Just another day in Washington D.C.…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

The Juggalos don't want to be called a gang — so they marched on Washington

By GERRICK D. KENNEDY | 5:30PM PDT - Saturday, September 16, 2017


Fans of the group Insane Clown Posse, known as Juggalos, hold placards mocking President Trump during a September 16th protest in Washington.
 — Photograph: Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

A MASS OF PEOPLE with red noses and faces covered in white paint descended during Saturday on Washington. They hoisted signs declaring “Clown Lives Matter” and posters decorated with doctored images of President Trump.

Also highly visible were numerous images of a wild-haired man wielding a hatchet. One was  plastered on an American flag.

No, this wasn't a scene out of “American Horror Story” or a gathering of fans of the hit film “It”. The occasion was a march near the Lincoln Memorial as scores of fans of the Detroit-based rap group Insane Clown Posse known as Juggalos protested the FBI for labeling them as a gang.

The Juggalos — named after the 1992 song “The Juggla” — are the fiercely devoted fans of the rap duo and its brand of “horrorcore”, a sub-genre of hip-hop punctuated by macabre themes.

Think Deadheads, Beliebers or Swifties, but far more rowdy.

ICP, as the group is commonly known, has sold about 7 million albums, and has had its name branded on items ranging from action figures to energy drinks. Since 2000, the group has anchored a raucous multi-day festival — the Gathering of the Juggalos — where revelry and unruliness are encouraged; the event even boasts its own drug bazaar called the Bridge. Fatal drug overdoses, fights and arrests have punctuated past festivals.

Ahead of Saturday's march, concerns were raised — largely through social media — that the Juggalos would clash with the Mother of All Rallies, a pro-Trump group. But protest leaders said the march was focused solely on showing strength in numbers and changing perception of ICP's fan base.

“Over the past five years, our legal team has heard testimonies and reports from Juggalos all over the nation who have lost custody of their children, been fired from jobs, denied access into the armed forces, and the most common consequence — being officially labeled as a gang member by law enforcement agencies for wearing Juggalo-related clothing or brandishing one or more Juggalo tattoos,” ICP wrote in a statement on the march's site.

The notoriety of the Gatherings has driven most of the public perception surrounding ICP and its followers. Videos from the festivals have depicted attendees throwing rocks and beer bottles at performers, and featured naked fans with painted faces wrestling and dousing one another with Faygo, a brand of soft drink popular in the Midwest.

Wrote Wired senior writer Brian Raftery in a 2010 feature: “ICP's following is made up mostly of young white men from working-class backgrounds. They tend to feel that they’ve been misunderstood outsiders their whole lives, whether for being overweight, looking weird, being poor, or even for just liking ICP in the first place. For them, the Gathering is a place they can be accepted, a feeling reinforced by the constant chants of the Juggalo credo ‘Fam-uh-LEE! Fam-uh-LEE’!”

However, a rise in criminal behavior has been connected to proud Juggalos, including a shooting that wounded a couple in King County, Washington, in 2011. The incident led the Justice Department's National Gang Intelligence Center to classify them as a “loosely organized hybrid gang”. Law enforcement officials in at least 21 states have identified criminal Juggalo subsets.

“Most crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft, and vandalism,” the report states. “However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies, and drug sales. Social networking websites are a popular conveyance for Juggalo subculture to communicate and expand."

Two Maryland Juggalos in 2014 were charged with attempted murder for trying to carve and burn an ICP tattoo off their roommate's arm because they felt he was no longer loyal. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin Juggalo was sentenced to more than three years in prison for chopping off a woman's pinky finger with a machete — even attempting to cauterize the wound with a blowtorch when a car cigarette lighter failed to work — and drinking her blood to honor another Juggalo who had passed away. The plan was to eat the finger later.

Insane Clown Posse has furiously denounced the gang classification; the duo sued the Justice Department and FBI, in a suit that has been dismissed.

The American Civil Liberties Union even stepped in, filing a suit on the group's behalf in 2014.

