the 2010 elections were those of its large corporate donors. More than 40 local chambers issued statements during the campaign distancing themselves from the U.S. Chamber, including chambers in the "battleground states" of Iowa and New Hampshire. Some chambers are considering what Politico calls the "extraordinary" step of ending their affiliation with the U.S. Chamber and quitting in protest.
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Hailing from Arkansas, 37-year-old Senator Cotton boasts the title of being the youngest member of the Senate, but he spouts the old warmongering rhetoric of 78-year-old Senator John McCain. From Guantanamo to Iran, food stamps to women’s rights, here are ten reasons why Tom Cotton is a dangerous dude.
1. He penned an underhanded letter to the leaders of Iran that sparked the trending hashtag #47Traitors. On March 9th, Cotton and 46 of his Republican colleagues went behind President Obama’s back by signing an “informative” letter to Iran, saying that a nuclear deal would not last because the next president could reverse it. Secretary John Kerry, one of the lead negotiators in the talks, called the letter “utterly disgusting” and “irresponsible.” Two dozen editorial boards slammed the letter and over 200,000 people signed a petition asking the senators to be charged for violating the Logan Act, a law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.
2. Senator Cotton said the only problem he has with Guantanamo Bay prison is that “there are too many empty beds.” Ignoring waterboarding, indefinite detention, forced feeding and other torturous acts, Tom Cotton insists that the US should be "proud" of how it treats the 
" detained in Gitmo. As far as Cotton is concerned, "[the prisoners] can rot in hell. But as long as they don’t do that, then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay." This is counter to the position of many other Senators and President Obama, who has promised time and time again to close the prison. There are still dozens of men held at Gitmo who have been cleared for release, but that doesn’t seem to bother Senator They-Can-Rot-in-Hell.
3. He has compared the negotiations of the UN Security Council (P5+1) with Iran to the “appeasement of Nazi Germany.”This accusation is ridiculous. Rouhani’s Iran is not Hitler’s Germany. Despite Cotton’s claims that “there are nothing but hardliners in Tehran,” Rouhani is a reformist, someone we need to work with to defeat ISIL. And the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran are a far better ––and safer–– approach than pushing Iran to the brink of war with the US (and Israel). For once, there is actually hope for a peaceful solution, something that certainly was not an option with Nazi Germany.
4. He thinks the use of killer drones should be expanded. Killer drones have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths in countries we’re not even at war with, like Pakistan and Yemen, and have led to an expansion of extremist groups. Senator Cotton makes the argument of many other pro-droners: that drone pilots are safer than air pilots, and casualties are reduced. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Drone pilots still suffer the psychological trauma associated with attacks, and the “collateral damage” of drone strikes means that families and children lose their lives along with the targeted terrorists. (Note: only 2% of all people killed by drone strikes have been confirmed “high-value” targets.) The last thing we need is the expansion of drone warfare, Tom.
5. He claims that “bombing makes us safer.” While in some masochistic, twisted logic that might make sense in the short term, historically speaking US military intervention has led to more extremism–– as with the formation of ISIS after the invasion of Iraq ––and turned local populations against the United States. Ultimately, bombing other countries just fosters more hate and anti-American sentiment. Bombing might not make us safer, but it certainly makes Tom Cotton’s friends in the defense industry a whole lot richer. Just 24 hours after his notorious letter to Iran became public, Cotton was the guest of honorat an event hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association, a lobbying and professional group for defense contractors.
6. He uses fear-mongering to call for a crackdown on immigrants and a clampdown on the Mexican border. Senator Cotton says drug cartels in Mexico are ready to expand into human trafficking and even terrorism, and could infiltrate our southern border and “attack it right here in places like Arkansas.” He’s made the wild accusation that Hezbollah is collaborating with locals in Mexico to “cross our borders and attack us here.” Ignoring the fences, drones, cameras and patrols that constantly survey the border, he maintains that the border is wide open. “As long as our border is open and it's defenseless, then it's not just an immigration issue, it's a national security issue.” Be afraid, says Cotton, very afraid--so I can keep feeding the national security state!