"The Juggalos are fighting for the basic American right to freely express who they are, to gather and share their appreciation of music, and to discuss issues that are important to them without fear of being unfairly targeted and harassed by police,” Michael J. Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, said in a statement.

“A simple traffic stop for a broken taillight can — and has — resulted in an otherwise law-abiding, hard-working, taxpaying citizen being put on a local or state list of gang members simply for displaying their Juggalo pride,” ICP wrote online. “Being labeled a gang member can be a permanent stain on an individual’s life, since it will come up in a simple background check every single time that person is applying for a job, trying to adopt a child, join the armed forces, or attempting to acquire housing … their name may pop up as being ‘gang-affiliated’, even if that person has never been charged with any kind of crime.”

A concert from Insane Clown Posse was scheduled to cap the day's protest.

• Gerrick D. Kennedy is a music writer for the Los Angeles Times covering pop, R&B/soul and hip-hop. An Ohio native, he came to the L.A. Times as an intern in 2009. On the pop music team, he's found his favorite stories while smoking cigars with Nas, being trapped on a Kid Rock-themed music cruise, rediscovering boy bands and perfecting the craft of the snarky tweet.  In 2012, Kennedy was named Emerging Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-juggalo-march-20170916-story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Yep....with the Orange Goblin at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. has become “clown city” and home to the world's greatest comedy show.

America is “the laughing stock of the entire world!”

[aDjUsToR]

How's the US economy doing under Trump?

[Donald]

Very well I hear...a lot better than kiwirail which loses $200million of hard earned tax payer dollars per year😳

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

How's the US economy doing under Trump?

Very well, thanks, not to Trump, but thanks to a Communist President of China and an Autocrat President of France, according to US economists.

THREE CHEERS for COMMIES and AUTOCRATS for making America greater than Trump is capable of doing!!


from The Washington Post....

Who's looking great again? It's not America.

A fine U.S. economy has China, France and Germany to thank — really anyone but Trump.

By SEBASTIAN MALLABY | 7:45PM EDT - Friday, September 15, 2017


French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. — Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters.

LAST YEAR, in the wake of President Trump's election, financial markets took off on a wild sprint, apparently believing his promise to make America great again. Ten months later, the financiers are wiser: The president's immigration clampdown alarms them; his divisive response to Charlottesville appalls them. Despite the heady expectations of this past winter, there has been no sign of an infrastructure plan; few expect serious tax reform given the bungling of health-care legislation, not to mention the sidelining of Gary Cohn, the tax plan's chief Sherpa. And yet, as if by a miracle of levitation, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is still about a fifth above its level on the day of the election. What's happening?

The short answer is that foreign leaders have done a surprisingly good job of making foreign countries great again. From Xi Jinping's China to Emmanuel Macron's France, politicians are delivering policies that businesses want. As a result, the world economy is growing faster than at any time since the post-crisis bump of 2010. The yuan and the euro have risen sharply against the dollar. A more competitive greenback and the prospect of strong exports have supported U.S. stock prices. A Chinese communist and a French technocrat have done more for American business than Trump has.

Consider China's recent performance. In 2015 and again in early 2016, China suffered acute financial turbulence. After averaging almost 10 percent growth between 2006 and 2014 and turbocharging the global economy, China suddenly emerged as the chief risk to the world. In its headlong drive to invest in coal mines and steel plants, it created a glut that was driving foreigners out of business. In its faltering experiments with financial modernization, it allowed cracks to appear in its currency controls: Well-to-do Chinese families were rushing to buy anti-dictator insurance in the form of real estate in Los Angeles or London. The government's war chest of foreign currency reserves shrunk by about $1 trillion as it desperately bought back yuan to offset capital flight.

In the past 18 months, however, China has restored calm. Last year the government ordered coal mines to cap production at 276 days; steel output was also cut, and producers the world over have profited from recovering prices. Meanwhile, authorities have put a stop to capital flight, using dictatorial powers to crush purchases of anti-dictator insurance. The process has not been pretty, but capital flight has ended and the yuan has recovered. Any company connected to China's global supply chains is breathing more freely.

Now consider the good news from Europe. Before France's spring elections, half the electorate supported business-unfriendly candidates of the far right and left. That polarization allowed Macron to power through the middle and seize the prize of the presidency, which he is now using to advance much-needed liberalization of hiring and firing. The challenge of labor-market reform has defeated other French leaders, but Macron is determined. He means to push through the reforms by decree, and he has persuaded two of the three main labor unions to stay out of the street protests against him. France's stock market index is up by nearly a fifth in dollar terms this year.

Meanwhile, Germany and Italy, the two other major euro zone economies, are also doing well. Angela Merkel, the calm anchor of the region, is cruising toward her fourth electoral mandate in the vote on September 24th. To ease the way for Macron's difficult labor reforms, she seems likely to use her refreshed authority to relax Germany's habitual enthusiasm for budget austerity. Italy, for its part, has emerged stronger from a recent round of bank bailouts, and its populist parties have scaled back their scary promises to quit the euro. If the European Central Bank is forced to dial back its extraordinary monetary stimulus — it is running out of German bonds to purchase — the combination of a less austere Merkel and healthier European banks should be enough to sustain recovery.

The one biggish economy that's foundering is the one Trump has celebrated: Brexiting Britain. There, populists are proving politically incompetent and economically harmful. British growth, which sputtered in at an annualized rate of 1.2 percent in the second quarter, is the lowest among the major economies. The pound is weak, even against the limping dollar. Inflation has jumped. Perhaps it is time for Trump to take stock of the world and ask himself: Who's looking great — and who is not?

• Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of “The Man Who Knew: The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan”.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • China's invisible influence

 • Macron attempts a feat that Trump wouldn't dare

 • The economy under Trump: Plan for the worst

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whos-looking-great-again-its-not-america/2017/09/15/368e7f4e-9a17-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Anyway, back to “doing it in Washington D.C.” (now that the two intellectual lightweights have shown they are too stupid & mentally-challenged to keep on the topic)....


from The Washington Post....

In the nation's capital of rallies, a day full of them
featured Trump sentiments and Juggalos

The day seemed almost designed to test Americans' ability to disagree peaceably.

By PETER JAMISON, PERRY STEIN, KELYN SOONG and MARIA SACCHETTI | 5:37PM EDT - Saturday 16, 2017


Photograph: Reuters.

WITH SIMULTANEOUS PROTESTS by President Trump's supporters, anti-fascist militants and the proudly outré fans of the rap-metal band Insane Clown Posse, Saturday's lineup of rallies on and around the Mall seemed almost designed to test Americans' capacity for peaceable disagreement.

But as the day progressed and demonstrators of wildly different ideological stripes crowded into Washington, that ideal did not seem so remote: By late afternoon, police reported no violence and said they had not made any arrests.

It was a relief for D.C. authorities, who had prepared for the possibility of violent clashes and taken extensive security precautions, deploying large numbers of police officers and National Guard members on the Mall and barricading surrounding streets.

Looming large over the day was the specter of Charlottesville, where a white nationalist rally just over a month ago turned into a deadly riot. Police in the Virginia college town were later faulted for not reacting swiftly or forcefully enough to the violence.

But the protesters in Washington, unlike those in Charlottesville, did not show up armed with shields, clubs and guns, and even implored one another at times to avoid brawling.


Photograph: Bloomberg.

“Political violence happens in Russia, in Iran, in North Korea. It's not supposed to happen here,” said Tommy Hodges, an organizer of the “Mother of All Rallies” attended by Trump supporters. “You should be able to say whatever you want without someone raising a fist against you.”

Addressing a crowd of a few hundred near the Washington Monument shortly before noon, Hodges pleaded for a peaceful gathering and asked his audience to “shake the hand of the person next to you.”

Standing in front of the White House at about the same time, Dan Ward, a Marine Corps veteran and Democrat running for Congress in Virginia's 7th District, said he was in his hometown of Charlottesville during the riot on August 12th.