7. He received $700,000 for his senate campaign from the Emergency Committee for Israel.That’s correct -- $700,000! Such an exorbitant amount of money ensures that Cotton is one of the most pro-Israel senators in Congress. During the 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza, when over 500 Palestinian were killed, Cotton called the Israeli defense force “the most moral, humanitarian fighting force in the world.” In December he said Congressshould consider supplying Israel with B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs for a possible strike against Iran.
8. As an Army Lieutenant in 2006, Cotton called for the prosecution of two New York Times journalists for espionage.From his early days, Cotton has not been a fan of expository journalism. When the New York Times published an article about how the government was tracking terrorist financing, Cotton called for the journalists to be imprisoned. This news story got a lot of heat from various conservative outlets, but before he was even running for office, Cotton took it upon himself to publicize his grievances in a sarcasticletter to journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. It seems that Cotton’s letter to Iran a few days ago was not the first of its kind.
9. He thinks food-stamp recipients are “addicts.”Senator Cotton hates food stamps. In his own words, he thinks the system is “riddled with fraud and abuse” and “has resulted in long-term dependency.” This is coming from the senator of Arkansas, which ranked number one in the number of residents who suffer from food insecurity. If Cotton had his way, there would be much harsher restrictions on food stamps, and the overall budget for welfare would be cut severely. Considering the high level of poverty in Arkansas, Cotton is actually voting against the interests of the people he is supposed to represent. If he’s concerned that the system is “riddled with fraud and abuse,” an audit of the Pentagon should be at the top of his to-do list.
10. He has opposed legislation to expand women’s rights.Senator Cotton voted against equal pay legislation and the Violence Against Women Act. While Senator Cotton’s website will say that the vote was taken out of context, and that the Senator supports harsh punishment for sexual assault, a vote is a vote. If that’s the case, then why would he vote against an act that would give women more resources in the case of abuse or assault? And why would he vote against legislation that would push for equivalent pay? No matter what defense Cotton’s team comes up with, there’s really no logic or excuse to vote against women’s rights.
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Rep. Alan Grayson says Sen. Cotton is “already on his way to marking himself as the premiere warmonger of the 114th Congress.” Heather Digby Parton from Salon called him“Ted Cruz with a war record, Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree, Chris Christie with a Southern accent.” Whatever your characterization, this much is clear: this freshman senator is an arrogant bully and needs a time out.
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Hillary Clinton also weighed in on the controversy surrounding a Republican letter to **Iran** aiming to undermine the ongoing nuclear talks. An open letter from 47 Republican senators warned the Iranian government the deal could be nixed by a Republican Congress or future Republican president.
Hillary Clinton: "The recent letter from Republican senators was out of step with the best traditions of American leadership. And one has to ask: What was the purpose of this letter? There appear to be two logical answers. Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander-in-chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy. Either answer does discredit to the letters’ signatories."
According to the website Lobe Log, the senator who spearheaded the letter, freshman Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, received nearly $1 million in donations to his election campaign efforts last year from the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol. The Intercept reports Cotton was set to appear at a secretive meeting of weapons contractors one day after sending the letter on Monday.
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fac so:
Rep. Tom Cotton has attracted nearly $58 million, with more than $35 million of that coming from super PACs and other outside groups. While much less than the money total for North Carolina's senate seat, Arkansas has only a quarter of the voters in North Carolina, adding up to more than $34 in election money per voter so far.
Kentucky, where incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell leads over Democratic challenger Allison Grimes, more than $67 million has flooded into the race. With just over 3 million voters, that means the Kentucky race has attracted more than $21 per voter to date.
Louisiana's battle between Democratic incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu and Republican challenger Bill Cassidy has seen nearly $40 million from the candidates and outside groups. With just under 2 million registered voters, that puts it nearly on par with North Carolina's Senate race at $13.56 per voter.
Georgia may be the biggest surprise: With with Democrat Michelle Nunn pulling even with Republican opponent David Perdue in the polls, the race has attracted just under $36 million, according to the latest available reports. That is not only the lowest raw total of any of the battleground Senate races in the South: Given Georgia's more than 6 million voters, it's also by far the lowest in per-voter cost at $5.91.
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In response, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his Democratic colleagues are trying to turn the Koch-linked money against their Republican opponents. The Democrats' strategy seeks to tie GOP Senate candidates to the agenda of Koch groups by highlighting how specific policies advocated by Republicans will aid billionaires and hurt everybody else.
Barasky points to Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton's vote against the farm bill as an example. Rep. Cotton, a Republican, was the only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation to vote against that bill, which Americans for Prosperity openly opposed. The Koch group has spent nearly $2 million on the Arkansas Senate race.
The Washington Post reports onArkansas as ground zero of the nuclear battle by financial titans to purchase control of the U.S. Senatefor Republicans. TheKoch political forceshave spent at least $1.4 million already on misleading ads targeting Sen. Mark Pryor and put ground forces in the field. Democrats say they'll fight back.
And still Rep. Tom Cotton, Pryor's Republican challenger, is so weird that he can't break away in opinion polling.
The Kochs have spent $30 million in swing Senate races this year. And that's just chump change. Here's that stunning Pro Publica article on the nearly $400 million the Kochs spent on elections in 2012, a pittance of which gave them solid control of the Arkansas Senate.
But back to the Washington Post. It reveals the Kochs have already poured $500,000 into Arkansas legislative races this year in hopes of mopping up after the move to a Republican majority in 2012. If you hate Obama you'll love the Kochs' message. Lots do, apparently.
The Koch/Republican combine thinks it's stolen a page from Obama in Arkansas...
TheDemocratic Party kept up its drumbeat today against Republican Rep. Tom Cotton, noting his junketing on the tab of conservative special interest groups that back issues he's supported, such asprivatization of Medicare. The party notes, too, that despite a flood of independent dark money advertising against U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, a recentindependent poll shows the race tied 46-46 among likely voters.
You can find the full details of Cotton's luxury travels here.
In short: Cotton has, among others, junketed to Florida, Sea Island, Ga., and Baltimore on the tab of the Club for Growth, Heritage Foundationand American Enterprise Institute, all bankrolled by conservative tycoons. He's done as they wished in voting for turningMedicare into a voucher system — the death knell of universal health coverage for older Americans and, at the same time, a windfall for the private insurance industry. The insurance industry angle prompts questions from the Democratic Party on why Cotton won't identify the clients he worked for as a private consultant at McKinsey, the world's biggest and richest consulting firm.
Give Cotton credit. He's repeatedly made clear his desire to dismantle the U.S. social safety net. He's a believer in Medicare privatization. Anybody who thinks that battle was won for good years ago doesn't understand the staying power of big money and the belief that misleading messaging will eventually win the day.
A good example is a big new ad buy from another dark money group dishonestly depicting Mark Pryor and other Democrats as enemies of seniors because of efforts to rein in costs of the Medicare Advantage program, a taxpayer-subsidized program that enriches insurance companies. (Ernie Dumas explained that cynical ploy this week.) The group buying their ads won't say where their money comes from — it's a byproduct of the perversion of the nonprofit portion of the tax code and the pernicious fallout of the Citizens United corporate personhood ruling. But Source Watch can tell you most of what you need to knowabout American Action Network, the source of the secretly funded attack advertising: Republicans, billionaires. ark times
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Network
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www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity
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www.arktimes.com/.../shocker-nfib-endorses-tom-cotton
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https://www.facebook.com/**TomCotton**AR/posts/819009298144331
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https://www.facebook.com/**TomCotton**AR/posts/828314417213819
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