He said the violence — which culminated with a car authorities said was driven by a man with white-supremacist ties plowing into a crowd, killing one and injuring 19 — reminded him of clashes between pro- and anti-Russian forces he had seen while serving in Ukraine.

“It was Charlottesville, not Ukraine,” he said. “And that's not okay.”


Photograph: The Washington Post.

Ward took part in a march of several dozen people from the White House to the Russian ambassador's residence on 16th Street, an elegant Beaux-Arts building where surveillance cameras looked down on a crowd that booed and shouted “Nyet!” The march, intended to protest Russian interference in the presidential election, broke up peacefully.

Even one of the right's more inflammatory partisans signaled the passions that fueled Charlottesville might be more muted during Saturday.

Richard B. Spencer, the Alexandria resident who coined the term alt-right and has become the movement's omnipresent spokesman, said white nationalists' enthusiasm for Trump was at a low ebb after his recent backtracking on campaign promises to crack down on illegal immigration, including the undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors and are known as “dreamers”.

“If anything, I would be protesting Trump this weekend,” Spencer said in an interview, adding that neither he nor his allies were involved with the Mother of All Rallies event. “It's a residue of an older conservatism. It really doesn't have much of anything to do with the alt-right.”

The alt-right is a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.


Photograph: The Washington Post.

Such distinctions were sometimes lost on demonstrators in overwhelmingly Democratic Washington. Tania Maduro, an organizer of an anti-Trump counterprotest, said she didn't see a meaningful difference between the avowed white supremacists in Charlottesville and the less­combative Trump supporters on the Mall on Saturday.

“If you're supporting Trump,” she said, “then you are supporting white supremacy.”

Trump was criticized after the Charlottesville rally for saying that protesters across the political spectrum were to blame for the rioting, rather than focusing on white supremacists.

The peaceful unfolding of Saturday's protests may have owed much to D.C. law enforcement, which has long experience overseeing volatile demonstrations in the nation's capital. When sparks flew, police quickly stamped them out. At one point officers headed off a shouting match between self-proclaimed anti-fascist demonstrator Lacy MacAuley and Trump supporters at the Mother of All Rallies. District resident MacAuley, 38, said afterward she had been “ready to get punched” if violence broke out.

D.C. police said 15 roads were closed around the Mall between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., including the tunnels at Ninth and 12th streets. Parts of C, D and E streets NW near the Mall were also closed. Metro also closed the Smithsonian station on the Mall during the rallies.


Photograph: The Washington Post.

D.C. police spokeswoman Margarita Mikhaylova and Sergeant Anna Rose of the U.S. Park Police said late Saturday afternoon that there had been no arrests related to the demonstrations.

Several hundred Juggalos, as fans of Insane Clown Posse are known, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. They were protesting their designation as a criminal gang by the FBI, and some said they were uninterested in the left-right political divide on display at the other gatherings.

Justin Thompson, a 24-year-old factory worker from a Detroit suburb, said he drove to Washington in his pickup truck to show that Juggalos “are just like everybody else.”

“We go to work. We pull our 9-to-5s,” he said. “We take care of our kids and everything else.”

• Peter Jamison writes about politics and government in the District of Columbia for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post he worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Tampa Bay Times.

• Perry Stein covers Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia for The Washington Post.

• Kelyn Soong works in the sports department at The Washington Post and contributes to The Early Lead and D.C. Sports Bog. He also covers tennis and running in the D.C. area.

• Maria Sacchetti is The Washington Post's immigration reporter. She previously reported for The Boston Globe.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Trump supporters gather for so-called ‘Mother of all Rallies’

 • VIDEO: Who are the Juggalos and why are they marching in D.C.?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-the-nations-capital-of-rallies-a-day-full-of-them-begins-featuring-trump-sentiments-and-juggalos/2017/09/16/f04a7a9c-9a57-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html

[Donald]

Yes..great to see free speech being allowed in America...if it was China  or Russia....it could be bad for your health😉